Legion Of The Damned - 02 - The Final Battle (27 page)

Drag sucked, but it wouldn’t pay to say so, which left Starke with no choice. “Got it, Sarge . . . I’m on the way.”

Finally, Booty led his platoon out of the compound and into early-morning traffic. It was morning rush hour and the noncoms struggled to keep the column “right and tight.” But the Legion had been dirtside for a couple of years now and familiarity breeds contempt. Rather than avoid the off-worlders as they had during the early days of occupation, the clones used their three-wheeled ca
rs to weave in and out of the convoy, pulled in front of the APCs, and peppered the legionnaires with rude gestures. The air turned blue with Parker’s invective. It made absolutely no difference. Within five minutes of hitting the street the column was stretched out over twelve city blocks.

Starke tried to walk backwards, mindful of his responsibility to watch the platoon’s rear, but it was hard to do, especially as vehicles swerved in front of him, pedestrians jay-walked every which way, and children hurled the usual insults. “Hey, freak! Hey half-man! Death to free breeders!”

Starke ignored the insults and the occasional rocks that bounced off his armor. It was tough, but the job was to keep a sensor out for
real
threats, the kind posed by people with shoulder-launched missiles, remotely piloted attack drones, and explosive-packed suicide droids. His surroundings were transformed into a blur of threat readings, trajectories, vectors, ranges, and heat sources, all flooding his senses, lighting up his displays, and vying for the cyborg’s attention. Which was why he missed the significance of a little boy named Fisk Twenty-seven trotting alongside him on the side
walk, why he ignored the truck that cut him off from the rest of the platoon, and why he died.

 

Fisk-Eight monitored the rear-facing camera. His truck was a large, boxy affair that smelled of freshly baked bread. By placing it where he had, the lead elements of the column would be unable to see what happened next. He spoke the word “now” into the voice-activated microphone and knew the right person would hear it.

Trotski-Eleven was twelve blocks away in a beat-up sedan. It hadn’t been easy to stay in front of the military convoy but he had managed. The word
now
was all the stimulus he needed to side-swipe a triple-decker bus. The larger vehicle screeched to a halt, followed by Trotski and the entire column of legionnaires. The anarchist tilted his chin down towards his lapel mike, said “Done,” and triggered the timer on the thermite bomb that rode in the passenger’s seat. The car was completely engulfed in flames by the time he reached the sidewalk and vanished into the quickly growing crowd.

Fisk-Eight smiled happily as thick black smoke poured upwards to stain the sky. Traffic ground to a halt and he glanced at the ceiling-mounted monitor just in time to see the boy named Fisk Twenty-seven dart out from between a pair of stalled vehicles and slap a disk against the lower part of the Trooper II’s back. Only the most careful observer would have noticed the manner in which the cyborg jerked as a half million volts of electricity were dischar
ged into the legionnaire’s electro-mechanical body. The electricity fried Starke’s circuits, burned his subprocessors, and cooked his brain. A wisp of gray smoke drifted away from a heat vent on his port side.

It took less than three minutes for Fisk-Eight to lower the truck’s ramp so that Fisk-Three, still encased in the Trooper II-like exoskeleton, could clank down and onto the finely grained pavement. Which was almost exactly the amount of time it took Booly’s APC to push the still-burning car out of the way, put a call in to the local fire department, and move forward again.

Fisk-Three had walked around in front of the truck by that time, and was easy to spot when Booly checked the number of transponders in his heads-up helmet display, and found the correct number. The van, still manned by Fisk-Eight, stayed where it was just long enough for Twenty-seven to hook a cable around one of the Trooper II’s enormous ankles, activate the winch that had been bolted to the truck bed, and jerk the now-dead cyborg off its feet. There was a loud crash as it hit the street. With that accomplished, it was a relatively simple matter to winch the carcass into th
e truck and close the door. The sight of this activity elicited cheers from the clone-packed crowd, who, while unsure of what had taken place, sensed that the Legion had received the short end of the stick, and heartily approved.

