“I’m glad you’re Legion,” said a woman who’d perched her butt on the nearest bike and was watching Osu with her head resting in her hands. He sensed a quiet lethality about her that reminded him of the SpecMish man currently going by the name of Bronze.
She pulled back her hood to reveal an unnaturally white face completely covered in tattoos: roses weeping black blood.
“Killing is normally such an ugly business,” she said. “Every death is a wound to the soul for soldiers like you and me, Sybutu, and you are a killer. I can tell that poor Lep Clynder was not your first kill. The lives we take... even for killers like us, it seems so slight at the time, Sergeant, but each one festers and never heals. Have you learned that yet?”
She hopped off the bike and sauntered over, laughing like a child. She looked up at him clicking her tongue. “Which is why it’s such a relief that you turn out to be legionaries.”
Dread crept along Osu’s spine. Troopers were walking behind him, but he couldn’t see. He couldn’t turn around. And when he tried to cry out a warning... silence.
“Legionaries, you see” – she covered her head once more – “are different. Killing you won’t leave an ugly residue. In fact, it’ll be fun, and boy, do I need some fun.”
She reached up and plucked something from his neck: a small dart which she presented in front of his eyes before storing in a pouch in her coat.
“Let’s see if this has worked, shall we?”
She poked him in the sternum with a single digit and over he went, his body completely rigid.
His head hit the ground hard, but he barely felt a thing.
“No peeking,” said the Militia trooper before someone unseen secured a hood over his head.
They’d paralyzed him. He could see nothing through the hood, smell only leather and sweat, and had only a vague sense of being dragged along the ground before being dumped into a vehicle, although they could be phantom sensations he’d imagined to fit with his expectations.
His ears, though... they worked only too well. The tattooed woman, who volunteered her name as Trooper Lily Hjon would not shut up. She spent the entire journey to Fort Iceni telling him the many ways she was going to enjoy torturing him.
Osu had some personal experience with torture. Enough that he could tell from her whispered details that she had a whole lot more.
And she knew that the most harrowing torture was often the simplest.
“You’re their sergeant,” she would tell him in a hundred variations of the same cruel barb. “They look to you to keep them safe. And did you? No. You let them be captured without a fight. And now they’ll suffer for your failure.”
The journey to Fort Iceni was not long in distance, but it felt endless to Osu’s soul, because the yapping tattooed trooper was right. He had failed his team. Better all around if it had been he and not Yergin who’d bought the others an exit through the phony legionaries.
But even the longest journeys end eventually. He felt a jolt as their transport halted. Then a burning pain in his neck and a merciless tingling in his extremities.
They had arrived, and he was recovering.
Whatever the Militia had planned, they had made a mistake in not killing him straight away. A mistake they would pay for.
Hic manebimus optime.
He was Osu Sybutu,
He was Legion.
And he would never give up.
NEXT ISSUE: CHIMERA COMPANY!
ISSUE 3
OSU SYBUTU
Osu rolled his shoulder blades against the boulder, trying to soak up every last morsel of heat from the rock into the naked flesh of his back. He felt his blood pumping hard in its attempt to transfer the life-sustaining warmth – modest though it was – to his chest, his face, and his numb arms that dangled uselessly over his head, brushing the icy stone ground of this accursed courtyard.
He couldn’t hold out much longer.
The resolve not to tell the Militia anything still held, but his interrogator had yet to ask him a question. At the beginning, Lily Hjon had declared she had no interest in extracting information from him; only pain. He had thought her words an interrogator’s gambit, but it seemed she had spoken truly.
So far, his battle had not been a test of wills with the Militia trooper, but a rerun of a more ancient battle: man against the elements.
After stripping him naked from the waist up, a mob of troopers had chained him upside down to a rounded boulder that had been warmed to stretch out this rearguard action against the cold of Rho-Torkis.
At least he was spared the sight of his body succumbing to frostbite, because his eyelids had frozen in place and his blurry eyesight was icing over.
A last wave of anger shook his body, rattling the manacles securing his ankles to the rock.
Immediately, he cursed his weakness. He knew any sounds he made would summon her.
Sure enough, he heard the familiar footsteps approach, and then hands in insulated gloves lifted his head away from the rock and into the cold.
Gently, she huffed her hot breath over his eyes, releasing them from their icy coating. The warmth that had passed through her lungs smelt of cigarettes and coffee, and he realized that she must be sitting nearby, enjoying the entertainment of a slow death. Perhaps through the windows of a mess hall.
Were others watching him too?
And what of his comrades? He hadn’t seen them since the Militia had taken them from the ice plain. Were they in the same courtyard at Fort Iceni, chained to other rocks?
He tried to call out to them, but his chest and throat were frozen solid.
Hjon shushed him like a child… or – strangely – even the intimacy of a lover. Drawing back her hood, she wiped away his slushy tears with her warm cheek. Then she stood back and her tattooed face clarified in his vision.
Expecting this to be his last chance, Osu tried to make sense of Trooper Lily Hjon. The words she flung with abandon sparked with a spiteful cruelty that didn’t match her face, which seemed to Osu dulled by tragedy that she tried to cover with sarcasm and tattoos.
