Legion Of The Damned - 02 - The Final Battle (2 page)

Norwood had tried to surrender, tried to end the slaughter, only to discover that the Hudathans were bent on nothing less than the total annihilation of any race capable of opposing them, and had no concept of mercy. And so it was
that she had fallen into the hands of a Hudathan war commander named Niman Poseen-Ka, who had used her, only to be used himself, and ultimately imprisoned on the planet below.

Norwood selected another camera, a mobile one this time, and watched a radiation-induced lightning storm play across what had been some of Worber World’s most productive farmland. The light seemed to strobe on and off, momentarily illuminating the ruins of a church, its steeple pointing accusingly skyward.

Anger boiled up from deep within her just as she had known that it would. Another image was selected and routed to the view screen. The shot came from above this time, and showed the ruins of what had been an industrial city, its once-sprawling factories reduced to little more than isolated walls and piles of randomly heaped rubble.

That’s the way it
looked
anyway, but Norwood knew better, and directed the camera down until it skimmed the ground. Now it became obvious that there was life in the ruins,
alien
life, as hundreds of Hudathan POWs shambled about, repairing makeshift shelters, hauling water from the cisterns they had built, or pursuing other less identifiable tasks.

The most amazing part was the fact that thousands of Hudathan troopers had managed to survive the surface conditions for more than twenty years, unaided except for the food they were given, and unharmed insofar as Norwood and her staff could ascertain.

The ambient radiation would have killed a human within a week or so, to say nothing of the never-ending storms, floods, and volcanic activity that played havoc with the planet’s surface.

But the Hudathans had evolved on a much different world than humans had, a planet that rotated around a star called Ember, which was twenty-nine percent larger than Earth’s sun, and had a Trojan relationship with a Jovian binary. The Jovians’ centers were only 280,000 kilometers apart, which, when combined with effects of other planets in the system, caused the Hudathan homeworld to oscillate around the following Trojan point, resulting in a wildly fluctuating climate. A climate that might be blistering one week and frigid the next, leading to some remarkably adaptable bodies.

The average Hudathan male weighed 300 pounds or so and had temperature-sensitive skin. It turned white when exposed to high temperatures, gray when the climate was temperate, and black when it was cold. They had humanoid heads, the vestige of a dorsal fin that ran front to back along the tops
of their skulls, funnel-shaped ears, sauroid mouths, and upper lips that remained stationary when they talked. In addition to which they were extremely resistant to the effects of bacterial infection and radiation.

In a word they were tough, something Norwood knew firsthand. She was one of the few humans to kill a Hudathan in hand-to-hand combat.

But no amount of toughness would allow the Hudathans to make themselves comfortable on the surface of Worber’s World. So they suffered. And, given the fact that the aliens had no place to hide, Norwood could vicariously enjoy their suffering, something she did with increasing frequency.

Twenty years is a long time for any sentient to spend as a prisoner of war and a more than sufficient time for a multitude of disciplinary problems to surface. Left free to deal with miscreants in whatever way they chose, the Hudathans had implemented a well-regulated system of punishments. The punishments were almost always physical in nature, and took place at the same times and locations each day, making it easy for Norwood to watch.

One such place Norwood thought of as “the dungeon,” due to its location in the basement of a bombed-out library. Her camera had no difficulty making its way down the stairwell and into a large room, where it was systematically ignored by the Hudathans.

Although the aliens had destroyed hundreds of similar cameras during the first few years of their imprisonment, they had long since grown weary of the reprisals that such activities brought and had given up. The camera bobbed through a crosscurrent, floated behind three ranks of official witnesses, and gave Norwood a wide shot. She saw an open space backed by rows of old-fashioned books.

The officer’s excitement grew as a scaffold of X-shaped beams were dragged into the middle of the room. The prisoner was huge, at least 350 pounds, and carefully impassive. Norwood knew that any sign of distress on the trooper’s part would be interpreted as an indication of weakness by his peers and leave him vulnerable to physical attack, a rather cruel practice by human standards but normal within the framework of Hudathan society.

