Rebellion

by Edward M. Grant

  “Plateau looks clear, sir.”

  “You see the girl?” Volkov said.

  “I see her horse, sir. And the drones haven’t seen her leave the building. No sign of anyone else.”

  “Alpha, Charlie, advance. And be quiet about it. Bravo, find the damn girl, and see if she has friends here.”

  Logan glanced behind him. Bairamov and Desoto’s squares on his HUD were moving up the hillside toward him. The rest of the section were spreading out as they clambered toward the edge of the plateau, ready to move in and clear the buildings.

  “Sir,” Desoto said, “can’t the drone just put a few missiles in the buildings, and save us the trouble of clearing them?”

  “I don’t think Poulin would be very happy about that,” Bairamov replied. “Besides, missiles are expensive.”

  Logan pushed himself to his feet, and began to run toward the barn. His metal claws dug into the dirt as he accelerated, then scraped against the ground as he slowed.

  Get up. He sees me. Get down. One of the first things Beauchene had drummed into them even in the early tactical training they received back at The Farm. Never stay out of cover long enough for the other guy to shoot back at you.

  The suit slid to a stop behind the trunk of a tree outside the village. The tree might not stop a gaussrifle round, but it would hide most of his body from view if anyone was looking that way. And there was nothing better between him and the barn.

  He crouched behind the tree, raised his rifle, and studied the buildings ahead of him. Still no sign of life. Nothing moved or made a sound. The village looked as silent and empty as it must have the day the colonists died.

  He heard a scraping and thumping as Bairamov hit the dirt behind a rock ten metres to his left, then swung his rifle around it, toward the village. Desoto followed. His feet skidded across the dirt as he tried to stop behind a decaying wooden cart that lay on its side. His suit fell to its knees, and he slammed into the cart. The wood cracked and fell around him as he slid to a stop in the middle of the pile.

  “I said quiet,” Volkov said. “What moron did that?”

  “Sorry, sir,” Desoto said.

  “Next idiot who makes a noise like that is on shit-burning detail for a month.”

  The green squares indicating the members of Alpha and Charlie teams lined up in Logan’s HUD as they took cover just below the edge of the plateau. Logan scanned the building again. Still just a big blob visible in IR through the gaps in the walls, and no other sign of life. Nothing showed in the drone’s cameras, except the glow of the suited men around the edge of the plateau, waiting to move in.

  “Bravo,” Volkov said, “capture the girl or kill her, whatever works for you. Alpha, move in and clear those buildings. And watch for mines.”

  “Desoto, McCoy,” Bairamov said. “Move in. McCoy, be ready with that grenade launcher if there’s trouble.”

  Alpha team were moving to Logan’s right. Desoto glanced toward Logan, who stared at the buildings through his rifle scope as Desoto moved closer to the barn, stopping behind a pile of wood that looked like it had once been a shed of some kind. Still no sign of life inside the barn.

  Logan pushed himself to his feet, ran to the nearest corner of the barn, then slammed down in the dirt. He peered through a narrow gap between the planks in the wall. Even with the light intensification in the visor, he could see little inside.

  The grey blob of the horse showed faintly in the shadows, but no sign of the girl or her lantern. Nor did the suit’s sensors show any sign of weapons or explosives inside. There was nowhere to hide a bomb from the sensors in an inch-thick wooden wall.

  “See her?” Desoto said.

  “Just the horse.”

  Logan rose to a crouch, and approached the doors as Desoto covered him with his rifle. Then he ducked as rifle rounds cracked in the night, breaking the silence that had filled the air beforehand. But they weren’t coming Logan’s way.

  “Contact,” someone yelled. A red square appeared on the HUD in a building near the far end of the street. Then another, on the upper floor of a building hidden behind the barn.

  “Charlie,” Volkov said, “flank them.”

