Douglas Hill - The Last Legionary 01 - Galactic Warlord

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The Last Legionary 1: Galactic Warlord
By Douglas Hill
BOOK ONE OF THE LAST LEGIONARY SERIES
HE STANDS ALONE...
HIS PLANET, MOROS, DESTROYED
BY UNKNOWN FORCES.
HIS ONE VOW — TO WREAK
A TERRIBLE VENGEANCE ON
THE SINISTER ENEMY.
But Keill Randor, the LAST LEGIONARY, cannot
conceive the evil force he will unleash in his
crusade against the WARLORD, the master of
destruction, and his murderous army, the
DEATHWING.
CHAPTER ONE
He had been walking the dirty streets since twilight first began to gather. The pain streamed like liquid
fire through every cell of his body – but he locked it away in a corner of his mind, ignored it, and walked.
There was little to please the eye in his surroundings, and he paid scant attention to them. He was on a
small poor unimportant planet whose very name, Coranex, meant nothing to him. But around the
spaceport clustered a drab, seedy town, which was a well-known stopover on the main space lanes. It
attracted freightermen, traders, wandering technicians, space drifters of every sort. Those were the
people he was looking for. Those were the people most likely to pick up the kind of information he
desperately sought.
He threaded his way through the clatter and glitter of the streets, thronged with people idling past the
tawdry attractions offered to space-weary visitors – everything from ordinary holoscreens to shadowy,
semi-illicit drug dives. Methodically he worked his way from place to place, concentrating mainly on the
attendants, doorkeepers, bartenders – those in a position to collect and distil the talk, the gossip, of their
hundreds of customers.
But he also watched faces in the crowds. Many people turned towards him with a flicker of curiosity –
their interest caught for a moment by his tall leanness, the controlled litheness of his movements, most of
all by the grey-black uniform with the brilliant, sky-blue circlet on shoulder and upper chest. Sometimes a
person would glance at him curiously and then look again, with a flicker of recognition in their eyes. And
then the uniformed man would pause, and intercept, and ask his questions.
Always the answers were the same. A shrug, a shake of the head, a negative. Sometimes a shadow of
sympathy – most often the blankness of indifference. The Inhabited Galaxy was a big place; everybody
had problems of their own.
Undeterred, he kept moving, as he had on a dozen planets or more before Coranex – while the pain
clamoured for his full attention, while twilight darkened into deep night. His head remained high and his
shoulders square, for a lifetime of military training cannot be erased in a few months – not by pain, not by
weariness, not by loneliness, not even by despair.
Despair was near enough, though, ready to overwhelm him. He knew how much time he had left to go
on searching. It was a good deal less than the time he had already spent. Yet in those months he had
picked up nothing except scattered hints, all of them vague, fragmentary. They were enough to keep him
going – but they were never enough to give his search some point, some clear direction.
But he kept on. He had nothing else to do. And the fiery pain in his body was nothing compared to the
grim, vengeful determination that fuelled his search.
He was Keill Randor, once the youngest and, some said, the finest Strike Group Leader in the 41st
Legion of the planet Moros.
But now he was a soldier without an army, a wanderer without a home, a man without a people.
And he was dying.
The bar was dim, half-empty, squalid, stinking of stale spilled drink and unwashed bodies. The bartender
was an off-worlder, from one of the ’altered worlds’ – where, over the centuries, local conditions had
caused changes, mutations, in the humans who inhabited them. He was dwarfish and stocky,
orange-skinned and hairless. But his shrug, when Keill asked his question, was an exact replica of all the
others Keill had met in his searching.
‘Legionaries? I heard what happened to ’em. Nothin’ else. Anyway, got no time to stand around jawin’,
pickin’ up rumours. Got a business t’ run.’
The orange-skinned dwarf moved as if to turn away, but glanced up at Keill and changed his mind.
Keill’s expression had not altered, but something in his eyes told the bartender that, if he moved, he might
not enjoy what would happen next.
