T. McCarthy - The Legionnaires

Twenty children huddled in a corner.

“We’re the Legion, Grandmother,” Toly said to me, “not a damn orphanage. This is a military post.”

“What else was there to do?” I asked. “Tell those things to go away until we can ship the children off planet? This was going to be a resort posting, five-star.”

When we initially landed in the Lavigne system all of us had been giddy. Who wouldn’t be? It was the first world with optimal conditions: the perfect climate, the perfect star type, and a soil chemistry almost identical to that of the south of France, just right to reestablish vineyards. A dream assignment. Nobody wanted Nimes Lointain again, the Legion’s training planet, the ideal place if you enjoyed marching all day with a full kit under two g’s. We had just come from Nimes; Lavigne was supposed to have been our vacation.

“How do they see?” I whispered. Out the firing port we could see an ocean of them, mante religieuse (French for praying mantis), huge insect-like things that had shown up that morning and slaughtered every single colonist—except for the kids in our bunker.

“Once they get closer,” said Toly, “I’ll arm the bots.”

Someone coughed on the other side of the room. “Leave it to miners to find killer bugs instead of metals. We always have bad luck with lousy miners.”

“Three hundred meters,” said Toly, ignoring her. “Coms get a response from orbital yet?”

I checked the transmission log. “No.”

One of the other girls dropped her carbine and curled into a ball, mumbling, “I want to go back to Nimes Lointain. I want to go home.”

That’s how bad it had gotten. Basic training had just become preferable to Lavigne.

The first drop of rain smacked my helmet, reminding me how far from Earth I had traveled. The second and third didn’t register. Soon water fell in sheets and, while standing in formation with the other recruits, I watched the parade ground turn from dust to a gluey mess, into which you sank at the slightest movement. We weren’t supposed to move.

A corporal stepped in front of me, taking a moment to access my suit’s transponder. “Rebecca Matthews. A mother?” he asked.

“I was.”

“But you have children, no?” I heard the confusion in his voice. The corporal spoke softly, his voice tickling my ears through helmet speakers, and its gentleness surprised me since I had expected to be yelled at from this point on. The other thing I had expected? French. Only he spoke in English, with almost no accent.

“I had three,” I said.

“But then…who is taking care of them?”

“They and my husband died. Car accident.”

“I understand.” A mirrored visor hid his face. Ours weren’t mirrored and we had been instructed to keep interior lights on at all times, so the instructors could watch the occupants. I saw myself, a squat armored figure in orange ceramic, reflected in the corporal’s visor while water poured off my shoulders in twin waterfalls.

“But you’re thirty-five,” he added, obviously troubled by something.

“That’s correct.”

The corporal broke the silence ten seconds later with a sigh. “In less than a minute I will give the volunteers another chance to leave. Anyone who wants it will be given passage back to Earth and a flight home. A widow at age thirty-five should consider this opportunity and take it. You are too old, too misguided, and too much a risk. This is a mistake.”

And he was gone. You weren’t supposed to look at him and had to stare straight ahead, so as soon as he moved away the corporal exited my field of view and left me to my thoughts—which he had just thrown out of whack. What was I doing there? Back in France it had seemed so clear, even when they first interrogated me, trying everything they could to figure out what would make a middle-aged mother want to join. I had given them the usual answers—duty, honor, Legion esprit de corps—but it wasn’t the truth. Even I didn’t understand the truth. It had more to do with an intangible instinct that had kept me up at night ever since I had seen the recruiting ad and started doing research, an inner voice that whispered go to France, enlist, finally do something that nobody expected, something important. Before you kill yourself.

My mother and the corporal would have gotten along instantly; she had cried for a straight week after I told her of my plans, and was crying when she dropped me off for the flight to Paris. I don’t even remember the plane ride. Three months later I found myself on Nimes Lointain, fitted for my training suit and herded onto the parade ground under a gravity twice that of Earth’s while sweat from the strain of standing made my forehead clammy.

The corporal’s voice clicked onto the general frequency. “ Garde-à-vous .” Those of us who knew no French had been given lessons during our voyage, and it took a moment to realize that I understood without thinking, my heels squishing together. Apparently we didn’t come to attention quickly enough.

“ Garde-à-vous! ” This time we moved simultaneously, and I willed my gauntlet’s thumb into the correct position, just behind the suit’s main thigh plate. The corporal stepped carefully onto a raised platform. “I am disgusted by all of you. The Legion wants women in its ranks. So, fine. We take women. You represent the ten percent of female humanity who volunteered and met the minimum requirements to even have a chance of making it through basic training.”

He held a stack of soggy papers up in one hand, over his head. “You signed yourself to us for five years, but from what I see none of you will last five days. Anyone who wants to leave now may do so. It will be your last chance. For the next four months this planet will do its best to crush you under its gravity, making every exercise, every movement excruciating. We can afford to lose all of you. Any injured personnel this unit incurs while away from camp will be given low priority for our medical and rescue staff, which is currently dedicated to supporting mining operations. Rocks have value, and you do not. Our miners are priceless. If you cannot return to camp on your own, you will be left where you fall. None of your section mates will have the strength to carry another body, and since vehicles are reserved for mining operations there will be only one option.”

A red light blinked on my forearm controls and a second later the message flashed on my heads-up: new data had been loaded into my suit computer.

“Self-destruction. All volunteers have the option to administer a lethal dose of combat drugs in the event that they become incapacitated, and the instructions have just been uploaded to your systems. Now look behind me.”

I did. According to the suit it was midday, and somewhere far above us Nimes’s star shone, but almost none of its light penetrated the cloud cover, so blackness hid the plains beyond our corporal. An occasional flash of lightning illuminated a distant communications tower.

“Your first exercise is to run to that tower and back. I say run , but what I mean is to move at your fastest possible speed and return before mess at 1600 hours. Anyone who misses the time will be discharged. Be advised that when it rains like this, the volcanic dust absorbs water like a sponge, which creates a quicksand condition in some areas that will suck you under in less than a minute. Some will not return.”

The corporal waved the sheets of paper again. “So who wants out right now?”