Blood World (Undying Mercenaries Series Book 8)

by B. V. Larson

  There was a pistol on the desk. Claver had it sitting there right out in the open, but his hand wasn’t near it. From this distance, it looked like one of those alien-made jobs from Tau Ceti.

  I was disarmed at the moment. They’d asked to check my weapon at the lobby, and I hadn’t put up a fuss. I hadn’t expected to need it.

  Without being asked, I slid into a seat across from him. I was closer to the pistol that way—but not quite within snatching range.

  “So,” I said, “you’ve been waiting here for me? I’m flattered.”

  “Don’t be. I’m here to deliver a message.”

  “What’s that?”

  He leaned forward, his face screwing up into an expression of rage.

  “You are a card-carrying moron! You blew it back there on Blood World! Millions of lives—maybe billions—will be lost now.”

  “Uh…” I said, unsure where this attack had come from. “Most people think I’m a hero.”

  He laughed bitterly. “I’m sure they do. But that’s only because they’re as dumb as you are.”

  “Look, Claver,” I said, getting tired of his act. “Is that really why you came here today? To yell at me?”

  “Partly, yes. But I must explain the rest in order for your lowbrow intellect to comprehend the true situation. You see, I had a deal cut back there on Blood World.”

  “Right. To sell out Earth. To give the Blood World troops to another planet.”

  “Not another planet, another empire.”

  “Wonderful. That makes your treason all the greater.”

  “Dummy…” he said, shaking his head. “I cut a deal with the Rigellians. They promised not to invade Earth’s domain if they were allowed to win and keep Blood World. I arranged the contract hiring out Varus to do it—but you guys stopped me.”

  “Rigellians? You mean those things they call Vulbites?”

  He made a flapping gesture with his hand. “They use Vulbites sometimes. They use lots of different kinds of troops. Most of the groups in the contest were sponsored by them.”

  “So they were cheating too?” I asked. “Just as much as Earth?”

  “More so. Did you really think the Skrull were interested in running Blood World?” he chuckled and shook his head. “Dipshit… Anyway, the point is they were willing to take Blood World and call off the coming frontier border-war.”

  “Well then, why didn’t you say something if it was so damned important?”

  “Would you have believed me?” he demanded. “Would you have let me win on behalf of the Rigellians?”

  “Maybe...”

  “How about ‘never in a million years’ instead?”

  “You might be right,” I admitted. No one trusted Claver.

  “Well then,” he continued, “we’ve now come to the other reason I’m here.”

  So saying, he snatched the pistol off the desktop. I reached for it too, but he surprised me. Like a swamp gator, he was pretty fast when he wanted to be.

  “I came to tell you about your immediate future,” he told me. “Think of me as your modern-day prophet on the mount.”

  “Let’s hear it,” I said, waving my fingers at him like I was bored—which I was.

  “You’re in some pretty deep shit, cowboy,” he said, leaning forward and lowering his voice. “I want you to thoroughly enjoy the new frontier war you just kicked off with the Rigellians. Every life that’s lost in the days that follow this one can be traced directly back to your red hands. It’s going to be rough, punk.”

  Claver lifted his gun then, and I flinched. I was expecting to take another unplanned trip through the revival machine.

  But instead, he put the gun to his own temple and calmly blew his brains out.

  Afterward, I slowly puzzled it out. Claver had somehow snuck a revive at Central, but he’d only used that life to berate me, then check himself out again.

  His corpse was still wet and sticky behind the ears. He’d been fresh from Blue Deck.

  I couldn’t imagine enduring a birth and death just to yell at somebody. It had to be the single oddest use of a lifetime I’d ever seen. It was almost spooky…

  * * *

  When Drusus discovered I was on Earth again, he called me immediately.

  He was kind of pissed. I expected him to send me right back out to Blood World using the portals—but he didn’t.

  He said it was because they didn’t want me back.

