Tech World (Undying Mercenaries Series) (5 page)

The lifter wasn’t crowded. In fact, it was almost empty. That was strange all by itself. Burning fuel to boost less than a hundred passengers into orbit wasn’t efficient, but the crew did it anyway without even announcing the lift-off was coming.

Only the warning tones and a few recorded messages warned us that heavy G-forces were imminent. Natasha, Carlos and I all strapped in, pulling down the safety bar over our heads and slapping the chest harness buckle into place.

“This is way too familiar,” Carlos said.

When I didn’t react right away, he had to emphasize his point. “You remember the first time, McGill? When we went up in one of these deathtraps and, in fact, died?”

“Yeah, I remember,” I said. “Except I didn’t die. Not that time.”

“You expecting some kind of thank-you rubdown? ‘Cause you’re not getting it. Not this time. I repaid that debt.”

“Shut up, Carlos,” Natasha said.

He grumbled, but he did shut up—for a few minutes. Once we broke into orbit and the powerful weight of acceleration left our bodies, he perked up again.

“I got that message last night, big guy,” he said. “A little love note just after midnight. The Primus must have been thrilled.”

I looked at him. “What do you know about it? Why would she care so much?”

“Are you kidding me? She’s Hegemony now. She figures Varus is just an embarrassment—a stepping stone from her past. She’d rather not have us do anything else dramatic now that she’s out of our outfit. She has plans, baby. All the way to the top, and she doesn’t care who she has to blow to get there.”

Carlos had never been a tactful guy, but in this case, I figured he was dead-on target. “You think that’s it? She’s out of Varus, so if we screw up she’ll get the blame?”

“Yeah, something like that. If we get sucked up into Hegemony, it’s some other guy’s fault if old McGill goes hillbilly on the Nairbs again.”

I nodded slowly. “What do you know about this deployment?”

“Sudden and unwanted. I’d prefer to be back on Miami beach. This is total, sugar-spiked bullshit.”

“Yes,” Natasha exclaimed suddenly.

We glanced over at her. She was working her tapper as usual. She had a cable running from her arm into her pack which was sitting in the seat next to her strapped in like a toddler.

“What do you have?”

“I’m linking up!” she declared, eyes shining. “I can do it.”

“Yeah, so?” Carlos asked.

“That means we can still vote,” she said.

We looked at her for a second. Finally, I caught on. “You mean because we’re up in space, our vote wouldn’t count?”

“I say we do it right now,” she said. “All three of us. If we don’t, we could get disconnected again. I’m running on a thin tunneling-hack right now to get a stream off this ship and down to central.”

“Could that be it?” I asked aloud. “Could she have called this emergency deployment just to scramble the vote? Once we’re up here, we’re out of range.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Carlos said doubtfully. “But that seems extreme.”

I was tapping at my tapper. I fired off a message to every marine on the lifter. Carlos got it right away, and he read it aloud.
“You’ve all been tricked. Vote now, vote fast, or you’ll be silent hogs forever.” Carlos looked at me. “Dude, you don’t
know
that. You shouldn’t spread rumors.”

“It’s already done,” I said. “Are they voting, Natasha?”

She worked, tapping quietly with a fixed frown on her face. She nodded after a while. “About half of them have logged in to the voting page. I’m going to have to fight to keep this tunnel open until they finish. Don’t bug me.”

“Excuse me? Is there a stewardess on this flight?” Carlos asked no one loudly. “I need to move to another seat before McGill makes me dead again!”

I smiled at him. “Too late,” I said. “Stop fooling around and vote to keep Varus independent.”

“What if I vote for unity, for strength—to join the pride and glory that’s known to us lowly rodents as Hegemony?”

I gave him an evil look. “If we lose, I’m going to ask that you and I serve together in a new unit under Winslade, damn you.”

“Okay, okay.”

-5-

When we reached
Minotaur
and docked, Natasha quickly repeated her hack. For a brief time, everyone aboard was able to navigate on their tappers to Earth and log into Central. I walked the promenades over the exercise deck spreading the word. It was time to vote—now or never.

I needn’t have bothered because the news spread like wildfire. They didn’t like the implications of the situation, and as far as I could tell there were a lot of angry votes shunting down the line to Earth. No one liked the idea that they’d been railroaded into not voting by being mustered off Earth on the eve of the vote.

“The loyalists are whipping the quitters five to one, I bet,” Carlos said.

“I thought you were a quitter,” I answered.

He looked at me in mock outrage. “That was just my charming sense of humor. I don’t want to be a hog any more than you do.”

I smiled at him, but inwardly I worried about what Turov had said. She’d indicated that it didn’t really matter how we voted. It was only a method to identify dissenters. I hoped she’d been bluffing about that.

