by B. V. Larson
“What?” demanded Harris.
“Did you not hear me pronounce the sentence?” Graves asked calmly. “I said I’d sentenced McGill to imprisonment for an undetermined amount of time. I’ve decided since then that his sentence is complete, and I’ve released him.”
“One minute?” asked Harris, aghast.
Graves motioned for Harris to get on with releasing me, and I lifted the manacles toward him helpfully. Harris grumbled curses, but he unlocked my wrists.
“Thank you, Veteran,” I said. “I’m sure I learned my lesson today.”
Harris rolled his eyes. Graves dismissed him, but he had me stay behind.
“Now, to our last order of business,” Graves said. “You’ve been promoted to candidacy for the rank of Veteran by the Imperator. Are you aware of that?”
“I am.”
Graves nodded and eyed me in speculation. “I never would have thought you’d be so good at horse-trading. I can only imagine what you held over her head to get this perk on top of everything else.”
He grinned at me briefly, while I pretended not to get his implication. Without letting on, I found I was pleased by Graves’ assumptions. If people thought I’d promised to keep my mouth shut about Turov’s transgressions with an enlisted man in trade for rank—well, that was better than having them know the truth. No one needed to know about the Galactic key.
“Harris isn’t going to like this,” Graves said. “In fact, I wouldn’t give you the best odds of passing the trials. But, you’ve got the Imperator behind you—what can I do? I’ll sign it.”
Frowning, I nodded as if I understood—but I didn’t. Not really. What I did know was that getting to the rank of Veteran in Legion Varus wasn’t completely straightforward. The commanders announced new candidates for the rank of Veteran, but that alone didn’t guarantee the promotion. Each candidate had to prove himself to the other Veterans in the cohort first. The exact nature of the process was somewhat arcane and shrouded in secrecy. What I did know was that a lot of it depended on a man’s popularity with the other Veterans. Unfortunately, the Veteran I knew best downright hated me.
“You have the right to turn down this promotion to candidacy,” Graves said, looking at me expectantly.
For an honest second, I considered exercising my option of refusal. But then I felt a spark of anger. Harris had been so greedy to see me dead or imprisoned, and I knew there was hardly anything I could do that would piss him off more than gaining the rank of Veteran.
“I accept the promotion, sir,” I said formally.
Graves shrugged. “Your funeral. Dismissed, Specialist.”
Wondering about the nature of my future, I left his office and returned to my quarters.
* * *
We arrived on Earth several days later. Our mission had radically altered over the course of the campaign, and it had been decided that leaving Tech World early was the best option.
Going home solved many of our problems. Both legions Varus and Germanica had suffered crippling losses. Worse, due to the loss of all but one of our revival units, we weren’t able to rebuild our strength. By going home, we could regrow every trooper within a few days. Hegemony could then decide if they wanted to send us back or utilize our skills in some other capacity.
When Minotaur came out of its warp bubble and glided close to Earth, I gazed through a viewport thoughtfully. I wondered how long I would have here at home before I was shipped off to war again.
For the first time, I had another thought in the back of my mind. What if the war followed me to here? What if Earth was the next battleground?
The thought was disturbing because I didn’t think we could beat the squids if they launched a full-out attack—not yet. Maybe not ever.
* * *
A month later, I was back at home in my shed. Things had improved around the homestead. Even though I was only a Veteran candidate, my pay had increased. I’d also collected my higher active-duty pay, and for once I had a good deal of cash on my hands.
Spending a few credits on extras, I bought a real environmental control unit. It was one of the new models that gently conditioned the air to whatever temperature, humidity, or even barometric pressure you wanted inside your home. It even had settable oxygen levels—and I found I liked mine just a little bit on the high side. It was an alien device, naturally, but it worked like a charm. Fall was setting in, with the cool breath of winter coming in on the wind behind it. I knew that even if it snowed I’d always be comfortable in my place.
