Honor of the Legion

by Leo Champion

  “Sir, I apologize,” said Croft.

  “Croft was a classmate of mine from West Point, sir,” said Dunwell. “He came third in our class, actually.”

  The pugnacious lieutenant-colonel’s demeanor immediately changed.

  “West Point? I’m a graduate of there myself, you know.” He raised his right hand to show a West Point class ring on one finger. “Class of ’03. You’re wasting a fine education in charge of these unrepentant garbage, Junior Lieutenant.”

  Newbauer gestured at the Bravo Company men, who were moving toward the fort.

  “I wouldn’t call them garbage, sir. Fine soldiers most of them.”

  “Unrepentant garbage, Junior Lieutenant. And as for the penal troops – the garbage of their garbage. Worthless trash every last one of them.”

  Newbauer turned on his heel and trotted away. Dunwell rolled her eyes.

  A roughly handsome blond sergeant first class in his late thirties came up to Dunwell and gave her a casual salute.

  “SFC Atkinson,” said Dunwell to the man. “This is Junior Lieutenant Croft. We were in the same cadet company at Hudson High.”

  “Nice to meet you, SFC,” said Croft.

  “James, this is my platoon sergeant, John Atkinson.”

  “Nice to meet you too, sir.” Croft addressed both of them. “What’s it like out here?”

  “So far, boring. We’ve been waiting a month for the Air Force engineers to show up and give us their wells. What, Administration hasn’t filled you in, sir?”

  “Only about the general details of the project. What I’d like to know” – Croft gestured at the twenty-foot walls of Fort Hubris, not far from them – “is why someone thought to build a symbol like that in an area that’s supposedly safe.”

  Dunwell shrugged.

  “Symbolism. And keeping idle hands busy, I guess. There’s been nothing else for them to do.”

  “Sir,” said Williams. “Officers gathering to divide up the workers.”

  “Good seeing you, James. Be nice working with you again,” said Dunwell.

  “Good to see you. And to meet you, Atkinson. OK, jefe” – Croft turned to Williams – “take me to these guys.”

  Chapter Seven

  “This is Labor Battalion 209,” said its commander, a Goldneck master sergeant named Koppel. There were about five hundred of the Black Gangers, divided into twenty-man gangs. Each had a Legion MP in charge; actual security was to be done by the Bravo Company troops, who were being split into their four-man teams.

  Lieutenant-Colonel Newbauer watched imperiously from the blockhouse above them, hands on his hips. An Air Force medical section, what looked like a dozen or so people in their pale-blue uniforms, watched from the shade under one wall. The dispirited Black Gangers had been lined up and now were being detailed off – a four-man regular Legion team to a twenty-man gang under the supervision of an MP.

  “People,” Newbauer announced. “I have been informed that the wells have finally, finally arrived from Earth!”

  Earth, thought Croft. That was a long way from here. Still, this organization had been set up out here for a month with nothing to do except build what seemed a largely unnecessary fortress, apparently for the pure sake of building something and keeping el picazon at bay.

  Newbauer was a type he’d come to know. In charge of a labor battalion, a Legion company and assorted supplementary elements like Dunwell’s platoon, he seemed like the kind of abrasive dick you shoved off to hardship projects in the middle of nowhere just to get rid of.

  Croft wondered who Dunwell had pissed off to get this assignment. Possibly just bad luck, although with the ongoing civil construction – and reconstruction, after secessionists and infiltrators blew things up – you had in the colonies, there were never enough combat engineers. It was her bad luck to be out here instead of in the middle of Chongdin.

  Unlike him, whose men had fucked up. They’d already been chewed out heavily, but he was still pissed at them over that. Vazhao had been a nice billet; this was looking set to become a shit one.

  “The wells,” Newbauer went on to the assembled Bravo Company, Labor Battalion 209 and the Air Force people, plus whoever else might have been in covered other areas of the fort, “are scheduled to be air-dropped three days from now after final assembly is conducted in orbit, using kinetic energy to blast them into the water table. This will make it logistically feasible for you convict workers to get started building the road that your worthless asses have been sent out to construct. The railroad, I should say! You will be doing hard work, picking and grading, while the combat engineer platoon will provide advanced technical assistance and mechanical support as needed.”

