Death World (Undying Mercenaries Series Book 5)
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Authors: B. V. Larson
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(Novella)
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DEATH WORLD
by
B. V. Larson
The Undying Mercenaries Series:
Death World
Copyright © 2015 by the author.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the author.
An excerpt from:
The Rise of Earth’s Legions
Earth’s military changed forever when the Galactic Empire informed us of our status as proud members of their grand regime. Up until that time, the human species had wrongly assumed we were alone in the universe, and that our miniscule planet-bound concerns were all that mattered. The true state of affairs was not understood in the old days. We had no idea we were part of a vast political organization that laid claim to fifty billion of the stars in our galaxy.
After that blissful moment of formal annexation, humanity stood both humbled and enlightened. A turbulent period followed, during which certain stubborn nations and individuals were corrected in their thinking. Within a decade, however, those of us who survived came to embrace our new status in the cosmos.
Comforted by the realization Earth was part of a massive brotherhood of alien worlds, we were given a series of fantastic gifts. The first of these was security. Each province, such as our own Frontier 921, was patrolled by a Battle Fleet charged with the twin duties of local enforcement and expansion. Another boon came in the form of trade with countless alien worlds. Wealth and technology untold can now be purchased from any world in the Empire with Galactic Credits.
These gifts do not come without a price, however! Our great patrons, known collectively as the Galactics, tolerate no transgressions. The breaking of the smallest of their infinitely wise laws results in immediate, harsh correction. Perma-death of the perpetrator is the usual punishment meted out, but it is by no means their only option. At times, an entire family unit, organization, locality or even the source species itself is found collectively guilty for having fostered a criminal—in which case they’re summarily removed from existence and forgotten.
Since our annexation, Earth’s role in the Empire has always been military in nature. It was discovered early on that our best trade good consisted of mercenary troops. We formed the legions to serve this need for our alien brothers. More recently, we’ve become an enforcement arm for the Galactics themselves. Earth’s military, therefore, is of vital importance to her economy as well as her security.
Our forces consist of two major groupings. Hegemony is a planetary organization dedicated to homeworld defense. Contracts with foreign worlds, however, are dealt with by a loose-knit brotherhood of independent legions.
Listed here are a few of the most famous (or infamous) legions from Earth’s pantheon:
Hegemony
Emblem: The Blue Globe.
Although it is called a legion, Hegemony is actually far larger than all the independent legions put together. The organization is Earth’s primary military authority, responsible for planetary security as well as the task of oversight for the smaller legions as they perform off-world missions.
As our role has recently shifted from performing purely mercenary tasks to local provincial defense, it’s quite possible that Hegemony will someday devour the rest of the legions. However, there’s been a good deal of resistance to the idea from the legions, various military leaders and even the public at large. The legions enjoy loyal patronage, almost like sports teams, among the general population. Talk of their dismantlement has resulted in lost elections for numerous politicians.
In addition, there’s still some validity to an independent command structure. Due to the vastness of space, it’s virtually impossible for a centralized government to fully control any military force deployed on a distant world. This reality means any task force must be capable of operating in an unknown environment with the freedom to make on-the-spot decisions for months or even years at a time.
The fact that deployed legions often cause incidents that come home to haunt Earth later is the topic of countless debates, but for the time being, the smaller legions remain independent.
Victrix
Emblem: The Crossed Swords.
Victrix was Earth’s first formally commissioned legion. They brought home Galactic Credits after successfully performing an off-world mission for the Skrull in their home system. For this and many subsequent actions, they will be forever remembered and revered. Without their initial forays, two of which were completed before a second legion was even deployed, we all might have perished as financial failures—a crime that isn’t tolerated by the Empire.
Germanica
Emblem: The Head of Taurus, the Bull.
Germanica has long been known as the legion most requested by the richest of clientele. They serve with distinction and even grace. There is no legion that is as professional in appearance and performance. Every despot among our neighboring worlds who requires an escort, a display of wealth, or merely a color-guard, asks for Germanica.
Vile rumors of corruption among the legion’s officers must be mentioned here. Germanica’s leadership has hotly denied the allegations for many years. It is this author’s suspicion that such slander is the inevitable outcome of envy, a sin that lurks in the hearts of all lesser men.
Iron Eagles
Emblem: The Double-Headed Eagle.
The Iron Eagles have a varied history. The third of Earth’s legions to be commissioned, they’ve fought in many difficult campaigns. Historically, they were regarded as among the most professional and capable of the legions. If a corporate ruler was in danger of losing his birthright to a gaggle of rebels, he would often summon the Eagles. In modern times, some say this legion has become more indolent and choosy with their missions, even refusing the hardest assignments. All in all, however, they still have the reputation for being the best fighting unit Earth has.
