Arun had never cared about lineage. What impressed him was how Horden had built quite a following with his secret teachings on Earth history, and compelling arguments about why Old Earth was something worth fighting for — worth humans fighting for — and, one day, returning to as free people.
Horden had graduated the year before, part of a replacement list sent off to some garrison fleet around the mining system of Akinschet. Arun’s mother had been posted there. Perhaps the two would meet?
Fighting for humanity… as he waited to die a pointless death on behalf of uncaring alien masters, he wondered what it must be like to fight for a cause you could believe in, a new kind of Human Marine Corps that actually fought for humanity.
Without warning, every Trog simultaneously emitted a screech like poorly lubricated wheel brakes. A few seconds later came another pheromone-laden smell. Like rotten fruit this time.
Guess that meant contemplation time was over.
He opened his eyes. The guardians had withdrawn from his hole, standing motionless in the main tunnel corridor. Great! They must have found some digging-caste Trogs to get at him safely without bringing the roof down.
“Cease fire, humans!”
The voice seemed to be coming from within the tunnel walls, not from a single source but diffusely spread throughout this area of the hive. “This exercise is concluded. Cease fire!”
Within moments, the guardians calmed to a stop, listing woozily. If the notion wasn’t so absurd, he’d say they had grown sleepy.
A ripple spread through the insectoid mob. The disturbance came from a new kind of Trog. Smaller and more lightly colored, this one lacked the halo of sharp horns. When the newcomer had pushed through the crowd and stood at the entrance to Arun’s little cave, he could see its carapace was as black as the guardians but covered in fine red hairs that looked unexpectedly delicate, when picked out in the beam of his helmet lamp. Instructor Rekka had explained in her briefing that this was a Trog in an earlier stage of the lifecycle: a scribe.
“The guardians will not harm you now,” spoke the scribe via a box hanging around its neck, which whirred with gears as it generated a mechanical version of a human voice.
Arun wasn’t convinced. But, what the hell? It beat cowering. He got down on hands and knees and slithered through the floes of spent sabots floating in a carnage sea. It was like crawling through a midden pit dug for an outdoor field exercise, except now he was so close to the chopped aliens, he smelled a tang of sweetened metal.
This had only been a training exercise.
But when he looked around at corpses of his supposed allies, killed by his own hand, he wondered whether the scribe would see things the same way.
—— Chapter 02 ——
The alien scribe stood motionless amidst the scene of combat carnage. Two pairs of glassy black bulbs — Arun assumed they were eyes — stared at Arun. If the creature was showing any kind of emotional reaction to the death of its fellows, it wasn’t in a form a human could recognize.
Arun’s combat drugs were beginning to wear off, enough for him to reason that the best thing for him to do was shut up, keep still, and await orders…
Thinking of orders… why wasn’t Brandt shouting at him through the comms link in his helmet? Was Brandt dead?
“I have given them a pheromone order to render them dormant,” said the scribe’s box after a while. “You too should take on a dormant state, human Marine cadet.”
He waited for the scribe’s box to say more, but the creature had said all it intended to for now. The hairs on the insect thorax looked so soft, he wanted to reach out and stroke them. Although the alien made no menacing moves, Arun kept his hand to himself, worried that his sudden urge for intimacy might be connected to coming down from the combat drugs.
After the gnarled bulk of the guardians, the scribe seemed as cute as a cooing baby. It was only seven feet long rather than a guardian’s nine plus, but still had the same three-segment body arrangement that looked like the head, thorax, and abdomen of Earth insects.
Arun was all too familiar with real insects. When his distant ancestors had been transported from Earth, the little buzzing, biting but pollinating pests had come too. The scribe only looked superficially like an Earth creature, though. It carried itself on three spindly pairs of limbs that ended in flexible suckers. Definitely not like an insect. The pre-mission briefing had mentioned these suckers, describing them as analogous to an Earthly elephant’s trunk.
