Chapter Sixteen

You must never remain deaf to cries of “A MOI LA LEGION.”

—Momento du Legionnaire,
Recruiting Pamphlet,
French Foreign Legion, 1938

Mario Antonelli felt a trickle of sweat running down his back and shifted uncomfortably. The sun had been down for hours now, but the cloying jungle heat still smothered the plantation clearing like a wet, heavy blanket.

His battledress fatigues were supposed to have built-in climate controls to compensate for extremes of heat and cold, but he’d been having trouble with the settings ever since the platoon had landed at Fort Marchand. One more thing, he thought bitterly, that he just couldn’t manage to do right. At least Sergeant Baram had allowed him to stand his watch with a borrowed FEK and wearing his fatigues. The onager with its heavy armored protective gear would have been doubly uncomfortable tonight.

He fumbled with the studs on his wristpiece computer to try to correct the settings, but he couldn’t see what he was doing. With his helmet faceplate set to receive sensor readings from the perimeter he was working blind. Suddenly angry, he cursed and cut off the external feed, then raised his faceplate and blinked a few times before he realized that the darkness around him was as thick and impenetrable as the jungle that lay only a few meters away. Konrad had assigned him to sentry duty, monitoring the perimeter sensor net, and after staring at the readout for what seemed like hours on end Antonelli had forgotten how black the nights in the Archipel d’Aurore could get.

Switching on a tiny light mounted on the side of his helmet, Antonelli studied the ’piece. It was hooked directly into the uniform’s climate-control system, and with a few quick touches he changed the settings that governed the environmental maintenance coils woven into the fabric of the battledress. He felt cooler almost at once.

Antonelli cut the light, but left his faceplate up for the moment. There was something almost comforting about the dark. The enveloping blackness hid the sight of the burnt-out plantation, though it couldn’t blot out the memory of the grisly tableaux of mutilated bodies arranged in their neat rows in the clearing. That was a scene that would remain burned into his brain for a long time to come.

He’d been assigned to the burial detail in the afternoon, and almost inevitably the horror of the bodies, the heat and humidity made even worse by his onager armor and the swaying motion he’d endured for over an hour in the Sandray before they reached the plantation, and cumulative fatigue from too many nights without enough sleep had all come together to hit him at once. Right in the middle of the work Antonelli had been overcome by wave after wave of nausea. He had torn his helmet off and tossed it aside as he doubled over to throw up. Afterward Baram had worked him twice as hard, and of course he’d been singled out to take the first watch after the rest of the party had turned in for the night.

He wasn’t sure how much more he could take. The extra training Vanyek had handed him, solo practice and tutoring from Kern, had helped him squeak through Weapons Training and was keeping him even with the rest of the lance now that they were at Fort Marchand, but it was grueling. On top of that he had the Christmas craftwork Ortega had assigned, an hour or more each night, and it was a rare week that didn’t see him pulling some kind of evening punishment duty as well.

Antonelli wasn’t sure how much longer he could keep up with the physical pace the Legion was demanding of him. Sometimes he thought that was exactly why the instructors kept throwing more evening duty at him. After all, Vanyek had tried his best to convince him to accept failure as inevitable and resign … maybe they had decided to push him to the breaking point and force him out since he refused to accept the trip to the penal battalions gracefully.

He shook his head wearily. He didn’t really think it was any kind of deliberate plot. It was just that sometimes everything seemed stacked against him.

And he was just so damned tired all the time.…

He leaned his head back against the trunk of the arbebaril behind him and closed his eyes. Just for a moment, to help him clear his head before he went back to staring at the sensor readouts.…

Just for a moment.…

* * *

Movement close by brought Lisa Scott instantly awake. That was something she had lived with for five years, the hair-trigger sensitivity that made her react to the slightest hint of a disturbance anywhere around her. She sat up, eyes wide open, her hand instinctively wrapping around the hilt of the Legion-issue knife under her sleeping bag. It wasn’t as good as the one that had been confiscated the first night of training, but it was good enough.

She relaxed as she saw Wolf crouching a few meters away, his back to her as he rolled up his sleeping bag. “Time for your watch already?” she asked softly, sliding the knife back into its accustomed place.

He glanced toward her. His face was hard to read in the soft illumination of one of the portable camp lights Baram had set up a few meters away, but she thought she could make out the mixture of bemusement and wariness that she’d come to expect from the aristo. He knew her foibles by now, and he went out of his way to keep his distance. That was fine by Lisa Scott. She knew in her mind that none of her lancemates, not even Antonelli, would do anything to hurt her now … but five years hadn’t erased all the scars, and she didn’t entirely trust herself if she was pushed too far or backed into a corner. Not even with someone like Wolf.

