The Human Legion Deluxe Box Set 2

by Tim C Taylor

  “Good. It’s important you hold your anxiety within. If the fear is so great that you piss or shit yourself, then you will both lick your posts clean from outer bubble to deck, making sure to get your tongues around every nook in the gun block and suck every last residue of your foul presence out of the harness straps.”

  “I acknowledge, Co-pilot.”

  Their superior laughed. “Relax, vermin. I’ve flown a dozen missions over Europe. Even when the enemy was fresh and well-supplied, they could not see through our cloaking. And now we have reduced them to a rabble of dogs against which even you two worthless ticks shine like gods burnished with fire. To be certain our craft will not be damaged needlessly, we’re flying low under what sensors they have, and slow enough over the water that any ripples we cause will be masked by the choppiness whipped up naturally by the wind.”

  Going slow sounded almost identical to making yourself an easy target, but Mar said nothing and watched the city for threats.

  London had been irradiated by missiles from America, and then shelled into oblivion once the theater artillery brigade had established positions in southern Spain. The endless blanket of gray and white powder made the city seem almost uniform in its lack of features, but here and there, the bones of tall buildings projected from the rubble like the skeletal fingers of corpses.

  The tactical HUD built into the gun bubble insisted that nothing else was in the air. Not even birds. Mar switched half the display to show the main feed from the sensor officer. Now she could see what the humans and their worthless allies were up to on the surface.

  It was curious to see which of the city’s structures had survived and which leveled, but none of the surviving remnants was stranger than the structure they were now approaching. An ancient stone fortification stood guard by the river, and a tap at the display for additional information revealed that this castle had stood there for nearly two thousand years. Half-buried under a ragged assembly of metal and upturned vehicles, and surrounded by Legion anti-air defenses (please let the Pilot be right that their stealthing would hold), the stone walls of a rectangular interior citadel still stood, with cylindrical towers at each corner like booster rockets.

  Her heart leapt – booster rockets…!

  This ancient structure, which her display labeled the Tower of London, was a gantry about which the Legion was constructing a bizarre space vehicle with which to contact their space fleet.

  The hull consisted of concentric layers of military junk that looked like… like primitive compound armor. Most bizarre of all was the empty space at the center of the contraption, as if they’d constructed the outer shell but forgotten the main crew, avionics, and engine sections.

  That empty space… the Drakhnix-Lho would fit that hole perfectly…

  “Pilot! It’s a trap!”

  The hatch to the Drakhnix’s interior thudded shut. Locking bolts slammed into their armored slots. Mar was trapped in a small blister on the outside of a blast door. Even if she survived the encounter with the Legion, the blister didn’t have an independent air supply. After the air ran out, she could secure the helmet to her suit and survive another hour with the suit’s supply. If the pilot was merely toying with her, she might open the door if Mar groveled in a sufficiently amusing way.

  “Pilot…” Mar began but gave up. The pilot had probably shut her up by disconnecting her radio transmitter. Even if she hadn’t, Mar had abased herself so low that she couldn’t lower herself further. She would rather die.

  The pilot’s voice came over the radio. “Sensor officer, report.”

  “Full spectrum images taken. I have all I need.”

  “Good,” said the pilot as calmly as if enjoying a vacation at a warm, underground spa. “Come around. Hold on tight everyone. I’m going to bring our bird around sharply and line up with the river again because even with our cloaking, I don’t fancy our chances flying directly over that castle site. Bombardier, I want two fusion bombs in the water next to the castle. Thirty-second fuses.”

  Through the HUD, Mar saw they were hurtling toward three stone towers standing in the river like stone sentinels, the bridge they had once supported having collapsed into the river. The pilot lined up against the middle tower, jinked right and flew between the two taller pillars.

  As soon as they passed through, Mar knew something was wrong. But what was it? A flicker of movement caught her eye, and through the transparent material of the gunnery bubble, she saw flimsy transparent material flapping in the wind behind them. It had been stretched between the towers of the bridge and they’d flown right through it.

