A group of kids, maybe eight years old, peered around the corner of the house ahead, half-hidden in an alley between the house and its neighbour.
They muttered to each other, giggled, then ran toward the Legionnaires, laughing. Alice would be scanning them as they approached, and her sensors searching for signs of hidden weapons or bombs. Without the visor’s HUD, he couldn’t see the status displays, but she wasn’t warning him of any threats through the speakers.
A boy with scars on his dirt-covered, bare feet and a body wrapped in torn shirt and pants raced alongside Logan, panting as he struggled to keep up with the suit’s marching pace. Logan raised his rifle higher and slowed a little as the kids swarmed around them. The last thing he needed was to step on one if they jumped in front of him faster than the suit could react, or smack them with the rifle when he turned.
But what if the insurgents had sent them to distract him from the surroundings?
Could he even trust the kids out here?
“Can I join the Legion?” the boy said.
His shoulders barely reached the waist of Logan’s suit. He must have been about the age Logan was when he first started thinking about leaving home for a life of adventure. He’d have joined the Legion in a shot if he could have done so at that age.
“Sorry, kid,” Logan said. “You’re too young.”
Besides, they called it the Foreign Legion for a reason.
Every man in it, aside from the officers, was a foreigner. Or, at least, pretended to be. He'd heard that some Frenchies joined up under false identities, but had never met one. The Legion had offered him the chance to change his name and take on a new identity when he joined, in case he would rather forget his past life and start over. But he kept his own. What reason would he have to be ashamed of his life? He might have made mistakes, but they were his mistakes. He’d live with them.
“Alice, see anything?”
“The walls are blocking my sensors.”
The narrow windows beside the door of the nearest house were set about half a metre back below the mass of dirt that was piled over the curved side walls and roof. The dirt must be at least a metre thick. Thick enough to block the radiation from the worst solar storm... and thick enough to hide anyone inside from the suits’ sensors. If they had to fight, a hypersonic gauss round from his rifle might punch through the wall and kill someone inside, but he couldn’t shoot what he couldn’t see.
His heart pounded with the adrenaline rush. A street like this was the perfect place to stage an ambush.
Catch the section in a crossfire from houses on both sides, while they were surrounded by civilians. The Legion would lose, either way.
If they threw everything they had at the insurgents, those insurgents would drag out some dead kid after the battle, and blame the Legion. If the Legion retreated, they conceded the village to the insurgents.
The flag in the town square clattered as it fluttered against its white pole. Logan could see it above the roofs of the houses to the right, flying between the radiation sirens that stood on a pair of wooden poles at least a dozen metres tall.
The street opened out as they reached the square, and Bairamov slowed from a march to a walk.
The flag fluttered beside a building on the far side of the square, not much taller than the houses, but four or five times as wide. Government, most likely. Logan had learned in France that any building that big had to be something to do with the government, or the aristos. And this probably weren’t many aristos living in Gries.
A man wearing a crumpled suit and circular spectacles stepped out of the double doors at the front of the building, onto the dirt of the square. He waited as Volkov, Poulin and Alpha Team approached.
“Mr Mayor,” Poulin said.
“Good afternoon, mademoiselle. I was only just told of your arrival. We are so glad to have you visit our village.”
He held out his hand, then suddenly seemed to realize that, regardless of how strong Poulin’s own hands might be, the power-assisted fingers of her suit could crush his without even thinking about it. He made a vague attempt at a salute, instead.
Bravo Team stopped a few metres behind Volkov. Logan gasped down as much air as he could, while he had the chance.
But his heart didn't even slow down. The adrenaline rush of standing there in the open surrounded by people who might want to kill him was making it pump faster than the exercise had on the way in.
The nearest cover they had were the buildings around the square, and they were a few seconds away by the time the suit built up speed and then stopped. Any competent ambush party would have men in them anyway, waiting to attack anyone who tried to hide beside them.
He looked toward the mayor. “Alice, scan him, will you?”
“Body temperature is high,” Alice said. “He is sweating.”
Logan could hardly miss the red face, the sun glinting from the drops of sweat rolling down the man’s skin, or the yellow-grey patches spreading across his white shirt where the sweat was soaking through the cloth.
But that could just be from the heat of the sun burning down on them, reflected back from the light brown dirt of the square and buildings.
Or the man could be scared out of his wits.
Which wouldn’t be surprising if he’d seen the vid of Petit Toulouse. Every colonist on New Strasbourg was probably imagining their head on a spike right now. What the insurgents had done might be evil, but it was great propaganda.
“Form a perimeter,” Volkov said.
“No,” Poulin said. “This is a friendly village. We will not come storming in here like an occupying army that doesn't trust the people.”
“Fine. Alpha, introduce yourselves to the people in the buildings around the square. Bravo, take a patrol around the village.”
“That is not...” Poulin began.
Volkov turned toward Bairamov. “Show your faces, smile at the kids. Let the people here know we’re their friends. Exactly as our political officer says.”
For once, Poulin had no answer.
