Curse of the Legion (27 page)

"Why do they hate us, Moontouch? Why did the Undead attack ConFree?"

"It is because of your evil deeds."

"What evil deeds? What did we do?"

"You betrayed them. It is in every hateful command they direct towards us. We are the willing slaves of the great betrayers, the creatures of the dark cross. That's how they think of you. They hate us for that."

"But what did we do?"

"You redeemed yourselves, with the antidote to the Great White Death. You gave it to them willingly, when you could have withheld it. You became friends and allies of the Undead race. And then you betrayed them, utterly."

"How did we betray them?"

"How I do not know, Slayer. I know only what the Undead have unwittingly revealed to me, in their bitter commands. I can sense…their sorrow, and their hate. They vow to eradicate your kind from the universe."

"Sorrow?"

"For the young. For the unborn. For the future. They cannot forgive you, Slayer. They will pursue you, forever, until your cursed race is extinct."

The young. What the hell did we have to do with the Omni young? I closed my eyes and that intercept thumped faintly in my ears, a message from the O's, delivered in the dark:

Blood blood heart heart side side reach reach touch touch memory memory love love shield shield children children supreme one. Light calm peace eternal one. Duty duty help help touch touch heart heart. Water water promise promise.

Blood ice heart serpent side lost reach lost touch burn memory lost love hate shield sword hatchlings corpse deathlord. Dark cross war eternal one. Duty kill help kill touch kill heart kill. Blood blood false false.

Duty struggle unborn young love sacrifice false hands false love.

Children, children, hatchlings. The unborn young. False love. What did it mean?

"Moontouch. These thoughts…their anger, about the children. Is there any place, that you became aware of, associated with the problem with the children?"

"Yes, my love. Sometimes—most of the time—they burn with hatred for the creatures of the dark cross, and I can hear Crista, Crista, Crista, like an evil heartbeat. Sometimes the world of Mongera seems to be the focus of their hate. But it is always the creatures of the dark cross that are to blame."

Mongera!
The memories swirled around me. All those dead troopers, my own brothers and sisters, Coolhand, Warhound, Ironman, Boudicca, Sassin. Squads Beta and Gamma, sacrificed so that ConFree could live. But we got the O.
Gamma got the O! You put that on my grave, Valkyrie!
Boudicca had said that, a chill whisper, and then died. Our raid on Mongera was years ago, and could have nothing to do with current events. But what was it? The O's had voluntarily pulled out of Mongera, after occupying it for several years. What did it mean? I couldn't get anything further from Moontouch, but it gave me a starting point, at least.
Mongera!

Chapter 21
The Dark Cross

"Decar! Death!" The crash doors of the Phantom snapped open, revealing only darkness outside. I leaped down, and the shock absorbers in my armorite combat boots cushioned the drop on to gritty soil. These were my new combat boots, presented to me by Priestess with all her love. I never did get my bunny slippers but it was probably just as well. I was A&A, guns up, fully armored, all sensors on alert, the inside of my helmet glowing red, safeties off, ready for anything. The rest of the squad was inserting behind me—the tacmap etched into my faceplate showed me everything. It was very dark, thick clouds covering the stars, but I could see the mound ahead, and my tacmap was sketching it out even as I ran towards it. I didn't need the sketch—my heart speeded up just from a glance at the real thing, a huge, brooding, dark, silent earthen mound, terrifying in its mystery and its menace.

"Disperse!" Dragon ordered, and the squad spread out. We weren't sure what to expect but we were ready for anything. I hated these damned mounds. We had fought our way in and out of one on Uldo and it had cost us more than I even wanted to think about. And now this—another mound, this one on Mongera. The O's built these things wherever they went. They were like underground bases, and used for different purposes. According to the tacmap, this one had three levels underground and only one that extended above ground. It was covered in dirt, and as it loomed above us, it appeared to be completely deserted.

"No life detected," Sweety reported.

