The villagers watched the Legion leave in silence from the windows of their houses, or from where they were working in the fields. Someone back there knew who that boy was and where he came from. Someone there had to know who planted the IED, if only the owner of the house it was in. Someone there knew who the girl was, and where she’d disappeared to.
But none of them were talking.
So Volkov had followed the track up into the hills, then taken a left, climbing up through the rocks, and on over the peak of the hills. Finally they hiked a kilometre or so along the far side of the ridge, hidden from view to anyone in the village by a hundred metres of rock, and found a temporary camp site where the rocks around the site would hide them from anyone who came looking. For all the villagers knew, the Legionnaires had disappeared, and wouldn’t be coming back any time soon.
Or maybe not at all.
After all, it wasn’t even midnight on the first day, and they’d already lost three men dead, and three wounded, two badly enough to be hospitalized. And those were just the casualties Logan knew about. Crap. At that rate, none of them would last much more than a month.
The drones were still hovering about ten kilometres above the village, giving them the eyes they needed now the hills blocked any direct view. The drones circled too high for any of the villagers to see it in the dark night, and much too high to hear, when their big wings allowed them remain on station for days with only a slow-moving propeller to keep them aloft.
But they could watch everything going on in and around the village. Not just in visible light, but whatever their sensors could monitor.
Logan studied the infrared footage from the drone’s cameras on his HUD.
The boy’s body still lay at the edge of the fields where they’d left it. It was still slightly warmer than the dirt, and Logan could see it as a blob on the darker soil near the rock. It lay beside the warm waste flowing out of the pipe into the river, which glowed as it dripped into the water, then slowly faded away as it floated downstream.
He flipped to the second drone’s cameras, which were pointing down at the village.
Nothing moved, except streams of hot smoke rising into the sky from the chimneys. At least, nothing warm enough for the infrared cameras to detect against the dark background of the dirt and fields.
The visible light cameras showed glowing lights from the windows of some of the houses, but could see little in the deep shadows between them.
“We should move on,” Poulin said. “There is nothing more for us to do here. We have other villages to visit.”
Volkov drawled in response.
“Considering you just got one of my men shot and another blown up back there, ma’am, I think I’m going to take my time over this visit.”
“I am in charge of this patrol.”
“You are in charge of the political aspects of this patrol. I am in charge of the military aspects. And, right now, we are in a military situation. I’m going to find out who set up this little ambush, and either kill them, or catch them for intel.”
“I will not let you create further ill-will toward the Legion in this village. We must show the flag elsewhere, and convince them to send the insurgents away.”
“Can I suggest, mademoiselle, that since you are so eager to be moving on, you start walking now, and we catch up with you in the morning? You slowed us down so much today with your constant demands for rest breaks that it would make sense for you to get a head start tomorrow.”
“I’m not walking off into the night on my own.”
“But it would make this patrol more efficient. Surely you can see that would be beneficial to all of us?”
If Poulin did wander off into the night, and got lost forever, it would make everything more efficient. At least until they were given another political officer to replace her.
Logan smirked as she and Volkov argued. Volkov could have switched them to a private channel, but he’d chosen to leave their conversation on the section net, so everyone could listen in.
Logan flipped back to the first drone’s camera as he listened to them argue. A bright blob had appeared in the cornfield near the boy’s body.
He switched to the drone’s visible light camera, but there was little detail to see in the faint starlight, just a hazy blob. Neither the drone’s light intensifier nor infrared sensors could show more detail from that height in these conditions. The blob looked too big to be human, unless they were crawling.
“Alice, when will the moon rise?”
“Moonrise at this location is in fourteen minutes.”
It would surely help. But they’d seen the planet’s biggest moon from the Marine LePen on the way into the system. It was closer to the planet than Earth’s, less than half the distance away. But it was a barren rock barely a hundred kilometres across. Two smaller moons orbited closer, but they weren’t much larger than the space stations Logan had visited for his zero-gravity training. Even with the moon up, the sky would have little in common with a well-lit night on Earth.
He switched back to infrared. The blob moved forward, slowly. A dog, maybe? It would have to be a big one to appear that large. He shivered as the blob crept toward the body, and imagined the dog sniffing the corpse, then sinking its teeth into the rotting flesh. The boy may have been an asshole, but he didn’t deserve that.
“Something’s moving in the field, sir,” Logan said on the section net, interrupting Volkov and Poulin’s argument.
“I’ve got it,” Volkov said. The drone’s light-intensifying camera zoomed in on the blob. It turned into a dim L-shape, bending as it moved. It had six legs, and something flapped around two of them as it crept out of the rows of corn.
No, it wasn’t one creature. It was two.
A horse, from the look of the blob. And a human, unless there was some other creature on New Strasbourg that walked on two legs. And something dark flapped around the human’s shoulders, like a mass of black or brown hair.
“Might be your lucky night, McCoy,” Volkov added. “I think we may just have found your girlfriend.”
The enhanced picture was grainy, and the resolution low, but the bright blob that was now crouching near the boy’s body could certainly be the girl he’d seen back in the village. He wouldn’t know for sure until they caught her.
Or killed her.
She had to have known that, when the boy carried out his attack on the Legion, he would have a good chance of ending up dead. But the way she was leaning over his body, rather than just turning away from it and leaving, said there was more to their relationship than just soldiering together.
She pulled something from the horse, then carried it toward the boy. She crouched for a few seconds, and rolled the boy over. Then dragged his body toward the horse. And fumbled with it for a moment, as though hauling his corpse up onto the horse’s back.
Then stopped and stood, wiping her arm across her brow. She grew larger and clearer in the image as the drone slowly descended, still circling around the field, but moving lower to get a better view. But it still floated kilometres above the surface, out of her sight and out of her hearing.
Moments later, she bent down. Something glowed in her hands. A circle of dim light surrounded her, and wobbled as she raised the lantern she’d just lit, holding it around chest level. The corn would shade its light from the village, but the drone hovering above could see it easily. It was just bright enough to illuminate her face. Logan zoomed in further. Despite the harsh, dark shadows across the grainy image of her face, that definitely looked like the girl he’d seen in the village.