Legion Of The Damned - 02 - The Final Battle (32 page)

 

Chrobuck fought her way up through a heavy, almost smothering darkness. Her eyelids seemed to weigh a ton each and opened with great difficulty. A dull, throbbing pain probed the side of her head. She tried to sit. A hand pushed her down. A face interposed itself between her and the ceiling-mounted light. It belonged to none other than Colonel Wesley Worthington. “So, you aren’t dead after all. Lord knows you tried.”

Chrobuck frowned. She remembered the Hudathan charge, the exploding bombs, and the exploding mines. Things became confused after that, but she remembered a cyborg climbing up over the ridge, firing her handgun in a futile attempt to hit its vid cams, and the way that its wedge-shaped brain case had looked her way. The rest was darkness. “Yes, sir, I mean no, sir. Sorry I lost the ridge.”

Worthington shook his head grimly. “You did all you could, Lieutenant. And then some. Like calling for an artillery mission on your own position.”

Chrobuck thought about all the people who had died and felt a tear trickle down her cheek. She didn’t want the colonel to see and wiped it away. He nodded understandingly. “I’d cry too if I had the time. Now listen, Lieutenant, because I need your help, and I need it badly. I asked the Navy to keep a scout ship in reserve. It’s fueled, armed, and ready to lift. I need an officer to board that ship along with all that we’ve learned, cyborgs included, and get the information to General St. James on Algeron. You’re the one I picked.”

Chrobuck realized what Worthington had said, what it would mean, and managed a sit-up. It made her head pound. “No disrespect intended, sir, but screw that. Give me a company, a platoon, or a squad. I’m going to work.”

Worthington smiled sadly. “No, child. You aren’t. Give St. James my regards, and tell him I’ll be waiting in hell. Lord knows he ordered me to go there often enough.”

Chrobuck frowned, opened her mouth to say something, and never got it out. The colonel nodded to a medic, a needle bit her arm, and darkness pulled her down.

 

Like most long-range recon ships, about 75 percent of the
LRS-236’
s mass was devoted to a pair of powerful engines, plus a hyperdrive that would have done justice to a destroyer. The rest of her payload was devoted to an enormous array of high-powered sensors and automated weaponry, with only a minimal amount of space being left over for environmental-support equipment and a two-person crew.

Lieutenant Bruce Jensen paced back and forth in front of his ship, sucked on the unlit cigar that protruded from the corner of his mouth, and cursed the double-dipped ground-pounding sonofabitch that had kept him dirtside while the Hudathans took control of the sky. It was stupid, that’s what it was, especially if they wanted their dispatches to get through.

Jensen wore a red baseball cap, olive drab flight suit, and a shoulder holster. He had brown eyes, a straight nose, and three days’ worth of black beard. A pair of medics emerged from the ship’s airlock. The larger of the two gestured back over his shoulder. “She’s all strapped in, sir. Should come around in a couple of hours. Change her dressing twice a day.”

Jensen nodded, couldn’t think of anyone he wanted to say good-bye to, and entered the lock. It took fifteen minutes to run a systems check, fire up the engines, and signal his readiness.

A hundred miles away a flight of six carefully husbanded surface-to-orbit missiles took off, locked onto their various targets, and zigzagged towards space. Short of massive incompetence the STOs presented no real danger to the Hudathan ships but the attack did serve to distract them. That’s when the bomb-proof lid slid back, and the
LRS-236
lifted off and screamed away. It took Jensen less than one sweat-soaked hour to fight his way clear of Jericho, make the hyperspace jump, and escape his pursuers. That was when he lit the cigar, noticed that his passenger was kind of pretty, and decid
ed that life could be worse.

 

It took the Hudathans twenty-three days to crush all resistance, to hunt down the last of the humans, and kill them. In all, 12,643 humans had been killed, but so had 4,281 Hudathans. It was one week later when Sector Marshal Poseen-Ka read the battle summaries, looked up at his adjutant, and gestured distress. “If this is the price of victory . . . then defeat is beyond our ability to pay.”

