Tech World (Undying Mercenaries Series) (28 page)

Seconds later, the broadsides fired. I could feel a concussion wave rolling through the ship. The shock
staggered me and almost knocked me off my feet, despite the fact the control room had special dampening systems. Strangely, there wasn’t as much of a roar as one might have expected. The barrels were out in space, and much of the energy had been released into the void. The only noise and vibration we felt was due to recoil alone.

I stabbed at the switch. The blast doors rolled
back up more slowly than I’d remembered.

Craning my neck, I could see trails of gas following a shower of sixteen projectiles. They’d already hit the atmosphere, propelled by the rail-gun system
at incredible speeds that were best measured as a percentage of the speed of light.

The shells were punching their way down through thin layers of gas toward the endless city that sprawled below. It was nighttime down there, and lights twinkled as witless Tau citizens went about their routines without any idea of what was falling from the skies above them. I felt sick, wondering how many would die as collateral damage to stop the cancer Claver had released.

The shells brightened as they dug deeper into the atmosphere. I knew that was their outer shielding, a combination of a projected field and burning ceramics. To prevent disintegration on entry into the atmosphere they were heavily protected.

“Right on target,” whispered Claver.

“What have we done?” I asked.

“We’ve saved a world, that’s what. The cancer had to be cut out. Don’t blame yourself, boy.”

I frowned at him. “Blame myself for what?”

He nodded toward the scene below. The salvo had reached ground and sixteen interlocked white flashes flared. Almost instantly, these impacts were obscured by the expanding clouds of dust and debris. Glowing shockwaves rippled in concentric circles destroying miles of buildings and people.

“I didn’t know we were going to hit them that hard!” I said, horrified. “We should have fired just one round!”

“You have to be sure with cancer,” Claver said. “Any surgeon will tell you that. When they cut on you, most of what they take out is good, solid flesh. You know that, don’t you?”

I didn’t look at him or acknowledge him. I was too shocked by what I was seeing below us. I’d never witnessed a Galactic warship’s broadsides striking a target before. Hell, I don’t know if any human being ever had. The destruction was terrific.

The white flashes had given way to a lurid red glow under the billowing clouds of dust. I saw something, something like a black thick strand coming out of that mess of destruction. As I watched, the strand moved upward, curling and whipping like a snake in slow-motion.

“The umbilical,” I said, almost unable to breathe. “That strike—you hit the base of the umbilical!”

That’s when he
nailed me. I have to admit, Claver’s timing was masterful. I’d looked at him not ten seconds before, but I’d spent the subsequent moments staring down in horror as the magnitude of the disaster I’d allowed to occur sank in.

The umbilical had been cut,
the station had been set adrift—and I’d let it happen.

My skull exploded in white pain and I sank to my knees.

I knew then I’d made the wrong choice in trusting Old Silver.

-29-

If there’s one thing my mama can confirm—should you ever have the chance to ask her—it’s that I have a hard head. There have been times in my life she’s told me that I should have been stone dead by all rights. Like the day she backed into me with the family tram while I zoomed by on my aircycle, or the time I fell off the fourth story balcony of our apartment and landed headfirst on a pine tree.

On both those occasions, plus a few others, medical types had later tapped, prodded and scanned my cranium to see if I’d suffered a crack. It had never happened.

Unfortunately, I’m
not immune to pain. My brain, that lump of gray and white matter that resides within my thick skull, was protesting with the most violent of headaches. But as was usually the case in these situations I stayed conscious throughout the trauma.

As I fell I spun around onto my back. Claver stood over me with a wrench in his hand. It was a wickedly heavy thing built for twisting open hatches and the like. The gleaming end of it had the look of worn steel. The tool had clearly been well-used by a dozen strong men in the past.

Stunned, I lay there with eyelids fluttering as Claver’s arms rose up for a second strike. He had the wrench in both hands, and he was going for an all-out homerun this time. His face was screwed up with the effort of it, his teeth bared like those of a killer ape smashing down a rival. I didn’t need much brainpower to figure out he was going to bash my face in with his next blow.

My n
umb fingers squeezed. The snap-rifle in my hand began to chatter. I didn’t even know where it was aiming. I barely cared. Just hearing the sound of it was enough for me.

My aim wasn’t too good. The recoil from the snap-rifle, although mild, helped out. The gun kicked upward in my weak grip. I barely managed to hang onto the trigger, to keep it hammering
out tiny rounds.

The first shower of
pellets splattered the ceiling of the fire control room. Dozens of orange sparks flashed up there before the recoil slewed my aim farther upward. I drew a line across Claver’s belly, stitching him with at least ten projectiles. They ripped upward through his body and a few stabbed right up into his skull.

