Marine Cadet (The Human Legion Book 1) (53 page)

“Cadets, keep to Cadet Lance Sergeant Brandt’s deployment,” said Sergeant Rathanjani. Barney used the sergeant’s broadcast to place a fuzzy outline around where he thought the NCO might be. “Force Alpha will operate as mobile reserve,” continued the sergeant. “Keep alert. Attack is imminent. And heed Corporal McEwan’s words. I know some of you might be a little young to hear the truth, but that’s hard shit. Today is the day you grow up. You’re all Marines now. If you do die, then die well. That is an order. Good luck.”

The door to the northern approach was still fused shut, but while the humans waited for the attack, Beta Section had used the drills to widen the opening in the door, and then post a picket guard on the far side.

“Incoming! North corridor defenses, prepare to fire.”

The warning came from Sergeant Rathanjani.
He must have a better AI than me
, considered Arun because it took another few seconds before Barney picked up the threat on LBNet and threw it up onto Arun’s tac-display.

Four rebels were advancing on the northern corridor, still hidden for now beyond the right turn. It almost felt like a re-run of the attacks along the corridor out of the bridgehead room, though with one difference. The rebels were plodding nearer at an astonishingly leisurely pace. Barney was getting firmer data now and was confident enough to show tight red circles to indicate the estimated position of the leading two rebels. Arun didn’t get the impression they were moving slowly because they were hesitating.

They simply weren’t in any hurry.

Arun decided he was frightened.

It was a weird feeling. He didn’t
feel
frightened — all he felt was calm anticipation of killing the enemy – but he knew with conviction that he was scared. It was like watching someone else shaking with fear.

He glanced at Fraser’s position. His brother was invisible, but his long-barreled gun was wedged securely in a slot set into an equipment console and aimed through the opening in the north door. When his brother got to open fire on the rebels, they wouldn’t stand a chance.

Then a combat fugue descended on Arun like a cool mist. His universe shrunk to his gun, his tac-display, and the enemy. An enemy he would kill.

The first rebel edged around the turn. LBNet activity flared as the suit AIs of the Marine cadets in the corridor assessed the attacker and fired packets of updated information and assessment at neighboring suits.

The AIs were MPQX-8 units: built on massive parallel quantum architecture and rated a minimum 8 peta decisions per second. That made them decidedly second rate, but plenty fast enough for Barney to start suggesting firing solutions within a tiny fraction of a second. What he wasn’t offering were killshots, and that wasn’t good enough. Only killing would slake Arun’s bloodlust.

Arun sprung into the air, getting above the cover of the equipment bank so he could see the rebels in realsight.

As soon as Arun crested his cover, Barney zoomed his visor viewpoint onto the leading rebel who had now advanced far enough to face Arun head on.

The rebel wore some seriously heavy armor. He looked like a column of vehicle tires stacked one upon the other and then partially melted so the bottom was wider than the top.

Arun remembered seeing sections of this armor before — in a broken wooden cargo box on the way to Alabama.

There were no feet and no head in this armored cone, but there were two bulges at the shoulders. Two stubby little tubes ending in gauntlets showed where the hands went. One of those gauntlets held the barrel of a plasma blaster. The stock and trigger were held by a black snake that Barney whispered was the rebel’s prehensile tail.

Arun aimed for the tail.

With Barney anticipating his intentions, all Arun needed to do was point his carbine roughly where it was needed and let Barney steady his suit and adjust the position of his hands and arms. As a safety precaution, Arun still had to pull the trigger.

As he did so, he felt a gentle nudge of recoil, and watched Barney register a hit.

The rebel’s blaster jerked and then accelerated a ball of plasma out of its barrel — aimed at Arun. But the shot went wide, melting a section of door instead of Arun’s head. Before he fell back behind cover, Arun saw the rebel’s gun and tail dance under a hail of fire. The blaster was dropping to the ground now, the enemy’s tail whipping back behind its body. A cloud was blooming around the rebel, debris from his disintegrating armor.

An aperture opened in one of the rebel’s shoulder bulges and a stream of fire streaked down the corridor, exploding in a ball of energy.

