Arun sighed. “Get me some water, will you? I have long days. Better get my throat lubed up if you want to hear about them.”
Pedro scuttled over to the water dispenser.
These sessions with Pedro had so inured Arun to the bizarre that he was only just starting to appreciate how weird this new room was. He recorded images through his eyes while Pedro was busy at the water dispenser – the same kind that was dotted around the human areas of the base. The Troggie tunnels were dark, but this room was brightly illuminated with red-tinged lamps. Arun was sitting in a swiveling sofa chair, deeply padded and covered in red faux leather. It looked brand new. Hung on the walls and ceiling were framed photographs of cadets. Arun was in most of the photos. All of Delta Section were there too. So was Xin. He wasn’t going to ask why Xin was there. He’d never mentioned her, had he?
“Do you like this chamber?”
“It’s… I don’t know. I guess it’s a good attempt to make me feel–” he glanced at Xin’s photo– “I don’t know what exactly but it makes me feel something.”
“Ahh. I see you like the photograph of your beloved.”
“My be-what?”
“Your beloved. The female you love.”
“She is not my beloved.”
“Correction. Ah, but your language is so messy. It is a minefield. This female is not one you are loving but one you wish fervently that you shall love in the future. You are in love but not…”
Pedro paused to regroup. Arun felt his face flush, caught precariously between anger and laughter.
“Let me rephrase,” said Pedro. “That Xin is one hot chick.” That last sentence sounded suspiciously like it had been sampled from Arun’s voice pattern. “I guess you’d love a piece of her action.” So did that.
The problem about Pedro, Arun decided, was that his face was an impassive mask. He couldn’t help but feel Pedro was laughing at him from behind that mask. Whenever the conversation touched anything sensitive or awkward, Arun just wanted to punch the alien to wipe the hidden smirk off its face, even though that was a totally dumb thing to wish for, given that Pedro was physically incapable of smirking.
Arun stepped back from confrontation. It wouldn’t help. That it wouldn’t help just made Arun want to hit Pedro even more and that made him feel… feel that he’d rather Barney was there for a little advice and maybe a sedative too.
“You got those words out of movies and TV shows, didn’t you?”
“Correct.”
“Do me a favor,” he told Pedro, “don’t mention anything about girls again. You’re just annoying when you do. Anyway, if you know all this stuff, why do you need me? I sometimes think you know more about humans that I do. What’s the point of these chit-chats anyway?”
“Because…” Pedro twisted his body into something approximating an S-shape. It probably meant something profound. “Because I have read facts about humans. This is not the same as understanding your species. The distinction could become vital one day. Our future may present opportunities for cooperation.”
Yup! There we have it, thought Arun. Those stupid hints that I’m meant to be a messiah or freedom fighter or something. He bit down on saying the words aloud, remembering that Pedro had gone to the trouble of meeting him in a mothballed orbital platform to escape the surveillance that permeated Detroit. After that first meeting, Pedro had never again hinted that there could be ways to live other than as slaves.
He laughed instead, noticing the manic edge to the sound, but why should he care if a dumb insect heard it? Depending on who you talked to, Arun was too soft, too much of a worrier, or just too much of a loser to be a proper Marine. Well, his emotions might have run wild recently, but he was no coward.
No one had ever accused him of being sensible either.
“Am I special?” Arun asked. There, he’d said it. And somewhere an AI would hear and record his words. “Is there something special I’m supposed to do? Is there something unique about me, Arun McEwan?”
Pedro pointed his antennae at Arun and then stood motionless and silent for a good minute. He might be a dumb insect, but he was perfectly capable of making Arun feel dumber.
“We are all unique individuals, Arun McEwan.” The insect’s artificial voice was so quiet it was barely audible.
“Unique? Horden’s Organs, you dumbchuck, you’re a hive creature. A drone. Uniqueness is an alien concept that you’re trying to learn from me.”
“I see I have upset you,” said the scribe. “I apologize.”
The alien wandered around for a while. The movement looked confused and aimless. It probably wasn’t, but Arun had no idea what it meant.
