Chapter Twelve

You have to be tough with recruits. We get very hard men coming into the Legion, and hard men expect hard treatment. That’s why they join the Legion.

—A drill instructor French Foreign Legion, 1984

“Reveille! Reveille! Come on, you nubes, up! Up!”

The numbing shock of a stun baton between his shoulder blades made Wolf scramble out of his cot, groggy and barely able to remember where he was. The attention was entirely impersonal, though. Corporal Vanyek was already moving on to prod Volunteer Scott into wakefulness. Across the common room Wolf saw Antonelli, face and torso mottled with the bruises of the beating in the shower room, leaning against his locker door and fumbling with his clothes.

“Come on, people, what are you waiting for?” Vanyek demanded. “Let’s get with it! Assembly on the parade ground in five minutes. Wear your sweats, ’cause that’s what you’re gonna be doing out there! Mag it! Mag it!”

Wolf groped in his locker for his clothes and dressed, still trying to clear his head. By the time he was done, Kern and Myaighee were helping Antonelli, and the whole lance poured out of the building at the same time. They formed up alongside the rest of the platoon, shivering in the cold predawn wind that blew off the Great Desert. The other platoons of the training company poured out of adjacent buildings.

Sergeant Horst Konrad blew a whistle and trotted into view, looking too fresh, too alert. “What a sorry bunch of nubes!” he shouted. “When reveille sounds you people had better mag it out here on FTL, or I’ll know the reason why! Now all of you drop and give me fifty!”

He pushed them through a grueling series of calisthenic exercises, with frequent repetitions when anyone failed to perform to his satisfaction. Wolf kept expecting to see Vanyek or one of the other noncoms wielding their ubiquitous stun batons among the sweating, straining recruits, but they were nowhere to be seen.

Finally, it ended and they were back in line, standing stiffly at attention. “All right, you nubes!” Konrad said brusquely. “Chow line forms in ten minutes. Change to fatigues before you eat, and police the barracks! Go!”

Wolf and the rest of the lance trotted back into the barracks, only to find their room a complete shambles. While they had been exercising, someone had dumped the contents of their lockers on the floor and overturned all the cots. Wolf discovered that his uniforms had been thoroughly soaked in the scented antibeard lotion he’d purchased at the base exchange a few days before. Judging from the noise coming from elsewhere in the building, the other lances had found similar scenes waiting for them as well.

“Cristo!” Antonelli moaned, righting his cot and sitting on it with an air of hopelessness. “Why the hell did they do this? As if we don’t have enough grief already!”

“What’s the matter, nube?” Vanyek’s mocking voice came from the doorway. “You want your mother to come and clean up for you?” The corporal’s cold blue eyes fixed on Wolf, and he gave an exaggerated sniff. “Fancy perfume. Too good for the common soldiers, I’d say, but just right for a fancy aristo. Smells expensive. Was it expensive, Aristo?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “There’s no servants in the Legion to keep you fine aristocrats from getting your hands dirty. You’d better get this mess cleaned up and get changed in a hurry if you want to have any breakfast!” He spat eloquently and moved on, leaving the recruits staring at the mess in dismay.

Myaighee broke the spell. “Kern, you and Antonelli get the cots in order.” The alien’s nose wrinkled. “Wolf, see if you can find a set of fatigues that isn’t too wet. Scott and I will start folding clothes and putting the lockers in order, yes?”

Wolf had to suppress the urge to tell the hannie to mind its own business. Myaighee was his lance leader, and if Vanyek or Konrad found out he’d disobeyed the alien’s orders there might be trouble. And, after all, Myaighee had told him to do exactly what he would have done anyway.…

It took nearly twenty minutes to restore order from the chaos and lay out each locker in the exact order prescribed by the Legion. By the time they reached the mess hall, they had only ten minutes left to go through the chow line and get a few bites to eat. The strong smell of antibeard lotion made several other recruits make comments about his taste in perfume, but Wolf wasn’t the only one in the company who’d been given the treatment. Volunteer Kochu Burundai, the nomad from Ulan-Tala, had found all of his uniforms lying in a pool of water in the showers. He promptly received the nickname “Soak” and was the butt of at least as many jokes as Wolf.

Then Konrad was blowing his whistle again and shouting orders. Wolf gulped down a bitter cup of Ysan tea and joined the race for the parade ground.

Once outside, the sergeant set them to running, leading them at a brisk pace across the camp and out into the rugged desert beyond. Konrad and the other noncoms didn’t seem to find it a strain, but the recruits, already tired and hungry, were hard-pressed to keep up. Corporals with stun batons helped the laggards find a second wind, though. Somehow Wolf forced himself to keep going, though it took every ounce of willpower. He saw Vanyek darting looks in his direction from time to time, but he was determined not to give the corporal the satisfaction of seeing him fail.

