Indigo Squad
Book2 of The Human Legion
Copyright © Tim C. Taylor 2014
Cover image © TsuneoMP / shutterstock.com
Square logo image © Algol / shutterstock.com
Published by Human Legion Publications
Also available in paperback (ISBN: 978-1505630848)
All Rights Reserved
HumanLegion.com
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The author wishes to thank all those who work-shopped, proof read, or otherwise supported the making of this book. In particular, Paul Melhuish for allowing me to raid his vault of filthy Skyfirean vernacular, the Northampton Science Fiction Writers Group, James D. Kelker, Melissa Bryan, and Mark Boss, for help and encouragement. And Ian Watson for persuading me to turn a short story into a book series.
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Extract from the NEW ENGLISH DICTIONARY, Patriot Publishing, Human Autonomous Region, 2671CE
human.
n. 1. An individual of the species Homo sapiens, possibly also of derivative species. See also: augmented-human.
adj. 2. Characterizing mankind, as opposed to aliens, animals, and machines (including AIs).
adj. 3. [meaning derived from common alien usage] oppressed, the ultimate underclass, the hopeless ones, unwashed : as in The Human Legion.
— Prologue —
Power from the scores of heat exchangers and hibernation monitors thrummed through the metal walkway where Indiya sat, legs dangling over the edge into the sea of frozen heads. The deep power hum beckoned her to sleep. Soon she would, but not just yet. Not without a last look at the one sleeping Marine who mattered to her.
Her mystery boy.
Who was he? And what?
Mamma had always said that the older Marines would flirt outrageously while they waited for the crew to put them to sleep, but the younger ones would be so blissed out on drugs that they scarcely knew what they were doing or where they were looking. She always said that to Indiya with a gleam in her eye, but a wistful look that told of a lifetime of memories, not all of them pleasant. The Marines have a lot to be nervous about, Mamma had explained. The ship could be destroyed while they’re still in cryo. And if they do wake, it will be to fight. And when they fight many of them will die. Smile on them, because by the time they meet us, their lives are already nearly spent.
If you had to die, thought Indiya, going in your sleep was the gentlest way. But the Marines were not like the ship’s crew. They were great hulking beasts bred for one reason only: to kill. For them, death was something to be faced head on, eyes wide open, kicking and screaming all the way to damnation.
They would not die in their sleep, though. Not here; Indiya would never permit that. She was a member of Beowulf’s human cryogenics team, and they were diligent about maintenance checks, running diagnostics far beyond the level called for by operational guidelines. Pod maintenance was almost a religion, and she was proud to keep the failure rate for the Marine cryo pods below one percent, which was maybe another reason why she couldn’t leave this one alone.
Give them a wink and a smile, Mamma had said. The Tranquility run is the worst because they’re mostly just kids. Children going off to war. If you bust them ogling your behind, just laugh it off. That way they’ll sleep with a smile on their face and have a reason to wake.
Indiya smiled at the memory. Mamma wasn’t around anymore, couldn’t answer the one question that had worried at her these past six months of flight: who was this Marine?
The roving eyes of the freshly minted Marines hadn’t bothered her. Indiya had been happy enough to smile and flirt, to allow her fingertips to brush against the brow of a troubled Marine, anything to send those boys, and some girls, to sleep smiling.
All of them, that was, except for the boy in front of her. She reached forward and slid back the view panel, which revealed a transparent window and a light shining onto the occupant’s face. His eyes were closed now, but she’d seen those passionate brown eyes that looked out of place in that battle-scared giant’s face, which looked like a skin façade stretched over a metal skull.
There was no smile on this Marine’s face, only shock.
The view panel was only meant as a backup check to verify that the occupant of the cryo pod matched the name on the status panel. She covered her tracks by sliding the panel back into place. The face meant nothing to her anyway. All she really knew about him was his name: Marine Arun McEwan: 88th battalion, 412th-TAC, ‘C’ Company, Indigo Squad.
She ran the name around her memories for the thousandth time, but she could draw no spark of recognition. The name meant nothing to her.
But she had meant something to him. Something unexpected and vital. But what?
At first he’d given her a dreamily flirtatious look, same as the others. Mellowed on sleeper drugs, he’d remarked in a slow slur about her purple hair. Her color was natural, she’d explained. By which she meant she never dyed it. It was an innocent enough answer, and then she’d dismissed him with a throwaway comment about chatting when he woke. But in the moment when she’d turned to attend to the next cryo pod, she’d glimpsed astonishment bloom on his face. The shock of recognition.
And the strangest thing, what she needed Mamma to explain to her most, was that she had instantly felt connected to him too.
In the days and months that followed, she’d replayed footage of McEwan going under. His dreamy contentment churned into a raging panic. In the end he’d fought sleep, desperate to attract her attention before he went under.
