Read Legion Of The Damned - 01 - Legion of the Damned for Free Online

himself ... and smile at a sergeant with the largest breasts that he’d ever seen.
    It was a relatively short walk from the mess hall to staging area 4, where the members of his patrol were running through last-minute equipment checks. It was a large rectangular room, filled with greenish-blue light and a lot of noise: the whine of servos as the cyborgs tested their electromechanical bodies, the chatter of a power wrench as a weapons tech tightened the bolts on a Trooper 11’s ammo bay, and the sound of profanity as a bio bod ran a systems check on her blast rifle.
    The staging area smelled too, a heady mix of lubricants, ozone, and hot metal. Some of his fellow NCOs complained about it and submitted recs demanding a better ventilation system, but Booly liked the smell. It was part of what he did.
    Booly stepped over to a wall terminal, entered an access code, and watched while names and serial numbers filled the screen. This was a routine “roust and reconnaissance,” or R&R, patrol, designed to keep Naa bandits on the jump and detect tribal movements should any occur. Not that anyone really expected anything to happen, since both sides adhered to a long-established policy of almost ritual combat, in which skirmishes were the rule and pitched battles were studiously avoided. By doing so, both sides were able to reinforce the warrior-based values they held in common, confer status on individual members, and keep casualties down.
    The Naa accomplished this by admitting adult males to the circle of warriors after combat with the Legion, and the humans had adopted a similar system in which recruits were brought to Algeron, where they were blooded in battle.
    The key to all of this was that Algeron had been given to the Legion by the Emperor himself, and that subsequent to that gift, the Legion had decided to forbid further colonization of the planet. So, with the exception of some early settlers, the legionnaires were the only humans around, a presence the Naa had learned to tolerate and even make use of.
    Scanning the screen, Booly saw that he’d been given a quad whose official name was “George Washington,” but was better known as “Gunner.” Not that “George Washington” was his real name, since recruits were allowed to take a nom de guerre, and most did. It was a link to the distant past when the original French Foreign Legion had been home to people from many countries, most of whom had been on the run from the law, from a failed relationship, or from themselves.
    Booly felt the floor shudder and looked over his shoulder. A quad had entered the bay. It stood twenty-five feet tall, weighed fifty tons, and had huge bull’s-eyes painted on both of its battle-scarred flanks.
    Booly shook his head in amazement. Gunner was a longtime legionnaire and one crazy sonofabitch. Some people thought the bull’s-eyes were some sort of joke. Booly knew better. Gunner wanted to die but seemed destined to live forever. No matter how thick the battle, no matter how many legionnaires fell, Gunner survived. It was both his blessing and his curse.
    Booly moved his eye down the list. He had the quad plus a full complement of Trooper IIs. Three were prime, with at least a battle a piece under their camouflage, but one, a newbie with a nom de guerre Napoleon Villain, was straight from Earth. He’d keep an eye on her.
    A half-squad of five bio bods under the command of a sergeant known as “Roller” completed his force and would ride on Gunner. So, while Booly would have welcomed another quad, or double the number of bio bods, the force was adequate. Or so he hoped.
    He wiped the screen, jumped down to the floor, and found that the patrol had formed up. Roller took a certain kind of perverse pride in allowing his people to run every which way right up to the last minute, and then, just when it looked as if he’d be caught short, bringing them together into perfect formation. Qûads to the rear, Trooper Ils towards the middle, and