Beauchene finally took his boot off Logan’s hand.
Logan hobbled back to the line of recruits, spitting out blood and holding his wounded hand against his wounded stomach. He was probably lucky they were fed so little, so he had nothing to throw up.
“Yes, sir,” the men said.
“Now, where’s my next volunteer?”
CHAPTER 11
New Strasbourg
Logan crouched in his metre-wide slit trench in the dark dirt, beneath the glow of a billion stars in the moonless night sky. The Milky Way stretched from horizon to horizon in a blaze of light, and one of those lights would be his home.
“Alice, show me Earth.”
The suit’s HUD drew a square around one small dot in the sky, and flashed it to attract Logan’s attention. He stared at the tiny spot of light, but that was only the sun. Even the suit’s light intensifiers wouldn’t be anywhere near powerful enough to see the planets orbiting around it from so many light years away.
It was still strange to imagine his family, Jason, Angelique and everyone else he’d ever known living around one of those tiny little dots.
Would they ever go out at night, stare up into the sky, and wonder whether he was living on some planet around one of the stars they could see? Or did they just think he’d drowned in the Channel, or been executed by the flics?
The Legion didn’t allow recruits to make contact with their relatives and friends during their service, and he couldn’t have contacted his parents in England from France, even if he wanted to.
The fifty kilometres of sea between France and Hastings might as well be fifty light-years. With the wormholes the early explorers had discovered as they ventured toward the edges of the solar system, space was easier to cross.
The hillside around the trench was so dark that he could see little of the rest of the section with his own eyes. Even the light intensifier in the suit’s visor only showed blobs where helmeted heads poked up above the edges of their trenches, and the dirt blocked most of the glowing heat from the suit reactors when he switched to infrared view.
All that showed on the visor were the infrared lights on their helmets, flashing the day’s IFF code, to mark them as friendlies to drones and other units. And those flickered so fast in their coded signals that they were only a dull glow to human eyes, barely visible above the background noise.
He’d stopped digging the trench when it was just over two metres deep, enough to reach up to his suit’s shoulders while he stood in it, or to cover him completely when he crouched. Volkov had made them spend the rest of that afternoon digging in after they stopped marching from Gries. Wearing the suit, it hadn’t felt much like hard work at the time.
Who needed a shovel to dig, when you had powered arms and metal hands? Just force your metal fingers down into the dirt, pull your hand back, and toss the contents onto a pile. Then repeat. About ten thousand times.
He rolled his shoulders and twisted his elbows inside the suit to try to relieve the pain of all that exertion, but it still didn’t seem to help. Digging might not have felt like hard work when he was doing it, but now his body sure felt like it had had a workout that day.
But, at least the work had kept them occupied until after the sun set, either from digging, or watching over their team-mates as they dug.
Desoto was crouched further down the trench with his rifle beside him, eyes closed, and helmeted head leaning against the dirt. One of them should get some sleep before they had to fight again.
Volkov had made a big show of leaving Gries, marching the section out of the village in a group. He led them away along the track in the opposite direction from where they’d entered, then on past the fields and the dead boy, up into the hills at that end of the valley.
The villagers watched the Legion leave in silence from the windows of their houses, or from where they were working in the fields. Someone back there knew who that boy was and where he came from. Someone there had to know who planted the IED, if only the owner of the house it was in. Someone there knew who the girl was, and where she’d disappeared to.
But none of them were talking.
So Volkov had followed the track up into the hills, then taken a left, climbing up through the rocks, and on over the peak of the hills. Finally they hiked a kilometre or so along the far side of the ridge, hidden from view to anyone in the village by a hundred metres of rock, and found a temporary camp site where the rocks around the site would hide them from anyone who came looking. For all the villagers knew, the Legionnaires had disappeared, and wouldn’t be coming back any time soon.
Or maybe not at all.
After all, it wasn’t even midnight on the first day, and they'd already lost three men dead, and three wounded, two badly enough to be hospitalized. And those were just the casualties Logan knew about. Crap. At that rate, none of them would last much more than a month.
The drones were still hovering about ten kilometres above the village, giving them the eyes they needed now the hills blocked any direct view. The drones circled too high for any of the villagers to see it in the dark night, and much too high to hear, when their big wings allowed them remain on station for days with only a slow-moving propeller to keep them aloft.
But they could watch everything going on in and around the village. Not just in visible light, but whatever their sensors could monitor.
Logan studied the infrared footage from the drone’s cameras on his HUD.
The boy’s body still lay at the edge of the fields where they’d left it. It was still slightly warmer than the dirt, and Logan could see it as a blob on the darker soil near the rock. It lay beside the warm waste flowing out of the pipe into the river, which glowed as it dripped into the water, then slowly faded away as it floated downstream.
He flipped to the second drone’s cameras, which were pointing down at the village.
Nothing moved, except streams of hot smoke rising into the sky from the chimneys. At least, nothing warm enough for the infrared cameras to detect against the dark background of the dirt and fields.
