T. McCarthy - The Legionnaires

They had a plan for everything.

“What a crap-hole,” said Buttons. We sat in silence for an hour before she finally stood, helping me to my feet. “I think that’s long enough. We should head back.”

When we returned to the perimeter my jaw dropped. The fight had ended but at first I thought the girls were still yelling at each other until I got closer and realized they weren’t yelling at all. They were singing. The corporal had taught us traditional French songs, the kind that dripped with significance even though you’d be hard-pressed to identify any of the places mentioned. If you listened closely you heard the sadness in them, a kind of depression that existed only in someone who had seen the depths of hell and clawed his way out. At first we wondered why we sang them. It’s not like they uplifted. But after a while we got used to it, and then, as the agony of daily training and the hardships of Nimes sunk in, we got a sense of maybe-I-understand-these-words-after-all, and they stirred something, sometimes bringing us to tears.

The girls were on their way to getting drunk. None of them wore helmets and when Toly smiled I noticed that she had lost a tooth. A Chinese girl sat next to her; in the twilight it was hard to tell at first, but it looked as if her left eye had swollen shut.

“Want a drink, Grandmother?” Toly asked.

“No thanks.” I smelled the alcohol from two feet away, and whatever it was, it smelled strong. The Chinese girl grabbed Toly’s bottle and laughed.

“You settle everything with our new friends?”

“Who? With the Chinese? These aren’t Chinese, Grandmother, they’re our long-lost Legion sisters, Uighurs and Tibetans, reforged. Didn’t the corporal tell you? We’re all reforged. We’re French now, every one.”

I found Jennifer just before going to sleep. She was drunk too, already passed out with a huge smile on her face.

When night fell one of them shrieked again, and the slope surrounding the bunker went quiet.

“Anyone hurt?” I asked.

Lucy popped her helmet and grinned. “No, Grandmother. But we’re all low on ammunition. Thank God they like to take breaks.”

“Tell that to the colonists.”

I peered out the firing port. Walls of dead mantes had gathered around the bunker so that their legs interlocked with one another, giving us our first close-up view. The main similarity they shared with praying mantises were the forelegs, which folded when they stood. Everything else was a little different. A hard carapace made up their skin, which was a dull gray that in the fading sun reminded me of mist. And there were definitely no eyes. They didn’t have sectional bodies like real mantises, and instead the main trunk consisted of a roughly four-meter-long cylinder that ended in a globular head and maw, around which four sharp mandibles snapped together, forcing in food. Some of them still twitched. At first the girls would shoot at them, to get the twitching to stop, but I told them to knock it off; it was a waste of ammunition.

For a moment it felt good. Most of us had popped helmets to eat for the first time in two days, and I didn’t have to remind them that some needed to remain on watch since we had lost the sentry bots. Then Lucy tapped me on the shoulder.

“Makes you wonder,” she said, pointing at the piled corpses.

“Wonder what?”

“How many of them are there? I mean we must have killed thousands by now, and I haven’t seen any signs of them slowing. Maybe they sent out a call, to wake up nests all over the planet.”

I popped my helmet and sighed. “You’re awful, Lucy.”

“Hey, Grandmother, I’m just thinking out loud. On the other hand, maybe they’ve given up now and we won’t see them again. The problem is that if we do see them, we no longer have an acceptable field of fire.”

And just like that my good mood evaporated. She was right. The walls of dead were too high to see over, and the next time they attacked the mantes would get almost to the bunker before taking hits.

“I need ten volunteers,” I said, and everyone stopped talking.

“For what?” someone asked.

“To go out there and clear the bodies, give us some breathing room.”

Nobody raised her hand. In the end I picked them randomly and was about to volunteer myself when Lucy shook her head.

“No way, Grandmother, we need you here.”

The others left reluctantly through the roof hatch and I positioned two of our auto-Maxwells on top of the bunker to cover them just in case. It was slow going. By midnight they had pushed the wall back ten meters, but it was a monumental effort involving chainsaws so that the girls could hack the bodies into manageable chunks. I began to feel sick when someone pointed out that if you turned off light amplification the girls were half red, dripping blood from the waist down.

The next attack was a surprise. One of the girls had climbed on top of the pile so that the others could hand her body parts, when she disappeared with a scream. Then the wall erupted. Some mantes must have been pretending to be dead and once my team got close enough the things leaped into action, dragging the girls away without a fight.

I ordered everyone back inside.

“All ten lost, Grandmother,” said Lucy.

I didn’t know what to say. For the first time I felt a despair so overwhelming that I considered handing the command over and going below, to crawl into one of the beds—just curl up and wait for the inevitable. Before I actually did it, though, Lucy grabbed my arm.

“Here they come.” She laughed then, before locking her helmet back on. “Makes me wish I had been a miner.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because for the miners it’s already over, and they have nothing left to worry about.”

The mining area was wasted. French corporates had scoured this section of Nimes clear of vegetation for at least ten kilometers, and toward the end of our march we were strung out on hundred-meter-high berms that separated huge pits filled with a pale blue waste liquid—like poisoned swimming pools. A main entryway had been carved out of a low mountain. Its doors swung in a strong wind, and a pair of narrow-gauge rail lines disappeared into the mine’s darkness.

Every once in a while the realization of what was happening would pierce my cocoon of exhaustion, even make me smile a little: it was almost over. We had just completed a three-day march—barely—and once we finished our assault we’d be Legionnaires, complete with white kepis. This was our final exam.

The corporal called me and Buttons over and a map popped onto our heads-up displays. “Give me your plan.”

“Heavy weapons won’t be helpful inside,” said Buttons. “So Grandmother will set her girls to cover all the exits, and my people will sweep the interior levels, one at a time, moving by fire teams.”

I marked the map using forearm controls and listed the personnel I’d assign to each spot while the corporal waited. When I finished he shouldered his Maxwell carbine, motioning to Buttons.

“Take us in.”

I was nervous. My groups moved to their assigned locations and there shouldn’t have been anything to worry about, it was just another training exercise—our last. But it wasn’t. The excitement of completing basic evaporated, replaced by a sense that something was off, like maybe we had always been cursed and only now would it hit. Jennifer moved her team atop one of the waste-containment berms overlooking the main entrance. She stumbled up the slope. It took them longer than the others to set up their auto-Maxwell, and while I scrambled up to join them I couldn’t shake the feeling that things were about to go wrong.

Once the teams had settled into their positions, I passed the word to activate chameleon skins. Our suits functioned the same way real combat ones did, so had been coated with a polymer that, when activated, mimicked the wearers’ immediate surroundings. By now I should have been used to it. But when one by one my people disappeared, their suits masking all thermal emissions and the skins making them completely invisible, I felt alone. Only blinking dots on my map said otherwise.