The Human Legion Deluxe Box Set 2

by Tim C Taylor

  The security breach was real enough, Indiya decided. She daren’t wait for more evidence if they were about to go into battle.

  She issued orders to her flag staff. “Hood, everyone on this list is to be arrested immediately. Treat them well but I want them isolated.”

  Her flag lieutenant allowed himself only an instant’s hesitation before replying: “Yes, Admiral.”

  The list included over thirty captains and forty-five commanders of warships going through hard maneuvering. Had she been the one receiving orders to arrest them, she would have hesitated for more than a moment. Hood wouldn’t let her down.

  Indiya bit her lip. The list of suspected security leaks were all humans. This wasn’t going to look good with the non-human Legion officers.

  She addressed her other flag officer, Chief Staff Officer Arbentyne-Daex, an empath of a humanoid race called the Kurlei. “CSO, you’re to assume Hood’s duties until he has completed the arrests.”

  As the CSO acknowledged, Indiya’s attention flicked to a tactical display showing the New Empire fleet, outnumbered though it was, moving out from its station hidden among the captured comets and asteroids around Athena to attack the Legion fleet, which was still locked into its Case White maneuver.

  As if they knew…

  Dammit, of course they knew!

  Any final doubts evaporated when the tactical display showed a Hardit fleet emerge from behind the gas giant. The lead elements of destroyer-class ships made her heart sink the most because they hadn’t merely appeared from behind cover. They should have been in clear sight. One moment the tactical grid insisted there was empty space, and the next the destroyers had appeared out of nowhere. Even the ships behind Euphrates should have been visible to the Legion sensor stations on the far side of the gas giant.

  The only reason she was seeing the Hardit fleet now was because it had chosen this moment to reveal itself.

  I’ve led us into a trap. Indiya couldn’t shake the unhelpful thought, because it was true.

  Kreippil came online. “We will come out of Case White in about three minutes, facing the wrong way and about to fight on two fronts. If this enemy trap is destined to defeat us, then let us extract maximum revenge on the White Knight blasphemers. I say fend off the Hardits with a screening force and direct our full attention on the imperials.”

  “I agree, Admiral,” said Indiya.

  She heard the Littorane admiral give a slight gargle, and knew that if she could see him, his gills would be flapping in surprise.

  “It is like a barroom brawl, Admiral,” explained Indiya, not that she had experienced one herself, but it was an analogy that stretched back centuries to the war strategists of old Earth. “Faced with two attackers coming from different directions, we fend off one as best we can while delivering a knockout blow to the weakest attacker. When they go down, we give our full attention to the other attacker. The New Empire forces are weaker, and so we smash them first.”

  “We rationalize our choices in different ways,” said Kreippil, “but both are rooted in the same divine inspiration.”

  “I hope you’re correct, Admiral.”

  In the long years of transit between star systems, Indiya and Kreippil had both insisted upon extensive contingency planning, including just this eventuality. “Admiral Indiya to all captains, we implement Case Blue as soon as Case White has concluded. Screening force led by Lance of Freedom to delay Hardit fleet. Main force to attack the incoming imperials. Let’s wipe the New Empire forces off this reality. Freedom Shall be Won!”

  — Chapter 21 —

  This was the biggest space battle of the Civil War and Indiya had placed Legion forces at a disadvantage by leading them into a trap. She fought hard to keep this indulgent sense of guilt at bay and allow her captains and fleet commanders to carry out the roles they had trained for.

  Indiya had lived in space all her life and knew how short life could be here in this lethal environment. The Marines and other non-spacer passengers felt snug and secure within their pressurized bubbles inside sturdy bulkheads, but any ship rat knew that the separation between life and death was always wafer thin.

  And that was during peacetime.

  Consequently, Indiya had insisted on a minimum of triple redundancy for all posts to account for both campaign attrition and battlefield casualties. Captains ordered commanders and lieutenants to train in their place, in case of rapid battlefield promotion. Commanders, in turn, did the same. As Indiya often told her subordinates: any Navy personnel who were indispensable were also liabilities. From senior Admiral to junior spacer, if you weren’t confident that at least two other people could fulfil your role if you are unable to carry out your own duties yourself, then you were not fit to serve in the Human Legion Navy.

