Steel World (30 page)

“The walls of the spaceport?” I asked in shock.

“Yeah.”

I sat up and frowned at her, not sure at first if she was serious. I could tell at a glance that she was. I groaned and flopped onto my back again.

“This is bullshit,” I said. “The deal was simple: the recruits went in and took the place. After that, we withdrew into reserve on the ship and the heavies set up to guard the walls.”

“That was the original deal. But the enemy is fielding a large force. They mean to retake their university, their government buildings and the spaceport. They intend to kick us off into space again. The brass wants us to guard the spaceport, as it’s the least important target.”

“They didn’t think it was unimportant a few days ago.”

“I know. But they have their grand strategy, I guess. They want to embarrass the lizards—which is forcing them to attack.”

I thought about that, and the more I thought the less I liked the situation. I’d really hoped to be moved to the university. The word was the fighting there was very light. The saurians didn’t seem to want to blow up their hallowed hive-like learning structures. But that damned spaceport—it was a deathtrap.

“What about those damned Nairbs?” I demanded. “Are they still there, cluttering up the place? It sucks to fight with them underfoot. You can’t fire a weapon without worrying about getting permed for hurting one of those nasty seals.”

Natasha laughed. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard such bitter words out of you, James.”

“I’ve had a rough month.”

She laughed again. Then she seemed to have a sudden thought, and she propped herself up on her elbow.

“James?” she asked in a near whisper. “What’s it like to be executed—to know…or at least
think
you know, that you’ve been permed?”

I looked at her and shrugged. “You probably know already. You died in training, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. Most of us did. But that was different. It hurt and I was scared, but in the back of my mind I knew it wasn’t permanent. I knew I’d live again.”

“How about back in our very first exercise? When we were on the lifter, and they let the air leak out? Did you die then?”

She shook her head. “I was scared, but I survived. I sat in my chair and conserved my oxygen. I remember holding my breath and watching you spin that damned locked door open. I could tell you were doing everything you could—it looked like you’d tear the door apart if you had to.”

I chuckled, remembering the day. “I didn’t realize you were on that lifter with me back then.”

Natasha smiled. “I’ve been thinking of you since that day. It’s hard not to remember a moment like that.”

I’m not an expert with women, but I am an opportunist. I made another grab for her. She let me kiss her, but stopped my reaching hands short of any further goals.

“You haven’t told me how it felt yet,” she said.

“You really want to know?”

“Yes.”

“It felt like the end of the world. In the end, I—I got really mad. That was my reaction. I wanted to kill someone, to take someone down with me.”

Her eyes widened and she studied me in the dark. “Did you try?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I went for the alien. I wanted to kill him a third time. If I was going down for the final count, I wanted him to feel a little more pain first.”

“Wow. What did he do?”

“He called me a barbarian. He said something about putting us all down, that we were wild dogs…I don’t know.”

“All of us?”

“All of humanity,” I said. “I’m sure that’s what he meant.”

Natasha pulled away and studied the stars with me. We were both quiet, and I could sense any kind of romantic mood we’d had going was gone now. I chided myself for having told the truth. I should have told her I wanted to smell a flower in my grandma’s garden one last time, or something like that. Damn.

“Thanks for telling me the truth, James,” she said.

“Sure. Are you glad you asked?”

She hesitated. “Not really.”

“What about tomorrow? Are you ready?”

“No. I don’t want to go back there ever again. I doubt I’ll even sleep tonight. I was killed, you know.”

“No shame in that. Nearly a thousand died with you.”

“But I was burned alive. The saurians didn’t hit me dead-on, they hit a fuel source I was near. It lit up, and I was engulfed in flame. My suit kept me alive for a minute or two, but the heat was too much for it after a while. I cooked inside like piece of meat in foil, trying to find a way out of a pool of burning liquid.”

It was my turn to sit up and stare. “Ouch. Try not to think about that. It happened to a different version of Natasha—not to you. For you, it’s only a dream.”

“Yeah. I’ll try to do that. But I don’t want to go down again. These saurians are fighting hard.”

It occurred to me that Natasha wasn’t the typical woman I’d met in Legion Varus. Maybe that’s why I liked her more than the rest. She was a bit sweeter than most of them. Not so rough around the edges.

“Why are you in this legion, Natasha?” I asked her, breaking an uncomfortable silence.

“I screwed up,” she said. “Isn’t that why we’re all here?”

“I guess so. The top-level legions didn’t want me. I still don’t know what those psych tests told them. Maybe they didn’t want a scene like the one we watched today between the Primus and Graves to play out in their outfits.”

“That’s not so bad,” she said.

“What about you? I remember you said you built some kind of illegal pet, right?”

“Well…that’s not
exactly
how I screwed up,” she said. “I didn’t want to tell you before—but I came in with a worse mark on my record they found during recruitment.”

“What’d you do?”

“I robbed a place. The place where I worked.”

“Yeah?” I said, perking up. “Was it a bank, or something?”

I sat up. This story sounded fairly exciting. I could see how an ex-con could be a perfect fit for Varus. What would they have stamp on her files that would want them to take her? Something like:
a resourceful self-starter
.

“No,” she said, “not a bank. I worked for a pharmacy.”

“You were a druggie?”

She made an irritated clicking noise with her tongue. “Let me just explain. My family had a little trouble paying the bills.”

“Who doesn’t?”

