“Good. More reinforcements will be trickling back. Take a break—unless the enemy shows up again.”

  “So… it’s confirmed?” I asked. “We completely kicked them off the complex?”

  “As far as we can tell we have. This place is strange—and huge. Who knows what might be hiding deep inside this maze of passages and chambers?”

  I thought about the remains of the human prisoner we’d found. Who had she been, and how had she come to be all the way out here in deep space? I didn’t know. This place had its secrets.

  Graves left and moved on, taking a long column of troops with him. He was apparently dropping some off at every post that had suffered losses against the Vulbites.

  Shortly after that, all of our officers returned. I was glad to see everyone—except Winslade.

  “So,” he said, swaggering up to me. “You survived the first round, McGill?”

  “I did indeed, sir.”

  “Somehow, I’m not surprised. You’re a cockroach of a man.”

  The heavy troopers listened. The guys who’d been with me since I’d left Earth stood a little closer to me as they listened in on our conversation. I wouldn’t have noticed, except for the fact they were about three meters tall.

  But when Harris showed up, they stopped crowding around. Harris shouted at them and the new guys as well. He made them line up, get counted, and individually report their status.

  Carlos sidled up while this went on. “At least you don’t have to play mother-duck anymore.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “These guys need direction, and they know it.”

  “More like they’re clueless retards who—”

  I slapped him one on the back of the helmet. It was reflex. I didn’t like one of my men putting down the rest.

  “What the hell?” he asked, rubbing the back of his head. “That’s the second time you smacked me in twenty four hours. Have you gone sweet on these meatballs?”

  Meatball was a term I was hearing more and more often. It was an unfortunate reality in every military organization that the troops would, sooner or later, invent derogatory terms for any and all subgroups. “Meatball” had become the word of choice in regards to the heavy troopers from Blood World.

  “They fight hard,” I told him, “they follow orders, and they die like the rest of us. In fact, they’re more likely to get permed than you are, so I respect their sacrifice all the more.”

  Carlos had been at my side for decades. During that time, I don’t think he’d learned as much as he should have, but I had noticed he’d come to understand when an officer was pissed off at him.

  Rubbing the back of his head, he walked off sullenly, muttering something about me having strange bunk-mates.

  Pretending I hadn’t heard him, I turned back to the other officers.

  Adjunct Leeson sought me out first. He was a little on the shorter side, balding, and opinionated.

  “This planet sucks so hard,” he told me. “You’re the luckiest bastard I know of on Dark World.”

  That’s what people had begun calling it: Dark World. Part of the reason for the name was the dim sun, but on top of that the planet itself looked dark all the time. It appeared to be in perpetual twilight. The purply night side was facing us right now, and I had to admit it looked pretty damned dark down there.

  “Um…” I said. “How do you figure I’m lucky?”

  “Did you hear about our drop?”

  “Just that you punched through the hull and splashed down in the middle of some kind of molten metal.”

  Leeson made a hissing sound, closing his eyes and remembering. “That’s right. Only, it was more like landing in lava. Just imagine, you’re cruising down on the drop, homing your capsule in on Winslade, our finest.”

  “Yeah…”

  “And so, BOOM! We cracked right through the skin of this giant titanium outhouse! Winslade planned that, see? He didn’t set our retros to fire as we approached the skin of the factory structure. He figured he’d be smart and grab some glory. So, he set our drop-pods not to fire the retros until they made actual contact.”

  “Ouch…” I said. I hadn’t known the disaster was so directly attributable to Winslade.

  “At that point,” Leeson continued, “we were going too damned fast, so WHAM! We punched right through the roof.”

  “And down into a pool of molten metal…”

  “Damn straight! But here comes the bad part: Sure, we knew at that point we were dead. It was hopeless—but the frigging drop-pods didn’t get it. They tried to keep us alive. They’re on automatic, you know.”

  “Oh…” I said, visualizing the scene.

