Secret of the Legion

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to actual persons, organizations, and/or events is purely coincidental.

A Ridan Publication
www.ridanpublishing.com
www.soldierofthelegion.com

Copyright © 2009 by Marshall S. Thomas
Cover Art by Michael J. Sullivan
Starcharts by Hatton Slayden
Editing by Carol Woods
Layout Design by Michael J. Sullivan

ISBN: 978-0-9825145-2-8
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
First Printing: December 2009

In Memory
Captain Ronald Speirs, warrior
101st Airborne
Normandy, Market-Garden, Bastogne, Eagle's Nest, Korea
Purple Heart, Silver Star, WWII Victory Medal
Presidential Unit Citation
Retired as a Lt. Colonel
Born April 20, 1920. Died April 11, 2007.
Army Signal Corps photo

Books in the Soldier of the Legion Series
Soldier of the Legion
The Black March
Slave of the Legion
Secret of the Legion
Cross of the Legion
Curse of the Legion*
Forthcoming*

Praise for Secret of the Legion

"Book Four of this exceptional series has one of the best first chapters I've ever read in a book of any genre…As in every book of this series, the battles are so realistic my heart pounded. I feared for every character in each battle. I feared this would be the last of Thinker and the Beta Unit. These characters have become like old friends to me. The writing style is exciting. Thomas brings his futuristic world to life, believably. I'm relieved to report that this is NOT the end to Thinker. In many ways, this is my favorite book in the series so far. Highly recommended."
— Midwest Book Review

"As in his previous novels, Thomas's characters have a level of depth and intensity that move this story way beyond a Sci-fi thriller, creating a compelling novel that will appeal to all readers. One other aspect that must be mentioned is the "world" Thomas has created. It is fascinating — intriguing in its intricacies. More than a simple frame around the picture — it is part of the overall masterpiece and worth noting. SECRET OF THE LEGION is highly recommended."
— Nancy L. Mehl, Author

Table of Contents

PART I — PIECES OF THE PAST
Chapter 1: Out Of the Oz
Chapter 2: Illumination
Chapter 3: The Priest
Chapter 4: The Hand of the Legion
PART II — SAVED FROM OBLIVION
Chapter 5: Dindabai
Chapter 6: A Taste of the Past
Chapter 7: Deep Dreams
PART III — SECRET DEMONS
Chapter 8: Marching in the Mud
Chapter 9: Every Crazy Bastard
Chapter 10: Evil Gods
PART IV — FIGHTING THE GODS
Chapter 11: Lost Souls
Chapter 12: K2
Chapter 13: Crazy but True
PART V — GRAINS OF DUST
Chapter 14: Plane Prime
Chapter 15: Perdition
Chapter 16: Masters of O-Rock
Chapter 17: Dust of the Gods
PART VI — ULDO X
Chapter 18: The Uldo Experiment
Chapter 19: Nothing to Report
Chapter 20: Blink Once and You're Gone
PART VII — THE ANGEL OF DEATH
Chapter 21: The Word of God
Chapter 22: Granite

Crista Cluster, 1,400 light years from Sol

When the first Outworlder refugees approached the Outvac fleeing System oppression, the Crista Cluster beckoned them onwards with a view that appeared to form a starry cross in the vac. ConFree's ancestors settled those worlds as a free people and vowed in a Constitution written in blood to uphold liberty, justice and freedom, no matter what the cost, and to remain eternally vigilant against all forms of tyranny and slavery. The ConFree Legion was formed to accomplish those objectives.

Chapter 1
Out of the Oz

Oz, Day 1002: Release. I stood in the cold as the gates slid shut behind me. The sky was grey. Winter was on the way. The jacket they gave me was too thin but I didn't care. I was afraid, but also ecstatic. Free! I clutched the doc case nervously. Everything I owned was in there. And it all flowed from today, the entire future, from this very moment.

