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“Well, gentlemen,” Beaufort said, “I have other duties I must attend to. I’ll leave Governor Porcher to answer your questions. Tomorrow, we begin our patrols. Be ready.”

At least they’d get some time for sleep before the shooting began. And a few hours to prep their suits and weapons, and be ready to move out. Assuming the suits and weapons survived their trip down in the cargo shuttles, of course.

Some time to fit in a good meal, with any luck. He might not get another one for days out in the field, just the usual gooey ration packs.

“So how do the colonists repay France?” a voice asked from Logan’s left.

“A young world like New Strasbourg has mineral deposits near the surface from recent asteroid impacts. Most men work in the mines, sending back iridium, uranium, and many other valuable materials that are much easier to mine here than from the asteroids themselves. The women, children, and men unfit for mining work on the farms, to reduce the need for importing machinery to run them.

“There is also our speciality, Radwine. The early colonists discovered that grapes exposed to the star’s radiation bursts can produce the most exquisite flavours. It is considered an exotic delicacy in some parts of France.”

As bad as life might seem on this planet, it must be paradise compared to what many had left behind. In France, these folks would be lucky to have a factory job that kept them in food and healthcare. Here, they could build a life for themselves, so long as they kept those ores going back through the wormhole.

If Logan had been born on a planet like this, he’d have been happy to stay there. Maybe he’d even be out in the woods, shooting at anyone from back home who wanted to tell him what to do.

“If the plants are inedible, what do they farm?” another voice asked.

“Pigs and goats can partially digest the local plants. And there are edible animals living in the rivers and sea, similar to fish. For the rest, we have found a number of Earth plants are compatible with the soil, if properly fertilized and tilled.

“But, as a planet around new star, we are prone to solar storms which produce the brief but intense bursts of radiation that you saw earlier today. Many other Earth plants are unable to survive in those conditions.”

Logan raised his hand again, to ask the question he really wanted answered. “Why should we fight for the aristos against these people?”

Volkov glared his way. Logan was risking more than just a punch for just asking the question. But how could he risk his life to fight them, without knowing the answer?

“Another question?” Chaput said.

Porcher ignored him. “No, no. You raised a very good question, young man. These are our own people fighting us here, not the Reich, the Islamic State, or Dixie. I’m sure many of you are wondering why should be fighting them, and not our real enemies.”

Volkov continued to stare at Logan with narrowed eyes, but without the I’m-going-to-kill-you look of a few seconds before.

Maybe he’d just get latrine duty for a week.

Porcher raised his hand. “Let me show you why you should fight them.”

A holographic image appeared, floating in the air above him, and covering most of the wall. A truck with long, tank-like treads, and smoke rising from the hood.

The camera turned, showing a train of half a dozen trailers behind the truck, now reduced to a mass of bent wheels and twisted metal on a dirt track beside a pile of rocks and a sparse forest. The camera moved around the wreck, as though it was footage from someone’s suit cam.

As it passed the front of the truck, it turned toward a body slowly swinging on the far side.

A middle-aged man wearing grey coveralls, hanging by his feet from a cable attached to the truck’s roof. His arms dangled limply beside his head, and his face and chest were covered with blood that had sprayed out from the long gash across his neck.

The camera panned around. More men lay dead on the ground, which had turned dark red where their blood had soaked into the dirt around them.

“This ore truck was bringing uranium ore from the mines, to be shipped back to Earth. Insurgents ambushed it, destroyed the truck, and killed the driver and his Compagnie guards. Without exports, our economy will soon collapse. And, as of today, we can no longer even bring in the freighters to collect the ore, in case they’re hit by SAMs.”

The image changed again. A closeup of a young, female face, her eyes open wide, and black hair fluttering against her forehead. The image wobbled slightly, as though recorded by a drone hovering nearby.

“We received this footage this morning. Since the Compagnie pulled back to protect the towns, the insurgents have had their run of the villages. Until yesterday, this was the village of Petit Toulose. The villagers did not want to support the insurgents.”

The drone pulled back. The girl’s head ended at her neck, and a wooden pole streaked with blood protruded beneath it, with the other end buried in the dirt below. More heads were impaled beside her, and bodies were piled on the dirt behind them, surrounded by blood-soaked dirt. Women. Old men. Children. Smoke rose from the bunker-like buildings around the bodies, where flames flickered behind the narrow windows.

“The radical insurgents call themselves Montagnards, after the revolutionaries of the Reign Of Terror in Revolutionary France, who executed everyone who opposed them.

“Thirty men, women, and children, all murdered. An entire village destroyed, just because they remained loyal to France. This is why we fight them. This is why we asked for your help. The good people of New Strasbourg are relying on you. Don’t let them down.”

CHAPTER 4

Hastings, England

Logan should have been glad. Happy, even. The day after they took Alice away, Morgan’s men followed through on their promises. The McCoys were moved out of their apartment, and into a four-bedroom house on the outskirts of Hastings. In a new management suburb, with surveillance drones buzzing through the sky, armed police patrols, and a three-metre-tall plasteel wall surrounding the estate, to keep the riffraff out.

Logan no longer had to share his bedroom with Malcolm, as the remaining kids each had one of their own. The house had a garden with grass and flowers, and a garage. Some families on their street even had cars to put in their garage, and no longer had to take the company bus to the factory, if they couldn’t work remotely through VR. But the McCoys weren’t so lucky.

Logan’s bedroom had a view of the sea, as he looked out over the wall around the estate, and across the town toward the marina. He could sit in his room and watch the boats sail out to sea at weekends, to wherever the toffs might want to travel.

But he never had a chance to meet Jason at school and give him the news. Logan was moved out of his old school right away, to a school for managers’ children on the estate, safely contained inside the wall.

A school with smaller classes, better teachers, and new buildings that weren’t collapsing around them as they studied.

But the other kids there knew he wasn’t one of them. They didn’t even have to know his background to tell that he didn’t look like them, speak like them, or act like them. His accent alone separated him from the others, and they knew his father had been promoted from below, with no family connections to save him from falling back into the world from where he came.

All it would take was for one toff to take a dislike to him.

“Filthy, stinking chav,” they called Logan, as they ganged up against him in the playground. Six or eight against one, laughing and scowling as they surrounded him.