Legion of the Damned

by William C. Dietz

Four legionnaires saw Booly coming, jumped up, and moved to another table. Sergeant majors ranked just below god and could sit wherever they pleased.

  Two pieces of toast and five cups of coffee later, Booly felt nearly human. Human enough to carry his coffee cup over to a cart himself ... and smile at a sergeant with the largest breasts that he’d ever seen.

  It was a relatively short walk from the mess hall to staging area 4, where the members of his patrol were running through last-minute equipment checks. It was a large rectangular room, filled with greenish-blue light and a lot of noise: the whine of servos as the cyborgs tested their electromechanical bodies, the chatter of a power wrench as a weapons tech tightened the bolts on a Trooper 11’s ammo bay, and the sound of profanity as a bio bod ran a systems check on her blast rifle.

  The staging area smelled too, a heady mix of lubricants, ozone, and hot metal. Some of his fellow NCOs complained about it and submitted recs demanding a better ventilation system, but Booly liked the smell. It was part of what he did.

  Booly stepped over to a wall terminal, entered an access code, and watched while names and serial numbers filled the screen. This was a routine “roust and reconnaissance,” or R&R, patrol, designed to keep Naa bandits on the jump and detect tribal movements should any occur. Not that anyone really expected anything to happen, since both sides adhered to a long-established policy of almost ritual combat, in which skirmishes were the rule and pitched battles were studiously avoided. By doing so, both sides were able to reinforce the warrior-based values they held in common, confer status on individual members, and keep casualties down.

  The Naa accomplished this by admitting adult males to the circle of warriors after combat with the Legion, and the humans had adopted a similar system in which recruits were brought to Algeron, where they were blooded in battle.

  The key to all of this was that Algeron had been given to the Legion by the Emperor himself, and that subsequent to that gift, the Legion had decided to forbid further colonization of the planet. So, with the exception of some early settlers, the legionnaires were the only humans around, a presence the Naa had learned to tolerate and even make use of.

  Scanning the screen, Booly saw that he’d been given a quad whose official name was “George Washington,” but was better known as “Gunner.” Not that “George Washington” was his real name, since recruits were allowed to take a nom de guerre, and most did. It was a link to the distant past when the original French Foreign Legion had been home to people from many countries, most of whom had been on the run from the law, from a failed relationship, or from themselves.

  Booly felt the floor shudder and looked over his shoulder. A quad had entered the bay. It stood twenty-five feet tall, weighed fifty tons, and had huge bull’s-eyes painted on both of its battle-scarred flanks.

  Booly shook his head in amazement. Gunner was a longtime legionnaire and one crazy sonofabitch. Some people thought the bull’s-eyes were some sort of joke. Booly knew better. Gunner wanted to die but seemed destined to live forever. No matter how thick the battle, no matter how many legionnaires fell, Gunner survived. It was both his blessing and his curse.

  Booly moved his eye down the list. He had the quad plus a full complement of Trooper IIs. Three were prime, with at least a battle a piece under their camouflage, but one, a newbie with a nom de guerre Napoleon Villain, was straight from Earth. He’d keep an eye on her.

  A half-squad of five bio bods under the command of a sergeant known as “Roller” completed his force and would ride on Gunner. So, while Booly would have welcomed another quad, or double the number of bio bods, the force was adequate. Or so he hoped.

  He wiped the screen, jumped down to the floor, and found that the patrol had formed up. Roller took a certain kind of perverse pride in allowing his people to run every which way right up to the last minute, and then, just when it looked as if he’d be caught short, bringing them together into perfect formation. Qûads to the rear, Trooper Ils towards the middle, and bio bods in the front. It drove officers, especially junior officers, stark raving mad. Booly ignored it as if so serenely blessed that the world always fell into place around him.

  Roller fumed but kept a perfectly straight face. He stood at quivering attention two paces in front of his troops.

  “Sergeant Major.”

  “Sergeant.”

  “The troops are ready for inspection.”