“Yeah,” he replied quietly. “You’d think the Sarge could’ve split the watch schedule between us and Charlie Lance … but I guess that’d make too much sense.”

“‘Ours not to reason why.…’” she quoted.

“‘Ours but to do and die, ’” he finished. “Just do me a favor and make sure Sleeping Beauty over there relieves me on time, okay?” He pointed toward Kern, who had spread his sleeping bag a few meters away from the rest of the lance. They were camped about halfway between the APC and the ruined plantation house, while Charlie Lance had set up much closer to the vehicle. Baram had insisted in spreading the recruits out, just in case. Scott found herself hoping that the precaution would prove foolish in the morning light.

“I’m perfectly capable of waking myself up,” Kern’s voice cut in before she had a chance to reply. “Especially when other people make all this noise. So move out before I decide to test my night shooting skills.”

Wolf chuckled and straightened up.

“Need a rifle?” she asked him. Since he was saddled with the rocket launcher, Wolf didn’t have an FEK of his own.

He shook his head. “Antonelli’ll turn his over to me. Thanks, anyway.” Stiff-backed, he donned his combat helmet and started off. Outside the circle of light, he was quickly swallowed up by the darkness.

She stretched out on the ground again, but didn’t close her eyes right away. The horrors of the afternoon were still too close, ready to spring unbidden from the dark recesses of memory. There had been clustered bodies the other time, too, five years ago, and one bad memory fed on the other.

Scott shut the thought out of her mind, just as she had during the burial earlier. She took a deep breath, going through the meditation technique she had originally learned to clear her mind in order to access the computer implant in her brain. Since the day the terrorists had kidnapped her from her father’s estate she had found that the same formula could help her banish the nightmares … at least for a while.

Slowly she let herself slip into the darkness.

And suddenly she was fully awake once more as the commlink receivers in every helmet in the camp shrilled an alarm simultaneously. The standby communications setting was designed to attract attention to an emergency alert message from a distance when the helmets weren’t being worn, and now they were doing just that as Wolf’s voice, edged with an urgency that bordered on panic, boomed from the speakers.

“Alert! Alert! Movement outside the camp!”

* * *

“Antonelli! For God’s sake, man, answer me!” Wolf resisted the urge to call out, either aloud or over the comm channel, and kept his voice to a hoarse stage whisper instead. He didn’t want to get the younger recruit in trouble with Sergeant Baram by calling unnecessary attention to him … but the Italian’s silence was exasperating. Where was he?

The image of the civilian with the slit throat rose unbidden in his mind, but Wolf thrust it away. “Antonelli!”

He had his combat helmet set for light intensification, and the faint starlight was enough to make the clearing look as if it was lit by floodlights on his faceplate. Wolf paused and took a careful look around, getting more concerned now. The Italian had been ordered to pay special attention to the southern perimeter, where the barrel trees were thickest and approached the plantation buildings most closely. Although he could have monitored the sensor net from almost anywhere, Antonelli had taken the orders literally and headed for that end of the compound at the start of his watch. The clearing, as defined by the five plantation buildings, formed a U shape with the open end facing south and the APC resting near the mouth, less than fifty meters from the tree line.

If Antonelli had done the sensible thing and set up his watch near the Sandray it would have saved a lot of trouble. As it was, Wolf couldn’t very well relieve the kid unless he could find him first. And so far there was no sign of the Italian.…

No, there he was. Wolf could see his legs past the squat trunk of an arbebaril at the very edge of the trees. The recruit was sitting with his back to the clearing. Still, he should have heard Wolf.

He cursed silently and unbuckled the strap on his pistol holster. It was his only weapon, since he would ordinarily have taken over the FEK Antonelli had borrowed. Wolf covered the distance to the tree quickly and dropped to one knee beside the Italian. He was sprawled against the trunk, head back, faceplate up. There was no sign of any injuries, and his breathing was deep and regular.…

Antonelli was asleep.

Wolf prodded him. “Goddamn it, kid, wake up!” he whispered urgently.

The Italian straightened up, looking wild. “What? What is it?”

“What a stupid stunt to pull!” Wolf told him, still whispering. “If the Sarge had caught you …”

Antonelli flinched. “I didn’t mean to, man. I … I only closed my eyes for a moment. I swear!”

“Yeah … well, now you can turn in for real. I’m supposed to be your relief. So get back to the camp and get some rest.”

