The Legionnaires

by T. C. McCarthy

  The impact shook my jaw. Toly flew from the bed and slammed onto the concrete as I struggled to stay on top, suspecting that she was the better fighter—had to be. Whom had I ever fought? But it didn’t matter on Nimes, the planet itself had taught us this lesson during our training sessions: in higher g’s, all you had to do was get on top and stay there, letting gravity do most of the work. Toly grunted. One of her fists swung at me from the side, so wide that I didn’t see it until the moment of impact. Someone told me later what happened. As soon as I got my bearings again and found that I was still on top, I screamed, and slammed my forehead down onto her nose, not just once but again and again until blood squirted from both nostrils. I kept doing it. Finally Toly stopped moving and Jennifer pulled me off. At first I expected Toly’s friends to come at me, to defend one of their own, but instead they smiled.

  “You’re tougher than we thought,” one of them said, extending her hand. “Francine.”

  “What the Christ?” asked Jennifer. She was just as confused as me; neither of us grasped what just happened.

  “My mother was French, not Russian,” the girl explained, clearly misunderstanding the source of our confusion. “So…Francine.”

  The others picked up Toly and splashed water on her face as I checked my watch. Five minutes left. Toly came to and barked an order at them in Russian, and even though I didn’t know what she said, it was obvious that they were getting ready.

  “Not bad,” she said. “Maybe we’ll listen to you for a while.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t get it.”

  “It’s just our way, from the camps. We won’t follow a coward, and you got lucky when you killed our friend, it wasn’t a real test. Now we know that you can fight, and it’s OK. Five minutes, Grandmother?”

  “Four,” I said, and then caught myself. “What’s this Grandmother crap?’

  The Russians all giggled and it sent chills down my spine—to see the toughness reflected in their tattoos and scars, their nicotine stains, and then to hear a girlish giggle as if they were really just a bunch of teenagers. “It’s what we call you. We’ve never seen a soldier so old.”

  At first I shook my head, wondering if I needed to nip this one in the bud, but there wasn’t time and I still had to get suited. We barely made it. Grandmother, I thought. Well, they could’ve called me worse things…

  By the time I climbed up the ladder and into the bunker, the bots had run out of ammunition. The first mine went off, sending a tremor through the floor, and a flash of bright light filled the room with a yellow glow. It wasn’t long before the children were all screaming.

  “All of you,” I shouted. “Quiet!” When they had settled down I continued, my words punctuated by constant explosions in the minefields. “Hold hands. Good.” I pointed to two of my closest girls. “You and you, get them down the ladder now.”

  One by one the children passed me on their way to the floor hatch, all of them tightly gripping the hands of their friends. I don’t know what came over me. When Phillip moved by I grabbed him and held the child against my armor, then unlocked my helmet so I could whisper in his ear. He smelled like kids’ shampoo, and the thought of my son nearly made me scream.

  “It’s OK, Phillip, we’ll make it. I’ll take care of you, you won’t get hurt.”

  “Grandmother?” One of the girls waited next to the hatch and by the time I looked up all of the other children had already gone, the other Legionnaire leading the way down. She called out every few seconds, “Nobody look down, move slowly, hand over hand. That’s it!”

  “What?” I asked.

  The girl pointed at Phillip. “He needs to go too, Grandmother.”

  I kissed his head and handed him to her before snapping my helmet back on, but it nearly killed me. None of them deserved this. And here I was again, helpless to change a course of events that would soon annihilate children I was supposed to protect. But once Phillip had left it brought back reality, and instead of spiraling downward into panic and fear I felt a sense of determination take over. Not this time.

  Lucy was nearly apoplectic from waiting. “Goddamn it Grandmother!”

  “What’s the problem?”