I glanced over my shoulder. High stone walls, to keep in the crazies. A cenite plaque, next to the gates:

OZER CLINIC
UNITED SYSTEM ALLIANCE
MINLAW REGIONAL PSYMED FACILITY
DIRECTED SERVICE
NIMBOS SECTOR

Farewell to Oz. I had no regrets at leaving but it would not be easy, starting from zero, making a new life in a strange world. I would try to remember what they told me. Their advice would be temporarily useful, I was sure—until I found out about myself.

Those were my first thoughts, out of the Oz, in the New World. I stepped out onto the road. An aircar shot past overhead, buffeting me with a wave of cold air. I set off down the road, cheap cloth shoes crunching over the gravel. I knew what I had to do—even then. I soaked up everything they taught me, I had parroted it out, I even persuaded myself that they were right. I became so good at it that even the Eye thought I was good. If all your reactions are correct, if you even think you're a Goodlib, how can you not be good? I was good—that much I admit. They certainly did their job. And now I was released, into the out. Cured. Harmless. A good citizen.

But there was one thing they had not quite extinguished—only one, a tiny spark, hidden deep deep inside me. I had tried to avoid even thinking about it inside the Oz. But now I was out, and it was growing, already.

I wanted to know who I was—that's all. After all that time, after all the treatment and all the training and all the talking and all my denials, I still wanted to know who I was. Unforgivable, I knew. But I didn't care! I wanted to know who I was—who I had been. I wanted to know about the past. It was evil. It was forbidden. It was socially counterproductive and psychologically destructive and counter to everything that Oz had tried to achieve with me. But I didn't care!

It started to rain. A dark sky, a light rain. I continued walking, overwhelmed with terrifying, anti-pubmor thoughts. I fumbled with the doc case and pulled out the crude city map. My quarters were pre-arranged, my employment all set. The System did all it could—now it was up to me to adjust. They had done a terrific job. It was truly frightening, how much money and time they devoted to my rehab. I realized I was a very unusual case, an exceptional case. The System did not have resources like that to waste on normal crims. I had been important, somehow—very important, to merit such special attention. I did not know anyone else who had been in the Oz for as long as I had, or who had been given more thorough treatment.

Free! I sucked in cold air. My cheap shoes were already soaking wet. It was time to start a new life. I had better concentrate on that first. I could worry about the past later.

They gave me a cube in Agra Worker's Hostel Number 14. The place was pretty miserable—a massive, ancient, crumbling prefab highrise hive, swarming with worker ants. My cube was a tiny closet with a broken window, and a broken bed, and the toilet down the hall. I didn't care. My own cube! It was all I needed. I could hear the people on both sides, but it didn't bother me. I set the doc case on a little table that folded down from the wall. One of the hinges was broken and it was a little wobbly. I struggled out of the wet jacket. Insects scuttled across the dirty floor. The ceiling light flickered.

I opened the doc case. My papers told me nothing—only that I was a graduate of the Ozer Clinic. I was a man without a past. I had come out of nowhere, and here I was. I was supposed to accept it, but I was not going to accept it.

I found a cracked mirror on the floor and put it up on the table, against the wall. A pale, clean-shaven youth looked back at me—green eyes, prominent cheekbones, and very short brown hair. I would let it grow out, I decided—my first voluntary act in this new life. An antisocial act, I knew. I stared at myself in the cracked, cloudy mirror. I was an Outworlder—that much I could say for sure. But that told me nothing. I was young and fit. My body was hard and strong and covered with little scars. I had evidently worked with my body, not my brain, in my past life.

The scars were worth thinking about. They were everywhere, little white scars, slash marks, puncture wounds, and places where it looked as if I had been burnt. But most puzzling were the red scars. Almost all my knuckles were disfigured with deep, reddish scars. It looked as if the skin had been burnt right off. And on my left arm it was the same—there was a large red patch on the upper arm just below the shoulder, the same kind of scar as the knuckles, but larger. I wondered about that.

And then there was the left arm itself. It looked the same as the right, but it did not feel the same. I had tremendous strength in that arm—superhuman strength. It wasn't a natural arm. It was artificial, inside—biogenned. I knew it. I could feel the cenite.