  “Gytha really said that?” I asked him via my tapper.

  “Apparently, you made quite an impression. Gytha felt stood-up. She had to cover for you, making up excuses for literally hours as her troops marched by into that portal by the thousands. At last, when it was all over, she was so angry she contacted Tribune Deech and stated that you were banned from her planet.”

  “But… she’s still honoring our deal, right?”

  “Yes, for now. Earth is no longer on the best diplomatic footing, but in retrospect, I don’t think Gytha was going to tolerate you for long, anyway.”

  “Hmm… that happens with me and women sometimes. They tend to blow hot then cold soon after. It’s a sheer mystery.”

  “Right, McGill. Here’s the deal: I’m demobilizing you. You’ll retain your rank of centurion, because you did well all things considered, but you’ll get no active duty pay as of the end of this call.”

  “Got it, sir.”

  He disconnected and I whooped. I was going home! I’d be short a few paychecks, sure, but such was the price of freedom.

  Down in Georgia Sector, my family was overjoyed to welcome me back. I didn’t tell them anything about Gytha, or how I’d almost been marooned on her strange planet. There was no point in freaking them out now that I was safe and sound.

  The only sad thing was I’d missed most of the summer. Etta was going back to middle school soon, and she didn’t like that idea at all. I strongly suspected her teachers felt the same way.

  “Dad?” she asked me on my first night home.

  “What’s up, Pumpkin?”

  “Do you have to call me that?”

  “It makes me happy.”

  She sighed. “All right. You know what would make me happy?”

  “What?” I asked, with just a hint of wariness in my voice. I tried to stop doubt from creeping in, but with this girl, there was no telling where a request might go.

  “Nothing weird,” she said, catching my tone immediately. “I just want to see where you went this summer.”

  I blinked at her. The whole Blood World project had been classified. Even the location and existence of that planet was a secret—not that I figured anyone cared much now that the mission was over.

  “Sure,” I said, shrugging.

  Stepping up to her star-scope, I tapped in the official name of the star, Epsilon Leporis, and it began whirring and zooming. A few moments later, we had a clean view of the star. Another thirty seconds passed, and we got a shot of the planet itself.

  “That took a long time,” she said, eyeing her instrument.

  Suddenly, she looked up at me in surprise. “Three hundred lightyears? You went outside the boundaries of the Empire? Past the frontier? Is that even a former Cephalopod planet? Did you even know where you were, Dad? Half-way to Rigel?”

  “Uh…” I said, suddenly understanding why things were classified.

  Etta looked at me with big eyes. “That’s why the others aren’t back yet, isn’t it? It’s too far out. How did you manage it…? No ship could get there so fast and—”

  My big hand moved of its own accord, and placed itself over her mouth—gently.

  She didn’t bite me. She just stared with those big, shocked eyes. The best part was that she did shut the hell up.

  “Now listen, Pumpkin,” I said in a calm, measured voice. “Didn’t we have a little talk about not upsetting this machine, here? Just in case it’s listening?”

  Her eyes swept back to her star-scope. They were so big around I thought they might pop out of her head.


  “To answer your question, honey: of course not!” I told her. “Nobody goes halfway to Rigel! Nobody. The entire idea is silly.”

  Calmly, I took my hand away from her face and reached out to touch the star-scope. I activated its local auto-search feature, which was programmed to find something interesting in the area. Dutifully, it panned up and to the south, spotting a summertime meteor swarm.

  “There! Doesn’t that look nice?” I asked Etta, giving her a pat on the head.

  She hated that, and usually when I did it she informed me that she was no dog. But I knew it would give her the correct message: stop talking.

  She took in a deep breath, looked into the scope, and began cooing about the meteors. Damn, she was good at bullshit. It must be in the genes. If I hadn’t known better, I might have believed she cared right now about a few burning dirt clods hitting our atmosphere.

  When we’d finished with star-gazing for the night, I headed back to my shack to sleep—but I didn’t make it.

