Legion Of The Damned - 01 - Legion of the Damned (44 page)

The Naa chieftain read the note over and over, let the slate fall to the floor, and held his head in his hands. He hadn’t cried since his wife’s death. The tears flowed for a long time.

 

The company of Pioneers, with help from some sturdy-looking robots, were hard at work enlarging the tunnel that housed MPC One. A side cave had been dug and turned into a makeshift meeting room.

Natasha, feeling less out of place than she had a few days before, sat on a cable reel with her arms wrapped around her knees.

Crazy Alice, her right arm resting in a bloodstained sling, sat on a folding chair. Her pencil pushers had been forced to go one-on-one with a marine recon unit. They hadn’t won, but they hadn’t lost, and she was damned proud.

Colonel Legaux, his metal parts gleaming with reflected light, preferred to stand. The battle for the marine airfield spoke for itself.

Iron Jenny had led the 13th DBLE against a mobile landing force and fought them to a standstill. She sat on a .50-caliber ammo box and looked fresh as a daisy.

Colonel Ed Jefferson leaned against the dirt wall, arms folded in front of her, a frown on her face.

“Where’s Tran?”

“Dead,” St. James answered as he came into the room. “Killed in action when the 2nd REP took on a battalion of marines in the southern hemisphere.”

Jefferson’s frown deepened. “Shit.”

“Yeah,” St. James agreed. “That about sums it up. We lost a lot of good men and women over the last few days.”

“And kicked some serious butt,” Jenny put in happily. “The grunts ran like hell.”

Everyone knew that the diminutive officer was referring to the fact that the marines had departed as suddenly as they had come, breaking off all contact, lifting as quickly as they could. Not only that, but the warships had left as well, leaving two scouts to keep an eye on them.

St. James looked Jenny in the eye. “That’s one way to look at what happened ... but I’m not so sure. We put up a good fight, yes, and might have won. But when? A week, two, if things went well, but victory was never certain. No, I think they pulled out for some other reason.”

“Like what?” Legaux asked.

“Like a direct order from the Emperor himself,” St. James replied.

“But why?”

St. James shrugged and looked towards Natasha. “It’s only a guess, mind you, but the Cabal had plans to release Marianne from prison, and that could have triggered a recall.”

“It sure as hell could,” Alice growled. “The Emp would freak.”

“Yeah,” Ed said happily. “He sure would.”

“So what now?” Jenny asked.

“Get ready for the next battle,” St. James said grimly. “The marines could return, or even worse, the Hudathans could arrive. One of Pierre’s people, a Sergeant Major Booly, watched the Naa torture a Hudathan agent to death.”

“
Ex
-Sergeant Major Booly,” Legaux said bleakly. “He deserted.”

St. James raised an eyebrow. His voice was as cold as an Arctic gale. “Really? Well, he’ll turn up sooner or later, and when he does, shoot him.”

Natasha, unused to the ways of the Legion, was shocked. To hear the man she loved, or thought she loved, casually sentence someone to death troubled her. Had she been wrong about him?

“So,” Ed asked, “how would you rate our chances if either one of them attacks?”

St. John spread his hands. “We’re okay for food and ammo, ditto the fuel and parts, but short on people. Between the reinforcements sent to the rim and the casualties suffered during the last few days, we’re very thin on the ground. So thin that either force could beat us within three or four days.”

The ensuing silence lasted a long, long time.

What goes around comes around.

 

 

 

 

 

Smoke boiled up from the city of Lancaster and stained the sky black. A breeze, just in from the Pacific Ocean, pushed the haze towards the east. The cloud made a fitting backdrop for the drama being played out on the street in front of Palmdale’s municipal building.

Bullet holes marked the structure’s marble façade, windows gaped empty, and uniformed bodies lay where they had fallen. The Legion’s dead had been buried, so these were clad in marine green or police blue. Good men and women for the most part, following orders from on high, and dying for no good reason.

