The Human Legion Deluxe Box Set 2

by Tim C Taylor

  Tremayne eyed them both warily. There was a dark secret to that battle, a murderous rage that had possessed the young Springer.

  “Perhaps you’re right,” said the first Marine. “The official record is a fabrication, so it is difficult to be sure. What we are saying, Tremayne, is that despite your intention to murder the general during that battle, you chose to save her life, and so we are proud to have you with us once more.”

  “And we have absolute confidence that you will not harm our commander,” said the other Marine, a hint of threat in her voice.

  “I don’t recognize your voices,” said Tremayne. “Frakk, I’m not even sure why Xin asked me along for the ride. If she wants me to save her ass again, I’d better know who you are.”

  “Of course,” said a voice behind her, which did sound familiar. “Which is what Kraken is trying – in his typical gasbag way – to do.”

  “Bolinny!” Tremayne exclaimed, pushing against the acceleration to force a smile to her face. “Is that you?”

  “It’s Corporal Bolinny now, Springer.”

  “And I go by the name of Tremayne these days, Corporal,” she said somberly.

  “Roger that, Tremayne. Now get to it, Kraken. Introduce us!”

  “In the 850’s cockpit are the Lieutenant-General and Sergeant Majanita, as you know. Also Grenadier Morgan and Technician Jintu.”

  Tremayne frowned. She had known a Morgan in Xin’s bodyguard, but Bolinny spoke as if Grenadier were a formal rank. That was new to her.

  “Sitting beside the corporal is Cyber-Specialist Kuzak, who remembers you clearly.” Kraken lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “In fact, I think he remembers you every night in his dreams…”

  “Kraken!” The Marine to Kraken’s left pushed herself, with difficulty, half out of her seat and punched Kraken in the gut, a cracking blow that echoed around the hold.

  “Sorry, sis’,” said Kraken, but he was laughing and so too were Kuzak and Bolinny. “Last and least we have my sister, Marine Giant, and I am Marine Kraken.”

  “So many specialists,” said Tremayne.

  There was the barest movement of Kraken’s shoulders, but Tremayne recognized it as a shrug inside a battlesuit. “It is the most effective small unit design,” he said.

  “What about you two?” she asked Kraken. “What are your specialisms? And while we’re about it, what’s with the fantasy nicknames?”

  Kraken and Giant looked at each other. “We are damned good Marines,” they chorused. “That’s our specialism.”

  “And our name is Lee,” added Kraken. “Siblings. You will appreciate the potential for confusion, hence we were assigned new names by the general.”

  “What about her?” asked Tremayne. “Does she have a dramatic name?”

  “No.” Tremayne couldn’t see inside Kraken’s helmet, but the tone of his reply suggested he was frowning at her idiotic question.

  “We refer to her as General,” said Giant. “Why?” There was a challenge to Giant’s voice, suspicion that could flare into violence in an instant. “Do you have another name for the CO?”

  Before she could answer, the crushing weight of acceleration lifted from Tremayne’s chest and despite being strapped into the couch, she could delight in a few blissful moments of zero-gravity. She knew what must come next, though, and breathed out so what would surely follow wouldn’t be quite so painful.

  Sure enough, the TS 850 spun about its center until her main engine was oriented with her direction of travel. Then the engines came back harder than ever and slammed her back against her couch.

  She thanked the bruising weight of deceleration because it saved her from answering Giant’s question. The truth was she had many names for Lieutenant-General Xin Lee, and none of them flattering.

  Majanita pushed the deceleration even harder, and Tremayne found her vision failing, her brain straining to keep in control.

  Maybe she blacked out or perhaps she was merely battered into a groggy state. Either way, by the time Tremayne realized she was back in zero-gee, the other Marines were already up and retrieving the accoutrements of war that had been secreted in concealed compartments on the hold.

  Kuzak had clamped his SA-71 to his back and was setting the controls on a three-foot by two metal box mounted on a small reaction-jet trolley. Colored lights began to wink, and a hum of power rattled the trolley.

  “What’s that, Kuzak?” she asked.

