Though his eyes remained on the screens, it was clear to Exo that the man’s mind was far away. An old fool killing time among memories of what was and what might have been.
Then the old man turned toward Exo and smiled.
Exo shook his head. Just some old wreck talking trash because he knew no one would do anything about it.
“Didn’t say fortune and glory.” Exo waved the guy off. “Adventure. Adventure and glory,” he mumbled. He swallowed what remained in the glass before him.
“Same thing,” whined the old man distantly.
The guy was right, Exo thought. He had it all wrong. The Legion was always about getting over your malfunctions and toughing it out. How many times had DI Mard pounded that into his thick skull back in basic? “Know thyself, maggot… and stay alive.” That and, “Check yo’self before you wreck yo’self.”
Except Exo didn’t really know what the Legion was all about now. Not here. Not after what had happened on Kublar.
He’d lost his way. And he knew it.
Lost the meaning of it all.
Gotten everything wrong.
“So what’s got your weapon all jammed up, Leej?”
Exo shook his head. He didn’t need some barroom rummy psy-empath.
“Ah,” continued the old man. “Lemme guess here… Ah. Those fine people you call your superiors have probably gone and done something completely stupid. Like getting your buddies killed. And then, to top it off, they’ve doubled down and given themselves some award, or a shiny medal… while you got a big old fat nothin’. So your buddies probably got killed in the process, and you think that’s all soooooo unfair.” He took a sip of his drink and smacked his lips together lustily, as though warming up for something bigger. “Now you wanna go ahead and quit the Legion.”
Exo said nothing, choosing instead to stew in his own simmering bitterness.
“Go ahead and try to make it out there on your own like some hired blaster. Maybe even get yourself a ship and try smugglin’. Get that fortune and forget the glory… because, well, it don’t pay.”
“Adventure,” Exo corrected again.
“Oh, yeah, sorry kid, fortune and adventure. You’re just dying to find that out there somewhere right up next to the galaxy’s edge. Where your blaster can make a name, and only the quick as opposed to the dead get that great big old award, the only one that really counts—gettin’ to live another day.”
The bartender passed through, checked Exo’s drink, and got the next ready with little fanfare. Not even bothering to ask if Exo wanted another. He knew a binge when he saw one.
“Is that about right?” continued the old man when the bartender had played his part and moved on.
Still, Exo said nothing. He sat considering his next round of poison.
“Well, Leej,” whined the old man as he picked up his drink once more. “You got time for one last story before you go?”
Nothing.
“It’s a good one. Real heroes. Real adventure.”
The old man waited, as though hovering over some fine steak, waiting for permission to continue. When Exo didn’t bite, he took another drink and shrugged in an “Oh well, your loss” sort of gesture. He returned to the screen above the bar, and its ghostly blue light turned his creased and wrinkled features to stone.
The return to silence and the red murder raging inside Exo’s head was almost too much. He barely waved his hand. Rotating it in the air. The Legion signal for continue.
“This was way before you were born,” began the old man after a moment. “Place was called Khan Saak. Don’t hurt your head—you’ve never heard of it. It’s way out there in the big deep dark. Ain’t nothin’ there now, I just about promise you that. Nothing except some leej graves. Mighty fine boys. Men. All of ’em. Though… if you woulda asked me at the time, I might’ve had a different opinion, but… ah, well, I was young. And dumb. Then. Like you are now.
“And believe me, if you think the Republic has changed, gotten worse like it’s all going downhill fast nowadays, well, it was horrible then too. You just had to look around in all the wrong places.
“The good old days… weren’t. Simple as that.
“So, where was I? Oh yeah—Skaurvold’s piss pot. See, this Skaurvold was a regular pirate prince. He’d been making trouble out in that sector for a long time. Knocked off a few ultrafreighters, took some hostages, he was, as they like to say… going places.
“Until one day he pissed off the wrong people, and they sent us in to fix his little red wagon. Real good. You know the drill. Go in, break their stuff, kill their leaders. Except… well, honestly, kid, we got in way over our heads real quick-like. All the Repub intel was crap. Lemme ask you: is it still crap?”
