“I saw her down there, sir. The explosion knocked me out. When I woke up, she was gone.”
Volkov’s visor leaned close to Logan’s face. “Hmm. How convenient, McCoy. How very convenient.”
“I didn’t mean to toss a grenade into an ammo dump, sir. If I did, I’d have been further away when it went off.”
“Do you have some connection to that girl? Something that would make you want to let her escape?”
“Never seen her before today, sir.”
“You do realize I can have Intel run another background check on you? I gather you’re one of Rousseau’s boys. If they find anything…”
Poulin stood, and her suit crunched across the dirt toward them. “Where are my prisoners?”
“They didn’t want to surrender, ma’am.” Logan reached into his body armour, grabbed the tablet, and held it out toward her. “But there might be something useful on this.”
Poulin’s long, metal fingers clunked down on the tablet, raised it toward her visor, turned it around, then placed it in a pouch on the outside of her suit.
“I’ll get it to Intel. But I’d rather have prisoners.”
Logan glanced toward the sun, which was rising over the roof of the building across the street. If there was a solar storm, the wood would do just about nothing to protect him from the radiation. “Can I get back to my suit, sir?”
“We’re about to move out,” Volkov said. “Hurry up, before I decide to leave you behind with your girlfriend.”
Logan strode along the street, and around the edge of the crater. Then through the half-open doorway of the barn.
His suit was there, where he’d left it, over beside the wall. The back of the suit was still closed, and locked. But the doors of the barn were wide open, out onto the plateau outside.
And the horse was gone.
CHAPTER 16
Logan stared at the five cards he held in his hand. Two aces, a jack, and two threes. Not so bad. Not so good. His chair creaked as he slumped back in it, and he kept his face perfectly still, giving away as little as he could to the silent, stern-faced men sitting around the roughly-carved wooden table in front of him.
Learning to hide whatever he might be feeling was a useful skill he’d learned during those months in the cells back in Paris. He’d worked hard to not give the interrogators a way in for their questioning. To not show them they were winning.
And it came in handy during the section’s late-night poker games. They’d scouted around a few more villages after the firefight in Gries, but hadn’t run into any more insurgents on their trip.
Walking through the villages, smiling at the villagers and not being shot at had almost felt like an anticlimax after all the excitement of the patrol’s first stop. Perhaps taking out one of the insurgents’ bases had knocked a bit of the fight out of them for a while.
Then they’d returned to Estérel. They needed time for equipment repairs and overhauls, medical treatment for the wounded, and debriefing with Intel.
And, tonight, for drinking and a few games of cards.
Something small, long and dark moved on Logan’s left wrist. He swung his right hand, and slapped it hard. Bright red blood smeared his fingers as he pulled his hand back. He wiped the remains of the mosquito from his wrist, onto the leg of his fatigue pants. There might not be much native life on this planet, but the mosquitoes, cockroaches and bedbugs that had stowed away on the colony ships seemed to be doing just fine.
“Chavs?” Bairamov said from the far side of the table. He raised his voice to be audible over the muttering and clinking of plates and glasses from the men and women sitting at the other tables in the old, wooden barroom.
It was their first night off duty since the landing on New Strasbourg, and the fireteam had strolled through the streets of Estérel until they wandered into Pierre’s Place, then decided to stay a while.
The sign outside the door claimed it was the oldest bar in town, and that was easy to believe. It was rather more difficult to believe that the place could remain standing until the end of the night.
There was no concrete in the bar walls or roof, it was just an old wooden building with a dirt floor, like those they’d seen in the Valenciennes. The roof planks high above the table bowed downwards beneath the weight of the metre of dirt that had been piled on top of them to protect against radiation. Flecks of dirt had been falling slowly through the gaps in the roof onto the table and floor as they sat and played.
Either way, the place seemed popular with the locals. Like the men and women—but mostly men—at the other tables who were resolutely staring away from the Legionnaires, and doing their best to avoid eye contact any time Logan looked their way. A few had left when the Legionnaires walked in.
Were they insurgents showing their dislike of the Legion, or townspeople worried that the insurgents might attack? Or heading off to tell their insurgent friends that the Legion were in town?
He couldn’t continue wondering whether every colonist he ran into was trying to kill him, or it would drive him insane.
That was probably the insurgents’ goal, anyway. To keep the Legionnaires guessing until they began to see everyone as an enemy. But he was keeping an eye on the men and women around them, just in case. So were the others.
“They called you Chavs?” Bairamov repeated.
It was one of those nights where men who’d shared their first experience of combat together felt the urge to tell each other their life stories.
Logan had been explaining why he left England, and ended up in France. He nodded, and looked between the helmets and empty wine glasses scattered across the table, toward Bairamov’s face. Which was somewhat hazy right now. Logan had learned to drink alcohol in the ZUS, but the wine here burned your throat on the way down, and melted your brain when it hit your stomach. Or maybe it was just that the alcohol had more effect in the thin air.
Either way, his voice slurred a little as he spoke. “That’s what they called us.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Corporate Housing And Violent, the teachers said. But I think they just made that up.”
“Like the Rednecks in America?” Gallo said from his seat to Logan’s right.
The medics hadn’t cleared him to return to action yet, but he’d sneaked out of the hospital with bandages still wrapped around his legs after Logan and Bairamov smuggled in a set of fatigues so Gallo could hide his wounds.
He might be in trouble with the officers tomorrow, but what were they going to do? Send him back to the unit early? With the casualties they’d taken, he’d be there again as soon as they could get him fit enough to operate his suit. Which wouldn’t be more than a few days, either way.
“Everyone has a name for us.”
The useless ones, the unconnected ones, the ones who didn’t come from a distinguished, ‘elite’ family who could pull strings, and whose only value was that they might be slightly cheaper than machines. And slightly smarter.
From talking to the other recruits he’d met, he knew now that families like his own existed in every country on Earth. The workers, to be used and abused by the toffs, and replaced if they objected to their fate. Maybe one day things would change, but how? The toffs had all the power, and no qualms about using it. The workers had none. The unemployed had even less.
“The French, you know, call them Les Sauvages,” Desoto said from Logan’s right. “Savages, like wild animals.”
Logan had heard that slang more than once from the flics in the ZUS. “The aristos are the real savages.”
Bairamov tossed a ten-franc note onto the table. “Raise.”
“I’m out,” Gallo said, and tossed his cards onto the table.