Marine Cadet (The Human Legion Book 1) (54 page)

Time had no measure here. A second. A century. They were the same. But time had gained one property. Time had a direction now, and it was running backward. Effect led to cause. Day preceded night.

Time was accelerating in its backward surge.

Light returned. He was moving from darkness to light. He remembered color and searched for it, but there was none.

Then taste returned.

Oblivion was hurtling at breakneck speed and tasted of bitterness and spit.

He sped through the barrier of light and out into the physical universe.

He sucked in stale air and felt it chill his teeth as he drew it in and
breathed!

“Corporal! It’s McEwan.”

“What the hell’s up with him now?”

“Dunno. He just,
shuddered
.”

There was movement nearby.

“Arun! Arun, can you hear me?”

Arun opened his eyes and looked through Springer’s blanked visor and onto her face. Her eyes gleamed with concern. He had seen this sight before. Did that mean he was still dreaming? It had been such a
long
dream.

“Arun, it’s me.”

“Springer?”

“Yes. Oh, yes. You’ve been acting weird for about ten minutes. I thought I’d lost you for good.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Shhh!” Springer nudged her faceplate against Arun’s to speak in private. “Del thinks your suit AI shut down your consciousness and took control. We didn’t want to ask the veterans if that was possible because…” She whispered. “It wouldn’t look good on your record.”

Arun backed away from his comrade. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“Shut up, McEwan,” snapped Madge.

“Don’t be sorry,” added Springer, irritated but not without sympathy. “I’ve forgiven you.”

“I know,” said Arun. “I’m not saying sorry to you, violet eyes, but to all of you. To my family, the Corps. I worry too much. You know I do. I feel too much. I can’t shut out my humanity and become a combat machine. Hortez should’ve had my place in the Corps. LaSalle. Even Adrienne Miller or the lowest Aux. I don’t deserve to carry this SA-71. I’m not a Marine.”

It was only when Brandt and the veterans turned to stare at him that Arun realized he’d spoken out loud. His secrets spilling out from his gut because something had torn and he couldn’t hold them in. He was overwhelmed by the emotions of love and loyalty and the sense that he had betrayed himself and everyone around him. If only he’d not given into his obsession with Xin. If only he’d loved Springer back as she deserved.

Arun sobbed. Thoughts of what should and could have been grew heavier until the burden was too great for his shoulders. He shrank into a clumsy fetal ball, cowering on the floor.

People were trying to talk to him but he couldn’t understand. Someone peered into his face but he shut his eyes.

A little lucidity returned. Enough to hear what Sergeant Rathanjani was saying. “I don’t care whether his mind’s been sequestered. I’ve heard enough,” said the sergeant. “Shoot this cadet. I’m sorry, Fraser. I don’t know whether its cowardice in the face of the enemy or combat shock. Either way, he’s a liability.”

“Understood.”

“I don’t want that cadet dead,” said Thunderclaws.

Even Arun could feel the charge of surprise explode through the room. Why would a Jotun waste time with a single, unimportant cadet?

“It’s his combat meds,” said Fraser, “They used to do the same to me before my implants took. I know what to do. I’ll make sure he’s never a problem again. Come here, brother. This won’t hurt.”

“Quickly!” snapped Thunderclaws. “We’re wasting time.”

Arun stood before his brother.

“Take off your helmet,” said Fraser.

Arun did as he was told. Frakk! It was cold. He took a breath. The air tasted tainted with poisons and burned his lungs with its chill.

Meanwhile Fraser had removed his gauntlet and was sneaking his hand inside Arun’s clothing until he could press his palm against Arun’s bare neck.

“They told you I was your brother, didn’t they?” asked Fraser, using a speaker mounted in his helmet to communicate.

Arun nodded.

“Knowing the Jotuns, they never told you I am you
twin
brother.”

Did that matter at this point?
wondered Arun. The question seemed to consume Arun in a recursive spiral until, when his legs buckled and he slipped out of consciousness, he barely noticed.

Arun had no clear idea of what the afterlife would be like. Some Marines claimed to have preserved religious teachings from Old Earth, but he was suspicious of anything claimed to be from the home planet. The Jotuns freely provided what they said were copies of religious texts from Earth. He was doubly suspicious of that.

