But she knew she would never harm her master. If she made the attempt, she would be dead before ever reaching the seemingly fragile creature. But what bound her even more completely than the futility of an attack, was the foreknowledge that she would never be a danger to the mutant masters. The foreseers did not see every detail of the future but they would surely see a rebellion, even an ineffectual, personal one. If there were futures in which the general acted treasonously, then she would have been executed long ago, and the repercussions of her punishment would be terrible in their severity.
As they did in so many matters, the masters had twisted the foreseers’ ability to see the future into an unbreakable grip on the present. Against such power, no resistance was possible.
The master taunted her with his weakness for a moment before changing to a more aggressive form: red-skinned and hugely muscled. There was no apparent transition from one form to another. The transformation was as instant as it was inexplicable.
“How is your wound healing, General?”
Deeproot-Steadfast felt an echo of pain along her left side where the grenade blast had caught her, in a training exercise of all things. “Healing is on schedule, master.”
“You look fit for duty to me. I’m giving you back your old command. Relieve the CO of the 32nd Marine Army and send her back here to take your place. The enemy are preparing their second wave of attacks. The 32nd will draw this second wave down through the upper levels. You will conduct a convincing fighting withdrawal that will nonetheless fail. And when the enemy senses you are beaten, and advances with renewed vigor, then I shall activate the coil defense to trap them here until our reinforcements can destroy them piece by piece.” The master mutant’s eyes narrowed and yellowed. “I see you forgot to wear your battlesuit, General. Try not to die too quickly, but do make sure to die. Now, leave me!”
She bowed and backed away before hurrying as best she could to comply. Her mind was so engrossed with the practical details of leading her command one last time, that when she saluted Senior Staff General Scrutineer-Vigilant on her way out, she almost failed to notice the general’s flared-back ears.
Was that a sign of anger, or sympathy? And if Scrutineer-Vigilant had such disloyal thoughts in her head, why had the foreseers not seen them long ago?
Deeproot-Steadfast cast this distracting puzzle from her mind. Such intrigues were for others now. Her fate was set.
— CHAPTER 36 —
“Promise me one thing,” said Remus when the volume of enemy fire pinging off the Lynx’s nose shield grew to a whining crescendo. “Janna?”
The Wolf huddling beside him in the lee of the mini-tank’s protection flung Remus an angry glare, the combat rage adding a demonic red glow behind her green-and-gold-flecked eyes that illuminated the interior of her breathing mask.
“Promise me you’ll stay alive,” he insisted. “For Romulus.”
Janna struggled to regain the power of speech. The berserker craze was almost upon her. “Don’t confuse me,” she snarled. “That’s how to stay alive – by being myself. He’s dead, anyway.”
Remus shook his head. “No, I’d know if Romulus were dead. I don’t mean a fraternal connection that I would tell if it ever severed. I mean every time I push for answers, the authorities always evade. If Rom had been killed–”
“Shut up, and look around!”
Remus bit his tongue. Janna was right: this was no time to discuss Romulus. With a start, he realized that nerves were making him babble. As a former squadron leader he had fought in many battles, but this was the first battle he’d fought on foot.
He also wasn’t used to being out of the command loop. The recon drones were blasting away at the enemy defensive position, where the road turned up ahead before descending down to the next level. What were their probes revealing? As a private soldier in the 7th Armored Claw, such information was now far above his pay grade. Were they about to charge the enemy, bloodcurdling battle cries of the Wolves echoing off the ceiling? Or were they about to pull out?
With the last of the New Empire’s outer perimeter mopped up by the Lynx machine gun turrets, the scene calmed. But when Remus looked around at the Wolves, he knew withdrawal was impossible by this point. The 7th Armored Claw was like a powder keg with a fuse already lit and about to blow.
