Though the insurgents had seemed remarkably determined to destroy it. Not to mention more competent than those the Legion had run into before. Whatever group was based around here, they knew what they were doing.
Logan’s helmet visor showed the local time. Still six hours to sunset. He could start moving before then, but he’d have to stay in the shadows, and try to cross over the river to the cliff if he could. Which didn’t seem likely, if all the rapids were as fast and turbulent as that one.
His eyelids drooped. Between the thin air, the exertion of the day, and the relief and surprise at still being alive, his aching body just wanted to sleep. For a few days. Better yet, for the rest of his five years in the Legion.
But the food and water wouldn’t last forever, and who knew whether he could safely drink from the river. Every minute he sat there resting was another minute that supply would have to last. The sooner he started walking, the sooner he’d be back with the rest of 1st Company, and they could return in force to clear this place out. Assuming they weren’t already on their way, if Bairamov had managed to call for reinforcements.
Logan pulled his boots from his feet, and tipped them upside down until the water drained out. Then wrung as much water as he could from his socks before he stuffed the boots back on. He grabbed the side of the rock, and pulled himself to his feet. His socks squelched in the boots as he took a step forward. Then another. His feet were going to hate him by the time he got back to base.
But, march or die. That’s the Legionnaire’s life.
He stayed in the shadow of the cliff. But where to? If he followed the valley, it would eventually lead him back to Estérel. Or he could try to make his way to the mine, after all. He’d be able to contact the Legion from there, maybe get a transport to pick him up. If he was lucky, he’d run into Bairamov and Desoto heading back from the mine, and could ride shotgun in the truck. Volkov would be less pissed at him that way.
But, if he was unlucky, he’d run into the insurgents again in Saint Jean, and they’d kill him. Or capture him. Which might well be worse. But at least he knew he could spend the day in the buildings there, if he had to. He couldn’t remember anywhere on the road they’d followed along the valley that would protect him from a solar storm.
He could be dead by this time tomorrow, no matter which route he picked.
“This is Legionnaire Logan McCoy,” he said into the helmet mike. “Can anyone hear me?”
The helmet was still transmitting, but no-one responded. The helmet radio didn’t have much range, and even less when the signal was blocked by the cliff on one side and hills on the other. The Legion would only hear him if they were within a kilometre or so, or had a drone high enough that the signal wouldn’t be blocked by the cliffs.
Odds were, no-one would consider the team missing for at least another day, and then the company may be too busy to come looking any time soon. Particularly if there were any more insurgent mortar attacks on the towns and villages in the department to deal with.
A thin, dark log twisted slowly in the water at the edge of the river ahead of him, caught in a slowly-turning eddy behind a rock.
He stared at it as he approached. For a log, it seemed to be bending a lot as the water swirled around it.
He slowed, and moved closer to the riverbank as he marched. No, that wasn’t a log. Something floated around it, something like long, brown weeds. Or long, brown hair.
As he came within a few metres he could see a pair of legs twisting side to side in the current beneath a waterlogged skirt. And outstretched arms floating beside a huge, bloated body.
And smell it. Rotten and putrid.
He stepped away from the dead girl’s body, coughing and spluttering at the stench. And hurried past. He had no desire to take a closer look. Whoever that was, they’d been dead some time. And, with no animals on the planet, there was nothing to eat their remains except their own bacteria.
But the smell grew no better. More bodies lay wrapped around the rocks near the riverbank, or trapped between them. At least a dozen, and who knew how many more had been carried further downstream.
So this was where the colonists from Saint Jean had ended up. The insurgents had tossed them over the cliff, down into the river, and they’d floated on until they came to a stop among the rocks. What had these people done to deserve that?
His body shook as he strode past them.
Those insurgents hadn’t just killed a fellow Legionnaire. They’d murdered dozens of innocent colonists. Not just the men who might fight them, but the women and kids, too.
That was it. He wasn’t going to spend days sneaking back to Estérel. He was going to regroup with Bairamov and Desoto, then find the bastards who did this, and make them pay.
CHAPTER 22
The sky was glowing blue with the first light of the sun rising above the hills as Logan crouched among the trees, studying Saint Jean for a second time. The village was just as dead as when he’d first seen it, except there were more bullet holes and RPG craters from the firefight yesterday.
