The cadets were pinned down and outnumbered. Surely they had to take the fight to the enemy without delay. And who was nearest to the enemy?
Arun was.
Cold fear struck through Arun’s heart. He wanted his combat meds.
Brandt’s voice entered Arun’s helmet. “Gold Squad will defend the bridgehead. Blue will push through the enemy in the corridor. Blue Delta Section. You’re point.”
Arun took a deep breath. The moment he reached the turn in the corridor a dozen rifles would fire at him.
“Blue-5, advance along the ceiling,” ordered Madge. “Take the corner. Blue-6, give pulse laser covering fire. Aim low. Ready on my mark.”
Arun wanted to say something — anything — to Springer. But everything he could think of sounded demoralizing. So he kept his mouth shut and tensed his legs in readiness.
“Wait!” Madge ordered.
Arun didn’t understand until he glanced at his tac-display. The Hardits were advancing.
“Fire on my command!”
The last Hardit attack had been hesitant. This time the Hardits came at the cadets in a rush.
Three of them had come round the corner. Five of them. Seven. And they weren’t carrying rifles. They had SA-71 carbines. Oh, frakk!
The leading rank of rebels launched grenades.
“Fire!”
As he pressed the trigger to release the laser bolt, the enemy grenades exploded, filling the corridor incredibly quickly with thick smoke. Had the laser shots got off in time before the smoke grenades scattered them to harmlessness?
All he knew was that he couldn’t see the end of his barrel but Barney insisted the Hardits were still coming.
Switching to shardshot, he raked the corridor. He extended his assault teeth too.
The Hardits were firing back. Fragments of the scrubber unit he was sheltering behind flew past his face. He felt a kick in his left chest, just below the collar bone.
Then the firing stopped, all sides unwilling to fire into the fog, fearful of hitting their own side.
Barney used the brief respite to inform Arun that he had been shot. That kick he’d felt was a kinetic dart passing through Arun’s body. Barney insisted he’d fixed the suit breach and anesthetized the wound. Nothing to worry about.
Good enough, though Arun. Out of the choking mist a looming blur rapidly solidified into a Hardit rebel, carbine at the ready.
He — or she — might be better armed than the first line of Hardit defense, but not better trained. The rebel scanned ahead for targets but wasn’t looking up at the ceiling.
Arun spun his assault teeth and thrust down in to the rebel’s shoulder. Let’s see how you like that!
The needle-like teeth sank in through the vacsuit embedding into the soft tissue beyond. Then Arun set the teeth spinning at 1000 rpm, ripping a jagged hole through the suit that released a geyser of pulpy, red spray.
Before the dying Hardit had finished slumping to the floor, another attacker pushing forward through the mist stumbled over its comrade. Arun jabbed at it with his assault teeth, but the rebel tripped before he could connect, falling headlong. The unexpected motion confused Arun. He missed. More rebels were passing beneath all the time.
The atmosphere scrubbers must be pretty powerful because the smoke was starting to clear.
When they did, they would reveal Arun to be alone in a sea of rebels.
He glanced behind him, convinced he was about to be stabbed in the back.
With a last blind jab from his carbine, he snapped his attention back to his front. No one there either, just the thinning smoke.
Stay still and die. That what the Corps had taught him.
So he moved. Forward.
The closer he got to the end of the corridor, the thinner the smoke got. LBNet was still unavailable. He should probably try WBNet but he’d been ordered not to.
He could see a heap of Hardit dead below him. Around the turn in the corridor, Barney estimated a half dozen rebels — the enemy’s final attack wave.
Was he really going to take them on alone?
Arun paused, then dropped down to the floor to plug in an ammo bulb from one of the fallen Hardits. If he going to die doing something stupid, he wasn’t going to do so firing pellets of chewed up ore tailings.
“You are another hero, yes?” said a scratchy voice.
Arun looked up to see a cadet on the ceiling: the replacement, Umarov. “More like another idiot, Carabinier. Yes.”
“Good lad.”
