Legion Of The Damned - 01 - Legion of the Damned (10 page)

“Roamer Two to Roamer Patrol. I heard traffic on freq four. Confirm.”

“That’s a negative, Roamer Two,” Gunner replied.

“Roamer Three didn’t hear it either,” Rossif added.

“Ditto Roamer Four,” Jones put in.

Roller’s voice was hard and sarcastic. “What’s the problem, Roamer Two? Getting nervous?”

Villain was about to reply when Booly’s voice boomed through the interface.

“Roamer One to Roamer Patrol. Cut the crap. We have some brellas feeding on something off to the right. Let’s take a look, Roamer Two.”

Servos whirred as Villain moved her head to the right. She saw the cluster of carrion eaters and swore silently.
She
was the one with the electro-optics,
she
had the point, and
she
had missed it. Damn Roller anyway. The bastard had a way of getting under her armor.

Villain started to jog, scanning the countryside as she did so, determined not to make the same mistake twice. With each step her metal feet broke through the crust of frozen sand and made a loud crunching sound. Booly clung to her back in the same way that her little brother had so long ago. The memory brought pain and she pushed it away.

Focus, she had to focus, had to see what was around her. Little tufts of vegetation dotted the plain, then disappeared as the ground rose, and funneled itself into a canyon. The sky had grown dark and started the transition into night.

Villain called up a satellite map, zoomed into the section she wanted, and saw that the canyon cut through the foothills to communicate with the desert beyond. The place was custom-made for an ambush. Exactly the sort of route to avoid if at all possible.

The brellas saw the Trooper II coming but were so gorged with meat that they had difficulty taking off.

“Slow down and stop fifty feet out.”

The command came from Booly via intercom rather than radio. It was a kindness on Booly’s part. A recognition that she was green and still learning. Other noncoms, like Roller, for example, would’ve put the order on-air just to humiliate her.

Villain slowed and came to a halt. The last brella drew air in, pushed it explosively outwards, and lumbered into the air. The body it had been feeding on was that of a Naa, only slightly decomposed, but badly disfigured by scavengers.

“The body could be booby-trapped,” Booly said calmly, “or surrounded by mines. That’s why you stop to scope things out.”

Villain knew this was a valuable lesson and was careful to file it away. The sergeant major switched to radio.

“Roamer One to Roamer Seven ... I need a trooper on the double.”

Booly climbed down from his perch on Villain’s back and circled the body. He felt stiff and sore but was careful to conceal it. There was no sign of booby traps, but he did see dooth dung, scuff marks, and some empty shell casings. All pointed to a fight of some kind, and based on the way they were spread around, the legionnaire suspected a one-sided battle.

Wismer had been forced to run from the depression in which Gunner was crouched and arrived slightly out of breath.

“Yes, Sergeant Major?”

The noncom pointed towards the corpse. “Probe the ground. Don’t hit the body.”

A less experienced soldier might have wondered why the sergeant major had given the assignment to a bio bod when a Trooper II stood ten feet away. But Wismer understood. Booly was afraid the newbie would make a mistake and didn’t want to say so. Some said the sergeant major was a borg lover. This sort of thing proved it.

Wismer brought his energy weapon up to his shoulder and fired. There was a stutter of blue light, followed by a puff of steam and the glow of molten rock. Nothing happened, so he repeated the procedure, until the area around the body was pockmarked with shallow black holes.

Booly moved in for a closer look. He used the newly made depressions like stepping-stones, avoiding the unmarked ground and the possibility of an undiscovered mine. Heat seeped up through the bottom of his boots to warm his feet. The body was a mess and the smell made him gag.

Villain decided that Booly was a cut above other noncoms. She knew, as her peers did, that officers and noncoms were taught to sacrifice cyborgs rather than expose themselves to danger.

It made sense in theory. Given their armor, and considerable weaponry, the cyborgs were much more likely to survive than bio bods were. The only problem was that many officers and noncoms tended to ignore the fact that the destruction of cyborg limbs, armor, and sensors was experienced as pain. Pain equal to that felt by embodied brains.

