A massive form materialized next to the bio bods. O’Brian gave mental thanks. Having Rossif there to provide additional cover would make the trip to the quad a lot safer.
Roller was waiting when O’Brian and Yankolovich returned. They ran full speed, dived, and slid the last few feet. Dirt geysered around them as bullets hit.
Gunner redirected the gatling gun towards the source of the fire, triggered a long burst, and watched a boulder disintegrate. Once revealed, the Naa lasted a quarter of a second. Fur, flesh, and blood sprayed outwards as the bullets hit.
Rossif and Jones stalked forward, fired missiles into the rocks, and followed up with machine-gun fire.
O’Brian pushed the biological support module in Roller’s direction. Except for the T-shaped handle and the six-pronged connector located on one side, the olive-drab case looked like a .50-ammo box. Roller grabbed it and motioned towards the hatch.
“Get the hell inside! We’re pulling out.”
O’Brian and Yankolovich dropped into their padded seats and strapped themselves in. Roller entered and the hatch slid closed. Bullets clanged against the quad’s armor.
Roller dropped into a seat. His helmet was cracked where a piece of shrapnel had hit it. Blood streamed down the side of his face.
O’Brian’s voice was strained. “Where’s Wismer, Kato, and Imai?”
Roller wiped his forehead with an arm. “Dead. Along with Wutu.”
“And the sergeant major?”
“Dead.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
Roller activated his radio. “All right, Gunner ... get us the hell out of here.”
Gunner had anticipated the order and rose in one smooth motion. Explosive shells and shoulder-launched missiles sparkled across the surface of his armor. He staggered under the impact, damned the luck that had kept him alive, and followed Rossif out of the kill zone. This was the moment to unleash his massive firepower and the cyborg did so.
All four of his energy cannons spit coherent light, the gatling gun roared defiance, missiles lashed out in every direction, grenades popped skywards, and smoke poured from heavy-duty generators.
Hardman recognized what was happening and gave the necessary orders. “The humans are attempting to withdraw. Allow them to leave. It’s impossible to defeat the four-legged cyborg. Enough blood has stained the sand.”
A few die-hard warriors unleashed their remaining missiles anyway, but they missed, or exploded harmlessly on Gunner’s armor. Minutes later and the humans were gone, with only the wreckage of their cyborgs and a handful of bodies to mark their passage.
Hardman forced himself up out of his hiding place and out into the open. He searched his emotions for elation, for happiness, and found nothing but pain.
Dead warriors littered the ground around him. Blood dripped down the side of a rock. A hand lay palm-up as if asking for friendship. A piece of metal skittered away from his foot. The air smelled of smoke, explosives, perspiration, urine, and feces. Healers moved among the wounded, aiding those that they could, granting eternal rest to those that they couldn’t.
It was a victory, a great victory, but Hardman found no pleasure in the pain and death. A hand touched his arm. The chieftain turned to find Deathtricker Healtouch by his side. He was a small male with gray fur and streaks of black.
“Yes?”
“A human lives.”
Hardman made a gesture of surprise. “Where?”
“Over there.”
Hardman followed the healer back to the point where the battle had begun. A human lay crumpled on the ground, blood running down to pool around his head, his eyes empty of awareness.
“Will he live?”
Healtouch looked doubtful. “It is difficult to say. Would you like me to give aid ... or release him to the next world?”
The chieftain gave the Naa equivalent of a shrug. “Treat our wounded first. Then, if the human continues to live, see what you can do.”
Healtouch made a sign of respect, stepped over Booly’s unconscious body, and headed for the makeshift aid station. Hardman watched him go, then transferred his attention back to the body. Like most humans, this one looked soft and as helpless as a newborn infant. If only that were true.
6
For on men in general this observation may be made: they are ungrateful, fickle, and deceitful, eager to avoid dangers, and avid for gain, and while you are useful to them they are all with you, offering you their blood, their property, their lives, and their sons so long as danger is remote ... but when it approaches they turn on you. Any prince, trusting only in their words and having no other preparations made, will fall to his ruin....
