Sweety’s color scheme enabled us to pick the bad guys right out of the crowd, though even inside the protection of our armor, the racket deafened us. Blood splattered up the walls and girls shrieked. We kept firing, trudging through bodies and exotic debris down one corridor after another, shrapnel pinging on our A-suits, firing more starflash for luck and leaving a trail of corpses in our wake.
“Targets!” Xmax burst all around us, the walls erupting with hits, lasers flashing. Two, three, no, four hostiles, coming right at us! I fired blindly and Sweety did it all, controlling angles and trajectories. The hostiles went down.
We advanced, stepping over body parts amid surprisingly intact corpses-some with their skin shredded away and some with blood still squirting from arteries. We marched through pools of blood, leaving behind trembling young girls huddled against the walls, gasping and splattered with blood. Too scared to shake, I moved in icy shock, an automaton, doing whatever Sweety ordered.
I noticed Merlin hadn’t made any more bad jokes, or spoken at all, for that matter. I didn’t feel much like conversation, either.
A hostile lay twitching on the deck. I shot him through the head with a laser burst and felt only cold horror. A Cyrillian, with black satin skin, tribal scars and sharpened white teeth. The slavers had given their group a name, Fortune’s All-Sub Crimson Souls. They were a diverse bunch. Assidics, Outworlders, Cyrillians, even a few outlaw Mocains and Ormans-the Crimson Souls welcomed all. Being a merciless homicidal maniac was the only qualification. They had found a nice hideout here on Alshana 4, but their good times were ending fast.
The Legion didn’t negotiate with slavers, and we didn’t arrest them. We killed them. According to our initial estimate there were more than two hundred fifty of the bastards in the complex. With only ten of us, including Redhawk in the aircar, we had strong motivation to terminate the engagement as rapidly as possible.
“Damn it,” someone said on the net. “DefCorps armor!”
Merlin and I were vaguely aware of an intense firefight raging outside.
“Snow Leopard, Psycho, Dragon. They’ve got some kind of reaction team. Looks like a whole squad in armor. Get ‘em, Priestess.” The voice belonged to Dragon, our most experienced soldier. I could hardly believe how calm he sounded. A squad in armor! Bad news, very bad news.
“Dragon, Snow Leopard. Responding. Thinker, Merlin, break off your target and engage their armored squad.”
“Snow Leopard, Thinker, tenners!” I replied. The rest of our assigned Slavebloc would have to wait. Merlin and I shot our way out of a door on the east side and ran along the wall toward Barracks 1.
“We’re entering Priestess’s line of fire!” Merlin and Sweety exclaimed in unison. We skidded to a halt amid dead and dying slavers littering the plaza in front of the barracks. Two more slavers with SGs charged out and ran right into Priestess’s precision xmax, one round apiece. Unarmored, they were torn to pieces instantly, going down spraying blood. Damned good shooting by our medic, Priestess. A very talented little girl.
We converged on the enemy squad through the dense white smoke drifting through the plaza. The armored slavers could see through it as well. Five-no, six DefCorps A-suits bounded towards Slavebloc 2. They opened fire on Ironman and Dragon with x as I raised my E and fired auto xmax. Snow Leopard and Psycho moved up on my left as Ironman and Dragon returned fire from the north side of Slavebloc 2.
“Targets!” I watched one of the armored slavers go down in a blinding flash of hits as I walked the xmax down his chest. Another went down as well-an obscene tracery of xmax and laser crisscrossed their path.
“Relax, gals, we can handle this bunch!” I recognized Psycho’s obnoxious whine. Then his Manlink spoke, auto tacstar, ripping open the world. Most of the armored slavers vanished, replaced by dazzling brilliant white hot cores, screeching gibbering actinic gold tracers, precision nuclear flowers writhing upward, with blinding lightning strikes flashing down all around them. Tacstar Goddess, Flower of the Legion, annihilating our enemies. The Manlink was effective tactical, shoulder-fired artillery. Merlin and I fired at the stragglers nonstop, xmax and laser. Priestess, Ironman and Dragon laid down a deadly crossfire of xmax while Snow Leopard switched to laser as the last of those A-suited bastards went down.