Soon after he’d first witnessed an execution, Arun found himself drawn to the array of temples to be found in Detroit, curious about religion for the first time.

Now he found himself floating in a sky of gold and crimson swirls. Was this purgatory? He tried to remember his religious teachings.

The memories of those visits to the temples came easily to him. He was
thinking
… his mind spinning furiously like a freewheeling supercomputer searching for a problem to solve.

That didn’t sound like purgatory. Maybe this was
bardo
— the in-between state.

Then a bright light came into being in front of his eyes. It seemed to beckon him. A destiny awaited Arun, some problem that he knew only he could solve.

He opened his eyes but immediately squeezed them shut. The light was blinding.

“And he’s back.”

The words used his brother’s voice. The light dimmed and Arun opened his eyes cautiously.

He was still in the control room of the mining base, his feet dangling helplessly in the air and held in his brother’s arms. His brother was hovering near the ceiling.

Alongside, Stopcock was cradling a captured drilling machine in his arms as if he were hugging a pet quadruped. The device looked like a miniature tank with four stubby legs and a conical drill for a head.

Arun’s helmet was back on, pressure seals locked.

“Welcome back, Cadet Prong,” laughed Madge.

“I think he had to come back to us because he was missing his Troggie boyfriend,” suggested Del-Marie. “In any case, Corporal McEwan assures me you won’t keep winking out on us. No more swooning for you, boy. You’re fixed”

“Not quite,” said Fraser. “You may need to ask your suit AI to remind you of orders because your short-term memory is going to be shot to crap while my nanites fix you. Other than that, you’ll function fine but you won’t remember a thing.”

“But don’t expect us to forget what you said while you were delirious,” added Del-Marie.

“Or what you do next,” said Madge.

Springer, Arun noticed, said nothing.

“If you’ve quite finished,” growled Sergeant Rathanjani – though Arun sensed amusement in his voice – “All teams ready to execute on my mark… Go!”

At ground level, the sergeant led his team in a decoy attack to the south.

Fraser counted to five and then pointed to Stopcock, who activated his drill. The cutting teeth on its nose cone whirled into a blur and a pale blue lance of light erupted from its tip, the distinctive color of a Fermi beam operating in atmosphere. At the focus point of the beam, the laws of sub-atomic physics were thrown out of the airlock. The matter in the ceiling was reduced to a squirming mess, easily gouged away by the drill teeth in a shower of trailings.

Four seconds later, the roof was breached and all the air in the room was racing to escape out into vacuum outside, trying to suck Arun out with it.

That was all Arun could remember.

——

Fraser McEwan, it transpired, had experimental augmentations. Hormonal factories had been implanted subcutaneously, intended to solve the problems with combat drugs by making them self-administered and tuned by bio-feedback.

There was a secondary purpose too. Human Marines and crewmembers could go for tours of decades or even centuries without leaving their ships. Troopships were not spacious. Depression, violence and other psychoses grew commonplace as lengthy tours outstripped anything evolution had prepared humans for in terms of living together in cramped conditions. The implants aimed to upgrade the very nature of human society by allowing a direct communication of moods and simple information between individuals by touching implants to the skin of another human, and using the hormonal nano-transporters to travel into the other person’s system

This
gifting
, as the Marines called it, was new and it was experimental but it worked. Fraser’s biology was close enough to his twin’s that he could purge the combat drugs that were messing with his head and replace with something far better tuned to Arun’s physiology than anything that Detroit’s medical staff could supply.

Fraser had been right about the side effect on his memory as Fraser’s nanites battled Detroit’s combat drugs.

Arun remembered nothing. He had to rely on his surviving comrades to explain the events afterward. Given the number of wounds he’d taken, Arun felt lucky to be alive, his periods of unconsciousness no cause for shame. Not his surviving comrades, though, who found Arun’s progress through the battle to be a constant source of amusement. They even named the engagement after him.

To the survivors, it would forever be known as the
Battle of the Swoons
.

