Chapter Nineteen

It is to the mystery of his origins that the legionnaire owes much of his character.

—Legionnaire Georges Manue,
French Foreign Legion, 1929

“Mail call! Form up for mail call! Aiken!”

“Here, Sergeant!”

“Ambrose!”

“Here!”

Wolf skirted the edge of the small cluster of recruits, cocking his head to listen as the names were called. Mail call was far from the minds of most of them. More than half of them, after all, had joined the Legion to break their ties with the past entirely, and even those who had signed on with the knowledge of friends or family were unlikely to start getting messages for some time to come. With interstellar communications limited to the speed of the fastest carriership, eight weeks was scant time for anyone on a distant homeworld to have learned that a recruit had actually been accepted, much less dispatch a holetter or message chip.

But on this particular day a lighter had arrived from the carriership METTERNICH, fresh in from the frontier around Robespierre. Fort Hunter had forwarded the mail to Fort Souriban promptly. That was one thing about the Legion. They were always good about getting mail from home into the proper hands. Mail call had sounded just as the evening free period began.

“Antonelli!”

“Here,” came the listless reply. Wolf started to angle across the parade ground to intercept him. He hadn’t been able to talk to the Italian since the hearing had adjourned the day before, and it was still important to him that he let Antonelli know that Akiyama’s comments hadn’t been based on anything Wolf had reported. But by the time he reached the spot where he had last seen the failed recruit, close by Sergeant Konrad and his mail sack, Antonelli was nowhere to be seen. Wolf lingered for the rest of the mail call, just in case something might have arrived from Freidrich Doenitz von Pulau Irian, the consul-general who had befriended him on Robespierre.

As it happened, there was nothing for him, but when Sergeant Konrad noticed him waiting the NCO shoved a small package at him. “Something for one of your lancemates, nube,” he growled. “Take care of it.”

The address chip on the front responded to his touch with a voice that echoed deep in his mind. “Recruit L. Scott, Fifth Foreign Legion Training Center, Fort Hunter, Devereaux.” Almost immediately it grew hot under his finger, and Wolf shifted his grasp on the packet at once. He’d heard of privacy chips before, but hadn’t encountered one before. Only the intended recipient could order the chip to open the package. Anyone else who tried to tamper with it would get a nasty burn.

Its presence confirmed Wolf’s opinion of Lisa Scott. Only someone very rich or very important was likely to seal correspondence with a privacy chip.

She was still in the fort’s tiny hospital, after the sandray attack the previous day. Luckily Vanyek’s first aid had come fast enough, and the fort’s medical warrant officer had been able to set her up on a full detox program as soon as the medical APC had brought her in from the field. Wolf was glad of an excuse to stop by and see her. Exercises had kept the recruits occupied almost constantly since the accident, and he still hadn’t been able to stop in and thank her properly for what she had done. The thought of taking a dose of sandray venom made his skin crawl.…

The ward was small, and Lisa Scott was the only patient. She looked up as he came in, smiling.

“Package for you,” Wolf announced, holding it out. “Maybe it’ll take your mind off the hospital food for a few minutes.” He grinned.

Her welcoming smile turned into a black frown. “Package. But who … how…?”

She took it from him, held her fingers over the address chip for a moment. “No! God damn it all, no!” Lisa threw the package at the wall with savage fury. “I should have known he’d find me here!”

Wolf took a step toward her, then checked the movement and the question he had been about to ask. The Legion’s no-questions-about-the-past policy was something none of the recruits was likely to violate anymore. Gunnery Sergeant Ortega had already made it clear that no one would enjoy going against that particular quaint tradition.

But she looked so miserable, lying there staring at the offending packet where it had landed beside the door. He struggled to find the right thing to say, then crossed over to the offending object, retrieved it, and raised one eyebrow. “This obviously doesn’t belong here,” he said lightly. “What should I do with it? Dump it in the fusion hopper? Or plant it out on the grenade range?”

