Rebellion

by Edward M. Grant

  Particularly not with the Legion around.

  Logan carried the same flag himself, displayed on the right shoulder of his suit. And English George Cross on the left.

  The Legion said no man should be forced to fight his own people, and the flags on the suits indicating every Legionnaire's nationality were one way to enforce that. But there was no guarantee of anything in fast-paced frontier warfare.

  If a Legionnaire had to fight, he fought.

  His suit motors whirred faintly as he raised his head above the rocks. The suit’s external microphones amplified the sounds of the village, tracked them, picked our those that sounded most human, and marked them on the HUD of his helmet visor as yellow squares. He zoomed in on a few of the squares as he studied the scene.

  Women and children shuffled between long rows of vines and olive and orange trees behind the houses, rows that stretched out toward the fields of corn that filled much of the valley floor. The fields slowly petered out into a mass of thin, waist-high grass as they rose into the low hills on the far side of the valley, where a forest of the planet’s own scraggly, twisted trees was soaking up the light of the bright blue sun.

  The roofs of a dozen or more small bunkers spread across the fields rose just a little higher than the corn, presumably so they’d have a safe place to hide if there was a solar storm while people were working in the fields.

  More kids, mostly the younger ones, played in the narrow, slow-moving river that ran along the bottom of the valley, bringing its brown, muddy water to the village. They laughed as only kids can as they stood in water up to their waists, and splashed it at each other.

  Goats were tied to posts outside the houses, chewing on the tall, thin, brown weeds that rose from the dirt all around the village. Chickens clucked in the yards behind the houses as they shoved their beaks into the dirt, looking for anything they could eat. Pigs dug through the dirt in wooden pens, outside their own small bunkers that protruded from the sides of the houses. A handful of horses chewed the thin grass around the edge of the fields, fenced in beside dirt-covered stables.

  1st Section had left the spaceport at dawn, one of several sections from the company sent to scout and show their faces around the mining villages across the department, while a few fireteams were heading to the mines, to protect the ore trucks en route to the spaceport. After hours of marching, the sun was nearly overhead. It would be dazzling if the suit’s visor hadn’t darkened to block out the worst of the glare.

  Living around a star so bright, it was no wonder most of the locals had been tanned brown by working outside. Logan could almost feel the heat on his skin despite the cold air blowing across his face from the suit’s air-conditioning unit.

  “Alice, status check.”

  “Reactor capacity 80%,” the suit’s AI responded. “Secondary lower body hydraulic pump output pressure down 1.5bar. Right knee motor has an intermittent ground fault. Remaining systems nominal.”

  His suit could do with a service, but it wasn’t going to get one before they moved out from their hiding spot behind the rocks. The maintenance records showed it hadn’t been touched for over three years, except for routine servicing, and had been on combat duty much of that time.

  The Legion was constantly deployed across the colonies, and had little downtime. The old, worn-out suits were just handed down to the new recruits. If Logan lived long enough, he’d eventually get a new one.

  The only things moving in the cloudless sky were the two tiny dots of the drones providing high cover for air support. So high that he probably wouldn't even be able to see them if the suit's HUD wasn't marking them with green squares against the blue sky.

  The Legionnaires had trained for combined-arms battles, using their own weapons to take on anything that was within their capabilities, and calling in support for those that weren’t.

  They'd easily won simulated wars that way, against other armoured troops in a combat zone. Just obliterate anything that moved that wasn't on your side, and, sooner or later, you won.

  But what if you got into a firefight in a village you were supposed to protect? Call down a drone-launched missile into a house full of kids, and the single hidden insurgent it killed would be replaced by a dozen more before the funerals were over. Didn’t seem like the smartest idea ever.

  Logan adjusted the grenade launcher on his back as he turned, then scanned his sector of the horizon for any sign of insurgents heading their way. He still wasn’t used to the weight of the launcher on top of his normal loadout, and while the suit’s motors and mini-nuke power plant could easily lift it, the extra inertia still took some getting used to whenever he turned.

  “Are you ready yet?” Poulin’s weak, whining, female voice said from the suit’s helmet speakers.

  She was crouched low between the rocks, beside Volkov. Her suit looked like any other in the section, made of thick metal and composites that had changed their surface colour from the default silver and black to deep brown, to better match the dirt and rocks around her. Her arms ended at big metal hands, and her legs at long, clawed feet that gave better grip while moving rapidly across the battlefield.

  The only real difference between her and the men was that she wasn’t hauling a hundred kilos or more of weapons and ammo. Which was probably fortunate. No-one wanted to get shot in the back when she dropped it.

  Volkov was studying the village from a crouch behind the rocks. Logan could almost hear the swearwords Volkov wanted to send Poulin’s way, but that would just get him a fast track to the Legion prison.

  Or worse.

  “I said,” Poulin repeated, “are you ready yet?”

  Volkov motioned for her to move forward, down the hill.

  “Perhaps you would like to lead the way, mademoiselle?” he said, in the slow drawl he reserved for those he considered too stupid to live, but too much trouble to kill.

