Chapter Thirteen

There are many, too many, who join the Legion with no sort of qualification for a soldier’s life, and these men do no good to themselves or to France by enlisting.

—A Legion recruiting officer,
French Foreign Legion, 1889

“Look sharp! Look sharp! It could come at us from anywhere!”

Wolf hunkered lower behind the protective bulk of a rock outcropping and blanked his mind to access the interface chip that controlled his combat helmet. The tiny computer could translate thought into orders that could govern a variety of helmet functions, from communications to vision settings to tactical data displays, though it was far less complex than a conventional adchip or computer implant. An ordinary soldier not only didn’t need full-scale computer access, but in fact would be handicapped by having too much information available at times when survival depended on combat instincts rather than sophisticated data retrieval. But the combat helmet was a versatile tool he was finally beginning to master.

He called up a sensor map on the inside of the helmet’s faceplate. Superimposed on the computer-generated topographic chart, five green triangles showed how he and his four lancemates were spread out over the barren ground in a loose skirmish line. He took careful note of their positions to avoid any chance of mistaking one of them for the hostiles who would be trying to penetrate the defensive zone sometime in the next few minutes.

“Look sharp, people,” Kern repeated, voice gruff. Despite his experience, he sounded as much on edge as any of them.

Wolf switched off the map and raised his faceplate to get an eyeball view of his surroundings. The Legion combat helmet was an amazingly versatile piece of equipment, fitted with a computer-coordinated sensor system that could generate a wide range of different displays, including maps, optical sighting, passive and active infrared, light-intensification, and electronic magnification and image enhancement, but none of them was a completely satisfactory replacement for the human eye and brain. He still trusted his own senses best.

Motion to his left attracted Wolf’s attention, but it was Lisa Scott running a zigzag course to reach a gully that would give her a better view of the battlefield. The lance was fitted out as a heavy weapons unit, and she was acting as a spotter.

He shifted the bulky tube of the Fafnir missile launcher in his hands. It was a versatile weapon that packed a powerful punch, its programmable targeting system equally effective at seeking out and destroying any specific target type, ground or air. But he didn’t care much for the job of Fafnir gunner. The notion of having only five warheads and a pistol to fall back on when his ammo was used up made him appreciate the standard-issue FE-FEK battle rifle with its hundred-round magazine of Mylar-coated plastic needles and the 1 cm autogrenade launcher. That was a weapon that could keep a soldier in a firefight.…

But for now he had the Fafnir, and the tacdata briefing had reported the likely opposition would be small, fast-moving Ubrenfar attack pods which wouldn’t be vulnerable to ordinary small arms fire. That put most of the burden on Wolf and Antonelli, who was carrying the unit’s onager plasma gun.

“Motion! Motion bearing three-two-three degrees!” Kern called out.

“Gunner ready!” Myaighee chimed in.

Wolf swung to face the indicated stretch of terrain. It was dominated by a series of low, undulating ridges that could mask the approach of an enemy.

The on-board fire-and-forget tracking system on the Fafnir could be programmed to discriminate an Ubrenfar attack pod—or almost any other type of vehicle, aircraft, or installation the Legion expected to come up against—and attack it at long range, unhampered by considerations of intervening terrain or line-of-sight. Wolf opened his mouth to request a “weapons free” order from Myaighee, then bit back the question. Over and over again during weapons training he’d been given stun-lashings by Vanyek and other instructors for trying to tell the lance leader how to do his job. That was a mistake he wouldn’t dare to make again.

Anyway, it might not be an attack pod. Without visual confirmation he might just be throwing away a missile to no purpose. Better to play it safe.…

At that moment, as if to taunt him over his decision, the attack pod darted into view from behind the cover of the ridge at lightning speed. The flattened sphere paused, suspended on magrep fields as its turret sensors swiveled in search of a target. Wolf gritted his teeth and fought the urge to open fire with his Fafnir. Doctrine required him to give the onager gunner first crack at a target. The Fafnir’s limited ammo supply could be a drawback in a firefight. But the fusil d’onage Antonelli was carrying, on the other hand, was good for twenty high-powered shots and could be recharged from any fusion power source. When the target was in plain line of sight, the onager had priority.

But the onager wasn’t firing, and the attack pod was starting to move once again.

“Fire, damn it!” The angry voice was loud in Wolf’s ear. “Fire the goddamned onager! Fire something, for Tophet’s sake!”

The Ubrenfar vehicle was gathering speed, closing on his position. Wolf’s fingers danced over the Fafnir’s programming keys, feeding in the target type information the fire-and-forget missile needed to lock on and attack.