  Charlie team began to move on the HUD, approaching the village. Alpha split up, taking cover along the cross-street. The wooden buildings wouldn’t do anything to stop a rifle round, but they’d conceal the suits behind them. With no muzzle flash from the gaussrifles to give away the shooters’ position, the fight would come down to who saw the others first.

  Logan kicked the barn doors. Splinters flew from the wood as his metal foot smashed into the door, and the claws tore into the planks. The lock ripped away under the impact, and the door twisted on its hinges. He kicked it again, and the nails holding the top hinge to the door tore away.

  The door twisted further, and the top fell inward, stopping at an angle where the lower hinge still managed to hold it off the ground. Logan stepped up onto the door.

  The hinge creaked beneath the weight of his body and suit. Then he crouched as he stepped through the doorway, and jumped down onto the dirt floor of the barn.

  The horse whinnied and turned, and wood crunched as the animal backed into one of the poles that supported the roof. Its reins strained as it pulled back, lifting its muzzle toward the pole they were tied around.

  “Alice, IR.”

  The visor’s image shifted to infrared. The heat of the horse’s body glowed against the wood, but there was no other source of heat in the barn. He looked up, into the roof. The girl wasn’t hiding above him, either. She’d simply disappeared.

  “I’m hit,” a voice yelled. One of the HUD squares for Alpha team showed suit damage.

  “Stop shooting,” Poulin said. “We need them alive.”

  Volkov’s voice sounded like he was torn between laughing and yelling with rage as he spoke. “You heard the mademoiselle. Please try not to kill all of the bastards.”

  The shooting continued. Logan crept toward the far side of the barn as Desoto clambered over the door behind him. The final hinge gave way, and the door slammed down onto the dirt floor with a loud crack of torn and broken wood.

  Dirt was piled up waist-high against the inside of the walls, as though someone had been trying to build themselves some kind of improvised radiation shield. Not that it would do much good, at least once the sun was above them. Which it would be, in just a few hours.

  Otherwise the interior was empty, aside from some old farm tools, and stacks of ancient, rotting, straw-like plant stems.

  He kicked the straw, but nothing moved beneath it. He grabbed a rusty pitch-fork from the tool pile, and shoved the prongs into the dirt piles in case another IED was hidden there. The spikes just sank into the dirt until they scraped against the wooden wall behind them.

  Desoto crouched beside the wall, in the corner across from the horse. “Where’s the girl?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Logan pushed on the human-sized door on the street side of the barn. It creaked open onto the weed-strewn dirt of the street outside. Through the doorway, he could see the rear of the left-most building that the others had targeted as hostile.

  Yellow light flashed to his left for a split second, then chunks of the roof planks of that building exploded upwards, tumbling through the sky. They clattered across the street, and smashed into the buildings on Logan’s side.

  Logan glanced to the left.

  The green squares of Charlie team were moving into the village from that end, and one of them crouched with a grenade launcher on his shoulder. Whoever it was stared at the building for a second, then slung the launcher and walked on.

  The red HUD square that had hung over the wrecked building disappeared. Logan took a step out of the door, then crouched at the side of the street, as he pulled his own launcher from his back.

  “Drone incoming,” Bairamov said.

  A flashing red rectangle appeared on Logan’s HUD, around the building with the other shooter. Logan pr
essed himself back against the wall.

  Then a crackly howl came from the sky.

  The building erupted in a spray of wooden splinters for a few seconds as one of the drones opened fire with its Gatling gun. The thick planks on the side of the building split apart as the hypersonic rounds tore through the wooden frame. The top floor twisted and collapsed, pushing the walls apart until they fell to the ground in a pile of shattered wood.

  Then there was silence once more, except for the sound of Logan’s breathing, and the air hissing into his helmet.

  “Move up,” Volkov yelled. “Clean up the mess. There are probably more of the bastards hiding here somewhere. Bravo, do you have the girl?”

  “No sign of her, sir.” Logan said.

  “Then where the hell is she? She didn’t come out of the building, and she didn’t just vanish into thin air.”

  “Don’t use the drones again,” Poulin said. “I need prisoners.”

