Legion Of The Damned - 02 - The Final Battle (18 page)

The war commander gathered his weapons and started down the slope. His skin started to turn black in the sun, his sandals slid on a scattering of pebbles, and a half-buried skull stared up at him from a rain-eroded grave.

 

Something was amiss but Norwood couldn’t decide what it was. And because generals are supposed to base their decisions on more than just gut instinct, there wasn’t a damned thing she could do about it. Besides, the landing force consisted of more than a thousand heavily armed marines and legionnaires. More than a match for the bows and arrows the Hudathans could theoretically come up with.
The thought should have alleviated the hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach but didn’t.

Master Sergeant Max Meyers more than occupied the jump seat across from her. The light machine gun, often served by a two-person crew, looked like a toy in his massive hands. Linked ammo crisscrossed his chest, the butt of a handgun protruded from his left armpit, and a commando knife hung hilt-down from his harness. He smiled and Norwood responded in kind. It was impossible not to. “Nothin’ like a little stroll to keep a soldier in shape, General.”

Norwood eyed the small paunch that pressed against his shirt. “Really? Well, maybe we oughtta come dirtside a little more often, then.”

Meyers laughed, as did those seated around them, and the shuttle leveled out. There weren’t any windows, so Norwood couldn’t see the surface, but she had little difficulty imagining the ocean of rubble that passed beneath the shuttle’s stubby wings.

Cities, towns, homes, businesses, schools, churches, and millions of people all murdered by the Hudathans. Yes, the aliens had their virtues, but what good is bravery without compassion? Intelligence without empathy? Strength without kindness? And so it fell to her, and the men and women under her command, to keep chaos at bay, at least on Worber’s World. She couldn’t do much about the Confederacy as a whole.

Due to the fact that the snoop-and-poop inspections had taken place for about twenty years now, and that the Hudathans were unarmed, airstrips had been cleared near their centers of population and were reused as needed. That’s why marine recon dropped first, checked the runways for booby traps, and reestablished a defensive perimeter
prior
to each landing.

So when Norwood’s shuttle thumped down, dumped forward momentum, and taxied towards a berm-protected parking area, she knew the immediate area was secure. Ramps were lowered, dust spurted upwards, and metal clanked as she made her way down and onto the surface of her home planet.

Colonel Maria Chow, the highly capable commander of the 16th Battalion, 3rd Marines, was waiting, as was the irrepressible Major Ricardo Hussein, commanding officer of the Legion contingent, which had been temporarily detached from the 5th Foreign Infantry Regiment to reinforce the marines.

Both popped to attention and held their salutes. Norwood returned them in kind and shook their hands. “Maria . . . Ricky . . . it’s good to see you. Is everything secure?”

Hussein had brown skin and a lot of extremely white teeth. His uniform was heavily starched and he looked like a recruiting holo. “The grunts needed lots of help, General, but we showed ’em what to do.”

It was a running joke and Chow played along. She was short and squat, like the mortars she had commanded as a lieutenant. “Shit. If it wasn’t for us, Ricky and the rest of his cyber-weenies would be up in orbit drinking hot chocolate and reading each other bedtime stories.”

Norwood shook her head in mock disgust. “I have a whole planet to run and this is what they send me. So how ’bout it? Did either one of you slackers get a sitrep on zones one and three?”

Both officers nodded their heads but it was Chow who answered. “Yes, ma’am. Both teams have landed and report their perimeters are secure. Ricky will lead the One Team . . . and I have Three.”

Norwood nodded. The fact that she had divided her team into three roughly equal parts might have been a mistake had they been landing on an enemy-held planet, but the Hudathans were unarmed, so a reinforced company should be adequate for each major location. “Good. Let’s saddle up.”

It took the better part of an hour to reinforce the marine perimeter with four of the Legion’s Trooper IIs, load the APCs and head for the Hudathan-occupied ruins. A flight of aerospace fighters, fighting to keep their speed down, roared overhead. They were gone a few seconds later. Both Chow and Hussein had joined their respective teams and were closing on their objectives.

Norwood rode in the lead vehicle with her head and shoulders sticking up through a hatch. Master Sergeant Meyers didn’t approve . . . but Norwood wanted to see the terrain with her own eyes. The APC lurched as the right-hand track rode up and over a concrete block. Norwood braced herself against the motion. The metal felt warm beneath her fingers.

A knowledgeable eye could still tell the difference between the rubble created by a bombed-out apartment complex and a high-rise business office. Signs advertised services no longer available, arrows guided nonexistent traffic, and lampposts, heated by the same energy beams that had burned huge swathes across the city, drooped like dying flowers. Protruding from a sidewalk that had flowed like lava, Norwood saw the head and shoulders of a man, arms raised in supplication, forever entombed in a suit of glassified concrete.

Norwood felt her anger return and used it to feed the moment, to immunize herself against the feelings of pity that threatened to dilute her hatred. Strength, that was the answer, and Norwood took pleasure in the fact that there was nothing subtle about the robo scouts that swept the area ahea
d, the quads who guarded the convoy’s flanks, or the main battle tank that brought up the rear. The message was clear: “Do what we say or die.”

 

Hard eyes watched the convoy pass and waited for the prearranged signal. The Hudathans emerged from their hiding places. They knew every square inch of the surrounding terrain, were heavily armed, and willing to die. A dozen or so started to work on ambush number two. The rest, some two hundred in all, headed for Landing Zone Two.

Elsewhere, hundreds of miles away, similar activities took place in the vicinity of Landing Zones One and Three. A surveillance camera drifted in from the surrounding bad-lands, spotted unexpected movement around Zone One, and was destroyed with a shoulder-launched missile. The battle had begun.