  And he probably wouldn’t have to. After Poulin’s behaviour on the shuttle, she had now risen to #3 in the dead pool. The only real question was whether the insurgents got her before the Legionnaires did.

  And how many Legionnaires she got killed first.

  “We came to show the people that the Legion is here to protect them from insurgents, not to hide in the hills,” Poulin said, as though addressing a child who hadn’t yet mastered pooping in its potty and needed further instruction.

  Logan turned his face away as he smirked, back toward his assigned quadrant, and scanned the dusty hillside above them for any sign of insurgents. After the number of times Volkov had yelled at him, punched him, or given him the some of worst duties in the platoon just for being a newbie, it was nice to see the Sergeant suffer for a change.

  “Charlie fireteam,” Volkov said. “Set up all the heavies and cover us from here. The mules stay with you.”

  Charlie team rapidly spread out and picked positions among the cover of the rocks. The robot mules followed the men. The mules' six legs twisted beneath their boxy metal bodies as they moved, and their wide metal feet crunched the dirt beneath each step. Their surface changed colour slowly to a darker brown as they turned, the camouflage doing its best to fade into the background, like the Legionnaires’ suits.

  The tough little robots carried supplies to help extend the Legion patrols. Spare ammo, food, heavy weapons, anything beyond what you had to carry in or on your suit for immediate use in combat.

  Charlie team grabbed the section missile launcher and autocannon from the mules’ backs, and rapidly assembled them on tripods between the rocks with a good view of Gries. From the hillside, they could raise hell down in the village, if insurgents had set an ambush.

  With the weapons unloaded, the mules shuffled into cover behind the rocks, then crouched down in the dirt, folding their metre-long legs beneath them. The faint hiss and whirr of their motors faded as they settled down.

  Seconds later, after their colours shifted again, their bodies were barely distinguishable from the rocks around them. Boxy rocks with str
ange protrusions, for sure, but they'd fade into the background if anyone looked at them from more than a few metres away.

  “Stay sharp up here,” Volkov added as he stood. “We may be coming out in a hurry.”

  “Gries is a friendly village,” Poulin said. “There is no need to treat the people like enemies.”

  “Every village is a friendly village, until the bastards start shooting at you.”

  “There's no chance of that here.”

  “In that case, why did you need us? You could have just walked in there and sung Kumbaya with the locals.”

  “To show them we are here now, to protect them from the insurgents. To give them the comfort of knowing we care, and the strength to ignore any threats the insurgents may make. To prove we are all in this together.”

  “Travelling overwatch,” Volkov said. “You men heard our beloved political officer. Let's show the people we're here.”

  Then he hopped over the rocks, and stomped away down the track. Alpha team scrambled to their feet, strode around the rocks, and followed him, leaving a gap of a few metres between each man. Then Bairamov stood.

  “Bravo, on me.”

  Logan raised his MAS-99 gaussrifle, gripped it tighter in the suit’s metal hands, and pushed the butt against his chest, so the suit’s motors would absorb some of the recoil. The hypersonic slugs it fired could punch through the thick metal armour of a suit, and the recoil would knock him flat if he tried to fire it without the mechanical assistance of his own. If he could even lift it, when the loaded rifle weighed over forty kilos.

  He followed Bairamov down the track, forming a wedge with Desoto and Gallo, and remaining far enough away from Bairamov so a hidden mine or IED wouldn’t hit both of them. He looked up, watching the hills to the right as the section strode through the dirt toward the village.

  If the insurgents were planning to attack the Legionnaires as they approached, the rocks above them right now would be a great place to hide. But the houses came closer with every step his suit took, and only the thin grass twisting in the breeze moved among the rocks and weeds up above.

  Maybe the patrol’s arrival had scared the insurgents away. If Logan was hiding up there in the rocks with only body armour to protect him, he certainly wouldn’t want to take on one man wearing a combat suit. Let alone a dozen.

  Back at school in England, the teachers had shown them vids of the Royal Marines landing on planets in assault pods, jumping out in their suits, winning battles, then climbing into shuttles to fly home. In the vids, the battles were always won, and the few token deaths on our side were always heroic and necessary. No-one ever got their head ripped off by shrapnel before they even touched the ground, or burned alive when the pod malfunctioned.

  It all looked glamourous and exciting, and some of the other kids had been determined to join up when they were old enough. Logan had even thought about it himself.

  But, unlike the Marines, Logan had soon learned that what the Legion did most was...

  Walk. March. Yomp. Pound Ground.

  Whatever the Legionnaires might call it in their native tongue, the act was the same. One foot after the other for hours on end, taking care not to let the suit’s power-assisted legs throw you high into the air where you’d be an easy target for anyone who wanted to kill you.

  Even wrapped in a nuclear-powered exoskeleton, that much walking left your muscles aching after a day of non-stop travel across the worst of terrain. And Legion patrols usually took the hard route, the route no sane man would follow, to increase the chance of surprise.

  Even if the insurgents didn’t have SAMs, transports large enough to carry a section of suited-up Legionnaires and their equipment could be heard a kilometre away. There was little to no chance of surprise if you came in with jets blaring.