Keill took out a handful of the plastic wafers that were galactic credits, selected one, and laid it on the
bar. ‘Is there anyone,’ he said evenly, ’who might have had time to listen to rumours?’
The bartender’s hand covered the credit, and pondered for a long moment. ‘Maybe,’ he said at last.
‘Freighter pilot named Crask, gets around a lot, has big ears and a big mouth. Might know somethin’.’
‘Where do I find him?’
The orange dwarf sneered. ‘Blind drunk in an alley somewhere. Unless he’s got back to the port. That’s
where he sleeps – in his ship.’
Keill nodded and left the bar. He did not seem to see the bartender gesture quickly towards a group of
heavy-set men slouching over drinks at a nearby table.
A yawning security guard pointed out the freighter owned by the man called Crask. It was a battered
hulk of a ship, bulbous and ungainly like all freighters – and it was deserted. Keill settled down to wait.
He did not allow himself to hope; he did not allow himself to think about the possibility that Crask might
know something, or the stronger possibility that he might be just another dead end. He merely leaned
against the ship – relaxed, controlled, infinitely patient – and waited.
The men came soon, as he had half-expected. Four bulky Shadows in the dim lighting, which focused
mainly on the low buildings across the spaceport’s flat plasticrete surface.
They ranged themselves in front of Keill, looking him up and down slowly. Keill had taken in the details
of the four in a glance. All of a type – heavy muscle running to fat, soiled one-piece coveralls, hard,
empty eyes. Small-time space drifters, who would be more willing to operate on the criminal fringe of
interworld trade than off it.
The biggest of the four, almost bald, stood slightly to the front of the others, as if to underline the fact that
he was their leader. Keill straightened up slowly, away from the ship, still relaxed and calm.
‘I’m Crask,’ said the balding man. ‘You the one lookin’ to hear about legionaries?’
Keill nodded.
‘An’ you’re a legionary yourself?’
‘I am.’
‘Yeah. Too bad about your planet.’
The words were spoken as if Crask were sympathizing over some minor affliction, like a head-cold.
Keill’s expression did not change. ‘I was told that you might be able to give me some information.’
‘I might,’ Crask said. ‘What’d it be worth?’
‘It depends on what you tell me.’
The big man snorted. ‘You want me to tell you what I know – andthen you name your price?’
‘You won’t be cheated,’ Keill replied.
‘Ain’t that easy,’ Crask said stubbornly. ‘Name us some kind o’ figure.’
Keill sighed. ‘I’ve got about three thousand galacs. I can pay your price.’ He recalled for an instant the
day that he had ripped out of his one-man fighter every expendable item he could – second space suit,
escape capsule, some of his hand weapons, spare parts – and sold them to help finance his search.
Crask licked his lips. ‘You got that kind of money with you?’
‘Not here. In my ship.’ Keill pointed out into the darkness of the spaceport, towards the central pad
where his ship waited, just as he had left it after landing.
Crask’s grin was unpleasant. ‘Then let’s us walk out there just now, an’ you can get y’r money.’
Keill shook his head. ‘We’ll stay here, you’ll tell me what you know, then I’ll go and get the money.’
Crask’s laughter was even more Unpleasant. ‘You don’t get the idea at all. You’re a drifter, a nothin’.
You don’t know nobody here, nobody knows you. So nobody’s gonna raise trouble if you’re found
face-down in a gutter. Happens all the time t’ drifters. Get drugged up, get into trouble, get dead.
Nobody cares.’
As he spoke, Crask slid a meaty hand into a pocket and dragged out a slim plastic cylinder. A
needle-gun – more likely, Keill knew, to be armed with a killer poison than an anaesthetic.
The other three men also drew out weapons. Two had the knobbly metal clubs favoured by backstreet
thugs on many worlds. The third, unusually, had a glowing therm-knife, its blade superheated so that it
burned, rather than cut, through most materials – including human flesh.
Keill stood calmly, watching, seeming not to move. Yet his body was gathering itself, balanced, ready.
