The Legionnaires Read online

  The rest of the day passed in a blur. I lost track of the number of times I passed out, but every time the corporal revived me to continue the punishment, each stage becoming more and more harsh with only minor breaks to stay hydrated. It ended at dinnertime. I had expected to get a chance to talk to someone in the mess hall, finally meet some of my unit mates, but as it turned out I could barely keep my head from the table, and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Nobody was allowed to talk.

  By the time morning came we were exhausted from fear. Most of the children still slept, had passed out some time after midnight, but nobody in our unit wanted to take a chance on resting. I had just decided to close my eyes when Toly’s voice forced them open.

  “Movement.”

  “What in God’s name is it doing?” someone asked.

  A lone mante approached the perimeter. Our bunker was a typical Legion advance base, built into the ridgeline of mountains that overlooked the settlement, and with three underground stories about two to three hundred meters below us. We could see the settlement—a bunch of Quonset huts that had been torn apart. The day before it had crawled with mantes, and they had tossed human corpses all over the place as they rampaged through the prefab houses, splitting them open with their forelegs. The only reason the kids had made it to safety was that they were on a hike with their teacher, who dropped them off on her way to try to save her husband. She never made it back.

  The mante advanced toward our line of sentry bots, squat metallic turrets that rose a meter from the ground. Toly had her finger over their arming button.

  “Hit it, Toly,” I said.

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s not attacking. Maybe it came to talk since we gave them such a beating last night. We have to buy as much time as we can until we figure out why we can’t get through to orbital. And we need to save our ammunition.”

  “Maybe it wants to surrender,” someone suggested.

  I shook my head. “Or a duel to the death.”

  We watched for a while longer. It skittered closer to the line and stopped, waving what looked like a pair of long antennae over the closest bot, and for a moment I thought that my helmet amplifiers picked up a strange clicking noise.

  “I think it’s in love,” I said, and got a few chuckles.

  Toly stood. “I’m going out there.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  Her boot slammed into my faceplate so that my head snapped back, cracking against the concrete wall. Before I could react she pressed her helmet against mine.

  “Don’t question me ever again, Grandmother.”

  Toly pulled herself up the ladder and left through the tight ceiling hatch before dropping with a thud in front of the bunker. We waited. She moved hesitantly forward, her carbine pointed directly at the thing as she took one step after another, careful to avoid the mines that were marked on her heads-up display. When she got to within ten meters of the creature it froze and raised its forelegs to extend a pair of knifelike spikes.

  “Maybe that’s its way of saying hello,” I said.

  I was wrong. The thing leaped into the air and spun, so that the moment it landed its two spikes popped through the front of Toly’s armor and out the back, sending a pink spray into the air. It then let out a shriek and lifted her overhead, throwing the body fifty meters downslope.

  The light blinked on in my helmet and it took me a moment to remember what it meant. “I have command.”

  I flipped open the cover on my forearm controls and punched the arming button for the sentry bots, which then reduced the mante to a twitching mass of legs in under a second. Toly and I had a less-than-friendly history, but her death still hit me. Tears started welling in my eyes and I clenched my jaw, forcing them back and promising myself that there would be time later.

  “Why did she do that?”

  The boy from earlier had crept up to the firing port to watch, had seen the whole thing. I pulled him away. “Don’t do that again, kid, OK? What’s your name?”

  “Phillip.”

  “Phillip, promise me you’ll stay over there with the others and won’t sneak up to the ports anymore, OK?”

  He nodded. “But why did she go out there? Why did she get mad when you tried to stop her?”

  “Well…” It was a good question, and although I knew the answer, it wasn’t so easy to explain. “Toly was Russian. That’s how the Russians are, Phillip, just…really, really brave.”

  And insane.

  Although few of us had the time to talk to one another during the first week, the Russians in our group glommed together instantly, and it took me a while to realize it wasn’t because of instinct. It was a tattoo thing. Most of them were refugees, granddaughters of the survivors of the Second Subterrene War, when Chinese hit them unexpectedly from Manchuria and then kept rolling toward the Urals. They spoke Chinese in Moscow now. Anyone who survived the takeover had been ear-tattooed for identification before being shipped to the old gulags, which is where these ones must have lived before they escaped. It didn’t matter that it had been over for more than a century, or that it wasn’t the Americans who had conquered Russia, because it was almost as if the experience had imprinted a notion in Russian DNA: it was our fault. If the Americans hadn’t weakened their forces with the First Subterrene War, the Russians figured, they would have never lost later to the Chinese. I had known that there would be Russians in the Legion but hadn’t thought it would cause me any trouble—“We’re all on the same team,” that kind of crap. Right.

  One day I returned to the barracks to find a Russian girl sitting on my bunk. She smiled and lay down. “You American?”

  The room got quiet. A few of her friends watched from nearby, smiling as one of them whispered something.

  I was too tired to be scared. “Get off my rack.”

  “Your rack? No, you can sleep on the floor, we need this one for screwing.”

