“I don’t think I can go on...” Desoto said.
But Logan was already fading into blissful oblivion as every bone and muscle in his body demanded rest.
Stefano and Yazid gave up after breakfast. Beauchene yelled at them to try to keep them moving, but yelling wasn’t enough to motivate their bodies to move another metre. Beauchene didn’t even try thumping them, he just handed their rifles to Logan and Adamski, and told Stefano and Yazid to meet the truck at the bottom of the hill, where it would take them home to Mummy.
Logan slung the rifle over his left shoulder. Great, another weight to carry. But the Legion didn’t leave weapons behind.
There would always be a new recruit that needed one.
They marched on. Over the hills, through the woods, breathing in the clean mountain air, trying to ignore the pain, struggling to turn it into a motivation to keep going, rather than a reason to collapse and give up.
Markov made it to lunch. Then he tossed his pack aside and told Beauchene he’d had enough.
Beauchene grabbed him by the chin and stared into his eyes with a madman’s gaze, but Markov just shrugged. “Better years in jail than years of this shit.”
Beauchene took Markov’s rifle himself, and directed him to the nearest village to wait to be picked up. And reminded him that the drones would be watching him all the way.
“Any more of you don’t think you’re cut out to be in my Legion,” he said to the survivors, “you might as well follow him right now. I’m not stopping again.”
Desoto took a step forward, but Logan grabbed his arm.
“I’m done,” Desoto said to him. “I can’t take any more.”
“We’ve only got a few hours left. We got this far. We can finish it, can’t we?”
Desoto stared at him for a few seconds, then nodded.
They marched on, down from the hills, legs moving easily as gravity pulled them on, back toward something resembling civilization. With houses nestled between the green fields, it was certainly more civilized than anything Logan had seen since leaving Paris.
As they passed through the small villages, the girls pouted and stared at the marching men. The old men sitting at tables outside the bars looked up from their wine glasses. Some raised their glasses, or shouted encouragement. Others just scowled.
All the recruits, no matter how much they might have wanted to quit a few moments before, pushed their shoulders back, pushed out their chests, and marched through the villages like they’d never marched before.
The pain no longer mattered. They might be willing to quit in the woods where no-one else could see them, but they sure as hell weren’t going to show weakness in front of civilians.
The sun was sinking toward the Pyrenees when Beauchene raised his hand and told them to halt.
Logan and Desoto were taking turns to lean on each other for support, and Logan slumped down on a rock at the side of the track. He gasped for air, thankful for a break at last. The soles of his feet pounded almost as rapidly as his heart, sweat had soaked through his fatigues, and the blisters and cracked skin on his feet sent pain stabbing through them whenever he moved. A rest was nice, but would he ever be able to get going again?
He lay back against the rock, and closed his eyes. He could go to sleep here. Maybe he’d never wake up.
“C’est fini,” Beauchene said.
Yes, Logan was finished. Just send him back to prison. Wake him up when it was time to die.
No, wait. Pain and exhaustion had become his entire world, and Beauchene’s words took a moment to sink into his mind.
It was finished.
Not him.
The march was over.
He’d done it.
“You are now Legionnaires,” Beauchene said. “You have joined a proud tradition, centuries-old. And you will make me proud of you.” He leaned toward Logan. “Because, if you don’t, I will hunt you down, drink your blood, and eat your liver. Then I will kill you. Do you understand?”
Logan remembered yelling in response, but he could barely believe he’d have found enough reserves of energy in his body to do so. The “Yes, sir,” that emerged from his lips must have been little more than a whisper.
He did stand proudly at that moment, even though his body was shaking from the cold and exertion, he could barely lift the weight of his pack and rifles, and his feet were raw from marching.
Desoto leaned on Logan’s shoulder and laughed.
They’d succeeded where so many other men had failed, and that white cap would be their reward. They were now officially Legionnaires, and no-one could take that away.
Moments later, the trucks arrived to drive them back to The Farm. The men laughed as they shook hands, helped each other into the trucks, then slumped down on the hard, wooden benches inside.
Half of them were snoring by the time Logan fell asleep. The rest were by the time Beauchene’s shouts woke back at The Farm’s gates.
Beauchene led the new Legionnaires out to line up on the parade ground under the bright glow of the floodlights, finally wearing their prized caps. Beauchene gave another inspiring speech which Logan was too tired to remember or care much about, then they collapsed into their bunks.
For once, they weren’t disturbed before morning.
Two days later, they marched from The Farm to the train that carried the new Legionnaires to the DeGaulle Spaceport, to climb about Legion shuttles that carried them to an assault ship orbiting high above the Earth. Like the shuttles that landed them on New Strasbourg, there were no windows to watch the world of his youth shrink beneath him as he rose into the sky on a trail of flame, leaving all of that behind.
He barely had time to unpack and glance out of one of the few portholes in the assault ship before it was blasting away from the only planet he’d ever known, and toward the first wormhole he would travel through in his life, a strange freak of physics which would allow them to cross dozens of light-years from planet to planet in a few days of their time.
