Legion Of The Damned - 02 - The Final Battle

by William C. Dietz

  The long armorflex body wasn’t all that different from the one Weasel had been born to and provided him with a side-to-side snake’s-eye view of the ground. He was smart enough to understand some of the dangers, and didn’t like this particular errand. What was the human up to anyway? Charlie Six said, “No,” and no meant no, didn’t it? At least that’s what she’d told him, not just once, but dozens of times. Not that humans were especially consistent, since they usually had one standard for themselves and another more stringent requirement for everyone else. The egg-sucking bastards.

  Interactive camouflage, electronic countermeasures, and high-density shielding can work wonders, but there comes a point at which their effectiveness disappears and a robo-tank looks like a robo-tank. Unfortunately for Weasel, that point arrived at the exact same moment that an armorflex snake looked like an armorflex snake. The robots opened fire on him. He turned, made use of what little cover there was, and snake-slid towards home. The analog’s report, made while bullets churned the dirt around him, was more than a little shrill.

  “Damn it, Sarge! I’m taking fire from at least twenty, repeat two-zero armored vehicles. Tell one of those flap-assed leather wings to pull my butt outta here!”

  O’Neal noted the breaks in both military and radio discipline but knew better than to comment on it. The fact that the analog had included the number of enemy vehicles was an improvement over the week before.

  “Negative, Baker Nine . . . extraction denied. Find a hole and pull it in after you. The fire mission starts three-zero seconds from now.”

  The DI known as Charlie Six chuckled and made a notation on the portacomp strapped to his right thigh. Having discovered the robots, and having been denied permission to take what she knew to be the correct action, O’Neal had intentionally provoked an attack on one of her analogs, thereby gaining authorization to fire according to the rules of engagement, while still remaining inside the bounds of military discipline, and saving her squad from possible destruction.

  It was the kind of gutsy, out-of-the-box call that a lot of noncoms are hesitant to make, which is why Charlie Six listed O‘Neal as a potential PFR, or “promotion from the ranks.” Given that many of the cyborgs were criminals, they had traditionally been ineligible for command. But, what with the famous Chien-Chu coming back from the dead, and an increasing number of “accidental” cyborgs like O’Neal, the policy had changed. Casualties had been heavy, and the brass needed officers.

  In the meantime O’Neal had called on the tubes located five miles to her rear for an artillery mission. Within a matter of seconds 155-mike-mike rounds were screaming out of the sky and exploding among the tanks. Fire flickered around the massive machines as their twin gatling guns filled the sky with lead. Some of the shells exploded, hurled chunks of red-hot shrapnel in all directions, and spared the tanks below. Still, every third shell was steerable, and packed enough AI to dodge the worst of the defensive fire. O’Neal saw one of the tanks take a direct hit and explode into an orange-red fireball. She shuddered and gave thanks that no sentients had been aboard. It made her wonder, if this was a training exercise, what would the real thing be like? Mauled, and at risk of total destruction, the robots withdrew.

  The next few hours were passed repositioning her squad in case one or more of the attack bots had managed to get a fix on them. Especially important in case the DIs declared an “intelligence failure” and provided the previously ground-only enemy with air cover.

  But once they were dug in, with their positions separated by the standard fifty feet, and the parameters for interlocking fields of fire entered into their on-board computers, there wasn’t much to do.

  It was then that the usual tidal wave of depression rolled over O’Neal and pulled her down. Her analogs stirred uneasily, checked their sensors, and decided that all was well. After all, this wasn’t the first time the human had felt this way, nor would it be the last. Besides, with the exception of the ground-dwelling carnivores from Myro Major, the rest of the analogs had been nocturnal, and were equipped with sensors so good that darkness held little fear for them.

  Still, one can’t be too careful when it comes to the safety of one’s ass, so Weasel checked to make sure that the noncom was truly off-line, assumed her manner, and ordered Drapa One and Two out on a reconnaissance mission. Which was a lot like sending himself on a reconnaissance mission, since the roundabout electronic linkage allowed Weasel to “see” what the leather wings saw, “hear” what their pickups heard, and “feel” what they felt.