The younger recruit kept his eyes fixed on Wolf’s face and didn’t move. “Are you … are you going to report me?”

“Well … you only closed your eyes for a moment,” Wolf told him with a half-smile. He knew he ought to do just that, but he wasn’t willing to be the one who finally got poor Antonelli busted. The kid looked scared enough never to fall asleep on watch again. “No, I won’t report you. Word of honor on that. But you know I could get a fast trip to Tophet myself for covering your ass. Keep it in mind, kid.”

The Italian nodded and stood slowly.

“Okay, I relieve you. Let’s see the perimeter.…” He switched from LI to sensor feed, and his faceplate lit up with a dozen blinking red dots. The unexpected sight made him forget his Terranglic. “Mein Gott!”

Each one of those red lights was a sensor reporting movement by man-sized bodies pushing through the jungle. There might be a dozen moving targets out there … or perhaps many more.

Wolf hit his commlink button. “Alert! Alert! Movement outside the camp!” He didn’t even have time to repeat the warning before the whine of kinetic energy rifles erupted from the brush. He grabbed Antonelli by the web gear and pulled him down on the ground beside him. “Keep your head down, kid!” he said harshly, switching his faceplate back to LI vision again before groping for his pistol. “And let ’em have it!”

A grenade went off behind them, near the heart of the camp, and half a dozen bulky figures burst out of the jungle howling and waving a weird assortment of weapons as they ran. Wolf drew a bead and squeezed off a round, but the shot was wide. “Lay down some autofire, Antonelli! Nail the bastards!”

Antonelli clutched his FEK, but made no move to use it. He lay where Wolf had pushed him, eyes wide, his mouth opening and closing but making no coherent sounds.

Wolf fired the pistol again, then rolled sideways as one of the rebels took aim with an antiquated-looking rifle. The crack and whistle of the shot was nothing like the sound of a kinetic energy rifle, but it made Wolf duck anyway. He’d heard of old-fashioned projectile weapons, and even though his battledress was reportedly adequate protection against typical longarms of that sort he had no desire to test those reports.

The bullet missed him by a safe margin, but the massive alien shouted and pointed, and more of its comrades turned to join the fight.

Now they knew exactly where the two recruits were, and with Antonelli paralyzed it would be an uneven match.…

* * *

Lisa Scott crawled on her belly up to the protective bulk of a log, braced her FEK across the top, and got off a long full-auto burst. It was just blind, random fire, but it elicited an unearthly scream that made her skin crawl. She fired again.

The camp was a scene of chaos. The attack had started hard on the heels of the first warning, and before anyone could react explosions and shouts were already filling the clearing. The first grenade had gone off close to the APC, where a couple of the Charlie Lance recruits, Owens and Banda, had bedded down. Peering over the top of the log, she could see one body sprawled there on the ground. It was too small to be Banda, so it was probably Volunteer Owens. Dead?

No … she could see the figure moving feebly. Beyond were the hulking shapes of Wynsarrysa rebels fanning out across the clearing, large, slow moving, but relentless as so many juggernauts. One was heading straight for Owens, holding a massive sword and baring his teeth in a savage snarl.

She remembered the mutilated bodies and opened fire again, raking the ponderous form with a stream of needle projectiles that tore into the rebel’s torso. With a screech like the one she’d heard before the alien toppled.

“Legionnaires! Hold ’em, legionnaires!” That was Yancey, the Sandray driver, waving a pistol as he ran toward the APC, heedless of the swarming hostiles.

Scott opened fire to cover him. If Yancey could make it to his armored vehicle, its kinetic energy cannon would make short work of the attackers.

But at that moment the driver’s back exploded in a haze of blood. At least one of the savages had a captured FEK and knew how to use the 1 cm grenades to good effect. She swallowed sour bile and squeezed the trigger again, feeling sick but refusing to give in to the nausea.

Where were the rest of the recruits? She couldn’t see Antonelli or Wolf, but she noticed Kern crouching at the corner of the nearest building, the warehouse, off to the left. Myaighee had given his weapon to Antonelli when the latter had gone on watch, but the diminutive hannie was scrambling up a ladder on the outer wall of the warehouse, apparently oblivious to the shots the attackers were taking at him. She wasn’t sure what he intended, but the roof would at least give him a good vantage point to act as a spotter for grenade fire.

As for Charlie Lance, she wasn’t as clear. Owens was down, of course, but there was no sign of Volunteer Banda or the others. The fight had erupted so fast that she’d lost track of almost everyone.

