Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
PREVIEW: INSURGENCY
INSURGENCY
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY EDWARD M. GRANT
REBELLION
Legionnaire #1
Edward M. Grant
Banchixi Media
Canada
Copyright © 2017-2018 Edward M. Grant
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without permission in any manner whatsoever.
First Edition, 2018
Revision: #13068 - December 20, 2018
Published by Banchixi Media, www.banchixi.com
CHAPTER 1
Approaching New Strasbourg, 2123 A.D.
The plasteel floor of the troop shuttle’s passenger compartment twisted beneath Logan McCoy’s boots like a dinghy bucking in a stormy sea. His hard, moulded seat rose beneath him as the shuttle climbed, then the thick, black webbing straps across his chest pulled his shoulders down as the seat dropped away, and left his stomach hanging in mid-air.
He closed his eyes, and tried to ignore the constant creaking and rattling behind his back from the thin hull that had been heated to over a thousand degrees by the fury of atmospheric entry as the shuttle descended from low orbit, and was now bumping through the turbulence lower in the atmosphere.
The air in the shuttle’s passenger compartment was growing warm as the heat from the heat-shield slowly soaked through the cylindrical green walls around them.
He reached up behind the transparent visor of his green plasteel helmet, and wiped away the drops of sweat from his forehead and eyes as best he could. More had soaked through the thin T-shirt beneath the heavy body armour that covered his chest, and now the black cloth of the shirt was stuck to his skin. He pulled the waistband loose from his fatigue pants, and shook it gently, to get some fresh air over his skin.
This was the second new planet he'd landed on since leaving Earth with the French Foreign Legion, and the sixth landing. But it was the first landing in a real combat zone.
The first landing where people on the ground might be shooting at him with real weapons, not simulated ones. Trying to kill him, and everyone else on board.
The next time he landed on a new planet, after a few months of his first combat posting here on New Strasbourg, he’d be a veteran.
Or a corpse.
The last time he landed, he and Desoto had been strapped into well-used Brigandine Combat Suits on the outside of an assault landing craft as it trailed kilometres of smoke and flames across the sky, listening to the hiss of cold air flowing into their helmets as the suit’s air-conditioning struggled to keep them cool. Staring through the darkened, centimetre-thick armoured visor of the helmet as the heat-shield below their feet melted and glowing embers flashed past.
With no choice but to stand there and hope the heat-shield held together until the pod touched down.
This shuttle trip had almost been relaxed in comparison. There were no windows to see what was happening outside the passenger compartment. And no-one had shot at them, so far.
But there was still time before it landed.
His heart thumped the way it always had before a fight back on Earth, as he sized up the other guys, and wondered whether he could avoid the conflict, and what might happen if he couldn't. He’d been in plenty of fights in Paris in the last few years, but most had used fists or knives, not missiles and nukes.
They’d been fighting for dominance. To show the other guy who was boss. To beat, scar and bruise him, not to kill him.
War was different.
The deep, drawling voice of the shuttle commander spoke through Logan’s helmet speakers, as though the man had burned a trail of fire through the atmosphere from space into a combat zone so many times that now it just bored him.
“En approche finale. Préparer pour l’atterrissage.”
French, without a trace of a foreign accent. Like most of the Legion’s officers.
No Englishman like Logan could progress past Sergeant, unless he became a French citizen first. He’d learned enough of the language to get by during his years in Paris, and some more during the Legion training. Mostly new swear words, and l’argot militaire, the language of destruction and death.
In combat, his suit’s AI could translate between English and French, but he’d seen more than enough simulated casualties in training caused by the split-second delay the AI introduced to convince him not to rely on it.
And those simulated deaths were usually followed by the ‘corpse’ rolling on the floor groaning as the instructors gave him a good kicking for getting himself killed because he was too lazy to learn.
Studying the Legion's language seemed much less painful.
But, for now, to the officers, Logan was still the rosbif with the wrong accent and wrong background, expected to give his life for the Legion, but not trusted enough to lead it.
He opened his eyes, and glanced at the other fifty-eight men of 3rd Platoon, strapped into the remaining rows of seats that faced inward along both walls of the shuttle's narrow passenger compartment.
The equipment crates and kit bags piled in the space between the two rows of seats rattled in the webbing that held that cargo tightly to the deck as the shuttle bounced through the turbulence. But he could see past them to spot some familiar faces on the far side of the passenger compartment.
While most of the men wore body armour like Logan, Johnson was sitting on his. “Rather lose my arms than my balls,” he’d said as they climbed aboard the shuttle. Now he smirked, and gave a thumbs-up as Logan looked his way.
“Told you’d we’d be fine,” he said.
Logan nodded, and faked a smile.