Rocket attack!

The shockwave took hold of Arun while he was still falling back behind cover. It tossed him onto the floor.

He heard a human cry of pain and suddenly remembered that it wasn’t just him and the enemy. There were other people here too.

Barney understood his new concern and showed him the cadet casualties out in the corridor. No one in the central control room had been wounded so far. The rockets must be set to low yield, the enemy unwilling as yet to obliterate the equipment in the control room.

Another rocket strike rocked the corridor.

“Aim for the skirt.”

A third rocket hit.

“Aim for the skirt!”

By the time Arun had scrambled back onto his feet, Barney had marked the Marines stationed out in the corridor with a red cross.
All dead
.

“We’re hurting him!”

It occurred to Arun that he was hearing Corporal Majanita’s words. She was important and he was supposed to pay attention. Battle was so much easier when it was just him, Barney, and the enemy. But Barney had betrayed him, raising the volume of Majanita’s words until his helmet rang like a bell.

Damn those combat drugs.

Damn reality without the drugs even more.

Arun gasped, stumbling backward. It felt like waking up suddenly from a nightmare. He shook his head. He felt normal again.

“Aim for the skirt on the lead rebel,” Majanita shouted.

Standard doctrine said he should shift to a new firing position after each burst of fire to frustrate enemy counter fire. But the room was too full of Marines to offer opportunities for new cover, and the enemy fire was wild anyway.

More importantly, his urge to kill would not wait.

Arun jumped up from behind cover and ordered Barney to hold his position, hovering a meter above the ground. He aimed through the thickening cloud of smoke, dust, and armor fragments, at the feet of the rebel, who had now advanced about another four paces toward their room.

Majanita must be right. Behind the blob of armor was a monkey with two legs on the ground and slowly walking the bulky armor their way. There must be at least some space cut away from the armor in front of the monkey’s legs or else he would trip over. Which meant the armor was thinner there. Probably.

It was the best plan Arun could think of.

Just before he put his first shot into the skirt, he heard a screaming hum of power rise to a crescendo and unleash in a deafening whine. Barney selectively dampened the noise, which Arun recognized as a heavy duty linear accelerator powering up and then spitting out a hellfire of spinning rounds. It was his brother opening up.

Arun fired too. Rapid blasts at the enemy’s skirt. He left Barney to continue firing while he looked at the other rebels. There were five in total. Two had advanced several more paces toward the room, weathering the hail of fire, uninjured so far. The three at the back were not carrying blasters. They didn’t seem to be carrying anything. Other than the low-yield rockets — which he suspected were being used as a distraction — none of the rebels were firing.

“What are they up to?” he asked.

“Don’t know. Don’t care,” replied Majanita. “Just kill them.”

And they were. The skirt armor of the first rebel gave way, splitting into a dozen fragments that spun away under the firestorm coming from the humans.

The veterans put grenades into the gap that had opened in the armor. Arun figured that was one enemy down and was shifting aim to the next rebel. His brother beat him to it, hammering the rebel with a stream of bullets aimed at his head. The rebel had no faceplate or helmet. Or if he did, it was hidden inside the mound of protective armor that offered no obvious weak spot.

No weakness, except perhaps simple physics and the concept of levers. The rebel either tripped, or the kinetic push from Fraser’s fire toppled him over backward.

Arun heard a roar of shared hatred go around LBNet. He didn’t join in. He was readying to aim at the three rebels who stood in a line at the rear.

But they had readied their own attack. As one, the rebels were using their dexterous tails sheltered behind their back to throw metal objects.

Was this a grenade attack? Nerve gas?

Neither held any fear for Arun but the three round disks of metal they’d thrown hadn’t been aimed at the Marines. Instead, one flew at the ceiling and two on the wall to either side.

Fraser fired on one of the rebels at the rear. Most of the humans were shooting at the rebel who had just fallen onto his back. Arun aimed at the thing on the ceiling.

An instant before his finger squeezed the trigger, a curtain of shimmering purple fell across the corridor, a force shield emitted from the devices on the walls.

