Chapter Two

A new planet is just another place for legionnaires to die.

—Colonel Maurice Lequillier,
Second Foreign Legion, 2238

Captain Colin Fraser squeezed through the throng, dodging around a pair of polliwogs arguing over the price of a bolt of plush cloth. The bazaar at Ourgh was a riot of color and sound, a scene that might have come straight out of Medieval Terra had it not been for the alien forms of the shopkeepers and passersby who filled the narrow streets. The noise they made was an assault on the ears as they haggled, individual voices blending together in an unearthly cacophony.

Here and there among the wogs there were even stranger forms as well. Some were company employees, like the majority of the humans on Polypheme, but Fraser was startled to note a party of squat Toeljuks waddling awkwardly on thick, stumpy tentacles, hampered by gravity twice what they were used to. Once the Toeljuks had been virtual masters of the planet. Now only the occasional trading ship kept up the contact between the Autarchy and Polypheme.

“Slow down, Colin!”

He turned back to see Kelly Winters struggling to push past a local who was busy unloading goods from the back of a stubborn-looking groogh, one of the oversized beasts of burden the land-dwelling wogs used for hauling heavy loads and plowing fields ashore. She finally got around wog and beast and joined him, out of breath.

“I thought you said you wanted a rest,” she accused.

He grinned. “After two weeks behind a desk this is a rest, Kelly.” It was hard to think of her by her new name, her Legion name, Warrant Officer Fourth-Class Ann Kelly. She had been a combat engineer with the Commonwealth Navy, stationed on Hanuman, when he was still a newly posted Lieutenant serving as Exec with a Legion company there. Then came the rebellion and the long march out of hostile territory. Fraser’s CO had died, forcing him to assume command of the unit; Kelly, the only survivor from outside the Legion, had accompanied the troops. At first she had shared the scorn for legionnaires most “decent” people felt, but over time she had come to respect them.

And in that final harrowing battle, when her own Navy people had left the legionnaires standing alone against horrible odds, Kelly had fought alongside Fraser’s men. Her expertise in combat engineering had contributed to the victory they had somehow wrung from seemingly certain death. But when it was over, she’d made her contempt for the Navy clear. Instead of returning to duty, Kelly had volunteered to join the Foreign Legion, and Fraser and his superior had contrived to arrange her “death” in the official records of the fighting.

Sometimes Fraser’s conscience gave him a twinge of guilt over his involvement in her desertion, but his unit owed Kelly Winters too much to refuse her. Signed on as a warrant officer specializing as a sapper and pioneer, Kelly had accompanied Fraser’s men when they went back into hostile territory to put down the rebellion. Now she commanded a platoon of Legion sappers attached to the garrison on Polypheme.

They spent a lot of time together. Shared experiences, common interests, a similar way of looking at things … Fraser wasn’t sure yet if it was love, but it was certainly a friendship that made life on Polypheme a little more bearable.

“Wish you my wares to see, Ukwarr?” a vendor asked. Fraser had chipped the principle local tongue, but there were many dialects and variations. This native seemed to be speaking one of the nomad tribal languages, but Fraser wasn’t sure.

He glanced down at the blanket the native had spread on the ground, then knelt for a closer look. Being bimodal, the wogs found it perfectly comfortable to drop down on all fours whenever they had to, though most of the merchants in the bazaar had carts or tables. That confirmed Fraser’s suspicion that this was a nomad. They didn’t use carts—there was little call for the wheel in their oceanic lifestyle—and a nomad wouldn’t be likely to be carrying a table in a pouch on his harness.

“Take a look at these, Kelly,” he said, picking up one of the delicate pieces. It was a piece of bone, intricately carved with symbols and designs that seemed to bring out natural patterns in the material.

Kelly dropped to one knee beside him. “It’s beautiful, Col.” She took it from him and held it up, letting the reddish rays of sunset play across the ornate surface.

