Undying Mercenaries 2: Dust World (3 page)

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The taxman glanced over his shoulder. I couldn’t blame him for that. He was caught between me and whoever was stepping into the situation behind him.

I didn’t wait around for his surprise to subside. I didn’t have time to reach him with a kick or a punch. So, I threw my new knife at him.

Throwing a knife accurately isn’t easy even if the weapon used is balanced and built for the purpose. I’d been combat-trained aboard my legion’s ship for months, but we hadn’t done much in the way of knife-throwing.

My whirling blade sailed past the taxman, missing him by a hair. Instead of its intended target, it thunked into the smart-door behind him.

“McGill! You asshole!”

“Carlos?”

I couldn’t believe it. He was standing there, his stocky form silhouetted in the doorway.

I winced when I saw the knife had nearly hit him, but I didn’t have time for apologies. I came forward, closing with the taxman. He turned back to me, lifting his
riveter, and I knew I was screwed. I couldn’t reach him before he could pull the trigger.

Thick arms came out and latched onto the thug’s wrist. Carlos had finally made his move. The riveter fired, over and over. The concrete at my feet sparked with tiny yellow explosions.

Carlos and I tackled him a second later, and he went down, but he still had both hands clamped onto that damned riveter. Not wanting either of us to be shot in the foot in the struggle, I ended the fight by slamming the smart-door into the taxman’s head repeatedly. Finally, he stopped moving.

We
stood over the unconscious thug, breathing hard.

“Making friends again, huh McGill?” Carlos grunted out.

“As always.”

By this time
, Hegemony MPs had reached the scene. The smart-door must have alerted them. We explained the situation, and they arrested the thug at our feet.

“What’s his name?” one of them asked me.

“He said he was the taxman,” I explained.

The MP twisted his lips. “Very funny guy. He can tell his next joke in the District auto-courts.”

The MPs hauled him up, carrying him between the two of them like a sack of potatoes.

“He’s not dead,” I said.

“I figured.”

“Shouldn’t you call an ambulance or something?”

The MP snorted. “They won’t come out here. We’re going to have to drive him to the District hospital ourselves. It’s a jurisdiction thing.”

I frowned and shrugged as they hauled him off.

“I don’t get you, McGill,” Carlos said. “One second you’re in a death fight with that loser. The next, you’re worried they’ll stub his toes.”

“He might have a broken neck. They should put him on a stretcher or something. He’s not like us, he’s a civvie. He won’t get a new grow if they screw up his body.”

Carlos laughed and shook his head. “He would have killed you if he could have. Get over it.”

“People are desperate, Carlos,” I said. “I don’t know what his story is, but I’m sure it’s not a happy one.”

“What can we do about it?”

“We can bring home the bacon,” I said. “We can go out there and win new accounts, new planets for our legions to serve.”

Carlos snorted at me. “Yeah, sure. We’re going to save the Earth. You always have big, dumb ideas. I think it’s because you’re so tall. The air is too thin up there for your brain to work properly.”

Lines like that had often brought Carlos and me to physical blows. But I restrained my irritation. It was just his way of talking, and I’d gotten used to it for the most part.

“What are you doing here at the Hall, anyway?” I asked him.

“Mustering back in, same as you.”

We’d been told we’d be contacted and brought back to the same Mustering Hall where we’d been recruited after shore leave was over. But it hadn’t been long enough for that yet.

“By my accounting, we’ve got nearly three more weeks of leave,” I said.

“What? Didn’t you get the call? We’re supposed to be here
now
. That’s why the adjunct sent me up here when you buzzed the door. The computers alerted him. Why didn’t you check in with your tapper?”

“It’s not working—and no, I didn’t get that call. I came back to see if there was any news about our next contract.”

We were walking through the Hall by this time. I was still limping, but it wasn’t that bad. I figured if I got the wound sprayed over by a flesh-printer, I’d be right as rain in a day or two.

The Mustering Hall was a loud, echo-filled chamber, nearly as big as a football stadium. As the non-legionnaires had been kicked out, only official people were left still milling around.

“Lucky you,” Carlos said. “You would have been reported AWOL if you hadn’t shown up by tomorrow night. Anyway, here’s the update: our contract
was
canceled. We’ve got a new one, though. We ship out in less than a week. No one seems to know where we’re going or what the mission is.”

I nodded. “I hear there are a lot of legion contract cancellations happening.”

“Figures,” Carlos said. “Everyone’s getting a vacation except for us. Same old Varus bullshit. Whatever the new job is, I bet it’s going to suck.”

I couldn’t argue with him on that point.

On the way down to Legion Varus’ offices, which were located on the lower floor, we ran into two legionnaires. They were standing on either side of the escalators, loitering.

I could tell right off they were from a different legion than we were. They had shiny black boots, and their legion patch depicted Taurus, the raging bull. The emblem indicated they were both from Germanica, a respectable outfit. I noticed that the symbol was bigger than our wolf’s head symbol. In fact, their patches were so wide they were hard to ignore.

Germanica was one of the famous legions. I’d tried to join them when I’d first come to the Mustering Hall last year. They hadn’t wanted me, and I’d joined Varus instead.

Carlos and I glanced at these two, then moved to walk between them to the escalators, but they moved to bar our way.

“What do you losers want?” asked the legionnaire on the right. She was a black woman with a pair of the thickest thighs I’d ever seen on a fit person.

The legionnaire on the left
gave a bark of laughter at her comment. He had his arms crossed—and they were big arms, I had to give him that. He had reddish curly hair that was cut so tightly it looked like he had a cap on his head. He was a specialist too, same rank as me, but his second patch indicated he was a weaponeer.

“You want to go downstairs where the rats live?” the woman asked. “That’s it, isn’t it, rat?”

