Legion Of The Damned - 01 - Legion of the Damned (2 page)

Ellis bobbed his head obediently. “Yes, ma’am. I’ll get on it.”

Norwood smiled. He would too. No matter how Ellis might
look
, he was sincere, and a helluva lot more competent than some of the regulars she knew.

“Thanks, Ellis. How ’bout the message torps?”

“They were launched two hours ago, just as you ordered,” Ellis replied. “Twenty-two at random intervals.”

Norwood nodded. Given the fact that the scientific types had yet to develop any sort of faster-than-ship method of communications, the torps were the best that she could do.

Maybe
a missile would find its way through the Hudathan blockade.
Maybe
an admiral would get up off his or her ass long enough to ment
ion the matter to the Emperor. And
maybe
the Emperor would make the right decision.

But, given the fact that Worber’s World was just inside the rim, and given the fact that the empire was contracting rather than expanding, Norwood had her doubts.

“Good. We gave the bastards a chance ... which is a helluva lot more than
we
got.”

Ellis nodded soberly.

“Major Laske will assume command until I return, and Ellis...”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Lace your fraxing boot.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Ellis bent over to lace his boot, realized that he should have saluted, and straightened up. It was too late. Norwood had turned her back on him and was entering the shuttle. She looked terribly small for such a big job. Why hadn’t he noticed that before?

The hatch closed behind her and Ellis felt a hollowness in the pit of his stomach. Something, he didn’t know what, told him that he’d never see her again.

Repellers roared, a million pieces of grit flew sideways through the air, and the shuttle lifted off. Norwood looked out a window and saw Ellis. His hat was centered on his head, his back was ramrod straight, and his salute was textbook perfect.

“Well, I’ll be damned. He got it right.”

The pilot rotated the ship on its axis. “Did you say something, Colonel?”

Norwood made a small adjustment to her headset. “No, talking to myself, that’s all.”

The pilot shrugged, knowing that Norwood was to the rear and couldn’t see through the back of his seat. Brass. Who could figure ’em anyway?

The shuttle rode its repellers up one of six massive ramps, paused while armored doors slid open, and lifted straight up. The aliens had become quite adept at nailing low-atmosphere aircraft, so the pilot applied full military power.

G-forces pushed Norwood down into soft leather which had until recently served to cushion an admiral’s rather ample posterior. She was certain that he would have disapproved of a mere colonel using his private gig, but like all of his peers, the admiral was entombed under Black Lake and unavailable for comment.

The G-forces eased and Norwood looked out the window. This was the first time that she’d been outside since the initial attack. She’d seen most of it before, but secondhand, via satellites, drones, and helmet cameras. This was far more immediate and therefore shocking.

The shuttle had climbed to about five thousand feet. High enough to provide a good view but low enough to see some detail. Wh
at had been some of the most productive farmland on Worber’s World looked like a landscape from hell.

Clouds of dense black smoke rolled away towards the horizon and were momentarily illuminated as a nuclear device went off hundreds of miles to the east. Lightning flickered as bolt after bolt struck the ground and added its destruction to that already wrought by the aliens.

Fires burned for as far as the eye could see, not in random order as one might expect, but in carefully calculated fifty-mile bands. That’s the way the Hudathans did it, like suburbanites mowing their lawns, making neat overlapping swatches of destruction.

First came the low-orbit bombardment. It began with suppressive fire intended to keep aerospace fighters on the ground, and was almost immediately followed by an overwhelming air assault, and landings in force.

Norwood had seen video shot from the ground, had seen a thousand carefully spaced attack ships darken the sky, had seen the death rain down.

And not just on military installations, or on factories, but on each and every structure that was larger than a garage. Homes, churches, libraries, museums, schools, all were destroyed with the same plodding perfection that was applied to everything else.

The Hudathans were ruthless, implacable, and absolutely remorseless. Such were the beings to whom she was about to appeal. A tremendous sense of hopelessness rose up and nearly overwhelmed her. Norwood pushed it down and held it there. She felt tired, very tired, and wished that she could sleep.

