Empire Ebook Full (15 page)

“I was in South America before Star Force leveled it,” she said.

I winced. The ill-fated South America campaign was a sore point for everyone in Star
Force. The press had never forgiven us for the loss of a continent. The human species
had survived, but a billion armchair generals would forever second-guess every decision
we’d made on the ground in the old days.

“I have to know what’s in that case,” I said. “Is it a weapon of some kind?”

“No.”

“Then why are you going to such lengths to hide it? What are you afraid of?”

Marvelena licked her lips. “I’ll make it up to you,” she said suddenly. “The report
will be quite favorable. Just give me the unit, and I’ll return to Earth immediately.”

Sandra and I looked at each other. Sandra smiled predatorily. “Can I arrest her now?”
she asked.

I nodded. Marvelena squawked in outrage as Sandra sprang toward her and grabbed her
from behind. She pulled back her arms and lifted them up slightly. I turned and headed
toward the beach, Sandra and Marvelena followed. The reporter produced quite a bit
of noise.

“You’re under arrest for suspicion of possessing contraband on this base,” I said
formally. I had to shout to be heard over the woman’s protests. “As the commanding
officer in this system, I’m placing you in custody until your guilt or innocence can
be determined.”

We headed back to the spot with the little stack of black stones and the dark case.
Lying there in the sand, it looked quite innocuous. I couldn’t help but wonder what
was inside it.

Sandra gave the girl a shove and she stumbled close to it. She gave us a venomous
glare.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she wailed. “They made me bring it here, and they said it was harmless.”

“What is its purpose, then?”

“It has no purpose.”

Sandra laughed. “You lugged this box all the way from Earth and hid it carefully.
Then you tried to seduce Kyle. I think it is a camera or something. A system to record
data. You’re trying to blackmail us, or make us look bad.”

Marvelena gritted her teeth. “I demand to be sent back to Earth.”

“You will open the case,” I said.

“I can’t.”

“You don’t know how?”

“I do, but they told me not to.”

“Who are
they
?” I asked.

She didn’t answer. She looked worried now, she was cornered and she knew it.

“Marvelena,” I said. “Perhaps you are only now realizing how far you are from home,
and how helpless you are against us. There are no cameras out here recording every
event as they do in the old cities back on Earth. There are no world tribunals, no
powerful elites who can pull in a favor with a phone call. All you have on the frontier
worlds are the people you deal with every day.”

“That’s why you don’t screw with us,” Sandra added.

I took a step toward her, and the waves lapped over my ankles. Sandra put a hand in
front of me. “Let me do it,” she said.

I considered. The spectacle of me manhandling a woman like Marvelena while she was
barely dressed, cameras or not, wasn’t something I wanted anyone on the base to witness.
I nodded to Sandra.

She trotted into the surf, grabbed the woman, who screamed, and the case with her
other hand. She eyed the case critically.

“It’s blinking,” she said. “Blinking with a green light. Just an LED—no nanotech.”

“You shouldn’t touch it,” Marvelena said, she squirmed in Sandra’s iron grasp. “The
Agent said not to.”

“What agent?” Sandra demanded.

“Someone from the Ministry of Trust.”

We both stared at her. We’d never heard of such an institution. What was Crow doing
back home?

“What the hell is the Ministry of Trust?” Sandra demanded.

Marvelena looked confused—and terrified. “That’s where I work. I’m a reporter.”

I frowned and opened my mouth to ask another question, but Sandra shouted triumphantly
at that moment.

“Ah-ha!” she said. She’d lifted the case and turned it over. “There we go, here is
a second opening. You—put your hand in here. I think it is touch-sensitive.”

Marvelena did not cooperate. Sandra finally took her hand and shoved it into the opening.
Marvelena screamed again, and I thought I heard a new note in her voice. It was the
sound of sheer terror.

Everything changed after that. I saw a blur of motion, and a flash of released energy.
I was knocked down into the wet sand.

I blinked up at the pale disk hidden behind the omnipresent clouds of Eden-6. I couldn’t
hear anything.

It really was a bomb
, I thought. My mind was numbed and I recognized the sensation. I was in shock.

-13-

I climbed to my feet and swayed unsteadily. I was shouting Sandra’s name, but I couldn’t
hear my own voice. All I heard was an intense ringing sound. In my body, I knew the
nanites were rushing to injured spots. I could feel them, tickling in my veins and
under my skin the subcutaneous layer.

I squinted and peered at my surroundings. It had been a long time since I’d been injured
this badly. One of my eyes, my right one, seemed not to operate at all. My left was
clouded by blood and the images coming in of my surroundings were dim.

I knew I should seek help. I should be trying to save myself. That was the first mission
of every soldier when injured on the battlefield. Guarantee your own survival, then
tend to the lives of those around you. But I kept looking for Sandra, heedless of
the blasted bits of shrapnel and sand that had riddled my body.

There was a big bloodspot in the water, staining an area perhaps twenty feet around
a dark color. I knew it was blood and gore. I dipped my hands into it, and found a
foot. I looked it over numbly. I saw the painted nails—lavender and silver. I shook
my head and dropped the foot. It wasn’t Sandra’s.

I kept digging until Kwon showed up. He and about six other marines rushed into the
water and lifted me up, carrying me toward the bunker. I resisted feebly. They were
saying things to me, but I wasn’t able to hear or understand them. I was dragged down
into the bunker like a scrap of food carried by a pack of industrious ants.

In a cool, dark room under the base a dozen skinny metal arms went to work on me.
I was unfortunate, in that they didn’t turn off the nerves first. Nanite medical tables
didn’t always worry about pain and suffering. I passed out before the stitching was
done.

