Legion Of The Damned - 02 - The Final Battle

by William C. Dietz

  Both officers nodded their heads but it was Chow who answered. “Yes, ma’am. Both teams have landed and report their perimeters are secure. Ricky will lead the One Team . . . and I have Three.”

  Norwood nodded. The fact that she had divided her team into three roughly equal parts might have been a mistake had they been landing on an enemy-held planet, but the Hudathans were unarmed, so a reinforced company should be adequate for each major location. “Good. Let’s saddle up.”

  It took the better part of an hour to reinforce the marine perimeter with four of the Legion’s Trooper IIs, load the APCs and head for the Hudathan-occupied ruins. A flight of aerospace fighters, fighting to keep their speed down, roared overhead. They were gone a few seconds later. Both Chow and Hussein had joined their respective teams and were closing on their objectives.

  Norwood rode in the lead vehicle with her head and shoulders sticking up through a hatch. Master Sergeant Meyers didn’t approve . . . but Norwood wanted to see the terrain with her own eyes. The APC lurched as the right-hand track rode up and over a concrete block. Norwood braced herself against the motion. The metal felt warm beneath her fingers.

  A knowledgeable eye could still tell the difference between the rubble created by a bombed-out apartment complex and a high-rise business office. Signs advertised services no longer available, arrows guided nonexistent traffic, and lampposts, heated by the same energy beams that had burned huge swathes across the city, drooped like dying flowers. Protruding from a sidewalk that had flowed like lava, Norwood saw the head and shoulders of a man, arms raised in supplication, forever entombed in a suit of glassified concrete.

  Norwood felt her anger return and used it to feed the moment, to immunize herself against the feelings of pity that threatened to dilute her hatred. Strength, that was the answer, and Norwood took pleasure in the fact that there was nothing subtle about the robo scouts that swept the area ahead, the quads who guarded the convoy’s flanks, or the main battle tank that brought up the rear. The message was clear: “Do what we say or die.”

  Hard eyes watched the convoy pass and waited for the prearranged signal. The Hudathans emerged from their hiding places. They knew every square inch of the surrounding terrain, were heavily armed, and willing to die. A dozen or so started to work on ambush number two. The rest, some two hundred in all, headed for Landing Zone Two.

  Elsewhere, hundreds of miles away, similar activities took place in the vicinity of Landing Zones One and Three. A surveillance camera drifted in from the surrounding bad-lands, spotted unexpected movement around Zone One, and was destroyed with a shoulder-launched missile. The battle had begun.

  Specialist Third Class Jessica Clemmons heard the buzzer, touched a series of keys, and watched the last thirty seconds of video from SURCAM 1147. The images she saw were so jarring, so unexpected, that she ran it again. The camera drifted around the comer of a tumbledown building and out over a street. About fifteen Hudathans were digging some sort of trench. Four of them saw the surveillance device, one gave an order, and the other three aimed weapons towards the camera. The video went to black.

  Clemmons gulped, stabbed the button that would download her screen to Lieutenant Rawley, and hit the intercom. The connection was voice only. He sounded ragged, and slightly out of breath. “Lieutenant Rawley here.”

  “I-i-it’s Clemmons, sir. Th-th-the Hudathans destroyed SURCAM 1147. R-r-request permission to notify Ops.”

  The voice was annoyed. “What did they do? Beat the damn thing with a stick?”

  “N-n-no, sir. Th-th-they hit it with a shoulder-launched missile.”

  Rawley gave an exasperated sigh. “I’m surprised at you, Clemmons . . . drinking on duty is a court-martial offense. Log off, inform the duty NCO, and report to quarters. I’ll deal with you later.”

  Clemmons started to reply, started to object, but knew it was hopeless. She broke the connection, stood, and had started to log off when it hit her. There were a thousand people on the surface, and if the Hudathans had weapons, all of them were in danger. She sat, downloaded her screen to the Ops Center, and activated the intercom. The response was immediate. “Ops Center.”

  Clemmons spoke and discovered her stutter had disappeared. “EW Section here, sir. The enemy attacked and destroyed SURCAM 1147. Video confirmation is available on channel one-three-six.”