“Yeah?” Carlos said, puffing up his chest a bit. “You clowns from Germanica shouldn’t talk big. I hear your last contract was cancelled. And I do mean your
last
.”

Their faces, which had been bullying and amused, suddenly displayed rage. Carlos had a special gift when it came to making people want to hit him. I knew Germanica had lost their contracts, everyone
had. Their contracts had mostly come from Steel World, but that was all over with now.

“You little shit,” the redheaded weaponeer said, stepping forward and poking Carlos with a thick finger. “That’s why we’re here. We want to talk to you Varus bastards. You’re the reason we lost our contracts in the first place.”

As legionnaires from different legions, we were technically in the same overall force. But there was a strong sense of rivalry between the different outfits. In the past, troops from various military services hadn’t always gotten along. There had always been Army-Navy rivalry, for example. But with legionnaires it was even stronger than that. We were more like armies from different allied countries. We operated independently, and we had complex relationships.

In the case of Legion Varus, however, the relationships weren’t complex. Pretty much everyone else despised us.

I put my hands up in a cautioning gesture. I figured we could settle this calmly. After all, I’d just been in one fight, and that was usually my limit on any given evening. But before I could speak words of peace and wisdom, Carlos had his mouth open again.

“Unemployed,” he said, then laughed. “
We’ve
got a contract, and you’re standing in the way of one of Earth’s few sources of hard currency. I wonder why the aliens picked us over you guys? Maybe because we get the job done instead of whining about how our cush deals went sour. I’m glad you pukes got cancelled. Maybe you’ll have to do some real fighting next time out.”

The redhead’s fist was pulling back before Carlos even finished his little speech. I couldn’t recall seeing a guy’s face go from white to red quite that quickly before. The situation might have been a record for Carlos, who often generated this sort of response from people.

“Stand down, Specialist!” called a voice.

We looked and saw an officer striding in our direction. She looked small but mean. She had a Hegemony patch on her shoulder, a globe, and under that there were two bars which served as the universal emblem of rank for adjuncts.

I could tell the redhead was uncertain. His arm stayed up and cocked. I could almost see in his mind that he was weighing a night in the brig against the joy of punching Carlos. It was a tough call, and I couldn’t blame him for hesitating.

Not helping matters, Carlos was smiling at him and tapping at his chin with his middle finger, begging for the punch.

The female legionnaire from Germanica defused things. She put her hand on the redhead’s fist and gently pushed it down.

“These rejects aren’t worth it,” she said, giving each of us a sneer. “You know, you’re right, we did lose our contracts. But we got new ones: bullshit missions because of Varus!”

The two stepped aside and left. The adjunct glared us, watching as we separated. When we’d safely passed down the escalator, she disappeared.

“I was totally going to take down that ginger-headed moron,” Carlos said. “He’s lucky a couple of girls were there to save his sorry ass.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

Carlos looked at me, and his expression turned thoughtful. “What do you think she meant about getting new bullshit contracts?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they have to take on crappy jobs like we do. Maybe that’s why they’re hating us right now.”

“They always hate us. But yeah, that makes sense. I bet they’re trying to carve out new territory. Ha! That serves them right! Let them do some hard fighting and dying for a change.”

“You’re a bitter little man, Carlos,” I told him.

He glared at me, but then he looked thoughtful again. “Do you think everyone on Earth blames us for what happened? For the lizards dropping contracts with all the legions?”

“Probably. The news-nets are pushing that idea. They never accuse us directly, but they hint around all the time. They talk about how the very last legion to set foot on Cancri-9 was the ‘notorious’ Legion Varus. Then they go into a brief discussion about what a bunch of losers and misfits we all are.”

“But that’s just a cover story, right? I mean, Hegemony Gov knows we’re the best, right? That’s what you said the Tribune told you.”

I glanced at him and felt a guilty pang. The truth was the Tribune hadn’t told me any such thing. He’d said we took on the jobs that no one else wanted, and that we did essential work. But that pretty much describes morticians and school janitors who sprinkle smart-dust on barf stains, too. Just because you had a hard, necessary job didn’t guarantee anyone would respect you for it.

I decided to maintain the fiction, however. Now wasn’t the time to bring Carlos down any further.

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s right. We’re the best in the system. They’re just jealous.”

“Damn straight.”

We reached the Varus offices and walked into a wardroom. It wasn’t big enough to hold all the soldiers present, so we had to stand in the back, shoulder to shoulder. There must have been a hundred people in the room, which was built to hold half that number.

“Glad you could make it, McGill,” Veteran Harris rumbled at me.

I touched my fingers to my cap and flashed him a smile he didn’t return.

“Eyes front,” he said.

I looked forward and saw another familiar face. It was Primus Turov. She was the leader of my cohort, which was mostly made up of people from North America Sector. She didn’t like me, but fortunately she wasn’t looking in my direction right now. The only thing I liked about the woman was her posterior, which I found myself staring at right off.

With an effort, I tuned into the briefing. I had the feeling she’d been talking for quite a while.

“Our destination world is still a secret, but our mission is not. We’re to grow Earth’s territory. We’ve lost certain critical accounts, and they aren’t coming back. Because of that, our entire world is feeling an economic bite.”

“More like an economic swallow,” whispered Carlos.

Veteran Harris must have been waiting for this moment, as he’d positioned himself nearby. It was like he’d known that one of us would eventually make a comment. His boot slid sideways, crashing into Carlos’ shins. It was a move I’d seen him use before, usually on recruits who weren’t showing the appropriate level of respect. Carlos made an odd sound that made me wonder if he’d consumed a small animal in a single gulp. The troops around us grinned faintly, without ever taking their eyes off the Primus. I had to admit, I was grinning too.