We’d stopped walking, but at this point I moved on. I left him there to ponder in confusion.

  As I rounded the next corner, I glanced back once.

  Cooper was still standing there. He was leaning his back against a wall, staring up at the ceiling. I could tell he was thinking hard.

  That made me smile. The kid had gotten his bell rung today. Time would tell if he was a real Legion Varus man or not. I couldn’t make that transition happen—I could only facilitate.

  When I got to the unit module, the mood was more than glum. All the regular recruits had checked in by dinnertime—but not the Blood Worlders. The heavy troopers who’d died in the firefight were wandering back in very slowly from Blue Deck, one at a time.

  They glowered at me and my snap-rifle men with hate. Harris and Silt were walking among them, explaining that no one had died—not permanently—and that this process was all part of their training.

  I could tell the Blood Worlders were having a hard time swallowing it all.

  Dinnertime came and went, and I noted less than half the heavy troopers were back yet.

  “Harris?” I asked. “What’s the hold up with your new boys?”

  “I’ll be damned if I know!” he complained. “I’ve half a mind to go down there and kick ass. These heavy troopers are still suspicious of the whole process. I need them back here now, so they’ll stop trading rumors.”

  I looked around for Winslade, but he was hiding in his quarters again.

  “I’ll go check it out,” I told Harris. “Keep the lid on up here with Silt.”

  Harris frowned at me. “You don’t give me orders anymore, McGill.”

  “Okay, fine. I’ll just go watch a vid-show and catch a nap.”

  “All right, all right. Never mind, I’m just annoyed. I’d appreciate the help.”

  Marching down to Blue Deck, I was met with unpleasant expressions.

  “What are you doing down here, Adjunct?” one noncom had the balls to ask. “Are you lost, or maybe you’d like to take another ride on the gurney?”

  I glowered at him, and he melted. Sometimes, freshly revived troops—even officers, came back with vengeance on their minds.

  “I’m here to check up on the slow revives. What’s the hold up?”

  “Slow… oh, you must be talking about those fat bastards from Blood World, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Yeah… they’re not being revived with the rest. They’ve got their own ward down the hall.”

  He directed me, and I marched down a long passage to the very end.

  Hardly anyone was around down here. Just a few orderlies, and a single, large door. I ignored the restricted-access signs, pushing it open and walking inside.

  There, I was in for a new shock. A massive revival machine, three times the size of any I’d ever seen, hulked in one corner. It took up at least a quarter of the floor space.

  Revival machines are a little sickening to begin with. They’ve got a metal encasement on the front, with a control panel merged with the fleshy part. But the part that did all the 3-D printing of cells, that part looked like a massive slab of meat with a skin of mottled gray.

  There were tanks to charge the machine—and this one had the biggest cylinders of protoplasm and bone meal I’d ever seen. The maw was hanging open and dripping, just like normal, but it was gargantuan. A dinosaur’s mouth had never existed that could rival it.

  Except for being bigger, grosser and smellier, none of this was all that shocking. In fact, it made a perfect kind of sense once I’d laid eyes on it. The heavy troopers were simply too big for traditional machines. They had to have their own unit—and this was it.

  The real shocker came when I saw who was running the outsized unit. There were three saurians in the chamber.

  They looked at me when I opened the door, and we had ourselves a mutual stare-down.

  “Who are you?” demanded the nearest of them.

  At his throat, I saw a flashing translator. I knew that device well—Floramel had given one to Raash, that murdering alien back on Earth.

  It was new tech, I realized. And this was the newly assigned post for the saurians Turov had paraded for us after we left Earth.

  “I’m Adjunct McGill. I lost several heavy troopers today. Why’s it taking so frigging long to revive them?”

  The saurians shrugged. “They’re big,” the leader said. “As big as our juggers. That’s why we were hired to work here.”

  Suddenly, I got it. The legion had wanted a method of bringing back heavy troopers, but new revival machines—especially big ones, cost a lot. They also had to be manned by a team of bio people who could lift a ton together. These three looked like they fit the bill. Each was as strong and powerfully built as Raash had been.

  Also, I recalled that back on my last trip to Steel World the saurians had tried to match our revival units with some of their own. They’d revived juggers—members of a huge sub-race that were the size of draft horses. I’d never really thought about it before, but they must have had a really big revival machine somewhere—and a team that could operate it.

  “I see…” I said. “Is this the only big unit? The only one that can spit out a heavy trooper?”

  “Yes. It’s the only such organism aboard Nostrum.”

  “Cheap bastards…” I muttered.

  “What was that? You insult us?”

  “Uh… no. I’m insulting the top officers. They didn’t want to pay for enough machines—or enough bio teams like you guys to run them.”

  The saurians exchanged glances. “We do not believe you insulted us with your odd statements, but you must go now. We’re recharging to start the process again.”

  As I watched, the maw slowly closed. They poured in fluids and powders, and the machine shivered and began to steam and drip. It seemed to stink a lot, too. Even more than they usually did.

  Wrinkling my nose, I decided to exit the place in a hurry. My troopers would come back eventually—but not as fast as I wanted them to.

