Lock turned her attention back to the away team. “Chief Petty Officer Deflector is waiting for you on Bonaventure. She will guide you through the captured ship and facilitate access to whatever you wish to investigate. The CPO has always hated you scheisse-munching freaks, and being ordered to play nursemaid to you will make her loath you with a burning passion. Any chance you get, you lick her boots, and wipe her arse. If she says jump, you leap as if your life depends on it, because maybe it does. I want you back here at 21:30, alive and well.”
Indiya felt the edges of her mouth tilt up.
“What’s this, freak? A smile?”
“Sorry, petty officer.”
“Explain!”
“Well… you said something nice about us.”
“Nice?” Lock’s face flushed red. “Nice!” A vein started throbbing at the petty officer’s temple.
Indiya accepted a new message from Loobie: an animation of Lock where the heat in her face grew so intense that her hair burst into flame and the skin peeled away to reveal a blackened skull. How did Loobie do that in real time?
“I want you freaks back safely because you’re my freaks,” snarled Lock. “That’s what distinguishes me from the chief petty officer. Mader zagh! Don’t ever mistake that for thinking I like you turd-wrangling, pig-licking slurry of bakri chod chod wixers. Nice? Unbelievable, Indiya. You’re on a charge for insulting a superior. Now get out of my sight, the lot of you.”
As per regulations when leaving or boarding the ship, Indiya and the others saluted before about turning and marching along the charged walkway that led to the shuttle.
Unlike regulations, though, Indiya was grinning all the way out of the docking bay.
Whatever Lock might think about her being a freak, Indiya was still too human to put a lid on her excitement. This was a chance of a lifetime – of a thousand lifetimes.
What the captain had renamed Bonaventure was a captured alien ship loaded with mysterious new technologies. Alien tech that Beowulf’s engineers couldn’t decipher.
Too bad. They’d had their chance.
Now it was the freaks’ turn to finally prove to everyone what they could do.
— Chapter 09 —
How had Bonaventure created artificial gravity? Gravity sensors estimated its displacement to be twenty times that of Beowulf, but its volume only twice as much. The evidence was beginning to suggest there was a black hole in the stern.
A black hole! Even listing the engineering challenges that implied made Indiya break into a sweat.
And they had captured or killed fewer than fifty crew. That was less than half Beowulf’s complement. How did a skeleton crew manage such a large ship?
Above all else, what the hell was a ship doing in White Knight space crewed by humans speaking the Human language better than the bonehead Tranquility Marines could manage?
They claimed to be Amilx. What kind of dumb name was that? An alien loan word?
These and a score of other questions flitted between the away team as they hung from their harnesses during the shuttle’s thirty-minute hop to Bonaventure. The same questions had obsessed them for the two days since the Marines had boarded and captured the Amilxi ship. Indiya filtered them out. There would be plenty of time for that soon enough.
Right now it was their companions on the shuttle who demanded her attention, the silent squad of Marines sent to relieve their comrades guarding the captured ship. Their presence – that sense of barely concealed threat – bent Indiya’s gaze their way and raced her pulse. They terrified her.
The other specials weren’t so concerned. They didn’t know as much about the Marines as Indiya.
One of the special assignments allocated to Indiya by the reserve captain was to mine thousands of years’ worth of recorded battles, trying to come up with improved ship tactics. An early truth she had uncovered was that the very existence of human Marines was an aberration. Most races used combat-bots rather than living soldiers. For all the hardening of their redesigned bodies, human Marines could never withstand the same acceleration as a robot. Why, then, did the White Knights raise a Human Marine Corps?
There were many theories, of course, but the most popular was that humans were cheaper to build and far simpler to maintain than bots.
She laughed humorlessly. When Mamma had been a girl, Beowulf had contacted a human terraforming civilization. Their distant ancestors had been supplied with a survival dome and self-replicating machinery, and then left alone for a few centuries to get on with the job of transforming a barren, poisonous rock into a world fit for White Knight colonists.