The visible light cameras showed glowing lights from the windows of some of the houses, but could see little in the deep shadows between them.
“We should move on,” Poulin said. “There is nothing more for us to do here. We have other villages to visit.”
Volkov drawled in response.
“Considering you just got one of my men shot and another blown up back there, ma’am, I think I’m going to take my time over this visit.”
“I am in charge of this patrol.”
“You are in charge of the political aspects of this patrol. I am in charge of the military aspects. And, right now, we are in a military situation. I’m going to find out who set up this little ambush, and either kill them, or catch them for intel.”
“I will not let you create further ill-will toward the Legion in this village. We must show the flag elsewhere, and convince them to send the insurgents away.”
“Can I suggest, mademoiselle, that since you are so eager to be moving on, you start walking now, and we catch up with you in the morning? You slowed us down so much today with your constant demands for rest breaks that it would make sense for you to get a head start tomorrow.”
“I’m not walking off into the night on my own.”
“But it would make this patrol more efficient. Surely you can see that would be beneficial to all of us?”
If Poulin did wander off into the night, and got lost forever, it would make everything more efficient. At least until they were given another political officer to replace her.
Logan smirked as she and Volkov argued. Volkov could have switched them to a private channel, but he’d chosen to leave their conversation on the section net, so everyone could listen in.
Logan flipped back to the first drone’s camera as he listened to them argue. A bright blob had appeared in the cornfield near the boy's body.
He switched to the drone’s visible light camera, but
there was little detail to see in the faint starlight, just a hazy blob. Neither the drone’s light intensifier nor infrared sensors could show more detail from that height in these conditions. The blob looked too big to be human, unless they were crawling.
“Alice, when will the moon rise?”
“Moonrise at this location is in fourteen minutes.”
It would surely help. But they’d seen the planet’s biggest moon from the Marine LePen on the way into the system. It was closer to the planet than Earth’s, less than half the distance away. But it was a barren rock barely a hundred kilometres across. Two smaller moons orbited closer, but they weren’t much larger than the space stations Logan had visited for his zero-gravity training. Even with the moon up, the sky would have little in common with a well-lit night on Earth.
He switched back to infrared. The blob moved forward, slowly. A dog, maybe? It would have to be a big one to appear that large. He shivered as the blob crept toward the body, and imagined the dog sniffing the corpse, then sinking its teeth into the rotting flesh. The boy may have been an asshole, but he didn’t deserve that.
“Something’s moving in the field, sir,” Logan said on the section net, interrupting Volkov and Poulin’s argument.
“I’ve got it,” Volkov said. The drone’s light-intensifying camera zoomed in on the blob. It turned into a dim L-shape, bending as it moved. It had six legs, and something flapped around two of them as it crept out of the rows of corn.
No, it wasn’t one creature. It was two.
A horse, from the look of the blob. And a human, unless there was some other creature on New Strasbourg that walked on two legs. And something dark flapped around the human’s shoulders, like a mass of black or brown hair.
“Might be your lucky night, McCoy,” Volkov added. “I think we may just have found your girlfriend.”
The enhanced picture was grainy, and the resolution low, but the bright blob that was now crouching near the boy’s body could certainly be the girl he’d seen back in the village. He wouldn’t know for sure until they caught her.
Or killed her.
She had to have known that, when the boy carried out his attack on the Legion, he would have a good chance of ending up dead. But the way she was leaning over his body, rather than just turning away from it and leaving, said there was more to their relationship than just soldiering together.
She pulled something from the horse, then carried it toward the boy. She crouched for a few seconds, and rolled the boy over. Then dragged his body toward the horse. And fumbled with it for a moment, as though hauling his corpse up onto the horse’s back.
Then stopped and stood, wiping her arm across her brow. She grew larger and clearer in the image as the drone slowly descended, still circling around the field, but moving lower to get a better view. But it still floated kilometres above the surface, out of her sight and out of her hearing.
Moments later, she bent down. Something glowed in her hands. A circle of dim light surrounded her, and wobbled as she raised the lantern she’d just lit, holding it around chest level. The corn would shade its light from the village, but the drone hovering above could see it easily. It was just bright enough to illuminate her face. Logan zoomed in further. Despite the harsh, dark shadows across the grainy image of her face, that definitely looked like the girl he’d seen in the village.
She led the horse behind her with her free hand as she crept toward the edge of the field, down by the river.
Then crept on through the grass beyond it, past the pipe that was still pumping its dark waste down into the water. And up the shallow incline beside it, crouching whenever she needed to grab a rock for grip, as she and the horse clambered up into the hills.
“Should we follow, sir?” Bairamov said.
“The drones can track her for now,” Volkov said. “But be prepared to move out on my order.”
Logan checked his rifle, and flipped through the diagnostics on his suit. One round fired, suit hydraulics still worn and glitchy, otherwise everything was working as well as it usually did. The grenade launcher was loaded, and ready to fire if he needed to. The others checked their weapons around him.
