Legion Of The Damned - 01 - Legion of the Damned (23 page)

Niber-Ba clasped his hands behind his back and swept the audience with his eyes.

“You have done well. Time and time again you have looked death in the eye and stared it down. And thus it shall be one more time. Not two, three, or four more times, for there is no need. One overwhelming blow will be sufficient to crush all resistance, to seal the humans in their rocky tomb, to eradicate the menace that they represent. With that in mind I will commit
all
of our ships, and
all
of our fighters, to the next attack. Our robo-spies are cruising the surface of the asteroid even now, and the moment that their reports have been analyzed and cross-checked, we will attack.”

A sharp-eyed psych officer felt the confidence flow back into those around him, saw them swell with pride, and seized the moment. “A cheer for Ikor Niber-Ba! Long may he command!”

The cheer was part shout, part war cry, and it shook the ship’s hull metal with its power. Niber-Ba felt it, was lifted by it, and was immeasurably cheered. No one could stand in the way of warriors like these. No one.

 

Seeger waited for the other cyborg to get into position, grabbed his end of the steel I-beam, and lifted. It, like the fifteen others before it, would be used to reinforce the railgun’s basic structure. In order to launch six star divers, and do so in a relatively short period of time, all would have to be positioned and ready to go. That was why Leonid Chien-Chu had ordered his workers to build a complicated framework over the point where the ramp met the asteroid’s rocky surface, and why Seeger, along with three more of the Legion’s cyborgs, was lending a servo-assisted hand.

If the launcher was about to become a cannon, then the framework was a magazine, feeding full-sized spaceships into the chamber like bullets into a gun—spaceships that would put a lot of stress on the ramp as they were fired in quick succession.

Seeger followed the other borg down the side of the railgun’s s support structure and paused when she did.

“Are you ready?” Her name was Marie and she’d spent more than a thousand imperials to have her voice synthesizer reprogrammed to sound like that of a famous pop singer, which allowed her to pick up the odd credit or two singing in bars. Lots of guys had hit on her, hoping to score through a dream box, but none had succeeded. None that he knew about anyway.

“Yeah,” Seeger replied. “That’s a roger.”

“Okay.”

Marie looked upwards towards the point where the bio bods were working to weld the steel supports into place. Laser torches burped blue-white energy, headlamps bobbed up and down, and a latticework of crisscrossed 1-beams divided the star field into a maze of squares and rectangles. She switched from the Legion’s utility channel to the frequency used by everybody else.

“Ground here. You guys ready for some steel?”

A male voice answered. “That’s a roger, babe. Send it up.”

Marie’s voice was sweet but ice cold. “My name isn’t ‘babe,’ butt hole, and here comes your steel.”

Marie bent at the knees, Seeger did likewise, and both straightened together. Unrestrained by gravity or an atmosphere, the I-beam soared upwards.

Someone—Seeger wasn’t sure who—grabbed the beam and pulled it in. At that exact moment, as a laser torch lit the scene with a whitish-blue glare, something round drifted by. It moved slowly, deliberately, as if it had every right to be there, which it might, for all he knew. Yet something bothered him. A similarity between the object and what? Then he had i
t. Float pods! Like those on his native Elexor! Like those the Hudathans used during their attacks. Seeger tracked the device while keeping his voice light and casual.

“Marie, meet me on F-5.”

Marie turned his way, curious as to the reason for his request, and switched to F-5. It was a combat frequency, scrambled both ways, and theoretically secure.

“What’s up?”

“Remember the float pods? The ones the geeks use every once in a while?”

“Who could forget? I was there when one of those things cooked Salan in his own brain box.”

“Well, it’s payback time. Look upwards, to the left of the railgun, drifting right.”

Marie looked. A bio bod would have seen little more than laser torches and headlamps, but the cyborg was equipped with sensors, and once she knew where to look, had little difficulty separating the globe from the metal around it. Thanks to her infrared sensors, light-amplification equipment, and on-board processing capacity, the globe looked much as it would have in broad daylight. With one small exception, Seeger was right.