  “This will be the key to rescuing General McEwan,” he answered, without looking up from the device.

  He spoke without irony, but Tremayne remembered Kuzak from before and his intense dislike of Arun.

  Kuzak added, as if in explaining Tremayne’s unspoken question: “The general’s child will require a father. May as well be the biological one… at least to begin with.”

  “No chatter,” snapped Corporal Bolinny, and threw a bag Tremayne’s way. “We can’t spare anyone to guard you, so you need to come with us.”

  Looking around at the Lee siblings assembling a tripod-mounted heavy weapon, she agreed that the safest place for her was with the Marines. She drew out the pistol, ammo carousel, and an emergency pressure suit of the kind you could put on and seal within seconds, but hadn’t the strength to resist a sharpened fingernail, let alone a volley of railgun darts. There was also a belt or band of some kind.

  “Put it on around your chest,” instructed Bolinny.

  As she did so, he explained: “If you have a battlesuit AI, you can put it in the band.”

  “I don’t.”

  “A shame, but use it anyway. It powers your personal force shield. Activate it by tapping between your ribs.”

  Tremayne blinked. Since when had the Legion techs developed personal force shields?

  “Bolinny laughed. Don’t worry, my old friend, most in the Legion would have the same reaction. It’s unidirectional too. You can fire out, but it will stop incoming fire.”

  Her pressure suit auto-inflated and Tremayne stepped inside, the material automatically sealing itself around her. “Is the force shield reliable?” she asked.

  Bolinny’s reply resonated around her head – the material of the pressure suit’s head section acting as a speaker. “Not exactly. Let’s put it this way, you’re statistically safer if you turn it on.” His voice was slightly distorted in the way characteristic of ultra-narrowbeam microwave line-of-sight comms.

  “Understood,” she replied, as much to let Bolinny know that comms were functioning as to accept his implication that the force shield was unreliable in ways she did not want to know.

  It took just over a minute between the 850 coming to a halt and Tremayne following the Marines along the corridor to the side-mounted hatch through which she’d entered the modified ammo carrier. Not long, but a lifetime in comparison to her Marine days when a squad could deploy out of a specialized troop carrier and into space in under three seconds. This secret stealth tech Xin mentioned was keeping them alive.

  “About time,” said Xin when Tremayne arrived. “For the benefit of Deputy Ambassador Tremayne, here are my orders for this expedition. If you see General McEwan bring him back to the 850. If you see anyone else, kill them. My additional orders to you, Tremayne, are: one, don’t get yourself killed because General McEwan would be upset – and two, stay close in case your freaky mutant powers suddenly become vital, which they have an annoying habit of doing.”

  “What about Romulus?” asked Tremayne in a panic. “If he’s here, do we shoot him?” She had rarely met the boy she had rescued from the clutches of the Hardits in the abortive liberation of Tranquility, but she had followed the careers of every one of the few survivors of that expedition.

  “You have your orders,” growled Xin. “Do not question them again.”

  Tremayne bit down on the anger roiling in her breast. You aren’t my commander, bitch. I do what I think best.

  Tremayne tested the heft of this pistol. It was weightless in the zero-gee but still possessed inert
ia, and she needed to familiarize herself with its feel. The sidearm was a miniature railgun, which meant it would be useless against armor, but for its compact size, very effective against soft targets.

  Then, with a brief howl of wind, the outer door slid away, and Tremayne shot into space, seeking targets.

  But according to the evidence before her eyes, there was nothing there. Even the Marines had disappeared.

  When it came to void combat, Tremayne was still a Marine. Stick her inside an ACE/2 combat suit with her AI embedded in the armored chest band, and admit her into the team’s combat net, and her instinct and training would cut back in – she was sure of it.

  But none of those things happened.

  She hung in space, unable to see Xin’s squad, the kidnappers, the Legion fleet or even the TS 850 that had brought her here. She felt at rest because she had no frame of reference, but for all she knew she could be hurtling at high speed away from any or all of those points of interest. Even if she had a tactical map, she was still helpless, because the maneuver capability of her pressure suit was minimal.

