Soldier of the Legion sotl-1

by Marshall S. Thomas

  “Where is she? NOW, trooper!” Lowdrop erupted, his eyes flashing. The fellow was certainly touchy.

  I intervened before Valkyrie did something unforgivable to a superior officer. “Right over there, Sir.” I pointed out the burning, smoking building from which we had just escaped. Flames shot through the hole we had made in the roof, and licked out the windows. “Second floor. We came out through the roof.”

  Lowdrop bared his teeth, “You didn’t bring her?”

  I blinked. “No, sir, we didn’t bring her!” I tried to hold my temper in check. “I guess we were more worried about Valkyrie and our own troops than some Mocain sub.” How do people like him get promoted?

  He whirled away and pounded his fist on an already dented aircar bulkhead. “Damn!”

  Gravelight rushed toward Lowdrop, tripped over something, recovered slightly and seized his arm. “We’ve got to get her,” she pleaded. “She may still be alive!”

  “What’s the problem, Sir?” Snow Leopard and Boudicca joined us. A fighter barreled right over us, firing chainlink tacstars. Red smoke swirled madly around us, and pink snow fell softly from the sky. Lasers snapped nearby, a flickering cold terror in my guts.

  Lowdrop looked at Gravelight, nodded and turned to us. “Beta, Gamma, we will recover this Mocain woman…Millina…immediately.” He had made up his mind.

  I think we all had the same reaction: stunned disbelief. Boudicca bristled and Snow Leopard grabbed her just in time, holding her back. She spoke up anyway, “Oh, great!” she exclaimed. “Yes, Sir! That’s a terrific idea! She’s in that hellhole over there with her throat cut. Are you coming?”

  Veins popped out on his temples and for a moment I was certain Lowdrop was going to shoot her. He pursed his lips and barked, “Yes, Trooper, I’m coming! Into my aircar. Now!” He turned and ran toward his aircar with Gravelight in tow and shouted over his shoulder, “We need a medic!”

  Snow Leopard took Boudicca by the elbow and held her in place. “Priestess, Thinker, Merlin, Sassin, you’re with me!” We dashed after Lowdrop and leapt aboard. One of the CAT 21 troopers hustled Valkyrie away. She struggled a bit but her heart wasn’t in it. The assault doors slammed shut and we lurched away from the crash site.

  The skin of the aircar rang with hits, and I wondered briefly why we had to risk our necks for a Mocain.

  We hovered over the building in a rush of flame and smoke shooting up from the hole in the roof. Xmax and lasers popped and screeched against the armor. The assault doors snapped open and the cabin filled with a great gust of black smoke and sparks, and the hole in the roof slid back and forth dizzily beneath us. A second Legion aircar darted up above us and began strafing the Systie troops with tacstars and lasers.

  “Jump!” We jumped right into the inferno, our E’s strapped to our chests. Lowdrop went first, followed by Snow Leopard and Boudicca. I landed on a burning ceiling beam and it snapped and dropped me right down onto the burning table that Valkyrie had pulled out into the corridor. I rolled off to the floor and raised my E. For a moment, it felt like I’d broken several ribs, and maybe a leg or two as well, but I was still moving so I concluded I was all right. The corridor was ablaze, the ceiling burning brightly. I suddenly realized that I did not even have on a liteshirt. My Legion coldcoat smoked, and my naked hands were blistering.

  Boudicca and I led the way down the corridor, with Lowdrop and Gravelight and Snow Leopard and Priestess and Merlin and Sassin right behind us.

  The open doorway glowed, flames crackled up the walls, the room full of smoke. A figure crumpled on the floor, Millina, as still as death.

  “Priestess!” Boudicca called out. Priestess appeared immediately, bending over the body. It lay on a pile of smoking, blood-soaked blankets, wrists and ankles still tied behind her. Gravelight was on her quickly, a psychic parasite, hovering mils from Millina’s face as Priestess frantically tried to repair the massive damage done to her throat. I caught a glimpse of the Mocain’s face, dead white, drained of life. Dead for sure. Priestess hit her with a biotic charger. Sassin and Merlin stood guard in the corridor. The firing outside increased.

  “Opscon to Downside. Recall! Recall! All units evac Coldmark. Immediate recall, all units evac. All units off-planet. Repeat, recall, all units return topside now!”

  “God, she’s still with us!” Gravelight spoke, her voice charged with wonder. “Bring her back, Priestess!”