  There was a momentary pause as the Ops officer checked the video, followed by the words “Holy shit! Good work, EW. Stay on it.”

  General quarters sounded just as Lieutenant Rawley was about to come between Ensign Ngundo’s rather shapely legs. He didn’t appreciate the way Ngundo pushed him to one side and reached for her pants. Goddamn the navy anyway! Would the bullshit never end?

  Norwood got the word on SURCAM 1147 only seconds after War Commander Poseen-Ka received the same news via the low-powered radio relay system that tied his forces together. The lag time made little or no difference. Though not completely within his trap, the convoy was two-thirds of the way into Hudathan kill zone. Not perfect, but good enough.

  Norwood was still in the process of deciding what to do when the Hudathans opened fire. Not at the bio bods, who were vastly outnumbered, but at the quads and the single tank.

  Poseen-Ka always made it a point to avoid making the same mistake twice in a row. So, having underestimated the effectiveness of human cyborgs during the Battle for Algeron, and having paid for his error, the Hudathan had no intention of doing so again. And, given the fact that the micro-bots had not been equipped to manufacture the heavy artillery, rocket launchers, or other weapons that would normally be used on armored targets, he’d been forced to improvise.

  Which explained why both quads had been targeted by three suicide teams, each consisting of two troopers, carrying twenty-five pounds’ worth of explosives apiece.

  All of the teams had prepositioned themselves along the quad’s line of march in hopes that one of them would be relatively close when the moment came. But the radio transmission ruined that and the Hudathans were forced to sprint towards their respective targets.

  Drulo Baka-Sa, leader of team three, had been a world-class athlete twenty years before. He was older now, but still powerful, and put everything he had into the effort. Bullets started to fly, and his target quad, the one guarding the convoy’s western flank, was in the process of lowering its body to the ground. Once there, the cyborg would become impregnable to anything the Hudathans could presently bring to bear. Everything, literally everything, depended on Baka-Sa’s ability to close the gap and get beneath the behemoth before it settled in. The Hudathan looked back over his shoulder, saw that Nola-Da was only steps behind, and redoubled his efforts.

  The quad known as Abdul had been a legionnaire for thirteen years, ever since a mining accident had claimed his body, and thought he’d seen it all. Not the big war of course, the one that put the Hudathans on Worber’s World to begin with, but two or three smaller conflicts and a police action or two.

  But prisoners who suddenly had weapons, that was a new and not especially pleasant surprise. Still, there was no real cause for alarm, since there was no sign of enemy artillery, which along with heavy armor, was the only thing that quads fear. No one needed to order him down, which they did anyway, or to open fire, which they also did anyway. There were damned few targets, though, excepting the two greenish blobs who had appeared in the middle of his electronic vision and were headed his way.

  Abdul zoomed in and saw no sign of the assault rifles he might have expected, and was not especially concerned in any case, since they could do little more than chip his carefully applied paint job. Then he saw the packs they wore, received a warning from his brain-linked on-board computer, and knew what they were. A demo team! Hell bent on placing explosives under his belly!

  Already moving downwards as fast as his hydraulics would permit, Abdul directed most of his fire to the oncoming blobs, and the rest to the backup teams coming along behind them.

  Baka-Sa felt his abd
ominal muscles tighten as dirt geysered to his right and an energy beam pulsed overhead. The cyborg had seen the danger and was focusing its considerable weaponry on the threat. The Hudathan leaped over a huge chunk of concrete, shouted his clan’s ancestral war cry, and pounded towards the alien quad. He heard a grunt through his ear plug and knew Nola-Da had been hit. A series of bright blue energy beams stuttered by his shoulder and caused his radio to crackle. He tripped, caught himself, and staggered ahead. The rubble made it difficult to run and also made it hard for the quad’s computer to predict where he would go next. Grenades popped out of the quad’s launchers, tumbled end over end, and exploded in midair. Shrapnel whined past the Hudathan’s head and peppered his three-hundred-pound body. He kept on going.

  The quad was lower now, no more than six feet off the ground, and steadily falling. Something thumped into Baka-Sa’s shoulder and hurt. But there were only feet to go before he crossed the finish line, before he showed the others who was fastest, before the race was won.

