Curse of the Legion (16 page)

Chapter 10
Deathpaint and Psybloc

"Wait here, Slayer." Deadeye disappeared into the dark. We were within sight of Alpha Station except that it was the pit of the night and we were huddled in the tangled undergrowth of a thick forest of dato trees and I hadn't yet had a glimpse of the station. I craned my neck to see through the trees.

"Careful, Slayer," Sworn to Die warned me in Taka. "The Undead fire at any movement." I had finally gotten around to asking. It seemed the Taka called the O's "the Undead" because they weren't dead yet, but they would be as soon as some Taka did the right thing.

"Right." I froze. There were a whole lot of us, hundreds of Taka in Lizzie camfax, combat dispersed, creeping through the dark towards the objective. Every one of them had an E and a psybloc unit. I had personally made sure they knew how to fire the E. We now knew that the O could not detect the Lizzie, and that helped us a great deal.

My tacmap projected Alpha Station onto my visor, thin green lines showing the station behind the trees. It gave me a little chill. That's where we were going—O's or no O's. Who the hell did they think they were, dropping onto my world? Deadman was about to avenge all those dead Taka and Outworlders. And I was Deadman's sword. I felt great. My face was daubed crudely with Taka deathpaint as Sweety whispered in my ears, her voice like a soft, warm wave gently rippling over the sands of some phantom beach.

"Heavy Omni activity in and around Station, as marked. No humans detected yet except for our forces. Random psyprobes from Omni external defense forces. All our psybloc is active but will not counterprobe until you give the word, Three."

"Thank you, Sweety."

"It's nothing, Three."

The night sky flickered briefly, revealing low, black clouds close overhead. It was cold and smelled of rain. A deep rumble rolled across the sky. Then the sky lit up, a searing, soundless flash, fading to darkness, then another. A titanic blast shattered the silence, leaving me shocked and twitching. Multiple phospho trails suddenly streaked across the sky, blinding white, followed by a grinding, ripping, snapping orchestra that told of unimaginable forces tearing something to shreds. The burning wreckage fell slowly to the horizon, a terrible, eerily beautiful scene, and I knew it was a tragedy for someone, Legion or O's, I didn't know which. Far overhead hot blue specks flickered in and out of sight behind black clouds, a deadly ballet. I watched it with a kind of detached fatalism.

"Legion fighters," Sweety whispered.

"Slayer!" Sworn to Die called out, "Deadeye Standfast approaches."

###

"Are you Commander Thinker?" An Outworlder in Lizzie, A-vest and comtop appeared out of the dark by Deadeye's side. "Welcome to Andrion 2. I'm Stones, Captain of Recon 919, Task Force Boots. We've been downside twelve days and we've reinforced surviving Legion units." He looked like a kid, just out of Hell. I knew better.

"Stones has saved many of our people, Slayer. And killed many Undead." Deadeye always looked best in warpaint, all decked out for his own death, a grim shadow in a camfax cloak, all set to reach out and kill you.

"Nice to meet you, Stones," I said.

"I understand you've brought a bunch of auxiliaries, sir," Stones said. "How many do you have?"

"We've got roughly four hundred and fifty combat-dispersed in this immediate area, with another one hundred and fifty on the way—and every one is equipped with an E, Lizzie, and psybloc."

"Excellent! Do they know what they're doing?"

"Yes."

"Whose orders will they follow?"

"They'll obey Deadeye. And Deadeye will obey me."

"Excellent. I like your war paint. All right, here's the sit." He unfolded a silky color tacmap showing Alpha Station with all enemy units highlighted in red.

"Thinker! It's 019. Remember me? Beta Squad, 1st platoon, 5th Training Company, BT." It was another Legion trooper, snapping his visor up, revealing a slim, pale face with thoughtful eyes.

"019! Of course. It's great to see you here." I grasped his arm. I did remember him, a slight, intense trainee. I hadn't been sure about him, but here he was, right in the thick of it.

"I made Recon! I told you I'd make Recon." He was beaming. Beaming, in the face of death. One of our weakest students. No, ConFree wasn't ready for the ash heap of history. Not yet, not with all these kids throwing themselves at the enemy. I felt so good right then, with Trainee 019 at my side. My faith was instantly renewed.

