SF Books by B. V. Larson:

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  Alpha Fleet

  Earth Fleet

  Star Force Series:

  Swarm

  Extinction

  Rebellion

  Conquest

  Army of One (Novella)

  Battle Station

  Empire

  Annihilation

  Storm Assault

  The Dead Sun

  Outcast

  Exile

  Demon Star

  Starship Pandora (Audio Drama)

  Lost Colonies Trilogy:

  Battle Cruiser

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  Star Carrier

  Visit BVLarson.com for more information.

  GLASS WORLD

  (Undying Mercenaries Series #13)

  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

  Illustration © Tom Edwards TomEdwardsDesign.com

  Copyright © 2019 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.

  “Too bad there is only one world to conquer.”

  —Alexander the Great, 326 BC

  -1-

  My hometown was Waycross, in Georgia Sector. Out in the countryside, my parents owned a spread of swampy acres near the Satilla River. I’d taken up residence there in a dim-lit shack on the edge of a bog. The place wasn’t much to look at, but it had one of those floating iceboxes and a sagging couch to sleep on. I called it home.

  My parents felt a little lonelier now that Etta had moved up to Central City. She was doing fine up there, and I’d been pleased when she’d gotten raises and promotions until she was able to support herself fully.

  Naturally, I had no knowledge of what she was actually working on day-to-day. Every project was top secret down in the dungeons underneath Central. Some people might be bothered by that, but to me, it was a familiar state of affairs. Legion Varus, my outfit, often served with strange restrictions and protocols—and almost always without the awareness of the general public.

  Although I was officially without a clue, I did have an inkling of what she might be doing. It had to do with certain captured enemy technology I’d recently encountered.

  After a tremendous space battle had occurred at Eridani 77, better known as Clone World, there had been a whole bunch of wreckage left behind. The Mogwa, Rigellians and the Skay had all left the floating hulks of their dead spacecraft behind. We’d even managed to commandeer a few of the ships from Rigel intact. We’d brought them home with us for study.

  I happened to know that Floramel was heading up a research group dedicated to studying those wrecks—and Etta was her top aide.

  One day in late spring, a full year after the battle had occurred, my tapper began to buzz. Normally, I would have ignored it as the ID was invalid. There was always some hacking market-bot trying to reach every citizen on Earth, and once in a while they got through. This was probably one of those cases.

  But instead of swiping it away and obliterating it from my forearm, I stared at my tapper instead. No one should have been able to get to me, not with any unknown ID.

  That didn’t sound right. The ones that got through always had some kind of cover story, pretending to be a coworker or a friend. It never simply printed unknown on the screen.

  With a growl of frustration, I paused the ballgame I’d been projecting on my grungy ceiling and made a stabbing motion at my inner forearm.

  “McGill here—who’s this?”

  The tapper glowed, but there was no image. Just a blank screen and some signal-strength data. For a few seconds, no one spoke.

  “Ah, dammit,” I said, sitting up and ready to jab my big finger at it again, this time striking the cutoff button.

  “McGill?” my tapper said.

  I hesitated. The best sales bots could be tricky. I’d already given it my name. Maybe it had been waiting for just such a clue. My finger hovered indecisively, and I considered disconnecting rather than saying another word. A good piece of software would just learn from me and use what it gained to trick me again the next time.

  “McGill?” the voice asked again. “This is Abigail. Are you alone?”

  My finger dropped away along with my jawline as my mouth sagged open. I noticed my tapper’s camera had a tiny, gleaming red dot of light on it, indicating the caller was looking at me. She was obviously blocking her own outgoing vid feed, but I supposed that was acceptable. Girls sometimes did that when they were naked or something.

  I cleared my throat. “Abigail? Really?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry to bother you, but it’s been months. Have you gotten a chance to contact Drusus yet—on my behalf?”

  “Uh…”

  Last year, I’d met Abigail Claver for the first time. She was a lady-Claver, a female who was genetically a twin to Claver himself. She’d displayed an obvious interest in poor old James McGill from the start. That was all six kinds of creepy, but the girl herself had looked pretty good to me…

  “Did you forget?” she asked.

  Naturally, she’d hit the nail on the head. I’d probably forgotten a few minutes after she asked me. I was the kind of man who never remembered what I’d had for dinner the night before, much less a request from a girl who wasn’t in my immediate vicinity.

  “No… no, no,” I lied. “I didn’t forget. I gave it a shot, in fact, right after you asked me. But Drusus never got back to me. He isn’t very happy with me right now, you see.”

  “Why not?”

  A slight smile of relief crept over my face. I’d mixed a lie with a truth, and now it was not only convincing, it served to move us right past the part about me forgetting in the first place. Lying is like shooting pool, I always say, it’s not good enough to sink the ball. A real master sets up his next shot at the same time.

