One of the blue dots moved up the slope. It was Madge.
“Ready on 3,” she said. Simultaneously, the red dots rearranged and firmed as Barney received an update on their position: Madge had sneaked a visual of the enemy surging below them.
The bots fired first. Not at Delta Section but at one of the teams at the boarding point.
“Contact!” screamed Lance Corporal Yoshioka from Gold-3. “They’re coming at us from behind.” She sounded surprised. Why wasn’t Yoshioka in on Madge’s plan?
But there was no time to worry about Yoshioka. Madge counted down. “3… 2… 1… Now!”
Arun raised his carbine over his head and fired his flash-bomb. Without waiting for its effect, he scrambled over the ridge and opened fire with his laser, Barney applying a charge to the suit that glued it to the projector on a rough approximation of standard gravity.
Barney was ready for the explosion of light from the flash-bomb, limiting its effect to be merely dazzling. The bots, though… they acted stunned.
Perfect!
Arun raked them with laser fire. From the feet of his first target, he played his aim diagonally up to the right and then down again, stitching a repeating pattern of simulated death.
They might be bots but they still acted confused, staring up, seeking for the hidden threat that was scything them down.
Yeah!
This was the therapy he needed!
He tried to imagine he was shooting Tawfiq and her skangat monkey-bitches, Instructor Nhlappo for trying to get him executed to save her butt, the traitors who were drugging his section…
“Cease fire!”
So soon? The feeling was too good for Arun to release the pressure on the trigger, but the thermal cutout on Arun’s carbine obeyed Madge’s order for him anyway.
He knelt as he picked a new position to switch to while his carbine cooled.
There was movement. There… from the heap of robot bodies.
He froze
No!
But they were dead… The bots… he’d seen them fall!
The combat bots rose from death, picking themselves up on spindly limbs. One rotated its bulbous sensor node and looked straight up at Arun. It didn’t pick up its weapon, just stared.
Arun scrambled back behind the projector ridge. “Corp—”
Too late! His warning died with his comms connection. Stiffened cords erupted over his suit, immobilizing him. Barney wasn’t there any longer, and the AI had taken his tactical-display and vision enhancements with him.
That look from the bot had killed him. Arun was certain. But… but that was impossible.
The charge on his suit that had stuck him to the ship went too. As the momentum from Arun’s backward scramble carried him off the shield projector, his boot snagged briefly on a cooling fin, transforming his feet-first reverse into a head-over-heels tumble away from the warship. He bumped into a laser emplacement and off into space at the speed of an arthritic worm.
The veterans would be in no hurry to resurrect the dead cadets after the exercise, which left Arun with more time than he wanted to ponder how Delta Section had messed up so badly.
His answer wasn’t long in coming. Delta Section hadn’t screwed up at all: the exercise had been sabotaged.
Doubts gnawed at him, growing stronger as his distance from the ship stretched ever further. Until now he’d dodged the clutches of the conspiracies swirling through Detroit. He had begun to feel as if he were acting out a daring tale of adventure, something he would look back on one day and laugh.
No longer. Although his body was tumbling helplessly through the vacuum, he knew his fate was held fast by the traitors, gripped as surely as by a powered gauntlet.
There would be no Human Legion now.
—— Chapter 48 ——
“You may turn around.”
After the veterans unlocked the suit AIs of the dead cadets, they had then ordered Delta Section to stand facing the bulkhead in a passageway on Deck 14 of Fort Douaumont to contemplate their failure.
Now, after an hour with his visor up against a vertical sheet of metal, it was time for Arun to face the conspirators, for surely the veterans must be in on the set up.
In theory, Gold and Blue Squads had been victorious — after a fashion. Casualties had been high; tempers higher. The other cadets had taken the homeward shuttle long ago, but Arun suspected the rest of Gold and Blue had never been more than cover for what was really taking place here. Delta Section’s day was far from over.