  The light was on inside, and I hadn’t left it that way.

  My shack is about as basic as you can get. It has electricity, and sometimes the heating and cooling works. But I’d installed a few gizmos such as automatic lights. You could turn them off, but I usually didn’t.

  They were on motion-sensors, and unless that frigging tomcat from the Bentley farm down the road had managed to break-and-enter, someone was inside my place right now.

  I didn’t go to the front door. I crept around to the back window instead. It was blacked out, of course, so I could sleep-in when I felt like it.

  But there was a crack in the casement, down low. I put my eye there and looked inside.

  A figure sat on the couch. The shape was female, slight-build, fidgety fingers…

  All of a sudden, I knew who it was. Yanking an axe out of the stump out behind my place, I stalked around to the one and only entrance.

  The door crashed open under my foot. I stood in the entrance, axe in hand, filling the doorframe.

  “What are you doing here, Thompson?”

  Specialist Evelyn Thompson jumped half out of her skin. She dropped the magazine about floaters she’d been paging through. She had a terrified look to her, and I didn’t see a weapon.

  Thinking that I might have made a mistake, I forced a smile and set the axe aside.

  She watched it with fascination.

  “Chopping wood?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I lied. “We’ve only got a few months to go before winter sets in.”

  “I’m really sorry. I knew you lived back here, and I saw you with your daughter—I didn’t want to intrude.”

  “So… you came back here and broke in?”

  She shook her head. She still seemed to be a little freaked out. “No, the door wasn’t locked.”

  “Oh… right. You want a beer?”

  Evelyn watched me move to my fridge and rummage inside.

  She began to get brave again, so she stood up and put her small fists on her hips.

  “How’d you even know I was in here?”

  I shrugged. “Sometimes people come here to mess with me. I have ways of detecting that. Did Turov send you?”

  She got up and walked toward the door.

  “Hey,” I said, “was that the wrong question?”

  “Yes, of course it was. I’m not on anyone’s payroll tonight.”

  “All right. I’ll take your word for it. Sit back down and have a beer.”

  “No,” she said. “I shouldn’t have come. I was just feeling a little guilty after all that’s happened—but it can’t work between us. You’re too crazy, too paranoid, too hurt.”

  “Hurt?” I snorted. “By what?”

  “By what I did. You know.”

  “You mean where you slept with me for money?”

  Glaring, she pushed past me and ran out into the yard. She kept going despite a few shouts I sent after her. Finally, I was alone in the dark.

  Shrugging, I turned to go back inside, but I saw another, smaller figure moving in the trees.

  “Etta! Now, don’t you go and kill her! She was just a visitor!”

  Etta came out of the shadows reluctantly. She looked angry and downcast.

  That was a bad look on my girl’s face. When she did something bad, she felt bad—and feeling bad pissed her off. It didn’t make any sense, really, but that’s how it went with her.

  “What’d you do, girl?” I asked, stepping down off the porch to where she stood in my tiny yard.

  “Nothing…” she said, but I wasn’t convinced.

  “Come on,” I said. “I’ve looked less guilty with blood on my hands.”

  “All right… I found her tram. That’s all. She can fix it tomorrow.”

  “Aw, dammit girl.”

  Sighing, I walked toward the lane. There, in light of the Moon, sat an unfamiliar vehicle. All four treads had been disabled.

  I looked around, but I didn’t see Evelyn anywhere.

  Going back to the family garage, I got out the tram and began rolling out into the street to look for her.

  A few hundred meters away, I flicked on my brights.

  There she was, walking toward town with her shoulders hunched and angry. Sometimes, it seemed like every woman I knew was angry about something.

  I rolled up beside her, but she kept walking. She didn’t even look at me.

  “Come on, Evelyn,” I said, “let me at least give you a ride to town.”

  “You’re dangerous,” she said.

