Death World (Undying Mercenaries Series Book 5) (25 page)

“Have you got him, Sargon?” I asked.

“I think so.”

“Carlos, what’s wrong?”

There wasn’t any answer.

“Carlos? Dammit man, drop the egg. Let’s get you out of there.”

“No!” Leeson shouted from behind me. “I don’t want to see Ortiz without his frigging egg!”

“One more pull, Sargon.”

We reached down, braced ourselves and pulled hard. We each had one of his elbows and were pulling on his arms. I couldn’t tell what was wrong with him. There was white smoke billowing all around all three of us. I could hear the sounds of leaking fluids.

Suddenly, I lost my grip. Sargon gave a whoop and held something up into my face.

Confused, I stared at Sargon. He was just an outline in the vapor. “Did you get him?”

“Sort of,” he said. He showed me what he had.

It was an arm—Carlos’ arm. The rest of him…well, that was missing.

-32-

“Damn!” Leeson shouted when we showed him what was left of Ortiz.

Sargon thrust the bubbling arm up into Leeson’s face, making sure the adjunct got a good, close look.

“Should we go in there and fish the rest of him out?” Sargon demanded. “I think there might be some more parts that haven’t melted down to foam yet.”

“You’re crazy, weaponeer!” Leeson said. “All of your men are crazy, McGill.”

“You ordered my man into that pit sir, not me,” I answered.

Adjunct Leeson nodded, still staring at the arm. “So I did.”

The smoke had cleared somewhat, and we could see that a discolored soup lay around the egg, which looked rather deflated now.

“McGill,” Leeson said in a lowered tone. “I’m asking for your expert advice, here. How do I disobey a direct order from my superior and get away with it?”

I blinked at him for a second. It seemed odd to me that my adjunct was asking me such a question. In addition, I found it equally strange that everyone thought I was some kind of wizard when it came to going off-script.

Still, I felt his question was heartfelt, so I attempted to answer as honestly as I could. “There’s no need to get any more troops killed, sir. Ask for Natasha’s analysis first.”

Leeson ordered Natasha to join our huddled group. She checked over Carlos’ remains.

“Acid,” she said. “Probably the same stuff that ate into
Minotaur
when the aliens attacked. It makes good sense, if you think about it.”

“Let’s pretend we’re all dummies,” Leeson said. “Explain it to us.”

“These eggs—they’re baby ship-invaders. Remember the monsters that ate through the walls of our ship? They must have started off like these eggs. When fully formed, they’re able to burn their way into the hull of a ship.”

“Then why the hell don’t they burn their way through the walls of
this
ship?”

“The first layer of defense is the egg-casing itself. Many acids only work on either organic or inorganic surfaces. Some of the most deadly ones will eat skin and metal but leave wax or glass alone. Look at the deck in this hold. There’s a rubbery layer coating it, a membrane that protects the metal. These hoses or veins, they’re embedded in that semi-transparent membrane.”

I could see what she was talking about now. What I’d mistaken for roots or hoses were really vein-like growths in an almost transparent skin that coated the inside of the hold.

“A hold full of baby ship-invaders…” Leeson said. “I think I get it. This ship isn’t exactly like a lifter. I bet it drops these invaders, seeding them out in space like land mines. The plant-creatures like the ones that attacked us originally when we entered this star system—they amount to a defensive system.”

Liking his chain of logic, I nodded in agreement.

“Stands to reason, sir,” Natasha said.

“Will fire destroy these things safely?” Leeson asked her.

“Destroy, yes—safely…I don’t know.”

Leeson’s eyes sought mine. “My helmet is beeping. Graves wants a progress report. What’s my next step, McGill?”

“Your tech has now given you valuable intel,” I said. “That’s what you’ll tell Graves about when he finds out you didn’t do as he asked. Always distract with an interesting detail.”

“Okay, I got that. What next? Should I answer this call?”

“No, that will establish a timeline you can’t afford. We have to move fast. Burn up the eggs.”

Leeson looked worried, but after a moment of indecision, he made his choice.

