Legion of the Damned

... When you dash the enemy’s sword aside, or ward it off, or force it down, you must slightly change the feeling in your thumb and forefinger. Above all, you must be intent on cutting the enemy in the way you grip the sword.

The men stood on Spindle’s rocky surface and looked up at the electromagnetic launcher more commonly referred to as “the railgun.” It was huge and the far end was lost in the blackness of space.

The idea had been around for a long time. The concept required a pair of conductive rails, a power source, and a projectile that rested on the rails and completed the circuit. Then, by providing a powerful pulse of electric current, like that available from Spindle’s massive accumulators, it would be possible to push the projectile forward. Once in motion, the object would accelerate for the entire length of the rails, gain a great deal of velocity in the process, and fly off in whatever direction it had been aimed.

Initial research had focused on the possibility of a “super cannon” capable of lobbing artillery shells at targets hundreds or even thousands of miles away. There were difficulties, though, and other more cost-effective ways to kill people, so scientists turned their attention to the possibility of payload launching systems. After all, they reasoned, why use expensive chemical rockets to launch satellites when a railgun could accomplish the same thing for a fraction of the cost?

The idea looked good on a CRT but there were problems, the most difficult of which was that anything small enough, and rugged enough to withstand the stress of a railgun launch, would cost more than the chemical rocket that it had replaced.

But time passed, man colonized space, and electromagnetic launchers came into their own. Space was the perfect place to use a railgun. With no atmosphere to overcome, railguns consumed less power and subjected their payloads to less stress. Besides, who cared how much stress a chunk of rock endured on its way from an asteroid to a pickup barge?

So, when stardust was discovered, and the decision had been made to gather the stuff in commercial quantities, railgun-launched scoops had been the obvious solution. The scoops, also called “star divers,” were fully automated spaceships. The railgun provided a highly efficient, low-cost way to get them started, but conventional drives carried them the rest of the way.

A typical mission would carry a star diver around the sun, in through the sector of the atmosphere that looked the most promising at that particular moment, and back by a carefully calculated deceleration curve. Once the ship had slowed sufficiently, tugs took over and guided the star diver into Spindle’s docking facility, where it was unloaded, fueled, and prepared for the next launch.

What Leonid proposed to do was turn the railgun back to its original purpose. He wanted to convert the device into a cannon, use the star divers as the high-tech equivalent of cannonballs, and launch them at the Hudathan fleet. It would, he’d pointed out, give them the means to strike back and possibly win. Narbakov had been quick to disagree. The merchant found it hard to be patient.

Narbakov had a point. The railgun was similar to the single-shot rifle Leonid had received on his twelfth birthday. In order to reload, it had been necessary to open the bolt, eject the empty casing, and insert a fresh cartridge. Only then could Leonid close the bolt, aim at the target, and squeeze the trigger. The gift had been his father’s way of teaching finesse over force. After all, why use ten bullets when one would do the job? Which was fine then ... and useless now.

“All right, Omar, you have a point. But you’re forgetting one important factor. The Hudathan fighters rely on their mother ships for fire control, attack linkage, and electronic countermeasures. So if we kill the mother ships, we’ll kill the fighters too.”

“True,” the legionnaire said grudgingly, “but the Hudathans have three battleships. The first star diver might catch one of them by surprise. The rest won’t.”

“Unless we find a way to launch all of our surviving star divers within seconds of each other,” Leonid countered, “in which case it might work.”

“Maybe,” Narbakov admitted, sunlight gleaming off his visor. “But the effort to do so will siphon effort away from the rest of our defensive preparations.”

Leonid shrugged. The suit barely moved. “So what? You’ve done an incredible job, Omar, more than anyone could rightfully expect, but we’re going to lose. We might survive the next attack, or the one after that, but the geeks will eventually win.”

Narbakov stood tall. His voice was stern. “Then we will die as they died at Camerone, at Dien Bien Phu, and at the Battle of Four Moons.”

Ikor Niber-Ba stood on the platform and looked the length of the launch bay. It had been sealed and pressurized for this occasion. Rank after rank of pilots, crew, technicians, and soldiers stood at attention. Beyond them, towards the rear of the enormous compartment, rows of battle-scarred fighters waited to rejoin the fray. A trio of robotic vid cams stood poised around him, their insectoid bodies still, their lenses ready to feed to the other ships whatever ensued.

