Legion Of The Damned - 02 - The Final Battle (43 page)

The inner hatch provided access to the small galley in which the sector marshal’s meals were prepared. First meal had been served and consumed. The cook was on his break and would return in fifteen minutes or so. Stepping inside, the spy tiptoed to the window through which food was passed, and inched the panel aside. His heart was in his mouth. What if Poseen-Ka had broken his routine? What if the sector marshal had chosen to sit on the other side of the table? And was staring at the panel?

But the Hudathan was where he was supposed to be, back to the opening, peering into his latest terrarium. To the best of Isaba-Ra’s knowledge, tending the plastic bubble, and the miniaturized likeness of Hudathan countryside
that lay within, was the only form of recreation that Poseen-Ka allowed himself. It seemed ironic that the aspect of Poseen-Ka’s personality that most humans could understand was the one that left him vulnerable to assassination.

Careful to make no sound, he brought the energy pistol up, aimed it at the back of the Hudathan’s head, and put his finger on the trigger. This was the moment that he’d planned for, when he would kill the enemy leader, weaken the fleet, and reduce the possibility of a Hudathan victory. Because while the fleet had plenty of capable officers, none of them was on a par with Poseen-Ka.

But the spy couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger. Because in spite of the fact that the sector marshal had the blood of countless innocent sentients on his hands, Isaba-Ra liked and respected him. The pistol wavered and was withdrawn. Isaba-Ra slid the panel closed, tiptoed out of the galley, and into his office. He was in the lift tube on his way to the flight deck three minutes later.

The process of signing out for a training mission, peeling away from the fleet, and running like hell turned out to be a lot easier than Isaba-Ra thought it would be. But the Hudathans were known for strict discipline, and when the prescribed number of interrogatories brought no response, fighters were dispatched to bring him back.

The spy thought about killing some of them, but knew that it wouldn’t make any difference, since the fighter didn’t have enough range to reach a Confederacy outpost. So he looked out through the canopy, took aim on a star, and ignored his pursuers.

Poseen-Ka was in the process of placing a tiny cabin next to a gunmetal gray lake when the news arrived. Nagwa Isaba-Ra, the best aide he’d ever had, was dead.

 

Enormous though it was, the wardroom aboard the battleship
Invictor
was packed with officers. It was a long, narrow room filled with theater-style seating. Looped holos of famous naval battles, all against the Hudathans, graced the slightly curved bulkheads. Most of the audience were of human stock, but Sergi Chien-Chu saw others as well, including a contingent of hard-looking Ramanthians, and a scattering of Naa. They were the most visible evidence of his efforts to broaden membership in the Confederacy’s armed forces but not the most important.

No, there were thousands of Trooper Ills to consider, with their melding of sentient and near-sentient life-forms, the Say’lynt in their spacefaring swimming pool, and a host of races busily producing the ships, weapons, and materials required by those capable of physical combat. And, thanks to the Hudathans’ ruthless extermination of even the most helpless civilizations, their suffering was widely known. As a result, the resentment Anguar feared failed to surface, all the races felt a sense of partnership, and the Confederacy had been strengthened rather than weakened.

As the senior officer of LEGCOM Algeron, General Ian St. James had accepted the role of moderator, and launched into the inevitable introduction. Chien-Chu heard his name surface in the ocean of words and force
d his mind to the task at hand. He waited for the applause that nearly always followed the list of his accomplishments, stood, and made his way to the podium.

Although everyone present had seen him on countless news vids, many had never seen him in person, or in this person anyway, since his new, mostly cybernetic body was at odds with the rather portly version that had preceded it. He wore the uniform of a vice-admiral. The room hummed as the officers marveled, joked, and commented on his blond good looks. Chien-Chu understood and smiled from the podium. A sea of faces looked up at him. “Thank you, General St. James . . . and greetings, fellow sentients. We are gathered in the name of a great cause.” The words hung in the air, conversation died aw
ay, and Chien-Chu took possession of the room.