“Akurg muuin ghoourak?” Fraser asked the vendor. “Free Swimmers carving made?” He hoped he was interpreting the curious dialect correctly. The sentence structure was quite different from what he had learned for dealing with the citizens of Ourgh, and nomads could be touchy.

The native’s eyestalks twitched with pleasure. “Yes … yes, tusk from woorroo Free Swimmers carved. Woorroo hunt most difficult.”

Fraser glanced at Kelly, who continued to examine the tusk. She seemed to share his fascination with the alien artist’s ability to blend the natural appearance of the bone with the delicate strokes of a knife.

He smiled. There weren’t many humans on or off Polypheme who could appreciate the nomads’ art. Even the people who had to work regularly with the locals—scientists, and the businessmen from Seafarms Interstellar—were inclined to dismiss the nomads as worthless savages.

“On Terra about a thousand years back there were humans making carvings like that,” he commented in English. “Scrimshaw, I think it was called.”

“Who, primitives?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Sailors. Navy men on the old surface ships with too little to do on long sea trips.” He held out his hand, and she passed the carving to him. Turning back to the vendor, he went on in the nomad dialect. “Barter for this would we.”

The nomad held up a feeding tendril. “One drooj, Ukwarr,” he said.

That would be at least ten times its real value, Fraser thought. The nomads understood money well enough from centuries of trading with the land-dwellers, but it didn’t stop them from carrying on their own traditions of barter and hard bargaining.

“!!Ghoour,” he replied, not quite getting the double clicking sound at the start of the word. “No. One vroor! is too much.”

They bargained until Fraser was sure the nomad’s sensibilities would be properly satisfied. It took a careful touch to keep from offending the sea-dwellers in transactions like this one. Offering too much for an item was almost as serious an insult as paying too little. He handed over four vroor!, small iron coins that were legal tender here in Ourgh. Then he turned back to Kelly.

“Looks like old Navy customs die hard,” he said, handing her the carving. “A little scrimshaw to take your mind off the boredom.”

“You saw it first, Col. Don’t you want it?”

He shook his head. “It’s yours. Take it, before I change my mind!”

She grinned and slipped it into her shoulder bag. Her full-dress Legion uniform looked out of place in the bazaar, but the Seafarms management had made it clear that they wanted legionnaires to show a high profile in the town. The uniform certainly did that, with a khaki jacket and slacks, a blue cummerbund, red and green epaulets, and a kepi. Kelly’s headgear was white with a broad black stripe, while Fraser, a Legion officer, wore the traditional kepi noire. It was a needlessly gaudy uniform, but it traced its history through all of the units that had counted themselves as “Foreign Legions” all the way back to the original French Foreign Legion of pre-spaceflight Terra.

Fraser suspected that the company was probably insisting on high visibility as a way of overawing the locals with Commonwealth military prowess, despite the fact that there was no more than a platoon of legionnaires on duty in town at any one time, and their sole purpose was to act as military police to look after the legionnaires who could turn a town into a small-scale war zone while enjoying an overnight pass.

It was galling. There were exactly two combat companies, plus a few specialist troops, stationed on Polypheme, but Seafarms treated them like a full-fledged garrison. Nor was it comforting to know that the company regarded the legionnaires as their own private corporate police force.

But Seafarms Interstellar was a wholly owned subsidiary of Reynier Industries, and even a subsidiary of the company that held the monopoly over the Commonwealth’s production of interstellar drives commanded a lot of clout—at least enough to get Colonial Army troops assigned as glorified security guards on this worthless backwater world.

“You’re getting that look again,” Kelly commented as they left the scrimshaw vendor behind. “What’s wrong?”

Fraser shrugged and pointed to her bag. “I guess that thing reminded me of boredom. It’s a topic I’ve been running into a lot lately.”

“More trouble with cafarde?”

He nodded. “Somebody in Alpha Company hung himself last night. And we’ve had three attempted desertions in the past week.” He shook his head. “One of them was Gates—one of the Hanuman vets.”