  Antipersonnel mines exploded, triggered by Abdul’s last-ditch attempt to save himself, but it was too late. Suddenly Baka-Sa was there, rolling into the cyborg’s enormous shadow, looking up at camouflaged metal. He wanted to detonate the pack himself, to control his last few moments of existence, but that was denied him.

  Seeing Baka-Sa’s success via his high-powered spotting scope, and not inclined to take any chances, Dagger Commander Enora-Ka activated the remote triggering device. Baka-Sa, and the legionnaire known to his friends as Abdul, died in the same flash of light.

  The second quad, the one covering the convoy’s eastern flank, survived the initial assault, but lost both legs on one side, and was effectively immobilized. And, as if that wasn’t bad enough, a full fifty percent of the APCs in the first half of the convoy, or the part fully enmeshed in the Hudathan kill zone, had been destroyed by prepositioned command-detonated mines. So, badly outnumbered, and stripped of a good deal of her mobility, Norwood had little choice but to retreat.

  Three legionnaires died while trying to pull the second quad’s brain box, and more would have made the attempt, if the cyborg in question hadn’t threatened to fire on them, and promised to cover their retreat. And cover them she did, hurling a sleet of lead in every direction as the APCs pulled back, hunting the Hudathans like rats in a gravel pit.

  Twice the APC Norwood was riding was blown out from under her, twice she was helped to safety, and twice she stopped to pull dead and dying soldiers out of the wreckage. And always with the same thoughts burning through her mind. Where had the weapons come from? How had they done it? And what could they possible hope to gain?

  Because no matter how many humans they killed in the coming hours, and given the reports coming from Landing Zones One and Three, the butcher’s bill would be high indeed, she could still call for reinforcements, or retreat to her fortress in the sky and sterilize the entire planet from there. And the aerospace fighters were still up, too, ready to inflict damage.

  A sniper opened fire from the cover of a recently repaired stone wall. Lead spanged off metal and Norwood ducked. A huge bandage-wrapped hand touched her shoulder. It was Meyers, wounded, grimy, but still smiling. “It’s the Bear, ma’am. He says it’s urgent.”

  Norwood grimaced and accepted the hand-held com set. If her XO wanted something it would be important. A shoulder-launched missile hit an APC and detonated with a sharp, cracking sound. Her latest vehicle lurched and someone started to scream. “Yeah, Ernie . . . what’s up?”

  The Old Lady’s skipper was a big man, made seemingly bigger by the personality he projected, and the entire Ops Center hung on his every word. Quite a few of the SUR-CAMs were still operational and provided live coverage of the battle. “We’ve got trouble, General, big trouble.”

  “Gee, Ernie, thanks for the insight.”

  The naval officer ignored Norwood’s sarcasm. “No, boss, I mean real trouble, fleet-sized trouble. There are approximately fifty ships. Each and every damned one of them is a ninety-six-point-eight percent match with known Hudathan designs. They dropped hyper ten minutes ago and are headed this way.”

  Norwood felt her heart sink. Suddenly it all made sense. The purpose of the ground action had been to weaken the battle station. The destruction of the battle station would be but the first highly symbolic blow in an all-out war to destroy the Confederacy. And it was her fault. Every decision she’d made had been predicated on the same faulty assumption: that the Hudathans were unarmed. How they obtained the arms no longer mattered. The damage was done. She chose her words with care.

  “I’ll attempt to regroup in the LZ, Ernie . . . but things don’t look very good. Program a full flight of message torps. I want five-hundred-percent redundancy on all priority-one destinations. Give ’em what we have so far . . . and tell them to get ready . . . this is only the beginning.”

  Big Bear nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And, Ernie?”

  “Yes, General?”

  “Pull our air support . . . use them to attack the Hudathan fleet . . . and make the bastards pay.”

  Captain Ernie Big Bear looked up at the screen. He knew he’d never see Norwood again, not in the physical world anyway, and wanted to cry. But warriors don’t cry, not with the entire Ops Center looking on, so he didn’t. “Roger that, General . . . Good luck . . . Ops out.”

  Norwood handed the com set to Meyers. “All right, Sergeant . . . let’s fall back on the airstrip. Warn the perimeter guards and order the Trooper IIs to dig in.”