Eight smiled, nodded to the crowd, and pulled away from the place where Starke had died. Fifteen minutes later the truck was full of bread, Starke’s body was being stripped of its armament, and the anarchist was having breakfast in his favorite café. There would be plenty of time to read the morning newsfax, trade insults with the regulars, and watch the assassination live. Life was good.

 

Marcus wore a formal toga secured with a double-helix-shaped silver pin. Mosby wore her full dress uniform with medals. They had spent the night together in the Alpha Clone’s quarters and were waiting for Anguar to arrive from the spaceport. Marcus had suggested sex, and while Mosby would have agreed under normal circumstances, today was different. Duty came first, which was why she took the opportunity to slip a small disk into the Alpha clone’s holo player, and waited for the video to appear.

Marcus frowned. “What’s this?”

“Some propaganda,” Mosby said honestly. “Ignore the narration and watch the pictures. They were taken on the surface of Worber’s World, but it could have been Alpha-001, or 002, or 003, and
will be
if we lose the war.”

Marcus watched Norwood and her troops walk into the Hudathan ambush, watched them fight, and watched them die. The narration had been created with the Confederacy’s citizens in mind, and was therefore open to question, but the video was undeniably real, not because it
couldn’t
be faked, but because he knew it
hadn’t
been faked, and the knowledge made him sick. He watched a Hudathan execute a female general and knew it could have been Marianne. Could
still
be Marianne. He thought about what she had come to mean to him, about the life that could be growing inside her belly, and knew he could never allow it.

The Alpha clone touched the coffee table’s control comer and the holo tank snapped to black. “Marianne, there are some things that you and President Anguar need to know. My brothers entered a pact with the Hudathans. They agreed to open a second
front that will split your forces between the aliens and the Hegemony.”

Mosby nodded calmly. She was disappointed but not especially surprised. “They told you this?”

Marcus shook his head. “No. I have a spy that they don’t know about. A clone taken from an officer named Arrow Commander Nagwa Isaba-Ra. The real Isaba-Ra was tracked and killed while taking long-range sensor scans of Alpha-001. Knowing the Hudathans would continue to be a threat, I gave my scientists permission to replicate the scout’s body, scrub the resulting brain, and download one of our most experienced agents into the newly vacated tissue. He returned home to the Hudathan fleet, received a hero’s welcome, and was assigned to War Commander Poseen-Ka. He was present when my broth
ers cut their treacherous deal.”

Mosby’s eyebrows shot upwards. She was surprised. Not so much by the technology involved, since that had been around for a long time, and been outlawed by the rest of the human race, but by her lover’s foresight, and ruthless attention to what he believed to be his duty. It was a quality they shared and she had thought about. To what extent does the means justify the end? The question was as old as her profession and nearly impossible to answer. She focused on other more immediate concerns. “Your spy is an aide to Poseen-Ka? War Commander Poseen-Ka? The same one we just watched?”

Marcus had been unaware that the Hudathan he’d seen put a bullet between General Norwood’s eyes, and the officer to whom his spy had been assigned were one and the same. The knowledge came as a shock and served to reinforce the appropriateness of his decision.

Mosby started to pace back and forth between the coffee table and the gas fireplace. “So Poseen-Ka is still in a position of power . . . and we have a spy on his staff. This changes everything.”

Marcus noted the “we,” started to correct her, and thought better of it. Right or wrong, the decision was made.

 

Convinced that ornamental office buildings did little but instill distrust in the general population, the Founder had specified that all such buildings would be plain and drab, and there was little doubt that her architects had taken the good doctor at her word. Booly could not remember seeing a less interesting building in his entire life. It was large, gray, and with the exception of its cylindrical shape and unblinking windows, completely without ornamentation of any kind. A park, which fronted the building, and was of the same diameter, served to complete one of the figure eigh
ts that Hosokawa seemed to favor, and could be seen on any aerial map of the city.

Color, such as it was, came from the bunting that had been draped over the reviewing stand, the dress uniforms that swarmed over the area, and the standards that snapped atop the long, slender flagpoles.