Although he wasn’t one of the few who resisted the Earth-centric obsession, sometimes Arun thought it went too far. What kind of dumb veck thought it was a clever idea to compare Trogs to an animal on a far-off planet that none of the human Marines would ever encounter?
“I mean,” he told the scribe, “really, it would make far more sense to describe an elephant’s trunk as like a scribe’s limbs, rather than the other way around.”
On the scribe’s motionless head, its two pairs of eyes blinked. Then it raised its antenna into a frenzy of wriggling.
Without warning, those feelers telescoped outward, directly at Arun’s head.
He jumped back, settling into a loose crouch, ready for unarmed combat. But the feelers stopped their advance and Arun amused himself with the thought that he’d never been taught unclothed combat.
The antennae retracted slightly into a fixed pattern, a square shape that it maintained for a few seconds before saying: “I agree. I have read the same human texts. As if anyone on this planet would ever encounter an elephant!”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking!”
Arun’s squadmate, Zug, studied aliens with a passion. He’d be able to make sense of this conversation later.
“So…” Arun continued, wondering how you were supposed to change subject with an alien species you’d never met before, except to shoot at. (Arun glanced nervously at the carnage around him). “Er… did we win?”
“You failed to meet the success criteria of this exercise. We do not know the detailed assessment that will be forthcoming from the Jotuns and your senior humans. Our own assessment is that too many small-unit commanders proved inadequate, and your company commander lacked imagination. Most disastrous of all, you failed to keep reserves. The concept of a front line is tenuous when contesting a three-dimensional tunnel network. Counter-attacks can come from any direction. Have you not been taught the concept of a mobile reserve?”
“Oh.” Arun’s shoulders slumped. This was the scenario every human on the planet hated: being made to feel like children by older races that had seen it all before. He tried to put every iota of assertiveness into his voice and asked: “Were there any casualties?”
Speaking those words made him think of his fire team buddies: Osman, Madge and Springer. Were they dead? Properly dead?
“There were four minor injuries,” the alien told him. Arun relaxed. “And one fatality. Name of Isabella de Grouchy.”
Arun pictured bouncy brown hair, a hooked nose set into a serious, freckle-dashed face that was often frowning. De Grouchy had flashed him a momentary half-smile once; they’d never spoken but he’d seen her enough to paint a vivid picture of her in his mind’s eye. And now she was gone.
Isabella hadn’t exactly been the first to die. Not when Arun considered all those who hadn’t survived to graduate from novice school as a cadet.
He glanced at the guardians still crowding the tunnel, apparently in deep sleep.
Arun idly flicked the larger chunks of mess off his body. He felt a throb of pain to his left leg and torso. He squeezed his right eye shut against the fierce pain that stabbed through it. Sensation was returning. And he was injured.
He froze, his wounds forgotten. He realized he’d just flicked a piece of Troggie body onto the scribe. Trogs lived in nests. Nest members, the briefing had said, were almost a gestalt entity, a hive whose members were far closer to each other than any human twin.
“Were…” Arun cleared his throat. “Were there many
tropied on your side?” He winced, unable to stop himself glancing around at the combat slurry.
He could have phrased that better.
“A little over a thousand nest-siblings were… tropied. Is that the right word? You do mean killed, don’t you?”
The alien had replayed a recording of Arun’s voice when it said tropied. Seemed the translation software wasn’t up to date with the vernacular used by the 412th Marines.
“Yeah, tropied. You know, entropied.” Arun shrugged. “I’m sorry.”
“Why?” The scribe twitched its feelers. “Because you humans killed so many?”
“Well…” Zug always told him that aliens don’t do sarcasm, not that a human would ever understand, anyway. So Arun decided to take the alien’s words literally. “Yes,” he said, looking at the massed ranks of guardians. One word from the scribe and he’d be chopped meat himself within two seconds.
“I feel regret,” Arun decided to add, “that so many nest-siblings were… slain.”