That drew a reluctant smile. “Too easy,” she said, her voice husky with suppressed emotion. “I’d want something more creative.” She hesitated. “I guess I’d better take it until we come up with something.” Another quick smile crossed her face, but her eyes were still bleak.

As she composed herself Wolf laid the packet on the table beside her bed. “At the risk of violating all sorts of Gunny Ogre’s rules, is there anything I can do?” he asked quietly. “I’ve got a sympathetic ear, if you want one. And Lord knows I owe you.”

She sat down with a sigh. “I don’t know,” she said slowly. There was a long pause. “Hell, if the message is what I think it is I won’t be keeping secrets long here anyway. Dear Daddy will see to that.”

“Daddy?”

She nodded slowly. “Next to the rest of you guys I don’t have a very exciting past to run from. I mean, Antonelli’s got … had … his criminal record, and Myaighee turned his back on his own kind to stay with the legionnaires, and whatever Big Red’s hiding must be a really big deal. And you … the messtalk has it that you’re on the run from the war on Laut Besar.” She plunged on without waiting for a response. “I’m just a rich kid who got sick of being a prisoner in my own house. So I cut loose and joined the Legion, figuring I’d be safe even from Daddy’s long arm. But he found me anyway.”

“If what we were told is the truth,” he said slowly, “I don’t think his finding out is going to make any difference. They claim the Legion looks after its own, no matter what.”

“Yeah, and I believe in the Milky Way Magician and all ninety-nine of the Ubrenfar hero-gods, too,” she said bitterly. “My father’s one man who can get his way, Legion or no Legion.” She hesitated. “Senator Herbert T. Abercrombie sits on the Military Affairs Committee, after all. If he says he wants his daughter discharged, the Legion’s not going to buck him on it.”

He let out a long, low whistle. “Abercrombie…?” Even on Laut Besar, where Commonwealth politics weren’t of much interest, Abercrombie’s name had been well known. The terrorist attack two years back that had killed the Senator’s wife and left his only daughter wounded.…

His only daughter …

“You’re Alyssa Abercrombie?” he went on, hardly believing it. “The one who—”

She nodded wearily. “Yes, the teenaged heroine who avenged her mother by killing a terrorist and making a daring escape from a hotel window.” She recited it in a singsong voice. “God, you’d think the media would have got sick of it before the story made the interstellar circuit. They never bothered to cover the trial where the rest of the gang got off on some legal shortcut the compols took arresting them.”

“That kind of attention … it must have been pretty tough.”

“Yeah, and the Semti War was a mild disagreement between reasonable beings,” she shot back. “First I was the famous heroine. And by the time the story finally started dying down Daddy was convinced I’d be a bigger target than ever, and that’s when it really got bad.”

“So you decided to strike out on your own.”

“You sound like you really understand it,” she said, a note of surprise in her voice. “Anyone I ever talked with before thought I was crazy for wanting a life of my own.” She looked across at the unopened package on the table beside her. “Money and clout never seemed very important. I mean, it was nice to have, but I would have given it all up if it could have brought my mother back. And living for what everybody else wants … it’s … I don’t know. I can’t really explain it right …”

He thought of his own life. His father was long dead, but his uncle had expected young Wolf Hauser to be a good aristocrat. Those expectations had taken him to the Sky Guard Academy … to the fighting on Telok and the duel on Robespierre. “I hear you, Lisa. Alyssa, I mean.…”

“It’s Lisa here,” she told him. “And … thanks. It’s nice to know there’s one person who doesn’t think I’m just an ungrateful, spoiled little rich girl.”

He gave a sour laugh. “Hell, you turned your back on it all to go after what you wanted. My family had money and political connections, too, and I spent my whole life doing exactly what I was told to do just because that’s the price an aristo’s supposed to pay. Noblesse oblige, and all that garbage.”

“So what changed? How’d you end up here?” She raised an eyebrow. “If you don’t mind my asking … at the risk of violating all sorts of Gunny Ogre’s rules.”

