Undying Mercenaries 2: Dust World (11 page)

“We’re abandoning
Corvus
,” he told me.

I almost rolled my eyes at him, but I controlled the urge.

“That makes sense, Adjunct,” I said. “But why the hurry? I thought we had at least ten hours to go.”

“Yeah, sure. We’ve
had ten hours before we reached the critical point of no return and got sucked into the star. But did you stop to think about our position in this system? Once the decision was made to jump ship, we realized we had to move as fast as possible.”

I frowned. “So we have another ship we’re trying to rendezvous with?”

This amused Leeson. “Right, sure,” he laughed. “There’re like fifty luxury cruise ships from the Core Systems hanging around out here circling this shithole frontier star in case lost troopships happen by.”

“I take that as a no, sir.”

“A big
no
, Specialist. We jumped off
Corvus
because the only places to run to consist of a few scrubby planets. Two of those are in the Goldilocks Zone. We’re aiming for those worlds and we couldn’t wait any longer.”

After he said this, the race to get off the ship made more sense. I knew enough planetary astronomy to know that the Goldilocks Zone was the region of space around a star in which liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface. Earth was in that zone as were almost all inhabited worlds.

“I get it, sir,” I said. “The only place we could run to consisted of the local planets that are inhabitable. We’ll need air and water to survive.”

“Exactly.”

“So, I’m assuming we’re making planetfall on that ocean planet the colonists were sent to years back, right?”

Adjunct Leeson shook his head. “No, afraid not. That was considered and rejected.”

“Why?” I asked, my heart sinking. I’d been entertaining visions of warm oceans and even warmer beaches.

“Where do you think those damned squids came from?” Leeson asked me.

I thought about it. “They did seem to be aquatic, at least originally. But are we sure they’re native to this system at all?”

Leeson lost patience with my battery of questions. He’d never been a patient man. Competent, yes. Calm and collected, no.

“Look,” he said, “I have no idea why they decided to bail out and head for the dust world instead of the water world. And I didn’t order you to plant your butt next to mine so we could have this little bedtime chat, either. You’re here for one reason.”

He pointed at my plasma tube.

“I want that,” he said, indicating my weapon. “I want you and your weapon as close as possible to my position. From what I’ve heard, only heavy weapons damage these squid things, and you’ve already had combat experience with them.”

“That’s true, sir. Just one more thing?”

“What?”

“You said something about a ‘dust world’?”

“Yeah,” he said. “The brass looked at all their options and narrowed them down to three. One was to try to invade the water world. That idea was dropped because those oceans are probably teeming with massive squids. The second idea was to hang around space and broadcast an S.O.S. That was rejected too, as the enemy would doubtlessly hear the signal and come to wipe us out—assuming we could even survive in open space long enough to be rescued in the first place. Fortunately, there’s another world in the Goldilocks Zone in this system.”

Dust World.
It had a certain ring to it, I had to admit. Unfortunately, the name conjured up a vivid image—an image I didn’t like in the slightest.

“Sir? What’s this Dust World place like, if you don’t mind
my asking? I’d been kind of hoping to take a bath, if you know what I mean.”

“Look,” he snapped. “It’s a frigging rock in space, okay
? A dry rock with a little air, a little water, and a whole lot of dust. Maybe if you’re lucky, you’ll get to make mud when we land and you can take a bath in that. Now shut up. I’m listening in on command chat.”

I fell silent and endured the Gs as the lifter maneuvered and rocked. I had time to ponder my choices in life, and I had to admit I was full of regrets today.

-11-

A banging sound on my helmet made me open one eye. I’d been sleeping—which wasn’t easy to do in heavy armor aboard a lifter.

Adjunct Leeson’s face stared into mine. Our visors were open, but we’d kept our helmets on. That was SOP in dangerous systems.

“Sir?”

“Let’s go. I’m supposed to move forward and attend a briefing. You’re coming with.”

I didn’t argue. I removed my straps and got to my feet, groaning. The internal joints of metal armor always created sore spots that dug into my flesh and cut off circulation. I was all but dragging my left leg behind me as I set off after the adjunct.

We traveled to an open ladder and hauled ourselves upward. The hatch at the top was tight for a weaponeer, and my kit scraped and banged as I slipped through.

On the upper deck things looked different—very different. I’d never been anywhere on a lifter other than down inside the troop pods. The upper decks were reserved for the crew and the higher ranking passengers.

The deck we stepped onto wasn’t as big as the lower troop bays, but when compared w
ith the rows of bare metal jump seats it was luxuriously appointed. There were swiveling chairs with actual cushions. These seats even had armrests with cup holders attached to them. Leeson directed me to an out of the way chair with a wave of his gauntlet. I settled into it happily even though my thick armor kept me from enjoying the upholstery.

