Honor of the Legion

by Leo Champion

  Right now, after having been sent even further east, Kaggs was confident. He’d gathered information; right now his guards were Fire Team Ciampa, First Squad, Third Platoon of Bravo Company.

  Simon had a shiv too, something their incompetent MP guard Corporal Paulson had failed to note. It might very well be Simon’s shiv that would go through Paulson’s neck, in fact. Or Corporal Ciampa’s.

  They were out in boondocks nowhere. Their time would come.

  * * *

  “Fuck this,” said Dr. Leora Cramer, Captain of the US Air Force. “Fuck all of this. Fuck this station, fuck this task, fuck the military and fuck US foreign policy.”

  “Ma’am?” asked her senior subordinate, an assistant nurse named Kirby. A second lieutenant.

  Cramer shook her dark-haired head.

  “You heard me, Kirby. Fuck this shit. And now they’re looking to send me out with that nut Newbauer to keep him sane. As though Johns Hopkins itself could!”

  “We do our duty,” said Kirby dutifully.

  Screw that. Right now she was wishing she’d just paid down her college loans the honest way, six figures in debt but no military bullshit to worry about.

  For refusing to sleep with a douche colonel she’d been shafted out to here, to the middle of nowhere. In charge of a team of young kids, medical doctor for a platoon of engineers, a company of Legion and a battalion of Legion convicts. Supervising the basic care of snakebites and sprained ankles, and Lieutenant-Colonel Newbauer’s own psychopathology.

  She suspected Newbauer was the reason she’d been given this particular shit assignment after her confirmed disinterest in fucking Colonel Gordon. She was both a psychiatrist and a neurological surgeon, not – by specialty – a general doctor, although she was qualified that way well enough. Newbauer… she’d seen his file and it wasn’t good.

  It was still a waste, and she didn’t like it.

  Just one year eight months, five days and – she checked her watch – four hours thirty-one minutes until her service obligation was through.

  * * *

  Mullins had been bored. Especially after they’d sent Robinson, Borchardt and most of the rest of the company signals team, along with Sergeant Gomez and the rest of the attached-to-Bravo battalion supply people, out with Bravo Company.

  It had been ration bars and field-stove-heated meals for the three days they’d been at a mostly-empty Hubris. He was surprised nobody had sent the platoon leadership teams out to mind their own Black Gangs, but apparently there hadn’t been enough convicts to make it worthwhile.

  So he’d dicked around playing on his phone, although the internet out here – even with his radio, which had slots to wire your phone into for satellite access – was for utter shit. Enough good stuff already on it, though. The training apps, getting better at interlang. He’d already memorized, and aced practice tests on, comm protocols and the technical stuff.

  From what he understood, from text messages he’d been able to exchange with Reuter, Janja, Mandvi and Khaliq, it was even more boring out in the field. Watching the Black Gangers do their thing. Dicking around on their own phones.

  So it was a relief when Croft called him over.

  “Want an errand?” the lieutenant asked.

  “I could use something to do, sir.”

  “Colonel Newbauer wants to go out and inspect the line. By standing orders, chief doctor goes with him. They need comms and most of the company guys are away guarding their own Gangs. One of the other RTOs could do it, but I’m senior after Gardner, and Gardner’s away making his own tour on the southern line. Do you want to accompany her?”

  Mullins shrugged.

  “Sure, sir. Why not?”

  “Hey, sir,” said Jorgenson.

  “What’s up, Jorg?” Croft asked.

  “You mind if I tagged along with the doctor? Harvey’s here, and Sergeant Dax of the company medical section. You don’t need me. Could stand to learn something from her if she’s up for conversation.”

  The lieutenant seemed to think for a moment, then nodded.

  “We can spare you if you want to go along and provide a little added security,” he said. “Williams, what do you think?”

  Mullins hadn’t noticed the platoon sergeant, who last he’d seen had been checking out Hubris’ defenses, inspecting the unmanned heavy weapons positions on top of the block tower. At one point yesterday he’d called Mullins over to help, lifting heavy mortar baseplates so the senior sergeant could inspect their placement. Raising belts of 40mm grenades from one of the automatic launchers.

