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  Honor of the Legion

  Book 2 of the Legion series by

  Leo Champion

  Dedication

  This is for Cedar Sanderson, who called in favors and pushed me to publish my first book, Legion; it would probably have never seen the light of day otherwise.

  Thanks, Cedar. I kinda owe you this writing career I now have.

  Published by Henchman Press

  Cover by Cedar Sanderson

  Edited by Wayne Borean

  Honor of the Legion copyright 2017 Leo Champion

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-941620-31-1

  Published in the United States of America.

  Since the brothers Rock, Flame and Sky fought and their blood ran together to form the world, our hard dry lands have bred hard, warlike people.

  The soft lands on the edges of the world, where water flows in great rivers and the soil is thick, black and fertile, gave rise to empires. Regular food and steady labor would soften their people, turning their bodies fat, their muscles soft and their hearts cowardly. They would build cities and mine gold and make trinkets, and they would become weak.

  While the tribes in the hard lands, where food is scarce, water limited and death constant, would grow strong. We would raid, taking spoils and tribute from the weak as is the right of the strong; over time the bands would grow, unite into hordes and eventually conquer the empires, leaving only their own outcasts behind in the wastelands.

  But the rich lands would in turn make the lines of those conquerors decadent, while those remaining in the hard lands grew again in numbers, and conquered, and in turn became weak to be themselves conquered. And so it went for thousands of years.

  Until the strange beings came, saying they were from the pinprick stars of the night. They claimed to be men, although their skins were soft pale flesh instead of hard dark chitin; their faces were round and flat, their eyes small and their bodies adorned with skins of many colors. They called themselves the Empire of the Stars and Stripes and became rulers of the eastern empire; they declared that the eastern lands in the center of the world were also theirs, although no empire has ever ruled the lands in the center of the world.

  They were weak, the Stars and Stripes, because they tried to placate us with gifts as the weak did. But they were strong, because their weapons spat fire and death, and they flew through the sky in metal birds our arrows could not harm.

  The metal birds spat bile of flame and dropped eggs that hatched death, and we of the center of the world had no choice but to acclaim them our lords, although we of the hard lands have never acclaimed lords beyond our own khans. It was false acclaim, but the alternative to giving that false acclaim was to be cut down or burned.

  Until one day, when our khans had gathered to discuss the business of khans, and an envoy came from a different empire of star men.

  They were the Empire of the Red-White-Blue, and they had taken the soft kingdoms of the western side of the world in the same way that the Stars and Stripes had declared themselves lords of the east. But, the envoy said, the Stars and Stripes were the bitter enemies of his people the Red-White-Blue, and he would have us gather once again into hordes and rise, as our forebears had.

  Rise in war against the metal birds that burn us, our khans said to their envoy, while we cannot touch them?

  Ah, said their envoy, but we will give you weapons that can.

  And then he demonstrated these weapons. He spoke into a box and from the horizon a metal bird appeared in the sky to come in toward the gathered khans.

  One of the envoy’s guard-warriors raised a black tube to his shoulder and spat a fire-tailed arrow at the bird. The bird dove and dodged, but the fire-tailed arrow changed its path as it flew so that the evasions did not help. When it hit there was an explosion and the metal bird fell crippled from the sky.

  This is called a stinger, the envoy said; we have many of them for you so that you need no longer fear the metal birds. And others from his guard showed us other weapons, for which the envoy said he wanted no gift in return but death to his people’s enemy the Stars and Stripes, and destruction to the eastern empire that they ruled.

  And our khans agreed.

  Part I

  Chapter One

  Trumpets pierced Paul Mullins’ brain through the sleep and the hangover, forcing his eyes open.

  Oh no, he thought. Not again.

  Reality came back to him as the trumpets blew again, sharp and penetrating.

  Last night drinking with the others from Third and Fourth Platoons and, after a while, anyone from 1/4/4 who’d come in and, a while after that – well, it had become a blurred haze a while after that, with memories of those Air Force personal-jet pilots coming in and, if his memory was right, being hoisted up into the air and being carried around the room while thanks and drinks were pressed on them.