When he was done, Pedro clambered onto a shelf carved into one dirt wall. Dim orange lamps were directed at the shelf. Basking in the resulting heat was probably a sensual pleasure. Arun had no way of knowing for sure without asking and he wasn’t about to do that. The session had already edged too close to the borders of friendship.
“Tell me about a day in your life,” said the scribe.
“You mean like an itinerary?”
“Sure. However you want to do it is fine. Then I’ll tell you about my day. Shoot.”
“Okay. Well, we wake at midnight. That’s the end of First Sleep. We’re woken gently. Basically, a switch in our heads is turned on by our internal clocks. We might take a leak, have a slurp of drink, but basically we put on our training cap, check it’s attached properly and that we’ve inserted our suit AI chip. Then we go back to sleep.”
“This sleep-training cap – what does it teach you?”
“Well, I don’t actually know, seeing as I’m asleep at the time. I seem to know a lot of facts that I never learned in class or read in a book. I mean, we’ll be training on a new weapon and I’ll know burst radius, recoil strength, ammo variants and all that stuff, and yet I’ve never seen that kind of gun before. What else the caps do, we can only guess. Probably makes us super-brave and ultra-loyal to the White Knights.”
“I expect that is correct.”
Arun thought about that. He’d been joking, but he didn’t think Pedro was. “So that’s Second Sleep,” he continued, “where they fill our brains with something. Then at 05:00, there’s a buzzer sounds in our dorm. Doesn’t give you any option but to be awake. I mean, if there were any corpses interred beneath the floor of our dorm then we’d know about it, because they would rise from the dead to complain about the noise.”
“And who do you sleep with?”
“Hey! I thought I told you to keep off that topic.”
“I have not gone on that topic. You have a dormitory, which I understand to be a separate room inside a habitation disk. Your hab-disk is designated 6/14 and houses Charlie Company and Dog Company from 8th battalion, 412th Marines. Is it always the same individuals who sleep in that dorm?”
“Oh, I see. Yeah. Now that we’ve graduated from the crèche to be full cadets, we get to live in a hab-disk and the dorm members are fixed, far as I know. Two fire teams make a section and it’s one section per dorm. That’s eight cadets. Me, Springer, Zug, Brandt, Majanita, Osman, Del-Marie and Cristina.”
Pedro seemed satisfied, so Arun carried on: “It’s quite relaxed first thing. The hab-disk has its own gym and firing range. So we stretch and work out – enough to get fit but not to tire us out before the day has started. Then we wash dress and clean ourselves ready for inspection between 07:00 and 07:30.”
“You clean yourselves with water?”
“Sure we do. Why? What do you use to clean yourselves with?”
“Dirt. We sweat out toxins and scrub away by burying through dirt.”
“Lovely. Don’t you still smell?”
“We like to smell. We are our smell.”
“O-kay. Anyway. Yeah, we have showers dotted around the disk. There’s five of them. You can fit about ten people in each shower, twelve if you squeeze together. Sometimes you have to. It can get real busy at peak times.”
“And these showers,
males and females share the same facilities?”
“What is it with you? You’re sex-obsessed.”
“Possibly. Remember, my species has no genders. If smell defines my people, I think gender defines yours. This gender distinction is so fundamental to your species and yet completely absent from mine. How can we be so different? I do not understand this yet.”
The insect made a good point. But how could Arun explain to someone who has no gender the horseplay that went on at the top and tail of a cadet’s day? About how they were given license to let off a little steam? How dorm mates might vacate their dorm to give a couple ten minutes of privacy?
“It’s different,” Arun said. “In the showers, I mean. At other times, taking clothes off can be a big deal, but everyone has to get clean first thing and have their protective spray. It’s mandatory. You get on with it. It’s no big deal.” That wasn’t always strictly true, but it would do for an explanation. “Anyway, your idea of gender and sexual attraction is too simplistic. It isn’t just a question of males liking girls and vice versa.”
