The Human Legion Deluxe Box Set 2

by Tim C Taylor

  Number 3 gun had fired 17 rounds in just under two minutes, most of which were still en route to join the fire lighting the roof four klicks away.

  Job done, now it was time to hightail it out of there. Knopf unscrewed the stabilizers anchoring the gun platform to the roof, and unglued the buffer gel. When the battery was ready, the captain gave the order and they moved to a new firing position, frustrating any defenders who had been rolling back Gamma Battery’s firing trajectories to calculate counter-battery fire.

  Knopf clung onto the gun platform’s handhold and tried not to shut his eyes as the Bomb flew the gun up, threading it through the deadly jumble of fallen towers and down to a new location, another space cleared by the Marine Engineers about 800 meters to the west of the initial position.

  They survived their hop without further casualties, and from the new firing position, the battery delivered on what was its original objective: direct fire support to a battalion of the 87th Assault Marines, who were now heavily engaged with enemy infantry. The Assault Marines had intended to probe a gash cut through the roof of the habitat, but now defenders were spilling out and a familiar rumble shook the ground beneath the gun line – heavy gravitic motors. Tanks!

  The major was there with the Assault Marines, as were the human observers and surveillance drones of ‘A’ Echelon, which meant the targeting information would be good.

  This is where we earn our due, thought Knopf with a warm swell of pride. No one else could do this.

  Gamma Battery, 2nd Aerial Artillery, performed like a perfectly calibrated machine. ‘A’ Echelon fed a steady stream of accurately updated targeting data to the ‘B’ Echelon gun line that sent a steady 12 rounds per minute into the enemy, switching from melter rounds to corrosive to high explosive without missing a beat. And all the while, ‘C’ Echelon made ammo resupply in a hostile environment look easy.

  Knopf wasn’t sure what was going on over on the rooftops, but he guessed their fire support at first halted the enemy counter-attack, and then turned the gouge through the roof into a much larger opening. Anything that survived what they were putting into that hole had to have supernatural defenses.

  They kept firing and Knopf didn’t like what that was doing to the gun barrel. “HC3,” he reported, meaning the gun was approaching critical heat. The gun’s heat sink absorbed the bulk of the recoil energy, but its ability to cool the barrel was more limited and it was on the verge of warping. That was bad enough; worse was the knowledge that guns were never meant to reach the heat critical state, because in theory, the gun would have been destroyed by counter-battery fire before that point was reached.

  Knopf looked at the gun crew. If they had pinched faces and deep frowns inside their helmets, it didn’t interrupt the steady rhythm of reloading and firing.

  Gunny Zinelli knew what his gun crews were thinking before they did. “Keep it up, my gammas. Battery Captain says we are the ones that’s winning this battle. I don’t care if your weapons are glowing white, keep firing!”

  It took two more shots of corrosive rounds before disaster struck. The sound of an explosion spun Knopf around. He expected to see the barrel had burst, but that would have been wonderful in comparison to what he did see – the residue of an explosion, about 15 meters beyond the rightmost gun.

  The shell burst wasn’t one of theirs.

  “Move out!” screamed the Gunny.

  Knopf fumbled at the gun controls, unscrewing the stabilizers and unsticking the buffer gel beneath the gun platform.

  “Come on!” he shouted, as the enemy fire rapidly upped its rate from an occasional burst to a constant bombardment.

  His battlesuit AI had just enough time to estimate that they were being subjected to 50 rounds a minute when Knopf was blown high into the stinking, rusty air and clear of his gun. In a daze, he scrambled to his feet and raced back to Number 3, dimly aware of ominous warnings from his suit’s medical diagnostics. He reached three paces before he fell headlong.

  “Let her go,” said the Bomb.

  Knopf looked behind him and realized that the bombardier had tackled him to the ground.

  “We’ve done our job,” she told Knopf, “and so have our guns. Let them go.”

  The enemy bombardment had concentrated on the guns, but were now widening their barrage. The battery’s inert shells waited patiently for the gun crews, blown across the firing position but engineered to only explode when their fuses gave the correct fire instruction. The guns though – they were tangled debris.

