by Tim C Taylor
“I know that,” said the Admiral. “The Littorane Articles of Servitude were signed eight thousand centuries ago. It is not coincidence that the gods sent the Purple Warrior to us at a time of civil war. This is our chance to crush the White Knight tyrants. The gods seek always to test us. Victory will not come easily, but our divine backing means we shall prevail. Defeat is only possible if we are too cautious to even fight. Too cautious, or…” The Admiral twisted his tail so that its tip pointed at Arun. “Or too cowardly. Makes no difference.”
“Don’t—” Arun took a deep breath and deviated from the furious response he was about to spit at the Littorane. “Don’t forget that we are still weak and need the shield of loyalty to the Old Empire. If they emerge as the victors in the war, we can argue that all the Human Legion did was loyally secure assets from the rebels. Behind the public statements, the stronger we are militarily, the more concessions we can demand from the Old Empire.”
“And if the so-called New Empire wins,” Del added, “we challenge their right to inherit the rights and privileges of the predecessor White Knight Empire. Our bargaining position is even stronger.”
“Thank you,” said Admiral Kreippil. “This matter of politics is finally clear to even an old warrior such as myself.” He bowed to Arun, who managed to relax a little. Perhaps sense would prevail, after all. “Our political position is strongest if the New Empire wins the war. Therefore we must declare for the New Empire without delay and betray them later.”
“It’s too risky,” said Arun.
“War is always risky,” retorted the Admiral.
“True. But a good leader controls the risks. Not the other way around.”
The Admiral was angry – his flicking tail needed no interpretation – and looked at Indiya for her judgement. Kreippil had stopped a few nanometers short of openly challenging Arun’s status as overall commander, but he was getting closer all the time. As far as the Littoranes were concerned, the entirety of Arun’s legitimacy came from Indiya’s backing for him.
“General McEwan is correct,” said Indiya. She could have replied quicker.
Kreippil hissed but eventually calmed enough to say: “Very well, we bide our time. This will be hard for my warriors, who have seen the White Knights insult our gods for countless generations. They wish retribution.”
“Admiral, I have an information update.” The officer who spoke was Xoomar, the captain of the Vengeance of Saesh, which Arun reckoned made her Kreippil’s second-in-command.
“Update on enemy comms. We now have partial decryption. We’re hearing nothing but chatter, but the enemy refer to themselves as ‘Free Corps’. Linguistic interpretation suggests the enemy species is human.”
Humans! Arun flicked a glance at Indiya who had never fully healed after killing so many people in the Free Corps mutiny years earlier. If the prospect of going to war against fellow humans daunted her, she did not show it.
Captain Xoomar paused, studying the reaction of the humans before continuing. “We still don’t know what is going on at the surface of Khallini-4, but there is even more activity there than in the orbital dockyard. It’s the rebel side for certain. The so-called New Empire.”
Kreippil flapped his gills. “See, General? Our enemy is in plain sight, which means we need no longer concern ourselves with your moral and political complexities. The entire Human Legion is united in simplicity. Every one of us is but a simple warrior now. And as warriors our sacred duty is clear. We must destroy our enemies with every iota of strength. General, do you still hesitate?”
Hesitation at this point would be indistinguishable from weakness. Arun knew that perfectly well and, much as he would prefer not to be rushed, realized that the time had come.
He raised his fist high and declared: “Freedom can be won.”
Chants erupted, engorging the atmosphere with a sense of common purpose… or so it seemed until Arun realized the chanting was Littorane, in their own tongue. Barney had enough years of interpreting that he was flooding his translation with convincing human passion.
Freedom can be won. Human Legion! Human Legion!
When the cheers had quieted, Kreippil added his own words. “May foul water confound our enemies as we crush the life from them. Death to the enemy! Death to the White Knights!”
Frakk it! Trying to control the Littoranes was like taming a herd of nuclear-tipped missiles on final attack vector.
Chilled with foreboding, Arun raised his fist too and tried to inject passion into his voice as he joined in with the chant exploding from Littorane lips. “Death to the White Knights!”
— Chapter 13 —
Laughing, Arun stretched across his rack to stroke a stray curl of copper hair from Janna’s neck. “Say, you’re not going to run off with the Beowulf are you? Indiya and the Marines will be joining me with the Littoranes on the far side of the star system. What’s to stop you taking the ship and running?”
Janna frowned. Frakk, she was considering his words carefully! He’d only been joking.
She shrugged. “Never thought of that. With all the drugs you’re putting into us now to combat the effect of zero-g, I guess enough of us could stay strong to keep control. To be honest, Arun, I don’t want to let you down, but the answer depends on what the Chief wants.”
“Chief? You mean Lieutenant Nhlappo?”
She nodded. “She’s the Chief. And so long as she’s loyal to you, so am I. Same with the other Wolves. We respect her. Not like that bastard Banner. And her kids are so cute. Absolutely adorable.” She gave what would have been an angelic smile, if not for the teeth that had dropped out before being cured of space atrophy.