  Riding back to base in the back of a five-ton truck, someone passing around a flask, someone else vomiting out the tailgate; stumbling into bed because it was a Sunday and they were all on sixty-hour passes and aside from the poor Alpha Company bastards on guard shift, everyone was drunk and nobody was going to be up much before about ten, if not midday.

  The clock on the wall said, in bright red letters, 7:16.

  “Wha’ the fuck is going on?” asked Specialist Harry Jorgenson from the next cot over in the small rectangular room. He was Third Platoon’s medic.

  “We under attack?” asked Fourth’s medic, a big blond man called Harvey. He rolled out of bed, drawing an automatic pistol from under his pillow.

  Mullins rolled a leg out of bed as the reveille trumpets came again. He’d been trying to pace himself, trying to drink water, and it could have been worse. He’d had worse. From how Harvey collapsed heaving as he tried to get up, there was far worse.

  A cursory double-knock on the door, then – before anyone could reply – it was pushed open by a sergeant Mullins recognized as being from Battalion HQ.

  “Wha’ the fuck’s going on, sarge?” Mullins asked, getting the blanket off. He couldn’t hear gunfire; if they were under attack there’d be shooting, right? Besides, the secessionists had withdrawn. It was over on New Virginia for a while. This place had finally become a safe posting.

  “Battalion’s being shipped off to Dinqing. You got fourteen minutes to pack everything you been issued and all the personal shit you wanna keep and assemble – no,” the sergeant said, probably hearing something from the phonebud in his left ear, “you got thirteen minutes. To assemble for unit formation in duty uniforms.”

  “What the fuck?” Jorgenson demanded, rolling out of bed in his boxer shorts. He was a lean dark-skinned man with close-cut black hair and a pencil-thin moustache.

  “Battalion formation,” the sergeant repeated. “Pack your shit for a permanent departure. Duty uniforms, thirteen minutes.”

  “God, I need water,” said Harvey, still retching.

  Jorgenson had opened his locker, tossed Harvey a canteen.

  “Think ahead next time.”

  Harvey missed the catch, reached towards it, was a few inches short. Mullins rolled all the way out of bed, extended a foot and kicked it over to Harvey’s grasping hand.

  Jorgenson had a second canteen, was hydrating. Extended it to Mullins; it was about half full.

  “Thanks. And what the hell is going on?”

  * * *

  The last of Bravo Company staggered into formation, rifles in one hand and duffel-bags in the other and groaning under their packs, at about seven thirty-five. Acting First Sergeant Ortega finished shouting at them and then report
ed to Senior Lieutenant Gardner, the new company XO and acting commander.

  Mullins, fighting to stay on his feet and keep from retching, as his body screamed to do from the hangover and the alcohol still in his system, didn’t catch most of what the acting skipper said; thankfully it was brief. Something about 1/4/4 having fought effectively on New Virginia and, having driven back the cowardly attackers, moving on to new battles.

  If he’d had more energy, he’d have rolled his eyes. The secessionists on New Virginia were anything but cowardly, and not even the dumbest Legion grunts believed they’d been driven off when the fighting had ended two weeks ago. They’d achieved most, if not all, of their strategic objectives and retreated in good order in part because there hadn’t been a whole lot more for them to do. They’d be back sometime – maybe not for a while, but they’d won about as decisive a victory as outnumbered guerrillas possibly could.

  Part of Mullins was glad he wasn’t going to be around when the bastards regrouped and came back. The smarter part of him agreed with the opinions that that wouldn’t be for at least a few years, if only because they’d wait for shit to be rebuilt before destroying it again.

  And, it had crossed his mind while throwing shit into the duffel bag now at his feet, the purpose of the Legion is to fight. They’re pulling us out because fighting isn’t expected here for a while, and sending us to where it is.

