Marine Cadet (The Human Legion Book 1) (4 page)

“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.

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 forget 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.