  “Come on, Knopfy,” urged Evans. “I always said you were too in love with the length of your weapon.”

  Beneath the wafer-thin humor, Knopf heard the well of hurt and shame Evans felt at losing their piece. He scrambled to his feet and raced to join the rest of ‘B’ Echelon who were jumping up and into a nearby fallen walkway. As he ran, he glanced over at ‘C’ Echelon to see if they needed assistance, but they were already spiriting away ammunition for use by the rest of the regiment.

  The 40-odd survivors of Gamma Battery regrouped in the half-melted walkway, which was listing at a 30-degree angle. Knopf tried to ignore the charred corpses, the wrecked interior, and helped Bomb to gather the remnants of Number 3 crew, while at the same time keeping an eye on the approaching enemy.

  They were Gliesans, hundreds of them, whose naturally evolved gliding ability had been enhanced by a lightweight exoskeleton that massively enhanced their wing muscles. These Gliesans could not only fly, they could also carry mortars and box after box of bombs to satisfy the mortars’ rapid fire rate. It was these mortars that had killed the battery’s guns, and now the Gliesans were advancing to take possession of their vacated firing position.

  The gun crews had lost their pieces, but weren’t defenseless. All the while they had served the guns, their assault carbines had been clamped to the back of their battlesuits. The 2nd Aerial Artillery Regiment was part of a Marine division, and everyone from a novice gunner to Major-General Ling, the CO, had been born with an SA-71 in their little baby fingers.

  The battery had entered the walkway through a hole blasted out of its side. Knopf joined the others in firing back, putting two darts through one about to fire its mortar. That only brought a temporary respite as bombs burst all around the entrance, and shook the top of the walkway.

  Lieutenant Parker led Number 3 crew and two other gunners to race up the walkway to scout out the interior and establish a firing position higher up. Luckily the next room along had exterior windows that served as gun ports, and interior ones with a view of the hole they had entered through.

  The Gliesans took to the air like a swarm of deadly insects. The carbine fire from Gamma Battery was devastating. At close range, even spray and pray took its toll of the huge and unarmored Gliesan wings, but those downed Gliesans could still crawl through the cover afforded by the debris of the battlefield, and kept up a constant fire upon Gamma Battery. Meanwhile, those with undamaged wings had landed on the walkway and established themselves farther up, posting snipers around the vicinity. In a contest against an enemy who could fly, height was not your friend.

  And while Gamma Battery was engaged in a desperate struggle for its survival, a portion of the Gliesan unit who had seized the battery’s gun line was using their own firing position to rain mortar bombs down on the Marines of the 87th.

  The Gliesans were everywhere. Windows became invitations for the enemy to shoot inside. They could appear at any place at any time. Only the lightness of the Gliesan weapons, and the strength of the Legion battlesuits delayed the inevitable.

  But help was on its way, or so thought Knopf’s suit AI, which painted shadowy figures in his head-up display, crawling toward the Gliesans like ghostly beetles. When he switched off the AI enhancements, the figures disappeared, but the distinctive way they clambered and hopped was instantly recognizable as Marines in powered armor.

  A series of grenade blasts blew thoughts of a rescue out of Knopf’s mind and sent his body clattering dow
n 30 meters into the room below.

  Gamma Battery gathered together their survivors and fought a spirited withdrawal, moving deeper into the walkway until finally the way down was blocked. At the end, they kept the Gliesans at bay by firing grenades up the walkway until their supply finally ran out.

  But the final assault to finish off the gunners never came. Instead, Knopf heard the sounds of the Gliesans fighting farther up the walkway, until soon those sounds died away to be replaced by shouts of: “Freedom shall be won!”

  The battle for Australia had barely begun, but when the company of Assault Marines from the 87th met the survivors of Gamma Battery, the shattered walkway echoed with shouts of jubilation as if the campaign for freedom was finally over.

  Knopf slapped a corporal on the back. “Thanks for coming back for us.”

  “No problem, pal. Our lieutenant says you’re to tag along with us now.”

  “Guess we’re all riflemen now, eh, Knopf?”

