The Human Legion Deluxe Box Set 2

by Tim C Taylor

  “Admiral?”

  But that night, her XO had overridden her instructions that they should not be disturbed. Dear Loobie had been right to do so, but there had never been another night with Arun.

  Nor with anyone.

  There had never been time! Half the fleet saw her as a divine vessel or honored her in a personality cult she tried to discourage but kept flaring up, often bordering on religion.

  “Are you feeling all right, Admiral?”

  A tear came to her when she added an audio feed to her surveillance and heard Janna groan in deep sexual fulfillment.

  The Wolf was burdened by little more than the drive to survive this day and the next. Despite all that Indiya had ever accomplished, there were moments like this when she would give it up in a heartbeat to swap places with Janna.

  “Admiral. If you don’t answer, I shall summon a medical team and report you unfit for duty.”

  Indiya gasped… and was back in control. For now. “That won’t be necessary, Squadron Leader. I am well and fit for command.” She felt her shoulders slump, and heard herself add in a whisper, “Just not fit for anything else.” Indiya could read people like no other human. The air around them was thick with her nano-constructs, many of them were inside Dock at this moment. She felt his relief that Indiya was okay, also his deep concern and empathy.

  She regarded him afresh. If the needs of the Legion hadn’t been so desperate in its early years, Dock would have been executed and his name long forgotten by now.

  She had never given him much respect, and always suspected his loyalties. Yet he’d fought hard and well, and he had suffered much. She wondered whether his preternatural ability to enjoy himself was part of the reason she hated him. Was she jealous of this man?

  It was not a welcome thought.

  She dismissed him. He saluted and made his way out the compartment to surrender his body to be drained of blood.

  “Dock,” she said as he left. “I’d wait an hour or so before giving Remus his orders. I don’t think he’s as desperate to find something to do as you think.”

  — Chapter 57 —

  To run.

  To drink.

  To play.

  To hope.

  A tinge of despair shot through Desiree Kelly’s heart as she chalked the last verb onto the blackboard. Hope. What hope was there for any of them?

  She daren’t turn around to face her pupils and let them see the despair on her face.

  “These are verbs,” she told them. “Doing words. Can any of you think of other doing words?”

  She took a deep breath and faced the class presenting a forest of eager arms raised high. “Yes, Myleene?”

  At nine years old, Myleene Costa was the oldest kid in Junior Class III at Area 34’s Burleith Elementary. Although the ten years that separated Myleene from Desiree were few in number, they were heavy with terrible experiences that interposed a vast gulf between pupil and teacher. Myleene was neither naïve nor stupid, but she still managed to cling to hope.

  “To contemplate,” Myleene said, a smug grin showing she was proud of her answer.

  Desiree gave the girl a smile she didn’t feel inside. “Very good. Contemplating is a big word that means to think about things deeply.”

  She moved to chalk up the new addition to the blackboard, but the itching she’d felt in her wrist suddenly felt so intense that she instead placed the chalk carefully on her desk rather than risk dropping it. What’s wrong with me? I’m falling apart.

  She took another deep breath and told herself that if she could just make it to recess, she’d have a quick smoke and then hunt down the principal and beg him for painkillers.

  Grimacing through a wave of itching, she contemplated the sea of hands still raised by the class.

  “Anyone else?” she prompted.

  The young schoolteacher wanted desperately for one of the boys to volunteer, but they remained sullen and disconnected as always, present at her class only because they feared the beating that any absence would bring.

  Of the forty-three kids in Junior Class III, only a dozen were boys. In Area 34, boys graduated to the labor camps at eight years of age for a brutal ten-year lesson in servitude. The Hardits considered males to be the likelier source of insurrections. How little the aliens really understood the human race, even after all these years.

  What was the use? The fate of boys and men was not something she could fix.

  She nodded at little Sharon Phillips on the front row.

  “I’ve got a good one, Miss.”

  Sharon’s left cheek was matted with weeping scar tissue, probably from a poorly cleaned up chemical warhead strike or having been caught unprotected during a fallout storm. Nonetheless, the girl’s eyes shone with the eagerness of a five-year-old who thinks she can please her teacher.

  “Go on, Sharon.”

  “To die, Miss. Dying is a doing word, isn’t it?”

  Desiree froze. Dying. Did she have to pick that word? But Sharon looked so proud…

  Forty-three pairs of eyes were upon their teacher, scrutinizing her every word and reaction.

  I can’t take this anymore.

  A sudden attack of itching left her hand jerking in full sight of the class.

  Her mind filled with the battered old metal tin inside her desk drawer and its contents of pre-rolled cigarettes. Jeez, she needed a smoke. She could almost taste the satisfying burn on the back of her throat.

  Desiree forced another smile, but she knew she wasn’t fooling anyone. “Very good, Sharon. Yes, dying is a verb. You’ve all done so well with verbs that I’m calling recess early.”

  She tried to laugh at the wave of delight that swept over a few of her young pupils. Then she felt a stab of guilt at the resentment from the boys. They had learned to fear disorder and she had just broken the routine they sheltered behind. They knew no good would come of this.

  Damn the Hardits. She couldn’t take this much longer.