* * *

Awakening from a bad dream, I found I could see with both eyes again. How many hours
had I been lying on this slab like a stiff in a morgue? I didn’t know, but I saw there
was another body lying next to me. It was Sandra, I could tell in an instant.

With a tremendous effort, I climbed off my slab, tripped and fell on my face. After
several minutes of groaning and heaving, I managed to get to her on my knees. I touched
her hair and then her cheek with the back of my mangled fingers. I thought I felt
warmth there.

Her jaws moved, and after a moment, I could make out quiet words. “I’m going to get
Crow for this,” she mumbled.

I smiled and leaned back against my own slab. I closed my eyes and laughed until I
choked. We’d both survived another attempt on our lives.

A few days later, we were sore but functional. Nanites and microbes had done amazing
things once again. We headed back toward the beach. This time, Kwon hovered near.

“I should never have left you,” he complained to himself. “I was a moron, just like
Jensen says.”

I shook my head. “No, Kwon.
I
was the moron. I had my head turned by a pretty face. I skipped protocol and I paid
the price.”

“That wasn’t the first time,” Sandra said in a scratchy voice. Part of her throat
had been damaged by the blast.

“It was luck you guys both lived,” Kwon said.

I shook my head again. “Not really. Sandra bounded away like a jackrabbit when she
heard the device click, and I was far enough away. We would have both died anyway,
if it hadn’t been for the work of nanites and the body-edits performed by the Microbes.”

Kwon muttered something I didn’t catch. I could tell he still blamed himself for this
security lapse. He’d set up automatic turrets along the beach now, which twisted and
scanned us occasionally as we passed by.

“This is the spot,” I said when we reached the collection of rocks. Marvelena had
led me here the first time we’d met.

Sandra stood with her hands on her hips, surveying the scene. “I get it,” she said.
“This place is very private. You can’t see the bunker from here. You brought her out
to this spot and screwed her, didn’t you Kyle? Don’t lie to me.”

I grimaced. “She led me out here. And no, I didn’t do it—but that might have been
her intention.”

Kwon looked alarmed. “You two aren’t going to fight now, are you? We only just got
you put back together!”

“We’re here to see why she led me to this spot.”

We searched, and quickly found another device like the first one under the waves,
but further offshore. These devices seemed adept at staying put. We examined this
one at a safe distance.

“What I don’t understand is how she got these boxes out here into the ocean,” I said.
“They’re too heavy for a normal woman—and she didn’t seem nanotized.”

“Ah…” Kwon said hesitantly. “Maybe I recognize that box-thing, now that you mention
it.”

We both stared at him.

“Well, she said she needed help. I might have carried a box for her—or two of them.”

“
You
did?” I asked. “And you didn’t feel like bringing this up before? What were the boxes
supposed to do?”

“She said they would monitor the planet, track eco-data. Some bullcrap like that.
I didn’t listen.”

“What did she give you in return for your help, Kwon?” Sandra asked.

“Uh…she was a very generous and friendly woman.”

“That little witch,” Sandra said. She turned on me, her eyes flashing. “She tried
to lead you out here Kyle to screw you, or kill you—or both. Right off, the moment
after you’d met!”

“Maybe,” I said.

“We should burn this second box with hand-beamers until we’re certain it can’t detonate,”
Kwon suggested.

“Then we won’t learn what it is,” I said.

In the end, I contacted Marvin and requested he come to the island base and take a
look. To my surprise, he showed up within the hour.

“That was quick, Marvin,” I said. “I thought you were stationed in space, orbiting
Eden-11.”

“A mistaken assumption, Colonel. I’ve been working here on Eden-6.”

I frowned. “Why?”

“Because there are subjects here who I need to examine.”

“Subjects? What’s here that triggers your overly-curious mind?

Marvin shuffled his tentacles and paused. I knew that meant he was thinking up a dodge,
if not an outright lie.

“Don’t bother to bullshit me, Marvin. Just answer the question.”

Almost every camera he had studied me. “I was about to explain that I’ve been studying
the Microbes. They are native to this world, as I’ve explained in the past.”

I did seem to recall him telling me the Microbes came from this planet. I frowned
in concern. We’d been swimming in these oceans. I hadn’t thought about getting some
kind of infection from the water.

“Are these creatures dangerous, Marvin? My people have been swimming these oceans
for months.”

“Yes and no,” Marvin said. “Only the intelligent Microbes could damage humans, and
those colonies are relatively rare.”

“But they’re in the water, right?”

“Yes.”

I heaved a sigh. “Is the ocean teeming with these little bugs? Trillions of them?”

“Trillions is an insufficient numerical concept in this instance. I have calculated
we are dealing with numbers in the octillions.”

“The octillions?” I asked. “Isn’t that a one with about twenty zeroes after it?”

“Twenty-seven zeros, sir.”

“Right. Well, I suppose when you have a trillion micro flora in a single human body,
an ocean would have a population with a count many orders of magnitude higher.”

“Correct.”

“You still haven’t told me why they aren’t dangerous to humans.”

“They aren’t all the same species,” he said. “The vast majority of them don’t know
we exist. Just as on Earth, there are a millions of species of bacteria here. On Eden-6,
a few species have developed intelligence. Most are literally mindless, wild microbes,
just as they are on Earth. My point is that the odds you have encountered intelligent
colonies just by occasional bathing are low.”

I nodded. “I guess it is a very large ocean. But don’t they travel around and interact?”

“Not as humans do. They are very fractious, due to their small size and short lifespans.
A solitary traveling Microbe, should it survive the journey from one colony to another,
would find the trip took multiple lifespans to complete.”