Death World

by B. V. Larson

  Before I could answer, she looked at Natasha, who appeared to be embarrassed.

  “Spying again?” Turov asked her. “You techs are all the same. Get out before I take your stripes!”

  Natasha hurried away. Turov looked over her shoulder at the others. “Winslade, downstairs. Prepare the action we discussed.”

  “I’m not sure that would be a good idea,” Tribune Drusus said.

  “I’m well aware of your objections,” Turov said. “Do you want to interrogate Claver or not?”

  “What will we gain from that?” Drusus asked. “Time is short. We must marshal our forces. We must appear to comply with the cephalopod captain’s wishes. Let’s use our last lifter to retake Minotaur while we can.”

  “I’ve heard your arguments, Tribune.”

  “I feel I must restate them because they’re critically important. It’s only a matter of time until the cephalopods realize we’re not in control of Minotaur. Once they do, they’ll stop giving ultimatums and start firing salvos.”

  “We don’t know that. This Captain Torrent is talking big, but they always do that. We’ll call his bluff.”

  Tribune Drusus fell into a tense silence. Turov turned to Claver and I, who were listening in with interest.

  “Sounds like Drusus has a pretty good plan there, Imperator,” I said.

  She twisted her lips into a grimace. “When I want your advice, McGill, I’ll—never mind. That will never happen.”

  She eyed Claver like he was a bug on a plate.

  “You,” she said. “You’re worse than these plants. At least the Wur are loyal to their own kind. You disgust me.”

  “All life is my kind, Imperator,” Claver said spreading his hands open wide. “Have an open mind, for pity’s sake.”

  “Pity? No, there shall be none of that for you. Are you aware I’ve come up with a way to perm insects like you? Even if you have a clone, a back-up, an automated revival system somewhere—I can have you erased.”

  Claver cleared his throat. “McGill mentioned something about that. Let me make an appeal. Let me suggest a solution that will get us all out of this unfortunate situation.”

  “By all means.”

  “Here’s my idea: let me talk to the plants. Send me to negotiate with the biggest central brain in the forest. I can convince it to let us go in peace. To let us trade with this species.”

  “A central brain?” Turov asked. “What are you talking about?”

  “The plants don’t operate as a committee,” Claver said. “One brain is in charge of this entire planet. It’s hidden, and it coordinates all the others.”

  “Hmm,” Turov said, walking around the two of us thoughtfully.

  We watched her pace for about thirty seconds before she made up her mind.

  “All right,” she said at last. “McGill will go as your watchdog. Tell the plants we’ll kill all their brains if they don’t pull back their forces and make a deal with us.”

  Claver’s grin was broad and a little predatory, I thought.

  “That’s perfect,” he said. “I know these creatures—they’ll deal. They want trade for metals. They understand the concepts of equitable give and take…for the most part.”

  After the meeting, we went our separate ways. Turov followed me and approached me in the hallway.

  “Sir?”

  “McGill,” she said, looking up at me speculatively. “Do you like these plant aliens?”

  “Hell no.”

  “Do you think the Wur will make good trading partners for Earth?”

  “I think they’d make a better salad, sir.”

  She smiled. “Then you and I are in agreement. Go with Claver. Let him lead you to his brain-plant, the biggest of them all. When you find it…kill it for me.”

  I stared at her for a second, then I nodded. “Yes sir, Imperator. Can I take my squad?”

  “Yes, and take Natasha too. Her spying is getting on my nerves.”

  “Will do.”

  She quickly looked both ways up and down the passage, and when she saw the coast was clear, she gave me a little kiss on the cheek. She had to stand on her tip-toes to do it, and I had to lean forward to help out.

  We parted after that, and I went outside to marshal my squad.

  Claver looked over the group with misgivings. He had his hands on his hips, head shaking from side to side.

  “This won’t do. Too much weight.”