They should have guessed the insurgents would mostly move at night. Not only because they thought they could hide in the dark, but because there’d be little radiation to worry about. If there was a solar storm in the next few hours, most or all of it would be blocked by the bulk of the planet between them and the star. All any insurgent out in the open had to worry about was what little radiation might find its way around the planet, and down to them on the far side.
But where the heck was she going?
CHAPTER 12
Pyrenees, France
Logan accumulated more scrapes and bruises before he could fight the instructors off in most of the combat training sessions. A lot more. But the beatings lessened and the food improved, though there was still never enough to sate his hunger.
He did better at shooting and knife fighting than unarmed combat, and his scores rose rapidly the more they trained. Beauchene actually began to compliment him, occasionally.
But then came the Kepi Blanc March. The most important test any Legionnaire would ever face. Pass, and he’d gain the white cap of a Legionnaire. Fail, and all he’d see was the door of The Farm as he was sent back to wherever he came from.
The march was two days on foot, with each recruit hauling all his equipment in his pack, and his rifle over his shoulder. Led by instructors and monitored by drones, just in case a recruit should decide to take a short-cut, or to try to make a run for it, because that was better than heading back to prison if they failed the march. Not that any of them would feel much like running after a few hours of marching kilometre after kilometre across the hills around The Farm.
“Do you want to be a Legionnaire?” Beauchene asked them as they lined up on the morning of the march.
And that line of recruits had thinned, until there were now little more than a third as many as had lined up on that first day, weeks ago.
“Yes, sir,” the assembled recruits answered as one.
But every one, like Logan, must have been wondering whether they really meant it. And which of them would be on their way out of the Legion within forty-eight hours because they just didn’t want it enough.
The instructors loaded the recruits into ancient, mud-smeared trucks, whose engines roared as they bounced over the rough roads and dirt tracks of the nearby hills. Beauchene kept the men in Logan’s truck singing Legion songs, and taught them a few new ones along the way; mostly the kind you wouldn’t sing in polite company. Whatever you said about his instructing techniques, he knew how to take the mens’ minds off their problems.
Then the trucks stopped, and he was yelling at them again to get out, and get moving.
Each instructor led a team across the hills, and marched so effortlessly that they made it look like an afternoon stroll. The recruits followed Beauchene as he strode over the grassy hills beside the mountains that separated France from Spain, capped with snow, and the thick plasteel and concrete of the wall, which glowed in the sunlight where red lights weren’t flashing.
For a second Logan wondered whether hiking over those mountains and finding a way across the border would be easier than finishing the march.
But Spain still wasn’t home. An escape would be temporary, to say the least. He’d be in some prison in weeks, at most.
Besides, the cool mountain air and the smell of grass and flowers was almost relaxing. For the first few hours.
Then his legs grew heavier with every step. It was barely noticeable at first, but rapidly worsening as the day went on. Desoto gasped for breath beside Logan, as he adjusted the straps of his backpack every few minutes. Logan’s was pulling his shoulders down, and the weight on his hips seemed to be pulling them away from his chest.
If it continued, his legs would be half a metre shorter by the end of the march, crushed down by the perpetual load.
But carry it he did.
The strain grew as they climbed uphill through the woods. Pain began to spread through his knees and ankles as the march skirted the edge of the woods along the side of the valley, and they peered down the hill for any sign of the other teams, eager to know whether they were ahead or behind.
They laughed every time they saw another team behind them. And muttered and cursed every time a team was ahead.
By lunch, Logan’s feet were pounding in his boots, but a hot meal and drink helped take his mind off of the pain. Desoto pulled off his boots and socks, and studied the blisters growing on his heels.
They’d marched hundreds of kilometres before in training, but they’d never marched so fast for so long. And it was taking its toll on their bodies.
“Now you’re fed and watered, ladies,” Beauchene said, “we can do some real marching this afternoon.”
And he meant it. Now they were on the flat ground at the top of the ridge, Beauchene had them marching faster than ever before. Logan’s legs became lead weights, and his feet wore down, blistered and bloody, in his combat boots.
Clouds rolled in along the valley, and rain began to fall. Now they not only had to march, but keep it up while their boots slipped in the mud, with their fatigues soaked through to the skin, and rain dripping down their helmets.
Desoto yelled as he slipped and fell.
Logan grabbed Desoto’s arm and heaved, gasping and straining to lift the man, and the pack on his back that must have weighed about the same again. Desoto grabbed a rock, and the two of them got him back to his feet. Then struggled onward, marching even faster to catch up with the others.
After that, it was just one step after another, following the man in front, staying ahead of the man behind. That was all they had to do. And keep on doing it for the rest of the day.
And the next.
By the time night came, Logan barely had the strength to build a shelter in the trees that would keep the rain off him overnight. He and Desoto shovelled their supper down their throats before clambering into the shelter and pulling the boots from their feet to let them air overnight.
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