“It’s getting pretty bad, then.” It was more of a statement than a question.

“Yeah. These men are combat soldiers. Sticking them in a garrison is begging for trouble.” He paused to dodge an aggressive shopkeeper hawking his wares. “They say the only real cure for cafarde is a loaded rifle and plenty of targets. Not much chance of that here.”

She pulled him into an empty alley mouth. “You can’t keep blaming yourself, you know,” she said.

“Yeah. Right. The damned Commission is breathing down the neck of every Colonial Army unit in the sector. And I’m the hot potato no CO wants to be stuck with!”

Fraser didn’t even try to keep the bitterness out of his voice. For a while there on Hanuman, it had looked like his luck was turning.…

He had been a rising star in the Commonwealth Regulars, son of the hero of New Dallas, General Lovat Fraser of Caledon. Posted to Intelligence with a lieutenant’s commission and a spotless record, Fraser should have been set for life. No struggling for recognition like his father, no long career with nothing but Citizenship papers and a few distorted holovid stories to show for a lifetime’s dedication, not for Colin Fraser!

That was before Fenris, though. The rebellion on Fenris had taken everyone in the Commonwealth by surprise, of course, but once it had erupted it should have been easy enough to put down. But Major Richard St. John, the officer responsible for overseeing the planetary intelligence-gathering effort, had turned out to be incompetent, and men had died. A lot of men, and Commonwealth Regulars at that.

Colin Fraser had been St. John’s aide, and in the inevitable inquiry that followed the disaster he gave the evidence that sealed the man’s fate. The major resigned the service … but the story hadn’t ended there.

Major Richard St. John was the nephew of Senator Warwick, and Senator Warwick was an important man on the Commonwealth’s Military Affairs Committee. Warwick had pulled a few strings and contrived to take down the man who had ruined his nephew, and Colin Fraser’s promising career had evaporated overnight.

Volunteering for the Colonial Army had been the only real option open to him short of court-martial or resignation. The Colonials weren’t as glamorous as the regular Terran regiments, but they offered more action, more opportunity to really do something for the Commonwealth. General Fraser had risen to command the Caledon Watch in the Colonial Army.

But General Fraser’s patronage was no match for Senator Warwick’s displeasure, and it turned out that the Fifth Foreign Legion was the only haven left open. The rising star of Intelligence had ended up as exec in an infantry company—that seemed somehow inevitable, military organizations being what they were—posted to Hanuman.

Bravo Company, his new outfit, had pulled off a miracle in the jungles of that primitive planet. After bringing his men across fifteen hundred kilometers of hostile territory and winning the battle that stopped the native insurrection cold, Fraser had suddenly seen new opportunities opening up. Promotion to captain and command of his beloved Bravos, a key role in the pacification of Hanuman, favorable notice from his superiors in the Legion … notoriety like that could have put his career back on track.

Should have put it back on track.

The Commonwealth Senate had chosen the wrong time to start one of its periodic witch hunts for corruption in the Colonial Army. Members of the Military Affairs Committee—including Senator Warwick—were on the prowl through the frontier sectors searching for someone to nail to the cross. Suddenly, notoriety and a promising future were the last things Colin Fraser needed. As a bona fide hero, Fraser was likely to attract the Senator’s attention, and no one wanted to risk being caught in the fallout if that happened.

His previous CO, Commandant Isayev, had explained it carefully to Fraser. “Don’t get me wrong, son,” he had said. “The Legion looks after its own. But you know how the Commission does its business—none better, I’d bet. What we need to do is get you out of sight for a while. That’s better for you, and it’s better for the Legion.”

When Seafarms Interstellar requested Colonial troops to safeguard their harvester project on Polypheme, the Legion had responded by forming a provisional battalion. Fraser’s company had been one of the first units picked for the new formation, and so far only one other outfit had been posted to Polypheme.

