Soldier of the Legion sotl-1

by Marshall S. Thomas

  Val hesitated in the open doorway, his features hidden in shadows, as I hovered behind him. Gravelight was motionless, lying on her back, her face concealed by the towel. Gravelight had stripped off her boots and litesuit pants and abandoned them on the deck. She wore only panties and a ripped litesuit blouse. She’d apparently torn open the blouse and then collapsed onto the bed. She wore a flesh-colored bra under the blouse.

  Gravelight breathed shallowly, her throat faintly rising and falling. I guess we were both taking it all in. She was certainly lovely. Val was silent. Stunned, maybe. I could have told him it would never happen, not with a psycher. Some things are not meant to be.

  “Eighty-Eight…” Val finally spoke. Eighty-eight was her number. We hated to wake her, but there was much work to do. Important work.

  “I’m awake.” Gravelight pulled the towel away from her face. Her eyes remained closed. Little drops of moisture trickled down her cheeks to her neck. I wondered whether Gravelight had been reading our thoughts. Her eyes flickered and opened, focusing on the overhead. She did not look at us. Her face appeared splotchy and strained. She raised one hand to her forehead.

  “Oh, no. It hurts. Oh, no.” She closed her eyes again, stiffening.

  “Can I do anything?” Val asked.

  “Water. Water, please.”

  Val punched a frosty cup of ice water from the kitchen console and touched it gently to Gravelight’s lips. Her hands grasped the cup. She sipped it slowly, and the color gradually returned to her cheeks. Val slipped one hand behind her neck, tangled in golden hair, to steady her head. I stood in the doorway wondering how to gracefully disappear.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “It’s nothing,” Val replied.

  She struggled to a half-sitting position, then collapsed back onto the pillow. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I feel really bad.”

  “It’s a ten. Can you answer a few questions?”

  “Yes. Yes, sure. Fire away.”

  “I know you’re tired, but we need a report. Did you pick up anything in the conference, anything good?” Val triggered his recorder.

  “I picked up a nasty headache. That was the high point, I’m afraid.” She made another effort to ease her back up onto the pillow, and was partially successful. Her eyes focused on Val. I might as well not have been there, but I’ll admit to being curious how one went about debriefing a psycher.

  “There must have been something else,” he said.

  “Yes, sure. Sure, sure, sure. All right, let me see…” She found the soggy towel and wiped her face with it. “Well, that Orman slut was the psycher. Only one. She was good, but we very quickly got tired of fencing. I concentrated on the Systies, and she went after you people. I went into a lot of heads, but couldn’t find anything intelligible about Andrion 2. The whole delegation only knows the negotiating position. Surely you don’t want to know about that. They don’t seem to know anything substantial about the unitium mines.”

  “You’re using words like ‘intelligible’ and ‘substantial’. We’ll take anything we can get. Did you get any hints?”

  “No…no. I’m hedging because I need more time to get in deeper. But they’re not stupid. I think I’m wasting my time in there. You should take me for a stroll past Systie HQ here, wherever that is. I might pick up something there. They’re not going to send anyone to the negotiations who knows anything.”

  “Did you get anything on Valkyrie?”

  “If I had picked up anything on Valkyrie,” she said, “I would have leaned over and told you about it during the conference.”

  “Sorry…I know you would have. I had to ask.”

  Gravelight rolled her head back and forth. “It hurts. I need more rest. I’ll get more for you tomorrow. We still have time.”

  “Yes,” Val said softly. “We still have time.”

  “And we need to travel,” Gravelight said sleepily. “We need to move around…” Her voice faded. “I’ll find her…I’ll find unitium…we need more…more…”

  Gravelight fell asleep. Val gently took the empty cup from her grasp. She did not wake. He took a blanket from the drawer under the bunk and covered her. Such beautiful legs, I thought, such a sweet, innocent girl. Awake, she was trapped in a never-ending nightmare. I wondered what psychers dreamed about. Strange dreams, from alternate worlds. We quietly left the room and Val palmed the door shut behind him. In the corridor, he leaned against the wall and sighed. He ran one hand through his curly, reddish hair. Light from the overhead lit up his features.