  She saw the ripped material… and if she could see it… Mar drew a deep breath and prepared to scream a warning so loudly that they would hear it inside the ship.

  The pilot beat her to it. “We’ve been seen,” she announced.

  Detection alarm scents unleashed their foul stench even in the gunnery blister.

  “Grab hold of your stomachs,” the pilot warned her crew and then brought a lurch to Mar’s guts as the aircraft’s nose pulled up sharply.

  Through an aft camera view, Mar saw the false façade of the bridge being pulled away to reveal the waiting Fermi cannons which flickered and pulsed at the aircraft.

  The engine silenced. The hum and rattle of atmospheric flight gave way to a serene sense of floating.

  If the Legion had deployed GX-cannon, then Mar and everything around her would have been shredded in seconds. And if the Fermi beams had been given free rein, they would have blown every last piece of electronics to a fiery hell, but they hadn’t. The Legion wanted to disable their craft, not destroy it. They wanted to use it for their own devious purpose.

  “Total systems failure,” said the pilot. Her voice came to Mar through her helmet speaker, not the speaker set into the blister.

  For a stretched moment, the aircraft seemed to refuse to accept its death, continuing its ascent even without power.

  “I can’t open the hatches,” shouted the co-pilot.

  “Remind me to explain the meaning of total systems failure,” sneered the pilot.

  It was only a slight flip in her stomach, but Mar could feel the miniscule instant of freefall… and then the river rose up to claim them.

  Everything happened very quickly. The Drakhnix-Lho’s tail slammed into the waves and bounced off the water, ramming the nose into the river like a heel dug into soft ground.

  In her bubble on the outside of the craft, Mar tried to roll with the impacts and concentrate on the one thing she could do to survive: attach her helmet and get ready to break out.

  While the aircraft pinwheeled along the water’s surface, Mar sealed her suit and switched on her helmet lights.

  Just in time. The Drakhnix came to rest on her back, and Mar was trapped in a murky underwater hell of debris, mud, and rotting corpses of buildings, vehicles, and animals – most of them human.

  Mar was determined she wasn’t going to join them.

  After releasing her harness, she stretched up to the overhead and pulled down on both blister release handles. She heard a dull hiss that didn’t sound right. Normally she performed this operation in space, releasing the blister bubble to allow ammunition resupply while linked to a supply platform via a pressurized umbilical. Nothing happened. Did she need someone on the outside to initiate the blister release?

  No, she told herself. Must have been the water pressure holding in the bubble because when she kicked at the blister, it fell gracefully away, the air quickly displaced by a frothing flood of dirty water.

  Just in time, Mar remembered to grab the carbine and antipersonnel equipment belt from under her seat before pushing off and following the bubble into the water.

  The three beams of light from her helmet pierced the watery darkness, throwing out cylinders of illumination through which bubbles and dirt motes swam randomly before disappearing into the murk.

  She couldn’t make out a thing! The damned lights were worse than useless, so she switched
them off. Made her a target anyway.

  Mar reached behind for the downed aircraft, but there was nothing there! She waved her hands pathetically, thrashing around in a desperate search of solidity in this alien environment, her helmet flooded with the sounds of her own panic. Then her tail found the solid presence of the fuselage and her nerves calmed.

  You’re a Janissary, she reminded herself. Of the hellspewers. Not a mewling human.

  With her eyes now adjusting rapidly to the gloom, she groped around the top of the aircraft, seeking Sho’s position. They’d survived the campaign so far. May as well see it out together.

  As she crested the top of the fuselage, a whining noise made her look out into the river. Something small was darting through the water, very fast.

  She could see them now, boring channels through the water as her helmet lights had so recently, but they weren’t shafts of illumination. Had she encountered a native Earth lifeform? Was it predatory?

  More cylinders reached toward her like searching fingers, whistling as they passed her and pinging against the fuselage.

  Bullets!

  She traced the bullet trails back to their source and saw that she was indeed pursued by predatory Earth lifeforms; the most dangerous of all. A squad of armored Marines was advancing to claim the downed aircraft, humans led by a six-limbed Jotun.

