“The cause I speak of is even greater than freedom, for without survival, freedom means nothing.” There was scattered applause and Chien-Chu waited for it to die away.
“Many of you have heard rumors that the Hudathan fleet is headed this way, that they mean to crush Algeron, before taking the inner planets. I am here to tell you that those rumors are true, that we are gathered on the eve of a great battle, and that everything we care about is on the line.”
Some of the officers nodded soberly, others exchanged glances, and the rest stared straight ahead. They knew many would die and wondered if they would survive. Chien-Chu knew what they were thinking and responded to it. “President Anguar wanted to be here, wanted to be at your side when the battle was joined, but was overruled by the joint chiefs. Even if we lose here—and I pray we won’t—the battle must go on. But my staff and I will stay, and while most of us are better at firing off memos than rifles, we can sure as hell make coffee.”
The laughter served to relieve the tension and Chien-Chu gave silent thanks as he used his highly enhanced vision to pan the forty-second row. Most of the officers were smiling or talking to their neighbors.
Someone shouted: “Let’s hear it for the admiral!” Three huzzahs rang out, each louder than the last. Conscious of how critical morale would be in the coming battle, and cognizant of the fact that he wasn’t likely to elicit a better response than the one he already had, Chien-Chu brought his speech to a close.
“Thank you, not only for the cheers, but for your courage. This is the last time we will be able to assemble like this. Take what you heard, what you felt, and what you know back to your units. Tell the sentients under your command what’s at stake. They will carry us to victory.”
The applause was thunderous and lasted a full three minutes. Finally, after it died down, the officers stood and shuffled towards the doors. Most were cheerful, or as cheerful as they could be given the circumstances, but there was at least one exception. Captain Cynthia Harmon, commanding officer of the warship D’Nooni Dai, had a frown on her face. Because while all the rah-rah stuff might be fine for the others, they had something to shoot with, and with the exception of six bolt-on energy weapons, her ship was unarmed. A problem she planned to remedy.
Harmon put on her most determined “don’t mess with me” expression, plowed into the oncoming crowd, and fought her way towards the stage. A group of high-ranking officers had gathered around Chien-Chu and were trying to impose their individual agendas on him when the marine biologist shouldered her way through the outer circle. “Excuse me, General, sorry, ma’am, thank you, sir . . . I need a word with the admiral.”
Seeing her, and glad of an excuse to escape the gold-braided trap that he found himself in, Chien-Chu produced his best plasti-flesh grin. “Captain Harmon! What a pleasant surprise! How fare the Say’lynt?”
“Very well, thank you,” Harmon replied tartly, “assuming they aren’t killed before they can accomplish their mission.”
Chien-Chu sighed. He should’ve known. His selection had been the correct one, and while Harmon would no doubt deny it, she had turned into the very thing she had once despised. A military officer. He nodded patiently. “The Nooni is an old ship, as I recall . . . what would you suggest?”
A number of more senior officers frowned at Harmon’s effrontery but she ignored them. They had careers to consider and she didn’t give a damn. Not about rank anyway. “I want missile launchers, something with a little punch, in case the Hudathans penetrate the fighter screen.”
Chien-Chu established an electronic link with the ship’s master computer, made a lightning-fast query, and nodded his agreement. “It shall be as you say. Four launchers were stripped out of the Spirit of Ramantha the day before yesterday. They’re on the way. Say hello to Rafts One and Two for me . . . they help just by being here.”
Harmon nodded, realized that she should’ve said something military, but discovered that it was too late. Chien-Chu had disappeared behind a wall of blue and khaki.
It took three hours for Harmon’s gig to land on the Invictor’s flight deck and another thirty minutes to get clear. Traffic was that bad. But she had what she needed and the effort had been worth it. Ensign Hajin saw Harmon’s smile and felt his spirits rise. If the captain felt good, then he did, too.
Lieutenant Connie Chrobuck used her glasses to draw a line across the land. The valley, which she had come to think of as her valley, was a broad U-shaped affair that had been cut by a retreating glacier.
The surface-to-air missile battery, also known as Delta Base, was dug in about halfway down the valley’s length, where it could command a large sector of sky. It was not located near the supply dump it was supposed to protect, nor did it need to be, since the missiles it fired could engage targets up to a hundred miles away. Although most of the complex was underground, four widely spaced launchers sat on the surface, waiting for targets. Carefully camouflaged radar arrays dotted the surrounding ridges. Some were real and some had been planted there as decoys. They, along with thousands of others spread out across the planet’s surface, had been networked together by means of a vast ECM-proof subsurface fiber-optic communications network. That meant that what one installation could “see,” the rest could see as well, vastly enlarging the extent to which the surface defenses could be dynamically linked together.
But powerful though the SAM batteries were, they were still vulnerable to both aerial and surface attack, which was where good old foot soldiers came in. Booly’s company had been assigned to defend Delta Base and they were stretched damned thin. The combat company consisted of four platoons. Two were comprised of infantry, one contained a badly mismatched set of cyborgs, and the last had been split between weapons, communications, and support, including intelligence, medical, and some hard-pressed cooks.
