by B. V. Larson
She looked around the scene. It was alien, but lovely in a way. Natural beauty abounded. The total population of Dust World was about the same as a small town back on Earth. Spread out over an entire planet, humans weren’t exactly elbow-to-elbow like they were back on Earth.
“I’m not sure…” she said. “Maybe when I’m a little older, I’d like it better. It’s so empty here, and I miss my grandparents.”
I felt kind of bad for her. She was a girl without a planet, in a way. Sometimes, for a young person, having two homes was like having no home at all.
Before I finished contemplating the situation and figuring out what to say next, I heard a splash behind us.
Etta and I turned as one.
“The McGills…” said an odd voice.
It was Claver’s voice, but it wasn’t quite right. It sounded a little deeper, a little raspy.
“Claver?” I called. “Come out and show yourself.”
“Gladly,” the man said.
Reeds snapped and bent. Claver appeared.
He was nude. Slathered in mud and dripping blood from a dozen spots, I thought I might know what had happened. Inside the Investigator’s makeshift gestation tanks, there had been many attached tubes to the bodies he was growing.
My own tubes had been removed by the time I’d awakened. I still had a dozen itchy round holes in my skin, but I’d never had to endure the pain of their removal.
Perhaps it had gone differently for this clone of Claver. Or maybe, the Investigator had seen fit to speed up the process since I was awake, and he’d stimulated this man’s fresh body into quickening.
After noticing the nudity, the dripping blood, and the yellow glint in his eyes, which seemed crazed—I saw the weapon. He had a pistol in his hand.
The bulky gun was shaped like a power drill. Dust Worlders made these guns themselves. It was an oversized but effective weapon.
Automatically, I shifted myself between Claver and my daughter. Etta took her cue, diving backward off the flat rock where she’d been painstakingly assembling an alien skeleton. She vanished into the soupy bog.
Claver charged forward, aiming his gun after her. He sent one hot bolt after her retreating form, melting a dozen fleshy plants. A misty explosion of heated gasses puffed up around us.
I stepped toward him to distract him, and his gun swung to cover me again.
I held the book up between us. Maybe that would give him pause.
“What do you want, Claver?”
“Where…?” he said, his lungs rasping. “Where is the Prime?”
I laughed. “Don’t you know? You are the Prime now. Think about it: aren’t you having new thoughts? Isn’t your head clearer today than it’s ever been?”
The Claver looked tormented, haunted. I could see my words had struck through.
Wondering what it might be like to be an idiot awakened in the brain and body of a genius, I could almost feel pity for him. Almost.
“I can’t be the Prime…” he said, sounding lost.
His weapon hand sagged a little, and that’s when I charged at him.
I was too far away from him to start with—I knew that. But I hoped that his slow wits might impede his reaction time.
But they didn’t. His weapon flicked upward, and as I raised my hands to shield myself the gun sang again. I felt a gush of heat.
First, a fireball blossomed in my hands. In a singular fraction of a second, I realized he’d unwittingly obliterated the book.
I also realized this Claver didn’t care about that. He wanted his leadership, his society, his planet of Clavers to order him around. Without that, he was completely lost. He’d asked me over and over where the Prime was because he needed a boss Claver to lead him through life.
None of that mattered now. The beam didn’t take long to burn through the book. It lanced onward, stabbing into my skin a moment later.
The beam burned away the flesh covering my chest, then it popped the marrow inside those gray-white ribs, turning them black and making them smolder.
Toppling backward, mortally wounded, I saw a cloud of steam rising from my ruined chest. I’d been burned—burned badly.
There was a growl from the reeds then. It was an almost inhuman sound. If it hadn’t been high-pitched, I wouldn’t have been able to credit the source.
The idiot Claver who stood over me shivered repeatedly. His eyes widened in shock. I heard the repeated thrusts of a knife sinking in.
Before I died, Etta crouched over me in the mud. She was crying—something she hadn’t done for years.
She was saying something. Holding my dying hand and telling me something important—but I couldn’t understand her.
Then… I died.
Lying on my back in an alien swamp, my body quit functioning on me. The whole thing was a nightmare, and it was probably the worst death I’d gone through in decades.
-8-
When I woke up, I fully expected to find myself floating in the Investigator’s turd-tank again—but I didn’t.
“What have we got?” asked a male voice.
“This is a backorder revive,” a woman said. “Questionable docs.”
“Meaning what?”
“No body was found. At least nothing that’s been confirmed on Earth.”
“Well… why the hell are we doing this, then?”
The other voice, the female voice, down-shifted to a low tone. A whisper. I couldn’t make out what she said.
“Is that so?” the male asked. “Well… I don’t like it. Let’s reroll.”
“He’s not a bad grow.”
“I don’t care. I’m not losing rank over some kind of cluster-fuck upstairs. It doesn’t matter who ordered it, we’re going to recycle. Get his legs.”
Two strong hands gripped my ankles. I was pulled off the gurney. Wet and slimy, I flopped onto the cold floor. My limbs groped, but they lacked strength. My fingers felt like half-inflated rubber balloons.
