Tech World (Undying Mercenaries Series) (29 page)

By the time I managed to get Turov to the fire control center, she’d figured out she was on
Minotaur
and that there was something massively wrong with that.

“Why is this place empty?” Turov demanded. “You can’t have killed
everybody
.”

I didn’t bother to answer her question.

“Where’s the staff?” she demanded. “Where are the Germanica Legionnaires? What have you done, you crazy fuck-up?”

I gestured toward Claver’s body, which was still sprawled on the floor and staring. Right then, I decided to take a few liberties with the truth.

“Sir, this situation is admittedly hard to explain, but I’ve been chasing your murderer for about a day now. I caught up with him here and found him raving about stopping the attack on the station.”

Explaining quickly, I told her about Claver’s claims that the hologram projection equipment the Tau civvies wore had been tampered with—and that he’d done it himself. Then I explained Claver’s belief that it was the root of all the riots, and the production of such systems had to be stopped.

By the time I got this far, she’d wandered to the viewports and gazed outside. Horror materialized on her pretty face.

“You’ve destroyed the planet!”

“Not at all, sir,” I said. “First of all, Claver did it. Secondly, only one small section of the planet has been damaged. He only got off one shot with the broadsides before I killed him.”

Turov looked at me, then Claver. “He struck you?”

“Yes. I’ve got new skin itching and growing right over the hair on my scalp.”

“Incredible,” she said. “This is an unbelievable diplomatic breach. I thank you for stopping him, and I now understand why you revived me.”

“You do?”

“Yes, of course, McGill. I may look like I’m nineteen, but I’m not naïve.”

Nineteen?
I thought in shock. Could she really be that young? Looking at her, I knew that she could. Thirty-nine in the mind and nineteen in the flesh. That was going to be confusing for everyone.

“You’re hoping to curry favor with me,” she continued. “You killed my killer and apparently stopped this same madman from destroying an entire world. I’m now in the strange position of being in your debt. Perhaps millions of Tau are as well. But I’m not sure about one thing.”

“Uh…” I said, not certain which of her leaps of logic she might be questioning.

“Why won’t you let me communicate with the station?”

“Oh…that,” I said. Then I showed her the station, which had drifted almost out of view and explained that the broadsides had disconnected the umbilical.

Her eyes widened to an improbable size.

“I don’t believe it,” she said. She looked at me, and her shock was infectious. “He’s killed them
all
! That must be why I wasn’t revived on the station. They might all be dead already if there is a hull breach. Think of it, Germanica and Varus wiped out together—all at once. Earth has never lost two of her legions in a single campaign, James. Not since Roman times.”

“The Battle of Teutoburg Forest,” I said thoughtfully.

“Yes. I’m surprised you know of it. I’m glad Varus still teaches her lore to enlisted men.”

“Let’s call the station and learn the truth,” I suggested. I gave her a
headset, and she pulled it over her head.

She hesitated before opening the channel. She looked at me for a moment, and I could see in her eyes that she felt lost. I knew that she didn’t want to verify that we might well be the last living human beings in this star system—or that we soon would be.

Her face was so full of youth and relative innocence that I found myself feeling differently toward her. I knew it was just my mind responding to what it was seeing rather than what I knew her to be. But I couldn’t help it.

Standing before me, Imperator Turov was a fine-looking, frightened young lady. I wanted to hold her in my arms and comfort her.

I told myself I must be completely nuts, but that’s how I felt.

-30-

Could it be that a younger version of a person was really a
different
person? More like a relative to the original rather than a direct copy?

That was what I was wondering about as I watched Imperator Turov attempting to communicate with our legions on the station that drifted nearby. There was no response, and her eyes began to redden. What was that expression? I’d never seen it on Turov’s face before. Was she actually going to break down and cry?

Partly, her emotional state had to be related to her recent revival. It had been a very long time for her, and that must be affecting her thinking. I’d been there many times myself. Nothing makes a man reconsider his place in the universe more than dying and being reconstructed from slime.

It was more than that in Turov’s case. Her new body was too young for her to be the same person she’d been before she died. People underwent vast changes as they aged. Those changes weren’t all due to the slow rerouting of our neural pathways—what we called memories and experiences. Our brains aged just like the rest of our bodies did. Our hair turned gray and our organs wore out. Our sleep-patterns changed—and the way our minds worked changed as well.

Younger people had more musculature. They were much better at healing and scored very differently on IQ tests. Their brains worked faster but were also more chaotic, impulsive and emotional. 

I could see these realities playing out on Turov’s face. She wasn’t the same bitter woman she’d been the last time I’d seen her. She was battling with youth, uncertainty, and surging hormones.

For me, whenever I died I lost less than a year of time, so I was pretty much the same guy I’d been for years. I’d gotten a little wiser maybe, but not much. Perhaps that was why people kept telling me to “grow up”, but I never seemed to do so.