Suddenly a bolt of raw energy surged across the open field as Antonelli opened fire at last. A clump of scrub a good fifty meters to the left of the target vanished in the searing fury of the onager bolt. The attack pod shot off at an angle on powerful fusion airjets, disappearing behind another low ridgeline. Wolf squeezed the trigger on the Fafnir, watching the missile streak skyward and then arc down.

There was a flash before the warhead was even below the masking terrain. A moment later the attack pod was in sight again, its weapons trained precisely on Wolf’s foxhole.

Then the image flickered and faded out as the holographic projector creating the illusion cut out.

“You’re dead, Stinky!” Vanyek shouted from behind him. “No more perfume for you, ever, and all thanks to Lover-boy!”

“Ah, shit, man,” Antonelli said, clambering out of his own foxhole and pulling off the heavy-duty combat helmet that covered his face. “If he’d started shooting before the machine broke cover that bastardo never would’ve come close.”

Wolf didn’t respond. For three days now Vanyek’s section had been training with support weapons, with each lance in turn acting the part of a heavy weapons unit on the firing range. The standard doctrine for engagements like this one had been drummed into them over and over, but Antonelli seemed unable or unwilling to comprehend the role each weapon was supposed to play in combat.

“Get your sorry asses down here,” Vanyek snapped. “Now!”

Wolf checked the Fafnir’s safety and trotted back from the firing line to the trench where Vanyek and the other recruits waited. It took longer for Antonelli to cross the distance, hampered as he was by the bulky onager and the full body armor required to protect him from the weapon’s deadly, scorching backblast. As the Italian appeared at the lip of the trench and started to climb down, Vanyek swore and darted toward him.

“Christ Almighty!” the corporal said. His hand reached up to yank the power cord connecting the weapon to Antonelli’s ConRig harness assembly. A red light on top of the onager went out. “You strakking idiot, you didn’t safe your weapon! You could’ve fried everybody, damn it!”

Antonelli blanched and stammered his response. “I-I’m s-s-sorry …”

“Sorry doesn’t cut it, you stupid bastard!” Vanyek shouted, thrusting his face a few centimeters from the Italian’s. “Never, ever leave the firing line without safing your weapon, for God’s sake! Now get out of that armor. You’re done for the day.”

As Kern and Scott moved forward to help Antonelli start to unstrap his armor, Vanyek turned away to address the section as a whole. “All right! Critique! What did these two straks do wrong out there? Myaighee!”

The hannie shot an apologetic glance at Antonelli before he replied. “Volunteer Antonelli should, by doctrine, have engaged the target as soon as it was in plain sight. The Fafnir must be preserved as a weapon of last recourse, except as specified otherwise by higher authority.”

“True enough,” Vanyek said. “Mayzar?”

The leader of Echo lance answered briskly. “When he did fire the onager, Antonelli overcompensated on the aim. The onager is more responsive than it looks, because the ConRig slaves the tracking system to the operator’s eye movements.” He sounded like he was reciting from the instruction chip. “As a result, his shot was too wide to do any good, and there was no opportunity for a second attempt.”

Vanyek gave him a curt nod. Mayzar had spent more than his share of time trying to get the hang of the tricky ConRig system. Although he was one of the most experienced soldiers in the recruit company, his time with the Centauri Rangers had stressed other skills than heavy weaponry, and he was sadly out of practice. It was no wonder he could quote the chip instructions verbatim. He’d gone over them often enough.

“Who else noticed mistakes?”

None of the other recruits answered. After a long pause, the corporal turned to face Wolf. “All right, here’s a few. Wolf waited to program his target type until he had visual verification of the pod even though he knew that was what we were going to be up against.…”

“But—” Wolf bit off the rest of his protest too late. He grunted as Vanyek slapped his arm with the stun baton.

“It takes no longer to reprogram a Fafnir than it does to program from scratch,” Vanyek went on as if nothing had happened. “If your intel briefings say you’re up against a specific weapons system you should be ready to handle it. Just make sure you’re also ready to handle surprises quickly as they arise. Preprogramming the Fafnir might have given you the edge to hit the bastard while he was still scurrying for cover.”

He let the point sink in for a moment before jabbing his baton at Kern. “And you, nube. Where were you in all this?”

The redhead looked glum. “I should have laid down sustained fire as soon as the pod came into view, Corporal,” he said. The big ex-Marine looked down at the MEK he still cradled in his hands. It was a larger, heavier version of the FEK with a bigger magazine and larger-caliber ammo, useful for antipersonnel and general suppression fire.

“That’s right,” Vanyek said with a sarcastic edge to his voice. “Your fire might have caused the bad guys to hesitate even if you couldn’t penetrate their armor. The mix of weapons in your lance is designed to be mutually supporting, and you weren’t pulling your share. Why not?”

Kern looked embarrassed. “I guess I knew that the simulation wouldn’t be diverted that way, Corporal,” he admitted slowly. “So I didn’t want to waste the ammo.”