The firing stopped, and I got my first look at what a tacstar can do to armored troops. Cenite was supposed to be just about indestructible; however, a direct tacstar hit was beyond the limit. What remained of the enemy squad glowed like a junkyard of fused, blasted, cenite armor. My weapons instructor’s intonations suddenly had real-world meaning. The tacstar is a micronuke designed for shock troops to rapidly impose tactical superiority over the enemy. I guess if anyone qualified as shock troops, we did.
“All right, gang,” Snow Leopard said with finality. “Let’s mop up.”
Our helmets now off, Merlin and I ended up in the central hive of the obscenely opulent HQS building. Slaveblock 1 had been impressive, but the slavers had saved the best of their stolen riches for their headquarters. Rare and exotic woods paneled the walls and ceilings. Tapestries that surely could have ransomed small planets now lay shredded, blood soaked and crushed by Legion boots. Millennia-old pottery and glassware lay shattered, bits and shards strewn with a careless abandon that must be the stuff of archaeologists’ nightmares.
Here the Fortune’s All-Sub Crimson Souls had planned their raids, counted their loot, and raped and tortured their captives. Here it had ended for many of them. They’d terrorized countless worlds but now their bloody, dismembered corpses littered the floor. Smoke still hung in the air and stunk heavily of gore and exhaust gasses of E’s and SG’s.
The smell was getting to me. I started to put my helmet back on, but several of the nearby slaves saw what I was doing and gasped, apparently terrified that more fighting was imminent. I stopped. The young, attractive girls, some of them still naked, huddled in groups of two and three in the corners, consoling each other. Most were on one side or the other of absolute panic. Looking them in the eye seemed to calm them down a bit. I don’t think they really understood what was happening. Some probably thought we were just another bunch of slavers.
“Whooo!” Psycho careened into the room, popped off his helmet and strutted around in his armor, the Manlink thrust out in front of him like a great cenite penis. “Mother did it again! Did you see those stars?” A little guy, he had short blond hair, vacant blue eyes and a wild grin. “Say hello and die! Thank you, Mommy. Thank you!” He stroked ‘Mother’, his Manlink. “Deadman! I haven’t had this much fun since…well, since yesterday!” Psycho had earned a reputation as a total maniac. He’d actually liked Planet Hell.
“Snow Leopard, we’ve ID’d Saint Mongro.” Coolhand stood over a large corpse sprawled in a pool of blood. The dead man’s blue, pockmarked face was frozen in a harsh scowl. His filmy eyes stared into infinity. A dead slave girl lay crumpled beside him.
Someone on Veltros had said it, and now I understood. The dead always look the same, like lumps of clay.
Coolhand poked Mongro gently with his E, consulted a datacard and muttered to himself, “That’s certainly him.” Tall and rangy, Coolhand had a thin, handsome face and wavy brown hair. He seemed perfectly casual about having found the Crimson Soul’s notorious leader.
Snow Leopard drifted over and glanced down at the corpse. He removed his helmet, revealing straight white-blond hair, hot pink eyes and a chunky face so pale we could see blue veins pulsing at his temple.
“Record it,” he said coldly, and turned away.
“Get any interesting kills, Thinker?” Dragon asked me. His sweaty forehead sported a nasty bruise, but he didn’t seem to notice. He moved like a great cat, balancing his E on one shoulder. His deep-set eyes glared at me. Dragon was a first-class killer. I always felt better with him around, tattoos and all.
I wasn’t sure if he really expected an answer. “Well, nothing worth writing home about,” I replied.
He actually smiled. “Good! Keep it that way. Interesting means you let them get the drop on you!”
Before I could figure out how to reply, a commotion broke out down one corridor. Shouting, shrieking, a gang of girls went at it, jumping on each other wildly. A catfight! I ran, but by the time I arrived Warhound and Ironman had separated most of the combatants. One girl writhed on the floor as the others continued kicking and spitting at her, screeching invectives and convulsed with hatred.
My natural voice needed no amplification this time, “Break it up! What is this? Stop that!” I threw the attackers to one side, straddling the downed girl to protect her. The others very quickly learned not to hit me in my armor. Cradling bruised knuckles, they circled like wild dogs, bristling with hatred.
Ironman interrupted, “It’s Black Ice, Thinker!” He held several of the slaves back. “That’s what they’re saying. It’s Black Ice!”
Black Ice! I suddenly recognized the girl as a Mocain, hair cut short to the scalp, hooded eyes and no