Like many of their generation of the Human Marine Corps, the Wolves were originally bred and engineered to be a terror weapon, but even the geneticists who had designed them couldn’t have imagined how the weapon they had built would combine with the Ginquin skin parasite. It had been a freak accident. Romulus and Remus had been infected by a mother Ginquin who had nuzzled them as babies. When the brothers with their taller physiques, clad with muscle, had grown to be young men – virile youngsters surrounded by admiring young Wolf women, who were not shy about taking what they wanted – the parasite began to spread throughout the Wolf population. Soon, it became a badge of identity, and a ritual of infection was formalized for those Wolves who hadn’t shared rack time with the right people.
All around, Wolf soldiers with wild eyes and bared teeth strained at the leash. Many of them went sky clad, stripped to the waist to better display the colorful zigzags and whorls of their armored skin. Many would fight naked if they could, but even Wolves had vulnerabilities in their groins and the soles of their feet where the armor was weak, and they needed equipment boxes, rations, and the breathing masks to guard against the Flek’s poison.
The Wolves most eager for the fight began to edge away from the protective cone of the Lynxes’ shields. A salvo of missiles screamed around the corner and exploded overhead, showering the walls in fragmentation bursts. Those who had strayed from the protection of the Lynxes suffered the most, blown along the ground by the shockwaves. Peppered with shrapnel, they nonetheless shook their heads and picked themselves up. Most of them, anyway.
The six of them behind their Lynx looked okay except… Janna! A vicious shard of ceramalloy rose from her bare skin, just above one breast. She hadn’t even noticed, but he estimated that the shrapnel had embedded an inch or more. He itched to do something – to pull out the fragment and apply a med-patch that would automatically sterilize, seal, and staunch any internal bleeding. But he forced himself to obey his 7th Armored Claw retraining, and did nothing. Med-patches were for humans, and the hexagonal plates that covered Janna’s torso in swirls of greens and golds were not human.
He watched her skin reject the foreign body, squeezing out the invader until it fell to the floor. Merde! He’d been wrong. The shard had punctured her body to about the length of his index finger, and Janna hadn’t noticed.
She was amazing. Romulus was one lucky guy to have shared his love with this Wolf girl. Whatever stupid things Rom had done to get in so much trouble, he prayed his brother had not wronged this woman.
A sudden surge of power fueled Remus’s muscles, making him impatient to step out from behind the nose shield of the Lynx and unleash the fury of the SA-75(h) mobile mini-gun with its enormous backpack that would prove too heavy a burden for even the strongest Wolf. Even though Remus was a different variety of human from the Wolves, born centuries later, he had been raised as a Wolf and felt the battle rage infuse him.
He snarled at the soldier operating the mini-tank. The stink of that creature burned in his nostrils, slicing through the fumes of burning and explosives, burrowing underneath the light sprinkling of poisonous Flek, and forcing its way through his breathing filter. Romulus and Remus had been named by Colonel Nhlappo because their birth mothers had been so dismayed by the nightmare world they had brought their babies into, that they had refused to name them, not until such time as they dared to hope that their children had any kind of future. That was the story Momma had taught them, and their birth mothers had been right, because they had died at the hands of that tanker’s stinking people.
Hardits!
Remus raised the barrel of his mini-gun. The cables connecting the stubby barrel with the back
pack throbbed with urgent need.
A low growl rumbled at the back of Remus’s throat. It would be so easy. A quick burst of fire, and the Hardit would be a mess of matted fur, soaked in blood. An accident of war.
A massive blow to his temple sent Remus reeling, arms out to keep his balance. He stumbled out of the cone shape that was the mini-tank’s shield, feeling his body ripple as he passed through the invisible barrier. The dropped barrel of his mini-gun dangled by its strap, and made him yelp when it crashed against the inside of his knee.
“He’s on our side, arsehole!” Janna shouted. She brandished her fist and looked eager to punch him again.
Remus scrambled back inside the force shield, limping a little.
Little Janna didn’t even come up to the collarbone of a modern Marine such as Remus, but she didn’t need physical stature to stare him down, draining enough of his hatred that he looked away, ashamed.
The Wolf berserker was right. If anything, the Hardit volunteers from Klin-Tula hated Tawfiq and the New Order more than anyone. And although the Legion commanders born on Tranquility had been reluctant to admit Hardit soldiers, they couldn’t subvert their claim that the Human Legion represented all dispossessed and downtrodden people. They had grudgingly accepted that the Hardit survivors of the New Order’s conquest of Klin-Tula had every right to join the Legion.
