“We don’t know anything, Carlos. Shut up, and stick to your ranks. Barton, move your lights ahead of my heavies. Harris, hold the center with me and your boys in the fat-suits. Leeson, you’re bringing up the rear with the auxiliaries.”
“Always a pleasure to be last in a head-long rush, sir,” Leeson said happily.
“You’re a frigging plucked chicken, Leeson,” Harris told him, but Leeson just laughed.
We went down a ramp, then two more. Other units were doing the same thing. They were units from our own cohort.
That’s about when I realized our final destination was Green Deck.
“Aw, come on!” Leeson complained from the back. “This is unscheduled bullshit.”
“It’s always bullshit,” Harris said. “Scheduled or not.” Harris turned a suspicious eye in my direction. “What are we walking into, sir? As our centurion, you’ve got to know.”
I shook my head. “Not this time.”
A big closed set of blast-doors with the number three painted on them brought us to a halt. The light above it was red—no entry allowed.
We tried the doors anyway, of course. They were sealed tight.
Sargon came up to me and slapped my helmet. He gestured with his belcher. “You want I should cut a hole in that door, sir? Three tight beams, all converging—it will cut right through.”
I considered it for a second. I honestly did. “Nah.” Then I turned to the unit at large. “All right, troops. After that filling breakfast, and all those warm-up exercises, we’re primed and ready for a drill here on Green Deck. I’ve heard there will be cold beers at the bottom of the lagoon if we get there first.”
Barton looked at me in confusion. “Sir? No one’s been fed or has exercised or—oh. I get it. You made a funny.”
Barton came from Victrix, and she was still our resident straight-man at heart. There was no joke so obvious she couldn’t miss it at first.
“Yes, it was a joke, Adjunct. Thanks for squatting on it.”
The unit laughed half-heartedly, and some of them began to stretch. The smartest ones broke out rations and water they’d stashed in their kits for just such a moment.
Harris came to hover around me again. He seemed agitated.
“What is it, Adjunct? Do you need to pee?”
“Sir, can you find out what’s up? Maybe with some help?” He nodded his head toward our techs, Kivi and Natasha.
They weren’t usually in a good mood, and today was no exception. Still, the idea had merit. I walked over and started a hacking spree. We soon got was a glimpse of the security cams from the inside of Green Deck.
At first, it looked like an angelic scene. There were trees, fake sunshine, a few fake birds and a lot of bushes. In the center of the place, the lagoon sparkled like the clearest water Earth never had.
“What’s that?” Harris demanded, pointing at my tapper.
“What?”
“Pan it, pan it back!”
I frowned at him. “Don’t get too scared. There’s probably someone in there setting up an ambush of some kind.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah… but that wasn’t a human. It was too… skinny.”
I frowned, spinning back the footage about thirty seconds. Nothing moved for the first ten, then…
“What the hell…?”
“You see? You saw it, didn’t you? A pile of sticks or wires or something. It was walking like a man.”
I had seen something. I didn’t know what it was, but I hadn’t liked it, and there was no way it was a human. It moved with bipedal motion, kind of like a human—but it was too thin and too quick to be a man.
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s a glitch or something.”
“No! It’s some kind of escaped freak. That’s why we’re down here without orders, just standing guard. Something is loose inside there.”
We both looked at big door number three. It showed no hint of what was hiding behind it.
“Unit, prepare for a fight,” I told the group. “Expect to walk in hot.”
That got them to change gears. People were walking around, slumping against the walls, chatting and generally goofing off. That was the Legion Varus way, after all. You took your breaks whenever you could get away with it.
But a warning from the CO was something serious. They lifted up their weapons and checked their gear. They made sure every indicator was green, and if it wasn’t, they banged on it until it was.
Finally, the big light over the door switched to green. The doors opened, and we aimed a hundred guns into the interior.
“Advance by squads, maintain overwatch. Move inside fifty meters, take cover, and be ready for anything.”
They did as I ordered with precision. No one was bullshitting anymore. That was all over with. This was go-time, and we didn’t know what we were walking into, but it had to be something.
A Legion Varus man soon develops a powerful sense of paranoia. It comes early in a man’s career, and it never leaves him. As far as I was concerned, that was a good thing.
When the lights were all inside, crouching behind every leaf, fake log and puff-crete rock in sight, I ordered Harris to advance with his heavies.
He did so with his gun to his cheek. You would have thought he was walking into a tunnel full of Vulbites rather than the pleasure center of our own transport ship.
But I didn’t fault him. He’d been the first man to notice something was wrong. That kind of paranoid instinct was worth encouraging in a junior officer.
“Centurion,” Barton called to me over command chat. “I’ve got eyes on… something.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know, sir—I’ll pass the feed.”
She did so, and I saw nothing at first. The point of view was from Barton’s helmet. I had to zoom