Sergeant Volkov glared at Johnson from the far end of the hold. Johnson would be in the crap after landing, if Volkov had heard him speaking English. Or American, in his case.
Logan had never asked Johnson how he’d found his way to the Legion. Crossing the English Channel from England to France was one thing, but crossing the Atlantic from Dixie? He’d never heard of anyone crazy enough to do that before.
Most of the Legionnaires and recruits Logan had met so far had been colonists on planets captured during the wars, who’d somehow found their way to France, then the Legion. A few of the others were prisoners-of-war, who’d rather fight for France than spend years hoping to be repatriated. Some were deserters, who’d found no other way to survive after desertion than to go back to war under a different flag.
He’d never met another recruit who moved to France just to see what it was like.
Volkov was still scowling. His gre
y hair and wrinkled face marked him as the oldest member of the platoon, and at least twice Logan’s age.
Once, on the week-long trip across the light years to New Strasbourg, Volkov had claimed he'd been in the Legion since it was first formed centuries ago.
Logan could almost believe it. Somehow, the man had never quite managed to progress to lieutenant, and had been demoted soon after every time someone decided to promote him to chief sergeant. Rumour was, he liked the brutality of combat-zone NCO life too much, and just couldn’t bear leaving it behind.
“Are we there, yet?” Desoto muttered in French tinged with Desoto’s own thick Spanish accent, from the seat to Logan’s right. He swung his legs below the seat, tapping his combat boots against the floor of the hold.
How had Logan ever got stuck in a team with him?
Oh, yeah, they'd been assigned together since the first days of Legion training, back in France. Desoto wouldn't have been Logan's first choice if he’d been given one, but they'd managed to keep each other alive so far.
Which was more than some of the other recruits that joined at the same time could say.
“Shut it, Desoto,” Corporal Bairamov said from Logan’s left. “Just be glad you’re still alive.”
A woman wriggled on the far side of the shuttle. Short, and chubby, with squinting eyes. The only woman on board, strapped into the seat between Johnson and Lieutenant Merle, the platoon commander.
Johnson had chosen to sit beside her, when any other man in the platoon would have done his best to avoid it. As Logan's father would have said, that’s the bloody Yanks for you, always thinking they’d get lucky.
But, after Johnson's feeble attempts to start a conversation on the way down, now she was studiously ignoring him.
Poulin was her name. The damn political officer the platoon had been lumbered with, to make sure they didn't get any ideas of their own, and do something the aristocrats of Paris might regret. First they gave the Legion weapons, then they did their best to ensure those weapons weren’t turned against them.
The loose black hair dangling from the bottom of Poulin’s helmet showed that she wasn't one of the combat troops who sat beside her with hair shaved almost to the scalp. Right now, her eyes stared straight ahead, and her long, thin fingers clung tightly to the sides of her seat.
She wouldn’t have made it through the first hour of Legion training. Probably not even the Legion's normal physical and mental pre-recruitment screening of volunteers, to eliminate the no-hopers and time-wasters early. Legion recruitment was officially open to male or female recruits, but there was a reason few women ever made it into the combat arms. Or tried.
Poulin looked like a liability even as a political officer. Her father was something big in the Ministry of Defence, or so the rumours said. How else would she have got the job?
For the men, the Legion was life and death. For her, it was just something to put on her resume to help her progress through the bureaucracy.
“Check straps and armour for landing,” Merle yelled.
About time. Logan grabbed the straps of his chest armour, and pulled them tight. Then tightened his helmet, and pulled the seat straps until they pressed the armour against his chest so hard he had to force himself to breathe.
If the turbulence grew worse, he wasn't going to go flying around the cabin and break his bones before they even landed.
He wriggled his feet in his combat boots. They longed to feel solid ground beneath them again.
The regiment had been packed into the assault ship Marine LePen in their cramped, temporary quarters ever since they left LeBrun’s World to pass through half a dozen wormholes to New Strasbourg. The Legion ships were designed to carry their regiment to another system, then unload them as quickly as possible. There was no space on board for luxuries like decent beds or proper air-conditioning. Just cramped dorms that stuffed bunks into every available space, each bunk shared by three men on an eight-hour rotation.
And, after being crammed into the ship with the sweat of over a thousand Legionnaires for so long, the chance to breathe the fresh air of a planet and stretch his legs was worth the risk of being shot at by insurgents on the way down.
Poulin fumbled with her own straps.
“Let me help,” Johnson said. In French, this time.
Poulin simply ignored him.
The men nearby glanced her way, but none of them offered to help. Not even the lieutenant. The last thing any sane man in the platoon needed was to offend an aristo, and disappear into some political dungeon to be tortured and sent home.
Probably in pieces. In a bag.
