However bad it got, though, she knew that holing up in Detroit would be worse. The human levels were suffocated by the ghost of the only remaining person she cared for in the galaxy. Her son.
Grief choked her once more, smearing her vision with tears. In the seclusion of her underground tomb, Nhlappo wept. Time lost any meaning, the sensor grid forgotten. All she knew was one wracking sob after another in an endless path of despair.
Again and again her mind tormented her with recorded memories of a happier time, watching the playful antics of her little boy, his skin as dark as his father’s. It had been his father who had given her boy the young Serge Rhenolotte the nickname of Zug, in those last weeks before they surrendered him to novice school.
When she had called in every favor to be posted back to Tranquility, Nhlappo had assumed Zug would instantly recognize her…
“Contact!”
A jolt of adrenaline wrenched Nhlappo from her sobbing.
“Scout party approaching from northwest,” warned Tremayne from the western observation position.
Nhlappo pulled herself out of her well of sorrow, and verified that Tremayne’s alert had woken the other recon Marine from his scheduled sleep. No one spoke. If all went well they would keep perfectly still and completely silent until the Hardits had moved on.
Nhlappo watched the Hardits approach down a muddy slope from the northwest. The enemy would be penetrating a sensitive triangle of forest marked by three points: the hidden entrance to Detroit’s Trog tunnels, the waiting Stork, and the crashed transport where Del-Marie Sandure had fallen. Each side of the triangle was about 200 meters.
The recon team was concealed inside that triangle, its mission was to watch over the abandoned Stork to ensure it was undamaged and secure when they made their break to orbit. The three hidden Marines didn’t just watch the camera feeds; their carbines were buried with them. If they needed to, they could emerge from behind an enemy attacking the tunnel entrance or to help clear a path to the Stork.
That made tactical sense, but Nhlappo was under no illusions. If the enemy knew of the tunnel entrance and sent a significant force to secure it, none of the Marines would get off this planet alive.
Nhlappo counted 23 Hardits spreading out around the Stork, with a few more remaining at the top of the slope, trying to conceal themselves behind trees while poking their heads around to keep a watch on the ground below.
The idea of keeping concealed fire support in reserve on the high ground worried Nhlappo because it made good tactical sense. Were these elite soldiers?
Any fears were soon dispelled. This group was no more professional than the last two Hardit groups to poke around the downed gunship. The slowness of movement, and utter lack of initiative revealed the ragged militia for what they were: unwilling conscripts who were too scared of their superiors to disobey the order to inspect the Stork, but too lethargic to do much when they got there. Nonetheless, they were showing worrying signs of learning.
The Hardits placed an explosive against the flight deck hatch. Other than a loud bang that panicked squadrons of flying creatures into the air, it did no damage.
One of the Hardits fired several shots at the pilot’s window. Nhlappo cheered silently when the resulting ricochet tore a chunk of flesh out of a nearby Hardit thigh. Shame the bullet didn’t tear out its wretched throat.
After the others clubbed the shooter’s head with their rifle butts, they simply gave up. It was as if they’d done all they were prepared to, and were happy to sit around gassing for a while before heading back.
Nhlappo couldn’t quite believe what she saw next. The monkey-like creatures began separating into groups of between two and four, and then proceeded to snake their tails into each other’s filthy outfits where each rubbed at their neighbor’s crotch.
Her face screwed into disgust to see this half-assed alien orgy. The sexual activity didn’t bother Nhlappo, but the ill-discipline did, because that crossed species boundaries. These filthy vecks were an affront to soldiers everywhere.
After a few minutes, the rubbing ceased suddenly. Perhaps a scent order had been issued that the recon sensors couldn’t detect. The Hardits rose languidly and ascended the gentle slope, heading back from whence they’d come.
The militia were just outside the recon team’s triangle when an animal growl rumbled through the forest, causing the Hardits to freeze.
They were not much more than dumb animals themselves. Reverting to an instinctive threat response, the enemy soldiers dropped to all fours and raised their snouts, sniffing out this sudden threat.