“Harris!” he shouted.

“Sir!”

Harris, who’d been lingering near the exit after the suggestion he would be the next to go on an egg-hunt, suddenly joined our group.

“Harris,” Leeson said, “is it your opinion that these eggs represent a clear and present danger to my men?” He pointed at the mess in hexagonal chamber.

Harris frowned then looked over the situation. He caught sight of Carlos’ arm, which Sargon was still waving around like a baton.

“Holy shit!” Harris said. “Yes sir, I agree wholeheartedly with that statement.”

“Then I order you to destroy this danger. Now.”

Harris grinned. “With pleasure, sir!”

That was it. We broke out every plasma grenade and incendiary device we had with us. Standing back at the entrance, we burned them all down to the metal.

Unfortunately, some of the acid got through the egg-casings, the membrane, and the flames. Then…it burned through the lower hull of the ship we were supposed to be capturing.

Leeson was cursing and crying about that, but we had to abandon the ship before we could do anything to stop it. The fumes, heat and blinding corrosives were melting our suits.

Stumbling out into sunlight, falling off the mosquito’s tongue and gasping for air in the clear, I was never so happy to have abandoned a ship in my life.

Graves was the last man to exit the ship. He came down the tongue at a walking pace, just as he’d done when first boarding her.

At his approach, we scrambled to our feet and stood at attention. Graves walked among us with a grim expression on his face.

He stopped in front of me, and he drew his sidearm. He aimed it into my left eye socket.

“McGill,” he said. “You see that gutted ship behind me?”

I glanced toward the mosquito. It was on fire now, stem to stern. The belly was a burning hole with acid, flaming alien eggs and only God knew what else falling out of it.

“Yes, Centurion.”

“That might have been our only way off this planet. You just might have permed us all, Veteran. For that—”

“Sir!” Leeson shouted.

“What is it, Leeson?” Graves asked, his gun never wavering from its target.

“Sir, McGill did not start the fire.”

Graves turned his head slowly toward the adjunct. “What did you say?”

Leeson began to explain. He mentioned the death of Ortiz, the analysis of Natasha and the back-up determination by Harris that the eggs were dangerous. Leeson managed to tell the story right, but he screwed up badly on the last part.

Not all men are born equal when it comes to the subtle arts of misdirection, embellishment and general weaselry. Leeson simply wasn’t up to the task. In retrospect, I figured I should’ve coached him on exactly what to say—but there just hadn’t been enough time for that.

The basic problem was he was too damned honest for his own good. Sure, when a man lives by his word, he should commit himself to the truth. But the time and place for honesty had long since gone by the wayside. The fact was Leeson had disobeyed orders. Lying about it afterward, in my opinion, was a relatively minor offense. One that was downright required if you were going to get away with the original crime.

“So,” Graves said, his attention fully upon Leeson now. “
You
ordered these men to destroy this captured vessel because you lost your nerve?”

“It wasn’t like that, sir, I—”

“Answer the question, Adjunct. Yes or no.”

“Well, I…I guess that’s so, sir. I’m sorry. It was an error in judgment.”

Graves nodded. “ Indeed it was.”

The centurion turned to Harris. “Veteran, as the most senior noncom in this platoon, I’m temporarily elevating you to the status of platoon leader. Are you ready to take on that responsibility?”

Harris looked from Graves, then to Leeson, confused. “Well sir, I think the platoon already has a good leader. I don’t—”

Blam!

Grave’s sidearm had gone off. Leeson toppled forward onto his face, his helmet a smoking ruin.

“I repeat, Veteran Harris,” Graves said in a perfectly even, calm voice. “Are you ready to assume command of this platoon?”

“Absolutely, sir!”

“Good. Now, gather up your troops. We’re marching back toward Winslade. He’s gotten himself into some kind of trouble.”

That was it. Leeson was gone. We stripped his body of whatever useful equipment he had, and we left him lying there on the ground. I felt bad about it—but damn, that man needed to learn how to stretch the truth properly if he was going to pull off stunts like this.

