Edward Grant - Rebellion

And no hoof prints came out of the building.

So one thing was sure. He wasn’t alone.

None of the insurgents had ridden horses during the attack on the truck yesterday. But maybe they’d hidden the animals somewhere over the ridge. If the insurgents were out in the daylight, they couldn’t have come far without something to help them move fast enough to escape the sun’s radiation.

He crouched low as he jogged to the corner of the barn.

He peered in through the gap between the doors, but could see little more than a pile of straw in the corner of the barn. He’d seen the back of the building yesterday when he scouted out the river. It was completely buried beneath the dirt. There was no way in or out, aside from these doors.

His heart pounded, and sweat dripped down his forehead as he crept toward the door. He’d have felt a lot safer in his suit than he did with just an inch of wood and some body armour to protect him. He took a few long breaths as he pulled a grenade from his belt, then pulled the pin.

He tossed it through the gap, crouched, and covered his ears. The flashbang exploded in the barn, rattling the doors and illuminating the interior through the gap between the doors. A girl screamed, and the horse whinnied.

Then he kicked the partly-open door.

The bottom scraped on the dirt as it opened, and it exposed the dirt floor and piles of straw and hay inside as he swung around the edge of the door. The horse’s hooves thumped on the ground as it reared up, but the reins were tied to a pillar that supported the upper level of the barn. The pillar jerked as the reins pulled against it, and a cloud of dust fell slowly toward the floor from the hay and straw piled on the upper level.

The girl crouched low in the straw on the far side of the barn, holding her hands up to her face, and rubbing her eyes. He recognized that hair and that dress. And, as she lowered her eyes and whimpered, he recognized the face.

She screamed as Logan grabbed her shoulder, and pressed the pistol against her head. The horse reared up again at the noise, then kicked against the wooden walls of the barn. The planks shook, and dirt fell in through the gaps between them.

She pushed herself up, kicked at him, bit at his arm, and twisted out of his grip. As she turned aside, he grabbed her arm and kicked her legs out from under her. She yelped as she slammed down onto the straw, then rolled over. He straddled her stomach, grabbed her wrists with one hand so she could no longer hit him, and waved his pistol toward her face.

This time, she wasn’t getting away.

“Stop struggling,” he said. “If you run, the solar storms will kill you.”

She stared up into his face, and her eyes blinked as they struggled to recover from the bright flash of the grenade. “Who are you?”

If he hadn’t been sure she was the girl from Gries when he saw her, he was when he heard her voice. He’d heard her speak enough times back in Gries and the Valenciennes tunnels to recognize her accent.

“Logan McCoy. French Foreign Legion. And you’re under arrest as an insurgent.”

She kicked her legs and tried to swing her arms, even though Logan was holding them against the ground. All they did was wiggle.

“Why are the Foreign Legion sneaking around Saint Jean?”

“Probably for the same reason you are.”

“I’m here to visit my aunt. But she’s not here.”

“It’s a little late for that. Your friends have already come to visit her.“

“What do you mean?”

“They threw your aunt off the cliff.”

“They wouldn’t have…”

Logan nodded toward the doors. “Her body’s down there in the river somewhere, if you want to look for it. Along with all the others.”

She relaxed at last, and was silent for a moment. Her eyes and mouth opened wide. Not that he really believed she had an aunt in the village, but she didn’t seem to believe the insurgents would have killed them.

“You can’t mean that.”

He looked into her eyes. Could she be serious about her aunt? She looked distraught, but what man could really tell whether a girl was lying? He’d learned that much in the ZUS. All of Jacques’ girls were expert liars, at least when they wanted to please their customers. Customers who didn’t have much of an incentive to disbelieve them.

“I don’t know whether I saw your aunt down there. But I saw a lot of people. If she was up here…”

Then the girl began to cry. For a second, Logan wanted to release her. Then he remembered Gallo lying in the square after her friend blew him up. And what was left of his body, back in the ruins of his suit.

“I’m not who you think I am,” she said, finally.

“You’re the girl who led us into an ambush in Gries, and you’re the girl who was in the tunnels in Valenciennes. You can deny it if you want, but we’ll get the truth out of you in the end. So you might as well admit it now.”

She just stared at him, and pouted. “If you let me go now, I won’t tell anyone what you did.”

He waved the pistol in front of her face. “You can tell my sergeant exactly what I’ve done. He’ll be real glad to hear about it, because he’s been pissed with me ever since you got away the first time.”

She stared at the gun.

“You wouldn’t really shoot me, would you?”

Could he? She’d tried to get him killed. She’d helped to get Gallo killed. He should really want to shoot her for revenge. But she was just a girl, and no older than his sister had been the last time he saw her. What did she know about real life?

“I’ll be in less trouble for taking you back dead than I will for not taking you back alive.”

The urge to fight seemed to leave her face at his words. As though, for the first time, she really believed he might do it.

“Now,” he continued, “Do you think you could do what I tell you, and stop doing things that might make me want to shoot you? We’d all be better that way.”

She nodded. “Just don’t hurt me.”

Hurt was the least that Intel were likely to do if they got their hands on her. But that was a choice she made when she decided to take on the Legion. He thought of Gallo, and all the men wounded and killed so far on this deployment. If she could give them intel that would help them end the insurgency…

“Did you see that burned-out suit back before the bridge?”

She nodded. “That was a friend of mine. Before your friends killed him.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Bit late for that. But I’m not exactly worried about hurting insurgents at this moment. Do you understand?”

She nodded. Good. The more scared she was, the less likely she was to do something that might make him do something he’d regret.

His heart had slowed down as his body recovered from the exertion of the last few minutes in the thin air. He’d been up all night and most of the previous day, and now his eyelids were starting to feel heavy. He had to stay out of the sun for the rest of the day, and be ready to head to the mine tonight if the truck didn’t come back.

That meant he needed some sleep.

He yawned at the thought. He’d survived months in Legion training on barely any sleep, but the last few days had been mentally harder than anything the instructors had put him through. No wonder they pushed them so hard in training, so they’d have some chance of surviving combat in the real world.

But that didn’t seem like a good plan when he was sharing the building with a girl who’d previously led him into what was supposed to be a deathtrap. She’d pretended to be an innocent bystander before. Surely she wouldn’t stop at trying to take his pistol or a grenade and kill him while he slept?

“Come on,” he said, and climbed off her. He stepped back and kept the pistol at his hip as she clambered to her feet, and brushed the straw from her dress.