  “I believe it all started,” I told her, “when I became admiral of Drusus’ fleet and wrecked a lot of his starships and such-like.”

  “Oh… but that was a brief situation, and it wasn’t in your control.”

  “That’s what I said!”

  “He’s a petty man,” Abigail said. “But I can help you get around his petulance.”

  “Uh…”

  I was squarely back in the danger zone. I hadn’t contacted Drusus in any way, shape or form, much less asked him about Abigail. On top of that, Abigail was now on the wrong scent. I’d never heard anyone call Drusus petty before. He was a straight-arrow and whenever he’d gotten angry with me, he’d had a damned good reason for it—including this time.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “How come I can’t see you?”

  “Bandwidth,” she said. “This connection isn’t sanctioned, so I’m using the thinnest datastream I can.”

  “Huh…” I said. “But I can’t even be sure it’s you when I’m looking at a blank screen.”

  She sighed and the rectangle of photo-reactive skin on my forearm flickered to life. I saw a gloomy green sky behind her. She moved a little, and I caught sight of the land—none of it looked like Earth. Wherever she was, she was outside and the landscape was full of wet, black rocks. There was a foamy sea in the background that matched the greenish clouds above.

  “Green World?” I demanded. “What are you doing out there? Holy shit, are we talking on a deep-link?”

  She made a sound of frustration. “How do you know about this place?”

  “I’m what you might call a well-traveled man,” I told her. “I don’t know where it is on a star map, but I’ve been there. I met my first Wur on that planet.”

  Abigail shook her head and laughed. The laugh was nice, her voice was soft, and her hair encircled her face just right. She looked at me with those intense eyes of hers. I could tell there were lots of gears and sprockets spinning behind those eyes. She was a smart one, all right. That meant all kinds of trouble for the likes of me.

  “Will you call Drusus again?” she asked. “For me?”

  “Uh…” I said. “Could you remind me again exactly what I’m supposed to say?”

  “We need help, McGill. We need a connection with Central—with Drusus, if possible. We’re rebel Clavers, and we’re always being hunted. We need allies.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I get that. You said something about helping me get through to him. What have you got? I can’t go in there empty-handed.”

  “A trade…” she said. “All right. I’ll give you something. Remember the Skay—the ones that were destroyed at Eridani 77?”

  “I could hardly forget them.”

  “Those hulks were so badly damaged they’re pretty much useless… but I know where another one is. Here, record
these coordinates.”

  She gave me a list of numbers, and I knew enough about astronavigation to realize they defined a point in space. Imperial coordinates were always based on the center of our galaxy, and so the first several numbers were the same if the location was anywhere near Earth.

  “926…” I said. “That’s not our province. It’s not the frontier zone 928 next door, either.”

  “No, but it’s close—in relative terms.”

  “Almost next door neighbors…” I said, frowning at the numbers. She would probably have described Waycross and a Martian colony dome as being “close” because they were both in the same star system.

  “Take that to Drusus,” she told me. “Don’t give the information up too easily. Make him beg for it.”

  “I’ll have him holding a stick in his mouth by tomorrow afternoon,” I said. “Now, what about my part in all this?”

  “Ah, at last,” she said with a knowing smile. “My brother assured me you’d help out of kindness. Instead, you promptly forgot. That’s why people get paid to do things.”

  “Well… I didn’t want any money. I’d just like to take you to dinner sometime.”

  She blinked twice and stared. I’d actually surprised her. “Really? We’re not even in the same part of the galaxy. I haven’t been to Earth for almost a year now, and—”

  I raised a hand. “No worries. There’s no time limit or anything. Just a promise aimed for a convenient moment in the future.”

  She dropped her eyes and frowned. “Just a date? A dinner?”

  “Yeah, yeah, that’s all.”

  Abigail looked up again, smiling. I had to wonder what she’d thought I’d been asking for. I wasn’t that kind of a scoundrel. Sure, I was pretty bad. I was generally considered to be a low man of base principles, interests and habits. But I wasn’t the type who pressured people for personal favors they didn’t want to give.

  “All right,” she said. “I owe you a date.”

  “Okay, so, how do I reach you the next…?”

  I trailed off then, mouth hanging open again, as I saw Abigail duck low. The green sky, the green sea and the black rocks all spun, and I could hear a scuffling sound that was very loud as the microphone was banged around.

  Then, I heard a clacking sound. A rattling of dull hollow tubes.

  “No, no,” I heard Abigail say to someone off camera. “I’m not talking to anyone. I’m downloading communications from abroad, that’s all.”

  She was a liar, the same as me. That thought made me smile.

  There was more clacking, louder this time, and it seemed like a command. The world spun sickeningly again, and for just a second, I saw Abigail’s face as she stabbed her finger at the camera pickup.