"What's the plan?" I asked. We went back to the tacmap.

###

"That's the sluice trough—see it?" Stones had it highlighted on the tacmap.

"I've got it." It was on Sweety's tacmap as well—I made sure of it.

"That's our back door. It runs underground from several industrial waste outlets to a series of decontamination and purification chambers, even further underground. We don't have to worry about those. We enter right there, at that red dot. It should be on your tacmap as well by now. Got it?"

"I got it."

"We've already tunneled in there."

"I had been planning on using the power service tunnels."

"Can't do it. The O's seem aware it's a vulnerability. But it looks like they haven't discovered the sluice trough yet. We've saturated the station with eyemotes. We know exactly what's happening."

A searing, deafening blast turned the night white-hot for a frac, and I could suddenly see Alpha Station, harshly illuminated by a swirling ball of fire that was rising slowly into the dark.

"Deadman!" I exclaimed.

"That's our diversion. Tacair is going to keep their heads down. Also, it would be helpful if your auxiliaries could fire aimed shots at any O that shows his face. We've been doing that regularly at night. If we stopped doing it, it would seem unusual."

"How do they respond?"

"They're very wary now. Before recon arrived, Legion escapees from the Station were raising hell at night, sniping and shelling and mining. At first the O would respond aggressively, but they had trouble finding their targets, and the targets were shooting back. After recon got here, our weaponry and tactics got better and the O have been running scared. We're pinning them down. Do you know how great that is? We're pinning them down."

"I know exactly how great it is. Deadeye, we're doing a recon into Alpha Station. Your mission is to secure this side of the Station. If any O shows himself, you shoot him dead. Tell your warriors you want only aimed shots—no autofire. First canister. Once the shield goes down, use x. Single, aimed shots. If you get two O's I want it done with two canister rounds and two xmax."

"We will bring you the heads, Slayer!"

"Don't take any chances, Deadeye."

"Tell that to the women, Slayer. We live to die!"

###

"Almost there." Stones' voice echoed in my comtop. I was slithering through waist-high brush like a snake, enveloped in my Lizzie. A full-scale air raid was ripping through the air above us. Every frac or so everything would light up in a white phospho flash and I'd freeze. Then it would fade to black and I'd resume crawling. The sky was full of tracers, flickering downwards like hot hail. Alpha Station was burning, glowing in the night,. I sure hoped there would be something left for us.

A putrid, rotting corpse was sprawled just to my left. A faint breeze moved a shredded fragment of cloth. Such light, silky cloth—it must have been a female. The fields around Alpha Station were covered with bodies—hundreds of them, Legion soldiers and ConFree civilians, men, women, children, and Taka, all warriors, and O's too, still in their A-suits. It was a killing ground. I tried not to look at the corpse—it was burnt to a crisp, clearly from starmass. Just ahead I spotted a rotting skull, still partially encased in dead flesh. The birds had been busy. I vowed, once again, that the O would pay for their bloody deeds. They were not going to escape Legion justice. We were going to kill them all. Not one O would escape Andrion 2, if the Legion had anything to say about it. And we did!

"Omni target ahead, Thinker, see the zero. A&A, mag shield active, Vulcan on, projecting random psypower, not yet in range." Sweety was as calm as ice. Damn it! I hit the zoom and spotted the O easily. He was not far from the station—a sentry, no doubt. Why the hell hadn't Deadeye's guys spotted him? Then I realized he was hidden from their view by a projecting wall of the station.

"Stones, Thinker. I've got an O on scope. I have to take him out or he may spot us."

"Go ahead, sir."

I set my E to canister and aimed carefully. The zoom brought the O's faceplate right up close—I could even see his ugly split head. The O's mag shield flickered a very faint violet. The damned things used to be invulnerable to us, with that force field. Even tacstars couldn't hurt them, with the mag shield up. But they weren't invulnerable any more. I gently touched the trigger. The canister rounds hit him like a swarm of killer bees, ripping aside the madly whirling molecules of the force field, peppering his armor. I fired xmax, one round, right into his helmet. It exploded inside and blasted his head to a shredded goo.

"Target eliminated," I reported.

"All right, we're at the entrance. Get over here."