"Entry team!" Dragon called out. Jo-Jo and Rabies sprinted to the huge armored double door in the side of the mound. It was firmly closed. They affixed the contac charge to the door, ran back, and triggered it. A shattering blast and a white-hot glare announced our presence. Shrapnel whistled around eerily and large glowing pieces of cenite bounced past us.

"Attack," Dragon ordered calmly. We charged into that great open doorway, firing full auto xmax into the dark. I hosed it down thoroughly, the noise setting my teeth on edge. We were in a huge entry hall, now flashing and erupting from the x.

"Cease fire." We stood there in the sudden silence in a fighting arc, wreathed in smoke, looking around the darkened hall. It was burning here and there from the x. My darksight activated.

"Negative life," Sweety reported. There was nothing there—it had been cleaned out of whatever had once been there. The flooring and walls and ceiling appeared to have been burnt to a crisp, and it wasn't us that did it.

"What's the story with the walls?" Dragon asked.

"Look at the deck," Dr. Doom said. "Looks like it was hit with starmass."

"Tourist, stay alert," Dragon said. "If we meet anything here, we're talking with your Manlink first."

"You betcha, sir!" I liked this bunch. Recon Nine Seven, Dragon's squad, was experienced and dependable. I was getting to like them despite myself. I was afraid of getting too close to them, or anyone else. I had lost too many friends, and it hurt too bad.

"You shouldn't open your…" I began, but Gravelight had popped up her faceplate. She ignored me. A pale, tired little girl, she peered into the darkness with tragic big blue eyes, her face framed with wispy blonde hair. Tara had insisted on Gravelight accompanying us. She had proven useful on Mantis, communicating with the Daz'ra, about the O's. And now she was to help us out—tracking down the problem, just like a bloodhound.

"Oh no," she said quietly. "Oh no."

"What's the matter?" I asked.

"They burnt it," she said. "Starmass, yes. The whole base. All of it. They wanted to…purify it."

"Purify it?"

"Yes. A tragedy. A great tragedy. Oh no. Oh no."

"Who burnt it?"

"The O's. They burnt it."

"What for? It was their base. Why did they burn it?"

"They were leaving. Leaving it behind. What a tragedy. Oh…a great sadness. How could they…oh no."

"How could they what?" I insisted.

"How can you think of them like that? They're not monsters. They love, they care, they grieve. They protect their own. Don't we do that too?" She wandered around the great hall, one hand slightly raised, almost as if testing the air. "Oh no. Oh Deadman save us. It's here. Oh no. I don't want to go on. It's going to hurt. It's right here, it happened right here. Oh no."

"What does that mean?" Dragon asked me on private.

"Beats me. The reason they call 'em psychers is they're all psycho, you know that. We'd best check out the whole installation. She seems to think there's something here. Sweety?"

"I detect no life, Thinker," my Persist answered.

"Redhawk, any action?"

"Nice and quiet up here," Redhawk replied from the Phantom, gliding silently and invisibly somewhere overhead like a murderous guardian angel. "Nobody in the vicinity."

"Well, keep watching our perimeter. I doubt we're welcome here."

"Tenners." The situation on Mongera was confused. The O's had left, and the System was rushing back, but not very efficiently. Some of the locals had just declared independence, so it was unclear who was really in charge. We didn't want to ask anyone's permission to examine our mound, hence the armor and weaponry. This mission was vital to ConFree and I didn't want any interruptions.

"All right," I said. "We start with this level and level two, and search them both thoroughly, then head for levels three and four below. I want fast and efficient, gang. All sensors recording. Anything strange or suspicious, take samples. We could be interrupted at any time."

"Sweats, take Seven, Eight and Nine," Dragon ordered, "and do the second level, as planned. I'll take this level. If anyone needs the pscyher, uh, Gravelight, sing out. She's going to walk through every level anyway just to be sure."