Teutoburg
Emblem: The Oak Leaf.
Teutoburg is a legion with a questionable past. Their tribunes have faced more charges of corruption, misconduct and unsanctioned alien dealings than the top officers of any other legion. A quick look through imprisonment records finds the odds that any given leader of this organization will eventually be convicted of a serious crime is nearly one in three.
On the other hand, it must be mentioned that Teutoburg has served Earth well on countless occasions. They pride themselves on never refusing an assignment or failing to complete their missions as described. Detractors point out that it is not their effectiveness that is questioned, only their unorthodox methods.
Solstice
Emblem: The Rising Sun.
Solstice would not normally be worthy of mentioning here as their performance has been far from stellar in years past. They have, however, been recently redeemed. Along with Legion Varus, easily our most infamous and questionable formation, they were instrumental in the procurement of a metal-rich planet circling Gamma Pavonis.
This author agrees with the common wisdom that Solstice did the majority of the fighting and dying on Gamma Pavonis, otherwise known as Machine World, and thus deserves the lion’s share of the credit.
Varus
Emblem: The Wolfshead.
Some historians would argue that Varus shouldn’t be mentioned at all alongside distinguished legions with valorous histories. However, despite their reputation for slovenly conduct, questionable ethics and behavior bordering on the criminal, this author feels no list of our legions could be considered complete without their inclusion.
Whatever one thinks of them, their impact on history is undeniable. The legion has participated in numerous critical campaigns. They’ve affected the fate of every human being that draws breath today, for good or for ill.
At the dawn of the current era, during which the local Battle Fleet was recalled from our province to the Core Systems, Varus battled with the saurians of Cancri-9, officially known as Steel World. This led to a falling out with the saurians who had been, up until that time, our best clients. This new rivalry between Earth and Steel World has never abated since.
Rumor has it we most recently came into direct conflict with the saurians on Machine World, our newly acquired metal-rich planet. Again, Legion Varus was involved.
Perhaps greater than these famous disasters was the inclusion of Dust World as Earth’s second legally colonized planet. Legion Varus was on the scene again, by providence, claiming the new territory even as they helped trigger a new conflict with the Cephalopod Kingdom. This case exemplifies the dichotomy Varus represents: We gained a few thousand exiles who’d been marooned on a desert planet, but we did so at the cost of a new conflict with the cephalopods. Some hypothesize that this dispute will grow into an open war that may eventually lead to our extinction.
Misunderstood waifs? Or devils with hearts of coal? This author, like so many others, suspects the members of Legion Varus are a little of both.
“The poisoned fig tastes no less sweet.”
– Livia Drusilla, 14 AD
-1-
After living on Machine World in the Gamma Pavonis system for months, coming home to Earth felt like a vacation in paradise. On my homeworld the skies were blue, the air was clean, and it was blissfully warm even in the dead of winter. Machine World, by comparison, was a frozen Hell. The land was permanently overcast and devoid of organic life. Instead of water, methane filled the seas and fell from the sky in flakes, forming alien snowstorms. The electromechanical beings that “lived” there could be friendly, but they weren’t very bright, and their natural hunger for metals drove them to aggression when they encountered armored humans. In short, I didn’t miss the place at all.
My hometown was Waycross, in Georgia Sector. My parents owned a small plot of land there near the Satilla River. I’d taken up residence in a dimly-lit shack on their back acreage. It had a portable fridge, creaky floorboards, and a sagging couch to sleep on. It wasn’t much to look at, but I called it home.
Anne Grant, a legion bio I’d had a thing for over the years, spent a few happy days with me in that shack after our return to Earth. But one gray afternoon she said her goodbyes and drove back up to Kentucky. I knew I’d miss her, but I felt comfortable about our parting. She was one to be remembered.
Seeing that yet another girl had come and gone from my life, and possibly feeling wrong-headedly sorry for me, my parents took me out to dinner the same night Anne left. They told me all the local news while driving home in the family tram. Like a good son, I hunched in the tight backseat, nodding, grunting and pretending to listen.
They no longer bothered to ask for any of my stories—the details of my last campaign to the stars.
They’d given up on asking about that kind of thing after hearing about how I’d watched giant lizards run around with my guts in their bloody muzzles on Steel World and other, similar tales. They’d learned to leave well enough alone.
So, instead of asking me about Machine World, they kept the tram’s cabin full of easy talk—and I liked it that way. Our whole coming-home reintegration had become routine now, and all three of us seemed to be comfortable with that.
