The Battle of Cairo_The Human Legion_Prequel to the Battle of Earth

by Tim C. Taylor

  The Battle of Cairo

  A prequel novelette to the Human Legion novels: The Battle of Earth Part1 and Part2

  Due to be published June 2018

  Copyright © Tim C. Taylor 2017

  Cover image: Vincent Sammy

  Published by Human Legion Publications

  All Rights Reserved

  For a free Tim C. Taylor starter library, join the Legion at HumanLegion.com

  — A note to readers —

  The Battle of Cairo is a novelette, which you can think of as a meaty short story that you can read in one sitting, in this case typically about an hour. I think novelettes are a great way of delivering science fiction, but please don’t start reading thinking it is novel!.

  In terms of the Human Legion Universe books, The Battle of Cairo fits in between War Against the White Knights and The Battle of Earth: Part1. However, you don’t need to have read any of the other books to get started with this novelette, and you don’t need to read it to make sense of The Battle of Earth. It doesn’t contain spoilers, but the events and characters in Battle of Cairo will play a crucial role in the Battle of Earth.

  If this is your first Human Legion story, then forget about those other books, strap in and get ready to read; this story makes a great jumping off point for further adventures in the Human Legion Universe.

  Tim C. Taylor — May 2018

  — Chapter 1 —

  2717AD

  I woke up dead.

  A tiny suspicion buzzed around the back of my mind, an irritating firefly whispering that I was only dreaming.

  Well, the stupid insect was wrong. I was dead. I was frozen. All the heat had drained from my body, and my thoughts were encased in ice. For heaven’s sake, I was even entombed within a coffin, a heavy sarcophagus with a glass lid through which I dreamed I could see only ice.

  Nonetheless, I succumbed to the firefly’s seductive whisper. I knew it was wrong, but… well, what would you rather be: dreaming or dead?

  The instant I allowed myself to fall into that firefly’s lies, everything suddenly flipped head over ass and I was inside the dream. And in this dream, I woke up… dead. At the back of my mind an angry, buzzing insect was spinning tempting lies about me not being dead at all, that this was only a dream.

  How could I be dreaming when not a single breath escaped my cold lips to warm the icy tomb?

  Your resuscitation procedure was unpleasant, Sergeant Bloehn. I sympathize, but I need to understand your experience after you were woken.

  That’s not what you told me. You said you wanted to hear my experience of the Battle of Cairo. This is part of that experience, so shut the hell up.

  Don’t you dare–

  No, let him be! If there is one resource we do not lack, it is time. The good sergeant is, after all, on our side. Speak then, Bloehn, if you truly think the manner of your awakening was important.

  I do. I woke again and again in a recursive nightmare that ended with me banging on the lid of my stasis pod until my fists bled.

  I came around too soon, you see. By the time the resuscitation tech reached me, I had died a thousand times in my mind. And that shit matters. So what if it all took place in my head? It seemed real to me. Don’t you get it? I died a thousand times. People aren’t designed to do that. Hell, this happened months ago, and I haven’t slept since then. Fatigue slows my body, sure, and my brain dozes but I cannot sleep. I’m too scared of waking up inside a coffin.

  I’m sorry, Bloehn. Getting angry will not help. I do not understand why your resuscitation was so dramatic. Was it a consequence of the rapidity of your unit’s deployment?

  No. It was because I’d been under for 92 years. The maximum was supposed to be 75.

  I understand. You had exceeded the technical specification of your cryogenic suspension system.

  I’d definitely exceeded its legal limit. The only reason we were on ice at all was due to budget cuts. Taxpayers weren’t prepared to pay for the armed services the chiefs of staff said Earth needed, so some bean counter had the bright idea of training up the military we needed, and then freezing them. A soldier in a coffin costs peanuts to keep on ice. Once you’ve invested in the cryo units, all you have to do is keep the power switched on. Most soldiers signed up for a five-year stretch in the freezer, but I went for the maximum permitted – seventy-five years. Beyond that they said the risk of social dislocation would be too great. By social dislocation, I thought they meant waking up and discovering that humans had merged with dolphins and cleared off to live in the oceans of Europa. Not what actually happened.

  How did you reach the battlezone?

  Oh, I’m sorry. Am I moving too slowly for you?

  Yes. The battlezone… Did you march or take vehicles? When did you receive your orders and what were they? Who issued them?

  Whoa there, buddy! Slow down! I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. When they sealed me in that damned coffin and turned up the ice function, my rank of sergeant meant something, but when I came out, it didn’t mean diddly shit. That’s what the bean counters and pen pushers never understood. The tactics had changed – not hugely, but enough to get you killed without retraining. The men and women I’d served with, and formed bonds of understanding and comradeship – all dead. They’d defrosted me and sent me off to the races, but I was the unwanted relation. No one was quite sure who I was or why I was there. Have you any idea what that feels like to a soldier?

  Oh, yes. Very much so. Your commander – what was he like? What was his objective?

  I don’t know. By the time the battle was underway, I still didn’t know who was in command. I just knew we were a scratch task force ordered to destroy the main communications hub in Hardit-occupied Cairo.