The gaiety, or appearance of it, was a nearly meaningless gesture, since the citizens who had been commanded to line the U-shaped drive were a somber bunch, and clearly wanted to be somewhere else. Still, matters of protocol had to observed, so Marcus had ordered a sufficient number of bystanders to give the occasion some weight.

Although the president’s civilian bodyguards retained responsibility for overall security, Booly had been given secondary control of the area immediately surrounding the review stand, and took the assignment seriously. During the hours since he and his platoon had arrived, they had swept the area for bombs, set up lanes of fire that could be used to repulse a full-scale military attack, and stepped through a variety of maneuvers that had been devised and rehearsed via interactive virtual-reality training scenarios. As a result, Booly’s troops could handle anything from an une
xpected plane crash to an outbreak of food poisoning.

Still, there’s no such thing as being
too
ready, and the president was due to arrive in fifteen minutes, so Booly took one last tour of his platoon and their positions. While the bio bods could be useful in a single assassin scenario, the president’s bodyguards were the primary line of defense, and the legionna
ires were there to handle crowd control, or in the unlikely event of a massed assault, to add their firepower to that of the security detail.

The cyborgs were more critical, however, since they were the president’s
only
defense against an armored attack, or aircraft that somehow managed to elude the fighters that prowled the sky overhead.

With that in mind, Booly paid close attention to the way the Trooper IIs were situated and wished he’d been allowed to bring some quads. Their heavy weaponry would have been welcome at either end of the drive, but they were bulky, and thought to be too imposing, especially on the evening news, where it might appear as if the already-subdued crowd were there at gunpoint. So the Trooper IIs would have to do, and Booly approached each one looking for weak points.

Fisk-Three watched the legionnaire’s slow, methodical approach with butterflies in his stomach. Each and every moment since joining the column had been fraught with danger. Would someone notice a difference between the way his exoskeleton looked and the real thing? Would they ask a question he didn’t know the answer to? Would he unintentionally draw attention to himself? These questions and more had haunted him ever since the charade had begun. Now an officer was approaching, speaking with each borg in turn, and making small adjustments to the way they were positioned. Beads of sweat broke
out on Three’s forehead. He wanted to wipe them away but couldn’t.

“This is Big Dog Four. We are mean, green, and clean. Five from the door.”

The voice boomed through Booly’s ear plug and belonged to the huge black man who headed Anguar’s mostly human security detail. His name was Slozo, Jack Slozo, and Booly feared him more than potential assassins. The message meant that the trip from the spaceport had gone smoothly, there were no signs of opposition, and the motorcade would arrive in less than five minutes.

Booly debated whether to inspect Starke at all, decided to give the cyborg a quick once-over, and beat feet back to his command position. He analyzed the cyborg’s field of fire as he approached.

Fisk-Three had excellent optics at his disposal and used them to switch back and forth between the quickly approaching officer and the review stand. It was thick with minor functionaries. They swirled suddenly as two additional figures appeared, one of whom was clad in a toga, the other in full military uniform. This was the part that Fisk Eight didn’t know about, the fact that he had been given orders to waste the traitorous Marcus, and his free-breeding military whore, before she corrupted the entire planet with her perverted ways. Be
cause when Marcus died, killed by a berserk Trooper II, any chance of an alliance with the Confederacy would die with him. Anguar amounted to a desirable but almost secondary target.

“Starke?”

Three jerked his attention back to the officer who stood in front of him. There was something about the legionnaire’s tone of voice, and the expression on his face, that signaled danger. The anarchist felt a tremendous need to go to the bathroom and fought to keep it in. “Sir?”

“Your voice synthesizer sounds different.”

“Yes, sir. I’m having some trouble with my radio. That could account for it.”

Booly nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, I suppose it could. But what happened to the unit decal on your right shoulder? The dent over your right knee joint? And the death’s head that Private Leiber painted on your left forearm? Where are they?”

Fisk-Three began to fire before his arm was pointed at the review stand. Dirt geysered next to Booly’s left boot as the armor-piercing bullets hit the ground, dug a trench to the curb, and sparked their way towards the bunting-draped platform. Booly reacted without thinking and was hanging from the Trooper II’s gun arm by the time the words came out of his mouth.