The White knights loved the simplicity of low maintenance solutions.
Now she was staring the reality face-to-face, clamped against the bulkhead opposite, stacked in neat rows of six up halfway to the forward hatch. They reinforced Indiya’s personal explanation behind the Marine Corps’ existence: humans were the most violent species in the galaxy.
Motionless and silent inside their metal armor, the Marines appeared scarcely human. With the tubes, internal pouches and feeds taking care of many essential bodily functions, and the suit AI chips acting like a superhuman XO that really ran the show, the Marines were more cyborg than human.
She shivered. As soon as the Marine sergeant had verified his squad was in place, they had all… switched off. Without a purpose to activate them, they were just waiting in standby mode.
Which only made her boy, McEwan, even more mysterious. Back when she’d put him into cryo, something about her had shocked him. His robot mask had slipped – just long enough for her to glimpse the human underneath.
But this lot, hanging on the wall like bats, just gave her the creeps.
Petty Officer Lock and the other normals called Indiya’s group freaks, but these Marines had ceased to be human generations ago.
— Chapter 10 —
The harness straps tugged at Indiya’s shoulders, and her stomach cartwheeled as the shuttle pivoted around 180 degrees.
Her pressure suit was climate controlled, but the air inside suddenly felt very chilly.
The bulkhead at her back creaked in protest and rumbled with power as the engines applied maximum thrust.
“Merde!” she said, but no one was listening.
The shuttle’s flight plan was to accelerate for nine minutes to reach cruising speed, coast for ten, and then swivel around to use its main engine to brake.
Only six minutes had elapsed since they’d left the Beowulf. Something was wrong.
She set her helmet comm to general broadcast. “Hello? Pilot? Please advise status.”
There was no reply. On this shuttle she was cargo, not crew. The occupants of the flight cabin either weren’t listening or were too busy.
“What’s going on?” one of the Marines asked her. Not being a part of their suit-to-suit Battle Net, it took a while to work out which one was talking. He was several rows up, waving at her.
But she wasn’t interested in these brainless Neanderthals. They were only good for the kind of problem you could shoot at.
Instead she used the microwave comm system in her head to hack into the shuttle’s AI.
“It’s you!” said the Marine.
She was in. Full telemetry, sensor feeds, flight vectors. Even with all her augmentations, straining her mind to encompass all the shuttle’s information simultaneously was painful. She didn’t need long, though, the situation was chillingly clear.
“Mader zagh!” she said, with feeling.
“What’s up?” asked Loobie.
The words choked in Indiya’s throat. How could she tell her dear friend that they were all about to die?
“Sitrep!”
It was that annoying Marine again, barking an order at her. Congratulations for being the only one with an IQ in double figures. Afraid you will have to collect your prize in heaven.
“Frakk you, purple girl. I need sitrep. Now!”
“Shut up!” she screamed back. “It’s not somet
hing you can hit or shout at. Guess that makes our situation beyond your comprehension.”
“You promised to talk with me. Remember?”
Indiya looked up at the Marine. Was that her mystery guy? He made his visor go transparent, but he was too far away to see his face properly. Unlike them, she didn’t have ocular zoom.
“Yes, I’m Marine Arun McEwan. I can’t solve this if I don’t know what’s going on.”
She had to wait for bubbles of excitement to finish coursing through her before replying. “Bonaventure has exploded,” she broadcast. “Total destruction. There’s a debris wavefront hurtling our way.”
“How long before the shockwave hits?” asked McEwan.
“Twenty-four seconds.”
“What? You tell me this now!”
Ever since meeting him, she’d dreamed of adventure, of dangers shared alongside this deadly warrior with a human heart. For a moment she’d thought her fantasies were crossing into real life, that this was McEwan’s chance to rescue her. But as the seconds counted down, the hope she’d invested in this Marine drained away, leaving nothing but bitterness. McEwan said nothing, did nothing. He simply hung in silence, waiting for the end along with all the other dormant warriors.