  And the rest of them laughed. When I noticed the knife in her hand, I got a little scared, but the gravity had worn me down, made me feel as though if I didn’t get a chance to sleep I’d die anyway.

  “Screw you.” Lifting my boot would have taken too much effort and been slow enough that she could have reacted, so instead I slammed my knee upward. Her head snapped back. The girl’s momentum took her toward the other side of my rack and I helped it, leaned down and shoved so that she flew in two g’s to slam onto the concrete floor with a grunt. It took me a second to sort through the confusion. For some reason there was blood, lots of it. The puddle under her grew slowly in a red amoeba shape until I finally noticed that the knife had somehow lodged itself in her throat. Her friends stared at her, shocked, and when one of them shouted at me you didn’t have to speak Russian to figure it out. They were going to kill me.

  But before they moved the corporal arrived, and I trembled at attention as he stood over the body. “She fell on her own knife?” he asked me.

  “Yes, Corporal.”

  “Good. You’re acting platoon leader. The rest of you”—he raised his voice even though it wasn’t necessary, you really could have heard a pin drop it was so quiet—“will obey Volunteer Marianne. Her words are my words.”

  The corporal approached the group of Russians—eight of them left now—and poked his kepi brim into one of their faces. It surprised me to hear him speak their language. Whatever he said it must have been bad, because they all went white before finally speaking in one voice. “Yes, Corporal.”

  After he had gone, the remaining Russians followed him with their friend’s body, and I collapsed onto my rack. I had almost fallen asleep when a girl tapped my shoulder.

  She extended her hand. “Jennifer Simpson.”

  “Marianne.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I shook my head, confused. “For what?”

  “For calling you an asshole—the first day, during our tower run.”

  “Oh.” I remembered then, and grinned.

  “You
were right, I didn’t get it then but I do now.”

  “Get what?”

  “We have to look out for ourselves in this place. Anyway, I’m sorry for calling you an asshole.”

  She turned and walked to her bunk, lay down, and shut her eyes, leaving me to my thoughts. I couldn’t predict when they’d come to me—my family. Their faces appeared out of nowhere, my husband and children, and I watched in slow motion as my husband started to scream when the transport broke through the median barrier and headed straight for our car. He swerved, but instead of turning the car skidded on wet pavement and began to spin, just before the front wheels of the truck climbed over our hood and slammed into the windscreen. I would have avoided the accident if I had been driving, I was sure of it.

  “You weren’t wrong,” I said, and she turned her head to face me.

  “What?”

  “You weren’t wrong. You American?”

  She nodded. “DC. What do you mean I wasn’t wrong?”

  I thought for a second. “If we don’t try to help each other, we’re animals, and who knows? Maybe that’s what these people want. But this is a strange place, and something tells me that we’ll need to stick together, whether we’re animals or not.”

  My technical specialist thought she had the answer, and had called me down to the communications room. I tiptoed through the sleeping children. The ladder’s side rails slid through my fingers with a loud squeal until I landed heavily at the bottom, and I peeled off, heading for the coms shack. It felt good. To be deep underground and away from the mantes somehow made things seem better.

  “Lucy,” I said over the radio. Lucy was still a bit young but a natural leader, and I’d chosen her as my second after Toly died. “I’ll be in coms, you have control of the bots until I get back.”

  “Roger.”

  There was barely room for two in the communications room and our specialist liked to wave her arms a lot, to punctuate her arguments, so I listened from the doorway.

  “I’ve tried every frequency I can think of and we’re not getting through. Nothing. So last night I started reading the manual.”

  “Wait a second,” I said. I had forgotten her name in all the excitement and had to check her tag. “Heidi, you’re our specialist and you’re only now reading the manual?”

  “Look, it’s not my fault, I didn’t ask for the job and I haven’t been to coms school yet, that was supposed to happen after the regular army relieved us here. They assumed that since I’m German I must be good with a radio. Or something like that.”

  “And you’re not.”

  “And I’m not. I was in cosmetology school when one of my friends dared me to sign up, so I did, and, well, here I am. Look, Grandmother, you know it the same as me: nobody expected this to be a tough assignment or they would have sent someone else, not a brand new unit fresh out of basic.”

  I knew she was right. If we’d been up in the bunker with the main group I’d have told her to shut up, but it was the truth. All of us were slotted for our next training billet but the Legion belonged to the regular army, and since women Legionnaires were relatively new someone had gotten the idea that a quick and easy assignment would be better than a training camp. It would give the Legion publicity—more recruits, that sort of crap.

  “Just tell me what you’ve found.”

  She pointed to the computers. “We’re being jammed. Those things are communicating over multiple frequencies, the same ones we use to transmit.”

  “Or…” The antennae. None of us had seen their eyes, not even the smallest indication of them, and I wondered if they “saw” using something else. “Or they have something like radar. For seeing.”

  “That might do it too.”

  Lucy clicked into my headset and I saw the warning light blink at the same time. Sentry bots had been activated. “Grandmother?” she said.

  “On my way.” Before turning I grabbed Heidi’s shoulder. “Can you get around it?”

