Soldier of the Legion sotl-1

by Marshall S. Thomas

  “Let go of him, Boudicca! He’s a Legion prisoner! I don’t care if we are pledged, you touch him again and I’ll see you lose your squad!” Snow Leopard wrestled her away from the prisoner. She pulled her hand away viciously and blood spattered on the deck. The Systie howled mournfully, his bloody hand still outstretched before him.

  Boudicca again tore herself away from Snow Leopard’s grip, raising her E to the Systie’s head. “Talk, you scum! Your prisoners! Where are they! Talk, or you die!” She made a terrifying sight, a rabid wolf of a girl spitting venom. With that Legion cross burned into her forehead, she could have posed for a Systie hateprop show on the Legion.

  The Systie continued to scream, his mouth locked open, his body twisted in agony. Boudicca had some support from the troops.

  “Kill him! Do it!”

  “Cut his arm off!”

  “Set him on fire!”

  “Put down your E! He can’t talk like this!” Snow Leopard tried to control her.

  “He’s dead, I don’t care what he says, he’s dead!”

  I watched this show in stupefied wonder, then I went on private to Priestess. “What’s all this about, Priestess?”

  “I don’t know, Thinker. I just got here!”

  “Talk, you maggot! You want to die slow? I’ll put you in a pit of acid! Talk, damn you!” Boudicca was going off the deep edge.

  The Systie was a big man, but he was soft, clearly not a soldier. His face twitched, and his lips moved. “The ship,” he said. “We were supposed to be on the ship.” He had a very strange accent.

  Boudicca seized him by his tunic, and pulled him up until his puffy, round face almost touched hers. “Prisoners! Speak, you fat slug! You took a prisoner! Where are your PWs! If you don’t tell me, I’m going to kill you, right now! Tell me and you live! Speak!” She screamed in his face, spittle flying wildly.

  “They used stunstars…”

  “Tell me something I don’t know, Systie!”

  “They wanted some prisoners, to find out…”

  “Where! Where did they take them!”

  “We don’t know, they didn’t tell us! We’re not with the DefCorps!”

  Boudicca slammed him to the floor in disgust, and raised her arms over her head, a gesture of supreme frustration. “I’m going to kill him!”

  “I’ll talk to him, Boudicca. You’re too upset,” Snow Leopard said. “Take a drink, have some water. They’ll talk. Don’t worry, they’ll talk.”

  Boudicca turned, and I had never seen her look so shattered. She appeared stricken and her eyes were moist. “All right, tenners, try, but if they don’t talk, I am personally going to strangle them both. You hear me, Systies!” She spun on her heel, hissing at them, and they recoiled from her fury.

  A growing sense of dread washed over me. The fat man, on his knees, held his shattered hand before him, trembling and crying. Blood poured freely down his arm. “Can’t we stop the bleeding?” he sobbed. “We’re a civilian. We’re not a soldier. We didn’t shoot at the Legion. We don’t belong here.”

  “Shoot him!”

  “Shut down, Boudicca! Thinker-” A sharp blast outside interrupted Snow Leopard. We went to ground, and several troopers went charging out the doorway. Priestess made a move toward the wounded Systie. I stopped her.

  “Get out of my way, Thinker!”

  “Just wait a few moments-just a frac, all right? He’ll be all right.”

  Snow Leopard interrupted us. “Thinker, you and I will interrogate the prisoner. Take off your helmet. Priestess, wait until the interrogation is complete.”

  “The man is wounded,” Priestess said, pale and furious. “I formally request permission to treat his wounds. Now! He’s losing blood. I can bandage his hand while you’re interrogating him. And I am filing a report on how he got this wound!”

  “Wonderful,” Snow Leopard said calmly. “All right, proceed, Priestess.”

  I cracked open my helmet, and the stink of the place hit me immediately. It smelled of burning power cables and death. My eyes stung from the smoke in the air. Lasers snapped outside.

  “Thinker, you may do the honors.” Snow Leopard wanted this done correctly, I could tell.

  Priestess was already prepping the Systie’s hand.