“The Ubrenfars took away my planet,” he said bitterly. “And some of my own kind took away my honor. I decided that was one price I couldn’t pay.”

* * *

It was a letter, an old-fashioned scribed letter that had been dictated to a computer and printed on paper. His parents had never been able to afford a holorecorder.

Antonelli crumpled the paper in his hands, but the action couldn’t erase the words that had burned into his mind. What else can happen? he asked himself bitterly. Haven’t enough things gone wrong already?

He had been struggling to keep up with the other recruits, and had even started making some progress … right up until the battle at Savary’s. That had ruined everything. The commandant’s announcement that he would be headed for the penal battalions hadn’t been much of a surprise. Antonelli had been prepared for that inevitable consequence of failure for a long time. But the possibility that he might be punished for his part in the battle was something else entirely. He’d never expected that. Never thought Wolf, for all his arrogance and superiority, would betray him.

And now his father was dead, and his mother was sick. Uncle Giuseppe’s letter made it clear where the blame lay. Salvatore and Nunzio and some of the others from the old gang had started shooting their mouths off, and his father had overheard them, learned about the court sentence. It had been too much for the old man’s heart to learn that his son had dishonored the family, had lied about everything. All that pride gone in one moment, and nothing to take its place but death.…

Tears stung Antonelli’s eyes, and he sat down heavily in the single chair in his Spartan transients’ quarters, still clutching the letter in one fist. His parents’ pride had been all that had held him on course. Without it, what did he have left?

The penal battalions would claim him now. After all his efforts, all his struggles. They’d all been useless.…

Antonelli chucked the paper away. There was really only one option open to him now, and he had to take it quickly, before he lost the will to go through with it.…

* * *

Wolf paused outside the hospital door and checked his wristpiece. The miniature computer was tied in to the fort’s much larger database, and it was easy to query the personnel files for a room assignment. After a few seconds the screen displayed the information he’d asked for, and Wolf gave an approving nod and set off across the compound.

It was high time he saw Antonelli. He’d put off the confrontation too long. Somehow the whole incident, from the battle at Savary’s right through the hearing and even Lisa Scott’s accident, had all made Wolf doubt his place in the Legion more than ever. MacDuff had died, and Scott had come close to it herself, and either one of them was better Legion material than he was from start to finish. And Mario Antonelli, though he wasn’t much of a soldier, had tried with all his will to make it and still failed. Wolf hadn’t put in one-tenth the effort to fit in. What right did he have to succeed where the kid had failed?

And what guarantee was there that Wolf would succeed, in the long run? Myaighee, who had the advantage of past Legion experience, hadn’t kept his lance leader’s star. Even if he kept his nose clean and did everything the Legion demanded, a rebel bullet could still strike him down the next time he had to fight.…

He had always understood the dangers of a soldier’s life. The possibility of death was something he’d accepted long ago, even before the Ubrenfars attacked Laut Besar. But he had come to terms with the problem by thinking of it in the traditional aristo fashion. He was an aristocrat, and it was his duty to fight, and if need be die, for his world. His honor and his family name demanded no less.

But what was he putting his life on the line for in the Legion? His name wasn’t even his own. These weren’t his own people, by any stretch of the imagination. Their customs and beliefs were like nothing he had been raised to revere … with these notions of species equality and all the rest of it. The Fifth Foreign Legion was nothing but a mercenary unit in thin disguise, fighting for money or personal glory or the sheer love of violence. Wolf found it hard to think of putting his life on the line for any of those things.

His mood was thoroughly black by the time he reached the transients’ block. This Foreign Legion adventure had been a mistake, pure and simple. Wolf … Hauser knew that now. He should have taken his chances with Neubeck’s family.

But he still had a duty to perform here and now. Wolf stood for a long moment outside the door of Antonelli’s room, gathering his thoughts, trying to put aside his own problems and focus on the Italian instead. Perhaps he could tap Doenitz on Robespierre for a loan to help Antonelli out once his sentence was finished…?