Natasha showed up one night in November. It was cold outside, but warm and perfect in my shed. She came in when I invited her and marveled at the change.
“This is so different from the last time I visited here,” she said.
“Yeah, I even cleaned all the bloodstains off the walls.”
She gave me a wry face. “Don’t spoil it.”
“Sorry.”
She looked down at her hands for a second which were fidgeting with one another. Still looking down, she began to speak. “James…James, I came to tell you I’m sorry.”
This surprised me. Really surprised me. Of all the stuff I was expecting this girl to throw into my face, an apology had to be dead last on a very long list.
My mouth opened a tiny fraction, but I clamped it shut again. Under no circumstances was I going to screw this up.
She looked at me, and I looked back at her with a blank poker face. I honestly didn’t know what else to do.
She looked down again, and I was off the hook. “I’ve been studying these cases—ones like yours, I mean. I’ve read up on them. Sexual predators come in all shapes and sizes, James. I know that now. I didn’t understand before.”
I wanted to say something. I wanted to choke or even laugh out loud. But I didn’t, and I was proud of my self-control.
“Turov was your superior. You were taken advantage of. That’s how I understand it, and I want you to accept my apology for getting angry with you about sleeping with her.”
“Okay…” I said. I felt I had to say something.
She gave me a little kiss then grabbed me by the chin. “But don’t go back to her. Not if you want to ever be with me again. I hate that woman. She’s a monster. Do you understand me?”
I nodded. “Yeah…look, Natasha…”
“What?”
What was I going to say next? That I’d been as guilty of any transgressions as Turov had? That blaming it all on the officer was bullshit in my book?
I couldn’t do it. Instead I hugged her, and I poured her a glass of wine. It was perfectly chilled, due to the precision-engineering of my new alien-made fridge. The old one had never recovered after taking a bullet months ago.
Sitting with Natasha again, I handed her the wine and we chatted about light things for a time. Finally, the subject of the squids came up. The topic never seemed to be far from anyone’s mind these days.
“Do you think they’ll come here, James?” she asked me almost in a whisper. “They might, you know. They know what we did.”
“Are you sure? We blew their ship up in a single salvo.”
She shook her head. “I’m a tech, remember? We went over all the radio signals while we were stabilizing the megahab. They got off a packet of data with a powerful transmitter. They sent it on a tight beam toward the rim of the Galaxy. Somewhere out past the edge of the frontier.”
I frowned. “You think it was an SOS?”
“What else could it have been?”
“Hegemony knows about that, right?”
She pursed her lips at me. “Of course.”
“I’m just asking because I haven’t heard anything on the net.”
“They’re not talking about it on the online reports, naturally. There’s no benefit to causing a panic.”
A panic. The words rang in my mind. Natasha was right—if the people of Earth knew the real score—that unknown worlds full of Cephalopods were out there and enraged with us… If they knew that Battle Fleet 9
21 was gone and not scheduled to return... Yes, they’d panic all right.
“Did we do the right thing, James?” Natasha asked me in a small voice.
I looked down at her. I could tell she was freaking out. It was true we’d taken it upon ourselves to blast the squids. Sure, Turov was taking the credit and was now doing a talk-show circuit—her new looks were helping her there. But it had been Natasha, Carlos and I who’d pulled the trigger on this new war.
“Absolutely,” I said, putting my arm around her and pulling her close. “We didn’t have any choice, really. They were bullying Earth, and we punched them in the face. They’ll think twice before they come after us again.”
Natasha seemed happier, but I wasn’t sure she bought my bullshit. Hell, I didn’t even buy all of it.
We sipped our wine until the bottle was empty and fell asleep together on my couch. Alien air pumps wheezed and thrummed softly. Somehow, it was a comforting sound.
The End
From the Author: Thanks Reader! I hope you enjoyed TECH WORLD, the third book in the Undying Mercenaries Series. If you liked the book and want to see the series continue, please put up some stars and a review to support it. Let me know what kind of world you’d like McGill to discover next.
