The Human Legion Deluxe Box Set 2

by Tim C Taylor

  Acting as a single unit, Arun and Hansel aimed for another Hardit, crouched in a firing hole. If she had kept her nerve, maybe the Janissary could have shot Hansel from beneath, but she panicked and sprayed bullets that deflected harmlessly off Hansel’s sloping head armor. The Hardit stared into the onrushing blue of the lance tip… and then dodged aside at the last moment.

  The lance did not strike home, but Hansel had been waiting for this and crushed the Hardit with his rear legs as he passed.

  And on they charged.

  As wave after wave of dragoons smashed into the Hardit infantry, the clone riders fired searing blue energy discharges out of their lances to disable weaponry and vehicles; the living flesh of the enemy was skewered, cut, and sliced by the lances as they swept past.

  To the east, Scipio’s Marines set about the grisly business of dismembering fleeing Janissaries with their spinning monofilament needles.

  Far above, Marchewka watched the blue noose tighten, its interior flooding with red.

  The senior Hardit commander knew she had the superior force, that if the Janissaries could just hold firm long enough to dissipate the impetus of the Legion advance, then their greater numbers and firepower would still tell.

  Superior numbers or not, Janissaries saw the terrifying sight of Legion Marines on one side, and this nightmare Trog cavalry on the other, and instinct cut in.

  They dug.

  Once the first Hardit scratched away at the red desert sand, her comrades nearby raced to follow suit, throwing away weapons in their desperation that they would not be the ones caught at the rear of their flight.

  But there was no sanctuary below the ground. Swarms of Trog guardians oozed out of the earth to slice through Hardit limbs before diving back down beneath the sand, reappearing a short distance away to deal more death to the fleeing Hardits.

  There was nowhere to run. Nowhere safe to dig.

  The behemoths were not intimidated, though. Firing constantly, they were grouping, forming an armored spearhead that would tear through this thin blue line, cutting it to ribbons. Even now, if the Hardits could break out and rally behind the safety of the giant armored vehicles, their numbers were still superior. And the Hardit commander knew reinforcements were only an hour away.

  Suddenly, Hansel was through into open space because the dragoon charge had overrun the first Hardit unit and was making for the rear of a unit facing east in readiness for Scipio’s attack. The rear elements of this new target were beginning to turn around, weighing up options for running.

  But the Hardits were several seconds away. Arun took advantage of this pause in his killing work to survey the battlezone.

  Dragoons were streaming ahead of Arun now, the foremost with couched lances and Trog horns about to hit the Hardit line. Gretel was alongside, Springer having lost her lance and replaced it with a Hardit rifle. When had that happened?

  But before he could ask, a crescendo of screaming engines overhead made him look up.

  While some of the Sleeping Legion’s surviving dropships were spiraling up through clear skies, making for the troopships in space, others were diving at the battlefield like giant birds of prey. They were aiming… at the tanks.

  The behemoths saw the threat and raised their main armament as rapidly as possible. Support vehicles and any ground forces that still maintained discipline sent up fire from cannons and missiles. A dropship exploded into a fireball, sending red-hot metal shards raining down into the desert, but the others kept coming.

  The crews bailed out in what looked like jet packs, just in time… the dropships slammed into the tanks.

  No amount of advanced armor or force shield could resist the brute laws of physics, not with such enormous forces in play.

  The tanks blew.

  When the ordnance inside exploded, adding to the already immense energies released on the impact, the giant turrets were thrown high into the air, their enormous barrels scything through Hardit bodies on their descent.

  The biggest threats to the Legion’s victory were now burning carcasses of metal and high-tech materials.

  A small group of Janissaries who’d kept discipline throughout – perhaps an elite unit – rallied with some of the surviving lesser armored vehicles and punched their way through the encirclement to the north.

  But that was all. The remainder lost all cohesion, and in many cases lost their sanity before the end.

  It was a grisly business, but Marine and dragoon alike slaughtered every last Hardit except for the handful that Marchewka had urged them to take for questioning.

