The Last Legion: Book One of the Last Legion Series (45 page)

Yoshitaro drank twice. “I think you were one ahead of me,” he explained. “Yeh. I guess it’s over. Assuming
Caud
Rao makes sure there are straight elections, and the Rentiers get told to shut up and just make money. Good luck on that one, and on the goddamned ’Raum who’re left suddenly becoming society’s darlings. Sure, this is gonna be the best of all possible worlds.”

Garvin thought of Jasith, swallowed hard, and took the bottle back. “This isn’t the way it is in the holos when you win a war,” he complained after drinking.

“Nope,” Njangu said. “Things got a little expensive. Williams, Vauxhall, Gonzales …”

“Hank Faull.”

“Petr.”

“Yeh. And Petr.” Njangu tried to keep bitterness out of his voice. “But everybody’s got medals, and you and I are officers, even if you somehow wangled it so I’m just a stupid
aspirant.
”

“Careful, young soldier,” Garvin said, trying to be cheerful. “Promotions come to he or she who serves well. You know they commissioned Penwyth, too. It was either that or court-martial him for impersonating an officer.”

“And we’ve got the I&R Company all for our very own.”

“Which isn’t going to be run business-as-usual,” Garvin said. “I had a long sit-down with Jon and Angara today, and we’re gonna reorganize. Liskeard’s gonna go over to a Regiment, and Angara’s gonna fold Mobile Scout into I&R, so we’ll have Griersons with maybe a couple of Zhukovs for instant backup. No more frigging Cookes. Ben Dill’s going to be commissioned and take over that end of things. Monique takes over as First
Tweg
, no matter how much she pisses and moans. I tried to get her to take that commission they waved in front of her, and I thought she was gonna smack me.

“The way things’ll be is you and me work as a team, you being the supposed brains, me sounding like I know what the hell I’m talking about with the crunchies, Dill gets us into the fighting, and all’s as it should be.”

“So the good are rewarded,” Njangu said.

“Supposedly.”

“How come I don’t feel any better?”

“You aren’t drinking enough.” Garvin handed him the bottle. “Life’s gonna get interesting, when those goddamned Musth come back. Or when Redruth gets the hots for our young asses.”

“I’ll worry about that shit when it happens,” Njangu said.

They drank in silence for a time.

“You remember,” Njangu said, “way the hell back when we were hauling ass from the
Malvern
, and Petr was showing off all the stuff he’d memorized?”

“Yeh?”

“He had a poem. Can’t remember much of it, but there were lines that went something like ‘those I fight, I do not hate, those I guard I do not love.’ ”

“Petr’s epitaph?”

“Or ours,” Njangu said.

“What a shitty way to make a living,” he said, after a space.

Garvin grunted agreement, retrieved the bottle.

“Pity it’s the only game in town.”

The Cumbre system has a medium main sequence sun, about 1.5 million kilometers in diameter.

There are thirteen planets in the system, named, rather unimaginatively, after the letters of the alphabet. A- and B-Cumbre are too close to the sun to be habitable, with limited atmospheres, and have only solar and astronomical observation stations.

Mineral-rich C-Cumbre is the reason for both Man and Musth colonizing the system. Its riches include manganese, tungsten, vanadium, niobium, titanium, godarium, natural gamma iron, and some precious metals.

Mines, worked by both races, stud the arid landscape. It’s uncomfortable for both races, more for the Musth than Man. It has a single moon, Balar.

E-Cumbre is chill, just habitable for Man, comfortable for Musth, who know it as Silitric, and consider it the center of the system.

F-, H- and I-Cumbre are ice giants.

G-Cumbre is a half-destroyed world from an out-of-system asteroid, and moonlets litter its orbit.

J- and K-Cumbre are small planetoids and have small observation stations.

L- and M-Cumbre are little larger than J- and K-, and are almost certainly trapped asteroids, with extremely irregular orbits.

D-Cumbre is — mostly — Man’s world. It has three small moons: Fowey, Bodwin, and Penwith. Only the largest and nearest, Fowey, affects D-Cumbre’s tides.

D-Cumbre is about thirteen thousand kilometers in diameter at the equator, and its axial tilt is fourteen degrees, producing a more even climate than Earth’s. Unlike Earth, there are no continental masses, but many, many islands, mostly in the temperate and tropical belt, although two significant landmasses are at the poles. Some of the islands are large and of volcanic origin. Their peaks have been worn into plateaus with an entirely different climate than the lowlands — still wet, but chill and mist-hung, with the vegetation fernlike, from tiny to enormous. The Musth make their headquarters on the largest of these, the Highlands on Dharma Island.

Man settled at sea-level, mostly in the tropics, with his capital, Leggett, on the northwestern portion of Dharma and three smaller islets. There are two dozen smaller cities, some not more than villages, on other islands in the temperate or tropical zones.

The climate is balmy, and there are few weather hazards, although open seas away from the island masses produce enormous globe-circling waves, and the stormy season can be uncomfortable.

The environment must be considered benign, although there are still-unclassified predators in the jungles and several species of fish, from large sea serpents to marine carnivores to coelenterates that must be considered hazardous to life.

This edition published by
Prologue Books
a division of F+W Media, Inc.
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Blue Ash, Ohio 45242
www.prologuebooks.com

Text Copyright © 1999 by Chris Bunch
All rights reserved.

Published in association with Athans & Associates Creative Consulting

Cover image(s) ©
123rf.com

Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

eISBN 10: 1-4405-5362-9
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-5362-2