Marianne Mosby, commanding officer of the Legion’s free forces on Earth, stood at the top of a long flight of stairs. She felt the wind tug at her uniform and looked down into the square. A statue of the Emperor stood on a pedestal, its head missing, an arm pointed towards the stars. In joy? As a warning? It was impossible to tell.

Most of Mosby’s forces were elsewhere, fighting their way towards the Imperial Palace, but 250 men and women stood before her, witnesses to what would happen.

They might be dressed in the remnants of prison uniforms and armed with a wild assortment of weapons, but her legionnaires looked like what they were. Soldiers. But like all soldiers, especially those recruited from the bottom of society’s barrel, some were better than others. In the wild semi-crazed days since their escape from prison, there had been incidents of theft, rape, and yes, murder. Actions for which no leniency could or should be shown. Colonel Jennings, her XO, stood toward the bottom of the stairs and read the findings.

“... And so,” Colonel Jennings concluded, “having been tried and found guilty, you are hereby sentenced to death. May god have mercy on your souls.” The words had been amplified and echoed back and forth off the surrounding buildings.

The five men and women stood on the roof of a large hover truck. A decal in the shape of an enormous loaf of bread graced its side. Their hands had been tied behind their backs and nooses placed ’round their necks. Yellow rope, like the kind sold in hardware stores, led up and over a gracefully curved light standard. None wore hoods.

Mosby forced herself to examine their faces. One, a private named Torbo, looked familiar. The rest were strangers. A woman with multicolored tattoos on both arms tried to spit on Jennings. She was thirty yards short. The officer turned and looked in Mosby’s direction. She felt herself nod.

Jennings gave an order and a pair of legionnaires, both equipped with drums that said “Palmdale Tech” along their sides, started a steady rhythm. Turbines screamed, pieces of paper skittered sideways, and the truck came off the ground. It wobbled slightly and a man started to fall. A companion moved in to prop him up. The truck moved forward. The legionnaires stumbled off the roof one at a time. Their necks snapped as they hit the end of the rope. They swung from side to side, their boots arcing through the air.

Mosby felt sick to her stomach but kept her face impassive. It was horrible, but as Chien-Chu had pointed out the day before, so were the crimes they had committed. There was a political component too, because if the Cabal was to have any hope of toppling the Emperor, they needed popular support, support that would be hard to come by if her troops raped and murdered the very people they had to protect. No, it had to be done, but the executions were a stain on an otherwise successful effort.

The revolt had begun when a specially trained cadre of corporate security people had dropped out of the sky and into the middle of the prison’s parade ground. The attack occurred when Commandant Tough Shit Gavin had least expected it, right during the heat of the day, when the legionnaires were busy “walking the wall” from one end of the grinder to the other.

The first indication that something was wrong came when ten lighter-than-air freight platforms appeared on radar and ignored all attempts at communication. Gavin could have launched antiaircraft missiles or called for air support, but didn’t. Yes, the platforms had entered restricted airspace, and yes, they had refused to acknowledge his calls, but they were clearly civilian. Hell, they had “Chien-Chu Enterprises” painted across their flanks in twenty-foot-high letters, for god’s sake. No, it was a mistake of some sort, and one he would soon straighten out.

Mosby remembered feeling a sense of satisfaction as the big black shadows drifted across the parade ground, knowing the time had come, knowing her people were ready. She remembered how the exoskeleton-mounted guards had tried to herd them inside, how they had screamed when the legionnaires pulled them down, how it felt to hit them with her fists.

No mercy was shown to the yards guards, or to those that spilled out of the armory, weapons chattering as they machine-gunned
the crowd. Hundreds died that day, swept away in the storm of lead, but thousands had survived, and, armed with weapons dropped from above, began to fight. Black-clad security troops had joined them, repelling down from the hovering platforms, firing as they came. The battle was over a scant one hour and fifteen minutes after it began.

Mosby had searched for Gavin, planning to kill him with her own bare hands, but arrived too late.