  “Too much weight?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”

  He laughed at me like I was the biggest dummy on the planet. “What? Did you think we were going to walk through that trackless forest over there? Our destination is hundreds of kilometers away and walking would take weeks, dippy. Here’s the plan: we’ll reconfigure a pig into a flying platform. That can be done in a few hours. Ask your tech, here.”

  I turned to Natasha questioningly.

  “Well, yes,” she said. “Drone pigs have repeller plates built in, like that surfboard table-thing you built back home, James. They have to so they can run with a heavy load over rough terrain. But rebuilding one is against—”

  “Since when does McGill give a shit about regulations?” Claver demanded. He turned to me. “Veteran, do you feel like walking into that forest with a couple thousand hungry pod-walkers chasing your ass around?”

  Thinking about it for a second, I shook my head.

  “Good. You’re not as dumb as I thought. Let’s go.”

  It took a little wrangling with the quartermaster, and a few calls for support from the brass, but we got it done. The resulting platform was like the floater I’d built back home, but it was bigger and faster. As Claver had suggested, it wasn’t big enough for my entire squad. I had to choose only four people to go along with me.

  In the end, I took Natasha, Carlos and Kivi. Claver made the fifth man. I wanted to take Sargon, but I figured bringing a weaponeer on a peace mission might give away my intentions.

  Before we left, I quietly loaded extra explosives and detonators onto our flying pig. A whole rucksack full of them.

  -38-

  When I’d been told we could build an aircraft out of a drone, I’d visualized something like a flying carpet. Instead, we ended up scudding over the forest floor on an uneven platform that looked more like a homemade raft than anything else.

  Just hanging onto the damned thing when we had to swerve to miss a fern branch was difficult. Claver wanted to fly the contraption, but I didn’t let him. I had Natasha do it instead as she’d supervised the rushed conversion process. She knew best what her hay-wired vehicle was capable of.

  We weren’t an hour into the journey before we were all questioning the wisdom of the entire adventure.

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it?” Carlos demanded. “There aren’t any officers on this little jaunt. You caught the significance of that, didn’t you? This is a suicide run. A joke in poor taste.”

  My eyes slid over to him then back to the forest, which was as endless and green as ever. We skimmed along at a good clip, covering a couple kilometers every minute.

  “You’ve got a point,” I said.

  “Damned straight I do. Here’s their bullshit excuse: ‘We wanted our best to save the day! That’s why we’re sending you clowns to certain death.’ Sure, right... You want to know what I’d have asked our grand Imperator, McGill? I’d have demanded to know if she, our glorious leader, was willing to go along on this mission.”

  One thing that made Carlos possible to listen to, if you didn’t take him too seriously, was his tendency to answer his own questions immediately after he asked them. That made him tolerable as long as you weren’t the type who got annoyed quickly.

  “Why isn’t Turov here horning in on the glory this time?” Carlos asked Kivi. She rolled her eyes, but he answered his own question anyway. “Because we’re all as good as dead, that’s why!”

  He kept complaining, and I kept scanning the horizon. The worst part of the trip so far had been the first moments af
ter we hit the cool green gloom of the forests. The walkers lurking at the edge of the tree line had tried to catch us, reaching up with impossibly long arms that went on and on.

  Hundreds had shambled after us, but only one had gotten close. It managed to snag one of the skids of the undercarriage with a finger that was as thick as a baseball bat, but we hacked it off and kept on humming.

  Now, in the deep emerald gloom of the rolling land, we seemed to be beyond their reach. Only rarely did we see any of the enemy. When we did, it was always a lone spider or lost walker. They barely had time to register our approach before we were gone, doing about seventy knots over the whipping ferns.

  “You’re not even listening to me, are you, McGill?” Carlos demanded at last.

  “Nope.”

  “The next time I get the chance, I’m going to let you die.”

  “Same here.”

  He finally shut up after that. Ten minutes later, I scooted myself carefully over the lurching, vibrating surface of our make-shift vehicle and joined Claver and Natasha in the front. Natasha was driving while Claver navigated.

  I noticed, as I approached them, that the front end was taking on more fern-strikes. They slapped and rustled as they beat against the prow.

