Wotun extended vicious claws from all four hands. “Your predecessor as Sergeant of Marines spoke out of turn. He only made that mistake once. This had better be appropriate.”
“Thank you, sir. I wish to ask a question. The business with Indigo Squad and Ensign Krimkrak left many unresolved threads that I can follow back to the person of the reserve captain. May I inquire as to the status of that exalted senior officer?”
Captain Wotun’s claws flickered, itching to taste human blood. That the reserve captain wasn’t present around this table, or on a remote link from her cabin, spoke eloquently of her status. But would Wotun accept having that pointed out by a human?
The Jotun’s claws retracted. “You skirt deftly around the potential to demonstrate insufficient deference toward a superior. Coming as you do from a race of merciless brutes, you do not possess the intellectual apparatus to appreciate the honor that the reserve captain has earned over her long service. Nonetheless your facts are broadly accurate, and we must not allow protocol or sentiment to blind us to possible sources of disloyalty.”
The captain swirled his trumpet-like ears, showing that he genuinely felt uncomfortable as he considered his move.
“You are to continue affording the reserve captain every deference,” he announced. “She brings great prestige to Beowulf, and that will be to our advantage when we meet with Themistocles. We have vital issues of priority and honor yet to establish with the officers of the other ship. Once we have concluded our negotiations–” the captain’s claws slikked out– “I shall eliminate the reserve captain myself.”
— Chapter 42 —
“The reserve captain sends her compliments,” said Darius, setting his voice to convey excitement.
“Why? Does she know we’re here?” said Arun, his heart pumping hard for the first time in days. “I thought the only people who knew were just the frea– frakking specials.”
“Of course she knows. This is her secret compartment that she has generously allowed you to use.”
Springer slapped a restraining hand onto Arun. “Leave Darius to me,” she snapped. “There’s no point trying to bully info out of the poor little guy.” She beckoned the AI over. “Darius, why tell us about the reserve captain now?”
“Because now it is time to act. The officer wishes to speak with you both in conference in her cabin at 18:42 hours. Dress uniforms are required and will be provided shortly.”
“Don’t just repeat the officer’s words,” Arun told Darius “I know you’re smarter than that. Tell us what’s changed. Why now?”
Darius made a show of tugging at his chin with his claw while blinking furiously. “Well… I could speculate. Do you think it might be the Themistocles? She’s going to pull alongside in slightly under 37 hours. The following day, all Marines and ship’s crew from both vessels are to assemble in Beowulf’s dorsal hangar for an important announcement.”
Arun smacked his fist into his palm. “About time!”
“As if we haven’t enough problems,” sighed Springer. “If Themistocles is here, it can only mean your other girlfriend, Xin, has taken over the ship so she can come back to haunt us all.”
Arun tasted the bitterness in Springer’s words, but pretended to ignore her. “What’s the plan, Darius?”
Darius positioned himself just in front of Arun’s head and narrowed his eyes. “The plan? The reserve captain was rather thinking that planning was your area of expertise, Mister McEwan.”
— Chapter 43 —
Give a Marine an order and she’ll obey almost without question. That had been proved enough times by the ease with which the boneheads had allowed themselves to be used as the mutiny’s muscle.
Indiya had assumed it was the drugs that had made them so malleable. But as she stood with Loobie and the boys beside the reserve captain, watching McEwan and Tremayne paraded in front of her, she wasn’t so sure.
Bringing the two back inside the ship was insanely risky. If she were standing there in the center of the cabin like the two Marines, she would be inwardly spitting fury – in fact, she was standing safely to the side but she was furious anyway.
Arun and Tremayne didn’t seem to feel that way at all. Nothing pleased them more than to stand at attention in their dress blues and salute an officer. They looked as if they had come home.
Beowulf was currently accelerating at 1g, so the Marines even had artificial gravity to make their backs straighter and salutes snappier.
“At ease, Marines,” said the reserve captain.
Did a flicker of movement pass over the two Marines? Indiya would need a microscope to distinguish between at ease and at attention.
With a faint motor whine, the officer drove her survival chair over to Arun.
“You have both disappointed me,” she said. “I have set neither foot not wheel on your home planet of Tranquility, but I have followed your development most attentively.”
“You!” The Jotun pointed a mid-limb at Springer. “You are merely an incremental development. Proof of precognition developments. Useful, perhaps, but not a reliable finished product. Unlike you, McEwan. You are supposed to have a fully working organic planning computer in your head. Did it ever occur to you that you didn’t quite fight in, McEwan?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ahh! At last, a glimmer of perception emerges from the deep shadow. You should not fit in with your peers because Marines are bred to be a tight-knit group and you are not like them.”
While the reserve captain flicked her ears in annoyance, Indiya fought to keep her balance in the unnatural pseudo-gravity. What the hell was going on here? First Arun’s brother turned out to have hormonal delivery implants, and now Tremayne and Arun are super-augments. Precognition! Mader wixering zagh, that was crazy. And the Marines’ reaction? Neither of them so much as blinked.
