Chimera Company - Rho-Torkis Box Set

by Tim C. Taylor

  “You told the Legion what you found?”

  He shifted uneasily. “Most of it. It’s why I’m here. Although why I’ve not simply been eliminated... To be honest, that’s an even bigger mystery to me.”

  “It seems the galaxy is a stranger place than either of us expected,” said Osu. “Do you know where they come from? They have to be invading from somewhere.”

  “No idea.”

  “I bet that Muryani does.” Osu shifted his gaze; Enthree had them under observation and was not troubling herself to be subtle about it.

  “Agreed,” said Bronze. “Secrets, secrets… everywhere I see secrets and mysteries, but before we can get anywhere, we’ve a mission to carry out and that remains priority one.”

  “After you attacked Meatbolt today, those troopers will be watching you. If I can engineer an opportunity for you to have another argument, can you kill this... this Invader and make it seem an accident?”

  “I can. But that’s no guarantee the Militia will treat it as such.”

  “Understood.” Murderous plans began circling in Osu’s mind. His ma would not approve, but the mission was all. “Leave it with me.”

  “Good.” Bronze spoke with finality, reached into his deep pockets, and drew out his pipe. A short while later the shelter began filling with the sweet aroma of his synth-bacco.

  How does he switch off like that? Osu wondered. He had no such skill himself. With his spirit growing more stained by the second, he honed his plans for murder.

  OSU SYBUTU

  “What did I tell you, Arunsen? We should have buried your injured animal and run for the trees. They’ve found us.”

  The Militia sergeant peered down at Osu from his mount but said nothing.

  The Saruswine he rode through the trees was the same beast that had broken two legs in yesterday’s wild descent. Now it carried Arunsen, a half load of supplies, and Green Fish – the woman who seemed to be forming an attachment to Zavage. The beasts were magnificent and Osu had grown proud of Chimera Company’s Saruswine contingent, although it suited him to pretend otherwise for now.

  “I left a motion sensor at the shelter after we leveled the site. Built out of parts salvaged from the bike wreckage. It’s showing multiple contacts. Looks like vehicles there. Probably attracted by the sheet that wasn’t properly secured.”

  “You were there,” Arunsen growled. “We wouldn’t have made it to the trees before the blizzard hit.”

  “We would have if you hadn’t wasted time with your pets, and your Militia thugs hadn’t picked a fight with my man.”

  The gap narrowing between the trees, Osu had to break contact for a short distance to thread his own way through the forest before pulling alongside again when the route widened once more.

  It was only a short detour, but it was enough to observe the tension in the party as the Saruswine-mounted troopers stabbed barbed comments down at Bronze and Zavage. The legionaries for their part remained aloof, not deigning to respond to their inferiors.

  The insults were becoming angrier by the second.

  “Chimera Company is fracturing,” Osu warned Arunsen on his return.

  “Yeah, and whose fault is that?” Arunsen swallowed his anger. “We don’t have to work together,” he said after a long pause. “I just have to make sure you fulfil your mission and be present at the photo opportunity so I can say we were there. But… although it tastes like mud to say this, if we do work as a team, we’re more likely to reach that point alive.”

  “Agreed. But it’s not working so far. In the Legion, when we have two people who can’t tolerate each other, we stick them in a room or cave for a few days and leave them to sort out their issues. If all goes well, they come out as brothers or sisters. Second best outcome: only one emerges alive. Third best: they both die. At least that way they no longer endanger their comrades.”

  Okay, so Osu was exaggerating, but the Militia sergeant seemed to buy it wholesale. He tugged at his beard inside his cloak and then joined in. “Fourth best,” said Arunsen. “Leave the discord to simmer away. If two troopers are at war with each other, the entire team is imperiled. I agree that we are sparring with each other, Militia and Legion. I myself would feel more relaxed after burying my knuckles in your face, Sergeant Sybutu. What do you propose?”

  “You and I should settle our differences in private. Everyone else, lock them all in a room for a day to get it out their systems. Kill or cure, Arunsen. Anyone who survives that bloodletting we take with us to Bresca-Brevae.”

