T. McCarthy - The Legionnaires

“What?” I asked.

The girl pointed at Phillip. “He needs to go too, Grandmother.”

I kissed his head and handed him to her before snapping my helmet back on, but it nearly killed me. None of them deserved this. And here I was again, helpless to change a course of events that would soon annihilate children I was supposed to protect. But once Phillip had left it brought back reality, and instead of spiraling downward into panic and fear I felt a sense of determination take over. Not this time.

Lucy was nearly apoplectic from waiting. “ Goddamn it Grandmother! ”

“What’s the problem?”

She didn’t have to tell me. As soon as I knelt and peered through a firing port it was clear that the mantes had crossed the minefield. Image amplification made the scene surreal, as if, rather than actually experiencing the attack, we watched it in some kind of three-dimensional holo as the creatures scrambled over the piles of their own dead, one of them every once in a while touching off an un-detonated mine. There were too many to count. The empty space between the bunker and the minefield had already filled with the things and as far as I could see there was nothing but mantes .

I clicked onto the general frequency. “Short bursts, aim for the center sections not the legs. Open fire.”

“It’s easier than the corporal’s small unit tactics sessions, Grandmother,” said Lucy. She laughed. Her grenade launcher cracked loudly and punched into her shoulder to cut the laughter short.

“Oh yeah? Why is that?” I asked.

“Because.” She dropped an empty clip and loaded another before raising the launcher to aim again. “The damn targets are closer, and there are so many that you can’t miss.”

Extended small unit tactics meant that we now spent almost all our time in the field. Marching. Hand-to-hand. And the Legion’s favorite pastime, solutions that involved fifty-kilometer marches followed by an assault up the side of an ubersteep mountain in two g’s. Fun.

The corporal had combined our platoon with three others, then divided the resulting company into two sections: an infantry section, and a heavy-weapons one that was smaller, but that packed a punch in terms of crew-served auto-Maxwells, mortars, and antiarmor rockets. He put me in charge of the heavy weapons section, and a Frenchwoman—“Buttons” because her nose had been squashed so that it looked round and flat—in charge of the rest. I hadn’t even really gotten a chance to know her before a civil war broke out.

Ever try marching thirty klicks over broken terrain in less than a day and then digging defensive fortifications? In two g’s at age thirty-five? It felt like a twisted form of anesthesia so that I knew my body was in agony but the pain was great enough to overload the nervous system, made it so I didn’t sense anything . There’s not much to care about at that point. Training kicks in and you do things automatically because the part of your brain that’s responsible for rational thought doesn’t work anymore, only the parts that you can’t control. Breathing. Circulation. And one last thing that all these weeks had burned into our nervous systems: rote memorization of military procedures. I had just finished digging my hole with the enthusiasm of a sleepwalker, and was about to make the rounds, when Buttons grabbed my arm and led me from the perimeter.

“What’s wrong?”

“Christ,” she said, “your French is awful. You sound like a retarded donkey. Trust me, just walk.”

So I did. But before we crested a ridgeline and lost sight of our position, I glanced back and saw what I had feared all along: a group of Chinese girls from the new section had faced off against my Russians, and everyone else was circled around them, watching.

“Oh shit.”

Jennifer’s voice clicked into my headset. “Marianne, you gotta stop this, it’s bad.”

“Turn off your receiver,” said Buttons.

“Why? We’ve got to go back and stop it, she’s right.”

Buttons grabbed my arm and fingered the forearm controls, silencing Jennifer. “Your friend is wrong. Trust me.”

There’s a strange thing about the Legion, and it was something you learned quickly if you were going to make it: a sense of whom to trust, whom to listen to, and who was worth following. Your survival depended on it. Buttons had that “follow-able” quality, and you heard it in her voice, saw it in the surety of her actions. So I went with her.

“What is going on?”

She sighed and, once we lost sight of the perimeter, sat on the ground, popping off her helmet. “I’m not allowed to come home anymore, I’ve shamed my family.”

“What are you talking about?”

“My father was Russian and a Legion captain, which is as high as you can go if you’re not French. He met my mother on leave one year and nine months later I was born. I’ve grown up in all this. He fought the idea of admitting women into its ranks, and when he learned of my enlistment disowned me.”

“Why are you telling me that, it doesn’t have anything to do with what’s going on. ”

“The point is…” Buttons pulled out a cigarette and handed it to me before lighting her own. “I know the Legion, and you should know—understand—that this is the way things are handled.”

“By letting them kill each other.”

“If it comes to that, yes. Fucking think. We’re about to be shipped to some shit-hole if and when we get out of here, and there won’t be anyone to help us if things go badly. What are you going to do? Call for reinforcements? Then what? Wait six months for a cleanup crew to wormhole its way into your system just in time to scoop up all the dead? They send us to the worst assignments imaginable—to die, not win—because it’s easier to send foreigners than real French. So the Legion isn’t an army, it’s a family, and we’re all sisters whether we like it or not. Sometimes families fight, even kill each other. In the end, it’s this process that weeds out the ones who don’t belong, the ones who are too sick, too crazy, too soft, too useless. If we go back there and stop this, nothing gets resolved, it’s like treating the symptoms of cancer without cutting out the tumor. If we let them settle it, once and for all, the problem is solved.”

She took a long drag then, and I noticed the view with a shiver. In front of us stretched the panorama of Nimes’s lush side, a section of the planet that for whatever reason responded to the rains with a bizarre form of life. Increased gravity meant that its trees didn’t grow as high as they did on Earth, but Nimes’s vegetation made up for it by growing sideways, sending down roots at regular intervals to support the branches, which otherwise would have sagged. If you squinted the plains resembled a never-ending field of green lichen, leaving you with simultaneous feelings of awe—that you saw something most on Earth hadn’t even seen in pictures—and of isolation. The planet wanted us dead. Somewhere out there walked the ghosts of my husband and children, wandering in the alien bushes, and the wind gusted over the ridgeline behind us. It hit me like a lightning bolt: that’s why they chose Nimes, because it was so…creepy.

But we were beginning to belong there. I mean, when I stepped back and took a look at how we had started and how we had transformed, it was clear we weren’t human anymore and it fit with what Buttons had said. The Legion didn’t want people . It wanted orphans that it could reshape into a family of psychopaths, and because they took their orphans from every culture in the world the Legion needed someplace to put them—someplace none of them could call home. A level playing field. Spend enough time on a planet where nobody belongs except the Legion, and soon everyone belongs to the Legion.