As he turned — an awkward movement without gravity but with his boots sticking to the deck like glue — all the overlays and vision enhancers in Arun’s visor shut down, reducing it to a transparent bulge at the front of his helmet. Even his helmet lights failed. Gupta had taken control of his helmet.
To Arun’s unaided eye, the only light in the utter black of the passageway came from the lamps mounted to either side of Gupta’s helmet. They burned like fusion torches.
Arun shut his eyes. The lamps burning through his eyelids scarcely dimmed.
“McEwan!” bellowed the sergeant. “Stand at attention properly!”
Arun opened his eyes and squinted into the blazing light. Gupta held his gaze before walking down the line, halting again in front of his first victim.
“After you were in position above Fort Douaumont, did you hear Cadet Lance Sergeant Belville’s instruction?”
In the airless passageway, there was no direction to Gupta’s voice, the sound of his words coming only through Arun’s helmet speaker.
“Yes, sergeant.” There was a subtle note of desperation in Madge’s voice. They all assumed the sergeant’s words were meant to trap her with no possible means of escape.
“What were her orders?” asked Gupta.
“To guard the boarding teams against counter-attack, sergeant.”
“And did you carry out that order?”
Madge hesitated.
“Answer me, Majanita! Or would you prefer me to first explain the concept of carrying out orders?”
“No, sergeant”
“Then answer, damn you. Did you carry out your orders?”
“Yes, sergeant.”
“Yes, sergeant? Really? Then explain how your section failed to warn the boarding party of an attack coming from your sector? And why Delta’s defense was such a steaming puddle of drent that you might as well have been back in Detroit, chowing down in the mess. Were there actually any cadets inside those ACE-2/T suits? Were you actually? Frakking? There?”
“Yes, sergeant.”
“Then how do you explain your vulley-up?”
Arun glanced left to where Madge was pinned by Gupta’s helmet lamps. Should he speak up? Shit happens, for sure, but Madge didn’t deserve this. It wasn’t fair.
Then he faced front, sharpish. He’d been warned before about not thinking things were fair. Besides, he bet Gupta knew what had really happened better than any of them.
“You!” bellowed the NCO.
Gupta took two bounds along the passageway to come to a position looming over Arun. He jabbed a gauntleted finger at Arun’s chest.
“Do you think you’re special, McEwan?”
“No, sergeant.”
“Then why were your eyes on Cadet Corporal Majanita? Did you have something to say?”
“No, sergeant.”
“Oh, really? Well, you do now. Tell us whether your section commander carried out her orders.”
There was no hesitation. “Yes, sergeant.”
“Interesting. Then explain how the enemy brushed aside your defense so easily that they wiped out Gold-3 unopposed.”
“There was a fault with the bots, sergeant. We shot them but—” A red alarm sounded inside Arun’s brain. A sensation he’d been trained to associate with going offline. Gupta had shut him out of the local comms net. Arun finished his explanation anyway. “We shot them, but they got back up and shot us. Frakk! They didn’t shoot us. One just looked my way and I was de
ad. It wasn’t our fault.”
“Not your fault. Not fair? Not – fucking – fair? Your overactive sense of justice forced Staff Sergeant Bryant to send you down to join the Aux. Looks to me like he wasted his time. Are you hankering to reunite with your Hardit friends?”
“No, sergeant.”
“Then let me remind you one final time. Life is not fair. This exercise was not fair. Wasting my breath talking to an idiot cadet is not fair. Do you still believe the bots malfunctioned?”
Did he? What was worse, lying or complaining? Lying to a superior was a capital offense, so it wasn’t much of a choice. “Yes, sergeant. They malfunctioned.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Does that mean your section is off the hook? That your screw up wasn’t your fault?”
“No, sergeant. Drent happens. We have to succeed despite that.”