Exo nodded.
“Figured. Well, old Skaurvold had found himself a little treasure out there on the rim of the galaxy, the edge. Y’know, where stuff gets real weird sometimes—of course you know, you just came in from Kublar. Well anyway, he found a whole new race. No first contact records or nothin’. Maybe there was once. Maybe the Repub went in and found out why no one had ever come back from that system survey. Once we showed up, we coulda told ’em exactly why. Because whoever discovered that system ran smack dab into the perfect killing machine.”
Silence washed over the bar. Down the way, the bartender seemed to be working at something.
“They tell you that in the Legion, don’t they? Tell you you’re the pinnacle of the art of killing other life forms. The perfect killing machine. Well… nuh-uhhhhh!” The old man let out a wheezy gust of what breath remained in him. “We met those monsters in no-holds-barred, toe-to-toe, man-to-man combat right at Skaurvold’s palace. And you wanna know the funniest thing about the whole mess? If some old diplomat no one ever heard of hadn’t tried to blow up the House of Reason, we might never have known about these things until it was far too late to do anything about them.
“See, whoever that old geezer was, and that’s funny because I’m an old geezer now, he tried to assassinate the council. Said they’d lost touch with the people. Ha! Ain’t that the truth? I bet the guy wasn’t half bad. Anyway, they killed him. And he had this daughter, a real fox, and they sent her to be executed at Demaron V. Well, good old Skaurvold hijacked the ship she was on, an Omicron-class starliner—can you believe I remember what kind of ship she was on after all these years?—and made off with her.
“Boy, I’d give anything to be that young and stupid again.
“So this Skaurvold takes her back to his palace on his little nothing world, and he makes her a slave in his harem. But see, Repub wants to kill her real bad-like. So they send us in to rescue her so they can kill her. Crazy, huh?”
The old man stopped, wiped some spit from his lips, and took a sip of his drink. After this he coughed.
“You know who we were?”
Exo said nothing.
“Ever hear of the 101st Screaming Raptors? Some used to call it Rex’s Dogsoldiers?
Yeah, Exo had heard of one of the most decorated leej units ever. Everyone had. Except they all got wiped out at Andaar.
“And how about General Rex?” the old man continued, staring intently at Exo. “You ever hear of him?”
Exo hadn’t.
“Why, General Rex was a basified hero. Back when heroes were real heroes, mind you. Savage Wars. Rebellion at Tychon. The Gomarii Actions. The Spinward War. All the big ones. And he was our general.”
The old man straightened a bit in his seat. As though the mere mention of this fabled general had reawakened some long-lost pride that allowed him to carry himself with dignity and bearing worthy of the young man he’d once been.
“So… we go in hot. Assault corvettes laying down prep fire. Three of ’em. Big sky battle over the palace. Skaurvold’s got all kinds of pirate freighters and attack fighters from just about every surplus local navy in the galaxy. We lose two corvettes to a planetary ion gun no one told anyone about, but we manage to get our ship planet-side. Except s
he ain’t goin’ nowhere now, since the old bucket was shot to pieces and burning by the time we started digging in.
“Well, then we get into a big old fight. I tell ya, I never seen the likes of it. And that’s when we met the perfect killing machines. The Cybar, they were called. Biomechanical AI lifeforms almost as old as the Ancients. You know what that is? Well, if you don’t, I’ll tell you. They were living machines that could think. Not like stupid servitor bots—these could really think and reason. And what they thought a whole lot about was killing.
“So… you gotta imagine a spider crossed with a velociraptor. Kinda like a tyranasquid but… human-sized. Like us. And to boot—just for giggles, ya know, cause we’re already up to our eyeballs in pirates with guns—these freaky monsters don’t feel pain. And they also don’t go down all that easy. In fact, almost not at all. They come in at you hard and fast, and you could be putting blasts on target and your marksmanship doesn’t seem to do anything to them. Them Cybars was tough.