  “Let him go for the ride, Lieutenant sir,” said Williams.

  “Tag along if you want, then. But bring your weapon as well as your kit. You’re officially added security, Newbauer should appreciate that.”

  “Thanks, sir,” said Jorgenson. “Hanging around a real doctor might be educational.”

  “OK, guys. Going to be lonely around here without you two,” said Croft. “It’s empty enough as-is right now. Take care of yourselves and I’ll probably see you this evening.”

  It was morning now.

  “And watch yourselves around the colonel,” the lieutenant warned. “Word is that he’s not entirely stable, and I might not be able to protect you from everything he takes out on junior enlisted.”

  Yeah. Mullins had already figured that. There had to be a reason the colonel was on his own without the sort of communications and command section you usually associated with lieutenant-colonels. Aside from how something like this part of the Project didn’t need its operating commander to have those kinds of assets when there was already the company stuff.

  “Yessir,” said Mullins. “I’ll watch my back. But we should be fine.”

  * * *

  This part of the Project had a couple of light helicopters, a half-dozen trucks and some jeeps assigned to it. The acting company skipper was out in one of the jeeps with his personal radio man, Borchardt. So was Lieutenant Henry, inspecting his guys.

  Now, Dr. Cramer boarded one of the choppers, with Colonel Newbauer and the two Legion men who’d been assigned to her as bodyguards. One – in his late twenties, he looked, with sharp features and black hair like her own – was a radio man; in addition to the rifle and day pack he carried, on his back was a field digital radio. The other was a platoon medic, a sallow-faced long-haired guy a few years younger than the radio man. Both carried M-25 rifles.

  “Get going, you fuckwits,” Newbauer told the chopper pilots in front. “Can’t you tell we’re ready?”

  Engines whined and the helicopter lifted off.

  “PFC… Mullins,” said Cramer over the headset they’d been given, necessary to talk above the deafening noise of the helicopter’s engine. “Specialist Jorgenson.”

  “Doctor Cramer,” came back the radio man. “Is there anything you’d like us to do?”

  Below, as their booted feet hung outside the side of the chopper, they passed over the wastelands at two hundred miles an hour.

  “Just keep an eye out for threats,” Cramer told Mullins and Jorgenson. And Technical Sergeant Robert Josephson, her personal aide.

  “There are no threats,” came Newbauer’s voice. “Just those lazy convict scum. And you two convict scum, be seen and not heard, got it? Don’t waste the time of the captain or I, you’re here to guard our asses.”

  Dick, thought Cramer.

  After a moment one of the Legion men – she couldn’t tell who – said “Yessir.”

  “Yessir,” said the other one a moment later.

  * * *

  It was awkward hours, it felt like to Mullins, before they made landfall at the far end of the Project, where Lennon and his team were working. They flew over flat ground and low-rolling hills, seeing teams every so-often; the chopper pilot seemed to be following the line of the planned railway.

  The teams were making progress; after three days it would have been surprising if they hadn’t achieved anything. The helicopter wasn’t flying high, only a
few hundred yards above ground level, but every so-often they saw a team proceeding east then a well. Men looked up to watch the chopper pass.

  Behind them, between the brightly-orange-vested Black Gangers – their vests flashed in the midday sun making them very visible from the chopper – and their blue-shirted regular-Legion guards, was a trail of several hundred yards, cleared ground for the railway between the wells and ultimately to the Vasimir Pass.

  Here and there was a truck; not all of them had been sent back to Vasimir where Captain Numminen was hanging out with Delta Company.

  Mullins wondered how his Delta Company friends were doing. Private Korpik, Corporal Anselm, Sergeant Stewart, guys from the old Fourth Platoon of Bravo and men he’d made friends with since. You tended to know everyone in your platoon and, in Mullins’ case as a platoon headquarters team guy, the company headquarters sections and to some extent your counterparts, in Mullins’ regard communications, the battalion people.