Slain? He didn’t think he’d ever used the archaic word before, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to say killed with all those alien warriors standing there in the wreckage of their brothers and sisters — or whatever passed for gender within the nest.
The scribe twisted its antennae into spirals, and said: “You humans amuse us with your wild flights of emotion.” It paused. “We also feel intense emotion at the appropriate stages in our life-journeys, but there is always a purpose to our emotion. But you, human, why do you grieve for fallen enemies?”
“Trogs aren’t my enemies. We’re all slaves of the White Knights on Tranquility.”
“True. Just as those of my race are also slaves to our biological lifecycle, and to our nest’s resource constraints.”
The scribe relaxed its feelers and swayed slightly. “Today you killed my nest-siblings who were in the stage of our lifecycle you call guardians. An individual’s body changes to the guardian state only because they failed in their previous life-phase. They are the oldest, on average, and so are expendable. In primitive nests, guardians are first to form the defensive wedge when rival nests attack. Without war between nests, our guardian population must be culled. For us, it is a kindness for humans to kill and maim so many, because we remember these individuals from an earlier time in their lives when they were our friends, our children and our parents. Better you do it than we kill them ourselves. However they are culled, their role is not yet complete as we will shortly take their remains to be composted.”
Arun pointed at one of the nearby corpses that was still relatively intact. “That one,” he said. “Are you telling me you’re going to chop him up and use him to help grow your vegetables?”
“Of course.”
“Frakk!” Arun raised his hands, palms up. “Aliens!”
The Trog matched his gesture of bemusement, using its front limbs to approximate a shrug. “Aliens!” it exclaimed, playing the sound of Arun’s voice through its box. “My thoughts exactly. See how you referred to that maimed Trog as he once you felt sympathy?”
“No. But… you’re right. I did.”
“You humans fascinate me.” It paused. “May I ask you a question?”
“Go on…” said Arun, dearly wishing it wouldn’t.
“You exhibit two incongruities that have led me to form a hypothesis. I should like to state my hypothesis for your review.”
“O-kay.”
“Firstly, I note that you are naked.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Forgive my imprecision. You are naked other than your helmet and your gloves.”
“Right. Well, there’s a simple explanation. I had to abandon my battlesuit because your nest-buddies had pinned me down.”
“Secondly…” The alien extended both its feathery antennae to touch him in a place Arun really didn’t expect an alien to ever make contact. Arun yelped in shock.
“Secondly, you have activated your mating prong.”
Arun gasped, and slowly lowered his gaze. Sweet final homecoming!
Damn those frakking combat drugs and their drenting side effects.
“My hypothesis,” continued the alien, showing no sign of noticing Arun blush like a nuclear furnace, “is that you wish to engage with me in a sexual encounter.”
Arun slapped one hand down to guard his genitals, and the other up to hide his face.
“It is my privilege to study alien behavior for the benefit of the nest. In the course of my research, I have observed many recordings of human copulation, and I surmise that you wish to penetrate first.”
Collapsing to a ball on the tunnel floor, Arun willed the world to go away, or for him to die. Whichever came first; he didn’t care, just so long as an end came quickly.
Through a crack in his fingers, Arun watched the alien turn side-on. Patches on its thorax had turned bright red, and a section of its carapace was… puckering.
“If my hypothesis is correct,” said the alien, “you will find my reproductive opening on my flanks. I regret, though, that I cannot reciprocate.”
Arun groaned loudly.
“Oh,” said the alien, or rather its mechanical voice in a box, which managed to sound offended. “I hear your disappointment. My reluctance to penetrate you in return is not through lack of interest, rather that I would rip your opening and rupture your bowels.”
“Cadet McEwan. Acknowledge ceasefire.”
For several moments, the new voice confused Arun. It sounded deep and worn and it wasn’t coming from the scribe. Then he remembered the comms link in his helmet.
“McEwan. Acknowledge! This is Sergeant Gupta. Acknowledge.”
“Roger that. Sorry, sergeant.”