Specialist Third Class Jessica Clemmons heard the buzzer, touched a series of keys, and watched the last thirty seconds of video from SURCAM 1147. The images she saw were so jarring, so unexpected, that she ran it again. The camera drifted around the comer of a tumbledown building and out over a street. About fifteen Hudathans were digging some sort of trench. Four of them saw the surveillance device, one gave an order, and the other three aimed weapons towards the camera. The video went to black.

Clemmons gulped, stabbed the button that would download her screen to Lieutenant Rawley, and hit the intercom. The connection was voice only. He sounded ragged, and slightly out of breath. “Lieutenant Rawley here.”

“I-i-it’s Clemmons, sir. Th-th-the Hudathans destroyed SURCAM 1147. R-r-request permission to notify Ops.”

The voice was annoyed. “What did they do? Beat the damn thing with a stick?”

“N-n-no, sir. Th-th-they hit it with a shoulder-launched missile.”

Rawley gave an exasperated sigh. “I’m surprised at you, Clemmons . . . drinking on duty is a court-martial offense. Log off, inform the duty NCO, and report to quarters. I’ll deal with you later.”

Clemmons started to reply, started to object, but knew it was hopeless. She broke the connection, stood, and had started to log off when it hit her. There were a thousand people on the surface, and if the Hudathans had weapons,
all
of them were in danger. She sat, downloaded her screen to the Ops Center, and activated the intercom. The response was immediate. “Ops Center.”

Clemmons spoke and discovered her stutter had disappeared. “EW Section here, sir. The enemy attacked and destroyed SURCAM 1147. Video confirmation is available on channel one-three-six.”

There was a momentary pause as the Ops officer checked the video, followed by the words “Holy shit! Good work, EW. Stay on it.”

General quarters sounded just as Lieutenant Rawley was about to come between Ensign Ngundo’s rather shapely legs. He didn’t appreciate the way Ngundo pushed him to one side and reached for her pants. Goddamn the navy anyway! Would the bullshit never end?

 

Norwood got the word on SURCAM 1147 only seconds after War Commander Poseen-Ka received the same news via the low-powered radio relay system that tied his forces together. The lag time made little or no difference. Though not completely within his trap, the convoy was two-thirds of the way into Hudathan kill zone. Not perfect, but good enough.

Norwood was still in the process of deciding what to do when the Hudathans opened fire. Not at the bio bods, who were vastly outnumbered, but at the quads and the single tank.

Poseen-Ka always made it a point to avoid making the same mistake twice in a row. So, having underestimated the effectiveness of human cyborgs during the Battle for Algeron, and having paid for his error, the Hudathan had no intention of doing so again. And, given the fact that the micro-bots had not been equipped to manufacture the heavy artillery, rocket launchers, or other weapons that would normally be used on armored targets, he’d been forced to improvise.

Which explained why both quads had been targeted by three suicide teams, each consisting of two troopers, carrying twenty-five pounds’ worth of explosives apiece.

All of the teams had prepositioned themselves along the quad’s line of march in hopes that one of them would be relatively close when the moment came. But the radio transmission ruined that and the Hudathans were forced to sprint towards their respective targets.

Drulo Baka-Sa, leader of team three, had been a world-class athlete twenty years before. He was older now, but still powerful, and put everything he had into the effort. Bullets started to fly, and his target quad, the one guarding the convoy’s western flank, was in the process of lowering its body to the gr
ound. Once there, the cyborg would become impregnable to anything the Hudathans could presently bring to bear. Everything, literally everything, depended on Baka-Sa’s ability to close the gap and get beneath the behemoth
before
it settled in. The Hudathan looked back over his shoulder, saw that Nola-Da was only steps behind, and redoubled his efforts.

The quad known as Abdul had been a legionnaire for thirteen years, ever since a mining accident had claimed his body, and thought he’d seen it all. Not the
big
war of course, the one that put the Hudathans on Worber’s World to begin with, but two or three smaller conflicts and a police action or two.

But prisoners who suddenly had weapons, that was a new and not especially pleasant surprise. Still, there was no real cause for alarm, since there was no sign of enemy artillery, which along with heavy armor, was the only thing that quads fear. No one needed to order him down, which they did anyway, or to open fire, which they also did anyway. There were damned few targets, though, excepting the two greenish blobs who had appeared in the middle of his electronic vision and were headed his way.

Abdul zoomed in and saw no sign of the assault rifles he might have expected, and was not especially concerned in any case, since they could do little more than chip his carefully applied paint job. Then he saw the packs they wore, received a warning from his brain-linked on-board computer, and knew what they were. A demo team! Hell bent on placing explosives under his belly!

Already moving downwards as fast as his hydraulics would permit, Abdul directed most of his fire to the oncoming blobs, and the rest to the backup teams coming along behind them.

Baka-Sa felt his abdominal muscles tighten as dirt geysered to his right and an energy beam pulsed overhead. The cyborg had seen the danger and was focusing its considerable weaponry on the threat. The Hudathan leaped over a huge chunk of concrete, shouted his clan’s ancestral war cry, and pounded towards the alien quad. He heard a grunt through his ear plug and knew Nola-Da had been hit. A series of bright blue energy beams stuttered by his shoulder and caused his radio to crackle. He tripped, caught himself, and staggered ahead. The rubble made it difficult to run and also
made it hard for the quad’s computer to predict where he would go next. Grenades popped out of the quad’s launchers, tumbled end over end, and exploded in midair. Shrapnel whined past the Hudathan’s head and peppered his three-hundred-pound body. He kept on going.

The quad was lower now, no more than six feet off the ground, and steadily falling. Something thumped into Baka-Sa’s shoulder and hurt. But t
here were only feet to go before he crossed the finish line, before he showed the others who was fastest, before the race was won.