Sky World (Undying Mercenaries Book 18), page 1
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SKY WORLD
(Undying Mercenaries Series #18)
by
B. V. Larson
The Undying Mercenaries Series:
Steel World
Dust World
Tech World
Machine World
Death World
Home World
Rogue World
Blood World
Dark World
Storm World
Armor World
Clone World
Glass World
Edge World
Green World
Ice World
City World
Sky World
Illustration © Tom Edwards TomEdwardsDesign.com
Copyright © 2022 by Iron Tower Press, Inc.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the author.
“Ruin comes when the trader, lifted up by wealth, becomes ruler.”
—Plato, 367 BC
-1-
Etta liked the outdoors. She always had, which was why she’d become a computational biologist. Working for the secretive labs buried under Central, she’d climbed high in their priesthood of scientists. She’d worked on many classified projects including teleportation, gene manipulation and a dozen other criminal activities—criminal at least from the point of view of the Galactics that ruled over us.
So, it should have come as no surprise to me that one morning at dawn she appeared on my porch, tapping at my door.
I came awake with a gun in my hand. I glanced out the window and saw it was Etta, and she was alone. I slipped the gun in my back pocket, opened the door, and put on a big smile.
“Hey, girl,” I said, “is breakfast already on the table?”
The birds were peeping hard. The sun was a glimmer on the horizon, buried by trees and the Blue Mountains.
Etta glanced toward the house, then gazed out toward the swamp. She had a worried look on her face.
“There’s no breakfast,” she said. “Not yet, Dad.”
“Well then, what—?”
“I found something… out there.” Her eyes darted away from me. She gazed out into the dark swampland behind my family’s plot.
Right away, I felt a spike of worry. Etta was good at finding things she was not supposed to find. She wasn’t a housecat—she was more of a prowler.
When she was young, she’d found the bones of a kit fox along with a dozen other remains in the bogs of our backcountry. That was precisely the kind of thing I did not want her to locate in our family swamp.
“Uh…” I said. “You, uh… you say you found something? Like what?”
Her eyes slid back to me. She looked more worried than ever. “Is something buried out there, Dad?”
“What? You mean like under that old barn?”
“Maybe…”
I faked a laugh. “That’s just plain crazy, girl. We knocked the barn down. We were going to sell that property, remember?”
She shook her head. “That deal fell through.”
“Well… yeah. Grandma and Grandpa didn’t get any money for it—but they were going to sell it.”
“What does that prove, Dad? Any why did the deal fall through, anyway?”
I shrugged. I spread my hands. The truth was I had done my best to sink the deal. I’d gone down to the county land office and made a bunch of stipulations. I’d even reported some things about the property that weren’t true.
That had done the trick. Government permits to sell the property were denied. The deal had been blown.
Later on, this last spring, I’d decided it was high time I made up for my rude, underhanded move. I’d gathered up some credits I’d earned by going on various deadly off-world missions. I’d quietly injected the funds into my parents’ bank account. They’d accepted the gift because they needed the money, but they weren’t really that happy about it.
I argued that this way, we weren’t selling off the family land for cheap. They’d still grumbled, but they went on with it. The developers had looked elsewhere.
The truth was, even after doing a lot of work to cover my tracks out there in that swampy land, I was worried what they might find. Sure, the barn was knocked down and all the bones were at the bottom of a well. But what if there were more bones that I had missed?
What if when they dug a new sewer line, at some point, they had to remove that well and all the stones around it? Well, I’ll just tell you what. They’d find what I’d hidden down there.
To prove me right, here was my own daughter standing in front of me, telling me she’d found something. Something incriminating.
I knew in that moment that I had made the right call by burying the whole thing. I put my hands on my hips with my knuckles pressing under my belt loops on both sides. “What did you find out there?” I asked.
“Something weird.”
“Uh… something human?”
“I’m not sure.”
This surprised me as Etta had an education. She’d taken every anatomy class there was. She knew all kinds of things that I’d never bothered to learn. If she’d found some bones, I was pretty sure she could identify them.
“All right. All right,” I said. “So, you found something. There’s always been strange goings-on in that swamp, you know? In fact, that barn was once the hideout of some pretty big-time criminals.”
Etta looked intrigued, but wary. She knew about my propensity for telling a tall tale. “Criminals? What kind of criminals?” she asked.
“I’m talking about the worst kind. The rebel kind.”
“What?”
I lowered my voice and took a half-step closer to her. “Girl, I’m talking about people hiding out. During the unification wars, see?”
