The odds seemed insurmountable. Captain Mhabali commanded Charlie Company. With the rest of the battalion in cryo, that made him the most senior active Marine on the ship.
Did it even stop there? “Do you think there are rebels amongst the ship-rats too?” Arun asked.
“Do not interrupt.”
“Or what?”
“Do not question your superiors.”
“Superior? No, you go vulley yourself. You’re a wetware construct here to communicate. The most efficient communication is two-way, so frakk your stupid sense of superiority and answer my damned questions.”
The virtual officer hesitated, but only for a moment. “Very well,” it agreed, “I believe members of the crew are involved too.”
Krimkrak vanished.
“Come back. Tell me what I need to do.”
“Can’t you see me?”
“No,” screamed Arun.
“Shit.”
That shut Arun up. He’d never heard an officer swear before. Theoretically, they didn’t even permit bad language to corrupt the mouths of their Marines, although there they realized they were messing with the laws of nature.
“Having killed the other ‘C’ Company officers,” said the wetware construct, “I expect the rebels’ next step will be to remove opposition from the Navy officers and then murder me.”
“What must I do?”
“Act swiftly. You must take risks. Sergeant Gupta was a good ally but he is unreliable now. The ship’s cryogenics teams are still feeding the drugs to the sleeping Marines. The must know they are doing this. Try from your end to uncover who’s doing the drugging and why. Look for the unusual that your comrades cannot see. Distrust your fellow Marines; they have been compromised. Make allies instead with the human ship crew. Don’t move until we have evidence so that we know whom to go to and evidence so that we can prove what is happening. At most, we w – ggg– ddd”
“What? You’re breaking up. I can’t hear you, AI.”
Arun heard only static and then silence.
He looked around at the featureless white of the conference world. What was he supposed to do now?
“…we will get one chance to do this right.” The words swirled around Arun’s head, the illusion of someone speaking to him had died. “Here’s how to contact me…”
Arun felt a spike rammed through his mind. The knowledge of how to contact Ensign Krimkrak had been driven into him. When the officer had cut Arun’s shoulders, he’d left more than the wetware construct. A tiny communication device was embedded into the flesh of his shoulder. Arun would have to dig it out before the wound healed over it, but it promised stealthy comms that couldn’t be intercepted.
He blinked… and was back in reality, crouched on the green walkway of the deployment tube, looking at the scores of Marines backed up behind because they couldn’t figure out how to progress around this obstacle of a fallen Marine.
Arun picked himself up and set off after the rest of Charlie Company. Those in front of him had pushed on over a hundred meters up the tube, oblivious to the disturbance behind.
Find allies amongst the crew. Those were his orders, and he knew just where to start: that pretty ship girl with the acid tongue and purple hair. He needed to find her and quickly.
She was Indigo Squad’s only hope.
— Chapter 14 —
Indiya activated the recorded feeds taken from Beowulf’s external sensors, and tried to relax her mind into the state of loose alertness where it would be ready for anything. What she was looking for, she didn’t know. That was the problem: there were far too many strange goings on for comfort and she had only two threads to pick at. One was that Marine, Arun McEwan, and the other was Bonaventure’s destruction.
The captured ship had been monitored by ship’s engineers, patrolled by Marines, and snooped on by nano-spies. If a bomb had been set off, a powerplant gone critical, or an attack come from a hidden ship, all those fates should have been detected and recorded.
But none were.
Cause of explosion: unknown.
Oh, you pig-licking moron!
She’d just spent several seconds staring at an array of softscreens tacked to the Freak Lab bulkhead before she noticed the screens were blank. The recordings weren’t streaming into her lab because she’d forgotten to tag her request with the correct security token. What was wrong with her?
She already knew the answer. That fucking boy was distracting her.
And she never allowed herself to be distracted, especially when working on a project. And by a boy, of all things.
Indiya slapped the bulkhead in annoyance, which – in the absence of gravity – had the effect of propelling her backward to float toward the opposite wall at a crawling pace.
Frakk that McEwan. What was it about him?
Sighing, she bowed to reason and did something she should have done weeks ago. She used auxiliary memory crystals in her head to replay memories of the seventeen year old Marine at the same time as running a medical self-diagnosis.
She was testing for love.
Arun was the same age as the three boys in ‘B’ crew’s freak squad. Furn, Finfth, and Fant all had a permanent adolescent crush on Indiya. Unlike Indiya and Loobie, the three boys had been orphaned as infants, taken in and experimented upon by the reserve captain, who especially prized Furn and Fant because they were brothers. The ancient Jotun had renamed them: Furnace-Shield, Food-Synthesizer, and Fusion-Plant, double names like the Jotuns’ bifurcated nouns. And nouns not verb, which made them girls’ names. She’d never dared to ask the reserve captain whether she’d deliberately burdened Furn, Finfth and Fant with such feminine names.
Maybe their lack of a normal childhood explained why all three were so emotionally needy. The boys had worshiped Indiya since they were young kids, an attitude that had matured over the years, taking on a sexual angle.