  “Dammit, McGill,” Natasha said. “I can feel the whole nose dip down when you come up here. Hold your position in the stern, please.”

  I scooted my butt back to the rear of the ship and used my suit radio to contact her instead of tapping on her shoulder. The drone’s engine buzzed under our butts, generating a level of noise that was close to that a helicopter.

  “How’s it going Natasha?” I demanded. “Is Claver bullshitting you, or are we really headed somewhere that looks promising?”

  “I’m not sure, actually,” she said. “As far as our scans go, the region he’s taking us to has no contacts at all. No spider-fields, no walkers—nothing but ferns and tree trunks.”

  “That’s just grand.”

  “The good news is we’ll be there in less than an hour.”

  Time crawled. Over the next hour, we grew tired of the novelty of traveling on our flying pig.

  Finally, as we neared our destination, Claver carefully climbed his way back to me. He had Carlos go forward to balance out the ship—I can’t say I was sorry to see the specialist move out of earshot.

  “McGill,” Claver said, looking at me seriously. “We need to talk.”

  “Go ahead. I’m listening.”

  “I need a favor,” he said. “I need you to give me a shot at communicating before you do anything nuts.”

  Shifting uncomfortably, I gave him a shrug. “Sure. Negotiate away. That’s what we’re here for.”

  He eyed me distrustfully. “I’m not an idiot, McGill. I wasn’t born yesterday, remember? In fact, I was born almost a century ago. You remember how I was called Old Silver before you got me killed and brought back a few times?”

  I smiled at the memory, although it was probably rude to do so. Claver had been called Old Silver when I first met him because his body was physically about fifty. That was very unusual in the legions. He’d worn his silver hair like a badge, proudly showing the world he hadn’t died for a long, long time. Actual gray hair in the legions was almost unknown. People tended to die often. When they were later revived, their bodies were regrown as they had been when they were last stored. Only a man’s mind was backed up regularly. The effect prolonged our lives by many years. Claver had gotten his youth back all at once on Tech World—with my help.

  “You like being young again?” I asked him.

  “Sometimes—but it still pisses me off that I lost my silver hair and my nickname.”

  I smiled. “Glad to be of service.”

  He gave me a sour glance. “Look, my point is I’m older and wiser than I look. I know how things are going to go when we get to the nexus plant. You’re going to try to kill it. What I’m asking you for is a little time, a fair shot at talking to it first.”

  My grin faded. His request was a serious one and not entirely unreasonable. Moreover, I was impressed he’d figured out what I was planning to do.

  “How long?” I asked.

  He stared at me for a second, dumbfounded. “Dammit! I was only fishing. I hate when I’m right! You’re honestly planning to kill the biggest brain on this planet, aren’t you? Of all the crazy—”

  “Why else would Turov send me?” I asked him reasonably. “I’m better at blowing things up than I am at talking to them.”

  Claver studied his hands, frowning fiercely and muttering curses. He was dejected but thinking hard.

  “Okay,” he said, nodding to himself at last. “Okay, I have to prove my case to you, that’s all. I get that. Maybe I’m lucky it’s you. Anyone else would follow Turov’s orders blindly. They’d shoot and ask questions later. But you, you’ve got that independent streak. How many times have officers ordered you to slaughter helpless civilians only to have you refuse them?”

  I blinked a few times. I wasn’t quite sure if he was playing a game with me or if he really meant what he said. “You’re claiming that this plant species is innocent? They killed your whole crew. They permed my folks back on Earth.”

  “There have been misunderstandings, certainly. That’s normal when two wildly diverse species meet up for the first time. They’re a hive-minded species of self-mobile plants, for God’s sake. But I’m hoping you’re a better man than most. A man with a big heart and an open mind.”

  “Ten minutes,” I said after thinking it over. “You get ten minutes to talk to your plant-buddies. After that, I’m making a salad.”