  She didn’t have to tell me. As soon as I knelt and peered through a firing port it was clear that the mantes had crossed the minefield. Image amplification made the scene surreal, as if, rather than actually experiencing the attack, we watched it in some kind of three-dimensional holo as the creatures scrambled over the piles of their own dead, one of them every once in a while touching off an un-detonated mine. There were too many to count. The empty space between the bunker and the minefield had already filled with the things and as far as I could see there was nothing but mantes.

  I clicked onto the general frequency. “Short bursts, aim for the center sections not the legs. Open fire.”

  “It’s easier than the corporal’s small unit tactics sessions, Grandmother,” said Lucy. She laughed. Her grenade launcher cracked loudly and punched into her shoulder to cut the laughter short.

  “Oh yeah? Why is that?” I asked.

  “Because.” She dropped an empty clip and loaded another before raising the launcher to aim again. “The damn targets are closer, and there are so many that you can’t miss.”

  Extended small unit tactics meant that we now spent almost all our time in the field. Marching. Hand-to-hand. And the Legion’s favorite pastime, solutions that involved fifty-kilometer marches followed by an assault up the side of an ubersteep mountain in two g’s. Fun.

  The corporal had combined our platoon with three others, then divided the resulting company into two sections: an infantry section, and a heavy-weapons one that was smaller, but that packed a punch in terms of crew-served auto-Maxwells, mortars, and antiarmor rockets. He put me in charge of the heavy weapons section, and a Frenchwoman—“Buttons” because her nose had been squashed so that it looked round and flat—in charge of the rest. I hadn’t even really gotten a chance to know her before a civil war broke out.

  Ever try marching thirty klicks over broken terrain in less than a day and then digging defensive fortifications? In two g’s at age thirty-five? It felt like a twisted form of anesthesia so that I knew my body was in agony but the pain was great enough to overload the nervous system, made it so I didn’t sense anything. There’s not much to care about at that point. Training kicks in and you do things automatically because the part of your brain that’s responsible for rational thought doesn’t work anymore, only the parts that you can’t control. Breathing. Circulation. And one last thing that all these weeks had burned into our nervous systems: rote memorization of military procedures. I had just finished digging my hole with the enthusiasm of a sleepwalker, and was about to make the rounds, when Buttons grabbed my arm and led me from the perimeter.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Christ,” she said, “your French is awful. You sound like a retarded donkey. Trust me, just walk.”

  So I did. But before we crested a ridgeline and lost sight of our position, I glanced back and saw what I had feared all along: a group of Chinese girls from the new section had faced off against my Russians, and everyone else was circled around them, watching.

  “Oh shit.”

  Jennifer’s voice clicked into my headset. “Marianne, you gotta stop this, it’s bad.”

  “Turn off your receiver,” said Buttons.

  “Why? We’ve got to go back and stop it, she’s right.”

  Buttons grabbed my arm and fingered the forearm controls, silencing Jennifer. “Your friend is wrong. Trust me.”

  There’s a strange thing about the Legion, and it was something you learned quickly if you were going to make it: a sense of whom to trust, whom to listen to, and who was worth following. Your survival depended on it. Buttons had that “follow-able” quality, and you heard it in her voice, saw it in the surety of her actions. So I went with her.

  “What is going on?”

  She sighed and, once we lost sight
of the perimeter, sat on the ground, popping off her helmet. “I’m not allowed to come home anymore, I’ve shamed my family.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “My father was Russian and a Legion captain, which is as high as you can go if you’re not French. He met my mother on leave one year and nine months later I was born. I’ve grown up in all this. He fought the idea of admitting women into its ranks, and when he learned of my enlistment disowned me.”

  “Why are you telling me that, it doesn’t have anything to do with what’s going on.”

  “The point is…” Buttons pulled out a cigarette and handed it to me before lighting her own. “I know the Legion, and you should know—understand—that this is the way things are handled.”

  “By letting them kill each other.”