And, so, a week later, he landed on LeBrun’s World, the French military’s training world, and the second he had ever felt beneath his slowly-healing feet. An otherwise uninhabited world of varied climates where the French forces could train as hard as they wanted, with no natives or colonists to complain about the noise or the mess.
The first work was spent in Medical, being prodded and studied, and connected to machines he barely understood even when they were explained to him. The doctors and engineers examined and processed every new recruit, enhancing their bodies, making them stronger and faster, and increasing their endurance. That would all have been useful back in France, but the Legion didn’t invest the time and effort in enhancing the bodies of those who might drop out afterwards. Only those who'd earned their cap qualified for treatment.
The next week began combat training. On the first day, six recruits went to the hospital, some with life-threatening wounds. On the second day, two went to the morgue.
Legion training was as realistic as as the instructors could make it, including using live ammo in the instructors’ weapons. One screwup, and it could well be your last day in the Legion.
And, most likely, the last day of your life.
Two more recruits were burned alive during assault drop training. The shuttles had carried the new Legionnaires back up to the assault ship, just so they could make their way back down in assault pods, as they would when landing on an occupied planet. The dead recruits’ assault pod heatshield failed because they hadn’t completed the pre-drop checks properly. The next day, the instructors played the recording of the mens' screaming calls for help to the assembled Legionnaires, to encourage them not to make the same mistake.
Logan checked his pod four times before the next landing practise. Those screams were something he would never forget.
Only one more died in the remaining six months, though half the new Legionnaires spent some time in the hospital.
They fought each other and the instructors a
cross the barren plains, in the mountains, and through derelict towns built just for the Legion to destroy in their training.
They practised jungle combat, arctic combat, underwater combat. They went back up into space, for zero-gravity and vacuum combat.
And they marched.
Not just on foot this time, but hundreds of kilometres in their suits, with the instructors leading other groups in attacks on their patrols as they struggled to reach their destinations. They studied tactics, military history, and every weapon in the Legion’s arsenal, including the assault ships’ heavy artillery and nukes. And practised with all of them, except the nukes.
They studied foreign weapons, not just so they would be able to identify the enemy, but because the Legion had to know they would be able to handle any weapon they might pick up on the battlefield.
In the final weeks, they engaged in wargames against the French Army recruits based on the far side of the planet. Games that included a planetary assault, cover from the assault ship in orbit, and every other weapon that would be at their disposal in a real battle.
When it was done, the Legion had won, with twenty percent simulated casualties and a few real ones. The Army took eighty percent.
And then it was over.
The year of training had seemed like the most important thing in Logan’s world at the time, with his life depending on success. A constant struggle toward one goal: graduating as a Legionnaire, trained and ready to fight. Feeling as though his life would be complete once he reached that end, and he could finally relax. Now it turned out to be just a prelude to his real life in the Legion, as front-line infantry.
The instructors had beaten down Logan’s old self, starved it, and pushed it to the limits of its endurance. Every step of the way, they encouraged him to quit, turn around, walk out of The Farm, go back to the prison he came from, until his only motivation was to win his white cap and prove them all wrong.
Then, after they’d broken him, and he’d beaten them, his new self grew on top of the foundation they’d created, with levels of strength and endurance he’d never imagined he had. And the training and confidence to make use of it.
The newly graduated Legionnaires lined up on the parade ground on their last day together, and marched in front of the assembled dignitaries. Including one familiar face.
Rousseau watched from the throng, nodding quietly to himself as the men passed. Logan saluted proudly. Whatever might happen in the future, that man had saved his life, and found him a new home.
The next day, Logan was assigned as a replacement to 1st Company, along with a dozen of the other newbies.
The regiment had been hit hard on their last posting, losing a third of their men in combat with the Prussians. They needed fresh blood to fill out the ranks.
And that was how he ended up, two days later, sharing a bunk on the Marine LePen, and heading for New Strasbourg.
CHAPTER 13
New Strasbourg
Logan crawled uphill through the dirt. The moon was now high in the sky above the valley, but it cast only a faint glow on the hillside around him. Not enough to see his surroundings well with his naked eyes, but enough for the suit visor’s light intensifier to show a clear, if blurry, view of the barren hillside.
The knees and elbows of his suit tore into the ground as he crawled up the hill, heading for the narrow plateau above.
The drones hovered high above them. The infrared cameras had shown no signs of life on the plateau after the girl rode ten kilometres up a narrow path from the river to reach it, before she disappeared into one of the dark, silent buildings that stood upon it. There’d been no sign of her for over half an hour, not even a glow from her lantern.
The drones had followed the girl as she rode up the hillside, then Volkov had led them around the reverse slope of the hill to catch up with her. It wasn’t difficult, when their power-assisted legs could move several times faster than she was moving with the horse in the dark.