  — Chapter 31 —

  Arun McEwan

  LZ-Alpha

  “Nice ride, sir,” said Scipio to his new commanding officer when they finally met on the field of battle. The mysterious colonel, who claimed to have been thawed from a dead Marine base on Tranquility-4, seemed to be weighing up whether it was safe to reach up and shake the hand of a man atop the insectoid equivalent of a heavy tank in a bad mood. Scipio decided it wasn’t worth the risk of the Trog slicing off a limb.

  Arun tried to imagine how his dragoon charge must have looked to a man who had probably never seen a Trog, but soon gave up. He’d lived around Trogs ever since that day as a cadet when he’d been sent into the tunnels below Detroit on a training exercise, and came out the laughing stock of the base but with the best kill score in the regiment. “Relax, Scipio,” Arun said to the nervous Marine. “It’s the guardian Trogs you need to be careful around. Hansel here won’t bite you while I’m around. Not so long as you behave.”

  The Marine standing next to Scipio came to attention facing Arun. “Permission to ask an impertinent question, sir?”

  There was something about this woman that sounded familiar – as if she were a memory buried so long ago it would be unwise to retrieve. Intrigued, he nodded at her.

  “Sir, have you fought Hardits before?”

  He nodded grimly. “Many times.”

  “Good. What is the instinctive Hardit response if you humiliate them?”

  “They lash out without a care to the consequences.”

  “Exactly.”

  The hot rush of victory froze to ice in his breast. Arun surveyed the scene of dead and dying Hardits, of the carcasses of the armored vehicles, and bowed his head to Scipio’s comrade. “You’re right. We need to get far below the surface before Tawfiq wipes away the scene of her defeat.” Barney, open a line to the Sleeping Legion commander in orbit.

  The image of a Jotun officer appeared in the viewscreen on the reverse of Hansel’s head crest. “Marchewka here, General.”

  “Postpone the second wave of landings. Keep the dropships safe with you in orbit.”

  “But the second wave is already launching.”

  “Then send them back! Tawfiq wants to beat us here, to destroy us in a straight battle. If she can’t do that, she’ll settle for scorching the Earth. Within ten minutes this whole area will be radioactive hell. Let her have her fit of pique. We’ve no choice.”

  The Jotun hesitated, but only for a moment. Then she set about recalling the next dropship wave.

  “Get your people down below ground,” Arun ordered Scipio. “I want everyone living or dead to safety, and I want it done real fast. But leave no one left behind.”

  “This leave no one behind is human madness,” said Marchewka.

  “Is it? I sent Nhlappo back to Tranquility-4 to rescue the sleepers beneath the ruins of Detroit. She left her own children to go back down and defend them against Tawfiq’s attacks. If we hadn’t gone back for our brothers and sisters then you, Marchewka, would still be sleeping the war away beneath Beta City. It’s that same human madness that got us this far.”

  The Jotun bit her lip, the front fangs piercing the flesh to leave ragged bloody scraps. Without mentioning her wound, she started issuing orders to her subordinates on the ground. Everyone who still had a pulse was to be moved down deep below ground. As far as they could be taken.

  “Thank yo
u,” mouthed Arun, and set to work evacuating his own people from the surface, summoning worker-mode Trogs to help bring back the Trog wounded through the red mountain they had hidden within and down to safer depths. The evacuation of the humans too, both Marines and clone children – wounded, dead, and fatigued – was made possible by the workers, dragoons, and scribes of Nest Hortez. Only with the guardians did Arun keep his Nest members separate from Scipio’s legion.

  Arun worked silently, except where speech was necessary to liaise with Scipio. He was discovering the simplicity of pheromone commands, and the efficiency with which scribes could interpret every nuance and organize results with inhuman efficiency.

  Even so, they were still on their way hurrying to the lower depths of the shelters below Uluru Ayers Rock when they felt the first explosions burst overhead.

