Legion Of The Damned - 02 - The Final Battle (15 page)

“YOU ARE NOT DEAD. THE FUTURE IS UP TO YOU. YOU ARE NOT DEAD. THE FUTURE IS UP TO YOU. YOU ARE NOT DEAD. THE FUTURE IS UP TO YOU.”

The words went on forever.

Like a dreamer who has experienced a dream before, and knows how it will end, Raksala-Ba felt himself pulled out and up. He wasted no energy fighting the sensation because he knew it would do no good. The red plain was as before, except that a variety of strange shapes and icons had been added to its surface. The voice returned.

“LOOK AROUND YOU.”

Raksala-Ba did as instructed.

“IDENTIFY THE ICON THAT LOOKS LIKE A CYLINDER.”

Raksala-Ba turned and saw a pink cylinder that stood on end.

“GO TO THE CYLINDER.”

“Go to the cylinder?” What in the four devils were they talking about? He was dead and couldn’t “go” anywhere.

Excruciating pain lanced through Raksala-Baʼs mind-body. He screamed soundless obscenities at the voice and sent the same signal that had moved his body. Something happened. Did he move? Or did the cylinder move to him? Raksala-Ba wasn’t sure but the result was the same. He mind-touched the icon and felt something akin to a mild sexual orgasm. The voice boomed in his head. “THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU LEARNED.” Darkness closed around him.

 

Raksala-Ba found himself on the red plain once more. The icons were as they had been. But others were present this time. Dark amorphous bodies stalked the land, their shadows crossing his, their thoughts like static in his mind. They were threatening, dangerous somehow, and he growled in a nonexistent throat.

“YOU ARE PART OF A TEAM,” the voice said. “TAKE ALL OF THE ICONS AND PLACE THEM ON THE EAST SIDE OF THE PLAIN.”

Somehow, without quite knowing how, Raksala-Ba knew east from west. Eager to complete the exercise and get away from creatures around him, the recruit thought his way to a pyramid-shaped icon. It was bright green. He tried to “think” the object across the plain but it refused to budge. A mild electric shock buzzed through his brain. The voice was calm and unemotional: “YOU ARE PART OF A TEAM.”

Raksala-Ba looked around. Some of his fellow beings stood alone but three had gathered around a blue cube. He thought himself in that direction. The closer he got the better he could see. Although the “creatures” had heads, torsos, arms, and legs, all of which added to their somewhat Hudathoid appearance, they were different, too, and had a robotlike aspect. Suddenly the recruit thought to look down at his own body and discovered that he looked as they did. What had been static became language.

“Welcome, comrade. We have been unable to move the cube by ourselves. Let’s find out whether the addition of your strength will prove sufficient. Please join in ‘thinking’ the cube towards the east.”

Raksala-Ba did as instructed but the cube remained where it was. An idea occurred to him. “The voice said to ‘place’ the icons on the east side of the plain. We have bodies now. Let’s lift the cube and carry it across.”

There was a moment of silence as the others considered the proposal, followed by general agreement. They bent at the waist, slid their hands under
the cube, and lifted. The icon proved to be light as a feather and the foursome had little difficulty moving it to the “east.”

Having seen their example, others gathered together, lifted their respective icons, and moved them to where the cube now stood. All were intelligent and understood the lesson: A team can accomplish that which an individual cannot.

Raksala-Ba stood on the surface of a computer-generated planet. The grass, trees, rocks, and other objects were recognizable but lacked detail and definition. The voice was unemotional as always. “YOUR CYBERNETIC BODY HAS BEEN EQUIPPED WITH A VARIETY OF WEAPONS. YOUR RIGHT ARM CONSISTS OF AN ELECTRONICALLY DRIVEN, SIX-BARRELED, FULLY AUTOMATIC PROJECTILE WEAPON. AIM AT ROCK NUMBER THREE AND FIRE.”

The numeral 3 appeared over a distant rock. Raksala-Ba raised his arm and saw a set of cross hairs slide across his mental view screen and pause over the boulder in question. In the meantime, information regarding windage, target density, and a dozen other factors scrolled down the right side of his electronic vision. He thought the word
fire
and felt his arm shudder as simulated feedback reached his brain. Rock chips flew in every direction and the target seemed to go out of focus as a haze filled the air. Raksala-Ba thought the word
stop
and the weapon obeyed. A programmed wind
blew the dust away and the recruit saw that the rock had been shattered and reduced to four or five large chunks. The voice returned:

“YOUR LEFT ARM HAS BEEN EQUIPPED WITH A THREE-PINCER TOOL HAND AND AN EXTERNAL MISSILE RACK. PROVISION HAS BEEN MADE FOR SIX PROJECTILES. EACH WEAPON CAN BE INDIVIDUALLY CONFIGURED FOR ANTIPERSONNEL, ANTIARMOR, OR ANTIAIRCRAFT MISSIONS. ALL OF THESE MUNITIONS CAN BE GUIDED TO THE TARGET IN THE HEAT-SEEKING, ELECTRONIC-ACTIVITY, OR OPTICAL MODES. AIM AT TREE SIX AND FIRE.”

Raksala-Ba brought his arm up, allowed the cross hairs to settle in over the designated tree, and ordered the launcher to fire. The force of the recoil caught him by surprise and pushed him backwards. The missile hit the tree. Bar
k flew and a chunk of wood disappeared, followed by a series of individual explosions. Raksala-Ba jerked as an electric shock stabbed at the tender flesh of his brain.