  -13-

  The long, long journey through space to our destination star took several weeks. It would have taken months, but Nostrum was a fast ship. She was a new, sleek design that fit humans better than our previous rented-out models had ever done.

  Most of the passages and public chambers had a ceiling or a wall that appeared to show the cosmos as we passed by it all.

  It was nice to watch the stars slide by. On a long trip, it made you feel like you were going somewhere fast. Other than this simulated starscape, there was no sensation of movement at all inside our warp-bubble.

  We continued to have training sessions, and I came to respect the heavy troopers. For one thing, they didn’t complain all the time. None of them were like Cooper—a maverick with a sneering expression and loud mouth.

  Instead, they hunkered down and endured whatever abuse our legion chose to throw at them. Those that died were brought back, and that simple fact began to calm the littermates. They didn’t go quite as mad anymore whenever a brother fell, because they knew the loss wasn’t permanent. That was a big relief for the rest of us.

  Silt, however… that Cephalopod was another thing entirely. He began grating on my nerves more and more as the journey came to an end.

  “Your slaves have failed again,” he informed me after a bloody exercise on Green Deck. “They are clearly inferior.”

  This time, we’d thrown the recruits into the jungle to attack nine entrenched giants. The recruits had served as targets, primarily. We’d retreated and called the battle a loss when over half the light troopers had been lost without a single heavy being taken out.

  My eye met Silt, and he rustled his elephant-trunk limbs idly.

  “Why are you staring at me?” he asked. “Have you no words? Can your shame be so tremendous, human?”

  “I’ve been wondering,” I said, “if you would fit into that big new revival machine they’ve got downstairs.”

  “Why would you ponder such a thing?”

  “Well… you know… you’re part of this unit too. I wouldn’t want to lose you the moment we arrive on a new planet, but if I do, I would want you to be revived.”

  “Why would such a thing happen?”

  “There are a thousand ways to die in a ground campaign, squid. How many times have you invaded a planet, by the way?”

  Silt thrashed his limbs around and stared at me. “You know I’ve never been deployed in actual battle.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “I must have forgotten.”

  “It seems unlikely that you would require so many reminders.”

  “Sorry about that. But I’m going to have to ask the saurian orderlies down on Blue Deck about this. They might even want to measure your carcass—just to make sure they’ve got the right materials, and the unit is big enough for your kind. You understand.”

  “Did you mention saurians?”

  “Yep. We hired saurians from Steel World to operate our new, larger revival units.”

  “Steel World… Cancri-9. That world has not been subjugated by humans.”

  “Nope, it sure hasn’t. They don’t even like us very much in that star system.”

  “Trusting such beings to raise your dead—that seems foolhardy.”

  Smiling, I spread my hands wide and shook my head. “I agree! I don’t trust those scaly, long-tailed lizards at all.”

  “Then why would the top officers—”

  “What can you do?” I said, laughing. “They probably work cheap. We’re all here to die over and over again on a strange planet. We’re supposed to come back to life—but who knows? I guess we’ll find out if the lizards know about Cephalopod biology one of these days.”

  “Your words are almost threatening.”

  “What? Nooo. Not at all. I’m thinking of your welfare, that’s all. It’s an officer’s job to predict problems and prepare to meet challenges. For that reason, I’m thinking I should assign a veteran like Sargon to shadow you as you deal with the Blood Worlders. If you’re dead and gone for an extended period, he can step in to fill your role.”

  Silt didn’t appear to like that idea. After a moment’s pause, he spoke up.

  “That seems unnecessary—”

  “On the contrary! It’s very necessary. Just imagine the scene: we land the legion, go into combat and BOOM! You’re squid-meat within five minutes! Who handles the big guys while our lizards are back aboard the ship reading the manual? Who knows if they can even get a good grow? Might take them seven or eight tries, pushing each failure into the grinder to start over—”

  “What’s this grinder you speak of?”

  I explained how a bad grow might come out deformed and require recycling. The wood-chipper device they used to reclaim their failures got some loving details. I painted the most vivid picture I could for him.

  “I’m dissatisfied with these possibilities,” Silt said at last.

  “Ah now, don’t turn coward-like on me! I’ve always heard your race feared nothing.”

  “You heard correctly.”

  “Good then! We land in two days, from what I hear. No more waiting around aboard this dull ship, bored out of our minds! Time to kill and be killed!”

  Disgruntled, Silt retreated into his humid chambers to sulk.

  “Ha, HA!” a familiar laugh burst out behind me when Silt was gone.

  It was Leeson, and he looked like he’d been listening in.

  “That was priceless, McGill. Old Silt is going to ink his bed tonight with nightmares for sure!”

  “I hope he does,” I admitted.

  The next day, Nostrum came out of warp. Everyone watched the walls and the ceiling. We were glued to the visuals.

  The warp bubble dissipated like torn cobwebs, pulling away in a manner that was both alarming and beautiful to behold.

  The imagery darkened as it went from simulated to real. Dead ahead of our ship was a glimmering brown dwarf. It was a deep orangey-brown star with stripes on it that almost looked like Jupiter might if you lit the whole thing on fire. It was small but dense, and it burned so faintly it barely looked like a sun at all. It reminded me of a dying coal in a campfire, rather than a stellar body.