After dinner, I was ready for bed. We climbed out of the tram, said our goodnights, and separated. My parents walked into the main house, while I made my way in the darkness to my private residence among the trees.
Falling asleep alone on my couch felt like I’d rediscovered heaven. Anne had been an excellent houseguest, but I was more than ready for a little R&R after her visit. When I had a woman staying in my place, I tended not to sleep the night through—if you know what I mean.
Before retiring, I decided to have a few drinks. After much experimentation, I’d discovered the perfect dosage of alcohol to sleep well and yet awaken refreshed. Promptly after consuming the last shot glass, I stretched out with a smile on my face.
A few weeks lazed by after that, during which I reacquainted myself with all my old pastimes. I rode over the Satilla River on my homemade floater, visited the Chapter House bar for cheap beer and shot a lot of pool there. Since they’d begun to serve alcohol, the Chapter House had been transformed for the local legionnaires. It was no longer just a trap for wide-eyed legion recruits from the Sector, it had become a hangout for men and women like me. People whose eyes were already haunted by the light of the stars.
It was about a month into my leave time when I made a mistake. I was in my parents’ house, not my back shed where I usually hid during the daylight hours. While visiting with my mom, I was caught messing with my tapper instead of listening to her.
Fooling with a tapper while pretending to have a conversation with your parents was a common enough thing to do, of course. What older person could hold the full attention of someone half their age?
Imagine the temptation. The entirety of the galaxy’s entertainment was accessible from a tiny screen embedded into the flesh of my arm. In comparison, my mom was prattling about trimming the brush from the driveway, obviously hinting that I should volunteer for the job.
“Sure Mom, I’ll do it,” I said without looking up. “Don’t even worry about it.”
“What’s on your screen?” she asked, craning her neck as she passed by me, heading for the kitchen. “Who is that child?”
I froze for a split-second then lowered my arm and tapped the X that closed the window.
“No one.”
“A
child
in your photo box? That’s not like the James McGill I know. She’s a girl, isn’t she?”
“Uh…I think so, yes. How can you tell if a baby is a boy or a girl?”
“I’ve seen a few of them before,” she said with a hint of sarcasm.
“That sort of thing never ceases to amaze me. Women have an undefinable edge in that department. Take fashion choices, for example—”
“Who is she?” my mom interrupted.
It was at about this moment that I realized she’d stopped walking toward the kitchen. She was looming over me and frowning. My dodge, attempting to switch the topic to feminine traits in general, was gaining no traction at all.
I felt the tickle of sweat all over my body. The girl she’d spotted was none other than Etta, my daughter with Della. The fact that I’d neglected to bring up the existence of my child to my parents had bothered me from time to time, but I’d thought it was for the best—up until now.
Why had I been fooling with the photo album on my tapper at that moment, right in front of the most dangerous person on Earth, as far as my privacy was concerned? I don’t quite know how to answer that. I wasn’t sure why I’d held back the information in the first place, except that I knew my parents would be uncomfortably crawling all over me for details I didn’t have about my daughter.
From somewhere deep in my chest, a sigh erupted. It was long and protracted. I didn’t look at my mom. I didn’t say anything at all.
I didn’t want to lie to her, but I didn’t want to start the conversation that was about to begin, either.
My mom studied me with that curious frown for about two more seconds, then walked into the kitchen. “I’ll be right back.”
My relief was short-lived. She returned with tweezers. I twisted my mouth into an irritated expression when I saw them.
“Hold out your arm,” she said.
“I’m not seven anymore, Mom,” I complained. “I can pluck the hairs out of the screen myself.”
“Apparently, you can’t,” she said, taking my wrist.
I let her stretch out my arm, and she proceeded to remove about ten curly blond hairs that had grown on the inside of my forearm, getting in the way of the screen which wrapped around the inside of my left wrist.
Seemingly by accident, she opened my photo album again. Etta’s face was there, looking up at both of us with that clueless look all babies wear most of the time.
“Look at that, she’s a cute thing,” she said.
I sighed again. “Yes, she is.”
“A little young for you, isn’t she?”
“She’s not my girlfriend, Mom.”
“So, then, who is she?”
“She’s…her name is Etta.”
My mom set down the tweezers, and then she sat herself down on the couch opposite me. She stared at me with hungry eyes.
I knew she was onto me. It was confession time.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know quite how to tell you.”
“Tell me what?” she asked in a tiny voice.
“Etta is my daughter. She’s your granddaughter, Mama.”
You could have heard the grass grow for about five seconds. My mom had this weird look on her face, like she was going to cry, pass out, or both.
