Soldier of the Legion sotl-1

by Marshall S. Thomas

  The rest of Beta was right here, helmets off, breathing the hot night air and watching the flames as the base burnt and the Third fought the fire. We had kicked in the door and walked right into their best. Snow Leopard, staring into space, silent at last, pale and drained, hair plastered to his skull, hollow eyes now bloody red.

  Coolhand, also silent, squatted in his armor, watching the show, hypnotized, content. Merlin stood, stunned, staring at the burning charcoal forest and the volcanoes spitting flame and the fleets of dancing aircars and the blinding searchlights flashing over us, and the lovely sparkling trail of destruction up by the stars, taking it all in as if he never wanted to forget it.

  Psycho, spent at last after his orgy of destruction, his face all cut and swollen, both eyes blackened, still toting his Manlink on one hip-the Manlink that saved us all. Psycho called her the Mother of Destruction, and we called her the Tacstar Goddess.

  Warhound sat in his armor, holding his head, eyes closed. Dragon stood off by himself, scowling, cradling his E in his arms. This was one of his unapproachable times. What did he think about, I wondered. Flashes from lost wars? Lost worlds, lost causes, vanished soldiers?

  Priestess, precious Priestess, her head on my armored shoulder, her scent a hot musk in my nostrils, her hair soaked in sweat, Beta’s perfume of the day. I could easily lose myself in dreams of Priestess, with her lovely soft hair kissing my cheek. I would only have to close my eyes.

  An aircar slowly passed over us, raising a swirl of smoke. And a vision came to me: the Phantoms of the March. Surely this was what Longwalker and Starlight had discovered, all those lost dead years ago. They had run into the Systies, and somehow escaped. The Phantoms of the March, an alien army. What else could Longwalker have believed? He thought they were ghosts.

  I was too tired to sleep, too tired to close my eyes. I could only stare into the night. I saw Valkyrie, misty in the smoke, the breeze rustling her blonde hair. Valkyrie, a captive of the Systies. It was obscene. She worshipped freedom, and even the Legion could not hold her. She did as she pleased, always. How could they put her in a cage? What would happen to her?

  Horrified, I looked up to the stars, the smoke of the burning forest stinging my eyes. Valkyrie was still alive. I was positive I could feel her, across the light years. Alive.

  Priestess looked up at me calmly. “I don’t hate her. I’m jealous whenever she’s around and I’d fight her again over you, but I don’t hate her. The Legion will find her. We will find her! And when we do I’ll kick her butt. And then I’ll kick your butt-and you’ll still be mine.” She smiled and laid her head back on my shoulder.

  Chapter 13: In the Eye of the Hole

  Somewhere in the eye of the hole, I awoke. I knew immediately where we were. The chron confirmed it. That far in, we were probably already on our way out. Still too early to tell. I knew it from the silence and from the pressure on my skin, and from my own fear. Boring a magical hole into the vac, we ripped through the delicate fabric of reality, making our own fantastic highway, Atom’s Road, a sparkling antimat bullet right between the eyes of the Cosmos, holding the wormhole open with antimatter, quantum vacuum and negative pressure. In the eye of the hole. We still had a long, long way to go.

  Awake, again. I pondered the bottom of the wall bunk above me. A tomb. A shiver rippled over my skin. I did not want to be alone but I could not move. Thoughts coiled around my mind like snakes.

  Coldmark lay somewhere ahead of us, a pale fat frozen fruit glowing against a black sky. And in distant combat orbit around the planet, hurtling across the night sky like a tiny silver star, the System Ship Preference no doubt awaited us, its sensors all on max, its crew probably on yellow alert. We now knew exactly where the Systie ships had gone. Most of them were too fast for us, hiding in hundreds of deceptors. They had escaped death, but they did not escape Atom. A fleet of deep space probes had followed the tracks all the way, right into the out and out to the in. And it led to Coldmark.

  There were plenty of other Systie ships, in orbit around Coldmark-a whole fleet! We had plans for them all, but I wanted the Preference. Preference had a Legion prisoner, and it was marked for destruction, whether or not we got our comrade back. We rode the Spawn, one of Atom’s cruisers, and Spawn carried its own fleet of fighters and assault craft. We had enough power to knock Coldmark right out of orbit, but lucky for the Systies it was not that kind of mission.