  * * *

  “Meaning we get to blow shit up,” SFC Atkinson grinned to Lieutenant Dunwell under his breath. “About time we got a chance to blow something up.”

  This had been a shit assignment out in the middle of nowhere, away from the comforts of Chongdin or even the relative civilization of Varren Province, with its military towns and latifundia.

  “Yeah yeah,” Dunwell said. “Sergeant, you always want to blow something up.”

  Atkinson shrugged.

  “Combat engineers, hoo-yah!”

  * * *

  The Black Gangers, in their razor-wire-surrounded tent encampment outside the walls of, and limited space inside, the fort didn’t need a whole lot of guarding. The machine-guns of the blockhouse overlooked it, and a platoon – Fourth, Weapons – had been delegated to run patrols around their crowded encampment.

  Quarters inside the fort were crowded bunks, but temporary. Most of Bravo Company, and Labor Battalion 209, were going to be out in the field; one platoon minding the base and providing logistical support to the rest as they built the railroad track.

  Now, Mullins – tailed by Reuter and Blanket – approached Croft, who was standing on one battlement looking out at the Black Gangers’ tent village. The Legion convicts milled around, some of them resting. Apparently Newbauer, Dunwell’s engineers and their past guards had been pushing them pretty hard on the busy-work of building and developing the fort.

  Now the fort was complete and the real work was about to begin, Newbauer – or someone above him – must have decided they deserved a break.

  “Sir?” Mullins asked Croft. As the radio man and therefore the guy closest to the lieutenant, the three had decided he should be the one to ask permission.

  “What’s up, Mullins? Reuter and – uh, Blanket, right?”

  “We’re not really doing anything for the rest of the day, are we?”

  “Settling in. Not that there’s much here to settle into, huh?”

  “We were hoping for permission to take a walk outside. Go check out the abandoned city.”

  “What for?”

  Mullins shrugged. “Join the Legion, see the galaxy, right?”

  The lieutenant thought for a moment then gave a nod.

  “You remember the bit of the briefing about wolves and snakes, right?”

  Exoskeletal Dinqing analogs to the Earth creatures, but yes, Mullins had heard. He gave a nod.

  “Don’t want you guys getting hurt. Poke around the ruins all you like, but you bring your rifles with you.”

  “Reuter and I have sidearms, sir.” In Mullins’ case the nifty little .22 machine-pistol he’d taken from a dead secessionist in Roanoke. It wasn’t much more than a long-barrelled handgun with a fully-automatic firing mechanism, but it could deliver a murderous spray of death up close for a few moments.

  Croft shrugged. “Just go armed, is all. In fact, spread the word. Nobody leaves the fort perimiter without a weapon. Intelligence says the local nomads are friendly, but we don’t take chances.”

  Mullins doubted the mostly-experienced men of the company were going to do that anyway – these days he for one had come to not think of himself fully dressed without that little gun in its cross-draw holster on his left hip – but he nodded and gave the platoon leader a salute.

/>   “Yessir.”

  “Might take my rifle anyway,” Reuter said as they headed off. “Phone’s getting a little low on juice, needs some shaking.”

  “You get a signal, Reuter?” Blanket asked.

  “Out here? Satellite only so I’m not bothering. But there’s porn on it, some movies and a few books.”

  “You got porn and you didn’t share?”

  “Direct connect and you can have all of it, fish.”

  “In that case, I’m definitely bringing my rifle,” Blanket said. “I need to charge my phone, too.”

  * * *

  A few minutes later, accompanied by Khaliq – who had decided to tag along – they headed out the fort’s open steel gates, nodding to the pair of Weapons guys standing guard by them.

  “Going to do a little urban exploring?” one of them – Lance-Corporal Chen – asked. His newly-assigned role in Fourth Platoon was to handle a Multi-Purpose Rocket Launcher, but right now he had a heavy black M-10 submachinegun, the defensive weapon of choice for Legion heavy weapons troops, slung in front of him.