It was almost unfair.
The thugs were grinning. They saw themselves as four tough, well-armed men facing only one man,
empty-handed, helpless.
But they were facing a legionary of Moros. A man whose people were trained – all of them, and from
infancy – to the highest pitch in the arts and skills of battle. And a man who, in his own right, had been a
leading medal-winner for each of the previous two years in his planet’s annual Festival of Martial Games.
Many of those medals had been for unarmed combat.
So Crask was still in the process of raising the needler when Keill moved.
He gave no hint or warning, did not tense or poise his body. He simply dropped, full-length, to one side.
His right hand met the plasticrete, the arm rigid to take his weight. On the pivot of that hand, his body
swung in a horizontal arc, legs scything.
One boot swept the feet out from under a club-wielder. The point of the other boot struck precisely
against the beefy wrist of the hand that held the needier.
The crack of bone breaking was nearly drowned by Crask’s shriek of pain. As the needle-gun sailed
away into darkness, Keill had already flexed his body like a spring and come to his feet.
Crask had staggered and half-fallen, clutching his shattered wrist and moaning. The club-wielder whom
Keill had felled was struggling to his feet; the second one had just begun to bring up his club. Keill moved
again with the same bewildering speed, slipping under the raised weapon. A rib crunched as Keill’s
elbow slammed into the thick chest, and the man screamed and collapsed. In the same motion Keill
lashed out with his left foot, the blow perfectly timed, burying the point of his toe in the first
club-wielder’s bulging paunch, sending him hurtling back to collide with the knife-man, both sprawling.
The knife-man picked himself up, staring wide-eyed at Keill, who stood quietly, waiting. Then the
therm-blade drew a glowing curve in the air as the man’s hand swept back, and threw.
As the white-hot knife spun towards him Keill seemed to sway aside almost lazily. But the other man’s
eye was not quick enough to follow the movement of the legionary’s hand as it flashed up and plucked
the knife from the air by its insulated handle.
In a continuation of the same blurred movement, Keill pressed the stud that deactivated the blade, and
with a snap of wrist and forearm hurled the knife back.
He had thrown to deliver the knife hilt-first, for he had no wish to kill. The heavy handle made a dull
smack as it struck the knife’s owner exactly between the eyes. He toppled backwards and lay still.
Keill stepped past the crumpled forms of the two club-wielders and took hold of the collar of Crask’s
coverall, effortlessly jerking the bulky form to a sitting position.
‘I want what information you have,’ he said quietly, ’and I want it now.’
‘You bust m’ arm!’ Crask groaned, almost sobbing.
Keill tightened his grip, twisting so the collar bit into the thick neck. ‘Your neck will break as easily.’
‘Don’t – wait!’ Crask shouted, half-choking. ‘I’ll tell y’ !’
‘Go on.’ The steely grip eased a fraction.
‘Don’t really know much,’ Crask mumbled.
Keill’s other hand came round, palm under Crask’s heavy jaw, bending the neck back. ‘After all this,
you had better know something,’ he said grimly.
‘Wait! All right!’ Again the grip eased, and Crask, gasping, began to spill out words. ‘Just bar-talk, see?
Weeks back. When everybody was talkin’ about your planet, wonderin’ how it happened, lots of
rumours.’
‘What kind of rumours?’
‘Just space talk. You know. One figures a sun flare, another figures a collision with somethin’ from
space. Nobody knows. Then one fella, freighterman, he says he’s seen some legionaries. Two, three of
’em. An’ they’re like you – lookin’ for others.’
‘What did this freighterman say about them?’
‘Not much. He didn’t talk to them. One of them was a real big son – dangerous lookin’. But this fella,
the freighterman, he heard that these legionaries were aimin’ to set up a base somewhere.’
Urgency made Keill’s grip tighten again on the collar. ‘Where?’
‘Listen, go easy, will y’?’ Crask pawed weakly at the fierce grip. ‘Somewhere out near Saltrenius.
That’s all he said – truth. Don’t know nothin’ more.’