  In Hell, Valkyrie and I had gone through the swamp together. We were only trainees at that point, not lovers. The luck of the Legion threw us together for the swamp. It was a simple test, the kind the Legion liked best. They armed us with cold knives and dropped us by twos into that nameless swamp. The mission: get to the hills on the other side. If we reached the hills, we passed. If we never appeared, we failed. Howling packs of swarmers opposed us, and swamp suckers, and hungry, aggressive lizards and flesh-eating fish and numberless varieties of poisonous snakes and clamstones and snappervines and even carnivorous trees. Invisible mudholes might suck us in to our deaths and poisonous vegetation could send us into fevers and death dreams and hallucinations. At night the vampire gliders awaited to kill us quietly as we slept, sucking us dry. Worst of all were the cannibals, human stone-age throwbacks, tracking us quietly through the swamp, hungry for Outworlder flesh. They had committed some awful outrage against the Legion, generations ago, and were still paying for it.

  That was where I got to know Valkyrie. I could not have made it without her, and she could not have made it without me. I had never admitted it to her, but she frightened me. I had never before met anyone without a soul. The cannibals actually found us one night, and we killed about six of them with our cold knives in their first wild rush, and ran from the rest. We stayed together and cut sharp wooden stakes with our knives and left them in our tracks, punji stakes, under the water, and listened to their outraged screams. She bound my wounds, and I bound hers, and we fought our way out of that swamp.

  We climbed through a cool forest of tall dark trees, wreathed with mist, and walked along a freezing stream. Eventually, we found a secret road of stone and climbed some more and dropped, exhausted, halfway up the hill to a grove of softly swaying trees. A light rain started and we huddled together for warmth. Her eyes were like a wild beast. She had blood on her hands and she left scratches all over my back and tooth marks on my neck. From then on I was her Thinker, and she was my Valkyrie, and it was Thinker and Valkyrie, forever.

  Forever. I was pledged to another, and she was a prisoner of the System. But it changed nothing.

  I triggered a minicard, and her image appeared before my eyes, glowing with life, floating in the air. How could I have ever been lucky enough to meet this girl? A miracle, a gift of the Gods. An angel, carved from sunshine and moonlight. Hair of molten gold and glittering emerald eyes, focused on some other world. I never understood her-never. But that did not matter. Not now.

  I entered the lounge, cold and lonely. I knew I had been rather withdrawn lately; nobody wanted to bother me. Powerful, spooky music wailed in the background, Empire stuff. Beta was normally not so introspective; we preferred noise and feeling. Somebody else must have put it on. I spotted a few troopers from Gamma, and many others I did not know. Beta huddled in a corner on the floor around a low table covered with charts and readouts and minicards and d-screens.

  “Thinker here,” I said.

  “Welcome back,” Snow Leopard responded. “We were just talking about Coldmark. Have a seat.”

  I found a place on the floor. Snow Leopard looked good, his long blond hair brushed carefully back revealing his prominent widow’s peak. He appeared rested and alert as his piercing pink eyes roamed over the readouts. He was a great planner, and in his element here. We faced a very tricky situation on Coldmark.

  Priestess had curled up in a chair. She wore minishorts and her legs appeared to be distracting Psycho who sat on the floor nearby, ogling her. Coolhand and Merlin and Warhound and Dragon huddled around the table. Ironm
an would not be with us on this op; he was back in Atom’s body shop, growing a new arm.

  “This is not going to be easy, girls.” Snow Leopard was always a realist. We knew his plan to accomplish the mission would also maximize our chances for survival. Some leaders focused on the mission exclusively and viewed their assets as expendable. Snow Leopard wasn’t like that. “You heard the man. Coldmark is in the Neutral Zone. Officially it’s an independent world, and the inhabitants do have their own government. Unofficially, the System has been more active in this sector than we have, and the locals have been cooperating, not having any choice.”

  “So let’s give ‘em a choice,” Coolhand suggested. He gazed thoughtfully at an aerial shot of Port Coldmark.

