T. McCarthy - The Legionnaires

One day I returned to the barracks to find a Russian girl sitting on my bunk. She smiled and lay down. “You American?”

The room got quiet. A few of her friends watched from nearby, smiling as one of them whispered something.

I was too tired to be scared. “Get off my rack.”

“ Your rack? No, you can sleep on the floor, we need this one for screwing.”

And the rest of them laughed. When I noticed the knife in her hand, I got a little scared, but the gravity had worn me down, made me feel as though if I didn’t get a chance to sleep I’d die anyway.

“Screw you.” Lifting my boot would have taken too much effort and been slow enough that she could have reacted, so instead I slammed my knee upward. Her head snapped back. The girl’s momentum took her toward the other side of my rack and I helped it, leaned down and shoved so that she flew in two g’s to slam onto the concrete floor with a grunt. It took me a second to sort through the confusion. For some reason there was blood, lots of it. The puddle under her grew slowly in a red amoeba shape until I finally noticed that the knife had somehow lodged itself in her throat. Her friends stared at her, shocked, and when one of them shouted at me you didn’t have to speak Russian to figure it out. They were going to kill me.

But before they moved the corporal arrived, and I trembled at attention as he stood over the body. “She fell on her own knife?” he asked me.

“Yes, Corporal.”

“Good. You’re acting platoon leader. The rest of you ”—he raised his voice even though it wasn’t necessary, you really could have heard a pin drop it was so quiet—“will obey Volunteer Marianne. Her words are my words.”

The corporal approached the group of Russians—eight of them left now—and poked his kepi brim into one of their faces. It surprised me to hear him speak their language. Whatever he said it must have been bad, because they all went white before finally speaking in one voice. “Yes, Corporal.”

After he had gone, the remaining Russians followed him with their friend’s body, and I collapsed onto my rack. I had almost fallen asleep when a girl tapped my shoulder.

She extended her hand. “Jennifer Simpson.”

“Marianne.”

“I’m sorry.”

I shook my head, confused. “For what?”

“For calling you an asshole—the first day, during our tower run.”

“Oh.” I remembered then, and grinned.

“You were right, I didn’t get it then but I do now.”

“Get what?”

“We have to look out for ourselves in this place. Anyway, I’m sorry for calling you an asshole.”

She turned and walked to her bunk, lay down, and shut her eyes, leaving me to my thoughts. I couldn’t predict when they’d come to me—my family. Their faces appeared out of nowhere, my husband and children, and I watched in slow motion as my husband started to scream when the transport broke through the median barrier and headed straight for our car. He swerved, but instead of turning the car skidded on wet pavement and began to spin, just before the front wheels of the truck climbed over our hood and slammed into the windscreen. I would have avoided the accident if I had been driving, I was sure of it.

“You weren’t wrong,” I said, and she turned her head to face me.

“What?”

“You weren’t wrong. You American?”

She nodded. “DC. What do you mean I wasn’t wrong?”

I thought for a second. “If we don’t try to help each other, we’re animals, and who knows? Maybe that’s what these people want. But this is a strange place, and something tells me that we’ll need to stick together, whether we’re animals or not.”

My technical specialist thought she had the answer, and had called me down to the communications room. I tiptoed through the sleeping children. The ladder’s side rails slid through my fingers with a loud squeal until I landed heavily at the bottom, and I peeled off, heading for the coms shack. It felt good. To be deep underground and away from the mantes somehow made things seem better.

“Lucy,” I said over the radio. Lucy was still a bit young but a natural leader, and I’d chosen her as my second after Toly died. “I’ll be in coms, you have control of the bots until I get back.”

“Roger.”

There was barely room for two in the communications room and our specialist liked to wave her arms a lot, to punctuate her arguments, so I listened from the doorway.

“I’ve tried every frequency I can think of and we’re not getting through. Nothing. So last night I started reading the manual.”

“Wait a second,” I said. I had forgotten her name in all the excitement and had to check her tag. “Heidi, you’re our specialist and you’re only now reading the manual?”

“Look, it’s not my fault, I didn’t ask for the job and I haven’t been to coms school yet, that was supposed to happen after the regular army relieved us here. They assumed that since I’m German I must be good with a radio. Or something like that.”

“And you’re not.”

“And I’m not. I was in cosmetology school when one of my friends dared me to sign up, so I did, and, well, here I am. Look, Grandmother, you know it the same as me: nobody expected this to be a tough assignment or they would have sent someone else, not a brand new unit fresh out of basic.”

I knew she was right. If we’d been up in the bunker with the main group I’d have told her to shut up, but it was the truth. All of us were slotted for our next training billet but the Legion belonged to the regular army, and since women Legionnaires were relatively new someone had gotten the idea that a quick and easy assignment would be better than a training camp. It would give the Legion publicity—more recruits, that sort of crap.

“Just tell me what you’ve found.”

She pointed to the computers. “We’re being jammed. Those things are communicating over multiple frequencies, the same ones we use to transmit.”

“Or…” The antennae. None of us had seen their eyes, not even the smallest indication of them, and I wondered if they “saw” using something else. “Or they have something like radar. For seeing.”

“That might do it too.”

Lucy clicked into my headset and I saw the warning light blink at the same time. Sentry bots had been activated. “Grandmother?” she said.

“On my way.” Before turning I grabbed Heidi’s shoulder. “Can you get around it?”

“I think so, I just have to find a band that’s free. The good news is that orbital must know that something’s wrong, they must be trying to send us messages as well. Won’t they come investigate?”

“Maybe. But until we get in touch we can’t count on them, so get to work.”

After I started back up the ladder my muscles began cramping. Halfway to the top I had to rest, and leaned back against the circular framework designed to give you a chance if your grip on the ladder slipped. Only fifty meters to go, I thought, and suddenly felt my age.

Being thirty-five on Earth hadn’t been so bad. But at Nimes’s two g’s thirty-five seemed more like eighty. Every morning my muscles bunched into inextricable knots, and as soon as we began fitness training and military operations the corporal gave less and less time to sleep. It wore us down. Within days the planet turned us into walking corpses who had trouble recognizing reality, orders taking a few seconds to register through a fog of despair. We ran most of the mornings, barely able to raise our feet over the dust, learning in rain how to spot the suck-sand, the name the Legion gave to those pockets of liquefied dust.

Afternoons and evenings we spent in lectures learning the finer points of combat suit maintenance, small unit tactics, and how to properly crease our fatigues. Did you know that the Legion was the only service that didn’t use powered servos in their armor? Everyone else used them. We learned that during the massacre on Stephens-Eight, Chinese forces had deployed nanos—contrary to the universal ban, which they had refused to ratify—and that the bots had targeted all power sources, including suits. After that it was a turkey shoot. All those American and British forces, frozen in place because their servos wouldn’t budge, had no choice but to get naked in vacuum or wait for the enemy to advance, all the while knowing that the Chinese didn’t take prisoners. The only survivors were a Special Forces unit that had declined powered armor. They were Legion.