Legion Of The Damned - 02 - The Final Battle (11 page)

Axler took a sip of her coffee. It had too much sugar in it but she wasn’t about to tell the general that. “I thought he was going to take a swing at me when I insulted his mother.”

St. James nodded. “Yeah, but it had to be done. The Legion needs to look more like the Confederacy that it’s fighting for. That means officers and legionnaires of every possible race. Or combinations of races, assuming the Naa aren’t of human stock themselves, which scientists are beginning to doubt. But we can’t afford hotheads. Lieutenant Riley swore that Booly walked away from a confrontation inside that nightclub but I had to know for sure.”

Axler nodded. “Yes, sir. Well, now you know.”

The general smiled. “I sure do. Now tell me about all the ‘political crap that generals swim in.’ I’d like to know more.”

The colonel checked to make sure the general was joking and they laughed together.

 

The better part of the afternoon was spent out-processing for Clone World Alpha-001. Parker,
sans
arm band and weapon, accompanied Booly through the process. The young officer had thanked the NCO, and tried to release him, but the cadaverous corporal refused to go.

The first stop was a normally quiet area three floors above the Green Room. Normally used for routine administrative purposes, the offices were tem
porarily transformed into processing centers whenever a class graduated from the academy. A sizable number of Boolyʼs classmates were already there, talking, arguing, and trading friendly insults. Booly looked for Kadien and didn’t know whether to be happy or sorry that he wasn’t there. Colonel Axler had been right about the way he’d been manipulated, and the last thing he needed to do was get in a fight with a classmate. But if Kadien said one word, just one word about his race, Booly knew he would wipe the sneer off the other officer’s face.

Habits are hard to break, so the newly minted lieutenants automatically formed six lines and put an arm’s worth of distance between themselves and the person in front of them. Each line terminated in front of a door, and each door had a number stenciled on it. Everyone had heard Riley’s or Kadien’s version of what had taken place the night before and Booly was greeted with hoots and whistles.

“Hey, Booly! Some marines are looking for you!”

“Look! He kept his boards!”

“Bill, good to see you, man, how’s the arm?”

“Hey, shithead, whereʼd they send you?”

A hush fell over the crowd. Everyone knew he’d been to Summary Court and was curious about his punishment. Booly forced a smile and shrugged. “Clone World Alpha-001.”

There were groans, words of commiseration, and a round of the usual clone jokes. But Booly knew most if not all of the men and women around him were secretly pleased. Not because they were bigots but because humans beings like to feel lucky.

Fortunately for Booly, his classmates’ attention spans were notoriously short and conversation soon veered toward the eternal verities of sports, sex, music, and warfare, not necessarily in that order. Booly’s headache had returned, and his arm hurt, but it felt good to be reabsorbed into the wrap and weave of military society. The line moved quickly and Booly found himself standing in front of it fifteen minutes later.

Door number three opened, he stepped through, and found himself in a brightly lit but otherwise unremarkable room. There were no furnishings other than a platform with a frame around it. A vaguely humanoid robot with an olive drab paint job greeted Booly with relentless courtesy. “Welcome to out-processing station three. Please step onto the platform. The platform will rotate. Do not be alarmed. A series of questions will be asked. Please answer in a loud, clear voice.”

Booly obeyed and the platform started to rotate. A gender-neutral voice came from nowhere and everywhere at once. “You have been wounded. With the exception of your wound, are you in pain?”

Booly lied. “No.”

“Do you have bouts of nausea? Blurred vision? Unexplained dizziness?”

Booly had all three but knew why. “No.”

“Do you have regular bowel movements? Have you seen blood in your stool?” And on and on until the questions and the sound of his own replies became a distant drone.

In the meantime a complex tracery of laser beams roamed his body, hundreds of precise measurements were taken, and the resulting information was sent across campus to a series of one-story buildings where an entire set of perfectly tailored class-A, class-B, and utility uniforms were produced, along with body armor, shoes, boots, and a customized side arm. Additional weaponry if any would be issued on-station.

Once that process was complete, and the platform had stopped, Booly was directed to pass through another door. The second room was very much like the first, except that there was no platform, and the resident android had no human qualities whatsoever. It consisted of some tubes, a shiny metal arm that extended from the ceiling, and a sensor-equipped air gun. Like his peers, Booly had been inoculated many times during the last six years and undid his shirt before being asked to do so.

“Welcome to out-processing station three. You will receive a full set of inoculations appropriate to Clone World Alpha-001. If this is not your destination, or you have entered the room by mistake, please say so now.”

Booly remained silent and the computer-controlled equipment picked up where it had left off. “Please expose both your shoulders.”

The sling was a hassle but Booly got the job done. The robotic arm whined as it moved into place and the air gun felt cold against his skin. “Please stand still. The air-injection system will lacerate your skin if you move.”

Booly stood perfectly still, flinched when the gun went off, and braced himself as it was positioned on his wounded arm. The injector fired again, the arm whirred up and away, and the officer checked to see if he was bleeding. He wasn’t. The machine intoned its final blessing. “Thank you, and have a nice day.”

The officer was still struggling to get all of his buttons buttoned as he stepped out of the cubicle and into a room staffed with a real person. The private was twenty-something, reasonably attractive, and immune to Lieutenants. S
he noticed his fur but did a good job of hiding her curiosity. A com set, computer console, and mysterious black box sat on top of her well-worn desk. “Lieutenant Booly?”

“Yes?”

“Please take a seat, insert your right hand into the box, and remain still.” Booly could have demanded an explanation and would have received one but found it difficult to overcome six years of unquestioning obedience. He did as he was told.

