When I relayed our new orders to my unit, the news was met with a chorus of groans and curses, but no one was all that surprised. There was no rest for the weary, the wary or the wicked in Legion Varus, and we all knew it.

  We turned our marching column around and headed back toward the dome. It began to rain as we did so, and the ashes under our boots turned into black mud.

  Vehicles converged on our location as we drew near the site. I was stunned by the number and variety of them. There were skimmers like the one we’d rode in on, plus all kinds of ground cars and trucks. I was impressed, and I walked up to the engineering officers.

  They were sappers, and I held some respect for their sort. They weren’t frontline troops, mind you, but they died often enough in the service by setting off bombs and building temporary structures that got blown up on alien worlds.

  “How deep are you going to dig this tunnel?” I asked the first centurion I saw.

  His nametag said he was Centurion Roth. He rounded on me, frowning hard, but his face softened when he saw I was the same rank as he was. He squinted, and then his face lit up as he read my nametag.

  “McGill? You’re that crazy, shit-for-brains who crawled under the dome, right? That was impressive, Centurion.”

  “Thanks, but it’s nothing compared to the work you boys have ahead of you. What’s your game plan?”

  Roth looked thoughtful. “Well, we started off by laying out EMP traps. To disable those mini-tanks. They’re heavily shielded, but a burrowing buzzer and a quick jolt in the wire-harness seems to take care of most of them.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, uncertain as to how the drone-tanks would take to such behavior. It might trip their AI into marking all humans for death—but again, it wasn’t my problem, so I kept smiling.

  “Next, we’re going to drill about a hundred meter long tunnel. It will be ten in diameter, twenty deep. A quick run down and up again, like a dog digging under a fence.”

  “Sounds good,” I said, using a convinced tone. “How long do you think it will take?”

  “Ten hours, more or less.”

  Frowning, I shaded my eyes and studied the skies. They looked quiet, but that wouldn’t last long.

  “Uh…” I said, “did anyone mention to you guys that there are hostile ships approaching this planet even now?”

  Centurion Roth waved a big gauntlet at me. “They sure did. That pesky Winslade of yours brings it up every few minutes, seems like. We’ll have this trench done long before that.”

  “Yeah, but did you calculate how long it will take our column to get through the dome?”

  “Of course. There shouldn’t be a problem, as long as everyone lines up neatly and hustles.”

  I was frowning more deeply now. “But… what if the Mogwa on the other side don’t understand? I mean, what if they want to scan our tappers, or search our rucks for contraband?”

  The engineer eyed me strangely. “You went in there, right? You’re the one that knows how they’re going to react.”

  I was feeling itchy again. That happened sometimes when one of my frequent lies caught up to me. I opened my faceplate and scratched. “I have some idea…”

  “Were they officious? Uncertain?”

  “Yeah, well… they didn’t greet us with open arms. Don’t expect to be hailed as liberators. They kind of… well… to a Mogwa, humans are all like trained seals, see. Or dogs, maybe. Stray dogs that barely know how to do tricks. They’re more likely to worry about us pissing on the carpet than to give us a treat, to be honest.”

  Roth stared at me in disbelief. “You’re telling me there might be a delay? An interruption to the flow of personnel? This is critical information. Why wasn’t I told about this?”

  I wagged a finger in the air. “I think you know where the trouble comes from. You already mentioned him by name.”

  His face brightened in recognition. “Primus Winslade… right. Okay, I know what to do on that score. I take my orders from Drusus directly. We’ll remove the bottleneck. In the meantime, is there anything else you’d like to tell me?”

  I thought of a dozen grim realities that this man was about to face once he got under the dome. To my way of thinking, that was when his real troubles would begin. But I didn’t want to tell him any of that, so I just grinned and spread my hands wide. “Can’t think of anything right now. Maybe something will come to me later.”

  “All right. I’ll contact you if we run into anything… unusual. Thanks for all your help, McGill.”

