“Good afternoon, Madam Dasser. What a pleasant surprise.”
“A surprise perhaps,” Madam Dasser replied, “but not especially pleasant. I bring bad news.”
Madam Chien-Chu’s teacup clattered as a hand flew to her mouth. The Eurasian eyes that had fascinated Chien-Chu these many years were wide with fright.
Dasser shook his head. “That was thoughtless of me. Can you forgive me, Nola? The news has nothing to do with Leonid. Not directly anyway.”
Chien-Chu sighed, opened the brass box next to his elbow, and selected a cigarette. He wasn’t supposed to smoke but it didn’t seem to matter anymore. He sucked on the filter, felt the tip ignite, and sucked the smoke into his lungs. It came out in a long thin stream.
“And?”
Dasser took a sip of tea. “The Emperor ordered his forces to withdraw from the rim. That was yesterday afternoon. Most of the 3rd REI, along with elements of the 4th, and the 1st REC tried to lift seven hours later. They were caught and placed under arrest.”
“And General Mosby?”
“The general and her staff have been charged with treason.”
Madam Chien-Chu turned pale. A withdrawal meant almost certain death for those on Spindle. Her hand shook slightly as she gestured towards a darkened holo tank. “There was nothing on the news.”
Dasser smiled grimly. “There will be. Scolari threw the whole thing to the media about thirty minutes ago. The explanation was rather one-sided, to say the least.”
Chien-Chu thought about his son, about his daughter-in-law, and the millions of other human beings spread along the rim. All had been sacrificed. He took a drag off his cigarette. His voice was low but tight with anger.
“Scolari’s an idiot ... but I had hopes for the Emperor.”
Dasser wanted to state the obvious, wanted to push him, but played it cool instead.
“Yes, the whole thing is most regrettable.”
He looked her in the eyes and chose his words with care. “The poetry group that you told me about.”
“Yes?”
“Could I come to a meeting?”
Dasser smiled as she set the hook. “We’d love to have you.”
Chien-Chu nodded, stubbed his cigarette out, and swore when it burned his finger.
14
God knows ’twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear.
But I’ve a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.
Legionnaire Alan Seeger
KIA the Somme
Standard year 1916
Legion Outpost NA-45-16/R, aka “Spindle,” the Human Empire
Spear Commander Ikor Niber-Ba felt his heart swell with pride as the task force’s entire complement of fighters and troop carriers formed up and headed for the strangely shaped asteroid. All three of his battleships had moved in close, shortening the distance the smaller vessels had to travel, and bringing their mighty armament to bear. He could actually see the surface, mark the spots where metal and molten rock glowed cherry red, and glory in what the spear had accomplished.
They had pounded the asteroid for the better part of a Hudathan day, laying waste to every surface installation they could find, preparing the way for the final ground assault. And what an assault it would be. Every soldier not required to operate the ships would be involved.
Light reflected off fighters as they went in for one last strafing run. The troop carriers moved more slowly, dark silhouettes against the sun’s bright corona, staying in formation, mindful of their assigned landing areas. Only fifteen or twenty units of time would pass before the last of them had landed, discharged their troops, and lifted again.
The humans had been clever, very clever, but no amount of cleverness would protect them from the “Intaka,” or “blow of death.” Originally part of the lexicon that had grown up around Gunu, a highly disciplined form of personal combat, the concept of Intaka had been adopted by the Hudathan military and used to describe the use of overwhelming force.
Though favored by most of his peers, almost all of whom had grown up big and strong, Niber-Ba had a tendency to withhold the Intaka, using it only as a last resort. This stemmed from the fact that opponents had always been larger than he was, from a natural sense of thrift, and from a healthy dose of Hudathan paranoia. After all, why use more resources than necessary to overwhelm an opponent? Especially in a universe where more enemies were almost certainly waiting to attack.