  “Yeah, that I am. Come on, get in.”

  She glanced over at me. “You’ve got your axe in the tram, don’t you? Is this supposed to be some kind of ritualistic killing this time? Something you’ve been planning for years?”

  “Uh…” I said.

  Turning her words over inside my skull twice, I figured I might just know what she was talking about.

  “Are you still mad because I killed you that one time? That must have been twenty years ago.”

  “No, I’m not mad about that. I’m mad because you destroyed my tram. How’d you even get out there so fast? No, wait! I have it!”

  She stopped walking, put her fists on her hips again, and glared at me. “You did it before you came busting into the room, didn’t you? That’s why you had the axe!”

  “Sheesh,” I said. “I’ll tell you what really happened, even though it’s embarrassing.”

  Evelyn paused, squinting at me. “Well?”

  “Get in. I’ll drive you back to town.”

  “I’ll hitch a ride.”

  “Look,” I said in a reasonable tone, “if I’d wanted to kill you, girl, you’d already be dead.”

  She thought that over, saw the logic of it, and finally climbed in. She crossed her arms and legs tightly and sat up against the passenger door.

  I told her about Etta then, my wild-animal daughter.

  For some reason, this made her curious. She stopped pouting and asked a few questions. I realized after a time that she was intrigued by the thought of a Dust Worlder-Earther hybrid.

  “We’re not two different species,” I told her. “You’ve met Della. That’s Etta’s mother. She’s human enough.”

  “Oh…” Evelyn said in disappointment. “I was visualizing offspring between you and one of those things the squids bred on Blood World.”

  “Lord no!” I said, laughing. “She’s no genetic freak, half-littermate or something.”

  We fell silent for a time, but then she broke this new ice as we got close to town.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should never have come down here. I tried to call you when Nostrum got back from Blood World, but your tapper just bounced everything I sent at it.”

  I shrugged. I had it set for priority-only calls. If the brass wanted me, they could get a message through—or someone on my friends list. But Evelyn wasn’t either of those.

  As we got closer to town, she suddenly got agitated.

  “Let me out,” she said. />
  I looked at her. I’d begun to entertain certain ideas. Perhaps the night was recoverable. Maybe if I took her to the Gator Farm, a local bar and grill that stayed open late, I could change the mood.

  “James,” she said. “Just stop the tram here and let me out. Please?”

  I looked at her. She had true pain in her face.

  What was all this about?

  Looking around, I was suddenly on the alert.

  We were on the outskirts of Waycross. Most of the town was shut down, with nothing in sight but streetlights and late traffic gliding this way and that.

  “All right,” I said, stopping the tram.

  She got out, and she started to run away, but then she came back. She leaned into the driver’s side window and kissed me.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “For everything.”

  Then she was gone again, her shoes slapping on the pavement. Surprised, I didn’t even get in a word.

  Then I saw it.

  An air car was parked across the street. It was a familiar shape: long, sleek, and darkly painted.

  It was Turov’s air car. I couldn’t make out the driver. It could have been Winslade, Claver, or even Turov herself—it didn’t matter.

  Evelyn climbed into the air car, and the vehicle shot into the sky. Locals craned their necks out of their crappy trams to watch.

  I didn’t bother. I did a U-turn, and I headed back home.

  Walking back to my shack, I felt low. The whole thing had been another trick. Evelyn was still working for Turov, and I’d been her mission for the night.

  She’d failed—but I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. I was pretty sure I’d have enjoyed my night more if she’d managed to fool me again.

  The stars shined on my back. After I’d spent so much time in the dark, they seemed bright to me.

  When I was back home and digging out a beer, a shape came to my door and tapped. It was Etta.

  “She’s gone, isn’t she?” she asked. “I blew it for you, didn’t I? I’m sorry.”

  I gave her a sad smile and a hug.

  “Nope,” I said. “Your instincts were right this time. That one—we can’t trust her. Never again.”