Rebellion

by Edward M. Grant

  The last thing he needed was to fall down another shaft in the darkness. If he broke a leg down there...

  His knuckles slammed against something cold and hard as he pushed his hand forward. It scraped across the dirt, and smacked into the wall. He reached out, and felt cold metal. Then a trigger, and the plastic sides of a pistol grip.

  He turned the pistol around carefully in the dark, trying not to shoot himself by accident, feeling the metal and plastic with his fingers until he had it safely in his hand and pointed away from him. At least Volkov wouldn’t be able to punish him for losing it now.

  As he moved on, there was no sound any more except for his own breath, the scraping of his hands and boots on the dirt, and the tapping of his fingers on the wall. No more scraping ahead, and no shooting up above.

  If the section had given up on him and left, it would be a long trek back to Gries, particularly on foot. And he’d be lucky if the villagers didn’t take him out in the fields and shoot him when he got there.

  He tapped the butt of the pistol against the right wall. It thumped against solid wood. Then he moved on another half metre, and tapped the left with his hand. More wood. Another half-metre. Surely they wouldn’t have built a tunnel to nowhere? It had to come out of the ground eventually, or it would become his coffin.

  He swung the pistol grip toward the wall again, but his arm twisted past where he’d expected it to stop when the butt hit the wall. He slid that way along the tunnel, holstered the pistol, and ran his hand across the dirt. He reached out as far as his arm would go, but there was no obstruction even as he strained his shoulder until his tendons complained. He slid his hand back around toward his side, and it stopped part-way as it slapped into wood. The side wall of a cross tunnel.

  He crawled into the side-tunnel to the right. After a few seconds of crawling, his hands found the wooden wall at the end of the tunnel. He rose to a crouch, and slid his hands up the walls. The left hand stopped as it reached the wooden roof of the tunnel. The right continued up a shaft, until it found the wooden hatch over the tunnel mouth.

  He pushed it up. The hatch moved easily, and a thin rain of dirt poured down onto his face and shoulders. He coughed and flicked his face to shake the dirt away, but kept pushing. Then squinted as the near-blinding glow of the sun burned into his eyes. He closed them, then blinked a few times as pain stabbed his eyeballs. Then opened them only far enough to see a faint bright band between his eyelids as he pushed the hatch aside. It slid a few centimetres, then stopped.

  He stood as well as he could, and peered out through the gap between the hatch and floor. A twisted, cracked, wooden plank leaned against the wall of the building above the hatch. The wall on that side had collapsed inward in a mess of broken planks, and they now lay on top of the hatch. The sun had risen just above the edge of the plateau, and now cast long, dark shadows across the floor of the building as it shone through the gaps between the planks, and into his eyes.

  He pushed up on the hatch, until the broken planks that were pressing down on it creaked above him. He twisted his head sideways as he pushed it out through the gap between the hatch and the ground, and his shoulders followed. The back of his body armour scraped against the hatch, and the wood creaked again as he squeezed out and pushed it higher. He dug his fingers into the dirt and heaved until his body slid through the gap, and his legs followed.

  Then he lay panting for a moment as he filled his lungs with enough air to sustain himself. He grabbed a plank that leaned against the remains of the wooden frame of the house, and used it for support as he pulled himself to his feet. Then he shaded his eyes from the dazzling light of the morning sun as he crept out toward the street. The last thing he needed now was to surprise one of the others, and get himself shot.

  “Sir, I’m back,” he said into the helmet mike.

  “Damn, McCoy,” Bairamov’s voice answered. “LeFavre thought he’d just won the dead pool. You got the girl?”

  “No, sir. But I don’t think anyone else will be coming up out of those tunnels.”

  “Was that you who blew the shit out of this place?”

  “Please tell Mme Poulin that it wasn’t intentional, sir.”

  Logan reached the doorway at the end of the building. It opened out onto the street, where the door had fallen onto the ground outside.