A group of specially trained security people had located the prison’s computer-controlled life support system, liberated the brain boxes stored there, and plugged them into their cybernetic bodies. Within minutes Mosby’s forces were 362 cyborgs stronger. All of the quads and most of the Trooper IIs left the prison to defend against the possibility of a counterattack, but five went in search of Gavin. They found him cowering in a corner of his office.

There were various rumors about what they’d done to him, but Mosby had seen the body and had a theory of her own. She thought the borgs had played catch with him. She imagined Gavin being thrown back and forth until the trauma killed him. The blood-smeared office seemed to support her hypothesis, as did the commandant’s broken-doll body, but she’d never know for sure.

Jennings appeared at her elbow. Glass crunched under his boots. He gestured towards the bodies. “Shall we cut them down?”

Mosby looked and shook her head. “No, not today. I want people to see and remember.”

Jennings nodded. He needed a shave but looked good anyway. Mosby hadn’t thought about her appearance in days.

A sergeant major dismissed the troops. They broke into groups and headed for the mismatched convoy that waited nearby. A trio of Trooper IIs faced outwards watching for trouble. Jennings gave her a quizzical look.

“So, what’s next?”

Mosby looked towards the south, where the ancient city of Los Angeles had stood hundreds of years before, and the Emperor’s mother had made her home. She couldn’t see the high-rise towers but knew they were there. She smiled.

“It’s time to visit an old friend of mine. The same one that threw us into prison and sent the Navy against Algeron.”

Jennings nodded. “Sounds like a plan. Let’s go.”

 

Exactly why the complex had been constructed, and left off the building’s architectural drawings, was known only to Madam Dasser and her immediate family. But whatever the reason, it made a rather handy headquarters, and being located only miles from the Imperial Palace made it even more secure, since the Emperor’s secret police had searched the structure above countless times and declared it clean. That,
plus the fact that the building was owned by a front company not known to be part of Dasser Industries, meant the Cabal had a place to gather.

Chien-Chu found himself an unknown number of stories underground, sitting in a darkened room, viewing video of what had once been his estate. Nola sat beside him and did her best not to cry. The Cabal had grown since the early days, adding hundreds of new members, but the executive committee had been limited to only five people. All were present and wore the usual loose-fitting robes.

The holo had been shot twenty-four hours after the secret police had attacked and there wasn’t much left to see. The house and all that it contained had been blown up. Then, to make sure that Chien-Chu got the point, the wreckage had been burned. Two of the chimneys still stood, as did a ragged section of brick wall, but the rest of the place had been reduced to little more than blackened rubble. Smoke drifted up from a fire that still burned somewhere beneath the debris.

“I’m sorry,” Madam Dasser said, “but my estates were targeted as well.”

“And mine,” Ari Goss added.

“Mine too,” Zorana Zikos said.

“And ours,” Susan Rothenberg put in.

Chien-Chu sighed. “It was to be expected, I guess. We had to come out in the open, and the moment we did, they attacked.”

Nola noticed something that struck her as both sad and funny. She made a choking sound. “They missed something, though . . .”

Madam Dasser turned in her direction. “They did? What?”

Nola pointed to the holo. “Look ... Sergi’s sculptures are completely untouched!”

They saw that the rusty metal plates the merchant had welded together stood exactly as they had before, and laughed.

“Perhaps the secret police assumed that someone had already destroyed them,” Zikos said dryly.

Chien-Chu smiled and took his wife’s hand. “Laugh if you will, but at least I have a second career, and how many of you can say the same? We can’t be revolutionaries forever, you know.”

“Sergi has a point,” Rothenberg said. “We must plan for success. What happens when the Emperor is deposed?”

“We’re a long way from having to worry about that,” Goss said soberly.

“Maybe,” Madam Dasser replied, “and maybe not. Let’s take a look at the report that our combined intelligence and marketing research staffs put together.”

She touched a button and the holo dissolved into a thousand shards of light. They swirled, chased each other in circles, and came back together. A set of eight summaries, graphs, and charts appeared in front of them, and being business people, they sat up and paid attention. Dasser narrated.