###

The entrance to the sluice trough was at the bottom of a very narrow slit trench cut down through spongy soil with a plasmapak. We were a squad of eleven Legion soldiers, ten recon boots and me. We were all in litesuits, A-vests, and comtops, carrying E's and psybloc, wearing Lizzie camfax cloaks. As Trainee 019, warname Bluesky, sealed the narrow entrance above us with the camo plug, we were plunged into the deepest gloom and my darksight activated. We were squatting by a cenite pipe that had a large opening slashed into it. It didn't look large enough to admit a child.

"Are we really going in there?" I asked.

"Yes sir. We should be able to get through according to the measurements. Anything wrong?"

"Oh no! I'm looking forward to it! Tell me—it seems to me this raid would be a perfect use for Holo-X. I'm surprised the Legion is not using Holo-X."

"Ah well, that's ideal all right, but I was told we don't have vac superiority yet."

"I see."

"Without vac superiority you won't have a stable topside platform to project your Holo-X."

"That's true. Yes, true. We seem to be raising hell though. Any hints when we're going to win the vac?"

"I think the first hint is going to be when about five hundred Legion troopers overrun Alpha Station and slaughter all those O's. Some of them will be Holo-X but with those numbers a whole lot of them will be flesh and blood as well."

"I guess you're right. All right, follow me." I squeezed my way into the narrow pipe. I was terrified. My claustrophobia wasn't getting better with the passage of time, but I was the leader and I had to go first. Deto!

###

All I really remember about that fun little crawl, besides the sheer horror of it all, was the realization that I was going first, that I was the point for the Legion's bloody retribution for everything the O's had inflicted on Andrion 2—my adopted world. As I slithered along that filthy pipe like a poisonous snake my E was pointed right ahead and I felt a tremendous determination. Deathpaint and psybloc—it was a terrible combination. I was going to avenge all the Taka who had died for their world, and I was going to avenge all the Outworlders who had died for their civilization, for their race, for their people. That's what it was all about in the end—people. I guess that chased away all my fear. What the hell did I have to fear? I was Deadman's sword. It was the O's who had better fear me, not the other way around.

Still, it was pretty scary. There wasn't even enough room to turn around. The sluice pipe was surrounded by tons of earth and stone, and if anything went wrong I knew I'd die miserably, hopeless and terrified. As I crawled forward through the muck, I tried to concentrate on the mission. Stones had told me Recon's mission was threefold: first, determine the O's positions and capabilities. They'd already done that, mostly through the eyemotes. Second, raise as much hell as possible to keep the O's off-balance when the main attack came. Third, capture a live O and return it to Legion forces upside. Stones had been greatly relieved when I told him that mission number three was already accomplished. Now they could concentrate entirely on having a fun time—mission number two.

My personal mission was to recontact my wife and child and by this time I thought this could best be done by liberating as many Taka prisoners as possible from the O's. I had already accomplished Tara's mission by arming and training new Taka soldiers and setting them loose against the O's. Now it was time to free some prisoners. And there wasn't much time left. O shuttles and starships were still leaving the planet regularly, and the eyemotes told us some of them were loaded with ConFree and Taka prisoners. I knew Fleetcom was targeting and destroying all the O ships they could intercept, and nobody was asking about the cargo. The cargo didn't matter, even if it was our own women and children. We'd rather see them dead than captives of the O's. I felt the same. We all did. We knew all about the O's.

###

"We're here, gang!" I announced. The removable grille was right where the tacmap said it should be, an icy pale metallic grate, set into the side of the sluice trough, just before the waste intake mechanism that was set into the floor of the aircar garage. It was right next to my visor. It was so damned beautiful I almost kissed it. It opened right into the garage subfloor, so the techs could get access to the sluice trough if anything went wrong. My blood was ice cold. A burst of hot emotion rushed over me. We had made it! We knew the aircar garage was full of prisoners, Outworders and Taka, all those who had not yet been murdered. The eyemotes told us the whole story. Women, children, babies—forced in there, a convenient holding site before being loaded onto the alien ships. Hopeless, hopeless, hopeless…I touched the grille. No longer hopeless. I felt so good it was scary. I knew I wasn't human any more, at that point. I was Deadman's Dog, and I was out for blood.