  The Marines were dangerous, but their appearance calmed her. She was a Janissary, a soldier of the New Order, and she had been built for this. Literally.

  She pushed off the fuselage and threw a smoke bomb behind her. It wasn’t primarily an explosive device – but she nonetheless emptied her lungs as best she could and spread her limbs and tail wide in readiness to ride the blast wave.

  A flicker of intense light revealed the underwater landscape in ghastly sharp details. The Drakhnix-Lho was slowly sinking into a maze of upturned building girders, and silt-blanketed vehicles. And everywhere bodies… so many bodies looking up at her in accusation through milky eyes. Had they dived into the water to escape the nuclear fire of the artillery bombardment that had killed London?

  Then the light went out and she was spared the sight. Behind her, the grenade was spewing out thick clouds of opaque pigments, mixed in with false heat and radar targets. The pressure wave reached her, and she rode it to the far side of the aircraft and Sho.

  The two survivors of the hellspewer battery slammed into each other in the water, the presence of an ally making Mar tremble in relief.

  “We need to cover our comrades’ egress,” said Sho over the helmet radio, firing her carbine into the smoke.

  What comrades? Mar bit back on the replies that came to mind. All her comrades but Sho were dead. The arrogant piss-stains inside the aircraft were no more her comrades than the humans. But as Mar added her fire in the direction she guessed the Legion Marines might be, she said nothing. Some fates were worse than death and allowing disloyal ideas out of your mouth was a surefire way to reach the worst.

  The smoke was clearing now. Mar readied a directional flechette grenade to launch at the Marines but doubted it would penetrate their armor.

  Where were they?

  Fear penetrated her suit and stabbed her heart because she was so damned vulnerable. The enemy suits were heavy but were designed to maneuver underwater. Mar’s pressure suit was designed to keep her alive in a vacuum; nothing more. Every movement she made was slow and utterly predictable. And there was no cover.

  Suddenly an intense light from below robbed her ability to look into the gloom. Instinctively, she moved – though that amounted to no more than a clumsy paddle through the water. The light was from a flare, and it was coming from just outside Sho’s open gunnery blister.

  “What are you waiting for?” growled the pilot. “Cover our exit.”

  How? Without knowing the enemy’s position, all Mar would accomplish was to advertise her location so the enemy would concentrate their fire on a worthless auxiliary, but the impulse to obey was stronger than self-preservation. She fired in random directions as first the bombardier emerged, carbine pointing out into the gloom, followed by the co-pilot. Neither of them was firing. They kicked their legs and swam away from the fading flare and the aircraft as fast as they could.

  Lights appeared in the water, an ethereal blue glow like watching eyes. The sight was strangely beautiful yet sent a deadly chill up Mar’s tail, because she knew precisely what was generating them – the horrifying needles that the Legion Marines spun into a blur at the ends of their carbines. The glowing needles that churned fur, skin, and bone into red paste.

  Fighting back the terror, Mar made herself sniff out the goodness in the situation – finally, she had a target!

  Mar lined up the shot, but Sho slapped the carbine’s barrel away from the lights and waved her tail in negation. Duty and reason warred within Mar. She couldn’t run… couldn’t abandon the crew even if maybe the pilot had intended to murder her. But they could not hope to survive a fight with Legion Marines. Underwater, it was doubtful their weapons could ever penetrate the enemy’s armor, and they were about as agile as a lump of lead.

  It was only when a line of grenades thrown by the crew made Mar’s head ring that she accepted their crewmates were as good as dead. None of the blue lights so much as faltered at the grenade attack. They relentlessly closed in on Sho’s blister, and the crew fired back with everything they had… to no effect.

  Mar and Sho swam for their lives, ignoring the brief screams as the needles turned the river red.

  ——

  Mar flopped, exhausted and dripping with fetid water, out of the ventilation shaft and into the dryness of the ceramic-lined tunnel.

  Sho was already through, using her helmet lights to examine the human writing on the wall.