  Meyer’s reply was lost in the sound of a tremendous explosion. The Hudathans had detonated an enormous mine under the up-till-now undamaged battle tank. It was built to survive such explosions and did. But one of the machine’s massive fans had been damaged, forcing the tank to remain where it was. Explosions rippled across its surface as the Hudathans unleashed a storm of shoulder-launched missiles. The marines answered by traversing their still-potent weapons across the surrounding ruins, tracking and eventually finding many of their attackers.

  Norwood wanted to come to the tank’s assistance, wanted to rescue the crew, but knew it was hopeless. A hundred yards separated the slowly retreating convoy from the now-isolated tank and every inch of it was swept by enemy fire.

  A hand grabbed her arm, pulled her towards the rear of the vehicle, and down the ramp. Norwood looked back to see that smoke had started to boil up from the badly damaged engine. The next piece of bad news came with mind-numbing speed.

  A grimy face appeared next to hers. She had seen it before but couldn’t put a name to it. “We got through to the landing zone, ma’am. They’re cut off and taking heavy fire. Two of the drop ships were destroyed by command-detonated mines, a Trooper II is down, another is damaged, and the entire west side of the perimeter is under heavy pressure. Lieutenant Alvarez requests permission to abandon sixty percent of the LZ and consolidate her position.”

  Random thoughts chased important thoughts through Norwood’s mind. Alvarez? What about Captain Horowitz? Dead or wounded. All was not lost, though. Yes, two of the landing craft had been destroyed, and so had at least fifty percent of her force. The remaining ships would be sufficient if they could reach them. “Permission granted. Tell Alvarez to defend the remaining ships.”

  The face nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

  The next fifteen minutes passed with agonizing slowness as the convoy tried to disengage and the Hudathans refused to cooperate. Then, just when Norwood could see the smoke pouring up from the vicinity of the landing strip, Poseen-Ka triggered the second ambush. It was as he had intended to be, the blow that broke the convoy’s spine.

  The hand-dug trench ran the width of the road along which the convoy had traveled and was packed with explosives. When detonated, the resulting explosion threw soldiers fifty feet in the air, cut an APC loaded with wounded marines in half, and disabled two more.

  Norwood, walking backwards and firing from the hip, had her feet knocked out from under her. The gro
und hit hard. She tried to rise, saw a stump where her left foot had been, and started to scream. Meyers appeared, applied a tourniquet, and injected something into her thigh. Then, ignoring her orders to the contrary, the master sergeant tossed the general over a massive shoulder, and jogged towards the drop zone. A mere handful of survivors, twenty at best, followed along behind.

  The battle for Battle Station Alpha XIV, better known to the humans as The Old Lady, went entirely according to plan. The Hudathan plan, as visualized and carried out by none other than Grand Marshal Hisep Rula-Ka, onetime protégé to War Commander Niman Poseen-Ka, father of the Hudathan Cyber Corps, and intellectual architect of the coming war.

  Upon emerging from hyperspace, it had come as no surprise to him that the weapons he had so carefully placed in his former leader’s hands had not only been used, but used in a strategically thoughtful manner, weakening the human battle station, and opening it to the very real possibility of an attack from below.

  Now, as his attack ships slashed their way in through the human fighters, victory seemed certain. The only items left unresolved were the number of ships destroyed, the number of lives lost, and the fate of his old comrade. Would Poseen-Ka emerge alive? It wouldn’t make much difference to the overall war effort, but he’d look good on the propaganda holos, and the old fart would make a good ally in the days to come.

  Rula-Ka sat in his oval-shaped command center, his back comfortably protected by two inches of solid steel, and watched the three-dimensional holo that dominated the center of the room. The other fourteen niches were empty due to the fact that his immediate subordinates were spread out over the fleet.

  Another officer might have been busy issuing commands, giving orders that no one needed, or generally getting in the way. But not Rula-Ka. No, he had learned the art of war from Niman Poseen-Ka, and knew that less was more. Yes, he thought contentedly, a well-thought-out plan, executed by well-trained troops, needs only the occasional nudge or adjustment in order to succeed.