“But somehow this Skaurvold had gotten them under his control. Later we’d find out he was breeding an army of them out in some old ancient ruins up in these high jungle mountains beyond the palace. In other words, he was looking to next-level his game from pirate to downright warlord. Who knows what after that? Seems like any old local thug can run for the Senate these days.
“So we go in blasters blazing on the palace for this ‘rescue’ mission to get some fox the Repub wants to kill themselves. Again, parse that out, young leej. What have we lost so far… close to five hundred leejes and three corvettes and crew? Just to kill one pretty little fox? Somethin’ don’t seem right, but I never did find out what.
“And maybe that’s the thing. Maybe none of it don’t never make no sense no matter how many times you try to fix the jam. Maybe war ain’t s’posed to make sense. And if it did, then maybe smart people wouldn’t do it. I know they wouldn’t try to be a legionnaire. You got to have no sense to try and pull that off.”
The old man cleared his throat once more.
“I can think of dozen better ways to die. But back then we was all real excited to get ourselves killed. Y’know… leej tattoos and ooah. What’s the old saying? ‘Heartbreakers and… and… and lemme see…”
“Lifetakers,” said Exo.
“Yaassssss!” cheered the old man. “Heartbreakers and lifetakers! That was us. We got pirates with trick blaster rigs and even mean old mercs shooting at us as we advance on the palace. In fact, we’re takin’ real heavy, and I mean heavy, casualties from all directions. I mean fire. Fire from all directions. Casualties everywhere. But you know how it is—Sarge says keep moving forward. You have a good sergeant, leej?”
“The best,” Exo answered, staring into the empty bottom of his glass. “Made brevet lieutenant. And then they took it away from him.”
The old man nodded. “That sounds about right. So you keep on movin’ forward. I was a sergeant, so I had to say it. LT told me. Cap’n told him. General Rex probably told the cap’n… so you know the drill… move forward no matter what.
“Well, once we reach the palace—and that, as they say, was something in and of itself—we see that it was old. Real old. Real old ruins the Ancients left behind long ago, and this Skaurvold had turned them into his personal pleasure palace. And you know how those old Ancient ruins is when you get to crawlin’ around inside ’em. All weird angles and passages that don’t make no sense. Those weird runes. Crazy-cray.”
The old man’s face is ghostly white and gray now. Exo knows that death has made its appointment with this old leej. It’s coming for him despite his attempts to get killed by the galaxy. The old man knows it, too. It is known. Not today. Maybe not even tomorrow. But soon. The appointment has been made for this dodgy old leej despite his best attempts to delay the inevitable.
Exo vows not to get old. Not to die.
As if.
The old man leans forward into the pale light above the bar like some master storyteller on the shows and says, “We lost half a company in them ruins. Half a company. Of legionnaires. And that was just to start.”
Silence covers the bar. Far down the way, near the exit out onto the street, the door opens, and white light washes across the bar. Outside, the world is alight and bright and the opposite of all that is hidden here in the shadows. The door slams, and darkness returns again.
“That’s when the old pirate slipped the leash on most of his Cybar. Sent ’em right on us,” whispered the hoary old man.
Pause.
“They came out of the walls like real live monsters, or so it seemed. In a moment we was getting chopped to shreds. See, they’d come in at ya, you doing that sustained firing thing they teach you back in basic. Doing your almighty best to put them down. But they don’t care about center mass. Their systems just rerouted power and kept coming at you while some sort of internal repair function started rebuilding the damage right before your eyes. They come in with two to three solid hits from the old N-16 dead on target. Pirates and mercs, they’d be dead with shots like that. The Cybar still come straight at you. And those things acted like they were mad. How do ya stop that kind of real life crazy-cray?”
The old man searched the ether before his eyes as though he might find the answer to that particular question all these years later right here in this bar. But he didn’t, and he continued on.