Centurion Graves was there as were a lot of other adjuncts and centurions. Leading the conversation was Primus Turov. She strutted around a central planning table and gave everyone the evil eye. My visor was up, but I kept my face well back inside my helmet. I hoped she wouldn’t recognize me.

“Let’s get started,” Turov said.

The rest of them stopped talking and took seats. There weren’t enough to go around, and some of them had to stand. I felt self-conscious but didn’t move from my seat in the back. Adjunct Leeson had ordered me to sit here. That was my story, and I was going to stick to it.

There were a few other non-coms in the room, but I was the only weaponeer. The others were veterans along with a few techs. The techs operated the planning table by working on their hands and knees around it, coaxing the system into displaying graphics that showed our position. I looked for Natasha among them, but I didn’t see her.

On the planning table, our small fleet of lifters resembled a school of tiny green fish traveling in a slow orbit around the central star. The target world was represented by a burnt-orange ball. It didn’t look to me like we had far to go.

“Here’s the good news,” Turov said, “we’re going to make planetfall soon. There’s no question of that. There’s no sign of pursuit, either. The enemy fleet—if they even have one—isn’t intercepting us. What we’re here to do now is decide where on this Garden of Eden we’re going to land.”

Adjunct Toro, a woman who’d never liked me since we’d first laid eyes on one another, raised her hand.

“What is it, Adjunct?” Turov asked her.

“Sir? Is this really the only choice we have? Just about anything else looks preferable.”

“I agree,” Turov said. “I argued all along that our top choice was to bail out and stay in the space-lane to see if the techs aboard
Corvus
could pull a miracle and regain control of the ship. In fact, I wanted to put all our technical people on that task. But the Tribune felt it was too risky. He believes the enemy might be waiting to finish the job by ambushing us in space.”

I frowned as I listened to her talk. I gathered from her statements that there were still techs aboard
Corvus
. The idea was alarming. People were on that ship, sailing into the star, still trying to fix it? If so, they had only a few hours left to live.

I checked the local roster of contacts on my tapper and my heart sank. Natasha wasn’t on the lifter with me. That could only mean she’d been left behind on Corvus. I didn’t want to think about how that was going to end for her.

Adjunct Toro seemed to be thinking along the same lines I was.

“But sir,” she said. “Would it be wise to lose even more people in what’s likely to be a fireball at the end?”

Centurion Graves stirred. He was one of the ones who’d been left standing. Turov signaled for him to speak.

“No one is going to get permed on
Corvus
,” Graves said. “Not unless we all die. We copied their data to the lifters. If
Corvus
crashes into the star, we’ll record the fact, then revive them after we land on the target planet.”

This assurance seemed to settle everyone down. I was still alarmed, however.
I couldn’t stop thinking about Natasha. Things must be awful right now for her aboard that doomed ship. The techs we’d left behind were all sailing directly into a blazing star, knowing they’d been abandoned with nothing to look forward to other than cooking to death. The radiation alone would probably finish them before they felt the terrible heat.

“Now, back to the matter at hand,” Turov continued. “Let’s take a look at this rock we’re supposed to land on. For the most part, it’s a giant desert. There are a few places where life has been detected. Deep gullies exist—valleys that are essentially cracks in the surface of an endless expanse of blowing grit. Inside these valleys
, water runs and the shade keeps the plants from burning up. By our best projections, the shaded regions are similar to tropical oases.”

Turov
proceeded to display the world on the planning table and show these rifts in the surface. Some were over thirty kilometers long, as wide as three kilometers and nearly as deep as they were wide.

“The valleys we’re most interested in are those clustered around the southern pole. We’ve identified ten of them—one for each lifter—as landing zones. These valleys are
sheltered from the sun and suitably temperate.”

The briefing went on while I stared in fascination. I realized I was about to land on an unexplored world and perhaps be one of the first humans in history to breathe its air. I found that exciting, but it seemed like a wearisome chore to the rest of the assembled officers. Most of them were veterans of many campaigns on alien planets.

In time, the group settled on a green valley close to the pole itself. Due to the angle of the planet, the bottom of this gully was never in the direct sunlight. Our cohort’s techs assured us the temperature would be quite comfortable and possibly even cool at night.

“We don’t have a lot of time to find a suitable region where we can bivouac and survive until help comes,” Turov explained. “The tribune ordered us all to choose a different valley—one for each cohort on each lifter—and
to land there when we make planetfall. Once we’re down we’ll explore, compare notes and report in. The plan is to decide which of these holes in the desert is the most suitable and to gather all our people at that spot.”

I could hardly believe what I was hearing.
We were breaking up the lifters, each of which carried a single cohort? What if the enemy was down there waiting for us? We thought the squids came from the water world—but we could be wrong.

Several centurions moved about uncomfortably, but no one said anything. Finally, Centurion Graves cleared his throat.

“Yes?” asked the Primus.