  “It’s not that easy,” Snow Leopard responded. “We’re here for some very specific reasons, and starting another war with the System is not one of them. You all heard the briefing. Mission One is to discover why the System has been extracting unitium from Andrion 2. Mission Two is to recover Valkyrie. Mission Three is to discover why the Systies are kidnapping Taka and where they are taking them. And Mission Four is to negotiate with the System on the future of the System’s unitium mine, or what’s left of it.”

  “Our unitium mine, you mean,” Coolhand said.

  “Well, the negotiation proposal came from the System direct to ConFree. Starcom ordered us to negotiate. I don’t know if we’re going to negotiate seriously or not. Maybe it’s only a tactic to allow us to accomplish the other tasks. Anyway, that’s not Beta’s worry. Beta’s part in all this is to assist Gamma in recovering Valkyrie. That’s all we have to do.”

  Unitium. The System was mining unitium. That had been clearly established. We had busted a unitium mine, and according to Command, the exosegs had been imported to Andrion 2 from Andrion 3 by the System, most likely to protect the secret of the mines from the Sunrealmers. It had worked, for a hundred years.

  According to Command. The part about the exos bothered me a great deal. The instant we spotted an exo on Andrion 2, we knew something was wrong. Why would the Systies do that? The exos were a minor question, however. The major question was unitium. I didn’t know much about it except it was rare. Merlin said unitium had once been of interest in connection with some vexing containment problems associated with early antimat star drives. That, however, was ancient history. The problems had long ago been solved, by other means, and unitium discarded as being of no practical value.

  No practical value. The System had invested billions of credits in scarce resources, launched a major secret military mission, and constructed a hardsited base deep in ConFree vac, in blatant violation of treaty. They knew full well that its discovery might lead to another interstellar war. The Confederation and the System had coexisted uneasily for almost a generation, and now every star fleet in the galaxy was surely on the move, prepped for combat. The Systies must have thought long and hard before coming up with this one.

  “Nonsense!” Merlin had declared. “The stuff is worthless, and it’s also very rare and expensive to extract. There’s nothing you can do with it that can’t be done better, or cheaper, using other methods and materials, all of which are available to the System.”

  “Come on, Merlin,” Coolhand argued. “They were spending billions to mine and transport it out of the local system. What are they doing with it? Eating it? They’re using it for something!”

  “I don’t deny all that. But I find the whole concept very puzzling. Look, it’s possible unitium may have applications we don’t know about yet. But it means going down an entirely new road of scientific development, and it means going in blind, for years of research, with no goal in sight. It means billions invested in pure science. That’s fine. I’d love to see it, but it’s not going to happen. ConFree puts a lot into pure science, but there are financial limits. And the System is a lot more selective than we are about what they do.”

  “They put a lot of resources into the military, don’t they?”

  “Sure. But all the military-related scientific and technical tasks that can be envisaged for unitium have already been accomplished. Acceleration of promat is done with iomags quite nicely, thank you. Unitium is not needed for that.”

  “They’re making a major-and dangerous-effort to extract and transport the stuff,” Coolhand said. “Obviously they’ve discovered some use for it that we don’t know about.”

  “Well, I’ll say it’s strange. It’s very strange. You know the System steals all their best technology from us. I can’t imagine why they’d want to wrestle with a brand new research effort on their own. And if I could answer this question, I’d drop in on Firefall and tell him. And I assure you, I’ll do that as soon as I figure it out.”

  “Well what do you think it is?”

  “Don’t know.” Merlin closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “But I’ll bet somebody does.”

  And that was all we could get out of Merlin on the subject. Unitium wasn’t our concern, anyway. Our task was to recover Valkyrie.

  I glanced over at Priestess. She blinked her big brown eyes and wet her lips with the tip of her tongue.

  I forced my eyes away. A miniscreen showed a cutaway of the SS Preference

  “Of course she might not even be on the Preference. She might have been transferred to another ship, or maybe even transported downside,” Snow Leopard said. He paused, and sighed. “She won’t still have her c-cell in. They’ll have taken that out. So finding her is not going to be easy. But we’re going to have a little help.”

