Legion Of The Damned - 02 - The Final Battle

by William C. Dietz

  “Oh, yes you do,” Mosby replied confidently. “It has to do with the way free breeders reproduce. No labs, no test tubes, and no syringes. We just say what we feel, strip off our clothes, and have honest-to-goodness sex. Sometimes we do it for fun and sometimes we do it to make babies. Surprise babies that don’t necessarily have a gift for any one thing. And that’s the fun of it, Marcus, not knowing and waiting to see. So what do you think? What would our baby be like? Would she be a politician like you? A soldier like me? Or something else altogether?”

  Marcus knew that free-breeder sex led to chaos, knew that what Marianne suggested was wrong, but couldn’t help himself. He reached for the topmost metal button, pushed it through the buttonhole, and started down a path from which he could never return.

  Fisk-Eight turned the corner, stopped to look into a shop-front window, and used the reflection to check his back trail. He’d always been careful but never more so since the narrow escape from the apartment building. The off worlders had come very close to neutralizing his entire cell and his escape aboard the unicycle had been more a matter of luck than skill. There was no doubt of the fact that they had been betrayed, and betrayed at the highest levels, since the location of the safe house had been a closely guarded secret, known only to those who lived there, and a tiny handful of high-level cadre.

  Fisk checked the reflection one more time, assured himself that it was clear, and headed down the street. He was an average-looking man who had gone to great lengths to look even more so, a task made easier by his even features, light brown skin, and nondescript clothes.

  But in a society made up of millions of look-alike soldiers, technicians, laborers, teachers, and cops, and less than a hundred anarchists, Fisk stood out as much as any free breeder would have, and had to fight for his anonymity. A check? Put in place by the Founder to make sure that her homegrown revolutionaries never got out of hand? There was no way to be sure.

  The clone turned into an alley, walked twenty feet or so, and slipped into a doorway. He waited five minutes for a tail to appear but none did. Satisfied that it was safe, he touched a carefully concealed button, stepped out into the alley, and continued on his way. Cameras hidden under the eaves of nearby buildings swiveled, captured his image, and fed it to a nearby control room. Fisk-Three saw it, confirmed his brother’s identity, and was waiting when Eight took a sharp right-hand turn and descended a short flight of stairs.

  Fisk-Eight waited for the steel fire door to slide open, stepped into a small metal-walled room, and heard it close behind him. A full minute passed while he was X-rayed, weighed, and retina-scanned. Eight felt no resentment, no impatience, because security was of the utmost importance. The final door slid open and Three stood waiting to greet him. They embraced. “Greetings, brother.”

  “Greetings . . . I rejoiced at the news of your escape.”

  Eight held his sibling at arm’s length. “Thank you. Fisk-Twenty was not so lucky. A sniper shot him through the head.”

  Three nodded grimly. “The free breeders will pay. As will the sympathizers who coddle them. Come, I will show you the progress we have made.”

  Eight followed Three down a hall, through a door, and out into a carefully sealed warehouse. The windows were located high above the concrete floor and painted black. Smoke drifted through the light provided by six ceiling-mounted fixtures. There, supported by a maze of scaffolding, and served by a crew of androids, was an eight-foot-tall Trooper II. Or what looked like a Trooper II, since the fabrication of a real cyborg was way beyond the amount of technological-biological expertise that the Fisk brothers could bring to bear, or needed to bring to bear, considering the fact the machine had never been intended as anything more than an elaborate disguise. Three had been working on the project for the better part of a month and hurried to explain.

  “This baby is a lot slower than a real Trooper II, which can reach speeds of fifty mph over relatively flat terrain . . . but that won’t matter where our application is concerned. The electronics are important, though, especially the radios and the transponder.

