“Thanks for telling me the truth, James,” she said.
“Sure. Are you glad you asked?”
She hesitated. “Not really.”
“What about tomorrow? Are you ready?”
“No. I don’t want to go back there ever again. I doubt I’ll even sleep tonight. I was killed, you know.”
“No shame in that. Nearly a thousand died with you.”
“But I was burned alive. The saurians didn’t hit me dead-on, they hit a fuel source I was near. It lit up, and I was engulfed in flame. My suit kept me alive for a minute or two, but the heat was too much for it after a while. I cooked inside like piece of meat in foil, trying to find a way out of a pool of burning liquid.”
It was my turn to sit up and stare. “Ouch. Try not to think about that. It happened to a different version of Natasha—not to you. For you, it’s only a dream.”
“Yeah. I’ll try to do that. But I don’t want to go down again. These saurians are fighting hard.”
It occurred to me that Natasha wasn’t the typical woman I’d met in Legion Varus. Maybe that’s why I liked her more than the rest. She was a bit sweeter than most of them. Not so rough around the edges.
“Why are you in this legion, Natasha?” I asked her, breaking an uncomfortable silence.
“I screwed up,” she said. “Isn’t that why we’re all here?”
“I guess so. The top-level legions didn’t want me. I still don’t know what those psych tests told them. Maybe they didn’t want a scene like the one we watched today between the Primus and Graves to play out in their outfits.”
“That’s not so bad,” she said.
“What about you? I remember you said you built some kind of illegal pet, right?”
“Well…that’s not exactly how I screwed up,” she said. “I didn’t want to tell you before—but I came in with a worse mark on my record they found during recruitment.”
“What’d you do?”
“I robbed a place. The place where I worked.”
“Yeah?” I said, perking up. “Was it a bank, or something?”
I sat up. This story sounded fairly exciting. I could see how an ex-con could be a perfect fit for Varus. What would they have stamp on her files that would want them to take her? Something like: a resourceful self-starter.
“No,” she said, “not a bank. I worked for a pharmacy.”
“You were a druggie?”
She made an irritated clicking noise with her tongue. “Let me just explain. My family had a little trouble paying the bills.”
“Who doesn’t?”
“We had particular trouble with our medical bills,” she said. “There wasn’t enough in our medical time-share account last year. They pool it for each family, you know, and that works all right if only one person gets sick at a time. But both my parents started needing drugs—expensive ones.”
“Oh, that kind of drug,” I said, somewhat disappointed.
“What? Were you envisioning masks, guns and wild parties?”
“Something like that.”
Natasha laughed again, and I found I was beginning to like the sound.
“I stole medicines,” she explained. “Expensive ones.”
“Isn’t stuff like that tracked?”
“Of course it is. You can’t just lift a bottle off the shelf. You have to skim. A few pills from one bottle, just one from the next. Who notices if they have twenty nine caps in the bottle or thirty?”
“Well, sounds like someone did.”
“Yeah. They traced it back to us, but couldn’t pin it on me enough to convict. Still, the charge went on my record. That’s a sector-level crime. I couldn’t get another job after that, so I tried to join the legions. Only Varus was interested.”
I nodded slowly. I’d learned over time that many recruits had a story like that behind their decision to join up.
“We’ll be fine tomorrow,” I said. “Stop worrying about it.”
“You’re a bad liar. You’d do better just keeping quiet.”
I did as she suggested, shutting up and holding her hand instead of talking. Then I kissed her fingers, one at a time. After a while, we were kissing more passionately than before. Maybe she’d needed to tell me a few things first.
Before the date was over, I managed to get a little farther with Natasha—but not as far as I wanted.
-22-
The next morning, we were on the lifter heading down again. The mood aboard the transport was grim. No one wanted to return to Steel World—especially not to the spaceport.
We’d learned more about the invasion over the last twenty-four hours. Apparently, things were going pretty well for the legion in general. Our plans had been secret until they went into action—as a recruit, I was the last one to be told anything.
“It’s unbelievable, really,” Weaponeer Sargon told me. He had been assigned to our unit, along with a few techs and bios. “The tribune has some serious gonads. He blitzed the lizards—all around their own capital city. We now hold their university—which looks like some kind of beehive—and their government buildings and the spaceport.”
I was glad to get the info, even if it came from the dubious source known as Sargon. I decided to play along and pretend I believed he knew everything that going on. For all I knew, he did.
“Why didn’t we just grab their military headquarters or the royal palace?”
Sargon shook his head. “I don’t know. I bet because the tribune looked at it and decided those targets were too well-guarded. Besides, we aren’t here to conquer the planet. That would be illegal. We could help a saurian faction take power, but Earth forces can’t take invade and take over another sovereign member world of the Empire. No, the whole point of this op is to embarrass the saurian military, to show the Galactics that we are better fighters than they are. If we can invade and hold vital spots, they’ll have to concede we’re superior.”
It made a certain kind of sense. At the same time, this kind of limited, rules-filled warfare felt a little crazy. Even more crazy was attempting to do this with such a small force. How could we fight an entire populated planet? I asked Sargon that question, and he nodded sagely.
