If your idea of a holiday consisted of non-stop cleaning, running, climbing, press-ups, and sit-ups. Logan had expected the Legion to teach him to fight like a soldier, to use military weapons, and military tactics. They issued him a rifle soon after he arrived, but an old one, an ancient gunpowder weapon with no ammunition, that had probably last been fired a century ago.
The rifle was just another weight for him to have to haul around everywhere he went, and something else to keep a close eye on to ensure no-one walked off with it. At best, that would have left him doing press-ups non-stop until someone found it. At worst… a sore and bloody neck.
For the first few weeks, the instructors mostly seemed to spend their time trying to beat him down and wear him out, with constant chores and kilometre after kilometre of runs on little sleep and little food. The few days when the recruits were allowed to get to bed early, expecting to collapse into eight hours of deep sleep, were just another form of punishment.
They’d be woken by instructors yelling and banging clubs on garbage-can lids for a midnight run, or for another surprise inspection at two in the morning, where the instructors would find an excuse for every man to fail and spent the rest of the night cleaning and reorganizing his bed and kit.
By the third week, all Logan dreamed about in the few hours of rest he managed to claim each night were eating a good meal and getting a proper night’s sleep.
But he never did.
And the slightest mistake due to that lack of sleep would be rewarded with a sharp punch to the chest or a club across his back, and another fifty press-ups, or a run to the wall and back. Every night he went to sleep convinced he would finally drop out the next morning, but, every morning, he remembered that would mean a return to his cell, for just long enough for them to prepare to chop off his head. Every time he imagined his head lying in the metal bucket, his dying eyes staring up at the stump of his neck as it spurted blood, he was more determined to see The Farm through to the end.
After a month, when half the recruits had already dropped out and taken the long walk through the gates back to prison or civilian life, the survivors began to study something that almost resembled the kind of training he’d expected, beginning with knife fighting and unarmed combat.
That day in the gym, Beauchene asked who knew how to fight. Logan should have known better than to put up his hand, but his street fights in Paris had taught him how to punch and dodge. And he’d killed a man with his bare hands.
Besides, he’d appreciate a chance to punch Beauchene for a change. Even if he got punched a few times in return.
Beauchene motioned for Logan to attack him.
The instructor didn’t even put up his fists, but just stood in the middle of the gym with his hands at his sides, and a smile on his face.
That was when Logan began to wonder whether he’d made a mistake. Beauchene wouldn’t do that if he expected to get hit. But there was no backing out now. Logan feigned a punch with his right hand, then dodged left and swung a punch from that side. If he was just fast enough…
Beauchene dodged the blow, punched him in the face, and kicked his legs out from under him.
Logan slammed down on the floor, with his mouth full of the coppery taste of his own blood. Before he could get up, Beauchene was kicking him in the stomach. Logan grabbed Beauchene’s foot, and tried to pull it aside, to knock the man off balance so he’d fall.
Beauchene twisted his foot against Logan’s thumb, pulled it free, and swung the boot down on Logan’s hand. Logan grabbed for the hand as it pounded with thudding pain beneath Beauchene’s weight, and lay there, grimacing, as Beauchene lectured the other recruits.
“Some of you think you’re hard men. Some of you think you’re tough because you killed someone. Well, I can tell you now, what worked on some aristo with his dick hanging out in Paris won’t work on me, or on the battlefield. You pull that street crap here, and I will kick the shit out of your worthless ass, you understand? A Legionnaire trains as he fights, and he fights as he trains. What you learn about losing here, you won’t have to learn the hard way, in combat.”
Beauchene finally took his boot off Logan’s hand.
Logan hobbled back to the line of recruits, spitting out blood and holding his wounded hand against his wounded stomach. He was probably lucky they were fed so little, so he had nothing to throw up.
“Yes, sir,” the men said.
“Now, where’s my next volunteer?”
CHAPTER 11
Logan crouched in his metre-wide slit trench in the dark dirt, beneath the glow of a billion stars in the moonless night sky. The Milky Way stretched from horizon to horizon in a blaze of light, and one of those lights would be his home.
“Alice, show me Earth.”
The suit’s HUD drew a square around one small dot in the sky, and flashed it to attract Logan’s attention. He stared at the tiny spot of light, but that was only the sun. Even the suit’s light intensifiers wouldn’t be anywhere near powerful enough to see the planets orbiting around it from so many light years away.
It was still strange to imagine his family, Jason, Angelique and everyone else he’d ever known living around one of those tiny little dots.
Would they ever go out at night, stare up into the sky, and wonder whether he was living on some planet around one of the stars they could see? Or did they just think he’d drowned in the Channel, or been executed by the flics?
The Legion didn’t allow recruits to make contact with their relatives and friends during their service, and he couldn’t have contacted his parents in England from France, even if he wanted to.
The fifty kilometres of sea between France and Hastings might as well be fifty light-years. With the wormholes the early explorers had discovered as they ventured toward the edges of the solar system, space was easier to cross.
The hillside around the trench was so dark that he could see little of the rest of the section with his own eyes. Even the light intensifier in the suit’s visor only showed blobs where helmeted heads poked up above the edges of their trenches, and the dirt blocked most of the glowing heat from the suit reactors when he switched to infrared view.
All that showed on the visor were the infrared lights on their helmets, flashing the day’s IFF code, to mark them as friendlies to drones and other units. And those flickered so fast in their coded signals that they were only a dull glow to human eyes, barely visible above the background noise.
He’d stopped digging the trench when it was just over two metres deep, enough to reach up to his suit’s shoulders while he stood in it, or to cover him completely when he crouched. Volkov had made them spend the rest of that afternoon digging in after they stopped marching from Gries. Wearing the suit, it hadn’t felt much like hard work at the time.
Who needed a shovel to dig, when you had powered arms and metal hands? Just force your metal fingers down into the dirt, pull your hand back, and toss the contents onto a pile. Then repeat. About ten thousand times.
He rolled his shoulders and twisted his elbows inside the suit to try to relieve the pain of all that exertion, but it still didn’t seem to help. Digging might not have felt like hard work when he was doing it, but now his body sure felt like it had had a workout that day.
But, at least the work had kept them occupied until after the sun set, either from digging, or watching over their team-mates as they dug.
Desoto was crouched further down the trench with his rifle beside him, eyes closed, and helmeted head leaning against the dirt. One of them should get some sleep before they had to fight again.
Volkov had made a big show of leaving Gries, marching the section out of the village in a group. He led them away along the track in the opposite direction from where they’d entered, then on past the fields and the dead boy, up into the hills at that end of the valley.