Osu wasn’t fooled. This was a woman performing a role. Militia Trooper was not what Lily Hjon was meant to be.
She could be cast into the Five Hells for all eternity for all Osu cared, except that just maybe this untapped restlessness he sensed in her was a last straw for him to clutch.
Still grasping the back of his skull, Lily moved closer until all he could see was an upside-down pair of feminine eyes.
“Is there something you wish to ask me, Sergeant?” She spoke in ecstatic gasps, as if aroused by this interplay.
Osu wasn’t buying any of it.
Her falseness gave him hope, but the biting cold was all too real.
“Wh... wh... why?” he stuttered. With his brain and his lips so numb, it was a supreme effort to say even that.
“Why?” she echoed, and then let his head drop to crack against the boulder. “Why? Because despite your pretty dark flesh, you’re still Legion. And even if you haven’t wronged me personally, there’s plenty enough guilt attached to those of your order who have. The deaths of you and your men will not even begin to compensate. Especially not after what you did to Raven Company.”
Osu wanted to ask what she meant, but the cold had him too strongly in its grip, and he watched her depart through misting eyes.
But she hadn’t abandoned him to his death. He couldn’t see, couldn’t move, but he heard the ringing of metal on metal and the hum of a power unit starting.
She returned, bulkier than before and holding something.
He jerked in his chains as a sudden whoosh of flame lit the cold air of the courtyard. She was carrying a flame projector.
“Let’s see if we can warm you up,” she teased, releasing another gout of fire from the weapon’s barrel.
She was a couple of feet away and the warmth from the flames was invigorating. He felt his strength return.
“Why?” he repeated. “Militia and Legi
on, we can work together.”
Hjon pointed the barrel at him, leaving the muzzle between his eyes close enough to sear his brow. “Not anymore.”
“Ahhh! But we can. I’ve done it.” He smelled his flesh smolder. “Hnnnnn! At my last posting.”
She dropped the barrel, and Rho-Torkis immediately supplied a soothing balm of icy chill to his tortured flesh. “You are not a good liar.”
That was true. He had been part of a joint Militia-Legion operation on Irisur, but it had taken only hours before each side had trained their weapons on the other.
She’d gone.
The cold had already leached the heat away from the burn on his forehead, and he was ready to beg for the flamer’s return.
Where was she?
The flame thrower unleashed a long burst nearby.
From behind.
“Tell me when you’re warm enough,” said Hjon cheerfully from the other side of the boulder, before hurling more fire at the rock.
He could feel the surface warming between his shoulder blades.
“A bit more?” she teased. “You got it.” She poured more flame into the boulder.
“That’s enough,” Osu shouted. His back was now slick with sweat.
“What’s that?” Hjon called. “That’s not hot enough?” She played fire over the stone.
“Stop!”
“More hot?”
Lily was laughing now, and when Osu began thrashing his body, trying to keep his flesh away from the burning rock, her laughter grew louder.
“Please!”
She ceased her laughs and powered down her flame projector.
“Better,” she said bitterly and walked away, leaving Osu shackled upside down across a boulder that was rapidly cooling, but not quickly enough to prevent him screaming in agony.
Five Days Earlier
VETCH ARUNSEN
Vetch Arunsen ran into the courtyard with the stupid fat fingers of his left hand struggling to fasten the strap beneath his helmet, while his right kept the haft of his war hammer close to his body. The weapon’s sling mostly did a good job of holding it securely, but even in its collapsed state, his melee weapon of choice had a nasty habit of battering his kneecaps when he sprinted.
He sensed a slowing down of the stream of troopers racing to Raven Company’s assembly point near the punishment area that could be viewed from the chow hall.
Upon the walkways and watchtowers, he saw sentries moving with a bored shuffle. Wrapped up tight in the cold weather gear, they feared neither the bitter cold of Rho-Torkis, nor the assault of an enemy. They weren’t even afraid of their officers.
No, sir. This was not a base under attack.
Vetch knew exactly what this call to arms really was: another meaningless exercise in keeping Raven Company on its toes and its troopers miserable.
He slowed to a jog and let his helmet straps dangle freely. They were barely noticeable in the great mass of his beard anyway.
What he couldn’t do was look his comrades in the eye. Raven was not like the other companies in the Fort Iceni garrison. They were fair game for every petty torture its officers could devise because Raven was a punishment company. It was everyone else’s duty to make Raven suffer before it could ever hope to atone for its crimes.
He took his place in the front rank of his squad and cursed the guilt that washed over him like it always did. Raven Company’s plight was an injustice, of course. Legion misunderstanding and arrogance had been seized upon by a corrupt Militia officer as an excuse to dump them here on Rho-Torkis.
Captain Solikin-Goh watched her company assemble from the top of the south gate.
How much did the Raven’s new commander know about the real reason for the company’s presence in Rho-Torkis? They hadn’t been posted here to be punished; they had been sent here to die for the crime of knowing too much.
And he, Sergeant Vetch Arunsen, knew more than all of them because he was the one who had provided the excuse for Raven Company to be punished.
They’d been sent here to die in the ice of Rho-Torkis because of him.
