“There is also our speciality, Radwine. The early colonists discovered that grapes exposed to the star’s radiation bursts can produce the most exquisite flavours. It is considered an exotic delicacy in some parts of France.”
As bad as life might seem on this planet, it must be paradise compared to what many had left behind. In France, these folks would be lucky to have a factory job that kept them in food and healthcare. Here, they could build a life for themselves, so long as they kept those ores going back through the wormhole.
If Logan had been born on a planet like this, he’d have been happy to stay there. Maybe he’d even be out in the woods, shooting at anyone from back home who wanted to tell him what to do.
“If the plants are inedible, what do they farm?” another voice asked.
“Pigs and goats can partially digest the local plants. And there are edible animals living in the rivers and sea, similar to fish. For the rest, we have found a number of Earth plants are compatible with the soil, if properly fertilized and tilled.
“But, as a planet around new star, we are prone to solar storms which produce the brief but intense bursts of radiation that you saw earlier today. Many other Earth plants are unable to survive in those conditions.”
Logan raised his hand again, to ask the question he really wanted answered. “Why should we fight for the aristos against these people?”
Volkov glared his way. Logan was risking more than just a punch for just asking the question. But how could he risk his life to fight them, without knowing the answer?
“Another question?” Chaput said.
Porcher ignored him. “No, no. You raised a very good question, young man. These are our own people fighting us here, not the Reich, the Islamic State, or Dixie. I’m sure many of you are wondering why should be fighting them, and not our real enemies.”
Volkov continued to stare at Logan with narrowed eyes, but without the I’m-going-to-kill-you look of a few seconds before.
Maybe he’d just get latrine duty for a week.
Porcher raised his hand. “Let me show you why you should fight them.”
A holographic image appeared, floating in the air above him, and covering most of the wall. A truck with long, tank-like treads, and smoke rising from the hood.
The camera turned, showing a train of half a dozen trailers behind the truck, now reduced to a mass of bent wheels and twisted metal on a dirt track beside a pile of rocks and a sparse forest. The camera moved around the wreck, as though it was footage from someone’s suit cam.
As it passed the front of the truck, it turned toward a body slowly swinging on the far side.
A middle-aged man wearing grey coveralls, hanging by his feet from a cable attached to the truck’s roof. His arms dangled limply beside his head, and his face and chest were covered with blood that had sprayed out from the long gash across his neck.
The camera panned around. More men lay dead on the ground, which had turned dark red where their blood had soaked into the dirt around them.
“This ore truck was bringing uranium ore from the mines, to be shipped back to Earth. Insurgents ambushed it, destroyed the truck, and killed the driver and his Compagnie guards. Without exports, our economy will soon collapse. And, as of today, we can no longer even bring in the freighters to collect the ore, in case they’re hit by SAMs.”
The image changed again. A closeup of a young, female face, her eyes open wide, and black hair fluttering against her forehead. The image wobbled slightly, as though recorded by a drone hovering nearby.
“We received this footage this morning. Since the Compagnie pulled back to protect the towns, the insurgents have had their run of the villages. Until yesterday, this was the village of Petit Toulose. The villagers did not want to support the insurgents.”
The drone pulled back. The girl’s head ended at her neck, and a wooden pole streaked with blood protruded beneath it, with the other end buried in the dirt below. More heads were impaled beside her, and bodies were piled on the dirt behind them, surrounded by blood-soaked dirt. Women. Old men. Children. Smoke rose from the bunker-like buildings around the bodies, where flames flickered behind the narrow windows.
“The radical insurgents call themselves Montagnards, after the revolutionaries of the Reign Of Terror in Revolutionary France, who executed everyone who opposed them.
“Thirty men, women, and children, all murdered. An entire village destroyed, just because they remained loyal to France. This is why we fight them. This is why we asked for your help. The good people of New Strasbourg are relying on you. Don’t let them down.”
CHAPTER 4
Hastings, England
Logan should have been glad. Happy, even. The day after they took Alice away, Morgan’s men followed through on their promises. The McCoys were moved out of their apartment, and into a four-bedroom house on the outskirts of Hastings. In a new management suburb, with surveillance drones buzzing through the sky, armed police patrols, and a three-metre-tall plasteel wall surrounding the estate, to keep the riffraff out.
Logan no longer had to share his bedroom with Malcolm, as the remaining kids each had one of their own. The house had a garden with grass and flowers, and a garage. Some families on their street even had cars to put in their garage, and no longer had to take the company bus to the factory, if they couldn’t work remotely through VR. But the McCoys weren't so lucky.
Logan’s bedroom had a view of the sea, as he looked out over the wall around the estate, and across the town toward the marina. He could sit in his room and watch the boats sail out to sea at weekends, to wherever the toffs might want to travel.
But he never had a chance to meet Jason at school and give him the news. Logan was moved out of his old school right away, to a school for managers’ children on the estate, safely contained inside the wall.
A school with smaller classes, better teachers, and new buildings that weren’t collapsing around them as they studied.