Hearing another human voice was all he needed to restore his morale, despite the enemy waiting around the corner. And the army behind them.
Umarov shifted around so he was standing on the right hand wall of the corridor. “Stand on the wall opposite me,” he ordered.
While Arun moved to comply, Umarov dropped his carbine and drew a combat blade in each hand. They were like nothing he’d never seen: crescent moons attached to either end of a hand grip, the blades glistening with drips of what looked like fluorescent puss.
“Let’s see what they make of old-fashioned poisoned carbon. Suppress them until I engage. Go!”
This was it.
Arun ran along the corridor wall, to meet his fate. At the last moment, he told Barney to select rocket rounds. He hadn’t many, but they would make more of a show for the untrained rebels.
Then he was rounding the corridor and firing. His finger didn’t release from the trigger until the rocket rounds were spent and he was firing kinetic darts so fast that his recoil limiter tripped out.
And still he was running at the Hardits.
Umarov was on them now, limbs extended in a whirlwind dance of cuts and kicks. Killing elegance.
Umarov had their full attention now, which meant somehow Arun had survived against all odds.
He extended his assault teeth to join Umarov in the melee.
But the Hardits seemed to be getting farther away, not closer.
And gravity felt as if it were strengthening.
His legs were weakening.
What’s happening Barney?
His suit AI brought up a damage summary. He’d been shot five times. Barney had sealed his suit. Fixing the holes in Arun’s body was another matter entirely.
But what about the Night Hummer prophecy? I thought the future needed me?
He clung to that protest as everything slowed.
And went black.
—— Chapter 59 ——
A bell rang for Arun, beckoning him to his place in the afterlife.
He hadn’t expected this.
To be dead: yes. But afterlife? He’d assumed that was Jotun propaganda.
“Yes, that’s it. Welcome back.”
The voice came through his helmet speaker. It didn’t have the gravitas of a supernatural being. It sounded familiar
He opened his eyes onto the medic tapping Arun’s helmet with her gauntlet. It was Puja, or Lance Corporal Puja Narciso as she’d become. She was command section’s medic.
He’d had a thing for her in novice school. She’d felt the same way too. Briefly.
She smiled. “I’ve still got it, ain’t I, Arun?”
“I guess so, l… lance—”
“No!” She put a finger to his lips, or as close as his helmet would allow. “Don’t ‘lance’ me. Not yet. You shut up and rest for a minute.”
“Am I dying?” Arun croaked. He couldn’t feel pain. But his body felt as if all its life-force had leeched away, leaving nothing more than dust held together by a memory of once-strong flesh and bone.
Puja paused, working out her story. She sighed. “You’ve taken multiple hits. A lot of trauma and blood loss. But I’ve patched you up and given you a transfusion. Bottom line: Stay in bed. Light duties for minimum three weeks. I’ll check up on you in the morning.”
“Seriously?”
“Of course not, you donker. We’re heavily outnumbered and most of us are already dead. You’re good to carry a carbine and that’s all you
need to know right now. Corporal Majanita can fill you in on the rest in a minute. Just as well you aren’t human.”
“What do you mean, I’m not human?”
“Well, have you ever studied a pre-Contact medical textbook?”
“No, of course not.”
Puja grinned, making her visor transparent so Arun could see. “Good. Don’t bother, ’cos you’d be wasting your time. Whatever the hell we are, we aren’t Homo sapiens, that’s for sure. You’d be dead if you were.”
Puja’s grin, flashing that cute gap between her incisors. Yes, he remembered her smile.
“McEwan?”
He tried to work out where he was but he couldn’t see properly. Hey, did someone say most of them were dead?
“Frakk! Spoke too soon.”
He didn’t want to think of dead friends.
“Arun. Come back to me, Arun!” begged a memory of a girl who’d for an intense few weeks had meant the universe to him. Puja had been his first kiss. It seemed a lifetime ago. He closed his eyes and dreamed memories of better days, of a teenage girl back in the days when she wore too-tight fatigues, not a poly-ceramalloy battlesuit.