The one augmentation that was consistent between all the specials was their ability to communicate hormonal messages via skin contact. The result was the freaks could never keep their feelings secret. Indiya did not desire any of the boys, and they knew the platonic nature of her affection down to the last, brutal decimal point.
At eighteen, Fant was slightly older and prided himself on his stronger physique – an attribute that attracted Loobie’s eye too – but Fant was still a boy. Arun wasn’t. He was a little younger, but he was a man. The Marine’s brown eyes drew her in, hinting at tales of sadness and pride. His crew-cut emphasized the strength and symmetry of his head. And as far as his body, he massed as much as Furn, Finfth, and Fant together.
She imagined what it would be like to experience that strength embracing her, Arun’s fingertips tracing lines down her spine that sent her heart racing and melted all the strength from her limbs.
That should do it.
Indiya ceased trying out hot thoughts about Arun and checked the diagnosis. It reported that her hormone responses had reacted to him as an attractive possible mate, but at levels far short of sexual obsession.
She wasn’t in love.
Mader zagh! Thank fuck for that.
She sighed. She had put off running this self-diagnosis for weeks, frightened that if she found evidence that she was smitten by McEwan, the knowledge would snare her in a self-reinforcing trap.
Still in flight, after slapping the bulkhead, she somersaulted just before reaching the far wall, and then pushed off back to her starting position. How the hell could normal people stay sane when they fell in love? Without control of their own hormones, they must suffer a temporary psychosis. Perhaps that was the point.
Her virtual eyes played over recorded memories of McEwan’s body. Her evolutionary programming nagged at her, telling her that if she clothed him and shrank his body to sensible levels, then he would be a handsome young man from an exotic tribe, an irresistible prospective mate. She’d never had much time for boys – or girls in that way – but she understood her evolutionary programming was tagging McE
wan with a flashing status light labeled cute.
But cute was a word Indiya could never apply to McEwan. Not after she’d seen him unclothed and revealed under the scrutiny of medical scanners on her cryo deck. She’d seen his multiple gunshot wounds, the remodeling where his knee had shattered, and the damaged nerve endings that suggested his entire torso had been subjected to prolonged electrocution.
In other words, he was a bio-engineered war machine clothed in human flesh and then scarred in battle. If he was a baseline human from Earth, he would have died many times over,
Arun McEwan was anything but cute!
And yet…
Indiya shook her head free of him. Arun would have to wait his turn.
Too many strange occurrences were unexplained. Arun was one thread to unravelling these mysteries, but she’d promised Uncle Purify to leave the matter of the Marines with him. First she wanted to investigate further into Bonaventure’s destruction.
Using the correct security tokens this time, Indiya accessed Beowulf’s sensor archives. Her softscreens came alive with recordings of EM radiation from visual to microwave and out to radio wave. Radiation sensors, chemical sniffers, threat analyzers all added their perspectives and told her absolutely nothing,
Even stepping through the event millisecond by millisecond showed nothing out of the ordinary, until one moment Bonaventure was fine; the next it had already exploded. It was as if the cause and initiation of the explosion had been cut from reality, the history of the universe re-spliced with that sequence missing.
Half the crew were shitting themselves because of the rumors that Bonaventure had been destroyed by a stealthed ship: a hidden ship that could destroy Beowulf at any moment.
Indiya was convinced the stealth ship theory was bullcrap. Even if a ship could hide from every sensor on the ship, there would still be signs of the attack on Bonaventure; the stricken ship’s destruction would have to start somewhere.
The screens went blank.
Indiya trembled. Had they blanked because she’d gotten too close to a dangerous truth?
The screens reset themselves, reporting that there had been a temporary power blackout.
Instinct drove Indiya to glance behind at her experimental black box equipment stowed against the bulkhead. Immediately, she chided herself for the lack of a cool head: her experiment ran on separate power. That was the whole point. No need to worry about her work getting fried by a power surge.
What she ought to be worrying about, she told herself, was why the blackout had happened at all. All their systems were hardened to cope with power loss. They trained on backup systems and simulated blackouts and power surges, fires and endless emergency situations. But when it came to genuine, unintentional power loss, she’d never heard of one happening before.
The conclusion left her feeling numb: the power loss was intentional.
Thinking of power sources kept bringing her back to her black box equipment.
She glanced back at her black box and grimaced. That bakri chodding McEwan had gotten to her more than she realized. She should have been cross-checking the Beowulf feeds with what her black box could tell her.
Five minutes later and once again Indiya was replaying the moments leading up to Bonaventure’s fiery end, the explosion that would have killed her if not for Arun. This time several of the screens were showing feeds from her black box recording.
Both the ship’s official records and her unofficial black box had been fed by the same sensor inputs. So it wasn’t surprising to find both showing an identical version of events.
That all changed when the recordings had advanced to about five minutes before the explosion.
Her body began to tremble once again, simultaneously shot through with the heat of discovery and the chill of fear.
In the black box version of events, a green smudge appeared a few hundred meters away from Bonaventure, and then whatever it was had moved in to… dock. It moved like a ship. After five minutes, the ghost ship began moving away for a few seconds before vanishing completely at the same instant Bonaventure exploded.