Vanyek looked at him with an expression that mingled disappointment and distaste for a long moment. “We’ll give you some time to think about that doing a few laps around the range in place of lunch,” he said at last. He raised his voice. “I expect you all to treat every exercise exactly like the real thing. You understand me?”

The corporal glared at the recruits. “Next point. Myaighee, you’re the lance leader. Why weren’t you taking charge?”

The hannie looked back at Vanyek, neck ruff stiffening. “I understood this to be an exercise for the gunners, Corporal,” he said slowly.

“The lance is a unit, damn it!” Vanyek shot back. “You should know that by now! In the field it would have been your job to encourage your gunners … and to give the order releasing the Fafnir sooner. You said it yourself: higher authority is supposed to decide when to override doctrine. Your job! Nobody fired until I said something, and they don’t issue instructors in your battlefield supplies!”

There were some chuckles from the rest of the section. Wolf started to smile, not so much at the corporal’s joke as at the satisfaction of seeing Myaighee taken down a peg or two. Because of the hannie’s past Legion experience the little alien had always come across as a cut above the rest of the recruits. And although Wolf had come to admire his skill in handling the disparate characters in the lance, he still found it hard to accept a nonhuman as a superior. Now that the hannie had made a mistake, maybe attitudes would be changing.…

“And you can wipe that grin off your face, Stinky,” Vanyek said sharply, jerking Wolf out of his reverie with a quick brush of his stun baton. “Just because you didn’t have orders is no reason to sit still and do nothing!”

He replied without thinking. “But doctrine …”

Vanyek jabbed him in the stomach with the stun baton, and he doubled over in pain as the muscles of his stomach and diaphragm went into spasm. “Doctrine is no excuse for stupidity, nube,” the corporal told him. He stepped back, raising his voice for the benefit of the others. “When are you straks gonna get it through your heads that this is combat training? Kill or be killed, that’s the name of the game. Out on the battlefield you have to think for yourself. If you stick to one set of rules and freeze up when you can’t find some tenet of doctrine to cover your ass you’re gonna end up dead … maybe take a bunch of your buddies out with you, too. So you use doctrine, but you use your own initiative, too. If you see that something’s not going the way it’s supposed to—and that pretty much describes any battle you’ll ever be in—then you have to adapt. Act. Don’t just sit still and wait to get killed.”

Lisa Scott raised a diffident hand. “Corporal?”

“What is it, Scott?” Vanyek’s voice was almost gentle, now. She was the only one of the five who hadn’t drawn his ire.

“If we’re supposed to think for ourselves, why drum the by-the-book doctrine into us?”

The corporal gave a thin-lipped smile. “Because the rest of the army, not having the benefit of seeing screwups like you, still believes in a perfect world,” he said quietly. “It’s true that under textbook conditions it would be best to take out an attack pod with an onager and save the Fafnirs for better targets. And we’d rather see you try it that way because Fafnir warheads are expensive and we don’t want to waste them … nor do we want to use up all our shots the first time the bad guys show up, and end up with nothing but rocks to throw at them later on. So we teach you to give the onagers a chance at the easy targets first.”

Vanyek’s voice became harder. “But at the same time you’ve got to learn to really put yourself into a fight. It won’t be a practice exercise when you’re out in the field. Mistakes will kill people. So you’ve got to learn to judge when to play it by the book, and when to throw the book aside and make it up as you go along.”

Wolf was still feeling the effects of the stun baton, but the corporal’s words struck a familiar chord. He remembered the battle in the corridors on Telok, the moment when he’d panicked. Maybe if he had shown more initiative then, instead of giving in to appearances, things might have gone differently. Not just the battle, but everything that had followed. The quarrel with Neubeck … the duel … his flight from Robespierre.…

The pain of that battle was still like a raw nerve, but he forced himself to think about it. His lack of sound judgment in that fight had convinced him. He would never be a leader of men.

Now he was beginning to realize that it could keep him from being a soldier as well.…

* * *

Mario Antonelli listened to the corporal’s systematic critique of the lance with a sinking feeling of failure and despair. Nothing he did ever seemed to come out right. Somehow he’d avoided washing out of training so far, but he was making no more than a barely passing mark. Sooner or later he wouldn’t even manage that, and then it would all be over.

Why couldn’t he deal with the training better? Why couldn’t he fit in here?

All the talk about the legionnaires being a family, helping out each other, that had been a big lie. No one had offered him any help. If you weren’t a perfect little rembot who snapped to on command, you were beat up, and nobody lifted a finger to save you. They all said they cared. “The Legion takes care of its own” was how they kept putting it, but it wasn’t so. He was an outcast, would always remain an outcast among these people who always demanded more than he was able to give.

