Chapter Twenty

You’re given a hard time and you can’t relax. If you can’t take it, you shouldn’t have joined in the first place. I’ve changed a lot since I joined the Legion.

—an anonymous legionnaire,
French Foreign Legion, 1984

The sign over the bar door read The White Kepi, and the entrance was flanked by a pair of mannequins clad in Legion dress uniforms. It was a popular watering hole for legionnaires from Fort Hunter, located a block from the maglev terminal in the seedier side of Villastre known as Fortown. The owner, Jacques Souham, was an ex-Legion NCO who had chosen to invest his retirement money and Citizen’s stipend to build a business on Devereaux, rather than migrating to some more popular world. That was how the Commonwealth did business. Citizens had power and prestige on frontier worlds like this one, and over the years their numbers grew until they could bring the planet painlessly into Terra’s star-spanning empire.

Karl Wolf clutched the package in his hand a little more tightly and went inside. The bar was dimly lit and crowded, and though there were plenty of legionnaires within there were a fair number of civilians as well. He even noticed a table of Gwyrran-descended Wynsarrysa natives in one corner. Not all of the ales on Devereaux were rebels.

The smell of narcosticks and cheap synthol made him choke, and Wolf regretted agreeing to use the bar as a meeting place. He hadn’t particularly wanted to come into Villastre in the first place, even though this was the first pass the recruits had been granted since the start of training. Since the training battalion had gathered back at Fort Hunter for the holiday break in their schedule, Wolf’s idea of recreation had been to seek out some precious moments of privacy so he could think … and try to map out his future.

But Lisa Scott had wanted to do some Christmas shopping in town, and she had talked him into coming with her. They had split up at the maglev station, setting The White Kepi as their rendezvous point, and Wolf had dutifully battled the crowds in the city’s commercial district in search of token gifts to give to the rest of his lance. He wasn’t very satisfied with his purchases, but thought it was probably just his bad mood influencing his judgment.

He spotted her, sitting alone at a table near the Gwyrrans in the corner. She waved, and with a curt nod he pushed his way through the crowd to join her. When he reached the table he saw that she had turned to examine a display of knives on the wall above her. Her interest in them brought back a flash of memory, the sight of her that first night in the platoon shower room, her knife at the ready to hold off young Antonelli.

A lot had happened since then, he thought bitterly as he put his package on the table and sat down opposite her. More than he cared to think about, today.

“Glad to see the decor’s to your taste,” he said, trying to keep his tone cheerful and light. In the ten days since Antonelli’s suicide he had been fighting hard to avoid letting his ill humor show, but it took an effort. Wolf had never been much interested in small talk, and it was harder than ever to keep from sitting and brooding when the people around him were enjoying themselves.

She smiled at him. “You bet. This guy Souham’s got a great collection. So how did you make out? Find what you were looking for?”

A waitress in a tight-fitting, low-cut parody of Legion fatigues appeared to take their drink orders. He checked the chrono function of his wristpiece. Another maglev car would be leaving for the base in thirty minutes. Enough time for a beer, perhaps.…

He ordered, then looked back across the table at Scott. This excursion had been her idea. Was she ready to head back yet?

“Find what you were looking for?” she asked again, seemingly ignoring his byplay with the ’piece.

“Some,” he said shortly. “But I still agree with what my father told me when I was a kid. If we had been meant to mingle with crowds of shoppers, God never would have invented computer shopping networks.”

She laughed. “That would take all the fun out of it,” she told him. “Anyway, you can’t haggle over the price with a computer.”

“I wouldn’t have imagined you as the haggling type,” he said absently. “Not much need to haggle when you’ve got money.…” The words were already out by the time he realized what he had said. Since that day in the hospital at Fort Souriban he had been careful not to mention anything about her background.

But Lisa didn’t seem put off by his comment. “Where else do you want to try?” she asked. “We’ve got time.”

He sighed. “Look, I think I’d rather head back to the tube station and catch the next car to Hunter. I’ve had about all the holiday shopping I can take.”

“If that’s what you want,” she said with a shrug. “But if you still have stuff you need to pick up …”

“Hell, I don’t even know what to buy,” he told her. “I mean, you and Kern are easy enough, but what the devil am I supposed to buy for an alien who never even heard of Christmas until he joined the Legion? What do you buy a hannie, anyway?”

She looked at him with a stern expression. “You really don’t like Myaighee much, do you?”

Wolf shrugged. “I don’t dislike him,” he said defensively. “It’s just that nonhumans aren’t real common back home, and I don’t know how to deal with them.”