  Only one thing was abundantly clear to her: she was fully visible and on a constant vector, like a training target for a freshman novice. In void combat you had three choices: move fast, hide, or die. The fact that she was doing none of them meant the enemy must be blind or were being jammed. Or that no one was there.

  Had Xin abandoned her? Tidying up an irritating detail from her past before carrying on to rescue her beloved, the father of her unborn child? Surely Bolinny and the others wouldn’t follow such orders?

  She looked around for any sign that she was not alone.

  The situation was so unsettling that when something impacted her arm, she screamed like a crècheling. It took a moment to realize it was the hand of a Marine, one who was now towing Tremayne.

  “Stealth on stealth… it’s hilarious,” said Kraken, who she assumed was the one grabbing her arm. “We had to find the enemy ship and map its exterior by feel. Can you believe that? And with all the cloaking and cyber-bollocks we’re pulling, we’ve also lost the 850.”

  “You mean it’s destroyed?”

  “No, I mean we can’t find it. Could be a long walk home. Still, all these cyber-shenanigans have kept you alive, at least until now.”

  “You mean we’re going to board?”

  “Yep. Right about… wait for it… now!”

  The invisible Kraken grabbed Tremayne and swiveled her around until she was pointing at a circle of glowing blue about a hundred meters away: a breaching charge burning hot, not least warming Tremayne’s heart to finally see something. The blue suddenly flared into an intense ring of yellow and white before exploding into a hail of shattered fragments from the ship hatch. Behind the white vapor streaming out of the depressurizing ship, she could see its interior. It looked so ordinary. Nothing there to intimidate her.

  Then the ship reestablished pressure seals, shutting off the spray of vapor. A moment later, the open hatchway folded itself away out of sight as the enemy ship’s stealth capability reasserted itself, but not before Tremayne caught flickering glimpses of Kuzak’s mysterious box inside the kidnapper’s ship before it too was lost to sight.

  Once again, she was alone in the void, according to what her eyes reported, but this time she knew that was misleading, and within seconds the invisible Marine had pushed her through a hidden perimeter and suddenly the kidnapper’s ship was fully visible.

  It was an ugly, blocky craft, about the size of a Stork, the largest shuttle craft in the Legion fleet. Given the insistence of the White Knights for reusable and modular designs, the fact that she didn’t recognize any aspect of this ship meant it was highly unlikely to be part of a White Knight fleet, of either faction. It didn’t look like a Muryani ship type either.

  Hardits! It had to be.

  At last she was inside the ship, and glad to find modest pseudo-gravity pulling down through the deck. A ladderwell aft led down into the ship, but she allowed Kraken to point her in the other direction, where a passageway led away from the hatch before curving around to the right. A few paces along was a shimmering, translucent wall, which she recognized as the pressure wall preventing the atmosphere from rushing into the vacuum where she stood.

  “That direction’s forward,” he explained, not realizing that she had glimpsed the ship from the outside. “The passageway feeds starboard until it meets the bridge. We are on the upper of three decks. Romulus is on Deck Two and General McEwan on Three. Neither are moving.”

  “Talking of not moving, why are you standing there telling me all this? Shouldn’t we be, you know, doing something?”

  “I am doing something. Horden’s Hairy Fanny, you’re out of practice, Springer.”

  “I’m not called… Oh, you’re covering the blown hatch.”

  “Got it. And Giant’s covering the ladderwell, though she’s got it easy because she’s behind a force wall. Reckon if I were the Hardit commander, my best chance would be to take a team out into the void and come at us through our own breach.”

  The idea sparked painful memories. “General McEwan used that tactic against the Hardits on Antilles when he was still a cadet.”

  “Which is where you lost your leg and half your face. Yes, I know. Problem is, so do the Hardits.”

  “Isn’t there anyone else at our position?”

  “Negative. Now, shut up and listen. We read twelve Hardits aboard but can assume there are many more, hidden from our sensors by their stealth systems. Update…. Stand by… Eight of those Hardits are now dead.”

