Free Soldier of the Legion by Marshall S. Thomas Page B

datascreen. He drew it expertly, with all the stars right where they should be, seen from his forest. He drew a moving star, and traced it right down to the horizon. After that, he did another sketch, an exoseg, Exoseg Gigantic Soldier, eating a man. Then he smashed the d-screen with the lightpen, suddenly convulsed with rage and tears. The lifies could get nothing further from him. But it gave us something to work on.
    They took Boy Scaler by aircar to the edge of the flower forest near where he’d been captured, and released him. Dressed once again in his tunic of scaly skin and armed with his slingshot and spear, he bolted into the forest and disappeared. The lifies had injected a c-cell into his scalp. It would lead us to him, wherever he went.
    He’d gone here, to Site 2012. The probes quickly confirmed that the bowels of this dead city crawled with Scalers. Now we had what we wanted: a big Scaler community. We were ready to come calling.
    We knew so little we could have been blind, but the primary mission was certainly to defend this planet from the Systies. Everything else was secondary. I munched a mag, leaning against the doorway of the dome.
    “It’s simple,” Psycho declared. “The star was a Systie ship. The exos came from the ship. Command knows it, they just don’t want to get the troops upset.”
    The rain eased off. It would be dawn soon. “It seems obvious, Psycho,” I said, “but why would the Systies want to transport exosegs from one world to another? It’s crazy. Why would anyone want to do that? Even Systies aren’t that crazy.”
    “How should I know? Ask Merlin. He’s the brains of the outfit. I just work here. Maybe the Systies are using the exos to do something for them.”
    “Do what? They’re not smart enough to do anything.”
    “How do you know? They sure know how to eat people. Maybe the Dominants are running the show for the Systies.”
    “Come on...they’re not that bright.”
    “We don’t know how bright they are,” Psycho insisted. “Not until we capture one of the Dominants alive, and disassemble it. Then we’ll know.”
    “The Dominants are not intelligent. They live in holes in the ground, and the high point of their day is when they get to suck on somebody’s abdomen. They couldn’t be doing anything for the Systies.”
    “Why not? That’s the high point of my day, too!” Psycho exclaimed. “Look—the exo soldiers are from Andrion 3—fully developed natives of Andrion 3. They didn’t develop here. But they got here somehow. They don’t have wings, and they can’t breathe vac. Why couldn’t a comet or asteroid blow a chunk of Andrion 3 to Andrion 2, with some exo eggs attached? I don’t know. I think they came here by ship. It’s the only way to get from planet to planet.”
    “What do you think, Merlin?”
    “I think we’ll know the answer when we find the Systies,” he replied.
    “Do you think they’re here?”
    “I don’t know. But somebody’s been here. And done some mighty strange things. I don’t think there’s much doubt it was the Systies.”
    Strange! The exosegs were natives of Andrion 3. And if the Systies had transported them, where were the Systies? We had swept the planet clean and found no advanced signals or power sources. It’s not easy to hide a starship. Despite all our biomag wizardry, there could be whole cities, whole nations, whole empires, hiding from us in the forests, in the mountains, and deep underground. But if there were any Systies here, they weren’t using power systems.
    “All right, you tell me how they got here. Soldier exosegs, from Andrion 3.”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “But we’re going to find out. Probably sooner than we’d like. And if the Systies show themselves, we’re certainly not going to be worrying about exosegs.”
    Psycho let it go. He got bored easily. It was one of his problems. I let my mind wander back to the moment when Priestess and I had suddenly come face to face with