Without a word Keill flung the man aside and turned to move swiftly towards his ship. Despite his
control, his pulse had quickened, his eyes were bright, tendrils of hope rose within him. He had heard
tales of legionaries being seen, had followed them all down to their ultimate dead ends. But this was
different. A fixed base, of course! It was the right thing to do – and then from it send out the word to be
picked up by any other survivors from Moros, to gather them in.
Above him the blunt wedge-shape of his ship loomed. He sprang up the ramp and through the hatch of
the airlock, sealing it behind him ready for space. Strapping himself into the padded slingseat, he swiftly
activated the control panel, feeding details into his guidance computer. Around him the life-support
system hummed sweetly into action, and in moments the ship rose howling into the night, on a towering
pillar of almost invisible energy.
As he hurtled through the territorial space of Coranex, Keill brought himself under control, regaining his
calm, his patience. His eyes and hands automatically monitored the precision of his departure orbit, while
his mind just as automatically sorted through the details of the journey ahead. He knew his fuel core was
getting near to needing replenishment, but it would probably last. His air renewal, food concentrates and
the rest would also hold out. Thankfully, he would need no stopovers until he reached the planet
Saltrenius.
Idly he wondered why the group of legionaries – two? three? – would choose such a place. A sparsely
inhabited world, in a minor system, well off the major spaceways. What could it offer? And who, he
wondered, was the big legionary whom Crask’s freighterman had described as ’dangerous looking’?
But Keill had learned long before the futility of asking questions that could not be answered. Answers
would come when he reached Saltrenius.
He had reached deep space now, the planet he had just left receding into a small disc of brightness in the
rear viewscreen. The other screens, forward and side, presented the familiar panorama – the
unnumbered points of light that made up mankind’s Inhabited Galaxy.
Keill’s fingertips issued more instructions to his computer, which searched its prodigious memory for the
position of the planet Saltrenius, found it, and set its course.
On the viewscreens the points of light shimmered, blurred. The computer was obediently taking the ship
out of planetary drive and into ‘Overlight’ – in which a ship could cross the breadth of the galaxy in only
days.
The viewscreens went blank. A formless void gathered round Keill and his ship. In Overlight, he no
longer existed in the normal universe. Moving unfathomable times faster than the speed of light, the ship
had entered anon-place, leaving space and time behind it. Only Keill’s inner time sense remained, to note
the computer’s estimate of arrival at Saltrenius in about ten hours.
He settled back against the slingseat, letting his eyes close wearily. It had been a long and active night –
and somewhere, behind his rigid control, the pain still flamed and seared throughout his body.
Yet he felt a fierce gladness as sleep began to close round him. At least there was a chance now that he
would find others of his kind, before he died. And perhaps then he would also find answers toall his
questions. Even, if fortune willed it, a chance to wreak the bitter, hate-filled vengeance that blazed within
him more fiercely than any physical pain.
But that thought, all thought, faded as he drifted into sleep. And with sleep, as if from the grey emptiness
that surrounded his speeding ship, came the dreams.
CHAPTER TWO
The dreams were fragmentary at first, as they always were. Broken, fleeting visions of a landscape – of a
bleak and inhospitable world, dominated by chill expanses of desert, by towering ranges of rock-fanged
mountains.
It was Keill Randor’s world – the planet Moros, in the system of a white star on the outer reaches of the
Inhabited Galaxy. A harsh world it was, a harsh life it gave to the space colonists who had made it their
home so long ago, during the centuries of the Scattering – the time when the human race had spread itself
out through the many millions of planets in the galaxy, to seek those thousands that could support human
life.
Moros was one of them, for at least it had breathable air, with water and thin vegetation grudgingly
available in its central regions. It also had a variety of its own life forms – the venomous reptiles of many
weird shapes, the deadly sand cats, the huge, horned mammoths of the mountains, the tangled vine
growths that fed on flesh – all as dangerous and threatening as the desert itself.