  The engineer turned back to his digging, but he seemed to be moving faster now. I skedaddled out of there before anyone else could start asking me questions. At this point, stacking up any fresh lies was liable to make me feel bad.

  To make shirking easier, I led my team back to the crater we’d occupied when we first landed. That wasn’t popular with the group, but they were bone-tired and didn’t much care where we went as long as we stopped marching.

  “Damnation,” I told them. “Does anyone here need to have a good cry? How about you?” I grabbed Gary and shook him. “Are you going to soil that armor you don’t deserve?”

  “Me, sir? I didn’t say anything.” Gary looked sheepish. He’d been one of the chief complainers, and I knew it. That was unacceptable in a supporting officer.

  Naturally, I knew what the trouble was. Marching around night and day with no rest could wear down a weak man. Gary wasn’t a real Varus soldier, and it showed. He’d earned his rank by kissing unmentionables, not by slogging through mud and blood.

  “All right then,” I said, letting him go.

  Harris had been standing behind Gary pantomiming murder. When I let the adjunct go, he stalked away in disappointment.

  My unit proceeded to lounge and snooze in the crater. Along about noon—or whatever passed for noon on this rock—the brass finally caught up to me.

  “McGill? McGill!”

  My tapper was buzzing and bitching at me again. It was Primus Winslade, and he was all fussed-up about something.

  “Hello, sir!” I said, answering with the most cheerful tone I could muster. “Is it time for us to march into the dome to receive our heroes’ welcome?”

  “What? Hardly. I’m calling because we’ve had difficulties. Are you certain the Mogwa officers knew what you were saying when you met with them?”

  “Both sides spoke Imperial Standard, sir. If there’s a misunderstanding, it’s probably on the head of your tunneling crew.”

  Winslade shook his head and tsked. “It must have been some breach of protocol, then. That engineer—what’s his name? Centurion Roth? He’s been complaining all afternoon about everything. No matter, I’ve come to expect incompetence at every turn. I’ll handle it—Winslade out.”

  Disconnecting with a happy touch of my index finger, I sat back in the mud and smiled. Now that was how you handled a difficult situation. You diverted the attention of two antagonists so that they focused on each other, rather than the real weasel in the mix. That way they would get more deeply involved with the problem and end up owning it.

  By the time the officers figured out that the Mogwa were huge tools, and that there was no way their plans were going to work out, it would be waaay too late to blame one James McGill.

  This time out, it wasn’t going to be easy for Winslade and his sidekicks to point the big stick of shame at me.

  Closing my eyes again, I managed to nod off after a few minutes.

  -33-

  Access tunnels were constructed all around the dome, with our engineers and sappers working night and day. When the following dawn came, I awakened to an unpleasant development.

  Looking through the glassy dome itself, I could see an army of mini-tanks had assembled. Walking around in front of each squadron of drones was a real, live Mogwa marine. These bad hombres were just as threatening as the drones themselves, and they looked kind of similar, too.

  “Huh…” I said, eyeing the standoff. “Doesn’t look like the Mogwa are interested in being rescued.”

  “It sure doesn’t,” Carlos said. Somehow, he’d managed to sidle up to me and poke his nose over the rim of the crater. “So far, they haven’t allowed anyone other than a few engineering officers in there to talk to them. The funny part is they grabbed the engineers with those shock-noose things.”

  I frowned. That seemed to me like the Mogwa were going too far. After all, Centurion Roth was a hard-working fellow. He didn’t deserve to be outright abused.

  “What about Winslade? Any word?”

  Carlos looked furtive. “Well… Kivi might have tapped into the local grid.”

  “She might have, huh? What happened?”

  Carlos leaned forward grinning. “We think Winslade went in there and got his ass arrested, too.”

  “Huh… That’s funny, but not good.”

  I craned my neck, looking up at the sky. It could have been a moon or some local planets… but I thought I saw a number of small bright objects hanging over us. I pointed up at them.

  “What are those things?”

