Legion of the Damned Read online

  Table of Contents

  Epigraph

  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

  “WHEN IT COMES TO MILITARY SF, WILLIAM DIETZ CAN RUN WITH THE BEST, AND THIS BOOK PROVES IT.”

  —Steve Perry, author of the “Matador” novels

  LEGION OF THE DAMNED

  Their human bodies destroyed.

  Reborn as living weapons.

  The cyborg troopers of the Legion

  are the Empire’s most lethal defenders.

  And the only defenders

  against an alien race

  who lack any human

  traits ... except aggression.

  All that stands between

  humankind and extinction

  is the ...

  LEGION OF THE DAMNED

  Ace Books by William C. Dietz

  GALACTIC BOUNTY

  FREEHOLD

  PRISON PLANET

  IMPERIAL BOUNTY

  ALIEN BOUNTY

  M,CADE’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

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  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (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.

  LEGION OF THE DAMNED

  An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Ace mass-market edition / August 1993

  Copyright © 1993 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 : 978-1-101-49586-5

  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 Marjorie:

  friend, lover, and buccaneer.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My thanks go to Joe Elder and Judy Travis for encouraging me to try something new, to Ginjer Buchanan for believing in it, to Dr. Sheridan Simon for his design of the Hudathan homeworld, the Hudathans themselves, the planet Algeron, the Naa, and the asteroid known as “Spindle,” to Tony Geraghty, author of March or Die, Christian Jennings, author of Mouthful of Rocks, John Robert Young, author of The French Foreign Legion, and last but certainly not least, the legionnaires themselves, past, present, and future, who know what it is to fight for lost causes.

  1

  There is nothing more dangerous than an honest man falsely accused.

  Lin Po Lee

  Philosopher Emeritus

  The League of Planets

  Standard year 2169

  Worber’s World, the Human Empire

  Colonel Natalie Norwood stepped out of the underground command post and into the elevator. Though normally spotless, it stank of vomit and was littered with bloody bandages, used hypo cartridges, and empty IV bags. Medics had used the elevator to ferry an endless stream of wounded soldiers down from the now devastated surface.

  She nodded to the guard and watched the armor-plated doors slide closed. Blood had been spattered on the shiny metal. She noticed that the dots were uniform in size and thicker towards the bottom.

  The soldier touched a button, machinery hummed, and the elevator rose. Norwood felt self-conscious in her dress uniform, gleaming medals, and polished boots. They made a marked contrast to the guard’s fire-scorched armor, cracked visor, and battle-worn rifle.

  Both had fought and both had lost.

  The alien Hudatha had taken less than five days to destroy the four battle stations that orbited Worber’s World, to decimate the three squadrons of antiquated aerospace fighters the Navy had sent up to protect it, and to lay waste to all of the planet’s major cities.

  One of them, the city of Helena, had been home to the governor and headquarters for the general staff. They had been in a meeting, trying to decide on what to do, when a subsurface torpedo had burrowed its way under the command post and detonated.

  The resulting explosion created a crater so large that it diverted the south fork of the Black River, formed a new lake, and left a heretofore obscure Army colonel named Natalie Norwood in command.

  What a joke. In command of what? The shuttle that would carry her to the enemy battleship? The stylus that she would use to surrender?

  The elevator came to a stop. The door slid open. The guard flipped his visor up and out of the way. He was no more than seventeen or eighteen, a kid really, with soft blond peach fuzz crawling over his cheeks and chin. His voice cracked as he spoke.

  “Ma’am?”

  She paused. “Yes?”<
br />
  “Why don’t they stop?”

  Norwood searched for something to say. The soldier had put his finger on the very thing that bothered her the most. The Hudatha had won the battle many times over. So why continue? Why attack objectives already taken? Why bomb cities already destroyed? It didn’t make sense. Not to a human anyway. She forced a smile.

  “I don’t know, son.”

  His eyes beseeched her. “Will you make them stop?”

  Norwood shrugged. “I’ll try.” She forced a smile. “Your job is to keep the slimy bastards out of my liquor cabinet.”

  The soldier laughed. “No problem, Colonel. I’ll take care of it.”

  Norwood nodded. “Thanks. I’ll see you later.”

  She felt guilty about her inability to answer the guard’s questions. Officers knew everything, or were supposed to anyway, but the Hudathans were a mystery.

  An Imperial survey ship had encountered them two years before, had established rudimentary contact, and learned very little other than the fact that the aliens were technologically sophisticated, and very wary of strangers.

  Why they attacked, and kept on attacking, was unknown. Her only chance lay in communicating with the Hudathans, meeting whatever demands they made, and waiting for help.

  She stepped off the elevator and into the underground aircraft hangar. It was a huge place, made even larger by the fact that the aerospace fighters normally housed there were gone, along with the crews that flew them. Not “gone” as in “gone out on patrol,” but “gone” as in “gone and never coming back.”

  They had left their marks, though. Yellow lines that divided one bay from the next, grease stains that resisted even the most ardent crew chief’s efforts to remove them, and the eternal stink of jet fuel.

  The walls were covered with a maze of conduit, equipment readouts, safety slogans, and there, right in the middle of the back wall, a twenty-foot-tall three-dimensional holographic of the squadron’s insignia, a skull wearing an officer’s cap, and the motto “Touch me and die.”

  It seemed a bit ironic now.

  The sound of Norwood’s footsteps echoed off cavernous walls as she made her way towards the darkly crouching shuttle. It was a large V-shaped aircraft, originally intended as a VIP toy, now comprising roughly 25 percent of the planet’s surviving Air Force.

  They appeared like ghosts from the shadows. Power techs, com techs, weapons techs, and more. Some came on foot, some on ground-effect boards, and one wore a twelve-foot-tall exoskeleton.

  These were the men and women who had armed the planes, traded jokes with the pilots, and sent them out to die. They looked at Norwood with pleading eyes, not expecting good news, but hoping for it anyway.

  She nodded, forced a smile, and marched across what seemed like a mile of duracrete.

  The ground crew watched her go, absorbed her silence, and faded into the shadows whence they’d come.

  Captain Bob Ellis stood waiting by the shuttle. He was a reservist and, like many of his kind, incredibly sloppy. His battle dress hung around his body like a deflated balloon, his sidearm threatened to pull his pants down, and his left boot was only half-laced. Ellis tried to salute but looked like he was summoning a cab instead. Norwood returned it.

  “Captain.”

  “Colonel.”

  “Did you get through?”

  Ellis nodded miserably. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And?”

  “And they refuse to grant you safe passage through the atmosphere.”

  “But that’s outrageous, it’s ...” Norwood was about to say “uncivilized” but caught herself. The Hudathans were aliens and what seemed outrageous to her could be normal practice for them.

  “So they refuse to see me?”

  Ellis shook his head. “No, they’re willing to see you, but they won’t protect you.”

  “Says who?”

  “That’s another thing, Colonel. Their spokesperson is human. Some guy named Baldwin. Colonel Alex Baldwin.”

  The named sounded familiar but Norwood couldn’t place it. “Terrific. A goddamned traitor. Well, get on the horn and tell Colonel Baldwin that I’m on my way.”

  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 mention 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. What 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 c
ame 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.