  “I’ve got a faint heartbeat. She’s alive. She used the blankets to stop the bleeding.” Priestess had done a quick flesh patch on the horrible slash along the Mocain’s throat. Now she slipped a biopack into the charger and it immediately began pumping life into Millina’s cold, still body. I knew how it worked. It was the blood of the Legion, our own blood, cooked up by our own unholy lifies.

  I don’t think we even heard the recall order. To us, it was just background noise. We were busy.

  Boudicca commented absently, “Your jacket’s on fire, Thinker.”

  “Can you put it out, please?”

  Merlin called out a warning, “Systies on the roof!” A deafening explosion rocked the building.

  I charged out the door into the corridor with Boudicca, Snow Leopard and Lowdrop.

  “Systies in armor!” Sassin, Gamma Seven, informed us, “coming in through the roof!” He backed towards us from our left, and fired a deceptor into the smoke.

  “Defend the exit!” Lowdrop called out. “Priestess…” Merlin appeared on our right, also backing up, and even as we spotted him, he opened up with a laser burst.

  “Systies! They’re here!” A wild tracery of laser bursts flickered all around us, screeching into the stone walls, raising dust. We dropped and fired back, xmax and lasers. Suddenly, I saw the Systie troopers in my darksight, huge armored beetles bristling with antennae and weapons, walking right at us, flames licking all around them. Sassin fired a tacstar.

  “Back! Out of the corridor!” Lasers snapped all around us through heavy smoke. I crawled into a doorway, flames roaring up from the floor. Someone screamed. Sassin appeared beside me.

  “It’s Merlin,” he shouted. “Your Four’s hit!”

  Merlin sprawled in the doorway, still halfway in the corridor, clawing at my foot. Both his legs were shredded, raw meat, hissing and spitting flame. He screamed in agony.

  “Cover me, Sassin!” I dragged Merlin into the room. Auto xmax tore through the corridor, spraying us with shrapnel. I yanked loose the medkit from the coldcoat and ripped it open. A ripple of movement behind us, inside the room.

  “Don’t shoot us! Please! We’re…” Sassin whipped around and fired, laser, slicing them in half. It was just two boys, now burning body parts, blood splattered all over the walls. I did not even have time to react. A tacstar thundered in the corridor, phospho white contrails cracking right into our room. I stabbed a biotic charger into Merlin’s arm right through his coldcoat. His moans continued.

  “Priestess, Gravelight, stay put! Don’t go into the corridor!” Lowdrop ordered. “Sassin, Thinker, Merlin, report!” We were alone in the room, just Sassin and Merlin and me and the two dead Coldmarker boys. We’d backed into the wrong room; Priestess and Gravelight were alone with the Mocain girl!

  “Beta, Thinker! I’m with Sassin and Merlin. Merlin’s hit bad!” Xmax shattered my words. Sassin leaned out the door, firing down the corridor.

  “Snow Leopard, Priestess!” She sounded tense. “The Systies are right outside our room!”

  “Sassin!” I shouted, “I think this is the room next to them! Blow a hole in the wall with your Manlink!”

  “Deadman, Thinker, it’s solid stone!” Sassin’s black face was grey with fatigue and steamed with sweat behind his faceplate.

  “Can’t you do it? Use xmax!”

  “I can do it, but we might kill them!”

  “If we don’t do it, they die anyway! Do it! Priestess, Gravelight, heads down! We’re taking out your wall!” I wanted to scream. My blistered hands were roasting and the outside of
my coldcoat was melting.

  A tremendous concussion deafened us. Swirling dust, a dull buzzing in my ear. Sassin had fired. Merlin still had a death grip on one of my legs, begging me to kill him. Sassin turned to cover the door with his Manlink.

  Movement in the dust. We had done it! Gravelight came scrambling through the hole headfirst. A deafening cacophony of auto xmax and the crackling of lasers followed her from the other room. I fell into the hole, poking my E through. Gravelight clawed at my arm.

  “The Mocain!” she shrieked. “Priestess! Pass her through!” Priestess and the Mocain were right next to the hole. Priestess fired her E. I fired on laser into her open doorway. Then an A-suited Systie stepped in, firing an SG on laser. The burst missed Priestess by mils, but my laser caught the Systie right on the chest, screeching and popping, white-hot death. He shuddered and collapsed.

  I released my E and reached through the hole in the wall and seized Priestess and dragged her through. She resisted all the way, kicking and screaming.

