by Leo Champion
Besides, after six years he’d come to like the Legion. Maybe he’d even do a third hitch, try for senior or even master sergeant if they’d let him. Good place to have a fight.
Now, Murdoch gestured at a bunch of the local guys. Seven of them, some eating burgers like himself. The others were acting funny.
“Wha’ d’you think those Mongols are doing, Sarge?” Murdoch asked.
“Looks like they’re Russian-dancing,” said Roccio, always quick to make an ass of himself. Roccio was a lousy soldier and not even much of a man, in Hill’s opinion.
The local Legion troops, who looked to be off duty from the fact that most of them had placed their rifles up against a terminal seat and some of them were drinking from bottles that Hill knew perfectly well weren’t going to be the soft drinks they looked like, were… acting stupid.
Strutting around with their hands in their pockets. Then suddenly, maybe on another man’s hand-signal, booting an imaginary opponent in the crotch as they whipped their hands out of their pockets to face them. From all Hill’s experience, it looked like they were training for something.
What?
No time like the present to ask.
“Get my back, you two,” Hill said as he finished the last of his triple-burger. Because it wasn’t remotely unknown for Legion troops to start fights with one another when there were no other asses around to kick.
Gartlan got up immediately, shoving the rest of his burger down his throat and leaving the fries behind. Roccio waited until Hill was already moving, but Hill could have given or taken Roccio; the scrawny little man was no good as a soldier and Hill didn’t need the guy at his back anyway.
“What the hell you lot doing?” Hill addressed the senior man in the group, a corporal.
The man lazily, slowly – deliberately – turned to look at the sergeant from the visiting unit.
“Pocket walk, Sergeant.” The tone of the guy’s voice was clear: ‘care to make something of it?’
“Hell’s that?” Gartlan asked.
“Simple. You guys don’t like Army much, do y’all?”
“Fuck no,” said Roccio, wanting to be included.
“They have regulations. Needless to combat regulations riding on them, to balance the bling they don’t earn on their uniforms.”
That was a damn straight truth. Hill had heard that Army guys got something called a Combat Infantryman’s Badge just for being shot at, and a Purple Heart whenever someone so much as winged your ass. Those were both assumed in the Legion: it was taken for granted that you’d get into fights and that you’d be hurt in them. And he’d never quite understood the practice of writing guys up, for medals, just for doing a good job outside of combat. Spoiled, arrogant bitches, Army were.
“Pampered assholes,” Hill agreed.
“So we can walk around with our hands in our pockets all we want, but some stupid rule of theirs keeps them from it.”
“So you do it,” said Hill, “to piss them off. Then they swing at you and it’s their fault.”
“Yo, I don’t know where you’re from,” said the Mongol corporal, “but you catch on fast. Yeah, that’s what we’re training for. They’re all the more eager because they think with your hands all caught in your pockets you can’t hit back.”
Behind the corporal, two more men were drilling. Hands in pockets, then a high boot as their hands came out of their pockets into a defensive stance, out of defensive to offensive fist-pounding right away.
Hill grinned.
“Oh fuck yeah. You guys wanna show this a little more to us? Anything that messes with Army douchebags I’m way down for.”
Chapter Four
They’d slept a shitty night on filthy inch-thick foam mattresses inside the Black Gangers’ cells, twenty a room in concrete rooms in a barracks underneath the terminal. Although the rooms hadn’t been locked – the convict troops who’d occupied the rooms had been unceremoniously made to triple up – a lot of guys had chosen the thin carpet of the terminal instead.
Bugs, Jorgenson had said to Mullins for why he had; he could tell the rooms were filthy with bugs. Although probably for exactly that reason, the thin foam mats and the rooms themselves had reeked of acridly stinking bug spray.
Interplanetary travel really did play Hob on your circadian rhythms, he thought as they boarded the shuttle. Groaning. Mullins exchanged looks with Hassan Khaliq; the lean Kuwaiti had, from his appearance after the ride down, had as bad a time in zero-gravity as Mandvi.
