Even if the insurgents didn’t have SAMs, transports large enough to carry a section of suited-up Legionnaires and their equipment could be heard a kilometre away. There was little to no chance of surprise if you came in with jets blaring.
By the time the transport landed and the men disembarked, the insurgents would be lying in wait, or scattering as fast as they could, weapons hidden, ready to fade back into the civilian population. Men on foot in combat suits could cover a hundred kilometres a day, even while staying in cover and taking their time to scout ahead before moving. And they could set their own ambush for the insurgents when the time was right.
There was a reason the Legion’s unofficial motto was ‘march or die.’ Even in training, they’d been expected to march up to forty kilometres a day. Without suits.
Logan’s legs felt weak just thinking back to those days. Nothing he’d done since had come close to the exertion and deprivation of his first weeks in the Legion. And he got half-decent food these days, too.
His metal feet crushed the dirt beneath him as the section descended the rough track from the hills to the village, covering a few metres with every step. The soles of his feet were used to marching, but they still tingled after the amount he’d walked that day. For all the arguments in favour of marching, he would still have preferred to fly.
“Do you really think the insurgents did that?” Desoto said on the team channel.
“Did what?” Logan said.
“Killed their own people like that. Chopped the heads off those little kids, and stuck them on spikes.”
Gallo chuckled. “If there’s one thing you’re gonna learn, it’s that the French like few things more than cutting their enemies’ heads off. It seems like their favourite hobby.”
“But why?”
Wasn’t it obvious?
“To scare the crap out of them,” Logan said. “Who’s going to try to stand up to the insurgents, if they know they might come home to find their families’ heads on spikes?”
“Seems like a shitty way to get rid of the aristos. These Montagnards sound even worse than they are.”
Bairamov coughed. “Cut the chatter, ladies. This is a combat zone, not a tea party.
“Sorry, sir.”
He was right. Now they were moving in the open and the blood was pumping through their veins, they’d started to relax after hours of staring into the hills imagining an RPG hidden behind every rock. When you expected to get shot at for so long and didn’t, you began to drop your guard. And that was exactly then the insurgents would aim to strike.
Logan turned back to his sector, and watched the bushes and dirt for any sign of life.
Still nothing.
After less than five minutes, they were on the valley floor, marching between fields at the sides of the track, and rapidly approaching the village.
The women in the fields stared their way, and some whose wide-brimmed hats weren’t up to the job of shielding their faces from the sun raised their hands to block it out as they looked up. The children pointed, and some of the younger ones ran toward the women, then clung to their legs.
“A friendly face is worth a battalion of solders,” Poulin’s gasping voice said over the speakers as she struggled to keep up with the rest of the patrol.
Volkov paused before he spoke. “Visors up.”
For the hours they’d walked en route to the village, Poulin had been telling them that they were supposed to look like friends, not an occupying army. Hearts and minds, she said. Make the people love you, she said, when those same people had spent the last year fighting the Compagnie. And done well enough against them for the Legion to be called in.
But, apparently, they’d be convinced by a friendly face and a smile. Where did she get this crap?
“Alice, visor up.”
The helmet visor slid up. The blast of heat on his face felt like he’d opened an oven door and shoved his face into it, after hours in the suit’s air-conditioning.
His eyes stung for a moment as his pupils contracted in the harsh sunlight. But the sudden feeling of light-headedness as the oxygen content of the air fell was the worst.
He opened his mouth and gasped down air as rapidly as he could, but his legs slowed for the final hundred metres to the houses. He pushed as much energy as he could muster into his muscles, and hoped the motors would do the rest.
An old man sat in the sun on a rock beside the house at the edge of the village, smoking from a small pipe. His face was a mass of brown wrinkles, and a red, lumpy growth bulged from his cheek. His bare right foot tapped on the dirt as he watched the men approach, and he nodded and smiled at them as they passed. His left leg ended at the knee, where it became a long bar of plasteel with a three-toed foot at the base.
Was he just taking a break and being friendly, or was he scouting for the insurgents? Sitting there until the Legionnaires were in position for an ambush, waiting until he could signal the insurgents to strike?
Or maybe that smile was the signal, and the trap was about to be sprung.
Logan shouldn’t think like that. But what else could he think? Anyone could be working for them. And they weren’t going to advertise that fact to the Legion.
Bairamov slowed as Volkov and Alpha Team entered the street, spreading out between the rows of houses.
The gap between the teams grew, giving Bravo Team more room to manoeuvre if they were attacked, and reducing the chances of an ambush catching all of them.
Logan marched behind Bairamov as the team entered the village. The rows of houses seemed to move closer together as he followed Bairamov along the street, and they became trapped between them, where their suit’s speed could be as much of a liability as a benefit. One mistake while turning at a full run in these streets, and he’d slam into the side of a house and bury himself in the dirt that was piled over them.
Logan watched the houses on his side of the street.
The door of the first house on that side was closed, and the windows beside it were dark. Two eyes stared out of those windows as he passed the house, then quickly disappeared as whoever was inside backed away from the glass.
A goat watched him from a pen at the side of the house, chewing idly on a leafy weed that dangled half out of its mouth.
A group of kids, maybe eight years old, peered around the corner of the house ahead, half-hidden in an alley between the house and its neighbour.
They muttered to each other, giggled, then ran toward the Legionnaires, laughing. Alice would be scanning them as they approached, and her sensors searching for signs of hidden weapons or bombs. Without the visor’s HUD, he couldn’t see the status displays, but she wasn’t warning him of any threats through the speakers.
A boy with scars on his dirt-covered, bare feet and a body wrapped in torn shirt and pants raced alongside Logan, panting as he struggled to keep up with the suit’s marching pace. Logan raised his rifle higher and slowed a little as the kids swarmed around them. The last thing he needed was to step on one if they jumped in front of him faster than the suit could react, or smack them with the rifle when he turned.
But what if the insurgents had sent them to distract him from the surroundings?
Could he even trust the kids out here?
“Can I join the Legion?” the boy said.
His shoulders barely reached the waist of Logan’s suit. He must have been about the age Logan was when he first started thinking about leaving home for a life of adventure. He’d have joined the Legion in a shot if he could have done so at that age.
“Sorry, kid,” Logan said. “You’re too young.”