  “London Hypertube,” said the former infantry officer. “Tower Gate Station. Wokmar, this is the underground mass transit system. It’ll be heavily shielded from EM pulses and radiation. It’s our safest bet. We’ll hide out there.”

  “Desert? No, that would be madness.”

  “Would it? Twice now we have survived when our betters all died. That is not a good record. Our executions would not be gentle affairs.”

  The gunner auxiliary was right and the knowledge that they had run out of alternate strategies had a strangely calming effect. Mar felt propelled on a wave of cool logic down the narrow tunnel of the only choice that remained. “Very well, we shall become outlaws. Let us seize this opportunity to survive today. Tomorrow’s challenges can look after themselves.”

  Sho gave a nod of appreciation. “You speak well, Wokmar.”

  Wokmar. To hear her full name once more… A little strength returned to the gunner’s limbs. With that brief sound through her throat, Sho had handed Wokmar her life back. No matter that they were hiding like rats in these hypertube tunnels, she was whole once more. Her elation stuttered when a thought struck for the first time.

  “Sho, your name… do you have a missing syllable too?”

  “My correct name is Shocles Phane-Elphix.”

  “And it is true… that you were an officer?”

  “I commanded an infantry brigade, but one day I was insufficiently careful in concealing my contempt for Tawfiq.”

  Sho the auxiliary scum… Wokmar recalled the way she had treated her inferior, when all the time the gun team’s auxiliary was rightfully a brigadier.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, Wokmar. Such thoughts are not helpful. For now, call me only Shocles. Rank no longer carries meaning to us. We are equals and we must cooperate if we are to survive. Agreed?”

  “Very well, Shocles.” She took a deep breath, but it didn’t calm her. “I agree these tunnels are an excellent place to keep us safe, but others will have come to the same conclusion. If they are human, then our noses will smell them long before they see us. Nonetheless, we must be cautious.”

  “Are you scared, Wokmar?”

  “I wish I were, but I’m too exhausted. Let us survive
for today, Shocles. Do not overload me with your analysis and questions. You are not my officer.”

  “Well said.” Shocles slapped her tail against Wokmar’s.

  Careful to make as little sound as they could, they advanced into the hypertube station, sniffing for danger with every step.

  — Chapter 55 —

  “How did the gremlins’ tests go?”

  Indiya’s heart froze another degree colder on its way down to absolute zero. Arun’s words were neutral enough, but the absence of hope behind them rang clear as a bell, even across the entangled comm link connecting her cabin on the flagship orbiting Mars to her friend trapped beneath the Earth in the ever-shrinking European pocket.

  She needed Arun’s hope desperately. Without it, she couldn’t function.

  “Indiya? Do you copy?”

  “Sorry… the tests. They failed. The New Order barrier is wreaking havoc with our comms and sensors, but we can see they have been launching crude orbital defense platforms at an astonishing rate. They’ve already forced our vessels back to the safety of Luna orbit and could have blasted our test probes to atoms but chose not to. They wanted us to know our tests would fail.”

  “Typical of Tawfiq,” said Arun, and bizarrely a glimmer of hope was once again behind his words. “She doesn’t just want to win, she wants to enjoy humiliating her enemies. And that is her perpetual weakness. We might have proven one way through the barrier didn’t work, but we did gain data from the experiment. Right?”

  A tear bulged at the corner of Indiya’s eye, quickly ballooning in the micro-gravity until she could no longer see. Tawfiq was predictable but so too was Arun. The essential implication of the test failure was that his insanely dangerous idea of punching a downed New Order craft through the barrier to waiting Legion ships was the best option they had. In a few hours, Arun would take the jury-rigged craft up through the gauntlet of Tawfiq’s orbital defenses, and he would do so because the Legion was desperate. But Arun didn’t see that. He saw only that Tawfiq had made a mistake – that they had won some useless fragments of data. Even after the war had ground away so much of his body and his spirit, his love of risk taking and his psychotic levels of optimism could still occasionally bubble to the surface, as if Arun McEwan were still a boy at crèche.