  By the time the transport landed and the men disembarked, the insurgents would be lying in wait, or scattering as fast as they could, weapons hidden, ready to fade back into the civilian population. Men on foot in combat suits could cover a hundred kilometres a day, even while staying in cover and taking their time to scout ahead before moving. And they could set their own ambush for the insurgents when the time was right.

  There was a reason the Legion’s unofficial motto was ‘march or die.’ Even in training, they’d been expected to march up to forty kilometres a day. Without suits.

  Logan’s legs felt weak just thinking back to those days. Nothing he’d done since had come close to the exertion and deprivation of his first weeks in the Legion. And he got half-decent food these days, too.

  His metal feet crushed the dirt beneath him as the section descended the rough track from the hills to the village, covering a few metres with every step. The soles of his feet were used to marching, but they still tingled after the amount he’d walked that day. For all the arguments in favour of marching, he would still have preferred to fly.

  “Do you really think the insurgents did that?” Desoto said on the team channel.

  “Did what?” Logan said.

  “Killed their own people like that. Chopped the heads off those little kids, and stuck them on spikes.”

  Gallo chuckled. “If there’s one thing you’re gonna learn, it’s that the French like few things more than cutting their enemies’ heads off. It seems like their favourite hobby.”

  “But why?”

  Wasn’t it obvious?

  “To scare the crap out of them,” Logan said. “Who’s going to try to stand up to the insurgents, if they know they might come home to find their families’ heads on spikes?”

  “Seems like a shitty way to get rid of the aristos. These Montagnards sound even worse than they are.”

  Bairamov coughed. “Cut the chatter, ladies. This is a combat zone, not a tea party.

  “Sorry, sir.”

  He was right. Now they were moving in the open and the blood was pumping through their veins, they’d started to relax after hours of staring into the hills imagining an RPG hidden behind every rock. When you expected to get shot at for so long and didn’t, you began to drop your guard. And that was exactly then the insurgents would aim to strike.

  Logan turned back to his sector, and watched the bushes and dirt for any sign of life.

  Still nothing.

  After less than five minutes, they were on the valley floor, marching between fields at the sides of the track, and rapidly approaching the village.

  The women in the fields stared their way, and some whose wide-brimmed hats weren’t up to the job of shielding their faces from the sun raised their hands to block it out as they looked up. The children pointed, and some of the younger ones ran toward the women, then clung to their legs.

  “A friendly face is worth a battalion of solders,” Poulin’s gasping voice said over the speakers as she struggled to keep up with the rest of the patrol.

  Volkov paused before he spoke. “Visors up.”

  For the hours they’d walked en route to the village, Poulin had been telling them that they were supposed to look like friends, not an occupying army. Hearts and minds, she said. Make the people love you, she said, when those same people had spent the last year fighting the Compagnie. And done well enough against them for the Legion to be called in.

  But, apparently, they’d be convinced by a friendly face and a smile. Where did she get this crap?

  “Alice, visor up.”

  The helmet visor slid up. The blast of heat on his face felt like he’d opened an oven door and shoved his face into it, after hours in the suit’s air-conditioning.

  His eyes stung for a moment as his pupils contracted in the harsh sunlight. But the sudden feeling of light-headedness as the oxygen content of the air fell was the worst.

  He opened his mouth and gasped down air as rapidly as he could, but his legs slowed for the final hundred metres to the houses. He pushed as much energy as he could muster into his muscles, and hoped the motors would do the rest.

  An old man sat in the sun on a rock beside the house
at the edge of the village, smoking from a small pipe. His face was a mass of brown wrinkles, and a red, lumpy growth bulged from his cheek. His bare right foot tapped on the dirt as he watched the men approach, and he nodded and smiled at them as they passed. His left leg ended at the knee, where it became a long bar of plasteel with a three-toed foot at the base.

  Was he just taking a break and being friendly, or was he scouting for the insurgents? Sitting there until the Legionnaires were in position for an ambush, waiting until he could signal the insurgents to strike?

  Or maybe that smile was the signal, and the trap was about to be sprung.

  Logan shouldn’t think like that. But what else could he think? Anyone could be working for them. And they weren’t going to advertise that fact to the Legion.

  Bairamov slowed as Volkov and Alpha Team entered the street, spreading out between the rows of houses.

  The gap between the teams grew, giving Bravo Team more room to manoeuvre if they were attacked, and reducing the chances of an ambush catching all of them.

  Logan marched behind Bairamov as the team entered the village. The rows of houses seemed to move closer together as he followed Bairamov along the street, and they became trapped between them, where their suit’s speed could be as much of a liability as a benefit. One mistake while turning at a full run in these streets, and he’d slam into the side of a house and bury himself in the dirt that was piled over them.

  Logan watched the houses on his side of the street.

  The door of the first house on that side was closed, and the windows beside it were dark. Two eyes stared out of those windows as he passed the house, then quickly disappeared as whoever was inside backed away from the glass.

  A goat watched him from a pen at the side of the house, chewing idly on a leafy weed that dangled half out of its mouth.