  “As with the real thing, this machine has a fast-recovery laser cannon in place of its right arm and an articulated fifty-caliber machine gun where its left arm should be. I had hoped to obtain real surface-to-surface missiles for the shoulder launchers but haven’t been able to steal any. The replicas will pass any but the most detailed inspection.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Eight said reassuringly, “you’ve done a remarkable job. Given the fact that the machine will be part of the presidential guard, the laser cannon and machine gun will be more than adequate. I look forward to using both on the free-breeder president and his Hegemony sympathizers.”

  Three frowned. “I mean no disrespect, brother Eight, but I built the machine, so I should have the honor of taking it into battle.”

  Eight pretended to take the matter under consideration. The truth was that he had never for a moment intended to operate the machine himself. Yes, it was true that the person who killed Anguar, and thereby destroyed any chance of a Confederacy-Hegemony alliance would be venerated for hundreds if not thousands of years to come, but it was also true that he would be dead, a condition that Eight wanted to postpone as long as possible.

  Eight thought it was particularly interesting that while physically identical, his brother and he were so different where certain key attitudes were concerned, and theorized that it was due to the different environmental stimuli they had experienced while growing up. He had grown up largely on his own, while Three had been reared in a state-run school, where he had been heavily indoctrinated. He did his best to look peeved.

  “Well, if you insist, but it hardly seems fair. I’ve been working towards the same goal, after all . . . and that should count for something.”

  “And it does,” Three said soothingly. “I’ll make explicit mention of your contribution in my report.”

  Your last report, Eight thought cynically, soon to be filed. Externally he nodded his head agreeably, followed Three to the place where an android was testing a leg servo, and listened politely as Three went on. His sibling was an idiot but he couldn’t help but feel cheerful. In a relatively short period of time, days at most, President Moolu Rasha Aneuar would be dead.

  16

  And bow begat bow, and cannon begat cannon, and missile begat missile. Such is the lineage of war that each generation of weaponry is copied by the enemy and added to the inheritance of death.

  Hoda lbin Ragnatha

  Turr Truth Sayer

  Standard year 2201

  Planet Drang, the Confederacy of Sentient Beings

  O’Neal stepped out into the main channel and leaned into the oncoming current. The water pushed hard, but her Trooper II body weighed half a ton, and pushed even harder. A quick check of her sensors confirmed that the squad had followed her lead. They were blips on her heads-up targeting system and spread out to lessen the effect of an ambush. First came Yang, followed by Tyler, Hata, and Verbeek, with Khyla on drag. She had the unenviable job of walking backwards most of the time, guarding against an attack from the rear.

  O’Neal listened to her servos whine as she forced her way through the oncoming water. Her readouts informed her that the river was flowing at a steady five mph, that the visibility index was seven on a scale of ten, and that the ambient temperature was 52°F.

  The cyborg knew that an attack if any would almost certainly come from upstream, which would allow the frogs to ride the swift-flowing current and rake the patrol as they swept by. There were alternatives of course, like wading through the maze of stagnant channels that paralleled the river, but that meant forcing their way through knee-deep mud. A fate worse than a frog harpoon.

  With that in mind, the squad leader kept to the right side of the river, where the current was weaker, and took full advantage of the relatively firm footing offered by the gravelly bottom. Depth varied as the cyborg moved upstream. Her headlike brain box broke the surface occasiona
lly, providing glimpses of the river up ahead and the triple-canopy jungle that obscured the sky. Not that it mattered much, since it was pouring down rain, and almost as wet as being in the river. It was a crappy way to make a living, and only slightly better than being dead, which was where she’d been when the medics had jerked her back.

  They said the odds against a meteor holing a habitat and doing significant damage were millions to one, but that hadn’t stopped one of the little buggers from hitting the High Stakes IV at about thirty miles a second, punching a hole through the triple-thick hull, shooting the width of a large gaming room, and burying itself in the far bulkhead.

  O’Neal, who had been hired to deal blackjack, and show a bit of leg, remembered klaxons, a strong wind that snatched the cards off her table, along with anything else that was loose, and sucked the whole mess through a hole that had appeared on the far side of the room.