But the other kids there knew he wasn’t one of them. They didn’t even have to know his background to tell that he didn’t look like them, speak like them, or act like them. His accent alone separated him from the others, and they knew his father had been promoted from below, with no family connections to save him from falling back into the world from where he came.
All it would take was for one toff to take a dislike to him.
“Filthy, stinking chav,” they called Logan, as they ganged up against him in the playground. Six or eight against one, laughing and scowling as they surrounded him.
The first time they attacked him, he went home covered in bruises and scratches, with blood oozing from his mangled lips. His father told him to fight back next time. He did.
Three of the boys went home crying to their mothers, and Logan was suspended the next day. His father had to work hard and pull strings at the factory to get him back into class.
As Logan struggled at school, and tried to stay as far from the other kids as he could, his father started coming home later, and drunker, every night.
Dad spent more and more time drinking in the community pub with his new colleagues after work before he returned home. Which was a relief, because, when he did get home, he’d spend the rest of the evening in a drunken shouting match with Logan’s mother.
Logan made do by covering his head with his pillow as he tried to sleep.
He went back to the old neighbourhood one Saturday, but everyone there knew he was no longer one of them. Even Jason claimed he wasn’t home when Logan knocked on the door and asked to see him.
But why should they trust him?
He’d left the street without any warning, and returned as a manager’s kid. They had every reason not to. A few words from a toff could consign any of these families to living rough on the streets.
He took to climbing over the ‘No Entry’ barriers at the seafront end of the decaying old pier near the marina, walking out over the sea on the uneven wooden planks, past the boarded-up theatre a
nd stores, then sitting at the end, all alone, watching the ships pass the town out to sea.
A police patrol saw him one day, but one glance at his new ID was enough to convince them to leave him alone with just a warning about the dangers of the old, rotten wood that had been exposed to the ravages of weather and sea for centuries.
He’d listen to that wooden floor and the tall wooden legs of the pier creak below him as he stared out across the cold, green waters of the English Channel. Out to where the water met the sea at the horizon.
The sounds of the town, and the sounds of his troubled life, seemed to fade away when he walked out along the pier, above the sea. The sunlight glinted from the white wings of seagulls squawking in the sky, and the stench of dead fish, old mud, and rotting seaweed filled his nose.
He’d shade his eyes from the sun with one hand, and stare out across the waves at the grey blobs of the Royal Navy and French ships patrolling the dark water that separated England from France.
One clear summer night, when he was eight years old, Dad had taken Logan, Malcolm and Alice for a walk up into the hills beyond the town, and shown them the lights in the distance. The lights of France, on the far side of the Channel, and the lights of the navy ships moving slowly as they faced each other off in between.
Alice thought they were pretty, but she was more interested in the flowers and trees. Logan sat on a rock at the top of the cliff, and stared out across a space that seemed larger than that between him and the stars. Men had crossed that vast, dark space and returned, but he'd never heard of anyone crossing the Channel. Let alone coming back.
He was looking at another world, completely disconnected from his. Were there even people over there like the ones he knew? Or were they as alien as his new classmates at school?
He’d made no friends in his new life, and no longer had any left in his old. If he was lucky, in a couple of years he’d get a management job in the same factory as his parents. Marry one of the less desirable girls in their suburb, who'd failed to catch one of the better-connected boys who taunted him at school, or a pretty girl from the chav estates to whom he could offer a new life of luxury that she’d never imagined she could have. Make some kids. Work for the toffs every day until he died, the way his parents would.
If he was unlucky, he’d never find a job, and be left with a choice between living off UBI, or joining the masses of chavs who lived hand-to-mouth every day on the streets of the big cities, stealing or worse, to make enough money to survive. Until they were finally caught doing something bad enough for them to be executed.
There had to be something better than this. A place away from the toffs, away from their constant interference, where he could live a better life. A place where he wouldn’t have to make such hard choices, where he could expect something more from his time in the world than a tedious job followed by long nights drowning his sorrows at the pub.
He packed his bag that evening. He took one last look at his mother sleeping in her bedroom, then crept down the stairs to the sound of his father’s snores, as Dad tossed and turned in his armchair. A moment later, Logan stepped out into the cold night air. The curfew would begin soon, but fog was coming in from the sea, filling the streets with a thin haze that would help him hide as he moved toward the shore.
He nodded to the guards as he strolled out of the gate, then stayed in the shadows, and away from the staring cameras and the buzzing of drones, as he made his way to the seafront. Sirens whined in the darkness, but the police had better things to do than worry about a kid running away from home.
He found Jason’s father’s dinghy where he’d last seen it months before. Tied up at the quay, floating low in the water with the sail furled, and the sides of the hull tapping against the rubber lumps that hung between it and the plasteel wall.
He tossed his bag into the dinghy, untied it from the quay, and climbed down. A few minutes later, the sail was fluttering in the wind above him, and the boat began to move.
He crouched low, expecting to be spotted at any moment, as the dinghy sailed out across the marina, between the yachts anchored in the water. Then he was past the quay, and the shadowy English coast faded as the boat entered the fog bank.