As we marched double-time back toward the giant trees, Graves moved to my side and trotted there beside me.

“Sir?” I asked him. I couldn’t help but glance at his sidearm. Fortunately, it was back in his holster.

“McGill,” he said, “I still smell your signature brand of bullshit on this fiasco. If I learn that you had a lever on Leeson, that he confessed to save your sorry skin, I’ll—”

“Sir, it was the damnedest thing. Leeson just up and lost it, I swear. Before any of us could stop him, the whole place went up. In his defense, though, those eggs were pretty creepy. He might need a psych eval when he gets revived.”

Graves’ slid his eyes to meet mine for a moment. He shook his head. “Sometimes I don’t know if you’re smart, dumb, or just a smart-ass.”

“My grandpa used to say I was one part genius and three parts retard, sir.”

“That sounds about right. I can only commiserate with the man.”

He moved off then, and I sighed heavily releasing a lungful of tension. Sure, I’d sold out Leeson. But he’d already been executed in the field. With any luck, that wouldn’t amount to a perma-death. Graves usually forgave a man after meting out his own particular brand of harsh, instant justice.

-33-

It had been a long while since I’d served directly under Veteran Harris. We’d often had trouble getting along, but we’d always pulled it together when push came to shove in a combat situation.

Today was no different. Harris looked at me, and I looked at him. We veered toward one another, and he gave me a nod.

“That should have been you back there, taking the bolt in the face,” Harris said.

“I disagree. Leeson made his own choices.”

“You coached him in your special brand of chicanery and look what happened.”

“His choice, Harris,” I repeated. “He’s a full-grown man.”

Harris looked at me sidelong. “You think you could have gotten away with destroying that captured ship, don’t you? You figure you’re above the chain of command. What makes you—”

“Two o’clock, Vet!” I said, pointing.

Harris dropped his bitching about my behavior and unlimbered his morph-rifle in a single, smooth action. He adjusted its structure into a long-range configuration.

“Enemy sighted!” he shouted, engaging the unit-wide channel.

There they were. Towering monsters the size of redwoods themselves. Their long, dangling limbs bent in curves rather than angles. I’d done battle with pod-walkers before, but this time seemed different. It took me a moment to figure out what it was.

“Command?” I heard a breathless female voice in my helmet. It was Kivi. She was in the rear of our formation, running with those of us who were unarmored. “The pod-walkers are being herded. See those smaller creatures at their feet? That’s what you have to kill.”

Graves spoke up next. “McGill, has your team seen those spiky-looking things before?”

“Yes sir,” I said. “I reported them just before you brought us home with a missile barrage. Claver explained they’re direct servitors of the enemy brain-plants. We call them spiders, sir.”

“They do look spidery... So, it’s their job to get the pod-walkers to charge in a single mass, is that it? Makes sense. I never did figure out how the walkers were able to coordinate. They don’t seem too intelligent alone.”

The walkers were encircling Winslade’s position. The sound of the action was reaching us now—snaps, whines and ripping noises like distant thunder. I could tell a terrific firefight was in progress. The sound of the weaponry was intermixed with the howl of the enemy.

“Okay, here’s the plan,” Graves said. “We’re going to dive into the thicket of ferns to our right. Try to stay together, don’t straggle. We’ll swing around under the cover of the undergrowth and hit the aliens right in the butt, pinning them between our guns and Winslade’s.”

I swallowed. Graves’ plan had its merits, but it was going to take us close to the enemy. I’d been hoping that we’d engage them from range with our rifles and belchers. I’d figured we’d distract the walkers and help Winslade that way.

Graves was planning a much more direct and aggressive play. We were going to be under their feet, in the thick of it.

Harris was still running near me. Resignedly, he reconfigured his rifle again, turning it into a short, stubby carbine weapon. I did the same. This was going to be a close-assault action, so we needed our guns to operate with a high firing-rate.

We soon dove into the thicket of ferns. We would normally have been running at speeds only an Olympic runner could match, aided by our exo-skeletal legs, but we couldn’t do that this time. Too many of our troops didn’t have armored leggings to propel them along. Already, I could hear our lighter-equipped troops puffing. The rearmost were struggling to keep up.