Snap-rifles fire a lot of rounds quickly, but each bullet is small, about the size of a BB. At the speed the rounds were traveling, it didn’t much matter. They
tore right through the man’s unprotected body and blew bigger holes out of the back of him than they made going in.

Claver never landed his second blow with the wrench. Instead, he sprawled out on the deck beside me.

It took several long minutes of groaning before I could get to my feet. There was blood in my hair and more of it ran down my back. If a bio had been around to witness the situation, they might well have recommended I start over again with a fresh body—and the way I felt at that moment I might have agreed with them.

But in the end, I managed to get to my knees and then my feet. Swaying, I took the opportunity to look at Old Silver.

He was a mess. His eyes were bulging in shock, showing all the whites like boiled eggs with blue yolks. There was blood and fragments of bone everywhere.

“I hope you stay dead,” I told the corpse. Then I looked down at the planet below us.

The destruction I saw down there made me want to puke. I scanned the billowing clouds of dust, rubbing my head absently as I did so. It looked as if a meteor strike had landed—a big one.

Gathering my wits and my strength, I staggered out of there
and headed for the modules. Claver had only ejected the three occupied units. Maybe there were more people aboard.

I could have contacted the Skrull—but what good would that do? They were hired hands here. They had no stake in this battle. If everyone in this system killed one another, they barely cared as long as we didn’t molest them. In fact, they
couldn’t
interfere or even disobey an order from a legitimate source without incurring the wrath of the Galactics.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t a legitimate authority. I was an enlisted man. I was mere cargo as far as they were concerned. That meant I couldn’t control this ship, not even with the Galactic key. I could control individual subsystems, but I couldn’t fly the ship itself. The Skrull would only listen to an officer.

Limping around the modules, I found no one. I cursed and raved. Claver had been thorough, and his Germanica victims had been obedient. They’d all sealed themselves in their modules and been promptly ejected into space.

I took stock of what resources I had left. There wasn’t much. I could commandeer a pinnace and fly back to the station—but that didn’t look like a very good idea right now. The station might well be doomed and spiraling in a decaying orbit. At the very least, it was full of deadly rioters and even more deadly legionnaires, all of whom had to know by now I was to be killed on sight.

The broadsides were still under my command, I realized. But who was I going to blast next? I barely understood their operation much less how to precisely target them. Besides which, I had no intention of causing even more misery and pain today.

I turned my thoughts back to the modules. I took a quick look at the non-standard units. There was the tech module, a combination of laboratory and workshop. The armory was reasonably well-equipped with thousands of weapons I had no need of.

Then I came across a bio module. Here, as on every ship, it was called “blue deck”. I stepped inside and had a look around. Soon, I had a flesh-printer in my hands and was running the wand over the back of my head. Pain-relievers, fresh skin cells and a trickle of stimulants made me feel better almost immediately.

My eyes drifted to the locked sub-chamber. There was a revival unit in there, I thought. There had to be.

I shut off the flesh printer and walked to the door. It was locked, but a touch of the key solved that.

Inside the room, I regarded the
dormant revival machine. I hated these things. To this day, I didn’t see how bio people could handle working with them all day, every day. They were slimy, disturbing—and they smelled pretty bad, too.

Due to an unusually colorful past in Legion Varus, I was able to operate this str
ange piece of equipment. I needed more people. I couldn’t run this ship alone. Accordingly, I tapped the priority list and stabbed the go-button. The machine would decide who I needed first, and I trusted its judgment. Whoever was on the top of that list was the best person I had available to me.

The revival machine gurgled and sloshed inside. The thought that it was working to grow a new human being was
freaky, but I was beyond feeling such emotions.

My mind drifted to the Tau
below. Sure, they were an overpopulated, irritating species, but I didn’t think they deserved to be slaughtered wholesale for all that.

Before the revival machine finally signaled it was finished, I’d found the stimulant cabinet and partaken of the ampules inside. I had a faint smile on my face and my aching head was a distant worry.

The revival unit’s maw fell open with a wet sound. I sighed and got out the spatula-like tool.

Feet. Bare feet. It was giving birth to a woman by the look of it.
She was small and shapely. I got the tongue of the shovel-like tool under her butt and pulled, but she didn’t come out right away. I had to tug at her feet, grunting with effort.

She finally flew out with a popping sound and a gush of thick fluids. Wrinkling my nose, I struggled to get her onto a gurney without accidentally injuring her.

I assumed she was an officer, possibly a Germanic bio. When she was functional, she’d have a lot of questions for me. I didn’t want to even contemplate what answers I was going to provide her.