  “Little post-urban exploring, yeah,” said Khaliq.

  “We might be up for some of that when we’re off-shift,” said Chen’s loader and the man with him, Private First Class Murphy. “Have fun, guys.”

  As they trooped past the Black Gangers’ tent barracks, men looked past the razor wire at them. Some of them pleaded for cigarettes. Mullins would have been tempted to hand over a couple to the poor bastards – although he did hear they got paid a little bit, which they could spend at a prison-like commissary – but he knew that if he gave them to one or two guys, the others would get more insistent and he’d be out of his pack before long. He only had a couple of cartons out here in the field, for however long this damn assignment was going to last.

  Of course, they were on the wrong side of a bunch of razor wire with manned machine-guns looking down on them. It wasn’t like they could follow.

  He wondered what they’d done. Minor crimes in the Legion got you confined to quarters, docked pay, busted down or flogged, as had been the case with Hill, Gartlan and Cuyahoga. His own charges, thankfully beaten, had been attempted desertion; if you tried to run, or did run and they caught you, you were up for real time in the Black Gangs.

  Theft of government property, assault on an officer or an NCO, refusal to obey orders – those were the sort of crimes that would land you in a Legion-issued reflective vest. Underfed, looking like shit and treated worse, from what Mullins could see.

  “Hey, Muls!” Reuter pointed at a particular man, speaking in an undertone. “Is that Leon Smith?”

  Shit. It was. A big man with a blond buzz cut and not-too-bright eyes looking out from a rectangular face. Only glimpsed for a moment, as the guy tromped into one of the enclosed encampment’s latrine pits.

  “Think it is,” said Mullins in a normal voice. “Was.”

  “Always wondered where that guy ended up,” Reuter said.

  “Who the hell’s Leon Smith?” Khaliq asked.

  “Guy from our platoon on Chauncy,” Reuter said at the same time as Mullins said,

  “Idiot who almost got a bunch of us killed fucking around with grenades. Screw him.”

  “I didn’t know him,” said Khaliq, who hadn’t been with the 996th Training Regiment from the very beginning; he’d recycled in after washing out of the second phase of his earlier regiment’s training cycle.

  “He was with us from the start,” Reuter said. “Platoon fuckup. First man we knew to get flogged after that grenade shit Mullins mentioned. Later tried to kill himself.”

  “Yeah, he tried to beat himself to death with a damn flashlight one night in the platoon bay,” said Mullins. “That’s the last we saw of him.”

  “They only give you so many tries before you end up in a Black Gang,” said Khaliq.

  That was true. Mullins had heard of guys who never made it through Chauncy and spent all their five years in a Class One Black Gang.

  “Aren’t these guys a Class Two labor battalion?” Mullins asked.

  “Guess he must have done something to get busted down further,” said Blanket with a shrug.

  “Yeah, probably.”

  The process of quarrying stone from the walls of ancient Kandin-dak had left a well-worn path trodden between the fort’s front gate of the city and a gaping hole that had been made in the old city’s walls. It was about a half-mile across rough rocky ground, covered in shrubs and grass. You could probably graze cattle pretty well here; maybe the nomads had before the Central Territories Improvement Project had shown up in force.

  It was why the city had been built, of course, on an oasis.

  And later sacked. The nomads didn’t like intruders, but the Chongdin defenders of this remote place hadn’t had the kind of firepower that Legion men did.

  The four of them picked their way through the foundations of what had been a wall, over a lot of little stones. You had to move carefully if you didn’t want a busted ankle; the builders of the fort had been apparently going mostly for big stones, leaving the little ones behind.

  Above them, coming in for a landing on the dirt strip, was a cargo plane. From back at the fort Mullins could hear Goldnecks yelling, probably organizing a work crew to unload it.

