He laughed. Being alive was so glorious! Even better, he understood why he’d survived.
Arun was not human. Marines had been selectively bred over centuries, genetically altered and augmented. That allowed him to see a complicated battle scene for a split second and immediately identify the tactically important details, filtering out the 99% of sensory input that would not help him to stay alive.
As Barney had hurled him across the room, he’d seen the defenders pause and begin to turn away from Arun to face Beta Section’s flank attack. That had saved his life, though he’d been hit twice in the left arm.
He rolled onto his side, taking in the scene of carnage, while Barney carried out emergency repairs to the suit’s arm and to the human arm inside.
The human defenders wore unpowered armor, white flexible plates covered in studs. It looked like they could don that armor in seconds, not like the Marines in their ACE-2’s with a waste pipe stuck up their butts and input feeds that enabled them to go without food or drink for weeks. Those studs… were they force field projectors? Their armor had deflected the kinetic darts impacting at Mach 4, but as Arun had hoped, they hadn’t stopped the carbine teeth of the charging Marines from chopping them into a red slurry of chopped meat.
A Marine stood over Arun, inspecting him.
“Looks like you’ll be okay, McEwan,” said Umarov, Arun’s friend who was a Marine from an earlier generation. Arun was the only one fully immune from the effects of the doping, thanks to the medical nanobots his brother, Fraser, had once injected him with. The effect on Umarov was erratic, swinging from confusion to rare moments of lucidity.
Where’s Springer!
The only other squadmate who showed occasional signs of normality was his buddy, Springer. Arun heaved a sigh of relief when he queried Local Battle Net and found Springer was unwounded. He had long ago steeled himself to the prospect of losing more comrades in every engagement. How he could continue if he ever lost Springer was beyond him.
Barney told him to keep still while his wounds were patched. So he lay there while Umarov gave him a stumbling speech about how confused he was, but he was certain of one thing: that he could trust Arun.
He ought to be grateful for the support, but Arun had heard it all before. He glanced over at Madge, who stood nearby, staring at him. Umarov was gesticulating as he always did, but Madge was eerily motionless.
Of all the newly-minted Marines of 88th field battalion, 412th Tactical Marine Regiment, Corporal Majanita was the canniest. Did she realize at some level that something was very badly wrong with her?
“I’m sure of it, McEwan,” Umarov was saying. “It was English. Not the butchered version you speak, but proper English.”
What? Arun snapped his attention back to Umarov. “Say that again.”
“The humans in the medical facility. They spoke the way I do. They are my build too. Smaller than you. Bigger than Earth humans. We are fighting against Marines here. Vintage ones.”
Umarov had graduated as a Marine ninety years ago. Within days he’d been put in cryo storage, only being thawed out to fill a gap in Arun’s fire team. He spoke differently and his body had a much lighter frame than modern day Marines. All of Umarov’s vintage were like him.
“And they…” said Madge. “They… they fired Corps-issue SA-71 carbines. Standard kinetic dart rounds.”
Ignoring Barney’s warning to keep still, Arun sat up and peered at those tattered scraps of flesh, bone and hair inside remnants of armor that could withstand railgun rounds.
Amilx. That’s what that wounded man in the infirmary had said.
Who the frakk were these Amilx?
— Chapter 06 —
Arun took stock of the situation since no one else was capable.
The plan was for Indigo Squad to capture CIC while the other squads took the powerplant. By taking the two critical areas of the ship, they hoped to prevent the ship from self-destructing, and to disable its ability to fire upon Beowulf, who could then close.
“Sergeant,” Arun asked, “any word from Lieutenant Balor?”
“Negative,” mumbled Gupta. “We’re being jammed.”
That was the problem with radio broadcasts. Simple to jam and simple to intercept.
“Lance Corporal Sandure, can you hack their systems?”
Sandure, or Del-Marie to his friends, knew more about wetware and electronic soft-systems than any human was supposed to. He should be foaming at the mouth in his eagerness to take control of the CIC.
Instead he answered: “What systems?”
Suddenly, Arun’s helmet took on a mind of its own, wrenching his head to the right. Arun wasn’t doing this. It was a suit malfunction or…
Arun’s visor display zoomed into a section of wall-mounted console. This wasn’t a malfunction, Barney was trying to tell him something.
“Never mind, lance corporal. I have another hacker in mind.”
Barney had spotted an access port. The same kind as the neural programmers Marine cadets wore on their heads during Second Sleep. The same as the port on his suit used to insert and extract Barney. A rumble across Arun’s chest announced that Barney was journeying through the extra thick band of liquid armor that protected the suit’s AI chip. Arun waited for Barney to make his way to the surface, opened the patch in the outer skin of his suit, and removed the thumb-sized sliver of crystal that was his most intimate companion.
Instantly, the suit grew heavier, Arun’s movements clumsy. The suit was still operational, but without the AI to marshal the suit’s functions, Arun had to use crude backup controls.
No matter. Arun inserted the crystal containing Barney into the console port, which lit in green and sucked the AI inside.