  “Bravo, try to get her alive, if it’s not too much trouble.”

  Logan stepped back into the barn. The girl had to be there somewhere. The drones would have seen her leave, even if he hadn’t. He peered up into the roof again. Wooden planks ran across the rafters, and were piled high with straw. But nothing showed there in IR. There was just nowhere for the girl to hide.

  He turned around on the spot, staring at the walls. Could she have removed some of the planks, and moved from one building to the next without being seen?

  None looked loose, and she’d still have to cross the open dirt between the buildings, where the drones should have seen her. Besides, if she thought the Legion were following her, why would she even come here? Unless it was a trap.

  There was something else. He glanced toward the horse. They boy’s body no longer hung over its back. Wherever she’d gone, the dead boy had gone with her. She wouldn’t have dragged him through the village, would she?

  An explosion rattled the planks in the walls. Logan dove to the dirt. Another explosion followed a second later. Sounded like grenades, but whose?

  “Man down,” a voice called. Then rifle rounds cracked in rapid bursts.

  One of Charlie’s men turned flashing red. The buildings they were clearing had turned green on the HUD as they marked them safe, but one now switched back to red.

  “I thought you cleared that damn building?” Volkov yelled.

  More grenades exploded, followed by long bursts of rifle fire. No-one had flagged a hostile in the building, so who was firing at what?

  “We did, sir.”

  “Then where are they coming from?”

  “Don’t know, sir. But I don’t reckon there’s anything alive in there now.”

  The rear door creaked behind Logan as Bairamov clambered over it. “Where’s this damn girl?”

  Logan crouched as he stomped across the building toward the horse. Wood creaked beneath him, and his foot sank a few centimetres into the ground.

  He stepped back, and kicked at the ground with the metal claws. Dirt sprayed into the air, then the claws scraped on wood. He crouched, and dug his fingers into the dirt.

  They wrapped themselves around a plank, and he pulled it free. More planks lay in the dirt beside it, and he heaved on them all until he’d cleared the ground beneath them.

  “What have you found?” Bairamov said.

  Logan crouched, and stared down at the floor of the barn where he’d ripped up the planks.

  “Alice, IR illuminators.”

  The suit’s external IR lights turned on. Lights bright enough to illuminate the area around him for the suit’s visor to see, but still invisible to anyone looking their way with the naked eye.

  And a dark circle about a metre across lay there in the dirt where the planks had been, hiding it from view until he’d stepped on them.

  A tunnel entrance.

  Logan had crawled through smaller tunnels in the caves along the shore when he was a kid. But he’d been much smaller then, too.

  And not wrapped in hundreds of kilos of metal and plastic.

  This tunnel was wide enough for a human to drop into, but too narrow for a man in a suit.

  It didn’t look like the kind of thing the colonists would have built when they first constructed the village. And a thin layer of dirt still clung to the top of the planks, as though someone had stuck it there to try to hide them.

  The suit’s ground-penetrating radar was only designed to spot mines, not to look metres deep into the ground. But it showed a faint outline of something leading away from the hole, out of the building, and across the street.

  “Sir, I’ve got a tunnel.”

  It would make sense. If anyone was still living there, they’d be living underground to protect themselves from the radiation. There was nowhere else they could go.

  And, if they built radiation-protected homes above ground, they’d be easy to see. But beneath a dead village... no-one would notice them there. Even if someone saw the insurgents as they came and went, they’d just see a few people enter the buildings and leave.

  More gunfire outside.

  “I’m hit,” a voice yelled.

  A suit in Alpha team showed damage on the HUD. Another building they’d marked as cleared turned red.

  “Sir,” Bairamov said, “we’ve found a tunnel in the building where the girl was. They must be using them to move around behind us.”

  “Drop grenades down the tunnels,” Volkov said, “then fall back to the rally point. We’ll call in the drones and and destroy this place.”

  “No,” Poulin yelled. “We need to capture this village.”

