Steel World (37 page)

I wiggled the needle, and she shut up.

“I’m sorry sir,” I told her. But I can’t let you kill me right now. If you’ll kindly undo my straps, without attempting to withdraw from the needle, I’ll be on my way.”

“What about your injuries?”

“I’ll fix them myself.”

Thompson made a mistake then. Her hand had been drifting down toward her belt. She had a com-link there. At the last second, she moved fast, reaching for the button, fumbling blindly with it.

I jabbed the needle into her neck and the syringe began to pump automatically. The little bulb at the end pulsated. It was like watching a bee’s poison sac contract when it’s rammed home in your flesh.

I grimaced sympathetically as she made a strangled sound. I hadn’t wanted to hurt her, but she might have been going for a weapon. I’d killed her on reflex.

Her hands flew up to her throat, and her face purpled.

I sat up, sawing at more straps with my small knife. I talked to her as she died.

“Sorry about that,” I told her. “You shouldn’t have made that sudden move. Try to look on the bright side: you’re out of this hellhole. I’m sure they’ll revive you on
Corvus
. Good luck.”

Centurion Thompson sank to her knees. She tried to talk, but couldn’t. I figured I was happy about that. She probably wasn’t trying to say anything I wanted to hear.

“Listen,” I said as she lay on the floor, gasping for breath. Her eyes were glazing over. “If you keep quiet about this, I’ll do the same. It will be an accident, nothing more. I’ll stay away from your tech. I’ll leave the bios alone. I hope you’ll do the same for me.”

I don’t know if she even heard the last of it. By the time I’d stopped talking, she was stone dead.

-28-

I took a few minutes to barricade the door with a chair tilted under the door handle. It wasn’t much, but I knew she’d told the orderlies to leave us alone. Hopefully, this would give me the time I needed.

Scrambling and dropping things on the floor, I found a pack of syringes labeled with something that ended in “mycin”. That had to be an antibiotic, so I shot myself with two of them, right into my shoulder. The injections burned and my flesh crawled. I hoped I hadn’t just poisoned myself somehow.

Then I removed the skin-printer from the wall. Really, it was just a wand with a wide nozzle. I ran it over my injured flesh—the bullets inside would have to wait. If it was at least clean and sealed, that would do for now. I’d bother a field medic in my own unit about it later on—if I lived long enough to get fancy.

The dead woman on the floor did nothing to keep my mind on the task at hand. It was strange standing there, sweating and nervous, while trying to heal myself with a flesh-spraying device. Wet, pinkish material went everywhere looking like juices from a raw steak.

I told myself I hadn’t really killed her—at least not permanently. She was already queued up on
Corvus
waiting for her turn to come out of an alien oven. I wondered if she’d blab about how she got there—I suspected she wouldn’t. She’d held me illegally and tried to murder me.

After about a minute with the wand, I decided I’d done what I could. My arm felt a lot better, but it didn’t look much better. The flesh was growing in and around the damaged tissue, healing over what would have taken months to do naturally.

When I pulled my suit over the mess the new skin tore in places. I winced, even though it caused no pain. There were no nerve endings in there yet, just raw skin cells. I should have dressed it more carefully, but I didn’t have the time or the training.

Hoping for the best, I stripped to the waist, laid gauze over my shoulder, taped it as best I could, then suited up again. I removed the chair from under the door and walked out like I owned the place.

This was going to be the hard part. I’d decided there was only one way to handle it: by brazenly heading for the exit at a steady walk. I didn’t run, I didn’t even rush. I just walked.

As I passed through three longish corridors, I earned several looks and a few frowns. I ignored every duty-nurse, orderly and bio. They all seemed to have something to do. As far as they knew, I was just a grunt heading down to the lab for a test or looking for the bathroom.

Once, I saw one of the orderlies who had brought me in. He gave me a glance, then did a double-take. But someone tapped him on the shoulder, demanding his attention. Bios didn’t like it when orderlies ignored them. Before he could investigate, I turned a corner and did my best to vanish.

The only problem came when I reached the front door. We were in a bunker, after all, and there was security. Fortunately, the protocol seemed to involve the automated door checking people’s IDs as they entered. I waited just inside until a group passed by on the way out, then fell into step behind them. The guards didn’t give any of us a second glance.

When I was outside, I took a deep breath. The night was dark and quiet. The air of Steel World was hot, as usual, but not oppressively so. I’d left my helmet behind, and as I walked to my bunker I let the sweat dry off me.

Twenty minutes ago I’d been certain I was going to take another trip through the revival machines. I dared to smile. That bio was going to wake up pissed-off if she did remember all this. I wasn’t sure which one of us had broken more regulations during our encounter, but I sincerely hoped I wouldn’t need her help again.

By the time I reached my own bunk and sank into it, I had a jug of water in my hand. I drained most of it then poured more on my head. I sighed and stretched out.

I half-expected Carlos’ face to come over the top of my bunk like a full moon. I could almost hear his big mouth smarting off at me—but then I realized he was dead. They all were dead. I was almost alone in my unit on Steel World. Most of my squadron had died over the last few hours and were now up on
Corvus
—if they hadn’t been permed.

I found a snap-rifle and planned to fall asleep with it across my chest. I closed my eyes and tried to rest. I was tired and felt beaten down. I knew I shouldn’t sleep right now, but I had to get rest whenever I could.

I awoke a few hours later to a terrible grinding sound. I felt sure for several confused seconds that the orderlies had me again. I came up into a sitting position in my bunk, feeling feverish. My snap-rifle was aimed into the dark with the safety flipped off.