“We should slow down,” I told Harris. “We’re losing our lightest troops.”

Harris shook his head. “Wrong. We’ll plow in at a dead run. Let Kivi and the rest fall behind—they’ll last longer.”

Thinking about it, I nodded in agreement. Harris was right. Why endanger our most vulnerable troops right off the bat? Might as well give them a fighting chance.

The more I thought about it, the more I liked Harris’ manner of bending his orders. I figured I still had a thing or two to learn from him. Not just in adjusting orders but also when it came down to tactics. He got the job done any way he could. If he won the fight, the officers weren’t likely to complain just because he’d done it his own way.

The ferns were thick now, slamming and lashing us like palm fronds in a hurricane.

“McGill,” Kivi called on a private line. “I’m over a hundred meters behind you. If you don’t slow down—”

“Squad,” I said, overriding her voice and all the rest of the chatter among my people. “When the foremost elements engage, halt and find a good firing position. Engage at will.”

Sargon answered me then. “I like that. Thanks for the clarification, Vet.”

I knew what he meant. The rest probably did, too. I’d just edited our orders a little more. Graves had wanted us to hit hard as a single shocking strike, but what was going to happen now would be a more spread out force, all firing together, but not physically close to those deadly, stomping feet.

There wasn’t much more time to think. At first, we caught a few glimpses of the enemy, looming over us like trees that were bending and then straightening up again.

What could they be up to? It looked like…

“Centurion?” I called. “It looks like they’re throwing rocks at Winslade’s troops. Is that right?”

“I wish, McGill,” he called back. “They’re throwing things, all right. They’re throwing living pods. Winslade’s men are on the receiving end. They can’t keep a coherent line because the enemy keeps smashing those pods right into their midst.”

I got it then. The big pod-walkers were picking up and throwing the smaller creatures. We closed in fast and broke out into the open. The whole battlefield was laid out before my eyes.

There were pods—greenish black things that reminded me of the eggs we’d seen inside the invasion ship.

But these pods were much bigger. They were about three meters long and two meters thick. They must have weighed a ton each. The pod-walkers bent, picked them up and threw them like pinecones into Winslade’s line.

As a counter to this action, Winslade’s people were lashing the walkers with a storm of small-arms fire. As I watched, a pod split open under withering fire and green-white liquid drenched the walker that had lifted it above his head. A pall of white smoke rose up from the walker’s head-section as the acid went to work.

Sargon took careful aim and fired his belcher. He shot for a pod raised high, not for the walker. He opened up another pod before the walker could throw it, copying what Winslade’s people had done.

“Score one for our side!” Sargon whooped as the walker fell thrashing.

“Good shooting, Weaponeer!” Harris shouted. “Platoon, engage!”

We opened up with our morph-rifles, advancing at a walking pace into close range. We sprayed a deadly hail of bullets right up into the butts of the nearest walkers, who didn’t seem to know we were there until that moment.

Stupidly howling with pain and surprise, the towering giants turned on us. One stood right over me. He lifted a pod high, like a primitive man with a rock lofted in both hands.

I thought it was over. It was a shame, really. I’d only just gotten into the fight.

But when the walker smashed down the pod, it didn’t strike me dead, it crushed Harris instead. Acid exploded, spraying my armor and burning through my smart cloth where I wasn’t wearing any armor. The newly hatched creature inside shivered and rose slowly from the shattered pod.

Cursing and dancing away, I didn’t bother to look for Harris—he had to be dead. No one could take such a blow and live. Even if the hurled pod hadn’t broken his spine, the gush of deadly liquids would have finished the job.

Nearby troops blasted the acid-dripping alien apart. It was indeed one of the same kind that had invaded
Minotaur
when we’d first entered this star system.

“Advance!” I shouted, realizing I was in command now. “I want concentrated fire on the walkers that turn to face us. Ignore the rest.”