The black box hummed, something warm wrapped itself around his wrist, and a tingle ran up his arm. The private looked at her computer, then at him. “Each unit is keyed to a single person. Did you feel a tingling sensation, sir? Good. That was the page function. You may remove your hand. Your orders have been downloaded into your wrist term, along with a copy of your service record, Legion regs, and a few other odds and ends. This booklet covers the operational stuff. Questions, sir?”

Booly withdrew his hand and found that a small flat black box had been attached to his right wrist. It was identical to the units worn by enlisted people except that it had a command channel and more memory. Data that would automatically self-destruct if his vital signs fell below certain limits. Booly touched the case, watched the full-color screen come to life, and saw a five-item menu.

He knew that four of the five listings would provide access to sub-menus but would figure them out later. “No, thank you. I’ll read the booklet.”

The private looked relieved. She hated explaining things to lieutenants. They were so damned stupid. She smiled politely. “Thank you, sir. Have a nice day.”

Booly nodded, adjusted his sling, and walked out into a sparsely populated hallway. Parker was waiting and led him off to get his uniforms and other gear. His career, already tarnished and somewhat in doubt, had started.

 

True to their programming, and eager to carry out their missions, millions of maggotlike microbots burrowed down into the planet’s slowly dying flesh. Most, but not all of the tiny machines dug down through soft, moist earth, followed fissures into the ground, scuttled through subsurface conduits, probed the depths of long destroyed buildings, and communicated their finds via bursts of low-frequency code.

Other robots gathered in remote caves, in damp sub-basements, and at the bottom of lakes, where they electronically mated with one another over and over again until thousands of the tiny machines were linked into what amounted to massively parallel computers, and certain master-programs were brought on line—master—programs that were quite capable of receiving the bursts of low-frequency code and responding with clear-cut orders.

Orders that sent the worker-bots into a frenzy of activity as many were disassembled and reconfigured so they could more efficiently mine the required ore, build the refineries, and construct the factories necessary to manufacture finished products.

Days, weeks, and months passed while the robots worked, and because their labors were carried out beneath the planet’s surface, and because they made no attempt to establish contact with the heavily monitored Hudathan prisoners of war, their efforts went undetected.

Grain by grain, ounce by ounce, and pound by pound the necessary ores were mined, transported, refined, shaped, and manipulated until storerooms began to fill up with a variety of parts. Parts that any Hudathan trooper would have immediately recognized as those belonging to assault rifles, energy weapons, machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars, and shoulder-launched missiles.

And then, hidden in the bottom of a bombed-out building, and supervised by a computer located in the ruins under Black Lake, a team of specially programmed robots went to work. Unlike the assemblies created by their peers, this particular machine would be the only one of its kind. Following designs devised by War Scientist Rimar Noda-Sa, and careful to adhere to the usual standards of quality, the micromachines fashioned what looked like a Hudathan trooper.

Great care was taken to ensure that the resulting robot appeared to be middle aged and undernourished. When the last section of black plasti-flesh had been applied and all systems had been tested, the robot was given a limp to simulate an old war wound, what appeared to be a well-worn battle harness, and sandals similar to those the prisoners made for themselves.

And so it was that in the Stygian blackness of a long-forgotten subbasement a brand-new creation was born, tested, and charged with one of the most important tasks of the upcoming war: to find War Commander Poseen-Ka, or if he was dead, the current commanding officer, and prepare him for a revolt and mass escape. Slowly but surely, with its highly sophisticated sensors probing the darkness ahead, the messenger began its journey.

 

Specialist Third Class Jessica Clemmons frowned, ran a hand through her kinky black hair, and stabbed a key. The computer screen winked, lines of numbers rolled by, and the same old message popped up: “Probability of natural causation .00001.” It was the third time she had run the data and received the same answer.

Clemmons felt vindication mixed with apprehension. The Hudathans were up to something, there was no doubt about that, but would Lieutenant Rawley believe her? He’d been on her ass about one thing or another ever since he’d boarded the
Old Lady
two weeks before. “Clemmons, press that uniform. Clemmons, where’s that report? Clemmons, I see gear adrift.”

The loot was a major pain in the butt. And even worse than that, a
nontechnical
pain in the butt, who was rotating through the Electronic Warfare (EW) section on his way to bigger and better things, and wouldn’t recognize a chip if he found one floating in his coffee. All of which made it damned hard to
explain technical matters to the idiot. Still, her duty was clear, so Clemmons ordered a printout of her findings, checked her uniform for ketchup stains, and wished she was one of the smoothies who could talk birds down from the trees. They seemed to get along with Rawley just fine and received favors as a result.

Very few people said hello or acknowledged the serious young technician as she wound her way out of the EW Ops room and entered one of the
Old Lady’s
busiest corridors. The loot’s closet-sized office was a hundred yards down-ship and shoulder-to-shoulder with other similar cubicles occupied by his peers. Clemmons walked eyes down, careful to salute each officer’s highly shined shoes, but otherwise disconnected from those around her.

Unlike most of the other officers aboard ship, Lieutenant Rawley routinely kept his hatch closed, a habit that forced subordinates and superiors alike to knock and announce themselves. Clemmons stopped in front of the door marked Electronic Warfare Officer, checked her uniform one last time, and rapped on the airtight door three times. “Specialist Third Class Clemmons! Requesting permission to enter!”

Rawley’s voice was nearly inaudible from behind the thick metal. “Enter.”

Clemmons touched the hand plate and the hatch slid out of the way. A single step carried her to the center of the office. It was furnished with a fold-down desk-computer unit and two chairs. Rawley occupied one of the chairs and had no intention of offering the other to her. He was handsome in a pretty sort of way, with a straight nose, large dark eyes, and pouty lips. He arched a perfectly shaped brow. The move was carefully rehearsed and would come in handy throughout what Rawley assumed would be a long and distinguished career. “Yes?”