Marine Cadet (The Human Legion Book 1) (39 page)

The temptation to turn and watch the action threatened to wrench Arun’s head around, but he had his orders and they hadn’t changed. Checking what was going on elsewhere in the battle was Madge’s responsibility. Instead, he settled back into a watchful gaze. He’d spent countless hours in this state playing stealthsuit cat and mouse games set up between rival squads. That was good. That was routine, and routine was something he could sink into and ignore the fighting that raged behind and beneath him.

“Gold Command has boarded,” said Alice. “Brandt has secured the upper two decks, and I’m forming up for attack on Target 1. Gold-3 follow. Gold-6 remain stealthed as reserve. Blue-6 maintain position. Let’s show those vets what we can do, Marines!”

Not only was Alice still alive but she sounded like she was having fun. That was a good sign. ‘Target 1’ was the bridge. Even though the Corps’ alien enemies weren’t expected to understand the human language, and even though battlesuit comms had encryption beyond the ability of human crypto-experts to explain, much less decrypt, the Jotuns insisted that Marines used code words for tactical objectives.

Arun’s confidence lifted still further when Bizzy reported over the command channel that the enemy counter-attack had been repulsed with minimal casualties.

Arun sensed victory, but only for a few seconds. Down there… in the shield generator array… he thought he saw movement.

He strained his eyes trying to tell whether this was an attack, but he couldn’t be sure. He had to get nearer.

To remain in stealth mode, albeit simulated, his suit could only move slowly. Arun approached the suspicious area as fast as he dared, snapping a flash-bomb off the equipment patch on his hip, and slotting it into the launcher beneath his carbine.

There was something there all right.

Directly below him, hatches had opened in the hull, spilling hostiles into the cover of the shield array generators. The enemy were scurrying spider-like training bots, the size of a human child but with lasers attached to two of their limbs. A fist-sized plate was grafted onto the central ‘body’ of the robots. If you hit that with your laser, the robot would deactivate — a combat casualty.

Already he could see dozens. More were spilling out by the second, forming up ready to rush the boarding party. The counter-attack on Bizzy had been a feint intended to commit the cadets’ reserves.

Should he warn the others? He readied his carbine to fire the flash-bomb at the bots, but he daren’t reveal his presence by broadcasting a warning as Bizzy had done. Instead he asked Barney to find a tight-beam comms route. Although he could turn around and see Springer, the stealth training protocol meant Barney pretended she was invisible. The AI simulated firing tight-beam pings at the probable location of his comrades, hoping to strike it lucky before being noticed by the enemy.

“Hold fire, McEwan. Activate LBNet.” Madge had found him first, bouncing her order off Springer’s suit.

The instant Arun switched to Local Battle Net, Barney changed Arun’s visor to tactical-display mode, adding five blue dots to indicate the positions of his section comrades. Delta Section should have seven other cadets: Brandt had been promoted out, and it looked like Zug hadn’t made it through point defense.

LBNet continuously connected everyone in the team using tight-beam links. It was risky, but more secure than broadcasting on Wide Battle Net. With the suit AIs now able to share what their wearers could see, and add what the AIs suspected, scores of enemy red dots erupted like an infestation over the terrain below.

“Hey, Springer,” Arun called out. “Join me at the hatch? We can drop grenades in and then take the bots from the rear.”

“Negative,” Madge replied. “Assigning orders.”

As Barney sketched an outline of Madge’s intentions, Arun scooted off to comply, while Madge used words to duplicate her orders.

The shield generator array was a funnel aimed at the boarding point, but the funnel drained between a pair of shield array projectors. The shield rails that charged the interstellar medium fed out of these 30 meter diameter tubes, which were pointed forward, angled toward the starboard and port bows. Each of the two Delta Section fire teams would take a position on top of a shield projector. When the bots passed below, the Gold fire teams at the boarding point would pin them down, and then Delta Section would rake the bots with flanking fire.

It was obvious, though he hadn’t seen it.

And that was why Madge was section leader.

By the time Arun was in position, lying prone atop the starboard shield projector, and using the ridge that ran along its crest as cover, Barney was telling him the bots were already beginning to swarm on the other side of the projector.

The temptation to stick his head over the ridge to see for himself was powerful, but the fear of screwing up the operation was greater. He glanced to either side. Osman and Springer had rolled onto their sides, checking their flanks for bots. They appeared calm, but of course it was impossible to be sure in their ACE-2/T training suits. He turned back to face the enemy. Blue dots showed Madge, Del-Marie and Cristina on the reverse slope of the other projector — the two fire teams keeping in touch by means of signal repeaters slapped over the ridges.

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.

“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 dead. 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?”