  “Hey, excuse me?” she said to little Sharon when the girl started running for the door. “Have you forgotten something?”

  Sharon thought a moment and then realized she had, a glum look overtaking her earlier enthusiasm. “The Pledge, Miss.”

  “That’s right, the Pledge. Recess is early, but we still need to do things correctly. Let’s say it together with pride in our hearts. Altogether now… One scent! One race! One leader!”

  The class having said the Pledge of Loyalty together, she released the children out of the room and released herself to the seat at her desk and the metal tin that had once been her father’s. The lid was badly scratched, but she could still make out its description of the specialist drill bits it had contained long ago.

  Five seconds later and the box was open on her desk, a lit smoke in her mouth, and the taste of sweetened nico-fibers rolling around her lungs.

  It felt good… but not good enough.

  She sucked at the cigarette greedily, but it did little to satisfy her craving.

  Seriously, what was wrong with her today?

  She scratched around for an answer. True, she was terrified on behalf of her pupils for their future, and numb to the prospect of her own, but that was a horror that never left her, and wouldn’t do until the day the Hardits finally tired of humanity altogether and exterminated everyone on the planet. Today she was afflicted by a different malady. This was more immediate.

  It was something other than nicotine that she craved today. Had she been drugged?

  She thought back to the events of the past twenty-four hours, but she hadn’t been anywhere or experienced anything unusual. And why would anyone bother with her? She was a malnourished nineteen-year-old with skin sagging like an elderly hippopotamus and a bald head covered by a cheap wig she’d bought from the internment camp store.

  Why would anyone be interested in her?

  The itching in her wrists turned to fire.

  On a sudden impulse, she tried to rub away the itching on the underside
of the desk in the drawer space.

  And to her amazement, there was something there. A waxy substance.

  She tried not to think what it might be, only that rubbing her wrist against it eased the burning.

  A sudden sense of falling overwhelmed her… of stumbling back… collapsing into herself.

  She remembered who she really was.

  And what she was.

  She grinned.

  Very quickly, her lip curled up, transforming the grin into a snarl.

  Humanity still had teeth.

  And it wasn’t going down without a fight.

  — Chapter 58 —

  “Blake! Blake! You copy?”

  What’s wrong with me?

  “This better not be some dumb stunt you’re pulling for laughs, cos I’m not laughing.”

  Police officer Jayden Blake sank to his knees. No matter how hard he tried, no words would come to his throat.

  I’m here, Sarge. Don’t abandon me!

  Blake sensed citizens crossing the street to avoid him, of people hurrying into the nearest building, desperate not to be associated with an incident in which an officer was in trouble. Others would soon come for whom a troubled officer was a powerful lure.

  There were not many would openly assault a representative of the New Order – even a human one – but here in the outer limit of Baltimore’s Amber Sector there were even fewer who would hold any sympathy in their hearts for a collaborator. Blake understood that news of his predicament would be spreading fast.

  Help me!

  “Goddammit!” he heard Sergeant Arne-Miller say over the radio. “I told them solo patrols are too dangerous. If you can hear me, Jayden, hang on there. I’m diverting Blue-14 to come to your assistance.”

  Solo patrol. Since the Human Legion showed up in system, the persistent absenteeism amongst police officers had escalated into widespread desertions at the same time as crimes of violence, theft, and insurrection had multiplied beyond control. All the same, patrols had always kept to the buddy principle until today.

  What’s happening to me? Perhaps if I can figure it out…

  He was immobilized, robbed of the power of speech, but his heart was still beating. He didn’t think he was dying, nor was he falling into unconsciousness. And this happened on the first day of a solo patrol in Amber Sector.

  Jayden Blake didn’t believe in coincidence.

  Someone had planned this fate specifically for him.

  Sure enough, footsteps soon approached from behind.

  Unable to turn and see his assailant, Blake’s eyes sought a glossy surface in front of him — maybe he could see a reflection of the fate that stalked him – but he found nothing.

  The footsteps closed on him, their pace determined but not rushed. He had no doubt they were coming directly for him. Whatever fate this assailant had planned, he was going to learn it soon and it would not be good.

  The footsteps stopped… right behind him.

  His heart raced, and his mind flashed with images of what might soon come to be. Perhaps they intended a humiliating public spectacle, or maybe he was to be decapitated for a Resistance video.

  Someone had needed to keep the peace – just look at what the gangs had done to Arlington! He was no hero, but he wasn’t a collaborator either – not that a fact like that would carry a lot of weight around here though.

  He held his breath, and in the silence that gave him, he noticed the person behind was breathing heavily, and with that slight rasping quality that suggested the person was a chain smoker.

  “Turnaround 24,” said his assailant – a woman’s voice… young he thought, and with a D.C. accent.

  Turnaround 24. Was that code?

  The woman turned and hurried away.

  Was that it?

  But no – numbness still held him; he was still being offered up like a helpless sacrificial victim.

  At last! A tingling in his extremities pointed to a release, but would it be too late? Two men, lean in tight clothing, and cloth caps down over their eyes, had turned the corner ahead of him and were heading straight for him. One reached into his pants pocket and drew out a blade.

