Legion Of The Damned - 02 - The Final Battle (14 page)

The main course was removed and the dessert arrived. Dinara stood and a new round of toasts began. Saved from the need for further conversation, Booly and the now-sweat-drenched ensign regarded each other with expressions of mutual relief, and turned their attention to the light frothy green concoctions that had appeared in front of them.

The whole thing was relatively easy after that, but by the time Booly was allowed to stand and had waited for his seniors to leave the wardroom, he
felt as though he had been in combat. And while he hadn’t exactly won, he hadn’t lost, either, which felt just as good.

 

Long, thin fingers of pain reached down into the darkness where Starke hid, found his soft, vulnerable brain tissue, and squeezed. Pain lanced the center of his being as the fingers pulled him up out of the warm, comfortable darkness and into the relentless light of consciousness. “No!” he screamed. “Let me die! Please let me die!” But the fingers were made of chemical compounds and had no choice but to interact with what remained of his body in ways dictated by what? God? Evolution? Or one of the countless regulations that governed the Legion? There was no way to tell.

Thus a cyborg named Starke and two of his companions were brought on line and readied for installation. They were awake during the first stage of chemical conditioning but unable to access the outer world without benefit of the vid cams and sensors built into their Trooper II bodies.

Starke hated the first stage for a variety of reasons, not the least of which were the feelings of vulnerability, claustrophobia, and guilt that it produced. With nothing to distract him, the past had a way of closing in around the legionnaire, confronting his mind with images he wanted to forget, forcing him to relive the same horrible episode over and over again.

He’d been an engineer on the grav train that ran from old New York to San Diego. A good job, hell, a great job, that required little more than staying awake, since computers handled the whole trip all by themselves. Yes, his one and only job had been to function as the ultimate fail-safe in case the triple-redundant systems managed to fail.

For the first two years Starke had performed flawlessly, staring out the control compartment windows as dark wilderness alternated with the blip, blip, blip of small-town lights, the long, drawn-out smear of the middle-sized cities, and the brightly lit splendor of huge metro-plexes. He had watched the control board that never lit up, the idiot lights that burned eternally green, and the com screen that scrolled endlessly redundant routine messages.

Then Linda had left him, and he had found what he thought at the time was temporary solace in the arms of street comer chemicals. The relationship had grown deeper and deeper until it consumed all of his pay, and all of his time, and left him dog tired. So tired that he took little naps in the control compartment, always careful to set his battery-powered alarm clock and to pick the least dangerous sections of the journey in which to sleep.

He had gotten by, until the night when whatever gods ran the universe decided to destroy him, and an electrical fire consumed the number one guidance system, and the number two system failed for reasons they never did figure out, and the number three system, which was located in Omaha, and capable of running the train from there, went down in a localized power outage, and the batteries he had meant to replace, but never got around to, finally ran out of juice. Yup, the dead batteries, and the ensuing head-on collision, had killed his alarm clock, him, and 152 men, women, and children.

Most of the passengers were injured beyond the possibility of repair, or had been dead too long to bring back, but thirty-three brains had been resuscitated. Starke had been one of them.

The trial had taken less than three hours. An artificial intelligence known as JMS 12.7 had found him guilty of negligent homicide, had sentenced him to death, and offered to take him through a course of appeals. He had declined. But then, just as they had prepared to run his brain through a computer-simulated version of what his passengers had experienced, to be concluded with his very real death, they had offered him the possibility of life as a cyborg. Out of weakness, and fear of the unknown, Starke had accepted. A decision he still regretted but didn’t have the courage to correct.

“Hey, Starke . . . rise ’n shine, dickhead. You got company.” The “voice” cut through the cyborg’s thoughts like a knife. Though not received as sound per se, the syntax belonged to CPO Huber—butthole extraordinaire. Starke started to formulate a rude response and stopped when an unfamiliar “voice” entered his mind.