  “How?”

  “Killed when we seized the bridge… Bridge control systems are now destroyed, main force returning to our position. Get ready to move out, Tremayne.”

  The Marines might have been stealthed beyond her ability to see them, and there was no sound in the vacuum of the depressurized part of the ship for sound to travel through, but the deck carried the unmistakable pounding of armored Marines running in low gravity. Strange that it was this sound that brought the memories flooding back. She had been proud to be a Marine, and she’d been a good one too.

  Don’t suppose you ever stop being a Marine, no matter what they do to you.

  She frowned. Why weren’t the Marines flying? Outside of a gravity field, their combat suits were designed to do just that. In fact…

  “Kraken?”

  “Yes?”

  “Can’t you just pick me up and fly me around?”

  “Negative. Suit systems are failing fast. Hardits might be cowardly monkeys in the physical world, but they fight hard and dirty in cyberspace. We still move fast, though.”

  The Hardit ship lurched and Tremayne fought to keep her feet as violent flashes of light flared up the ladderwell from the deck below.

  “Move it!” yelled Kraken.

  Tremayne bounded toward the ladderwell, pushing through the pressure wall and into air and sound. She descended using the handrail to push herself down hand-over-hand in the low-gee. It was faster this way, and with less chance of breaking an ankle because she was soon enveloped in impenetrably thick clouds. The Marines must have fired off smoke grenades.

  She had just planted her feet on the deck when a shadowy humanoid form suddenly loomed out of the clouds.

  Tremayne didn’t hesitate, didn’t even need to think. She drove headfirst into the passageway, firing two accurate shots at the figure before rolling in midair and coming to her feet. With only one of those feet still flesh and blood in nature, her landing wasn’t as balanced as it needed to be, and she fretted that she was wasting valuable moments before regaining her poise sufficiently to dodge and fire at the target again.

  Turned out, that was just as well.

  “Cease fire, Tremayne!” The voice was Kraken’s. “Stop shooting at me and shift your ass up the passageway. Come on, move!”

  “Did I damage you?” asked Tremayne, as she advanced up the passageway.

  “How should I know? My suit’s on the
fritz. Jeez, you got a strange way of telling a Marine his stealth function has failed.

  The background hum of fans, ubiquitous in space vehicles, became a foreground, screaming whine as the air-scrubbing system went into overdrive. The smoke from the grenades cleared within seconds, and finally Tremayne could see the situation with her own eyes.

  Xin and her bodyguard of eight Marines were trapped in a twenty-meter section of passageway. Limpet-like devices were positioned around the passageway and over the two hatches that led deeper into the ship. Invisible – for the moment – force shields were generated by those limpets. There were no signs of Hardits, but they would soon congregate on the outside of the force shields. Given that they had the equipment and skill to penetrate Lance of Freedom and steal away the commanding officer of the Human Legion, she didn’t expect the shields would hold up for long.

  As for the Legion side, the situation looked tactically dire. Giant had secured the tripod-mounted weapon to the deck just inside the forward force shield, and looked ready to fire. Alongside her was a Marine she didn’t recognize with a stubby weapon attached by a thick cable to a bulky backpack heavy enough that he had struggled to move into position. What was that, a flamethrower?

  The Marines could spit fire if they were given the chance, but they were bunched in a tight space. And having given up options for movement they had yielded the initiative to the Hardits, offering themselves as static targets.

  Tremayne prayed Xin and Majanita knew what they were doing, because it sure looked like a frakk-up to her.

  The lone Marine who’d taken up a position on the overhead flailed one arm for balance, and then fell to the floor with a dull thud, combat suit motors finally succumbing to the Hardit cyber-attack.

  “And I thought you could see the future,” said Kraken, mockingly, though she could hear his smile even though she couldn’t see it. “The monkeys are as good as dead.” Then he added somberly, “I just pray the same can’t be said of the General McEwan.”

  “Switch to radio comms,” said Xin. “I’m bored with stealth now. Go ahead, Kuzak, let her rip.”