Chrobuck had the second of the infantry platoons and was in the process of infiltrating her commanding officer’s perimeter. Or so she hoped. Her mostly Naa troops were masters at moving through this kind of country unseen and had successfully brought her to within fifty yards of the outermost minefield. The explosives were on safety, or so the Pioneers had assured her, but the thought of losing people to an accident was repugnant. Especially after the three days she had spent in Booly’s village, where she had met many of their relatives. Relatives who were counting on her to bring their sons home in one piece.
Though she was of another race, and should have felt awkward and strange, these days spent in the Naa village had been some of the happiest Chrobuck had ever experienced. Starting with Windsweet’s unprecedented welcome, and continuing with the most open-handed hospitality the young human had ever experienced, she’d been pulled into the embrace of a large extended family, which, if it had ever been shy regarding humans, had changed over the last twenty years.
Not only that, but there had been moments with Booly as well, moments when glances said more than words, when hands touched more than they had to, and bodies made surreptitious contact. It hadn’t come to anything and couldn’t come to anything given the nature of their relationship. But it was there just the same, like money in the bank, waiting to be spent.
“Baldy Four to Baldy One.”
Chrobuck allowed herself a frown. Her supershort hair-style had been mysteriously transformed into her call sign. She didn’t know if she liked it, but knew better than to make an issue of it, since that would reveal that she cared. “This is Baldy One . . . Go.”
“We found the command frequency for the crab mines and ordered them to stand down. The next countersweep will identify the glitch ten from now. Request permission to enter. Over.”
Chrobuck absorbed this bit of playacting and made one last sweep with her glasses. She saw nothing out of the ordinary and gave the necessary order: “Permission granted. Over.”
The legionnaires advanced leapfrog style as one four-person fire team dashed forward, dropped to their stomachs, and waited for the next to pass them by. It took eight minute
s and thirty-three seconds to make their way through the minefield, reactivate the self-propelled explosives, and start work on the chain-link fence. A variety of detection systems had been designed to protect it, but nothing’s perfect, especially when you know how to maintain and repair it. Which is why half the platoon was inside, and headed for the launchers, when a sentry spotted them and opened fire. The detuned energy cannon washed them with harmless blue light and a voice came over the command freq. “Cease fire. Cease fire. The infiltrators have been eliminated. Med check. Med check. Secure from exercise.”
The outcome was somewhat predictable given the fact that everyone in the company knew that an exercise was under way. Still, it served to keep the legionnaires on their toes, which was especially important, given the fact that a real attack was almost certain, with life-and-death consequences for everyone concerned. That’s why Chrobuck heard less complaining than usual as the troopers made their way down into their underground quarters, racked their weapons, and prepared for chow. Chow she couldn’t eat because of the knot that constricted her stomach. The dreams returned when she hit the rack. They were worse than usual and left her tired and nervous.
All of the company’s cyborgs were housed in the same bay. There were eight Trooper IIs, a pair of quads, and one Trooper III, although O’Neal and her analogs occupied the same amount of space normally devoted to three T-2s, a fact that had attracted the not-so-desirable attention of a cyborg known as Cassidy. O‘Neal and her analogs were still getting organized when he swaggered over. All the gloss had been sandblasted off his armor, there was a patch where a high-velocity slug had torn through his pelvic area, and he boasted four hand-lettered tattoos. One was located in the middle of his chest at what would be eye level for most bio bods. It read Machines Rule. Looking at the words, and realizing how much smaller her latest body was, O’Neal felt more than a little intimidated. His words didn’t help.
“Well, look what we have here, a brand-new kind of freak, complete with assistant freaks. Animal warriors, I wonder what’s next? Cybernetic fleas?”
Except for the quad on the perimeter, and a pair of Trooper IIs that were out on patrol, the rest of the cyborgs were present. They laughed, not out loud the way bio bods would, but on channel 3, the frequency where most off-duty conversations took place. O’Neal sighed. It was funny the way human nature worked, the way bullies still acted like bullies, no matter what happened to their physical bodies. The fact that Cassidy was something of a freak himself made the whole thing even more absurd. She looked up into the other cyborg’s vid cams. “Save the histrionics for newbies, Cassidy, I’ve been around too long to take shit off the likes of you.”
Cassidy turned to his left, and O’Neal thought he was about to walk away, when he whipped right again. The spin kick came with mind-numbing suddenness. It was much faster than specs called for, suggesting that Cassidy had paid for some of the highly non-regulation battle mods she’d heard about. It gave him an unexpected edge, the kind that might work fine for a while, but could fail as well, leaving the cyborg disabled and vulnerable to attack. Not that she was likely to experience that sort of luck.
One minute O’Neal was standing and next she was on the concrete, looking up into the other legionnaire’s expression-free face. She had allowed him to close with her and paid the price. Satisfaction was apparent in his voice. “Oh, my goodness . . . it appears the sergeant was wrong. Maybe she does have to take shit off the likes of me. Isn’t that right, Sarge?”