  The big man pulled again on his beard. Osu began to suspect it was a deliberate attempt to wind him up. What could be a less appropriate look for a professional soldier than eyeshadow and bejeweled beard?

  Nonetheless, Arunsen’s tone became almost soothing. “I misjudged you, Osu. You’re arrogant, a complete arse, impaled on your bigoted self-importance, and strangled by your solipsism. Yet you’re not as ignorant as I assumed.”

  “Thank you. And you, Arunsen, are ugly, fetid, and about as unprofessional as a soldier can get and still fire a rifle. I wouldn’t trust you to run anything of financial value because you are a king of thieves, ruling an infinitesimally petty kingdom. And yet…”

  The Viking laughed when Osu was lost for words. “This is the part where you say something nice.”

  Osu shook his head, the task beyond him. “What the hell does solipsism mean, anyway?”

  Arunsen shrugged. “Fucked if I know.”

  The whole conversation had been a lie, but there was nothing fake about the laughter that tumbled out of Osu’s chest and into the snow-laden trees.

  Arunsen joined in with his deep guffaws. Mounted a little further up the same Saruswine, Green Fish turned and regarded them both with disgust.

  “Lily knows the ground better than any of us,” said Arunsen when they’d settled. “I’ll ask her where she suggests.”

  “Agreed. But after the blizzard blew itself out, the air’s been still. Without our tracks healing up behind us, we have to assume any pursuers will follow straight into the forest. We need to shake them first, and I have an idea how.”

  CHIMERA COMPANY

  After another hour’s journey headed east through the forest, Chimera Company met the river Beythu-Los flowing south toward the sea. The waist-deep water was clear and fast flowing. Fish with fins like brightly colored ribbons darted playfully in and out of sharp rocks.

  The Saruswine proved their mettle again, stepping into the cold water and navigating the uneven and slippery riverbed with only the occasional stumble.

  Instead of crossing, they remained in the river and followed its course downstream, the Legion bikes carving a foaming channel as their gravitics churned the water. The animals remained as unconcerned with the cold of the water as they were with the snow and ice.

  After a couple of hours journeying this way, and with the Saruswine growing restless for a feed, the trees thinned and then gave way to open plain. The party scanned the horizon for trouble and found none. However, they did see scattered signs of habitation: a radio mast here, a storage silo there, and along the crest of a low range of hills on the far eastern horizon, an occasional wheeled vehicle moving along an ice road.

  Rho-Torkis remained fiercely untamable, but it was yielding crude signs of settlement.

  Since setting out from Fort Iceni, Enthree had developed such a connection to the Saruswine that by now they would follow her anywhere. She led them to the east bank to feed, urging them to hurry. The beasts tore great furrows in the snowy riverbank in their obedient haste to get to food.

  Enthree, Vetch, and Lily rode the Saruswine back into the Beythu-Los and resumed their journey downstream, while Rynter, Darant, and Sward joined the three legionaries in tramping east through the snow, pushing the riderless bikes with them and making as heavy a trail as they could without being too obvious about it.

  After cresting a hill three klicks out from the river, Osu judged it too risky to carry on. He really had left a mo
tion sensor at the blizzard refuge, but it was a crude affair. There was no way of telling whether it had detected a flurry of snow blowing past or a division of heavy armor, but he deemed it better to plan for the worst than hope for the best.

  They mounted the bikes, troopers riding pillion, and pressed on for a few hundred yards, moving slowly so as to minimize the evidence they left in the snow. Then they circled around in a wide arc before picking up speed to rendezvous with the Saruswine plowing through the river.

  Reunited, Chimera Company followed the Beythu-Los downstream until they reached the sea an hour before dusk. By nightfall they had arrived at their destination, the location Lily had recommended to thrash out their differences. It was a small island out across the frozen sea. It was an uninviting place with a boulder-strewn beach rising to aggressive cliffs, but snuggled within a fold in those cliffs was a cave accessible via a series of rocky ledges. The Saruswine jumped up them without a problem. By the time the legionaries and their bikes had been lifted up to the cave with ropes, the troopers had already lit the interior, a barrel of brandy had been tapped, and the plasma weapons had been used to heat a circle of stones built up within a large metal trivet they had found there.