Her black box recording was synchronized with Beowulf’s standard sensor feeds. But on the official record… no ghost ship. Nothing at all. No matter how closely she looked.
This mystery ship was fuzzy, as if a superimposed image that wasn’t fully opaque. An echo, perhaps, of an image not in this universe.
That was insane.
But as good a hypothesis as anything.
She stepped through the recordings before the explosion, one millisecond at a time.
At one millisecond before, she paused the replay, her jaw open, staring at the display in disbelief.
She moved the recordings forward, and then backward in tiny time increments. It was always there. In that one instant, the ghost ship revealed itself. Fully opaque. Enough for her to extract a slew of readings about power distribution, hull materials and radiation sources. The next instant – the ship was a ghost again and Bonaventure’s explosion already underway.
It wasn’t a ship design she recognized, but in hull composition, shape, and some of the externally mounted equipment, it appeared to share a distant common ancestor with Beowulf.
Was this connected in some way to McEwan?
If it was, she couldn’t see the link yet. More pressing was the question of what to do about her discovery.
If she showed the output of her black box, she might have to reveal how it really worked. And that involved knowledge no human should possess.
“Indiya, it’s me,” came a voice through one of the softscreens.
Indiya smiled, grateful for the distraction. “Hi, Furn. Any idea where that blackout came from?”
Furn, pointedly, chose not to reply directly. “We need to meet,” he said carefully. “All of us. 23:00 hours in the Freak Lab.”
“Okay.” She paused. “Convention dictates that by this point you should explain why.”
“It’s a surprise.”
Now she knew for sure something was up. Furn had a pathological need to control everything and everyone around him. There was no one on the ship who hated surprises more, even those sprung on someone else.
“Well, mostly…” he continued. “I’m sorry, Indiya. I should have said this first. Terrible news. It’s your uncle, Deputy Chief Cryo Officer Purify. Indiya, he’s dead.”
— Chapter 15 —
You’re being too reckless, nagged the annoying voice in Arun’s head, which was a cross between the sounds of his own voice with the attitude of Chief Instructor Nhlappo on a bad day. Thinking of his novice school instructor made his hands bunch into fists; if only he could punch a hole in his skull and rip out his doubts.
He settled for taunting his qualms instead by risking drawing attention to himself. Abandoning ship’s protocol, he unstuck his boots from the charged walkway on his side of the passageway, and floated over to the grips recessed into the bulkhead. Like walking a ladder, he used them to pull himself along.
Blinding agony slowed him. The wounds carved into his shoulders by the Jotun’s claws rubbed mercilessly. Propelling himself hand over hand was the worst thing he could possibly do.
Arun gritted his teeth and pulled at those handles all the harder.
That’s the problem with messing with a Marine, he told himself, we don’t know how to give up.
He didn’t ease off until he was fast enough to feel wind on his face.
At the junction by Deployment Tube Beta he used the holds to brake somewhat. It was just as well, because a couple of ship-rats came around the corner, directly toward him.
“Hey! Look out!” they called.
Arun cursed. If he’d slowed to a more sensible speed, he could have passed easily over the heads of the crewmembers and taken the turn amidships. But he was running too hot into the junction.
With a final push off the bulkhead, he curled into a ball and prayed for good fortune.
He cannoned into the astonished rats, who fl
ung up their arms at the last moment. His momentum ripped them off the walkway and sent them – arms flailing – to slam against the junction bulkhead.
Crap! He’d only meant to bump against them to bleed off his excess momentum. Rats were so flimsy. He’d practically sent one off at lightspeed.
Arun ignored the cries of rage while he was frantically adjusting his velocity around the junction, selecting the route to the Freak Lab.
When he looked back, he realized that only one of the rats had shouted at him. The rat gave Arun a last twist and pull gesture with his hand before giving up and attending to his comrade who had been knocked senseless by Arun’s impact.
He was so flekked.
Arun sped along his way, enveloped in doubt. Very little on the ship was functioning as it should, which was just as well because he’d first stolen surveillance gear, and had now gone AWOL so he could see the purple-haired ship girl. He’d committed enough crimes to be thrown out of the airlock with extreme prejudice.
Sooner or later, mundane functions such as equipment inventory control would return to normal and a whole army of fingers would point to his guilt. Arun was gambling that by the time that happened he’d either be a hero or dead. Possibly both.
He built up speed.
The rats he’d knocked flying would report him. Maybe he’d killed one. Marines all look the same to ship-rats, but despite their doped state, surely one of the Marine NCOs could be prodded into investigating.
The situation was unreal. If this was mutiny, it was a slow-burner. It felt like a live grenade, falling under low gravity. Inoffensive for now – almost serene in its descent – but very soon it would go off, and nothing Arun could do would stop it. At least, not on his own. That was why he was pinning his hopes on his purple girl. He’d asked about her – another risk-taking. Indiya, as he’d learned she was called, had a crazy schedule. For half her time she was a member of a cryogenic team, and half was spent on special projects in a ‘freak lab’, whatever that meant.
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