The woman was
attractive and seemed way too young to be an officer. I had her on the table, and she tried to speak, but couldn’t. I checked the readings, squinting at them.

“
Atrial fibrillation?” I read aloud. No one answered. No one was there to tell me what to do. “A bad grow right off? Crap.”

I considered grabbing her and shoving her into the recycling slot. She was barely conscious, and she wouldn’t remember this short lifetime. But I couldn’t do it for some reason. There was something familiar about this woman. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it was there.

Unlimbering the defib equipment, I shocked her repeatedly. After the fourth try, she came awake, puking and gasping. I checked the reading.

“All clear,” I said, smiling. I’d done it despite the fact my body was operating on stims and sporting a serious head-injury. I felt mildly proud.

The woman rolled away from me then, curling up in a ball on the gurney. Then I knew the truth.

She had a distinctive set of hips. Her shapely posterior that was more than a little familiar. I’d stared at her for years. Of course, I’d never seen her without clothing, but a man like me knows a shape that stands out.

“Turov?” I asked.

She coughed and weakly struggled to sit up.

“McGill?” she asked. “I’m going to kill you. Over and over again.”

“Yes sir,” I said. “You probably are. Did you know your hair is a different color?”

“I dye it, you idiot.”

“Oh, right. But you’re
also a lot younger than the last time I saw you. Haven’t you backed up your body over the last couple of—decades?”

She glared at me with red eyes. “I haven’t died for a long time in the service of the legions.”

I nodded slowly. “Yeah, but you look like you just joined up.”

“Are you high or something?” she asked.

I thought about the pain meds. I’d partaken liberally. I smiled a small smile. “A little, yeah.”

She produced a sound of disgust. “Give me some damned clothes.”

Smart-cloth soon covered her body. Like a wrapper closing and cinching, flaps slid over her breasts and thighs. I was sorry to see them go.

“It’s going to be hard on you as an Imperator,” I pointed out. “You look like a kid. In fact, you’ve got to be younger than I am now.”

Glaring, she twisted up her lips. “Why the hell did you revive
me
?”

My mouth opened, and I almost told her I’d hit the priority-revive button. But some part of my brain was still operating. I knew you never told a girl that chance had brought you together. She had to be special.

“I needed help,” I said. “I couldn’t think of any one better than you for the job.”

She narrowed her eyes at me disbelievingly then they slid down to the snap-rifle I still had on a strap over my back. There was blood on my hands and my face and—everywhere. Her eyes widened and she bit her lip.

“You’re sure this isn’t some kind of odd fantasy of yours?” she asked. “Did you revive me for a chance to make me suffer? I hadn’t thought you were that kind of a man.”

She sounded confident enough, but there was a new note of worry in her voice. She’d finally picked up on the fact that there was no one around except me and her.

It was true, I realized as I thought about it. I could murder her right now. After stuffing her body into the recycling chute, no one would be the wiser.

“I’m not a fiend,” I said. “I needed a ranking officer to help me handle this emergency. I immediately thought of you.”

“What emergency?”

“Uh…what’s the last thing you remember?”

“I was in the lobby outside my office—and that rodent Claver shot me.”

“Right, well…a lot has happened since then. Can you walk?”

“Certainly,” she said, batting away my helping hand.

She got down off the gurney and almost did a facer right there. I was ready for it, and managed to grab onto her before she hit the floor.

“Get off!” she shouted.

I ignored her complaints and stood her up like a doll. I supported her elbow as she took her first steps despite her protests. Soon, she had the hang of walking again.

“I can tell it’s been a while since you went through a revive,” I said.

“This isn’t going to get you out of execution if that’s your plan,” she told me. “Anyone could have revived me.”

“Well…maybe not,” I said.

“What’s that supposed to mean? Give me a
headset, now!”

“Just give me a few minutes to show you the situation.”

Turov eyed me. “So…I am your prisoner? You won’t get any pleasure out of this, McGill. I assure you of that.”

The revival machine began to churn and slosh, creating fresh life. I could only guess who it had chosen to be second off the line. That process would take a few minutes, so I thought now was as good a time as any to reeducate the Imperator.

I could tell she wasn’t going to believe anything I said, so I figured the only thing I could do was
show
her the situation. I took her to the fire control room. As we walked down the echoing, empty passages, I wondered why the machine had chosen to revive Imperator Turov. I guessed that it had decided such a high-ranking individual deserved special treatment. Probably, back on the station the bio people had been too busy churning out combat troops and throwing them at the front lines to bother with wasting time on the brass. They hadn’t had time to pamper the officers. They’d needed fighting troops to stop the enemy advance.