My eyes tried to open, but they were fluttering, rolling in my head. I only saw vague shapes, bright lights, shadows.
Lashing out with my hands, I caught an ankle, heard a curse and my fingers exploded with pain. They’d stomped my groping hand.
“Turn it on, dammit!” the male bio said. “Turn it on! He’s waking up!”
“Adjunct,” the woman said. “Don’t you think we should check—”
“Shut up and turn it on! That’s an order.”
Then I heard the most terrible sound a fresh revive can hear: the whirring of angled blades. Sounding like a cross between a wood-chipper and a vacuum cleaner, the recycling machine was on and soon my foot would be going into it. Once part of your body went in there—well, there wasn’t any escape from death.
My feet. That was the thought that struck through to me then. For the past thirty seconds of awareness, I’d been trying to operate my arms, my hands, my fingers.
But I’d never tried to use my feet.
Now, I’m big man by any measure. A solid two meters tall and well over a hundred kilograms in weight. My foot was built to match and unreasonably large.
Using my left leg, I drew it back and kicked out blindly. The person dragging that foot turned out to be the woman on the team, and she was taken for a ride. Dragged almost to her knees, she stupidly tried to hold on. When my foot jacked back out, catching her in the belly, she didn’t sound too happy.
She made a whuffing sound and went ass-over-tea kettle into a rack of equipment. Instruments, tools and the like clattered and rained down on the tile around me.
The male adjunct came toward me then, growling. He had something in his hand. I could see well-enough to catch onto that fact by now.
My hand caught his. Surprised, he put his second hand onto his first, and he tried to drive the spike into my chest. It was probably a syringe loaded with a kill-solution, or at least a sedative. I was pretty sure of that.
My other hand worked well enough to join the fray. Grunting, we struggled. He was on top of me, and his
body was operating fully. Fortunately, he didn’t possess more than half my strength.
Every second that passed, my mind became clearer, my vision grew sharper, and my muscles functioned more precisely.
The woman got to her feet, but she didn’t jump in and help the adjunct.
“Go get help!” the adjunct told her.
“Yeah,” I said in a husky voice. “You’d better get help.”
She scrambled off the floor and rushed out the door.
The bio bared his teeth at me. In return, I grinned.
“This isn’t going to be your day, hog,” I told him.
With a sudden burst of power, I reversed the syringe and jabbed it into his neck. The bulb pulsed and throbbed, automatically pumping its load into his bloodstream.
He screamed and his eyes flew wide.
While the adjunct writhed and curled up into a ball on the floor, I got to my feet with a groan. I almost slipped and fell again, but I caught myself.
“That was a close one, hog,” I told the dying man on the floor. “You should have checked the roster. I’m a Varus man. You don’t go around recycling real, star-going legionnaires without cause. You just don’t.”
Stepping over him, I gave him a solid kick in the ribs. He seemed to wheeze in response, but it could have been his death rattle. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell.
By the time a pair of blue-tunic wearing MPs rushed into the revival chamber, I was dressed in a smart-cloth jumper. I’d found a beret, which I put on at an appropriate angle. In the insignia box, I found my centurion’s red crest and slapped it on.
The floor slished with sliding boots. Breathing hard, the two MPs came into the room. They had their shock-batons out, and they regarded me warily.
“Gentlemen,” I said loudly in a commanding tone. “You’re late. The incident has passed.”
Their eyes flicked over me and my rank insignia then down to the bio, who was curled up like a stone-dead beetle on the floor.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “It was just a misunderstanding. I’m not going to press charges.”
“Who the hell are you?” one of them demanded.
“I’m Centurion James McGill. Legion Varus. I’m here to report to the brass upstairs.”
My eyes were functioning well enough now to recognize this was a revival chamber inside Central. Only the Lord above knew how many times I’d awakened in a room just like this one in the past.
The hogs relaxed a little, and they switched off their batons.
The smaller female bio behind them peered past their elbows. When she saw them standing down, she was immediately outraged.
“What’s this bullshit? He assaulted me and Adjunct Harrison while we were performing our assigned duties! I demand you arrest this man! He’s slated for recycling!”
“He sure doesn’t look like a bad grow to me,” one MP said.
“That’s not for you to determine,” she said officiously. “Are you going to help me or not?”
The MP shrugged and threw up his hands. “Not my job, lady. If you want to recycle him, be my guest.”
The two hogs walked out, and I made a mental note to buy them both a beer if I happened to meet up with them later on.
When they were out of the place, the bio watched me warily. I walked over to the lockers and fished around for any personal effects—there were none.
The bio girl trotted quickly to Harrison’s side. She bent over him and gasped.
“You killed him! That’s murder!”
I laughed, and I kicked on the recycler. It whirred and buzzed and made greedy slurping sounds. They all had the ability to vacuum up debris.
“You want me to help you stuff Harrison in there?” I asked.
She opened her mouth to say something nasty—but then she thought the better of it and clamped her lips shut again.
“Just get out.”
That was good enough for me. I left the place.
As I headed to the elevators, I thought I heard the buzzing slow down and choke for a moment.
I smiled grimly, knowing it was the sound the recyclers made when they hit a hard lump of bone.
