Legion Of The Damned - 02 - The Final Battle Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Unanimous acclaim for William C. Dietz’s

  LEGION OF THE DAMNED

  “BUCKLE YOUR SAFETY HARNESS AND ENJOY THE RIDE.”

  -Steve Perry, author of The Forever Drug

  “THE UNRELENTING ACTION SWEEPS ALL BEFORE IT.”

  —Kliatt

  “ROCKETS AND RAY GUNS GALORE . . . and more than enough action to satisfy those who like it hot and heavy.”

  —The Oregonian

  “ONE THAT I RECOMMEND to enthusiasts of military SF.”

  —Australian SF News

  And more praise for William C. Dietz’s Drifter trilogy and the Sam McCade series . . .

  “SLAM-BANG ACTION!”

  —David Drake, author of Through the Breach

  “ALL-OUT SPACE ACTION!”

  —Starlog

  “GOOD SOLID SPACE-OPERA, WELL TOLD.”

  —Science Fiction Chronicle

  “A FAST-PACED ‘SHOOT-EM-UP’ . . . ONCE THE ACTION STARTS, IT NEVER LETS UP.”

  —SFRA Review

  Ace Books by William C. Dietz

  GALACTIC BOUNTY

  FREEHOLD

  PRISON PLANET

  IMPERIAL BOUNTY

  ALIEN BOUNTY

  McCADE’S BOUNTY

  DRIFTER

  DRIFTER’S RUN

  DRIFTER’S WAR

  LEGION OF THE DAMNED

  BODYGUARD

  THE FINAL BATTLE

  WHERE THE SHIPS DIE

  STEELHEART

  BY BLOOD ALONE

  BY FORCE OF ARMS

  DEATHDAY

  EARTHRISE

  FOR MORE THAN GLORY

  FOR THOSE WHO FELL

  RUNNER

  LOGOS RUN

  WHEN ALL SEEMS LOST

  WHEN DUTY CALLS

  AT EMPIRE’S EDGE

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

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  Penguin Books (SouthAfrica) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagnation or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  THE FINAL BATTLE

  An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Ace mass-market edition / July 1995

  Copyright © 1995 by William C. Dietz.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-49578-0

  Visit our website at www.penguin.com

  ACE

  Ace Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ACE and the “A” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  This book is dedicated to Dr. Sheridan Simon, who designed the Hudathan homeworld, the Hudathans themselves, and the planet Algeron. We miss you, Sheridan, and think of you when we look at the stars.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In order to prepare for this novel I read a number of excellent books, including March or Die, by Tony Geraghty; Mouthful of Rocks, by Christian Jennings; and The French Foreign Legion, by John Robert Young.

  1

  Prisoner of war! That is the least unfortunate kind of prisoner to be, but it is nevertheless a melancholy state. You are in the power of your enemy. You owe your life to his humanity, and your daily bread to his compassion. You must obey his orders, go where he tells you, stay where you are bid, await his pleasure, possess your soul in patience. Meanwhile the war is going on, great events are in progress, fine opportunities for action and adventure are slipping away.

  Winston Churchill

  My Early Life: A Roving Commission

  Standard year 1930

  Worber’s World, the Confederacy of Sentient Beings

  General Natalie Norwood stood, stretched, and eyed the empty expanse of the light-blue computer screen built into the top of her desk. The cursor blinked steadily in the lower right-hand comer. It had taken twelve hours of hard work to deal with the seemingly endless stream of orders, requests, reports, inquiries, memos, interrogatories, and just plain bullshit that went along with command of Confederacy Battle Station Alpha XIV, better known to her six-thousand-plus inhabitants as the Old Lady (plus a host of other less charitable names). And old she was, dating back to before the Human-Hudathan war, having originally been commissioned as a battleship.

  “Do you need anything else, General?”

  The voice pulled her back. A master sergeant filled most of the hatch. He was huge, and ugly as the pit bull he resembled. Until he smiled, when his face took an expression so pure, so angelic, that it melted the hearts of women everywhere. He took advantage of this fact as frequently as he could. Norwood shook her head. “Thanks, anyway. See you in the morning.”

  Morning is a relative concept in space, but Master Sergeant Max Meyers knew what she meant and nodded in response. “Yes, ma’am. I can hardly wait.”

