The Last Legion: Book One of the Last Legion Series (32 page)

• • •

Dill’s Grierson had just cleared land, going back for another load of troops, when it bucked, slewed sideways in midair, rolled twice drunkenly. Garvin heard the drive cut out, then start again, then cut out once more.

“Hang on, people,” Stan said. “Trying to restart it.”

“Stand by for ditching,” Ben ordered. “Ho, Garvin, out of your turrets.” The two obeyed, strapping themselves down on a troop bench. “Seventy-four meters above water,” Dill reported. “I’ll try to pancake the turd in.”

The drive caught, hiccuped, then caught again, but whining shrilly, like a high-speed motor with sand in its bearings.

“We’re going again on sixty percent,” Gorecki reported. “But for how long is crystal ball territory.”

“Remembering that a Grierson, sans power, has the glide pattern of a brick,” Dill said, “stay at ditching stations. I’ll try to lumber this prick to something a little solider than what’s underneath us.”

Garvin listened to the drive whine, break, whine, break, and found his lips moving.
No
, he thought.
You are not praying. You do not believe in anything more than Garvin Jaansma. So stop with the stupid prayer already.

The Grierson, smoke pouring from its vents, limped over the beach and slammed across the parade ground at seventy-five knots, wallowing, sliding, slewing from side to side.

Eventually the crashing and slamming stopped. Garvin opened his eyes, looked up at Kang, realized the situation was unusual, because she’d been across from him when he closed his eyes and the bouncing had started. Dill clambered from the VC compartment into the troop box, yanked the manual hatch release, and the rear ramp fell away. “Come on,” he shouted. “Griersons don’t burn, but this one just might. Outside, outside, outside!”

Garvin punted Kang out in front of him, jumped clear, ran to the front of the Grierson, and pulled Gorecki bodily out of his compartment through the emergency hatch. Not looking back, the four ran, bent over, then went flat. Eventually they realized there wasn’t any explosion, any fire, and lifted their heads to the accompaniment of onrushing sirens.

“Aren’t they going to be all pissed off,” Garvin said, “when there isn’t anybody bleeding for ‘em?”

“Yes there is,” Dill said. “See? I scratched my pinkie. Medal time, medal time, medal time!”

• • •

Four Cookes darted across the smoking jungle, autocannons roaring, and a ’Raum counterattack hesitated, broke. They spun, blasted the area again, and caught two AA missile crews in the open.

• • •

“Cambrai Leader, got a whole bunch more of them,” an electronics Grierson reported. “Humping like they’re late for something. Passing the target along to you.”

“Thank you, Big Eye. Guess they’re afraid they’ll be late for the ball.” The Zhukov commander switched channels. “All Chambrai elements … we have a big target. Men in the open … looks like reinforcements. We’ll use main arty, finish them with the chainguns. Let’s go collect us some heads.”

The four Zhukovs dived on the ’Raum, and collision alarms screamed. Their pilots pulled control wheels back into their laps, and the Zhukovs shuddered, nearly stalling, as five alien ships flashed out of the cloud-cover over the Highlands. They were scythe-shaped, the curve of the C forward, about twenty-five meters from horn to horn. On the top and bottom of the ships were pods, each containing one prone Musth. The Musth called them
aksai
, after a snakelike creature of their home-worlds, known for viciousness and lethality.

The standard watch frequency came to life: “It isss perceived you have isssolated our mutual enemiesss. Perhapsss we ssshould offer asssistance.”

Without waiting for a response, the Musth ships rolled into the attack. At the horns of each
aksai
air ionized, and a line seared into flame. The ships sprayed fire across the ’Raum formation, then again.

The Zhukov pilots recovered, came back. But there was few targets for their 150mm autocannon except roaring fire, as everything, trees, brush, men, and women, even, it seemed, the ground itself, burned.

“It isss good to sssee the wormsss burn, isss it not?”

• • •

“Shit,” a rifleman said. “I don’t see anything left to kill.”

“Nope,” his teammate said. “Guess we — ”

“There’s one,” the other interrupted. A ’Raum got out of a shell crater and stumbled toward them. He was holding something against his chest, and shouting incoherently. Both infantrymen fired, and the body spun sideways, lay still. “Wonder if he was carrying anything worth souveniring?” the first asked.