He succeeded, but too late. Before she’d finished setting the next Marine to sleep she’d gone back to McEwan, reeled in by Creator knew what. She’d checked and rechecked his pod; everything was working perfectly.
When Petty Officer Lock had commed her to ask why she was behind schedule, Indiya didn’t have an answer and had to leave McEwan and attend to the other Marines in his company.
She smiled at the memory of all those corny pledges of love and sidelong glances, flattered really, though she’d never admit that when they woke.
Indiya knew she wasn’t anything special to look at. She was young; that was all. At 17 Terran standard, she was the same age as some of the Marine kids. They probably thought she looked exotic with her violet hair and slender, supple limbs, not at all like the musclebound hulks they raised on heavy-gravity worlds such as Tranquility. She was a sleek attack cruiser to their inertia-bound heavy battleships.
No, she told herself, comparing people to spacecraft was crass. She was a cat, she decided, the Marines were water buffaloes – the human ones were at any rate.
But there were wolves on board too. Predators sniffing out McEwan. His cryo unit’s diagnostics had been accessed far more times that was routine. The pod’s activity log registered its systems had been controlled on two occasions by a remote process thread hidden by privacy locks so secure that Indiya was too scared to breach them.
She was not the only one with an interest in Arun McEwan.
And not just McEwan. All of the Marines were being fed such quantities of mind-altering drugs that even Petty Officer Lock was worried, although she ordered Indiya to ignore them.
Indiya sighed. “Good luck,” she mouthed, nearly blowing him a kiss, but that would be going too far. She felt a clawing at her gut, tears threatening to burst from her eyes. She pictured poor Tizer from ‘A’ Crew, in storage on Deck 10. While Tizer was frozen during the flight to Tranquility, his girlfriend had lived a waking shipboard life for nearly twenty years, and then died in an accident before reaching their destination. Indiya kept telling herself she should learn from Tizer’s tragedy and burn away any ties to someone such as McEwan, whose future was so damned.
She rose, turning her back on the Marine so he couldn’t se
e her sadness, not that he could see anything in his deep sleep.
Try as she might to put him from her mind, she couldn’t help wondering whether this Arun McEwan would still be there when she came back on shift in six months’ time.
Clad only in the paper cryo tunic that would disintegrate safely during freezing, her bare feet padded softly on the walkway as she made her way to the higher-spec cryo units reserved for the crew.
Without her, Arun McEwan was alone.
And defenseless.
Her musing was interrupted by a thought message:
She shot an answer back.
Indiya felt exhilaration surge through Furn even before he answered.
A chill crept up Indiya’s spine. No one had any idea the enemy were so close.
— PART I —
The Cat and the Wolf
— Chapter 01 —
Arun McEwan’s heart swelled with pride when he accessed the internal camera feeds, and saw himself lined up with the rest of Charlie Company in Beowulf’s dorsal hangar. The Marines twitched with eagerness to emerge and take the fight to the enemy.
Whoever the frakk they might be. They were at war with the Muryani Accord, but the hostile didn’t display the power signature of a Muryani vessel.
It was fear, not pride, that made Arun so impatient to launch and get the boarding action over with. The prospect of facing hostile aliens in battle was exciting and nerve wracking, but what truly scared him was the possibility of revealing himself as different.
Fed a constant dose of combat drugs, even while in cryo sleep, all his other comrades were doped-out mental wrecks, left with as much initiative as the dumbest robot. Well, maybe not the slightly smaller armored figure to his left: Springer. Marine Phaedra Tremayne, known to Springer to anyone without a death wish, was his best friend and fire team buddy. The drugs had less effect on her, as with their comrade, Umarov, but they all acted as if they were as doped as the others. Hidden conspiracies swirled around Arun like a persistent stink. He’d hoped all that had gone away when he left Tranquility System on Beowulf, but here it was even worse and felt more urgent. Playing dumb now might just give Arun the edge he needed when the traitors made their move.
“Ready to launch on my mark,” ordered Staff Sergeant Bryant, on behalf of their silent alien officer, Captain Mhabali. Bryant had become an unexpected ally back on their depot planet of Tranquility, but now he too had succumbed to the drugs.
“Ten… nine… eight…”
From his camera feed, Arun watched the ACE-2 combat suits flick from field gray to matt black, shimmer and then disappear. Charlie Company had activated stealth mode.
“Seven… six…”
With the waiting over, Arun’s worries were draining away.
“Five… four…”
Arun McEwan had an advantage over everyone else in the company: his future had been foretold by the strange alien creatures known as Night Hummers. Unlike the others he had a destiny. The cause of human freedom would not let him die today.
“Three… two…”
Arun knew he would be coming back.
“One… go!”
Arun placed his life in the virtual hands of his battlesuit AI, Barney, who hurled him into space a split second after the hangar doors snapped open. The Marines emerged into a bloom of light across the electromagnetic spectrum as Beowulf simultaneously launched a barrage of kinetic torpedoes and blew smoke, both intended to cover the real attack, a close assault by the stealthed Marines.