  It was an old joke, one they had shared many times, and Norwood laughed. “Me too. Get some rest.”

  Meyers looked at the lines etched into he
r still-pretty face, the fatigue that filled her big brown eyes, and the gray that dominated her once-auburn hair. He wanted to tell her that she lived too close to the edge, that she worked too hard, that she had been aboard the ship about sixteen years too long.

  But a chasm existed between generals and sergeants, a chasm so wide it could never be jumped, even if they worked together every day. The sergeant withdrew. The hatch closed behind him.

  Norwood checked the computer screen one last time, assured herself that nothing new had appeared, and headed for her cabin. It was only steps away, a clear indication that the engineers who had designed the Old Lady knew how commanding officers lived, and had incorporated that knowledge into the ship’s design.

  Thick carpet cushioned her footsteps, a blast-proof hatch swished out of the way, and a ghostly glow threw heavy black shadows across her private compartment. The source of the reflected light, a blue-brown planet, filled the view port.

  Unlike the location of the cabin, Norwood saw the view port as an indulgence of the sort that makes enlisted people justifiably cynical, and had given serious consideration to eliminating it. But that had been in the early days of her command, before the view port had become her secret obsession, claiming what little free time she had.

  Norwood stripped off her uniform, threw it toward the usual comer, and stepped in front of the bulkhead-mounted mirror. Her breasts sagged a tiny bit, but the rest of her was firm and reassuringly fit. Still, it had been a long time since anyone else had seen her body or touched it, and she wondered what they would think.

  Norwood turned and walked toward the chair. It was big, black, and mounted on a pedestal. She knew the chair was an extension of her obsession, a part of the nightly ritual, but the knowledge did nothing to lessen her need. The leather felt deliciously cool against her naked skin. She wiggled slightly and felt the chair adjust to her form. Her fingers sought the familiar buttons, touched them in the usual order, and caused the machine to tilt backward. Then, with the chair just the way she wanted it, Norwood took a moment to admire Worber’s World, to appreciate the familiar outlines of its continents, and the manner in which the clouds marbled its surface.

  From miles up in the sky there was no way to see what the Hudathan bombs had done to the surface or to appreciate the mathematical precision with which the swaths of destruction had been etched into the land, or the remains of the millions who had died. And died, and died, until no one was left.

  The army, navy, and a pitifully small number of legionnaires had fought back, but when the fighting was over, Norwood’s family, friends, and—with the exception of a handful of people like herself—every other person on the planet had perished.

  And not just on Worber’s World, but on hundreds of human-held planets, until the aliens had been stopped just short of the inner worlds. Been stopped, and soundly defeated, resulting in thousands of alien POWs, every damned one of which was down on the surface of what had been her homeworld, living out their miserable lives in the midst of their own tailor-made hell. A hell she supervised.

  Yes, there were negotiations, but they had been going on for the better part of twenty years, with no end in sight. No end to the days spent in orbit and the nights spent in the black chair.

  The idea pleased her and the touch of the keypad brought fifty vid screens to life. They framed the view port and provided the images she craved. Images of Hudathans suf fering the way they should suffer, paying for what they’d done, and atoning for their sins.

  The touch of another button was sufficient to enlarge one of the pictures and superimpose it upon the view port. She recognized the shot as coming from the heavily armored camera positioned near the north end of Black Lake, a lake that had been born when a subsurface torpedo burrowed its way under the planet’s capital city, exploded, and created a huge crater. The entire general staff had died that day, leaving a rather junior colonel named Natalie Norwood in command of the surviving military forces. Of which there were damned few.

  Norwood had tried to surrender, tried to end the slaughter, only to discover that the Hudathans were bent on nothing less than the total annihilation of any race capable of opposing them, and had no concept of mercy. And so it was that she had fallen into the hands of a Hudathan war commander named Niman Poseen-Ka, who had used her, only to be used himself, and ultimately imprisoned on the planet below.

  Norwood selected another camera, a mobile one this time, and watched a radiation-induced lightning storm play across what had been some of Worber World’s most productive farmland. The light seemed to strobe on and off, momentarily illuminating the ruins of a church, its steeple pointing accusingly skyward.