  The drop-pods were built to resist heat. They could take a lot of it, being built with outer layers that burned off as they fell through the atmosphere of a target world.

  “Yeah…” Leeson said, eyeing me. “I can see you’re getting the picture. We were trapped in those damned coffins with the outer insulation slowly burning off. We were broiled, McGill. Cooked like one of those barbecued meats you bury in a pit of hot coals—only we were burned alive.”

  “More like lobster, then.”

  He squinted at me after this comment. “You think it’s all funny? Just a big joke?”

  “Uh… no.”

  In truth, the thought of it almost gave me a shiver. I’ve died a lot of ways, some worse than others—but I’d never been cooked. Not to the best of my knowledge, anyway.

  “I’m sorry to hear about that mess,” I told him seriously.

  “It’s okay,” Leeson said, getting over his anger quickly. “Wasn’t your fault.” He studied my boots for a moment. “You haven’t heard anything, have you?”

  “About what?”

  He tossed a hateful glance at Winslade’s back. “About command changes.”

  I followed his look, and I thought about the situation. Finally, I caught on.

  “Uh…” I said, “are you wondering if my rank has been reinstated?”

  “Yeah, dammit. What about it? I heard Graves came through here just a half hour ago.”

  It was nice to have a man who was hoping I’d get my rank back. In his own way, Leeson was paying me a big compliment.

  “The topic didn’t come up,” I said, recalling that Graves had been annoyed with me. I left that part out.

  “Okay. Okay… but listen: don’t screw up anymore on this mission. You got that? We need you running this unit again.”

  Leeson stalked off, and I thought his words over.

  I wasn’t sure I could manage it. I was already entertaining ideas of doing things that were unsanctioned at best.

  Shrugging, I went to find some food. The reinforcements had brought good rations and camping equipment down with them, at least.

  I figured I’d just play everything by ear. After all, that’s pretty much what I always did.

  -21-

  After I’d eaten and found a place to anchor my sleeping bag, I settled in for the night.

  Sleeping in null-G is hard for some people, I hear, but not for me. I kind of liked it. The sensation was like that of floating on a raft. Recruits often felt out of control and jumpy—but I just drifted and snored.

  Command chat woke me up a few hours later.

  “Cohort! We’ve got incoming!” Graves said.

  For safety reasons, we were sleeping with our helmets on. That wasn’t terribly comfortable, but if the station suddenly lost pressure, all we had to do was slam down our visors, and we’d be able to keep on breathing.

  Reflexively, I did just that. Graves’ voice continued speaking in my ears as I groaned and stretched.

  “The Vulbites are taking another shot at us,” he said. “This time, they’re coming up the umbilical.”

  Like most large permanent space structures, the space-dock had a thick, hollow cable anchoring it above a single location. The space-dock was in orbit, but it moved at the same speed the planet rotated. That meant the structure was always above one fixed spot on the world below.

  “Can’t we just destroy the umbilical?” I heard a voice ask on command chat.

  It was Centurion Manfred. He wasn’t a man who could keep quiet long if he had a question. If I hadn’t lost my rank, I would have asked the same thing.

  “No,” Graves said. “That would impair the operation of this facility. Most of this factory’s raw materials come up from the planet it’s anchored to. If you destroy that…”

  He didn’t need to tell us anything more. Many of us had served on Tech World when a heavily populated orbital city had been disconnected from its anchoring planet. The results had been memorable—and disastrous.

  “I’m patching in Tribune Turov,” Graves said. “She’ll lay out the overall battle plan. If any of you feel like speaking up, don’t bother. I’ve put you all on mute.”

  The channel scratched and beeped for a few seconds before Turov came on the line.

  “We’re setting up a defensive perimeter in the docking area,” she said. “Cohorts four, six and seven are to advance and encircle the loading bays. The rest of you maintain your positions for now. Turov out.”