Again, I was editing our orders. Graves had told us to light up all the walkers to distract them—to keep them from overwhelming Winslade’s line. But I figured that plan was flawed. If they just turned around and killed us all quickly, we wouldn’t be doing much to help our fellow troops. No, I wanted to kill as many of the enemy as I could, one at a time, if possible.

The walker that had killed Harris went down fast. We tore it apart with hundreds of rounds at short range.

Two more walkers turned on us, pods held high. Sargon beamed one’s head off, and it threw its pod right into the back of the other walker. I had to grin at that, we’d caught a break. They both died before they could do much else.

I took a moment after that to survey the battlefield. I didn’t like what I saw. The other two platoons in Graves’ unit weren’t faring quite as well as we were. Tactics or luck had failed them. I checked my tactical displays—we’d lost all our officers except for Graves himself. Half our troops were dead, and the enemy didn’t appear to be dying as fast as we were.

We’d broken a hole in the enemy line, but it wasn’t enough to call a victory yet. There were at least ten walkers hunting down and destroying Toro’s platoon one man at a time.

“Harris?” Graves called.

“Harris is down, sir,” I answered.

“All right, McGill. I need your platoon to support Toro’s right now. Flank right, attack immediately.”

I marshaled my people, and we advanced toward Toro’s group.

As I watched, a big hand dipped down and scooped up a fleeing trooper. I think it was a bio, judging by her light gear. The walker crushed her with a convulsive squeeze of that many-fingered hand. Dropping the limp pulp, it reached for another.

We began to light them up, one after another. After half of the enemy was down, the rest turned and made a lumbering charge toward our position. I knew as they stumbled toward us that we couldn’t take them all. Not when they were focused on us single-mindedly.

I tried to contact Graves for clarification, but he was dead. I was on my own.

There wasn’t much time for thought, but I had one burning question in my mind: Who’d ordered these walkers to act in a coordinated fashion? Scanning the battlefield, I saw them—a dozen or so spiders up on the back of a high root behind us. Overlooking the region, they were quiet, calm, and deliberative.

“Platoon, disengage!” I roared. “Follow me up this root structure. Double-time! If you don’t have powered legs—well, hide someplace!”

To tell the truth, I don’t quite know why I gave the command. Tactical ingenuity? No, not entirely. Rage was more like it. I wanted to kill the spiders who’d ordered the death of my entire unit.

They sat smugly up there on their high root until they saw what we were doing. Then, like cowards, they began to dive off on either side. We reached them seconds later and tore apart the slowest spiders with ripping blasts of fire from our guns.

Turning back to the walkers, I’d expected to find them charging up the root after us. But they weren’t. They were milling around searching for prey in random patterns. Without the direction of the spiders, they’d broken off their attack.

Up on top of the ridge-like root, we found stacks of unopened pods. A big pile of them in a bowl-like area. The pods were big ones, juicy and ripe with corrosives.

My troops were firing down the steep sides of the roots, tagging the spider commanders in the ass, but it wasn’t enough. Many were getting away.

“Roll these pods after them! Move people, move!”

My last dozen troops hastened to obey. Sargon was still with me, along with a few others I knew: Della, Sladen and Marquis. We worked in teams of three, rolling the pods over the sides of the root. Dropping pods and shooting after the spiders, we caught a few more and watched them die. Then we rolled the rest of the pods into the face of the walkers that were closest.

That’s when things changed on the battlefield as a whole. The walkers had been operating as an organized formation of troops, but now that we’d killed most of their commanders, they were bereft of intelligent leadership.

Some stood dumbly, swaying and looking around, confused. Others charged blindly at whatever enemy they saw. They stopped throwing pods and marched directly into Winslade’s guns. They were cut down with focused fire.

A few more tried to get to us up on top of the root, but we were ready for that. We rolled pods down onto them, burning away their limbs with acids and blasting them with concentrated fire. As the root was relatively narrow for walkers, they were only able to approach one at time.

After a few minutes passed, they were all dead—every one of them. Not one of the enemy walkers had retreated. None had asked for quarter.

That suited me just fine as I wasn’t in a merciful mood, anyway.