  “That’s got to be the dinkiest excuse for a star I’ve ever laid eyes on,” Leeson complained. “Better break out the jackets, troops. I’m predicting snow and sleet.”

  A general groan went up from the unit’s rank and file. We were all taken by surprise, as very little had been explained to us in briefings about the exact nature of our destination.

  “Wait a minute,” I said aloud. “Is this the right star? I thought we were going to 39 Eridani. That system is supposed to have two good-sized stars in a binary system.”

  Winslade looked at me, and he shrugged. “It would seem they lied to us.”

  “But why?” I complained. “They made such a big deal out of telling us what the target was, then arresting Toro and that other guy afterward for leaking it. How could they—?”

  “Turn that simian brain of yours back on, McGill,” Winslade said. “It’s counterintelligence. Trickery, deceit—whatever you want to call it. You tell your team something very important—but the information is a lie. When that particular lie shows up in a transmission, you can trace the leak directly to its source.”

  “Huh…” I said. “Diabolical. So this sparkler is it? I can’t even see any planets.”

  “They’re out here in the dark, somewhere,” Winslade assured me. “We’re supposed to land in the morning.”

  This whole invasion felt wrong somehow. We hadn’t been equipped with proper cold-weather gear. We’d have to stay in our pressure suits just to stay warm. The whole thing looked bleak.

  Harris came up to stand beside me. “More shit. We’re always fed shit and kept in the dark in this legion.”

  “Seems that way,” I admitted.

  The unit broke up soon thereafter for equipment checks. With deployment in the morning, we had to repack everything and check every seal on our suits.

  I was especially concerned about my new people. Light troops didn’t get any armor, just a tough, layered spacesuit that wasn’t all that different from the ones that men had first used to spacewalk and explore on Mars.

  As an officer, I got a breastplate at least. It protected my vitals without restricting my movements—but to me, it wasn’t good enough.

  After years of serving in heavy armor, the idea of landing on a hostile world in what amounted to a leathery balloon filled with hot air held no appeal for me. I felt naked—but I didn’t let on.

  “Snap-rifle inspection!” I shouted, and Veteran Moller went into action.

  She marched the ragged line of recruits, kicking ass and screaming into people’s faces. It was time to become harsh now. There was no room for screw-ups on a drop—especially a drop into the total unknown.

  My helmet crackled with an incoming call as I watched Moller work.

  “Varus officers,” Turov’s voice spoke in my ears. “We have a surprise for you—the destination we described to you at the kickoff briefing has been changed.”

  “No shit,” Harris whispered to himself.

  We were both on the command channel, which only allowed officers to tune in. As adjuncts, we weren’t expected to talk, just to listen.

  “Our target is not 39 Eridani—not exactly. It’s a brown dwarf nearby. By the star catalogue, it’s been listed at 191 Eridani.”

  There were more muttered comments from the officers around me. None of them seemed to appreciate being left out of the loop.

  “Some of you—particularly those of limited intellect—might be wondering why Central saw fit to lie about our target. That should now be obvious. This has always been a highly secretive mission. Any public release of our goals could jeopardize the entire venture. For similar reasons, only a single legion has been dispatched to conquer the target planet.”

  At this, Leeson, Harris and I exchanged alarmed glances. We’d been under the impression the place was all but abandoned, waiting for Earth forces to land and snap it up. Perhaps that was a lie, too.

  “191 Eridani is between Earth and Rigel,” Turov continued, “a zone where our rivals infest many stars. We must gain control of this middle-ground between our two growing domains. It’s a frontier region not only for Earth, but for the Empire as well.”

  I couldn’t even look at Harris any longer. He hated surprises. His face was so full of contorted expressions—showing in turns rage, disgust and resignation—that I found it distracting.

  “I’m told the target planet has a lot of geological activity, and therefore isn’t as cold as one might assume. It is, however, dimly lit during both day and night.”

  Already, we were changing our kits. We had night gear, of course, but a permanently dark world? That would require some special outfitting. I relayed the information to Moller, who immediately set the troops to rummaging in the equipment lockers.

  “We will be landing on the factory superstructure at the end of the shift. No immediate resistance is expected, but the enemy might be able to mount a counterattack in time. It is essential we spread out and gain control of the space dock within a few hours after dropping. Legion Varus forever, Turov out.”

  She cut the feed, and we three adjuncts looked at each other.

  “Did you hear that sign off?” Leeson complained. “What kind of a pep-talk was that? She sounded bored with the whole thing.”

  “Who cares about that?” Harris asked. “She said we’re dropping on a factory? An active space-dock? Are you shitting me? Who are they building ships for? Where are those ships? How is Nostrum supposed to invade a space-dock that’s active and presumably armed?”

  “Huh…” I said, firmly believing Harris had a point. “This whole thing doesn’t feel well-planned.”

  “That is the understatement of the twenty-second century, McGill!” Harris said. “I smell a meat-grinder. Blue Deck is going to get a workout, mark my words.”

  Walking away, I went to Winslade. He flicked his fingers at me and sighed.