A metal cable. A bundle a few centimetres across of perhaps a hundred smaller cables wrapped around each other. It rose from the water in his hands, but it seemed to grow heavier with every millimetre he lifted it.
He heaved against the weight, but only succeeded in tilting the boat as a couple of metres of the cable rose from the water on each side of him. And the cable would go no higher. More, and thinner, cables hung down from it into the sea. As he tried to turn the cable in his hands, something bright and spherical flashed to his right in the fog. A buoy supported the weight of the cables in that direction. He swung the flashlight to the left, and spotted another buoy that way, barely visible in the haze.
He’d found the top of a huge net, hanging in the sea. He should have guessed there’d be some kind of obstacles in his way. The English and French wouldn’t let just anyone sneak across their narrow, water border.
But it was too late to worry about that, now. And the dinghy was light. He pushed the cable down into the water, trying to force it below the boat. The dinghy turned slightly in the wind, and the bow slid over the net.
He pulled up the centreboard, so the keel would be as flat and smooth as possible. The sail twisted on the mast, and the hull scraped against the cable as it slid over. At the dinghy tilted, he reached back and grabbed the tiller, pulling the rudder up out of the water.
Seconds later, the bow slammed down into the sea, the keel scraped over the cable, and he was safely on the far side. They’d made that net to stop or delay big boats and subs, not a dinghy as small as his.
He sailed on, staying as close to due south as he could, and staring into the night for any sign of another net. He checked the sea around him every few minutes with the flashlight, and hoped the batteries would hold out until he reached the far side.
Something tapped against the underside of the dinghy. He clicked the flashlight on and shone it ahead, looking for another net, or anything else that might be interrupting the steady flow of the waves around him. But all he saw were fog and sea.
The tapping came again, from the port side this time.
The boat tilted as he leaned that way, then tilted further as he leaned over the side, holding the flashlight out. He pointed the light toward the water.
He just had time to see the dark sphere that was bumping against the hull before the whole world exploded.
CHAPTER 5
The village of Gries looked as arid and dry as Logan felt as he stared down toward it from the barren, rocky hillside.
A winding dirt track barely wide enough for a horse and cart ran just beyond the rocks where 1st Section had taken cover, and led down the hillside into the valley below. At the end of the track, a kilometre away, stood the few dozen brown dirt mounds with tall, dark, narrow windows and metal doors that made up the village.
The mounds lined both sides of a long strip of dirt about five metres across which had been churned up by boots heading in all directions, and the thin tracks of whatever kind of wheeled vehicles had rolled through the village since the last rains. Ore trucks, maybe, heading back to town with supplies to be shipped back to Earth.
The blue, white and red stripes of a tricolour French flag flew prominently in the open square between three larger mounds at the centre of Gries, flapping slowly in the wind that was blowing in from the south.
But it didn’t mean much. The flag seemed to fly everywhere on the planet, no matter what the locals felt about it. A village that didn’t proclaim its allegiance to the government would be a village asking to be wiped off the map as a potential haven for insurgents. No-one in their right mind was going to announce that they were on the other side.
Particularly not with the Legion around.
Logan carried the same flag himself, displayed on the right shoulder of his suit. And English George Cross on the left.
The Legion said no man should be forced to fight his own people, and the flags on the suits indicating every Legionnaire’s nationality were one way to enforce that. But there was no guarantee of anything in fast-paced frontier warfare.
If a Legionnaire had to fight, he fought.
His suit motors whirred faintly as he raised his head above the rocks. The suit’s external microphones amplified the sounds of the village, tracked them, picked our those that sounded most human, and marked them on the HUD of his helmet visor as yellow squares. He zoomed in on a few of the squares as he studied the scene.
Women and children shuffled between long rows of vines and olive and orange trees behind the houses, rows that stretched out toward the fields of corn that filled much of the valley floor. The fields slowly petered out into a mass of thin, waist-high grass as they rose into the low hills on the far side of the valley, where a forest of the planet’s own scraggly, twisted trees was soaking up the light of the bright blue sun.
The roofs of a dozen or more small bunkers spread across the fields rose just a little higher than the corn, presumably so they’d have a safe place to hide if there was a solar storm while people were working in the fields.
More kids, mostly the younger ones, played in the narrow, slow-moving river that ran along the bottom of the valley, bringing its brown, muddy water to the village. They laughed as only kids can as they stood in water up to their waists, and splashed it at each other.
Goats were tied to posts outside the houses, chewing on the tall, thin, brown weeds that rose from the dirt all around the village. Chickens clucked in the yards behind the houses as they shoved their beaks into the dirt, looking for anything they could eat. Pigs dug through the dirt in wooden pens, outside their own small bunkers that protruded from the sides of the houses. A handful of horses chewed the thin grass around the edge of the fields, fenced in beside dirt-covered stables.
1st Section had left the spaceport at dawn, one of several sections from the company sent to scout and show their faces around the mining villages across the department, while a few fireteams were heading to the mines, to protect the ore trucks en route to the spaceport. After hours of marching, the sun was nearly overhead. It would be dazzling if the suit’s visor hadn’t darkened to block out the worst of the glare.
Living around a star so bright, it was no wonder most of the locals had been tanned brown by working outside. Logan could almost feel the heat on his skin despite the cold air blowing across his face from the suit’s air-conditioning unit.
“Alice, status check.”
“Reactor capacity 80%,” the suit’s AI responded. “Secondary lower body hydraulic pump output pressure down 1.5bar. Right knee motor has an intermittent ground fault. Remaining systems nominal.”
His suit could do with a service, but it wasn’t going to get one before they moved out from their hiding spot behind the rocks. The maintenance records showed it hadn’t been touched for over three years, except for routine servicing, and had been on combat duty much of that time.
The Legion was constantly deployed across the colonies, and had little downtime. The old, worn-out suits were just handed down to the new recruits. If Logan lived long enough, he’d eventually get a new one.
The only things moving in the cloudless sky were the two tiny dots of the drones providing high cover for air support. So high that he probably wouldn’t even be able to see them if the suit’s HUD wasn’t marking them with green squares against the blue sky.