Sometimes he thought it would be better to just give up, leave the Legion and serve out his sentence with a penal battalion. At least then he wouldn’t have to face the constant pressure, the continual bullying from the instructors and the unspoken amusement of his lancemates.

But if he didn’t make it with the Legion, he’d lose that look of pride he’d finally kindled in his father’s eyes. The old man probably wouldn’t survive the shock if he found out his son had been consigned to a penal battalion.

The sharp pain of a stun baton across his shoulder blades made him jump. “You want to get with the program, nube?” Vanyek bellowed into his face. “Or am I boring you?”

“N-no, Corporal!” he said, snapping to attention.

The NCO struck him again, but the shock setting was lower and just made his shoulder and neck tingle. “What you did out there was bad enough,” he growled. “But ignoring the range safety regs is a screw-up you don’t make twice in my unit. You get me, nube?”

“Y-yes, Corporal.” The reply was anything but crisp.

Vanyek hefted the baton in one hand as if contemplating the best place to apply it, then lowered the wand and turned away from the Italian.

“All right, that’s enough for this morning,” Vanyek said at last. “We’ll try another drill this afternoon. Get your gear, fall out, and head for the mess hall.”

The recruits looked surprised. By rights he should have kept them on the firing line for at least another quarter hour, and after what had happened none of them would have been shocked if he’d kept them longer.…

As Antonelli started to bend over to round up his equipment Vanyek stopped him with the baton, its power turned all the way off this time. “Not you, Antonelli. You stay here. We still have some things to talk about.” He turned away again. “And you, Kern, you start your laps. I’ll let you know when to stop!”

The redhead nodded and moved off at a trot, leaving the others to round up his MEK and combat helmet. When everyone was gone Vanyek spoke again, his tone quiet and almost sympathetic.

“Listen to me, Antonelli,” he said slowly. “And listen good. I know the training is tough, and I also know that you’ve been trying as hard as anyone. But you’re still making mistakes—stupid mistakes—that you should have stopped making the first week of training. Normally I’d work you over for a while with this.” He hefted the stun baton for emphasis. “You’d have a few aches and pains to remind you to do better, and we’d move on. But I’ve done that enough to know that it isn’t gonna help this time. The question is, what will get you motivated?”

Antonelli didn’t answer, didn’t know how to answer.

The corporal looked at him for a long time in silence, then shook his head. “I just don’t know. I really expected you to snap in and start showing some skill, kid. Your kind usually do well in the Legion. But it’s clear you’re heading straight for an unsatisfactory mark on your training record. That means you struggle on for days or weeks longer, with noncoms using you for a punching bag and poking these glorified joy buzzers at you until you do something really dumb and get sent to the penal battalions … or you might not do anything spectacular and still wind up doing hard labor because your performance just isn’t up to specs. Maybe you ought to just drop it now and save yourself the grief.”

“No!” Antonelli said, pulling back. “No! I can cut it … I have to!”

“It’s not that big a deal, kid. Penal battalions are no picnic, but it’s not really as tough as the Legion in some ways. You won’t get your Citizenship back, but …”

Antonelli shook his head violently. “Let me keep trying, man! Please!” He hesitated. “I miel genitore … my parents, my whole family … they don’t know I was sentenced. They think I volunteered. And they were proud of me.…”

“That won’t help you much if you pull an unsat rating, kid,” he said gently.

“It will kill mio babbo, my father, if I don’t make it,” Antonelli went on as if he hadn’t heard. “It’ll kill him. I’ve gotta keep trying.…”

“I can’t force you to put in for the penal battalions, kid,” Vanyek said reluctantly. “If you won’t go voluntarily, you’ll have to earn yourself a trip there. Which is what you’ll do if you don’t buckle down and show some improvement pretty damned quick. What’ll your parents think if you keep screwing up the way you did today, huh, kid?”

The recruit didn’t answer.

“All right,” Vanyek told him. “You’ve had your warning. Just remember that you’re about a centimeter shy of an unsat already, so you’d better get your act together. You’ll pull two hours a night extra duty on the indoor weapons range for the rest of this training phase. By the time you’re through I expect you to take that onager and use it to light a narcostick a klick away without hitting the guy who’s smoking it. Think you can handle that, nube?”

“Y-yes, Corporal,” Antonelli responded, pulling himself to attention. There was a long pause. “And … grazie. Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me, nube,” Vanyek told him. “Not until you pass. Now … what shall we have you do to learn about range safety? Maybe what you need is some exercise with your buddy Red, hmm?”

Antonelli followed his gesture and saw Kern rounding the far end of the practice range. He suppressed a groan and started to run, but inwardly he was elated. He had a second chance … and he would work twice as hard this time to make it work.