Outwardly, I clapped people on the shoulders and told them they were doing the right thing. I wondered about myself as I did so. Was I really into winning this vote? How much did it matter to me that we stayed independent? Sure, the dirt-side hogs were losers, but at least they didn’t have to look forward to getting their guts chewed on by aliens once or twice a year.

“I hope you know what you’re doing, James,” Natasha said later, echoing my sentiments. She’d been eyeing me. I
recognized the look. She knew me too well, and she knew when I was in over my head and bullshitting. This was definitely one of those times.

I took a moment to remind myself that Turov
deserved
to lose this vote even if it was only an embarrassment for her. She’d overstepped her authority, and right now she was coming off as petty despite her promotion. Defying her just for spite was a worthwhile cause in my mind.

“I joined this legion to see the stars,” I told Natasha. “And I mean to keep doing just that. I don’t want to be gelded and left in an office someplace.”

She laughed. “Don’t worry. I have a feeling no one in any office could put up with you for more than an hour.”

I took her statement as a compliment, thanked her, and moved off to tour the ship.
Minotaur
really was an improvement over
Corvus
. Word was it had been shipped out from the Perseus spiral arm systems, from its old base about two hundred lightyears closer to the Core.

Whether this rumor was true or not, I liked the ship. It wasn’t just a transport, it was a hulking warship.
Minotaur
had a broadside of guns, sixteen of them, strung down the starboard length of her thick, scarred hull. That meant this ship could fight if she had to.
Corvus
had been very lightly armed and built only to take a legion of humanoids to battle.

I managed to get to my bunk just before midnight. Over the last hour, every trooper I’d met had already voted. At the end they were telling me that they couldn’t get through to Central anymore, and I assured them that that was normal—even though I had no idea why the connection had been broken.

Tired, I arrived at my quarters ready for bed. It had been a very long day. To my surprise, my roommate wasn’t there. Instead, Centurion Graves stood in the middle of the room.

“Is there a problem, sir?” I asked, setting aside my bag.

Graves let his arm fall. He’d been watching his tapper. He stared at me coldly. “You tell me, Specialist.”

“Sir?”

“You’re late.”

“Just got aboard, sir. Last shuttle up from—”

“Bullshit, McGill,” he snapped.

I shut up. It had always been hard to bullshit Graves. I decided to quit while I was behind.

“I’ve been waiting here at the barracks for the last hour or two. Then I decided to hunt you down using your tapper to locate your position. Do you know what I found?”

“Uh…I was taking the grand tour, sir.”

“Yes, you were. I’ve spoken to some of the people who were on your itinerary. Do you know what they said?”

I was standing at attention by now having come to realize this wasn’t a social call. “I can guess, sir.”

“They told me you’ve been out drumming up votes to keep Legion Varus independent. Is that right, Specialist?”

“In a manner of speaking, sir.”

“Right… Do you know that the officers in the legion have all been specifically forbidden to sway the votes of troops in this matter?”

I glanced at him. “No sir. I wasn’t aware of that.”

“Well, it’s true. That’s why I’m here.”

“Sir?”

“I want you to carry on, soldier.”

“Oh. I see, sir. Will do.”

Graves snorted. “As if you would listen to me if I told you to stop.”

“The vote is pretty much over with anyway, sir,” I said. “It’s almost midnight, and they’ve cut our access to Central.”

This seemed to amuse Graves. “No, Specialist. You’re wrong about that. This is far from over. Now, if you’ll please excuse me. I need to get out of your presence before the crazy rubs off on me.”

He bid me goodnight and marched off down the passageway chuckling.

After my head landed on my bunk a few minutes later, I found it was hard to keep my eyes open. The vote was over, and I was pretty sure we’d won. If we hadn’t won, I figured I could at least take comfort in the fact that I’d done my damnedest.

I wondered what Graves had been hinting about, but I hardly cared as long as we’d beaten Turov.

* * *

The next morning after breakfast we were summoned for a briefing.
Minotaur
was still in orbit, I was glad to see. I’d been worried they’d leave Earth during the night. I wanted the chance to tell my folks I was shipping out—once we were in a warp bubble there’d be no transmissions possible.

My unit stood at attention in a square inside our designated module.
Minotaur
was a big enough ship to allow each unit to have its own module. They were all linked together of course, stacked up like suitcases inside what had to be a single massive hold. But to us tiny humans, the modules were comfortable homes. There was an exercise chamber, sleeping quarters, and a mess dedicated to each. We were in the exercise chamber right now waiting for the mass briefing to begin.

Centurion Graves marched in from a side door at precisely 0700. Martial music began to play—I recognized it as the Hegemony anthem. A few troopers hissed, and their veterans silenced them.

A face flickered into being on the forward wall of the chamber. The image had to be thirty feet high. The face belonged to none other than Imperator Turov.