  “Mademoiselle, if you’d like to go crawling through those tunnels, feel free. But I’m tired of you getting my men shot. The rest of us are leaving.”

  “Disobey me again, and I’ll have you demoted and shipped back to France. Don’t think I can’t do so.”

  Volkov was silent for a few seconds as gunfire and grenade explosions continued around the village.

  Logan lowered his rifle barrel into the tunnel mouth, and looked through the sights on his visor as he tried to see around the curve at the bottom.

  But that only showed him another metre of dirt, and the roughly-cut planks that supported the dirt roof and walls of the tunnel proper.

  Finally Volkov spoke again.

  “Bravo, send a man down into the tunnels to scout them out. Alpha, Charlie, destroy any tunnels you see, and keep the bastards’ heads down until the mademoiselle is happy.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Logan’s now-empty suit stood in the straw, facing the dirt pile beside the wall of the barn. The back of the suit was wide open after he'd climbed out. The HUD and instruments still glowed faintly inside the suit, giving him just enough light to see by when he leaned in through the open back.

  The heat of the reactor warmed his skin as he leaned past it. He pulled open the survival kit attached to the inner wall of the suit, and grabbed the pistol, light-intensifying goggles and flashlight from the kit.

  He strapped the goggles onto his face, and could see the barn again, in the glow from the suit’s IR illuminators. The rubber of the goggles smelled new, and the straps pressed them hard against his face. This was probably the first time they’d been removed from the survival kit since it was installed when the suit was built.

  A Legionnaire whose suit was too badly damaged to stay in the fight rarely lived long enough to need them.

  He closed the back of the suit and sealed it, then grabbed a few grenades from the suit’s belt. They were large enough for the suit’s oversized hands to easily hold them, but small enough for a human to use if he had to. He clipped them to his belt.

  Bairamov and Desoto watched from where they were crouched on the far side of the barn.

  Logan pulled hard on the straps on his body armour to check they were tight, then slid his helmet back onto his head, and tightened it in place.

  “Can you squeak, McCoy?” Bairamov’s voice said from the helmet’s speakers.

>   “What do you mean?”

  “If they see you, just squeak loudly, and pretend to be a rat. It might work.”

  “I'll bear that advice in mind, sir.”

  Logan sat back and took a deep breath. Then another. And one more for luck. The world grew brighter and seemed more solid as the oxygen filled his lungs. Maybe he should wait a bit longer, let his heart slow down, and wait for his skin to cool, and the sweat to stop.

  Or maybe he was just delaying things, and should get down there and do his job. Even though he might never come back out of the damn tunnel.

  He took one more deep breath. “Going in. Don’t shoot me when I come back out.”

  He’d have no way to communicate with the others once he was inside the tunnel. His helmet comms wouldn’t get through the metres of dirt above him. And it would really suck to get shot by his own comrades when he crawled out.

  “Good luck,” Bairamov said. “And kill a few of the bastards for me.”

  Logan took another grenade from the suit, pulled the pin, leaned over the edge of the hole until he could reach down to the tunnel entrance, and tossed the grenade inside.

  It bounced along the dirt floor into the tunnel for a metre or two as Logan rolled aside. Then it exploded with a crack that left his unprotected ears ringing, and threw a cloud of dirt into the air from the tunnel entrance.

  If anyone was waiting down there, he’d either just killed them, or just woken them up. He’d soon find out which.

  He leaned over the edge of the hole, turned on the goggles’ IR illuminators, and peered into the tunnel. It was empty for the few metres the goggles could see in the IR glow.

  Chunks of wood lay scattered across the dirt where the grenade had blown them down from the roof and walls. The walls bulged in where the explosion had weakened them, and the weight of the dirt pushed them inward. How long had those rotting planks been standing there, supporting the weight of the dirt?

  They’d better not pick today to collapse.

  He could still hear firing and explosions around the village. He had to get this done, to help his fellow Legionnaires who were being attacked out there.