  “If it comes to that, yes. Fucking think. We’re about to be shipped to some shit-hole if and when we get out of here, and there won’t be anyone to help us if things go badly. What are you going to do? Call for reinforcements? Then what? Wait six months for a cleanup crew to wormhole its way into your system just in time to scoop up all the dead? They send us to the worst assignments imaginable—to die, not win—because it’s easier to send foreigners than real French. So the Legion isn’t an army, it’s a family, and we’re all sisters whether we like it or not. Sometimes families fight, even kill each other. In the end, it’s this process that weeds out the ones who don’t belong, the ones who are too sick, too crazy, too soft, too useless. If we go back there and stop this, nothing gets resolved, it’s like treating the symptoms of cancer without cutting out the tumor. If we let them settle it, once and for all, the problem is solved.”

  She took a long drag then, and I noticed the view with a shiver. In front of us stretched the panorama of Nimes’s lush side, a section of the planet that for whatever reason responded to the rains with a bizarre form of life. Increased gravity meant that its trees didn’t grow as high as they did on Earth, but Nimes’s vegetation made up for it by growing sideways, sending down roots at regular intervals to support the branches, which otherwise would have sagged. If you squinted the plains resembled a never-ending field of green lichen, leaving you with simultaneous feelings of awe—that you saw something most on Earth hadn’t even seen in pictures—and of isolation. The planet wanted us dead. Somewhere out there walked the ghosts of my husband and children, wandering in the alien bushes, and the wind gusted over the ridgeline behind us. It hit me like a lightning bolt: that’s why they chose Nimes, because it was so…creepy.

  But we were beginning to belong there. I mean, when I stepped back and took a look at how we had started and how we had transformed, it was clear we weren’t human anymore and it fit with what Buttons had said. The Legion didn’t want people. It wanted orphans that it could reshape into a family of psychopaths, and because they took their orphans from every culture in the world the Legion needed someplace to put them—someplace none of them could call home. A level playing field. Spend enough time on a planet where nobody belongs except the Legion, and soon everyone belongs to the Legion.

  They had a plan for everything.

  “What a crap-hole,” said Buttons. We sat in silence for an hour before she finally stood, helping me to my feet. “I think that’s long enough. We should head back.”

  When we returned to the perimeter my jaw dropped. The fight had ended but at first I thought the girls were still yelling at each other until I got closer and realized they weren’t yelling at all. They were singing. The corporal had taught us traditional French songs, the kind that dripped with significance even though you’d be hard-pressed to identify any of the places mentioned. If you listened closely you heard the sadness in them, a kind of depression that existed only in someone who had seen the depths of hell and clawed his way out. At first we wondered why we sang them. It’s not like they uplifted. But after a while we got used to it, and then, as the agony of daily training and the hardships of Nimes sunk in, we got a sense of maybe-I-understand-these-words-after-all, and they stirred something, sometimes bringing us to tears.

  The girls were on their way to getting drunk. None of them wore helmets and when Toly smiled I noticed that she had lost a tooth. A Chinese girl sat next to her; in the twilight it was hard to tell at first, but it looked as if her left eye had swollen shut.

  “Want a drink, Grandmother?” Toly asked.

  “No thanks.” I smelled the alcohol from two feet away, and whatever it was, it smelled strong. The Chinese girl grabbed Toly’s bottle and laughed.

  “You settle everything with our new friends?”

  “Who? With the Chinese? These aren’t Chinese, Grandmother, they’re our long-lost Legion sisters, Uighurs and Tibetans, reforged. Didn’t the corporal tell you? We’re all reforged. We’re French now, every one.”

  I found Jennifer just before going to sleep. She was drunk too, already passed out with a huge smile on her face.

  When night fell one of them shrieked again, and the slope surrounding the bunker went quiet.

  “Anyone hurt?” I asked.

  Lucy popped her helmet and grinned. “No, Grandmother. But we’re all low on ammunition. Thank God they like to take breaks.”

  “Tell that to the colonists.”