The pilot jinked right, left, and right again.

Norwood tightened her harness. “What’s up?”

“Surface-to-air missile. One of ours. Some poor slob saw us, assumed we were geeks, and took his best shot. I sent a recognition code along with instructions to look for another target.”

Norwood imagined what it was like on the surface, cut off from your superiors and hunted by remorseless aliens. She shivered at the thought.

Norwood noticed that the copilot’s seat was empty. “What happened to your number two?”

The pilot scanned his heads-up display and felt feedback flow through his fingertips. The shuttle had no controls other than the implant in his brain.

“She took a flitter and went home.”

Norwood was not especially surprised. While some continued to fight, thousands of men and women had deserted during the last couple of days. She didn’t approve but understood nonetheless. After all, why fight when there was absolutely no hope of winning? Of course the Legion had sacrificed more than a thousand legionnaires on Battle Station Delta, but they gloried in that sort of thing and were certifiably insane.

“Where was home?”

“Neeber’s Knob.”

“It took a direct hit from a twenty-megaton bomb.”

“I think she knew that,” the pilot said evenly.

“Yes,” Norwood replied. “I suppose she did. So why stay?”

The pilot ran a mental systems check. It came up clean. “Different people react in different ways. She wanted to go home. I want to grease some geeks.”

“Yeah,” Norwood agreed. “So would I.”

The pilot sent a thought through the interface, felt the G-forces pile on, and arrowed up through the smoke.

 

Baldwin screamed, and screamed, and screamed. Not with pain, but with pleasure, for the Hudathan machines were capable of dispensing both. He lay naked on the metal table, muscles rigid under the surface of his skin, gasping for air as another orgasm rippled through his body. His penis was so rigid that he thought it would explode. Sometimes he almost wished it would.

Part of the human sex act involves release, but the aliens had bypassed that function in order to prolong his pleasure, and in so doing were unknowingly torturing him.

But there was no alternative. The Hudathans believed that it was important to dispense rewards and punishments in a timely fashion. By associating pleasure or pain with a particular event, they hoped to reinforce or discourage the behavior in question. Since Baldwin had provided them with some excellent advice concerning the attack on Worber’s World, he deserved a reward. Never mind whether he
liked
the reward, or
wanted
the reward, he
deserved
the reward and had to receive it.

So Baldwin screamed, the technician waited, and a timer measured the seconds. Finally, when the allotted amount of time had passed, the pleasure stopped. His body tingled all over. The human was only vaguely aware of the 350-pound alien that stepped in to remove his restraints. The straps were intended to protect rather than punish.

There were no wires or leads to disconnect, since all of the necessary circuitry had been surgically implanted into his brain, and was radio-controlled.

That was the part of the bargain that Baldwin liked the least, the knowledge that the aliens were in total control of his body. But it was absolutely necessary if he wanted to continue his relationship with them. If a single word could be used to describe the Hudathan race, it would be “paranoid.”

Except that humans classify “paranoia” as aberrant behavior and Hudathans considered it to be normal. Normal, and desirable given the nature of their home system.

Baldwin knew that Hudatha, their home planet, was fairly Earth-like, and rotated around a star called Ember, which was 29 percent more massive than Terra’s sun.

So even though both stars were about the same age, the gravity generated by Ember’s greater mass had compressed its core, which led to higher central temperatures and more rapid nuclear fusion. That in turn had shortened the star’s life span and caused it to grow significantly larger, redder, and more luminous over the last few million years. The result had been warmer temperatures on the surface of Hudatha, the loss of some species, and increasingly bright sunlight that hurt the eyes.

Having observed these changes, and being scientifically advanced, the Hudatha knew that their sun was headed for red-gianthood and that they would have to move.

Making things even more complicated was the fact that the planet Hudatha was in a Trojan relationship with a jovian binary. The jovians’ centers were separated by only 280,000 kilometers, so their surfaces were only 110,000 kilometers apart.

