Marine Cadet (The Human Legion Book 1) (40 page)

“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
.

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.

The TU continued to spin about its center in a spiraling pattern that placed each EVA chute back to its starting position every 4.8 minutes. Thanks to the damned counters and timers he could never turn off, Arun knew for a fact that the TU was on its 38th cycle since the exercise had begun.

On cycle 39, the fear he’d experienced almost as a curiosity began to really bite. This could be the White Knights’ new mode of murder: to entomb marines in their amniotic prisons until their minds were ruined. But why? It made no sense.

By cycle 41 he had it. Aliens were cruel for a reason and he knew that reason now. Disobedience was punishable by death, the sentence carried out by the assault carbines of an execution squad formed from the friends and squad mates of the guilty Marine. At least it was quick. As for death in combat, every Marine cadet accepted that was their most likely fate, one day out there in the stars, fighting for a contract signed on Earth centuries ago. Death in space combat was so quick you would never know you’d been hit. Anyone who couldn’t cope with that prospect had been weeded out years ago.

But if a quick death was something they were prepared for, it would be something else entirely to be kept for a week or more in their gibberballs. Once returned to the base on Tranquility and paraded as an example, their bodies would be physically healthy but once proud young men and women would be reduced to pitiful gibbering wrecks.

Pour encourager les autres
, as Zug would say.

Arun fought against the sense of entrapment. He thought of Xin, imagined kissing those vital lips… but Xin was out of his league. His fancy battleplaner brain had caused only heartache. The idea of her falling in love with him was so improbable that he only felt even more of a loser.

Alone… Abandoned… Sacrificed…

And drugged! He should be able to handle the wait but whatever they were feeding the other cadets was driving his brain wild. He’d never make it.

Desperately, he replaced Xin in his mind with Springer. It was her lips he focused on, but not to kiss but to hear her speak words of comfort and reason. It helped. A little. He reinforced Springer with Zug, the calmest person he knew.

But all imaginary Zug would do was shrug and say repeatedly: “You must die to encourage the others.”

That was it.

Arun broke.

He screamed!

Inside his helmet, stuffed with buffer gel, his scream sounded like distant thunder. Then the gel was pushing itself down his throat, He was drowning. He swallowed a quantity of the tasteless gloop, but when his throat released, more gel had pushed into his mouth and stuffed itself down the back of his mouth, pushing, suffocating, drowning. He knew he should shut his mouth but the need to scream and gasp for air was stronger than his sense of reason. He gagged, but the link between gagging and vomiting had long been removed, so he kept on choking and gasping and drawing in yet more gel that pushed further down into his gullet.

Arun was drowning. Every instinct screamed that he was on the cusp of death, that he must
act
now! He was drowning! Yet he couldn’t die. The gel was supplying him with oxygen. He knew that, but what help was knowing because he needed to breathe and could only drown and keep on drowning?

Enough reason returned to his mind for him to order he EVA chute to launch.

It refused. Barney knew that the cadet inside him was ordering a launch for the wrong reasons. Only when the launch criteria had been met would Barney relay a launch instruction and Barney would know when Arun was lying.

And so Arun continued to scream, continued to drown…

And drown…

Drown…

——

Arun’s mind became so lost in the hinterland of death that he had no idea how long he had been drowning before Barney snapped him out of his funk with the mental equivalent of pouring an ice-cold bucket of water over his head.

Around him, he saw a glittering halo of sparkles — gloops of buffer gel flash-frozen in the cold of space. The others had launched!

He braced himself and then willed his EVA chute to launch.

Nothing happened.

He tried again.
Come on, Barney. Damn you!

Barney explained.

Arun braced for launch. He calmed and relaxed his throat until the gagging eased. The idea of being deliberately driven insane seemed ridiculous now, the result of spending time in this gibberball while doped. To experience yet another equipment failure… maybe this really was a cyber-assault? That was bad, but not as bad as being murdered by your superiors.

He watched as Osman, Springer, Madge and the others converged on a jittering dot that his faceplate overlay said was Sergeant Gupta. His squadmates closed in on their target and chased it around the back of the TU and out of sight.

“Why have we not launched?” he said. Or tried to. Even Arun couldn’t hear more than an incoherent grunting, and Barney made no reply.

Seconds turned to minutes.

Minutes stretched into hours.

He fought a rearguard action against the approach of insanity. He imagined resting his head on Springer’s chest, his head cradled in her arms. Even in his imagination, Springer was pissed at Arun for letting down his comrades again, blaming the sabotaged training bots on him. Too angry to speak any words of comfort, her embrace offered just enough comfort for Arun to keep a fingerhold on his sanity.