  I peered out the firing port. Walls of dead mantes had gathered around the bunker so that their legs interlocked with one another, giving us our first close-up view. The main similarity they shared with praying mantises were the forelegs, which folded when they stood. Everything else was a little different. A hard carapace made up their skin, which was a dull gray that in the fading sun reminded me of mist. And there were definitely no eyes. They didn’t have sectional bodies like real mantises, and instead the main trunk consisted of a roughly four-meter-long cylinder that ended in a globular head and maw, around which four sharp mandibles snapped together, forcing in food. Some of them still twitched. At first the girls would shoot at them, to get the twitching to stop, but I told them to knock it off; it was a waste of ammunition.

  For a moment it felt good. Most of us had popped helmets to eat for the first time in two days, and I didn’t have to remind them that some needed to remain on watch since we had lost the sentry bots. Then Lucy tapped me on the shoulder.

  “Makes you wonder,” she said, pointing at the piled corpses.

  “Wonder what?”

  “How many of them are there? I mean we must have killed thousands by now, and I haven’t seen any signs of them slowing. Maybe they sent out a call, to wake up nests all over the planet.”

  I popped my helmet and sighed. “You’re awful, Lucy.”

  “Hey, Grandmother, I’m just thinking out loud. On the other hand, maybe they’ve given up now and we won’t see them again. The problem is that if we do see them, we no longer have an acceptable field of fire.”

  And just like that my good mood evaporated. She was right. The walls of dead were too high to see over, and the next time they attacked the mantes would get almost to the bunker before taking hits.

  “I need ten volunteers,” I said, and everyone stopped talking.

  “For what?” someone asked.

  “To go out there and clear the bodies, give us some breathing room.”

  Nobody raised her hand. In the end I picked them randomly and was about to volunteer myself when Lucy shook her head.

  “No way, Grandmother, we need you here.”

  The others left reluctantly through the roof hatch and I positioned two of our auto-Maxwells on top of the bunker to cover them just in case. It was slow going. By midnight they had pushed the wall back ten meters, but it was a monumental effort involving chainsaws so that the girls could hack the bodies into manageable chunks. I began to feel sick when someone pointed out that if you turned off light amplification the girls were half red, dripping blood from the waist down.

  The next attack was a surprise. One of the girls had climbed on top of the pile so that the others could hand her body parts, when she disappeared with a s
cream. Then the wall erupted. Some mantes must have been pretending to be dead and once my team got close enough the things leaped into action, dragging the girls away without a fight.

  I ordered everyone back inside.

  “All ten lost, Grandmother,” said Lucy.

  I didn’t know what to say. For the first time I felt a despair so overwhelming that I considered handing the command over and going below, to crawl into one of the beds—just curl up and wait for the inevitable. Before I actually did it, though, Lucy grabbed my arm.

  “Here they come.” She laughed then, before locking her helmet back on. “Makes me wish I had been a miner.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because for the miners it’s already over, and they have nothing left to worry about.”

  The mining area was wasted. French corporates had scoured this section of Nimes clear of vegetation for at least ten kilometers, and toward the end of our march we were strung out on hundred-meter-high berms that separated huge pits filled with a pale blue waste liquid—like poisoned swimming pools. A main entryway had been carved out of a low mountain. Its doors swung in a strong wind, and a pair of narrow-gauge rail lines disappeared into the mine’s darkness.

  Every once in a while the realization of what was happening would pierce my cocoon of exhaustion, even make me smile a little: it was almost over. We had just completed a three-day march—barely—and once we finished our assault we’d be Legionnaires, complete with white kepis. This was our final exam.

  The corporal called me and Buttons over and a map popped onto our heads-up displays. “Give me your plan.”

  “Heavy weapons won’t be helpful inside,” said Buttons. “So Grandmother will set her girls to cover all the exits, and my people will sweep the interior levels, one at a time, moving by fire teams.”

  I marked the map using forearm controls and listed the personnel I’d assign to each spot while the corporal waited. When I finished he shouldered his Maxwell carbine, motioning to Buttons.