Undying Mercenaries 2: Dust World (39 page)

BOOK: Undying Mercenaries 2: Dust World

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Friends and relatives had done a one-eighty in their opinion of the legions. We were no longer
failures; we’d brought home the bacon and then some. They understood that troops in steel ships had dragged this bounty back to Earth, but I don’t think any of them appreciated how hard-won our new wealth was, or how difficult it might be to keep the money flowing in the future.

For
me and my comrades, none of this had come easily. For us, this new era wasn’t about spending credits and building new buildings. We’d paid a price in blood to bring back good economic times—the best Earth had yet to see in all her storied history. But would it all be worthwhile in the end? What would the Galactics make us do to keep our status? To my knowledge, no one had even thought to ask the Chief Inspector what had happened to the last Enforcers who we’d been chosen to replace. Maybe nobody wanted to know.

I didn’t have any answers, only questions. I found solace in beer and companionship
during my second shore leave. I guess in the end that’s all any of us ever really have.

I looked up Natasha and she made a special trip to Atlanta to see me. That was never a bad sign
, when a girl spent money to come visit you.

Natasha and I went out after I introduced her to my folks, who were busy looking at houses out in the suburbs. They both had jobs again, and I knew that made them happy. They had dreams of buying some land with trees and a half-dozen songbirds—real ones
—if they could scrape together enough credits.

After taking Natasha to
a few places we ended up at a bar full of military types. I don’t know why—I guess I felt most at home in that kind of place now.

“How are you holding up, James?” she asked me when we were alone and settling into our second
round of drinks.

“Pretty well.
At the end of the first month, I got a happy surprise. My pay-mail arrived, dinging on my tapper. When I checked the amount I discovered it hadn’t been reduced. Graves had told me he was demoting me from Specialist to grunt again—but apparently, he never did fill out the official screens.”

Natasha smiled and squeezed my hand. “
I guess that was his little way of saying thanks for negotiating the legion out of mass perma-death.”

We
laughed and had another round. We’d saved two planets while utterly destroying a third. All in a day’s work for Legion Varus. Seen from that perspective, I guess I did deserve to keep my rank and full pay.

“I’ve been wondering about one thing,” I said to her about an hour later.

“The answer is ‘yes’,” she said, eyes shining.

I laughed. “Great—but that wasn’t what I was going to say
—not yet, anyway. I was wondering what kind of trade good the Dust World colonists could possibly come up with. If they can’t figure that out, we’ll be busted back down to a single-system species again.”

“Haven’t you heard?” she asked. “They have an excellent trade good. The Nairbs hav
e already approved it, and they’re making shipments by now.”

“What did they come up with?”

“Nanites,” she said, “what else?”

I thought about that, and it made perfect sense. They had managed to steal some advanced nanotech from the squi
ds and fine-tune it. Now, they were selling their wares to the Empire at large. I was glad to hear humanity’s position as a two-system civilization was secure for now. It did seem ironic that the squids could have done the same thing, but had chosen to end their existence rather than knuckle-under to the Empire. I guess some species were too proud for their own good.

Natasha and I got a hotel room and spent several intense nights together. By the time she had to leave, I was feeling better about life.

Before our next deployment orders came a month or so later on, I’d had time to reflect on how much Earth’s role in the Empire had changed since I’d joined Legion Varus. I now suspected that this wasn’t all due to chance. Looking back on recent events, I’d begun to see a pattern.

Why had the Saurian peoples of Steel World tried to take our single trade good from us? Such things did happen from time to time, but the brazen behavior of the Saurians and Legion Varus itself during the conflict went beyond the norm. The Nairbs had let both sides get away with it, too. Could this lax attitude on the part of the Empire be due to internal weaknesses far, far away in the Core Systems?

I daydreamed of vast armadas floating in the cold void between the close-knit stars at the center of the galaxy. I imagined millions of vessels struggling, striving for dominance. Seen from the fringe of the Empire, the distant upheavals all seemed remote and yet ominous at the same time. It was like watching a thunderstorm on the horizon and imagining how it must be furiously lashing the ground with lightning.

T
he part humanity played in this galaxy was an infinitesimally small one. Frontier 921 was a tiny, far-flung province that meant almost nothing to the commanders of those vast fleets at the Core. If they thought of Earth at all, it was in terms of a category of planets and beings. We were ants to them, and they were a herd of elephants having themselves a stampede.

If I’d learned anything during my brief adulthood, it was that being the ant in such situations could be dangerous.

The End

From the Author:
Thanks Reader! I hope you enjoyed
DUST WORLD,
the second book in the Undying Mercenaries Series. If you liked the book and would like to see the series continue, please put up some stars and a review to support it. Let new readers know what’s in store for them.

P.S. Star Force fans, book
ten will be out soon!

-BVL

More
SF Books by B. V. Larson:

UNDYING MERCENARIES SERIES

STAR FORCE SERIES

Army of One
(Novella published in
Planetary Assault
)