—— Chapter 60 ——
“You’re alive then.”
Arun opened his eyes. He was in a room he didn’t recognize, his back propped up against something. A lot of people were rushing around. People in battlesuits. And they were glowing vision-enhancement blue because there was very little light. One battlesuit was standing over him. Inside was a woman.
“Puja?”
“Dream time’s over, lover boy. I’m not Lance Corporal Narciso.” She studied him for a moment. “Do you recognize me?”
The woman made her visor go clear. He squinted at her face. It seemed familiar. “Corporal… You’re Corporal Majanita.”
“Damn right I am.”
“You don’t want me.”
She laughed. “What I want isn’t worth squit. You’re in my section and I’m giving you 60 seconds recuperation time before I need you ready to use this.” She thrust something into his hands. It was an SA-71 carbine. His carbine.
“Here’s the sitrep. We beat off the rebel counterattacks, but it wasn’t easy. We’ve lost half the cadets who dropped from the Yorktown. Cristina and Osman are both dead but, frankly, we’ve gotten off lightly. Gold Squad’s down to about section strength.”
A chill, prickling sensation marched up Arun’s spine. So many dead?
“Where are we now?” he asked.
“Don’t interrupt. We think this is the main control room. We made a mess of the doors coming in, helped by some drills the monkeys were kind enough to leave for us in the bridgehead. Del tried hacking the computer systems but doesn’t think that worked. Zug had a brainwave and found power cables running through a conduit in the roof. We cut them. The main lights went out. The power hum in all the machines running here died too.”
But how do we know for certain that we’ve turned off power to the mass driver? Or the force shield protecting it?”
Madge hesitated. “We don’t. We can’t raise Force Alpha on WBNet — the monkeys are jamming us. So Brandt’s ordered us to stay here. Make sure the monkeys don’t sneak in and turn the power back on.”
“Shouldn’t we try to link up with Force Alpha? At least recce the mass driver?”
“Did God visit you in your dream and promote you to sergeant?”
“No, corporal.”
“Then the lance sergeant still outranks you — thank the Fates… I think. And there’s this tradition that means you kinda got to do what your superior says. Humor me. It’s a Marine thing.”
Madge turned away, adding: “One last thing. The base has set up pressure plugs, meaning any pressure loss is sealed automatically by a kind of gradual force field. So we can’t repeat the trick of cutting a hole in a door and watch the poor vecks inside tripping over as their air rushes out. And now that we’re back in an atmosphere, grenades and blast weapons — they’re gonna hurt a whole lot more.”
“Those pressure plugs,” cut in Zug. “I’ve studied the theory. Playing with the laws of nature like that doesn’t come cheap. Which means there must still be a lot of power running through this base. Power they could re-route to the mass driver.”
“Thank you for the interruption,” snapped Madge. “Makes me feel a whole lot better. I’ll pass it on to the lance sergeant. You worry about keeping your eyes on the northern approach.” She kicked Arun’s feet. “You too. Recuperation time’s over.”
Arun tried standing up. There was a slight wobble, no more. There wasn’t even any pain. In fact, he felt completely numb except for the tingling sensation of his gauntleted hands gripping his carbine.
Barney’s medical summary explained that Arun had been stabilized just this side of death, patched up, and set running again. The reason Arun wasn’t collapsing in a swoon was because, instead of using the battlesuit motors to amplify Arun’s muscle movements, Barney was pretty much running the suit himself by guessing Arun’s intentions. If he were outside of his battlesuit, Arun would probably be in a coma.
But at least he wasn’t getting any worse. A near-coma would just have to do.
Arun was behind a huge equipment bank. He imagined it would normally be winking lights, heat and a power hum. Currently it was a cooling metal box. Even in the emergency lighting — putrid green bio-luminescence seeping out of the walls — the box looked pretty shot up by the cadet attack. With Barney’s guesses helping to make up for the lack of illumination, Arun saw that he was in a 12 by 10 meter rectangular room filled with dead computer and power equipment and consoles.
