The Legionnaires had trained for combined-arms battles, using their own weapons to take on anything that was within their capabilities, and calling in support for those that weren’t.
They’d easily won simulated wars that way, against other armoured troops in a combat zone. Just obliterate anything that moved that wasn’t on your side, and, sooner or later, you won.
But what if you got into a firefight in a village you were supposed to protect? Call down a drone-launched missile into a house full of kids, and the single hidden insurgent it killed would be replaced by a dozen more before the funerals were over. Didn’t seem like the smartest idea ever.
Logan adjusted the grenade launcher on his back as he turned, then scanned his sector of the horizon for any sign of insurgents heading their way. He still wasn’t used to the weight of the launcher on top of his normal loadout, and while the suit’s motors and mini-nuke power plant could easily lift it, the extra inertia still took some getting used to whenever he turned.
“Are you ready yet?” Poulin’s weak, whining, female voice said from the suit’s helmet speakers.
She was crouched low between the rocks, beside Volkov. Her suit looked like any other in the section, made of thick metal and composites that had changed their surface colour from the default silver and black to deep brown, to better match the dirt and rocks around her. Her arms ended at big metal hands, and her legs at long, clawed feet that gave better grip while moving rapidly across the battlefield.
The only real difference between her and the men was that she wasn’t hauling a hundred kilos or more of weapons and ammo. Which was probably fortunate. No-one wanted to get shot in the back when she dropped it.
Volkov was studying the village from a crouch behind the rocks. Logan could almost hear the swearwords Volkov wanted to send Poulin’s way, but that would just get him a fast track to the Legion prison.
Or worse.
“I said,” Poulin repeated, “are you ready yet?”
Volkov motioned for her to move forward, down the hill.
“Perhaps you would like to lead the way, mademoiselle?” he said, in the slow drawl he reserved for those he considered too stupid to live, but too much trouble to kill.
And he probably wouldn’t have to. After Poulin’s behaviour on the shuttle, she had now risen to #3 in the dead pool. The only real question was whether the insurgents got her before the Legionnaires did.
And how many Legionnaires she got killed first.
“We came to show the people that the Legion is here to protect them from insurgents, not to hide in the hills,” Poulin said, as though addressing a child who hadn’t yet mastered pooping in its potty and needed further instruction.
Logan turned his face away as he smirked, back toward his assigned quadrant, and scanned the dusty hillside above them for any sign of insurgents. After the number of times Volkov had yelled at him, punched him, or given him the some of worst duties in the platoon just for being a newbie, it was nice to see the Sergeant suffer for a change.
“Charlie fireteam,” Volkov said. “Set up all the heavies and cover us from here. The mules stay with you.”
Charlie team rapidly spread out and picked positions among the cover of the rocks. The robot mules followed the men. The mules’ six legs twisted beneath their boxy metal bodies as they moved, and their wide metal feet crunched the dirt beneath each step. Their surface changed colour slowly to a darker brown as they turned, the camouflage doing its best to fade into the background, like the Legionnaires’ suits.
The tough little robots carried supplies to help extend the Legion patrols. Spare ammo, food, heavy weapons, anything beyond what you had to carry in or on your suit for immediate use in combat.
Charlie team grabbed the section missile launcher and autocannon from the mules’ backs, and rapidly assembled them on tripods between the rocks with a good view of Gries. From the hillside, they could raise hell down in the village, if insurgents had set an ambush.
With the weapons unloaded, the mules shuffled into cover behind the rocks, then crouched down in the dirt, folding their metre-long legs beneath them. The faint hiss and whirr of their motors faded as they settled down.
Seconds later, after their colours shifted again, their bodies were barely distinguishable from the rocks around them. Boxy rocks with strange protrusions, for sure, but they’d fade into the background if anyone looked at them from more than a few metres away.
“Stay sharp up here,” Volkov added as he stood. “We may be coming out in a hurry.”
“Gries is a friendly village,” Poulin said. “There is no need to treat the people like enemies.”
“Every village is a friendly village, until the bastards start shooting at you.”
“There’s no chance of that here.”
“In that case, why did you need us? You could have just walked in there and sung Kumbaya with the locals.”
“To show them we are here now, to protect them from the insurgents. To give them the comfort of knowing we care, and the strength to ignore any threats the insurgents may make. To prove we are all in this together.”
“Travelling overwatch,” Volkov said. “You men heard our beloved political officer. Let’s show the people we’re here.”
Then he hopped over the rocks, and stomped away down the track. Alpha team scrambled to their feet, strode around the rocks, and followed him, leaving a gap of a few metres between each man. Then Bairamov stood.
“Bravo, on me.”
Logan raised his MAS-99 gaussrifle, gripped it tighter in the suit’s metal hands, and pushed the butt against his chest, so the suit’s motors would absorb some of the recoil. The hypersonic slugs it fired could punch through the thick metal armour of a suit, and the recoil would knock him flat if he tried to fire it without the mechanical assistance of his own. If he could even lift it, when the loaded rifle weighed over forty kilos.
He followed Bairamov down the track, forming a wedge with Desoto and Gallo, and remaining far enough away from Bairamov so a hidden mine or IED wouldn’t hit both of them. He looked up, watching the hills to the right as the section strode through the dirt toward the village.
If the insurgents were planning to attack the Legionnaires as they approached, the rocks above them right now would be a great place to hide. But the houses came closer with every step his suit took, and only the thin grass twisting in the breeze moved among the rocks and weeds up above.
Maybe the patrol’s arrival had scared the insurgents away. If Logan was hiding up there in the rocks with only body armour to protect him, he certainly wouldn’t want to take on one man wearing a combat suit. Let alone a dozen.
Back at school in England, the teachers had shown them vids of the Royal Marines landing on planets in assault pods, jumping out in their suits, winning battles, then climbing into shuttles to fly home. In the vids, the battles were always won, and the few token deaths on our side were always heroic and necessary. No-one ever got their head ripped off by shrapnel before they even touched the ground, or burned alive when the pod malfunctioned.
It all looked glamourous and exciting, and some of the other kids had been determined to join up when they were old enough. Logan had even thought about it himself.
But, unlike the Marines, Logan had soon learned that what the Legion did most was…
Walk. March. Yomp. Pound Ground.
Whatever the Legionnaires might call it in their native tongue, the act was the same. One foot after the other for hours on end, taking care not to let the suit’s power-assisted legs throw you high into the air where you’d be an easy target for anyone who wanted to kill you.
Even wrapped in a nuclear-powered exoskeleton, that much walking left your muscles aching after a day of non-stop travel across the worst of terrain. And Legion patrols usually took the hard route, the route no sane man would follow, to increase the chance of surprise.