“Try treating them the way you would anybody else. As long as you keep thinking of every nonhuman you meet as something different, you’ll always treat them as inferiors. Myaighee’s a better person than a lot of humans I’ve met, and he doesn’t deserve this human superiority act of yours.”

“Hey, I went along with him as lance leader. I took his orders when he bothered to give any.”

“Sure, but everyone could see that you resented it, Wolf. How would you like it now if one of us started acting that way toward you?”

He looked away. “Doesn’t matter much now,” he said slowly.

“What are you talking about?”

“I don’t think I’m going to Kessel next week,” he said slowly. The thought had been nagging him for days, and he said the words with a feeling of making a decision at last. “I don’t think I can make the grade in the Legion, Lisa. Maybe it’s time I just admitted it and left the soldiering to the people who are qualified for it.”

“Nonsense!” Now she looked angry. “You’ve got the highest score in the lance, and I heard Konrad telling Vanyek the other day that you’re still in the top ten in the whole company. You can’t just give up!”

“We’re only partway through,” he pointed out. “There’s plenty of time for me to screw up yet … especially now that they gave me the lance. Look what happened to Antonelli. He was finally starting to show some progress. Then he screws up once and …” He trailed off, picturing the body swinging back and forth in the tiny barracks room back at Fort Souriban.

“Antonelli was a whole different case,” she said. “Nobody knows the whole story. He did, but he’ll never tell it now. He muddled through as long as he could, but you know how close he was to a downcheck the whole time. When they finally cut him, he couldn’t take it. Pure and simple. So don’t sit there and use Antonelli as an excuse. He didn’t have what it takes. You do.”

“Do I?” he asked. “Really? The only thing I had in common with the kid was not fitting in around here. I just can’t buy into all the mystique. The traditions they try to foist off on everybody to turn us into obedient little drones. ‘Honor and Fidelity’ and ‘the Legion takes care of its own’ and all that drivel. They didn’t take very good care of Antonelli when the chips were down … or even Yeh Chin, who couldn’t help getting hit before the real fighting started.”

He looked down at the table. “I didn’t see anybody rallying around to help Antonelli when he got in trouble. Not the rest of our class, and certainly not the regular legionnaires. Do you know that when a lance came to take down the body and investigate his quarters they took the rope he’d used and cut it up to sell as souvenirs? Another of their damned traditions.…”

“I know,” she said. “It’s supposed to be a good luck charm, or something. The superstition goes back to the very beginning of the Legion, back on Terra.”

“My point is, they weren’t worried about him. Just like most of the other recruits didn’t even bother to come to the funeral.” He thought about Myaighee and Vanyek taking dirt from the grave, but dismissed it. Just another superstition … it had nothing to do with their feelings about Antonelli himself. “So where do they get off preaching about camaraderie and dying for the Legion and all that garbage? You’ve got to believe if you expect to get anywhere in this outfit, and I just don’t believe.”

“Oh, come off it,” Lisa said harshly. “You don’t believe the advertising hype, and right away you think that makes you doomed to failure? That’s ridiculous.” She reached across the table and took both his hands in her own, fixing his eyes with her ice blue stare. “Yeah, the mystique can be pretty damned silly sometimes. But it isn’t just empty words. If that was true, Banda would have left Yeh Chin to bleed to death when the fight started at Savary’s. And your friend MacDuff wouldn’t have rushed the Sandray trying to save the rest of us. Do you think he believed all the crap they’ve been feeding us about Camerone and Hunter and all the rest? I doubt it. But he thought enough of his duty … and of the rest of us … to put his life on the line when we were in trouble. As I recall, you were doing the same thing. But where was Antonelli? Crouching out in the woods somewhere, wasn’t he? You never said so, but I saw the way you were looking at him later on. He was afraid, wasn’t he? Don’t compare yourself to him, Wolf. And don’t try to make him a martyr. He killed himself, because he couldn’t take the pressure.”

“Yeah. Maybe.” He nodded reluctantly. The scorn in her voice hammered at his newfound resolve, but deep down he wasn’t convinced. And he was sure that Antonelli had taken his life largely because he believed Wolf had betrayed his trust, and that was a stain on Wolf’s honor that couldn’t just be dismissed as unimportant.

The waitress returned with their drinks before he could say anything more. He took a cautious sip of his beer and set it down with an expression as sour as the beverage tasted. Most of the crops grown on Devereaux picked up a tart flavor from the local soil. But all legionnaires professed to enjoy Devereaux products, and even though he had enough money in his ident disk to buy offworld imports he had decided long since that it was best to blend in as much as possible.