  “That’s not enough time. I can’t do it. Just connecting with the plant takes a ritual of sorts. It’s like hypnotizing a deadly snake. You don’t just walk in there, shake hands, and start jawing like an auctioneer. You have to gain trust, exchange fluids and scents—”

  “Okay, okay. How long?”

  “An hour. Probably ninety minutes to get a coherent reply. It could take longer, but I doubt it. The good thing is we’ll only have to talk to one plant. The top brain has the authority to speak for the others. It won’t have to relay the message and request a vote or anything like that. If we can agree on a negotiated peace, we’ll know their answer right off.”

  Heaving a sigh and throwing up my arms, I almost told him ‘no’ on the spot. Stalling for an hour and a half was going to be nearly impossible. Turov was watching, after all. She knew where I was on the map. She probably had drones searching the area intently. When we got there, she expected fireworks to start. If they didn’t, she’d know I was disobeying her orders.

  “Listen,” I said. “I don’t have time for a tea-ceremony. Get in, say your piece and get out. I’m not losing my stripes by disobeying orders to make you happy. You get half an hour, tops.”

  “Okay,” he said quickly, slapping his hands together. “Thirty minutes will do fine, thanks.”

  He was grinning again, and he seemed excited. He turned away to go back up to the prow, but I landed a heavy gauntlet on his shoulder and pulled him back.

  “What the hell?” I asked. “What was all that business about ninety minutes being the minimum?”

  “I’m a trader,” he said. “I always ask for the Moon and then settle for Delaware. That’s my actual motto, in fact.”

  I shook my head sourly and let him go. He scooted back up to the front of the vessel, chuckling to himself. I’d been scammed already, and I had a bad feeling about the rest of the afternoon.

  We arrived sometime later and landed at the edge of a gully. Claver asked us to wait on the drone, but there was no way I was going for that.

  “Right,” I said, “like we’re going to sit out here in the car while you handle everything. Start walking, and don’t make any funny moves.”

  “You promised, McGill,” he chided me. “Don’t forget.”

  “You’ll get your minutes. The clock is ticking right now.”

  Claver set off at a trot, and we
had to move quickly to keep up. I shouldered the rucksack of explosives and grimly brought up the rear of the group.

  We walked down a long, curving ramp of black earth. I quickly realized why we hadn’t seen anything special in this region. There was a big, deep hole in the ground. At the bottom of the pit, I could see slushy mud. The opening wasn’t very wide and was overgrown with those damned ferns. From the air, the buzzers and probes had missed the spot and marked it as nothing special.

  “Turov’s on my tapper,” Natasha said, looking at me worriedly. “Should I answer?”

  “Don’t touch it!” I said. “Mine’s beeping too, and I’m ignoring it. That’s why she’s calling you now. Listen up everyone, the story we’re going with is that we weren’t able to get clear reception down here in this hole. Ignore your tappers. That’s an order.”

  “McGill, McGill, McGill,” Carlos said, shaking his head. “What kind of a fresh Hell are you leading us into this time?”

  “Just keep an eye on Claver,” I told him.

  We reached the bottom of a muddy ramp and stood in about a half-meter of swamp water.

  Claver sloshed forward in a crouch. “You see it?” he whispered.

  “See what?”

  “That bulb over there, dummy. The one with the spines.”

  “Oh yeah,” I said, feeling like I wanted to belt him one. I resisted the urge and let him sidle forward.

  “Better wait here,” he said. “She’ll get nervous otherwise.”

  “She?” I asked.

  “These plants spawn spiders, and they have a definitely feminine twist to the mind. I think of them as female.”

  “Whatever turns you on, Claver,” Carlos interrupted. “Get on with it. My trigger finger is aching, and I don’t care much if I shoot you or the cactus.”

  Claver gave him a sneer, but he quickly scuttled ahead nonetheless. We watched as Claver approached the plant and caressed a few leaves then stabbed himself with one of the meter-long spines. He allowed droplets of blood to sprinkle onto the leaf he’d touched, which was rustling on top of the water now.