“Let’s go check — ”

The explosives the ’Raum carried blew up, and the two soldiers flattened. Dirt rained, and the two stared at each other. “That guy,” the first soldier said thoughtfully, “took things
way
too serious.”

• • •

Comstock Brien picked himself up, wiped blood from his eyes. There were no more than fifteen or twenty of his fighters still moving, and all were wounded. His com carrier was unconscious, blood spurting from a severed artery. He picked up her mike. “Base, this is Brien.”

There was a crackle, then: “This is base. What is going on? I tried to contact you twice, without result.”

“This is Brien. Don’t know. Some kind of shell hit us.” Brien wiped his face again. “We are surrounded. Are there any reinforcements? Are there any more reinforcements?”

• • •

Jord’n Brooks looked around the cave at the thirty men and women, touched the corn’s sensor. “There are no more reinforcements. Can you break away?” Silence, then: “No. We are trapped.” Again a pause. “Brooks … this is Brien. You were right.” Brooks looked at Poynton, grimaced. “I wish I wasn’t.”

“This was one ending, but a beginning, too,” Brien’s voice said. “Now, it is your Task to see it to its end. Don’t mourn for us, Jord’n Brooks. See that we did not die in vain.” The com went silent.

“You heard him,” Brooks said. “I want you … you … you …” He pointed around the cave at ten people. “Your Task is with the guards outside, holding back the enemy, for they will be attacking in minutes. Fight to the last, and keep them from following us. The rest of you … take what records, what files you can carry. Be ready to move in five — ” A bomb blast outside rocked the cave. “No, three minutes. Take what is essential. For we are now the heart of the ’Raum, heart of The Movement, heart of the Revolution, and we must not fail.”

• • •

The Force swept across the battlefield, found only a handful of wounded to take prisoner, and some of those suicided or made soldiers kill them. One might have been Comstock Brien, for one soldier said a wounded man with a livid scar played dead, then shot three soldiers before being killed himself. But when II Section realized who the tenacious warrior might have been and went back, no trace of his body was ever found.

Force casualties were comparatively light — fewer than seventy-five killed, twice that wounded, for almost five hundred ’Raum killed.

“Now we take their base,” Williams ordered. The Third Regiment, augmented by I&R Company, started forward, a little cockily, sure the battle was over, and fire sheeted. Four officers were down in the first blasts, and half again as many noncoms. They fell back, regrouped, attacked once more, and again the ’Raum drove them back.

“All right,”
Caud
Williams said. “If they want it the hard way …
Mil
Rao, we’ll use Zhukovs to reduce their base from the air.”

“Sir, if we could take some prisoners, it would be — ”

“
Alt
Hedley, you can do your scavenging among the dead after the smoke clears,” Williams said furiously. “I will not lose another of my men uselessly. And I’d advise you to hold your tongue, for the goodwill you’ve gained by finding these ’Raum is being rapidly dissipated.”

Hedley started to say something, turned and stamped out of Williams’ command vehicle.

• • •

“Hey, Monique,” a Beta Team
finf
called. “The boss wasn’t whistlin’ through his bum. There
is
a cave.”

“Team forward,”
Dec
Lir ordered. “Two volunteers, with me. The rest, blow the shit out of anything that moves.” Blaster ready, she entered the dimness of the cave. Smoke billowed, and she coughed, came back out. “Anybody got a light?” Someone tossed her one, and Lir pulled on her gas mask, went back inside. Her light played around the rocks. There were half a dozen corpses, all killed by blast, none appearing hurt except for slight trickles of blood from their ears and mouth.

“Come on in,” she shouted. “We got them all. Goddammit, that horseshit Kipchak had all the fun.” She moved the light more slowly around the chamber, across the stacks of paper, fiches, and shattered computers. “But I think we got a ton and a half of good shit ourselves,” she said to herself. “II Section’s gonna come all over themselves.”

• • •

The five Musth ships landed beside
Caud
Williams’ C&C Grierson. A center pod on one opened, and Wlencing got out. Two armed Musth flanked him, as he stalked across the waste to Williams. The
caud
saluted, and Wlencing lifted a clawed arm in acknowledgment.

“Finally,” he said, without preamble, “you have defeated thessse not-worthiesss. Perhapsss, when the time comesss, and we make war on each other, you will not be a helplesss babe.”