  “I think so, I just have to find a band that’s free. The good news is that orbital must know that something’s wrong, they must be trying to send us messages as well. Won’t they come investigate?”

  “Maybe. But until we get in touch we can’t count on them, so get to work.”

  After I started back up the ladder my muscles began cramping. Halfway to the top I had to rest, and leaned back against the circular framework designed to give you a chance if your grip on the ladder slipped. Only fifty meters to go, I thought, and suddenly felt my age.

  Being thirty-five on Earth hadn’t been so bad. But at Nimes’s two g’s thirty-five seemed more like eighty. Every morning my muscles bunched into inextricable knots, and as soon as we began fitness training and military operations the corporal gave less and less time to sleep. It wore us down. Within days the planet turned us into walking corpses who had trouble recognizing reality, orders taking a few seconds to register through a fog of despair. We ran most of the mornings, barely able to raise our feet over the dust, learning in rain how to spot the suck-sand, the name the Legion gave to those pockets of liquefied dust.

  Afternoons and evenings we spent in lectures learning the finer points of combat suit maintenance, small unit tactics, and how to properly crease our fatigues. Did you know that the Legion was the only service that didn’t use powered servos in their armor? Everyone else used them. We learned that during the massacre on Stephens-Eight, Chinese forces had deployed nanos—contrary to the universal ban, which they had refused to ratify—and that the bots had targeted all power sources, including suits. After that it was a turkey shoot. All those American and British forces, frozen in place because their servos wouldn’t budge, had no choice but to get naked in vacuum or wait for the enemy to advance, all the while knowing that the Chinese didn’t take prisoners. The only survivors were a Special Forces unit that had declined powered armor. They were Legion.

  I also learned that Jennifer and I were the only Americans in our group. Amy Tipton was from London, and had joined the Legion after doing time for prostitution, thought it would be a good way to finally do something worth bragging about. And there was Juliette (I can’t remember her last name), a Canadian whose boyfriend regularly beat the crap out of her—so badly that the last time out of the hospital she hadn’t bothered going home, and had had a friend bring her passport to the airport. There were a few others whose names have faded entirely, but they could be distilled into a few types: the ones who were crazy, the ones who were running from something and had no place left to go, and the ones who thought the Legion would be a romantic getaway. There weren’t many in this last group. The first day had cured most girls of any notion that Nimes would be fun.

  Then there were the Russians, a type unto themselves. Whatever the corporal had said to them (we also learned that he was originally from Russia) kept them from retaliating, but they maintained their distance and refused to listen to me. In fact, it was for this very reason that the corporal called me to his office one day, where I stood in the heat and waited for his acknowledgment. It was easier now. Standing. Three weeks in two g’s had finally whittled down my weight and built up muscles so that an uneasy equilibrium had developed.

  Five minutes passed before he looked up. “You are failing.”

  “I don’t understand, Corporal.”

  “I’ve given you three weeks to take over the platoon, to demonstrate your leadership skills. And you’ve shown me nothing.”

  I didn’t argue because I knew he was right. The Russians had undermined my efforts at every chance, despite the fact that whenever they failed—refused to prepare for inspections, showed up late for mess, or moved just a little too slowly during training—it brought them punishment.

  “You have until the end of the day to change things. If you don’t, I’m putting one of the Russian girls in charge. Dismissed.” I began to turn when he looked up again. “One last thing. Have the platoon assemble on the parade ground in ten minutes, we’re doing something new today, somethi
ng happened on one of our far outposts so we’ll have to accelerate the schedule.”

  “Corporal?” I saw it then, that he was preoccupied and that his ashtray had filled with cigarette butts. He never smoked.

  “We’re at war. Chinese forces attacked the Korean Colony on Koryo, where we have an outpost. Dismissed.”

  War. Suddenly it was too much and as I strode back to the barracks I felt light-headed, overwhelmed by the thought that we were four weeks through basic already and in eight more we’d be one step closer to a real conflict. But what conflict? How had it all started? Clouds gathered and jagged lightning playing over Nimes’s volcanic peaks, making me wonder what it would be like. Real fighting. None of us had been in it before, and the closest thing we had experienced was in a movie theater. Except for the Russians. Whatever had happened to us in our past lives, they had seen the hardest times, would be the most prepared—mentally, anyway—for what waited. I needed them. The problem was that by the end of the day, I suspected that they would be in charge, because I had all but failed as their leader.

  Word traveled fast. When I pushed into the barracks Jennifer looked up and the other girls fell silent.

  “Is it true?” she asked. “War?”

  I nodded. “That’s what they say. Suit up. We’re to report to the parade ground in nine minutes.”

  Everyone started moving except for the Russians. Their new leader, a short stocky girl named Toly, grinned at me, her teeth yellowed by nicotine. She sat on her bunk with two others and played cards, ignoring the order I had just given. I sensed the tension in the air—knew something was about to happen—and for a moment I considered repeating the order, but then shook my head, thinking to hell with it. I leaped at Toly before she could react.