Legion Of The Damned - 02 - The Final Battle

by William C. Dietz

  Although the villa suffered from the same lack of architectural flair common to most structures on Alpha-001, the site made up for it. Set into the side of a heavily forested slope, and located at the top of a sheer two-hundred-foot drop, the veranda looked out over the shimmering surface of a lake. The Founder’s cartographers had blessed the body of water with the designator NE-47/65, but Mosby thought it deserved a name, and was in the process of picking one when Marcus sidled up behind her. His lips found an earlobe and his hands cupped her breasts. “And how is my favorite general this morning?”

  “Fine,” Mosby lied, remembering the morning sickness that had started her day. “And how is my favorite world leader?”

  “He couldn’t be better,” Marcus said warmly, kissing her on the cheek, then moving away. “I have news. News your superiors will want to hear.”

  Mosby felt her heart beat just a little bit faster. “News? What kind of news?”

  Marcus scanned the buffet table, selected some fruit, and forked it onto a plate. “The very best kind of news. The kind the enemy doesn’t know you have.”

  “You’re rotten to the core,” Mosby said petulantly. “Tell or die.”

  Marcus shook his head in mock amazement. “Legionnaires are so violent. I’m surprised the Founder didn’t use your particular genetic line to staff our officer corps.”

  Mosby grinned. “Sure, so you could ruin her plan by seducing thousands of women who look like me. Besides, my parents were ministers, so spill it.”

  Marcus grew serious. “My spy tells me that the Hudathans are preparing to attack a planet called Algeron. That’s a military world, isn’t it?”

  Mosby nodded. “Yes, Algeron belongs to the Legion and represents an important strategic target. We didn’t expect an attack quite so soon, but Poseen-Ka lost the first war there, and will be eager to secure it. May I share the news?”

  The question was a mere formality, and both of them knew it, but Marcus waved a piece of fruit in her direction. “Of course. That’s why I told you.”

  Mosby nodded and left the veranda. She had a secure porta-com in her luggage. The message would be on its way within a matter of minutes.

  The guard, one of an entire company of Jonathan Alan Sebo’s stationed in the vicinity of the villa, watched the limo approach, saw the insignia on the front bumper, and popped to attention. His salute was crisp and professional.

  Fisk-Eight, dressed as a chauffeur, braked the car to a halt. He touched a button and waited while the driver’s side window whirred out of the way. He searched for and found the knowing smile that one servant reserves for another. “Good morning, soldier . . . Alpha Clone Antonio to see Alpha Clone Marcus.”

  Stupid foot soldiers aren’t half as valuable as intelligent foot soldiers, so the original Sebo had been chosen as much for his I.Q. as his physical makeup and well-tested courage.

  But soldiers grow used to orders, especially when they came from well-known authority figures, and Sebo-945 was momentarily confused. The sergeant of the guard, Sebo-612, had made no mention of a high-level visit, yet there was no denying the existence of the driver, the limo, and the bumper insignia.

  Sebo-945 was about to call for assistance when another window whirred down. There was also no denying the identity of the head that poked out. Everyone knew Alpha Clone Antonio and his greasy hair. He looked annoyed. “Is there a problem?”

  Sebo-945 popped another salute. Right or wrong, he would take the chance. “No, sir. Routine security check, sir. I’ll call the villa and let them know that you arrived.”

  The Alpha clone smiled and motioned 945 closer. “Do me a favor, soldier, and don’t notify the house. It’s our decanting day, and I want to surprise brother Marcus.” The leader followed his comment with a wink and Sebo found himself winking in return. “Yes, sir! It shall be as you say, sir. Congratulations, and many happy returns.”

  The Alpha clone nodded politely and disappeared behind polarized glass. The barrier swung up and out of the way, the limo whispered down the gently curving drive, and Sebo made the appropriate entry in the gate log. There was little doubt that 612 would approve of his actions and give him a well-deserved attaboy.

  Sun streamed down through the trees that bordered the veranda and dappled the flagstones with branch-thinned light. Marcus sat gazing out over the lake as Mosby emerged from the villa and took an adjoining chair. He turned, smiled affectionately, and held out his hand. “I’m glad you’re here.”