Imperator Turov had frozen herself in time. Today she’d returned as she had been in her youth. Everyone thought they wanted to be young again, but it wasn’t going to be easy for her, I could tell already.

Struggling to drop these thoughts and worry about our current situation, I waited for her to give up attempting to communicate with Legion Varus, then Germanica.

She put the headset aside and stared at it. “I think they’re all dead,” she said.

“What? The station has lost some atmosphere, but it can’t be that bad yet.”

She shook her head. “The rioters—they were attacking hard before I was killed. They might have overwhelmed the legion. They outnumber us thousands to one.”

I stared out into space, shocked. How could they
all
be dead? The battle must have been going worse than I’d believed. I felt bad about having run out of there chasing Claver.

“Some of the civilian Tau are still alive at least,” she continued. “I heard some traffic but nothing intelligible on our command channels. Possibly we’ve lost our communications stations, and there are still knots of troops fighting aboard the station.”

We both gazed out the viewport.

“What are we going to do, sir?” I asked her.

“I’ll contact the Skrull. We’ll get
Minotaur
moving and circle the station to assess the situation. Stay on the open channels.”

“Good idea, sir,” I said. “But I request permission to return to the revival unit. It’s processing another birth and I need to be on hand to keep the person alive.”

“Oh—of course. Do that immediately. You’re sure you’re qualified?”

“Not at all, sir. But I’ve done it before and we haven’t got anyone else.”

I turned to go, but she called me back.

“James?”

“Imperator?”

She reached out a small, smooth hand and squeezed my arm. “Thank you. I’m going to formally drop the charges against you.”

“Uh…that would be appreciated, sir.”

I rushed out, knowing that the revival unit was probably spitting out its next victim any minute. I gave my head a little shake as I trotted down echoing passages.

The look in her eyes—she’d been thinking about
kissing
me. Call me a fool, call me crazy, but I’d seen that look before. Plenty of times.

Reaching the revival unit, I was in for a new shock. There had already been a birth, a male who’d fallen out of the maw and turned blue on the floor.

I scramble forward and tried to bring him back—but I’m not a bio. I’m a front-line fighter. I failed.

Cursing and breathing through clenched teeth, I carried the body over to the chute. I knew I should recycle him—but I couldn’t do it. I didn’t even know the man’s name. Here he was, dead in my arms, and I’d caused it because I hadn’t been here when he’d needed my help.

I felt pain in my chest, a pang of guilt. To steel my resolve, I reminded myself that millions had died today and the dying wasn’t over with yet.

I let the body slump on the floor, pushing it out of the way with the toe of my boot. There was just too much crap going on today, and I refused to shove him into a wood-chipper. I’d heard the recycle machine buzz in the past, doing its grizzly work, and I just couldn’t take that right now. I was on my last nerve.

“This shitty job isn’t
my
shitty job,” I said aloud to nobody. I walked to the console, determined. I flipped through the touchscreen interface, scrolling through to the bio specialists. To hell with letting this machine decide who popped out next, I was going to make the choice.

So many dead!
I could scarcely believe it. Never in all my years with Varus had there been such a disaster. I knew that there were two legions worth of names on that list, and that was too grim to contemplate. Just reviving them all would take weeks.

Flipping through the names of various bio people, I automatically selected Legion Varus troops over Germanica. Germanica had given me the gift of Old Silver, so screw them. I figured they could wait their turn in a very long line.

There was a name that stood out to me, one which made me pause immediately. Anne Grant.

I almost selected her name, but stopped. She would hate me for this.
Thousands
of revives? Work without rest for long days? Why do that to her? I decided to let the poor girl rest.

I kept scrolling with a new goal in mind. I found another name, one I hadn’t had the pleasure of dealing with for a long time. Centurion Thompson.

Long ago, back on my first campaign on Steel World, she and I had not gotten along. She was a bio and an officer. She’d done everything she could to perm me, and I’d hung on to life despite her best efforts. Smiling, I tapped her name and confirmed.

Who deserved to be set up as a slave to this machine other than my least-favorite high-ranking bio? I couldn’t think of a better candidate.

Then I charged the tanks and rushed back to find Galina—I mean, the Imperator. She was still standing on the deck of the fire control room. The view out of the front portals had changed. No longer were we staring down at the planet. Instead, we had turned and were gazing at the station.

The massive structure looked like it was operating normally, but then I saw escaping gas near the bottom. It looked like a jet of steam flowing out into space.

“What’s that?” I asked her.

Turov stared without turning around. “At first, I thought the lower tip of the station was touching the atmosphere. But I don’t think that’s the case. She’s venting. Overheating. Now that she’s drifting, she’s getting too much sun.”

“I assume you got into contact with the Skrull?”

