Chapter Four

The French, a people of etiquette, imagine that the Legion is full of criminals and barefoot savages.

—Colonel Fernand Maire,
in a letter from his deathbed,
French Foreign Legion, 1951

Officially it was known as “Cyclops Project One,” but workers and legionnaires alike called the huge complex “The Sandcastle.” It rose from the tidal flats a hundred and fifty kilometers southeast of Ourgh, a squat, ugly, starkly functional compound surrounded by a fifteen-meter high fusand wall. Even from a distance the base’s nonhuman origins were plain.

The Toeljuks had constructed the Sandcastle as part of a chain of similar installations when they leased the world from the Semti Conclave centuries ago, and their characteristic architectural style was stamped on every building enclosed by those massive parapets. The walls, composed of a fused sand compound developed by the Toels, made the base look like an elaborate military fortress, but in fact their main job was to hold back a natural enemy, the water that coursed across the plain at high tide.

Tides on Polypheme were like nothing Colin Fraser had encountered before. They could raise the water level along the coast by as much as ten meters—more, during the fierce storms that boiled out of the equatorial latitudes during the bhourrkh season. In the space of an hour a stretch of open plain could be completely covered by water.

At high tide the Sandcastle became an island, and those walls were the only barrier to the lashing force of the flood tide or a raging bhourrkh.

The base had to be located on the tidal flats. When the waters closed in, it could become a port for the huge ore-extraction ships the Toeljuks had introduced to these seas. The corrosive content of the oceans here made frequent maintenance essential, so the Sandcastle was fitted with massive seagates which opened to flood the center of the complex and allow vessels to enter. Then the water could be pumped out, turning the compound into a dry dock where the ship could be unloaded and serviced.

At their peak, the Toeljuks had operated a fleet of thirty giant extraction ships, each one with its own home base. Since the Commonwealth had acquired Polypheme, most of the bases had fallen into ruin along with the ships. But Seafarms Interstellar had cannibalized the old Toel fleet to put the Seafarms Cyclops back in service, and the Sandcastle had become a port facility once again, all part of a pilot project designed to explore the possibilities of large-scale oceanic mineral extraction.

The tide was at the flood stage now, just beginning to rush in around the walls of the base. Fraser had moved into the driver’s cab beside Legionnaire Sandoval, where he had direct access to the vehicle’s communications gear. Glancing at the video monitor that showed the terrain ahead, Fraser tried to gauge the time left before the water would crest. About forty-five minutes, he thought. When the waters were at their highest the nomad threat would be greatest. If the nomads really were a threat …

Watanabe’s report from the Seafarms Cyclops didn’t leave much room for doubt. He’d spent the trip reviewing the computer file, trying to evaluate the implications of the subaltern’s observations.

Any combination of high-tech weaponry and the kind of ferocity he’d seen for himself in Ourgh would be deadly. Moreover, Watanabe was suggesting that the nomads were using tactics more sophisticated than anything seen on Polypheme to date.

It all pointed to an outside influence. And odds were that the confrontation wouldn’t stop with the abortive skirmish aboard the Seafarms Cyclops.…

“We’re here, Captain,” Sandoval said quietly.

Fraser looked up to see the massive seagates swinging slowly open to admit the APC. Water swirled into the center of the compound, turning the parade ground into a sea of mud.

The gate closed behind the APC as Sandoval guided it across the complex toward the motor pool. Like the rest of the habitable part of the base, the motor pool was built into the inside of the wall, with doors that could be sealed tight when the interior was open to the sea.

A cluster of figures were waiting there, tension plain in their stances.

Sandoval guided the APC up a ramp and into the structure, then cut fans and magnetic fields to allow the Sandray to come to rest. Fraser turned in his seat to call orders to the legionnaires in the rear.

“Mr. Narmonov, keep your men ready to return to the city. I think it would be a good idea if we kept you as an escort for the company people, in view of what happened this afternoon.”

“Sir!” The response was crisp, parade-ground correct.

He glanced at Kelly Winters. “Kelly, if this is going to be a full staff meeting, I’ll want—I mean, Captain Hawley will probably want you there.”

“I’ll come with you, Captain,” she replied formally. The medic had pronounced her fit, beyond a nasty bruise on her leg and a few abrasions from her fall.

He opened the hatch and clambered out of the vehicle.

“Captain,” the smooth, cold voice of his Executive Officer greeted Fraser as he crossed the wide fusand floor. Lieutenant Antoine DuValier was tall, lean, and aristocratic, and Fraser still found him something of a mystery. His disdain for his surroundings was all too clear, and Fraser thought he sensed a personal dislike behind the young officer’s aloof manner. He did his job efficiently enough, but Fraser was uncomfortable relying on DuValier as XO.

