Dark World (Undying Mercenaries Series Book 9), page 26
If everyone I knew was down there on Dark World, as good as permed, using the broadsides was one sure way to get them out of purgatory. A single salvo from those big guns—sixteen shells screaming down with fusion warheads—that would wipe out any nest of bugs that had captured my people. Certified death for all—and a revival for all those captured.
“I’m not magic,” I told her. “I can’t just storm the fire-control center and operate the guns solo.”
Evelyn reached into her shirt and fished between her breasts for a second. I watched this with my eyebrows raised high.
Finally, she pulled out something that looked like a seashell.
“Oh…” I said. “The key.”
“You know what this thing is?” she asked. “You know how to use it?”
“I sure do,” I said, taking it from her hands. It was warm to the touch, and I looked at it thoughtfully.
“Good,” she said, sighing in relief. “That’s all I can do to help. Take it, and do your worst.”
I reached out a hand, and I planted it on her shoulder. I lifted the key up and held it between us.
“This will get us inside,” I said. “But I’ll still need help. You’re in this to the end—right?”
Evelyn looked scared again. “What more can I do?”
“You can talk our way past security, for one thing. Once we’re there, you can pull levers—I’ll tell you which ones. They changed things aboard Nostrum. The interface controlling the broadsides has fail-safes now.”
“How do you know that?”
I shrugged. “Idle curiosity can get a man into all kinds of trouble. Anyway, I’ll need help working the fire-control stations. It’ll take at least two people to pull this off.”
“Dammit,” she said softly. “I guess I’m in.”
-37-
On the way up to Gold Deck, I let Evelyn do all the talking and all the checking in. She was a centurion, meaning she outranked me. I played the part of the big, dumb sidekick.
To add authenticity to the ruse, I had her stop by Blue Deck, which was situated immediately below Gold Deck. We rummaged in a storage closet, and I was soon dressed in the blue coveralls of an orderly.
Hulking behind her, I marched along the passages. We took the elevator to the top. The fire-control center was in the aft region of Gold Deck on Nostrum, as Earth was now licensed to build and operate her own warships.
In the past, transports like this maintained a Skrull crew on a flight deck, and a separate human crew on a gunnery deck to handle the broadsides. That had been necessary for legal reasons. Humans had been approved to fight battles, and the Skrull had been approved to fly starships.
A decade ago, it’d been illegal for Humans to fly a ship or for Skrull to fire broadsides. That was a typical bureaucratic setup in the Empire. It was a goofy way to run a fleet, so Earth had performed some redesigns on ships like Nostrum once we were no longer under such severe rules of engagement from the Empire.
Showing off the red crest of her rank every time she was challenged, Evelyn made rapid progress toward our goal, but we were stopped cold when we approached the fire control center.
“State your business, Centurion,” a deck crewman demanded.
“There’s been an accident,” she lied. “I’m here to confirm the status of the injured.”
The crewman frowned in confusion. It wasn’t uncommon for bio people to perform such inspections. They had the task of confirming who was alive or dead, allowing revivals. They also decided who among the injured needed to be finished off and recycled.
“There’s just one problem,” he said, checking his tapper. “I’ve got no reports of any accidents.”
“James?” Evelyn said, crossing her arms.
“Oh… right. You see, Vet, the trouble is…”
I walked toward him as I talked, and he frowned up at me. I lifted the tapper on my arm so he could see it.
“You see this message right here?” I asked him.
“I don’t see—”
He crumpled after I sucker-punched him repeatedly.
Evelyn bent to check his vitals. She sucked air between her teeth.
“Did you have to hit him so hard? He’ll have to be recycled.”
“Come on, let’s keep moving.”
We reached the fire-control station moments later. The Galactic Key bypassed the locks, and there was no one on duty. The place was deserted.
“Turov arranged this part,” Evelyn said. “I can’t believe we’re really up here, doing this.”
I walked past her and began operating the equipment. The fire-control system was Imperial standard, and I’d operated such a station before. The only difference was the triggering mechanism. Instead of a standard touch-interface, two big metal triggers stood out on the console, each shrouded in a hand-guard of black. The triggers reminded me of pump handles at a tram-fueling station.
On the plus side, the observation ports gave us a fine view. The purplish disk of Dark World glowed below.
Rapidly, I touched the Galactic Key to the various control panels, overriding their security. They all logged us in as super-users. There were no more checks, no more passwords—we were in control of everything.
“Here,” I told Evelyn, “punch in the coordinates of the hive Turov gave you.”
She did so, and I watched her, feeling a little suspicious. But the coordinates matched the ones she’d specified, and they made sense.
The big guns outside swung in unison and locked on the target, aiming down at the equatorial region of the planet. Once locked, they slowly began to track as the world spun.
“We’ve got to fire soon,” I said, “or we’ll be forced to wait until the planet spins all the way around again.”
Evelyn nodded, and she moved to her firing station. Two people had to pull the triggers at once to get the big guns to fire—it was a last-ditch security measure that I didn’t know how to circumvent.
The triggers themselves were large metal things you squeezed together inside their protective guards.
“I’m putting up the blast shields,” I said. “The broadsides won’t fire unless we do.”