——

About the time Fraser’s nanites were temporarily destroying Arun’s short-term memory, the assault force that contained both McEwans was scurrying away across the roof of the base. Wide Battle Net was being jammed by the rebels, but the loss of comms affected the enemy too. The thirteen heavily armored rebels were vulnerable to being cut off from each other. Fraser exploited this, making hit and run raids, drilling through walls, and surprising the enemy detachments from behind before the slow-moving rebels could turn in their bulky armor and fight back.

Arun had a brainwave. When Force McEwan sneaked back into the building via the breach they had first cut into the wall from the outside, they had found Osman still hanging upside down. Arun removed his comrade from his suit, laying him to rest in gravity’s embrace, but dragging Osman’s suit with him. Corporal McEwan had a more advanced form of battlesuit, one able to switch his visor to share the view anyone in his command was seeing at the time. Even dead members of his command. They’d left Osman’s body behind, but his suit AI was still on active duty, buried in an armored band across the chest of his suit.

Osman’s helmet and suit AI made a perfect scout as they played cat and mouse games with the rebels through the maze of corridors, always trying to hit the armored rebels from their lightly armored rear.

Arun remembered none of this. His first dim recollection was of their attack on the secondary control room.

The main objective of the Hardits in their heavy armor was to keep the humans pinned down while their engineers could boot up the secondary control room and re-route power to the mass driver, recommencing the bombardment before the system defense boats blew them off the face of Antilles.

The Hardits had been only a whisker away from completion when Stopcock cut through the wall, allowing Arun, Majanita and Springer to rush through while the rest of Force McEwan were pinning down the enemy fighters tasked with defending the room.

The engineers surrendered immediately, complying without hesitation when Majanita ordered them to kneel with hands on heads.

When Corporal McEwan joined them, he began shooting the prisoners and ordered the others to do the same.

Majanita complained that this was murder, and Arun could remember Fraser’s reply clearly. “Murder suggests the rule of law, but in war there are no rules, there is no law. There are only winners and losers. Murder? What authority declares one action to be acceptable in wartime and another to be murder? Such a body doesn’t exist.”

Majanita told Arun later that Fraser had been calm throughout rest of the battle. But when he shot the prisoners, he was impatient, as if he didn’t want to give them a chance to talk. But what could the Hardits say that Arun’s brother didn’t want to be heard? It made no sense.

Had Arun obeyed and shot the unarmed Hardit technicians? He didn’t ask and no one offered to tell him.

——

Perhaps the events with the prisoners troubled him so much that his brain commandeered all of its limited capability to record them, because of the skirmishes and raids, the victories and casualties that followed, he had no memory.

It wasn’t until the final firefight that an image seared across his mind so vividly that it overcame all forgetfulness.

He was running, his breath hot in his helmet, his vision fogging with the exertion. Stabbing pains jolted up his legs and into his ribs, his head. Everything hurt because Arun’s body was screaming its need to shut down and die, but Arun was forcing himself beyond the limit of endurance. And all because there ahead of him, on the edge of a heap of bodies blocking the blood-slicked corridor, lay Springer.

She’d been caught in a lethal rocket blast and now she was down with her lower leg blown off. Below the knee, her suit was growing an emergency seal, simultaneously fusing shut the spray of Springer’s arterial blood.

“Get back, Cadet McEwan!”

The order came from Ensign Thunderclaws.

For the first time in his life, Arun disobeyed a Jotun.

Springer was down. There wasn’t time to explain to the officer why that mattered so much.

Arun blacked out.

When he came to, he found he’d only been out for three seconds. Loyal, clever Barney had kept him moving forward. Arun was now coming down into a crouch over his wounded comrade. His wheezing gasps were bubbling, leaving the taste of blood on his lips.

He checked Springer’s suit integrity and requested a medical update from her suit AI. She was stable, it told him, but she couldn’t take any more damage. Arun had to get her away.

That was when his fogged-up brain remembered he was in a firefight.

He glanced up at the Hardit defender who’d unleashed the volley of rocket fire. He was still standing there in his huge battle armor, being blasted at by the Marines, like a titan wreathed in fire. His rocket launchers were ruined and his armor near blasted away. But behind him two more titans were turning around, ready to launch everything they had at the humans.