Khaliq returned a meek thumbs-up as they boarded the shuttle.
“Strap yourselves in, kids, we’re going for a rocket-assisted takeoff!” smirked the pilot over the intercom.
Some shuttle pilots were more talkative than others, Mullins had come to notice in his experience. He personally didn’t appreciate any of them.
Strapped into an aisle seat with Jorgenson across a pile of bags to his right, yawning and tired, Mullins tried to close his eyes.
Fuck this shit. Fuck all this Legion shit, all of it. Really.
* * *
Ranjit Mandvi stood at attention with the rest of Fourth Platoon in a crowded conference room aboard the liner Mercianna as Lieutenant Nakamura addressed them.
“As you may have heard,” the platoon leader said, “this liner’s previous port, two stops ago, was Chauncy. As such, we’ve received recruits and orders. 1/4/4, effective immediately, is being reorganized in accordance with the Force 2214 restructuring.
“Force 2214, for those of you who don’t know, was based on the fact that as a counterinsurgency force most of the Legion’s engagements are fought at the platoon and company level. Therefore, the 2214 reorganization ends the arrangement of having three line companies and a weapons company in a battalion, as Army infantry battalions have had, and continue to have.”
Yes, yes, thought Mandvi. This was probably news to most of the men in the platoon, who didn’t use their heads or care much about anything outside their immediate vicinity. But he’d read about the 2214 reorganization a while back and discussed it with Sujit Janja.
The rural Rajput was a romanticist and a glory-hound, in Mandvi’s opinion, and he’d been an insufferable caste-worshipping ass at first. But he had been an officer himself, and on military matters he was far from idiotic.
“Instead,” the lieutenant went on, “battalions will now have four line companies, each consisting of three rifle platoons and one weapons. The intent is to devolve support firepower to the company level, under the direct authority of the company commanders.
“As a result, Delta Company is being split up; Fourth Platoon in each company will now be heavy weapons and field engineers. Chen, Karst, Peters, Walton; you guys will actually stay in Fourth, you’ve been reassigned to heavy weapons training. The rest of you are being split across First through Third Platoons of this company. It has been an honor to lead you for the brief time that I have.”
The lieutenant started reading off a list of names and where everyone would be going.
“Allen, Dashratha, Davis, Janja, Kalchenko, Mandvi, you guys are with Third. They’re hanging out right now in the starboard bow C Deck lounge; go join them.”
* * *
“2214 was last year,” Lance-Corporal Davis muttered as the six of them headed down the corridor to their new assignment. “Why are they still calling it Plan 2214 when it’s 2215 now?”
“Probably because they came up with the plan last year,” said Sergeant Kalchenko, a burly shaven-headed man who’d somehow managed to get out of Russia.
“Came up with it in ’13, Sarge,” Mandvi said. “And there’s some evidence that policy circles were talking about it for a while before that. But Pentagon approval was in ’13.”
“So why didn’t they make it happen with us earlier?” Davis, an American who’d taken Legion enlistment in lieu of a prison sentence, asked.
“Don’t you even read the news, Davis?” Mandvi asked. “Lance, New Virginia was a backwater until shit blew up the
re. We were last on everyone’s priority list.”
* * *
“Welcome to the platoon,” Lieutenant Croft had said to the guys from Fourth. Mullins knew them all; they’d been in Bravo Company since the start, and Fourth Platoon had worked alongside Third outside the Mason castle of Bergschloss.
Now, standing in the third-class lounge, Mullins watched new men file in. They seemed nervous and everything about them yelled ‘fish’.
They stamped their right boot-heels on the linoleum deck and saluted – stiff, at-attention Chauncy salutes – Croft.
“And you must be the replacements,” Williams observed.
“Sir yes sir!” one of the men – a shaven-headed brown-skinned guy with a handlebar moustache – shouted back.