  As we were the third unit in the third cohort, I felt some relief. We were to maintain our post.

  Harris signaled me, and I looked at him.

  “That was unusual,” he said. “Maybe this attack is a bad one.”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” I said. “That short, to-the-point set of commands from Turov surprises me. She usually likes to give long, drawn-out, moralizing speeches that totally waste—”

  Our conversation was interrupted as the channel crackled back into life again.

  “I’m reopening the legion-wide command channel,” Turov said, “but I’ve removed the three cohorts I’ve activated so as not to distract them.”

  “Damn, I should have known,” Harris groaned aloud.

  “I’ve overheard several conversations,” Turov continued, “indicating wrong-headed thinking among the rank and file. This enemy is NOT in the right.”

  Harris and I looked at each other and shrugged. We certainly hadn’t felt any special sympathy for these overgrown centipedes.

  “The Vulbites are mere servants to the mysterious Rigellians. They’re squatters here, entitled to nothing. In fact, this territory was ceded to Earth six years ago at the end of the Cephalopod War.”

  Damn. Had it really been six years already? Time sure flew by when you kept fighting and dying on different planets.

  “These Rigellians are cowards,” Turov said, and I sensed she was winding up for a full-blown speech. “Have any of you wondered why we haven’t seen them yet? They don’t like to fight their own wars. Their troops are never volunteers. They’re mercenaries at best, slaves at worst.”

  “If that’s not the pot calling the kettle black,” I said.

  Harris gave me a funny look, but then he got it. “You mean because we’re mercenaries, right? Or because these Blood Worlders are… um…”

  “Right!” I said. “We got both.”

  I tuned back into Turov’s speech, because she wasn’t done yet. Not by a long shot.

  “…absolutely no respect for their troops, not even their officers. Even those among them who command their servant troops are considered low-caste. The Rigellians sneer at military people of every kind—including us.”

  That was different, I had to admit. Back on Earth, people generally liked the legions. They even had their favorites. Some officers had trading cards, online followings and public appearances that went beyond just recruitment drives.

  “I wonder what they look like,” I said aloud, but of course, she couldn’t hear me. I was on mute.

  Harris waved to me, and pointed to his tapper. I looked at my own, and I saw a blinking indicator. I touched it, and a visual data stream sprang to life.

  There, on the inside of my forearm, I saw Galina walking on a stage. Behind her was a large image of a strange-looking alien.

  “This is a Rigellian—we think,” she said. “We haven’t captured an individual of the overseer species yet, but by using deep probes—the nature of which will remain secret—Hegemony has managed to secure snippets of video like this one.”

  The Rigellian wasn’t entirely ugly, but it wasn’t pretty, either. If I had to put a label on it, I’d say it looked like an oversized bear cub. But this bear cub stood upright, and it didn’t have much fur, just curly tufts here and there.

  Was it cute? Not to me. A girl might think so, but I thought it was kind of nasty-looking. Like a troll in a kid’s story that squats under a bridge.

  Wearing no clothing other than a loop of silver chain, the plucked bear cub marched along a catwalk above a large mass of Vulbites. Now and then, it gestured and gave commands. Often, when it did so, the bear-thing pointed down into the crowd. A flying drone would then dart into the mass of Vulbites, locate the individual which the bear cub had indicated, and snipped off a leg.

  That was alarming, and it clearly brought pain to the Vulbite. Since they had about a hundred churning legs each, they could still function all right. It was unfortunate for them that they had plenty of limbs to sacrifice.

  “What a vicious teddy bear!” Harris said.

  “That’s a slave-driver if I ever saw one,” Leeson added.

  I glanced at each of them, not sure what to think yet.

  Turov was back onscreen again, walking around in boots in front of her video clip. She froze the shot and slapped at the bear’s ears.

  “We believe these are sensitive organs,” she said.

  “No shit?” Harris said, snorting.

