The Legionnaires Read online

  The Legionnaires

  T.C. McCarthy

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  The Legionnaires

  Twenty children huddled in a corner.

  “We’re the Legion, Grandmother,” Toly said to me, “not a damn orphanage. This is a military post.”

  “What else was there to do?” I asked. “Tell those things to go away until we can ship the children off planet? This was going to be a resort posting, five-star.”

  When we initially landed in the Lavigne system all of us had been giddy. Who wouldn’t be? It was the first world with optimal conditions: the perfect climate, the perfect star type, and a soil chemistry almost identical to that of the south of France, just right to reestablish vineyards. A dream assignment. Nobody wanted Nimes Lointain again, the Legion’s training planet, the ideal place if you enjoyed marching all day with a full kit under two g’s. We had just come from Nimes; Lavigne was supposed to have been our vacation.

  “How do they see?” I whispered. Out the firing port we could see an ocean of them, mante religieuse (French for praying mantis), huge insect-like things that had shown up that morning and slaughtered every single colonist—except for the kids in our bunker.

  “Once they get closer,” said Toly, “I’ll arm the bots.”

  Someone coughed on the other side of the room. “Leave it to miners to find killer bugs instead of metals. We always have bad luck with lousy miners.”

  “Three hundred meters,” said Toly, ignoring her. “Coms get a response from orbital yet?”

  I checked the transmission log. “No.”

  One of the other girls dropped her carbine and curled into a ball, mumbling, “I want to go back to Nimes Lointain. I want to go home.”

  That’s how bad it had gotten. Basic training had just become preferable to Lavigne.

  The first drop of rain smacked my helmet, reminding me how far from Earth I had traveled. The second and third didn’t register. Soon water fell in sheets and, while standing in formation with the other recruits, I watched the parade ground turn from dust to a gluey mess, into which you sank at the slightest movement. We weren’t supposed to move.

  A corporal stepped in front of me, taking a moment to access my suit’s transponder. “Rebecca Matthews. A mother?” he asked.

  “I was.”

  “But you have children, no?” I heard the confusion in his voice. The corporal spoke softly, his voice tickling my ears through helmet speakers, and its gentleness surprised me since I had expected to be yelled at from this point on. The other thing I had expected? French. Only he spoke in English, with almost no accent.

  “I had three,” I said.

  “But then…who is taking care of them?”

  “They and my husband died. Car accident.”

  “I understand.” A mirrored visor hid his face. Ours weren’t mirrored and we had been instructed to keep interior lights on at all times, so the instructors could watch the occupants. I saw myself, a squat armored figure in orange ceramic, reflected in the corporal’s visor while water poured off my shoulders in twin waterfalls.

  “But you’re thirty-five,” he added, obviously troubled by something.

  “That’s correct.”

  The corporal broke the silence ten seconds later with a sigh. “In less than a minute I will give the volunteers another chance to leave. Anyone who wants it will be given passage back to Earth and a flight home. A widow at age thirty-five should consider this opportunity and take it. You are too old, too misguided, and too much a risk. This is a mistake.”

  And he was gone. You weren’t supposed to look at him and had to stare straight ahead, so as soon as he moved away the corporal exited my field of view and left me to my thoughts—which he had just thrown out of whack. What was I doing there? Back in France it had seemed so clear, even when they first interrogated me, trying everything they could to figure out what would make a middle-aged mother want to join. I had given them the usual answers—duty, honor, Legion esprit de corps—but it wasn’t the truth. Even I didn’t understand the truth. It had more to do with an intangible instinct that had kept me up at night ever since I had seen the recruiting ad and started doing research, an inner voice that whispered go to France, enlist, finally do something that nobody expected, something important. Before you kill yourself.

  My mother and the corporal would have gotten along instantly; she had cried for a straight week after I told her of my plans, and was crying when she dropped me off for the flight to Paris. I don’t even remember the plane ride. Three months later I found myself on Nimes Lointain, fitted for my training suit and herded onto the parade ground under a gravity twice that of Earth’s while sweat from the strain of standing made my forehead clammy.

  The corporal’s voice clicked onto the general frequency. “Garde-à-vous.” Those of us who knew no French had been given lessons during our voyage, and it took a moment to realize that I understood without thinking, my heels squishing together. Apparently we didn’t come to attention quickly enough.

  “Garde-à-vous!” This time we moved simultaneously, and I willed my gauntlet’s thumb into the correct position, just behind the suit’s main thigh plate. The corporal stepped carefully onto a raised platform. “I am disgusted by all of you. The Legion wants women in its ranks. So, fine. We take women. You represent the ten percent of female humanity who volunteered and met the minimum requirements to even have a chance of making it through basic training.”

  He held a stack of soggy papers up in one hand, over his head. “You signed yourself to us for five years, but from what I see none of you will last five days. Anyone who wants to leave now may do so. It will be your last chance. For the next four months this planet will do its best to crush you under its gravity, making every exercise, every movement excruciating. We can afford to lose all of you. Any injured personnel this unit incurs while away from camp will be given low priority for our medical and rescue staff, which is currently dedicated to supporting mining operations. Rocks have value, and you do not. Our miners are priceless. If you cannot return to camp on your own, you will be left where you fall. None of your section mates will have the strength to carry another body, and since vehicles are reserved for mining operations there will be only one option.”