  Knopf looked over and saw Battery Captain Jones standing beside him, arm hanging uselessly by his side, and an SA-71 cradled in the other.

  “No shame in that, sir.”

  “Well said, Lance Bombardier. No shame at all. Now, let’s follow these fine people and go find the Battery Commander, while we’re about it. I expect Major Schneider has been wondering where we’ve gotten to.”

  — Chapter 35 —

  “Master, I beg to report with heart-shattering sorrow that the Gliesan counter-attack in Area 217 has been repulsed. The enemy has breached the upper levels.”

  General Deeproot-Steadfast did not need to look up from her station to know that Staff-General Ndjaek would be rippling its foul-smelling skin in supplication to its master, but then the obsequious Friokebi were always sycophantic buffoons around the mutant masters. The moment its master was gone, Ndjaek would show its poison-tipped fangs in dealings with the other vassal races.

  “No matter,” replied the mutant master. His voice hissed with sibilance, which meant the figure in the command throne had taken his thoughtful form: slime coated, and his back a writhing mass of tentacles. “I had asked the glider troops to buy me fifteen minutes. They won me thirty. They did well.”

  This ridiculous performance of sycophancy and dominance made Deeproot-Steadfast’s fur itch. In all of its physical forms, the mutant master had the mental ability to coordinate the activity of scores of subordinates simultaneously, and indeed was doing so with his staff officers. The groveling, the imposing throne finished in polished bone – supposedly taken from the skeletons of favored slaves – and forcing all in his presence to speak aloud in the language native to this moon rather than use far more efficient machine translators – all this was but an act. A performance of dominance. And out there on the battlefield, brave soldiers fought and died for their mutant masters, because long ago their worlds had been forced to sell their distant ancestors as the mutants’ price of protection against the even worse fates possible in this hostile galaxy.

  Razor-sharp claws flicked from the tips of the general’s rubbery digits. She retracted them, praying the master had not seen anger get the better of her.

  The general’s display screen went blank, to be replaced by a simple but empty message box. Deeproot-Steadfast’s ears flicked back tight against her head as the message text eventually began to scroll lethargically into view.

  “Is there a problem, General?”

  The author of that death sentence did not need to sign his name.

  An overwhelming sense of calm overwhelmed Deeproot-Steadfast, a sign that her hormone-effector implants were preparing her for her fate. The life of a slave soldier could be grim indeed, she told herself, even for a Jotun. But hers had been better than most, and she had retained at least a semblance of honor.

  The general rose from her station, walked in front of the throne, and bowed, careful to ensure the protocol of keeping her head lower than her waist. “Master?”

  He could hear Staff-General Ndjaek hissing in amusement.

  “Rise, General,” commanded the master.

  The Jotun general lifted her head and looked into the face of her superior. The mutant had changed into a slender form, almost stick-like. She suspected the master chose the form that most humiliated his subordinates. He was two paces away, and his body so fragile in this mode. A second was all it would take to close the distance and rip the creature’s head off with her strong Jotun arms.

  But she knew she would never harm her master. If she made the attempt, she would be dead before ever reaching the seemingly fragile creature. But what bound her even more completely than the futility of an attack, was the foreknowledge that she would never be a danger to the mutant masters. The foreseers did not see every detail of the future, but they would surely see a rebellion, even an ineffectual, personal one. If there were futures in which the general acted treasonously, then she would have been executed long ago, and the repercussions of her punishment would be terrible in their severity.

  As they did in so many matters, the masters had twisted the foreseers’ ability to see the future into an unbreakable grip on the present. Against such power, no resistance was possible.

  The master taunted her with his weakness for a moment before changing to a more aggressive form: red-skinned and hugely muscled. There was no apparent transition from one form to another. The transformation was as instant as it was inexplicable.

  “How is your wound healing, General?”

  Deeproot-Steadfast felt an echo of pain along her left side where the grenade blast had caught her, in a training exercise of all things. “Healing is on schedule, master.”

