Marine Cadet (The Human Legion Book 1) (41 page)

His legs kicking over the pit of despair, Arun held on to his sanity by his fingertips, time stretching beyond any meaning.

And then, without warning, he was hurled back into the physical universe in a frantic blur of events.

Nutrient and waste tubes retracted. The buffer gel pulsed out of his suit, his helmet, but not his throat. He chocked, panicked.

The skin of the EVA bubble blew out in a million tiny fragments and he was shot out into the vacuum, buffer gel freezing all around.

His lungs quivered, protested, screamed for the air flooding into his helmet but none could make it through the gel still clogging his gullet. Without the gel supplying air through his skin, he was choking to death.

He tried. He tried so hard but he could not breathe.

A tear came to his eye.
It mustn’t end like this!

Then a deeply embedded instinct took over. He gulped and belched simultaneously. It was confused and painful but whatever he’d done worked.

He was breathing.

He was alone.

Arun tried radioing the
Yorktown
, but Barney reported the warboat was refusing comms. He decided to scan the outside for a hatch, or better still a camera that he could wave into. Then he thought better of it. The
Yorktown
crew already knew he was here. His EVA port had just opened for frakk’s sake.

His answer came when a bright speck detached from the starscape and came in on a looping trajectory around the
Yorktown
, decelerating to halt side-on a hundred meters away from Arun.

The distant speck had grown into a TS-32(c), a utility shuttle configured in troop carrier mode. The side of the main section facing Arun folded up, ready for boarding.

He couldn’t imagine a more obvious invitation

A whoop came from Arun’s mouth, a sound as weak as he was exhausted.

That won’t do
, he decided. So he flipped his suit over in a series of somersaults, the zero-g equivalent of jumping up and down while punching the air in triumph.

Someone was going to a great deal of trouble to lure Arun to a time and place of their choosing.

He laughed. This was more like it. He was living an adventure and loved it.

Too many people whose opinion he valued had called Arun an idiot recently. Well, they could go vulley themselves because he was unlucky, not stupid.

He realized that what had sapped his morale these past weeks was the fear that he would die pointlessly and unremarked, his life amounting only to a few lines on the regimental records that no one would ever read. That shuttle was as clear a sign as he’d ever get that someone powerful thought Arun was important.

Earning the contempt of his battalion had hollowed him out, leaving him a void inside a brittle shell. But if he didn’t die now, he was confident he’d claw back the trust of his comrades one day, refilling that void inside with the sense of belonging that had once sustained him. He was already making good progress with Springer.

As for teetering on the brink of destruction so many times recently, that only energized him.

What was it Hortez had said on that first trip to Alabama?
Things happen around you, McEwan.
Dear Hortez. How had his friend’s ending played out?

Arun instructed his suit AI to head for the shuttle.

C’mon, Barney, let’s prove Hortez right.

Arun watched the external video feed to the passenger cabin as the shuttle’s AI touched the craft down gently. They landed on a mid-sized lump of rock that would once have been an asteroid much farther out from the sun, but had been captured and towed to a Lagrange point between Tranquility and one of its moons. The gravitational pull between planet and moon canceled out at these Lagrange points, making them an excellent place to dump things, such as old spacecraft and tamed asteroids, because they would stay where you left them rather than clutter up the already crowded orbital paths around moons and planets.

This rock had a simple landing pad of fused and flattened rock, set a short walk away from a cavernous hole that led down into darkness.

Arun checked his suit comms. Only the shuttle’s AI was registering as a node on his local ad-hoc network, and it was refusing to answer any of Arun’s questions. The shuttle’s cabin was airless and unpressurized, designed to disgorge a squad of armored Marines within seconds. With no one talking to him, the journey and landing had been silent, other than the sound of his own breathing.

Arun expected to be contacted by the AI controlling operations on this asteroid. But if such an intelligence existed, it was hiding from Arun. There was no sign of technology at all, other than the artificial nature of the crude landing pad.