 

There was no doubt about it, ASX41 was a beautiful planet. The seemingly endless cobalt blue sky arched down to meet an equally blue ocean. Light sparkled off the waves as they ran before the wind, chasing each other across the world-spanning ocean. The planet was so beautiful, so benign, that the air seemed to welcome the shuttle, lowering it through the atmosphere with nary a bump, and setting it free to roam.

A wild assortment of emotions clamored for Dr. Harmon’s attention as the ocean passed beneath her. She felt relief at escaping the
Nooni
for a while, apprehension regarding the Say’lynt, and sadness about Valerie’s death. Ensign Hajin, voluble as always, was at the shuttle’s controls, and bore no such burdens. The transformation from lowest-ranking officer aboard the Nooni to commanding of ficer of the shuttle always made him happy, and today was no exception. “Captain! Look! There’s the wreckage of the Hudathan destroyer!”

Harmon looked, and sure enough, there, sticking up out of the steadily shallowing sea was the unmistakable shape of a Hudathan spaceship, waves washing the length of its rusty hull.

She had seen the wreck before, of course, but that had been on video, and the real thing was a lot more impressive. It and a few lonely graves on a
nearby island were the only signs of a war that had left many planets completely devastated.

 

It had been in the closing days of the long, bloody conflict that the then-Imperial Navy had dropped into the system, found three Hudathan warships standing guard, and given chase. None had been willing to surrender, and this one, the wreck that had already slipped beneath the shuttle and disappeared to the rear, had made the mistake of passing through the upper reaches of the planet’s atmosphere, where the Say’lynt group minds known as Rafts One, Two, and Three had seized control of the crew’s higher-thought processes, and forced them to crash.

Harmon had studied the Say‘lynt, or what there was to know about them, so she knew how important the planet’s ecology was to them, and understood the bravery of what they had done. The act of pulling the alien ship down out of the sky had been analogous to taking a poison-laden dagger and plunging it into one’s own chest. There was no doubt that all sorts of toxins were leaking out of the Hudathan warship and would be for hundreds of years to come. Toxins that could harm the Say’lynt. So if it was courage that Chien-Chu was looking for, or the willingness to sacrifice oneself for th
e greater good, then the Say’lynt were on a par with the most decorated soldiers in the Legion.

Something tickled the back of Harmon’s mind, or she thought it did, but a glance at Hajin was enough to establish that he felt nothing of the kind. “There’s the island, Captain . . . shall I put her down?”

Harmon considered carrying out a brief aerial survey first, but decided it could wait, and nodded her head. “Sure, put her down. I’d like to take a look at the site where the research station was located. Maybe I can learn something.” The order
sounded
official but Harmon knew that her real motivation was personal. A chance to see Valerie’s grave and make peace with the past.

The island looked like something from a travel feelie. Harmon saw white sand, a curving beach, and a crystal-clear lagoon. The ship slowed, flattened the water beneath it, and flared in for one of Hajin’s picture-perfect landings. The sand gave slightly as the aircraft settled on its skids. The purpose of the mission was to make contact with the Say’lynt and determine their willingness to serve in the Confederacy’s armed services. So with the exception of Hajin, and over the objections of the public-relations specialist sent to make sure that everyone knew about an agreement that hadn
’t been negotiated yet, Harmon arrived alone.

The pilot was still at the controls, still in his shut-down sequence, when the scientist cycled through the lock and jumped to the ground. The sand
was smooth and outside of the wavy lines left by the wind, completely untouched. It gave under her sneakers as she made her way between clumps of lush vegetation and into a clearing.

Energy weapons had reduced the closely clustered prefabs to a pool of brittle brown glass. Temperature fluctuations had shattered the material into a thousand pieces. Harmon made her way around it and towards the dozen or so stainless steel grave markers that signaled where Valerie and her companions had been buried by the Hudathans, dug up, and reburied by the Imperial Navy. Similar monuments had sprouted by the millions all over what had been the empire, and given the way things were going, more would be needed.