  “We estimate these creatures are a little over a meter tall,” Turov continued, “but they possess greater muscle density than humans. These monstrous beings are powerful and cruel to their subordinates.”

  She turned to face the camera drone fully, and we all watched. I had to admit, seeing her like this was generating a certain interest I’d forgotten about since that day in her office.

  “If you ever have the displeasure of meeting up with a Rigellian,” she told us. “I don’t want you to take its life immediately, despite its disgusting nature. We could learn a great deal from a captive.”

  The camera lens zoomed in on her face now, and she filled my tapper. The girl still had it. I was suddenly real sorry I hadn’t managed to finish up the last time I’d been with her. I recalled how she’d led me on and teased me after that. I felt a certain determination overcome me to follow through with my original intentions—sooner or later.

  Maybe my expression revealed something of my thoughts, because when I looked up, both Harris and Leeson were staring at me and grinning.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I bet you can’t even stand up straight right now, can you McGill?” Leeson laughed.

  “You dirty dog!” Harris declared in mock disgust. He shook his head. “I keep hearing rumors about you two, but I’m a hard man to convince. Then you go and confirm it all!”

  “How’d I confirm anything?” I demanded.

  The two adjuncts looked at each other in amusement.

  “It’s in your eyes, McGill,” Harris told me, “…and your pants.”

  Leeson nodded sagely. “That’s right. It’s true love. I’ve seen it before, and I’m sure I’ll see it again. You two are soul mates. A match made in Hell.”

  They both laughed.

  Trying not to show how annoyed I was, I looked back down at my tapper.

  True love. As if. Sure, Galina was cute, and I’d always enjoyed hooking up with her whenever the moment presented itself. But the idea we had a tight relationship—that we could ever be anything but friends—that was absurd.

  Turov kept going, talking and strutting around. She was trying to make the Vulbites and the Rigellians out as monsters. I’d seen and heard it all before. True or not, it was a standard-issue propaganda technique.

  Long before Galina stopped talking, I’d stopped listening. I was still watching her, however. She was pretty.

  An alert signal went off, jolting me out of my reverie. I tuned back in, surprised.

  Galina stopped yapping suddenly.

  “The enemy has reached the hull,” she said. “Our loading bay ambush…” she trailed off as someone offstage began speaking to her.

  She listened for a moment, and after a few sentences she showed her fine, white teeth in a snarl.

  “Shit,” she said, and stalked away from the camera.

  The vid stream cut off. Harris, Leeson and I exchanged confused glances.

  Then, we felt rather than heard something. The hull was shivering.

  “Impacts?” I asked aloud.

  “Sure as hell feels like it,” Leeson said.

  Winslade buzzed into our ears a few moments later.

  “I’ve gotten word from Graves,” he said. “The Vulbites apparently didn’t read the script Turov wrote for them. They stopped the elevator short of entering the loading bays, and they’ve moved in force out onto the exterior hull instead.”

  “What are those explosions we’re feeling, sir?” I asked.

  Winslade slid his eyes to regard me. “They appear to be using charges to blow open hatches. They’re invading the decks about a kilometer from here right now.”

  Grunting, we got to our feet and ordered our platoons to assemble. Over recent hours, our ranks had swollen due to revivals and reinforcements. The unit was nearly full strength.

  “We should have blown that umbilical!” Leeson declared.

  “Don’t I know it,” Harris agreed.

  I didn’t chime in. It was my belief that the brass had been right on that call. If we’d destroyed the umbilical, this massive orbital factory would have been rendered useless.

  In that case, what would have been the point of invading Dark World at all?

  -22-

  The enemy wasn’t fooling around this time. Vulbites poured out onto the station’s hull, crawling in a black-brown mass.

  They didn’t bother to come in stealthed this time. They wore pressure suits, but they seemed to be much more form-fitting than ours were. They were even the same color as a typical Vulbite carapace, which gave the illusion we were fighting creatures that could tolerate hard vacuum.