  “The Mocain! My patient! She’s dying. Let me bring her!”

  Gravelight frantically tried to push us aside and crawl back through the hole to the Mocain. A horrific blast shattered the Mocain’s room, ending the argument and pitting my faceplate with frags. The building shuddered.

  “Xmax! No! She’s dead!”

  “Sassin, will you hold this crazy psycher?” I was trying to stop a hysterical Gravelight from crawling back to her death. Priestess sobbed, writhing in my arms. Merlin moaned in agony. But Sassin did not take time to worry about Gravelight. He fired into the corridor nonstop. Deafening tacstars shook the rooftop above us.

  “More Systies! Legion, we’re coming into the corridor! Thinker, let’s go! Bring Merlin! I’ll cover the corridor!” Sassin knelt by the door, Manlink to his shoulder. “Legion in the corridor! Legion in the corridor! We need an evac!” We burst out the door and backed down the corridor to where we thought the others were, Priestess and I dragging Merlin by his arms, Gravelight firing her E from the waist, screaming something incomprehensible. I fired my E with one hand, auto xmax into the smoke.

  “This way, Legion!”

  “We’ve got you, guys!”

  “Heads down, Legion!” A glittering tapestry of golden laser bursts streamed and snapped just above our heads. Lowdrop and Boudicca were firing. Friendly lasers, only I knew there was no such thing as friendly lasers.

  Suddenly Snow Leopard appeared, stepping out of the smoke like a phantom, firing one-handed down the corridor just like on the range, seizing me by one arm to guide us into another room. A tremendous crack from up above. “Legion on the roof. We’ve got the roof! Fight your way out, guys! More Systies on the way!”

  “Where’s the Mocain?” Lowdrop looked around wildly. Merlin screamed. Priestess bent over him, frantically working on his legs.

  “The Systies have her!” I replied, stepping up to confront him. “It was Gravelight and Priestess alive, or all three of them dead! Don’t you understand? We’ve lost her!”

  He turned from me. “Gravelight, did you get anything?”

  “I don’t know!” she moaned. “It was a bloody mess! I don’t know!”

  “All right, evac! Unit evac! Lowdrop calling…”

  Sassin blew a massive hole in the roof, showering us all with debris. He didn’t need any further invitation. Boudicca crouched in the doorway, firing auto xmax down the corridor. An aircar hovered right overhead, firing chainlink laser. More debris came raining down. An A-suited Legionnaire appeared in the hole in the ceiling, covering us all with his Manlink. Evac lines came shooting down, crashing onto the floor, steaming. The smoke was so thick I could hardly see, even with the darksight.

  “Out! Out! Evac!” The A-suit boomed. “Snap on and pull!” We got Merlin tied on immediately. Priestess went up with him, shooting up through the rafters abruptly. The Legionnaire in the A-suit came crashing down to the floor and took up a position by the door, firing a Manlink. Boudicca abandoned the doorway and seized one of the evac lines. I pulled and went shooting up into the rafters, beams crashing into my comtop, flames whooshing past me.

  I shot into the aircar’s open assault door like a rag doll, landing breathlessly on top of Sassin. Two A-suited troopers from CAT 21 worked the extractors, hauling us in like fish. The car had been stripped for evac duty. Lasers flicked past the outside, smoke filling the cabin, and I could hear xmax peppering the skin. Boudicca and Snow Leopard came hurtling in, slamming against each other. Then Lowdrop cartwheeled right into me.

  “Two’s free!” the aircar’s pilot spit out as he shot away from the building, hauling the A-suited trooper along behind on the evac line, dangling in the air, a wild ride through bleeding skies. The snow had stopped.

  “Opscon to Downside. Recall! Recall! All units evac Coldmark. Immediate recall, all units evac. Recall! Recall! Quit fooling around and get outta there!”

  A flaming aircar went hurtling past us, disintegrating. The crew reeled in their Two and he crashed in and the assault door snapped shut immediately. We arced into a power climb.

  Snow Leopard wrenched off his comtop and threw it angrily to the floor. Her hands scarlet, Priestess desperately worked on Merlin. His lower legs had been shredded. She was covered with blood.

  “Save him!” Lowdrop and I tried to help her with Merlin, but my fingers did not work.

  “Did Warhound get out of the aircar?” Snow Leopard demanded.

  “I didn’t see Warhound or Dragon,” I answered.