Without a doubt, this was the most remote place Arun had ever been.

Untraceable
would be another word for it.

All these thoughts floated through Arun’s mind but failed to catch there. While he’d been trapped in his EVA bubble, his Marine’s enhanced physiology had suppressed sleep, kept him concentrating on tiny dots in space for hour after hour, and had filled him with such a sense of threat that his muscles had powered up ready to leap and bound, but had found themselves unable to push effectively against the entombing buffer gel that had drowned him relentlessly.

The elation he’d felt when he first saw the shuttle had consumed his final reserve of strength. Now he was exhausted almost beyond the capacity to care any longer. Whoever had set this up had gone to so much trouble that it was pointless to resist. Arun thumbed the door pad, and half jumped, half floated down onto the landing pad.

He took long, bounding jumps along the path to the cavern. After fifty paces stumbling through the winding cavern entrance, Barney switched his faceplate to infrared but there was no heat source to serve as illumination: the walls were as cold as space.

He stopped and laughed. Out of habit, he’d been trying to avoid drawing attention to himself, but the idea of remaining undetected was silly, so he activated his helmet lamps.

The twin patches of illumination revealed a crudely hewn tunnel with a floor that was flattened and textured for improved grip. Arun had expected the entrance tunnels to be just large enough for him to carry out a long micro-g bound without cracking his head on the roof. It was far larger than that.

He searched his memory for zero-g mining. He knew almost nothing, but after a few seconds, facts vomited themselves out of a deep store, unpleasant to access but ready for use all the same. Whether this new knowledge came from artificial memory stores or had been implanted during Second Sleep he had no idea. But he did know that asteroids were normally assessed for mining potential by lozenge-shaped robots that would drill holes just large enough for them to drag themselves through. Larger tunnels could wait for when full-scale mining began. He saw images of asteroids being actively mined, and those fully mined out. But there were no signs of the equipment, tailings or port facilities he should be seeing in either scenario. So this wasn’t a mining asteroid at all. But what was it?

It took another half hour of following twisting tunnels, and worrying whether he was circling round on himself, before he heard the hum. The tunnels were airless, but there was a faint vibration running through the floor that Barney picked up and fed in a cleaned and amplified form through his helmet speakers.

At first, Arun thought this was the electrical hum from a power source. Then, after immersing himself in the sound for a while, he changed his mind. It reminded him of listening to radio wave emissions from the sun. No, that wasn’t quite it either. There was an organic quality to the hum. It was alive.

Whatever the hum’s source, it gave him a beacon to aim for. Time seemed to speed up once he had a clear objective. Soon he emerged into a cavern painted with abstract symbols on its walls. Tracks ran along a ceiling, and from one of those tracks hung heavy brown drapes that ran across the room, hiding whatever lay behind from his sight. Barney was convinced that the hum’s source was just behind the curtain.

“Approach the hanging barrier!”

The voice in his helmet was mechanical. Could it be a Trog? The voice was identical.

Arun walked to the curtain and then halted.

“Turn off your light and remain stationary.”

Arun turned off his helmet lamps, but switched his faceplate to infrared. All he could see was a faint circular smudge right in front of him that shifted and swirled. It could easily be his mind playing tricks.

Whatever it was stayed motionless, throbbing gently in front of him. As the minutes dragged on, Arun became convinced he was making up the image, and yet something tangible was there: the hum. Under the fizz and swash, he heard – or thought he did — an echoing thump. A double pumping sound, as if twin hearts were beating.

A flash of heat came from overhead. Switching back from infra-red to visible spectrum, Arun saw that the ceiling was glowing with a diffuse blue-tinged light, and that the curtain was drawing back to reveal a… creature of some sort. But if this were a living thing, its evolutionary route was not one that had led to limbs, spine, torso, and head.