-BVL
BONUS Reading!
What follows is the beginning of the Star Force Series, Book #1: SWARM
To purchase the entirety of the book follow the link or search for SWARM on your eBook Seller's website, or go to BVLarson.com
SWARM
(Star Force Series #1)
by
B. V. Larson
-1-
The night before the invasion, the whole sky looked wrong somehow. It was the color of it, I think. The sky was purple, rather than blue or black. It was as if the sun never completely went down that night, but instead turned a dark umber and lurked beneath the bottom rim of the world, lighting up the heavens ever so slightly. Only a few shreds of cloud moved along the horizon, over the Sierra Nevadas to the east. Each strip of cloud was tinged a deep red, the color of wet rust or dried blood.
Other than the strangely hued sky, it felt like a typical Central California night in late spring. It wasn’t stormy, but a cool breeze came down from the foothills as the evening deepened. In the fields around my farmhouse, a thousand stalks of ripe corn rippled.
Jake, my oldest, performed his usual shrug when I asked him if he had completed his list of chores. His short, black hair was as shiny as a crow’s feathers. His eyes were blue and piercing. He looked so much like me his sister sometimes called him my evil twin.
When I took my son out to the stable to prove he hadn’t shoveled the stalls, the horses were uneasy, shuffling about and sidestepping. They showed the whites of each big eyeball and tossed their heads, but didn’t shy when I reached up to stroke them. Frowning, I joined Jake and we finished the shoveling. He looked at me, surprised to get help with a chore he loathed. I pretended nothing was wrong. Truthfully, I didn’t want to leave him alone out there.
Afterward, we came out of the stable to find the moon was rising. The fields were rustling and the smell of ripe corn and fresh-cut alfalfa hung thickly in the air. I kept looking over my shoulder, up at that strange sky. We’d bought this place, my wife Donna and I, as part of a back-to-the-country dream. My colleagues called me the “gentleman farmer” and theorized I must be commuting through cow herds each morning to the university. I loved it out here and even after Donna died I refused to move back to the city. But in all my years out here, I’d never seen a sky like this one.
Jake ignored everything that was wrong with the night and headed upstairs. He would spend the evening surfing the web, twiddling with his headphones and pretending to do homework. My second child, Kristine, knew the moment she saw me that something was different tonight. She’d always been more intuitive.
“What’s wrong, Dad?” she asked, looking up from her algebra paper. She was thirteen, and this year her body had a new shape I found upsetting. She looked like her mother—except she was skinny and wore braces. To me, she was perfect.
I shook my head as I tapped her algebra book. “Nothing, Kris. Don’t get distracted.”
Kristine went back to her homework, and I went back to gazing out at the strange purple sky. Nothing changed, so I headed for the computer in my study. I had a lot of grading to do, but fortunately most of that was online. I logged into the university website for the last time and began answering emails and grading lab projects.
Teaching online wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Computer science students asked hard questions of their professors and typing in comments was often more work than simply discussing things in person. Sometimes I missed the simplicity of a pen and paper. Even scribbling notes in the margins of printouts was better than typing everything. Red-penned circles and Xs were wonders of communication that we’d lost somehow, over the years.
Some hours later I chased the kids to bed and fell asleep myself. I dreamt of my wife Donna, who had died nearly a decade ago in a car accident. We’d hit a chain link fence and gone right through it. The steel posts had whipped around the car as the chain link wrapped us up like a net. One of the posts had come through the back window and impaled Donna.
She looked at me from the passenger seat. I saw her eyes in my sleep. Her lips moved, trying to tell me something, but her staring eyes were the eyes of the dead.
It was the eyes that woke me up. I sat up in bed, gasping.
I’ll always wonder what it was Donna had been trying to tell me. If I had stayed asleep one minute longer, could I have heard her voice? Maybe everything would have gone differently…if I had.