  He peered out. The sunlight burned his eyes. He pulled down the helmet visor, and it darkened until it blocked out the glare. The centre of the street had become a crater at least five metres across, and a couple of metres deep. The explosion his grenade set off had blown the dirt up into a ridge a metre high, and the centre had collapsed into the tunnel shaft. No-one was going back down there in a hurry.

  Not without a dozen miners to dig their way in.

  A transport sat on the open plateau at the end of the street, with engines whirring and the rear ramp down. Two men in suits carefully carried a third up the ramp, with one leg of his suit hanging limply down, mangled and twisted.

  A familiar suit stood at the edge of the crater, with a Russian flag on the shoulder. Bairamov. More of the men of the section crouched in defensive positions around the street, or near the transport.

  Logan stepped out of the doorway, feeling almost naked in just his fatigues, helmet and body armour.

  Even if all the insurgents were out of action, a solar storm right now would give him only a short time to dive back into a tunnel before the radiation killed him.

  Bairamov turned toward him.

  “You made a hell of a mess.”

  “Shouldn’t you be in the barn, sir?” With Logan’s suit. And weapons. Not the kind of thing they should be leaving lying out in the open, even though the suit was soft-locked to their Legion IDs.

  “We came out to see what the noise was about. You shook the whole damn building, and the dirt from the explosion went so high that most of it ended up on the roof. What the heck was that?”

  “IED factory, maybe? Ammo dump? I don’ t know, sir. I just tossed a grenade down a shaft in the tunnels. I didn’t see what was down there before it blew up.”

  “Remind me to stay away from you in combat, kid.”

  Poulin was crouched over a pile of bodies on the far side of the crater. Volkov stood beside her, his rifle raised, and turned his head slowly as he scanned the street.

  Sunlight reflected from three long gouges across the back of Poulin’s suit. Something had hit her during the firefight. Maybe she’d smarten up a little, now she had some real experience of life in the Legion.

  But probably not.

  Logan strode around the crater toward them. If Volkov had expected him to die down in those tunnels, Logan was going to stand in front of the man and show him his plan failed.

  Two suits strolled along the street toward the pile, dragging the limp, blood-soaked bodies of two men in civilian clothes behind them.

  One of the suits carried a bloodstained head, dangling below the suit’s metal hand on the end of its dark hair, and swinging as he walked. The men tossed the bodies on to the pile, then dropped the head on top.

  “That’s eight insurgent KIAs, sir,” one of the suits said. “At least, we figure it’s enough pieces to make eight.”

  Poulin leaned over the new bodies, and held out her suit’s hands toward them. “Intel says they’re all fake IDs. They’re in the colony database, good enough to pass everyday checks, but a deep scan shows enough inconsistencies in the data to flag them as suspicious.”

  “So they could search the database, and maybe find more of the insurgents?” Logan said.

  “They already are. But it takes time to scan that deep. And, by then, they'll probably have created new IDs.”

  “Someone must have entered them into the database,” Volkov said. “I’d like to talk to that person.”

  “So would I.”

  “Any other use for the bodies?” Volkov said.

  “I’ve scanned whatever’s left of them, sir,” Bairamov said. “If Intel need any i
nfo, I should have it.”

  “Good. Let the rats have them.” Volkov’s suit whirred as his helmet turned until the visor pointed at Logan’s face. “So, Mr McCoy. We thought you were dead.”

  “Sorry to have disappointed you, sir.”

  “What the hell have you been up to for the last couple of hours down there?”

  “Scouting the tunnels, sir.”

  “Any of the bastards still alive?”

  “Not that I saw, sir. But five or six KIAs.”

  “And the girl?”

  “I saw her down there, sir. The explosion knocked me out. When I woke up, she was gone.”

  Volkov’s visor leaned close to Logan's face. “Hmm. How convenient, McCoy. How very convenient.”

  “I didn’t mean to toss a grenade into an ammo dump, sir. If I did, I’d have been further away when it went off.”