Etta looked alarmed. She lowered her voice as well. Even she knew that no person on Earth would dare talk about the Unification Wars openly. “That’s crazy. That’s a century gone at least.”
“Sure is,” I said.
“How do you know about stuff like that, Dad?”
I shrugged. “I’m a legion man. I have been for fifty years now. Sometimes... Well, a few secrets leak out.”
Etta was staring out in the swamp in earnest. “Are you trying to tell me I found something out there that was from some rebel leaders? Some hunted foot soldiers, guerrillas from a century back?”
“It’s possible,” I said.
The key to lying and lying big was to plant that initial seed of doubt. You had to convince someone there was a possibility you were right. One of the best ways to do this was an intriguing story. A rumor was perfect for this sort of dodge. It could grip the mind and cause the victim to ask other questions.
Soon, they’d be coming up with the answers themselves. They’d fit the pieces together. They would build a worldview that fit around the seed you had planted in their heads.
Etta was studying my creaky porch. I got out two bottles of ginger ale and offered her one. She took it and cracked it open. We sat on my groaning porch swing and sipped our drinks.
“I always like a bottle of ginger ale in the morning,” I said. “The only thing that’s better is real beer.”
“Dad… I know about the bones. The bones at the old barn—among other things.”
“Huh?”
My blood ran cold all of a sudden. Here I’d been thinking I almost had her bamboozled, and it was a shock to realize she was onto my game.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“You sure as hell do know. There are bones out there, and they tell bad stories about what happened to them.”
“Uh… I don’t know anything about that. You said you found something weird… You’re talking about aliens, right?”
“No, not aliens.”
“What was so weird, then?”
“For one thing the bones are weird because they’re identical.”
“What?”
“You heard me. I found two sets of skeletal remains that are virtually the exact same structure—like they were twins or something.”
All of a sudden, I got it. There had been a time not that long ago, before the Clone World campaign, as I recalled, when Claver had sent out some of his muscle-bound look-alikes to my house. They’d come to hassle me here on the farm.
I’d told them I had something special to show them out in the swamp. I’d led them out ther
I chose to release a belly-laugh. I even put my hand on my gut. “That’s crazy talk,” I said. “I don’t think there were any rebel guerillas out there. Not ones that were twins, anyways.”
“No…” she said. “They’re probably not rebels. I think the bones are too fresh for that. And in too good of shape. I salvaged them and did a little dating. As best I can tell, they’ve been out there much less than a century.”
I was alarmed all over again. “Did you say you salvaged these bones? Are you telling me you dug up an unmarked grave? In the middle of nowhere? That’s just plain crazy. That’s dangerous girl. However those men died, it couldn’t have been under happy circumstances.”
“No,” she said, “I suppose you’re right. Do you think the government could have done it? Do you think Hegemony could have taken a couple of men out there and shot them in our swamp?”
“What makes you think that they were shot?” My eyes flicked from side to side as she thought it over. I was beginning to sweat, and the day hadn’t even gotten hot yet.
Etta shrugged. “There was one neat round hole in each man’s skull. It doesn’t take a genius to read that evidence.”
I gave my ears a scratch and pretended to think things over carefully. “Okay,” I said. “You found some old bones out there in our swamp. What are we going to do about it?”
“We could report it to the police and to Hegemony. Maybe they would know what to do.”
“Oh yeah, sure,” I said, “they’ll have themselves an investigation. Maybe they’ll close down the property and call it a historic landmark, or a burial ground, or a crime scene—maybe all three at once.”
Etta sighed. “Yeah,” she said, “that would be terrible for Grandma and Grandpa.”
“It sure would. Just think about it. If they so much as catch one of those little owls that runs around on dirt out here, they’d shut down the whole farm.”
“I agree, I don’t think we can afford to tell anyone.” She shook her head, studying my boots and hers. “This is going to be a lot of work.”
“How’s that?”
She turned away and walked toward the toolshed. She walked into the shed and came back out again with a couple of power tools, one in each hand.
“Hey, little girl, where are you going?”
“Out to the swamp,” she said. “I found something else out there—not just the bones. It looks like I’m going to have to dig everything up myself.”
I jumped up off my porch like a water moccasin had bit me.
-2-
It was a bright, early morning. Dawn had just broken over southern Georgia. Normally, I’d still be asleep at this hour, but instead I found myself following my smarty-pants daughter into the swamp.
The clinging mud from the bogs weighed down my feet. This was not just a physical effect, but also an effect of the spirit. My heart was as heavy as my boots, which were covered in slime and muck. I didn’t even want to know what Etta had found out here.