“As a field trial,” said the officer, “it was felt best that your mental faculties were not made known to your human NCOs. Otherwise you would not be a fair trial, would it? I know for a fact that your officers kept a close watch on you because I have read their comments.” She flicked her ears toward Arun, the Jotun equivalent of giving him a penetrating stare. “Does any of this register with you, human?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then you know of this mental faculty?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t look to me to solve your problems, boy. Right now the default outcome for our situation is that we’re all going to die. Very soon too. When they merge ships and redistribute the crew, they will sail back to Tranquility. Already, we have nearly completed our deceleration. But before the rebels go back in their cryo pods, they will clear up the one loose end. Indigo Squad will be thawed and killed. And before you are lined up in front of an execution squad, they will interrogate you.”
Arun pictured the dead Marine in the cryo pod that was supposed to hold him. Even if he didn’t break under interrogation, the trail would lead back to Indiya and the freaks.
“What do you need to activate your planning mind, McEwan?”
“Inputs. Our advantages. Our opponents’ weaknesses, habits, characteristics. How do they think? What do they want? Then I need something to stimulate my mind – to keep my conscious brain revving while underneath my planner works undisturbed. And space. I need much more space. I’m too cramped to think properly.”
“There is an obvious solution to that last issue,” said the reserve captain. She snarled at Tremayne, who showed no reaction. “But I have presented you with a less obvious one that will suffice for the limited time that remains to us. Thanks to Indiya, I also have your distraction, as you shall discover presently.”
Indiya bit her lip. Necessity demanded what she must do next. Didn’t mean she had to like it.
Everyone gave a summary of the situation, intending to kickstart Arun’s planner brain. Passing messages via Darius and the other AIs was clumsy, but there was little to be said that McEwan didn’t already know other than the latest upd
ates on the merging with Themistocles, and a revelation from Finfth that he claimed to be able to fly any spacecraft.
“Enough!” With a wave of both mid-limbs, the reserve captain brought the discussion to a close. “We have talked enough. One more matter and then you two must return. McEwan, step into my thrust station.”
“Yes, sir.”
Arun marched across the cabin into the bubble-like chamber that filled the rear of the cabin.
Indiya followed.
It was a bespoke construction. Part survival bubble, part acceleration-hardened thrust chamber, and also a life-extender: the reserve captain being too frail to risk a full cryogenic freezing.
McEwan waited until he’d crossed the threshold before he let loose. “What the hell does the reserve captain mean by a distraction?”
Once they were both inside, the Jotun sealed the unit. It was just the two of them in complete privacy.
— Chapter 44 —
Indiya felt a pang of regret at what she was about to do to Arun. Though probably, she told herself, the deeper feeling was guilt.
Bonehead.
Cyborg.
These were the names they called the Marines, but she understood now that it was unfair. They weren’t stupid and they weren’t without feelings. She’d played him, strung him along like a remote-controlled drone. Arun deserved better than that.
More importantly, her messing with his head and his body chemistry was probably the explanation for why his planner brain wasn’t functioning.
“Something bothering you?” he said, with a cheeky raised eyebrow.
“I’ll miss you,” she said.
“I am coming back, you know.”
She sighed and started removing a glove. “Give me your hand.”
He hesitated. Guess he knows by now what I can do. “I’m not your enemy,” she said. “How could I be? I love you.”
Arun’s eyes widened, but he let her press her hand against his and infuse him with nano-transporters loaded with a purge program that would strike out all the hormonal controls she’d left in him earlier. It was hardly surprising that he looked shocked: he was still in her thrall and she’d just said the words he most needed to hear.
She didn’t mean them, of course.
“What is it?” he asked. “Even for you, you’re acting weird.”
“I was just thinking about what the reserve captain told me,” she lied. “You’ve some kind of organic planning computer in your head, and Tremayne can see the future. And they call us freaks!”
He smiled. “You think we’re strange? Imagine what our children will be like.”
There was a teasing twinkle in his eye. And that didn’t make sense. Her army of nano-effectors should have cleansed his body of her instructions by now. He should be confused, swaying even, grasping for certainty. Not twinkling.
Madr zagh! He must have the constitution of a Jotun. Had her instruction to love her embedded too strongly?
“Do you love me, Arun?” she tested.
He rolled the idea around for a few moments. “Yes,” he said hesitantly, “I think I do.”
Indiya’s muscles un-tensed. If he were still under her control, he wouldn’t have been so uncertain. “You don’t,” she said. “If you truly love someone, there’s no maybe.”
He shrugged. “I want to run my fingers through your wild, violet hair and kiss those beautiful lips from which you say such a stream of the unexpected. I want to unpeel you from your uniform and play with what’s inside. But what I’d really like to do is go EVA, just the two of us sharing the void in suits with powered motors. Hand-in-hand you would show me your home from the outside. To me, Beowulf is a box that moves across space, but if I saw her through your eyes, I feel certain your ship would capture me with her beauty.”
At first, Indiya didn’t know how to reply. Arun had just spoken the Marine equivalent of love poetry. “Sounds like love to me,” she whispered.
He drew near to her face. Close enough to feel the hot flow of his breath. “I’d like to say all those pretty things when I’m not running for my life because it would mean so much more. Peril makes a Marine randy. Didn’t you know that? It’s how we’re made.”