  People screamed and ran for the door. Like the rest of the casino’s staff, O’Neal had been through intensive safety instruction and knew exactly what to do. She stepped in front of the hatch, held up her hands, and shouted for calm. A dozen panic-stricken customers charged her. A ham-sized fist hit her chin and she went over backwards. The crowd stampeded over her body, crashed into the automatically locked doors, and screamed as more people collided them from behind.

  The safety systems worked of course, just as the ship’s architect had promised that they would, and sealed the puncture within the legally mandated five minutes, which was why most of compartment’s occupants survived. But three people, O’Neal included, were killed. Killed, and brought back to life, if they would accept life as a cyborg, if they would serve the Legion, and if they made it through basic training.

  Life over death had seemed like an easy choice at the time, a real no-brainer, but O‘Neal wasn’t so sure anymore. Not after eight long years on pus balls like Drang, fighting every kind of weirdo geek the Confederacy got into an argument with, while living in an artificial body. No, it wasn’t much fun, and given the chance to make the decision all over again, O’Neal knew she might go the other way.

  The attack came from the one direction the frogs had never used before . . . above. In spite of the fact that everyone had seen the beehive-shaped mud huts that lined certain riverbanks, and knew that the indigs were amphibious, they had assumed things wouldn’t change. And they were wrong.

  Bubbles exploded as mottled green-black bodies splashed into the river and allowed the current to carry them downstream. O’Neal barely had time to transmit a warning before she was locked in combat. “Frogs! Dropping from above! Backs to the riverbank and don’t shoot each other!”

  Outside of the fact that they had webbed feet, the indigs didn’t look like frogs at all. They were skinnier, for one thing, with snakelike heads and long, willowy limbs. Their arms terminated in three-fingered hands that lacked the opposable thumb common to many bipedal tool-users but had skin-covered-bone spurs that served the same purpose.

  O’Neal saw that the first one was armed with the usual gun runner-supplied harpoon launcher and a wicked-looking belt knife. The frog brought the weapon up, grinned a toothy grin, and fired. A stream of bubbles trailed the spear as compressed air was forced through its tiny propulsion unit.

  O‘Neal’s on-board computer identified the threat, acquired the target, and requested permission to fire. The cyborg provided mental authorization and felt the recoil as a pair of mini-torps left her shoulder launchers and sped away. The left one found the incoming harpoon, exploded, and neutralized the threat. The second weapon homed on the frog, followed the creature through a series of evasive maneuvers, and ran up its ass. The explosion was muffled and felt like a mild nudge. A curtain of pulverized frog drifted downstream, wrapped O’Neal in a bloody embrace, and was pulled away.

  O’Neal felt an unexpected weight land on her shoulders. An indig had dropped from above and was busy sawing on her neck seal. A primitive but potentially lethal strategy. First, because of the fact that no one was supposed to get that close to a Trooper II, second, because her weapons-heavy arms weren’t capable of reaching behind her head, and third, because joint seals were the softest and most vulnerable spot in her duraplast anatomy. Given a sharp knife, and a sufficient amount of time, there was a very real possibility that the warrior would cut its way through.

  O’Neal turned, backed her way into the riverbank, and tried to rub the indig off. It didn’t work. The frog’s long, slender legs made good anchors and it was tough. The cyborg needed help and needed it fast. She triggered the radio. “Red leader to red team . . . I have a rider . . . and can’t peel it off. Coming your way.”

  Cybernetic bodies were expensive, so the men, women. and computers that had put the Trooper II design together had been careful to establish bionic linkages between the legionnaires’ brains and their electro-mechanical bodies. That’s why O’Neal felt pain as the frog managed to cut through the first layer of the neck seal. The flashing red light that appeared in the upper left-hand comer of her vision was both redundant and unnecessary.

  The cyborg swore as her right foot hit a rock and threw her head over heels downriver. Perfectly content to be underwater and upside down, the indig continued to saw.