Anything touching the energy barrier flashed instantly into plasma. Arun’s round gave a flicker when the energy barrier disintegrated it. Fraser’s machine gun rounds gave a ferocious light display but could not punch through.

The fragments of blasted armor flared. So too did the body of the second rebel who had fallen across the path of the energy field. A fist-sized swathe of the Hardit’s body, running from shoulder to shoulder, had simply ceased to exist.

Arun was about to shoot through the force shield at the rebels behind, but stopped himself. He’d put such a hail of railgun darts into the armored rebels that his ammo was running low.

“Switch to laser,” Brandt ordered. “Concentrate fire on the upper shield generator.”

“Negative,” countered Sergeant Rathanjani. “That’s a 37-P tactical force shield. Save your power, we’ve nothing that can punch through that.”

“At least there is one advantage,” added Fraser. “The barrier is unidirectional. We can’t fire at them. But they can’t fire at us either.”

“Unless they switch it off,” added the sergeant cheerfully.

This was turning into a disaster.

Arun perched atop the equipment bank he had used for cover. His armored body sank into the deep pile of spent sabots. He watched the surviving rebels shuffle slowly backward and out of sight. With no shots firing into it, the energy curtain calmed. Coils of gold and crimson snaked along its surface until settling into a standing wave. Arun stared entranced at the shimmering energy field, which was framed by a corridor blackened with scorch marks and littered with the ruined corpses of his comrades. The way the rebel bodies lay amid heaps of armor dust on the ground, pointing toward the force shield, looked as if they were abasing themselves in worship of the shield’s majesty. It was a horrifically beautiful sight and Arun registered a high fidelity static recording of the image, to appreciate later if he should survive this day.

What was this?
he thought.
Are the drugs exciting my sense of artistic appreciation now?

“Get a squad south,” said Thunderclaws through his voicebox. “Their armor is the BA-2-G ground assault model. I know it well. Good frontal armor. Much weaker at the back. Get behind them and take them out.

“Fraser, Beder, with me,” ordered Rathanjani. “Brandt, give me your best fire team.”

Before Brandt could reply, Barney flashed a new threat alert. This time from the southern approach to the control room.

It was too much for Arun. Something inside him broke.

What are those disgusting three-eyed monkeys up to now? If I could just pry those frakking cowards out of their frakking armor, I’d rip their stinking fur off. And they do stink, I know them. I hate them. I wanna kill them all. Medical alert. Come here! Let me kill the frakking… frakking… Emergency cognitive sequester… Pound them! Pound ’em! How do you like that, eh? Smash the monkey bitch vecks. Every… single… last… frakking… Sequestering NOW!

Arun was alone.

He was nowhere.

He’d been angry. Yes, that was it. Run straight into the Hardit troops and beat the life-force out of them with his bare hands.

Or had he imagined that?

If he’d been running then he should have remembered seeing the room speed by. He remembered nothing. Couldn’t remember his fists pounding alien flesh. Couldn’t recall anything except anger… and argument. With Barney?

Barney, are you there?

He was a Marine — at home in the vacuum. But this was true void.

He had no existence.

Only a memory.

He clung to that memory and held on tight. He didn’t want to die.

He was Arun McEwan. If he forgot that, there was no one else to remember he had ever been. There would be nothing left to rescue.

Minutes turned to months. Years stretched and thinned to become pale decades of oblivion.

Once there had been a universe and he had lived within. Time had passed there in a way he could comprehend. Night had followed day. Cause led to effect.

Now he was cast adrift in a time-like infinity. He told stories of himself, desperate to keep his memory alive because memory was all he was. For a long time he told stories about others too, but then he realized the cold truth. Those others… he’d only dreamed them.

Relentless eons of time eroded his stories, leaving weathered husks, mere rumors of a physical existence: color, heat, life. Love.

Finally, even those last nubs of memory wore away and he drifted in the nothingness. He just
was
.

Then… a change.

Still there was nothing here. No sounds. No sights. The utter void. And yet the void was bounded in a way he could not fully describe, except that boundary was
shrinking
.