  The New Order punished the land with dirty nukes and biological weapons, but for Arun and his army, poor Australia had been no more than a starting off point. They dressed their wounds and organized a rudimentary cooperation between the Sleeping Legion and Nest Hortez. As night was falling on the burning desert sands above their heads, the leading elements were already headed west along tunnels cut long ago to reach the mass transit hub beneath the shore of the Indian Ocean.

  Next stop Arabia. And beyond was the pocket of Legion forces locked up in Europe. If they could break the siege and link up with the Legion forces there, nothing could stop them.

  Only one thing worried Arun as he dozed off to sleep that night on Hansel’s back; their great depth below a ground that was now highly radioactive had cut off their communication with Marchewka in orbit, and beyond to Indiya’s Legion fleet. Why had Kreippil taken command? Was the main fleet yet able to penetrate the corrosion barrier?

  But Arun had long ago learned the knack of snatching sleep wherever he could while he was on campaign. And when Hansel took his own rest during the night, so a fresh dragoon mount could carry their leader at speed, Arun was too safely wrapped in the comforting embrace of the Nest scent to stir from his slumber.

  — Chapter 32 —

  United Army of Liberation

  Beneath the Earth

  United – so long as the guardians were under tight control – Arun led the armies of Nest Hortez and the Sleeping Legion on through the tunnels beneath the Earth. They left their wounded cared for and defended but pressed on without daring to lose momentum, for there was no time for delay.

  Pedro had been preparing for this day for thousands of years. Deep underground, mass transit routes, which had been mothballed since the human industrial revolution for fear of discovery, now ferried soldiers and equipment at high speed beneath the Indian Ocean and then the Arabian Sea.

  Tawfiq and his Ultra Janissaries would come to life in North America, but Pedro had built the main tunnel routes long ago to relieve the beleaguered Legion troops in Europe before moving west across the Atlantic to Victory City. Why Pedro had forced them to relieve the siege of Europe first was a question Arun hadn’t found a satisfying answer to. Sometimes aliens just didn’t make sense and you had to roll with it.

  Worse, now that they suspected their existence, New Order forces sought out the hidden Trog routes and were beginning to discover them. Arun’s advance slowed dangerously because his units couldn’t know whether the route ahead was clear, blocked by a collapsed tunnel, or set with booby traps backed up by a Janissary suicide squad.

  All this time, joint operations between Arun’s Nest army and Lance’s Marines increased in sophistication, but there was no time to train together. They had to press ahead and learn how to work together as they moved.

  The objective of reaching Victory City drove them on. By the time their lead elements had reached the Mediterranean Sea, they had five days and ten thousand klicks to go. The main Legion fleet was headed their way from Mars orbit, but who still lived, and what progress they had made in penetrating the secrets of the corrosion barrier, was not clear from the scattered reports from the Trog signal teams who had made occasional forays toward the surface.

  In his youth, Arun could have carried on for weeks before dropping from exhaustion, but he was feeling every one of his 220-odd years now, and his life had not been gentle.

  Springer drove him on mercilessly. He could see in her eyes how much her cruelty cost her, but he thanked her all the same. There would be time to rest after he’d confronted Tawfiq – one way or another.

  Until then, sleep was a luxury they could afford only sparingly.

  The Trogs, though, were not Marines. Only two days after the Battle of Uluru, with New Order resistance appearing to crumble, and with Sangurian and human Marine reserves on their way from Australia following later waves of landings, Arun reluctantly called a general halt beneath the Mediterranean. The enemy had collapsed the long-laid Trog tunnels here, flooding them out, but the Trogs had swiftly cut around these obstacles with new tunnel systems.

  Even the digging caste of Trogs had their limits and they had exhausted the last of their energy reserves. It was time to rest.

  With the Trogs and their lilac-eyed human warriors halted for twelve hours, Arun sent Scipio ahead to link up with survivors of the first Legion expeditionary force, still holding out in northern Europe.

  The New Order forces were far from beaten, though.

  Hidden Hardit spy systems linked to human Faithful intelligence and interpreter teams discovered this temporary weakness in the relentless pursuit by Legion forces. New Order commanders saw the opportunity and seized it.