He brought her into his broad embrace, his fingers twining through her hair.
Heart pounding, she took deep breaths, giving herself to the anticipation.
When he leaned down and brushed his warm lips against hers, she closed her eyes and drew her head back just enough for him to get the message and loosen his hold.
Not that she wanted him to back off.
It was so unfair. Everyone expected her to be totally in control, a deep-thinking leader with a heart of metal, and a sense of humor so tiny it could only be perceived at a quantum scale. Why couldn’t she ever kick loose and have fun making some mistakes? That’s what your youth was for, right? Like fooling around with boys. When was ever going to find the time to do that?
Indiya bit her lip. It seemed to do the trick because her comportment returned. Her task was to purge Marine McEwan’s mind of her control so his battle planner could operate effectively. And that was what she would do. First, she needed to keep him talking. “Doesn’t all this danger and uncertainty put you off… you know, romance?”
He laughed. McEwan should be staggering around punch-drunk. Instead he was exploding with a deep belly laugh, a beautiful sound that declared to her, impossibly, that everything would be okay despite all the crushing evidence to the contrary.
“Did that idiot, Finfth, tell you that?” he asked.
She held his hand, and sent a diagnostic into his bloodstream while he talked, seeking an explanation for why he wasn’t responding as expected.
“I’m a Marine, Indiya. For the rest of my life I’ll either be frozen in a cryo pod or about to go into battle. Have you ever wondered how Marine children are made?”
“Well…” She reddened. Loobie was the only other person she discussed that kind of thing with. “The same way as ship babies,” she stated.
That twinkle was back in his eye. Why?
“I don’t mean the mechanics of insert male part A into female part B, you soft-headed donker. I mean…” He frowned. “You really don’t know, do you?”
Indiya shook her head. Why should she? Ship boys were a mystery. Marine men were off the scale.
“A discussion for another time,” he said. “Let’s just say that once you’ve put us to sleep on your transport ship, average waking-life expectancy for a male Marine is less than a year. And we make the most of every minute, as often as we can with whoever catches our attention. And this… this isn’t a moment for lovemaking. We’ve a job to do.”
A job to do. If only he knew the truth of that. She suddenly wondered what he would do if he learned how she’d been controlling him. Would Arun be violent with her?
“Male,” she said. “Why did you say male Marines have only a year? Isn’t that true for women too?”
Thank Fate! The diagnostic returned. She allowed the layers added to her mind for such purposes to query the results while she concentrated on keeping McEwan talking.
“No,” he said. “Men don’t have babies.” When he saw the bewilderment on her face, he added: “Gestation happens when convenient. That can be many waking-years after conception, and objective-decades after the father dies. If a transport ship is moving to a new system, and if we men have done our job, a whole auxiliary battalion can be born, trained, and fully grown while in transit.”
“And the males sleep through it all?”
Arun stiffened. Seemed she’d hit a nerve. “We don’t have a choice. The Marine Corps is our family. The only family we are permitted.”
The sensation of pressure in her skull told her that her diagnostic had finished reporting. She turned her attention inward to learn that… that her love potion had never taken hold! Something in his body had fought it off. Only another augment could do that. It must have been something Fraser had put into his brother.
; Merde! She’d thought all this time that he’d been in thrall to her. She was a dumbwit bakri chodder, just like Petty Officer Lock always told her.
“Indiya, this isn’t the right time. We’ve got a ship to retake. But after… You promised me a talk when we first met. I’m still looking forward to finding out where that might lead us.”
She wanted to tease out this moment with him, but he was already back in the mindset of a disciplined military cyborg, tapping on the door for the reserve captain to let him out.
Inside the cyborg beat a lover’s heart; inactive now, but she’d glimpsed it shining warm and bright.
Did a sister heart beat inside of her?
Of that she was much less certain.
— Chapter 45 —
Arun couldn’t believe what he was seeing: a pair of empty ACE-2 battlesuits crawling through the door of their compartment.
Out of habit, Arun requested a full-system cyber-defense diagnostic. Then he remembered that Barney wasn’t there – that his sight was fed directly from his eyeballs and so should be immune to cyber-attack. He shook his head instead, but that didn’t help either, because through the condensation-slick wall of the survival bubble, he could still see the approaching ACE-2s.
It looked as if the empty suits were moving under their own ghostly power, but the light from the bubble occasionally glinted off little crawling beings of bizarre shapes.
“Darius has an even larger family than we realized,” Springer said. She was right. As they grew closer, he could see that a battalion of little devices were hauling the suits, marshaled by Darius who flitted back and forth, fussing over his team. Some of the little AI projects Furn had built were mounted on wheels, others on crawler tracks. They seemed to be attached to hard surfaces in the way that his boots could stick to charged walkways. But the walls of the compartment weren’t charged.
“Barney!” Arun exclaimed. “Is he in one of those suits? I’d never thought I’d miss him so much.”
A change came over Darius. Arun had the impression that the little AI was buzzing angrily around the outside of the bubble. But, of course, there was no air outside to actually buzz. Not much light, either.
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