  Clearly, they weren’t the only ones to use this cave as shelter, but for tonight, the island belonged to Chimera Company.

  Though whether there would still be a Chimera Company by morning remained to be seen.

  VETCH ARUNSEN

  Across the cave walls flickered shadows of the troopers and jacks sitting around the glowing stones in the firepit.

  Chimerans, Green Fish had started to call the group. As if they were ever going to be a single unified team.

  No one else felt a need to use Green Fish’s new name.

  But then she had eyes for the fish-jack with the plump head tentacles. If Vetch ever discovered that the Kurlei had been using the lumps on his head to plant ideas into Green Fish’s heart, then he’d slice them off and roast them over the fire. Probably go well with onions.

  He found himself staring at this Vol Zavage. He’d never seen a Kurlei’s face this close before. On the trek here, heads and faces had been covered, but in the cave the goggles and hoods were off, and he could look his temporary allies in the face.

  Sybutu, he’d seen before, stretched over a rock for Lily’s amusement. Vetch was sitting next to him now but felt no compulsion to study the jack’s features. Osu Sybutu looked the same as pretty much every legionary he’d ever met. Sometimes he wondered whether the legions were stuffed with clones imprinted with false memories, and a random selection of skin tone and gender from a limited range of factory options.

  Bronze was not such a clone. For a jack, his build was slight, and his features pinched and even more pale than Vetch’s own. Yet he radiated far more danger than Sybutu. He moved with the grace of a jungle cat who could extend a single claw and sever your artery with a casual flick.

  The legionary said something to make the troopers around him laugh. Vetch couldn’t make out what they were saying on the other side of the hot stones, but he picked up the cruel edge to the laughter. It was bloodthirsty. Impatient.

  Drink had been consumed by all but Enthree and Darant who were on watch. Food shared. Clothing stripped down to the underlayers. It looked as if Sybutu would get his wish to scrap it out, because now that the troopers and jacks had been given their chance to get the measure of each other, there was an expectant air as everyone waited for the mood to switch.

  Who would move the group on to the next phase?

  “Hey, Sybutu!” called Lily from behind the two sergeants. “How’re you feeling?”

  Oh, this is gonna be good, thought Vetch as he watched Sybutu ignore Lily’s greeting.

  Lily, in turn, ignored the slight and waved at Vetch to shuffle along the smooth rock they’d dragged near to the heated rocks to use as a bench.

  “You know,” she said to the unresponsive jack, “I had you chained to a rock a little like the one we’re sitting on. Isn’t that funny?” She sat down, her lengthy sigh suggesting she was settling there for the night. “I even warmed it up for you with a plasma flamer, pretty much like the girls used to heat these cave rocks.”

  “Go away.”

  Vetch grimaced at the way Sybutu spoke. On the surface it was calm enough, but dig a little deeper and the legionary was boiling with resentment. He couldn’t fault the man. Lily had played rough with him, after all.

  “I’m sorry, Osu, but if we’re to work together, then there are some things I need you to know. Major Yazzie ordered me to loosen you up before she talked with you. Sounded like she wanted to play good cop, bad cop, and I’m very good at being bad. As for flames, when we captured you, I planted a sub-dermal tracker while you were paralyzed on the way to Iceni. The incision I made was covered up by the burn scars.”

  Now that’s odd...

  Vetch had a theory about what made legionaries tick. They made good soldiers, that was true, but that was only because they sucked so badly at everything else. Such as hiding emotions. Most Militia troopers were graduates of the gutters, sink-cyls, and prisons: they knew how to lie.

  Sybutu was the typical Legion open book. So when Lily’s jibes failed to fill him with righteous indignation – instead Sybutu looked guilty as hell – Vetch wondered what the man had done.

  Or what was he yet to do?

  “So,” Sybutu responded, “what are you saying, Hjon? Are you telling me you did bad things for good reasons? Do you expect my forgiveness?”