  “Thank you.”

  Booly stepped past Roller and headed for the first legionnaire on his left. Her name was Kato. She’d been in the Legion for five years, wore a nose stud, and had a dotted line tattooed around her neck. Booly stepped in front of her, ran an experienced eye over her gear, found it to his liking, and moved on.

  The next trooper wasn’t so lucky. His name was Imai, and it took Booly less than a second to notice that the emergency locator beacon that should’ve been attached to his belt wasn’t.

  “Sergeant.”

  Roller appeared at Booly’s right elbow. “Sergeant Major?”

  “This man’s emergency locator beacon is missing.”

  Roller treated the offender to a thunderous expression. “I’m glad you brought that to my attention, Sergeant Major. I’ll take care of it.”

  Booly said, “See that you do,” and knew that he had sentenced Imai to a week’s worth of punishment. Unpleasant, perhaps, but preferable to being lost in the wastelands with no chance of rescue.

  The rest of the bio bods, O’Brian, Wismer, and Yankolovich, passed muster, and Booly started in on the Trooper IIs. They had a more humanoid appearance than the Trooper Is plus heavier armament.

  Each was equipped with a fast-recovery laser cannon, an air-cooled .50-caliber machine gun, and dual missile launchers. They could run at speeds up to fifty miles an hour and could be adapted for a variety of environments including vacuum, Class I through Class IX gas atmospheres, underwater use, desert heat, and arctic cold.

  On the other hand, Trooper Ils had a tendency to overheat during prolonged combat, consumed ordnance at a prodigious rate, and were vulnerable to a variety of microbot-delivered computer viruses.

  Their greatest weakness, however, lay in the fact that they were only as smart and capable as the human brains that lived inside of them. Brains that had been connected to human bodies once, and then, in retribution for an act of criminal violence or as the result of some terrible misfortune, had literally died. Died, and been dragged back from the great abyss, to live in electromechanical bodies where they might very well die again.

  This common experience made the cyborgs different in ways that bio bods couldn’t understand. A bio bod might imagine what it would be like to live in a mechanical body but couldn’t really know it. Couldn’t know the feeling of isolation that came with looking like a freak, the yearning for physical contact, or the pain that a malfunction could cause, which was why a gulf existed between cyborgs and bio bods, and why the media sometimes referred to all of them as “The Legion of the Damned,” and why an aura of mystery surrounded them.

  Booly was six-two, but the Trooper IIs towered over him. Most of their equipment had been built into their bodies, so readiness was ascertained by checking tiny readouts located at different points on their armor.

  The first Trooper II in line had the name “Rossif” stenciled on his right chestplate, a 1st REC insignia on his left arm, and a heart with an arrow through it on what would have been his right biceps. By long tradition the cyborgs were entitled artwork in place of the tattoos worn by bio bods.

  Each Trooper II came equipped with no fewer than ten small inspection plates. Booly picked five in random order, thumbed them open, and examined the readouts. Power, 92%. Coolant, 98%. Ammo, 100%. Life support, 100%. Electronic countermeasures, 85%.

  Booly looked up towards the Trooper II’s massive head. “You have an ECM readiness reading of 85 percent. Explain.”

  The cyborg’s speech synthesizer sounded like a rock crusher in low gear. “There’s a shortage of high-end filters,
Sergeant Major. The techs have them on back order.”

  Booly nodded. Parts were a constant problem on Algeron. Thank god the Naa were relatively low-tech. The chance of an electronic attack was next to nothing. He moved on.

  Troopers Jones and Wutu got off with little more than a superficial inspection. But, by virtue of being a newbie, Trooper Villain came in for special attention.

  Although she had chosen a male name, and was just as asexual as the rest of them, she had elected to use the title “Ms.” in front of her name, indicating that she still viewed herself as female. Booly knew this was a touchy subject with cyborgs and made a mental note to use a female pronoun whenever he referred to her.

