Galactic Warlord

GalacticWarlord DouglasHill 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 happ