by B. V. Larson
Sateekas breathed hard for a few long seconds.
“Distrust and dishonor…” he said at last. “I can’t let them overtake me.” He ruffled himself and straightened. “Very well. I lost my temper. In time, we will defeat these filthy beings and enslave them—but we won’t go back on our word now. Escort the prisoner back to his vessel.”
Not wanting to give Sateekas time to reconsider, I hauled Squanto’s ass back to his ship. There, a group of his guards were waiting.
They stared at me with black, hostile eyes that glittered in the lights of the docking bay.
“Here’s Squanto,” I told them, tossing the limp form toward them. “He took a bathroom break and tripped.”
Squanto rolled and flopped on the deck. His crew rushed to him and lifted him up.
“You have abused him!” one Rigellian thug exclaimed.
“Nah,” I said. “Seriously, he did a facer on the toilet, like I said.”
They produced weapons and approached. I shrugged.
“This is what I get for doing a man a favor? I should have known Rigel breaks their deals.”
Squanto coughed then, and he weakly lifted a single claw. “Let the hairless ape go. Killing him will gain us nothing—not even his removal from existence.”
The crew backed off.
Giving them all a happy send-off, complete with waves and hooting, I watched them pack-up and go. It was a moment to remember.
-76-
Floramel was returned to us after I got back to Storm World—but not in the manner we’d expected.
“McGill,” Armel said in my earpiece the following day. “Get over here to Gold Bunker. Stop loafing on those broken walls with your slimy friends.”
The friends he was talking about were the Scuppers. They’d been very happy when the Wur went mad and began to wither away, and they weren’t upset to see the Rigellians pack up and leave their world, either.
After wishing Second-Man and all his confusable relatives good-bye, I headed for Gold Bunker—or what was left of it.
Cooper caught up with me soon thereafter. He was still wearing his stealth suit, but it had a few shorts in it after all the fighting. I could see flashes of his uniform revealed in midair now and then.
“Hey Ghost,” I greeted him.
“You’re going to do it then? You’re going to recommend me for the new specialist rank?”
“That’s right. Barring a solid perming in my near future, I’m putting your name forward for advancement.”
“That’s great, McGill. Thanks for coming through—sorry I wasn’t able to help you with that brain-plant in the end.”
“I was wondering where you’d gotten off to back then.”
“Well… I’m not that good of a swimmer.”
I let him off the hook with that. He’d played the bodyguard—to a point.
After a while, I noticed he was still pacing me. “Why aren’t you headed off to rummage for supplies?” I asked him.
“Well… I’m kind of nervous. Now that I’ve got my promo, I want to keep it. I mean, if Armel is pissed about something…”
“You think he might still perm me? Even with seventy percent of our troops face down in the muck, you think he might find room in the graveyard for one more?”
“Maybe… You do tend to piss people off pretty bad. You know that, right?”
Nodding, I found I couldn’t argue the point. After all, the evidence was overwhelming.
When I got to Gold Bunker at last, I found my way down into the bowels of it. They were using pigs and our last few unhappy giants to excavate. By this time, most of the basement level was useable again.
I found Armel in a grimy hole at the end of the complex. He was as far from daylight as it was possible to get.
He signaled for me to come to his side the moment he saw me.
“McGill, over here.”
Grinning like he was my rich uncle, I marched to his side. “What’s up, Tribune?”
He eyed me. “We have a strange transmission. A download, really. It’s coming in now.”
“From where?”
A single black-gloved finger pointed to the drippy ceiling. “From your friends, those obnoxious bears.”
“Yeah? Squanto is sending us some kind of love-note? Let me see it.”
I took a look at the slowly growing data file and frowned. “This is pretty long. Is it video?”
“If it is, they must like seventy-hour long presentations.”
After examining the header of the file, I got a sneaking suspicion.
“Uh…” I said. “Hey, can I call someone? I think I might know what this is.”
Armel eyed me suspiciously, but he nodded.
Working my tapper, I contacted Sarah. She wasn’t part of my unit anymore now that she was a bio. I knew she’d be busy with revives, and I hoped I wasn’t messing up my chances on our imminent date.
“McGill?” she answered immediately. “I can’t talk. We only have two machines going right now, and the revival queue—”
“I’m with Tribune Armel,” I told her. “Come on over to Gold Bunker. It’s important. Let a flunky run the damned machine.”
She stopped arguing and began slogging through the mud and bodies. Damnation, it was going to stink outside in a few days’ time.
When Sarah joined me, I showed her the files. She recognized them immediately. “This is an engram. Do you have the body scan yet?”
“Nope.”
“Who’s sending it to us?” she asked.
“Squanto.”
Sarah looked alarmed. I didn’t blame her.
“James, it might be anything! We can’t load up an unknown file. It might be a virus, it might—”
I put my hand gently over hers. “I don’t think so. I think I know who it is. I need you to take this file and match it up to a certain body scan we should have stored in the data core.”
“You know who…?”
Armel joined us then. “Ah, a sweet face returns—and already, I see the McGill is pawing at you again. Have some manners, you brute!”
