Legion Read Online Free PDF Page B

out on a stainless steel gurney, with drip-trays slotted in to catch the noxious seep. It had been dead in the desert for several weeks, and it had bloated. The face was lost in one raw, black graze, the uniform frayed and faded, the torso limp and slack where gut gas had previously bloated it.
    Soneka and Bronzi stood in the chilly light, and shivered as they regarded it.
    ‘That’s no Dancer I know,’ said Soneka. His words made smoke in the sub-zero air.
    ‘Oh, but he’s certainly one of yours, het,’ the staff medicae insisted. Medicae Ida was a tall woman, wearing a long surgical gown, the apron front of which was smeared with stains. She’d been a combat uxor in her youth, but age and experience had seen her graduate to the medicae branch as her perceptive skills dulled. Bronzi wondered if Ida missed her uxorhood, missed her command of geno men. It seemed so, from her tone.
    ‘He’s not,’ Soneka insisted, peering down at the corpse.
    ‘Well, I don’t know how you can tell that, sir,’ Ida said. ‘His face is missing.’
    ‘He’d know,’ said Bronzi.
    ‘Where was he found?’ Soneka asked, placing a hand on the corpse’s wax-cold shoulder. A surgical cloth had been spread over the abdomen to obscure the ravages of the autopsy.
    ‘The Tel Utan wadi,’ Medicae Ida replied.
    Soneka shook his head. ‘He’s not one of mine. I’m not missing anyone. The lists were in weeks ago.’
    ‘But he is wearing Dancer insignia,’ Ida insisted. ‘Here, the collar pins, and here, the brooch.’ She pointed. ‘He is dressed as a Dancer.’
    ‘Have you tissue-mapped him?’ Soneka asked.
    ‘Not yet,’ Ida admitted.
    ‘Then you’ll see the truth. This isn’t one of my men.’
    Senior Medicae Ida sighed. ‘I know that, het. I just wanted you to confirm it, before I—’
    ‘Before you what?’ Bronzi demanded.
    ‘Before I alert the Chiliad uxors. Hetman Soneka, is there any reason you can think of why one of your men would have no heart?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘No heart?’ Ida repeated emphatically. ‘What the fug did he have in there then?’ Bronzi asked, nodding at the corpse’s covered chest.
    ‘A cadmium centrifuge,’ replied Senior Medicae Ida gently. ‘The subject has undergone some extreme and non-standard organ modification. His liver was… well, I’ve never seen anything like it.’
    ‘What is going on here?’ asked Soneka.
    ‘I don’t know,’ Ida replied. ‘I was hoping you might.’
    ‘There’s something else,’ she added. She pulled back the surgical cloth.
    For a moment, all they could see was the scissor-snapped sternum and the splayed ribs, caked black with blood.
    ‘Here,’ she said, pointing.
    On the dead flesh of the corpse’s hip there was a small brand, partially obliterated by a shrapnel puncture.
    ‘What is that?’ asked Soneka, squinting at it. ‘Is that a snake?’
    ‘Maybe,’ said Bronzi, bending down to look for himself. ‘A snake… or some kind of reptile.’
    S ONEKA TOLD THE medicae to place a guard on the corpse and send someone to wake up the post commander. He went back outside with Bronzi.
    ‘Insurgent?’ Soneka asked.
    Bronzi nodded. ‘Has to be. That mark.’
    Soneka didn’t reply. Crocodilia and other forms of aggressive reptile were the most persistently recurring of all Nurthene emblems.
    ‘Have they the art to change a man inside like that?’ Bronzi asked.
    ‘I don’t know,’ Soneka replied, ‘but since that night outside Tel Utan, I could believe them capable of anything.’
    Bronzi wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Listen, Peto, the reason I came here today, it’s about that night. I wanted you to know that I didn’t hang you out to dry.’
    ‘I never thought you did, Hurt.’
    ‘Really, though. I was all for taking a force out to support you. I was warned off.’
    ‘I can imagine,’ said Soneka.
    Bronzi looked at him strangely. ‘What does that mean?’
    Soneka walked a few steps away and stared out into the