“Damn,” Carlos said next to me. “That mole on her forehead must be a half-meter across.”

“You should text her about it,” I suggested.

Turov’s face was tight and grim. She waited a moment then addressed the assembly. I knew she couldn’t see us as she had to be
looking into a camera pickup, but the effect of those gigantic eyes staring down on a man was chilling nonetheless.

“Fellow legionnaires,” she began, her voice rolling out over us with the booming power of an amplifier. “As many of you know, I’ve been transferred to Hegemony. I requested this opportunity to address my Varus cohort one final time.”

Carlos nudged me, his eyes shining with excitement. “We’ve finally lost the old witch!”

I slapped him away and stared at Turov in concern. She had a reason for all this—of that I was certain.

“Your new mission begins today,” the giant face told us. “You’ll ship out within hours, and you won’t be back for a year.”

A general chorus of groans went up from the assembly.

“Because last night’s vote was a failure,” Turov went on, “Legion Varus will not be joining Hegemony. As a direct result, Central Command feels Legion Varus should be deployed immediately to Tau Ceti. There you’ll serve as a color guard for the local aristocracy. The term of your contract will be, as I mentioned, one standard year.”

She said these words with emphasis, and I figured she knew they would cause every soldier who heard them pain. We normally didn’t deploy for more than six months at a time. A full year—that wasn’t going to be easy. Worse, Tau Ceti was known as a dull world. They were a merchant’s depot, a central clearing house for goods from twenty star systems. Most of the technology shipped to Earth these days filtered through Tau Ceti.

Although Earth legions often served there as bodyguards for rich merchant princes who wanted to show off to one another, service there wouldn’t be anything to write home about. Effectively, Legion Varus was being put on ice.

“Legion Varus will be relieving Legion Germanica,” she continued. “There will be a two week transferal period after which Germanica will be brought home aboard
Minotaur
.”

“Marooned on Tau Ceti for a
year
?” Carlos complained.

I didn’t glance at him. No one did. Carlos was always complaining about something—but this time I had to admit he had good reason.

“I wish you all well,” Turov concluded with a smug smile, “and I regret that I’ll be unable to accompany you on this mission. On a final note, I wanted to assure every trooper who privately texted me concerning certain irregularities in last night’s voting process that the matter will be investigated. Thoroughly. The wheels of legion justice grind slowly, but in the end, no wrong will go unpunished.”

Carlos slapped my belly. “She’s talking about you, dummy.”

I caught his hand and went for a finger-hold, but he managed to jerk it away before I could break something.

Veteran Harris turned his head, glaring. “You two knock it off. Is this junior high?”

“Sorry Vet,” Carlos said. “McGill can’t keep his hands to himself.”

Shaking his head, Harris turned back around with a sigh. I was surprised he hadn’t injured one or even both of us. Maybe he was too depressed to do so.

When Turov’s giant face finally melted away, Graves made a speech about duty and honor, but I wasn’t listening. The briefing broke up shortly thereafter.

All I could think of was the long, long year stretching out in front of me. We’d won the vote. Legion Varus was still independent. But it seemed like Turov had had the last laugh. She was sending us off to Tau Ceti for an entire year—a gulag assignment.

After the briefing, Harris was the first to “congratulate” me. He clapped a heavy hand on my back. His open palm landed so hard between my shoulder blades that the blow might easily have been mistaken for a slap.

“Well played, Specialist,” he boomed in my ear. “Now I’ll get to cool my heels twenty lights from home. I’ll be wearing parade uniforms and accompanying drooling
Tau while they go shopping in hostile townships. Lucky me. I’m so glad you kept us free and clear of the evils of Hegemony.”

I looked at him in surprise. “I didn’t realize you wanted to become a hog so badly, Veteran. Maybe you should appeal your case. They might let you off on a shuttle if you move fast. After all, we’re still in orbit and—”

Veteran Harris’ hand leapt from my shoulder as if I’d bitten it. He glowered and his eyes slid from side to side, glancing at the troops around us who were listening in.

“Shut up, McGill,” he rumbled then quickly marched away toward the exit.

“Ha!” Carlos said, coming up to me and staring after Harris. “You smacked him harder than he smacked you. What do you think? Did Harris really vote to bug out and join Hegemony?”

I shook my head. “Hard to tell. If he wanted that, he could have bailed out after returning from any deployment
over the years.”

“Maybe it’s a matter of pride,” Carlos said. “He can’t leave on his own because that would make him look like a coward to everyone in the legion. But if we
all
bailed out together, he could do it with dignity.”

I looked at Carlos and nodded. “No one will ever accuse you of being insightful, but you might just have something there.”

Carlos took my backhanded compliment well. He beamed and strutted. I guessed it was because, for him, praise was hard to come by.