Arun shook his head in wonder, and not for the first time. Janna swore she hadn’t been part of the Year of Sorrows, but others among the Wolves had been there in person, butchering Littorane children and setting their heads on poles. Janna could easily have been a part of that, had she been older. How could these ancient forerunners of the Marines be such brutal monsters? But her split nature made logical sense. The Wolves were artificially engineered killing machines, terror tools for the White Knights. They weren’t normal humans any more than the Marines or the Navy rats.
And Arun was the biggest freak of all. Who knew what the Hummers had planted within him?
“Sometimes I hate being the commander,” he said. “Did I ever tell you that?”
She raised an eyebrow at that. “Once or twice.”
“Half of the Legion expects me to be some kind of messianic leader. The other half is waiting for me to fail.”
“I know,” Janna whispered. She rolled over and placed a comforting hand on his shoulder. “You’re just a regular guy caught up in a Hummer conspiracy.”
“Exactly. I never asked for this. My role is to calculate the possibilities and then make choices. People live or die by what I decide. Not just the thousands in battle. Now that we’re beginning to act openly, the survival of our species could rest on any single one of the decisions I make. I know I can face enemy fire without flinching, but I don’t know whether I can face the consequences of my decisions.”
Janna shuffled up onto her knees and looked down at Arun, shaking her head sadly. “You’re making this easy for me,” she said.
She kissed him, the longest and most tender touch he’d ever felt from her lips. She was normally like a hungry animal. Just thinking about their furious intimacy of recent weeks brought a gasp of anticipation to Arun’s mouth.
“We’re off to war tomorrow,” she said. “Separately. Your way of dealing with it is to lie there and talk. Can you guess what I would rather do?”
A grin came to his face.
She sighed. “No, McEwan. It feels all wrong now. I’ll get what I need back on the Wolf Deck.”
Janna rolled off the rack and snatched up her clothes.
“I never promised to be exclusive,” she said as she dressed, “but I was anyway. It’s not difficult to see you would have been upset if I’d allowed
myself unrestricted entertainment.”
“Would have been?” The words drained out of his mouth like fine, desert sand.
“It’s been fun, Arun. And with your freaky engineered superbody, exotic fun.” Arun faded under the pity behind her smile. “You’re too needy,” she said. “Shame really. There’s a fun person hiding under all that man-of-destiny crap that weighs you down. If you were just the cheeky dickster you were born to be, then I’d stick around longer.”
As she reached out her hand to press the hatch opening control, she hesitated and turned her head. “No tears, McEwan? Not going to tell me you love me?”
“I don’t love you,” he replied, sensing that bluntness was appropriate. “I never said I did. But I’m very fond of you. I’ll miss you, Janna. Keep well.”
“Yeah, you too. Look, McEwan, I’ll give you a bit of advice because… well, they did a good job on boosting your body, but forgot about your brain. You’re no good on your own. Pedro’s your best mate, which is weird but works for you. But he’s not enough. You need someone human to share your fears and your rack, and not some random piece of tail like me.”
“Random? Hey, you came on to me, remember? You waited for me at the Deck 4 entrance to Deployment Tube Alpha and told me to take you back to my quarters.”
“I did. But only because your eyes never stopped caressing me whenever you inspected the Wolves.”
“They did?”
“Shit, McEwan! You’re so clueless sometimes. Look, let me spell it out for you. Indiya’s dead on the inside. Springer’s cut you off, and you should respect her. She’s all right, that lady. There’s only one other woman who could possibly give you what you need. Even you can figure out who that is.”
Advice given, Janna opened the hatch and walked off without saying a farewell.
Arun hated being told what to do as if he were a frakking imbecile. The Jotun officers had made a habit of that all through his time as a novice and a cadet. He didn’t like it then and he didn’t like it now. Pedro had been almost as bad – he couldn’t stop himself from treating Arun like a child – and even Springer spoke to him as if he were an emotional simpleton at times. Perhaps that ought to have told him something – the fact that everyone around him had independently chosen to treat him in a similar fashion… Maybe they had a point.
Arun sighed. Janna’s advice had been well-intentioned, he realized that, but the Wolf girl didn’t know what he did. She didn’t know about the embryos. They changed everything.
— Chapter 14 —
“How certain are you that this will work?” Springer clenched her fists. Maybe punching Furn wouldn’t help their mission, but it would definitely make her feel better. “This entire campaign was vulleyed-up from the start, and now you want to rescue the Legion using your… your magic.”
“I think the problem is your lack of understanding regarding my implants,” replied Furn, calmly enough to show he at least had a little backbone. “Their original purpose was to give us control over our hormones, like a super-effective version of your combat drugs. In the present context it’s better to think of them as nanobot-factories. Give me the right design and diet supplements and I can build anything, including spybots and mini comms relays capable of flight. You should already know this, because it’s years since Tizer hacked the implants and made them something far more.”
“Tizer,” muttered Umarov. “That’ll be Spacer Magnetizer, I take it – the one who was assigned to this mission in the first place. So how come we’ve ended up with you instead?”
The sound of movement nearby caused all three of them to freeze. The two Marines readied their carbines, but it was only an animal, probably one of the mud-suckers declaring its claim to a scrap of alluvial mud at the nearby riverbank. The mudsuckers were at their noisiest now, as dusk approached.