“The cause I speak of is even greater than freedom, for without survival, freedom means nothing.” There was scattered applause and Chien-Chu waited for it to die away.

“Many of you have heard rumors that the Hudathan fleet is headed this way, that they mean to crush Algeron, before taking the inner planets. I am here to tell you that those rumors are true, that we are gathered on the eve of a great battle, and that everything we care about is on the line.”

Some of the officers nodded soberly, others exchanged glances, and the rest stared straight ahead. They knew many would die and wondered if they would survive. Chien-Chu knew what they were thinking and responded to it. “President Anguar wanted to be here, wanted to be at your side when the battle was joined, but was overruled by the joint chiefs. Even if we lose here—and I pray we won’t—the battle must go on. But my staff and I
will
stay, and while most of us are better at firing off memos than rifles, we can sure as hell make coffee.”

The laughter served to relieve the tension and Chien-Chu gave silent thanks as he used his highly enhanced vision to pan the forty-second row. Most of the officers were smiling or talking to their neighbors.

Someone shouted: “Let’s hear it for the admiral!” Three huzzahs rang out, each louder than the last. Conscious of how critical morale would be in the coming battle, and cognizant of the fact that he wasn’t likely to elicit a better response than the one he already had, Chien-Chu brought his speech to a close.

“Thank you, not only for the cheers, but for your courage. This is the last time we will be able to assemble like this. Take what you heard, what you felt, and what you know back to your units. Tell the sentients under your command what’s at stake. They will carry us to victory.”

The applause was thunderous and lasted a full three minutes. Finally, after it died down, the officers stood and shuffled towards the doors. Most w
ere cheerful, or as cheerful as they could be given the circumstances, but there was at least one exception. Captain Cynthia Harmon, commanding officer of the warship
D’Nooni Dai
, had a frown on her face. Because while all the rah-rah stuff might be fine for the others, they had something to shoot with, and with the exception of six bolt-on energy weapons, her ship was unarmed. A problem she planned to remedy.

Harmon put on her most determined “don’t mess with me” expression, plowed into the oncoming crowd, and fought her way towards the stage. A group of high-ranking officers had gathered around Chien-Chu and were trying to impose their individual agendas on him when the marine biologist shouldered her way through the outer circle. “Excuse me, General, sorry, ma’am, thank you, sir . . . I need a word with the admiral.”

Seeing her, and glad of an excuse to escape the gold-braided trap that he found himself in, Chien-Chu produced his best plasti-flesh grin. “Captain Harmon! What a pleasant surprise! How fare the Say’lynt?”

“Very well, thank you,” Harmon replied tartly, “assuming they aren’t killed before they can accomplish their mission.”

Chien-Chu sighed. He should’ve known. His selection had been the correct one, and while Harmon would no doubt deny it, she had turned into the very thing she had once despised. A military officer. He nodded patiently. “The
Nooni
is an old ship, as I recall . . . what would you suggest?”

A number of more senior officers frowned at Harmon’s effrontery but she ignored them. They had careers to consider and she didn’t give a damn. Not about rank anyway. “I want missile launchers, something with a little punch, in case the Hudathans penetrate the fighter screen.”

Chien-Chu established an electronic link with the ship’s master computer, made a lightning-fast query, and nodded his agreement. “It shall be as you say. Four launchers were stripped out of the
Spirit of Ramantha
the day before yesterday. They’re on the way. Say hello to Rafts One and Two for me . . . they help just by being here.”

Harmon nodded, realized that she should’ve said something military, but discovered that it was too late. Chien-Chu had disappeared behind a wall of blue and khaki.

It took three hours for Harmon’s gig to land on the
Invictor’
s flight deck and another thirty minutes to get clear. Traffic was that bad. But she had what she needed and the effort had been worth it. Ensign Hajin saw Harmon’s smile and felt his spirits rise. If the captain felt good, then he did, too.

 

Lieutenant Connie Chrobuck used her glasses to draw a line across the land. The valley, which she had come to think of as
her
valley, was a broad U-shaped affair that had been cut by a retreating glacier.