Yet they had survived, those early spacefarers – survived and adapted to their new home. And its
rigours made them and their offspring tough, resourceful, self-reliant people, who even so had learned the
need for order, stability and discipline in their lives. There was room for little else, from the beginning, if
humans were to survive on Moros.
Yet the discipline was notimposed, from above. It wasaccepted, as a religion is accepted, by every
human inhabitant of that world. It was taught to the children before they were weaned. It became a basic
reality of life.
In the same way, as they learned to order and discipline themselves, so the humans of Moros learned to
fight to protect themselves. Fighting, against the alien beasts, the cruel environment, was also a reality of
life, was essential for life itself. The people of Moros taught themselves and their children everything they
needed to know for survival, in every kind of deadly circumstance. And that included a strict schooling in
forms of self-defence and combat, unarmed or with a wide array of weaponry.
So the people lived, their numbers grew, even finding a share of contentment and satisfaction in the
relentless hardships of their rugged, austere lives. But Moros was a poor planet, with little to offer the rest
of the galaxy in trade. For centuries it remained mostly alone, unvisited. And all that time its people
developed and refined their special way of life, becoming more fiercely independent, self-sufficient, at one
with themselves. They also became a planetful of the most skilled, most effective fighting men and women
in the galaxy.
Yet the people of Moros never lost that earliest sense of total commitment. In their world,communality
ruled – cooperation, sharing, mutual aid and support. The people of Moros did not fight among
themselves. All competition was relegated to an annual festival, the Martial Games. In their way of life,
private greed, destructive ambition, selfish indifference to the needs of others – such anti-social,
anti-survival ways were almost unknown.
Slowly, other human-inhabited planets in that region of the galaxy became aware of the uniqueness of
Moros. And others saw what the people of Moros had not realized – that theirs was not truly a poor
planet, for it had a special and valuable natural resource.
It had the martial skills of its population.
Gradually, the people of Moros were invited to use that resource, to trade with it as if it were minerals or
food products. They took their skills out into the galaxy, small groups of fighting men and women, hired –
at substantial sums – to fight in small wars on this planet or that. They became what, in an ancient human
language, had once been calledmercenaries. But they felt no shame in doing so, nor was any put upon
them.
They learned just how supremely skilled they were, compared to other soldiers in the Inhabited Worlds.
And the rest of the galaxy learned as well. Soon more offers were coming in then could be accepted, and
Moros began to know a measure of wealth.
With that income – held in common, like most property on the planet – the people of Moros acquired
new, up-to-date equipment and weapons. They bought spaceships, from one-man fighters to vast battle
cruisers, and created a formidable fleet. They visited other worlds, studied other advanced combat
techniques and took them home for their people to master them. So they organized themselves into an
armed force that could, if needed, include every adult on the planet. It was a force that became legendary
throughout the galaxy.
The Legions of Moros.
Even then, even though any army needs carefully drawn lines and levels of command, the communal
spirit of Moros was not impaired. Nor was the order and discipline: discord, slacking, disobedience were
unknown, and would have been shocking notions to any legionary. In battle, some led and others
followed, but they did so in order that every section and unit would operate like a finely tuned machine.
Otherwise the legionaries shared their lives as equals – working together, going into combat together,
celebrating victories together.
And, in the end, dying together.
(Keill Randor’s dream shifted, as it always did, and the broken, fleeting images gathered, held steady.
From the depths of his sleeping darkness Keill moaned, as the dream-memory rose, clear and terrible –
of the words he had heard from his ship’s communicator that day...)
He had been sent, with the other one-person ships of his Strike Group, on a simple reconnaissance
mission. But it was more than halfway across the galaxy, and in one of the most densely populated
sectors, where human worlds and their stars clustered like – as the Morosian saying had it – sand fleas at
an oasis.
Keill and his Group had come out of Overlight and were moving on ordinary planetary drive towards
their objective – a small planet where a local war looked like expanding into a major conflict, and where
the Legions had been offered a huge sum to join in on one side.