Niccolo Machiavelli
The Prince
Standard year 1573
Planet Earth, the Human Empire
Angel Perez stepped out of the troop carrier and fell towards the planet below. Others were all around him. Some were cyborgs, some were bio bods, all were soldiers.
It was night, but that made little difference, because the objective was radiating enough heat to cook breakfast for a brigade. Heat that his electronics could detect, sort, and integrate with surveillance photos taken days and weeks before. The result was an image similar to what he’d see during the day, except that a blue grid overlaid everything, and a bright red X floated across the landscape. Altitude, rate of fall, and a variety of threat factors appeared in the lower right-hand corner of his vision.
The aliens had been working on their stronghold for more than a thousand years. The fortress rambled all over the place, a maze of walls, streets, and buildings. And now, as Perez fell towards it, the structure grew larger with each passing second.
Perez waited for the chute to open but nothing happened. His chute would deploy when the auto timer told it to do so and not a moment before. It was for his own safety. The longer he fell, the harder it would be for the computer-controlled AA batteries to hit him.
Perez didn’t know how he knew these things, only that he did. His chute opened, jerked him upwards, and formed a rectangular canopy over his head. It was black like the sky above it, and steerable, like the parasails you could rent at resorts. He looked down, saw a darkened area that might be an open field, and banked in that direction.
Lights snapped on, tracers ripped the night into a thousand abstract shapes, and energy beams stuttered towards space. Some of the legionnaires fired back, but Perez concentrated on the chute and ignored the ground fire. Or tried to anyway.
Tracers drifted past, seemingly harmless but very deadly. The ground rushed up to meet him. He saw a building. It boasted three spires. There was a surface-to-air missile battery located between them. A radar-seeking rocket roared past Perez and homed on a troop carrier. A spire lurched up at him. He tried to avoid it, failed, and gritted his nonexistent teeth.
The impact was horrible. A metal rod hit the lower part of his abdomen, passed up through his reserve ammo bin, power storage module, and on-board processor. He screamed and the world went black.
The voice came from nowhere and everywhere all at once.
“Welcome to the Legion, scumbags. My name is Sir.”
The night, the battle, and the pain faded away. Perez found himself at the center of a huge parade ground. He occupied a body similar to the one in the dream. A small but dapper man stood before him. The man had beady little eyes, an oversized nose, and sun-reddened skin. His arms were decorated with colorful tattoos. His white kepi sat square on his head, his khakis had razor-sharp creases, and his boots boasted a high-gloss shine. His eyes moved from right to left and Perez realized that others were present as well. The man spoke in a conversational tone, but his words carried across the parade ground nonetheless.
“Each and every one of you was tried for a crime, sentenced to death, and executed. This is your last chance. If you follow orders, if you learn what we teach you, and if you are very, very lucky, you could become legionnaires. With that honor comes a new name, a better l
ife, and the opportunity to make something of yourselves.”
Perez remembered the stainless-steel room, the red dot on his chest, and the certain knowledge that he was going to die. Had died, and wound up here, wherever he was.
The man smiled. “Some of you will die in training accidents. Some will commit suicide rather than face another day. And I’ll kill three or four of you just for the fun of it.”
The man scanned the ranks. His eyes were like lasers, seeming to pass right through whatever they saw.
“Many of you don’t believe that. You think the rights you once had still apply. Wrong. You are legally dead, and until such time as you are formally listed on the Legion’s rolls, you have no existence other than the one that I grant you.”
The man clasped his hands behind his back.
“There was a time when it took months to train a good soldier. Well, not anymore. You are cyborgs. Little more than brains encased in machines. The hair, eyes, noses, arms, hands, tits, ovaries, cunts, cocks, balls, legs, and feet by which you knew yourselves are gone. You won’t have to eat, breathe, sleep, shit, or fuck. All you will have to do is train. Twenty-four hours of each day, seven days of each week, until you either learn or die.