  With Scipio away fighting his way north through France, the Hardits launched their counter-attack beneath the Med.

  While Arun’s forces had still been concentrated in Australia, New Order senior generals had begged Tawfiq to allow them to unleash their most potent anti-Trog weapon.

  Only now, with the Trogs almost in Europe, had Tawfiq finally relented – confirming the suspicions of many Hardit commanders that their supreme commander wanted loyal Janissaries to die, in order to weaken the hand of the army commanders who might one day threaten her absolute grip on power.

  Spearheaded by mini-tanks with a single crewmember, elite Janissary units punched deep into the Nest Hortez encampment beneath the Med.

  Sentry caste Trogs sounded the alert and tried to slice apart the invading Hardits with their enormous mandibles. Many Janissaries died in this way, torsos and limbs neatly sliced into many parts, but the mini-tanks cut a path through the sentries and beyond into the vulnerable army of sleeping Trogs. Behind them ran Janissaries armed with light weapons and bomb jackets. Speed was paramount to these teams, pressing ahead into their enemies by dodging and outrunning the Trogs while they were still slowed by sleep and fatigue. They were not weighed down by heavy equipment, because they had no intention of defending their objective against counter attack. None of them would be coming back.

  As the Trogs regained their effectiveness, the slaughter they wreaked upon the Janissaries was terrible, but still the enemy pressed ahead until the senior surviving Hardit commander gave the order to unstrap the bombs that hung around their chests and detonate them.

  Choking crimson poison gas billowed out through the tunnels beneath the sea. This gas was what allowed the Hardits to sleep at night, the ultimate counter to the terror of Trogs who could swim through the dirt and slice your head from your torso with a casual flick of their claws.

  Developed over centuries, the payload of the gas bombs was the same plague that at the start of the interstellar war had killed the Trogs beneath Tranquility-4 – Pedro’s birth world.

  Pedro was a brilliant bioengineer and had spent the first few decades after his people had been wiped out re-engineering his body to develop immunity to the plague. And that immunity adaptation extended to his many children, but whether it would work was another matter – it had never been tested outside the lab. It was Trog bioengineering versus Hardit biowarfare. Which would prevail?

  The Trogs caught in the poison gas attack choked, co
llapsed, and vomited into their narrow passageways and corridors until the poorly ventilated area reeked with alien bile.

  Then they rose to their feet and slaughtered every Hardit who had dared to unleash the vile plague that had killed all but one of the Trogs of the Detroit Nest.

  By the time the Janissary armored units at the vanguard of their follow-up assault smashed into Trog forces ten klicks offshore from Barcelona, eager to exploit the devastating effect of the poison attack, their enemy was not only fit for duty, but was alert and roused to anger. Even so, the battle was close fought, and conducted without mercy.

  The New Order commander, General Pordsin-Ayul, had recently taken command of the European sector by virtue of demonstrating superior loyalty to the supreme commander, but she was determined to prove that she possessed as much competence as the old fool she’d replaced when they had dared to criticize the supreme commander. Pordsin-Ayul threw all her theater reserves into this attack, judging this was the critical turning point in the campaign.

  For their part, the would-be liberators of the Earth knew that if they did not repel this counter-attack, they would not reach Tawfiq in time to prevent her awakening her super army.

  Pordsin-Ayul was very aware of this timetable and had concluded that the most efficient way to rob her enemies of the momentum they needed to reach Victory City in time was to decapitate the Legion.

  They had to kill Arun McEwan.

  The finest unit she commanded was the Sil-Rhul-Thullix Brigade: elite troops with fanatical loyalty to the supreme commander. They howled with delight when she sent them ahead through secret routes to win this war, for they would have the honor of killing McEwan.

  — Chapter 33 —

  Arun McEwan

  Beneath the Mediterranean

  Arun’s first live fire exercise as a cadet had been in Trog tunnels. Now the Trogs were his to command, but the uneven tubular passageways they carved were just as confusing as they had been in his youth.