“We had particular trouble with our medical bills,” she said. “There wasn’t enough in our medical time-share account last year. They pool it for each family, you know, and that works all right if only one person gets sick at a time. But both my parents started needing drugs—expensive ones.”

“Oh,
that
kind of drug,” I said, somewhat disappointed.

“What? Were you envisioning masks, guns and wild parties?”

“Something like that.”

Natasha laughed again, and I found I was beginning to like the sound.

“I stole medicines,” she explained. “Expensive ones.”

“Isn’t stuff like that tracked?”

“Of course it is. You can’t just lift a bottle off the shelf. You have to skim. A few pills from one bottle, just one from the next. Who notices if they have twenty nine caps in the bottle or thirty?”

“Well, sounds like someone did.”

“Yeah. They traced it back to us, but couldn’t pin it on me enough to convict. Still, the charge went on my record. That’s a sector-level crime. I couldn’t get another job after that, so I tried to join the legions. Only Varus was interested.”

I nodded slowly. I’d learned over time that many recruits had a story like that behind their decision to join up.

“We’ll be fine tomorrow,” I said. “Stop worrying about it.”

“You’re a bad liar. You’d do better just keeping quiet.”

I did as she suggested, shutting up and holding her hand instead of talking. Then I kissed her fingers, one at a time. After a while, we were kissing more passionately than before. Maybe she’d needed to tell me a few things first.

Before the date was over, I managed to get a little farther with Natasha—but not as far as I wanted.

The next morning, we were on the lifter heading down again. The mood aboard the transport was grim. No one wanted to return to Steel World—especially not to the spaceport.

We’d learned more about the invasion over the last twenty-four hours. Apparently, things were going pretty well for the legion in general. Our plans had been secret until they went into action—as a recruit, I was the last one to be told anything.

“It’s unbelievable, really,” Weaponeer Sargon told me. He had been assigned to our unit, along with a few techs and bios. “The tribune has some serious gonads. He blitzed the lizards—all around their own capital city. We now hold their university—which looks like some kind of beehive—and their government buildings and the spaceport.”

I was glad to get the info, even if it came from the dubious source known as Sargon. I decided to play along and pretend I believed he knew everything that going on. For all I knew, he did.

“Why didn’t we just grab their military headquarters or the royal palace?”

Sargon shook his head. “I don’t know. I bet because the tribune looked at it and decided those targets were too well-guarded. Besides, we aren’t here to conquer the planet. That would be illegal. We could help a saurian faction take power, but Earth forces can’t take invade and take over another sovereign member world of the Empire. No, the whole point of this op is to embarrass the saurian military, to show the Galactics that we are better fighters than they are. If we can invade and hold vital spots, they’ll have to concede we’re superior.”

It made a certain kind of sense. At the same time, this kind of limited, rules-filled warfare felt a little crazy. Even more crazy was attempting to do this with such a small force. How could we fight an entire populated planet? I asked Sargon that question, and he nodded sagely.

“Good point. I don’t think we can. The legion has only around ten thousand fighting troops when we’re all deployed. But we don’t have to take on the entire planet to win this. Tribune Drusus has been in fights like this before—we’re here to show that we can take our weight in lizards and more, that’s all.”

“What’s to stop them from bombing us into the dust?”

“They can’t do that. Air power and drones were not part of the deal. No heavy artillery, either. They made that rule to screw us originally, but I think it’s screwing them now.”

“Well, they have to have a million troops they could muster up and throw at us. Why not try that?”

“They might, but I think it would be embarrassing to them. What does it prove if we get overrun by overwhelming forces? We might kill three times our number before we go down, and that will just make our case for us.”

I thought about it, and it did seem to be a strange situation. The lizards had to beat us, but they had to do it with a similar level of force. If they used too big of a hammer, they would lose in the end—even if we all had to go through the revival machines several times.

The part about expecting to die a lot is what had led to the grim faces I now saw on most of the lightly-armed recruits around me. Sargon, the weaponeer, hadn’t fought in this spaceport battle yet. He was ready to get into this, but the rest of us had had our tails handed to us at the spaceport already, and we weren’t so eager.

“Seems to me the lizards should cheat just enough to win,” I said. “That’s what I would do if I were them.”

Sargon looked at me, frowning. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, make it look like an honorable fight, but throw in every dirty trick possible.”

He shrugged. “War is war. The worst you can do is die a few times. I’m game.”

That’s because you didn’t charge that wall manned by heavy lizard troops
, I thought. But I kept those words in my head. Why should I demoralize my fellow legionnaire?

“The spaceport fight was rough,” I said. “If anything, they embarrassed
us
on those walls. They showed they were better fighters by slaughtering us.”

“But we did win in the end. I’d say we are even now, they threw lots of troops at us at the mining complex, and we threw more at them here. We’re down to the third round.”

“How long do you think we have to hold out?” I asked. “I’ve been inside the spaceport—at least, inside the office buildings—staying there for weeks or months will be torture.”

“Our people will time it,” Sargon said. “The tribune is good at this. You watch. He’ll wait until we look really good, then he’ll retreat to the ship and claim victory.”

“Do you think they’ll hit the spaceport again? There are plenty of other targets.”

“Who knows? But with the Nairbs and the Galactics around, this has to be the most embarrassing facility to have lost.”

Sargon looked at me suddenly, as if having a new thought.

“Oh yeah,” he said, eyeing me curiously, “I heard you played a big part in the first battle for the spaceport—a bigger part than Graves or Harris wants to talk about.”