“If you learn, the Emperor is one legionnaire better off. If you fail, and I pull your plug, it doesn’t matter, because you were dead to begin with, and in most cases deservedly so. The empire benefits either way.”
Sir looked around to make sure that he had their undivided attention and nodded.
“Most of your learning will take place through a neural interface. The battle that you just experienced was the first of hundreds. By experiencing real battles and real deaths, you will learn very quickly. Does anyone have any questions?”
Perez found that peripheral vision was better than it used to be and saw a cyborg raise an arm. A distant part of his brain noticed that the arm had a pincer-like hand.
The noncom smiled, pointed a black box in the recruit’s direction, and pressed a button. The cyborg screamed, convulsed, and fell to the ground.
Sir looked from right to left. “Lesson number one. I don’t like questions. Questions imply thought. Thought implies intelligence. And intelligent recruits are a contradiction in terms. Would anyone like to discuss that? No? Good.
“Here’s lesson number two. I am a sergeant. That means I am god. I can walk on water, piss whiskey, shit explosives, and speak with officers. Are there any questions?”
Incredibly enough, Perez saw an arm go up off to his right. He winced as the sergeant pointed the black box in that direction and pressed the button. The cyborg screamed and fell writhing to the ground.
The sergeant shook his head in amazement. “They get dumber every day. All right, enough screwing around, company ... attenshun!”
Perez had seen troops come to attention on the news and in countless holo dramas. He did his best to comply. The result was more parody than the real thing. The others were little better. Perez expected the sergeant to lash out, to punish them for their clumsiness, but he seemed unaware of transgression.
“Company ... take three paces forward.”
Perez lifted his right foot, moved it forward, and fell on his face. The rest of the recruits did likewise.
The sergeant laughed. “That’s right, scumbags. You can’t even walk, much less march. Now, get up and try it again.”
Perez struggled to obey, and as he did so, wondered if death would have been better.
The Emperor was lost in reverie. The voices squabbled amongst themselves. Some favored an immediate response to the Hudathan attack and others didn’t. They wanted to pull back, retrench, and defend the empire’s core.
The Emperor knew that he should listen to them, should make some sort of decision, but found it hard to care. Caring involved an expenditure of energy and a certain amount of risk. People who cared got hurt. No, it was better to remain separate from the process, to float along the surface of things, bobbing and twisting while the current carried you along.
And that’s where the voices came in. They cared, they argued with each other, and they did all the things he sought to avoid. They enjoyed it, and more than that, thrived on it.
The Emperor couldn’t remember a time when they hadn’t been there, urging him to do what they wanted, arguing amongst themselves.
They had been real people once, with flesh-and-blood bodies, until his mother had selected them as his advisors. Some were scientists, some were military officers, and the others were politicians. There were no artists, philosophers, or religionists, since his mother felt they were little more than gilt on the carriage of state.
He’d been six months old when the advisors arrived. All felt honored to be among those selected, were cheered by the prospect of lifelong employment, and had no idea what they had let themselves in for.
The technology was experimental and was eventually abandoned as too dangerous for use with humans.
But that was after the advisors had been digitized, edited, and downloaded into a six-month-old brain.
It was, the Emperor reflected, a miracle that he had grown at all, surrounded as he was by eight contentious minds. The fact that his mother had each and every one of them murdered so they couldn’t scheme against him didn’t help either. The copies, as they referred to themselves, felt a kinship with the originals, and looked for opportunities to make him feel guilty about it.
But they did like to work, which left him free to do what he did best: enjoy himself. Something he had done less and less frequently since his mother’s death.
The voice interrupted and dragged him back to reality.
“Your Highness?”