This was it, the moment when he inspired then with visions of victory, when he struck the sympathetic chords of racial fear, when he motivated them to win. But the words had fled to places unknown and taken his surety with them.

The Hudathan cleared his throat. The sound was small in the cavernous space. The problem lay not with those who stood before him, but with those who had died, their bodies preserved within their suits, forever drifting through the blackness of space.

Not to overcome a fortress, or to subdue a planet, but to deny the humans a substance that glittered when exposed to light.

The situation made no sense, had no meaning, yet held him in its ice-cold grip. A grip that was all the stronger now that morale had started to sag, now that his fighter pilots had grown unduly cautious, now that the myth of Hudathan invincibility had been shattered. The seemingly endless assaults and the ensuing casualties had planted seeds of fear in the hearts of his crew, and it was his job to root them out before they could grow and flower.

“You have done well. Time and time again you have looked death in the eye and stared it down. And thus it shall be one more time. Not two, three, or four more times, for there is no need. One overwhelming blow will be sufficient to crush all resistance, to seal the humans in their rocky tomb, to eradicate the menace that they represent. With that in mind I will commit all of our ships, and all of our fighters, to the next attack. Our robo-spies are cruising the surface of the asteroid even now, and the moment that their reports have been analyzed and cross-checked, we will attack.”

A sharp-eyed psych officer felt the confidence flow back into those around him, saw them swell with pride, and seized the moment. “A cheer for Ikor Niber-Ba! Long may he command!”

The cheer was part shout, part war cry, and it shook the ship’s hull metal with its power. Niber-Ba felt it, was lifted by it, and was immeasurably cheered. No one could stand in the way of warriors like these. No one.

Seeger waited for the other cyborg to get into position, grabbed his end of the steel I-beam, and lifted. It, like the fifteen others before it, would be used to reinforce the railgun’s basic structure. In order to launch six star divers, and do so in a relatively short period of time, all would have to be positioned and ready to go. That was why Leonid Chien-Chu had ordered his workers to build a complicated framework over the point where the ramp met the asteroid’s rocky surface, and why Seeger, along with three more of the Legion’s cyborgs, was lending a servo-assisted hand.

If the launcher was about to become a cannon, then the framework was a magazine, feeding full-sized spaceships into the chamber like bullets into a gun—spaceships that would put a lot of stress on the ramp as they were fired in quick succession.

“Are you ready?” Her name was Marie and she’d spent more than a thousand imperials to have her voice synthesizer reprogrammed to sound like that of a famous pop singer, which allowed her to pick up the odd credit or two singing in bars. Lots of guys had hit on her, hoping to score through a dream box, but none had succeeded. None that he knew about anyway.

Marie looked upwards towards the point where the bio bods were working to weld the steel supports into place. Laser torches burped blue-white energy, headlamps bobbed up and down, and a latticework of crisscrossed 1-beams divided the star field into a maze of squares and rectangles. She switched from the Legion’s utility channel to the frequency used by everybody else.

Marie bent at the knees, Seeger did likewise, and both straightened together. Unrestrained by gravity or an atmosphere, the I-beam soared upwards.

Someone—Seeger wasn’t sure who—grabbed the beam and pulled it in. At that exact moment, as a laser torch lit the scene with a whitish-blue glare, something round drifted by. It moved slowly, deliberately, as if it had every right to be there, which it might, for all he knew. Yet something bothered him. A similarity between the object and what? Then he had it. Float pods! Like those on his native Elexor! Like those the Hudathans used during their attacks. Seeger tracked the device while keeping his voice light and casual.

Marie turned his way, curious as to the reason for his request, and switched to F-5. It was a combat frequency, scrambled both ways, and theoretically secure.

Marie looked. A bio bod would have seen little more than laser torches and headlamps, but the cyborg was equipped with sensors, and once she knew where to look, had little difficulty separating the globe from the metal around it. Thanks to her infrared sensors, light-amplification equipment, and on-board processing capacity, the globe looked much as it would have in broad daylight. With one small exception, Seeger was right.

The target was a killer pod, all right, except that it had a lot of what looked like sensor housings rather than weapons turrets, and had a flat-black finish.

That suggested a spy-eye, or the geek equivalent, and meant the device was capable of blowing the whole plan out of the water. One look at the information it would bring back would be enough to let the Hudathan commander know what the humans were up to.

“Get serious. It’d take the loot a full hour just to pull his thumb out of his ass. Let’s nail the little sonofabitch while the nailin’s good.”