The techies had designed borgs that way on purpose, to make sure that they took care of their expensive bodies, and as a means of discipline. Trooper Ils were heavily armed, after all, and more than a match for a squad of bio bods, so some sort of control mechanism was a must. Or so it seemed to the bio bods.

Villain remembered the zappers the DIs had used on her in boot camp and shuddered. She knew bio-bod officers were authorized to carry them but hadn’t seen one used since basic. She hoped she never would.

A host of tiny black insects acknowledged Booly’s presence by taking to the air, buzzing around in a seemingly random pattern, then settling down again. Booly knew that he should have sent Villain to examine the body but wanted to see it with his own eyes. What he saw, and more than that, what he smelled, made him sick. The brellas had gone for the eyes first. Then, following the path of least resistance, they had used the bullet holes to open the abdominal cavity and feast on the victim’s entrails.

The Naa’s clothing was tattered and stained with blood but told a story nonetheless. The braided armband, worn just above the right elbow, signified membership in the northern tribe. Not unusual in and of itself, since the members of the southern tribe stayed below the equator and didn’t venture north except for war and trade.

No, the significance of the armband lay in the fact that this particular Naa had been a member of a tribe, rather than a group of outlaws. That, pl
us the ceremonial beads that had been ripped from his neck and lay scattered on the ground, suggested an initiate.

Yes, Booly decided, chances were that the body belonged to a young male, undergoing the final rites of passage into adulthood, and unlucky enough to be caught in the open by outlaws.

His expression hardened. Naa outlaws were the scourge of both the tribes
and
the Legion. They took females, stole anything that wasn’t nailed down, and took great pleasure in torturing legionnaires. Some took days or even weeks to die.

Booly stood and eyed the gathering darkness. If he could catch them and put them six feet under, Algeron would be a better place to live. But it would be risky, very risky, since the trail led straight into the canyon, and the canyon would make an excellent place for an ambush.

But if outlaws
had
killed the Naa, there was no reason for them to expect a patrol to come along at this particular time, and therefore little or no reason for an ambush. That, combined with the fact that the patrol packed enough firepower to deal with anything short of a full-scale tribal attack, led to his final decision. They would risk the canyon, catch the outlaws, and send them to the Naa equivalent of hell.

Booly walked back to where Villain waited, climbed into position, and activated his radio.

“Roamer One to Roamer Patrol. It looks like some outlaws caught the poor slob, canceled his ticket, and took off through that canyon. We’re going after them. Same order as before, condition five, blast anything that moves.”

Villain felt emptiness where her stomach had been. She was about to enter what could be a trap. Not only that, but she’d be the first one in and the first one to take fire.

Villain remembered the impact as bullets hit her flesh, the wave of darkness, and the brutal awakening that had followed.

Anger rose to displace the fear. No matter what waited in the darkness, and no matter what happened beyond, she would live. Because then, and only then, could she hope to find the person responsible for her death. Find him and kill him.

Villain brought her weapons systems to condition five readiness, cranked her infrared sensors to high-gain, and moved forward. God help any Naa who got in her way.

Gunner waited for Rossif and Jones to move out, checked to make sure that Wutu was covering his ass, and stood up. His sensors probed ahead. The canyon looked dark and ominous. Booly was out of his fraxing mind. Good. This was the patrol he’d been waiting for. The one where he took a missile right between the shoulder blades. The armor was thinner there and more likely to buckle under the force of an explosion.

He’d have to unload the bio bods, but that was SOP and would happen shortly after the first few rounds were fired.

Gunner wondered what death would be like. His wife had believed in paradise, complete with angels, saints, and streets of gold. That would be nice, he guessed, especially if he could see her again, but darkness would be fine. An eternal darkness unlit by the flames that consumed his family’s flesh and empty of his children’s screams. Yes, he decided, this would be an excellent place to die.

Satisfied that the others had a sufficient lead, Gunner moved forward, his scanners running at maximum sensitivity and his weapons ready to fire. Wutu followed along behind, walking backwards half the time, watching to be sure that nothing approached the patrol from the rear. It was a shit detail but no worse than a hundred others he’d pulled.