Instead, she leapt up, ran over and hugged me. Then she let go of me and slapped me a good one.
“You little bastard,” she said, almost whispering. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Uh…I didn’t know how.”
She grabbed my wrist and began working the touchscreen on my arm like a pro. Navigating the tapper’s menus, she soon found a movie featuring Etta and watched it with tears running down her face.
“She’s got to be almost two. She’s walking, a few steps at a time. Two
years
, James? You kept my only grandbaby from me for
two years?
”
“Oh no, hold on,” I said. “It wasn’t like that. I didn’t know about her myself until a couple of months ago.”
Then I told her the story. All about the crazy colonist girl named Della, who’d killed me a couple of times before getting purposefully pregnant. I left out the part about her killing me, of course, but the story still didn’t sound entirely wholesome to my mother.
“You barely know this girl? And wait a moment—are you saying this child isn’t even on Earth?”
“Yeah,” I said, “that’s what I’m saying, Mom. She’s on Dust World…you know, Gamma Pavonis. I’ve never even met her. Della gave me a few pictures, but that’s all.”
“Are you sure the child is even yours? I mean, she looks like you—but this Della person—she’s doesn’t sound like a reliable source of information.”
“You mean she probably sleeps with plenty of guys, right? Well, according to her, she doesn’t. But as to the parentage—I’m sure about that. Della’s father is kind of a…a doctor. He did the DNA test.”
“They have your DNA?”
“Yes.”
The truth was, they had
plenty
of my DNA back on Dust World—more than I did in my own body, in fact. They’d dissected a couple of my corpses and knew me better than I knew myself. They had enough damned DNA to build a whole new James McGill if they’d wanted to.
My mom was crying again. I tried to comfort her, and I transferred all the pictures and movies I had to her tapper. I don’t think this helped much. She looked at them, but she still wasn’t happy.
When she’d settled down, we had lunch, then I went back to my shack. I walked back home like a hound dog who has just experienced a good solid kick in the hindquarters. As far as I could tell, I’d done the worst job possible of breaking the news to her, and she’d reacted in the worst possible way.
James McGill had struck again.
That evening, my dad tapped on my door. I let him in and faked a smile. He managed a flickering one of his own.
“What’s up, Dad?”
He stared at me for a few seconds. “You have any of that rot-gut beer left?”
“Sure do.”
I put a cold one into his hands and popped one open for myself.
He took a slug before talking. “Your mother is freaking out.”
“Yeah…I’m sorry about that. I didn’t mean to break it to her that way.”
“It’s not about how you told her. It’s about the news itself.”
“She’s always hinting about wanting to be a grandma,” I said. “I thought she might be happy after she got over the surprise.”
“Really, James?” he asked. “Our first grandchild is on another planet, and you thought she’d be happy? We’re not getting any younger, you know. You might not have noticed, but we’re aging—you’re not, but we are. We don’t have forever to wait.”
Thinking about that, I frowned. It was true. A mercenary in the legions, a man who stuck with it, could live a century or more without aging. Centurion Graves, for example, was somewhere around seventy to a hundred years old, but he looked like he was around thirty-five, tops.
That sounded great when you were a kid, and it was. But your family, the people who weren’t in the legions, they kept on aging. On every campaign I flew out to the stars and usually died out there in some fashion. Using the alien revival systems, the legion rebuilt a new body and mind for me from stored data. Since they didn’t bother to do body-backups often, I usually came back physically younger than the age I’d been when I’d left Earth.
But back home everyone plodded along through a normal, quiet life. My parents had been aging all this time. I’d seen it, but I hadn’t really thought about it until now.
“Mom wants to see the baby—is that what you’re saying?” I asked.
“Of course she does,” he snapped. “How can you be so smart and so dumb at the same time?”
He was angry, and with good reason, so I didn’t object. Besides, it was a question I’d often asked myself. Instead of responding, I took a big hit of my beer and got up to get a fresh one. I offered him another one as well, and he took it.
“She’s already pricing out a fare to Dust World,” he said a few minutes after we’d each consumed another brew in silence.
“What? You’re kidding me.”
“No, I’m not. It’s going to cost me a year’s pay.”
Alarmed, my mind was racing along new paths. Della had told me she was married. Not only that, when I’d last visited Dust World, there wasn’t really anyplace for tourists to stay.
“Dad…you should probably try to stop her.”
“I don’t know if I can do that.”
“But Dad, Dust World…it’s not like Earth. Most of the planet is a deadly wilderness. The people there, well, they don’t think like we do.”
“Obviously not. Couldn’t you have used some kind of protection, boy?”