  With scores of senior officers suddenly placed under arrest, at the very moment when the Legion was caught in a trap and had assailants coming from either side, Indiya’s policy could not have been tested more comprehensively.

  She saw the proof of her Navy’s resilience in the tactical map in her head, and the command chatter she eavesdropped upon. The changeover was as slick as one watch relieving another as the replacement officers slotted into their new roles bringing replacements, in turn, to fill their own posts.

  Lance of Freedom led a defensive screening force to keep the Hardits at bay. This formation was rich in combat drones, and missile defense picket ships. With so many unknown Hardit ship types, and their frequent upgrades that outpaced even the combined efforts of the freaks, Khallenes, and others to upgrade the Legion war machine, Indiya struggled to assess the strength of this new enemy fleet accurately. The brave force led by Lance of Freedom was heavily outnumbered and outgunned, that much was certain. Nonetheless, there was a surprise in store for the Hardits, the hidden sting in the tail in the form of a mobile reserve of stealthed X-Boats launched from Lance of Freedom.

  The Hardits were holding station about ten minutes’ hard burn from the main portion of the Legion fleet that was racing toward the White Knight homeworld of Athena. Until this point, the campaign for the system of Olympus-Ultra had been deliberately aimed to drive out New Empire forces from every world and moon until the survivors were bottled up in orbit around Athena. Indiya’s forces had made frequent faints and sorties over the past few weeks to wear down the enemy and keep them constantly off balance. If she had received any inkling of an oncoming Hardit fleet she would have launched the final invasion much earlier.

  That couldn’t be helped now. The New Empire forces were taking on a fresh burst of life, screaming out from orbit around Athena.

  Kreippil had tactical command of the combined naval forces attacking these revitalized New Empire warships. As was conventional, both sides had thrown out a cloud of AI-controlled combat drones, skirmish screens that now thudded into each other in a high-speed slugfest too fast for the unaugmented human eye to track.

  Behind the screen, the Legion forces swiveled about in a synchronized maneuver to keep their sterns facing the enemy, and then applied hard thrust. She watched with pride in the competence of her fleet as the center of its formation accelerated away from the enemy at the most brutal pace, until the Legion’s disposition began to take a concave form, like a dish with the smaller enemy formation enticed inside the bowl, allowing the edges of Kreippil’s formation to curl inward like fingers of a clenched fist crushing whatever it caught in its palm.

  Would the enemy fall for this old trick? She doubted it, but she did expect the maneuver to seize the initiative as the enemy sought to escape the trap.

  Indiya allowed the drama near Athena orbit to play out by itself for a while, devoting more and more of her mental resources toward the Hardit threat.

  In absolute contrast to the Imperials, who were stampeding into the attack, the Hardits were holding position, safely out of the effective range of the missiles and beam weapons of the screening force centered on Lance of Freedom.

  She opened a comm link to Lance of
Freedom’s captain. “Any idea what the Hardits are playing at, Cythien?”

  “Negative, Admiral. I am tempted to probe them with a small force of combat drones, but you humans have a saying for this situation. Let sleeping dogs lie.”

  A pang of loss stabbed at Indiya. She’d never heard that expression – it must have been from old Earth centuries ago. Loobie would have known, but Indiya’s best friend wasn’t here anymore. The expression’s meaning was clear enough, and pertinent. The screening force was meant to keep the Hardits at bay, but they must surely be up to something, she just couldn’t see what was yet.

  “Prepare your probe, Captain Cythien,” she said, “but I concur – hold fire until we know more.”

  The memory of Loobie reminded her of another childhood friend. Indiya activated an instantaneous communication link across scores of light-years to the Legion’s strategic hub at Khallini, and an undersea prison in which one of the sharpest minds in the Legion was incarcerated.

  “This is a surprise, Admiral,” said Finfth. His brain was boosted to capabilities far beyond human, and yet the weaknesses in his character were all too human.