The target was a killer pod, all right, except that it had a lot of what looked like sensor housings rather than weapons turrets, and had a flat-black finish.

That suggested a spy-eye, or the geek equivalent, and meant the device was capable of blowing the whole plan out of the water. One look at the information it would bring back would be enough to let the Hudathan commander know what the humans were up to.

“You were right. Seeg. It’s a robo-spy sure enough.”

“We need to grease that thing ... and do it quick.”

“How ’bout Lieutenant Umai?”

“Get serious. It’d take the loot a full hour just to pull his thumb out of his ass. Let’s nail the little sonofabitch while the nailin’s good.”

“That’s a roger,” Marie agreed. “But we can’t shoot at it from down here without hitting the railgun or a bio bod. Let’s climb.”

Seeger nodded. “You take the right ... I’ll take the left.”

“Roger that.”

Both of the cyborgs began to climb. Seeger made good time. The combination of handholds, light gravity, and his, own strength made the task relatively easy. Light flared from above as the welders continued their work. The cyborg felt his body temp start to soar as sunlight hit his back.

It was a trade-off—one of many the tech types had made while designing the Trooper IIs—cooling capacity for weight. The result was a cybernetic body that had the capacity to move a little faster than it otherwise would have, but a marked tendency to overheat during prolonged combat or
exposure to direct sunlight. Cooling systems had been developed to deal with the conditions found on hell worlds, but Seeger didn’t have one.

A readout began to blink in the corner of his video-generated, computer-enhanced vision, and then, to make sure that he got the point, pain was fed directly into his brain. Pain that was little more than a throb to begin with, but would soon grow and transform itself into a red-hot poker that seared its way to the center of his mind and forced him to respond.

It was a safety system, a built-in way to make sure that cyborgs took care of their expensive bodies and conserved the empire’s valuable resources. The only trouble was that it might keep him from reaching the robo-spy, from killing it, and that would cost a great deal more.

But those that had designed the system were elsewhere, working in the safety of their laboratories or eating lunch in their subsidized dining rooms, unaware and uninterested in the impact that their decisions had on people millions of light-years away.

Seeger grabbed the I-beam above his head, pulled himself up, climbed to his feet, and looked around. Marie was at the same height about seventy feet away. She pointed upwards and between them.

The robo-spy slipped into a shadow and rose along a vertical beam—a beam that supported the recently built structure that would feed star divers down onto the rails, where they would be launched like missiles towards the enemy fleet. The situation had just gone from bad to worse.

The cyborgs climbed with renewed energy. They had to get a clear shot at the robo-spy, had to destroy the device before it could escape and report to its masters.

A pair of bio bods were welding a joint directly above him. They turned, sunlight gleaming off their visors, as Seeger swung a leg over the crossbeam and pulled himself up. He nodded, jumped for the next crosspiece, and did a chin-up.

Pain lanced through Seeger’s brain as the temp reading on the rear portion of his armor hit 150° F. The techies were trying to defend the body they’d given him, trying to control him from their nice safe laboratories, trying to kill Marie and all the rest. That was the price of failure, the price that thousands of legionnaires had paid before him, the price known as death.

Seeger gritted his nonexistent teeth and pulled. Pain did its best to roll him under, servos did what they were told, and he gained the topmost piece of steel. Light bounced off metal and tried to spear his vid cams as the massive shape of a star diver moved his way. A pair of yellow strobe lights marked the positions of the small one-person tugs that had attached themselves to the spaceship like so many leeches and were pushing it into place.

“Seeger! Look!”

The voice belonged to Marie. She too had made it to the top of the structure and was pointing to her left. The robo-eye had se
en the star diver and was lurking in the shadow cast by a vertical I-beam while it watched the proceedings. It was roughly halfway between them, and neither one needed any prompting to move towards it.

There was no response at first, as if the robo-spy was so engaged in gathering intelligence that it had ignored everything else. But that was not the case.

