Legion Of The Damned - 01 - Legion of the Damned (27 page)

Each dawn brought the hope that a message torp would arrive, that the news would be good, that Leonid was alive. But each sunset made such a message less and less likely, and their spirits would spiral downwards.

Chien-Chu had taken refuge in his work, and in his hobbies, but Nola spent long hours knitting on the veranda, thinking about her son or comforting their daughter-in-law.

Natasha was a lovely young woman with huge eyes, a long oval face, and a slender bird-like body. Chien-Chu adored her almost as much as he did his son, and feared that the news of Leonid’s death would be very, very hard on her. No, he mustn’t think like that, for to do so was to tempt fate. Or so his mother had always said.

“Uncle Sergi! Uncle Sergi! Auntie Nola wants you!”

The voice belonged to a five-year-old boy. He was a chubby little thing, like the puppy that gamboled at his heels, and long overdue for a bath. Mud, his favorite substance next to chocolate cake, covered his face, hands, and playsuit.

Chien-Chu lifted the boy in his arms. “She does? And what does Auntie Nola want?”

A pair of serious brown eyes met his. “She wants you to come to the house, that’s what. There’s a woman to see you.”

Chien-Chu hung the laser torch on the sculpture and started for the house. It was a long low one-story affair and seemed part of the ground that it stood on. Ivy climbed here and there, brick peeked out between neatly trimmed shrubs, and windows winked in the sun.

“And does this woman have a name?”

The boy shrugged. “I made mud pies.”

“I made a sculpture.”

“I’ll bet Aunt Nola will like my mud pies better than your sculpture.”

Chien-Chu shook his head. “No sucker bets. I’m getting too old.”

“How old are you?”

“None of your business.”

Chien-Chu was huffing and puffing by the time he reached the veranda but too stubborn and too proud to put the boy down. They entered the living room together.

It was huge, with high ceilings, dark beams, and a massive fireplace. An eclectic mix of modem and traditional furniture was scattered about.

Nola Chien-Chu and Madam Valerie Dasser sat on opposite ends of a comfortable couch. They held teacups in their hands. Madam Chien-Chu took one look at her husband and frowned.

“Sergi! Look at you! Overalls. Filthy ones at that. And Toby! Shame on you!”

The little boy smiled happily. “I made mud pies.”

“You look like a mud pie. Now, run up stairs and take a bath. Your piano instructor will be here in half an hour.”

“But I don’t like him!”

“I don’t want to hear any more. Now, scoot.”

The little boy took one look at his aunt’s face, saw that she meant it, and ran towards a hallway.

Chien-Chu dropped into his favorite chair, ignored his wife’s pained look, and smiled at Madam Dasser.

“Good afternoon, Madam Dasser. What a pleasant surprise.”

“A surprise perhaps,” Madam Dasser replied, “but not especially pleasant. I bring bad news.”

Madam Chien-Chu’s teacup clattered as a hand flew to her mouth. The Eurasian eyes that had fascinated Chien-Chu these many years were wide with fright.

Dasser shook his head. “That was thoughtless of me. Can you forgive me, Nola? The news has nothing to do with Leonid. Not directly anyway.”

Chien-Chu sighed, opened the brass box next to his elbow, and selected a cigarette. He wasn’t supposed to smoke but it didn’t seem to matter anymore. He sucked on the filter, felt the tip ignite, and sucked the smoke into his lungs. It came out in a long thin stream.

“And?”

Dasser took a sip of tea. “The Emperor ordered his forces to withdraw from the rim. That was yesterday afternoon. Most of the 3rd REI, along with elements of the 4th, and the 1st REC tried to lift seven hours later. They were caught and placed under arrest.”

“And General Mosby?”

“The general and her staff have been charged with treason.”

Madam Chien-Chu turned pale. A withdrawal meant almost certain death for those on Spindle. Her hand shook slightly as she gestured towards a darkened holo tank. “There was nothing on the news.”