  You pretty much met everyone in your company, even those you hadn’t gone through Chauncy with. You ran across them sooner or later; some guys you liked, a few you didn’t, most were just basically there.

  And sometimes you met guys in other companies you got along with well enough to remember. Especially with the 2214 reorganization, which had shuffled a lot of guys including a few out of Bravo Company’s Third Platoon, you met guys from everywhere.

  Except Army. Mullins was fairly sure there was no such thing as a decent or reasonable Army soldier. The brawl had been a damn dumb idea, but… Army fuckers.

  * * *

  Army Chief Warrant Officer Two Luke Senechal guided the chopper into the landing site with expert precision. He was a full-jawed man with thick black hair in his mid-twenties, aiming to be an attack-chopper pilot once he’d built up the flight hours. You had to work your way up through the Chopper Corps.

  For now he flew a transport chopper, with WO1 Kennedy co-piloting next to him, a shaven-headed Asian man with even less rank or seniority. They were both doing their time out in the wasteland, slowly increasing their flight-hour counts and waiting for a better assignment. Captain McKintosh had said this had to be done, though, and both Senechal and Kennedy were seconded to this part of the project for the duration.

  “We are on the ground, guys,” he said into the cockpit mike. “Feel free to disembark. Lieutenant-Colonel Newbauer, your orders, sir?”

  “Wait here.”

  Newbauer, followed by the other passengers, disemarked.

  Senechal idled the engines of the chopper, took his water from its holder in the middle – it was hot and damn dry out here – and took a sip.

  Kennedy looked at him.

  “He says to wait,” Senechal told his co-pilot, “then we wait until we’re told otherwise.”

  “Shitty job,” said Kennedy.

  “It’s that,” Senechal shot back, “but we do it.”

  * * *

  Further out in the wastelands, two hundred miles east and almost five hundred miles north of Kandin-dak, a Qing nomad named Zavitz son of Vitzor felt the weight of his ‘stinger’ weapon, the ones the Red-White-Blue had so honorably given his tribe.

  The envoys had said to wait, but why should they? Although the horde had been moving east since receiving the weapons, the Chongdin fortresses and their border passes were still more than four days’ zak-ride from Zavitz’ horde.

  The timers said to attack then, to move east and attack when the schedule was. Zavitz understood what his under-khan had said, but there were intruders on his space now. A low-flying aeroplane, high-winged with a battery of antennae on its underside.

  Zavitz was no engineer, but he understood what those sensors were supposed to do; they detected minerals and types of rock that the Chongdin bastards and their Stars-and-Stripes overlords valued. When they found suitable concentrations of such things they would settle down mines, and plunder the hard lands of those underground valuables. Already there were several mines, or the flagged markers that meant mines coming.

  Now this aeroplane came prowling back again, and its sensors were so active that Zavitz’ stinger’s own sensors lit up.

  They were supposed to wait a few more days, Zavitz thought. As the weapons were distributed along all the tribes, hordes and bands. But this ‘prospector’ would bring plague upon Zavitz’ lands, should it find something of value in them.

  Without thinking, the nomad raised his weapon as the Red-White-Blue instructors had shown him how to. In the scope, a red cross aligned with the circle of the plane. Words that Zavitz couldn’t read but that said ‘serrure anti-missile’ – ‘missile lock’ – flashed across the screne.

  It gave a triple-beep, three sharp tones in rapid succession. That was when Zavitz had been told to pull the trigger, and he did.

  The missile blasted out from its launcher and lanced toward the light prospecting aircraft, whose high-intensity active sensors made it an easy target. The stingers had been designed to lock onto any number of broadcast or passive signals, and the plane was broadcasting pretty much everything, from ground-penetrating radar and spectrography to satellite communications.

  It hit the plane somewhere on the left wing, blasting apart one of its two engines as it exploded. That engine went up in a flash and the remains of the plane began to descend, from three thousand feet to ground.