The Emperor opened his eyes. Four people stood before him: Admiral Scolari, dressed in an absurd set of medieval armor; General Worthington, wearing little more than a G-string; the merchant, Sergi Chien-Chu, swathed in a Roman toga; and the recently arrived General Marianne Mosby, her breasts seeking to escape the almost nonexistent confines of her gown.
The Emperor brightened and motioned the group forward. He’d been present as Mosby had accepted command of her troops but had little chance to talk with her. The meeting would be tiresome, but her presence would serve to brighten it. The copies faded into the background.
“I hope you will accept my apologies for calling you away from the festivities. It seems as though the affairs of state are almost always inconvenient. May I summon refreshments? Some food perhaps? Or wine?”
The foursome looked at each other and shook their heads. It was Chien-Chu who spoke.
“I think not, Your Highness. We have already had benefit of your considerable hospitality and are quite full.”
The Emperor gestured towards some ornate chairs. “I’m glad to hear it ... Please ... sit down.”
It was a small room by palatial standards and decorated in masculine style. There were high arched windows, entire walls full of old-fashioned books, a real log fire burning in an open fireplace, and a massive desk that served as a barrier between the Emperor and his guests. Their chairs were arranged in a semicircle and fronted the desk.
Mosby chose a chair, sat down, and subjected the Emperor to a lightning-fast evaluation. She’d seen thousands of pictures, ranging from holo vids to stills, and glimpsed him from a distance. But this was the first time that she had met the man face-to-face and had the chance to size him up.
The Emperor was handsome and very athletic. It was common knowledge that some of his good looks were real, and the rest were the result of surgery, but it made little difference. His hair was dark, parted on the right side, and swept back to touch the top of his shoulders. His eyes were brown and very intense. He had a high forehead, a well-shaped nose, and a strong chin. The weakness, if any, was around the mouth. Mosby thought his lips were a shade too sensual and likely to pout. His mouth was acceptable, though, very acceptable, and worth further consideration.
Mosby decided that the Emperor’s chair must be resting on some sort of pla
tform, because he was higher than she was, and had already used that advantage to peer down the front of her dress. Far from disconcerted, she was pleased, and shifted slightly to give him a better view. Their eyes met, electricity jumped the gap, and an unspoken agreement was reached. Later, when the affairs of state had been resolved, they would have an affair of their own. And it would be anything but boring.
The Emperor smiled, leaned back in his chair, and threw a pair of highly polished boots onto the corner of his desk. He nodded towards the right and said, “Watch this.”
The air shimmered, filled with motes of multicolored light, and coalesced into a picture. The picture was of a planet called “Worber’s World,” and the narration was supplied by a militia colonel named Natalie Norwood. What followed was some of the most disturbing footage any of the group had ever seen.
The Hudathan fleet, the waves of assault craft, the swathes of destruction, the millions of casualties, and the seemingly pointless attacks that followed made Chien-Chu sick. They made him afraid as well, because his son, Leonid, was out on the rim and quite possibly in harm’s way. He pushed the thought away and forced his mind to the task at hand.
Norwood ended the report with a plea for help and her intention to surrender. The merchant admired Norwood’s cool, dispassionate narration and the control required to record it. The empire needed officers of her caliber and he hoped that she’d survive.
“So,” the Emperor said, making a steeple with his fingers, “we have a problem. I’d be interested in your reactions. Admiral Scolari, you’re senior, I look forward to hearing your thoughts.”
Scolari did her best to keep the eagerness off her face. She felt sorry for the people on Worber’s World but was eager to use the attack for her own ends. The fact was that the empire had grown too large, too fat to protect, and she favored a smaller, tighter grouping of systems that would make the Navy’s job easier. If colonists wanted to live out on the rim, then let them do so, but at their own risk. That a retrenchment would force the Legion off Algeron was frosting on the cake. The Emperor had been out of his mind to grant the Legion its own planet, and this was a chance to right that wrong.
Legion Of The Damned - 01 - Legion of the Damned Page 9