Logan suppressed a smile at Volkov turning Poulin’s own words against her. How could she argue with that?
Alpha moved toward the buildings. Curious faces peered out at the Legionnaires from windows and doors. The men nodded and waved at them.
“Have you seen any sign of the insurgents around here?” Poulin said.
The mayor shook his head. Fast.
“No insurgents here,” he said, waving his hands as he spoke. “We've never seen any sign of insurgents anywhere around the village. Never at all.”
Logan’s heart was still thumping hard as he followed Bairamov, Desoto and Gallo from the square.
If he was in charge of a village like this, would he be more afraid of the insurgents, or the Legion? Either could kill him. Poor sod probably just came here for a quiet life, and was now stuck in the middle of a civil war.
The kids were still watching the Legionnaires from the side of the square. They stood beside a building with wide windows and an open door, and a table on each side of the door piled with shiny trinkets. A middle-aged woman wrapped in a long dress of faded reds and yellows sat on a rough, wooden chair beside the tables, fanning herself with a wood and cloth fan in her right hand.
“Want to buy something, son?” she said as they approached.
Bairamov glanced toward the tables.
“No, but thanks, madame.”
They strolled on.
Logan kept his eyes moving over his sector, and tried not to stare at the locals as he passed them and they watched him go by. The ones who wanted him to stare at them were likely to be the ones who were trying to distract him from their friends with weapons hiding in the shadows.
A dog looked up at them from a gap between the houses. One side of its body still had fur, the other had only a few fuzzy patches between a mass of pink skin stretched tight over its ribs, and scarred by dozens of lumpy growths.
No-one paid any attention to the animal
as it sat there. Must be hard being a stray, having to find a place to hide whenever the radiation storms came. It probably wouldn’t survive long enough to still be here if the Legion ever came back.
A girl raced out of the street to the left, her long grey skirt swinging around her legs as she moved, and a small brown bag banging against her side. Logan glanced her way and tightened his grip on his rifle, but Alice didn’t report any sign of weapons or any other threat.
“Please,” the girl said. “My father...”
She didn’t look any older than Logan’s sister had been when Morgan took her away. About the same height. Thinner, maybe. Her hair was long and brown, but not as red as Alice’s had been. Her body was shaking, and her eyes opened wide as she stared at the men.
“Alice, what do you see?” Logan whispered.
“No threats. No contacts.”
Bairamov took a step toward the girl. “How can we help you, mademoiselle?”
“My father is sick. Can you do something?”
Logan glanced at her, then back to his sector. Peering into the gaps between the houses, and up at the roofs, looking for anyone who might be hiding there ready to take a potshot while the girl distracted them. His heart was thudding again, and his palms were slick with sweat on the hand-grips inside the suit.
Bairamov nodded toward him.
“McCoy, Desoto. Take a look.”
CHAPTER 6
English Channel
The French found Logan floating in the Channel the next morning. He was clinging to the shattered remains of the dinghy’s hull, soaked to the skin, and barely alive in the near-freezing water. His teeth were chattering, his legs felt like ice, his clothes were sodden with salty water, and he could barely feel his hands.
But at least he could no longer feel the pain that had shot through his limbs after the mine exploded and blew the boat apart. That had slowly faded away as the cold numbed his flesh.
He lay half-on, half-off the side of what remained of the dinghy’s hull, with his legs dangling in the sea. He’d clamped his fingers around the torn edge of the wooden planks after the explosion, and clung on ever since, refusing to release his grip for a second even as the sharp edges of the broken wood dug deep into his fingers. After an hour, they’d grown so cold that he couldn’t even feel that pain any more. He’d struggled to keep his eyes open all night, terrified of surrendering to the cold and exhaustion. To close them for a few seconds’ rest, and slip into the sea, into a sleep from which he’d never wake.
Then a dark shape appeared through the thick grey haze of the morning fog, like a cliff sliding through the open sea.
A French corvette, come to investigate the explosion.
The wreck of the dinghy bobbed up and down in the ship’s wake, and the corvette’s searchlights cast bright beams through the fog, as they scanned the floating wreckage on the waves around him. They briefly illuminated the dinghy’s waterlogged sail, the mass of broken wood from the hull, and Logan’s torn bag and its contents. Then moved on.
A drone buzzed in a few meters above him, hovered for a few seconds, then flew away. The ship hove-to nearby, and a rope net fell over the side. Dark shapes clambered down the net, and jumped into the sea.
The world faded into blackness as hands grabbed Logan’s arms. He couldn’t stay awake a second longer.
He remembered little of the trip to shore on the corvette, or the few weeks in hospital that followed. The mine explosion that shattered the dinghy had shattered his body too, fracturing his left arm, both legs, and two ribs. Injuries on that scale took time to heal.
He faded in and out of consciousness for days as the French doctors repaired the damage. Had he been one of their own, a French boy gone sailing in the middle of the night who ran into a roving smart mine, they’d just have left him to die. But a boy from the far side of the Channel?
That was worth investigating.