But because Captain Hawley needed his help running the demi-battalion, Fraser had been forced to leave Bravo Company almost entirely in DuValier’s hands.

The man in Legion battledress beside DuValier was the only reason Fraser could allow the lieutenant to oversee his company at all. Gunnery Sergeant John Trent was another Hanuman veteran; an experienced NCO Fraser was willing to trust with his life. Without Trent, Fraser knew, Bravo Company would never have escaped from the jungles of Dryienjaiyeel or survived the desperate fighting in that last battle.

“Glad to see you in one piece, skipper,” Trent said, genuine relief playing over his craggy features. “When the reports came in I—”

“Time for congratulations later.” A small woman with short blond hair and wearing a conservative business coverall stepped forward. “Fraser, we’ve got problems on the Cyclops.”

“I know, Citizen Jens,” Fraser said, keeping a tight rein on his temper at her abrupt manner. Sigrid Jens was said to be the youngest Project Director in the Seafarms hierarchy, and also the most aggressive. She was, so everyone said, destined for great things at Seafarms, maybe even in the parent company, Reynier Industries.

She was also, Fraser thought, a royal pain.

“I’ve been looking over the report,” he went on, still trying not to betray any emotion. “From the looks of things you’ve got a hell of a security problem, Citizen, and I think we’re going to have to reevaluate the entire setup on Polypheme if we’re going to handle this mess.”

The woman’s assistant, Edward Barnett, stepped forward belligerently. “If you people had done your job, the nomads would never be able to threaten the Cyclops,” he said. “I recommended more troops for the ship right along, Fraser, but you and your precious Captain Hawley overruled the suggestion.”

Fraser turned an angry glance his way. “Good thing, too,” he said. “You wanted a whole company on board the Cyclops, and that would have stretched our resources way past the limit.”

“Nonsense!” Barnett exploded. “You don’t seem to realize how important the security of that ship is.”

“Gentlemen,” Jens said, holding up a manicured hand. “We need to take action, not pass out blame.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Barnett said quickly. He shot Fraser a sour look. “But I want to go on record as saying that we should have had more support from the Legion.”

Fraser ignored him, turning to Jens. “This situation could get out of hand fast, Citizen,” he said quietly. “I hope the corporation will be willing to work with us. Unless we deal with the nomads now, we could all be in serious trouble.”

O O O

Warrior-Scout !!Dhruuj of the Clan of the Reef-Swimmers relaxed and let the flow of the tide carry him closer to the Built-Reef-of-the-Strangers. There was danger in swimming the tides so close to the massive stone walls, but !!Dhruuj felt no fear. He was a Warrior-Scout, and the best in the Reef-Swimmers apart from old Soor. He had claimed the honor of this swim, since Soor was still recovering from the wounds he’d suffered in the fight with the fangmouth three ebbs ago.

He felt no fear, just as his hand would feel no fear of its own even if he was to reach out to grasp a stingfloater stranded in a tidal pool. !!Dhruuj was a Hand of the Clan now, performing his function.

The water was already more than a head deep around the Built-Reef-of-the-Strangers, enough to keep him hidden. The Strangers-Who-Gave-Gifts had warned that the Strangers-Who-Lived-Within-Walls had powerful charms that allowed them to see clearly in the dark of the open air, and others that could chart the depths even more plainly than a Warrior-Scout, but the Stranger-Who-Betrayed-Clan had sent word from within that no such underwater magic was at work here. !!Dhruuj would be safe as long as he remained in the water.

He reached out to grasp the wall as the tide carried him toward it, then used his suckers to attach himself to the uneven surface. Inching slowly upward, !!Dhruuj raised his eyestalks and snorkel out of the water cautiously, and settled in to watch.

The Clan would need whatever information he could gather before they arrived to assail the Strangers above.

O O O

“You have to admit, Captain Fraser, that two companies of legionnaires was not what we were promised for the garrison here. We understood an entire battalion was to be stationed on Polypheme.”

Fraser looked at Sigrid Jens and then shrugged. “A provisional battalion, Citizen,” he replied carefully. “That isn’t necessarily the same thing.”

“A battalion’s a battalion, isn’t it?” Barnett said with a sneer. “Or doesn’t your Foreign Legion use the same military units as the rest of the Colonial Army?”