“That ain’t half the worst of it. See, then they start to cut into ya once they got you all pinned down with these flexible metal tentacles. And believe it or not they’d download… something… some kind of virus, right into your brain. They’d re-wire you right on the spot into some kind of living death. I ain’t kidding here. Within a few minutes you’re a walking host for another one of ’em as it starts to cannibalize your biologic for its mechanical. Yeah… I know… it don’t make no sense. It didn’t then either, and I saw it right with my own eyes. Did I mention my buddies’ eyes have rolled back in their heads and they’re using their blaster rifles on their fellow leejes?”
Exo stared at the old man in silence, wondering if everything he said was true. Or just crazy.
The old man must have sensed this, as he moved in for the kill. “They don’t tell you this story, do they? In basic. None of the old DIs tell ya because only a few of us made it out of there alive. I’m one. And no, we didn’t get no medals or fancy award ceremonies. We got told to shut up because the Repub don’t like failure. ’Specially when they tryin’ to kill someone. So I know all about where you’re at right now, young leej. Been there. Done that. Got the scars.”
The old man stared at Exo for a long moment. As though he were still a heartbreaker, and a lifetaker. As though he was daring the young leej rippling with muscles to call him a liar. Or even crazy.
“We made it,” said the old leej. “We made it to the girl. Into the inner sanctum of Skaurvold’s fortress. Blasting our way and watching corners. Tactical. Shoot, move, and communicate. You know all that stuff. Made it in there, and don’t she look like a real live slave girl princess from one of them films. Silk bikini and she’s putting a knife right in old Skaurvold’s big belly. Fat bastard is dancing around with a double-barreled blaster, tryna pull it out hisself. He was a Cyclorean, so you know they’re real big to begin with. But there’s just five of us left, and the general. And we ain’t doing so hot.
“We’re about fifteen stories up the side of Skaurvold’s palace and we got all these monsters howling on the far side of the harem door. Screaming like a banshee’s nightmare. Don’t know why they did that. But they sounded like they were in some kind of eternal torment. And mixed in with them is all the dead leejes that were our buddies just two hours ago.
“General Rex, he’s wearing that old Mark I armor. A real operator from the big book of old-school bad dudes. He just says, ‘Time to go,’ like we can just waltz on out should it please us and such. Never mind all the demons tryna get to us.”
The old man laughed, but it was really a gargling cough.
&n
bsp; “‘Sir,’ says I, because I was just a sergeant then and my LT was too awestruck to say anything to the greatest hero the Legion ever managed to squeeze out, I says, ‘Sir, we’re fifteen stories up. How we gettin’ out of here, exactly?’”
The old man leaned in closer. As though he was giving an aside to some witty cocktail party anecdote.
“Mind you, this ain’t a polite conversation like you and I are having right in this here bar. This is us in an improvised firing position inside a princess slave girl’s fantasy harem with these weird shrieking Cybars coming at us like screaming smart-bullets and the pirates taking shots at us at every possible opportunity.
“There was just us. No leej fire support. No Repub close air or strategic on station. No medics. No supply convoy or heavy armor. It was me, Lieutenant Hilbert, Corporal Tacas, and two privates. Ahamalee and Ren. In system we had a carrier task group—the Orion—on standby, but none of the group ships could get close to that ion gun.”
“I had a CO named Hilbert,” Exo offered. “Damn fine legionnaire.”
The old man nodded. “Good name. Where was we? Oh, right. ‘Sir,’ I says to the general, ‘how we gettin’ outta here? Exactly-like.’ ’Cause remember I told you we was fifteen stories up. His reply is, ‘Five clicks back to the LZ. That’s how, Sergeant,’ he says to me.
“So at that point I’m like every NCO you ever met. Officers sure are dumb, but I ain’t gonna get no court marital. So I guess I’ll jes’ get killed and all doin’ what he says I gotta do.
“‘Mother, this is Little Boy Blue.’ That’s what he said. General’s on tac support calling in an orbital strike. He says, ‘Mother, this is Little Boy Blue… I say broken arrow.’ Uh-oh. Broken arrow! Now, I don’t know what you guys use for codes these days, but that was one no leej ever wanted to hear. Ever. You guys still use it?”
Exo nodded.
“So you know what it means then?”
Exo nodded again.
Legionnaire Page 21