But this situation was different. Niber-Ba knew that now, and knew that he should have recognized the enemy’s weakness from the start and used the strategy of Intaka to defeat them.
The knowledge of that failure, and the deaths that it had caused, had left him sleepless for three cycles running. Nothing could bring dead warriors back to life or cleanse the shame from his soul. But victory could advance his people’s cause. Yes, victory would go a long ways towards easing the pain, and victory would be his.
Niber-Ba turned his attention to the command center’s holo tank and committed himself to battle.
Red eyed his screens, confirmed Spinhead’s analysis, and spoke into the mike.
“Time to serve the hors d’oeuvres ... our guests have arrived.”
The electronics tech’s words were heard all over Spindle. By Captain Omar Narbakov, who was supervising the last-minute reinforcement of a weapons pit, by Leonid Chien-Chu, who was struggling to make a splice, by Legionnaire Seeger, who placed a rock in front of something he wanted to hide, and by all the others who waited by their posts, stomachs hollow with fear, palms slick with sweat. This was it, the moment they’d been dreading, when their lives would depend on skills that most of them had never tried to acquire, and on luck, which observed no loyalties and belonged as much to the enemy as to them.
The exception was Narbakov. He had dreamed of this moment as a boy, trained for it as a man, and waited these many years for it to arrive. He savored the taste of peppermint as a piece of candy dissolved in his mouth, the hiss of oxygen as it blew against the side of his face, and the hard unyielding landscape beyond his visor. The dwarf hung like a searchlight in the sky, throwing hard black shadows down across Spindle’s surface, many of which concealed his troops.
Yes, this was his moment, his Camerone, his place to die. The thought brought no fear, no dread, just a mounting sense of excitement. For a legionnaire will not die, cannot die, as long as others live to remember him.
Narbakov stood in the open, disdainful of the Hudathan fighters that crisscrossed the asteroid’s surface, and chinned more magnification into his visor.
The Hudathan troopships had started to land, dropping onto their preassigned LZs with the delicacy of bees landing on flowers, dropping their troops like so much pollen. There was no response, no defensive fire, because Narbakov wanted the Hudathans on the ground. He was tired of being pounded from space, tried of fighting the aliens on their terms, and eager to strike back.
A Hudathan tripped, lost contact with the ground, and floated away. The alien looked like a large balloon, a plaything waiting to be popped, and the image made Narbakov laugh—a sound that made its way onto the command channel and caused his subordinates to look at each other and shake their heads in amazement. The old man was terminally gung ho—everyone knew that—but the laugh was bizarre even for him. Still, if the cap could laugh at the geeks, how tough could the assholes be? They grinned, checked their weapons one last time, and waited for the order to fire.
Narbakov switched to freq 4. The civilians had military-style code names but rarely remembered to use them. Leonid was known as “Boss One.”
“N-One to Boss One.”
Leonid sw
ore at the interruption, completed the cable splice, and wound tape around the repair. “Chien-Chu here ... go ahead.”
Narbakov looked heavenwards, hoped god had provided a separate reward for civilians, and did his best to sound normal.
“Sorry to bother you, Leo ... but the place is crawling with geeks. I’ll be forced to open fire in a moment or two. How are things going?”
Leonid dropped the cable and looked up at the launcher. Although some quick-thinking legionnaires had prevented the Hudathans from finding out how important the linear accelerator was, they had still done their best to destroy it. Not from any particular concern about the device, but as part of their general effort to destroy everything on Spindle’s surface and prepare the way for their troops.
A battleship-mounted laser cannon had sliced through a section of gridwork, slagged the small ops center located to one side of the ramp, and severed a major cable run. Leonid had repaired the last of the cables himself, and the ops center had been bypassed, but the intermittent flash of laser torches signaled that repairs were still under way.
Leonid looked out towards the area where Narbakov should be, saw sticks of light lance downwards, then disappear as a fighter completed its run. The silence made the daggers of light seem less dangerous, like the laser shows held on Empire Day, but the civilian knew they were different. People died wherever the light touched.