  “There’ll be chow at the port,” B Company’s acting commander finished. “Dismissed to transport.”

  * * *

  “Take these, drink this,” said Senior Sergeant Zheng from the battalion medical section, as he pressed a couple of horse-pills and a water bottle into Junior Lieutenant Croft’s hand.

  Around them, men loaded down with backpacks and duffel bags filed onto trucks, most of them groaning. Here and there somebody retched; lank blond PFC Kittery had emptied a torrent of green bile onto the concrete a minute ago.

  “Magic hangover cure?” Croft asked.

  Everyone in a medically-related job seemed to have one of those. Jorgenson’s, Croft knew for a multiple-tested fact, did not work.

  “Science hangover cure, sir.” Zheng moved on.

  Mostly because he’d already emptied his own canteen, Croft ate the pills and washed them down with whatever was in this bottle; it was clear and looked like water, but there was a salty bitterness to it. Didn’t taste good, but hydration was hydration; he made himself finish.

  “Sir?” Senior Sergeant Williams, Bravo Third’s six-foot-five, skeletally lean platoon sergeant, reported.

  “At ease, jefe. They on board?”

  “Yessir. And company commander requests your presence, sir. In the pickup truck.”

  Williams gestured at a double-crew-cabbed pickup truck, a civilian model painted dark-green with ‘FL’ stencilled in white on the doors. Its tray was piled with duffel bags; a couple of men were tying down a cargo net over them.

  The cab was a driver’s seat and shotgun, then a pair of passenger seats facing each other. Junior Lieutenants Nakamura and Henry, the leaders of First and Second Platoons, sat on one of the seats across from Senior Lieutenant Gardner, all three eating something out of styrofoam containers; a couple more of the containers were stacked next to Gardner.

  “Come in, sit down, eat,” said Gardner, a small black man in his early thirties with a shaved scalp and little gold crucifixes pinned through his earlobes.

  “How the hell’d we get food?” asked Croft.

  Sergeant MacGallagher, the company’s red-bearded chief signalman, turned around from the shotgun seat.

  “Communicators hear things, sir,” he smirked.

  “Both the same,” Gardner explained as Croft moved the containers to sit in their place, then took one. Turned out it was scrambled eggs and cubed potato, bacon rashers and a few thick slices of hamburger.

  Small red-haired Corporal Arwen, the company clerk, pulled open the driver’s-side door and swung in. A second later, Master Sergeant Ortega jumped up into the cab, seated himself next to Nakamura opposite Croft, took the last styrofoam container and slammed the door shut.

  “Everyone loaded up?” Gardner asked. Around them, trucks full of men were pulling out.

  Croft’s head was still a bit watery; he speared a piece of potato with his plastic fork and ate it. Part of him noticed that the first sergeant had sat in a way that gave him and Gardner the forward-facing seat to themselves; two men on that seat, three on the other. A minor gesture of respect; I’m not a fish LT any more, he was realizing.

  “All up, sir.” The acting first sergeant turned around toward the front of the cab. “Arwen, get us rolling.”

  Arwen started the engine and they moved forwards, behind a five-ton truck loaded with growling still-only-half-awake men. A civilian-rental moving truck with a Legion driver braked slightly to allow them onto the access road, out of the floodlit base area and into the dawn’s half light.

  Their pickup truck joined the long column of vehicles, military and borrowed-civilian, turning again from the access road onto the highway, taking the battalion away to a new world at half an hour’s notice.

  * * *

  For a while, as the pickup truck drove toward the Roanoke port, the company officers and first sergeant worked on their breakfast. At one point Lieutenant Nakamura remarked, between mouthfuls of bacon, that it was unfair that the officers had food and the grunts didn’t.

  “Rank has its fucking privileges, sir,” MacGallagher said from the shotgun seat, with flecks of egg in his own beard.

  “You mean that hanging around officers gives you an excuse to arrange your own breakfast, MacGallagher?” Ortega shot back.

  “Guilty as charged, top.”

