They studied foreign weapons, not just so they would be able to identify the enemy, but because the Legion had to know they would be able to handle any weapon they might pick up on the battlefield.
In the final weeks, they engaged in wargames against the French Army recruits based on the far side of the planet. Games that included a planetary assault, cover from the assault ship in orbit, and every other weapon that would be at their disposal in a real battle.
When it was done, the Legion had won, with twenty percent simulated casualties and a few real ones. The Army took eighty percent.
And then it was over.
The year of training had seemed like the most important thing in Logan’s world at the time, with his life depending on success. A constant struggle toward one goaclass="underline" graduating as a Legionnaire, trained and ready to fight. Feeling as though his life would be complete once he reached that end, and he could finally relax. Now it turned out to be just a prelude to his real life in the Legion, as front-line infantry.
The instructors had beaten down Logan’s old self, starved it, and pushed it to the limits of its endurance. Every step of the way, they encouraged him to quit, turn around, walk out of The Farm, go back to the prison he came from, until his only motivation was to win his white cap and prove them all wrong.
Then, after they’d broken him, and he’d beaten them, his new self grew on top of the foundation they’d created, with levels of strength and endurance he’d never imagined he had. And the training and confidence to make use of it.
The newly graduated Legionnaires lined up on the parade ground on their last day together, and marched in front of the assembled dignitaries. Including one familiar face.
Rousseau watched from the throng, nodding quietly to himself as the men passed. Logan saluted proudly. Whatever might happen in the future, that man had saved his life, and found him a new home.
The next day, Logan was assigned as a replacement to 1st Company, along with a dozen of the other newbies.
The regiment had been hit hard on their last posting, losing a third of their men in combat with the Prussians. They needed fresh blood to fill out the ranks.
And that was how he ended up, two days later, sharing a bunk on the Marine LePen, and heading for New Strasbourg.
CHAPTER 13
Logan crawled uphill through the dirt. The moon was now high in the sky above the valley, but it cast only a faint glow on the hillside around him. Not enough to see his surroundings well with his naked eyes, but enough for the suit visor’s light intensifier to show a clear, if blurry, view of the barren hillside.
The knees and elbows of his suit tore into the ground as he crawled up the hill, heading for the narrow plateau above.
The drones hovered high above them. The infrared cameras had shown no signs of life on the plateau after the girl rode ten kilometres up a narrow path from the river to reach it, before she disappeared into one of the dark, silent buildings that stood upon it. There’d been no sign of her for over half an hour, not even a glow from her lantern.
The drones had followed the girl as she rode up the hillside, then Volkov had led them around the reverse slope of the hill to catch up with her. It wasn’t difficult, when their power-assisted legs could move several times faster than she was moving with the horse in the dark.
Now the rest of the section crouched in what cover they’d found further down the hillside, waiting for Logan to give the all clear to move up.
Alpha Team was behind Logan to the south, Charlie to the east, and Bairamov and Desoto were about twenty metres to the west.
“Take a look, McCoy,” Volkov had said, after they watched the girl lead her horse into the building through the drone cameras. “Maybe your girlfriend would like another chance to kill you today.”
In other circumstances, Logan might have appreciated a promotion to point man for the section. It would at least have shown that Volkov had enough faith in him to trust their lives to his judgment.
Tonight, though, he could be sure that Volkov was just sending the dumb newbie up front because the drones didn’t show much of a threat, and Logan was the most expendable, if they turned out to be wrong.
Graduating as a Legionnaire really hadn’t changed much at all. The veterans who’d already survived months or years in the Legion weren’t going to trust him until he’d proven he could hold his own in battle without getting anyone else killed. Nor, to be honest, was he.
Not after what Bairamov had said earlier.
He was right. Logan could easily have run into an ambush chasing the boy out of the village, but, at the time, he’d been so high on adrenaline that he hadn’t even stopped to think for a second about the danger he might be in, or leading others into.
Running down the one who attacked and wounded his comrades had been all that mattered.
A rock rose above the edge of the plateau to his left, a couple of metres above him, and a couple of metres tall. It would give him some cover when he peered over the edge, and looked into the buildings up there on the plateau.
He crawled sideways across the hillside toward it.
“Alice, you see anything?”
“No threats.”
The suit sensors weren’t detecting anything alive on the plateau. Nor were the drones in the dark sky above him. It looked like the girl was there all alone.
Most likely, he could have marched up the hillside singing Le Boudin or La Marseillaise just as safely as he’d crawled all that way. And his knees and elbows wouldn’t hurt so much.
He crawled up to the rock, then gripped his rifle tighter as he raised his head above the edge of the plateau, and peered around the side of the rock toward the buildings. There was enough moonlight now to see the faint outlines of boxy shapes marked in red on his HUD, where the suit’s AI had flagged buildings as potentially hiding threats. The boxes glowed in the moonlight as the suit’s light intensifier enhanced the image.
A couple of dozen wooden buildings ran across the plateau in two rows facing each other, and a third row ran at ninety degrees across them at the end of the street. What looked like rusting shovels and scythes leaned against the walls of some of the buildings, beside wheeled contraptions with rusty blades that looked like something you’d use to dig up the fields. A cart leaned against another building, the wooden wheels twisted sideways on the old axle, and the shafts where a horse would have pulled it leaning high against the wall.
Bones protruded from the dirt nearby. Long, curved ribs much too large to be human. And a narrow, stretched jaw, more like a horse.
Some of the buildings didn’t look much healthier than the rotting horse skeleton that lay beside them. Planks had fallen from the walls of the building behind the cart, exposing the cracked wooden frame beneath. At some point in the past, the walls had supported double doors. But now, the right door was a pile of twisted planks on the dirt, while the left hung from only the top hinge.
The roof of the building alongside had partially collapsed. The edges of the roof planks still clung to the walls, but the middle had sunk a few metres, as though the joists supporting it had bent or broken.
The wall bulged out beneath the sunken roof, where the planks must be pushing the walls apart. In a few years, there might be nothing left of the village aside from a big, rotting pile of wood.
“Alice, what is this place?”
“Valenciennes was one of the first communities on New Strasbourg.” Alice said, quoting from the intel pack Logan had loaded into the suit before the patrol. “Earth lost contact with New Strasbourg five years later. Colonists first landed during a time of low activity in the solar cycle. When activity returned to normal, their buildings were unable to protect them from the radiation of the first solar storm. Only five men survived here, by remaining in the mines until the rescue mission arrived. Valenciennes was abandoned when new towns were built by the next wave of colonists, with radiation protected buildings.”