  “A shame,” he said.

  “That’s a ten,” I replied.

  “She’s just a kid.”

  “Yeah.” Gravelight was doomed, like all psychers. But she’d find Valkyrie for us, I was convinced. She had not even met Valkyrie, but it wouldn’t make any difference. If Gravelight could not find her, nobody could.

  “You’ve got a starlink call,” I said. The link glowed red. There was to be no peace for Val or me. The nights here were too short. We had a lot to do before tomorrow.

  “Val here,” he said wearily into the link.

  “She’s not there. I’m sorry.” Merlin turned away from the datascreen, discouraged.

  “You don’t know she’s not there! Spawn doesn’t know! Nobody knows!” Boudicca insisted, her face flushing.

  “Right, we don’t know. But it’s ninety-nine percent that she’s not there. You can’t get better readings than this. And Spawn says the Preference is clean.” Merlin was calm and logical. He knew how to handle Boudicca. The Legion scout had flashed past the Preference so close there had almost been a collision, and it had set off an immediate spastic run of red alerts throughout the System fleet. The Preference had been dosed with enough biotech to identify every life form on board. And Spawn told us Valkyrie was not there.

  “And what about that one percent?” I asked.

  “The only way we’ll know is to board her,” Boudicca insisted.

  “Right,” Merlin replied. “Tenners. You ask Cubes, I’ll suit up.” Boudicca could try the patience of an Inner. She knew an attack on the Preference was one of our final options. At any rate, it appeared very doubtful Valkyrie would still be there. We were in the lounge of the assault craft, downside, docked in Coldmark Port, sitting at a table overflowing with datascreens. It was very late. We all should have been asleep, renewing our strength for the next day. But we were munching on mags and I knew there would be no sleep for Beta, or Gamma, that night. We had too much to do.

  “Take a look at these anomalies, gals.” Snow Leopard dumped a fresh load of datacards on the table. They spilled over onto the floor. Spawn had cranked it out. Her sensors and probes mapped all of Coldmark, and anything that did not compute was highlighted for human attention. There were a whole lot of things that did not compute.

  “Thanks, Snow Leopard. I was wondering what to do this evening.”

  “Anybody want any dox?”

  I slipped another card into the screen and went back to work, mechanically, hardly thinking about it.

  “Look at this.” Priestess slid her screen over to me. A view from above, a rocky field, a half-naked girl lying on her belly, stones scattered all around her. A ragged circle of Coldmarkers surrounded her. One of them had an arm back, ready to hurl another stone.

  “It’s not her,” I replied. “The hair color is wrong, the…”

  “I know it’s not her,” Priestess insisted. “But look at those people! Stoning! What kind of subhumans are they? How can people act like this?”

  I did not answer her. I slid her screen back to her, and continued scanning my own. If they tried to do that to us, I thought, we’d burn them alive. Much more civilized than stoning.

  “In my world,” Priestess said, “the strong protect the weak. In my world, you can walk in the night without fear. In my world, we worship life, and protect it. And if you’re a ConFree citizen, you need fear only the Gods. And if you’re with the Legion, you don’t even need to fear the Gods
.” Priestess scanned her screen, talking as she worked. Nobody else said anything. The faint clicking of fingers on control tabs continued, and the flickering of light from the screens, and Priestess’s voice, almost hypnotic, wove a spell around us all.

  I knew she came from a Legion world. People like that were different. I never set my standards that high.

  “In my world, we enforce justice, not laws. In my world, people care for each other. And if you call for help, everyone comes. Everyone!” She punched another image onto her screen, her face pale, her eyes blazing.

  “It all flows from the past,” Priestess said quietly. “I could shoot before I could read. I didn’t understand it then, but I do now. First things first, my father said. We had an arsenal full of weapons. Every family had an arsenal like that. We didn’t need it, but it was there. If the situation ever changed back again, to the way it used to be, somebody would have to deal with a lot of armed and angry citizens.”

  “Was that a Legion world?” Warhound asked.

  “Yes. It didn’t used to be. We had an elected government, once, that decided they didn’t want to step down from power. They had made our world a paradise for criminals and lawyers. Finally they tried to disarm the citizenry that had elected them. My father told me about it.”