  “Do you have some connection to that girl? Something that would make you want to let her escape?”

  “Never seen her before today, sir.”

  “You do realize I can have Intel run another background check on you? I gather you’re one of Rousseau’s boys. If they find anything...”

  Poulin stood, and her suit crunched across the dirt toward them. “Where are my prisoners?”

  “They didn’t want to surrender, ma’am.” Logan reached into his body armour, grabbed the tablet, and held it out toward her. “But there might be something useful on this.”

  Poulin’s long, metal fingers clunked down on the tablet, raised it toward her visor, turned it around, then placed it in a pouch on the outside of her suit.

  “I’ll get it to Intel. But I’d rather have prisoners.”

  Logan glanced toward the sun, which was rising over the roof of the building across the street. If there was a solar storm, the wood would do just about nothing to protect him from the radiation. “Can I get back to my suit, sir?”

  “We’re about to move out,” Volkov said. “Hurry up, before I decide to leave you behind with your girlfriend.”

  Logan strode along the street, and around the edge of the crater. Then through the half-open doorway of the barn.

  His suit was there, where he’d left it, over beside the wall. The back of the suit was still closed, and locked. But the doors of the barn were wide open, out onto the plateau outside.

  And the horse was gone.

  CHAPTER 16

  Logan stared at the five cards he held in his hand. Two aces, a jack, and two threes. Not so bad. Not so good. His chair creaked as he slumped back in it, and he kept his face perfectly still, giving away as little as he could to the silent, stern-faced men sitting around the roughly-carved wooden table in front of him.

  Learning to hide whatever he might be feeling was a useful skill he’d learned during those months in the cells back in Paris. He’d worked hard to not give the interrogators a way in for their questioning. To not show them they were winning.

  And it came in handy during the section’s late-night poker games. They’d scouted around a few more villages after the firefight in Gries, but hadn’t run into any more insurgents on their trip.

  Walking through the villages, smiling at the villagers and not being shot at had almost felt like an anticlimax after all the excitement of the patrol’s first stop. Perhaps taking out one of the insurgents’ bases had knocked a bit of the fight out of them for a while.

  Then they’d returned to Estérel. They needed time for equipment repairs and overhauls, medical treatment for the wounded, and debriefing with Intel.

  And, tonight, for drinking and a few games of cards.

  Something small, long and dark moved on Logan’s left wrist. He swung his right hand, and slapped it hard. Bright red blood smeared his fingers as he pulled his hand back. He wiped the remains of the mosquito from his wrist, onto the leg of his fatigue pants. There might not be much native life on this planet, but the mosquitoes, cockroaches and bedbugs that had stowed away on the colony ships seemed to be doing just fine.

  “Chavs?” Bairamov said from the far side of the table. He raised his voice to be audible over the muttering and clinking of plates and glasses from the men and women sitting at the other tables in the old, wooden barroom.

  It was their first night off duty since the landing on New Strasbourg, and the fireteam had strolled through the streets of Estérel until they wandered into Pierre’s Place, then decided to stay a while.

  The sign outside the door claimed it was the oldest bar in town, and that was easy to believe. It was rather more difficult to believe that the place could remain standing until the end of the night.

  There was no concrete in the bar walls or roof, it was just an old wooden building with a dirt floor, like those they'd seen in the Valenciennes. The roof planks high above the table bowed downwards beneath the weight of the metre of dirt that had been piled on top of them to protect against radiation. Flecks of dirt had been falling slowly through the gaps in the roof onto the table and floor as they sat and played.

  Either way, the place seemed popular with the locals. Like the men and women—but mostly men—at the other tables who were resolutely staring away from the Legionnaires, and doing their best to avoid eye contact any time Logan looked their way. A few had left when the Legionnaires walked in.

  Were they insurgents showing their dislike of the Legion, or townspeople worried that the insurgents might attack? Or heading off to tell their insurgent friends that the Legion were in town?