Arun pictured Gupta chewing over Arun’s words behind his opaque visor. Gupta eventually responded: “I don’t believe a word you’ve just said. But at least I detected a faint flicker of intelligence, which is as much as I can hope for. You’ve reported a suspected malfunction to your NCO. And now I’m telling you that I don’t care. What should you do about the rogue bots now?”
“Nothing, sergeant.”
“Good. You will not speak of bots that don’t stay down. You will not speak of equipment malfunction. You will not talk about the events of this day at all, except to admit with the appropriate and deserved level of shame that you frakked up and let your comrades down. You will not speak of this to anyone at any time, ever. That is a direct order. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sergeant.” Arun understood very clearly. If he ever talked, he would be disobeying a superior, and the penalty was death.
But there had been more meaning than that in the NCO’s words. Equipment malfunction was an ever-present hazard. This was usually down to cyber-attack, not poor design or lack of maintenance. The Hardits had been mining this system for many thousands of years. Back when Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalis were scrapping for domination of the Earth, the most valuable raw materials of Tranquility’s system had already been extracted and hurled out into the interstellar trade routes by giant mass drivers.
That meant the system had long been a target for robot spies launched by rival empires. Counter-espionage bots scoured the asteroid, moons and comets forever discovering tiny automated factories pouring out nano-sized spybots to observe, challenge and test defenses.
Equipment malfunction should be investigated but Gupta was trying to snuff out any word of this. Which only confirmed what Arun already suspected: that Gupta was part of the conspiracy. And yet… Surely there were far simpler ways to silence a cadet who knew too much?
A green light clicked in Arun’s head, and he knew he was back on the public comms net.
“This was your first zero-g exercise under my instruction,” said Gupta. “You let me down. It is now my task to shake each of your scrawny hides until either a Marine tumbles out, or you die in the attempt. I don’t much care either way. What I do care is that there should be no losers in my squad, because out there in the wider galaxy there are no losers in the Marine Corps. Why is that, Cadet Koraltan?”
“Sergeant,” answered Osman briskly, “because only the best make it as Marines.”
“You can cut the parade ground bullshit, Koraltan. That’s for children. The reason why there are no losers in the Corps is because losers are a liability. No NCO would risk his or her entire unit in order to shield one unreliable Marine. Do you imagine the White Knight Empire provides a network of military hospitals to care for Marines who aren’t fit for combat duty? Out at the front, liabilities are quietly abandoned to the void for the good of everyone else. No Marine left behind? That’s a saying from long ago and far away. I don’t care whether you call it murder or natural selection, but if you don’t earn my trust by the time I lead your squad out to war, I’ll kill you myself. Understood?”
“Yes, sergeant.”
“I hope you do. And now for the good news. I’ve taken pity on you. Instead of going home to Tranquility, I’m going to give you a chance to start earning my trust without delay. I’ve booked you a place on my old boat, Yorktown. You’re going to be doing EVA drill.”
Arun kept his expression blank. Inwardly, his mind was spinning out of control. The Yorktown? That was a Tactical Unit assault warboat, recently returned from the frontier wars for refit and upgrade. Just when he thought he was beginning to peer through the web of deceit to see what was going on here, Gupta had clouded the picture once again.
Perhaps he would find the answers on the Yorktown.
—— Chapter 49 ——
There was a helluva lot of black in space, Arun mused, not exactly for the first time. Facing out to space from his Yorktown EVA chute, he saw a field of black, peppered with infinitesimally small silver dots. Sergeant Gupta would appear somewhere in the void — when he was good and ready — darting in front of Delta Section on his one-man flitter. The exercise was simple. The disgraced cadets had to keep their eyes peeled until they spotted him, and then they had five minutes to catch him. Anyone who didn’t manage that would not be going home. Ever. Or, at least, so the NCO had promised them. Gupta had seemed so pissed that Arun wasn’t sure whether he was exaggerating.
Arun had been entombed in his EVA chute for three hours now. The sergeant might appear in the next second, the next hour, even the next day. They had no choice but to wait, their natural sleep patterns kept at bay by their augmented Marine bodies.