“Good point. I don’t think we can. The legion has only around ten thousand fighting troops when we’re all deployed. But we don’t have to take on the entire planet to win this. Tribune Drusus has been in fights like this before—we’re here to show that we can take our weight in lizards and more, that’s all.”
“What’s to stop them from bombing us into the dust?”
“They can’t do that. Air power and drones were not part of the deal. No heavy artillery, either. They made that rule to screw us originally, but I think it’s screwing them now.”
“Well, they have to have a million troops they could muster up and throw at us. Why not try that?”
“They might, but I think it would be embarrassing to them. What does it prove if we get overrun by overwhelming forces? We might kill three times our number before we go down, and that will just make our case for us.”
I thought about it, and it did seem to be a strange situation. The lizards had to beat us, but they had to do it with a similar level of force. If they used too big of a hammer, they would lose in the end—even if we all had to go through the revival machines several times.
The part about expecting to die a lot is what had led to the grim faces I now saw on most of the lightly-armed recruits around me. Sargon, the weaponeer, hadn’t fought in this spaceport battle yet. He was ready to get into this, but the rest of us had had our tails handed to us at the spaceport already, and we weren’t so eager.
“Seems to me the lizards should cheat just enough to win,” I said. “That’s what I would do if I were them.”
Sargon looked at me, frowning. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, make it look like an honorable fight, but throw in every dirty trick possible.”
He shrugged. “War is war. The worst you can do is die a few tim
es. I’m game.”
That’s because you didn’t charge that wall manned by heavy lizard troops, I thought. But I kept those words in my head. Why should I demoralize my fellow legionnaire?
“The spaceport fight was rough,” I said. “If anything, they embarrassed us on those walls. They showed they were better fighters by slaughtering us.”
“But we did win in the end. I’d say we are even now, they threw lots of troops at us at the mining complex, and we threw more at them here. We’re down to the third round.”
“How long do you think we have to hold out?” I asked. “I’ve been inside the spaceport—at least, inside the office buildings—staying there for weeks or months will be torture.”
“Our people will time it,” Sargon said. “The tribune is good at this. You watch. He’ll wait until we look really good, then he’ll retreat to the ship and claim victory.”
“Do you think they’ll hit the spaceport again? There are plenty of other targets.”
“Who knows? But with the Nairbs and the Galactics around, this has to be the most embarrassing facility to have lost.”
Sargon looked at me suddenly, as if having a new thought.
“Oh yeah,” he said, eyeing me curiously, “I heard you played a big part in the first battle for the spaceport—a bigger part than Graves or Harris wants to talk about.”
It was my turn to shrug. “I got inside and helped open the gates, that’s all. Carlos was with me. We didn’t do the hard fighting and dying like the people outside did. I would say the real heroes were the guys who charged into that gate after we opened it. They’d already watched a lot of people die ahead of them.”
Sargon nodded slowly. “Still, I think you did good. If you don’t piss off too many people, I bet they’ll fast-track you to specialist.”
I didn’t tell him that Graves had already hinted as much. It wasn’t time to brag, I figured. But I was happy he wasn’t calling me “splat” any longer.
“I don’t know about that,” I said. “I have a gift for pissing people off, especially brass.”
Sargon gave me a loud, hitching laugh and thumped me on the shoulder. I gave him a pasted-on smile.
We didn’t have long to wait before reaching the spaceport. This was technically a combat jump, even if no one was shooting at us. Apparently, that had something to do with the rules, too. If they fired anti-air flak and missiles at us, we had the right to bomb them. Neither side wanted to escalate in that direction.
I recall reading of complex rules of engagement back on Earth in the past. They were pretty common in history. In the Napoleonic days, troops would line up neatly and spray lead at one another. Just the simple expedient of hugging the ground and seeking cover was considered dastardly.
There were always rules to war between nations, and my time was no different in that regard. The Empire had added the twist of applying a penalty for breaking those rules. We had the Galactics sitting on the sidelines, observing.
We didn’t know which Galactics were watching, or what they thought. Most people didn’t even know what one looked like. We knew they weren’t all from the same species, but that’s all we knew.
We could do whatever the hell we wanted on our own worlds—as long as we didn’t break their rules. But when it came to invading other worlds, things became tricky.
The lights changed and buzzers sounded. The lifter went almost dark, filled with red light at first. Then the ramp dropped, and there was a sliver of gray radiance coming from it.
Night had fallen outside. I couldn’t see any stars yet, but I knew they were out there. I gripped my snap-rifle and checked the magazine for the hundredth time.
This was it. My guts squeezed up, and I felt like I could use a trip to the head—but I knew that wasn’t going to happen now.
Veteran Harris came through the rows, climbing over legs with his boots banging into our knees. He whacked men and women on the helmet as he passed by, marking who was going out the door first. I wasn’t surprised when he passed Sargon by and thumped my helmet. The light troops usually were sent in first. We were faster on our feet and infinitely more expendable.