Huge, protective clam-shells rolled up and obscured all sight of the planet below.
“All right,” I said. “That’s it. On three, we pull these triggers. One… Two…”
“James?” Evelyn said in a voice I rarely heard from her. She sounded weak, frightened, out of her element. “I can’t do it.”
“Sure you can. Just give it a firm yank. Ready?”
“No... I mean… I can’t just kill a million aliens. I can’t do something like that without having the approval of our mission commander.”
“Deech? She doesn’t want any part of this.”
“I know. I just… I…”
“Listen,” I said, “this is a bad time to get cold feet. Someone’s bound to find us in here soon. Just do it.”
She looked freaked out. She stared at her hand, and I thought for a second she’d pull the trigger—mine was already half-squeezed—but she didn’t.
She removed her hand from the trigger guard and shook her head. “I can’t do it. I’m not like you. I can’t do it. Not for your friends—not for Galina.”
Before I could argue with her any further, a stern voice spoke from the doorway.
“Well, well, well,” Imperator Deech said. “What do we have here? Two agents of Varus caught in the act.”
A trio of guards stood at her back. My mouth hung open for a moment, as did Evelyn’s—but I recovered first.
“Hello there, Imperator,” I said in a cheery tone. “We just discovered an awful security oversight. No one should be allowed into this chamber without proper credentials. If this had been anything other than a test—”
“Shut up, McGill,” Deech said.
She advanced into the chamber warily. Her eyes were on Evelyn, however, rather than me.
“You didn’t have the guts to pull the trigger, did you?” she asked the centurion.
Evelyn didn’t answer. Her eyes were as big around as saucers. She slowly raised her hands above her head.
“Damn you, girl,” Deech said. “Don’t surrender! Fire those guns. Now!”
Bewildered, Evelyn shook her head in confusion. “You want us to fire?” she asked.
Deech rolled her eyes. “Of course. How do you think you got in here? Did you really believe this chamber is ever deserted? There’s a battle going on down below!”
When I thought that over, the situation did seem unlikely.
“Now,” Deech said, “are you going to fire those damned guns or not?”
Evelyn shook her head. Her mouth set itself in a tight line.
“Fine,” Deech spat out the word. She smoothly drew her sidearm and shot Evelyn repeatedly.
On reflex, I reached for my own gun, but the guards were covering me.
“Now, McGill,” Deech asked me, “are you in a more cooperative mood?”
As she talked, Deech grabbed Evelyn’s dead hand, shoved it into the firing stirrup, and forced the bloody fingers to close around the trigger.
Deech looked at me expectantly. “Well?”
“Is my cohort really down there, trapped in that hive?”
“They are. We lost contact with them yesterday. They were overwhelmed deep inside the nest.”
I nodded. “Just tell me one more thing: why the hell are you doing this?”
“You’re mistaken,” Deech said. “The record will clearly show that a squad of Varus renegades perpetrated this crime under orders from Turov.”
I got it then. It was like the heavens above had opened and spilled golden wisdom into my benighted face.
Deech was actually trying to pull a move. That was unheard of behavior—for her. She was trying to get Turov blamed for this whole disaster—instead of herself. That’s why she’d allowed things to go so far.
Deech followed my shifting expressions, and she knew I’d figured it out. She shrugged, perhaps feeling a twinge of shame.
“This business with the broadsides wasn’t my idea, originally. It was Turov’s,” she said. “But after I found out about it, I thought it over, and I came to the surprising conclusion that Turov was correct. We need to strike the planet directly. It’s the only way to win this campaign.”
“Let’s see if I’ve got this straight,” I said. “You liked her idea, but you didn’t want to take the blame for genocide? So, up until now you’ve been helping us slip by?”
“Up until now, I’ve done nothing but observe your criminal behavior. I hadn’t planned to do anything at all except arrest you two when it was over—but then Centurion Thompson chickened at the last step. A pity.”
“Tell me one thing: why are you convinced this is the only way to proceed?”
“It isn’t. Assaulting the nests on the ground is the approved approach. Engaging in genocidal attacks is unacceptable for Earth—even for Varus.”
I wasn’t so sure about that, as I’d participated in various actions that were on an equivalent plane of evil. Often, I’d tried to stop them, with mixed results.
But Deech wasn’t really from Varus. She had the high-minded ideals of the Iron Eagles stuck in her head.
“Why not just revive my legion and assault another nest?”
She squirmed a little. “Right now, Varus is mostly permed. We can’t legally revive those soldiers—not unless we know they’re dead.”
“Ah…” I said, nodding my head. “You’d deploy Varus again, not your precious Eagles, but you can’t because they’re on hold for a revival. The only other thing you can do is ask Earth for more troops.”
“Now you grasp the situation. Are we doing this or not?”
I looked at her intently for a moment. At last I nodded. How could I refuse? Without this effort, Kivi, Natasha, Carlos, Graves—they were all gone.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s do it.”
Deech looked at me for a moment longer, then nodded.
“On my mark…” she said. “One… two… Mark!”
Our eyes were locked as she counted down, and they stayed locked as we both squeezed the big, heavy triggers.