“What? You have more genders? Fascinating. Please elaborate… No, on second thoughts, leave that for another session. Please continue with your typical day.”
Arun shrugged. “Like I said, inspection is 07:00 to 07:30. We stand by our racks – which I guess you could call single-occupancy sleep pods. Our kit cabins are open. Everything is stripped clean, assembled, washed. Absolutely perfect. Of course on most days an instructor doesn’t come to inspect us. There aren’t enough of them to go around. But we have to be ready just in case. Same goes for evening inspection between 21:00 and 21:30.”
“Thank you,” said Pedro. “I have two more questions. Firstly how much time do you have to yourselves in the evening?”
“Well, depends what we got to do. Inspection ends 21:30. We’re supposed to in bed by 25:00 hours and sleep all the way through the remaining five hours until midnight at 30:00 hours. That’s three and a half hours to ourselves. We don’t just goof around, though. Some of us practice for Scendence. Sometimes we meet up with seniors from our battalion who will help teach and train us. Our merit points help determine their Cull status, you see?”
“I do. Thank you. Final question. Who prepares food for you?”
“Well, the Aux of course. They do all the cooking and cleaning. Maintenance too. That sort of stuff.”
“And these auxiliaries are lower caste humans, yes?”
Arun was about to deny that humans were so primitive as to have castes or a class system. The words caught in his throat when he thought of how he treated the Aux. He always tried to be polite, he supposed, but there was never any doubt in his attitude that he knew he was better than any Aux.
And from the vast majority of other cadets the best the Aux could hope for was indifference. Petty cruelty was more common because most cadets seemed to have had compassion bred out of them. They felt intense loyalty but struggled with the concept of kindness. And since the Aux were not part of their units, they might as well be aliens. Try as he might, Arun struggled to be so cold hearted. That made him a freak.
Before Arun could form an answer Pedro announced: “I must go now. I apologize for my abrupt departure. I am called away and cannot ignore the summons. I have a request, though. Please learn the name of one of your auxiliaries before our next meeting.”
Pedro leaped from his shelf and raced away as if his life depended on it. Perhaps it did. There could have been a major cave in with thousands dead already, but not the smallest fragment of emotion could ever enter Pedro’s artificial voice.
As he headed back up to the human levels, Arun silently cursed Pedro. How had the alien guessed that Arun didn’t know the name of a single Aux?
—— Chapter 18 ——
384th Detroit Scendence Championships.
Day 2 – Practice Match
Arun was no xeno-linguist, which wasn’t surprising, given there wasn’t much call for that skill. If an alien was on your side then the Jotun officers could communicate with the xeno if necessary. For all other aliens, you didn’t talk to them; all you had to do was aim your SA-71 and squeeze the trigger.
The only thing he knew about alien languages was that Jotuns used bifurcated nouns – a way of describing things from two perspectives. Zug said it came from the hexapeds having two pairs of hands.
Arun thought bifurcated nouns were an example of woolly thinking. Most humans agreed. But the Jotuns were in charge so they got to name the Scendence contests using their fussy nouns anyway. Equally naturally, the humans usually ignored this and simplified to a single noun.
So the contest of Deception-Planning was usually described as ‘Deception’ because most matches involved bluff and trickery. But sometimes – as with Arun’s first match for Moscow Express – the planning side came to the fore.
After Madge had let him join, Arun was desperate to make a good showing – maybe that would raise his reputation off the deck in the eyes of his comrades?
He’d been taken to one of the tech labs in the Level 5 novice school where he’d faced a G-1 cadet from the 420th Marines whose shrapnel scars to her face gave her a grim appearance.
Their challenge was to plan blockade-running logistics to resupply a besieged planet until it grew strong enough to free itself from blockade. A range of ships was available to each player, each with varying characteristics such as troop-carrying capacity, build time, cruising speed, fuel consumption, nimbleness to evade the blockade, and firepower to blast a way through. The game AIs handled all the simulation mechanics – combat, random hazards, the success of crash landings other such factors – letting the Scendence players concentrate on planning the logistical operation.