  “Thank you, Snow Leopard.” I turned my attention to the fat man, still on his knees. Snow Leopard and I squatted before him. Priestess pressed on a field dressing. “Systie, this is a combat tactical interrogation,” I told him. “You are a combatant, and you are being interrogated by field elements of the 22nd Legion of the Confederation of Free Worlds. We are now in a combat situation, and your cooperation is essential to our tactical success. If you refuse interrogation or attempt to deceive us, you will be shot dead immediately as a combatant. If you cease resistance and cooperate to our satisfaction, you will be granted official ConFree prisoner of war status and will come under the protection of the laws of the Confederation and of the Interstellar Code on prisoners of war. Do you understand the situation?”

  “Yes. Yes, we do…we want to cooperate.”

  “Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you cooperate?”

  “Yes…” he seemed in agony.

  “Good. Why is the System on this planet?”

  His face paled, his eyes went wild, and he gasped for air. “Please…no…don’t ask us…”

  “Thinker, forget that,” Snow Leopard interrupted impatiently. “Ask him if they took any prisoners.”

  “Yeah, sure. Systie, did you take any prisoners? What the…” The Systie froze, his face trembling, his eyes glazed over. Blood burst suddenly from his nostrils, two bright red jets. His mouth popped open and his eyes rolled back in his sockets and he shuddered and toppled over backwards, stone dead.

  Stunned, we just stared at the body. Priestess was astounded, her medkit still in her hands.

  “Good!” Boudicca declared. “Now kill the other one!”

  “Coolhand! Did you see that?” Snow Leopard asked.

  “Yes,” Coolhand replied. “That’s got to be psych programming.”

  “I agree. This is what happened to our two Systie recon guys.”

  Snow Leopard pondered the possibilities. “This is really interesting. It was the first question…not the second.” His gaze turned to the other prisoner, still miserably huddled in the corner, shirtless. We gathered around him. He raised his face, bravely. He was young and muscular, and covered with old scars. He shivered, whether in cold or fear I did not know.

  “Systie,” I began. “This is a combat tactical interrogation…”

  “We understand,” he said. “We are a soldier, we understand. We will cooperate. We will tell it all we know.” He had the same accent as the other one.

  “Prisoners!” Snow Leopard insisted. “Did you take prisoners? Speak!”

  “Yes, at least one prisoner. We heard it on the net, but we did not participate. We think it was…yes, it was the Seventh, their security elements, the 3rd and 4th squads.”

  “Details!” Snow Leopard was doing the interrogation now. I listened.

  “They used a stunstar, and it worked. They only had a few marks to get back to the ship before launching, but they made it back with the prisoner. We remember they gave a cheer. That was their mission.”

  “And the ship,” Snow Leopard asked. “What ship was it?”

  “The Seventh was on the Preference. That’s where they took the prisoner-to the Preference.”

  “Trooper,” Snow Leopard asked. “If we ask you about the purpose of this installation, are you going to die on us?”

  The Systie took a deep breath. “We don’t think so. It knew it was coming, we could see that. It was a baser. But nobody ever told us anything important. We’re just a soldier. Fifteenth DefCorps, Stratcom, the Starfleet Commandos. It was a good outfit…” he paused, overcome by emotion. “We’re sorry about Legion comrade. System lost some good men, too.”

  “So why is the System he
re? Why the base?”

  “We’re just a soldier,” he repeated. “The base was highly classified. It was a horror show. They said the basers never left. They just stayed there, forever. Our outfit was here to provide external security and strategic defense. But it was a big operation. Lots of star carriers, coming and going. Lots of heavy equipment. It was a mining operation of some sort. Unitium, somebody said. We weren’t supposed to know. We never got near the mining area. They had their own internal security.”

  “Unitium? What are you talking about? What’s unitium?” Snow Leopard sounded puzzled.

  “We don’t know! And we don’t ask questions.”

  Shocked expressions and a long pause followed.

  “Unitium?” Merlin mused. “Let’s see-unitium is an extremely rare, natural mineral with some unique properties that looked theoretically useful for the acceleration of promat. At one time, it was of interest in connection with some containment problems associated with star drives. But we solved those problems, and we didn’t use unitium.”