Bugger that!
Vetch had never been good at rolling over and being a victim.
He would be the one to get the Ravens reinstated in a place of honor.
But how to do it? That was proving tricky to figure out. And every day the endless cold and the mindless routine made it more difficult to think.
The captain descended the steps from the top of the south gate, looking unbalanced with her folded wings adding considerable bulk beneath her coat. Something had gotten the Gliesan excited and Vetch found himself hoping she didn’t slip and break her neck. He was surprised to find himself care. Solikin-Goh had been promoted directly from ensign – scarcely knowing more than which end of a rifle went bang – but at least she appeared dedicated to restoring Raven Company’s good name, no matter how many of its personnel had to die to achieve her aim.
“Bet the captain’s itching to unfurl her wings and glide,” said Lily from the other end of the front rank.
Vetch gave a little chuckle at Lily’s comment. It was true. Gliesans were a race of gliders who had a bizarre dislike of descending steps. To them, it was like an embarrassing bodily function. Nature intended them to glide; steps were something you used when no one was watching.
“I’d like to see her try,” said Meatbolt from the rear rank. “Reckon her wings would get frostbite before touching down on the floor.”
“Button it,” Vetch growled.
Meatbolt was a good lad and would do well, unless his unguarded mouth got him chained to one of the punishment boulders and his frozen corpse left there indefinitely as an inspiration to the others.
“Sorry, Sergeant.”
Vetch grimaced. He was going to have to teach the youngster when to shut up very soon.
Too late. As Solikin-Goh took a place in front of her assembled company, Vetch’s platoon commander, Lieutenant Shen turned his head around to scowl at the ill-disciplined enlisted ranks behind him.
Shen ran his withering stare over his troopers, making them quail under its intensity, quelling all disorder through an all-consuming mix of respect and fear for their platoon commander.
At any rate, that was probably what was running through Shen’s little head.
But if that really was the effect he thought he was bringing out in his troopers, he was an even bigger fool than he looked.
Like the other troopers, Vetch wore a comm headset beneath a heated fabric hat that kept the frostbite from his ears. A metal helmet perched on top; in his case, one with cheek plates and a crest that could have come straight out of the Bronze Age if not for the pair of helmet lamps.
The heated hat was so bulky that the helmet’s eye cut outs opened onto his forehead. And it wasn’t just him. With their randomized great coats, helmets, and other equipment, the other troopers looked like vagabonds standing in lines.
Not so Lieutenant Julius Shen. His helmet was a highly polished silver affair with an elegantly curved rim, modeled on ancient European Renaissance designs from Earth. His comm unit was integrated with the helmet, as was an advanced impact energy dissipation system, and climate control that included the ability to blow warm air over the ears, which were uncovered despite the intense cold. It was so highly polished that the captain had ordered him to add a fabric covering for operational use, lest its reflection advertised his unit’s position.
Vetch knew that he himself looked like a scruffy barbarian.
Better that than look a complete arse.
“Troopers of Raven Company,” announced the captain in her high-pitched Gliesan voice, which made her words very clear. “Thanks to our sharp-eyed sentries, I have wonderful news.”
Vetch groaned. This sounded like a new and exciting way to get her company killed.
“Tomorrow morning you were due to embark on a convoy of trucks that would transport you to the new guard post in the perimeter around the ASI-39 dig site. There you would ha
ve established the post, readying it for Legion reinforcements due in a few weeks. Troopers, it is not often that the Legion begs the Militia for aid, so it was natural that I volunteered us for this notable role.”
And we were duly lumped with it, thought Vetch. No one else would go near such a sucky job. So what have the sentries found to change all this?
“It was an opportunity to show the Legion we are as good as them. Better, in fact. To the south of us, at this very moment, a large body of legionaries is marching west across the Great Ice Plain in the direction of Camp Faxian. Marching! Why would they march if not to assert their mettle in front of us? I believe this is a test, and I do not intend for us to fail it. Therefore, we shall eschew our motorized transport and will march alongside our rivals and allies.”
We? I bet you won’t be joining us on the march, Captain.
“Ravens, you are designated a punishment company. I will seize every opportunity to prove you can rise above your mistakes on Lose-Viborg and demonstrate your true worth here on Rho-Torkis. Now is your opportunity to repay my faith in you. Ravens, we move out in thirty minutes. Liberty or death!”
VETCH ARUNSEN
When Raven Company set out into the snow to join with the legionaries, the air was crystal clear and sharp as a blade against any exposed skin. The freshly laid snow crunched beneath their boots with an obscene spitting sound. Within minutes, though, the western horizon darkened in anger and blew snow into their faces. Swirls of pitiless white brought land and sky together into a featureless hell.
Snowstorms on the Great Ice Plain could last for weeks, but mercifully this one blew over in less than an hour. By then, the troopers had lost all sense of direction and found themselves a mile to the east of Fort Iceni and, luckily, in the marching line of the legionaries headed west.
The troopers fell in with their rivals, saving their energy by stepping into the footsteps the jack-heads had flattened into the snow. At least, the humanoid ones did.
Chimera Company - Rho-Torkis Box Set Page 10