not with the Legion,' he said. 'We're with ConFree. Special Mission Strike Force. Our mission was to stop you from securing that ship.'
'ConFree! My God! Why? Why? It's crazy! The Legion takes its orders from ConFree!'
The trooper coughed again, and spit up more blood. 'ConFree wanted the System to secure that ship.'
'You must be insane!' I seized him by his shoulder and he shrieked in agony. 'Why? Why? Why would ConFree want the System to secure an Omni starship? The System hates everything ConFree and the Legion stand for!'
The young trooper looked into my eyes and blinked away tears of pain. 'I'm dying,' he said in disbelief. He looked around wildly, then turned back to me. 'We're fighting…for the future. ConFree believes the Legion has become too powerful. To counter the System…ConFree created the Legion. But the Legion has grown into a titanic, invincible monster, an instrument of blind aggression that ConFree can no longer effectively control. The System is doomed. Next, the Legion will turn on ConFree. That's what they told us. The Legion is now an instrument that is directing itself. And our mission was to redress the imbalance of power in the galaxy. Strengthen ConFree by strengthening the System. Oh, I'm going, Deadman, we believed…we believed…' And the life just slipped out of him. I saw it leaving his face, just like that. I slowly released my grasp on his shoulder and his body slumped back against the wall. I was overcome with horror.
'ConFree,' I muttered, in shock. 'We're fighting ConFree.'
'He was absolutely right about the Legion,' Tara said. 'We are monsters. And they made us. Now they're afraid. And they should be!' Tara made the sign of the Legion over the dead trooper's face, tracing the cross in the air. 'May you fight on in another world! Brave troopers, my God, what a waste! What an awful, criminal waste!'
'ConFree! Those dirty bastards!' I exclaimed, overcome with revulsion. 'They send us out to die for them, fighting the O's, fighting the System, and then they want to strengthen the System? Sending people to kill us? Deadman, I can't believe it!'
'Believe it,' Twister said mournfully. 'These troopers died for ConFree.'
'Merlin!' I suddenly remembered. We hastened back up the tunnel to our old position. He was still alive, against the wall, barely keeping his helmet above water, deathly pale. I gently took him into my arms.
'Thinker…' he said weakly, 'I wanted to see that ship. More than anything…take that ship, Thinker. Don't let them get it!' And he gasped and died, right in my arms. My eyes filled with tears. Merlin, our holy, beloved tech. Merlin, who had risked everything for us on Mongera. Merlin was gone.
'Kill me,' Dragon said. I turned. Dragon was propped against the opposite wall, his arms secured behind him.
'He's no longer in the autohypnotic trance,' Tara said. 'But it could return at any time.'
'Kill me, Thinker,' Dragon repeated, his face twitching. 'I betrayed our mission. I got Merlin killed. The bastards must have done me after I was wounded on Coldmark. I couldn't do a thing, Thinker. I was totally psyched—I remember it all now. All I wanted was to stop you all, and turn you over to Blue Gold. It must have been me that did that nova beacon, too—but I don't remember that.'
'It's all right, Dragon,' I said. 'We're all slaves. We're all psyched, by somebody.' Yes, I thought, we're all slaves. I was a slave of the Legion—and my mission was that Omni ship. If it wasn't there, after all this, I didn't know exactly what I was going to do. But I did know that a lot of people were surely going to die. And I also knew that, just as ConFree had feared, I was no longer under their control.
###
'You are approaching the lower levels of one of the Omni column buildings,' Sweety informed me.
'Terrific! Can you give me a fix on that O?' We were wading knee-deep in a sluggish stream of black ooze, on darksight, groping through the sewers of the Mound. Cold cenite walls coated with freezing scum hemmed us in. And at least one O was tracking us down.