And so it had fallen to the Hardits to put the ‘armored’ into the 7th Armored Claw. No one could doubt their talent for engineering, and cobbling together spare parts into what was officially designated the A-132 mini-tank, but was known universally as the Lynx. A tracked all-terrain vehicle with limited hover capability, the Lynx’s dimensions were no longer than a Marine’s outstretched arms, and less than half that in width. Yet the single crewmember packed an enormous punch with his heavy machine guns that could fire through the force shield which would momentarily switch off as each round passed through.
No one else had ever heard of a weapon synchronized to a force shield in this way, but the female Hardits who designed and maintained the mini-tanks had quietly upgraded the Lynxes with force shields without bothering to tell anyone their intentions, certainly not the male Hardits that crewed the tanks. That was hardly surprising as, outside of their brief mating season, male and female Hardits barely tolerated each other; the tank crews deploying that same professional contempt for the non-Hardits in the unit.
When Remus had tried to strike up a conversation with a Hardit tanker, to express his admiration for the synchronized force shield, the male was adamant that the female engineers had done nothing praiseworthy. As the Hardit put it: “Even you humans didn’t take long to develop synchronized machine guns in your aircraft capable of firing through propellers. The indolent females should have done this long ago. And if you think this is impressive, it’s only because humans are so stupid they didn’t think to remember their own history.”
Remus gripped the barrel of his mini-gun, and waited for the order to go, grateful to be fighting alongside the Hardit volunteers, no matter how impossible it was to like them.
At last, the aggressively amplified voice of Sub-Leader Matias sliced through Remus’s contemplation.
“Go for glory!” he screamed. “Go for blood! Kill!”
From the depths of their souls, an answering cry erupted from the minds of every Wolf soldier. They made no attempt to form words, the declaration of violent intent stemming from a more primitive instinct that long predated language. Remus, too, channeled his every frustration and fear to a high-pitched scream. Even the Hardit in his Lynx stirred from his studied indifference and flung his mini-tank into motion.
The vehicle’s tracks skidded, fighting for traction on the road surface covered with debris, and flinging a hail of detritus on Remus and the half-dozen Wolves behind. Then it was away at such a breakneck speed that even the charging Wolves couldn’t keep up.
Missiles streaked in both directions around the bend in the road. Explosions shook the ground and flung up plumes of shattered road surface that dropped as a hail onto the 7th Armored Claw, sliding harmlessly along the sides of the Lynx shield cones.
Remus stumbled, but kept running.
The air hummed with a new sound. He looked up and saw discs flying overhead, beginning to collect behind the advancing Wolves like a cloud of insects.
These enemy drones opened fire on the unshielded rear of the Wolf teams. A moment later and Remus let rip with his mini-gun. The SA-75 was an old weapon – largely replaced by the heavier GX-cannon – that had been designed to provide infantry squads with heavy fire support. Even without powered armor, Remus was strong enough to wield this heavy weapon and zigzagged a firing pattern through the cloud of drones. Remus only had to aim in the vicinity of his target, and the semi-intelligent munitions did the rest, blasting the drones out of the air in fiery explosions that lit the ceiling far overhead.
Alerted to the danger, the Lynx gunners traversed their turrets through 180 degrees and finished off the rest of the drones. The distraction slowed the mini-tanks enough for the Wolves to catch up and regain their protection just before they turned the bend and took on the enemy face-to-face.
The Wolves kept just enough discipline to remain shielded by the Lynxes as they were met by a hail of small arms fire, and then they were off. Screaming in berserker rage, the Wolves sprinted at the defenders, the two tips of their double-crescent combat knives glinting in the light of explosions.
The defenders were Kurlei: tall, lightly armed troops accomplished at scouting and infiltration. Remus could see in an instant that he faced an expendable position, intended to take the sting out of the 1st Marine Division’s attack. The Kurlei must know that their senior commanders had already given them up for dead, and faced with the terror of the charging Wolves – the harbingers of their deaths – they faltered.