  Mosby felt his hand close around hers and knew that a better time would never come. She smiled in return. “You’re not the only one with news. I hope you want me here once I tell you what it is.”

  Marcus frowned. Had she received orders? There was a war on, after all, and Mosby was one of the Confederacy’s top generals. Yes, they had allowed her to stay as part of their plan to secure his assistance, but other needs might be greater. “Orders? Did they give you orders?”

  Mosby shook her head. “No, nothing like that, although you may wish that they had. The news is that I’m pregnant.”

  Marcus had known that he’d hear those words one day and wondered how he’d receive them. Would he be shocked? Worried? Frightened? Any such emotions might be appropriate since there would be no hiding her pregnancy, and once delivered, the baby would change the future of his planet. The laws forbidding natural childbirth would have to be revoked, the ties that bound them to the rest of the Hegemony would be forever severed, and the changes that resulted would usher in a new, more democratic form of government. He would be unemployed.

  All such thoughts should have left Marcus depressed, should have sent him searching for a way out, but they had no such effect. An expression of tremendous joy came over his face, he leaped to his feet, and pulled Mosby to hers. Her heart leaped as he danced her around the swimming pool. “That’s wonderful, incredible, joyful news! Will it be a boy or a girl?”

  Mosby laughed, held on for dear life, and felt her worries melt away. “I don’t have the foggiest idea . . . that’s part of the fun.”

  “Marvelous,” Marcus said happily, pausing to catch his breath, “just marvelous. I can hardly wait. When? When will our little surprise be born?”

  “Never,” Fisk-Eight replied calmly, “since both of you are about to die.”

  Mosby spun, reaching for a side arm that wasn’t there. The anarchist shook his head and waggled a handgun in her direction. “That’ll be enough of that, General. Put your hands on the top of your head. And you can save your energy, Alpha Clone Marcus, I have a little black box that can and is jamming your implant’s ability to send. It worked on your brother here . . . so it’ll work on you.”

  Marcus continued his attempts to send on the chance that the man in front of him was lying and felt ice-cold fear trickle through his bloodstream as another Alpha clone stepped out onto the veranda. “Antonio? Is that you?”

  The other man shook his head. “Nope, just one of your trusty backups, out for a little stroll. Nice place, by the way . . . I’ll enjoy it.”

  Fisk-Eight saw a look of realization settle over the real Alpha clone’s face and laughed. “That’s right, Your Clone-ship, all he has to do is wash the grease out of his hair, and presto—a brand-new and considerably more loyal Marcus is born. Your brothers wanted you dead . . . but this will please them even more. Now walk over to the edge of the veranda and climb up on the wall. Let’s see if you can fly.”

  The backup watched his brother back towards the rock wall and the abyss beyond. Here it was, just what he’d always dreamed of, the opportunity to be a real Alpha clone. He remembered the passage of the years, the seemingly endless parade of video clips of Alpha Clone Marcus as he cut ribbons, met with workers, toured factories, attended meetings, and reviewed troops.

  And all he had to do to in order to take control was to assist in his brother’s murder. Of course a real leader would tidy things up by getting rid of the free-breeder female, the anarchist named Fisk-Eight, the gentech called Crowley-Thr
ee, and two or three others, but that would be relatively easy. If he really wanted to rule, if power meant that much to him, if it was worth the price.

  Mosby felt the wall touch the back of her calves. She had already decided that there was no damned way that she would jump off the cliff of her own volition. The baby would die, and so would she, but they’d go down fighting. She measured the distance between herself and the would-be assassin, shifted her weight to her right foot, and prepared to charge.

  Marcus knew his lover would go for the gun and had decided to beat her to the punch. The gunman would kill him, there was little doubt about that, but it would be worth it if she lived. Especially since he had little doubt that once Mosby got her hands on the anarchist, his life would end shortly thereafter. He had already started into motion when the backup threw himself at Fisk’s legs.