  Yang had killed a frog by breaking its neck and was waiting as the noncom tumbled in his direction. Unlike O’Neal and some of the others in the company, he liked killing geeks. His psych profile described it as “. . . a typical displacement phenomena, common to military cyborgs, in which the subject hopes to reclaim some of their lost humanity by killing as many non-humans as possible.”

  Yang felt what would have manifested as a grin on his original body and launched himself out into the current. It took a moment to sort out the intertwined bodies but Yang managed to wrap an enormous arm around the frog’s neck and started to squeeze. The warrior, obviously still hoping to kill one of the monsters, continued to saw. Yang squeezed harder. The threesome hit a large water-smoothed boulder and bounced off. “Don’t worry, Sarge . . . I’ve got it.”

  O’Neal was surprised and somewhat alarmed to find that she wasn’t worried, and, if it hadn’t been for the pain, would have been almost disinterested in the outcome. So she died . . . so what? What difference would that make? To her or anyone else? Maybe death would end the loneliness and the terrible sense of isolation.

  But it was the frog who died, choked to death by Yang’s relentless arm, and released into the current.

  By the time O’Neal was freed the attack was over. Most of the frogs had been killed but a few had managed to escape downstream.

  Khyla had taken a harpoon in a major subprocessor and had lost control of her right arm and all of its weaponry but everyone else was okay.

  O’Neal moved her to the middle of line, ordered Verbeek to take the drag position, and cautioned the squad to keep their sensors peeled. The noncom didn’t think the frogs had the command and control structures necessary to lay sequential ambushes, each attack driving the squad into the next, but she hadn’t figured them for a vertical attack either, and had been lucky to escape with only light casualties.

  It was a long, hard slog back to Firebase Victor and relative safety. “Relative” because the Confederacy base had been built on a platform that stood over a lake teeming with frog warriors. At night anyway, when they liked to serenade the legionnaires with eerie hoots, and long nerve-wracking screams.

  The patrol was still two miles from base when O’Neal called in. “Red Leader to Victor Six. We’re coming in.”

  The voice belonged to a bio bod nicknamed “Zits,” after the condition of his skin. “Roger that, Red Leader. Camerone is . . .”

  “The place where Danjou fought and died,” O’Neal replied automatically. The pass phrase had always seemed a bit silly, especially in light of the fact that no one had ever heard the frogs speak a single word of standard without benefit of an electronic translator, but the major was a stickler for procedure, and based on experiences earlier in the day, rig
htly so.

  The patrol climbed up and out of the river, swept the surrounding jungle for signs of an ambush, and trudged around the boulder-strewn outflow. The lake was large and calm. The never-ending rain made thousands of overlapping circles for as far as the eye could see. Firebase Victor was a dimly seen gray smudge a mile and a half out. Beacons flashed on and off, signaling its location to the shuttles that came and went. Some of the legionnaires were critical of the location, sitting as it did over a large body of frog-occupied water, but O’Neal disagreed. The lake provided and maintained a natural free-fire zone that would have been impossible deep in the jungle. They waded in and soon disappeared.

  The lake bottom was muddy, which was why the Legion had laid down miles of elevated matting that radiated out from the platform like the arms of a starfish. The indigs destroyed pieces of the walkways every now and then, but the maintenance bots had always managed to repair them, so the game went on.

  O’Neal fought the temptation to focus her underwater floodlights straight ahead and swept them left and right. The water was thick with silt, free-floating plant life, and other, less identifiable debris. The spots reached twenty feet out where they were lost in the surrounding gloom.

  The problem with the walkways was that the indigs could lay ambushes to either side of them with the almost certain knowledge that a patrol would come along eventually. Of course that advantage was lessened to some extent by the fact that the Legion’s tireless aqua drones identified 96.2 percent of such ambushes before they could be sprung.

  Still, O’Neal had no desire to fall into one of the 3.8 percent of the ambushes that weren’t detected, and kept her sensors cranked to the max, a policy that resulted in any number of scares as dimly seen fish glided by, but was necessary nonetheless. Nothing happened and the march was uneventful.