Dasser smiled grimly. “There will be. Scolari threw the whole thing to the media about thirty minutes ago. The explanation was rather one-sided, to say the least.”

Chien-Chu thought about his son, about his daughter-in-law, and the millions of other human beings spread along the rim. All had been sacrificed. He took a drag off his cigarette. His voice was low but tight with anger.

“Scolari’s an idiot ... but I had hopes for the Emperor.”

Dasser wanted to state the obvious, wanted to push him, but played it cool instead.

“Yes, the whole thing is most regrettable.”

He looked her in the eyes and chose his words with care. “The poetry group that you told me about.”

“Yes?”

“Could I come to a meeting?”

Dasser smiled as she set the hook. “We’d love to have you.”

Chien-Chu nodded, stubbed his cigarette out, and swore when it burned his finger.

God knows ’twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear.

But I’ve a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.

 

 

 

 

 

Spear Commander Ikor Niber-Ba felt his heart swell with pride as the task force’s entire complement of fighters and troop carriers formed up and headed for the strangely shaped asteroid. All three of his battleships had moved in close, shortening the distance the smaller vessels had to travel, and bringing their mighty armament to bear. He could actually see the surface, mark the spots where metal and molten rock glowed cherry red, and glory in what the spear had accomplished.

They had pounded the asteroid for the better part of a Hudathan day, laying waste to every surface installation they could find, preparing the way for the final ground assault. And what an assault it would be. Every soldier not required to operate the ships would be involved.

Light reflected off fighters as they went in for one last strafing run. The troop carriers moved more slowly, dark silhouettes against the sun’s bright corona, staying in formation, mindful of their assigned landing areas. Only fifteen or twenty units of time would pass before the last of them had landed, discharged their troops, and lifted again.

The humans had been clever, very clever, but no amount of cleverness would protect them from the “Intaka,” or “blow of death.” Originally part of the lexicon that had grown up around Gunu, a highly disciplined form of personal combat, the concept of Intaka had been adopted by the Hudathan military and used to describe the use of overwhelming force.

Though favored by most of his peers, almost all of whom had grown up big and strong, Niber-Ba had a tendency to withhold the Intaka, using it only as a last resort. This stemmed from the fact that opponents had always been larger than he was, from a natural sense of thrift, and from a healthy dose of Hudathan paranoia. After all, why use more resources than necessary to overwhelm an opponent? Especially in a universe where more enemies were almost certainly waiting to attack.

But this situation was different. Niber-Ba knew that now, and knew that he should have recognized the enemy’s weakness from the start and used the strategy of Intaka to defeat them.

The knowledge of that failure, and the deaths that it had caused, had left him sleepless for three cycles running. Nothing could bring dead warriors back to life or cleanse the shame from his soul. But victory could advance his people’s cause. Yes, victory would go a long ways towards easing the pain, and victory would be his.

Niber-Ba turned his attention to the command center’s holo tank and committed himself to battle.

 

Red eyed his screens, confirmed Spinhead’s analysis, and spoke into the mike.

“Time to serve the hors d’oeuvres ... our guests have arrived.”

The electronics tech’s words were heard all over Spindle. By Captain Omar Narbakov, who was supervising the last-minute reinforcement of a weapons pit, by Leonid Chien-Chu, who was struggling to make a splice, by Legionnaire Seeger, who placed a rock in front of something he wanted to hide, and by all the others who waited by their posts, stomachs hollow with fear, palms slick with sweat. This was it, the moment they’d been dreading, when their lives would depend on skills that most of them had never tried to acquire, and on luck, which observed no loyalties and belonged as m
uch to the enemy as to them.

The exception was Narbakov. He had dreamed of this moment as a boy, trained for it as a man, and waited these many years for it to arrive. He savored the taste of peppermint as a piece of candy dissolved in his mouth, the hiss of oxygen as it blew against the side of his face, and the hard unyielding landscape beyond his visor. The dwarf hung like a searchlight in the sky, throwing hard black shadows down across Spindle’s surface, many of which concealed his troops.