  “What happened?”

  “The people stormed the capitol and the Government called out the troops. That’s what it came to in the end. The citizens against the army, on the steps of the capitol. But it was a people’s army. They refused to fire on the people, and the people stormed the capitol, and killed every last one of those treacherous political rats. Then they went after the lawyers and the judges. They killed them all. All of them. Now we’re a Legion world. Criminals and lawyers know better than to target us.” Priestess was definitely Legion. I began to realize why she had left her quiet, safe, perfect little Legion world. She would have looked up to the stars, breathing cold air, and made a vow.

  “So why’d you leave?” Psycho had to ask.

  Priestess hesitated. It was almost like asking why she had joined the Legion. Finally she replied. “I wanted to help. I just wanted to help.”

  Psycho did not pursue it. Even he could tell that she was sincere. But Boudicca spoke up. “You are helping, Priestess. We all are. It won’t make much difference to this trash world, but it will make a difference to Valkyrie, when we find her. And we will!” She said it with such absolute, fierce conviction that she almost had me convinced.

  We went back to our screens.

  Chapter 15: Something Evil

  “Anybody know where we are?” Nobody answered Warhound. The temperature was plummeting as night fell. Glacial winds whistled through the vast slums of Coldmark City and plastic and paper trash drifted lazily in the air. The natives shivered in threadbare cloaks and huddled around fires of burning garbage. It would snow soon, and the suffering of the people would increase.

  We had no time to worry about them; we had our own problems. Four of us, bundled up in USICOM coldcoats, trotted through the back alleys of Old City, the nastiest part of Coldmark. Massive, crumbling prefabs towered all around us, peeling from age, caked in generations of accumulated dirt. The Old City was the original Coldmark. It had long ago disintegrated, and now served as the home of the most desperate elements of Coldmark’s increasingly desperate society.

  “Here!” Coolhand led us. We darted into the next alley. I could barely see, and we did not dare use any lights or night vision gear. I followed Coolhand’s tall, unmistakable figure, with Warhound and Priestess just behind me. Before dropping us off, our aircar had darted through alleys so narrow, we left a trail of destruction in our wake. Overhead another Legion aircar lit up the Old Town with a sky full of deceptor bursts. We wanted to pass as USICOM types to the casual observer, so there were no comtops this time. It limited us. I felt naked.

  Somewhere back there a Systie aircar had, hopefully, just lost us. In a few moments our own aircar would pop out of the other side of Old Town, and the only way for the Systies to find us would be to flood the area with troops. Somehow, I did not believe the natives would be overly cooperative with the Systies.

  “Left! Here!” The street was slippery with slime and refuse. We passed another miserable group of Coldmarkers, gathered around a pitiful little fire. They all held out their hands, palms open. Three little street urchins exploded out of the group, running toward us, palms out.

  “Credit-food! Credit-food! Credit-food!” An insane chant. Priestess stopped. She gaped at a shrunken, wrinkled old woman sitting by the fire, her face pinched with untreated advanced age and hunger and longing, her hand out to Priestess. Sensing weakness, the kids latched onto Priestess, seizing her legs, thrusting their open palms toward her face.

  “Credit-food! Credit-food, pretty girl! Rich girl! We die from hunger, rich girl! Credit-food!”

  “Move it, Priestess!” Warhound seized her by an arm, tearing her away from the kids, pulling her into the next alley. She came, running silently.

  “This is it!” Coolhand paused by an open doorway in a tall, featureless building; it looked like a warehouse. The number 78 was scrawled crudely in white paint on the wall by the doorway, over a pile of fresh garbage.

  Coolhand stepped into the doorway. I followed him, cautiously. I caught a movement to my right. I whipped the mini over to cover it and when my eyes adjusted to the dark I found the barrel of my handgun was hovering a few mils from the forehead of a very surprised Coldmarker. He sat on the floor against the wall, wrapped in a cloak, his empty hands exposed. He was young and had dark brown skin and glittering black eyes. He looked far too alert to suit me. Warhound and Priestess popped into the doorway.