He was starting to think that protective coloration wasn’t worth the assault on his taste buds. Beer had never been his favorite drink before signing up anyway, and this local brand …

Not that it mattered much anyway. If he went ahead and resigned, he wouldn’t have to keep up the pretense much longer, and even though Lisa Scott had made some good points she hadn’t really said anything to make him change his mind.

Lisa gave a sudden, mirthless laugh. “Wouldn’t you know it,” she said with a bitter smile. “You want out, but I’m the one who has a father pulling strings. And I’d give damn near anything to stay.…”

He couldn’t find any way to answer that.

The silence went on, and deep in thought, Lisa Scott drank her beer without noticing its tart flavor.

She had joined the Legion with the firm intention of keeping others at arm’s length. That was another legacy of the kidnapping, and its aftermath, the reluctance to allow anyone to get close again. Long ago she had started dividing the universe up into three distinct groups—the masses of people who had nothing to do with her or hers, the ones who wanted something from her, and the few who were genuinely worth caring about. The latter category, she had found, were in danger of dying or being sent away. Alyssa Abercrombie had vowed that she wouldn’t hurt—or be hurt by—anyone else again.

But Karl Wolf had gotten past her defenses somehow. She still wasn’t sure how to define her feelings about him. There was some physical attraction there, but she thought of him more as a friend than as a potential romantic interest. Growing up as the Senator’s only child, she could only imagine what a brother might have been like, and perhaps that was how she regarded Wolf. An older brother, someone who understood her, someone she could look up to.…

But it was hard to reconcile the Wolf she was seeing today with the man who had turned the tide at Savary’s. If he went through with this idea of resigning, it would be a terrible waste. Not that it could really matter to her. As she had expected, the package from her father had been one of his holocube lectures, ending with the promise that she would be out of the Legion just as soon as the paperwork was over and done with. Another week or two, at most. She wouldn’t even get the chance to put on the white kepi.

It was ironic that Wolf wanted out even though he had everything going for him, while she wanted to stay in but couldn’t escape her father’s long arm. People adapted to the Foreign Legion at different rates, she decided, thinking back to a discussion in the lance’s barracks at Fort Marchand a few nights before the battle at Savary’s.

They had been comparing their views of the training process. Kern had talked about the main obstacle that every trainee had to overcome sooner or later, called “the Hump” by some, “the Wall” by others. Every military recruit, whether he served in the Legion or the Centauri Rangers or the Commonwealth Space Navy, found it hard to make the transition from civilian to soldier. In the Legion the pressure was particularly hard because the conditions were much harder than in ordinary services. The first goal of any Basic Training, according to Kern, was to break down the individuality of recruits so that they could learn to subordinate themselves to the army as a whole. In a state as diverse as the Commonwealth, and particularly in the polyglot Foreign Legion, harsh treatment was one way to encourage would-be soldiers to let go of that individuality. Not only were tongue-lashings and the occasional beating effective methods of getting a point across, but the recruits also tended to be drawn together by a common resentment toward their instructors. It was a tough process, and the only options open were to adapt or to fail. That was the real essence of the Hump.

Most Legion recruits just opted out, earned their down-check and gave up all hope of a successful five-year hitch with a Citizen’s benefits at the end of it all. But for some, the Hump was too much, especially when there were pressures from other directions that made failure as impossible to face as the training the recruit couldn’t handle. When that happened, anything was possible. It was like cafarde, the classic Legion disease, starting with a little voice whispering the gospel of hopelessness and ending with madness, suicide, desertion … depending on the individual recruit, almost anything could happen.

It had happened to Antonelli, though he hadn’t actually broken until after the Legion had ordered his discharge. But she had never expected to see it happen to Karl Wolf. And it worried her … in more ways than one. Why was she suddenly so concerned over how Wolf lived his life?

But whether she liked it or not she did care. But she didn’t know how to reach him. Plainly he needed to cling to that sense of individuality the Legion was just as determined to squash. She could understand that much, at least. An aristocrat, accustomed to command, would find it hard to surrender the freedom that was an essential part of his makeup. It was easy enough for her to make it past the Hump, because compared with life with Senator Abercrombie the Legion for her was a genuine taste of freedom.

If only she could help make Wolf see that he could become a part of the Legion without giving up everything of himself.…

“Well, fancy that,” a voice said at her elbow. “A couple of genuine junior white-caps in for a look at the big city!”

She looked up. A trio of teenagers in motley civilian dress were looming over their table. The speaker was short and slender, and his cocky manner reminded her instantly of Mario Antonelli in the early days of training. His two friends were larger and seemed ready to take their lead from him.