“Yes. They’ve been monitoring the station, but not ‘interfering’—as they put it. How could a spacefaring crew watch such an ongoing disaster so callously, silently waiting for millions to die without bothering to lift a finger?”

I didn’t answer her. We both knew the truth. The Empire made such insane levels of caution a necessity for all frontier civilizations. We had to work the harsh calculus every day. Breaking a Galactic Law, no matter how good the cause, could result in disaster for one’s entire species. It was the kind of situation that revealed the worst side of the Empire.

“I’m reviving a bio now,” I told her. “And I’ve got an idea. I recall Claver saying he’d ejected several modules—modules full of Germanica’s troops.”

She turned to me. “Yes. The Skrull reported that. What a psychopath. To commit his own people to such a death—”

“Right,” I said. “But what if their orbits haven’t decayed yet? Maybe we could retrieve a module or two and save them.”

She brightened. “Excellent thinking, Specialist.” She contacted the Skrull and soon the ship swung around in space. We were skimming over the clouds, and a tiny, box-like object grew in perspective.

Turov looked at her tapper, listening to the Skrull at the same time.

“Just one left,” she said to me. “The others—it’s too late. Their orbits decayed almost immediately.”

Just one module. A hundred Germanica legionnaires. I hated to be choosy at a moment like this, but I really hoped the troops aboard this one didn’t recognize me. They might tell Turov a different story about my interactions with Claver. I hadn’t been one hundred percent forthcoming about my involvement with him.

“Gotta go check the revival machine again—if you don’t mind, sir.”

“Of course. Go.”

Trotting down the passages again, I made it back to the machine before the maw opened this time. Curling my lips and wrinkling my nose, I endured a shower of fluids when the maw finally sagged open.

The body of a woman slipped out. She was thin and had a pinched face, but she came out kicking. She coughed and panted. There was a wild look in her eye.

“You’re all right,” I told her, helping her onto a table.

“Get off me,” she managed to say, slapping at my hands weakly.

I smiled. This one wouldn’t need a defib or some other procedure I was even more hazy on. She was in fighting shape fresh out of the oven.

“Centurion Thompson,” I said. “I hereby declare you a good grow.”

She looked around, dazed but ornery. “What’s this? James McGill? What the hell are you doing in a revival room? Where are the bio people?”

“I’m it, sir,” I said. “Sorry to disappoint.”

“I don’t understand,” she said, looking around with squinting eyes. “This isn’t even the right module. Are we on the station?”

“No sir,” I said. “We’re on
Minotaur
. We’ve lost contact with the station. We fear the legion—they might have wiped.”

Her gaze became distant, unfocussed. I knew that look. She was reliving the circumstances of her death.

“I remember now. I thought it must have been a dream. They flooded right in coming out of underground tunnels and air shafts. While we struggled with them, more surged down the streets and right into the front door. I watched the monitors. The troops killed thousands upon thousands—but they kept coming.”

“It’s best not to think about that too much right now,” I said. “Just think of it as a dream.”

Her eyes came back to me, but they looked through me. She was still seeing that other place, that other time.

“They crawled up the walls,” she said. “They ripped men apart barehanded. I was working on blue deck—they came in and killed us all in the end. They had guns—our guns. They were stripping the dead as they came, and we couldn’t stop them. McGill you have to—”

Her voice had been rising and her eyes widening. Her breathing had increased to a hyperventilating pant.

I slapped her lightly on the cheek. She recoiled and snarled at me. “I’ll have you up on charges!”

“Sir,” I said in a reasonable tone. “You’re going into memory-shock.”

“I wasn’t,” she snapped. “I’m fine. Get me some clothes.”

I did as she asked, and she climbed down to the floor while toweling herself off. About one second later, she hit the deck with her butt. I grabbed her elbow, but wasn’t fast enough.

“You let me fall,” she said blearily.

Frowning, I flashed a meter into her eyes. The dilation was on the high side, but the machine didn’t register any brain damage.

“How long has it been since you’ve been revived, Centurion Thompson?” I asked her.

“I—I don’t know. Years.”

Nodding, I helped her to her feet. “Try to pull it together, sir. You’re just experiencing what every trooper feels when they come back to life after a bad death. It’s all normal to us. Routine. Shake it off, sir.”

She tried. I almost felt sorry for her despite our bad past. She put her elbows on the table and slumped over it.

“Can you get me some water?” she asked.

I did as she asked and tapped at the revival machine. Time was wasting. I selected a senior bio off the list. A noncom Centurion Thompson was sure to know and be able to work with. She was going to need an assistant.

“I’d forgotten,” she said, sipping her water. “I’d forgotten how much this sucks. You asked me how long it had been since I’d been revived.”

“Yes sir, I did.”

She turned and looked at me. Her teeth were bared and her finger was up in an accusatory gesture.