“That’s a roger,” Marie agreed. “But we can’t shoot at it from down here without hitting the railgun or a bio bod. Let’s climb.”

Both of the cyborgs began to climb. Seeger made good time. The combination of handholds, light gravity, and his, own strength made the task relatively easy. Light flared from above as the welders continued their work. The cyborg felt his body temp start to soar as sunlight hit his back.

It was a trade-off—one of many the tech types had made while designing the Trooper IIs—cooling capacity for weight. The result was a cybernetic body that had the capacity to move a little faster than it otherwise would have, but a marked tendency to overheat during prolonged combat or exposure to direct sunlight. Cooling systems had been developed to deal with the conditions found on hell worlds, but Seeger didn’t have one.

A readout began to blink in the corner of his video-generated, computer-enhanced vision, and then, to make sure that he got the point, pain was fed directly into his brain. Pain that was little more than a throb to begin with, but would soon grow and transform itself into a red-hot poker that seared its way to the center of his mind and forced him to respond.

It was a safety system, a built-in way to make sure that cyborgs took care of their expensive bodies and conserved the empire’s valuable resources. The only trouble was that it might keep him from reaching the robo-spy, from killing it, and that would cost a great deal more.

But those that had designed the system were elsewhere, working in the safety of their laboratories or eating lunch in their subsidized dining rooms, unaware and uninterested in the impact that their decisions had on people millions of light-years away.

Seeger grabbed the I-beam above his head, pulled himself up, climbed to his feet, and looked around. Marie was at the same height about seventy feet away. She pointed upwards and between them.

The robo-spy slipped into a shadow and rose along a vertical beam—a beam that supported the recently built structure that would feed star divers down onto the rails, where they would be launched like missiles towards the enemy fleet. The situation had just gone from bad to worse.

The cyborgs climbed with renewed energy. They had to get a clear shot at the robo-spy, had to destroy the device before it could escape and report to its masters.

A pair of bio bods were welding a joint directly above him. They turned, sunlight gleaming off their visors, as Seeger swung a leg over the crossbeam and pulled himself up. He nodded, jumped for the next crosspiece, and did a chin-up.

Pain lanced through Seeger’s brain as the temp reading on the rear portion of his armor hit 150° F. The techies were trying to defend the body they’d given him, trying to control him from their nice safe laboratories, trying to kill Marie and all the rest. That was the price of failure, the price that thousands of legionnaires had paid before him, the price known as death.

Seeger gritted his nonexistent teeth and pulled. Pain did its best to roll him under, servos did what they were told, and he gained the topmost piece of steel. Light bounced off metal and tried to spear his vid cams as the massive shape of a star diver moved his way. A pair of yellow strobe lights marked the positions of the small one-person tugs that had attached themselves to the spaceship like so many leeches and were pushing it into place.

The voice belonged to Marie. She too had made it to the top of the structure and was pointing to her left. The robo-eye had seen the star diver and was lurking in the shadow cast by a vertical I-beam while it watched the proceedings. It was roughly halfway between them, and neither one needed any prompting to move towards it.

There was no response at first, as if the robo-spy was so engaged in gathering intelligence that it had ignored everything else. But that was not the case.

The mini-missile caught Marie in the abdomen, exploded, and blew her in half. Though lightly armed compared to the float pods the cyborgs had encountered before, the robo-spy still had teeth.

Seeger responded with missiles of his own and a blast from his energy cannon. The resulting explosion lit the entire railgun for a fraction of a second and was extremely satisfying. Marie’s voice jerked him back to reality. Although her body had been blown in two, her braincase was intact, slowly falling towards the asteroid’s surface.

Seeger swore. The other borg was right. A small container, the size and shape of a standard tennis ball, had been flung free of the explosion and was accelerating away. There was little doubt that the globe contained the robo-spy’s memory, headed for home.

Seeger brought his laser cannon up, switched his sensors to full mag, and tried to see what they showed him. His temperature reading had soared to 163° F by now. At about 170°, major systems would start to fail. The pain was so intense that it felt as if his head would explode.

Lieutenant Umai was yammering in his ears. “Seeger? What the hell are you doing up there? No one authorized you to fire. Get your ass down here so the old man can boil it in oil.”

The ball soared, sunlight glinted off its polished skin, and the cyborg adjusted his aim. Lead it ... lead it ... lead it ... fire!