Whatever changes the alien scientists had wrought on his flesh, they did nothing to stop the hunger gnawing at Arun’s belly (breakfast had been 14.3 hours ago) nor did they stop imaginary lights flickering across his field of vision as his mind got its revenge for staring so hard for so long by playing tricks on him.
He issued a mental command to his faceplate to overlay astro-navigation interpretive information. Moons were ringed and named. So too were distant mining craft, as were ore shipments in their transport capsules that would shepherd them along the light years to their destinations. If he stared long enough at the tiniest dots, they would reveal themselves as stars or comets, their names appearing on his faceplate. And if he stared longer still, he would see summaries of composition, and political and economic status.
What he really wanted was to access combat mode. But his suit was not set up to show his commanding NCO as an enemy threat, no matter how Arun felt about him. Astro-navigation mode should still show up the NCO, but Arun no longer trusted his suit, and so he switched off the interpretive mode and relied upon eyeballs alone.
The ghostly blue fringe of Tranquility’s outer atmosphere entered Arun’s field of vision, followed inevitably by the rest of his home planet as the Yorktown continued her spin. He had no chance of spotting Gupta against the disk of purple-tinged clouds and azure seas, so he closed his eyelids. In the cocoon of an EVA bubble, that wasn’t easy, but he decided it was better to rest his eyes for a few moments.
As his eyelids shut and the dark closed in, Arun felt fear. At first, it was a curious sensation. Fear was not an emotion that came easy to a Marine’s altered mind. Even in dangerous situations, such a shooting away at an advancing horde of Troggie guardians, he was always so charged with a chemically-exaggerated combat high that he hadn’t time to think. But now he did. He could do nothing but think.
He was plastered like a squashed bug to the outside of an orbiting Tactical Unit, a spherical warboat that usually served as the assault vehicle for a squad or two of tac-Marines. In his EVA chute, he could barely move, and certainly couldn’t speak or even breathe. There was a reason the chutes were nicknamed gibberballs.
What if his NCO never did show? What if there was some elaborate scheme to cull the oversupply of Marines? Much of what the aliens did made little sense, but Arun was absolutely certain that the value their alien masters placed on each human life was precisely zero.
Fear, boredom, hunger, and betrayal. Arun was
not having a good day. He would have loved to speak with Springer, or Osman, even Madge. But in an EVA chute, everything was stuffed with buffer gel, even his helmet and the inside of his mouth. Talking was impossible.
Tranquility slid away out of sight and Arun stared once more into the field of black.
Still nothing.
The Extra Vehicular Assault chutes were tubes set flush into the hull that terminated in an amniotic bubble filled with buffer gel. The Marine inside was supplied through nutrient and waste tubes that connected inside their bodies via their suits. The gel allowed oxygen to pass through the Marine’s skin into the bloodstream, and to remove carbon dioxide through the reverse process.
In combat situations, deploying Marines to the position where they were most needed was a seriously dangerous business. The buffer gel that filled all empty spaces inside the amniotic bubble, and the suit itself, could protect a Marine against thirty second bursts of 16g acceleration while keeping at least 80% of the occupants conscious and no more than 5% fatal casualties.
Scuttlebutt had it that there were trialing a gibberball rated for 19g acceleration, The bubbles themselves were unaltered but the human occupants were upgraded by having their eyeballs replaced with artificial versions that would not pop under extreme acceleration. The brain fluid too was pumped out and replaced with buffer gel before each assault.
Arun’s amniotic bubble could, in theory, keep him alive for years. Zug often insisted that his was the future intended for their distant descendants. Zug was strangely at ease with the distant prospect of cyborg Marines, but even he accepted that being encased in buffer gel – and so unable to move talk or breathe – for more than a few days would drive anyone insane.
Marine Cadet (The Human Legion Book 1) Page 31