Fire discipline fell apart. A few individuals began to look behind, but there was no escape for them.
Their hastily prepared barricades were blasted away by the Lynxes, and with Remus’s mini-gun laying down a lethal wall of fire that punished any nearby Kurlei moving out of cover, the defenders’ forward position was doomed.
Remus ceased his suppressive fire as the leading Wolves leapt barricades and slashed down on the defenders with their blades. The Wolves were meant to be a terror weapon, and the sight of their deadly work tore Remus between horror, and a dark temptation to join them in their berserker craze.
It was never enough for a Wolf to merely kill their opponents. They decapitated the enemies, sliced open their guts and wrapped their enemies’ entrails around their necks as war trophies. Janna drop kicked a severed head into the next defensive line, dripping blood as it sailed through the air. The head exploded in a mess of blood, skull fragments, and brain matter as it was caught in the suppressive fire laid down by the Lynxes against deeper lines of defense.
In contrast to the berserker rage of the Wolves, the Hardits’ demeanor was calm bordering on nonchalant. Even Remus had to admit that the two attitudes complemented perfectly. The rears of the Lynxes were vulnerable without support from the Wolves. For the mini-tanks to advance alone would be suicide. So the Hardits had backed away just before the Wolves crashed into the defensive line and harassed the deeper lines of Kurlei defense, preventing them from supporting their comrades, who were being butchered before their eyes.
Weighed down by his SA-75, Remus struggled to keep up. By the time he reached the dismembered flesh where Janna and their group had encountered the enemy, the others were already screaming towards the next defensive barrier, the Hardits racing to overtake them.
Remus checked for any dangers still lurking, knowing that the Wolves were not exactly known for their thoroughness. He saw a wounded Kurlei lifting her rifle to shoot the Wolves in the back, and eradicated the threat with an accurate burst from his mini-gun.
Instantly, he was assailed with doubts.
Why do you fight? There is no need to fight, we are not your enemy.
>
“Yes, you are. Get out of my head!”
The Hardits, Remus. They murdered your parents. They are your true enemy.
Remus had no answer. It was all he could do to stumble forward after Janna. He knew what was happening, but that was no help. Kurleis were empaths, able to reach into minds and distract their opponents. That’s what made them so good at infiltration.
Shoot the Hardits!
“No!” But Remus glared at the Hardit tanker in the Lynx roaring past him. He saw a murderer, not a comrade. He picked up his pace. He couldn’t let that murdering Hardit bastard take Janna too.
Kill the Hardit and then go back, Remus. To advance is certain death, and there’s no shame in running.
Remus bit down on his tongue, and nearly choked as the blood bubbled up, filling his mouth. Pain and the taste of blood gave his mind the breathing room to rationalize this attack on his resolve.
The mental attack was bouncing off the berserkers harmlessly – empaths had no leverage against sociopaths, and that was what the Wolves were when their bodies glowed with bloodlust. The Hardits in their mini-tanks were too bloody-minded, and too fixated on the idea of an ultimate confrontation with the New Order to notice the Kurlei attack.
We’re your friends, not your enemies.
But Remus felt the vulnerability in his mind as doubts clawed their way into his resolve and raised their own questions. Who was he fighting for? Had the Legion betrayed Romulus? Was his brother dead? Knowing who was seeding these ideas made no difference.
You have failed your family.
A hard slap twisted him around, as a bullet skimmed off his shoulder. It was a wake-up call – a sign from the Fates that Remus had failed his brother, failed Janna too, and deserved his inevitable destiny to die here in this charnel house. All the doubts and worries about himself and his brother – the constant struggle against the enemies in war – all of that sloughed away like dead skin for him to emerge new and purified, ready to embrace his imminent demise. The mini-gun became a crushing burden. His flesh could shoulder its heavy weight, but his spirit no longer could. He had no need of weapons in the afterlife. Remus unstrapped the mini-gun, letting it fall to the floor.
War Against the White Knights Page 22