Arun concentrated everything on massive troop carriers loaded with defensive fighter squadrons to protect the carriers and their main cargo: great clouds of single-use dropboats loaded with troops and supplies.
The carriers took such a long time to build that his opponent had already made two blockade-running missions to her beleaguered planet before Arun’s carriers even reached his. Once there, his boats suffered a brutal 90% casualty rate as they passed through the blockade. And while his Scendence opponent’s ships had degraded her enemy’s defenses, Arun’s had barely touched his, being all about evading rather than blasting a way through.
The 420th supporters watching the Scendence feeds were jubilant, the 412th’s disappointed… except for Blue Squad, Charlie Company, 8th battalion. Some of Arun’s squad had lost confidence in him as a Marine, but as a Scendence player they knew him too well to give up hope.
Blue Squad was right. Arun himself soon grew confident that victory would be his.
Although his troopship carriers took a long time to build, they didn’t need rebuilding – they simply returned home to load the next cargo of cheap-to-build dropboats and the infinite supply of troops, who had no cost or build time. His opponent’s fleets were single use, a replacement having to be built each time from scratch.
The key to victory was to exploit the abundance of his virtual Marines by spending their lives freely. Arun repeatedly flooded the blockade with such swarms of dropboats that enough survivors and their supplies got through to rapidly bolster the planet’s defenders. It didn’t take many waves before the game AI announced that his besieged forces had counter-attacked against the blockade, wiping it from orbit.
He’d won!
Arun allowed himself a smile when his overwhelming victory was announced.
Normally he would leap up and punch the air. But this time he felt dirty. There was a cruel parallel between the cheapness of his virtual soldiers’ lives and those of the flesh and blood slaves bred to fight for the Human Marine Corps.
Still, a victory was a victory. And winning was all that counted.
The moment he entered the battalion mess hall after the game, a ragged cheer went up. Then he was surrounded by cadets wanting to slap him on the back, hug him, ruffle his hair or kiss him. After the mess
in the tunnels, being mobbed as a hero felt so damned good.
It only took a few seconds for the mob to thin out and then disappear, revealing the cold truth: Arun had only ever had a handful of well-wishers. Most of 8th battalion was watching him with stony indifference or outright hatred. Gods! He hadn’t seen many cadets outside of Blue and Gold Squads since he’d seen Little Scar – since his battalion had been demoted into the Cull Zone.
It didn’t take a genius to work out whom most people blamed for that.
“Hey, well done on your game,” called a female voice from behind. “I saw it all. An impressive performance.”
Arun was grateful for any sign of support. “Thanks, pal. I do my best to…” That voice!
He stopped, turned around, and stared into Xin’s face.
“Thing is…” Xin cast her eyes to the ground. She looked really uncomfortable. “Thing is, you’re a whole lot better than the Deception player in my team.”
Arun’s reply was simply to gawp, too stunned to speak.
“Yeah, not too good on the vocabulary. I get that sometimes. But I studied your record. You’ve got good form.”
“Well, yes, thank you. I wouldn’t say I’m better than your teammate, but thanks. I saw you too. I think you’re amazing.”
“Oh, man. Don’t go all twinkle-eyed on me. This is difficult enough as it is.”
Arun chewed over her words, but he still couldn’t make sense of them.
“Yeah. Lack of intelligence noted too, buddy. Still, you’ve got those plus points. And that’s why I want you on my team.”
“You… but… I can’t. I’m already in the Moscow Express team.”
“D’uh! I just saw you, remember?”
“Corporal Majanita has only just cooled down enough to let me on the team. I can’t leave them.”
“Yes you can. Can’t is a word only used by losers. Now, won’t is a word I’d accept, but can’t is too pathetic for my ears to process.”
Arun tried not to think too hard because he knew he’d hate himself for what he was about to say. “All right, Xin, I won’t. I won’t join you, much as I would dearly love to under any other circumstances, because… Well, you gotta see it my way. I can’t let my squadmates down.”
Marine Cadet (The Human Legion Book 1) Page 13