“When we first met you Marines,” Furn answered in a whisper, “Tizer was on ice. He doesn’t know you the way I do, and I’ve surpassed him in hacking my implants for surveillance and more.”
“But you limp,” said Springer. She palmed her face. “I can’t believe I’m saying this of all people, but my prosthetic leg is much better than yours. If we have to move quickly, you won’t be able to keep up, especially in this terrain.”
Springer grimaced. As concealment, the marshlands were excellent, with their tall reeds constantly waving in a breeze that also carried the damp loam’s rich organic stink. Even at its widest foot setting, her false leg was constantly sucked down into the mud. Beowulf stored components for Marine-sized leg prosthetics, but nothing for the much smaller Navy personnel. Presumably legs were considered to be of limited value in zero-g. Furn’s equivalent was more of a peg.
Furn smiled. “If we have to run, we’ve already failed. You know that. I won’t let the loss of my leg stop me playing a full part in the Legion. You’re my inspiration in that, Springer. That’s why I wanted to be the one to watch over you.”
Jealousy, pity, and implacable opposition… Springer knew how to deal with those. But admiration? This was an unknown scenario. “I’m Marine Tremayne to you,” she corrected halfheartedly. “You haven’t earned the privilege of calling me Springer.”
Umarov wasn’t helping. The little veck was so amused by Furn’s words that he was struggling to suppress his laughter, but the Old Man’s amusement was too much for Furn. The Navy rat who was normally as cold as an inactive robot now snapped. “We’ve been on this planet for three days. Why these wixering questions now?” Fury blazed from the ship-rat’s nearly gray eyes. Springer saw impatience there, a frustration that his comrades didn’t simply trust his judgment without question. She’d seen that look on Arun’s face before now. The general’s eyes might be a lusher brown, but the similarity was uncanny.
“Why? Because this is crunch time,” Umarov explained. “Now is when our comrades’ lives depend on you being right.”
“I’m sorry,” Springer said, drawing out her words while she dreamed up an apology. “I wanted to see whether you still believed in yourself when we put you under pressure.” She placed a hand on the little ship-rat’s shoulder, and was surprised to find so much muscle there. “You squirmed well, Leading Spacer Fusion-Furnace. I still don’t understand how you took Tizer’s place, or how you can control a man remotely, but I have decided we shall trust you. For now. Come on, disguise us, and we’ll be on our way.”
Furn took calming breaths to compose himself, before beckoning the two Marines over, ready to place his outstretched palms on their chests.
Springer hesitated, remembering an hour or so before when Furn had laid those same hands over the enemy Marine they had captured.
Sergeant Felix had fought viciously in the seconds before the sedative quietened him. The NCO’s body had fought again when Furn squeezed his hands over his victim’s neck. Sergeant Felix had gone from barely conscious to thrashing so hard that he gouged chunks out of the dirt. Furn’s face had been utterly without compassion as he had… She wasn’t entirely sure what he had done. Possession was as good a description as any.
Afterwards, the imperial sergeant had gotten to his feet, blinked at his surroundings, and then walked off as if nothing had happened.
And now it was her turn for Furn to lay hands on her.
She bit her lip and moved forward to press her body against Furn’s palm. Too late to back out now, whatever her misgivings.
As she watched, the instructions Furn squeezed out of his hands reprogramed the smartfabric of her fatigues. The black and gold of the Legion changed to the midnight blue of the void Marines. The epaulettes were absorbed and the collar softened. New insignia appeared over the shoulders to match the unit they were to infiltrate: Crimson Squad, 8th Company, 4th battalion, 599th Regiment of Void Marines.
The mud splashed up the sides of her uniform remained unchanged.
The 599th… Springer had never heard of them. Wherever they came from, it wasn’t Tranquility.
One thing was clear, though, they had di
scovered something already that threw everything into doubt. The 599th were loyalists, or Old Empire as the officers were calling it now. The briefing for this covert mission had focused on the need to find out what the enemy were up to on Khallini-4, but it had been made absolutely clear that they would be infiltrating the rebels of the New Empire, the traitor Marines who called themselves the Free Corps. The briefing had been wrong, and the comms window to tell Arun of the mistake wouldn’t open for another two days. This mission was a frakk-up before it had even begun.
“I know what you’re thinking,” said Umarov. “We all knew the day might come when we would square up against the Human Marine Corps. Let’s face it, the only thing separating our new chum, Sergeant Felix, from Sergeant Gupta is that you and McEwan weren’t assigned as cadets to his squad. I just never expected we would have to face this so soon. Tell me you’re not going to hesitate to shoot if it comes to it.”
“I’ll be all right, Old Man.”
Umarov held Springer’s gaze for a moment longer before nodding. “Civil wars suck, eh? Let’s go be traitors.”
They set off through the boggy ground to contact the loyalist Marines who were in woodland about two klicks away. The distance wasn’t far, but until they left the marshland, the going was tricky. Springer considered that a blessing: the mud soon sucked the fear from her mind.