  “Having trouble, pelt-licker?” taunted the other young man.

  “Don’t worry,” said the one with the knife. “Your troubles will soon be over.”

  As the men came closer, he saw his death written in their eyes, and yet his mind receded from the sight and he was falling… falling back into himself.

  Jayden Blake remembered who he really was and rose to his feet. As he shook the last numbness from his limbs, fear and anger took over the men. The police officer wasn’t as vulnerable as he’d seemed, but the men were committed now. They couldn’t let him live.

  They rushed in for the kill.

  But they were young men whose muscles were fueled with burning grievances, not honed by training.

  Whereas Jayden Blake had received extensive training in how to kill, training he had put into practice several times before.

  Luckily for the men, he was also trained in how to incapacitate.

  Blake swiftly dealt with his attackers, leaving them sprawled semiconscious on the sidewalk. He briefly considered pulling them out of sight, but they’d made their choice in attacking him, and if that choice led to consequences that was not his problem. Blake had a job to do… killing Hardits.

  “Blake! Jayden! What the hell is going on? Answer me?”

  “I just woke up, Sarge,” Blake whispered. Then he threw his radio across the street and got down to business.

  — Chapter 59 —

  Priya kept her head bowed until the Janissaries had ceased their chatter and passed beyond the respectful ten-yard boundary of supplication.

  The frakking pelts could have just flicked a tail to acknowledge her submission and let her get back to work rather than making her wait in that stupid posture for over ten minutes.

  Alien turds. Her uniform made it clear in sight and scent that her job was to tend the gardens of Victory Mall. It was the Hardit victory that meant it had been renamed from the National Mall, and most of the trees had been ripped up to be replaced with exotic alien plants. Didn’t the idiots understand she was working for them?

  Fantasies of Hardit corpses littering the gardens filled her head, but that was all they would ever be – fantasies.

  She didn’t have the courage to stand up to them. Anyone who had so much as breathed in a way the occupiers didn’t like was long since dead.

  With a sigh, she returned to her flowerbed – in reality a massive bomb crater at the northern edge of the mall that rumor said had been the result of a Resistance attack. Others said it had been a full-blown military operation conducted by human military special ops. All Priya knew was that the large bed of well-tended dirt was the most abundant display of flowers in the city.

  But now the perfection of her flower crater was marred by a rock that lay there amid the debris of broken Betelen Star stems. Someone must have thrown the rock while her head was bowed. Who would do such a thing?

  She grabbed the rock, and even through her leather gardening gloves she could feel it was coated with a sticky substance.

  Madness possessed her. She yielded to a wild compulsion to remove one glove and rub the rock’s stickiness against the bare skin of her wrist.

  A few moments later, a very different Priya Roy was pulling a battered old sports bag out of the rich soil of her flowerbed, her carefully tended plants carefully placed to one side so she could bed them back in afterward; the dumb pelts would never know.

  Without unzipping it to look inside, she stuffed the bag into her gardening cart and set about repairing the damage to the flowerbed. She already knew what the bag contained: guns.

  Whistling a perky tune, her mind filled once again with images of Victory Mall stuffed with Hardit corpses riddled with bullets.

  But this time she told herself this was no fantasy; this was an imminent future.

  And she couldn’t w
ait to live it.

  — Chapter 60 —

  “It’s a big enough risk without me burdening you too,” said General McEwan. “My heart urges me to ride with you into space, but my head tells me otherwise. Go without me.”

  The deep shadows thrown by the bunker’s emergency lighting seemed to consume him. Frankly, Aelingir felt only disappointment in the human. In anyone else, she would accuse them of cowardice. But to do so of Arun McEwan would be absurd. Instead, she asked, “what does your organic battle computer tell you?”

  McEwan made the human gesture of sucking at his lower lip, which indicated he was thinking hard and not liking the answers. “When I run the planning scenarios through my head,” he replied cautiously, “they all tell me that for us to win this war, we must breach the Hardit corrosion shell, and quickly.”

  Aelingir nodded like a human. “My people have an expression. When you see your opening, seize it with all six limbs.”

  “Dammit, Aelingir. You’re right. Of course you’re right. I was told that same Jotun expression while still in the crèche, but look at me, General. Look at what I am now!”

  Aelingir had known this human for many decades. He had aged significantly, and since Tawfiq had forced them underground, his gaunt face was pinched most of the time in a tense grimace of discomfort. And that was where she looked, because it was in his face and the square of his shoulders that he revealed his dogged spirit. Diminished, undoubtedly, and distracted, she still saw the fire in the man who had inspired so many millions, even if he failed to recognize it himself.

  Of course, McEwan was referring to the hover chair, and the absence of his lowest limbs. Even the chair’s gravitic motor buzzed like angry insects when it should be giving a satisfied hum. Nonetheless, worn though it might be, the chair still delivered its primary function – just like its user.

  “I was useful up in orbit,” McEwan said. “I had to pretend to be a long-dead comrade, but I could be a Marine one last time. But in this here? My judgement is clouded with pain and this chair is not exactly designed for high-g spacecraft. If I were to lead this operation I would be a burden.”