“Legionnaire Starke? This is Lieutenant Booly. How are you feeling?”

Starke felt a variety of emotions, including surprise, apprehension, annoyance, and pleasure. The response was automatic. “Yes, sir. Like hell, sir.”

“I’ll bet,” Booly said sympathetically, speaking into a microphone and ultimately a computer that digitized his words and reassembled them in the form of “speech” the cyborg could understand. “I can’t claim to know what it feels like, but if it’s even half as bad as the descriptions I’ve heard, then you’re feeling pretty damned bad. The good news is that we’re hitting dirt pretty soon.”

“Alpha-001?”

“That’s right, soldier. Since you’ve been assigned to my platoon I thought I’d drop by and see how you are doing.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“It might be a little early to thank me,” Booly said dryly. “But here’s hoping. I’ll see you dirtside.”

The officer moved on after that, and while there was nothing that could make Starke feel human again, the contact meant a lot. The lieutenant didn’t know it yet, but when the shit hit the fan, at least one cyborg would be covering his ass.

 

The Valley of Harmonious Conflict had played an important role in Hudathan military affairs for thousands of years. It had been created by a meteor strike long before recorded history and was circular in shape. Gray cliffs, dotted here and there with equally gray foliage, circled the crater like a curtain of stone. Two passageways, one to the east and one to the south, provided access to the valley and had been sealed until the advent of gunpowder and projectile weapons had rendered rock walls ineffective as a means of defense. Now the larger stones, too big to be carried off for u
se in primitive huts, lay across the openings like the vertebrae of a long-dead beast, and hinted at the barbaric past.

During feudal times the mountain-rimmed depression had been the site of numerous battles, culminating in the great slaughter known as the Harvest of a Million Heads, which had killed so many members of the aristocracy that a new order had been forced into being and what remained of the clans had formed a single government.

A government which, like the Hudathans who had created it, was shaped by the cruel and unpredictable surface conditions of the planet itself. A distant part of Rebor Raksala-Baʼs mind took note of the fact that thick gray clouds had rolled in to obscure a previously clear sky and that the temperature had dropped thirty degrees since the ceremony had begun. Only the latest in the billions of
wild fluctuations caused by Ember and the planet’s Trojan relationship with a Jovian binary. Snowflakes, just a few at first, whirled down to form a whitish crust across the upper surfaces of the Hudathan troops.

The parade ground was huge and could have accommodated ten times the roughly three thousand Hudathans assembled there. They stood in harmonious rows, their backs vulnerable to the ranks behind them, not because they
wanted
to but because military necessity demanded it. Thousands of years’ worth of military experience had proved the absolute necessity of teamwork, even if it went against the typical Hudathan persona, and generated a certain amount of stress.

Most of the assembled multitude, like Raksala-Ba, were about to graduate from basic training. The rest, like Grand Marshal Hisep Rula-Ka, were there to officiate. Rula-Ka appeared as little more than a distant dot from where Raksala-Ba stood, but he had a powerful voice, and it boomed through a multitude of speakers.

“Each and every one of you is to be congratulated. You have completed basic training and are now ready for Advanced Combat School or technical training. Your strength, your courage, and your intelligence are critical to the future of our race. The galaxy, and indeed the universe, teems with intelligent life, all of which represents a threat to our people. Nowhere does the old adage ‘If a variable
can be
controlled it
must be
controlled’ apply more than in the area of military policy. Only a fool waits for his neighbor to mine the ore, build the forge, and temper the steel that will b
e used to kill him. I submit that the so-called Confederacy of Sentient Beings is such a neighbor, and that steel must be met with steel, and blood must be answered with blood.”

Raksala-Ba watched for the subtle hand movement from his recruit-dagger commander, saw it, and joined the ancient cry. “
Blood!
”

The word was like thunder and echoed off the crater walls. The cry was as ancient as the warrior code that had spawned it. Raksala-Ba reacted to the shout as his father had, and as his grandfather had, with a surge of patriotism. Not for the family that had pushed him out into a blizzard at the age of sixteen, or the clan that had done little more than endorse his enlistment chip, but for his eternally threatened race.