  “Why would the System be interested in this stuff?” Snow Leopard asked.

  “I can’t imagine why they would,” Merlin replied. “They’ve already stolen all our stardrive technology. Nobody cares about unitium.”

  Snow Leopard turned back to the Systie. “Where were you guys when we got here? This place was dead!”

  The prisoner took a deep breath. “Legion really surprised us, when its starship hit the screens. We picked up that much. It was not expected! And it seems we were not supposed to be here, either, because we were all set. We went to dead systems immediately. The whole base was built for strategic deniability. It was a class camo job. But we never thought anyone would actually land here! So when Legion showed up, every major power system in the base and on the ships was cut. The whole time Legion’s been on planet, we’ve been sealed and dead, not a move, not a peep, just rotting underground, and the command so scared they wouldn’t even let us send out recon elements for the first few months. It’s been a stinking mess. We don’t know what they were planning. Surely, they didn’t think Legion was going to go away, not after we lost two of our recon units. Did Legion pick up on them? We figured it did.”

  The prisoner wouldn’t stop talking, pouring out his frustrations. “After a while they knew Legion was homing in on us and the plan was to abandon the base, because we did not have the strength to fight. And we guess it worked, except Legion surprised us again, popping up in the middle of the base like that. We don’t think anyone knows how Legion did that, and we’d guess it interrupted the basers. Because otherwise we’d all be dead.” He wiped his face on his forearm.” The plan was to antimat the base.”

  Antimat the base! It was one of those fascinating little bits of trivia that you’re really glad you didn’t know about beforehand. That would have ruined our whole day. I opened a canteen, took a swig, and offered it to the prisoner. He grasped it eagerly and drank deeply.

  “Tell me about the exosegs, trooper,” Snow Leopard said.

  The Systie stared vacantly at Snow Leopard. “Well, what does it want to know? All they told us was don’t ever leave the base. It seemed like good advice. The exos eat people. And worse. It’s an evil business. They have something to do with the levies. We didn’t ask.”

  “Tell me about the levies.”

  “We weren’t supposed to know about them, but it’s a small base. We’d see the natives-lots of them-men, women, kids-heading for the transports. It wasn’t voluntary, we can tell it that. They were in shock. Some couldn’t even move. Somebody once called it ‘the levies’. There was a connection with the exosegs. I don’t know what it was.”

  “The exos are native to Andrion 3. Why are they here?” It was a dangerous question. I knew Snow Leopard very well, and he was about to decide whether or not this Systie was lying to us.

  The Systie just looked at him. “Andrion 3? What’s that?” A tense little silence ensued, and then the Systie resumed, nervously. “Look, we don’t know any Andrion 3. In the System we do what we’re told, and we don’t ask questions. They told us we could call this world ‘Site X’. That’s all. We don’t have the slightest idea where we are. We never did. And we never heard of any Andrion 3. That’s the truth. Legion asked for the truth.”

  Snow Leopard kept looking at him, silent. Finally he spoke. “What was your last port of call?”

  “It was Coldmark, out in the Gassies. It’s a USICOM world. It’s the end of the line. We were on the Rule of Law, out of Port Promise. Very far out of Port Promise, we can tell it. We thought Coldmark was the armpit of the galaxy until we got to Site X. X was bad duty. It’s an evil place. We’re glad we’re done with it. Legion is welcome to it.” His head dropped again. He shivered. He was drained, and ready to crash. “Is it going to shoot us or not?”

  Snow Leopard ignored his question. “What happened to you, trooper? Why didn’t you make it back to your ship?” Snow Leopard had decided the Systie was telling the truth, I could tell.

  The Systie took a deep breath, and made another effort to control his emotions. “Some of our guys were trapped when the fifth level fell in. We knew the ship was launching, but they were still in there. We tried to get them out.” He hid his face from us. We did not ask him whether or not he had found his buddies. It would not have been polite.

  Exhausted, I couldn’t even form a complete thought. I noticed Boudicca propped up against a wall, one armored fist on her brow, eyes closed, jaw clenched. Her other hand came up to her eyes and she sat there miserably, trembling. I could not see her face. If I had not known her so well, I’d have sworn she was crying.