  A red light blinked on my forearm controls and a second later the message flashed on my heads-up: new data had been loaded into my suit computer.

  “Self-destruction. All volunteers have the option to administer a lethal dose of combat drugs in the event that they become incapacitated, and the instructions have just been uploaded to your systems. Now look behind me.”

  I did. According to the suit it was midday, and somewhere far above us Nimes’s star shone, but almost none of its light penetrated the cloud cover, so blackness hid the plains beyond our corporal. An occasional flash of lightning illuminated a distant communications tower.

  “Your first exercise is to run to that tower and back. I say run, but what I mean is to move at your fastest possible speed and return before mess at 1600 hours. Anyone who misses the time will be discharged. Be advised that when it rains like this, the volcanic dust absorbs water like a sponge, which creates a quicksand condition in some areas that will suck you under in less than a minute. Some will not return.”

  The corporal waved the sheets of paper again. “So who wants out right now?”

  A few women broke ranks and the corporal told them to return to the barracks. The rest of us waited.

  “I have only pity for you who stay,” he said. “Four hours to complete the task. Move out.”

&n
bsp; One second I was standing there, the next I found myself in the middle of a group of women struggling against Nimes’s gravity. Each step was more difficult than the last. The mud made loud sucking sounds as we pulled one foot out, then the other, and I soon felt as though the planet were alive, doing its best to grab hold. Before long a group of women, the faster ones, had pulled ahead and distanced themselves, leaving me in the middle of a long orange line, alone. How appropriate, I thought. None of us had had time to talk, and while the rain poured over my helmet I struggled not only against the gravity and the mud, but also against the realization that if anything happened to me there would be no rescue. There were no friends here, and my home was light-years away. I wasn’t just alone; it was as if I had never existed. Insignificant.

  I saw a commotion ahead of me. The lightning gave momentary glimpses of our destination so that every few seconds we could check to make sure we were on course. In the next flash I saw a group of women—the ones who had moved ahead—clustered, looking at something. By the time I got there several had broken off and moved to the side, and it took a few minutes for me to get close enough to see why they had changed direction.

  Three women stood thigh-high in mud, sinking fast. I couldn’t hear anything over the rain until I switched on the radio.

  “Help me!”

  A girl next to me turned. “Any ideas?”

  “No.” I stood for a moment, watching as they sank farther, and then moved to follow the others.

  “Aren’t you going to help them?” the girl called after me.

  “Why? They’re done.”

  “Asshole,” she muttered.

  I didn’t even think of responding—exhaustion, that had to be it. At first it disgusted me, that I had just left three women to die without trying to help, but the fight against Nimes’s gravity, and the effort to just lift my feet from the mud and slap them down, had drained me of everything. Even feelings. I knew there wouldn’t be any way to help, that the corporal had been right, because in this place you barely managed to help yourself. Sweat streamed down my face now, and the suit’s internal temperature indicator climbed, its numbers shifting from green (nominal) to yellow (struggling, but still OK).

  The other thing that vanished was a sense of time. One minute the chronometer froze and the tower stood there as if it would never get any closer, and a couple of times I had a sensation as though my feet were sliding in place, not actually moving forward. Or time flew. I’d glance at the clock, think about something else, and then look back to find that twenty minutes had elapsed when I swore it had just been a second. By the time I reached the tower I had passed at least fifteen more girls captured by the planet’s mud, and decided to switch off communications altogether.

  Two hours to make it back. It was easier on the return. Maybe there was a gentle downslope—imperceptible to the eye—or it might have been that the base lights winked in the distance, a reminder that whether or not you made the time it would all be over soon. The patches to avoid were obvious now. Some still had helmets sticking out, orange warning beacons. Even without the reminders our boots had carved a path that hadn’t yet filled in with mud so I didn’t have to be as careful where I put my feet. The chronometer had fogged over by the time I stumbled back onto the parade ground, and it took a moment to figure out how to wipe it with my chin.

  Two minutes to spare. The corporal waited with us, and as soon as the four-hour mark hit he screamed at the remainder of the women who straggled in, many of whom crawled for the last few hundred meters. They didn’t even get to enter the base. A shuttle waited with its hatch open, and the women had to remove their suits, stack them neatly by the gate, and then run, naked, into the craft. By the time it was done those of us on the field barely stood, fatigue threatening to finally claim us as the corporal walked between our ranks.

  He stopped in front of me, and I thought I heard surprise in his voice. “They gave you a new name when you signed up. Marianne. Do you know the significance of this name?”

  “It was my grandmother’s, corporal.”

  “It’s more than that. This is a very important name to the French, a symbol of liberty and reason. It’s a very good name.” He strode through the mud and back onto his podium, addressing the smaller group that now faced him. “Twenty. We started with one hundred fifty, and now we have twenty. At the end there will probably only be ten. Stow your suits, bathe, and get some sleep. Your first day of training begins tomorrow.”