It was times like this that Booly wished he was a cyborg, with a cyborg’s armor and a cyborg’s capacity to see in the dark. He wore night-vision goggles, and they were better than nothing, but hardly equivalent to the images that Villain saw, which were little different from those that she received during the day.

By taking the data provided by Villain’s infrared sensors, and combining it with the information provided by her light-amplification equipment, the Trooper Il’s on-board battle computer could “guess” how the missing information would look, fill the gaps, and feed the composite to her brain.

As a result, Villain could see their surroundings a lot better than Booly could, and had she been more seasoned, that would’ve been fine. But she wasn’t, and one slip, one mistake, could cost all of their lives. Still, this was exactly the kind of experience she needed, so Booly was reluctant to switch her with another cyborg.

The canyon rose around them. Everything had a greenish glow. The canyon’s right wall had received the full strength of the “afternoon” sun and was a good deal brighter than the left wall. Banks of still-warm dirt and shale skirted the cliffs, shimmered like luminescent fish scales, and twisted with the canyon itself.

A creek would appear when summer came but was presently trapped in the frozen ground. It formed a highway of darkness down the center of Booly’s vision and a background against which the slightly warmer dooth droppings glowed softly green. The outlaws had passed that way, all right, and were up ahead somewhere.

Booly felt the tension start to build. Where were the bastards anyway? Hiding around the next bend? Or out on the desert beyond ... huddled around a dooth-dung fire? There was no way to tell.

Booly shrugged with the fatalism of soldiers everywhere. What would be, would be. He stretched. His muscles ached and he was tired of riding Villain. He imagined Roller and the rest of the troopers lolling about inside Gunner’s cargo bay and felt a surge of resentment. He pushed the feeling back and clamped a lid on it. Rank hath privilege, but it comes with responsibility too, and this was his.

Villain was careful to scan rather than stare. Scanning made it easier to concentrate, was more likely to pick up movement, and covered a larger area. So her instructors had claimed.

A ghostly blue grid overlaid everything Villain saw. The point of focus was represented by a red X that traveled across the grid in concert with her electronic vision. Numbers shifted in the grid’s lower right-hand corner as range, wind speed, and various kinds of threat factors were computed and fed to the interface.

Villain saw movement to the right. Her left arm traveled upwards, as the bright green glow emerged from the rocks and turned its triangular head in her direction. The red X floated over the target and flashed on and off. Flame stabbed the night as the .50-caliber slugs drew a line between her and the small hexapod. It jerked under the impact, tumbled end over end, and exploded into green slush.

Villain stopped firing. She was surprised to find that she had enjoyed the feeling of power the moment brought her. The realization bothered her but there was no time to think about it. Not while they were in the canyon, not while lives were at stake, not while an ambush could wait around the next bend.

“Nice work,” Roller said sarcastically. “That should let ’em know where we are. Send up a signal flare next time. It’ll make their jobs even easier.”

Booly remained silent, which meant that he agreed. Villain cursed her own stupidity. Of course! Why use the machine gun when the laser cannon would do just as well? It made relatively little noise. And why fire at all? It had been a pook, for god’s sake, about as dangerous as a wild dog.

She told herself that Booly had ordered the patrol to “blast anything that moved,” that she’d never asked to be a soldier, but rejected the excuses as quickly as they came. She had screwed up. It was as simple as that.

 

Wayfar Hardman saw the first glimmerings of dawn off to the east. The view was somewhat proscribed by the homemade periscope that stuck up through the sand but was adequate nonetheless. At this point the new day was little more than a vague pinkness that separated earth from sky. Good. The humans would enter the kill zone at first light, time when eyes played tricks and minds made mistakes.

He swiveled the periscope to examine the point where the canyon emptied into the desert. There were no signs of the trip wires, weapons pits, and warriors who hid there. All were underground, sheltered from IR detectors by a layer of uniformly cold sand, waiting for his signal.