  It was an exhilarating sensation, floating out over the plain, looking down on an ocean of light green blotches, each surrounded by successively darker rings, eventually fading to black. Most, if not all of the blotches were rocks, still in the process of releasing heat acquired during the day, laying where they had for hundreds of years. Still, the odds were good that at least some of the blotches belonged to robots, their infrared signatures doctored to look like those that emanated from the rocks.

  Electronic prey was what One and Two were looking for, just as they had searched for the night-feeding xunus of their native steppes, plucking the fat little creatures from beside the safety of their burrows, and carrying them into the night.

  Two noticed something and her excitement was immediately transmitted to Weasel through O‘Neal. A blotch was moving, slowly to be sure, but in a determined zigzag course that would eventually carry it to the Legion’s lines. The leather wing requested permission to destroy the robot and Weasel stalled. He used words to prod O’Neal. “Sarge! Come out of it! Something’s coming our way!

  O’Neal heard from a long ways off. They were bothering her, always bothering her, and for what? So they could live another day. Why the hell bother? What if the miserable little bastards had thoughts instead of instincts? They’d be as depressed as she was, that’s what. The words formed and sent themselves back to Weasel. “So who cares? Let ’em come.”

  Weasel swore and felt his head hurt with the effort to think. What would O‘Neal do in this situation? Not this O’Neal but the real one? The battle disks repeated their request and the analog was forced to continue his impersonation. “Permission denied. The target is a scout. Find the force that sent it.”

  Leather-wing resentment flooded back through the interface and Weasel fought to control his anger. He was doing the best he could, wasn’t he? What did the fly-by-night assholes want anyway? Eggs in their beer? Not that he knew what beer was or would want any if he did.

  The DI’s attention had been elsewhere, throwing a frontal assault at another poor bastard, and watching him flunk. He turned his attention back to O‘Neal. The training plan called for a frontal assault on her position as well, but the instructor felt that would be too easy for someone of O’Neal’s obvious abilities, so he opted for something a little more challenging.

  The Hudathans had used microbots on two different battlefields so far. The first use had taken place on Worber’s World when they broke out. The second had occurred on Diko II just weeks before where a half million tiny machines had come within half a pubic hair of defeating a battalion of marines.

  But numbers aren’t everything, and thanks to the fact that the geeks had demonstrated a marked aversion to loading their constructs with a sufficient amount of AI, it was possible to outthink them. So, given the fact that a full complement of training machines had arrived, and O’Neal didn’t know about them, there was an opportunity to provide her squad with a valuable lesson. The challenge was to allow enough casualties so that it felt real without overdoing it. It would be damned tricky with all that live ordnance flying around. Charlie Six made a notation on his portacomp, issued a series of orders, and settled back to watch.

  Weasel was startled when the first shell exploded over their position. Who the hell was firing on them, and where the hell were they? The battle disks hadn’t reported jack shit yet all hell had broken loose. Frim and Fram started to back and fill, their tracks throwing up rooster tails of dirt,
as their weapons searched the sky. Weasel took his fear, his desire to live, added it to similar emotions provided by the other analogs, and forced it through O’Neal’s despair. “We need you!”

  The thought, powered by the strength of the emotions behind it, appeared in letters ten feet tall. O’Neal read them once, twice, then three times. Suddenly she had it, the thing she’d been searching for, and hadn’t been able to find. The squad needed a leader, but it didn’t need her. Any noncom would do as long as they were competent. But the analogs were different. They needed her the way a child needs a mother, to provide emotional support and guidance in a dangerous world.

  The knowledge pulled her up out of the darkness and into the alien night. Shells exploded overhead, analogs gibbered, and the squad demanded orders. Weasel sensed her return and provided a sitrep that was damned close to military. “The wings saw a scout but couldn’t find the force that sent it. The arty attack started about six-zero seconds ago and consists of nonlethal air bursts.”

