Rebellion

by Edward M. Grant

  Then he stepped out into the street. The mortar explosions had blown the table onto its side. The remains of the chocolate were splattered across the wall of the cafe. A dog was eagerly digging into the remains of his baguette. Blood dripped down the dog’s side from a twisted piece of shrapnel that protruded from its fur by its back legs.

  Heinrichs stepped out of the cafe beside him. “I’ll see if I can help out.”

  Logan surveyed the damage in the main street as he and Gallo walked back to look for Bairamov and Desoto. Chunks of shrapnel from the mortar shells protruded from the dirt piles covering of the buildings all around him. Medics worked over the wounded townspeople in the street, and carried the worst toward Pierre’s Place, laying the wounded on the tables inside, where blood dripped from the tabletops onto the dirt floor.

  Bairamov strolled out into the street from the whorehouse, adjusting his fatigue jacket, and tightening his body armour and helmet straps.

  “Glad to see you’re OK, sir.”

  “Hiding under the bed behind a metre of dirt is a pretty safe place to be in a mortar attack. And I barely even had to break my stroke.”

  “Wouldn't have done much good for you if there'd been a direct hit on the whorehouse.”

  “But at least I'd have died happy. And the girl was glad to have a big, strong man to protect her.” Bairamov smirked. “I reckon I might get a discount next time.”

  “What about Desoto?”

  “Last I saw, he was chasing his girl around the place, trying to calm her down after she ran away screaming during all the explosions. I’m sure he’ll join us once he’s done.”

  Half a dozen suits strode along the street behind them, from the direction of the spaceport. Volkov and Lieutenant Merle were easy to identify from the way they seemed to command the ground around them as they moved. The others kept their distance ahead of and behind the officers, holding their rifles ready, and scanning the area around them. Mortars would just be an annoyance to anyone wearing a suit, unless there was a direct hit. But who knew whether the insurgents might have something more planned? Logan began to feel naked standing out there in the street, but he’d be no safer standing beside an IED hidden in the dirt walls of the nearby buildings.

  “How bad was the attack?” Merle’s voice said from Logan’s helmet speakers.

  “Three dead so far, sir,” one of the medics replied. “At least a dozen wounded.”

  Volkov’s familiar voice joined the chatter on the company net. “Would have been much worse without the point-defence guns, sir. They hit most of the mortar bombs.”

  “The ones that got through still caused a lot of damage.”

  “They’re all we’ve got, sir. We’re spread thin on this planet. We have to pick and choose were to put them.”

  “No-one expected the insurgents to attack their own people just to get at us. What kind of psychos would do that?”

  Governor Porcher strolled along the street toward them, with Poulin at his side. Chaput followed close behind them. Porcher’s suit looked as though it had just been cleaned.

  Chaput’s was dishevelled and smeared with dirt, as though he’d been crawling on the floor. His face was smeared with dirt and sweat that glittered in the fading sunlight.

  Poulin’s sleek but crumpled black dress looked nothing like her military clothing. Nor did her pointed, high-heeled shoes, which would have been more at home on a dance floor than the dirt streets of Estérel.

  She obviously must move in very different circles to the rest of the Legion.

  Bairamov strode toward the officers as they stopped outside Pierre’s Place. Logan and Gallo followed. The politicos joined the crowd.

  “What’s that?” Poulin said as she stopped beside them, pointing toward the east.

  Logan turned, and followed her gaze.

  Dazzling streaks of light raced across the sky, descending from high above the clouds at a steep angle to the surface. The ground vibrated beneath their feet a few seconds after the streaks touched down, and a thick brown cloud rose above the horizon from where they’d hit. More glowing streaks followed the first, until dozens were coming down every second.

  “It must be the Marine LePen,” he said.

  Logan had seen orbital bombardments before, when the Navy demonstrated them back in training. The Marine LePen wasn’t a battleship, but it still carried cannon capable of causing total devastation on the ground.

  They didn’t even need to fire explosive rounds. The metre-long metal rods fired magnetically from the cannon hammered into the ground at near-orbital velocity, and the impact alone caused far more damage than any non-nuclear explosives they could have packed into them.

  As he watched, the impacts were tearing up the ground to the north-east of the town, throwing columns of dirt and debris a hundred metres into the air. Branches and even small trees tumbled in the middle of the dirt cloud, before falling back to earth. The angle of the flaming rounds changed as the ship passed over the target from horizon to horizon, and it would soon be out of range again. But little would be left in the target zone by then.

  The ground began to shake, gently at first, but growing stronger as the shockwaves reached them through the dirt.

  He sure wouldn’t want be be hiding out there right now, with flaming death from the sky coming his way, and nowhere to hide unless it was a dozen metres under the ground.

  'Sanitizing', the Navy bods had called it. They claimed there wouldn’t even be any bacteria left in the area after they were done with it.

  That seemed hard to believe, but there sure wouldn’t be many insurgents walking around out there now, even if they were wearing combat suits. The rods would tear through a suit like it wasn’t even there, and turn the man inside into a spray of red mush.

  As the Navy liaison said back in training, it’s a bad idea to bring a rifle to a starship fight.

