Edward Grant - Rebellion

The plasteel floor of the troop shuttle’s passenger compartment twisted beneath Logan McCoy’s boots like a dinghy bucking in a stormy sea. His hard, moulded seat rose beneath him as the shuttle climbed, then the thick, black webbing straps across his chest pulled his shoulders down as the seat dropped away, and left his stomach hanging in mid-air.

He closed his eyes, and tried to ignore the constant creaking and rattling behind his back from the thin hull that had been heated to over a thousand degrees by the fury of atmospheric entry as the shuttle descended from low orbit, and was now bumping through the turbulence lower in the atmosphere.

The air in the shuttle’s passenger compartment was growing warm as the heat from the heat-shield slowly soaked through the cylindrical green walls around them.

He reached up behind the transparent visor of his green plasteel helmet, and wiped away the drops of sweat from his forehead and eyes as best he could. More had soaked through the thin T-shirt beneath the heavy body armour that covered his chest, and now the black cloth of the shirt was stuck to his skin. He pulled the waistband loose from his fatigue pants, and shook it gently, to get some fresh air over his skin.

This was the second new planet he’d landed on since leaving Earth with the French Foreign Legion, and the sixth landing. But it was the first landing in a real combat zone.

The first landing where people on the ground might be shooting at him with real weapons, not simulated ones. Trying to kill him, and everyone else on board.

The next time he landed on a new planet, after a few months of his first combat posting here on New Strasbourg, he’d be a veteran.

Or a corpse.

The last time he landed, he and Desoto had been strapped into well-used Brigandine Combat Suits on the outside of an assault landing craft as it trailed kilometres of smoke and flames across the sky, listening to the hiss of cold air flowing into their helmets as the suit’s air-conditioning struggled to keep them cool. Staring through the darkened, centimetre-thick armoured visor of the helmet as the heat-shield below their feet melted and glowing embers flashed past.

With no choice but to stand there and hope the heat-shield held together until the pod touched down.

This shuttle trip had almost been relaxed in comparison. There were no windows to see what was happening outside the passenger compartment. And no-one had shot at them, so far.

But there was still time before it landed.

His heart thumped the way it always had before a fight back on Earth, as he sized up the other guys, and wondered whether he could avoid the conflict, and what might happen if he couldn’t. He’d been in plenty of fights in Paris in the last few years, but most had used fists or knives, not missiles and nukes.

They’d been fighting for dominance. To show the other guy who was boss. To beat, scar and bruise him, not to kill him.

War was different.

The deep, drawling voice of the shuttle commander spoke through Logan’s helmet speakers, as though the man had burned a trail of fire through the atmosphere from space into a combat zone so many times that now it just bored him.

“En approche finale. Préparer pour l’atterrissage.”

French, without a trace of a foreign accent. Like most of the Legion’s officers.

No Englishman like Logan could progress past Sergeant, unless he became a French citizen first. He’d learned enough of the language to get by during his years in Paris, and some more during the Legion training. Mostly new swear words, and l’argot militaire, the language of destruction and death.

In combat, his suit’s AI could translate between English and French, but he’d seen more than enough simulated casualties in training caused by the split-second delay the AI introduced to convince him not to rely on it.

And those simulated deaths were usually followed by the ‘corpse’ rolling on the floor groaning as the instructors gave him a good kicking for getting himself killed because he was too lazy to learn.

Studying the Legion’s language seemed much less painful.

But, for now, to the officers, Logan was still the rosbif with the wrong accent and wrong background, expected to give his life for the Legion, but not trusted enough to lead it.

He opened his eyes, and glanced at the other fifty-eight men of 3rd Platoon, strapped into the remaining rows of seats that faced inward along both walls of the shuttle’s narrow passenger compartment.

The equipment crates and kit bags piled in the space between the two rows of seats rattled in the webbing that held that cargo tightly to the deck as the shuttle bounced through the turbulence. But he could see past them to spot some familiar faces on the far side of the passenger compartment.

While most of the men wore body armour like Logan, Johnson was sitting on his. “Rather lose my arms than my balls,” he’d said as they climbed aboard the shuttle. Now he smirked, and gave a thumbs-up as Logan looked his way.

“Told you’d we’d be fine,” he said.

Logan nodded, and faked a smile.

Sergeant Volkov glared at Johnson from the far end of the hold. Johnson would be in the crap after landing, if Volkov had heard him speaking English. Or American, in his case.

Logan had never asked Johnson how he’d found his way to the Legion. Crossing the English Channel from England to France was one thing, but crossing the Atlantic from Dixie? He’d never heard of anyone crazy enough to do that before.

Most of the Legionnaires and recruits Logan had met so far had been colonists on planets captured during the wars, who’d somehow found their way to France, then the Legion. A few of the others were prisoners-of-war, who’d rather fight for France than spend years hoping to be repatriated. Some were deserters, who’d found no other way to survive after desertion than to go back to war under a different flag.

He’d never met another recruit who moved to France just to see what it was like.

Volkov was still scowling. His grey hair and wrinkled face marked him as the oldest member of the platoon, and at least twice Logan’s age.

Once, on the week-long trip across the light years to New Strasbourg, Volkov had claimed he’d been in the Legion since it was first formed centuries ago.

Logan could almost believe it. Somehow, the man had never quite managed to progress to lieutenant, and had been demoted soon after every time someone decided to promote him to chief sergeant. Rumour was, he liked the brutality of combat-zone NCO life too much, and just couldn’t bear leaving it behind.

“Are we there, yet?” Desoto muttered in French tinged with Desoto’s own thick Spanish accent, from the seat to Logan’s right. He swung his legs below the seat, tapping his combat boots against the floor of the hold.

How had Logan ever got stuck in a team with him?

Oh, yeah, they’d been assigned together since the first days of Legion training, back in France. Desoto wouldn’t have been Logan’s first choice if he’d been given one, but they’d managed to keep each other alive so far.

Which was more than some of the other recruits that joined at the same time could say.

“Shut it, Desoto,” Corporal Bairamov said from Logan’s left. “Just be glad you’re still alive.”

A woman wriggled on the far side of the shuttle. Short, and chubby, with squinting eyes. The only woman on board, strapped into the seat between Johnson and Lieutenant Merle, the platoon commander.

Johnson had chosen to sit beside her, when any other man in the platoon would have done his best to avoid it. As Logan’s father would have said, that’s the bloody Yanks for you, always thinking they’d get lucky.