  “Don’t forget this time, McGill,” she whispered, and the transmission went dead.

  That wasn’t what occupied my mind afterward, however. It was what I’d glimpsed behind her that really freaked me out.

  Looming there, dark and wet-looking, was something that resembled a lobster. A lobster made of cellulose and standing as tall as a house.

  It was one of the Wur. One of their smarter, technical types. Once, out on Green World, I’d met up with a creature like that, and we’d killed it, but only after it had taken down a few of my men in turn.

  I stared at my tapper for a time after the call had ended. So, Abigail was living with the Wur out on Green World—wherever that was. That was a shocker.

  Shaking my head in bewilderment, I went back to watching my ballgame on the ceiling. I found it hard to get into the swing of the game.

  God Almighty, why did I find the most dangerous of women interesting? Worse, why did they tend to like me? We were both moths drawn to the flame, I supposed.

  -2-

  I made a serious effort to forget about Abigail, and the Wur, and all that stuff. But I couldn’t. Not this time. It just wasn’t in me.

  The next morning, bright and early, I sighed awake and worked my tapper with bleary eyes. I hadn’t even gone out to spit on the grass or taken a piss yet, that’s how much my mind was preoccupied.

  Tapping out a simple message, I communicated with Drusus directly. It was only a text, but I knew it would elicit a response.

  Some years back, Drusus had placed a standing order with me, demanding that I report “unusual activity” that was “interesting and alien in nature”. If this didn’t qualify, I didn’t know what the hell did. So I shot him a text, reminding him in a few words of his request and suggesting I might have encountered just such a tidbit today.

  Not seven minutes later, as I was stepping into the shower to wash off, my tapper buzzed. The call was from Central, no name given.

  Now, you might think it would have been a prudent and reasonable thing for any man to finish his grooming before answering such a call. But this was Drusus we were talking about. He was one of a handful of men with the rank of praetor on my beloved green Earth. There was only one rank higher in the military than praetor—that of consul. That lofty rank was only temporarily given in times of the most dire circumstances, as it gave the office holder dictator-like powers. There had been whispers that if the rank were ever revived and used again, Drusus was probably the man who would get it.

  The long and the short of it was that a lowly centurion like me didn’t go around snubbing such people. I opened the connection and angled the camera up at my face.

  “Centurion McGill reporting,” I said.

  “McGill? What the hell…?”

  It wasn’t Drusus. It was Galina Turov, the acting tribune commanding my legion. “Oh… Uh… hi sir,” I said. “I’m sorry, I was expecting someone else.”

  Her face soured immediately. Galina and I had a long and sordid past. We’d shared plenty of sex, violence, backstabbing and even a little loving in our twisted history.

  “I see…” she said. “I’ll call back when you’re alone. But just one thing: why are you contacting Central?”

  I blinked. Then I blinked again. My mind generally moves like a snail on a drainpipe, especially when I’m surprised, but several things went off in my head at once.

  Right off, I realized she was under the false impression I was entertaining a lady-friend in my place. My first instinct was to persuade her that wasn’t true, but my second reaction hit me before I could do so.

  How did she know I’d just called Central?

  That was the real kicker. I was no stranger to being watched and fooled with in my private life. Galina was one of the worst offenders, having both private and political reasons to keep tabs on me. It still pissed me off when I caught her doing it, however.

  “There’s no one here, girl. As a matter of fact, I’m about to climb into the shower—and maybe you need to stop spying on my communications…”

  Galina squinted at me. She knew me well, and she could tell I was honestly angry.

  “Well… sorry about that. There’s been a lack of trust between us since Clone World, hasn’t there?”

  “Uh… I guess so.”

  “Good to have that out in the open. Now, if you can avoid having a hissy fit, can you tell me why you sent a message to Drusus then immediately stepped into the shower?”

  I thought about hanging up. I really did. If she’d been just a smidgeon meaner, or less pretty, I probably would have done it. But I’m a man of simple tastes, so I decided to put up with her bullshit one more time.

  “I’ve learned something interesting. Something Drusus needs to hear about.”

  Her face brightened. “Ah-ha!” she said. “Just as I thought. You’re bored and want to stir up trouble. Well, I’ve intercepted your transmission and trashed it.”

  My mouth gaped a little. “How’d you do that?”

  “It’s new tech. Your tapper had an update recently, didn’t it? In the middle of the night some six weeks ago?”

  “Not if I could stop it, it didn’t.”

  “Well, you can’t stop the priority updates. Not anymore.”

  “What’s this new update do?” I demanded. “It sounds wonderful.”

  “It is… from my point of view. The new software forces communications along the chain of command. No longer are such protocols mere suggestions. They’re now mandatory. No soldier is allowed to communicate with anyone directly if the target is more than two steps in rank above you. When you try, it sends a message to your legitimate commander.”