  “Mademoiselle,” Volkov said from his suit speakers. “You might not want to be standing out in the open like this. If they attack again...”

  “I’m not going to be intimidated by these people.”

  Volkov sighed. “As you will.”

  “I was discussing the source of the insurgents’ fake IDs with the Governors when they attacked us.”

  “Have you figured out who created them?”

  “The account that created them is supposedly registered to a department official. But that ID is just as fake as the insurgents.”

  “As I told you, mademoiselle,” Chaput said, “I will question every member of my staff tomorrow. I will find out who has been working with these people, and...”

  “I have also been examining all the data we could extract from the insurgent tablet so far. Looking for names and places the insurgents mentioned. Anywhere or anyone who seemed important to them.”

  “And what did you discover?”

  “When I checked the all place names in the colony records, I discovered that every ore truck heading to the Saint Jean mine in the last three months has been attacked, and either turned back or been destroyed.”

  Chaput waved his hand through the air. “Saint Jean is merely an inconvenience, mademoiselle. The mine is far from here, and of no great importance to the department. Keeping the route open to the mine is impractical with the number of men at our disposal.”

  “If the colonists here believe it is impractical, our success in reopening the route will invigorate support for the Legion.”

  “The mine has been shuttered for weeks, and the miners laid off. It will reopen when our current troubles are over.”

  “We can’t let the insurgents think they’ve beaten us.”

  Merle interrupted.

  “We’re spread too thin already, mademoiselle. We have many other mines and villages to protect. And we can’t spare men while the insurgents attack us in our own backyard.”

  “Do you remember the vids Governor Porcher showed us when we first arrived? Saint Jean is the mine that the truck was returning from when it was a
ttacked. We need to clear that route, and prove we are in charge here. Not the insurgents.”

  “Mademoiselle Poulin,” Porcher said. “There are much more important things for your men to be doing right now. Things that will have a much greater impact on the insurgents.”

  “No. I insist. This will be done.”

  “We could send a transport to fly the ore out,” Volkov said. “That would be faster and safer.”

  “The insurgents have SAMs now,” Chaput said. “We have spare trucks, but we can’t afford to lose any transports.”

  “Besides,” Poulin said, “that would show the insurgents we’re scared of them. We must send a truck.”

  “You should just stop worrying about such an unimportant mine. There is nothing there we can’t get a dozen other places.”

  “The insurgents clearly don’t think it’s unimportant, or they wouldn’t be trying so hard to prevent us from reaching it.”

  She had a point, for once. Either there were some very eager insurgents in that area just looking for a fight, or there was something about the mine that made it important to them.

  Either way, someone was going to have to fight their way up that road sooner or later. Poor bastards.

  Volkov’s eyes steamed behind his visor for a few seconds, before he spoke over the platoon net. “Bairamov, I’ve got a little job for you.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Logan’s breath came in short gasps as he trotted along the dirt road ahead of Bairamov. They’d been jogging for an hour, and their suits must have covered the best part of thirty kilometres already. A year ago, he’d never have imagined he could push his body for so long, but, so far, this patrol was no worse than their regular practise runs had been in training on LeBrun’s World. Their suits could have run even faster, but the ore truck wouldn’t be able to keep up with them if they had.

  He looked to the left, through the gaps between the trees in the thick woods to the side of the road, then looked up and past them to the low hills beyond. Still no sign of anything that might be a threat. Just leaves, bushes and dirt.

  Little noise, either, except the metallic clanking of the tracks on the ore truck as they crunched through the dirt behind him, giving it enough grip to haul a train of four ore carts toward the mine.

  Desoto jogged on the far side of the truck as point man, twenty metres ahead of Logan. Gallo brought up the rear with Bairamov, and a mule for their supplies.

  Two Compagnie men sat in the truck cab with the driver, wrapped in body armour and carrying rifles. But the Legion were the first line of defence. And anything that got past them would surely be too tough for the Compagnie to handle.

  Still, two more rifles were worth having.

  After the Marine LePen had sanitized the area from where the mortar attack was launched on the town, Merle and Volkov had returned to the spaceport to prepare to scout the area for intel, with most of what remained of 3rd Platoon. Bravo team, on the other hand, had been consigned to guarding an ore truck, like so many of the other Legionnaires in the company.

  “You understand,” Volkov had explained as Logan prepared to follow the truck out of the town, “it’s not that going to this mine is an important job, no matter what Poulin might say. It’s just that I don’t want you around me, and the Lieutenant won’t let me shoot you.”

  So, there they were, escorting the truck the best part of a hundred kilometres to the Saint Jean Mine, where it would be loaded up with ore before they escorted it back again.

  Then repeat, until Volkov found something more useful for them to do.

  At least he’d given them a drone, which hovered a kilometre above the patrol.

  The truck made so much noise as it crawled along the dirt road that there was little point trying to keep the drone high enough that it would be hard to spot from the ground. Anyone who could see or hear it in the sky would already have spotted the truck. Any kind of surprise on this patrol was going to come from the insurgents, and monitoring them was far more important than trying to be stealthy.