If there had been no other planets in the system, Hudatha would have followed along behind the jovians in a near perfect circular orbit, but there
were
other planets, and they tugged on Hudatha just enough to make it oscillate around the following Trojan point. The upshot of it all was a wildly fluctuating climate.

Hudatha had no seasons as such. Major changes came in response to the ever-changing distance between Hudatha and Ember. The chances took place on a time scale of weeks, rather than months, and that meant that at any given time of the year it could be searingly hot, frigidly cold, or anything in between.

And that, Baldwin knew, explained why the Hudathans felt the universe was out to get them, because in a sense it was.

All of which accounted for the implant. If the Hudathans could control a variable, they were sure to do so, knowing that control meant survival. And, to a race like the Hudatha, the very existence of another sentient species was an unendurable threat. A threat that must be encountered, controlled, and if at all possible, completely eliminated.

It was this tendency, this need, that Baldwin was determined to exploit. The only problem was whether he could survive long enough to do so.

The technician released the final restraint and Baldwin sat up. The alien backed away, careful to protect his back, always ready to defend himself—a reaction so ingrained, so natural, that the Hudathan hadn’t even thought about it.

He was seven feet tall, weighed about 350 pounds, and had temperature-sensitive skin. It was gray at the moment, but would turn black under conditions of extreme cold, and white when the air surrounding it became excessively warm. He had a large humanoid head, the vestige of a dorsal fin that ran front to back along the top of his skull, a pair of funnel-
like ears, and a frog-like mouth with a bony upper lip, which remained stationary when the creature talked.

“Do you have needs?”

The human swung his feet over the side and addressed the technician in his own tongue, a sibilant language that sounded like snakes hissing. “Yes. A cigarette would be nice.”

“What is a cigarette?”

“Never mind. May I have my equipment, please?”

The Hudathans had no need to wear garb other than equipment such as armor, which explained why the word “clothing” had no equivalent in their language.

The alien made a jabbing motion that meant “yes,” and disappeared. He was back a few moments later with Baldwin’s clothes.

“The war commander requests your presence.”

Baldwin smiled. The humans had arrived, just as he had predicted that they would.

“Excellent. Inform the war commander that I am on my way.”

The Hudathan made no visible response, but Baldwin knew that his message had been subvocalized and transmitted via the technician’s implant.

He zipped the uniform jacket, wished that he could see himself in a mirror, and made his way out into the corridor. It was taller and wider than a human passageway.

His guard, a huge brute named Nikko Imbala-Sa, was waiting (still another precaution to make sure that the human-thing remained under control). Baldwin moved towards the core of the ship. Imbala-Sa followed. The Hudathan equivalent of argrav had generated a rather comfortable 96.1 gee.

This corridor looked exactly like every other passageway on the ship. There were evenly spaced light strips on ceilings and bulkheads, identical junction boxes every twenty feet or so, and gratings that could be removed to service the fiber-optic cables that lay beneath them. Baldwin thought the sameness was boring, but knew that the Hudatha found comfort in the uniformity, suggesting as it did a well-ordered universe.

They arrived at an intersection, waited while a lance commander and his contingent of bodyguards passed by, and approached the lift tubes. There were eight of them clustered together. Four up and four down.

Baldwin waited for an up platform, stepped aboard, and knew that Imbala-Sa would take the next. Each platform was intended to carry one passenger and no more. The human had noticed that Hudathans had a tendency to avoid unstructured group situations whenever possible.

The platforms never actually came to a stop, so it was necessary to watch for the deck that he wanted and jump. Baldwin made the transition smoothly, waited for Imbala-Sa to catch up, and headed for the battleship’s command center.

There were four sentries outside the war commander’s door. All were members of the elite Sun Guard and were heavily armed. They made no attempt to bar Baldwin’s way but omitted the gestures of respect that would be afforded to a Hudathan officer. Baldwin ignored it. He had no choice.