No one was there but a few fellow recruits. They groaned and rolled out of their beds to their feet.

“What’s going on?” I demanded.

“How the hell should I know?” came an answer from a female voice in the dark. I recognized the voice: it was Kivi.

“Hey!” I called out. “I thought you died a while back.”

She got out of her bunk and came down the row to sit on mine. We regarded each other in the dark room, waiting for orders.

“It was close,” she said, “but while you were chasing dinos in that tunnel, the bio people patched me up in their bunker. They can do more than just revive us if they want to.”

“Yeah, I’ve just come from there. I’m sore, but functioning.”

“Maybe the people who died are the lucky ones,” she said. “But only because you risked everything to keep them from getting permed. That was cool, James.”

I smiled. “Not everyone thinks so.” I was about to tell her the story of the bio centurion who’d decided I’d seen too much and needed recycling, when the lights flipped on and the arrows on the floor lit up. They were red this time—emergency colors.

We pulled on our gear quickly and rushed out together. There were plenty of spare helmets with so many people missing, so I took one and put it on. More people from our unit gathered, but there were no veterans or officers. Not knowing what was happening, we aimed our weapons at everyone else who joined us in the main hallways.

“Have you heard anything over the unit channel?” I asked Kivi.

“Nothing,” she said, “but something’s up. I bet someone got hit.”

We followed our ant-trail of arrows to the exits and stepped outside. I half-expected to see an incoming bombardment or even an invasion force at the gates. But there was nothing there.

“Look at HQ!” shouted Kivi at my side.

The command post was a puff-crete bunker they’d set up behind the terminal building. It was—gone. Or at least half of it was. There was a small cloud of dust with a flickering orange light inside.

“Fire,” Kivi said. “It’s on fire!”

“It’s more than on fire,” I said, “it’s been taken out. That’s why we haven’t gotten any orders.”

“Can you get through to Harris or Leeson?”

I tried—all the troops coming out of the bunker did. Our tappers had locating units on them. The tappers worked, but they weren’t telling us anything because we were disconnected from the network.

More and more people were coming out of their barracks, and some were streaming down from the walls where guards had been posted. As a group, we decided to head toward the HQ to see if we could render assistance. There was a lot of confusion about what to do with our command post knocked out.

“That’s a crater,” a tech specialist said next to me as we trotted closer. He was a small guy with small eyes and an angry red face. He’d come over from the non-com barracks following his own set of emergency arrows. “That means the lizards must have used air power.”

“I don’t hear any planes,” I said. “It’s been quiet except for that single grinding sound followed by some kind of explosion.”

“Well then, what did this?” the tech asked me petulantly.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But someone purposefully knocked out the HQ. That means we have no networking, or officers on duty.”

The tech was nodding. “That explains the emergency arrows. The systems only know how to lead people to their gathering points when something really goes wrong.”

When we reached the HQ, I was relieved to find Harris directing traffic and Leeson giving orders.

“About time you recruits showed up,” Leeson said to us. “Form a perimeter. I have enough people looking for survivors already.”

We spread out with Harris bullying us into good firing positions. There wasn’t much cover, but we took what we could find and watched the night around us.

The next event took everyone by surprise. I think it was more startling because we all saw it with our own eyes.

The blue Medical center—the same building where I’d been abused just hours earlier—suddenly turned into a plume of dust. I saw dust shooting up into the air in a dark cloud. When it cleared, the Medical bunker was gone.

“We need to get the men out of there, sir!” shouted Harris.

Leeson looked at him and nodded. “I’m in contact with the surviving officers. We’re evacuating every structure.”

I stared at the missing building and thought for a moment.

“I heard something, sir,” I said. “A grinding sound. Right before it went down.”

“Yeah? What the hell does that mean?”

“I think—sir, I think they’re tunneling under us. Weakening the supports and sinking our bunkers.”

Leeson, Harris and the red-faced tech guy all looked at me like I was crazy for a second, but then Leeson nodded.

“It does make sense. I’ve been wondering why they were taking so damned long to hit us after the initial bombardment. If anyone should know what drilling through the metallic soil on this planet sounds like, it would be you. Okay, I’m relaying that up the chain of command.”

What happened next surprised us all again. Although, in retrospect, maybe it shouldn’t have. The saurians were playing this game their own way. As it turned out, they liked to tunnel.

Like every world, the reptilian inhabitants of Cancri-9 only had so many credits to spend on imported alien tech. On Earth, we spent that cash on interstellar invasion ships, weaponry and special devices like our revival machines. We put our Galactic credits into tech that would help return more credits—anything that helped us fight was an investment to us.

The saurians had done a similar economic calculus. If there was one thing they had the very best of, it was drilling equipment. Steel World was a mining planet, and to mine right through hard metals, you needed amazing drills.

Plasma-burning drills just such pieces of equipment. When the first rig surfaced, it looked like a plasma grenade on overload. It was blue, and ran with sizzling force fields.

Unlike standard military screens, the fields enveloping the drilling machines weren’t set to repel incoming ordnance. The screens moved and churned like invisible blades of force that spun around the central machine like knives of energy.

Steel, puff-crete, soldiers and vehicles were sliced away to nothing when they touched those spinning fields. We all hunkered down and stared as the ground vomited up one, two, three—six of them. They weren’t terribly large, but the troops that rushed out of the back end when they stopped spinning looked big to me.

Armored and carrying heavy weapons, saurians charged out to fire on anyone in sight. We returned fire, but our weaponry wasn’t penetrating their armor.

“Harris, gather all your light troops and attack,” Leeson shouted.