  “We thought they were tugs bringing rocks to bombard us—but there’s no such luck. We’re not getting off easy, dying clean and catching a revive next year when some investigation declares this mission a wipe—no, we’re going to have to fight for our supper. Again.”

  Staring upward, I thought I saw some streamers dropping from the bottom of the lowest craft in orbit above us. Whatever they were, they weren’t acting too friendly.

  “Invasion ships…” I said.

  “What?”

  “Winslade said they’re enemy troops. They’re dropping on us right now.”

  Carlos gaped and twisted his neck this way and that. “Holy shit… I think you’re right. What are we going to do, McGill?”

  “Lock and load. I’ll report the sighting—even though they have to know what’s happening.”

  When I reported in, I wasn’t too surprised to get Primus Collins on the line instead of Winslade. Apparently, what Carlos had heard about him being captured inside the dome was true.

  “Primus Collins? Are you in operational command of this zone now?”

  “That’s right, McGill. You fucked up.”

  “Uh… could be you be more specific, sir?”

  “You heard me. My staff has informed me that you’ve been trying to get Winslade permed for years. Now that you’ve succeeded, you’ll find me to be your worst nightmare.”

  Frowning, I tried to puzzle out what she was saying. “First off, what happened to Winslade?”

  “As if you didn’t know… He went inside that dome and was captured and abused by a pack of enraged, ungrateful monsters. I don’t know why we pay homage to these aliens. They’re no more honorable than any of the rest—possibly worse.”

  “If you’re talking about the Mogwa, sir… well… you’ve got the right of that. But as to me somehow engineering this whole thing—”

  Collins cut me off, and she seemed to be speaking with growing anger no matter what I said. “Stop! Just stop right there with your lies and nonsense. You pretended to penetrate that dome, then—”

  “Pretended? I handed in my vids, sir. Have you reviewed them?”

  “A very well-edited sequence of shots. I admit, it looks like you made it to some farmer’s field on the inside. But you didn’t negotiate anything with the Mogwa. Show me that vid, McGill. Show me the one where you talked to these bastards and made friends with them.”

  I began feeling itchy again. That was the trouble with smart people, they asked questions. I naturally had vids of my interaction with the Mogwa, but I’d erased them and hid them. I didn’t want to show any human, alive or dead, how we’d taken their shock-sticks and run them off. That would be hard to explain.

  Dammit. Why couldn’t Winslade have managed to fix this on his own? Did I have to do everything?

  Heaving a sigh, I decided I was somewhat responsible for this impending disaster. “Okay. I’ll go inside that dome again and see what I can do to help.”

  This statement seemed to take Primus Collins by surprise. She was just winding up for a fresh set of accusations, but she deflated somewhat. “You will…? All right. Hold your position until after the immediate area is clear, then you’ll go in and do what you can. I’m already suspecting I’ll regret this, but I also suspect it’s the best chance Leonard has. Try to set aside your natural hate for him, McGill. Your little joke has gone too far. ”

  “Uh…” I said, but I trailed off. She’d disconnected.

  Flumping back against the crater wall, I frowned upward. There were a lot of mysteries packed into that conversation, but I was beginning to sort them out in my mind.

  For one thing, I now believed Winslade had been playing a little grab-ass on the side with Primus Collins. That was kind of a shocker. He rarely got anything from the ladies, even though he tried now and then.

  The clues were all there as I reviewed her words. She’d talked about his best chance, and how he’d been screwed over, and she’d even called him “Leonard” instead of Winslade. That, right there, was a dead giveaway.

  Collins wasn’t exactly a beauty queen, but her main problem came in the form of a heinous personality. Apparently, that hadn’t deterred old Winslade. He’d gotten her attention, and she seemed to care about him.

  To my misfortune, I realized I now felt a little guilty about Winslade. Collins was right, I’d passed the buck and then some. “Leonard” was very poorly equipped when it came to any kind of diplomacy. The idea he was going to talk his way into that dome—that was plain ridiculous. I’d let my hopes for a clean dodge affect my good judgment.