The ‘smoke’, which consisted of sensor-reflective streamers, semi-intelligent decoy drones, and a dozen types of EMP flash-bombs, obscured Beowulf as the warship pivoted through 180 degrees and used her main engine to brake, applying enough power to keep out of effective firing range, but not so much that she fried Charlie Company in the quantum-effect cone extending hundreds of meters out of her zero-point engine.
Within minutes, Arun had left Beowulf far behind and drifted slightly to one side. The smoke had dissipated, and the kinetic torpedoes – which were on a parallel vector to the Marines – were dark in the visible spectrum, though still launch-hot in infra-red.
None of that mattered. What counted was whether the enemy warship had seen the Marines. That would determine whether most of them lived or died over the coming hours.
Beowulf’s attack plan was simple. The enemy ship was 20,000 klicks ahead and Charlie Company was on an almost identical vector to the enemy ship, except the Beowulf had been moving slightly faster. That extra velocity was enough for the barrage of torpedoes to hit in about an hour, and the Marines to arrive, ready to board, about five minutes later.
Missiles and x-ray bombs from their sister ship, Themistocles, had crippled the enemy’s main propulsion in a brief firefight as she’d flashed past 26 days earlier. The hostile ship’s maneuvering thrusters could spin it in any direction and nudge to either side, but that made negligible difference to its velocity of nearly 15% lightspeed. Unless the enemy repaired his main engines, the target ship was essentially headed in a straight line that would not stop until the end of time.
Barney estimated they would reach long range for beam weapons in approximately ten minutes. Until then, Arun was alone with only the sound of his breathing, and the fears in his mind for company.
He tried to get a visual on the target, but at this range it was no more than a faint dot. So he stared instead at home: Tranquility, or rather its sun. Still less than a light year away, it was the brightest object in the blackness of interstellar space. He thought back to happier times, messing around with his mate, Osman, in novice school, and chatting late into the night with Springer. Then there had been that night on the moon when he held in his arms the most beautiful woman he’d even known.
But his maybe lover, Xin Lee, was on Themistocles, less than a light day distant, but the difficulty in matching vectors meant she might as well be a galaxy away. As for Osman, he had been killed in the rebellion Arun had helped to put down. Springer lost her leg in the same fight, and was out there now, practically within touching distance, but as invisible to Arun in her stealthed battlesuit as, hopefully, they all were to the enemy.
He smiled. Thinking of Springer always made him smile. Arun’s life had mysteries and threats by the bucketload – not least the mysterious purple girl that the pre-cog Night Hummers had talked of – but thinking about them wouldn’t help him now.
Springer would be by his side in the fight.
As she would be afterward, when they celebrated victory.
That was more than enough.
— Chapter 02 —
After closing for fifteen minutes, when the target vessel had grown enough for Arun to see it was a rough cuboid shape, the enemy opened up with lasers.
The kinetic torpedoes were dumb bullets with limited maneuver capability of their own, which made targeting them child’s play.
Unlike in an atmosphere, there was nothing in space to scatter a beam weapon, robbing it of power. What limited a laser’s effective range was diffraction, the inevitable spreading out of beam diameter. What started as a tight beam at the laser’s focal po
int, had spread to a five-meter diameter disk by the time it played over the torpedoes.
Diluting the laser’s energy over a wider area turned it from a death beam to a pleasant heat lamp.
Nonetheless, in the near-absolute cold of space, that relentless heat lamp was deadly, warming the torpedoes in an uneven way.
After another ten minutes, secondary lasers opened up, pulsing their energy, so that the torpedoes rapidly heated then cooled.
It didn’t take much longer before the outer surface of a few torpedoes cracked. The material pitted, ejecting little plumes of debris.
To Arun, the effect looked so gentle, but it was enough. The torpedoes slowly tumbled and drifted.
There! The first collision. One torpedo had knocked into another, causing both to fly off on a new vector, narrowly missing others on their way out of the barrage spread.
And with every meter they grew closer to the enemy ship, the business ends of the laser beams narrowed, increasing their effect.
Arun grinned. The torpedoes were only a distraction, cover for the most deadly weapon in Beowulf’s armory: its complement of human Marines.
The fact that the enemy hadn’t fired on the Marines meant they hadn’t seen them.
Yet.
Oh, but they would do soon.
By the time they were ten minutes away, Arun was counting down the seconds before boarding, impatience adding a rasp to his breath.
He’d been bred and engineered to fight.
3,000 klicks and closing.
He couldn’t wait!
— Chapter 03 —
Indigo Squad boarded on the port beam and made for the CIC, the command nerve center of the enemy ship. The two Charlie Company officers commanded the other five squads who would breach the upper hull and work their way down to the main powerplant. Both targets were amidships. By coming at them from two directions, the battle planners hoped to maximize confusion in the minds of the enemy.
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