The thing was a blob, colored an impenetrable blue-black, about eight feet tall and three wide. The blob was surrounded in a rough sphere of orange liquid that fizzed and bubbled. It looked as if the orange liquid kept its shape through surface tension alone, because it wasn’t inside a container. At the top of the central blob — what Arun thought of as its head — tubes connected with the orange surround, pumping out ribbons of silver fluid. A similar setup at its ‘feet’ sucked darkened streamers back inside its central core.

“Thank you,” said the blob through Arun’s helmet. At least, Arun assumed it was the blob that was speaking, but there was no sign of a translation box, no mouth parts, and no nodes registering on his suit comms.

Conversations were so much easier when you stuck to sound waves through air.

“Why am I here?” Arun asked.

“I — we — wish to see inside you.”

“What? Dissection? Isn’t that a bit old school?”

“It is not your body that interests us.”

“You’re going to read my mind?”

“We read your destiny.”

“Oh.”

“And your mind.”

“You can…? Why?”

“Your future is — can be — important.”

That’s what Little Scar had told him. And the colonel had learned that from… “You’re a Night Hummer!”

“You are correct.”

“And all the weird stuff that’s happened. Training bots that revive. Bad comms. Being left to drown for so long. That was all you?”

“I requested this event sequence. Disorientation and exhaustion is an aid to see inside your mind. To feel your path without the resistance natural to a sentient.”

“Surely there must be an easier way to… to
read
me?”

“There is.”

“Then why not use it?”

“You do not want the answer.”

“Eh? What do you mean?”

“What I said.”

Arun wanted to punch this annoying blob. Could he actually do any damage if he did? He shook his head. The Night Hummer was many levels of importance above a human Marine cadet. There would be reprisals.

“Feeding us combat meds. Running guns off planet. Was that your doing too?”

“No.”

“Do you know anything about them?”

“No.”

Liar
. Arun was learning how deeply all the conspiracies were embedded into Detroit. Everyone knew more than they let on. And if this Hummer was in cahoots with Gupta – Arun was nearly convinced of that now – then it had to know something about the traitors on Tranquility.

The blob was probably laughing at him, those bubbles an expression of its contempt for the puny human. Nothing riled Arun more than aliens smug with the certainty of their superiority.

With difficulty, Arun sucked in his anger and snarled: “Do you realize how much trouble your little games have caused me and my squad mates?”

“No.”

“Corporal Majanita will probably be demoted — that’ll kill her. The battalion will be awarded demerits, which will make it even more impossible to climb out of the Cull Zone. I might be executed as a consequence of what you’ve done.”

When the Night Hummer gave no reply, Arun prompted: “And?”

“And? Please elaborate.”

“And don’t you care that you’ve caused so much trouble?”

“I do not care.”

“You’re a skangat, then. You know that?”

There came a pause. Then the Hummer replied: “Yes.”

“Yes? Yes, you’re a skangat?”

“Correct. My translation device tells me that
skangat
is a term humans use on each other to communicate disappointment in the other’s behavior, or to indicate aggression, possibly leading to physical combat. Is this correct?”

“Right on both counts, pal.”

“Thank you. Then I am a skangat.”

“Frakk! I can’t even insult you.”

“That assessment is probably accurate. Without long practice, inter-species communication is significantly less rich than between sentients of the same species. However, I estimate that if we communicate regularly over a period of no less than several weeks, and if you apply yourself to your task, then it might be possible for you to insult me.”

“Is that’s what’s gonna happen? We’re going to be stuck together for weeks?”

“No. I have completed my examination. You will leave shortly and only see me on one more occasion.”

“Then why…? Oh, what’s the use? Tell me this, then. What did you see inside my mind? What is my path?”

“It is best that members of your species are not given details of predestination. Your species is not evolved for that.”

“And yours is?”

“Correct.”

“Why?”

“Defense.”

“So you — what? — see a threat coming and change the future so you avoid getting tropied?”

“The broad thrust of your speculation is correct. Our precognitive capability is an adaptation of our feeding process. It is why my kind has an understanding with the species you call White Knights. They feed and guard us. We tell them the future.”