  A little help. I knew Gravelight was with us, locked away in her cube like an evil princess of power, avoiding us all, alone with Valkyrie’s possessions, clothes and equipment and personal effects, everything she’d left behind. There would be some things I had given her, and some things Boudicca had given her. When Gravelight was through, she would know Valkyrie better than either of us. And Valkyrie wasn’t even Gravelight’s primary task. Her primary task was unitium.

  We all feared psychers. I pitied her. How could anyone have that much power? She must be twisted with hate and bitterness. A normal life was impossible. How was love possible? I never wanted to see Priestess’s mind, for fear of what I would find.

  A little help. It was more than a little help. And Lowdrop had said there would be more help, on Coldmark. He did not say more than that, the people who had to know had already been briefed.

  “We’ll be working closely with Gamma,” Snow Leopard said. “It’s our joint responsibility to recover Valkyrie. We’ll only be indirectly involved in the unitium question, and the negotiations. Now I want to go over these contingency plans again. There are numerous possibilities, and I want every Beta trooper to be prepared for every contingency.”

  We went to work. At nearby tables, people listened to music and drank bitter. Beta never rested, but I didn’t mind. I didn’t mind at all. I cleared my mind of everything except the Mission. The Mission was Valkyrie. I didn’t care about the unitium. I didn’t even care if we started another interstellar war.

  LEGION 22. OUTVAC STARCOM FLEETCOM ALL UNITS. ACCESS BLUE MAGSEC CRITSIT SECRET.

  WARNING: This document contains classified information protected by ConFree espionage laws. Your access to this document has now been recorded. Unauthorized access subjects the user to serious penalties under the espionage and treason statutes.

  SUBJECT: Coldmark-Background

  SUMMARY: Coldmark is an inhabited Class A planet in the Gassy Sector of the Far Outers Neutral Zone. The star is Sista Alpha, a yellow prime. The planet is mineral poor. Coldmark’s inhabitants are relatively recent human migrants who settled Coldmark during the population shifts forced by the Race Wars. Although nominally independent and claiming to be neutral, the Government is a USICOM ward and has close relations with the United System Alliance. (See Starcord, Environment, History, Government and Interstellar Relations.)

  Living conditions are extremely primitive for the bulk of the rapidly increasing population, although the r
uling class, which maintains power through economic, military and religious control, has a high standard of living. Both ruling class and ruled are mortals. (See Society.)

  Coldmark is a Neutral Zone free port, and seldom denies orbit rights. All Legion registered starships have orbit rights by USICOM treaty. The ruling mercantile class engages freely in all profitable commercial enterprises, including the smuggling of illegal drugs, weapons, protected and classified information, contraband and slaves. None of this activity is illegal on Coldmark…

  I set the report aside. Cubes, Commander of the Second, had just entered the room, and I pretended to be invisible. I guess you could say he was a frightening guy. He was pale and wiry with a skull-like face and deep, dark eyes that burned with a hypnotic fanaticism. I hadn’t seen much of him before. Lowdrop was scary enough for me. I prefer to avoid contact with people at that level.

  The Second sat casually on the edge of a table, and briefed everyone in the narrow wardroom of the Spawn. Everyone who was going downside was right there, in the wardroom, clad in litesuit blacks. They would not stop lasers or x, but just about anything else. We had new kit for our handguns and commo gear as well. We were supposed to be diplomats for this mission, not soldiers.

  Anyone could tell just by looking at Cubes that he was dangerous. His hair was combed off to one side. There was a hint of Assidic in the eyes, but the overall facial structure was Outworlder. He appeared to be as young as anyone in Beta, but appearances lie. I heard he had joined the Legion during the Race Wars. It was the usual story: he had lost his family, his nation, his whole world. I did not want to know any more; his credentials sounded good to me. When he began to speak, the chatter stopped. He had a very quiet voice.

  “Cubes here,” he began. “Thanks for coming. As you know, we will soon be orbiting Coldmark. You’ve all been briefed on your individual missions. The big picture is much less clear to you. I’d like to make a few comments on that. We’re going into a very hostile environment in order to accomplish several very sensitive objectives. The System is going to have psychers present. So will we. Everyone going downside is a potential psych target, and that’s why you’re not getting the big picture, just what you have to know.” He paused, and looked around the room. Nobody was asleep. Even Psycho was paying attention.