Who would have gone to such trouble, and expense, to give me an artificial arm? And why the left? I was right-handed. The arm looked just fine, outside, except for the scars. The skin was perfect—it was real skin, the same as my other arm. There was no clue outside that it was not a normal arm.

I wondered a lot about the arm. I figured it was the best clue I had to who I had been. But I had no idea what it meant.

My employment was nothing to write home about—not that I would have known where to write anyway. The System found me a job as a dishwasher, in a pubfeed. It was all right. I didn't care what I did, and I didn't have any choice. I washed greasy plastic dishes in tepid water, elbow to elbow with a bewildering assortment of sleazers and druggos and broken-down losers. That didn't bother me, either—some of them were good folks. They called me "Loony," of course—it was no secret where I had come from. Even that didn't bother me. One big goon used to taunt me about it a lot, but he stopped after I smashed his face with my bionic left. My co-workers were friendlier after that. They hadn't liked the big guy much anyway.

Oz said when they psych you, it does not affect your intelligence, only your memory of past events. But I can tell you that's crap. I think it makes you stupid. Intentional or not, I don't know. But I found I had to concentrate hard enough to accomplish even simple tasks. It was easy to forget things, too. Of course I did not know how I had been before, but now I found I had to work very hard just to get the damned dishes done correctly. Sometimes I'd forget about lunch. And when I did eat, sitting there at the bench with the others, I would lose myself in the task, sipping warm soup, bringing the spoon up carefully to avoid spilling any. People would be talking to me and I wouldn't hear them.

Sometimes I heard snatches of music in my head, just for a tantalizing frac—terrifying music. I never quite got a grip on it. It wasn't really music, and I never really heard more than a brief flash, but it put a chill on my flesh, even then.

I knew it was from the past.

I learned more about myself as time rolled on. I got better at the job—a lot better. I fixed up the kitchen, I cleaned the filthy sinks and counters and the walls and the floors; I set up a system to sort the dirty dishes and glasses and cutlery; I fooled with the water heater downstairs and got hot water in the pipes and started sterilizing the dishes. When I was through, our product was sparkling. Most of my co-workers were uneasy about this, but it gave me a tremendous satisfaction. Our Super looked at me funny, but did not object.

I thought a lot about that, too. Why this dark sense of accomplishment, this strange urge to change things, to make things better? I knew it was anti-social behavior. Oz would not have approved.

I figured I had been a very strange unit. But that I already knew—otherwise why all the special treatment from the System?

"Loony. Is it there?"

"What?" I looked up in annoyance from my soup. We were all huddled around the table, scarfing up the slop. One of the sexboys from the clean-up crew was leaning over my shoulder. Stu-Two—he was a good little kid, I knew.

"A secret," he whispered conspiratorially. "Lou-Ellen is hot on Loony. It wants an approach. Hot and bothered, Loony! Red-hot info, Cit. We guarantee it!"

I looked out the plex to the feeding hall. Lou-Ellen was the doorgirl. She was sitting behind her battered table, wearily reading a comic. She was attractive, tall and slender, smoky red hair and smouldering dark eyes. I had wondered what it would be like with her. I turned my eyes away.

"We don't think so," I responded. "But thanks for the info, Stu-Two."

"If it doesn't like girls, how about us?" Stu-Two asked, running a hand gently down my arm. I turned and glared at his hand. He pulled it back quickly.

"Well! So touchy!" he sniffed, and turned on his heels. The rest of the gang all laughed.

I learned more about myself every day. Hetero—I was certainly hetero. I felt no attraction to Stu-Two, even though he was a good-looking kid. It had been hard to tell in the Oz. They had put something in the food to stifle the sex urge. But now I knew. I would have liked to get Lou-Ellen in bed, but sex was a very low priority for me right then. Oz had made me slow and stupid, and I did not want any distractions from the task at hand. And the task was to find out who I was, who I had been. Everything else was secondary. A girlfriend would take up time, and I would lose my concentration. I might even accept my situation. Lou-Ellen was fine, but she'd have to wait. I had more important things to do.