“Omar? You okay?”
The officer had started to lose his patience. “Come on, Leo. Quit screwing around and answer my question.”
“I need time, Omar. Thirty minutes.”
“Get fraxing real, Leo. We’ll be ass-deep in geeks thirty minutes from now.”
“Twenty.”
“Ten and not a goddamned minute more. You tell those toolheads of yours to get their shit together. Out.”
Leonid looked up towards the glow of laser torches. How long till the Hudathans saw the lights and came to investigate?
The civilian began to climb. His breath came in short angry puffs. Damn. Damn. Damn. A series of explosions marched across the horizon and terminated near lock 4. Shit. Shit. Shit. The had to complete the repairs, had to launch the star divers, had to hit the battleships. He chinned a button.
“Cody ... Hecox ... Gutierrez ... how much longer?”
“Twenty, twenty-five minutes, boss.” The voice belonged to Cody.
“Make it five.”
“No can do, boss. One launch maybe, two if you’re lucky, three, forget it. The stress will tear the ramp apart.”
“We’re out of time, Cody. Spot-weld as many joints as you can and then jump.”
Cody was silent for a moment. “Okay. You’re the boss. Five and counting.”
Torches flared as the construction workers made their welds, leapfrogged each other, and started over again.
Leonid ignored them, stepped onto a side platform, and eyed the star diver’s long oval shape. It was huge, almost the size of a destroyer escort, and packed with sophisticated technology. It pained him to treat the ship like this, to use it as a high-tech cannonball, but there was no other choice.
Leonid looked upwards. Five additional ships hung over his head, stacked on top of each other like bullets in a magazine, held there by a hastily built framework of steel. Would the jury-rigged conveyor mechanism feed the ships down onto the ramp quickly enough? Would the accelerator hang together long enough to fire them?
He looked down at the simplified control panel. Wires squirmed in and out of it like worms feeding on a corpse. The device had six ready lights, all of them green, and a box-shaped switch protector. Leonid flipped the cover out of the way. The button was red and pulsed to the beat of his heart.
The hatch disappeared, the twelve troopers who constituted Dagger Two of Arrow Five ran-shuffled down the ramp, while Arrow Commander Imbom Dakna-Ba felt his legs turn to jelly. He willed them to move, commanded them to do so, but they refused. His aide, a tough old veteran named Forma-Sa, was tactful.
“Is there a problem with your equipment, sir?” Dakna-Ba wanted to answer, wanted to say yes, wanted to come up with an equipment malfunction that would keep him aboard the troop carrier, but the words froze in his throat. Dagger Three made their way down the ramp, angled left, and took cover in a crater. The officer waited for the almost inevitable hail of defensive fire and was even more frightened when it didn’t come. The humans had fought like Stath Beasts up till now ... something was wrong.
“Sir?”
Dakna-Ba tried to speak but succeeded in producing little more than a squeak.
Forma-Sa nodded understandingly, deactivated his implant, and placed his helmet next to the officer’s. “It’s time to disembark, sir. Make your way down the ramp or I’ll be forced to put a bullet through the back of your head.”
Dakna-Ba found himself in motion. The humans frightened him, but Dagger Commander Forma-Sa scared him even more. There were stories about the things he’d done, terrible stories, and the officer believed them. The ramp shook slightly beneath his boots.
He looked around. Now it would come, the searing light, followed by complete and total darkness. But it didn’t. What were the humans doing? Somewhere down below the level of the fear there was tranquillity, and within that tranquillity the ability to think, and the thoughts seemed to express themselves of their own volition.
“It’s a trap, Dag. Instruct our troops to keep their heads down.”
The noncom nodded his satisfaction and relayed Dakna-Ba’s orders to the troops. No sooner had he done so than all hell broke loose. There was no sound in the silent world of space, but the stutter of energy beams and the subsequent radio chatter told their own story.
