And would it really make any difference at this point?
A deep, booming voice began to sing. The words of Le Boudin, the Foreign Legion’s own marching song, filled the passenger compartment. The voice fought against the howling of the wind, Poulin’s shrieks, and the creaking of the hull.
Logan looked toward the source of the sound. A smiling mouth on the far side of the compartment, with dark, wide-open lips exposing bright white teeth as it sang. The man’s lungs were yelling the song with all their might.
Joffer. The Company engineer, and one of the few black faces in the shuttle. He’d said he was from somewhere in Africa, but the name had meant nothing to Logan at the time. It wasn’t one of the many place names drummed into the recruits in their lessons on the Legion’s history. No Legionnaires had fought and died nearby in the last few centuries.
Another voice joined the song. Volkov yelled the words from the front of the compartment, almost as though he felt that overpowering Joffer’s voice was a matter of honour.
Then more men joined in, as though hearing the familiar words had distracted them from the fear of imminent death.
Or, perhaps, so that if they crashed and burned in the next few seconds, at least someone would have a good story to tell of the platoon who fell out of the sky to their deaths singing the Legion’s song.
Desoto began to sing, and nudged Logan’s side. Logan took a deep breath and joined in too, feeling his body relax as he yelled out the familiar words and the world around him seemed to fade away.
As the other Legionnaires joined them, the cacophony grew louder and louder until it even drowned out Poulin’s screams.
Then the shuttle’s nose pulled up.
The thrusters roared outside, much louder than a normal landing as the noise came in through the hole in the hull. But still not loud enough to drown out the sound of nearly sixty Legionnaires singing.
Flames flickered into the air beyond the hole as a concrete landing pad rose into view, and reflected the thruster exhaust back toward them. The shuttle’s landing legs clunked as it touched down. Logan’s heart still raced as the shuttle settled on the legs with a loud creak, and the whine of the motors slowed. The flames outside flickered and vanished.
The singing faded away as the men looked toward the ramp at the rear of the shuttle. It whirred, and sunlight glowed around the top and sides of the frame as it began to open.
“Evacuate,” Lieutenant Merle yelled, as he pulled the release on his seat straps, and they fell away from his shoulders.
Sergeant Volkov released his straps, and stood, swinging his arms toward the ramp.
“Don’t just sit there, ladies. Allez! Allez!”
Straps clicked around the hold as the survivors unlocked them, and extricated themselves from their seats. Logan pulled his straps away, trying not to stare at Johnson’s body as the blood spray faded to a trickle of red dripping down his chest.
He’d seen dead bodies before. Some up close.
But none quite like that.
Medics raced up the ramp into the shuttle, pushing past the men trying to get out. The platoon medics clambered past the other Legionnaires, to head for the wounded. They took one look at Johnson’s headless corpse, then crouched over Adamski’s motionless body.
Heinrichs grabbed Adamski’s wrist, while another medic unclipped the straps that still held him in his seat where it had become jammed between the crates.
The Legionnaires strode toward the ramp. But, somehow, Logan’s legs just wouldn’t move as fast as they should. He gasped down as many rapid, deep breaths as he could, and his legs moved a little faster with the extra air he sucked in.
Lieutenant Merle had warned them before boarding the shuttle that the air on the planet contained less oxygen than they were used to, but Logan hadn’t expected to struggle quite so much. The oxygen level on the Marine LePen had slowly been reduced during the trip to try to get them acclimatized, but not far enough to be a risk if the ship was attacked and they had to fight. Now he was facing the full force of the planet’s weak atmosphere.
The bright blue sun that was shining high above the wide concrete expanse of the spaceport’s landing pads blinded Logan for a second as he followed the other gasping men down the ramp. The world seemed to spin around him as the adrenaline began to fade, and he slowly raised his hand to block out the sun’s glare.
The shock of seeing men die like that had prevented him from thinking about what could have happened to him, and the others. That could have been him in there, torn apart by the shrapnel, or falling to his death, still strapped to his seat. Killed by insurgents on his first day in a combat zone, without even getting a chance to shoot back at whoever had hit them.
The hot air around the shuttle’s still-glowing heat-shield was roasting his skin. He strode away across the grey, dusty landing pad as fast as his legs could go, following Bairamov and the rest of 1st Section.
More medics ran toward the shuttle from the buildings nearby, and men wearing body armour raced toward defensive positions around the spaceport, as though they thought they could shoot down a SAM with an autorifle. The regiment had brought some point defence guns to defend against missiles from the ground, but they were still packed into the shuttles the insurgents had fired at.
Logan glanced back at their shuttle. The side of the hull was black around the three-metre-wide hole where the SAM had hit it. They’d been lucky. If it had knocked out the motors at that height, the shuttle would probably have crashed. The whole platoon would be dead, not just three or four of them.
Dust blew into the air as the last of the flight of six shuttles from the Marine LePen landed on another pad nearby, blasting the concrete with the flaming exhaust from the landing thrusters. The other two personnel shuttles were disgorging the remainder of 1st Company, who stared at the damage on 3rd Platoon’s shuttle as they carried their bags down the ramps.
Men in powered suits hauled crates and combat suits out of the cargo shuttles. One of those shuttles spewed a thick pillar of black smoke from its motors. Had that been hit, too?
The flight crew clambered out of 3rd Platoon’s shuttle’s cockpit, then strolled through the passenger compartment and down the ramp, nodding and pointing at the hole in the side as they surveyed the damage. Ground crew rolled up in a six-wheeled truck, and jumped down onto the pad. They tutted as they stared at the hole.
“Now that’s a job and a half,” one of them muttered.
Then another siren whined, and was joined by a dozen more around the spaceport, until the noise grew so loud that Logan’s eardrums ached, and he covered his ears with his hands. The maintenance crew spun around, and hurried back across the landing pad toward their vehicle.
“What’s that noise?” Logan yelled at them.
“Radiation alarm,” the man yelled back. “Get inside, and wait it out.”
There were a dozen semi-circular mounds of dirt on the far side of the landing pads. Each mound must be at least ten metres tall, and some had metal doors that rose almost to roof level. More, smaller, dirt-covered buildings were spread out across the plain beyond. Men and women around him were already running toward the dark rectangles of the open doors in the walls of the nearest buildings.
Logan picked the closest, and followed them. For the first few steps, his legs kept up, then he was gasping. He slowed as he sucked in the weak air, and his legs began to ache. So did the other men around him.
Just keep putting one foot in front of the other. He stumbled on, and the door grew larger as he moved toward it, until he was able to fling himself inside.