Price
$1.99
ISBN9780316191166
The Legionnaires
Publication Date—2011-04-18
In this short story by T.C. McCarthy, one ordinary woman with nothing to lose joins the French Foreign Legion and finds herself, and her comrades, pinned down in a bunker surrounded by enemies. Thousands of the mantis-like creatures swarm towards them and with no communications and little ammo, survival is a desperate hope. She is a volunteer and a soldier, and to save herself, her squad, and the refugees they defend, she must remember the life she left behind.
Excerpt
Twenty children huddled in a corner.
“We’re the Legion, grandmother,” Toly said to me, “not a damn orphanage. This is a military post.”
“What else was there to do?” I asked. “Tell those things to go away until we can ship the children off planet? This was going to be a resort posting, five-star.”
When we initially landed in the Lavigne system all of us had been giddy. Who wouldn’t be? It was the first world with optimal conditions: the perfect climate, perfect star type, and a soil chemistry almost identical to the south of France, just right to re-establish vineyards. A dream assignment. Nobody wanted Nimes Lointain again, the Legion’s training planet where if you enjoyed marching all day with a full kit under two g’s, it was the ideal place. We had just come from Nimes; Lavigne was supposed to have been our vacation.
“How do they see?” I whispered. Out the firing port you could see an ocean of them, mante religieuse (French for praying mantis), huge insect-like things that had shown up that morning and slaughtered every single colonist — except for the kids in our bunker.