He realized that Kelly was still watching him with a worried frown. “I could have asked for a transfer. Or resigned. That’s what I should have done in the first place.”

“You wouldn’t be Colin Fraser if you ran from a fight,” she said. “There were a dozen times you could have taken the easy way out on Hanuman, but you didn’t. This is the same thing.”

He tried to smile. “Yeah, that’s me. I don’t know the meaning of the word surrender.”

“Right,” she agreed, the frown melting into an impish grin. “Too many syllables for a legionnaire to handle.”

“I’d stop knocking the Legion if I were you, Warrant Officer Kelly,” he said, happy to keep the conversation in a lighter tone. “Of course, everybody knows you aren’t really a Legion sapper.”

“I’ve told you before, I’ll work on the beard,” she protested. Like the uniforms, that was an old Legion tradition. Sappers and pioneers almost universally wore long, full beards, except for the obvious exceptions like Kelly.

“You do, and you’ll have to find someone else to go to town with.”

Her response was cut off by a shout from the street. Fraser turned, craning his head to see the source over the milling locals.

The shout was repeated, and Fraser spotted the source. A native—a large, menacing female with an infant clinging to her back—had just thrown a piece of kwuur-fruit at a Terran girl in the coveralls of a Seafarms port worker. “Where are your offworld promises now?” the native shouted.

Another local took up the call. “Fifty young carried off last night! Seventy more in the past six-day!”

Muttering spread through the crowd, and Fraser could almost feel their mood, like a sudden shift in the wind, turning cold and nasty.

“Kelly …” He paused, sizing up the situation. “When you see their attention on me, circle around and get her out of sight. And use your ’piece to alert the ready platoon. We don’t want to hang around.”

“I’ll say,” she concurred. “Be careful, Col.”

He edged clear of the alley as the crowd started to close in on the girl in the Seafarms coverall. Whether at sea or on land, natives responded aggressively to any perceived threat, and it was hard to distract them once they fixed on a target. According to the chip he’d studied on early Terran contact with Polypheme, entire nomad tribes had thrown themselves at a handful of Terrans with autoweapons, refusing to run or exercise the most rudimentary tactics until the entire band was slaughtered.

Sometimes it had been the Terrans who had died, though. Mob tactics were messy, but they had a way of working when the mob didn’t care about casualties.

He squatted down to pick up a loose piece of tile that had fallen from a roof. Hefting it in his hand, he gauged the natives carefully before throwing it at one of the largest males on the fringe of the crowd. The wog gave a bellow that was more surprise than pain and focused his eyestalks on Fraser.

“Over there! Another one!”

“A soldier!” someone shouted. “Soldier! What about the young?”

“Why can’t you stop the swimmers?”

It had been a problem simmering for a long time, far longer than Terrans had been on Polypheme. The land-dwellers had built themselves a fine civilization ashore, but their life cycle made it necessary for their young to spend most of their time swimming. They could cling to an adult for a short time, sucking blood for nourishment, but they needed to swim. No native city was very far from the sea where juveniles could swim aimlessly, supervised—“herded” was probably a better word—by a few adults.

But the nomads, who recognized no bounds of territory or property, often raided around cities to capture juveniles who could be raised as slaves for the tribe.

The company policy of high visibility, of pushing the power of the Commonwealth military forces, was bound to collide with the slave-raiding problem sooner or later. There was no way for two companies of legionnaires to police hundreds of kilometers of tidal flats and coastal waters against slavers, even if the job was part of their mission on Polypheme. But pressure had been building ever since the Legion started arriving, and a raid the night before apparently had been enough to set the whole thing off.

“What good are your guns, Terran, if you won’t use them?” a voice called out.

“Your friendship is as empty as your faces!”

The mob was focusing on him now, allowing Kelly to reach the girl. She was speaking urgently into the microphone on her wristpiece computer. It would relay her message to the main computer at the Legion barracks here in town, and help would be dispatched.

He hoped it would come in time.