“A provisional battalion is formed from scratch, Citizen Jens.” Fraser went on, as if Barnett hadn’t spoken. “To put one together, the Legion takes whatever extra companies happen to be handy and puts them into a unified command. Two companies plus support troops isn’t unusual, especially for a hurry-up job like this. More companies are scheduled to join us later, unless something else diverts them in the meantime.”

“Meaning we get whatever nobody else wants, I suppose,” Jens muttered darkly.

“What else could you expect with the Legion?” Barnett asked her. “Criminals and screw-ups …”

Across the table from him, Gunnery Sergeant Trent made a low-voiced comment. “Criminals and screw-ups who might just have to save your ass from the nomads, Citizen.”

Fraser broke in to keep the exchange from going any further. “If you would reconsider the plan I submitted last month for native auxiliaries, Citizen Jens, we might be able to police things the way you want without any more Legion troops.”

“Native auxiliaries!” Jens laughed. “Get into orbit, Fraser! You’ve seen the locals. Lazy, shiftless … what use would they be as soldiers?”

“I think you’re underestimating them, Citizen. I’ve … seen the townies at close range, and they’d make good enough fighters.” He rubbed a bruise on his left arm as he spoke. “The nomads are even better material. They have the local knowledge we need to really make ourselves effective on Polypheme.”

“You’d trust the nomads? I’ve seen the xenopsych reports, Fraser. They don’t think anything like us. No concept of loyalty to anything higher than their own Clan … no understanding of tactical coordination.…”

“We all know how you Legion types like to set up native armies so there will be plenty of soft billets for your legionnaires to fill as officers and noncoms,” Barnett said. “But the whole idea of arming and training the wogs … that’s ridiculous.”

“Someone doesn’t think so,” Fraser commented. “Someone’s equipping them with high-tech gear, and they’re discovering tactical coordination fast enough, too.”

They were sitting in the conference room set aside for the garrison staff, adjacent to the suite of offices and living quarters that housed Captain Hawley and his small staff. Formal discussions wouldn’t begin until the captain joined them, but that hadn’t kept anyone from airing his views.

Fraser studied the two civilians. They shared the common attitude most outsiders held for the Legion, but that was nothing unusual. More surprising was the contempt they directed at the natives. It was fashionable for the idle rich back on Terra to spout human-supremacist nonsense, but out on the frontiers those attitudes were usually rare.

Barnett, especially, puzzled him. The man had been doing fieldwork on Polypheme for three years. How could anyone research a culture for that long and still hold it in such low regard?

DuValier spoke up from further down the table. “Actually, Captain Fraser has already shown that nomads can be used in conjunction with our troops, at least as native scouts,” he said in his flat, toneless voice. “He has been training twenty of them for several weeks now.”

“On what authorization?” Jens asked sharply.

Fraser glared at his Exec before answering. “Captain Hawley and I agreed it would be a good idea to look into the possibility,” he said. “Nor do I think that Seafarms can overrule the military command on this kind of point.” Inwardly, he was seething. As if he didn’t have enough trouble with these civilians, now his XO was complicating things.

What the hell was DuValier’s problem, anyway?

The door at the far end of the room slid open with a complaining whine. Gunnery Sergeant Istvan Valko and Lieutenant Susan Gage strode briskly through the wide, squat doorway. Valko, Alpha Company’s senior NCO, marked out a brisk “Ten-hut!”

The legionnaires in the room, including Fraser, stood as Captain David Hawley followed the others. As Hawley took his place at the head of the table, Fraser watched him sadly.

A phrase Father Fitzpatrick, Bravo Company’s chaplain, was particularly fond of ran through Fraser’s mind. “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”

Hawley was old for his rank, well past fifty, and looked even older after years of hard drink and the neglect that went with dreamchip addiction. His expression was vague, his eyes empty, a sure sign that he had been in dreamland when Gage and Valko roused him for the meeting. The man spent a lot of time in the living dreams of his habit, feeding fantasies directly into the brain by way of the computer implant in his skull.

Almost thirty years ago, David Hawley had been the hero of the fighting on Aten, when marauding Ubrenfars had nearly plunged most of the frontier into war. A lieutenant in the Legion, Hawley had stopped the Ubrenfars cold with a perfectly executed ambush by the survivors of his company. Promotion and recognition followed, but somehow it had all gone wrong. Hawley was shunted from one deadend post to another, his brilliant mind wasted in minor administrative jobs and routine garrison duty. He turned to dreamland for stimulation, but the mock battles he fought in his mind proved more real to him than his waking life.

The classic pattern of dreamchip addiction … with the inevitable aftermath. Hawley lost out on promotions he might have earned, and gradually slid into obscurity.