The mini-missile caught Marie in the abdomen, exploded, and blew her in half. Though lightly armed compared to the float pods the cyborgs had encountered before, the robo-spy still had teeth.

Seeger responded with missiles of his own and a blast from his energy cannon. The resulting explosion lit the entire railgun for a fraction of a second and was extremely satisfying. Marie’s voice jerked him back to reality. Although her body had been blown in two, her braincase was intact, slowly falling towards the asteroid’s surface.

“Look! The robo-spy launched something!”

Seeger swore. The other borg was right. A small container, the size and shape of a standard tennis ball, had been flung free of the explosion and was accelerating away. There was little doubt that the globe contained the robo-spy’s memory, headed for home.

Seeger brought his laser cannon up, switched his sensors to full mag, and tried to see what they showed him. His temperature reading had soared to 163° F by now. At about 170°, major systems would start to fail. The pain was so intense that it felt as if his head would explode.

Lieutenant Umai was yammering in his ears. “Seeger? What the hell are you doing up there? No one authorized you to fire. Get your ass down here so the old man can boil it in oil.”

The ball soared, sunlight glinted off its polished skin, and the cyborg adjusted his aim. Lead it ... lead it ... lead it ... fire!

A line of blue light reached for the memory module, touched it, and caused it to explode.

Seeger saw the hit, gave thanks, and allowed the pain to roll him under.

The wheels of war turn slowly and grind many lives beneath their weight.

Mylo Nurlon-Da
The Life of a Warrior
Standard year 1703

 

 

 

 

 

Another one-hour-and-twenty-one-minute period of darkness had begun. Two warriors, one of whom was Windsweet’s brother, marched in front of Booly, while two more brought up the rear. The guards were there to make sure that Booly showed up for the council meeting. It would be embarrassing if he didn’t and Hardman was in no mood to take chances.

The warriors held torches aloft. They made a circle of light and produced a pungent smoke. The legionnaire inhaled some of it and was forced to cough.

An opening loomed ahead. Booly saw that the rock around the tunnel’s entrance had been carved to resemble the mouth of a mythical beast. What looked like razor-sharp teeth ran across the top, fangs curved down along both sides, and a tongue bulged out into the ravine. It looked real in the flickering light produced by the torches.

The legionnaire had never come across this spot during his wanderings and wondered how that was possible. Did the Naa cover the tunnel with some sort of camouflage netting during the day? There was no way to tell.

Shootstraight and his companion mounted a series of stone steps, stood on the beast’s tongue, and waited for Booly to join them. A warrior shoved him from behind and he stumbled forward.

The tunnel was oval in shape and the floor was smooth from use. Vertical grooves had been cut into the walls to simulate the inside of the beast’s throat. The temperature dropped as they moved inwards and water slid down along the stone walls.

Booly saw that the reddish-brown liquid was captured by the grooves, channeled into gutters, and drained through holes drilled for that purpose. Holes made with primitive hand tools and a lot of sweat. The system was careful, logical, and, like most plumbing, completely nonthreatening.

So why did fear come bubbling up from some primordial source? Why was his throat so dry? And why did he have an almost overwhelming desire to look over his shoulder?

The answer was simple. The beings who had enlarged and perfected the tunnel so long ago had imbued the stone with a part of themselves. Booly felt as if they were all around him, their eyes peering from dark crevices, their work-thickened fingers ready to close around his throat.

Shootstraight turned. The torchlight reflected in his eyes.

“Watch your step.”

The warning came just in time. Booly shifted his weight and stepped downwards. The stairs were broad, cut from solid rock, and worn towards the center.

The legionnaire wondered how long the steps had been there and how many feet had trod them. The tunnel felt old, very old, and might have been there for a thousand years.

A current of warmer air touched Booly’s face. There was a deep booming sound reminiscent of the Legion’s kettledrums. It came at evenly spaced intervals, like the beating of an enormous heart, and added an even more ominous note to his surroundings.