-9-
As it turned out, it was night time. Inside Central, the hallways weren’t completely empty, but they were pretty quiet. Most of the staffers had gone home to bed.
Of course, being the headquarters of a military establishment that spanned a dozen star systems, Central never truly went to sleep. Probably a third of the usual daytime shift was on duty, along with plenty of janitors and other support personnel.
I got into an elevator, and I let it scan my tapper for a few long seconds. For a grim moment, I thought maybe I’d had my clearance pulled—but it wasn’t so.
The doors shut, and the elevator car began to hum. I chose to go up, not down, and I was lifted a few hundred floors higher. Walking out along a long corridor, I passed various tribunes’ offices.
Victrix was first in line. They usually were. Their famous crossed swords emblem was a half-meter wide, covering most of the door. Next was Germanica, with a stylized bull’s head on their entrance. That was Taurus—a cow-god, or something.
I passed them all, one by one. Solstice, Teutoburg, the Iron Eagles. The parade of offices continued until at the very end of the road I came up to a door with mean-looking wolf’s head on it.
Smiling, I tried the door. It hesitated, then opened.
That was good. I was still a valid officer in Legion Varus.
There was no one home inside. That wasn’t all that unusual. Varus wasn’t on deployment, nor were they gearing up for a mission. We were on shore leave until we got called up again. As we’d finished a mission on Dark World only a few months earlier, I didn’t expect to get such a summons for quite a while.
Sighing, I made myself at home on the couch in the tribune’s waiting room. Before I knew it, I was sound asleep.
What seemed like moments later, I felt a sharp blow to my over-large feet.
“Get your boots on, Centurion!” a familiar voice said.
“Yes sir,” I said, sliding around into a sitting position and stretching. An uncontrollable yawn howled out of me.
Galina Turov, tribune of Varus and my CO, stood over me with her arms crossed.
“What is it this time?” she demanded. “I’ve gotten several odd reports about you vanishing and reappearing on Earth. Is it possible you’ve gotten yourself into some kind of trouble again?”
“Uh…” I said, glancing over at her secretary and the two staff-primus types she had with her.
I got the feeling they’d had a breakfast meeting, walked into the office, and discovered me snoring on the couch.
The two primus-ranked pukes were hogs. They smirked at one another behind Galina’s back.
Now, Galina and I had had an inappropriate relationship going, that was true. But me showing up in her office like this broke our rules. Sure, she’d spent a weekend at my parents’ place a few months back—damn, had it really been that long already? Time sure flew by when you were dead.
But despite our special moments together, I wasn’t supposed to embarrass her whenever I felt like it.
“Sorry sir,” I told her. “But I’ve got some important, classified information for you.”
She stared at me with the narrowed eyes of a pissed housecat. Women often suspected me and my motives. Usually, they were right to do so—but not this time.
“McGill?” she asked. “Can this information wait?”
“Sure,” I said. “It’s no more important than, say, your average lost library book might be.”
Galina stared at me, and then she blinked—once.
Finally, she got it. She sucked in a breath, and her spine straightened.
Turning back toward the bemused group that stood in her wake, she clapped her hands together loudly.
“Gentlemen,” she said. “I’m going to have to postpone our meeting. Gary, please reschedule them.”
So saying, she spun around on
her heel and marched into her office. Her door hung open behind her. I presumed that was for my benefit.
Calmly, I stood up and followed her at a leisurely pace. I spoke to Gary, her latest secretary, before I entered her office.
“Better clear the schedule until after lunch, my man,” I told him.
He gave me a spiteful glance.
“McGill?” Galina called out. “Get in here!”
I touched a couple of fingers to my beret in the direction of the two primus hogs and marched inside. They lingered in my wake, confused and annoyed.
When I got into her office, safe and sound, I closed the door behind me. Then I looked around for some breakfast.
There wasn’t much. She had some chocolate candies on her desk, so I munched on those.
“What the hell have you been doing?” she demanded, her arms crossed tightly over her breasts. “You are officially AWOL, did you know that? We finally got word from Dust World that you’d died out there, and I green-lit a quiet revival. How did you manage to turn that into a bloodbath—right here in frigging Central?”
“Some bio downstairs got cold feet during my off-book revival.”
“You mean he tried to recycle you?”
“He tried, and he failed.”
She sighed, rubbing the bridge of her nose. “You’ve been off-planet for two months. Then you come back and immediately make a violent splash. That’s unacceptable.”
I shrugged, not caring one whit. “When a man tries to kill me… well sir, he’d better not miss.”
“All right. Forget about that. Tell me about the book.”
“Uh…” I said, looking around.
Not seeing any cameras or other recording instruments, I turned back to her. “Are you going to let me slide on these details?”
“You’ve got it, then?” she asked with sudden intensity. “You’ve stolen it back from Claver?”
I munched on her chocolate candies, staring at her.
She snatched the bowl away from me and put it back on her desk.
“All right,” she said, heaving a sigh. “I know how you operate. I’ll exonerate you from all legion-based charges. That won’t exempt you from Hegemony, if they decide to prosecute.”