  He checked all of her readouts, scanned the floor around her massive feet for any signs of leaks, and gave a grunt of satisfaction. “A nice turnout, Villain. You and I will take the point position.”

  Villain started to say “Thank you,” remembered what they had taught her in boot camp, and said, “Yes, Sergeant Major,” instead. She remembered something else too. She remembered that point was one of the most dangerous slots, if not the most dangerous, in patrol formation, which meant that she had nothing to be thankful for.

  Booly nodded and moved on. Gunner had lowered himself to the floor, a position that allowed Booly full access to his mechanical anatomy, but the inspection was for show. The cyborg was far too complex for Booly to evaluate from readouts alone, and far too wily to let any of his faults show. Besides, any problems with Gunner’s systems would reflect on the techs who maintained him, and they weren’t about to let that happen.

  So Booly went through the motions of an inspection, climbed down, and returned to the point from which he’d started.

  “Sergeant.”

  “Sergeant Major.”

  “Not bad. Not bad at all. We leave ten from now.”

  In truth it took more like fifteen minutes to complete the final checklists, download the latest intelligence summary, and form up.

  Roller had taken one hit already, so Booly ignored the difference.

  Booly found Villain, used the steps built into the back of her legs to climb level with the back of her head, and strapped himself into a recess designed for that purpose. He pulled his goggles on, adjusted his headset, and inserted the lead from his radio into a jack panel located at the base of Villain’s duraplast neck.

  “Villain?” Booly’s voice seemed to echo through her head.

  Villain cursed her rotten luck. Going out on her first patrol was bad enough, but doing it with a sergeant major strapped to her back was even worse. It was one more indignity, one more unit of pain, one more thing to avenge. The legionnaire forced a response.

  “Yes, Sergeant Major?”

  “Give me a radio check.”

  Villain knew what the sergeant major meant. By plugging his radio into her communications system Booly had doubled his range. If there was a problem, her testing circuits would find and identify it. She ran a check.

  “The com system is green.”

  “Good,” Booly replied. “Be sure to let me know if any of your systems turn yellow or red.”

  Hell, yes, she’d tell him. What did he think? That she was stupid?

  “Yes, Sergeant Major.”

  A new one-hour-and-twenty-one-minute day was dawning as they rode the lift up to the parade ground. Villain and Booly left the elevator first, followed by Rossif, Jones and Wutu.

  A work party stopped to let them pass, practiced eyes skimmed their equipment, and salutes snapped back and forth.

  Gunner’s head darted this way and that as his legs took large mincing steps. The cyborg was very much aware of the legionnaires inside his belly. He was honor bound to protect them while they were under his care, but the obligation ended the moment that they left the squad bay, and gave him an opportunity to die.

  Ah, the cyborg thought to himself, how wonderful that would be. To fall into eternal blackness where memories could not find him, where the past could not haunt him, where peace would be his. He’d been there once, but the medics had reached down into the darkness and saved him from the very thing that he wanted most. Damn each and every one of the bastards to hell!

  Massive gates rumbled open. The right side had been hit by a shoulder-launched missile the month before. Metal had buckled under the force of the explosion and grated where it rubbed against the fort’s outside wall. Not a serious attack, but a reminder that the Naa were around and could inflict damage when they chose to do so.

  The memory caused Booly’s stomach muscles to tighten. Chemicals entered his bloodstream and everything grew more intense. The blueness of the sky. The warmth of the sun on the back of his neck. The whine of Villain’s servos. The pungent odor of Naa incense.

  The Naa had an extremely acute sense of smell and used the incense to obliterate the odors that seeped out of the fort. They burned the stuff in small ornamental pots, so that a hundred fingers of smoke pointed up towards the sky, where the wind caught and pulled them towards the south.

  Booly turned to exchange salutes with a legionnaire on top of the wall, checked to make sure that Wutu had cleared the gates, and signaled accordingly. Servos whined, doors rumbled, and metal grated as the gates slid closed.