My hand left Sarah’s. Armel smiled at her like a hungry shark. “What is this file Rigel has seen fit to transmit to us as they leave our newly captured star system?” he asked her.
“It’s an engram—the storage of a mental state.”
“Who’s?”
“There’s one good way to find out,” I said, joining the talk. “We can look for a matching body-scan in the data core and revive the person.”
Armel frowned at us. “Are we talking about that furry scoundrel, Squanto?”
“Good lord no!” I said. “It’s a human engram, right Sarah?”
She looked at me quizzically, and I nodded.
“Uh… I think so. Nothing else would match our data core files.”
“There! You see? Just order the revive, and we’ll know the full story.”
Armel looked back and forth between Sarah and me. He seemed mistrustful.
“All right. I will allow it. You have piqued my curiosity once again. Do not disappoint.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, Tribune,” I said, watching him walk away to a screen which he brought to life with a gesture.
Sarah stored the file, which was finally finishing up.
“Ah-ha!” Armel shouted, pointing at his tactical battle map. “The Rigel ship has fled the system. The moment they finished that strange transmission, they left…”
He was eyeing us again, so I beat a hasty retreat, tugging on Sarah’s arm every step of the way.
“James!” she admonished when we were out in the passages again. “I can’t just revive this! We don’t know—”
“Maybe you don’t but I do—at least I think I do. It’s Floramel.”
I quickly fabricated a sad tale of Floramel being captured and dragged away by the Rigellians.
“That’s awful. But James, she’s been permed if that’s the case. We can’t revive her without knowing she’s been killed. We might
be making a copy.”
Shaking my head, I disagreed. “I made a deal with Squanto to get her back. Apparently, he didn’t feel like sending a shuttle down here to the surface.”
“He executed her and sent the file? That’s awful!”
“That’s the Rigel way.”
“But… we still can’t just revive her. If she—”
“Listen,” I said. “Armel just gave you an order to revive the person in this data file. That’s a clear mandate. If you don’t do it, you’ll be disobeying orders and perming Floramel at the same time.”
Sarah was flustered, but she went along with me in the end. That’s why I’d contacted her. Unlike most bio-people, she still had a heart.
-77-
Floramel came out of Blue Bunker in a dazed state. I was waiting around, as I was feeling concerned about her.
“James?” she said, her voice weak and introspective. “Where do we go when we die?”
I blinked at that. “Uh…” I said.
Now, you’d think that if anyone was qualified to answer such a query, it would have been me. But, unfortunately, I was as clueless as the next guy.
“I don’t know,” I said, “but you’re alive again now. That’s what counts.”
Floramel, to the best of my knowledge, had only died three times. She was basically still a civvie by Legion Varus standards. Many recruits died three times before they had their first battle—our training regimen was legendary.
That lack of experience on her part was why she was in this odd mental state, I knew.
Taking her by the arm, I walked her toward the exit. It was raining outside, but at least it wasn’t a vicious storm.
“McGill!” a voice called out behind us.
We turned and I saw Sarah, standing with her fists on her hips. She was still wearing her blue coveralls, which were streaked with stains.
One look at her annoyed face told me the story: she was feeling a little jealous. After all, Floramel looked like an exotic model, and she was leaning on me.
“Don’t worry!” I shouted back down the hallway. “Floramel is in love with a lizard.”
Sarah shook her head. “Just don’t take advantage.”
“I’d never!”
Sarah vanished after that, and I found Floramel studying me. “Is she jealous, or just looking after my welfare?”
“A little of both, I imagine.”
“Does she have a reason to feel this way?”
I thought about all the times I’d stood one girl up for another—well, that’s not true. There were too many such events in my long and storied lifetime to ponder them all at once.
“Maybe,” I admitted, “but I’m mostly worried about you. I felt somewhat responsible for leaving you on Squanto’s ship. How was that, by the way?”
“They were not considerate,” she said. “They’re apex predators. Quite different than humans. They lack compassion.”
“Did you give them the book?”
She shrugged. “What choice did I have? Did you expect me to make up another story, perhaps?”
That made me think of the cock-and-bull story I’d fed to Xlur back on Mogwa Prime. I knew Floramel couldn’t generate such a thing. It wasn’t how her mind worked.
“So, they now have the formula? The bio-terminator is spreading? I thought maybe you’d alter it just a little, making it look good, but…”
Floramel shook her head. “They had a Mogwa captive. They keep many captives, and they meant to keep me. I had to give them the real formula, so it would kill the captive Mogwa. If it hadn’t worked, they would have become very unpleasant.”
“I understand. You had no choice.”
“Not true, I could have made them false documents and suffered torments—but I chose not to.”
“Uh… I understand. You did the right thing. No Mogwa would take a pinprick to save the entire population of Earth.”
We walked out of the bunker and pressed through the rains to some muddy tents. The camp was shutting down soon, as we’d won the battle and gained the respect of the Scuppers. Soon, we’d use the gateway posts buried deep under Gold Bunker to escape this world and withdraw to Earth.