Rula-Ka continued. “It is my pleasure to announce that some of you, a tiny fraction of the whole, have been selected for special recognition. Even now monitor drones are passing among you, identifying the chosen few, and touching
them with the glow of honor. Those so identified are ordered forward that all might see and know them.”

Careful not to move his head from the mandatory eyes-forward position, Raksala-Ba checked his peripheral vision. The snow was falling more thickly now but the monitors had little difficulty bobbing through it. They were shaped like globes and held aloft by small antigrav generators. There were fifty or sixty of the machines and the air hummed as they passed. Suddenly intense beams of white light flashed down to touch individual troopers. Raksala-Ba felt fear followed by pride as a beam found and held him in its actinic glare. The recruit was careful to walk with his head up and hi
s back straight as he marched all the way to the front, did an about-face, and joined the others who had been chosen. They stood at parade rest and he did likewise.

Rula-Ka was getting old now and the crest that ran from the front of his head to the back was even more prominent than it had been when childhood playmates had called him “shovel head.” His eyes were like lasers as they swept the ranks before him. “Meet the chosen ones, first of a new breed, best of the best. It is
they
who will meet the human-machine warriors in combat,
they
who will reign victorious, and
they
who will prevent defeat.”

Raksala-Ba heard the words but had difficulty understanding them. “Chosen ones?” “Machine warriors?” But the machine warriors were cyborgs, brains that controlled electro-mechanical bodies, freaks that . . . He wanted to run, wanted to hide, but knew it was unthinkable. Fear, pride, and discipline held him in place.

“And that,” Rula-Ka continued, “is why they will sacrifice their bodies and join the ranks of a new spear. A spear so honored that it will have a name instead of a number . . . and has already been added to the scroll of racial heroes. For these troopers, and those yet to come, will be known as the ‘Regiment of the Living Dead.’ ”

The name sent a tingle through Raksala-Baʼs entire body as did the cry of
“Blood!”
that followed and the certain knowledge that he was about to die.

A huge drill instructor named Drak-Sa, “the Beast,” had been chosen to perform the executions. He took ten paces forward, stopped before the recruit to Raksala-Baʼs far left, and drew his side arm. It was a projectile weapon loaded with ultra-low-velocity ammunition. He looked up at Rula-Ka and waited for the war commander’s signal.

In the meantime, a small army of medics, festooned with the equipment necessary to prevent clinical brain death, had appeared off to one side, and stood like ghosts in waiting.

Rula-Ka allowed the moment to stretch tight, taking pleasure in the discipline of his troops, and the wind that nipped at his skin. The snow fell thickly now hiding the furthest ranks of troopers behind a curtain of white. He looked at the noncom and inclined his head.

Drak-Sa leveled his pistol at the recruit’s chest. The trooper had developed a never-before-seen twitch in the muscles of his right cheek but still came to attention. The weapon made a dull thumping noise as the slug penetrated his chest, mushroomed, and broke his spine. The body crumpled to the ground and medics rushed to the warrior’s side.

Raksala-Ba found himself praying for death as his knees grew weaker and threatened to betray him. For to fall, and lie crumpled on the ground,
that
was a fate even worse than death. The recruit felt his sphincter loosen and something warm trickle down the back of his leg.

The weapon thumped again, and again, and again, until the drill instructor looked Raksala-Ba in the eye and aimed the pistol at his chest. Snow fell like a shroud and the barrel gaped like the entrance to a clan tunnel. Raksala-Ba wondered if he would see the bullet or hear the sound it made. He didn’t.

 

The technicians used chemicals to pull Raksala-Ba out of his cave. He screamed soundlessly as they rolled his consciousness out over an endless red plain, secured it in place, and forced him to listen.