  He couldn’t continue wondering whether every colonist he ran into was trying to kill him, or it would drive him insane.

  That was probably the insurgents’ goal, anyway. To keep the Legionnaires guessing until they began to see everyone as an enemy. But he was keeping an eye on the men and women around them, just in case. So were the others.

  “They called you Chavs?” Bairamov repeated.

  It was one of those nights where men who’d shared their first experience of combat together felt the urge to tell each other their life stories.

  Logan had been explaining why he left England, and ended up in France. He nodded, and looked between the helmets and empty wine glasses scattered across the table, toward Bairamov’s face. Which was somewhat hazy right now. Logan had learned to drink alcohol in the ZUS, but the wine here burned your throat on the way down, and melted your brain when it hit your stomach. Or maybe it was just that the alcohol had more effect in the thin air.

  Either way, his voice slurred a little as he spoke. “That's what they called us.”

  “What's that supposed to mean?”

  “Corporate Housing And Violent, the teachers said. But I think they just made that up.”

  “Like the Rednecks in America?” Gallo said from his seat to Logan’s right.

  The medics hadn’t cleared him to return to action yet, but he’d sneaked out of the hospital with bandages still wrapped around his legs after Logan and Bairamov smuggled in a set of fatigues so Gallo could hide his wounds.

  He might be in trouble with the officers tomorrow, but what were they going to do? Send him back to the unit early? With the casualties they’d taken, he’d be there again as soon as they could get him fit enough to operate his suit. Which wouldn't be more than a few days, either way.

  “Everyone has a name for us.”

  The useless ones, the unconnected ones, the ones who didn’t come from a distinguished, ‘elite’ family who could pull strings, and whose only value was that they might be slightly cheaper than machines. And slightly smarter.

  From talking to the other recruits he’d met, he knew now that families like his own existed in every country on Earth. The workers, to be used and abused by the toffs, and replaced if they objected to their fate. Maybe one day things would change, but how? The toffs had all the power, and no qualms about using it. The workers had none. The unemployed had even less.

  “The French, you know, call them Les Sauvages,” Desoto said from Logan’s right. “Savages, like wild animals.”

&nbs
p; Logan had heard that slang more than once from the flics in the ZUS. “The aristos are the real savages.”

  Bairamov tossed a ten-franc note onto the table. “Raise.”

  “I’m out,” Gallo said, and tossed his cards onto the table.

  ‘Me too,” Desoto said. “I'm out of the game for tonight, and I’m out of money.”

  Bairamov smirked, and stared into Logan’s face. “So, how about it, hero? You feeling as lucky tonight as you were in those tunnels?”

  Logan squinted as he stared into Bairamov’s eyes. Was he bluffing, or did he have a better hand? He was right, either way. Logan had used up plenty of luck in the tunnels.

  Could he rely on having any left tonight?

  He placed his cards down. “Fold.”

  “Thank you,” Bairamov said, as he reached out for the pile of cash on the table, and added another hundred francs to his winnings. Logan grabbed Bairamov’s cards, and flipped them over. Two tens, a four, a five and a two.

  Well, Logan didn’t really need the money, did he? What could he do with it? They’d be back out in the field before he knew it, with nothing to spend it on.

  Bairamov grabbed the cards, and shuffled them back into the pack. “Another round?”

  “I’m done,” Gallo said.

  Desoto’s chair legs dug gouges in the dirt floor as he pushed his chair back and stood. “I’m gonna take a look around, while the sun’s still up.”

  Bairamov stuffed the cards in his pocket. “Good plan.”

  Logan grabbed his helmet, and studied the faces of the men and women in the bar as he strolled toward the doors. Few of them looked up, and none of them looked like they wanted to pick a fight with four Legionnaires.

  But their friends still might.

  The air outside the bar was beginning to grow cold as the sun descended toward the horizon. Logan shivered as they stepped out of the doors, and sudden pain stabbed his eyes as they adjusted to the bright light of the setting sun after the dim electric glow inside.