“Nothing,” Indiya snarled back through clenched teeth. Her mind could barely form words now. The engines were thrusting so hard that the harness was threatening to rip her arms off; the blood was draining from her head, her heart unable to pump that far.
The pilot’s efforts were hopeless. Despite all this frantic expenditure of delta-vee, all the engines could do now was slow their velocity toward the onrushing wavefront.
The world was fading away from her oxygen-deprived mind. Perhaps she would black out before the end. That would be for the best.
Then her head exploded with light. She was dizzy, the universe spinning. But not spinning away… the world was hurtling back into view.
The shuttle had spun around again and shut off the engines. Now she was weightless and the ship’s bow was facing the oncoming debris head on.
“The pilot wanted to slow us down,” said McEwan, “but that wasn’t going to be enough.”
Indiya gasped when the Marines launched away from the bulkhead, aiming at Indiya and the specials. God, they were fast! She put her hands protectively in front of her face, feeling like a fly about to be swatted.
“I persuaded her of a better plan,” said McEwan. Indiya dropped her hands, and saw that he was releasing her from the harness. “The bow has some shielding.”
“Not nearly enough,” she protested as he manhandled her through the cargo bay, moving so fast she couldn’t track what he was doing.
“We’ll soon see,” he said.
Then there was a scream of wind and she gasped as her respirator switched to suit air. They’d opened the cargo bay doors to space! She ought to be sucked out into the void, but the Marines seemed immune to the effects of decompression, just hanging there without a care in the universe.
She hated being carried around like a baby. She wanted to ask what the hell was going on, but they were out of time.
The shuttle bucked violently as the debris wavefront finally hit. If the compartment had still been pressurized, the impacts would make the shuttle ring like a bell, but the airless cargo compartment was eerily silent.
She counted ten seconds of buffeting. Long enough to realize that she and her friends were cocooned inside a mass of Marines, the bulk of the formation between her and the wavefront. The brainless cyborgs were shielding her with their armored bodies. And when the debris reached the hold, the vacuum meant there wouldn’t be any pressure waves to rupture her lungs.
Why didn’t I think of that?
Then the flight cabin shielding gave way and the jagged shards of metal and poly-ceramalloys that had once been a starship burst through the flight deck and tore into the cargo bay behind.
— Chapter 11 —
If Arun had thought he was getting used to life aboard Beowulf, the parade room on Deck 12 was a reality check.
Strictly speaking, it was called a parade ‘deck’, but he couldn’t bring himself to use that term. Deck suggested a floor where Marines could stand, and look down at their feet (if they dared) and look forward at an officer (if they had any sense). But now that Beowulf was at cruising speed, and wasn’t using her main thrusters, down was mutable concept.
The crew, and Marines when not in their battlesuits, got around by walking on marked areas on bulkheads that were charged, attracting their boots. Shoulder units called yokes were also attracted to the bulkheads, the downward push on the shoulders giving a better approximation of gravity than sticky boot soles alone.
All the squads in Charlie Company were lined up across the starboard edge of the fore, aft, dorsal and ventral bulkheads, forming a hollow square facing the port side. Despite all his years of zero-g training, Arun’s brain insisted that Checker, Red, Arrow and Command Squads were standing on the walls, and that Black and Silver were hanging upside down from the overhead.
He ignored the disconcerting configuration and concentrated on Ensign Krimkrak who faced them all, from just off the port bulkhead. Officer and humans alike wore dress uniforms. Normally the fatigues they wore took the form of functional olive green shirts and pants, distinguished only by subtle unit and rank insignia. When set to dress mode, the smartfabric fatigues transformed. The shirt took on a deep blue color and grew epaulets and buttons showing squad colors – Arun’s were indigo. His pants became formal trousers, cream with an indigo stripe down the outside leg. The fabric formed a sharp vertical crease and kept the legs taut despite the lack of any gravity to pull the material down.