"Tenners," Sweats replied. "Rabies, Viper, DD, on me." Now we were on it. I always felt better, when we were taking action. Everything we had learned from our examination of the sketchy record of events on Mongera during the Omni occupation pointed to something unusual that had happened at this particular mound, Mound 29G37 on our sitmaps. We didn't know what it was, but both Moontouch and Gravelight had pointed us towards Mongera as the source of our troubles. And now we were here. I didn't intend to leave without an answer.

###

"Sealed and locked. This section doesn't appear to have been fried too bad," Sweats said. He faced a huge metal vault. It was almost untouched by the starmass which had scorched and melted much of the rest of the installation. We were on the third level by then. The entire installation was pitch black, but we were on darksight and had our spotlights on as well where necessary. We weren't too worried about interruptions. All we were finding was ash and congealed blobs of unidentifiable debris. Starmass didn't leave much, and it looked like the O's had been anxious to annihilate this place from history.

"Sir, it's the psycher," DD reported on the tacnet. "We're on the bottom level, and she's not cooperating. She's kind of…falling apart. You'd better check her out." Doctor Doom was our medic, a very sharp Assidic who should have been able to handle Gravelight without any help from me.

"All right," I said. "Sweats, open it, I don't care how. DD, I'll be right there."

###

When I got there Dragon and Doctor Doom were standing over a very agitated Gravelight, who was huddled on her knees, alternately holding herself and fluttering her armored hands up to her face and back. Her faceplate was still open.

"What's the sit?" I asked Dragon.

"She's gone out of orbit," Dragon replied. "I told her we don't cry in the Legion, but it didn't work. You're the CO. Deal with it." He sounded pretty disgusted. Dragon was a certified hardass.

"What's the problem, Gravelight?" I asked. Her face was all screwed up just like a baby and the tears were streaming down her cheeks. She was sniffling and choking, rubbing her eyes with her armored hands.

"It—it—it was here. Right here!" She gave a kind of strangled yelp, and covered her eyes. "I don't want to go on! I can't! You can't make me! It hurts! Ahhh…it's haw—haw—horrible!" I looked around. We were in a vast, darkened hall and the deck was pitted with scores of dark openings, about a mike deep, that had evidently been starmassed thoroughly. Each opening was rimmed with a mechanism that might have been a covering at one time, but they were all open now, blistered and half melted.

"God! Dear God! Murder! No! No! I—I—I can't! Oh God! Deadman, save me! I don't want this! Please, please, please!" She was twitching, her lower lip was quivering, and her face was deathly pale, covered with icy sweat.

"Kick her ass!" Viper suggested. "We're working, why isn't she? Worthless bitch!" Viper was also a hardass and she evidently wasn't a fan of Gravelight.

"Silence in the ranks," Dragon ordered calmly.

"Gravelight," I said. "You've got to help us. You've got to get a hold of yourself. What happened here? Tell me."

"Bu—bu—but—I want to go home!" she cried in despair.

"We all want to go home, Gravelight. But the evil isn't going to go away. Not until we kill it. And we have to know what it is, first. ConFree depends on you. Only you can tell us what happened here. Now tell me." I reached out and took her hand. I gently pulled her to her feet. She was whimpering and twitching, but she came. I pulled her towards the center of the hall.

"No! Stop! Oh no! Aaah…It hurts! It hurts! They were right here. Here! Betrayal! The dark cross! They came…they killed everything that moved! They were only babies! Babies! No!" She shrieked and the tears came again, but she maintained a death grip on my hand.

"Who came? The dark cross? What do you mean?"

"The…the…the dark cross, they call us. They were…firing…plasma. Into the amniotic sacs. To kill the pupa, to kill the young. Kill the young! They burnt, hopeless, helpless, still in the sac, twitching…no! I can't stand it! The females, they were here too! The females! They died too! They were…to…to take care…of the young. To raise the young, to hold the babies, to love them, the next generation. They wanted a home here, a home, do you hear? Who are the monsters? Who are the monsters here?"