There, but for the grace of God … Fraser was all too aware of how similar his career was to Hawley’s early days.

He could end up like David Hawley, a superannuated Legion captain, grasping at memories and might-have-beens. The thought made him flinch, made his skin crawl.

“Ah … Mr. Fraser, why don’t you, ah … take things in hand,” Hawley said, blinking vaguely.

“Yes, sir,” Fraser replied. He knew a lot of officers who treated Hawley with contempt, but he had vowed never to be one of them. Somewhere under the drink and the chip addiction, the hero of Aten remained.

He touched a stud on the table to call up Watanabe’s report on the monitor screen mounted on the wall behind him. “Seafarms Cyclops was attacked around sunset by a strong force of nomads armed with high-tech weaponry and employing tactics that are far beyond anything previously credited to the locals on this planet.” He manipulated a computer pointer to indicate specific features on an image of the captured alien weaponry. “This is a five-millimeter rocket launcher. The design is unfamiliar, but as you can see here the grip is obviously intended to accommodate hands not unlike a wog’s. The whole mechanism is covered in a substance similar to duraplast. Subaltern Watanabe believes it is intended to insulate the weapon from the effects of corrosive seawater, and Warrant Officer Koenig, my Native Affairs specialist, concurs.”

“Wait a moment, Fraser,” Barnett said. “Are you trying to tell us that these things are manufactured locally? The wogs don’t have that capability, and you know it!”

Fraser shook his head. “My people think that these are being brought in from off-planet, but they’ve been designed specifically for conditions on Polypheme.” He paused a moment to let the implications of that sink in. “Someone is not only running guns to the natives, they’re doing it as part of a consistent policy involving a long-term manufacturing commitment off-planet.”

“Who?” Lieutenant Gage asked. “Any indications?”

“I’d put money on Semti renegades,” Trent growled. The Semti, once the rulers of a vast interstellar sphere, had lost control to upstart Terrans after the destruction of their capital by a human battle fleet nearly a century ago. Semti administrators now worked diligently for their new overlords, but more than one plot had been uncovered in the decades since the end of the war. The fighting on Hanuman had been inspired by Semti agents, and probably the Ubrenfar campaign Hawley remembered as well.

“Could be Semti,” Fraser agreed. “Or the Toeljuks. They leased the planet from the Semti, and I’m sure their leaders would like to get it back. Or we could be talking about human gunrunners, you know.” He glanced at Barnett and Jens. “There’s a lot of profit in instability, after all.”

Barnett looked away. Jens met Fraser’s stare with a level gaze of her own. “Surely it’s a moot point, Captain,” she said. “I would think we’d be better employed talking about security measures, not picturing plots and revolutions.”

“What, ah … what do you have in mind?” Hawley asked.

It was Barnett who answered. “Obviously the first imperative is to protect the Cyclops,” he said. “I would say our first priority should be the dispatch of at least one more platoon, preferably two more, to the ship.”

“Unacceptable,” Fraser snapped. “We have no idea what kind of reach the opposition has, or what their object might be. Diluting our defenses would be the worst possible thing at this point.”

“What do you recommend, then, Captain?” Jens asked.

“Recall the Cyclops to port at once. Keep her here where we can concentrate all our forces until we know what we’re facing. Shut down operations in Ourgh, too, and bring all Terran personnel out here. Right now we’re spread too thin.”

Barnett started to make an angry response, but Jens overrode him. “I’m sorry, Captain, but that’s equally unacceptable. The corporation is on Polypheme to make money, and we can’t do that crouched here in the Sandcastle. The Cyclops Project can’t be jeopardized at this stage. We have to show that it can operate at a profit, or the whole concept will be abandoned. And that would be a disaster, not just for Seafarms but for this whole planet. Without something like the mineral extraction operation, the Commonwealth will pull out entirely.”

Fraser leaned forward in his chair. “I think you should reconsider, Citizen,” he said quietly. “If you want the Legion to provide security, you’re going to have to let us do it right. Otherwise …”

“You know as well as I do that your unit is answerable to civilian authority—my authority—as long as it is deployed on Polypheme,” Jens said flatly.

“Except in cases where Commonwealth security considerations are stronger.”

She smiled without humor. “I’d suggest you have some pretty powerful proof before you go invoking that clause, Captain. Unless you’re planning an early retirement? I’m sure Reynier Industries can arrange it … if you fail to show the proper spirit of cooperation.”

Fraser bit back an angry reply. He glanced at Hawley again.

There, but for the grace of God …