“YOU FIRED WITHOUT SELECTING WEAPON MODE OR TRACKING PROGRAM. TRY AGAIN.”

Raksala-Ba raised his arm and selected the antiarmor mode with optical targeting. When the missile fired he was braced for the recoil. It flew straight and true. The recruit heard the electronic analog of a sharp cracking noise as the war-head detonated and the tree toppled. He shuddered slightly as a mild orgasm rippled through organs he no longer had. He remembered his body and wondered where it was buried.

 

Like those around him, Raksala-Ba felt nervous. Computer simulations were one thing but real combat was something else. Yes, the hostiles were an inferior race called the Muldag, and no match for Hudathan regulars, much less cyborgs, but the voice had gone to great lengths to explain that the aliens had been equipped with high-quality human weapons, and promised that their eggs would be allowed to hatch if they won the upcoming battle. Raksala-Ba had his doubts about that, but really didn’t care, since a Hudathan defeat would most likely mean death. And, though he had doubted it at first, he
did
want to live. Even if that meant life in a metal brain box.

Others felt differently of course, which accounted for the fact that more than a third of the recruits chosen on graduation day had been killed by the psychological trauma involved, or “excused” from further service by the seldom-seen observers.

The shuttle shuddered as it dropped down through the planet’s atmosphere. Like the other cyborgs who sat knee to knee in the cargo bay, Raksala-Ba was linked with the ship’s sensors and could see the richly green continent rising to meet them, studded here and there with mirror-bright lakes, and bound together with lazily flowing rivers.

The Muldag were a relatively obscure race. They had colonized only two planets in their home system, and had no particular need to find more. That hadn’t saved them from the attentions of a Hudathan expeditionary force however, a force that had taken less than three planetary rotations to defeat what little military the Muldag had and turn their home planet into a combat range.

The target, such as it was, consisted of an already bombed-out city. Having been armed with human weapons, Muldag prisoners of war had been dropped into the area with orders to fight for their lives
and
their unhatched offs
pring. Which was more than sufficient motivation in the minds of those who had designed and would observe the exercise.

Freed from the unpleasant necessity of dodging antiaircraft fire, the Hudathan shuttles made long approaches and zigzagged in towards landing zones located along the city’s western perimeter.

The plan called for each dagger to move inwards, secure designated objectives, and rendezvous on the main plaza, where the shuttles would pick them up. Still linked with the ship’s external sensors, Raksala-Ba felt his heart beat a little bit faster as the trees reached up for the shuttle’s landing skids, and gunfire winked at him from below. Something rattled against the heavily armored hull and he knew it was ground fire.

The shuttle landed with a heavy thump, Commander Naga-Ka gave the appropriate command, and led his fellow cyborgs into a full-fledged ambush. Realizing the Hudathans would have to land somewhere, and knowing the jungle would force them to put down in one of a limited number of clearings, the Muldag had laid thirty or forty ambushes in hopes of killing the Hudathans as they de-assed their transports. And, if Raksala-Ba and his companions had been run-of-the-mill troopers, the plan might have worked.

But Raksala-Ba and his comrades
werenʼt
run-of-the-mill troopers, they were cyborgs, and that made all the difference. Most of Dagger Two’s borgs were hit within seconds of their arrival. Some of what the Muldag threw at the Hudathans was of questionable quality but the rest consisted of human-manufactured armor-piercing rounds and should have cut the landing force to shreds. But it took the cyborgs only seconds to realize that what they’d been taught was true—their armor was proof against anything short of an antitank weapon, or one of the Legion’s quads. That reduced fear to l
ittle more than pleasant tension. The cyborg Hudathans went to work.

Thanks to their sophisticated sensors, the cyborgs had little difficulty finding pockets of heat and electro-mechanical activity in the surrounding forest. Raksala-Ba established a rhythm: Target, aim, select, fire . . . Target, aim, select, fire . . . Target, aim, select, fire.

The ground heaved as salvos of grenades searched for and found Muldag automatic-weapon pits. Leaves rippled and disappeared as bullets tore through them and found Muldag snipers. A tree swayed, then toppled as a flight of missiles locked onto a makeshift antenna and exploded on impact.

But the battle was not entirely one-sided, as Raksala-Ba learned when the cyborg to his right took a shoulder-launched heat-seeking missile directly in the center of his chest and disappeared in a ball of flame.

Raksala-Ba moved more carefully after that, and took better advantage of available cover, but there would be no more than four such deaths during the exercise, which was well within the number of missile-inflicted casualties the observers were willing to sustain. They wanted the newly blooded cyborgs to know they were powerful, but mortal as well, so they would protect the bodies they had been given.

But Raksala-Ba was oblivious to that, and much more interested in the fact that each time a furry brown body fell in front of his weapons, he was rewarded with a mild orgasm. Killing the Muldag became a game, an effort to string the kills together in a long, uninterrupted sequence, so the pleasure never stopped. Others did likewise and it was hard to find enough indigs to make everyone happy.

It took the Hudathans little more than six hours to reach the ancient limestone city and sweep through the already devastated streets. The observers noted that by the time the shuttles landed and the cyborgs climbed aboard, only a handful of Muldag had survived.

And so it was that congratulations were exchanged, toasts were drunk, and the Regiment of the Living Dead won its first battle.

 

The light from the holo table lit Parker’s face from below and made him appear even more cadaverous than usual. Booly had summoned the noncom to one of the ship’s many conference rooms to review the plan by which their personnel would be moved from the spaceport to the fortified control point that was their particular responsibility.