  It was a clumsy move, and one from which there would have been little chance of recovery, had the clone been acting alone. But the real Marcus hit the anarchist after that, quickly followed by Mosby, who wasted little time in snapping Fisk-Eight’s neck.

  It took a few moments for the three of them to untangle themselves and stand. Marcus looked at his twin. “Why? It probably would have worked.”

  The backup shrugged. “No offense, brother, but when I thought about the way you live, compared to the way I live, I wasn’t sure which was worse. Life in my apartment beats the hell out of your meetings. Of course there are my organs to consider, but what the hell, you look reasonably healthy. Let’s make sure you stay that way.”

  Marcus laughed, slapped his brother on the back, and turned to Mosby. “Come here, honey . . . I want you to meet your future brother-in-law.”

  24

  You can’t say that civilization don’t advance, for in every war they kill you in a new way.

  Will Rogers

  Standard year circa 1925

  The Planet Adobe, the Confederacy of Sentient Beings

  Drang was bad, but Adobe was even worse, O‘Neal decided as she up-linked to a spy-eye and scanned the surrounding terrain. After the long, somewhat tedious journey from Drang, she had found herself in a new and largely untested body. It was sleek where Trooper IIs were chunky, 25 percent lighter than its predecessor, and 50 percent more lethal. All of which was nice if you cared, which O’Neal did not.

  But if the body under her brain case had become smaller, her role had grown more complex, because in addition to her responsibilities as a squad leader the noncom had five analog bodies to keep track of. Each body, or extension of herself, had a different form and function. A pair of low ground-hugging weapons platforms guarded her flanks, two nearly invisible battle disks hovered overhead, and a serpent-shaped construct lay coiled twenty yards in front of her position. Thanks to new, interactive holo armor, all were nearly invisible from above.

  O’Neal withdrew from the high-altitude spy-eye and looked through her own vid cams. Miles of iron oxide-rich hard pan stretched out towards the point where cliffs dropped into a chasm so deep it made Earth’s Grand Canyon look like an irrigation ditch.

  In spite of the fact that O’Neal and her squad had never been anywhere near the canyon, a great deal of information had been downloaded to her computer, and she had seen video of the river. It was brown with silt and leaped like a thing gone mad as it rushed towards lower ground. It would be five, maybe six days, before the water emptied into Big Salt Lake, from which a good deal of it would eventually evaporate, starting the whole cycle all over again.

  But none of that mattered. What mattered was the fact that a platoon-sized force of killer robots had been programmed to eliminate her squad, and in spite of the high-flying spy-eye, hordes of robotic mini-scouts, and a shitload of fancy sensors, she didn’t have the foggiest idea where they were. A significant problem since the androids had better-than-average AI units and were heavily armed.

  But of even greater danger, to her squad at least, was the fact that O’Neal couldn’t find a reason to care. She was currently rated among the top 5 percent of the noncoms on Drang, but hadn’t made any effort to get there, and was operating more from habit than anything else. She was tired of being scared, tired of being a soldier, and tired of living on the inside of machines. Even new and improved ones. Death, and the ensuing peace, seemed ever more inviting. The only thing that had prevented her from calling for a fire mission on her own position was a sense of obligation to her team and a desire to punish the Hudathans for what they’d done. And the supersecret “Counter Blow” program had the potential to do that. Or so she told herself, but with less and less conviction all the time.

  “Blow,” or “the blow job” as the troops inevitably referred to it, was nothing less than an all-out effort to counter the threat from the Hudathan cyborgs who had done so much damage on planets like Jericho. So rather than strap even more hardware onto aging Trooper II bodies, the brass had decided to create a whole new generation of cyborgs. A “paradigm shift” as they liked to call it, designed to win the war and secure the peace.

  “Which is where I come in,” a voice said in her mind.

  Try as she might, O’Neal had never been able to adjust to the fact that her “symbiotic co-warriors,” as the training holos euphemistically called them, could access her thoughts anytime they wished, although the entity she called “Weasel” was the only one of them capable of articulated thought. She sent one in his direction. “You come when I tell you to come . . . so shut the hell up.”