The surface-to-air missile battery, also known as Delta Base, was dug in about halfway down the valley’s length, where it could command a large sector of sky. It was not located near the supply dump it was supposed to protect, nor did it need to be, since the missiles it fired could engage targets up to a hundred miles away. Although most of the complex was underground, four widely spaced launchers sat on the surface, waiting for targets. Carefully camouflaged radar arrays dotted the surrounding r
idges. Some were real and some had been planted there as decoys. They, along with thousands of others spread out across the planet’s surface, had been networked together by means of a vast ECM-proof subsurface fiber-optic communications network. That meant that what one installation could “see,” the rest could see as well, vastly enlarging the extent to which the surface defenses could be dynamically linked together.

But powerful though the SAM batteries were, they were still vulnerable to both aerial and surface attack, which was where good old foot soldiers came in. Booly’s company had been assigned to defend Delta Base and they were stretched damned thin. The combat company consisted of four platoons. Two were comprised of infantry, one contained a badly mismatched set of cyborgs, and the last had been split between weapons, communications, and support, including intelligence, medical, and some hard-pressed cooks.

Chrobuck had the second of the infantry platoons and was in the process of infiltrating her commanding officer’s perimeter. Or so she hoped. Her mostly Naa troops were masters at moving through this kind of country unseen and had successfully brought her to within fifty yards of the outermost minefield. The explosives were on safety, or so the Pioneers had assured her, but the thought of losing people to an accident was repugnant. Especially after the three days she had spent in Booly’s village, where she had met many of their relatives. Relatives who were counting on
her
to bring their sons
home in one piece.

Though she was of another race, and should have felt awkward and strange, these days spent in the Naa village had been some of the happiest Chrobuck had ever experienced. Starting with Windsweet’s unprecedented welcome, and continuing with the most open-handed hospitality the young human had ever experienced, she’d been pulled into the embrace of a large extended family, which, if it had ever been shy regarding humans, had changed over the last twenty years.

Not only that, but there had been moments with Booly as well, moments when glances said more than words, when hands touched more than they had to, and bodies made surreptitious contact. It hadn’t come to anything and couldn’t come to anything given the nature of their relationship. But it was there just the same, like money in the bank, waiting to be spent.

“Baldy Four to Baldy One.”

Chrobuck allowed herself a frown. Her supershort hair-style had been mysteriously transformed into her call sign. She didn’t know if she liked it, but knew better than to make an issue of it, since that would reveal that she cared. “This is Baldy One . . . Go.”

“We found the command frequency for the crab mines and ordered them to stand down. The next countersweep will identify the glitch ten from now. Request permission to enter. Over.”

Chrobuck absorbed this bit of playacting and made one last sweep with her glasses. She saw nothing out of the ordinary and gave the necessary order: “Permission granted. Over.”

The legionnaires advanced leapfrog style as one four-person fire team dashed forward, dropped to their stomachs, and waited for the next to pass them by. It took eight minutes and thirty-three seconds to make their way through the minefield, reactivate the self-propelled explosives, and start work on the chain-link fence. A variety of detection systems had been designed to protect it, but nothing’s perfect, especially when you know how to maintain and repair it. Which is why half the platoon was inside, and headed for the launchers, when a sentry spotted them and opened fire.
The detuned energy cannon washed them with harmless blue light and a voice came over the command freq.
“Cease fire. Cease fire. The infiltrators have been eliminated. Med check. Med check. Secure from exercise.”

The outcome was somewhat predictable given the fact that everyone in the company knew that an exercise was under way. Still, it served to keep the legionnaires on their toes, which was especially important, given the fact that a real attack was almost certain, with life-and-death consequences for everyone concerned. That’s why Chrobuck heard less complaining than usual as the troopers made their way down into their underground quarters, racked their weapons, and prepared for chow. Chow she couldn’t eat because of the knot that constricted her stomach. The dreams returned when she hit the ra
ck. They were worse than usual and left her tired and nervous.