-2-
The second night—the bad night—started off good. Both my kids were in a fine mood. It was only Tuesday, but school was out next week for summer, and the excitement of the coming vacation had caught up with them. We went to bed late, after watching movies over the net and eating popcorn. It was one benefit of growing up without a mom: there was no one around to tell Dad it was a school night.
The ship came to loom over my little farm sometime after midnight. It caught Jake first. I don’t know why—perhaps because his room was on the eastern side of the house. I heard later they had come from the east, following the darkness around the world in a wave.
I was asleep at the time of the ship’s arrival. The walls shook, and my TV fell off the top of the armoire. That’s probably what woke me up. The TV crashed and I threw myself out of bed, believing we were in an earthquake. I shouted for the kids, ordering them out of the house. This quake seemed like a bad one.
In movies, when they come for you, there are always lights in the sky beaming brightly into your windows. There were no bright lights at my house. In fact, the entire farm was bathed in deep shadow. This only made sense—I realized as I passed the window at the end of the hall in my tee-shirt and underwear—because there was a huge ship looming over us. It blotted out that strange, purple sky. I saw it hanging up there without a sound. It was maybe a hundred yards long and half as wide. It was completely dark, with no lights or visible engines. As black as pitch at the bottom of a well, my grandmother would have said. I paused and stared in amazement for several seconds.
I heard another crash, in Jake’s room. I ran down the hall, calling his name. There was no answer. When I reached his room, the bed was empty. His window had been smashed inward. Shards of glass and a torn out black screen lay on the floor. Jake hadn’t even screamed, as far as I could recall. Then I looked out the broken window and my brain froze over for a second or two.
Jake hadn’t been taken away by some kind of magic beam. Instead, a thick, cable-like, multi-segmented arm had reached down and plucked my boy out of his bed. It resembled the body of a two-foot thick snake—long, sleek, and black. Was there someone up there in the ship working a joystick and collecting specimens? That was my first stunned impression. I got the feeling that to them, we were things that crawled under rocks at the bottom of
the sea. They were the scientists who had come down to our world to poke about and disturb our tiny existence.
When I’d gotten over my shock enough to move, I ran outside. Kristine joined me on the porch. She stared up with me at the ship with the snake-like arm. Jake was in the grip of the hand. He still wasn’t screaming, but he was squirming, so it hadn’t killed him yet. As we watched, he disappeared with the arm up into the ship’s belly.
Kris’ mouth hung open, full of braces. Her eyes blinked in horror. “What do we do, Dad?”
“Get in the car,” I ordered.
“What about Jake?”
“I’ll get him,” I said. I had no idea how to perform such a miracle, but I was determined to try. I raced back into the house and snatched up my keys and my Remington 12-gauge with a box of shells. I was going to blow off that snake-arm, or at least blast away at the ship. What else could I do?
I ran back outside. The screen door had latched itself shut. I straight-armed it and the flimsy aluminum thing snapped off the frame with the sound of ripping wood. Kristine sat inside the car looking out the passenger window, terrified. I thought to myself, in a disconnected moment, that Jake would be angry when he found out she had taken the front seat. He was the oldest, and since time immemorial in our family, the oldest kid had always gotten to ride up front with Dad.
I loaded the Remington and trotted out into the gravel driveway, craning my neck to look up. Jake and the arm had vanished, but I kept loading. The ship hadn’t moved, so maybe they could be convinced to give Jake back. It was the only thing I could think of.
When I raised the gun to my shoulder, I saw a darker spot open up on the bottom of the ship. It was then that Jake fell back down to earth, plummeting out of the ship. He landed in the horse trough…or rather half-in and half-out of it. That broke his spine, I think, but he was probably dead before they’d dropped him. I ran to him, making choking sounds. Kristine was screaming inside the car, her high-pitched cries muffled by the closed windows and doors.