The French government agents didn’t want to save his life so much as they wanted to know who he was, and what he was doing there. As soon as he could walk again, they dragged him from the hospital to a mouldy cell in the basement of a cold, dark building in the suburbs of Paris.
For questioning.
“Where did you come from?” they asked, in their heavily-accented English.
“Hastings.”
“Why are you here?”
“I wanted to get away from home.”
The interrogator leaned closer to his face, and almost spat as he spoke.
“How stupid do you think we are? Why would you risk your life to cross the Channel, just to get away from home? You are a spy.”
“I just wanted to see what life was like on the other side.”
“Then you are a spy. You will be executed.”
“I’m just a boy.”
“What information were you sent to collect?”
“No-one sent me.”
“Who are your contacts?”
“I don’t have any contacts.”
When the questions failed, they beat him with truncheons.
Not hard enough to break any of the bones they’d just spent so much time repairing, but hard enough to leave his muscles so battered that he was barely able to walk back to his cell, or to sleep that night from the throbbing pain.
Then, the next day, they questioned him again. And beat him again. Still he had no answers to give that would satisfy them. After a few more days with no sleep, he tried admitting to being a spy, just to get a break. But, when they asked for more information about what he was spying on, he could give no answer that would satisfy them.
They beat him again.
They starved him.
They kept him up all night by shining lights in his cell and filling the air with non-stop music.
When that still failed to produce a result, they tried holding his head underwater until he could hold his breath no longer, and they did it again and again. Then beat him. For fun, he guessed, because it no longer had much affect on him. His body had grown used to the pain, and barely complained.
Nothing worked for them, because he had nothing to tell them. And no way even to make up a lie that would convince them he really was the spy they were looking for. After weeks of abuse, he’d have preferred execution.
Finally, they let him go. Put a blindfold on his face, tossed him in the back of a van, and drove him through the streets of Paris. Then tossed him out.
As the whine of the van’s motors faded into the distance, Logan pulled the blindfold from his face, and stared at the garbage-strewn street and dark, dirt-stained buildings all around him. They’d left him alone on the streets of Paris, weak, half-starved, battered and bruised with no status, and nowhere to go. All he knew about France were the few words of French he’d learned by listening to the interrogators talk between themselves over his time in captivity.
Why couldn’t they have just shot him?
It would have been more humane than dumping him on the streets, battered and bruised, with no money and no ID. He’d be dead either way, but, this way, he’d suffer first.
Or maybe that was the idea?
The day was cold and wet, and he shuffled along the street, ignored by the men and women rushing past. He found a charred wooden shed behind a half-collapsed old store with boarded-up windows, and broke the door open. Then fell asleep in the debris on the floor.
He woke in the morning, shivering, with a dry throat, and an empty stomach churning and rumbling. He could hear muffled voices and footsteps outside the shed, and sneaked out as soon as he could, back onto the streets of Paris.
He walked the streets, shivering and cold, begging for money or food, using gestures when he didn’t know the French words. The longer he walked, the more desperate he became. If he didn’t find food soon, he’d have to steal some, or starve.
The Parisians either ignored him, or scowled and passed by.
The further he walked, the more he noticed other young men lounging against the walls, chattering ra
pidly to each other in French, too rapidly for him to understand more than a few words of what they said. Their staring eyes followed him, like a predator following its prey, waiting for the right moment to pounce. He didn’t try asking them for help, just passed them as rapidly as he could, and kept his eyes on them as he did.
About a dozen girls leaned against the columns and brown stone walls of an abandoned bank, below the smashed windows, beside the thick, fallen doors that lay on the stone steps outside.
Despite the cold wind and drizzle, none of the girls wore more than a few scraps of cloth that passed as blouses and skirts which exposed the bare skin between them to the winter air, and every male gaze that passed by.
The girls smiled and twisted their bodies toward him as he approached, then started yammering at him rapidly in French, fighting for his attention.
“Sorry, I don’t understand,” he said.
That only caused them to yammer more and faster, but, this time, yammering at each other.
He turned and walked away.
But the rapid tapping of hurried footsteps followed him along the street. He glanced back.
A man followed him, not much older than he was, with curly black hair above a black T-shirt and battered leather boots, and a small cigarette dangling from his lips.
“Voulez-vous une femme?”
And that was how Logan met Jacques.
Full-time pimp and part-time drug dealer, selling a few minutes of release to the desperate inhabitants of Paris Section 19, in whatever form his customers desired.
The French called it a ZUS, Zone Urbaine Sensible, a walled-off section of the city where they dumped those who couldn’t be made to fit into their society, and left them to fend for themselves. There was only one gate in and out through the wall, and permission to pass through the guard post there could be revoked for anyone at any time for any reason.
Such as being found outside the ZUS during curfew. The aristos didn’t want the riffraff of Paris messing up their evenings out on the town.
The police mostly stayed outside the wall, except when they came through for a sweep now and again to remind the inhabitants that they were still there, and still watching. Or when they decided that an inmate was too much of a threat to those outside in Paris and had to be disposed of.
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