Antonelli wasn’t so fortunate. After what Wolf estimated was five kilometers the recruit stumbled and fell, and Vanyek’s stun baton couldn’t get him moving again. The unit kept going. As other stragglers fell by the wayside, a medical van on screeching turbofans skimmed by, stopping to gather in the casualties.

Eventually, the torment was over, and they were back on the parade ground gasping and panting. Wolf’s uniform, still smelling faintly of antibeard now thoroughly mixed with sweat, was making him itch, and the long run had almost done him in. But he had made it, seen it through, and that was what was important. Konrad dismissed them with curt orders to shower, change into fresh fatigues, and assemble in ten minutes.

When Wolf stumbled back onto the parade ground, Vanyek gave him a quick cuff and a jolt from his stun baton for being the last man back from the showers. Antonelli and the other stragglers were back in ranks now, looking dejected. Wolf thought he could detect a few fresh bruises on the battered youngster’s face.

He wasn’t sure what to expect next after the hard pace of the morning workout. Incredibly, what followed was two hours of singing practice under Konrad’s stern tutelage.

“You nubes will learn the songs of the Legion,” the sergeant told them harshly. “You will practice until you can sing any song, any time, to my satisfaction!”

He started with the words to “Devereaux Lament,” a slow, sad ballad of the Fourth Foreign Legion and Hunter’s last battle against the Ubrenfar and Semti forces more than a hundred years back. Shouting the words a line at a time, making the recruits repeat them back over and over, Konrad looked like some mad choirmaster with his crisp fatigues and close-cropped head. Wolf almost laughed, until he saw Lisa Scott chuckle and then gasp as Vanyek used his stun baton on her.

It seemed absurd, but one of the lectures he’d chipped aboard Kolwezi had discussed the importance of singing in Legion training. Songs helped transmit the spirit and mystique of the Legion, and singing bound the recruits together on a basic, very human level. Like so many other aspects of the training program, it was one of the old, solid traditions that went back almost to the beginnings of Legion history.

Once he got past the seeming silliness of it all, Wolf had to admit he enjoyed the interlude.

Unfortunately, after two hours it was time to parade for lunch, which meant falling in to ranks again, going through another round of calisthenics, and then trotting off after Konrad, singing “Devereaux Lament,” to the mess hall. They had more time for this meal, but there was still precious little chance for relaxation before the training started up again.

* * *

That first day set the pace for the next three weeks of Basic. Mornings were spent in physical training, exercising, marching, running, singing. After the noon mess call, the platoon usually shifted to academics in the lecture halls of the admin building, where the recruits went over material from individual training chips and had a chance to do practical, hands-on work that reinforced the chip courses. The period following the evening meal was supposed to be set aside to give them time to study chips or relax, though Wolf soon discovered that this “free time” was frequently taken up by extra duty imposed at the whim of Vanyek, Konrad, or Sergeant Baram, Konrad’s deputy.

This standard pattern was by no means a constant, though. Some days the morning march turned into an all-day excursion, and during the second week the whole company covered fifty long desert kilometers on foot, then made camp overnight and returned the next day. It was hard work, far harder than anything Wolf had experienced in the Sky Guard Academy, and as the days passed, he found himself wondering more and more if the noncoms who had doubted his ability to measure up might have known what they were talking about after all.

Still, he kept on trying. During that first overnight march, he managed to stick with the column all day, though there were others who fell behind. Two days later, Wolf was pleasantly surprised to find himself selected to give instruction to the rest of the platoon in saber fighting, and for at least an hour a day he could feel that even Vanyek and Konrad had to respect him a little bit.

Throughout these early weeks, the drills and lectures were only a part of the overall training process, though if it hadn’t been for Kern’s observations Wolf might never have noticed the deeper significance of the work. The Legion program started with the assumption that every recruit was completely inexperienced not just in military matters but even in many of the accepted norms of education and proper social behavior. At first it seemed a waste of time and effort, but as time went on Wolf could see how the recruits absorbed the lessons that made the Legion a common denominator for all of them. Rich in tradition, the Fifth Foreign Legion was almost a culture apart, as far removed from Antonelli’s origins on the streets of Rome as it was from Wolf’s aristocratic Besaran heritage. Though Wolf remained cynical about the whole process, he watched men like Burundai latch on to their new “culture” eagerly, and understood how the Legion could breed the fanaticism he had seen in some of the noncoms’ eyes.

On a purely military level, it was probably right to approach the training in such a stolid, step-by-painful-step way. Out of his training company of one hundred and twenty recruits, forty-eight admitted to prior military service, but there was a wide gap between Wolf’s Sky Guard background and the experience of Engaged Volunteer Hosni Mayzar, a twenty-year veteran of the Commonwealth’s crack Centauri Rangers who was leader of Second Platoon’s Echo Lance. And the ones with no military background at all had to learn even the simplest of things from the ground up. Those with some soldiering experience were expected to help the others along, whether they were giving formal instruction like Wolf’s saber training, or just passing along advice and useful tips as Kern seemed to do for his lancemates almost daily. The “veterans” didn’t get a break from the training routine just because they already understood something, though. They were expected to relearn the military trade the Legion way.