Arun shook his head, bewildered that this enemy ship had compatible systems. They’d expected to encounter incomprehensible quadruped aliens. Instead, this strange ship was feeling ever more like home.
“Can you control the ship from here?” asked Arun, feeling strange to speak aloud. Normally he talked to his AI in a fuzzy area between sub-vocalization and direct mind-link.
“Can you at least distract the ship?”
“Let’s blow up this thing,” said Sergeant Gupta. Until now, the squad had milled around aimlessly with no enemy to fight. “Laskosk, set a breaching charge against that control bank.”
“Sergeant, wait!”
“What now, McEwan?”
“My AI chip is in there.”
“You what?”
“It’s trying to hack in.”
“And you were going to tell me this when?”
Arun flinched from the hot blast of Gupta’s fury.
He braced himself for the shitstorm but it never came. For a fleeting moment, Gupta had been himself. Now that moment had gone.
His sergeant stood motionless. If Gupta set his visor to be transparent, Arun expected to see a blank expression of utter bewilderment.
Screens came to life across the console bank. One showed a ship schematic. Others showed the approaches to the CIC while the one that interested Arun most showed Lieutenant Balor and Ensign Geror leading the other squads to the powerplant.
The deck was a command information center once more. This time on the side of the Human Marine Corps.
“Sergeant, we have control.”
Gupta didn’t reply. Arun hadn’t expected him to, but somewhere in the record for this action, Arun’s words would be proof that he had at least remembered the chain of command.
“Can the officers hear me?”
“Lieutenant Balor, sir. Can you hear me?”
On the screen, Arun saw both Jotuns jerk in surprise.
“Who is this?” asked Balor.
“Marine McEwan, sir. Indigo Squad.”
“Bring on Sergeant Gupta.”
“Negative, sir. The sergeant is suffering from… combat fugue.”
“And so is everyone else. Right?” added Ensign Geror.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Same here. We’ll uncover why you are different later, McEwan. Now stop jabbering and give me a sitrep, Marine.”
While Arun updated the officers – talking care to describe the effectiveness of the enemy’s armor – he watched the screens flicker and then begin to shut down.
No, shit.
But Barney wasn’t giving up. While his control was increasingly intermittent, when he did have control, the AI was showing better camera angles and joining up the screens so Arun had a sense of what lay in front and behind Lieutenant Balor’s team.
Arun went cold. He caught a snatch of the battle about to unfold. Lieutenant Balor’s squads were just one compartment away from the powerplant. And that next room had a barricade with a dozen defenders behind it. Twenty more were waiting thirty meters away to Balor’s rear, just out of sight. This hidden force had heavy weapons.
“It’s a trap!” Arun screamed.
But the screens had blanked again. No one was listening.
“Barney, bring down those emergency bulkheads. Leave a route open for Lieutenant Balor and seal off everything else around his force. Do you understand?”
The screens came back to life.
“Lieutenant, the enemy’s behind you.”
“Disappointing. Now your brain’s gone wrong too,” snapped back Balor. “Bulkheads have come down behind us. The enemy is to our front.”
Arun heard the shouts, screams and persistent magnetic humming of a firefight between railguns.
Then the screens came back on and stayed on.
Barney was right. The enemy had thought to catch the attackers from the rear, but the enemy force sent to do so was trapped behind a wall of emergency bulkheads that had descended on Barney’s orders. Bulkheads strong enough to seal the ship against decompression would be strong enough to withstand rounds from handheld railguns.
The enemy had dropped their weapons and placed their hands on their heads.
Balor’s force had taken a few casualties. Two Marines were down. So were both officers!
Barney zoomed the camera feed into the fallen Jotuns, as if gloating in their deaths. Arun had no love for aliens, but they deserved better than that. The six limbs of the officers gave them a vigor to their appearance in life. In death, sprawled on their chests having all six limbs splayed out looked even sadder somehow, like butchered dumb beasts.
He realized with a start that he’d never seen a dead Jotun before.
Without Arun’s controlling influence, Barney could display primitive emotions of his own. He seemed to be taking Arun’s resentment at his slavehood and redirecting it at the Jotuns. That would explain why he was glorying in their deaths, but that attitude was unfair. Marines and officers, everyone in the Corps family was a slave. All were Marines.
The camera feed played over the Jotun corpses.
Arun looked away, sickened.
But then he snapped his gaze back because he realized he’d misjudged Barney. Now he understood what the AI was so eager for him to see.
The Jotun suits showed multiple entry wounds from SA-71 railgun darts.
They’d been shot in the back.
Murdered by their own side!
— Chapter 07 —
“My twin brother did well in the boarding action,” said Fraser.
“Too well,” said Lieutenant Commander Wotun. “We’re allowing Marine Arun McEwan too much initiative. He could become dangerous. Eliminate him.”
“I respectfully disagree, sir. He’s not acting alone, I’m certain of it. Consider this: if I made sure he had a fatal accident we would be eliminating a single claw from our enemy. Allow him a scintilla of freedom and he will lead us to the entire fist. Claw or fist? Which would you prefer we strike off, commander?”