“Come on! Hold them, damn it! Hold them!” Sergeant Baram’s voice was familiar, at least, something to latch on to in the chaos. A moment later he appeared as if out of nowhere and dropped to one knee beside her. “Keep up the fire, Scott,” he growled, spraying needle rounds at the closest clump of rebels as he spoke. “Yeh Chen! Banda! Report!”

There was a pause. Then the commlink crackled. “Yeh Chen’s down, Sergeant,” Banda said. “His arm’s off at the elbow. I’ve got the bleeding stopped.…”

“Leave him! Get in the game, Banda! We need to get to that goddamned Sandray!”

“Y-yeah … yes, Sergeant! On my way!”

“Scott, MacDuff, maintain covering fire. Everyone else rushes the APC on my order!”

There was a chorus of acknowledgements. A moment later Baram was on his feet and crossing the clearing at a dead run, zigzagging, while Scott covered him with a sustained FEK burst. “Legionnaires!” Baram shouted. “Legionnaires, form on me! Nail the bastards!”

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Kern grappling with a Wynsarrysa rebel who had sprung on him before he could get clear of the warehouse. Myaighee gave a blood-curdling, ululating screech and leapt from his perch to help the redhead.

Then her attention was wrenched away from that melee as Baram took a hit and stumbled. The black recruit, Banda, ran past him straight into a hail of needle rounds. He flopped backwards and lay still, and there was a long moment of stunned silence.

* * *

One of the rebels had an old-model FEK, and Karl Wolf scrambled over the uneven ground as needle rounds whispered just over his head. Reaching Antonelli, he pried the rifle out of the Italian recruit’s trembling hands and flicked the selector switch to full automatic. Clamping his finger down on the trigger and aiming up from his prone position, he raked the four charging rebels with a steady stream of fire until all went down. Then he cautiously peered around the sheltering bulk of the arbebaril.

Light-intensification made the darkness look bright as a cloudy winter day, and it was easy enough to spot the rebels spreading out along the edge of the clearing between the two recruits and the APC. A few of them had fallen under fire from the camp, but there were still more of the hulking alien shapes moving than the entire two-lance Legion outfit … and there was no way of knowing, from here, how many of the legionnaires had been killed in the first rush.

His commlink didn’t enlighten him much. There was a confused babble of orders and shouted warnings, but it didn’t sound like Baram had established any kind of control over the firelight.

Or maybe Baram was dead already.

He decided against trying to break into the channel to ask for instructions. Even if there was anyone left to give them, it sounded as if everyone in the camp already had enough to worry about. Instead, Wolf shut off his commlink altogether and studied the scene spread out on the inside of his helmet visor.

Three of the raiders were crouched near the corner of the nearest building, the processing plant, and several more were visible clustered around the APC. The vehicle was the key to the whole situation, of course. That heavy turret gun would turn the tide in no time. No doubt there were others in the camp with the same idea, but the clearing would be an open killing ground, hard to cross without coming under concentrated fire from the rebels.

But the rebels weren’t paying any attention to their flank or rear now, and that gave Wolf the edge.

He looked back at Antonelli. The young Italian was still on the ground, plainly terrified. His hands clenched tight around the FEK in frustration, but Wolf knew it was no use trying to goad the younger recruit into action. He’d have to behave as if Antonelli was out of the action entirely.

Wolf started to turn away, then had another thought. He belly-crawled to the cluster of rebels he’d killed before, grabbed the old FEK/24 one of them had dropped, and checked the magazine. It was still half-full. Switching the selector switch to three-round autobursts, Wolf crawled back to Antonelli and thrust the antiquated weapon into his hands. The Italian stared at it uncomprehendingly.

“Use it to defend yourself, kid,” Wolf hissed. “Just stay put here.”

Somehow, Antonelli managed to nod acknowledgement. Wolf left him and went back to the arbebaril. Raising his borrowed FEK/27 carefully, he switched to the single-shot setting and took careful aim on the nearest of the three rebels by the corner of the processing building. He squeezed the trigger and saw his target collapse in a heap without attracting any attention from either of its partners.

With a quick movement he shifted his aim and fired again. This time, though, his aim was off and the rebel felt the breeze of the high-velocity needle whispering bare centimeters past what should have been its ears, if these ales had sported anything identifiable as external ears. The raider grabbed its friend by the arm, pulling it to one side and gesticulating wildly. The image would have been funny if the situation hadn’t been so grim.

Wolf cursed. If he didn’t move fast, those two would have the whole rebel force on top of him.…