  “You look fit for duty to me. I’m giving you back your old command. Relieve the CO of the 32nd Marine Army and send her back here to take your place. The enemy are preparing their second wave of attacks. The 32nd will draw this second wave down through the upper levels. You will conduct a convincing fighting withdrawal that will nonetheless fail. And when the enemy senses you are beaten, and advances with renewed vigor, then I shall activate the coil defense to trap them here until our reinforcements can destroy them piece by piece.” The master mutant’s eyes narrowed and yellowed. “I see you forgot to wear your battlesuit, General. Try not to die too quickly, but do make sure to die. Now, leave me!”

  She bowed and backed away before hurrying as best she could to comply. Her mind was so engrossed with the practical details of leading her command one last time, that when she saluted Senior Staff General Scrutineer-Vigilant on her way out, she almost failed to notice the general’s flared-back ears.

  Was that a sign of anger, or sympathy? And if Scrutineer-Vigilant had such disloyal thoughts in her head, why had the foreseers not seen them long ago?

  Deeproot-Steadfast cast this distracting puzzle from her mind. Such intrigues were for others now. Her fate was set.

  — Chapter 36 —

  “Promise me one thing,” said Remus when the volume of enemy fire pinging off the Lynx’s nose shield grew to a whining crescendo. “Janna?”

  The Wolf huddling beside him in the lee of the mini-tank’s protection flung Remus an angry glare, the combat rage adding a demonic red glow behind her green-and-gold-flecked eyes that illuminated the interior of her breathing mask.

  “Promise me you’ll stay alive,” he insisted. “For Romulus.”

  Janna struggled to regain the power of speech. The berserker craze was almost upon her. “Don’t confuse me,” she snarled. “That’s how to stay alive – by being myself. He’s dead, anyway.”

  Remus shook his head. “No, I’d know if Romulus were dead. I don’t mean a fraternal connection that I would tell if it ever severed. I mean every time I push for answers, the authorities always evade. If Rom had been killed–”

  “Shut up and look around!”

  Remus bit his tongue. Janna was right: this was no time to discuss Romulus. With a start, he realized that nerves were making him babble. As a former squadron leader, he had fought in many battles, but
this was the first battle he’d fought on foot.

  He also wasn’t used to being out of the command loop. The recon drones were blasting away at the enemy defensive position, where the road turned up ahead before descending down to the next level. What were their probes revealing? As a private soldier in the 7th Armored Claw, such information was now far above his pay grade. Were they about to charge the enemy, bloodcurdling battle cries of the Wolves echoing off the ceiling? Or were they about to pull out?

  With the last of the New Empire’s outer perimeter mopped up by the Lynx machine gun turrets, the scene calmed. But when Remus looked around at the Wolves, he knew withdrawal was impossible by this point. The 7th Armored Claw was like a powder keg with a fuse already lit and about to blow.

  Like many of their generation of the Human Marine Corps, the Wolves were originally bred and engineered to be a terror weapon, but even the geneticists who had designed them couldn’t have imagined how the weapon they had built would combine with the Ginquin skin parasite. It had been a freak accident. Romulus and Remus had been infected by a mother Ginquin who had nuzzled them as babies. When the brothers with their taller physiques, clad with muscle, had grown to be young men – virile youngsters surrounded by admiring young Wolf women, who were not shy about taking what they wanted – the parasite began to spread throughout the Wolf population. Soon, it became a badge of identity, and a ritual of infection was formalized for those Wolves who hadn’t shared rack time with the right people.

  All around, Wolf soldiers with wild eyes and bared teeth strained at the leash. Many of them went sky clad, stripped to the waist to better display the colorful zigzags and whorls of their armored skin. Many would fight naked if they could, but even Wolves had vulnerabilities in their groins and the soles of their feet where the armor was weak, and they needed equipment boxes, rations, and the breathing masks to guard against the Flek’s poison.

  The Wolves most eager for the fight began to edge away from the protective cone of the Lynxes’ shields. A salvo of missiles screamed around the corner and exploded overhead, showering the walls in fragmentation bursts. Those who had strayed from the protection of the Lynxes suffered the most, blown along the ground by the shockwaves. Peppered with shrapnel, they nonetheless shook their heads and picked themselves up. Most of them, anyway.