Obey without question—the earliest lesson, taught in a way that one never forgot. What happened that first morning may have resulted from my stupidity, but you have to cut me some slack because I didn’t have any way of knowing. And I can’t describe the kind of fatigue that Nimes induced. We wilted under its gravity, sweating in half suits (we had been allowed to take off our helmets while working), and the shovel felt heavier than lead. I figured it was crazy. The Legion had plenty of engineering equipment, and who the hell dug a two-story underground facility with shovels? Every load of dirt caused a minor avalanche that filled my hole almost immediately so that progress, if you called it that, was a three-steps-forward-two-steps-back kind of thing.
When the corporal passed me I stiffened to attention and cleared my throat. “Corporal, why are we doing this by hand? Shouldn’t we be using equipment of some kind?”
He smiled. I knew it wasn’t a friendly smile, more like the kind you’d get from someone who had been waiting all morning for one of us to ask that exact question, and he poked the brim of his white kepi into my nose. During construction the NCOs wore traditional uniforms, not combat suits.
“Have you been in combat?”
“No, Corporal.”
“Do you think that where we send you, you’ll always have engineering equipment when it comes time to build fortifications? That you’ll have robots?”
“No, Corporal.”
“Then button up.” He waited for me to lock my helmet on before continuing, and gestured at my shovel. “Raise your shovel over your head. Both hands.”
I lifted it high and felt my muscles quiver under its weight. Even in one g it would have been hard enough—not at first, but as the seconds ticked by I knew that it wouldn’t be long until I’d have major trouble.
“Hold until relieved.” The corporal turned to the rest of the group and shouted, “The Legion takes care of itself, and even when we have nothing, we can make anything. Never question.”
And he left again.
It didn’t take long before it felt as though I would pass out, probably only half an hour. The occasional trembling in my arms became a steady tremor and then spasms. My back ached. After an hour I heard the blood pounding in my ears, and my breaths came so rapidly that they made me dizzy, turning each minute into a guessing game of will-I-last-to-the-next. I don’t even remember passing out. The next thing I knew the corporal had dragged me to my feet and begun swinging a wooden baton against the side of my helmet so that my ears rang and I barely heard his screaming, only just comprehending that now, in addition to holding the shovel overhead, I was to jog-shuffle around the perimeter.
The rest of the day passed in a blur. I lost track of the number of times I passed out, but every time the corporal revived me to continue the punishment, each stage becoming more and more harsh with only minor breaks to stay hydrated. It ended at dinnertime. I had expected to get a chance to talk to someone in the mess hall, finally meet some of my unit mates, but as it turned out I could barely keep my head from the table, and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Nobody was allowed to talk.
By the time morning came we were exhausted from fear. Most of the children still slept, had passed out some time after midnight, but nobody in our unit wanted to take a chance on resting. I had just decided to close my eyes when Toly’s voice forced them open.
“Movement.”
“What in God’s name is it doing?” someone asked.
A lone mante approached the perimeter. Our bunker was a typical Legion advance base, built into the ridgeline of mountains that overlooked the settlement, and with three underground stories about two to three hundred meters below us. We could see the settlement—a bunch of Quonset huts that had been torn apart. The day before it had crawled with mantes, and they had tossed human corpses all over the place as they rampaged through the prefab houses, splitting them open with their forelegs. The only reason the kids had made it to safety was that they were on a hike with their teacher, who dropped them off on her way to try to save her husband. She never made it back.
The mante advanced toward our line of sentry bots, squat metallic turrets that rose a meter from the ground. Toly had her finger over their arming button.
“Hit it, Toly,” I said.
“No.”
“Why?”
“It’s not attacking. Maybe it came to talk since we gave them such a beating last night. We have to buy as much time as we can until we figure out why we can’t get through to orbital. And we need to save our ammunition.”
“Maybe it wants to surrender,” someone suggested.
I shook my head. “Or a duel to the death.”
We watched for a while longer. It skittered closer to the line and stopped, waving what looked like a pair of long antennae over the closest bot, and for a moment I thought that my helmet amplifiers picked up a strange clicking noise.
“I think it’s in love,” I said, and got a few chuckles.
Toly stood. “I’m going out there.”
“You’re crazy.”
Her boot slammed into my faceplate so that my head snapped back, cracking against the concrete wall. Before I could react she pressed her helmet against mine.
“Don’t question me ever again, Grandmother.”
Toly pulled herself up the ladder and left through the tight ceiling hatch before dropping with a thud in front of the bunker. We waited. She moved hesitantly forward, her carbine pointed directly at the thing as she took one step after another, careful to avoid the mines that were marked on her heads-up display. When she got to within ten meters of the creature it froze and raised its forelegs to extend a pair of knifelike spikes.
“Maybe that’s its way of saying hello,” I said.
I was wrong. The thing leaped into the air and spun, so that the moment it landed its two spikes popped through the front of Toly’s armor and out the back, sending a pink spray into the air. It then let out a shriek and lifted her overhead, throwing the body fifty meters downslope.
The light blinked on in my helmet and it took me a moment to remember what it meant. “I have command.”
I flipped open the cover on my forearm controls and punched the arming button for the sentry bots, which then reduced the mante to a twitching mass of legs in under a second. Toly and I had a less-than-friendly history, but her death still hit me. Tears started welling in my eyes and I clenched my jaw, forcing them back and promising myself that there would be time later.
“Why did she do that?”
The boy from earlier had crept up to the firing port to watch, had seen the whole thing. I pulled him away. “Don’t do that again, kid, OK? What’s your name?”
“Phillip.”
“Phillip, promise me you’ll stay over there with the others and won’t sneak up to the ports anymore, OK?”
He nodded. “But why did she go out there? Why did she get mad when you tried to stop her?”
“Well…” It was a good question, and although I knew the answer, it wasn’t so easy to explain. “Toly was Russian. That’s how the Russians are, Phillip, just…really, really brave.”
And insane.
Although few of us had the time to talk to one another during the first week, the Russians in our group glommed together instantly, and it took me a while to realize it wasn’t because of instinct. It was a tattoo thing. Most of them were refugees, granddaughters of the survivors of the Second Subterrene War, when Chinese hit them unexpectedly from Manchuria and then kept rolling toward the Urals. They spoke Chinese in Moscow now. Anyone who survived the takeover had been ear-tattooed for identification before being shipped to the old gulags, which is where these ones must have lived before they escaped. It didn’t matter that it had been over for more than a century, or that it wasn’t the Americans who had conquered Russia, because it was almost as if the experience had imprinted a notion in Russian DNA: it was our fault. If the Americans hadn’t weakened their forces with the First Subterrene War, the Russians figured, they would have never lost later to the Chinese. I had known that there would be Russians in the Legion but hadn’t thought it would cause me any trouble—“We’re all on the same team,” that kind of crap. Right.