  “Don’t judge me too soon, Sergeant. I haven’t finished. Not quite. I wanted to make it clear that, yes, I was torturing you under orders, but I also want you to know that as I was hurting you, I was thinking only of myself.”

  For the first time, Sybutu looked at the woman sitting beside him, his face hard with disdain. “You’re not making any sense.”

  She grinned. “What I mean to say, Sergeant Jack, is that the main reason I tortured you for so long is because…” She leaned her head against his shoulder. “Because I enjoyed it.”

  Sybutu spun about and shoved Lily hard in the chest.

  She flew off the back of the stone and made a hard landing on the floor of the cave.

  “You asked for that, Lil’,” Vetch murmured. Some of his troopers got to their feet. He doubted they would be so understanding.

  Lily sprang up and jumped back onto the stone, pushing her face up against Sybutu’s. “Didn’t like that, did you, jack? Is it a fight you want? You’re bigger and uglier than me, but I’ll take you on if you’re brave enough.”

  A pair of arms slid beneath Lily’s shoulders and pulled her off her seat. Vetch glanced up to see Green Fish wrap her arms tightly around Lily’s chest and whisper something in her ear.

  He couldn’t hear what was said, but Lily walked off into the shadows and Green Fish took her place between the two sergeants. Meatbolt hovered nearby like a storm about to break.

  “What can I say?” Green Fish gave Sybutu a half-shrug of apology. “Lily’s tastes can run to the extreme.”

  “I just don’t get it,” said Sybutu. “The madwoman took a dislike to me before I even spoke to her. The first thing I said to Lily was an incoherent scream when she tortured me. Why does she hate me so much?”

  “That’s sweet.” Green Fish laughed. “The first word you ever spoke to her was arggh! You’re really not getting it, are you? You’re her type. She doesn’t hate you. Dealing with that would be simple enough. I think she’s a little in love with you.”

  Sybutu raised an eyebrow. “That’s… disturbing.” The eyebrow pushed to the limit. Sybutu was genuinely astonished by this revelation of the obvious. “And highly inappropriate.”

  “Highly inappropriate,” she echoed. “You’re so Legion.”

  “Her deviancy… is that why she was busted down to the ranks?”

  “In a manner of speaking.” Green Fish’s eyes beamed with pride for her friend. “Honesty is her deviance. She’s too decent
to avoid doing the right thing. That was her downfall.”

  Sybutu screwed his face up. “I don’t buy any of that. How can you extoll her virtues when she’s just told me how much she enjoyed torturing me?”

  “It wasn’t you as such,” said Vetch. “You represent the Legion. In messing with you, she was sticking it to jacks throughout the Federation. She has plenty of justification for that. We all do.”

  “And this from the same Lily Hjon who said she wants the Legion and Militia both gone to start over again.” Sybutu shook his head. “She’s crazy.”

  “Don’t go using words like crazy,” said Vetch. “My theory is that she’s got Jotun blood in her. I’m serious. When our distant ancestors were slaves to Jotun Marine officers, they were brutalized and culled by the aliens who placed no value on individual human life. And yet the same big, shaggy aliens risked their entire race to aid us in the War of Liberation. Hell, they’d started laying down the logistics for our war back when the longbow and lance were the cool new military tech on Earth. They’re generous and open-minded in principle, they just don’t care about individuals. When it comes to Lily’s strategic outlook, she’s like a cultured fleet admiral adhering to higher principles. But in her one-on-one tactics, it’s not just her tastes but her morality that’s… well, filthy.”

  “I’ve met my share of filth,” said Sybutu. “Blaster bolt through the head is usually the best treatment.”

  Green Fish bristled. “Attempting that would be a fatal mistake.”

  “Relax, Trooper,” said the legionary. “If Hjon stays away from me, I’ll leave her alone. It’s not easy to forget torture. It’s impossible to forgive. But I’m a legionary and that means the mission comes first.”

  Lily came from nowhere and yanked Sybutu back off his seat, spilling his precious brandy into the ground. She’d toppled him over, but she’d had to dig her heels in hard to the bottom of the heavy stone to lever him back.