  I remember the first Hardit I saw – a pelt, the guys were calling them. We were on the outskirts of Cairo, still traveling to our objective dispersed in mini-convoys of a half-dozen converted civilian trucks. The pelt was supervising a whipping in the town square we were passing through.

  For several seconds, curiosity reigned supreme. I’d never seen a pelt before – I don’t think any of us had. Just a hundred yards from the truck was a living creature with hands and eyes and thoughts in its head, but from another freaking world. The alien’s long, wolf-like snout was stuck onto a simian body thickly coated with fur. It was an ugly and scruffy creature. I couldn’t help but stare at its three eyes set in a triangular arrangement, because there was something unmistakably evil about their sickly yellow glare that horrified me.

  The being gestured with its long tail to the human holding the whip, who lashed it without mercy on the naked back of the man strung up on the post.

  It was the whip’s crack that woke me. Hatred replaced curiosity, and of the collaborator with the whip even more than the alien. How could this be happening on my world? When I went to sleep, Earth and the Terran Worlds had been such a loyal vassal of the White Knights that the idea of invasion seemed improbable – hence the budget cuts.

  I raised an M109 rifle and was readying to poke it through the firing port and shoot that scum with the whip, but everyone bar the driver slapped me down.

  “Not yet,” they told me.

  I knew they were right, but I was still in a post-resuscitation thaw. If you see invaders lording it over innocent civilians, the natural instinct is to kill them.

  You didn’t know how long the Hardits had been there, did you?

  Oh, you’re good. Nail in the head and drive in the spike. Yeah. At that point, I still thought we’d been woken for a strike behind en
emy lines in an ongoing invasion. I didn’t know the Hardits had already won, that Earth had lived under this new alien occupation for ten years before my resuscitation. They should have woken me when the pelts arrived, so I could have shot them as they emerged from their transports. I hadn’t wanted to sleep through it all.

  We’d diverted en route to Cairo so we could raid supply caches secreted in the desert, and it wasn’t until we sped past that whipping post that I understood I too had been war material safely stored away until needed. The joke was on us, you see. The pen pushers and accountants had tried to spin their cost cutting as a long-term defensive strategy – of secreting equipment caches and sleeper units all over the planet. That way, if we ever were invaded, we could emerge months or years later and counterstrike. Turned out they had a point.

  Had anyone in your task force experienced the Hardit invasion?

  Not the soldiers I spoke with. Rumors were rife, though, of the events of ten years earlier. The IFDF had made the enemy pay in blood to take our world. We were proud of the stand our brothers and sisters had made, and now we were bursting to take our own revenge.

  Your commanding officer – did he feel the same pride in the International Federation Defense Force?

  I told you, I never met him.

  Yes, I know. But you lied.

  Oh. Wait… is this about him or me? I thought you were recruiting for the resistance.

  We wish to debrief you on the action at Cairo first.

  Don’t give me that bull. I know what you want. The men and women and children who died as a result of that operation – you don’t care about them. All you want to know about is him. Isn’t it?

  Calm down, Sergeant Bloehn. We do want to know your story, and that of those who fell–

  But not as much as his.

  That is… true. We need to understand why Captain Greyhart was here and now. Bloehn! Stop that! Don’t be a fool.

  I’m fed up of talking to you through a damned hood.

  Stop him!

  Not… not so tough when I’m fighting back, are you?

  Cease! You must not remove the hood. It’s for your own safety.

  You worry about your own safety, pal. Just as soon as I get this damned thing… off.

  Think, man! I don’t know how much you learned about Captain Greyhart, but you must at least suspect that there was more to him than any normal human. I’m like Greyhart. I need to keep to the shadows Oh… frakk! You went and did it, you dumb drellock.

  You… you… what the hell?

  — Chapter 2 —

  When what I assumed to be a resistance cell contacted me a few weeks after I last saw Greyhart, I readily submitted to the thick hood they secured over my head. Outside the cities, the Hardits were rarely seen, but their surveillance devices, human collaborators, and – if the rumors were true – their nocturnal hunting beasts were everywhere.

  The less you knew, the less you could reveal if captured. The hood made sense.

  I’d spent two hours with my senses drawn into the sound and smell of my breathing. So when I ignored my interrogator, and fought off my guards to finally pull off the hood, I was temporarily stunned by sensory overload.

  I was underground and had been for a large part of the journey. Even with the hood, I had known this. I guessed I was inside an ancient tomb in the Valley of the Kings. Made sense. The Hardits cared nothing for the leavings of Earth’s ancient civilizations, and tourism had taken a knockout blow, ever since the Movement Restriction Protocols meant that anyone discovered outside of their registered geo-zone was now shot on sight by the authorities.

  Blue-tinged bioluminescence oozed out of the low-ceilinged but broad chamber I was held within, and extended through the tunnels that led away. The glow was dim, and pulsed in a freakishly organic way, but what it illuminated was stranger still. My guards were all around me, stumbling around the gloom in impenetrable sunglasses, as if they were hiding their identity on the off-chance anyone saw them. The dark glasses had made sense when they’d contacted me and led me here, but now? It was peculiar behavior, as was their appearance. They were men and women of a range of ages and with a strong family resemblance. Cousins, perhaps. And they were tall and hugely muscled, and yet I’d beaten them back for long enough to pull off my hood.