There was a System proprop outlet in Agra City, not far from the pubfeed. A library, they called it, run by MinTru, the Ministry of Truth. There wasn't much in there but Government proprop, but a few of the readers still worked and they had a lot of printed material. I started haunting the place. I needed information, and that was all the information that was available. I went there regularly after work, and would read for hours. I was often alone there, except for the derelicts trying to get out of the cold.

Somewhere in the library, I was convinced, lay the secret of my past. The one thing I knew for sure was that I was not from this world. Nimbos was not my home planet. Oz had told me that openly. Psychees are never released on their home planets, they said. They are sent somewhere else to start a new life where there are no traces of the past.

I read all I could find on robotics and biogens and advanced surgical techniques and regeneration. But there wasn't enough information to help me. The material available in the library did not specify who qualified for such advanced, expensive treatment.

I started to read about other worlds. I started to read history. I had no idea what I was looking for, inside the library. But I kept learning more about myself outside the library. It was a long, slow process. It was the little things that did it—things that I knew, instinctively, were wrong. Things they had not been able to erase.

The clothing, for example. The thin, cheap material. The shoddy cloth shoes. I knew I had never worn clothing like that. Coldcoats were supposed to be warm, and shoes—they were not supposed to soak through and come apart at the seams. I was instinctively angry with things that did not work the way they were supposed to. This was hostile, anti-social behavior, I knew.

The filth—that was wrong, too. Agra City was a rotting cesspool, an open sore. And as far as I could tell, all of Nimbos was the same. We all lived like pigs, shivering in the cold, eating once a day, twice if we were lucky, shuffling through dirty streets to our lice-infested cubes. It did not seem right to me.

Yes, we were at war, I knew, and sacrifice was necessary, I knew. But I saw no evidence on Nimbos that the situation had ever been better in the past, before the war.

Most puzzling of all was my reaction to social contradictions. I knew exactly what I was supposed to think, which is why my instinctive reactions frightened me. Everything I saw angered me, but the anger was not at myself, as it should have been. My anger was directed to others. It was thoughtcrime, and I knew I could never tell anyone. It meant that the Oz had failed, after all that effort, to cure me. I slowly came to realize that I was not a Goodlib at all. I was a Bacteria.

It hurt me to think about the meaning of what I saw. The streets were full of predators, darting out of the shadows like wolves, preying on the weak or the slow. It was a daily gauntlet, trying to get past them. As I watched their activity, my anger slowly grew. Murder and rape were everyday events. The thugs were all licensed by the System as charity cases, and citizens were required to contribute when approached. Theoretically you could write the donations off on your taxes, if the thug gave you a receipt. However the charity cases always wanted more than you had, and some didn't even bother to ask—they just took. The police were never in sight, except to clean up the mess afterwards, and none of the predators would ever see the inside of a jail cell. Yet if any of the pubfeed employees ever failed to turn over the 20 percent voluntary war donation from what was left of their pitiful monthly salary after the 60 percent income taxes had been taken out, why, we'd get to chat with the local constabulary. They always seemed to find time for that.

I decided that the authorities approved of the crims activity and encouraged it. I was not sure why. I did not dare tell anyone of these conclusions. It angered me. I was not sure why that was, either. My reactions were wrong—all wrong. The reactions of a Bacteria, a Doubter, a Wrecker, a Thinker, a Braincrim. I had just gotten out of the Oz—how could I have gone so bad, so fast? It was frightening.

There was a wonderful System proprop poster that one of the politicals had tacked up on the wall overlooking the staff lunch table. It glowed with colors, the brightest thing in our drab, dreary world. It showed a group of Legion soldiers, clad in sinister black armor, in the ruins of some unfortunate city, gathered around a campfire where they were roasting a baby on a spit. It was an absolutely beautiful shot. The hungry Legion troopers were intent on their task, poking at the baby's burning flesh to see if it was done. A dark cloudy sky was rolling overhead.