Like so much in the Legion, it made sense when viewed dispassionately, but it was damned hard to deal with the Legion’s ruthless but often painfully slow approach to turning the recruits into soldiers.

As the end of the first phase of the training program drew near, the recruits in Wolf’s lance were beginning to draw together into a solid, close-knit unit. Wolf grudgingly gave much of the credit to Myaighee, the hannie. He—no one in Fort Hunter bothered with the alien term “ky”—didn’t seem likely as lance leader, but somehow Myaighee did the job without losing the soft-spoken, diffident manner that was the little being’s most noticeable characteristic. Although he came from a background entirely unlike anything the human members of the lance could comprehend, Myaighee seemed to understand the Legion and its ways better than any of them. Perhaps that came with experience. Myaighee had started out as a servant employed by Terrans on Hanuman, his home planet, but during a rising by his people against the human population, he had thrown his lot in with the offworlders and ended up joining a column of legionnaires marching across hostile jungles to the safety of the main Terran enclave. In the course of the campaign the alien had helped the legionnaires on more than one occasion, and when it was all over he had chosen to stay with the unit rather than return to the home he had left behind. Another campaign on Hanuman, and one on the watery world of Polypheme, had followed.

Wolf still had trouble accepting Myaighee as a superior, or even as an equal … but surely once they were in the field the natural order of things would assert itself and the nonhuman members of the legion would find the proper place. After all, according to the background chips less than ten percent of the Fifth Foreign Legion was made up of nonhumans.

Mario Antonelli was still the odd man out in the lance, but the young man’s brash, cocksure attitude had softened under Legion discipline. Antonelli’s background typified everything the Uro aristocracy of Laut Besar objected to in the Commonwealth. Convicted of some minor offense—no one in the lance knew what he’d done, and the Legion tradition of asking no questions about a man’s past kept it that way—Antonelli had been sentenced to serve a hitch in the Legion, one of a handful in the training company who hadn’t volunteered.

Strangely, it was Myaighee who got along best with the moody youngster. The alien claimed that one of his lancemates from his old outfit had come from a similar sort of background, and encouraged him to devote his free time to wood carving and other hobbies with surprisingly good results. In training he tried hard and seemed determined to succeed, but he frequently ran afoul of Vanyek and Konrad through carelessness. Wolf found it hard to show much sympathy to a man from such a completely foreign social strata, and Lisa Scott continued to treat Antonelli with disdain. Nor did the Italian seem particularly interested in overcoming their low opinions. Everything he did seemed focused on the bare effort to hang on no matter what the Legion threw at him.

On the other hand, everyone found Tom Kern easy to talk to but hard to know. The big redhead was a quiet man. He never spoke of his past or his reasons for joining the Legion. He spent most of his free time alone. He knew a great deal about the training process and occasionally let slip comments about his past as a drill instructor. Most of the recruits figured him for a deserter who had sought out the anonymity of the Legion to ply the only trade he knew.

Whether the speculation was true or not, Kern was the ideal lancemate. Though he rarely sought out the companionship of others, he was always willing to put aside his own problems and share an hour in spinning a yarn or playing cards, and on the parade ground his consistently cheerful, solid competence was valuable to the entire lance. Academics gave him more than his fair share of problems, but Wolf had started as his tutor early on and they were making good progress. And though Kern in his way was as far removed in background and social standing as Antonelli, Wolf regarded him as something more than just another member of the unit. He was no substitute for the faithful Suartana, whose posting to First Platoon kept him well out of Wolf’s orbit, but he was as close as Wolf expected to find in the Legion.

The fifth member of the lance was altogether more of a puzzle. Lisa Scott’s background was even more mysterious than Kern’s. No one had an inkling of why she had joined the Foreign Legion or where she had come from, but Wolf thought he recognized in her the quality of another aristo. She was not from Laut Besar, of course, but she plainly came from a good bloodline and had enjoyed the same kind of wealth and good education he’d received. But she was a startling contrast to the pampered, protected daughters of the Uro aristocracy he’d known on Laut Besar. Self-assured, independent, and as tough as any of the men in the training company, she should have seemed as alien as Myaighee in Wolf’s eyes, but somehow the qualities he would have found repugnant in a woman of his homeworld seemed ideal for Lisa Scott.

He might have sought a closer relationship with her, but the memory of that unwavering knife and her cold blue eyes in the confrontation with Antonelli made Wolf cautious. She remained completely aloof from all the recruits, male, female, and alien alike, a loner who did her job but seemed unable or unwilling to lower her barriers and let anyone else get close.