  There were other things to think about, too. What had Primus Collins said? Something about going into the dome after the current action? What was that all about?

  “McGill!” Harris said, thumping over to my position. “What are we going to do about the drop-pods? Some of them are coming down right here. Kivi says so.”

  He pointed into the sky, and I followed his gestures. The trails I’d noticed before had grown in number and in size. I knew what they had to be—enemy drop-pods, falling down on us from orbit.

  “Centurion?” Harris continued. “I know you’ve been talking to headquarters. What are our orders?”

  I glanced down at my tapper. Sure enough, the damned thing was chock-full of maps and tactical schematics—but there wasn’t time to dig through all that stuff now.

  Collins must have figured I was wide awake and reading everything she sent me. That marked her down as a weak commander in my view. Graves would never have made such a mistake.

  Grunting, I jumped to my feet and began shouting orders. We positioned ourselves, guns ready, to meet the invaders, whoever they might turn out to be.

  -34-

  Having drop-pods scream down to fall on your head is alarming. I’d experienced this before, but not often. Once, Saurians had invaded Machine World and landed right on top of us. Another time Legion Varus had landed on an island on Green World…

  This time things looked different. The drop-pods themselves weren’t the same model. They slowed down as they approached the ground, firing jets to reduce speed. I squinted up at them, trying to figure out why they looked wrong somehow…

  “They’re small, and they have shielding!” Harris shouted. He pointed a gauntlet up into the sky and released a large amount of explosive pellets from his morph-rifle.

  Letting the gun aim itself, he tracked and chugged out pellets. These pellets were made of black tungsten, a metal with a high melting point. The pellets weren’t smart, not exactly, but the guns were. When approached by an object in an open sky, they could track it and fire accordingly.

  As we watched, the pellets popped into spinning sprays of tiny fragments. These jagged flying knives were designed to wreck missiles or other unarmored targets.

  Watching the pods fall, I calculated that everything I’d heard from Sateekas was true. These guys were Rigellians. There weren’t too many other species around who were small, brave and mean.

  Flashes like sparklers showered around the descending pods. I could see at a glance our antiair pellets weren’t working on the targets. They were shielded by weak force-fields—just enough to ward off small arms fire from the ground.

  All around us, Harris and his men were filling the sky with showers of pellets. I reached out a hand and pushed Harris’ gun down.

  “You’re wasting ammo,” I told him. Then I raised my voice to a shout. “Heavies! Forget the anti-air fire. Switch to armor-piercing rounds, and move to the rim of the crater.”

  They glanced at me in surprise, but then quickly hustled to obey. The chattering fire ended and transformed into clacking sounds as they reconfigured their rifles. I busied myself doing the same.

  Soon, we were ready to dish out some pain. Our morph-rifles were newly designed to have an armor-piercing mode. This allowed our guns to fire specially coated rounds at very high velocities that were designed to punch through hard targets.

  “You think there are drones in these pods?” Harris asked me as the first smoking capsules came in for a landing. “Cause these guns aren’t going to get through shielding and a drop-pod’s shell.”

  “Nope,” I said. “I think there are infantry in there.”

  Harris pushed his head up over the rim. “I see the first one in our vicinity. About two hundred meters south-by-southwest. Permission to fire, sir.”

  “Hold on. Let the trooper climb out. We don’t want to have to root them out of their pods if they decide to hide in there.”

  I scooted up next to Harris. A dozen other troops were all along the rim of the crater, aiming in the same direction. Two other pods came in, firing their landing jets.

  The first pod popped open. One half of the pod fell away and a figure climbed out.

  Harris gave a cry of inarticulate rage. “What the fuck? That thing is tiny. Is that what I think it is?”

  “Focused fire, people,” I ordered. “Take him down!”

  Streams of bolts showered the enemy soldier, the pod and the smoking dirt all around. The figure spun around, fell, but got up again. He scrambled to get behind his pod and take shelter.