There was no answer when he pressed the intercom buzzer.

Wolf shrugged. Maybe Antonelli had heard about Volunteer Cromwell’s secret still and was out drowning his sorrows. He would just have to keep trying.

As he passed the single tiny window next to the door, an odd flicker of motion caught his eye. Wolf looked into the room, curious.

The limp body of Mario Antonelli was swinging back and forth from a rope dangling from a light fixture on the ceiling. He was clearly dead.

* * *

Antonelli’s funeral was quiet and subdued, with only a handful of the recruit’s comrades and instructors in attendance. Wolf stood rigidly at attention between Kern and Volunteer Mayzar, convinced that Konrad and the other NCOs were keeping close watch on him.

It was a Catholic service, like the majority of religious observances in the Legion. When Mankind reached out for the stars it had been a largely European effort, with Catholic France in the vanguard of interstellar expansion, and when France became an empire and dominated Terra and the colonies the religion had taken firm root on dozens of worlds. Perhaps as many as three-quarters of the people who called the Legion home followed some version of the faith.

But on Laut Besar it had been different. The Indomay community followed Moslem, Hindu, or Buddhist beliefs on the whole, with a sprinkling of Catholic and Christian Protestant adherents, while the Uro upper classes who had any religion at all were almost entirely Protestants who had brought their faith with them from the German-settled colony world of Lebensraum.

Wolf himself had grown up in a largely agnostic atmosphere, and tended to scoff at religious pomp and ceremony. But today, standing in the hot afternoon sun, there was something comforting about Father Chavigny’s solemn words.

The chaplain finished by making the sign of the Cross, and Ortega nodded to Vanyek. The corporal stepped forward, and Wolf, Kern, and Mayzar followed. They lifted the plain wood coffin and lowered it carefully into the ground. As the four men stepped back, Chavigny sketched the Cross again before turning away.

A work detail with shovels moved in to cover the coffin with earth, and the funeral was over.

There would be no eulogy, no headstone, nothing but a shallow, unmarked grave for Mario Antonelli. He hadn’t even died a legionnaire. Just a suicide who had found his disgrace impossible to bear.

Wolf lingered, looking down at the grave as the others left. He tried to analyze his feelings and found that he could not. Antonelli hadn’t been much of a lancemate, but he had deserved better than this. It was typical of the Legion to ignore him in death after hounding him to the breaking point in life.

Something stirred behind Wolf, and when he looked he found Myaighee there beside him. The hannie hadn’t been told off as one of the pallbearers because of his small size, but as one of Antonelli’s few real friends the little alien had come to the service, Wolf found himself wondering what Myaighee thought of the human religious service, then realized that he had probably seen it many times before while serving in Fraser’s Bravo Company.

The alien knelt beside the grave and rambled with something at his throat. It was a small vial which hung from a chain, hidden by the neck ruff. Myaighee opened the vial and carefully added a few grains of sand from the earth the workers had used to fill in the grave to a layer of dirt inside the container. Then he sealed it up and returned the vial to its place.

“A custom from your planet?” Wolf asked the hannie.

“No,” Myaighee said quietly. “A custom of the Legion. When a comrade falls, dirt from the grave is collected in one of these containers. I carry a reminder of all the friends I have lost, and of the worlds they fought for, wherever I go.”

Wolf sniffed disdainfully. “Another Legion tradition. Wonderful.”

“I have learned that there is great comfort in tradition, Wolf. It might help you, if you would only let it.” The alien didn’t wait for a reply. Myaighee turned away, leaving Wolf alone beside the grave.

He stood there for a long time, lost in thought. When he finally walked away, he saw Vanyek coming back into the quiet cemetery. Wolf stopped and watched the corporal from a distance and was surprised to see the man kneel and take a small sample of dirt from the grave.