Tech World (Undying Mercenaries Series) (19 page)

“That’s not a toy, legionnaire,” I said.

“I know that. Don’t you think I know that? I know when I’m manning a real gun. This feels great! I almost hope the squid-faces make it all the way up these streets to us.”

I smiled thinly. That sounded more like the Carlos I knew. Whatever twinge of guilt and worry he’d been feeling, it was gone now.

Leaving him at the gun emplacement, I went out onto the roof again to find Natasha. I hoped she’d have answers—she often did.

-19-

As we were stationed on the flat top of a gigantic pyramid-like building, I had to walk a hundred meters or so to our central encampment. I found Natasha there, setting up a large bunker that looked like a bubble of puff-crete on the building’s roof. The skimmers had lifted off and left us by this time, and the bunker she was spraying into existence squatted next to the newly outlined air-vehicle landing zone.

After helping her set up the bunker, she deployed a weapons system inside it. I examined her weaponry with a critical eye.

“Anti-air?” I guessed.

“Automated drone turrets,” she said without looking up. “They work well for this kind of fortification as long as you can trust their friend-or-foe programming.”

“Uh, can we trust it?”

“Of course,” she said, a little abruptly. “I edited the scripts myself.”

“Must be good then. You got a second to talk?”

She glanced up at me and shook her head. “You never quit, do you?”

“What?”

“Am I the last female on the roof? Or have you already hit on everyone else up here today?”

“What?” I asked again
. “No…I mean…I’m not hitting on you. I want to know something.”

Natasha turned back to her anti-air drone. She began studiously messing with her turret scripts. That was real work—but I wasn’t fooled.

“I’ve been dead for several days,” I pointed out, “not fooling around with women in case you’re under some kind of misconception. Did somebody tell you a story?”

She heaved a sigh and faced me. “I guess I’m not being fair. You don’t always connect well with women.”

I blinked in confusion. To my mind, I was something of an authority on connecting with women.

“What’s this about?” I asked, trying to stay on neutral ground.

“Anne Grant.”

“The bio? Yeah, she revived me.”

“She told me she had a date with you and asked if that was cool with me. I told her it was. I told her she could marry your ass if she wanted to.”

I was beginning to catch on. My mind whirled around—twice, I think—then came to a stop.

“Did she say yes?”

Natasha frowned. “Yes to what?”

“To the marriage idea.”

Her hand snapped up fast, but I leaned my head back and she missed.

“Look,” I said, “I was dead. For three whole days. Can’t a man get a break after that?”

She heaved a sigh. “Maybe. But it seems like I cut you breaks all the time. Do you recall we slept together that last night on Earth when this whole vote thing started?”

“Of course, I think of it constantly.”

Her lips formed an unnatural pattern. I wasn’t sure if she was disgusted or annoyed. “Then why have you barely talked to me since? On the whole flight out here you never brought it up. When we got here, we never went out on the town or anything. You knew I wanted to hit the markets and find some cool tech, but you forgot all about that.”

“Huh,” I said. “What I remember is going on a crazy gunrunning mission then dying in battle with Tau rebels…nope, no shopping trips were planned or skipped.”

“As
if you were going to go out with me even if we were having an easy time here.”

Truth was, I’d forgotten about her plans in all the excitement. But I knew that wasn’t her real problem, anyway. What had her upset was Anne.

“Natasha,” I said, deciding to switch the direction of the conversation, “is this situation going to damage our odds for mission success?”

She straightened up in a hurry when I said that. Whatever else she was, she was a good soldier.
When she needed to, she could bury her feelings like few others I knew.

“No,” she said firmly. “All right then. Forget about my dreams of shopping. Maybe I’m just stressed—it’s silly, isn’t it? This hab is in the middle of some kind of civil war. I shouldn’t be asking you about this at all. Sorry, Specialist McGill.”

I forced a smile, even though I knew dropping back away from a first name basis wasn’t a good omen. “Great. Here’s why I came to you: in your opinion, what’s with these crazy rebels?”

She frowned. “You mean why are they fighting? I’m not entirely sure.”

“Neither am I. What we know is that they’re going completely batshit and the effect is spreading. Could it be drugs? Some kind of secret plan or cult we don’t know about? Usually, the Tau are only motivated by selfish profits. What would make them rise up as a single mass and attack us?”

Natasha tapped her face with a finger, puzzling it out. I could tell I’d managed to intrigue her as well as deflect her from asking any more unwelcome questions about Anne Grant.

“That’s a damned good question, James.”

I dared to let a smile creep back onto my face. I was James again, not that cold-hearted bastard, Specialist McGill.

“You’re right,” she said thoughtfully. “Why the hell are the Tau acting like lemmings? It just doesn’t make sense. After I set this up, I’ll do some checking around. Some of the other techs must be working on enemy behavioral models.”

“Great,” I said. I considered giving her a hug but passed on the idea. I beat a hasty retreat instead. A man has to know when he’s been let off easy and not give in to the temptation to go for broke.

Before I even made it back to the little bunker on the corner of the roof that housed Carlos and my 88, the situation changed. An alarm tone sounded in my helmet.

I’d had the visor up, but now snapped it down reflexively. I checked the sky, but found it empty. Natasha’s air-defense drone was in slow-scan mode which indicated it hadn’t detected a threat.  The rest of the troops around me on the roof were doing the same thing I was. We looked at each other, mystified. If the attack wasn’t coming via air, where was it coming from?

My helmet crackled and a familiar voice broke into the chatter of confused troops. “This is Graves. Finish those puff-crete bunkers immediately and get to your assigned positions. We’re about to have company. The Tau are coming up from the subways and should be visible in the streets soon.”

I broke into a run and reached my bunker in ten strides. I put a gauntlet on Carlos’ shoulder and pulled him around.

