Machine World (Undying Mercenaries Book 4) by B. V. Larson Read Free Book Online

had been eyeing me rather than Turov. Natasha had been placed near me as we were both specialists and accordingly had been assigned to a front row spot.
    I stared up at Imperator Turov expressionlessly. Sure, I wanted to smile about those lips which she’d glossed up. Each lip had to be thicker than a man’s arm on that huge screen, but I didn’t dare show interest. Natasha and I had an on-again, off-again thing going, and I knew that if she caught me grinning at Turov I’d be in the “off-again” stage indefinitely.
    “Do you think she’s doing this on purpose?” Natasha asked me.
    “Doing what?”
    Looking disgusted she nodded toward the screen. “Making us watch her. She has a captive audience of about twenty five thousand right now, and she’s not even making a speech.”
    “Oh, that,” I said. “I don’t know. I’m kind of hungry. I could really use some breakfast about now.”
    This was not total bullshit, but it was pretty close. I was hungry, but I could probably watch Turov’s little pre-game show for another ten minutes before I got bored with it.
    Finally, the Imperator got on with the briefing.
    “Good morning troops. I will attempt to answer all your questions at once with this briefing. We’re moving out today, not as a hired mercenary band, but rather as an organized force representing Earth. Our contracts have been paid by Hegemony, using Galactic credits. I’ve been chosen to lead this campaign personally by my superiors because of my intimate knowledge of our true enemy.”
    Frowning, I absorbed her words. Our true enemy? She could only mean the squids.
    “Renegade forces abound along the fringe of the Empire. Frontier 921, being at the edge of explored galactic space, naturally borders dangerous barbarians. One such untamed tribe calls itself the Kingdom of the Cephalopods.”
    I glanced at Natasha. She was frowning, too. We were both worried. I’d been holding out a thin hope we’d been assigned one of those easy escort-missions I’d heard so much about since I was a kid. Instead, this looked like we were marching to war—real war. At least Natasha seemed to have gotten over the idea that Turov was flirting with everyone.
    “The target world’s atmosphere is somewhat similar to that of Earth. It’s made up primarily of nitrogen, about seventy-five percent, with an oxygen content just under ten percent. That’s where the similarities end, however. The world’s surface is made up of an icy frost of methane and bubbling petroleum byproducts. There are lakes and even small seas of liquid methane—but very little water.”
    “Sounds like a real garden,” I said quietly.
    “Sounds like an ice-ball,” Natasha said. “It must be if there’s liquid methane.”
    “Sounds like you two need to learn when to shut the hell up,” Harris said from behind us.
    We both straightened up and stared at the giant Turov on the forward wall.
    “The surface temperature varies between minus one-fifty and minus two hundred degrees C,” she continued.
    I winced. An ice-ball indeed.
    “Interestingly,” the giant face went on, “science tells us there might be some kind of life on this world producing the oxygen in the atmosphere. If so, this life must be quite alien and subsist by using methane as a primary energy source. The cloud layer is so thick that photosynthesis, as we understand it, is probably impossible.”
    The world she was painting in my mind was an unpleasant one: Frozen, with deadly substances everywhere. The air might be breathable if we filtered it and warmed it up by a few hundred degrees, but that was about it.
    “The reason we’re interested in this planet is strategic,” Turov continued. “Galactic Intel tells us that the cephalopods are probing this world and maybe building an advance base there as it’s close to Empire space. Their strategic goals are easy to discern. The world is mineral rich. Metals and radioactives are plentiful.”
    That made more sense to me.