"The dark cross…" I began.

"Legion armor!" Gravelight declared "Lots of them, working very fast, then getting out fast. The dark cross. It wasn't us. It wasn't us!"

A cold thrill prickled over my flesh. "Who was it?"

"Biogens! Unholy, bloodless biogens! Killing machines! The babies were there, in those cribs, in their sacs, and the females were watching over them. Be-be-because they loved them! And they were all killed. Everyone! Who are the monsters? You can't blame biogens!" She burst into tears again.

"Thank you, Gravelight."

"Can I go home now?"

"Yes. We can all go home now."

"Thinker, we've got that vault open on the third level," Dragon said on the net. "You'd best take a look at this."

###

Our spotlights lit up an eerie scene. A rotting corpse lay on a chest-high metal slab in a room that had been stripped of most everything except some bizarre equipment that hung from the ceiling. I didn't recognize it. Our lights cut the room into segments of dark shadows and white-hot glare. We gathered around the naked corpse. The flesh was liquefying. The creature had been riddled with x, and starmass had melted most of the legs. It was so badly decomposed we could not even identify the sex.

"Biogen," Doctor Doom commented, lighting up one of the fiberex bones that showed through the putrid flesh. Yes, there was no doubt—it was a biogen. "This is a body shop," DD continued, "for the O's. That equipment—" he lit up the spidery tools that were dangling overhead "is for examining the patient. And this patient is a biogen."

"Take a look at this," Dragon said. His spotlight lit up a pile of junk in one corner. It was the remnants of an A-suit. A black Legion A-suit, badly shot up but unmistakable.

"All right, gang," I said. "Record everything. We take the body and the armor back with us. DD, I hope you've got a body bag."

"We've all got body bags," he said. "in our toolpaks. The fully camfaxed, all weather, autotemp Model 6 field sleeping bag, fully lined and waterproof. Also useful for when you're killed. I'll use mine." DD had a strange sense of humor.

"Thinker, Redhawk," the tacnet crackled. "There's a, um, a low-flying aircar approaching your position. Kind of nosing around. It looks like cops or military, I can't tell. Want me to erase them?"

"Redhawk, Thinker," I replied. "There's been enough killing here already. How about distracting them? Send them off in another direction, then get back here and extract us. We're about ready, I'll let you know."

"Tenners, can do," Redhawk replied.

"You're getting soft in your old age, Thinker," Dragon remarked.

"Yeah, I guess I am." I suddenly felt tired. Very, very tired.

###

"And that was it," I told Tara. "Redhawk blew away a power station he found not too far away, the cops diverted to check it out, and then he came back and evaced us. Mission accomplished."

"Thank you, Wester." She slumped in her chair as I faced her across the giant conference desk. There were only the two of us in her office. It was night outside, and she had the lights down. It was quiet, and the pale glow of the d-screens softy illuminated us. "So," she said. "We'll await the forensics, but it's pretty much what I expected. The raid on the Temple of the Sun on Asumara was just a dry run for the big one—the raid on the Omni hatchery on Mongera. The first caused the Holy Commune to raid Fortuna, which led to our attack on Asumara and alienated all the Gulf worlds. The second caused the Omnis to attack us, and led to another war, which we could well have lost. Since nobody can really communicate with the O's, it was a brilliant plan. Stupendous gains for the System, serious losses for us. And they didn't even have to fight us."

"And it was the Ormans that did it."

"It was the System that did it. The Ormans just thought it up. 'Let others do your fighting.' Remember that? That was the mission for Galactic Resources. But now, I think what's happened is the Mocains are getting nervous about what they did. It was spectacularly successful, but look at the consequences. The System provoked the Omnis into attacking humanity, again. When they had stopped. That's not going to look too good in the history books, even if it is depicted as an effort to weaken the CrimCon."