“Primus, this seems like a poor strategy. Spreading our forces around the moment we land will weaken us if we meet resistance.”

She nodded. “You’re right, but we don’t have much time. We’re not going to engage the aliens if we meet up with them. We’ll cut our losses and fly out. Dead troops will be counted and revived later.”

“What’s the hurry, sir?” Graves asked.

Turov worked her lips thoughtfully as if considering how she should answer the question.

“We don’t have much in the way of supplies, Cent
urion. Actually, we’ve got almost nothing. We don’t even have enough water to last a month. We depended on
Corvus
for that sort of thing, and we had to leave the ship suddenly to make planetfall as we passed this world. We know nothing about this planet, but we’re going to have to find a suitable spot to hole up until we’re rescued. We can explore faster by splitting up.”

Several others, emboldened by Graves’ success, raised their own hands to ask questions. I wanted to join them but didn’t dare.

Primus Turov lifted her own hands in a calming gesture. She looked worried. “I know, I know. You have a thousand questions. Let me give you a couple of facts instead. First, we need breathable air, potable water and hopefully a food source. We need them right now. Second, we might well be ambushed. We might even lose a lifter or two full of troops. But we’ve got the recorders running, and we’ll capture all deaths as they occur. Any group that gets wiped out will be revived at one of the other camps. Problem solved.”

I was stunned. This was just the sort of thinking that Legion Varus was famous for. If you didn’t make it, they shrugged and made a copy.

Centurion Graves asked one more question. “How long will we have to wait on this rock, Primus? When can we expect a rescue?”

“Indeterminate. The Galactics are aware of this renegade
frontier system. When
Corvus
doesn’t come home, the loss will be reported. I would expect we’ll have to wait no more than a year until another Skrull ship comes to investigate. Hopefully, they’ll come before the Galactic Battlefleet arrives. The warships may not bother to distinguish between legitimate castaways and feral local aliens.”

As I heard this, my heart sank. Was I really about to spend a year on a desolate rock in space with no assurance that there would be a rescue in the end? I couldn’t help but think about the events that
would transpire when the Galactics finally arrived.

It was quite possible, I knew, that by the time the Battlefleet darkened the skies of Dust World I’d have survived by scraping along for years only to be blasted to component atoms by a heartless maelstrom of interstellar ships.

The questions finally stopped and the group got down to the business of choosing a target valley. Turov made sure we all voted twice to choose the best possible option. In my opinion, she talked for too long. I was getting bored. We couldn’t really make the best choice from such limited data, anyway.

The officers finally
chose the biggest valley up around the southern pole. But after Turov selected it on the map, she quickly discovered it had been taken by another cohort. Then she selected our second choice, tapping at screen.

The computer map flickered orange
, refusing to take the input. Frowning, Primus Turov became alarmed.

“Those bastards…” she muttered.

She quickly tapped at each of the other major valleys, one at a time. All of them had already been taken. There were ten cohorts in our legion and apparently the rest of them had chosen their destinations first and talked it to death afterward.

Turov scanned the map scrolling it this way and that. Finally, she found a small valley farther north than any of the others. I knew this place would be hotter as it was closer to the equator. But it registered as deep and wet.

“It’s a crater, not a true valley,” Turov said. “It’s basically a deep lake with a sizable scrim of land around it. The sensors say it’s circular, four kilometers deep and about six wide. I guess it will have to do.”

I stared at the screen as her finger stabbed down. The outline of the valley turned green, indicating the selection had been accepted.

Adjunct Leeson walked over to me as the meeting broke up and gave me a grim smile. “Welcome to your new hole in the ground, McGill.”

“Looks like home sweet home to me,” I said.

“Now, here’s the deal. When we deploy I want you right next to me. You understand that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Any questions?”

“Just one, sir. Why did you bring me up here to this briefing?”

“I wanted you to know the score.”

“But why? You could have just briefed me later.”

Adjunct Leeson’s eyes slid around the room. After he was satisfied no one was listening in, he leaned closer to me.

“If these crazy squid-aliens of yours are down there waiting for us, I’m going to have you and your big gun front and center.”

“That sounds like a real privilege, Adjunct.”

Leeson snorted. “I’m not out to screw you over. You remember Cancri-9? When the lizards had us trapped at the spaceport?”

“I sure do. It wasn’t our legion’s finest hour.”

“No, it wasn’t,” he said. “But it was
your
finest hour. You outlasted everyone. I like a man who can survive the worst a planet can throw at him. That’s the kind of magic I want near me. I figured if you were here at the briefing it might give you an edge.”

I nodded, finally catching on. “You want to live no
matter what, is that it? That kind of attitude is almost unpatriotic in Legion Varus. Why not trust one of the other cohorts to revive us if things go wrong?”

“I don’t trust my own mother when the blood begins to spray,” he said. “But I trust a good weaponeer.”