I slapped my belt buckles off, got up and envied Sargon with his big black tube he had to lug around. It kept him at the rear of the line.
Less than a minute later, I was running over the tarmac again. I could hear the thumping tread of a thousand boots around me. There were whispered prayers and hitching sobs. Some recruits were having trouble with this. I didn’t blame them. This place held nothing but terrible memories for most.
The last hundred meters, we broke into a sprint. No one told us to—we just did it, like a herd crashing for the safety of the tall grass. Our leaders didn’t complain, they were running, too. No one wanted to be last guy to reach the gates.
There were figures all along the wall-top, I could see them now. Shadowy hunched forms that blotted out the starry sky. Those had to be the heavies that had been assigned here. There were a lot of them, and for that, I was glad.
Somehow, out of the crowd, Carlos managed to find me as we rushed through the gates. “Just like old times, eh, McGill?” he shouted.
“Yeah, I’m feeling real homey about now.”
We were directed by veterans with screaming voices and wild hand gestures. We poured into the compound and separated by unit and squad. Soon, I found myself standing with my team, looking around at the high walls around us. Every inch was pock-marked and scorched.
“What about the Nairbs?” I asked. “I don’t see them.”
“Didn’t someone tell our famous hero?” Carlos asked loudly. “The man who single-handedly took this spaceport? The guy who stands ten feet tall, and—”
“Cut the crap, Carlos. Do you know where the aliens went or not?”
He shrugged. “I heard they left. They probably didn’t like the stink of so many primitive humans around. I bet we made them nervous. For them, it was like sitting in a monkey house full of heavily-armed gorillas, wondering when we were going to go crazy.”
“Well, without the Nairbs, is this still a strategic objective worth holding?”
“That’s not our problem,” he said. “But I think it definitely is worth holding. Think about the symbolism of it—it’s embarrassing. People who protest right in the middle of your town always get noticed. Remember those clowns who chained themselves to the last living trees in Central Park a few years ago? They were on the news every night.”
I frowned at him. “You’re not much for causes, are you?”
He stuck out his thumb and jabbed himself in the chest. “I’m always down for one cause…the only one that matters.”
I nodded, unsurprised. My eyes wandered up to the walls, where the dark shapes of the heavies were moving now. “Hey, are they coming down from their posts?”
“Yeah, didn’t you listen to the reports?”
“Maybe I was too busy…” I said, thinking of my long night pawing Natasha.
“That’s what we’re here for, big guy. We’re relieving the heavies. These walls are strong, and they gave us back a few of our weaponeers. We’re supposed to hold here until someone else is assigned to relieve the cohort.”
I watched in alarm as the heavies made their way to the front gates and clanked away. They could only walk or trot, such was the weight of their armor. I knew that without a helping exoskeleton, they would barely be able to move.
Feeling left behind, I watched as the heavies marched away back toward the lifter we’d come down on. Wherever they were going, they seemed like there were in a hurry to get out of here. I couldn’t blame them. Without Nairbs to keep the combat in check, the lizards could do just about whatever they wanted to take this fortress back.
-23-
“You two are coming with me,” Veteran Harris said. He seemed happy, and that was almost always a bad sign.
We followed him down a long passageway that ended in a steep saurian stairway. We’d learned the lizards usually got down low on stairs.
With their long, powerful hind legs they could take big steps and didn’t need handrails. The other reason their stairs were big was because both juggers and raptor types had to use them. They had to fit both types of lizard.
In practice, this meant we had to hop from step-to-step going downward. We followed Harris. Carlos, Natasha, and I, as well as a half dozen others, hopped and cursed steadily.
I could tell none of us wanted to be here. It was dark, and the walls ran with moisture. They were arched and uneven—tunnels cut through steel, rather than smooth concrete walls. The lights weren’t really lights, either. They were glowing patches along the walls.
When we reached the bottom of the tunnel, I managed to get close enough to Natasha to talk to her.
“I guess the lizards like it this way,” I said. “This is kind of like the mines we had the joy of exploring. Must seem natural to them.”
She gave me a worried look. “Do you think this place is safe?”
“You mean from collapsing, or from lizard-invasion?”
“Either.”
“No,” I said.
Veteran Harris finally called us to a halt.
“This is it,” he said, tapping with his snap-rifle on the door.
This is what? My mind asked. I’m sure everyone was thinking it—but no one else said anything.
After a minute or two, a code pattern came up on the door. It shone with red letters and numbers. Harris typed something into the keypad and the door chimed and opened.
“Red?” Natasha asked. “Isn’t that the color the lizards can’t see?”
I nodded. They were supposedly colorblind in some parts of the spectrum. Troops joked that the twin Cancri suns had burned their retinas out over the years.
“Now here, see this lock?” Harris asked, pointing. “That’s a special anti-alien job. How it works is by presenting a series of symbols that are familiar to humans. The pattern is random. You must memorize it, then type the same pattern into the keypad within five seconds.”
“What happens if you screw up?” Natasha asked. “Does it fry you or something?”
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