  Anger boiled up from deep within her just as she had known that it would. Another image was selected and routed to the view screen. The shot came from above this time, and showed the ruins of what had been an industrial city, its once-sprawling factories reduced to little more than isolated walls and piles of randomly heaped rubble.

  That’s the way it looked anyway, but Norwood knew better, and directed the camera down until it skimmed the ground. Now it became obvious that there was life in the ruins, alien life, as hundreds of Hudathan POWs shambled about, repairing makeshift shelters, hauling water from the cisterns they had built, or pursuing other less identifiable tasks.

  The most amazing part was the fact that thousands of Hudathan troopers had managed to survive the surface conditions for more than twenty years, unaided except for the food they were given, and unharmed insofar as Norwood and her staff could ascertain.

  The ambient radiation would have killed a human within a week or so, to say nothing of the never-ending storms, floods, and volcanic activity that played havoc with the planet’s surface.

  But the Hudathans had evolved on a much different world than humans had, a planet that rotated around a star called Ember, which was twenty-nine percent larger than Earth’s sun, and had a Trojan relationship with a Jovian binary. The Jovians’ centers were only 280,000 kilometers apart, which, when combined with effects of other planets in the system, caused the Hudathan homeworld to oscillate around the following Trojan point, resulting in a wildly fluctuating climate. A climate that might be blistering one week and frigid the next, leading to some remarkably adaptable bodies.

  The average Hudathan male weighed 300 pounds or so and had temperature-sensitive skin. It turned white when exposed to high temperatures, gray when the climate was temperate, and black when it was cold. They had humanoid heads, the vestige of a dorsal fin that ran front to back along the tops of their skulls, funnel-shaped ears, sauroid mouths, and upper lips that remained stationary when they talked. In addition to which they were extremely resistant to the effects of bacterial infection and radiation.

  In a word they were tough, something Norwood knew firsthand. She was one of the few humans to kill a Hudathan in hand-to-hand combat.

  But no amount of toughness would allow the Hudathans to make themselves comfortable on the surface of Worber’s World. So they suffered. And, given the fact that the aliens had no place to hide, Norwood could vicariously enjoy their suffering, something she did with increasing frequency.

  Twenty years is a long time for any sentient to spend as a prisoner of war and a more than sufficient time for a multitude of disciplinary problems to surface. Left free to deal with miscreants in whatever way they chose, the Hudathans had implemented a well-regulated system of punishments. The punishments were almost always physical in nature, and took place at the same times and locations each day, making it easy for Norwood to watch.

  One such place Norwood thought of as “the dungeon,” due to its location in the basement of a bombed-out library. Her camera had no difficulty making its way down the stairwell and into a large room, where it was systematically ignored by the Hudathans.

  Although the aliens had destroyed hundreds of similar cameras during the first few years of their imprisonment, they had long since grown weary of the reprisals that such activities brought and
had given up. The camera bobbed through a crosscurrent, floated behind three ranks of official witnesses, and gave Norwood a wide shot. She saw an open space backed by rows of old-fashioned books.

  The officer’s excitement grew as a scaffold of X-shaped beams were dragged into the middle of the room. The prisoner was huge, at least 350 pounds, and carefully impassive. Norwood knew that any sign of distress on the trooper’s part would be interpreted as an indication of weakness by his peers and leave him vulnerable to physical attack, a rather cruel practice by human standards but normal within the framework of Hudathan society.

  She reveled in the moment when he was tied to the rack. Her hand followed a well-traveled path down across the hard, flat plane of her stomach, through the tuft of wiry pubic hair, and into the moistness between her slightly spread legs.

  Countless hours had been spent thinking about the pleasure that followed. What did it mean? Was she sick? Twisted? Perverted? She didn’t know. Whatever the condition was, it had manifested itself during the last two years. She wanted to talk to the psych officer about it but was afraid to try. After all, what if she were found unfit for duty and her job went to someone else? A more trusting soul who didn’t know what the Hudathans were capable of, and would relax some of her more stringent policies.

  And what difference did it make anyway? The pleasure she granted herself came at the enemy’s expense and troubled no one else. No, thinking about it, worrying about it, was a waste of time. Reassured, Norwood turned her attention to the dungeon.