The lieutenant commander hissed and growled, a sound like boiling water.
“We should have taken this ship before we ever left the Tranquility system. It is your brother who spooked the weakling Hardits on that moon into moving too soon.” The Jotun raised his lip to show off the fangs underneath. “If you value your life, do not remind me of your genetic connection to this individual who has caused more trouble than any other member of your species.”
“Yes, sir.”
The officer leaned his muscular bulk over Fraser, and exhaled hot alien breath over the human. “You are not as irreplaceable as you like to think, Sergeant Fraser McEwan.”
“I understand, sir. Although Ensign Purge has admitted that the ship’s security AI has become unreliable of late. Only I can track my brother’s movements reliably.”
“Enough! We proceed according to the revised timetable. I suspect you are playing games with your twin for your own amusement. Consider yourself indulged, human. For now. But if your hunter-and-prey games threaten the mission, I will show you what a single Jotun claw can do to a soft human throat.”
Fraser swallowed hard. The commander’s claws had ripped the throat from his predecessor as Sergeant of the ship’s Marine detachment. There were only 21 under McEwan’s formal command, compared with their cargo of over three thousand Marines in 88-412/TAC field battalion, but his detachment would play a key role in what was to come – important enough for Fraser to be rescued from the fallout after the Hardits had moved too soon in their part of the rebellion back in Tranquility system.
If Fraser pulled this off, the lieutenant commander had promised to promote him to ensign. The first human Marine officer! He felt flutters of euphoria every time he thought of what was at stake here, not so much for his own aggrandizement but for the symbolism of marking another step toward the day when other species would take humanity seriously.
The luster of the prize didn’t blind him to the stark truth that his elevation to officer rank would be a political message from the rebel faction. True, humans had been junior Navy officers for some time, but even they referred to human-officered vessels as cardboard ships: scarcely spaceworthy hulks there to make some noise on enemy sensor readings.
To what he guessed were tens of millions of human Marines in the galaxy, Fraser’s promotion was intended to be a far more powerful clarion call that the rebel cause was also humanity’s. As far as Lieutenant Commander Wotun was concerned, it scarcely mattered which human was promoted.
Fraser squared his jaw. Was the Jotun right? Would he act any differently if Arun weren’t his brother? He thought that over for a few moments… Then a gleam came to his eye.
No! Arun meant nothing. No one in the galaxy would get in the way of Fraser’s promotion.
— Chapter 08 —
Petty Officer Lock paced up and down the line, halting occasionally in front of Indiya to give the full effect of her glare. Loobie was the senior rating in the away team, but Lock knew Indiya carried the most influence in the group.
Lock rarely did happy. Today she wasn’t even going to manage seriously vecked off. Deep lines stretch downed either side of her lips, etched into her puffy red face by years of permanent disapproval.
The four spacers waiting to embark the shuttle wore pressure suits, with helmets held in front, as per regulations. Without wearing their headgear, most crewmembers could not send comms messages, but this group were not normal.
Freaks most called them – augments was the formal term. Indiya and the ot
hers simply called themselves specials.
Loobie linked to Indiya’s mind, and sent a thought message:
Indiya couldn’t help herself. She laughed out loud.
“Is something amusing, Indiya?”
“No, petty officer. Not amused. Excited.”
Lock loomed over Indiya, squeezing her eyes into narrow slits, as if forcing out every last drop of displeasure, until her eyes disappeared beneath ridge lines of folded skin.
Indiya felt the hairs raise on the back of her neck. Despite her perpetual bad temper, Lock took good care of her team of augments. Knowing this, however, didn’t protect Indiya from shriveling in the searing heat of the petty officer’s anger.
It was wrong of Loobie to make fun of the way Lock looked. The specials were prototypes for several new augmentations, but all spacers had been adapted for life in sunless zero-g. Sometimes the bioengineering didn’t work as intended. The petty officer’s bloated body and brittle bones were one result.
Loobie didn’t help, the little sow. She sent a doctored image of the scene adapted from live security monitoring footage. The five augments were lined up in the docking bay, as in reality, but in Loobie’s version, they were naked except for their helmets held in front of them to protect their modesty. Indiya’s violet hair lengthened and streamed out behind her in a fake wind, the pale indigo tips gleaming jewels of light. Loobie’s breasts were twice their real size, and Furn and Finfth had grown a beard and horns. At first, Fant was unaltered other than losing his clothes, which made sense as Loobie thought he was perfect just as he was. Then Fant’s helmet started to fade out of the picture, a slow reveal of what lay behind.
Loobie!
Indiya shut out Loobie’s mind link, but too late to stop the little demon inside Indiya’s head making her grin. But Indiya didn’t get into trouble this time because Lock was distracted by the hammering sound of the Marines in their powered armor passing behind her on their way to the shuttle. Indiya couldn’t help backing away from the giant cyborgs. You could talk, joke, even flirt with the humans inside when they were vulnerable in their cryo pods, but put a group of them in their battlesuits and they were the quintessence of applied violence.
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