“Hell, I guess we’re lookin’ at the future of our fair planet,” one of them rumbled. “The next generation of protection from the lokes and the ales, huh?”

Neither recruit answered. Lisa took another drink and studied the display of knives on the wall.

“Hey, junior white-caps,” the leader persisted. “Maybe you can tell us why your Legion won’t let us change things around here. We’re ready here for Membership … but it’s you white-caps who won’t let us have it. Isn’t that right? Explain it to me, why don’t you?”

She looked him over slowly, coldly. “I’m not up on local politics,” she said in a quiet, reasonable voice. “We’re just marchmen signed up for a hitch.”

The political situation on Devereaux was a complicated powder keg with twists and turns she was only vaguely aware of. The planet’s human population had once been ruled by the Semti Conclave, but the Terran Commonwealth had liberated the world and made it a Trust. In the usual course of things, a slowly expanding Citizen base would eventually have been able to form a government able to apply for full Membership, with votes in the Grand Senate and a voice in the administration of the Commonwealth as a whole. But conditions weren’t that straightforward. There was the ongoing problem of the Wynsarrysa rebels, for one thing. And there was also the problem of the Fifth Foreign Legion.

Devereaux was the official home of the Legion. It had been built on the ruins of the Fourth Foreign Legion that had died defending the world in the Semti Wars, and for over a hundred years it had been home to the current outfit. But unlike other units of Terra’s Colonial Army, the Legion was not permitted to be directly tied to any one Member of the Commonwealth. Individual worlds fielded military forces that served in the Colonial Army—the Black Watch from Caledon, for instance—but by statute the Legion was drawn from all parts of the Commonwealth and even from worlds outside the Terran sphere. If Devereaux became a Memberworld, the Legion’s connections would have to be severed, and that was something most legionnaires found unthinkable.

There are inevitably rumors that the Legion had blocked every attempt to gain Devereaux a better place in the Commonwealth, even accusations that the Legion was secretly fostering the Wynsarrysa risings in order to make itself seem indispensable for the planet’s defense. And there was a vocal body of human colonists who were calling for the expulsion of the Legion.…

“C’mon,” the agitator insisted, getting louder. “You come here to our planet to perpetuate your Legion rule … but you don’t want to own up to it, do you? Afraid people will learn the truth about you? We’re sick of having the scum of the galaxy calling this their home. So why don’t you leave and find some place that wants you?”

A few of the other civilians applauded. The other legionnaires, though, had gone silent. The atmosphere was suddenly tense.

Wolf stood, a smooth, fluid motion. “Why don’t you go peddle your politics to someone who cares, Citizen?” he said, soft-voiced.

“Citizen!” The agitator hooted. “You think me and mine have a chance to be Citizens? Hah! The only way we get to be ‘Citizens’ is if we go out and take what should be ours! Like this!”

His fist lashed out at Wolf, but the aristo parried the blow easily. Then one of the toughs grabbed him from behind, and the other reached for Lisa Scott.…

She ducked and pushed back her chair, bringing her foot up in a roundhouse kick in the same motion. Her boot caught him in the kneecap, and he fell heavily. Wolf elbowed his attacker in the stomach and pulled free. They were back to back now, facing the two remaining rabble-rousers. A few other civilians were starting to move toward the fight, as if to join in.…

Until the legionnaires scattered around the bar surged forward.

There was a long moment of deadly silence. Then a loud humming broke the quiet. A scarred man wearing an apron over old Legion fatigues with the name “Souham” prominent on the right breast stepped onto the floor, a stun baton in each hand. From the pitch of the hum they were both set on full power. “Break it up, you scum,” the man growled. “Take your politics out of here and leave my comrades-in-arms alone!”

For emphasis he lashed out at the leader of the toughs. The young man screamed and backed away, clutching at the livid welt on his bare arm.

As suddenly as it had started, the fight was over. Civilians and legionnaires alike drifted back to their tables and started drinking and talking again. But a couple of noncoms stopped to clap Wolf on the back, and Souham ordered another round for the two recruits, on the house. He shook Wolf’s hand before retreating behind the bar again.

Sitting down opposite Wolf again, Lisa Scott smiled. “Looks like you’ve got to take back a few of the things you were saying before, Wolf,” she said.

He raised an eyebrow. “Such as?”

“Well, if you don’t call that rallying around a fellow legionnaire, I don’t know what would qualify.”

Wolf looked thoughtful as he took another swig of beer.