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

his body. His penis was so rigid that he thought it would explode. Sometimes he almost wished it would.
    Part of the human sex act involves release, but the aliens had bypassed that function in order to prolong his pleasure, and in so doing were unknowingly torturing him.
    But there was no alternative. The Hudathans believed that it was important to dispense rewards and punishments in a timely fashion. By associating pleasure or pain with a particular event, they hoped to reinforce or discourage the behavior in question. Since Baldwin had provided them with some excellent advice concerning the attack on Worber’s World, he deserved a reward. Never mind whether he liked the reward, or wanted the reward, he deserved the reward and had to receive it.
    So Baldwin screamed, the technician waited, and a timer measured the seconds. Finally, when the allotted amount of time had passed, the pleasure stopped. His body tingled all over. The human was only vaguely aware of the 350-pound alien that stepped in to remove his restraints. The straps were intended to protect rather than punish.
    There were no wires or leads to disconnect, since all of the necessary circuitry had been surgically implanted into his brain, and was radio-controlled.
    That was the part of the bargain that Baldwin liked the least, the knowledge that the aliens were in total control of his body. But it was absolutely necessary if he wanted to continue his relationship with them. If a single word could be used to describe the Hudathan race, it would be “paranoid.”
    Except that humans classify “paranoia” as aberrant behavior and Hudathans considered it to be normal. Normal, and desirable given the nature of their home system.
    Baldwin knew that Hudatha, their home planet, was fairly Earth-like, and rotated around a star called Ember, which was 29 percent more massive than Terra’s sun.
    So even though both stars were about the same age, the gravity generated by Ember’s greater mass had compressed its core, which led to higher central temperatures and more rapid nuclear fusion. That in turn had shortened the star’s life span and caused it to grow significantly larger, redder, and more luminous over the last few million years. The result had been warmer temperatures on the surface of Hudatha, the loss of some species, and increasingly bright sunlight that hurt the eyes.
    Having observed these changes, and being scientifically advanced, the Hudatha knew that their sun was headed for red-gianthood and that they would have to move.
    Making things even more complicated was the fact that the planet Hudatha was in a Trojan relationship with a jovian binary. The jovians’ centers were separated by only 280,000 kilometers, so their surfaces were only 110,000 kilometers apart.
    If there had been no other planets in the system, Hudatha would have followed along behind the jovians in a near perfect circular orbit, but there were other planets, and they tugged on Hudatha just enough to make it oscillate around the following Trojan point. The upshot of it all was a wildly fluctuating climate.
    Hudatha had no seasons as such. Major changes came in response to the ever-changing distance between Hudatha and Ember. The chances took place on a time scale of weeks, rather than months, and that meant that at any given time of the year it could be searingly hot, frigidly cold, or anything in between.
    And that, Baldwin knew, explained why the Hudathans felt the universe was out to get them, because in a sense it was.
    All of which accounted for the implant. If the Hudathans could control a variable, they were sure to do so, knowing that control meant survival. And, to a race like the Hudatha, the very existence of another sentient species was an unendurable threat. A threat that must be encountered, controlled, and if at all possible, completely eliminated.
    It was this tendency, this need, that Baldwin was determined to exploit. The only problem was whether he could survive