  “We are in trouble, Finfth, caught in a Hardit trap. I’m sending you a status report. My question is–”

  “Why have the Hardits not attacked?”

  Still cutting straight to the point? You haven’t changed. “Well? Any ideas?”

  “I believe the answer is obvious… to someone with my unfortunate experience of life.”

  “No grandstanding, Finfth. Everything is at stake here.”

  “Then shut up, and pay attention, Admiral. The word you’re looking for is betrayal.”

  “Betrayal? We’ve had a serious security breach. We’re caught in a trap, because the Hardits and New Empire forces coordinated the movements. They knew where and when we would be.”

  “The betrayal runs deeper than that.”

  “The Hardits!” Indiya had been talking with Finfth in her mind but her excitement was such that she screamed out loud, the sound muffled by buffer gel. “The Hardits’ alliance with the New Empire is a sham, it has been all along, leading up to this moment. Thank you, Finfth.”

  “Happy to be of service,” he replied. “Do come and visit one day, I still keep–”

  Indiya cut the link to Finfth’s prison under the seas of Khallini and opened a channel to Captain Cythien. “Avoid contact with the Hardits,” she ordered. “I think they have appeared merely to draw out the New Empire fleet. It’s a double cross.”

  “It would be a characteristic Hardit behavior, Admiral,” agreed Cythien.

  “Too frakking right, Captain. Keep your X-Boat reserve hidden, but take a rotation of squadrons off the highest alert to keep them rested. If I know the Hardits, they won’t move until they’re ready to gloat, and how long that might be, I do not know.”

  Back at the Athena end of the engagement, the Imperial forces were proving to be too smart to be drawn in to the Legion’s trap. They were turning about, firing missiles at the outer rim of the Legion formation, firing everything else they had at the swarms of AI drones pursuing them, as the superior weight of Legion drone numbers began to tell.

  The Imperial warships were taking casualties now, but a hidden gauntlet still awaited them. The Imperials were breaking out of their encirclement by diving into Euphrates’ gravity well, unaware that five squadrons of stealthed X-Boats were racing to intercept, and the inertialess drives of the X-Boats meant they could accelerate far beyond the dreams of White Knight ship designers.

  “Admiral, I’m picking up a transmission from the Hardits,” said Holy Retribution’s Sensor Officer, a young Littorane called Yoh-Daen.

  “Wrap it in maximum firewall protection. Audio only. And then put it through, Lieutenant Yoh-Daen. The Hardits are ready to gloat, sooner than I thought.”

  As she waited for the transmission to be made safe, she observed a flight of X-Boats – Mark Six Phantoms – de-stealth beneath an Imperial destroyer and concentrate all their fire on a single point of the enemy warship’s hull. The destroyer’s point defense systems would be going wild, trying to swat away the attack from these upstart little warboats. But the same technology that allowed X-Boats to dump their momentum into D-Space also allowed them to shift away the kinetic energy of the destroyer’s point defenses, at least for the handful of seconds they needed to bore a hole through their target’s hull armor.

  The X-Boat flight peeled away as the destroyer ruptured, the little boats stealthing back into invisibility where their momentum dump system could cool to safe levels before it was brought back to full capacity.

  Damage control teams on the stricken destroyer managed to avoid the risk of depressurization ripping the craft apart. Indiya had to admire the skill and bravery that must have entailed. She knew that they would have been her comrades-in-arms if they had not been caught, by chance, on opposing sides in this chodding Civil War.

  The destroyer’s respite was only temporary. Its engines were badly damaged, and its targeting and point defense severely compromised. As ships throughout the Imperial fleet began taking hits from the deadly X-Boats, a flight of Swordfish fighter-bombers appeared on the damaged aft section of the destroyer and launched a barrage of deadly torpedoes before fading away into the void.

  The destroyer exploded. No one could have survived that.

  “Patching the Hardit communication through, Admiral,” said the sensor officer, flicking her long Littorane tail in excitement. “There’s a lag of about 70 seconds, but I thought you’d want to hear this exchange from the beginning.”