Caud
Williams could not find a response.

“With thisss,” Wlencing continued, “you will be able to sssmasssh the remainsss of thessse?”

“I hope so,” Williams said. “I think we will.”

“Good,” Wlencing approved. “It isss not fit for the grown to be dissstracted by cubssss.”

• • •

That night, the surviving ’Raum found shelter in a village. The nervous farmers reluctantly fed them.

“Don’t worry,” Jord’n Brooks said. “We are not remaining here, but will leave within the hour.”

Within two days, they would reach, and disappear into, Eckmuhl, the ’Raum district of Leggett, and the war would continue, but on another front.

• • •

Njangu Yoshitaro, Petr Kipchak, Erik Penwyth, and the others of Gamma Team slept through that gore-drenched day, and if they dreamed of blood or slaughter, none of them remembered their dreams when they awoke, late the next day.

“Should I tell you what I’m wearing underneath this jumpsuit?” Jasith whispered.

“Not unless you want me to explode all over your windshield,” Garvin said, a bit hoarsely.

“My
windshield
doesn’t want that,” she said. “So concentrate on the scenery. For a minute, anyway. See … there’s my house down there.”

Garvin forced his eyes … and his attention … out the canopy. He looked down at a tall buttress nearly in the center of the Heights that had evidently been hollowed out — large glass windows and balconies dotted its face. “Which one is yours?”

“All of them, silly. All those rooms are connected, plus there’s others that’re completely under … not ground, but rock. But none of those are mine mine. My place is over there.” She cut power, and pushed the lifter into a gentle descent. They closed on a huge abandoned mining site, now overgrown with flowers and plants iridescing the colors of paradise. In its center, next to a fountained pool, was a fairly small house, all dark wood.

“That used to be a quarry,” she explained. “One of the first things my great-how-many-times grandfather owned. It produced a multicolored veined rock, like granite, and it was a great favorite when the early Rentiers started building their mansions. I guess the Mellusins have always been miners, even back on Corwin VIII, which is where we came from.

“The quarry made grand-whatever even richer, and then he started buying great chunks of C-Cumbre and other things. But he built his house near where he started. Then the vein played out, and the quarry just sat there, until my mother married my father. She was a Kemper, and their money’s from holding companies, so she always thought she was better than my father. At least, that’s what I heard, even though Daddy never snides her. She died about ten years ago.”

“I’m sorry,” Garvin said.

“Don’t be,” Jasith said. “I never thought she liked me very much, and I guess I must’ve been a brat and returned the favor. Anyway, she’s gone, and so it doesn’t matter. She took a look at that quarry, after she and Daddy got back from their honeymoon, and said she wanted to turn it into a garden. She and about three hundred ’Raum she had Daddy hire full-time. She built a little house on the shore of the lake, that’s supposed to be a copy of something called a teahouse from ancient Earth, and spent time there. When she wasn’t buying things, anyway. She was gone a lot when I was growing up. She went to Larix a lot. I don’t know if she had a lover there, or if the stores on Larix have better toys. I guess it wasn’t much of a marriage.

“When she died, I asked if I could have the house, and Daddy gave it to me for my sixteenth birthday. And the garden, too. I still have about seventy-five gardeners working for me on the grounds. What’s the matter, Garvin?”

“Nothing, nothing,” Garvin said. “That was just the sound of my mind boggling. So you live down there, all by yourself? And Daddy doesn’t happen to have a spy-beam on your front door or anything? Or has the servants bribed?”

“I don’t know about any spy-beams,” Jasith said. “That only happens in romances, anyway.”

“I wouldn’t put large credits on that,” Garvin said.

“Of course he bribed my servants. But I’ve got my own trust fund, so I bribed them bigger.”

“The very rich
aren’t
like you and me,” Garvin murmured. “Just sneakier. Can I make a suggestion?”

“Of course.”

“Land this baby, or else we’re liable to find ourselves bumping into range shacks again. I feel a certain set of urges coming on.”

“Anything you want, Garvin. Absolutely anything.”

• • •

“Oh dear,” Jasith said. “I’m afraid my head gardener’s going to be hot at me tomorrow. And I’ll bet my back is all moss-stained and nasty like your knees.”