“James…” Floramel said. “I think… I think I’m still up there, on Squanto’s ship.”
“What?”
“I mean, I suspect I’m a copy. Certain things they said… They promised I’d never leave Rigel.”
My mind received that jolt without pleasure. I realized right off she was probably right. Squanto didn’t care about Imperial rules. They’d happily keep an illegal double.
“That’s crazy-talk, girl,” I scoffed. “You’re right here with me!”
“But why else would they have sent scan files instead of simply shipping me back down here?”
I stopped her, and we looked at one another in the mild storm. Her face was wet under her hood, and I wasn’t sure if she was streaked with tears or rain—maybe it was both.
“Listen!” I said. “Squanto made a deal with me—twice. I reestablished that deal when I got him out of Governor Sateekas’ ship alive. He’s not a nice guy, but he understands the importance of keeping his word in a deal like that. He probably killed you and sent you down—it’s easier that way. Hell, they do it all the time around here!”
I ticked off all the times I’d been killed lately as a means of long-distance transportation. By the time I was done, she was looking impressed, sympathetic, and hopeful.
“How do you stay with this grim life?” she asked. “I could never do it. I couldn’t be a legionnaire. I’m not tough-minded enough.”
“It’s not for everyone, I have to admit. But… I’ve gotten kind of used to it.”
Taking her below, I found Armel waiting for me. His arms were crossed, and he appeared to be angry.
“What’s up, Maurice?” I asked.
He glared at me. He didn’t like it when I used his first name, but we were both officers, and the battle was over—and I didn’t give much of a damn.
“You dare to mock me?” he asked. “This is something you knew about, is it not? I find such pettiness disgusting, McGill. Drusus has kept you as a pet for too long.”
“Um…” I said. “Could you give me more of a hint, Tribune? What’s wrong?”
“As you no doubt know perfectly well, I’m going to be marooned here. My Blood-Worlder legion is not going to be missed on Earth, apparently. We’re to be garrisoned on this rock to rebuild these broken fortresses.”
“What about the gateway posts in your basement, sir? You’ll be able to go back and forth at will.”
“Not so! There is no escape that way, not even temporary relief. The gateway has been realigned to bring fresh troops from Blood World. We’re to rebuild these shitty fortresses, gain the trust of the natives… The situation is depressing. To think of my talents being wasted in this fashion...”
His complaints kept rolling on, but I wasn’t really hearing him anymore. He reminded me of Xlur at that moment, lamenting his fate at being assigned to run a distant sub-optimal outpost for a growing empire.
Musing while I pretended to listen, I thought about the situation as a growing trend. It only made sense that as we conquered more planets we needed more garrisons. It was turning into a common fate for legions everywhere. Legion Teutoburg, led by Tribune Deech, was still stuck on Machine World. Now Armel, with his Blood-Worlders, would be marooned here on Storm World.
I was glad I was in a mobile legion. We weren’t well-treated, but at least we weren’t stuck playing cards for decades on some rock a hundred lightyears from home.
“Sir?” I asked finally, breaking into his eloquent litany of complaints. “What about Legion Varus? How are we going to get home?”
“Why do you always ask for information that is common knowledge?” he scoffed. “Really, McGill, you should read the notices on your tapper more often. If you were one of my officers—but, never mind. Legate has returned to pick up the remnants of your pathetic legion.”
Throwing up his hands in irritation, he left Floramel and me standing there in the mud.
My eyes swiveled immediately towards the only serviceable ship in the damaged base. It was, in fact, the same patrol boat I’d used to visit other ships in this system twice before.
“Should we?” I asked Floramel.
“You know that I’m only interested in Raash now, James.”
“What? Oh—oh, right. Uh… he’s dead though. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes, of course. I have a plan to get him back. I will go to Armel and offer to stay here on Storm World with him, if he revives Raash. He wants to mate with me. I’ll suggest it’s possible if he does this favor for me.”
I laughed. “This is a sad, sad day. You’re becoming more like a true human all the time.”
“I must do what works. You’ve taught me that, James.”
She gave me a little kiss then, and she left me smiling as she followed Armel into his torn-up Gold Bunker.
My eyes again slewed around, falling on the tiny ship sitting in its blast-pan. I almost went for it—but then I thought of Sarah. I’d as much as promised her a date. It seemed rude to not give an interested woman a shot at old McGill.
Going back to Blue Bunker, I lamented my weaknesses, but when I found Sarah that all faded.
“Where’s Floramel?” she asked.
I told her, and she laughed. “You’ve corrupted her.”
“Yeah…”
“This has been a rough deployment. I’m kind of regretting taking the role of a bio. I mean, it’s scary fighting out on the line—but it might beat reviving a hundred people a day.”
“You need a break,” I told her. “Come on.”
She followed me, and I led her toward the patrol ship, but I walked right past it. I’d come up with a better idea.
Instead, I took her down into the catacombs. The jump-tube network crisscrossed every kilometer of this strange world.
She liked the place immediately. It was quiet, alien and most of all, bone-dry.
After I taught her how to jump and fall sideways, traveling at wild speeds, she was laughing.