  “Why do you not attack?” The voice was produced by a standard translator system, and the originating words could have been spoken by any race. Indiya guessed this was a Jotun.

  “We did de-cloaked,” came the reply. Even if Indiya hadn’t been able to tell from the context, the sloppy sounding translation, with erroneous grammar, was characteristically Hardit. Indiya suspected the Hardits mistranslated on purpose. “We surprise the so-called Legion rabble at the prearranged time and place. Do we not?”

  “And we have moved to engage the Legion rabble, so that you may crush them from the rear. Time is running out. Make your advance now.”

  “No,” said the Hardit.

  “Why? Why squander this chance, Commander Tawfiq?”

  “My thoughts exactly. Why squander this chance to betray you, dear Admiral Gleaming-Diligence? Please consider the inaction of my Hardit fleet to be analogous to a barbed spearhead, heated until it glows red hot before I personally shove it up your rectum and begin to rotate the spear shaft. Did you really imagine the Hardit New Order was your ally?”

  While the Hardit paused, Indiya noticed how the quality of its translation improved when it wished. The Hardit continued: “We are destined by fate to win our fight for freedom, Admiral Gleaming-Diligence – and I hope you are hearing this too, human Admiral Indiya. In the future ordained for this galaxy, there shall be one people, one race, one scent. Human, Jotun, White Knight, Littorane, Khallene– the fate of all your races is extinction at the hands of the New Order.”

  “Admiral,” said Lieutenant Yoh-Daen, “the Hardits rebroadcast that exchange to us, into human language. They ceased transmission for about twenty seconds, and are now trying to establish a new link.”

  “Put in place the same security protocols as before, Lieutenant, and then connect them to me, also rebroadcasting to all Legion flag officers. And include Ambassador Sandure in the comms loop.”

  Xin Lee reported in. “We have Arun. He’s safe.”

  Relief flooded through Indiya. Finally, some good news.

  “He’s alive, stable, but unconscious. We’re headed for Vengeance of Saesh, seeing as our usual berth appears a little busy facing down the Hardits. Arun was mumbling something about Tawfiq. If she was the one who tortured Arun, then I’ll have to wait for my revenge – a shuttlecraft got away and went stealth on us before we could vape it.”

  “Tawfiq is alive a
nd attempting to contact me now,” said Indiya. “Or, at least, a Hardit claiming to be Tawfiq. What are the chances of Arun contributing to command decisions in this current situation?”

  “Zero.”

  A chill cut through Indiya. “Understood. Good luck, Lieutenant-General. I know you will take good care of him. Indiya out.”

  Indiya required only a small fragment of the mind to talk with Xin. Most of her attention was on the engagement with the Imperial forces. The X-Boat squadrons had devastated the enemy fleet, but their effectiveness was degrading due to the need to cool down their overheating energy dumps. Nonetheless, their contribution had been devastating.

  She opened a connection to the tactical commander of the main portion of her forces. “Admiral Kreippil, kindly pursue the enemy before you. Surrendering ships will be boarded and taken, their crews unharmed, but only if they show no resistance. To everyone else, display no mercy as you crush them.”

  “With pleasure, Divine One.”

  She had just made Admiral Kreippil’s day. More. For decades now as he slept his off-duty periods away in his water-filled cabin, he must have dreamt of this moment. She sighed. Now, she suspected, it was her turn to make the Hardit commander’s day.

  “I hope you enjoyed the recording of my conversation with Admiral Gleaming-Diligence,” said the Hardit. “I would have continued the exchange for longer, but your little fighter craft seem to have destroyed the Admiral’s ship. I wonder, was it Hardit technology you copied in that stealth design? Never forget that the originating innovation was ours. Do not expect Hardit sensors to be so blind to your tricks, copied, as they are, from obsolete Hardit technology.”

  “Is there any point this conversation?” said Indiya “or are you transfixed by a pathological need to gloat, a displacement activity to compensate for the deep-rooted sense of your inferiority? I hear you were a criminal from the lowest strata of your society, Tawfiq Woomer-Calix. Is that the source of your insecurity? Does that explain your need to sneer?”