  Croft had focused on eating; he hadn’t had too much to drink, mostly because he’d spent most of the night with a scorching blonde named Svetlana, with a thick Russian accent and a Colonization-visa for agricultural chemistry. It had been his good luck – bad, he’d thought until half an hour ago – that she’d had a morning shift at the processing plant and he’d wound up getting a pillion-ride back to crash in his own bed, after kisses and promises regarding tomorrow night.

  Damn, he thought now. Tomorrow night – tonight – I’ll be on a ship in A-space. Jeez.

  The sky was lighter now, and Croft could see pines and eucalyptus trees, a roadside fence and tree stumps covered with snaking kudzu vines. They passed a gas station/diner, a shuttered liquor store next to it. A civilian car, its sharply-angled lines the style from twenty-five years ago on Earth, idled at an intersection waiting for the long Legion convoy to pass by.

  “Faden and Rhee scheduled to come back,” Gardner said. “Looks like I won’t be running the company longer than three or four weeks, once we hit Dinqing.”

  “Good,” said Ortega. “Not so good I hear it from you. That flatfaced zipperhead fuck Rhee’s been in traction more than two weeks and he never has the time to write his old platoon-mate from fucking Chauncy a howya-doing?”

  “Been in a coma tank most of that time, I assume,” said Gardner. “Maybe still is; this email’s from Division G-1, not either of them. But it says they’re scheduled to ship out from the hospital shortly, finish their immersion-level healing on the way, cleared for light duty by the time they arrive.”

  “Which I assume will be ASAP,” said Croft. “They’re not going to roust us from the middle of a sixty-hour if we weren’t shipping out right away for something important.”

  Ortega laughed harshly.

  “Sir, you may have seen the allosaurus now – but when it comes to the Legion itself, sir, you are still very much a fish. Sir.”

  * * *

  “What the fuck kind of an emergency is this?” growled Sergeant Hill in the back of the five-ton truck. He spat blood again; the area around his right eye was swelling and beginning to shine, and there were abrasions across his cheek and jaw that had probably come through hits from someone wearing a big ring.

  He and machine-gun loader Sam C
uyahoga had left their celebration, a few hours ago, to go looking for a fight. From the shape Hill was in now, they’d found a doozy of one.

  “Bullshit emergency whatever it is,” Corporal Giovanni-Paolo Pantaleo muttered from next to Mullins.

  Mullins closed his eyes again. Some men in the truck, crowded in with their backpacks and duffels stacked precariously between their feet and on their laps, had managed to get back to sleep; lucky bastards.

  “They can’t possibly be rising again,” said Jeff Kiesche. “Can’t possibly be.”

  “Think they’d be shipping us out if Buddy was rising again?” asked platoon sergeant Williams, one of the men standing. “Use your head, Private, and listen to what they told you. We’re going to Dinqing.”

  “Where the hell’s that?” somebody asked.

  “Chink world, sounds like. We gonna fight Chinks, jefe?” someone else put in.

  “Euros, Qings, corporations and indies,” said Williams. “Haven’t been Chinks there since the Insurrection. Their colonists rose up, Paris did their good buddy Beijing a favor by stomping them hard, then forgot to give their half of the place back afterwards. Other half is ours; DC sorta wants to keep it that way.”

  “Dinqing,” said Hassan Khaliq, his phone open in front of him. “Anglicized corruption of the Chinese words for ‘green sky’. Notable for not actually having a green sky, most of the time.”

  Mullins rolled his eyes. “Let me get this straight: they’re shipping us out to a world named by Chinese who aren’t actually there, for something that isn’t actually true about the place. Right?”

  “On an emergency basis,” said Williams, “when there probably isn’t one.”

  * * *

  By the time they reached Roanoke port, darkness had become faint dawnlight, across the scorched concrete landing pads where men were assembling. Shuttles had landed, dark shapes outlined along the far edge of the pads; you could see lights here and there as fuelers and mechanics worked on particular areas.