'Negative, Thinker, the deceptors are extremely heavy.' I popped another deceptor. Twister tossed a psybloc grenade behind us. It was ludicrous—we needed the psybloc to shield us from the O's psypower, but the blasts were giving away our position. Gildron roared again, furious. I had concluded that he was a dead loss—a lot of noise and not much action. Tara looked around us warily, poised to fire. Well, she was getting what she wanted, marching in the mud—Deadman! We didn't know what had happened to the rest of the squad, Snow Leopard and Priestess and Valkyrie and Scrapper. We were on blackout and dared not transmit.
'Omni one level down!' Sweety snapped. She flashed us a location—there, moving fast, closing on us!
'On me!' We ran for our lives, splashing through the mess away from that glowing phospho dot on our tacmaps. I sloshed to a sudden stop under an open ceiling hatch—cenite steps, leading up. An access ladder, for O's.
'Up!' Tara and Gildron scrambled up into the hatch. Twister was next. I snapped a contac grenade off my u- belt.
'Movement! The Omni is on our level!' I set the grenade to 30 fracs and hurled it into the dark. I snatched another grenade and set it. Twister disappeared up the hatchway.
The world exploded, a blinding ball of fire booming down the tunnel, raw flames flashing past me, enveloping me, and suddenly I was burning like charcoal, a great roaring, my faceplate lit up with warning lights. I was dancing in flames as Sweety shrieked in my ears, maximum volume. 'TOLERANCES EXCEEDED! YOUR ARMOR IS FUSING! THE LADDER, THINKER—NOW!' I dropped the grenade and groped blindly for the hatchway. My fingers closed on the bottom rung of the ladder. I raced the flames up the ladder, exploding upwards in a volcanic blast of fire, climbing right up between Twister's legs and not pausing for an instant. If we had not both been in armor, it would have been very embarrassing. We erupted out the top in flames, with Gildron snatching at our limbs. I collapsed, my armor glowing and spitting sparks.
'Deadman! That was the O!'
'Thinker, are you…'
'Damn! If there's a galactic record for ladder climbing, I just broke it!' A sharp explosion sounded below us.
'What happened?'
'That's my contac grenade,' I said. 'The O is after us; he knows those flames work on us—let's move it!'
'WARNING! Your armor has been breached! I have three penetrations! Recommend…'
'Fuse it, Sweety!' We were in a narrow filthy alley, a floor slick with grease between oily cenite walls. Gildron paused, straddling the hatchway, firing his E straight down the ladder, auto canister. A berserk shrieking. Another blast sounded below, my second grenade.
'O RISING!'
'Run!' We ran again in a blind panic. Smoke poured off my armor. How could we fight the starmass? We could not counter it! The O's hadn't used it on Andrion 3 or Mongera, and the techs had no defense.
'Wester!' It was Tara, a shriek of horror. I slid into her. Gildron and Twister had just run up against a wall of cenite bars blocking all further progress along our alley. Beyond the bars, a solid cenite wall. We could burn our way out, but it would take time—and we did not have any time left. I turned, frantic.
'The enemy has reached our level! The enemy is approaching! Mag levels rising!' Sweety had it spotted now—a phospho dot on my faceplate coming at us, coming right at us like a dragon from the stars, drawing in its unholy breath, ready to blast us to fiery cinders.
'We stand and fight,' I said. I don't know why, but I was suddenly completely calm. A warm wave rushed over my flesh and I heard the music of the stars in the background. I raised my E and set it to canister. Gildron stood beside me, a massive presence, bristling, his E at his shoulder. Tara and Twister huddled against the walls, their E's up and tracking.
'O approaching! Mags off the scale!' Our psybloc helmet units flashed wildly, the light glancing eerily off the filthy, oozing walls. A dirty place to die, I thought. But suddenly I was overwhelmed with a hot rush of emotion. No, I thought, it's a fine place to die. A holy place to die, for justice, for mankind.
'Fire canister when it flames us, guys,' I said. 'We die like soldiers! One, Three! We're trapped and done for! It's all up to you! Death!' I was just throwing it out for the record. The last thing I expected was that One would actually hear it. But he did.
'It's them, Valkyrie,' Snow Leopard said clearly. 'Get that O!'