Yes, this was
his
moment, his Camerone, his place to die. The thought brought no fear, no dread, just a mounting sense of excitement. For a legionnaire
will
not die,
cannot
die, as long as others live to remember him.

Narbakov stood in the open, disdainful of the Hudathan fighters that crisscrossed the asteroid’s surface, and chinned more magnification into his visor.

The Hudathan troopships had started to land, dropping onto their preassigned LZs with the delicacy of bees landing on flowers, dropping their troops like so much pollen. There was no response, no defensive fire, because Narbakov
wanted
the Hudathans on the ground. He was tired of being pounded from space, tried of fighting the aliens on their terms, and eager to strike back.

A Hudathan tripped, lost contact with the ground, and floated away. The alien looked like a large balloon, a plaything waiting to be popped, and the image made Narbakov laugh—a sound that made its way onto the command channel and caused his subordinates to look at each other and shake their heads in amazement. The old man was terminally gung ho—everyone knew that—but the laugh was bizarre even for him. Still, if the cap could laugh at the geeks, how tough could the assholes be? They grinned, checked their weapons one last time, and waited for the order to fire.

Narbakov switched to freq 4. The civilians had military-style code names but rarely remembered to use them. Leonid was known as “Boss One.”

“N-One to Boss One.”

Leonid swore at the interruption, completed the cable splice, and wound tape around the repair. “Chien-Chu here ... go ahead.”

Narbakov looked heavenwards, hoped god had provided a separate reward for civilians, and did his best to sound normal.

“Sorry to bother you, Leo ... but the place is crawling with geeks. I’ll be forced to open fire in a moment or two. How are things going?”

Leonid dropped the cable and looked up at the launcher. Although some quick-thinking legionnaires had prevented the Hudathans from finding out how important the linear accelerator was, they had still done their best to destroy it. Not from any particular concern about the device, but as part of their general effort to destroy everything on Spindle’s surface and prepare the way for their troops.

A battleship-mounted laser cannon had sliced through a section of gridwork, slagged the small ops center located to one side of the ramp, and severed a major cable run. Leonid had repaired the last of the cables himself, and the ops center had been bypassed, but the intermittent flash of laser torches signaled that repairs were still under way.

Leonid looked out towards the area where Narbakov should be, saw sticks of light lance downwards, then disappear as a fighter completed its run. The silence made the daggers of light seem less dangerous, like t
he laser shows held on Empire Day, but the civilian knew they were different. People died wherever the light touched.

“Omar? You okay?”

The officer had started to lose his patience. “Come on, Leo. Quit screwing around and answer my question.”

“I need time, Omar. Thirty minutes.”

“Get fraxing real, Leo. We’ll be ass-deep in geeks thirty minutes from now.”

“Twenty.”

“Ten and not a goddamned minute more. You tell those toolheads of yours to get their shit together. Out.”

Leonid looked up towards the glow of laser torches. How long till the Hudathans saw the lights and came to investigate?

The civilian began to climb. His breath came in short angry puffs. Damn. Damn. Damn. A series of explosions marched across the horizon and terminated near lock 4. Shit. Shit. Shit. The
had
to complete the repairs,
had
to launch the star divers,
had
to hit the battleships. He chinned a button.

“Cody ... Hecox ... Gutierrez ... how much longer?”

“Twenty, twenty-five minutes, boss.” The voice belonged to Cody.

“Make it five.”

“No can do, boss. One launch maybe, two if you’re lucky, three, forget it. The stress will tear the ramp apart.”

“We’re out of time, Cody. Spot-weld as many joints as you can and then jump.”

Cody was silent for a moment. “Okay. You’re the boss. Five and counting.”

Torches flared as the construction workers made their welds, leapfrogged each other, and started over again.

Leonid ignored them, stepped onto a side platform, and eyed the star diver’s long oval shape. It was huge, almost the size of a destroyer escort, and packed with sophisticated technology. It pained him to treat the ship like this, to use it as a high-tech cannonball, but there was no other choice.