  That wave of dread returned and I suddenly knew. I took a deep breath. “So what’s all this about a prisoner?” I asked Snow Leopard quietly. “Who…who did they grab?”

  He looked at me wearily, vaguely surprised. “You didn’t know? It’s Valkyrie. She’s missing. Looks like the Systies got her.”

  The forest was burning in the night. That was the view when we reached the top. We had climbed all the way up through the shattered Systie base, threading our way through the twisted wreckage, avoiding the worst fires, crawling up like worms, alert for stragglers. But we found only the dead and what the living left behind. We also found mines and pockets of biogas. Lots of nasty surprises. Ironman had been evak’d by an amtac, slicing in from above.

  We surfaced in a forest of flames, a charcoal forest glowing red in the night, burning brightly. Great torrents of sparks and incredible rushes of flames rose up to the heavens, sooty smoke hiding the stars. Fire lifted into the night, exploding wildly, a chilling, beautiful spectacle. We stood in the ruins, cracked our helmets open, and breathed in the hot night air, lush with smoke and full of the taste of ashes and death. The glowing bones of the base crawled with soldiers from the Third, dropped in from topside on the glowing aftermath of our antis, but we were the first to surface from below. We had crawled up through Perdition, and I never wanted to see it again.

  The Systies had dug their base and unitium mining operation in from one side, leaving the forest above them for cover. Pits of flame glowed in the charcoal forest like volcanoes. Their ships had been well concealed under blast-proof launch silos. Now the silos opened to the stars, spitting rivers of flame as the base burned. The ships were splitting vac, far beyond our reach. Where the forest had collapsed, the skeleton of the base glowed cherry-red.

  I looked up at the stars, blinking. Another river of fire glowed high above, a ghostly highway in the heavens, a glittering stream of golden sparks and silver comets, traced across the velvet sky. As I watched, some of the sparks lit up and exploded silently, mini flashes of nuclear light, flaring briefly, then fading, breaking up into a shower of angel dust, winking in the night. It was a vision of ice and fire.

  We learned on the comnet that Atom had reacted to Snow Leopard’s first shouted warning in microfracs, crash-launching into stardrive immediately, but not before instantaneously launching the cruisers and
the fighter force and a full strategic strike. Fleetcom doesn’t like risking its battlestars unnecessarily and in this case Atom’s presence was not necessary to deal with this minor disturbance. She would be safe in stardrive and could return at any time.

  A lot of surprised pilots woke up quickly, some of them with faces scalded by cups of hot dox, but they all had alarms shrieking in their ears and the stars suddenly dancing in their screens and a red-hot weapons panel instantly alive with fully armed antis and nukes and chainlinks and targets coming on the screen, and Andrion 2 rushing at them, enemy deceptors lighting up their lives.

  Most of the Systie ships had gotten through, hiding in the deceptors, but some of them had not, and these still tumbled through space, the wreckage skipping along the atmosphere, lighting up the night sky-glowing, burning, spitting flames, exploding. Exhausted and stunned, we watched the show. Aircars hovered over the base like a swarm of bloodsucking gnats, dazzling white searchlights stabbing mercilessly down into the dark, revealing the Systie’s secret world. Legion fighters orbited high above, specks of blue flame in the night, and two of them dipped low for a better view, suddenly flashing past close overhead, twin sonic booms shattering the night, rattling my teeth. I never could watch them without a hopeless thrill.

  Even then, exhausted and drained, I could feel it. Raw power, and the will of the Legion, a mailed fist in the heavens for us all, and we knew it was ours, and ours alone. All we had to do was call it in, just like Snow Leopard did. Just one feeble squawk and they’d be there, Atom’s fist, dropping in from topside, ripping the atmosphere open like a rotten fruit, bringing all of Atom’s power and glory, bringing instant death to all our foes. They had torn the top right off this base and now it glowed in the night, the mark of the Legion, our mark, burnt into the face of this distant world for all to see.

  A miracle, I thought. We had all survived. Ironman was safe in evac, and all the Legion’s skill and knowledge were with him.