He’d been right! Not only that, but he’d survived the first few seconds of battle and hadn’t lost control of his bowels!
Dakna-Ba felt strength seep into his legs. They were steady once more and responded when he ordered them to move. The officer activated his implant.
“Daggers Two, Three, Four, and Five advance. You know the objective ... let’s show the Dwarf what the fighting fifth can do!”
Crew-served automatic weapons began to fire as troopers emerged from the shadows, from craters, and from rocks to advance on their objective.
Light stuttered blue as the incoming fire intensified and tracers flickered around them. Forma-Sa watched approvingly as Dakna-Ba ran-shuffled along with the rest, shouting words of encouragement, his head swiveling right and left. The youngster would make a halfway decent officer one day if he learned quickly enough, if he managed to survive.
Dakna-Ba considered the task ahead. His orders were clear: force the air lock that intelligence had labeled as “O-12,” make his way into the heart of the human habitat, and destroy the computer located there. The computer had already played a key role in the asteroid’s defense and might otherwise continue to do so.
It was either an extremely important endeavor, entrusted to Dakna-Ba as a sign of respect, or a suicide mission assigned to him because he was the most junior officer around, and therefore expendable. Dakna-Ba wanted to believe the former but knew the latter was a good deal more likely.
The humans had dug in around the lock. Light flashed back and forth as both sides exchanged fire.
A scream ripped through Dakna-Ba’s mind as a trooper started to say something and was literally cut in half. Dakna-Ba saw him off to the left, the top half of his suit spinning away while the bottom half remained where it was. Blood and entrails shot straight upwards, stabilized, and floated away.
The officer turned back, began to issue an order, and stopped when something grotesque appeared. It was taller than a Hudathan, heavier, and equipped with weapons where its arms should have been. Energy beams seemed to have little effect on the thing and tracers bounced off it. A cyborg! Intelligence had warned him that such things existed, had told him that the humans had an entire army comprised of cyborgs, but he was surprised nonetheless. Though sufficiently advanced to field cyborgs of their own, the Hudathan
s had a deep-seated aversion to the concept involved, and didn’t use anything more complicated than nerve-spliced artificial limbs.
“Hit the dirt!”
The order came from Dag Forma-Sa, and Dakna-Ba obeyed. He hit hard, bounced, and nearly broke free. Light flickered, tracers sectioned the darkness, and the Hudathans started to die. The thing was hunting his troopers the way a Namba Bak hunts gorgs, probing between the rocks, driving them out into the open. Shocked by the cyborg’s apparent invulnerability, and unsure of how to deal with it, some of the troopers ran. The cyborg liked that and picked them off with the precision of a marksman at the range.
Dakna-Ba activated his implant.
“Fight the cyborg as you would a tank ... fire your SLMs!”
The response was spectacular. The cyborg staggered under the explosive impact of at least six shoulder-launched missiles, continued to fire even as it fell to its knees, and didn’t stop until an explosion took its head clean off.
Shaken but victorious, the Hudathans fought their way through an amalgamation of civilians and legionnaires to reach the lock. It was made of thick steel, reinforced with concrete, but yielded to some carefully placed explosives.
The violent decompression that followed came as no surprise to those within. They had expected it and were prepared to fight the aliens for every inch of the habitat’s hallway.
Red swung his boots down from the console and took a sip from the mug at his elbow. The coffee was fresh-brewed and tasted good. He had climbed into his suit as a precautionary measure, but the control area was equipped with its own lock, so it would be a while before he needed the helmet. He shook his head in dismay. The environmental display left no doubt as to the situation and the radio traffic confirmed it. The geeks were inside the habitat and headed his way. They wanted Spinhead and he couldn’t really blame them. The computer had played a key role in the asteroid’s defense and was about to defeat them. Red smiled, selected a frequency, and spoke into his mike.
Legion of the Damned Page 21