  I barely made it to the barracks, out of my suit, and onto my rack before passing out.

  The mantes came for us after nightfall.

  “Bots activated,” said Toly.

  I peered out of my firing port and watched as the slope in front of me filled with greenish-white tracers, crisscrossing in overlapping fields of fire. It looked beautiful. Occasional grenade blasts overloaded my night vision, making me blink until I could see again, mantes dancing in the field, noiselessly. I sensed their surprise, as if the colonists had been easy pickings but this, their first real fight, scared the crap out of them. Some skittered toward us on twelve legs, then ten, then seven, and finally collapsed to the ground when they couldn’t propel themselves forward. Others lowered themselves and advanced as far as possible behind their friends’ bodies until they broke into the open. Those got it too, in the end. After a few minutes an eerie screech sounded over the battlefield, making me wish I could cover my ears, and the things slunk back into the darkness.

  Toly punched the keys on her forearm controls. “Sentries at half ammo. We can withstand another assault before they break through.”

  “There’s always the minefield,” someone said.

  “You’re an idiot.”

  I thought hard as Toly worked things out and wondered what Buttons, the section leader, would have done. As luck would have it she had been called to the orbital station with our lieutenant the day before the attack and it hurt—not that we didn’t like Toly. But Buttons wasn’t just a Legionnaire, she always had the answers, and to not have her felt like trying to fight with one hand tied. Toly, I decided finally, might not be ready for this.

  One of the children crept over to me. “Are you winning?” he asked.

  “Yes.” I picked him up, trying to place him on my lap, but the ceramic armor was slick and he slid to the floor. “We’re winning, don’t worry about a thing.”

  “You aren’t French,” he said. “What are you?”

  “I’m American. Toly over there is Russian. In fact most of us are Russian but there are a few Americans, some British, Chinese, and my friend Buttons, if she were here, well she’s French.”

  “I’m going to be a Legionnaire when I grow up.”

  I wanted to cry. Except for the fact that we were speaking French, he reminded me of my son, all innocence and totally clueless—in a kid kind of way. The thought occurred to me that it was highly unlikely he or any of us would make it out, that he wouldn’t get a chance to grow up, but I told him something different. “Well then, think of this as your first lesson. Watch us. Learn from what we do. Your Legion training starts right now.”

  When the corporal said “training” he must have meant something else. Slavery maybe. Servitude. We never touched a weapon, didn’t study two hundred ways to kill with a spoon, didn’t even spend one minute marching; the corporal explained that before a Legionnaire learned to destroy, she had to build. So our group spent the first week constructing a new storage facility for the base armored personnel carriers. We woke, barely, from our first reveille and lined up, after which the corporal interviewed us to find out if we had any construction experience. I didn’t. As a result he assigned me to the general labor pool, something that I would have done better to avoid.

  Obey without question—the earliest lesson, taught in a way that one never forgot. What happened that first morning may have resulted from my stupidity, but you have to cut me some slack because I didn’t have any way of knowing. And I can’t describe the kind of fatigue t
hat Nimes induced. We wilted under its gravity, sweating in half suits (we had been allowed to take off our helmets while working), and the shovel felt heavier than lead. I figured it was crazy. The Legion had plenty of engineering equipment, and who the hell dug a two-story underground facility with shovels? Every load of dirt caused a minor avalanche that filled my hole almost immediately so that progress, if you called it that, was a three-steps-forward-two-steps-back kind of thing.

  When the corporal passed me I stiffened to attention and cleared my throat. “Corporal, why are we doing this by hand? Shouldn’t we be using equipment of some kind?”

  He smiled. I knew it wasn’t a friendly smile, more like the kind you’d get from someone who had been waiting all morning for one of us to ask that exact question, and he poked the brim of his white kepi into my nose. During construction the NCOs wore traditional uniforms, not combat suits.

  “Have you been in combat?”

  “No, Corporal.”

  “Do you think that where we send you, you’ll always have engineering equipment when it comes time to build fortifications? That you’ll have robots?”

  “No, Corporal.”

  “Then button up.” He waited for me to lock my helmet on before continuing, and gestured at my shovel. “Raise your shovel over your head. Both hands.”

  I lifted it high and felt my muscles quiver under its weight. Even in one g it would have been hard enough—not at first, but as the seconds ticked by I knew that it wouldn’t be long until I’d have major trouble.

  “Hold until relieved.” The corporal turned to the rest of the group and shouted, “The Legion takes care of itself, and even when we have nothing, we can make anything. Never question.”

  And he left again.

  It didn’t take long before it felt as though I would pass out, probably only half an hour. The occasional trembling in my arms became a steady tremor and then spasms. My back ached. After an hour I heard the blood pounding in my ears, and my breaths came so rapidly that they made me dizzy, turning each minute into a guessing game of will-I-last-to-the-next. I don’t even remember passing out. The next thing I knew the corporal had dragged me to my feet and begun swinging a wooden baton against the side of my helmet so that my ears rang and I barely heard his screaming, only just comprehending that now, in addition to holding the shovel overhead, I was to jog-shuffle around the perimeter.