Officers kept their dress uniforms simpler: creased cream trousers, and a plain blue four-armed top marked on the shoulders with a single sun, donating the rank of Ensign. From what little he knew of them, Jotuns loved decoration, but in their dealings with humans they preferred plainness. The simplicity seemed to say that the aliens’ superiority was so innate that there was no need to draw attention to it.
The exception to this simplicity was the officer’s dress hat, which was a stubby little thing with a flat top. The material was the same cream as the trousers, and with a black ribbon around its base with the battalion designation in gold: 88-412/TAC – 88th battalion, 412th Tactical Marine Regiment. The whole getup was for the humans’ benefit – after all, why else were the hat bands showing human numerals? But if it was meant to impress, the officer’s dress hat failed. Marines were mesmerized by these hats, wondering what mysterious mechanism kept them attached to the huge Jotun heads with their shaggy fur and the prominent ridge running from front to back. The headgear was one of the wonders of the universe.
Ensign Krimkrak and his little white hat had kept Charlie Company waiting in silence for nearly an hour now, long enough for Arun’s concentration to wander. Every now and then, his brain would suddenly notice afresh that people were standing on the overhead, and send a stab of panic to his guts to alert him that something had gone fundamentally wrong with the laws of physics.
If only the other physical worry could be brushed aside so easily. The heat! His zero-g training had been on ancient hulks open to the frigid void but Beowulf was the opposite. The ship fought a constant battle to dump the heat it generated out to space fast enough to avoid cooking its occupants. His hip flask felt like it weighed as much as a miniature planetoid, but he daren’t drink from it. Not on parade.
Precisely one hour after the parade had formally begun, the six-limbed alien officer cleared his throat… and 144 thirsty Marines begun to hope their ordeal might soon be over.
“Honor your fallen comrades,” ordered Ensign Krimkrak. When he’d cleared his throat, Arun had thought the officer would speak with his own voice, but instead the order came through a human voice synthesizer. Arun had heard Colonel Little Scar speak once. The commander of the 412th Marines had sounded
as if he’d swallowed a box of razor blades, and gargled with grit.
Keeping his mid-limbs pointing at his feet, Krimkrak flung out his upper-left arm. On the bulkhead behind him and to the left appeared images of the two officers killed in the boarding action on Bonaventure: Lieutenant Balor and Ensign Geror. At a similar gesture from his upper-right arm, the remainder of the port bulkhead cycled through images of the human Marines killed in the same action, and Marine Giorgio Yakubov who had perished the day before when the shuttle had been caught in Bonaventure’s explosion.
“Too many died,” announced Krimkrak after a few minutes contemplation. “Your performance was unacceptable.” The alien began swiveling his trumpet-like ears, a sign of agitation. “One of you distinguished himself, both in the capture of Bonaventure and in an incident yesterday when we lost a shuttle. A mere Marine – the lowest among you – took initiative. Assumed control.” Krimkrak snarled. “Decided your fate.”
In his own razor-grit voice, the officer added: “And his.”
Without warning, the ensign shot across the parade deck like a railgun dart. He must have been wearing a maneuvering harness under his dress uniform.
From sweltering heat, Arun suddenly felt a paralyzing chill of fear. Krimkrak had swooped to a halt ten meters away. An unarmored Jotun weighed more than a human in a battlesuit. A primitive instinct told Arun that he was prey, and had better run.
“Come here, Marine McEwan.”
Arun pushed away from the bulkhead, slowly somersaulting to match the orientation of the officer, who was at right angles to Indigo Squad.
Krimkrak grabbed Arun’s shoulders, arresting the human’s momentum as surely as if he’d slammed into a battlecruiser. The rubbery suction-tipped tubes that passed for a Jotun’s default hand configuration looked soft but gripped forcefully enough to make Arun wince; his arms could pop out of his shoulder joints at any moment.
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