  But I barely registered the strangeness of the humans, because the figure in front of me was not the man he had sounded to be. It was a bloated insect of enormous dimensions, talking through a translation apparatus set upon a rock pillar.

  Insectoid is probably a better term. It was twice as long as I was tall, lacked any limbs, and its flaking skin oozed resin like the bark of a fallen tree left to rot in the forest. Nonetheless, it possessed antennae, and had three body segments that I couldn’t help think of as anything but head, abdomen and thorax.

  I finally regained the power of speech. “You… you… what the hell?”

  “Calm yourself,” said one of the human cousins. “This being here is an ally, an officer of the Human Legion.”

  “The who? What is it? Why hasn’t it got legs?”

  The creature jiggled its antennae. “I commend you, sir,” it said through the speaker set atop the pillar before me, although the being itself made no sound. When I’d been inside the hood, I had assumed the speaker to be a middle-aged man speaking English with a faintly South American accent. “Your species is obsessed with gender, and I have made it my life’s work to study this fixation of yours. You are a rarity in initially referring to me as an it, rather than instinctively trying to assign a gender.”

  “Gender? I call you it because you’re a monster.”

  It laid its antennae back along its head. “That I cannot deny. Bloehn, I warned you not to remove the hood, and now you face the consequences. I desire you no harm, but I have no choice. I serve the human cause and I cannot yet be discovered. Trillions of lives depend on this secrecy. Not merely lives but the continued existence of several species, including your own.”

  “If that’s so, then you seriously need to upgrade your security. These useless hulks you’ve surrounded yourself with couldn’t wrestle a kitten.”

  I suddenly noticed the guns trained on me by the giants in sunshades. They didn’t look as if they could hit a barn door at four paces, but there were about twenty watching me through those dark shades. I remembered another aspect of my hooded journey here. Throughout the twenty minutes or so I’d been underground, I’d heard the bustle of activity all the way. Either this was an elaborate ploy, or I had stumbled across a seriously large operation. I decided I wasn’t getting out of here unless these people wanted me to.

  Crap. “Trillions of lives, eh, big fella? You’ve a high opinion of yourself.”

  “Yes, on both counts,” the giant insect replied. “I shall regret killing you. I grieve every one of the lives I have ended, although I appreciate this offers you little solace.”

  I laughed bitterly. “At least that’s something. For a moment, I thought you were Captain Greyhart revealed in his natural insectoid form. Greyhart also told me I had to die to save trillions, but he tried as hard as he could not to care about a single one of the lives he was spending to save them.”

  The alien lifted its antennae and hesitantly curled them into spirals.

  “Hey, you,” I whistled at one of the humans – a girl so broad shouldered that by rights she should be able to pick me up with one hand. “What’s the big ant saying with its feelers? Time to rid itself of the troublesome sergeant?”

  “No,” she answered. “That configuration of the Great Nest Parent’s antennae signifies amusement.”

  She had the weirdest voice ever. First we’d had this giant insect doing an excellent imitation of human speech, and now this woman’s words were peppered with clicks, burrs and scratchy hissing, as if she were straining her mouth and larynx to sound as insect-like as humanly possible.

  “That is not quite correct,” said the insect. “I am signaling amusement overlaying relief. I do
this because if Greyhart revealed that much of himself to you, Sergeant Bloehn, and let you live, then I too might allow you to go free from this place, despite the enormous risk that would cause.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “About that word – might.”

  “Convince me,” the insect told me. “Tell me of your experience of Captain Greyhart, then I shall decide your fate.”

  “So, I’ve got to sing for my supper, eh? Who do you think I am, Scheherazade?”

  Without any order I could hear, all twenty-odd humans advanced a single step in unison toward me, brandishing their guns.

  “If you like,” said the alien. “Tell me a story and if it pleases me, I shall spare your life. Begin!”

  — Chapter 3 —

  Our objective had been to destroy the Cairo Communications Hub, the main command and control center connecting Hardit forces on Earth’s surface, their settlements underground, and forces in orbit and farther out into the Solar System. The monkeys could have buried most of it underground, but they chose to build it in Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo, and when the facility grew, they leveled the surrounding area whenever it suited them. From what the others told me, this had gone on all over the world: Hardits building over cultural icons and desecrating religious sites whenever possible, just to show us that they could. I even heard that in Washington DC, they’d replaced Lincoln on his stone chair with a statue of the alien’s leader, Tawfiq Woomer-Callix.

  I assumed our attack on the comms facility was part of a plan to take back our world, but as I was dropped off with a small detachment, and ordered to slow down enemy counterattacks along Highway 7, I rapidly established that none of us knew what was going on in the bigger picture. I couldn’t even ask an officer because the last one I’d seen – a harassed young lieutenant whose name I’ve forgotten – had placed me in charge of the detachment before hurrying off to deal with a light artillery piece that had been paired with the wrong ammunition.