  “Coolhand made it,” Priestess responded. “How about Redhawk? How about Psycho?”

  “Redhawk got out,” I replied. “Psycho was in the courtyard when the Systies strafed it with their lasers.”

  “Deto!” Snow Leopard almost bit the curse in two. “How is Merlin?”

  Gravelight furiously confronted me, face ashen, eyes wet and swollen. “We could have had the Mocain!”

  “Shut down, you raving lunatic! You and Priestess would both be dead if it wasn’t for me! I don’t give a damn for your Mocain!” I was in no mood for this nonsense.

  “You ignorant fool! You have no idea how important she is!” Gravelight trembled with rage and frustration.

  “I know how important Priestess is! The Systies were in the doorway, psycher! I killed one just as he shot at Priestess! It’s a miracle he missed! There was no way we could have recovered that Mocain!”

  “That’s enough!” Lowdrop cut in, pulling Gravelight away from me. “He’s right, Gravelight. You would have died, too. You all did your best! It’s over!”

  Boudicca wrenched her comtop off, revealing a flushed, sweaty face, bright red hair and the Legion cross on her forehead. She collapsed against the aircar’s fuselage beside Snow Leopard. He wrapped one arm around her shoulders protectively and pulled her to him, hiding nothing.

  “Hey, girl-how you doing?” His face was grim.

  “Hot and wet, kiddo. Hot and wet. I could use an ice-cold shower.”

  “Well, we’ll do one together.”

  “You’re on, kiddo. You’re on.”

  Priestess continued working on Merlin. There was nothing I could do to help. There was nothing for me to do at all. I closed my eyes, exhausted and overcome with anger and frustration. Deadman works in strange ways, I thought. He works through us, but he doesn’t make it easy. We had saved Valkyrie from the grasp of our foes, and saved Merlin from an awful death. Maybe it was up to us…to do what we could, for those we love.

  “Does that hurt?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Come back in ten hours. You’ll be called. Next!” We looked around the body shop of the Spawn. I could hardly believe we had made it back, but the fighters had kept the Systie fleet very busy. Now we were on vac run red, and my hands were encased in biogloves, one arm was bandaged and my torso covered with burn pads. The body shop was very, very busy.

  “Thinker! How are you?” I wandered in a daze. White-suited lifies and medics rushed around urgently with bio
packs and wheeled the casualties into the operating rooms. I looked up. Boudicca sat on a table with one arm draped around Valkyrie. Boudicca still wore her litesuit, peppered with shrapnel hits and scorched from the fire and splattered with dried blood. Valkyrie was still in the dark monk’s robe, bleeding from the lip.

  “Valkyrie! It’s good to see you.” I reached out and took her hands in mine. Her emerald eyes flickered, and once again it was just the two of us, against the world. She didn’t say anything at first. I noticed a lot of blood on her robe.

  “Hello to you, too, Thinker!” Boudicca said sarcastically. “Appreciate your concern. I’m all right, thank you. She may have broken some ribs. We have to wait a bit to find out.” Boudicca seemed perfectly happy, with her Two at her side.

  Valkyrie turned from me, with dull eyes, talking slowly, barely whispering. “She raped me, Thinker. She degraded me. She annihilated my soul. She turned me into a slave, a cipher. I wasn’t Gamma Two any more, Thinker, I was Gamma Zero. I did whatever she wanted. I was a good slave. Everything they told us about the Systies is true.”

  I swallowed hard. I said nothing. What could I say?

  “But I got my soul back, Thinker. And it felt so good. I’m going to kill Systies for the rest of my life.” Her gaze swept over the body shop. Over in the corner they were cutting someone out of a fused A-suit.

  “So many casualties!” Valkyrie whispered. “So many…how many dead?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I responded quickly.

  “What do you mean, it doesn’t matter? How can it not matter?”

  “It doesn’t matter!” I insisted. “We got you back, that’s what’s important. We took you back! And the entire galaxy will know it!”

  “But look at the cost! How many dead? It’s crazy! You should have left me! All these wounded troopers. They don’t even know me. They must hate me!”

  “Don’t you understand anything, Valkyrie?” It bothered me that she could not see it. “That’s the whole point. It doesn’t matter who you are, or whether it was just you or a hundred others as well. The point is, you’re a soldier of the Legion. And the enemy had you. And the Legion was going to get you back. And nobody was going to count the cost.”