She’d told me about the bones, but she’d also insisted there was more to it than that. I’d asked her several times what that extra something special might be, but she’d refused to answer. She wanted to show me in person.
I marched along, listening to the bugs and the birds, which always seemed loudest in the early morning. I was carrying my own thoughts, wondering how bad things would be when she finally confronted me with some dark truth.
“Dad, where are you going?”
I stopped, and I turned. Etta was no longer in front of me. She was off to the side. She’d taken a different path, following a narrow trail through the thistles and reeds.
It was a route I’d rarely to never taken myself. I blinked a few times in confusion. I opened my mouth, and I was about to say, “That’s not the way to the barn,” but I stopped.
The barn was what I was worried about. The aging ancient structure itself was nothing but a pile of quarried stones, crumbling mortar and rotting timbers—but many bad things had happened in and around that barn. I’d been involved in quite a few of these mishaps.
I’d wrongly assumed that was where Etta was taking me, but apparently, she wasn’t going that direction at all.
A real, honest-to-God smile graced my lips for the first time that morning.
“Oh…” I said. “I’m sorry, honey. I must have been daydreaming.”
She shook her head, snorted, and turned away. We walked deeper into the more wooded area of the swamp land.
I followed her, trudging behind. I found that my spirits and my step were lifting. I almost never came out this way. Whatever she had found was probably not rotting alien bones, or worse, human bones. It was probably something else entirely.
Soon we’d walked deeper and deeper into the woods, entering an area where the pines were literally centuries old.
I chided myself for having been so worried in the first place. It made perfect sense that Etta wasn’t coming out here because of my crimes. All her life she’d had odd interests of her own. In my opinion, this was because she had too much of her grandfather’s blood in her veins. The Investigator, as he was known on Dust World, was a strange old coot.
I frowned for just a moment as I wondered about Etta’s questionable heritage. She’d had a bad death and sketchy revive a few years back. Afterwards she’d come back… different.
She was still my daughter, mind you, but she was… different. She was wilder at heart and possibly even smarter than she had been.
Her grandfather had revived her illegally after her one and only death. We’d lost some of her body-scans, so although her knowledge and memories were intact, her DNA was not quite what she’d been born with. At this point, to the best of my understanding, she was one third my daughter, one third Della’s daughter—and one third something else.
The Investigator had told me this extra element came from Natasha, a friend of mine, but I had my doubts concerning that entire story. The man was an odd genius. He was apt to experiment with just about anything. He was at least half-mad, and I suspected my daughter might be too much like him.
“Dad? Daddy?”
I looked down again. Etta had stopped, and I’d almost walked right into her.
Looking around, I saw nothing of interest.
“Uh… where are we? I don’t even know this place.”
Etta pointed a finger to the west.
I looked at that direction, and I peered because underneath all the big old-growth trees, it was still a bit gloomy. The cool moist air was pungent.
I squinted in the direction she indicated, but I didn’t see anything special.
“See that pile of dirt, there?” she asked. “That mound?”
Then, I did see it. A black mound of rich soil. It was on top of a roll in the land. I wouldn’t call it a hill or even a hillock. It was a roll, a spot where the ground was perhaps one to two meters higher than the land that surrounded it. In a swamp, that’s a big deal.
Glancing down, I noticed that Etta’s hands were grimy. There was black dirt rammed under every fingernail.
“Hey girl,” I said, “did you dig up that hill with your bare hands?”
She shrugged. “No,” she said. “Not entirely. I have a shovel.”
I glanced at her again. Her eyes met mine. She still had that strange, suspicious sly look like she had a secret and a raft of suspicions in her head as well.
“What the hell is this about, girl?” I asked.
“That hill there—this whole place. Do you know anything about it?”
“No,” I said. “I’ve been along this trail, sure, but I’ve never dug anything up—certainly not on that little hump of dirt over there.”
“Okay then, let’s have a look.” She walked toward the mound and gave me a look I didn’t quite understand. I followed her for a dozen steps, maybe two dozen off the trail.
We stopped on top of that unusual roll in the earth. It was the highest point in sight. For some reason, Etta had chosen to dig a hole right here, forming a mound of black earth. It looked as if a giant gopher had been at work, but I knew it was just my crazy daughter. Large trees grew to either side of the mound, and their tangled roots ran all over under the swamp grass.
Etta peered down into the hole she had dug. I joined her and bent over with a grunt. Right then, I caught sight of a long-handled spade she’d clearly swiped from the toolshed. She’d brought it out here and dug random holes without asking. Like any father who finds tools rusting on wet dirt, I opened my mouth to complain.