The Strike Group’s mission was simply to gather data, to study the planet from orbit, to assess the war
potential, to monitor broadcasts and so on. This data would help the Central Command of the Legions to
decide whether to take up the offer.
For the Legions, by then, could pick and choose among contracts. And their ethic, born of their history,
would not allow them to take the side of aggressors, or fanatics, or would-be exploiters.
Often they had fought, for less payment, on the side of those defending themselves against just such
enemies. Often, indeed, the mere presence of the Legions on the side of the defenders had prevented an
aggressor from ever launching a full-scale attack.
As the planet grew larger in their viewscreens, Keill and his group were checking their inter-ship
communications link, preparing to slide into an orbit suitable for scanning the surface of this world. They
were not advertising their presence, and hoped to go unnoticed – so Keill was mildly annoyed when he
spotted a handful of silvery, tubular shapes rising towards his group through clouds beneath them. A
subdued ripple of voices on the communicator showed that the rest of the group had also seen the other
ships.
‘Maybe they’re friendly, maybe not,’ Keill said to his group. ‘We’ll ease away on a new course and be
ready for evasive action.’
His fingers moved over the controls, programming in the new course that his group would pick up and
follow. He kept his eyes firmly on the approaching ships, waiting for some sign of their intention, some
communication from them.
As he watched, twin points of light glimmered from the tapering noses of each of the oncoming ships.
Keill clenched his teeth angrily. It was all the sign he needed: he knew an ion-energy beam-gun when he
saw one.
‘They’re firing,’ he snapped into his communicator. ‘Amateurs – they’re way out of range still. Begin
new course for evasive action.’
‘Do we return fire?’ The voice from the communicator was that of young Oni Wolda, Keill’s
next-in-command and his closest friend in the Strike Group. Her voice was calm, but with a faint note of
eagerness that made Keill smile.
‘No,’ he said quickly. ‘We’re not here to fight. Evasive action will take us far enough out for Overlight –
that’ll lose them. Then we’ll report back.’
Again he made his course corrections on the control panel. Then he added, ‘I’ll drop back into rear
position and find out who this gun-happy bunch belongs to.’
But before any of his group could acknowledge, his communicator hummed for an instant and then
spoke, not in the voices of his friends but in the abrasive, metallic tone of a long-range communication.
URGENT MESSAGE FROM HOME PLANET – MESSAGE FROM HOME PLANET.
Keill sat up, startled. Messages seldom came from Moros to legionaries on a mission, unless the
legionaries themselves first made contact, to report or to call for reinforcements in an emergency.
The communicator seemed to have plucked the word from his thoughts.
EMERGENCY MESSAGE ALL LEGIONARIES – EMERGENCY ALL LEGIONARIES
PLANET UNDER ATTACK BY UNKNOWN FORCES
ALL LEGIONARIES RETURN TO MOROS AT ONCE – REPEAT RETURN AT ONCE –
PRIORITY ONE ORDER OF CENTRAL
COMMAND
Shock turned Keill’s blood to ice. Moros under attack? It had never happened – not in all the centuries.
Who would be foolhardy enough to attack the home world of the galaxy’s most renowned fighting force?
But the words had been spoken, and had to be true.
‘Emergency procedure!’ he shouted. ‘Prepare for Overlight at my signal!’
It was risky, entering Overlight that close to a planet’s gravitational pull, but there was no choice.At
once, the terrible order had said – and Keill had no intention of arriving too late, if only by seconds, to be
摘要：

 TheLastLegionary1:GalacticWarlordByDouglasHill  BOOKONEOFTHELASTLEGIONARYSERIES HESTANDSALONE...HISPLANET,MOROS,DESTROYEDBYUNKNOWNFORCES. HISONEVOW—TOWREAKATERRIBLEVENGEANCEONTHESINISTERENEMY. ButKeillRandor,theLASTLEGIONARY,cannotconceivetheevilforcehewillunleashinhiscrusadeagainsttheWARLORD,thema...

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