O‘Neal was still in the process of getting to her feet when the analogs attacked. Weasel had already wrapped himself around Cassidy’s legs when the weapons platforms hit the Trooper II from both sides, and the leather wings attacked his head. Fortunately their weapons had been safed or they might have killed their leader’s attacker outright. As it was, he required major repairs and was placed on report for assaulting a noncom, an outcome that caused the rest of the cyborgs to resent O’Neal and ostracize her.
So, rather than slide into the company the way she had hoped to do, the legionnaire found herself isolated and alone. Well, not quite alone, since her symbiotic co-warriors needed her more than ever. Having little or no choice, O’Neal turned inwards, worked to hold the analogs together, and focused on her job. It seemed as if some things would never change.
Rior Tollo-Sa was one of three surviving members of Dagger Commando Six, an elite unit equipped and trained to penetrate enemy defenses prior to a spaceborne attack. But Tollo-Sa might as well have been the only surviving member, since the others were not only spread out over five hundred square land units of Algeron’s surface, but had strict orders to ignore each other.
The insertion pod had functioned perfectly, the ceramic skin had burned away as it was supposed to, and carefully placed explosives had blown the device apart inside the atmosphere. Free-fall came next, followed by a long drop, and the spine-jarring thump of the number one chute.
He had felt good at first, swinging over the hills, falling towards the surface. But something, he’d never know what, had gone terribly wrong. The fabric over his head had collapsed, causing him to plummet towards the ground. It had taken every bit of the trooper’s courage, every bit of the discipline that had been hammered into his head during months of training, to release the main chute, and wait for it to clear, before pulling the reserve. He screamed as the ground rushed up to kill him, screamed as chemicals flooded his brain, and screamed as the wind sucked the sound out of his mouth.
But then the main was gone, a computer-generated tone sounded within his helmet, and Tolla-Sa was free to pull the reserve D-ring. What followed came so quickly he had trouble remembering it. There was a hard jerk as the number two chute popped open, followed by a briefly glimpsed military installation, and the impact of the rock-hard ground.
Everything had gone black for a moment until he awoke screaming in pain, realized what he was doing, and bit down on his tongue. The enemy could hear, he knew that, but never, ever, had he felt pain like he did now. It seemed as if someone had rammed red-hot pokers into his right leg. Tollo-Sa looked down, saw the bone white splinters, knew he was bleeding, and fumbled for his belt-mounted first-aid kit.
It took only moments to find the injector’s distinctive shape, drag it out of the belt pack, and slap it against his left thigh. He winced as the device squirted a painkillerstimulant combo in through the pores in his skin, concluded that this particular pain was absolutely nothing when compared to pain it was supposed to counter, and waited for the drugs to kick in. They didn’t take long.
The absence of pain felt wonderful, as did the sudden euphoria that accompanied it, but the bleeding continued. Tolla-Sa slapped a self-sealing compress over the wound, waited for it to harden, and tried to stand. He found it was impossible, lowered himself to the ground, and cut his way out of the parachute harness. Once free, he took a look around.
With the exception of an airborne creature that made its way through the air in a series of awkward-looking spurts, and a tiny, nearly invisible animal that chittered from the top of a nearby rock, there was no one in sight. Which would have seemed strange if it weren’t for the fact that he’d been well under the enemy’s sensors by the time the reserve chute finally opened. It was ironic to think that the same chute that had threatened his life might have saved it as well.
So, what to do? There was no point in trying to contact his comrades since chances were that they were too far away to pick up his signal and wouldn’t answer if they did. No, the only thing he could do was complete his mission.
Tolla-Sa rolled over and dragged himself upwards. Like most Hudathans, the commando had excellent upper body strength, and used it to pull himself up the slope. Rocks tugged at his webbing, thorns raked his arms, and gravel shredded the palms of his hands. It was stupid in a way, this self-imposed torture, because the find-me beacon in his pack would have been just as effective in the gully, but he wanted to see the base the landing force would destroy, and know that his efforts ha
d been worthwhile.
The sun had risen and set twice before the Hudathan reached the place where boulders blocked his way. Gritting his teeth against the pain that came when he stood, Tolla-Sa hopped around the barrier, eased his way through a gap in the rocks, and edged his way out onto a windswept ledge. The sun had just peeked over the ridge to the east and sent long slanting rays down towards the surface-to-air missile installation. Tolla-Sa felt a grim sense of satisfaction, leaned back against the still-cool rock, and allowed himself to slide downwards.
It took a moment for the pain to subside enough for him to find another injector, slap it against his flesh, and settle into place. Then, having squirmed out of his backpack, and opened it next to his lap, the Hudathan reached inside. The beacon was round and warm to the touch. He pulled it out, flipped a cover up and out of the way, and pressed the button within. Nothing happened. Nor would it until such time as the Hudathan fleet arrived and demanded a response. Then the signal would go out, then the avengers would fall out of the sky, then his sacrifice would be justified.
Rior Tolla-Sa peeled a ration bar, took a bite, and watched the alien sky. It was just a matter of time.
28
When fighting a duel, the provident warrior should take care to hide a backup weapon somewhere on his person, thereby providing himself with one last chance should his pistol misfire, or sword be knocked away. A dagger or similar blade is highly recommended.
Legion Of The Damned - 02 - The Final Battle Page 33