“One, I’m not an officer. Unlike the LT there, I work for a living. So don’t call me sir, got that?”
There were a few chuckles from the rest of the platoon. Six new men, almost enough – given the transfers from Fourth – to bring Third up to book strength again.
“Two, we don’t pull that Chauncy shit in the force. You don’t stamp your boots in the field because it draws unwelcome attention. I know they drilled that crap into you there; time for you to unlearn it.”
The six fish just nodded. A few of them murmured acknowledgement.
God damn, thought Mullins. Rationally speaking, he was fully aware that he’d been in the same place, as a fish right out of Chauncy, only three months ago. But these new guys seemed like babies to him.
“I’m your officer,” Croft broke in. “Junior Lieutenant Croft, platoon leader. Salute me. But please don’t do it ostentatiously in the field – there’s nothing Buddy snipers like more than a visible salute to tell them who to aim at. Welcome to your first assignment; as Legion soldiers you’ll find most of your time will be spent in the field.”
There were a few chuckles from the experienced men. Which in this context meant everyone. For the first time Mullins realized that he and the other former rookies from the 996th Regiment were just that – former rookies, no longer the new men since someone else was now that. They’d shared the experiences of New Virginia’s Insurrection and particularly Bergschloss; they’d proven they could cut it and some guys, like himself, had even started to make rank.
It was the new fish you could laugh at, look down on and give the shit jobs to. For fuck’s sake they deserved it; had any of them proven themselves under fire? Had they worked with Third’s guys and/or shown themselves to be solid troops as opposed to Black Gang bait?
No and no. And he’d personally remain skeptical of the fish until they did prove themselves.
“Very well,” Croft said. “Here are your squad assignments…”
He read them off, two men to each squad. Kalchenko’s arrival gave Third Squad a proper E-5 in charge again; Corporal Hernandez was back to being a fire-team leader. They looked at each other.
“Sort yourselves out on bunk space,” Croft went on. “Chow is in half an hour, then the platoon will practice urban operations in the holds. You’ll want to bundle up; it’s cold down there.”
* * *
The lieutenant hadn’t been kidding about it being cold. Mullins had, like most of the rest of the platoon, put on his heavy coat and a beanie under his helmet. General cargo space, unless there was something in the cargo that contraindicated doing so, tended to have life support functions disabled while the ship was under way. It saved power.
The crew had apparently heated things up earlier and pumped air in, but it was still meaningfully below freezing as the platoon made their way along a stamped-metal corridor. They rubbed their gloved hands together and stamped their feet and shivered until they reached the right hold; then Croft ran a card through a scanner by a door.
Inside – once lights had been turned on – were about fifty older-model cars, firmly chained by their axles to rings in the deck. Used vehicles being shipped out from Earth for a second existence in the colonies.
“You fish just out of Chauncy can consider this a team-building exercise,” Williams said, “since your own urban counterinsurgency training probably wasn’t long enough ago that you’ve forgotten it. The rest of the platoon could use a refresher on urban operations, so for the next few hours we’re going to practice searching cars.”
Gartlan raised a hand.
“Yes, Private?”
“Is Dinqing gonna be this fucking freezing, jefe?”
Williamson looked at Croft, who shook his head.
“Private, it’s mid-spring in Vazhao. The average midsummer high is ninety-eight degrees Fahrenheit. You’re here to drill on technique, not acclimatize,” the lieutenant said.
The platoon split into squads and, under the sergeants, began to go over a few of the cars. Williams moved around between them, watching and advising.
Mullins stayed with Croft and Jorgenson, not really sure what he was supposed to do. It took a four-man Legion team to properly search a car according to the methods they were practicing here. One man kept an eye, and possibly a weapon, on the car’s occupants. Two more did the actual searching – trunk, wheel wells, underneath, pop the hood and check the engine. Then the interior, allowing only one occupant at a time out of the vehicle. The fourth man faced outwards, providing security against external threats.