  Bits of broken, slowly-rusting iron and cracked pottery lay amidst the slightly-overgrown flagstones of the dead desert city’s street as the four Legion men tentatively probed through. Reuter, followed a second later, by Mullins, peeked through the door of a hundreds-of-years-abandoned building; six hundred and fifty years ago was the last anyone beyond maybe transient nomads had lived here. Inside there was still the wooden wreckage of broken furniture; and a heap of what might have been bones lay in one corner.

  Six hundred and fifty years, approximately. What was 2215 minus six hundred and fifty? Mullins did the calculation in his head; 1565. The Pilgrims had been half a century short of arriving in North America at that time, the Ming Dynasty had still been a going concern in China, and hadn’t Pizarro or Cortez been busy conquering the Incas around then?

  Of course, there’d been far more recent wars of conquest; all of humanity had gotten to play Spanish conquistadore in the armed diaspora that was still going on. For every two or three habitable worlds where no intelligent life had been found, there was one where it did exist. With the exceptions of two tens-of-thousands-of-millenia-ago nuke-blasted planets where technological development had apparently reached the point of the nuclear bomb and ended itself there, no intelligent life had been found at an industrial-age tech level, much less a space-age.

  There was no reason to think that any alien sapients anywhere had, or had ever, developed the Four-A Drive or any variant of it. Oh, some people had their conspiracy theories about the Greys, who were definitely the smartest of the races humanity had discovered and who with their big heads, lean bodies and pale skin did look a whole lot like pre-interspace depictions of flying-saucer aliens visiting Earth back in the pre-space age. But there was not a shred of evidence backing any of that; so far as the skeptical, liberal Mullins was concerned the word for theories without evidence was ‘bullshit’.

  They picked their way up a gentle slope, stepping over wood – roof support beams, maybe? – that had been thrown across the avenue. It led to a plaza, something scurrying out of the way. In the center of the plaza was what had obviously been a well; the invaders of a very long time ago had filled it to the brim with broken bricks and rubble.

  “This place feels haunted,” Reuter remarked.

  Nobody was really saying very much as they passed through an empty square that might have once been an open-air marketplace. A lot of wooden wreckage, which might once have been broken stalls, was piled around the area at any rate. If there’d been awnings or produce, they must have long since rotted away.

  Facing the marketplace in the direction they were going was an imposing building, the height of the city’s thirty-foot walls, with a semi-intact roof in the
two-convex-curves-heading-up style of the religious buildings that had been pointed out to Mullins in Vazhao. A church.

  Given what had happened to the city, Mullins didn’t particularly want to go inside it; given where the women and children had usually gone at the climax of Earthside sieges for millenia of history, and where they had died.

  By unspoken agreement the four men veered around, taking a course that led them past more of the smaller buildings which gradually got bigger and nicer. Blanket lit a cigarette and offered the pack around; Reuter took one.

  “Side-street,” said Khaliq. “This is a main avenue, let’s try a side-street.”

  “Sure,” said Mullins, and they took the next left.

  It was more of an alley, so narrow that Reuter and Blanket had to follow Khaliq and Mullins, rather than walking four abreast as they had been. Old rubbish lay around, and something slithered in one of the little buildings they passed by.

  “Dude, we could easily get lost here,” Reuter remarked.

  “Nah, just point south,” said Mullins. “Or walk in any one direction until we find a wall.”

  The alley was slowly curving, then split into two. Mullins chose the broader right-hand direction, the others going along with him. The buildings here were two- and three-story, staircases splitting off inside.

  Blanket paused them so he could look around inside, taking a couple of photos with his camera.

  “Family back home,” he explained. “They’ll never believe any of this. Six hundred and fifty years old.”

  “I wonder if there’ll be a new city here in ten years,” Khaliq said. “On the stones of the old.”

  “I was talking with a couple of the Army engineers,” said Reuter. “It could be a regional capital. Administration told them more than they told us, but the Army guys were saying that with enough wells and a transport infrastructure, this place could be like your American west.”

  “Turn the nomads into good little cowboys my ass,” said Mullins. “They’ve been raiders for thousands of years and they were about to overrun the Chongdins again before we showed up and bombed them to fuck. You don’t change a culture like that overnight.”