  The fact that someone had ordered the battle disks into the air registered on O’Neal’s mind along with the knowledge that there was no time to ask about it. She brought up the list of offensive weaponry that the enemy was supposed to have and verified that artillery was on it. Still, why now? Especially since the live fire exercise was supposed to be over in less than two hours?

  But pondering whys and wherefores doesn’t make much sense when someone is determined to blow your ass off. The noncom checked her battle comp.

  Twenty or thirty air bursts had gone off with no effect. Why? She should have casualties by now. The answer came from another member of her squad. “Baker Six to Baker Four.”

  “This is Baker Four . . . Go.”

  “I have artillery-delivered combat-equipped microbots in the air over my position. Request permission to engage.”

  It took O’Neal three seconds to confirm the fact that while microbots did not appear on the list of “enemy” weaponry, they weren’t proscribed, either, which left her holding the bag. She made the call. “Permission granted. Fire at will.”

  The night was split into hundreds of geometric shapes as the cyborgs and their analogs opened fire on the incoming machines. Many were destroyed but some survived. Most were no more than a few inches across during the air-dispersal stage, but combined on reaching the ground and assembled themselves into a variety of self-directed weapons systems. The newly formed units included highly mobile gun platforms, self-propelled energy cannons, and a variety of smaller but nonetheless effective attack units. Making a bad situation even worse was the fact that many of the devices had dropped inside the Legion’s defensive perimeter.

  Capable though it was, O’Neal discovered that it took her on-board computer way too long to find and destroy the tiny airborne targets, so she concentrated on the larger constructs instead. Her tool-hands moved in short, jerky arcs as the cyborg opened fire with her arm-mounted weapons.

  A partially assembled weapons platform staggered under the assault, swiveled on newly built treads, and fired a half-charged energy cannon. O’Neal felt the heat but shrugged it off. Her shells found a still-unprotected ammo bay and detonated the missiles inside.

  The explosion created a shockwave. It hit the battle disks, threw them out of position, and rolled away. The leather wings regrouped, linked their computers into a single fire-control center, and returned to work. Though difficult to hit from the ground, the microbots were vulnerable from the air. Hundreds of them exploded under the renewed assault.

  The robots were far from defenseless, however, and O‘Neal saw more than one battle disk explode at the center of their massed fire, or arc across the star-spattered sky to crash against the rock-hard ground. The despair felt by thirty-plus analogs threatened to pull O’Neal under, but she used a vision of badly mangled robots to rally them, and ordered a counterattack. The results exceeded both her and the DI’s expectations.

  Both afraid and angry, the squad’s analogs lashed out with an intensity the humans had never seen before. Weasel wrapped himself around a self-propelled gatling gun that had pushed in from the north, crushed the firing mechanism, and fried the machine’s fire-control processor with his eye lasers.

  Frim and Fram ganged up on what amounted to a tank, moving in until their gun muzzles were only inches away from the robot’s flanks and firing until their tubes glowed. One of the shells got through, found a subprocessor, and sent the machine into a tail-chasing spin. The leather wings finished it off.

  More than satisfied with the result, and concerned lest he generate more casualties, the DI sent an electronic message. The robots that could backed away and disappeared into the night. Those that were unable to do so remained where they were. Monuments to what a combination of technology, fear, and hate can do.

  The sight could have been depressing but O’Neal felt something different as she looked out over the battlefield. The analogs had proved their ability to operate as a team, most were still alive, and she had found a reason to exist. It wasn’t much . . . but it would have to do.

  25

  In those days, however, it was quite common for sentries at Camp Amilakvari to throw coins into the barbed wire . . . wait for African children to scamper in to retrieve the money . . . then shoot them for trying to get into camp.

