“Getting scared?” Redhawk asked. He draped himself over his seat lazily, his coverall zip half open, exposing a sweaty, hairy chest.
“I get braver with every sip of this stuff,” I replied.
“I ran into Valkyrie in Supply,” he said. “She asked about you.”
I hesitated. “Yeah? What did you say?”
“I told her you had some serious second thoughts about the relationship. And I reminded her that I was available and damned good in bed. She told me to…well, never mind what she told me. It wasn’t very ladylike. So I guess she’s still stuck on you.”
Visions of Valkyrie, Gamma Two, came to me, faintly. What kind of dark magic, what kind of evil alchemy, could find love in the Legion? Visions of silky golden hair, and a great hush. We’d slept out under the stars, on Hell. I’d been Gamma Four then-it was before I was transferred to Beta Squad. Once, we’d camped by a cold, black ocean with luminous silver waves and a beach of silver sand, with death waiting in the night. I blessed the Gods when she first came to me, but it got to be lonely after awhile. She was always there, but her thoughts were far away. For all I knew, she could have been a biogen. But I knew she wasn’t-I could understand biogens.
“Thinker, you still with us?” Redhawk slouched in his seat, finishing off his bitter. “Man, you’ve got it bad!”
I smiled. “Yeah. I guess so.” Here, even Hell seemed like the distant past-a previous life.
The rumor mill spread the word long before the official announcement: We were about to exit the wormhole and re-enter normal vac. I was lost in a crowd of troopers facing a giant d-screen in one of the rec rooms when I heard a faint whining. Reality languidly stretched in on itself. The pressure that had given us all mild tunnel vision abruptly vanished with a jolt. For a moment, I fought for control of my stomach. Then it was over. The ship shuddered and groaned, and the screen filled with stars. A savage cheer ripped through the ranks.
This was routine for the vacheads but good news for us. We made it! The future was dark, but we were right on course.
Troopers pointed excitedly at the screen amid cries of, “Look at that!” and “It’s beautiful!”
Andrion 2, itself in orbit around Andrion’s yellow dwarf star, grew larger and larger, glowing on the screens. It was truly lovely, truly marvelous, with great luminous green oceans and continents covered with brightly tinted forests. Rugged black mountain ranges spawned cold blue rivers that traced aimless patterns through endless flowerfields. Vast silver deserts of sand dominated cold plateaus. The polar areas gleamed white, and wispy clouds streaked brilliant skies. It reminded me a little of Veltros, and I tried to put the thought away. My heart beat faster. The future would depend entirely upon us.
Back in my cube, I collapsed onto my bunk, slid a datapak off the shelf and triggered it. I must have seen it a hundred times, but it still stirred my blood. A thin, silvery line, almost invisible, etched into the dark. It was the long-range image of the Systie antimat track entering this system. No doubt it was very much like the one we had just made on our wormhole exit. It was why we were here, prepped to drop onto this far-off world.
Outvac Sector Command-Starcom-had detected the Systie track quite by accident, in the vicinity of the Andrion System. When a ship exits an artificial wormhole, the negative energy slams the portal shut and the ship leaves a searing antimat trail-an unmistakable footprint on the cosmos-as the ship powers onto vac drive.
Why would the Systies be interested in the far rim of the Outvac? The Andrion System was the only habitable system in the sector, and we could think of no conceivable reason for a System starship to be here. It was, after all, deep in ConFree territory, our territory, and the Systies had seriously breached the treaty by intruding. CI had concluded their target was Andrion 2-what else could it be? There were no other obvious choices. The Legion had reacted immediately. ConFree had had no active colonization plans for Andrion 2, a Phase Four planet. The Systie antimat track changed all that.
Our mission: seize the planet, repel any Systie intruders, establish control, and find out what they were up to.
ConFree and the System were not officially at war, but the Legion and the DefCorps knew better. In this uneasy truce, both sides knew that only the survivors compiled the incident report. Regs were regs, and we took them seriously in the Legion, but when we were in a remote sector and up against the DefCorps troops on the far side of the Outvac, there weren’t any rules. It didn’t matter what the diplomats said later.
“You still lookin’ at that?” Coolhand stood in the open door to my cube. I always left it open to make the tiny cube a bit less claustrophobic.
“Hi, Coolhand, come on in.” Coolhand had earned his name by his relaxed attitude to our dangerous profession.
“They’ve launched the recons.” He pulled the little wall seat open and settled his lanky frame onto it. His knees hit the edge of my bunk.
“Yeah? Are we going to see it?”
“I’m afraid the reserved seats are all taken, Sir. Standing room only.” He laughed easily. My first friend in the Legion, Coolhand was a tall, handsome youth who always seemed to have the answers. As our Two, he served as Snow Leopard’s backup. I admired him, and trusted his judgment.
Star Survey had mapped Andrion 2 decades before, and that’s all we had. That, and the Systie antimat track. Sending another automated probe would only have postponed the problem-so ConFree sent the Legion instead.
The probes brought back a lot of data, but I knew we couldn’t trust the probes. All the biotech in all the sensor systems wouldn’t provide the kind of information that one Legionnaire plodding along in the mud could.
Andrion 2, the second planet of a seven-planet system, orbited a single, hot-yellow prime, similar to Veltros. Only two of the seven planets interested us, the second and the third. Both were in the life zone. Andrion 2’s status had been rated Class A despite its somewhat lighter-than-standard gravity. We knew from the probes that it was inhabited by human stock.
We had only a few, fleeting images of a frail, savage-looking race, apparently dwelling in the deep flower forests like animals. They had not always been savage. A great pre-industrial civilization had once flourished here. There were hundreds of ancient, crumbling cities and fortresses of stone, all deserted, dotting the planet, disappearing in the tightening grip of the forests, or stark and lonely on high plateaus and mountains. This had once been a growing culture, laid low by some unknown disaster. A warning for us. We had many images of strange texts carved in the stone, but no one could read them.
I knew the images of the natives by heart; we all did.
I’d made a solid of two of them frozen in mid-leap. I kept it on a little shelf above the fold-down desk. A young female, dressed in a ragged, filthy tunic of animal scales, fleeing the probe in terror into a tree line, long tangled dark hair streaming out behind her. She wore a gold bracelet on her left arm. Another scale-clad savage, a male with matted brown hair, looked up from a forest clearing, yellow teeth bared, clutching a crude metal-tipped spear.
Coolhand followed my glance to the solid and plucked it off the shelf. “She kind of has your nose, Thinker, she could be your sister. So marriage is out…sorry!” He chuckled. I had a reputation as a lover, because of Valkyrie. “Remember, they’re mortals. This shot was taken long before you were born, so she’s a wrinkled grandmother by now. Maybe even dead.”
Images, at the end of infinity, to tell us what we had to know. A dead civilization and savages in the forests and a Systie antimat track. What possible interest could the System have in this world? The natives are delicately built, I thought, not quite as tall as we are. Clean features, pale brown skin. The male had cold grey eyes; hers were a smoky brown. No records in the history of how they got here. Had they sprung from forgotten, kidnapped slave labor? Someone had brought them here in the dim past, but it was not a unique story. It had taken the Systie intrusion for anyone to take an active interest.