He could sympathize with the feeling. The more he saw of these people who had chosen the Legion life the more Wolf wondered at his own choice. Sometimes he felt like more of an alien than Myaighee. It was a feeling he wasn’t sure he liked … but the alternative, becoming a part of all this, scared him even more.

* * *

“All right, next up! Antonelli! Let’s go! Let’s go! We could spend your whole strakking enlistment waiting for you to get moving! Go!”

Wolf suppressed a smile as Antonelli stumbled on his way to the weapons rack at the front of the Barracks 18 exercise room. For all of his tough talk, the youngster couldn’t manage to keep his cool in the face of one of Sergeant Konrad’s badgering tirades. The sergeant came from Lebensraum, where most of the Besaran Uros had originated, and his uncompromising drive for perfection never failed to remind Wolf of his own grandfather. Konrad was no aristocrat, but he would have been right at home supervising an onnesium mine or running an industrial complex on Laut Besar … at least, on Laut Besar before the Ubrenfars came.

Antonelli selected a saber and stepped onto the strip facing Wolf. Saluting the Italian with his blade, Wolf dropped into the guard position.

“I want you to try the disengage I showed you earlier,” he said. “Remember that the idea behind the disengage attack is to mislead your enemy, to make him parry a false blow and leave himself open to your real strike. Do you understand?”

The youngster nodded a little uncertainly and dropped into guard stance without a blade salute. Wolf frowned, then dismissed the slip. Antonelli had enough trouble with the practical end of saber fighting without further confusing him by insisting on precise adherence to the proper forms. Later Wolf would have to go over the etiquette of dueling.

For just an instant Wolf looked over his blade at Neubeck, not Antonelli, and knew a moment’s revulsion. The feel of the sword in his hand kept bringing back bitter memories of that day on Robespierre. He fought back the feeling and nodded. “Begin.”

Antonelli beat his blade once, a brief tap lacking authority. His second beat, on the same side of the blade, was a little firmer, and Wolf nodded in encouragement. The younger recruit screwed up his face in concentration and struck Wolf’s blade a third time, then twisted his wrist to the left to make the disengage attack. Wolf parried the blow and stepped back, lowering his saber.

“All right,” he said with another nod. “Now that one wasn’t too bad, but you need to work on your technique. You’ve been chipping too many swashbucklers, kid, and you’ve got a tendency to make your attacks a little too wild. Keep your attacks precise and controlled. That’s the way to win the point.”

The younger recruit nodded, but Wolf wasn’t sure how much he actually understood. Before he had a chance to go on, though, he was interrupted by Sergeant Konrad. “Right! Platoon … muster on the parade ground for calisthenics! Move! Move! Move!”

The order caught Wolf by surprise. He had thought they’d have another half hour or so of fencing. But Konrad was nothing if not unpredictable, and he shrugged and headed for the weapons rack to put his saber away.

Konrad intercepted him as the rest of the recruits filed out of the exercise room at a trot. “You, nube,” he said, his voice harsh. “You are a good fencer.”

The sergeant rarely paid a compliment without balancing it with something scathing, and Wolf halted in mid-motion at the words. “Thank you, sergeant,” he said tentatively.

“A good fencer … but the Legion doesn’t want good fencers.” Konrad picked up a saber and hefted it in his hand. “We are not training recruits to fight saber in the Commonwealth Games, nube. Or to fight in duels between aristos, either. Do you know why we train our legionnaires to fight with blades, nube?”

“Uh … I thought I did, Sergeant,” Wolf replied. “It speeds the reflexes, sharpens perception …”

“Nein! Nein!” Once again Wolf was reminded of his grandfather as Konrad lapsed into the German of Wolfgang Hauser’s youth. “We fight with swords because some day we may have to use them in battle, nube! Many times our garrisons are on primitive planets where the sword is a major weapon. The Wynsarrysa outlaws right here on Devereaux use blades, for instance, when they can’t take anything better from settlers. So we learn enough that a legionnaire can fight with whatever weapons come to hand. That is why we learn saber … and knife fighting, and hand-to-hand combat, and all the rest. Do you understand that?”

“Yes, Sergeant,” Wolf replied slowly. He still wasn’t sure why Konrad had decided to point all this out to him, but he was learning from experience to be careful in dealing with the man.

“When you train my men,” Konrad went on, “I want you to stop worrying so much about proper forms and good technique. I want my legionnaires to know how to defend themselves with a blade, not how to score points in a match. Understand me?”

“Yes, Sergeant,” Wolf repeated.

“Good. Keep one thing in mind, nube, and we’ll get along just fine. In the Legion, we fight to win. Not for any other reason. We fight to win.”

Konrad turned away abruptly. “Now move it, nube, or I’ll have you on report!”