Horden’s Children! Didn’t the monkey vecks know anything? Nhlappo could easily recognize the species from the cry alone. It was a ginquin, a predatory quadruped that occupied a similar evolutionary niche to an Earthly wolf. Looked like one too, except for a feathery sensory organ that stretched from ear to ear, and barnacle-like symbionts that lived on its skin, providing hard, abrasive armor in exchange for a steady supply of nutrients from the animal’s blood. Standing on all fours, an adult ginquin would be thigh height against a Marine.
Anyone who bothered to understand Tranquility’s surface would know the ginquin. In fact, Nhlappo could picture the very animal who had given that warning growl. It was a red and brown patterned individual who’d remained nearby despite being disturbed by Nhlappo’s recon team.
It was probably a mother guarding her young, unwilling to abandon them whatever the threat. Nhlappo could understand that all too well; couldn’t the Hardits?
Obviously not, because one of the enemy bounded down the incline on all fours, rifle gripped in its tail. The Hardit stopped a meter away from the animal, grunting at it to clear off.
The ginquin barked back.
Snapping its jaws, the Hardit attacked, trying to club it with its rifle butt, but the ginquin dodged the attack easily and bared its fangs at the intruder.
The Hardit backed off, stood on two feet and brought its rifle to bear on the mother ginquin.
The beast lowered its head and backed away.
But not fast enough for the Hardit who shot at the beast.
The rifle crack was followed by a pitiful cry, and then pained yelps.
Puffed up by its victory over a defenseless beast, the Hardit scrambled back up the slope to rejoin its unit.
Nhlappo managed to smile. She’d seen the Hardit’s round throw up a clump of rotting leaves and dirt at least a meter away from the animal. The ginquin hadn’t been shot at all.
Nhlappo whispered, not caring that the other recon Marines could hear: “I apologize for calling you a dumb animal, Mother Ginquin. Or maybe you’re a father… I don’t know your biology that well. But I do know that you’re not dumb in the slightest. Not as ignorant as the Hardit you fooled, anyway.”
From its cover amongst the trees, the ginquin watched the Hardits leave the area.
Human eyes were following the enemy unit’s departure too. More or less human, anyway, because that sector was covered by Marine Tremayne. Nhlappo couldn’t work out the young woman with her freakishly violet eyes and sickeningly love-struck obsession with McEwan. But somehow Tremayne had chanced across one of the ancient recon AIs, and that precious suit AI was a treasure Nhlappo could value.
The last of the three-strong recon team was Umarov. As Tremayne’s buddy, he came with the territory, but he’d proved himself in a fight more than once.
A facile fool like McEwan would observe the animal outwitting the Hardit and see that as a sign. Nhlappo had seen too much of the galaxy to believe in fairy tale symbolism, but to see Hardits humiliated by a forest animal gave a moment’s easing of her bottomless grief.
“Hardit unit has left the area,” reported Tremayne a few minutes later. Good girl. Tremayne had waited until the enemy had left the vicinity before reporting. The buried cables the team were passing data traffic along were designed not to leak any signals, but on a recon mission like this, you took every precaution possible to avoid detection. Not dari
ng to breathe until your enemy was out of sight was still an important maxim, no matter how much fancy tech shrouded you.
“I spotted two elite soldiers in uniform,” said Tremayne. “Snipers, I think. They took positions high in trees with good fields of fire over the Stork. They weren’t impressed with the Hardit who shot at the Ginquin. Gave it quite a beating on their way out. My heart bleeds for the skangat veck.”
“Keep it professional, Tremayne.”
“Sorry, ma’am.”
“Until that point, though, you did well.”
The ginquin’s young chose that moment to wail, a human-like cry of innocent need that penetrated the forest. The mother barked over the cries of her young, concealing their sound. It was more than just crude volume that buried the younglings’ cries, the mother’s barks and growls were perfectly crafted to conceal the sound, the aural equivalent of draping a stealth cloak over her babies. Impressive.