  Ex-legionnaire Christian Jennings

  Mouthful of Rocks

  Standard year 1989

  Planet Algeron, the Confederacy of Sentient Beings

  Most of Fort Camerone had been hardened and placed deep underground, where it was safe from anything short of a direct hit from a nuclear missile. So, with the exception of missile launchers, antenna arrays, and fly-form landing pads, the one-story surface structure looked similar to Legion citadels that dotted North Africa in the long-distant past.

  And in spite of the fact that there was very little likelihood that legionnaires would ever return fire from the crenellated battlements, the likeness was far from accidental. The architectural details had been placed there to evoke the past, to remind those within that they were the latest links in a chain that had been forged in the heat of battle and tested by time.

  The duffel bag contained enough gear to carry Chrobuck through a five-day pass and threatened to slide off her shoulder. She readjusted the strap, returned the sentry’s salute, and stepped out through the main gate.

  A half-track full of visor-faced bio bods rumbled by while a pair of patrol-worn Trooper IIs passed in the opposite direction. Their servos whined in unison and one of them had a pronounced limp. Chrobuck acknowledged their salutes and noticed that the air reeked of ozone. Voices shouted barely heard orders, music leaked out of a hover truck’s cab, and rotors whapped as a cybernetic load-lifter dropped onto a nearby pad. The dust disturbed by its passage floated upwards to join the ever-present pall of smoke. The sun shimmered and climbed higher in the sky.

  Further down slope, beyond the free-fire zone and the constantly shifting crab-mines, hundreds of randomly spaced domes could be seen. They were made of earth, reinforced with whatever the Naa could lay their hands on, including wood, plastic, and scraps of metal, many of which had been polished to reflect the light of the sun. But no matter how much they glittered, Naa Town was still made of mud.

  Although most Naa lived in heavily fortified villages a long ways from the fort, some of the more marginal members of their society had been attracted to the relatively easy money that could be made working for the Legion during the day, and for the bored, entertainment-starved legionnaires at night, although the concepts of “day” and “night” had only limited meaning on Algeron, and commerce never really stopped.

  Still, as Chrobuck made her way down the intentionally switchbacked road, through the heavily fortified checkpoint, and into the town beyond, she couldn’t help but compare what she saw with her own youth, and conclude that mud huts were a step up from the overcrowded habitat on which she’d been raised.

  Six square feet of worn metal deck, that�
�s how much her mother, sister, and she had been able to rent each night, most of it paid for by recovering sludge from the holding tanks, running errands for drunk spacers, or stealing anything that wasn’t nailed down. And maybe other things, too, things her mother refused to talk about, things that made her cry at night. Things that paid hard currency, which, when saved year after dreary year, piled up until there was enough to ship two girls off-hab, and pay for the schooling that enabled one to qualify as a med tech, and the other to gain admission to the academy. Yes, Chrobuck decided, there are worse things than mud huts and wide-open spaces.

  The pungent odor of incense closed around her like a cloak. There wasn’t a single legionnaire who didn’t know what the incense was for, since it was common knowledge that the Naa had an acute sense of smell, and found many of the odors that emanated from the fort to be offensive. Which explained why a thousand tendrils of slowly burning incense trickled up to join the smoke generated by an equal number of cook fires and glaze the otherwise blue sky.

  Chrobuck liked the smell, the exotic feel, and took pleasure in her surroundings. There was life here and it felt good after Jericho’s dark and brooding ruins. An army of cubs swarmed out to meet her, each armed with something to sell, or the promise of something to sell.

  They were all sizes and shapes and ranged in age from four or five to early adolescence. All had short, sleek fur that came in a highly individual assortment of colors and patterns. Clothing was minimal and tended towards sandals, shifts, and trousers. Their heads were strikingly human in shape and size, having similar ears, noses, and mouths, although their teeth lacked canines and had a more even appearance.

  And in spite of the fact that they knew the Legion’s chain of command backwards and forwards, every single one of them had promoted Chrobuck by one rank. “Over here, Captain! The finest wine on Algeron! Only five credits per gallon!”