A column of smoke rose from one of the houses near the bridge, where the dirt roof had collapsed, and the wooden frame beneath smouldered. Something must have hit it and set it alight. Of the insurgents, there was no sign this morning. But he could still smell the burned ammunition and food packs from the blackened pile of scrap beside the road that had once been their mule.
He couldn’t afford to stay out much longer in the sunlight. His suit had a radiation detector, his helmet didn’t. For all he knew, he could be dying already.
He followed the trail of the truck tracks toward the village, looking up into the hillside for any sign of insurgents as he did so. But nothing moved up there.
He could see some of his own grenade craters spread across the hillside, but the insurgents must have carried away their dead and all their possessions.
For now, at least, the hillside was empty. He could only hope it remained that way.
The remains of Gallo’s suit lay slumped in the road about twenty metres from the burned mule. Logan didn’t want to look at the mess, or smell it. But the stench of burned flesh filled the air as he approached the pile of wreckage that used to be a suit, and the blackened flesh of the man who used to operate it. He should bury what was left of Gallo, but he had no time right now. He’d return as soon as this mess was sorted out.
He tried not to breathe as he strode toward the remains. He’d only known Gallo for a few weeks since he’d joined 1st Company, and had been starting to get to know the man. And now he was just a mangled mass of flesh in a melted suit.
What a waste. He didn’t deserve that.
Gallo’s rifle lay beneath the suit, but it was of little use to a man on foot. Logan would barely be able to lift it without the suit’s artificial strength, let alone fire it. Grenades still hung from the side of the suit, and he tried not to look inside as he crouched and grabbed some. Then clipped them onto his belt, and hurried away from there as fast as he could.
The open door of the building with the antenna was still swinging on its hinges as he entered the village. He crept across to it, and peered in through the windows. Nothing was moving inside the building. Sunlight reflected from the console beside the rear wall, but the screen was off. There was no signal his helmet could hook into to communicate with the Legion.
He stepped into the open doorway for a closer look. The console screen was broken, and the electronics behind it smashed. Whoever had thrown the people out of the village had made sure no-one could communicate with it, either.
He stepped back into the street, and reached out to close the door. Then thought better of it. If the door had been open since the insurgents killed the villagers, they’d notice if it was closed today. He couldn’t afford to bring them looking for him.
He crept on toward the bridge. Track marks led away on the far side, along the road toward the mine. Some of the logs had fallen away at the side of the bridge and now lay at an angle ac
ross the river, probably torn away by the explosion. But the truck must have got over.
The claw marks in the dirt from Bairamov and Desoto's suits left long trails on this side of the road near the river. They'd got this far, too.
So where were they?
He opened his mouth to transmit to them, then thought better of it. If they hadn't been captured, he had a good chance of hearing from them as they returned along the road. If they had… he was just eliminating any chance of surprising their captors. It was radio silence for now.
He crept toward the bridge, pistol at the ready, for all the good it might do him. Then over the logs to the far side.
He glanced back. No-one was following him, but he’d left a long trail of boot prints in the dirt as he moved.
Well, too late to think about that.
The child’s tricycle that had been lying on its side was now upright, on its wheels. And there was something else, too.
Hoof prints. A horse had walked along the road recently, and he didn’t remember that from the day before. Maybe he’d missed them in the heat of the battle, but they looked fresher than the marks the truck and suits had left behind.
The prints stopped at the bridge. Then began again on the far side, where the horse would have stepped off the logs and back onto the dirt. The trail continued for a few metres, then curved around, toward a wide building with doors large enough for the horse to get through, that could be a barn of some kind.
And one of the doors was slightly ajar. The wooden bar that would have sealed the doors shut lay on the ground beside them, shattered into half a dozen pieces, presumably hit during the battle the day before.
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.
He grabbed her wrist, and she squealed as he twisted her arm behind her. “That hurts.”
“Not half as much as your friends hurt my friend when they fired a rocket through his guts. You got any rope on that horse of yours?”
She shook her head.
“You sure? Because if I can tie your hands up, I won’t have to worry so much about you running away.”
“I haven’t got anything like that.”
The horse snorted as it twisted on the end of the reins in the far corner of the barn.
He’d never ridden a horse before. Never seen one up so close before. Or smelled the stench of hay, crap and sweat. A few of the bosses’ kids back home had horses, mostly the girls. That was about all he knew about them. They couldn’t carry a man in an assault suit, so the Legion had little use for them, only on special missions where a suit would be hindrance.
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