  The being called Weasel sent a rude thought in her direction but lapsed into silence. Which was just as well, because just as DIs could “zap” cyborgs for disciplinary reasons, O’Neal could punish her mostly nonsentient analogs if they got too far out of line.

  There were five analogs, counting Weasel, and with the possible exception of him, the rest fell into the category of what most sentient races considered to be animals, i.e., creatures more reliant on instinct than cognition. All were trainable, however, and like Terran dogs, preferred to hunt in groups, a trait that was supposed to make them more amenable to operating as part of a team, never mind the fact that “the team” had been jerked out of perfectly healthy bodies and dumped into cybernetic counterparts.

  O’Neal’s fire team consisted of Weasel, a near-sentient tunnel dweller from Zyra II, whose long snakelike body was coiled out in front of her position; Frim and Fram, ground-dwelling carnivores from Myro Major, both of whom had been installed in highly maneuverable tracked-weapons platforms; plus Drapa One and Drapa Two, better known as “One” and “Two,” who were leather wings, had originated on Santos XI, and flew small disk-shaped battle disks.

  Though not as articulate as Weasel, the other four members of the team communicated via unmitigated emotion, and though unable to understand the exact nature of the robotic threat, sensed O‘Neal’s general uneasiness, and were on edge. Knowing that her analogs had hair-trigger “fight or flight” reflexes, the human overcame her negative feelings to broadcast waves of “everything’s all right” comfort. The tension eased a little and O’Neal uplinked to her battle disks.

  The vast expanse of clear blue sky; the sweep of reddish, rock-strewn earth—everything was as it had been before. Or was it? Had those boulders been so close? Or had they been further away?

  One of the things that O’Neal liked about her new body was the fact that everything she “saw” was stored in buffer memory for a period of six hours. The legionnaire made use of that feature by retrieving what she’d seen an hour before and superimposing it over what she saw now.

  The comparison, and the fear the noncom experienced when she saw it, scared the analogs and caused them to gibber in the background. O’Neal sent a warning in their direction, opened the command channel, and zapped copies of what she’d observed to each member of her nine-borg squad.

  “Baker Four to Baker Team . . . the boulders you’re looking at have advanced ten yards during the last hour. I want condition-five readiness starting now.”

  The confirmatio
ns came on the team freq while O’Neal switched to the company push. “Baker Four to Charlie Six.”

  “Go, Baker Four.”

  “I have estimated two-four enemy units two hundred yards forward of my position. They are in-creeping at a rate that should put them on the perimeter at sundown. Request permission to engage.”

  Charlie Six, a DI who was playing the role of company commander, was ensconced in air-conditioned comfort about twenty miles away. He looked at the monitors and grinned. O’Neal was sharp, no doubt about that, but was she foolproof? Meaning, could she deal with a fool, and still do the right thing? He opened his mike. “Permission denied.”

  O’Neal could hardly believe her nonexistent ears. Permission denied? The sonofabitch must be out of his frigging mind! Assuming he had a mind. Was there a real honest-to-God reason for his refusal? Or was this a test of some sort?

  The noncom smiled internally. Maybe Charlie Six had her confused with someone who cared. A plan came to mind. If it worked she’d be free to engage the enemy before they ended up in her lap . . . and Charlie Six could kiss her chrome-plated ass. She sent an image to Weasel.

  It showed him crawling to within fifty feet of the still-creeping boulders. His reply was nearly instantaneous and incorporated some of the profanity he had learned since induction. “Bullshit! The rocks will turn into killing machines and blow my pointy butt off!”

  O’Neal sighed. It would be a long time, if ever, before the Legion got the same unquestioning obedience from Weasel that they expected from bio bods and cyborgs. “Shut the hell up and get your tail out there before I blow it off.”

  The analog obeyed but she could feel his resentment the whole way. The analog’s snakelike body appeared as little more than a fifteen-foot-long heat differential, and even that would disappear as his temperature rose under the direct sunlight. The robots would detect him, of course, but that was the whole idea, and should serve to get things rolling.