“Sir…” The breathlessness in Tremayne’s voice was so unexpected that it stirred Nhlappo’s muscles, readying her for action. “The ginquin young. Their cries… they’re human!”
“Get a grip, Marine,” snapped Nhlappo, angry that this promising young woman had fallen prey to the same flights of fancy as that idiot she doted on. “What you mean is the cries sound human. They are not. Even on this planet, the cries of animal young sound eerily human. I’m sure a biologist could explain why. Your mind’s fooling you into hearing human cries because you want so much for the animal’s young to be… the human young we lost. Wanting something doesn’t make it come true.”
“That’s what I thought, ma’am. But it’s not me who thinks those cries are human. It’s Saraswati — my recon AI.”
“Shit!”
“Said she’d had her suspicions,” continued Tremayne, “but that last cry confirmed beyond doubt.”
Every nerve in Nhlappo’s body started fizzing with energy. How could she have been so frakking stupid? It had been her mind playing tricks, not Tremayne’s. Denying the truth ringing in her ears.
Like a corpse rising from the dead, Nhlappo emerged from beneath the ground in a shower of dirt and leaf litter, her hands crossed over her chest holding her SA-71 carbine. As soon as she’d forced her way out of the soil’s grip, she ripped away the strandwire plugged into the socket at the back of her neck, and snapped her carbine to the back of her suit. Her suit hadn’t the power to use full stealth mode, but she checked she was scent-sealed and that her suit exterior was emulating the purple dappled pattern of the forest floor.
Then she was off, shedding dirt and leaves as she raced toward the Ginquin. The animal sensed her approach. It bared its fangs and growled at this new intruder, though with less certainty than when it confronted the Hardit.
Nhlappo slowed and came to a halt at what she judged to be a not-too-threatening distance. Animal and Marine regarded each other, unsure whether they were facing friend or foe.
Nhlappo blanked her visor so the ginquin could see her resemblance to the babies — if they truly were human. Then she got on all fours and bowed her head submissively.
The beast approached and sniffed at Nhlappo, bumping its nose repeatedly against her helmet, before proceeding to lick her battlesuit.
Nhlappo released her helmet seal, just for a second, hoping the beast would recognize the humanity in her scent.
It was enough. The ginquin gave a yelp of a kind Nhlappo hadn’t heard before, and then trotted into the undergrowth, looking behind every few seconds to check the Marine was following.
The mother beast led Nhlappo to her nest: a shallow pit scooped out of the dirt and screened by carefully placed branches filled with leaves and twigs.
Nhlappo could see something move inside. It was redder in color than the mother beast, but whether human or animal was impossible to tell through the nest screening.
Resisting the urge to tear apart the screen, Nhlappo waited a few seconds until her suit AI had enough information to paint an artificial image of the nest’s interior onto her visor.
The ginquin rubbed herself over her young.
There were two of the babies, their skin rubbed raw by the barnacle hide of the mother ginquin. The animal’s instincts were maternal but the children weren’t hers. They were Rohanna and Shelby’s babies.
Nhlappo carefully peeled away the screening and reached inside. When she scooped up the infants, the mother ginquin snapped her jaws over the human’s wrist, its eyes rolled high in their sockets to glare up at the Marine.
“It’s okay,” Nhlappo told the animal gently. “You’ve done well. These youngsters owe their lives to you, but you know I can care for them better than you.”
The ginquin gave a last bark and warning glare before running off, out of sight within a heartbeat.
The babies cried when their four-legged foster mother left them. Nhlappo shushed them and rocked them until they were asleep. They were weak from hunger and thirst. There wasn’t much fight left in them, not even enough to cry out their needs.
She headed off for Umarov’s approximate location, knelt down and whispered at the ground: “You’re in command. Acknowledge.”
Her AI turned her head left and zoomed the visor display onto an unremarkable patch of ground a few paces away. A wrinkled black finger snaked out of the ground — Umarov’s worm camera that had emerged from the top of his helmet. The camera tip lit up in purple — the dominant color of the purple foliage in the forest scene — and gave a repeating pattern of two short pulses followed by two long. Umarov was signaling his acknowledgment.