Now the rest of the section crouched in what cover they’d found further down the hillside, waiting for Logan to give the all clear to move up.
Alpha Team was behind Logan to the south, Charlie to the east, and Bairamov and Desoto were about twenty metres to the west.
“Take a look, McCoy,” Volkov had said, after they watched the girl lead her horse into the building through the drone cameras. “Maybe your girlfriend would like another chance to kill you today.”
In other circumstances, Logan might have appreciated a promotion to point man for the section. It would at least have shown that Volkov had enough faith in him to trust their lives to his judgment.
Tonight, though, he could be sure that Volkov was just sending the dumb newbie up front because the drones didn’t show much of a threat, and Logan was the most expendable, if they turned out to be wrong.
Graduating as a Legionnaire really hadn’t changed much at all. The veterans who’d already survived months or years in the Legion weren’t going to trust him until he’d proven he could hold his own in battle without getting anyone else killed. Nor, to be honest, was he.
Not after what Bairamov had said earlier.
He was right. Logan could easily have run into an ambush chasing the boy out of the village, but, at the time, he’d been so high on adrenaline that he hadn’t even stopped to think for a second about the danger he might be in, or leading others into.
Running down the one who attacked and wounded his comrades had been all that mattered.
A rock rose above the edge of the plateau to his left, a couple of metres above him, and a couple of metres tall. It would give him some cover when he peered over the edge, and looked into the buildings up there on the plateau.
He crawled sideways across the hillside toward it.
“Alice, you see anything?”
“No threats.”
The suit sensors weren’t detecting anything alive on the plateau. Nor were the drones in the dark sky above him. It looked like the girl was there all alone.
Most likely, he could have marched up the hillside singing Le Boudin or La Marseillaise just as safely as he’d crawled all that way. And his knees and elbows wouldn’t hurt so much.
He crawled up to the rock, then gripped his rifle tighter as he raised his head above the edge of the plateau, and peered around the side of the rock toward the buildings. There was enough moonlight now to see the faint outlines of boxy shapes marked in red on his HUD, where the suit’s AI had flagged buildings as potentially hiding threats. The boxes glowed in the moonlight as the suit’s light intensifier enhanced the image.
A couple of dozen wooden buildings ran across the plateau in two rows facing each other, and a third row ran at ninety degrees across them at the end of the street. What looked like rusting shovels and scythes leaned against the walls of some of the buildings, beside wheeled contraptions with rusty blades that looked like something you’d use to dig up the fields. A cart leaned against another building, the wooden wheels twisted sideways on the old axle, and the shafts where a horse would have pulled it leaning high against the wall.
Bones protruded from the dirt nearby. Long, curved ribs much too large to be human. And a narrow, stretched jaw, more like a horse.
Some of the buildings didn’t look much healthier than the rotting horse skeleton that lay beside them. Planks had fallen from the walls of the building behind the cart, exposing the cracked wooden frame beneath. At some point in the past, the walls had supported double doors. But now, the right door was a pile of twisted planks on the dirt, while the left hung from only the top hinge.
The roof of the building alongside had partially collapsed. The edges of the roof planks still clung to the walls, but the middle had sunk a few metres, as though the joists supporting it had bent or broken.
The wall bulged out beneath the sunken roof, where the planks must be pushing the walls apart. In a few years, there might be nothing left of the village aside from a big, rotting pile of wood.
�
��Alice, what is this place?”
“Valenciennes was one of the first communities on New Strasbourg.” Alice said, quoting from the intel pack Logan had loaded into the suit before the patrol. “Earth lost contact with New Strasbourg five years later. Colonists first landed during a time of low activity in the solar cycle. When activity returned to normal, their buildings were unable to protect them from the radiation of the first solar storm. Only five men survived here, by remaining in the mines until the rescue mission arrived. Valenciennes was abandoned when new towns were built by the next wave of colonists, with radiation protected buildings.”
No wonder this village looked different to the others they’d seen. No wonder it looked so old and decayed, like everyone had disappeared overnight; just gone away and left everything they owned behind them.
They had left. In coffins.
The buildings must have been lying there exposed to the sun, wind, and radiation for decades, since the last villagers died. It was no surprise that walls and floors had collapsed in that time, with no-one to repair them.
The girl had vanished into a rectangular building near the edge of the village. It looked about six metres tall, and twice as wide, with doors big enough that a horse and cart could pass through them. Some kind of barn, from the look of it. The doors were closed now, and she must have shut them behind her. But why? She couldn’t live up here, unless she’d built some kind of radiation shelter inside. As soon as the sun rose, she’d just be counting the hours until a solar storm killed her.
“Alice, infrared.”
The image on Logan’s visor flickered for a split second, then became a mass of colour. The wood was still warm from the heat of the day, and glowed brighter than the dimmer dirt and the cold, dark sky. There was no sign of the girl, or anything human, but something glowed brighter than the wood through the narrow gaps between the planks that made up the wall of the barn. Her horse, maybe?
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