“Get out of my chair, spotter!” I shouted at him.

He rolled out of the harnessed gunner’s seat, grumbling. He struggled with the spotter’s goggles. “What’s the deal?” he asked. 

“I have no idea.”

I climbed into the harness and strapped in as quickly as I could. Right away I could tell he’d fooled with all my settings. My balls were smashed up against the barrel and my knees were up so high my legs were almost bent double.

“Dammit, Carlos! Did you have to fool with the seat?”

“Sec,” he said, slapping a button on the side.

The seat immediately moved, whirring. I was eased back into a reasonable position and grunted with relief.

“I preset
the unit for you and me, both,” Carlos said.

Frowning at him, I narrowed my eyes. “Why? You’re not qualified to shoot this thing. You’re a spotter, not a weaponeer.”

“That’s true,” he said. “But remember how you got rank? Your weaponeer died on Steel World and you picked up his gun. I just figured…well.”

“Hoping they take out your gunner so you can be a hero, huh?”

He shrugged. “Worked for you.”

“I’m feeling the love, here,” I said. “Now, give me a range to that subway entrance a block west.”

“One-point four,” he said after playing with the goggles for a second. “These things are great. They take all the guess work out—holy shit!”

I didn’t even ask what he was talking about. I swiveled smoothly, aiming my projector down into the streets.

The Tau were boiling up out of the subway. The street filled with flickering shadows like blurs of somber color.

“Targets sighted, command,” I said into my
headset. “Do I have permission to fire?”

“How many have you got on your side of the building, McGill?” Graves asked in my ear.

“Looks like all of them, sir.”

“Roger that. Same thing on the other side. Take them out before they reach the building. We can’t let them get inside the barricades downstairs.”

The leading elements of the charge were already roaring forward and hitting the base of the pyramid I sat upon.

I took a deep breath and squeezed the trigger-bars with my gauntlets. The 88 didn’t make a loud sound when it fired, but a lot of hot air blasted out of the thing’s sides. Carlos was caught by surprise and almost had his goggles blown off his head.

The biggest problem with large-scale plasma weapons when used in an atmosphere was the overproduction of heat. My 88 was no exception to that rule. It seemed to generate almost as much heat from the housing as it did from the muzzle. Like the machineguns of the past, the metal swelled up and the entire thing could malfunction from overuse. As I didn’t have any barrels to change out, I had to make sure it didn’t get
too
hot.

The meter was tapped into my HUD and displayed inside my visor. The first blaze of plasma only lasted about a second, and by the end of it the temperature was already up into the yellow zone on my internal monitors.

Using the burst as efficiently as I could, I swept the beam in a broad swath across the mob at the base of the building. They were so bunched up I couldn’t miss. How many did I kill? I’m not sure. Maybe a thousand—but probably less.

I doubted this crowd had ever seen that level of firepower before, and they reeled back in shock. It had to be a surprise to see twenty ranks ahead of you turn to ash all at once with nothing but a cloud of hot gas and seared individuals at the edge of the kill-zone to clue you in as to what had just happened.

My weapon cycled up to a full charge again, and the temperature fell into the green—but I held my fire.

Graves noticed immediately that I’d stopped firing.
“McGill? Are you injured?”

“Negative sir.”

“Why aren’t you firing your weapon?”

“They’re falling back, sir.”

And they were. They were stumbling, reeling, and dragging their dead toward the subway entrance.

“Are they dragging wounded?” he asked.

“Uh, yes sir.”

“Good, all right. Hold onto that cannon of yours for a second.”

I heard him then, up along the rim of the building’s roof. He ordered a unit of light troops to the edge. I saw them hustle and kneel there, aiming down into the crowd. Graves was the senior Centurion present, and he had been put in charge of the defending units.

Light weapons began to chatter.

“Snap-rifles?” Carlos asked. He gazed down into the streets. “They’re chewing them up.”

I felt a little sick. It was one thing to burn down a raging mass of enemy troops who were hell-bent on killing you—it was quite another to shoot retreating civvies in the back.

Slapping the release on my harness, I climbed out of the bunker and walked along the wall to Graves’ position.

“There you are,” he said. “Do you know what I’m doing, McGill?”

“Killing retreating civvies, sir?”

He glanced at me in irritation. “No. I’m wounding them. These troops are aiming low.”

I looked up and down the line. It was true, the light troops had their sniper barrels attached and were popping single rounds down, choosing their targets with care.

“An army seeks to wound opponents,” Graves told me with the air of one delivering a lecture. “That’s preferable to killing them. Each wounded enemy takes another man to care for him.”

“The Tau don’t have a big history of caring for their fellows,” I pointed out.

“True enough. But maybe they’ll become demoralized and less wildly excited about charging us.”

“I see, sir.”

“You don’t approve?”

“That’s not my place, sir. I’m not in command here.”

Graves looked at me. I avoided his eyes and stared down into the streets. The civvies were falling back being driven underground like animals. Hundreds of wounded lay squirming all over the streets.

“That’s right, you’re not in command,” Graves said sharply. “And you never will be if you don’t learn a few things.”

“Can I ask a question, sir?”

“If you must.”

“What’s so important about this particular building?”

“It’s an armory. A government armory.”

Shocked, I turned my full attention to the centurion. “A government armory? Why are we the ones protecting it?”

“You’d think that the government forces would be more interested in doing so, wouldn’t you? Well, they’re not. They work for pay, and are willing to take a certain degree of risk. But they were unnerved by this crazy crowd. They abandoned the district hours before we got here.”

The streets were empty now except for the crawling injured and the smoldering dead.

“We can’t let these crazies have real weapons,” I said. “They’ll be unstoppable.”