  The smell of incense was more intense now as the domes of Naa town closed in around them. The domes were low, gently curved affairs, that served as roofs for the mostly underground dwellings. Light gleamed here and there where it reflected off metal that had been scavenged from the fort’s garbage dump and used to reinforce the adobe-style construction.

  Cubs chased each other around Gunner’s huge plate-shaped feet while their parents watched from a distance. Most people agreed that the Naa were attractive in an exotic sort of way. The males stood six to seven feet tall. Females were a foot or so shorter. Both were covered with soft, sleek fur, which came in a wide variety of colors and patterns. Their heads were extremely human in shape and size, as were their ears, noses, and mouths, although their dentition was different, featuring chopping teeth in front, grinding teeth in back, and no canines.

  Like humans, the Naa had four fingers and an opposable thumb, but had no fingernails. Their feet were different too, having no separate toes, and being longer, broader, and flatter than humans’.

  Booly watched them from his position on Villain’s back. These were tame Naa, of course, outcasts, misfits, and thieves for the most part, unwilling or unable to make a living out in the wild, huddling around Fort Camerone for protection from their own kind, while eking out a living based on alien scraps and day labor.

  Still, there was something about them that Booly liked, a fact he had kept to himself, since many of his peers called them “geeks” and other disparaging names, a practice that seemed more than a little strange, for many of the same men and women who called the Naa derogatory names praised them for their valor and considered them worthy opponents.

  The seeming contradiction stemmed from the Naa’s status as respected enemies. In order to kill, it was first necessary to hate, and calling the Naa names helped the legionnaires accomplish that. But there’s little glory in killing someone or something weak, so it was simultaneously necessary to build the Naa up, making them worthy opponents. Booly saw it as a piece of psychological flimflammery, and was often tempted to say so but had managed to hold his peace. After all, what difference would it make? One person says this, another says that, the whole thing was bullshit.

  The domes had thinned now and were dropping behind. Booly swept the horizon from left to right. Nothing. Good. He activated his radio.

  “Rossif ... Jones ... take the flanks. Wutu ... watch our back trail. You’ll be first to die if we take it in the ass. Gunner ... give me full scan on your detectors. Okay, everybody ... let’s move out.”

  Back at the edge of Naa town a male watched them go. His fur was spotted with age, and missing where an energy beam had sliced across his chest twenty-odd years before, but his eyes were bright with intelligence.
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br />   He watched the patrol until it became little more than specks. It was a two-klick walk to the garbage dump and the com set that was hidden there. A com set that had been liberated from a similar patrol six years before. Used sparingly, and kept where no one thought to look, it had already accounted for sixty-two legionnaires.

  The old one smiled and took the first step of his long journey.

  3

  To sup with the devil ... you must first enter hell.

  Dweller folk saying, circa 2349

  Planet Earth, the Human Empire

  Everyone knows they’re going to die but few know when. Angel Perez knew, right down to the day, the minute, and the second.

  And if he managed to forget somehow, or used contraband drugs to push the information out of his brain, it was there on the wall screen to remind him. The words appeared in different fonts sometimes, and changed colors every hour on the hour, but the content remained the same.

  “At approximately 1830 of day 4, standard month 2, you killed Cissy Conners. Having been tried for this crime and found guilty, you will be executed at 0600 on day 15, of standard month 4.”

  The words never varied, but the digital readout located in the lower right-hand corner of the screen did. It showed his life expectancy in hours and minutes. What had originally been thirty-one days had dwindled to little more than an hour. They’d send for him any moment now.

  He’d been in prison for more than a year while the criminal court’s centralized computer system took his case through the automatic appeals process. Then, having found no grounds for a retrial or an adjustment of sentence, an artificial intelligence known as JMS 12.1 had transferred him from carousel 2, tower 4, to carousel 16, tower 9, better known to inmates as the “death stack,” or DS for short.

  Perez was glad that he’d refused his last meal. An empty stomach made it less likely that he’d throw up or shit his pants. He thought of his mother and wondered if she knew or cared.