Nhlappo hurried over to the Troggie tunnel entrance as quickly as she dared without making unnecessary noise.
As she slipped behind the screen of trees she marveled at how similar it was to the ginquin nest.
A hundred meters into the tunnel, she encountered Lance Corporal Sandhu’s fire team who were acting as perimeter guards.
Even behind their dark visors, she sensed their astonishment.
“What the fuck are you staring at?” she barked at the sentries. “Even a drill instructor can be a mother, you dumb vecks.”
One of the babies woke. Wide eyes tried to make sense of this strange new environment. Nhlappo could almost hear the thoughts behind the confused stared: where was the nest and the nuzzling snout with its nice tickly licks and warmth?
Warmth! In camouflage mode, the exterior of Nhlappo’s battlesuit was kept to ambient temperature. Her suit AI caught the implications of her Marine’s train of thought and applied a gentle warmth.
“Don’t mind them,” Nhlappo cooed at the baby. “They’re only kids. Not much older than you. They’ve no idea how to look after little darlings like you. But I do.”
She raised them to head height, a baby in each gauntlet, her carbine safely snapped against her back. She laughed. Two babies and an SA-71: they made quite the little family.
Both infants were fully awake now, peering myopically at her face through her visor.
“I’m so sorry you lost your Mommas yesterday. I lost a son the same day.” She sensed interest from the guards. She hesitated… and then decided she didn’t give a shit. “We can give each other cuddles. Would you like that? It won’t bring our loved ones back, but it would make the sadness more bearable. What do you say?”
The babies gave happy gurgles, but she knew that wouldn’t last long. She needed to reach the nursery area in the human levels, to find milk. Between several assaults on Detroit, and Brandt blowing the route down to the secret legion buried in the depths, getting around the city would not be easy. But she would find a way.
After milk, the infants had other needs: cleaning and clothing – wound cleansing too. The mother ginquin had rubbed against them with her abrasive, parasite-infested hide, leaving their soft baby skin covered in angry red grazes. But they were Marine babies; with a little food inside they would shake off a few scrapes without a problem.
She headed up the tunnel as fast as she could without risking tripping.
After passing the second perimeter guard and entering the bottom of the human levels, she halted.
Something wasn’t right.
The babies’ mothers had refused to name them. Even numbed by her own loss, Nhlappo still couldn’t imagine the depth of despair that would prevent naming a baby. It was admitting that they would die young. Admitting defeat. How could she protect these little ones if she hadn’t the courage to hope they would grow to adulthood?
She lifted the babies to head height again. This time they didn’t wake.
“I name you,” she said softly. “And I apologize in advance, because I think Tremayne isn’t the only one to have been infected by McEwan’s love of symbolism.”
Dimly she wondered whether by naming them, she really intended to claim ownership. She shook away that stray thought and turned her head to the babe in her left hand. “You, I name Romulus. And you… Remus.”
— Chapter 68 —
On the far side of the hangar, 100 meters away, the trio of Hardit sentries froze, and then turned to face each other.
Springer told Saraswati to keep her carbine trained on the sentries across the way while she checked the nearer sentry trio, the Hardits only a few paces away who had no idea that Umarov and Springer were hiding so close.
Whatever had excited the distant sentries wasn’t alarming the ones nearby. Instead, growling crossed the hangar between the two groups. It seemed to dispel the moment of tension, enough for Springer to take her finger off the trigger.
The whole thing was probably just what passed for Hardit banter, she told herself. Nothing more.
She surveyed the hangar area once more. Checking for threats was what she told herself she was doing, but that was a lie and she knew it. What she was really doing was weighing her chances of making it out alive.
Detroit’s hangar was huge – large enough to house dozens of craft, both atmospheric airplanes and shuttles capable of making it to orbit. The flight path to the outside world was through an opening in the mountainside screened by a waterfall. Narrow bays were cut into the side of the hangar to house alternatively the aircraft, and the fuel and ordnance they required.
Renegade Legion (The Human Legion Book 3) Page 26