  “Apartment 2010?” I asked him, keeping the mini centered on his forehead.

  “Second floor,” he gasped, pointing a trembling finger up a staircase. “To the left.”

  “Thank you,” I answered. I stepped back, set the mini to V, and shot him in the chest. He jerked once and slumped, unconscious.

  “That was really subtle, Thinker,” Coolhand said.

  We moved up the stairs, minis up. Nothing stirred. We crept past doors, all closed, some with numbers, some without. We found 2010, and took up positions silently.

  Most people knock, but not the Legion. We blow away the freaking door, even when we’re invited. It’s an old Legion tradition. We didn’t have our E’s and it looked like a substantial door, so Warhound used a V charge, squeezing it onto the center of the door. Then he triggered it and it flared briefly and the door exploded inwards with a shattering roar and a white flash, and we barreled in all together, guns up, Snow Leopard, Thinker, Warhound and Priestess, the Legion hello.

  A young lady with a baby sat cross-legged on the floor by a hissing heating element, a young man rose up suddenly from a pile of blankets.

  “Don’t move!” Coolhand shouted the warning. Coolhand and I covered the man, Warhound and Priestess had the lady and the baby. They froze. It was dark and cold, the floor littered with clothing and blankets, filthy walls, the heater spitting and glowing red. A single room, two closets for the kitchen and toilet. The baby stared at us, mouth open. The lady had been feeding it, and she had dropped the food. They were Outworlders, not Coldmarkers. I frisked the man and his immediate surroundings. No weapons. Priestess frisked the lady and the baby. No weapons. Warhound waited by the door and scanned the corridor. Priestess stayed by the lady. Coolhand and I squatted by the man. We had him sit on the floor.

  “Are you Brandon Terrio, Defcom 80147-41?” Coolhand asked.

  The man hung his head, sighed deeply, and answered wearily. “It knows perfectly well who we are.” The lady gasped, and tears suddenly began to trickle down her cheeks. The baby looked up at her curiously.

  “I haven’t the slightest idea who you are,” Coolhand insisted. “Did you send us this note?” He dropped it before the man, a crumpled scrap of paper with a few lines of handwriting.

  The man stared at it briefly, then
his head rose and he looked at each of us in turn. The light of understanding slowly began to glow in his eyes.

  “It’s not with USICOM!” he declared.

  “No, we’re not,” Coolhand replied. “We’re with the Legion.”

  “The Legion!” He gasped it. “The Legion! It got my message! My God, we never thought it would work, we thought it was with the System, we thought they had intercepted the message. The Legion! My God! Tinlan, our guests. Make some tea for our guests!” He trembled with emotion and excitement. He was a young man, but he appeared ill, stricken with some terrible, primitive disease.

  “Thank you, but we don’t have time for tea,” Coolhand said. “We don’t have much time at all, you see, and if they trace us here, you will have plenty of questions to answer. Now, what does this list mean, who are you, and what did you want to tell us?” Coolhand held up the handwritten message. It read simply:

  Brandon Terrio Defcom 80147-41

  Aeria

  Preference

  Galleon

  Consensus

  Tranquility

  Old Town, 78 Cargo D, Apt 2010. Nights.

  The list had piqued our interest. The five ships listed had all hard-launched from Andrion 2 in the teeth of our attack.

  “We wrote it,” the man explained. “Brandon Terrio was our friend, a Sector Starfleet records officer with Coldmark Port. Our name is Tharos Cyprio, but that’s not important. We just want to give Cit what Brandon gave us.”

  Cit-a Systie term for citizen.

  He paused briefly, short of breath. His wife had dried her eyes and was feeding the baby again. It was a beautiful, bright-eyed baby, smiling at everything it saw, opening a mouth full of mashed food and cooing. Priestess appeared fascinated by the baby, her gloved fingers still hesitating to touch it.

  “Brandon discovered something it was not supposed to know. It was an accident. It was into some highly classified fleet programs, and there was a screw-up in the access, and its work got it into an area where it should not have gone. It should have backed out immediately, of course. But Brandon was always curious. It went into it further, and got itself in trouble. It copied the data.”