  It was time enough for the pilot to get out a distress signal and an emergency data dump.

  * * *

  “Ma’am, Governor Evanston,” said the aide in Imperial City, Vazhao about fifteen minutes after the prospecting plane had been shot down. “We have a situation in the Territories, flashing Orange Alert.”

  “Has this been cleared for me?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’m,” reported Chief of Staff Tribolo, feeding data to her. “This isn’t empty noise. The nomads are confirmed to have surface-to-air weapons.”

  “They took down a civilian prospector aircraft. Can they take down more than that?” the Governor demanded.

  “Ma’am, sensors indicate that plane was comprehensively destroyed. They can achieve that, they can take down our armored assault choppers. And…” Tribolo coughed, “that insubordinate man from Legion Intelligence—”

  “Colonel Doom,” said Evanston.

  “Lieutenant-Colonel Doom. A few days ago as you may recall, he predicted trouble from this direction. Freighter-type air signatures landing, presumably distributing something. The surface-to-air weapons?”

  “Get him in here.”

  “He’s outside already,” said Tribolo. “Must have heard on his own.”

  In a moment the cynical-eyed grey-haired Legion Intelligence lieutenant-colonel was in her office.

  “So you were right,” the governor said without preamble. “Tribolo thinks some impulsive type shot off his weapon before they were fully distributed, or else we’d be seeing everything coming at once. If they have one, they have a million of the things. Right?”

  “Your chief of staff,” Doom said without any particular respect, “is absolutely correct. Governor, I advise you to bring everything east of the Passes up to red alert right now, and everything on the other side to orange. Mobilize the border forts. They might have been pre-empted, but they’re going to be coming in force.”

  “And why do you think that?” Evanston asked the man evenly.

  Doom’s eyes met hers.

  “Because I know the woman in charge of Frog Intel in Binwin,” he said.

  “And?” Governor Evanston asked the insubordinate Foreign Legion lieutenant-colonel.

  “She knows about this too. Bring everything we have to red alert because if we know it she knows it, she’s going to be moving on it and we’d better get ready.”

  * * *

  Colonel Arlene Lavasseur looked down from the steel-reinforced castle that was her headquarters in Binwin. Through the arch eyebrows of a coldly beautiful face she sneered at the Polish battalion drilling in the courtyard; a race without the intelligence, the
culture or the moral fiber to do more than serve. Their place was to labor and die like animals.

  Poles, though, were not as stupid as nonhumans.

  Worthless eatie vermin.

  Firing their weapons off before they should have, like Russians on a bender.

  Well, she had no choice now, did she.

  Her little brother was out there. She hoped Andre, in his eagerness to prove himself, wouldn’t do anything stupid. She knew there were predators out there.

  Out to pursue their mongrelism. Out to ruin the rightful destiny of the universe, as designed and intended by Marcand.

  Marcandism would not be foiled, could not be foiled. It was the foregone place of the superior races to rule. The mongrel Americans, the insular Chinese, the presumptuous independents – eventually, they would all acknowledge rightful Marcandist order.

  She had only one option, and it was an option Arlene Lavasseur was happy to give.

  “Go,” she said into her telephone.

  “We have you at ‘go’, ma’am,” came the senior lieutenant-colonel in the field, Trossier. “May I go on record on saying this is inadvisable and we should have waited two or three more days, ma’am?”

  “You are recorded as that,” said Lavasseur reasonably. “But some trigger-happy eatie fuckup pre-empted us. Vazhao has already been warned. We go. Tell your hordes to push east with everything they have. We’ll destroy the Chongdins anyway.”

  “Ma’am!”

  Arlene Lavasseur smiled.

  * * *

  Captain von Kallweit frowned.

  “Sir,” he called to his boss.

  Major Andre Lavasseur came over; they were in a temporary command post set up in the wastelands, von Kallweit in front of a laptop on a folding table that Lavasseur now went to see. After a moment the young Frenchman murmured “Shit,” under his breath. “Already?”