  And it didn’t help that Poulin had been so eager to discuss the mine out in the damn street, where there could have been a dozen insurgents in the shadows, monitoring the results of their attack. Knowing that she considered the place so important could only make the truck seem a more urgent target.

  But, so far, the drone hadn’t seen anything unusual. Just the truck, the Legionnaires, and the trees beside the road. There’d only been one single attack on any of the ore trucks since the Legion began escorting them, and that had been averted when the Legionnaires spotted the IED the insurgents had planted in the road, and destroyed it before the truck passed by.

  The insurgents didn’t seem likely to attack men in suits with near-obsolete Islamic State rifles.

  But, as Poulin said, no-one had tried to run a truck along this road for weeks.

  Maybe the insurgents would have forgotten about this route, when no-one had tried to drive through it for so long. But, if the miners were preparing to fill the truck with a load of ore when it arrived, the insurgents have plenty of advance warning before the patrol reached the mine.

  “Are we there yet, sir?” Desoto said, as his gasping voice boomed from the suit speakers.

  “Still a couple of hours,” Bairamov said. “So keep your eyes open and your weapons ready. We’re not just facing another dumb kid with a rifle. They know the land, and they’ve had plenty of practice.”

  “Don’t know if I can make a couple of hours, sir,” Gallo said. “My legs ache.”

  “Man up, ladies. We’re not stopping for a break.”

  “I should still be in hospital.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have let Volkov see you sneaking out. I told you to stay out of his way.”

  That had been a bad move.

  “If you’re fit enough for a night on the town, you’re fit enough to fight,” Volkov had said.

  And now Gallo was back in his suit as part of the fireteam. Which would be appreciated if they did run into trouble. Four suits had to be better than three.

  As Logan reached the next bend in the road and followed it around toward the right, he spotted a dark shape at the treeline about five hundred metres ahead. The suit’s HUD flagged it in orange as the site of a previous ambush.

  The truck the insurgents had hit in that attack was still lying there at the side of the road; blackened, burned, and abandoned. Left behind when the Compagnie recovered the survivors, and the bodies of the dead.

  Logan turned his head and looked out to the north-west, scanning his assigned sector around the truck.

  The leaves and branches of the trees in the woods moved in the wind, but nothing else seemed to. They would give some kind of cover to any insurgents who might want to attack them, but the trunks were narrow and widely separated, with most of the branches and leaves beginning five metres or more above the ground. Not a good place to hide a group of men, even if they had dug more tunnels to allow them to move around the area unseen.

  A mine or IED was more likely than a firefight, but the suit’s sensors hadn’t detected anything like that so far. Nor were the insurgents likely to try to attack them again near the site of a previous ambush. Anyone passing by would be at their most alert near the ambush site.

  Logan gripped his rifle tighter at the thought, and scanned the area, looking for any sign that the wreck might have been interfered with recently.

  As he moved closer, he could see the shape of the burned-out truck. It lay on its side, and two trailers were twisted and bent behind it, with their sides ripped into sculptures of jagged, soot-blackened metal.

  He’d seen that kind of damage in training. The trailers had been hit by an RPG, or worse. Which wouldn’t be a nice thing to be hit by in a suit.

  “Alice, see anything?”

  “No threats. No contacts.”

  The drone still showed nothing alive in the woods beside the road. Logan tried to swallow as he stared into the shadows around the leaves beside t
he truck, but his throat was too dry. He lowered his mouth to sip from the straw near the base of the helmet. Orange juice flowed into his mouth, and he savoured the sweet taste as it wet his tongue, and slid down his throat. It made the suit smell better for a few seconds, too, after he’d been sweating in it for an hour. They say people don’t notice their own smell, but the people who say that had obviously never jogged tens of kilometres in a suit without a break.

  “Ambush site ahead,” Bairamov said. “Stay focused.”

  If Logan was the insurgent leader, what would he do?

  He wouldn’t try to attack them at the old ambush site. That would be stupid. But, just after the truck passed it, the men would relax, and feel good about having survived beyond the point where other men had died.

  They’d be talking to each other about how great that was. Distracted from their surroundings.

  And that would be an excellent place for an ambush.

  He stared past the wreck as he jogged on, peering into the shadows below the trees. Something moved in the dim light. Long and curved, like a big leaf, not a human. And nothing showed up there on infrared.

  Then he was alongside the wreck, passing the blackened underside of the truck, and the mangled tracks. He stepped away into the middle of the road, leaving more room in case they’d decided to hide an IED inside the wreckage, but there was no sign of the dirt being disturbed in the recent past.

  Nothing would have walked along the road since the attack other than humans or their horses, but there were no prints of any kind in the dirt, except the gouges left by the tracks and wheels of another truck passing by. Even any boot prints from the day of the attack must have been washed away by the rains over the last few weeks.

  The HUD showed no threat reports from the suit’s sensors. He glanced back at their truck as it rolled past the wreck.

  The driver and Compagnie men stared out from behind the transparent plasteel windows, most of which were now covered by thick metal plates drilled with holes to allow them to see and shoot out. The driver’s eyes were well hidden behind his dark sunglasses, but he must be wondering whether he would suffer the same fate as the burned-out truck he had just passed. How much had they paid him to take the job?