In theory the four-man platoon leadership element could have worked as a training team, but Williamson was wandering around coaching the other groups and Croft seemed to think his job was mostly to watch.
External security for the overall platoon, thought Mullins. That’s what he could provide. He said as much to Croft, who nodded.
“You too, Jorgenson. Mullins, stay by me in case hypothetical communications happen, but focus outwards. Jorgenson, take the other side of this imaginary roadblock. See the green American Vehicles van? Outwards from there, got it?”
“Sir,” said Jorgenson and headed off.
After a while the riflemen switched to occupied-vehicle drills, which gave Mullins something to do: playing occupant. He and Jorgenson got to be ordered out of the vehicles, frisked and secured. Again and again.
* * *
It was eight days from Adam’s World to Dinqing. The holds of the Mercianna were full of cars, hundreds of them, but the battalion had twelve rifle and four weapons platoons, a lot of men to practice on a limited number of vehicles.
There were a few empty second-class cabins, so they practiced dynamic entry – booting in the door, throwing dummy stun grenades. Of particular relevance to Mullins in his field-intelligence capacity was the Qing interlang; there was an app for learning that and while most of the rest of the platoon practiced searches, close combat and dynamic entries, he and Jorgenson exchanged sentences and phrases for hours at a time.
On board the ship a rumor spread, and was confirmed when someone asked the lieutenant, that they’d been given a new battalion commander. A hotshot originally from West Point named Hall; he’d made lieutenant-colonel in just seven years in the Legion, which did imply combat-experienced and badass.
Probably implies a lot of people got killed under him on his way up, Mullins thought as he hustled with his rifle, pack and duffel toward the shuttle exit point of the liner.
That wasn’t a wise line of reasoning to follow. Mullins was a liberal himself, certainly when it came to colonial policy; if people didn’t want to live under American rule then the government had no business forcing them to. But he was a soldier of the Foreign Legion, with his Constitutional rights suspended for the duration; he didn’t have to like his job in order to do it.
Mouthing off about shit could get you in trouble; sedition was a criminal offense and they could send you to a Black Gang for it. So far as Mullins had heard that didn’t happen often; if the Legion sent away everyone who grumbled, there wouldn’t be much of a force left. But Andrews, with his increasingly vocal cynicism, was asking for trouble.
Now, carrying his rifle, pack and duffel, Mullins joined the crowd of men filing thr
ough the third-class corridors for the shuttle that would take them down.
“Bravo Three over here!” he saw Williams shouting. “Bravo Three to me!”
It wasn’t hard to see the tall man, and Mullins made his way over to where the platoon was organizing, in a line along the wall of the corridor. He nodded at Croft and Jorgenson while other men passed by.
Soon they were boarding easily the nicest shuttle Mullins had ever seen the inside of. The seats were comfortable and padded, there were virtual portals on the bulkheads showing a view out into starry space, and large seat-back displays.
He took a window seat, sticking his duffel and pack onto the middle seat; a moment later Jorgenson took the aisle seat, adding his own duffel and pack on top of Mullins’ on the middle. They strapped themselves in; before long there was the familiar hiss of air-locks engaging, then a sharp jerk and sudden weightlessness as the shuttle detached from Mercianna’s gravity.
* * *
The luxury shuttle had a skilled pilot, or maybe just significantly better engineering; either way the ride down was relatively smooth, acceleration and deceleration happening in slow burns as opposed to sudden hard pushes. There was turbulence – there was always turbulence – but the padded seats and firm belts made it more comfortable, and there were long-corded vomit vacuums on the armrests for when someone did have a bad time.
Turned out that the virtual portals were also touchscreens; you could zoom in and out and even adjust the camera angle somewhat. Mullins watched, zoom set to the 20x maximum, as they coasted in on the final leg, ocean thousands of feet below becoming marshes then agricultural plains as they descended. Thousands of feet over farmland became hundreds of feet over an industrial district of warehouses, a railway line and factory complexes.