She reveled in the moment when he was tied to the rack. Her hand followed a well-traveled path down across the hard, flat plane of her stomach, through the tuft of wiry pubic hair, and into the moistness between her slightly spread legs.

Countless hours had been spent thinking about the pleasure that followed. What did it mean? Was she sick? Twisted? Perverted? She didn’t know. Whatever the condition was, it had manifested itself during t
he last two years. She wanted to talk to the psych officer about it but was afraid to try. After all, what if she were found unfit for duty and her job went to someone else? A more trusting soul who didn’t know what the Hudathans were capable of, and would relax some of her more stringent policies.

And what difference did it make anyway? The pleasure she granted herself came at the enemy’s expense and troubled no one else. No, thinking about it, worrying about it, was a waste of time. Reassured, Norwood turned her attention to the dungeon.

The charges had been read and the negative reinforcement began. Denied the high-tech dispensation of pain they normally preferred, the Hudathans had fallen back on older but still effective methods of punishment. The whip was made of hand-braided cord and ended in six knotted tails. Norwood knew that each knot would cut into the alien flesh in a most pleasing manner and produce intense pain.

A ragged-looking noncom withdrew the whip from a scrupulously clean bag, handed it to the master-at-arms, and stepped back. The master-at-arms took his position, planted his feet, and flicked the whip back and to the right. His arm flashed forward. The whip made a swishing sound, followed by the crack of impact, and a grunt of expelled air. The blow left a pattern of crimson lines. The soldier jerked but remained silent.

Yes! Norwood thought to herself. Each and every one of the aliens should be punished for what they’d done, made to suffer as their victims had suffered, then eradicated from the galaxy. Nothing less would make amends, nothing less would ensure safety, and nothing less would bring peace.

The strokes came more quickly now, and Norwood’s hand moved to the same rhythm as the whip, her excitement building until a series of short but powerful orgasms racked her body, and she moaned in pleasure. All of the stress, all of the tension seemed to ebb from her body, leaving her adrift on a tingly tide. The crack of the whip took on a monotonous quality. Norwood closed her eyes and felt the heavy hand of sleep pull her down. Darkness wrapped her in its warm embrace and oblivion carried her away.

 

Hundreds of miles from the room where the punishment took place, in a building that had originally served as a military museum, War Commander Poseen-Ka sat hunched over a makeshift table. It was huge and bore the considerable weight of a relief map made from hand-molded clay. A cone of sickly yellow light came from high above and threw short, stubby shad
ows across the make-believe land. Naval technicians had rigged the light from materials found in the ruins of cities he had destroyed. Power came from batteries and the occasional sunlight the humans were powerless to deny him.

Long, hard years of imprisonment had trimmed a hundred pounds from the Hudathan’s frame and left him thin and gaunt. His skin was gray, almost black in reaction to the chilly air, and showed early signs of the striations that mark old age.

But those who had fought under Poseen-Ka knew that the inner being was unchanged, except for the shame that accompanied defeat, and the passion it fed. A passion far more complex than simple revenge, because the war commander was too honest to blame the enemy for his failures, and too professional to let emotion govern his actions.

No, the passion had to do with correcting a momentary imbalance, a time when one of the countless threats that confronted his race had gained the upper hand, a situation that could and would be reversed. If not by him, then by someone else. In fact, viewed from the perspective of a race used to a chaotic environment, the situation was normal. As was his response, which was to analyze his mistakes and figure out how to avoid them in the future.

The fact that there
was
no future to speak of, beyond another twenty or thirty years of imprisonment, made no difference. The humans had a saying that went something like “Where there is heart there is hope.” A noble sentiment worthy of a Hudathan.