“Relax, son. It’s those frakking combat meds they keep tinkering with. There’s always a few green cadets enter a combat fugue and never snap out. But you’re coming round now. You’ll be okay. And next time your body will find them a little easier to take. Hopefully.”
“Sergeant… Brandt… why isn’t Brandt…?” Arun found words that should come easily swirled and slithered away beyond reach. “Sergeant, is he—?”
“—dead? No, cadet. Well, Acting Cadet Corporal Edward Brandt is dead according to the rules of the exercise, but perfectly okay in real life. Mind you, I expect he will hope it was the other way around when I review his sorry performance with your instructors. Yes, I’m your new veteran squad commander.”
Arun knew he should be paying attention to the NCO — a real one who had earned his rank. But he couldn’t help but stare at the alien instead. Its antennae were bent at an angle. It looked like a person tilting their head when listening with interest. Maybe this gesture meant the same thing.
“Cadet.”
“Yes, sergeant.”
Gupta paused. “I did three tours of duty before they had me nurse-maiding you kids. I’ve been around for 180 objective years and that means I’ve seen a little of the galaxy. I want to share some of that with you now.”
“Thank you, sergeant.”
“Life has a habit of being unfair. Sometimes you just gotta suck it in. Cry on the inside if you have to, wail in private with your best pals if you must, but keep your head high and wait for your luck to change. Remember, a Marine never buckles under pressure. That’s easy to say but now is your time to prove it.”
“Yes, sergeant.”
“Stay where you are, McEwan. Your injuries don’t look too serious but I’ve marked you for medical evac just in case. So I don’t want you walking out because that would make me look a damned fool.”
“Yes, sergeant. Umm… Sergeant?”
“Hurry up!”
“Well, what you said. About life being unfair. I didn’t quite follow. I survived. What’s unfair about that?”
“Ah, frakk it, son. Everything in those tunnels was recorded. Video, audio, the works. What that bug-ugly just said to you is already flying around the base. Why have you activated your mating prong? Like it or not your comrades won’t let you fo
rget that, so I want you to roll with it. See the funny side. That’s an order.”
But Arun wasn’t listening. He curled into as tight as ball as he could, and willed the lurking guardians to end his existence.
—— Chapter 03 ——
It was only as Arun approached the battalion chow hall, hobbling with the aid of the walking stick the medic had given him, that he knew for certain he hadn’t gotten away with his embarrassing episode in the tunnel. At first, the complete shunters of the 412th Marine Regiment — his future comrades-in-arms, sworn to aid him in his hour of need — had acted as if nothing had happened, though he imagined he saw concealed smirks on their faces.
He begun to hope he’d actually gotten away with it.
But now the cadets spilling out from the hall and into the approach corridor were no longer hiding their smirks. He ignored the little vecks as he pushed his way through and into the chow hall. As soon as he was inside, the door sphinctered shut.
Marine cadets of all years thronged the room, overwhelming the ventilation system to suffuse it with a sweaty pong, not unlike the stink of menacing Troggie guardians. Everyone in that room stopped whatever they were doing, and twisted around to stare at Arun McEwan.
Digi-sheets had been stuck onto every available surface. All of them looped the moment when the alien scribe grasped Arun’s manhood with its feelers. Underneath the moving image, some wit had added the caption: ‘Arun McEwan: so desperate he’ll prong anything.’
The room erupted in a cacophony of cheers, catcalls, hoots and jeers. Some was good-natured. Most of it wasn’t.
Osman slid over from somewhere and slapped Arun on the back, laughing along with everyone else in the room.
“Not you, too,” groaned Arun.
Slapping his back all the while, Osman leaned closer and said: “Laugh, Arun. Laugh with them. It’s your only chance.”
“He’s right,” said Zug, who was standing a few paces behind Osman. “If they sense your humiliation, they will use this against you forever. Your status will be permanently degraded. What then for your sexual fantasy?”
Marine Cadet (The Human Legion Book 1) Page 3