The massive guns spoke, and the whole ship bucked with the unleashed power. Sixteen shells went screaming down toward Dark World.
The war between Earth and Rigel had escalated again.
There was only one advantage I had in this grim situation. I’d fired broadsides before, and none of these Eagles had ever done so. Because of my prior experiences, I knew one critical thing: the main guns aboard a starship kick like a rabid mule.
Back in Georgia Sector on Earth, I’d fired more than my share of buckshot, but the kick of a twelve-gauge was nothing compared to the awesome power of sixteen fusion cannons going off under your boots in unison.
Unlike Deech and her guards, I’d braced myself for this vicious jolt in the ass.
Caught by surprise, Deech’s chin came down and slammed into the steel guard covering the trigger. She looked stunned, and her blood flowed over the housing.
The three guards had been standing around aimlessly. For the most part, they’d been directing their rifles at me and frowning at the instrumentation.
When the kick came, their knees buckled, and they were thrown to the deck. One of them stopped moving, knocked out cold.
This was the third time I’d been involved in the firing of broadsides. Unlike the ground-pounders, I’d set myself, and I rode it out. My knees bent, but they didn’t buckle.
Climbing back to their feet, cursing and confused, the guards were easy targets. One of them caught a bolt from my pistol before the second managed to return fire.
He got me in the side, but I put him down a split-second later.
Deech was stunned, but she was still in the game. She clawed out her own weapon a moment later. We stood there, aiming our pistols at one another.
“You savage!” she called out.
“Me?” I asked. “You’re the genocidal maniac. Take a look.”
So saying, I struck a big green button. The blast shields rolled away again, revealing the purple disk of Dusk World below us.
“Millions are about to die, sir.”
Sixteen streaks were still on their way down. We could see them clearly, arcing gently as they plunged through the upper atmosphere. They left white billowing trails of vapor as behind them as they fell.
“Won’t we be blinded on impact?” Deech said, unable to tear her eyes away from the scene.
“I don’t think so. Not at this range.”
Neither of us spoke for the next twenty or so seconds. Finally, a ripple of flashes went off far below. Deech threw her hands over her eyes, squinting and pulling her lips back from her teeth.
I could have shot her then, but I didn’t. Instead, I stepped close. I put my gun to her temple and pushed hers down. She jerked the trigger, but the bolt scored the deck instead of my body, drawing a smoking line of gouged-up, molten metal.
“You’re a treacherous dog,” Deech said to me. “You can kill me now, but I’ll be revived. I’ll be the one who watches you get permed.”
Ignoring her threats, I took her hand, and I pulled off her glove. She looked confused, but she didn’t struggle much.
Using her hand, I shoved it into the trigger guard. She finally figured out what I was doing then, and she tried to pull her hand back, but she was quickly overpowered.
I forced her hand to close over the metal squeeze-handles that formed the trigger.
“What are you doing?” she demanded.
“Oh, I think you know,” I said. “You turned off the cameras in here, didn’t you?”
Her wide eyes answered me despite the fact she stayed silent.
“That’s what I thought,” I told her. “But these triggers measure DNA. I just want to make sure you share in the credit for this bombardment.”
As I was using both my hands to force her to touch the trigger, making sure it had enough time to scan her, I wasn’t watching her other hand. She managed to get her pistol up against my gut, and she shot me.
I fell back. I’m a tough man, but I know when the game’s about over.
I could have killed Deech anyway, as I still had my weapon, but I didn’t see the point. Instead, I rolled over onto my belly, which was now a tangled, smoldering mess that hung out over my belt. That mass was kind of hot to the touch—a weird sensation.
Taking the Galactic Key, I slipped it into Evelyn’s back pocket.
“Stay down, you beast!” Deech shouted, and she shot me again, in the back this time.
“Oh shit… that one hurt,” I told her.
I got to my knees again anyway, and I heard her labored breathing as she stood over me.
“Die, damn you!” she hissed out.
“Losing your nerve, Imperator?”
Slowly, I levered myself back up and stood in front of her. I was swaying and leaning on the console—but I was on my feet. I looked her in the eyes, daring her to finish me off.
She shot me in the face.
That did the trick. I flopped down, deader than yesterday.
-38-
My next revival started off good.
“McGill…? Adjunct…? Can you hear me, James?”
The voice was feminine, vaguely familiar. My eyes fluttered open. I coughed up slime.
When I could answer, I rolled onto my side and wheezed.
“Evelyn?”
“That’s right,” she said in relief. “He looks good—it will have to do.”
Another figure shadowed me.
“McGill?” Graves asked. “Did you participate in the broadside strike on Dark World?”
Despite my bleary state of mind, I was immediately on-guard. Usually, Graves was a man I could count on for help. But he didn’t like junior officers taking drastic action. That meant we didn’t always see eye-to-eye.
“What strike was that, sir?” I asked, deciding to go with my tried-and-true appeal to ignorance.
“That’s what I thought,” he said.
Sitting up with an effort, I managed to look around.
“Are we still aboard Nostrum, sir?” I asked.
“We are,” Graves answered, “but we’re in a holding pen. We’re reviving our own people, one at time, waiting for the verdict.”