Poseen-Ka stood, clasped his hands behind his back, and circled the table. It modeled a section of a planet called Algeron. This particular piece of terrain lay just north of the world-spanning mountain range known as the Towers of Algeron. They were represented by fingers of reinforced clay that pointed toward the smoke-stained ceiling and the surveillance cameras that crawled buglike from one side of the room to the other. The Hudathan hated the cameras, and the knowledge that Norwood could watch his every move, but was determined to hide such emotions. Especially in light of th
e fact that the human had been his prisoner once and comported herself with warriorlike dignity.

The map had been constructed from memory, and was inaccurate to some extent, but not enough to matter. No, the foothills that fell away from the mountains, the plains that stretched to the north, those were as they had been. Would be if he returned. But what of the fort called Camerone ? And the damnable cyborgs that infested it? Had the fort been rebuilt
? Were the man-machines waiting as they had been before? Such were the questions he would ask in the highly unlikely event that he received a second chance.

A poisonous rain spattered against the plastic-covered door. The room felt suddenly small and confining. The war commander swept the plastic aside and stepped out into a bitter drizzle. Mud squished beneath massive sandals as he walked down a flight of steps and out into the military cemetery.

Lighting strobed in the distance and served to illuminate thousands of crosses that had managed to stay vertical when all else fell. They marked the graves of soldiers killed in previous wars, when the humans had fought each other, arguing over who should lead. An understandable if somewhat self-defeating activity that plagued Hudathan society as well.

Thunder rumbled across the land and Poseen-Ka looked upward. His eyes struggled to pierce the cloud cover and failed. The stars. What about the stars? Would he travel among them yet again? Or die on this accursed planet, his flesh and bones turning to soup, and seeping down to join the military dead? Acid rain spattered across the Hudathan’s face and made his eyes sting. Only time would tell.

 

The Hudathan scout ship was small, fast, and lightly armed. It hardly even paused as it dropped hyper on the edge of the solar system, launched the Special Operations package, and disappeared back into the strange continuum where objects can travel faster than the speed of light.

The package, no bigger than a soccer ball, had been fired in a manner that allowed it to join company with a meteor stream that, like Worber’s World itself, orbited the system’s sun. The stream, which consisted of debris strewn along the path of a well-known periodic comet, intersected the planet’s orbit a few weeks later.

Technicians aboard the
Old Lady
detected the meteor shower long before it arrived, checked to make sure that it coincided with computer projections based on past activity, ran routine detector scans on ten percent of total mass, and cleared the shower for atmospheric entry.

The Special Operations package, along with the true meteorites that surrounded it, entered the atmosphere at a velocity of approximately ten miles per second. Friction caused them to slow slightly while their outer surfaces melted and were swept away in the form of tiny droplets. Most of the heat was dissipated, leaving the inside of the objects cold. During the last seconds of flight a layer of solidified melt called fusion crust formed on the surface of th
e real meteorites while the Ops package exploded and scattered millions of peanut-sized metal capsules far and wide. The capsules spattered across the tortured landscape like metallic hail. Some ceased to exist. Some survived.

In fact, a full 94.2 percent of the capsules remained operational after impact with the ground, a much higher percentage than required for mission success, and a number that would have pleased a war scientist named Rimar Noda-Sa very much.

It took less than five seconds for the capsules to open and release their micro-robotic passengers. Designed to look like a locally mutated version of
B.germanica,
or the Earth-derived German cockroach, the tiny machines waited exactly ten minutes, identified themselves with a millisecond burst of code, activated their on-board navigation systems, and scuttled toward the primary assembly point. No one knew it yet, but the Confederacy of Sentient Beings was under attack, and would soon be involved in a full-scale war.

 

Danjou Hall, the traditional residence of senior cadets, boasted four gargoyles. Booly straddled the one located at the building’s northwest corner, just above the room he shared with Tom Riley. He wore black fatigues, the kind favored by the 2d REP, the Legion’s elite airborne regiment, a climbing harness, and a day pack. His feet were bare.