The lights of the town followed him for a few minutes more, their bright glow burning through the haze. Then they too were gone, and he was alone in the dark night. He pulled his flashlight from his bag. France was a long way away, but all he had to do was watch the compass that was mounted in the floor beside the mast, and keep it pointing south.
He couldn’t miss France if he kept heading that way.
His old life was over. Tonight, he was going to start a new one, or die trying. Whichever it happened to be no longer much mattered. He couldn’t continue living the way he was.
For hours, he sat in the stern of the dinghy, shivering as the damp sea air cooled around him, holding the tiller tightly in the darkness as the dinghy bobbed up and down on the waves, and watching for any sign of ships.
After a couple of hours, the luminous glow of the compass needle faded, and he took to turning on the flashlight every few minutes to check that he was still going in the right direction.
A low buzzing noise rose over the hissing of the wind. Somewhere up above, a drone was flying through the fog, searching for boats doing just what he was planning to do. He crouched low in the the dinghy, below the sail, for what good that might do. The fog would block the drone’s cameras, and there was little metal in the dinghy for it to detect, but who knows what other sensors it might have?
The droning buzz grew louder.
Then the dinghy stopped. The bow rose high out of the water, then it sank back, and the dinghy turned sideways in the wind. But it wasn’t moving any more, as though he’d run onto a beach on the far side of the channel. But it was surely much too soon for that? He'd be lucky to reach France before dawn.
He waited as the buzzing reached its peak, then faded away as the drone passed by. When he could no longer hear anything above the wind and the scraping from the side of the boat, he clicked on the flashlight, and shone it into the darkness around him. Wherever he pointed it, he could still see water as far as the fog would allow.
The dinghy tilted to the right as the sail billowed in the wind. Something long and black was pressing against the hull, just below the waterline. Logan reached down, and gasped with the shock of the sudden temperature change as his hand entered the cold water. He wrapped his fingers around the black thing, and pulled.
A metal cable. A bundle a few centimetres across of perhaps a hundred smaller cables wrapped around each other. It rose from the water in his hands, but it seemed to grow heavier with every millimetre he lifted it.
He heaved against the weight, but only succeeded in tilting the boat as a couple of metres of the cable rose from the water on each side of him. And the cable would go no higher. More, and thinner, cables hung down from it into the sea. As he tried to turn the cable in his hands, something bright and spherical flashed to his right in the fog. A buoy supported the weight of the cables in that direction. He swung the flashlight to the left, and spotted another buoy that way, barely visible in the haze.
He’d found the top of a huge net, hanging in the sea. He should have guessed there’d be some kind of obstacles in his way. The English and French wouldn’t let just anyone sneak across their narrow, water border.
But it was too late to worry about that, now. And the dinghy was light. He pushed the cable down into the water, trying to force it below the boat. The dinghy turned slightly in the wind, and the bow slid over the net.
He pulled up the centreboard, so the keel would be as flat and smooth as possible. The sail twisted on the mast, and the hull scraped against the cable as it slid over. At the dinghy tilted, he reached back and grabbed the tiller, pulling the rudder up out of the water.
Seconds later, the bow slammed down into the sea, the keel scraped over the cable, and he was safely on the far side. They’d made that net to
stop or delay big boats and subs, not a dinghy as small as his.
He sailed on, staying as close to due south as he could, and staring into the night for any sign of another net. He checked the sea around him every few minutes with the flashlight, and hoped the batteries would hold out until he reached the far side.
Something tapped against the underside of the dinghy. He clicked the flashlight on and shone it ahead, looking for another net, or anything else that might be interrupting the steady flow of the waves around him. But all he saw were fog and sea.
The tapping came again, from the port side this time.
The boat tilted as he leaned that way, then tilted further as he leaned over the side, holding the flashlight out. He pointed the light toward the water.
He just had time to see the dark sphere that was bumping against the hull before the whole world exploded.
CHAPTER 5
New Strasbourg
The village of Gries looked as arid and dry as Logan felt as he stared down toward it from the barren, rocky hillside.
A winding dirt track barely wide enough for a horse and cart ran just beyond the rocks where 1st Section had taken cover, and led down the hillside into the valley below. At the end of the track, a kilometre away, stood the few dozen brown dirt mounds with tall, dark, narrow windows and metal doors that made up the village.
The mounds lined both sides of a long strip of dirt about five metres across which had been churned up by boots heading in all directions, and the thin tracks of whatever kind of wheeled vehicles had rolled through the village since the last rains. Ore trucks, maybe, heading back to town with supplies to be shipped back to Earth.
The blue, white and red stripes of a tricolour French flag flew prominently in the open square between three larger mounds at the centre of Gries, flapping slowly in the wind that was blowing in from the south.
But it didn’t mean much. The flag seemed to fly everywhere on the planet, no matter what the locals felt about it. A village that didn't proclaim its allegiance to the government would be a village asking to be wiped off the map as a potential haven for insurgents. No-one in their right mind was going to announce that they were on the other side.
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