She took a long drag then, and I noticed the view with a shiver. In front of us stretched the panorama of Nimes’s lush side, a section of the planet that for whatever reason responded to the rains with a bizarre form of life. Increased gravity meant that its trees didn’t grow as high as they did on Earth, but Nimes’s vegetation made up for it by growing sideways, sending down roots at regular intervals to support the branches, which otherwise would have sagged. If you squinted the plains resembled a never-ending field of green lichen, leaving you with simultaneous feelings of awe—that you saw something most on Earth hadn’t even seen in pictures—and of isolation. The planet wanted us dead. Somewhere out there walked the ghosts of my husband and children, wandering in the alien bushes, and the wind gusted over the ridgeline behind us. It hit me like a lightning bolt: that’s why they chose Nimes, because it was so…creepy.
But we were beginning to belong there. I mean, when I stepped back and took a look at how we had started and how we had transformed, it was clear we weren’t human anymore and it fit with what Buttons had said. The Legion didn’t want people. It wanted orphans that it could reshape into a family of psychopaths, and because they took their orphans from every culture in the world the Legion needed someplace to put them—someplace none of them could call home. A level playing field. Spend enough time on a planet where nobody belongs except the Legion, and soon everyone belongs to the Legion.
They had a plan for everything.
“What a crap-hole,” said Buttons. We sat in silence for an hour before she finally stood, helping me to my feet. “I think that’s long enough. We should head back.”
When we returned to the perimeter my jaw dropped. The fight had ended but at first I thought the girls were still yelling at each other until I got closer and realized they weren’t yelling at all. They were singing. The corporal had taught us traditional French songs, the kind that dripped with significance even though you’d be hard-pressed to identify any of the places mentioned. If you listened closely you heard the sadness in them, a kind of depression that existed only in someone who had seen the depths of hell and clawed his way out. At first we wondered why we sang them. It’s not like they uplifted. But after a while we got used to it, and then, as the agony of daily training and the hardships of Nimes sunk in, we got a sense of maybe-I-understand-these-words-after-all, and they stirred something, sometimes bringing us to tears.
The girls were on their way to getting drunk. None of them wore helmets and when Toly smiled I noticed that she had lost a tooth. A Chinese girl sat next to her; in the twilight it was hard to tell at first, but it looked as if her left eye had swollen shut.
“Want a drink, Grandmother?” Toly asked.
“No thanks.” I smelled the alcohol from two feet away, and whatever it was, it smelled strong. The Chinese girl grabbed Toly’s bottle and laughed.
“You settle everything with our new friends?”
“Who? With the Chinese? These aren’t Chinese, Grandmother, they’re our long-lost Legion sisters, Uighurs and Tibetans, reforged. Didn’t the corporal tell you? We’re all reforged. We’re French now, every one.”
I found Jennifer just before going to sleep. She was drunk too, already passed out with a huge smile on her face.
When night fell one of them shrieked again, and the slope surrounding the bunker went quiet.
“Anyone hurt?” I asked.
Lucy popped her helmet and grinned. “No, Grandmother. But we’re all low on ammunition. Thank God they like to take breaks.”
“Tell that to the colonists.”
I peered out the firing port. Walls of dead mantes had gathered around the bunker so that their legs interlocked with one another, giving us our first close-up view. The main similarity they shared with praying mantises were the forelegs, which folded when they stood. Everything else was a little different. A hard carapace made up their skin, which was a dull gray that in the fading sun reminded me of mist. And there were definitely no eyes. They didn’t have sectional bodies like real mantises, and instead the main trunk consisted of a roughly four-meter-long cylinder that ended in a globular head and maw, around which four sharp mandibles snapped together, forcing in food. Some of them still twitched. At first the girls would shoot at them, to get the twitching to stop, but I told them to knock it off; it was a waste of ammunition.
For a moment it felt good. Most of us had popped helmets to eat for the first time in two days, and I didn’t have to remind them that some needed to remain on watch since we had lost the sentry bots. Then Lucy tapped me on the shoulder.
“Makes you wonder,” she said, pointing at the piled corpses.
“Wonder what?”
“How many of them are there? I mean we must have killed thousands by now, and I haven’t seen any signs of them slowing. Maybe they sent out a call, to wake up nests all over the planet.”
I popped my helmet and sighed. “You’re awful, Lucy.”
“Hey, Grandmother, I’m just thinking out loud. On the other hand, maybe they’ve given up now and we won’t see them again. The problem is that if we do see them, we no longer have an acceptable field of fire.”
And just like that my good mood evaporated. She was right. The walls of dead were too high to see over, and the next time they attacked the mantes would get almost to the bunker before taking hits.
“I need ten volunteers,” I said, and everyone stopped talking.
“For what?” someone asked.
“To go out there and clear the bodies, give us some breathing room.”
Nobody raised her hand. In the end I picked them randomly and was about to volunteer myself when Lucy shook her head.
“No way, Grandmother, we need you here.”
The others left reluctantly through the roof hatch and I positioned two of our auto-Maxwells on top of the bunker to cover them just in case. It was slow going. By midnight they had pushed the wall back ten meters, but it was a monumental effort involving chainsaws so that the girls could hack the bodies into manageable chunks. I began to feel sick when someone pointed out that if you turned off light amplification the girls were half red, dripping blood from the waist down.
The next attack was a surprise. One of the girls had climbed on top of the pile so that the others could hand her body parts, when she disappeared with a scream. Then the wall erupted. Some mantes must have been pretending to be dead and once my team got close enough the things leaped into action, dragging the girls away without a fight.
I ordered everyone back inside.
“All ten lost, Grandmother,” said Lucy.
I didn’t know what to say. For the first time I felt a despair so overwhelming that I considered handing the command over and going below, to crawl into one of the beds—just curl up and wait for the inevitable. Before I actually did it, though, Lucy grabbed my arm.
“Here they come.” She laughed then, before locking her helmet back on. “Makes me wish I had been a miner.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because for the miners it’s already over, and they have nothing left to worry about.”
The mining area was wasted. French corporates had scoured this section of Nimes clear of vegetation for at least ten kilometers, and toward the end of our march we were strung out on hundred-meter-high berms that separated huge pits filled with a pale blue waste liquid—like poisoned swimming pools. A main entryway had been carved out of a low mountain. Its doors swung in a strong wind, and a pair of narrow-gauge rail lines disappeared into the mine’s darkness.