It took little more than a moment to locate the stake that had Valerie’s name on it, to kneel in the sand, and rest her forehead against the sun-hot metal. The tears came in a flood, along with deep, racking sobs, and the combination left her trembling.

But a tremendous weariness settled over her shoulders, the sobbing slowed, and a wonderful sense of peace flooded her body. Harmon felt light, so light that she could float away. Which was exactly what she did. She found that she was everywhere yet nowhere at all. It felt particularly odd because she was used to having her thoughts centered in one place rather than scattered across the surface of a planet.

But she liked it, or thought she did, and was still trying to come to terms with the feeling when a voice entered her mind. “Welcome, Dr. Harmon. We share your feelings of sorrow. Valerie was our friend. She is dead now but lives on in our memories.”

Then, as if the word
memories
were some kind of cue, Harmon was transported back in time, and found herself watching Valerie. But from where? From the surface of the sea, it seemed, because she had a plankton-eye view of the beach, which bobbed up and down with each passing wave. Valerie wore a two-piece bathing suit, her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and a patch of white sunscreen protected her nose. There were other humans, too, milling around behind her friend, and joking with each other, but Harmon ignored them. Valerie filled her eyes, her mind, and her heart. Long white legs
flashed in the tropical sunshine as her friend ran down the beach, splashed out into the bathtub-warm water, and dived through an oncoming wave. Harmon was all around her, viewing Valerie from a multiplicity of angles, recording what she looked like while sending the image elsewhere.

Valerie paused, put her feet on the sandy bottom, and touched one of the long white filaments that floated next to her. She frowned and called to the others. “Look! An organism of some kind . . . I wonder what the rest of it looks like.”

“Be careful,” someone cautioned, their thoughts echoing through Harmon’s mind, “we haven’t even started to catalog the life-forms in that ocean. Who knows what sort of defense mechanisms it might have.”

“It seems harmless to me,” Valerie replied, but released the filament nonetheless, and moved to an open section of water. The memory faded and was gone.

Suddenly Harmon was back, her forehead pressed against warm metal, tears dried on her face. She stood and looked around. “Can you hear me?”

“Of course we can hear you,” a voice said from inside her head. “We heard you from the moment that you entered orbit. Come, wade into the sea, that we might feel you.”

Harmon felt a mixture of fear and wonder as she walked down onto the beach, kicked off her sneakers, and waded out into the water. Other than the gentle passing of the waves and the distant call of a seabird, nothing happened at first. Then, with a gentleness that seemed almost accidental, fifteen or twenty long white tendrils drifted in with the waves, caressed her calves, and stopped just short of the beach. “You are as beautiful as Valerie’s memories said you would be.”

A feeling of incredible joy filled Harmon’s heart. She
wasn’t
beautiful, and was well aware of it, but the fact that Valerie had thought of her that way meant everything. “Thank you. Thank you for everything! I read the reports that Valerie wrote about you. She was right. You
are
gentle beings.”

“
Too
gentle to be soldiers?” a voice asked mockingly. Harmon wasn’t sure how she knew, but it was different from the first one, and more distant. She scanned the horizon. “You know about that? About why I came?”

“Of course,” the voices said in perfect unison. “We knew from the moment you arrived. You think of little else.”

Harmon smiled at the rather accurate assessment of her mental processes. She was somewhat obsessive at times and the Say’lynt had said as much. “Then you understand my concerns.”

“Yes,” the voices agreed, “we do. You question the motivation behind your orders, the practicality of transporting bodies such as ours, and the risk involved.”

“Yes,” Harmon replied soberly, “I do.”

“Then consider this,” the second voice said. “Millions of your kind have perished at the hands of the Hudathans. Even now your sol
diers fight distant battles in behalf of the organization that you call the Confederacy. Why should we be exempt? We have visited their minds, we know the Hudathans would have killed us during the first war, if it hadn’t been for their desire to study us first. So we have every reason to fight, and as the one you call Chien-Chu pointed out, the ability to do so. You saw the wreckage?”

Harmon nodded, realized how stupid it was, and thought her reply. “Yes, I saw the wreckage.”