It was easier to just say 'equalité' and let her get on with it.
Then Poulin stifled a yelp as the floor dropped away again. Her body twisted and bounced against her loose straps, and she grasped the seat tighter. Logan’s body pressed back against his seat as the shuttle turned beneath him, and his head twisted to the left as the pilot threw the shuttle into a crazed, turning dive.
Some of the other new recruits had been scared of burning alive if the shuttle broke up in mid-entry. But that rarely happened. This would be the dangerous part of the flight. The best way to avoid attacks from the surface was to get down to the spaceport fast, before they could lock on and hit with whatever weapons they might have.
Logan’s heart beat faster as he felt the familiar sensation of adrenaline filling his blood. His body was preparing for fight or flight, and he could do neither. His life was in the hands of the shuttle’s crew, not his own.
He breathed deeply, and tried to concentrate on how he’d be walking out of the shuttle in just a few minutes, dragging his kit-bag behind him across the spaceport, and looking for a place to sleep. A week in bed would be nice after this trip.
If he was lucky, he might get a few hours.
The cargo pile twisted toward the front of the hold, and strained against the webbing as the nose of the shuttle dropped further. The crates and bags slid to the left, then the right, as the shuttle tilted from side to side.
The pilots were working hard on this one. Or just trying to show off, and scare the heck out of everyone on board. With no windows, it was hard to tell.
Then a siren's harsh blare filled the passenger compartment. The drawling voice of the shuttle commander returned. And he didn't sound bored this time.
“Brace, brace, brace.”
The shuttle tipped hard to the right, pushing Logan up against the seat straps for a split second before he fell back as the nose tilted up. Poulin screamed, and clung tighter to her seat.
Without even thinking, Logan pulled his legs up to his chest and lowered his head onto his knees, making the smallest target he could for whatever was coming their way. It might not make a difference, but it would make him feel better for what might be the last few seconds of his life.
Something thumped outside, probably the crew launching decoys, if a SAM was heading their way. Not that they were likely to do much good, as a shuttle still glowing with the heat of atmospheric entry couldn't be a hard target to lock onto. His instincts turned his head to look behind him for a threat, before he remembered the shuttle had no windows.
But at least he would never know what hit him.
His neck twisted as the shuttle turned again, and pulled up. His body shook with another adrenaline rush.
In a few seconds, he’d be on the ground, one way or another. Hopefully in one piece.
Just a few more seconds.
The siren blared again. Faster and louder.
The floor tilted to the left.
Then the far wall exploded inwards with a boom that shook the whole shuttle, followed by the high-pitched creak of the torn metal.
Adamski flew forward across the compartment, still strapped into his seat with jagged chunks of hull still attached to the back. He smashed into the cargo crates in front of him, and the seat caught in the webbing.
Something hard and jagged, the size of a tennis ball, bounced off Logan’s
helmet, knocking his head to the side. He turned back just in time to see two seats tumbling out into the air through the hole, their occupants still strapped to them, screaming and writhing as they fell toward the green leaves of a forest at least a hundred metres below.
An arm floated leisurely behind them, severed at the elbow, and spinning slowly through the air.
Something red was splattered over the wall of the hull near the hole. Johnson was still in his seat beside the hole, but his head was gone. A piece of twisted medal half a metre across protruded from where his head should have been, above the narrow gash the shrapnel had torn through the hull.
A spray of blood spurted from the edges of what was left of Johnson’s neck, hit the chunk of shrapnel, and splattered across everything nearby.
The wind howled in through the hole as the shuttle twisted through the sky. Poulin shrieked as Johnson’s blood squirted over her body armour and helmet.
His head rolled across the floor, then smacked into her boots. She pulled her legs up against her chest, and shook. The head rolled away again as the shuttle's nose tilted up.
Logan’s stomach rose into his chest as the shuttle dropped again, then tilted hard to the left until he could see nothing through the hole but the forest of tall, warped trees below them.
Then it turned back, until he was staring out at the sky. The nose yawed to the right. Were they landing, or crashing?
And would it really make any difference at this point?
A deep, booming voice began to sing. The words of Le Boudin, the Foreign Legion’s own marching song, filled the passenger compartment. The voice fought against the howling of the wind, Poulin’s shrieks, and the creaking of the hull.
Logan looked toward the source of the sound. A smiling mouth on the far side of the compartment, with dark, wide-open lips exposing bright white teeth as it sang. The man's lungs were yelling the song with all their might.
Joffer. The Company engineer, and one of the few black faces in the shuttle. He’d said he was from somewhere in Africa, but the name had meant nothing to Logan at the time. It wasn't one of the many place names drummed into the recruits in their lessons on the Legion's history. No Legionnaires had fought and died nearby in the last few centuries.
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