There was a door to the north which had been fused shut and then cut through and peeled back from the outside. Must be where the cadets had drilled through. A mound of spent SA-71 sabot casings on the far side of the door told the story of what had transpired.
Corpses were piled up against one wall — human and the more numerous Hardits mixed together.
To the south, a second door was propped open leading out onto an approach corridor. The Gold Squad survivors were guarding that approach.
Arun’s eyes dimmed, his breath quickened. He closed his eyes, felt like he was swaying but he knew Barney wouldn’t let him fall. He didn’t want to open them. Didn’t want to see. Not yet; he was still too weak.
Hiding didn’t help, though. He could remember what he’d seen in the tac-display clearly enough to count the Gold Squad dots. There were 8 survivors of the 31 who’d dropped from the Yorktown just 83 minutes ago. From Blue Squad, 21 had made it this far.
He wanted his heart to feel as numb as the rest of his body but he felt only aching loss… and Cristina had gone too.
A jumble of memories jostled to overwhelm him: happy times with Cristina, of arguments and impossible boasts he’d traded with Osman. He opened his eyes to escape, and tried again to take in his surroundings.
He was crouched alongside Madge and Springer behind the metal-skinned box. The alien writing and dead display screen set into the box told him nothing about its function or inner contents.
Behind a similar box next to them crouched Del, Zug and Umarov.
They were facing the northern corridor approach. They couldn’t see it in visual because the boxes were in the way. They didn’t need to. If anything came at them from north or south, every cadet would see it on their tac-display. Delta section would simply leap up, fire, and then drop back down behind cover.
Arun unsnagged his mind from speculating what might be transpiring around the mass driver and memories of fallen comrades. He settled his concentration instead onto the dots and wire-frame schematics of Barney’s tac-display.
Seconds turned to minutes.
Nothing happened.
Like the training missions where he remained floating in space, keeping watch on the void, once Arun had settled into the rhythm of observation, he could keep his concentration fixed for hours. He’d been bred for this, engineered.
So it came as s
omething of a shock when his concentration was broken by someone rapping on his helmet with the barrel of an SA-71 carbine. It was Springer. Her faceplate blanked to transparency, an internal light in her helmet illuminating her features. She smiled. It was forced, but the affection warmed him.
He blanked his own visor, automatically lighting the inside of his own helmet. A little glare reflected off the inside of the visor.
Arun was struck by the look of concern that shone out of her eyes like violet jewels.
Springer pursed her lips and blew him a kiss from the inside of her helmet. With faceplates touching so that the sound wave could travel directly into his helmet, he could hear the sound as if from a great depth underwater.
“That was a vac-kiss,” she breathed in a voice that Arun found teasingly steamy, but he recognized was the sound of Springer speaking from her heart despite the distortion of speaking faceplate-to-faceplate. “When we get back home,” she continued, “I’ll give you a real one.”
“Then I’d better make sure I stay alive,” said Arun, grinning.
“Be sure of it. No Marine left behind. They used to take that seriously, you know, those old Marines on Earth. Bryant might laugh at that, but I don’t. I can’t leave you behind, Arun.”
A burst of warmth flooded through Arun, spreading out from his heart and into an uncontrollable grin that filled his face. He fantasized entwining his suit with Springer’s. There was an annoyingly rational part of his brain that Arun wished he could turn off, but maybe one day would save his life. Right now it was reminding him that human hormonal responses were dangerously amplified by combat stress, a dangerous side-effect of their re-engineered physiology that would normally be overcome by the use of combat-stim drugs.
A harsh aural assault of white noise made Arun flinch. He brought his free hand to cover his ear. Of course, that made not the slightest difference to the noise attacking him through the speakers inside his helmet.
Arun gritted his teeth and hung on tightly to his sanity until the noise cut out as suddenly as it had hit him. It had lasted six seconds.
Marine Cadet (The Human Legion Book 1) Page 40