“Thank you,” said McEwan. “I never thanked you and I should have. Doubly so for bringing me Springer.”
An icy spear of jealousy stabbed at Indiya’s guts, twisting evilly. How could she be so jealous of a one-legged fuel tank that she couldn’t speak?
But she couldn’t allow Arun to go without telling him how she felt. She used his body to pull herself up so their lips were level, and then kissed.
His lips were still cracked and cold after his freezing. Maybe that was why he hesitated before kissing her back.
She closed her eyes and abandoned herself to the soft crushing of his lips against hers. He was delicate – her gentle giant – and yet she also felt his raw power. She spread her arms as far as they would go around his powerful torso and hugged him, the sense of barely controlled power oozing from his presence made her skin tingle.
She broke away and sighed.
“Come back for me, Arun.”
He nodded, once again a soulless military machine. Then he sealed his helmet over his head, cutting her away from him.
She watched him follow Tremayne into the airlock, wondering how the coming days would play out. If he evaded detection, Arun would be cooped up with a woman he loved at some level. Indiya knew Marines rutted like animals, given half the chance, assuming that this behavior had been bred into these soldiers whose average waking life expectancy after shipping out of their depot planets was probably measured in scant days.
But Indiya had something that Tremayne didn’t.
Still spinning through Arun’s bloodstream was the hormonal cocktail she’d placed in him all those weeks ago in the shooting range. She’d summoned the hormonal state of her choice and locked it in his mind to be forever associated with her, a high tech love potion.
Would it be enough?
— Chapter 40 —
After the thousands of hours he’d spent in hard vacuum, Arun wasn’t expecting what awaited him on the void side of the airlock after leaving Indiya.
Terror!
His guts knotted and re-knotted ever tighter, squeezing his breath into short, panting bursts.
He was falling off the edge of the world!
He’d grabbed at the first handhold he could find and held on. But his hands were gripping so tightly they had gone numb. His eyes were squeezed shut.
He was afraid to open them. What if he’d drifted away, beyond all hope of rescue? Doomed to relentless asphyxiation in the deep void.
Springer grabbed his shoulders and crab-walked around his torso until she was hanging underneath, her legs wrapped around his hips. She brought her helmet to kiss against his so she could talk using the vibration of her helmet against him, a way of talking that couldn’t be overheard.
“Let me guess,” she said, her voice sounded far away. Distant and pissed. “No suit propulsion. No suit AI. No map. No weapon. No tether. Limited air and no backup. If you lose your grip you’re dead. You can be just two meters away from the ship but you might just as well be two light years distant because without a suit motor there’s no way back.”
“Shut up. You’re making it worse.”
“No, you shut your dumb mouth until you learn to load it with something worthwhile. I haven’t finished yet, mister. No loyalty. No respect.”
What did she mean, no loyalty? Arun’s terror started shifting toward anger.
Springer was relentless. “Del-Marie. Madge, Zug, Sergeant Gupta. Our Indigo Squad comrades are on ice, waiting to be tortured, interrogated, and then murdered. They’re relying on you. I can’t do this alone, Arun. If you lose your nerve now, you condemn all of us to death.”
Arun’s breath stretched from gasps to groans, but he had nothing to say. How could he? Everything his buddy was saying was true.
Then Springer twisted the knife. “What would Hortez say if he could see you now?”
Hortez! Arun’s terror completed slewing around, transforming to anger directed at himself.
Arun’s friend had been kicked out of the Marines due to a mistake Arun had made. Hortez had chosen to sacrifice himself so that Arun could send a message of hope to Detroit’s human Aux slaves.
Arun peered through a tiny gap in his eyelids to see Springer’s violet eyes boring into him across the bulge of her helmet. Her voice had been flinty contempt, but her eyes spoke only of concern.
“Hortez would say he’d died for nothing,” said Arun.
Springer nodded inside her helmet. “Come on then, Cadet Prong. Grab my ankle. You’ll be fine.”
——
To Arun’s eternal surprise, Springer was right. At first, he grabbed her only ankle and flew behind her like an unresponsive tail.
Which meant he’d transformed Springer into a space mermaid. The thought was so ludicrous that it chipped away at his funk.
Before long, his fear of falling off the hull, caved in to the concern that Springer’s grip was having to support their combined momentum. He let go and scurried from handhold to handhold across the hull, soon letting the thrill of the escape melt away his fear. It was like the rock climbing they’d all had to do as cadets. The hull was littered with pipes, tethering rings, storage boxes, and mounting ports. Every so often, you looked ahead to select the next few handholds and pushed yourself along.
The journey was exhilarating until he remembered that without a map he didn’t know where he was going.
“We’re headed for the starboard nacelle,” he said. “I remember that bit. But where exactly?”
With a jolt, he realized he didn’t have comms either.
Out in the void he normally felt superhuman because… well, that’s what he was. Inside his armor, he was a human-machine cyborg with the acceleration of a missile and a suit AI to control his maneuvers and every function of the battlesuit, an AI that had always been with him. The relationship with Barney had been so intimate, Arun couldn’t tell when he spoke commands, thought them, or Barney anticipated them. Barney knew what Arun wanted and always delivered.
He’d just have to get along without Barney for now.
Arun pushed ahead and tapped Springer on the shoulder. When she looked his way, he pointed to a gun turret that was a little way to port.
Springer answered with a thumbs up.
Soon they were sheltering in the lea of the turret, helmets kissing.
“You know where we’re going, Springer?”
“More or less.”
Arun checked the display built into the wrist of his pressure suit. “I’ve three hours of air left.”
“I’ve four. Plenty.”
“I assume when we reach our destination, we go back inside for more air.”
“I’m not so sure. Your girlfriend planned all this and planned it well. There will be something waiting for us at compartment B02-09-A04.”
“She’s not my girlfriend.”
“Really? Does she know that?”
Arun let it go. “It’s not a nice thought,” he said with a grimace, “but if you know where we’re headed, you should tell me now, in case…”
“In case I lose my grip and drift off into space. Welcome back, yourself, Arun. That’s a good point.”
“Deck B02 is on the starboard nacelle,” said Arun. “Third deck to aft. I got that much. Where’s Frame 09?”
“That places it slightly to port of the centerline running through the nacelle.”
“Okay. What’s the ‘A’ in ‘A04’?”
“The number says where it is in terms of a line running from the dorsal hull down to the ventral hull. ‘A’ means it’s outside of the ventral hull.”
“Outside? Perhaps they’ve left air for us there.”
Springer punched him playfully. “See? It’s not too hard. I’d already figured that.” She frowned. “There is one thing I do not understand. The bottom-most compartment on the ship is A02. Even if we had a map, it wouldn’t show our destination because A04 doesn’t officially exist.”
“A secret hiding place.” Krimkrak had been right to tell
him to seek allies amongst the ship’s crew. He was impressed.
So was Springer. Her face brightened, regaining the carefree look he’d seen so rarely since the injury that had taken her leg and burned her skin. “You see? I told you your girlfriend would take care of everything. She’s probably put a shower in there and a welcome barrel of beer. Bet you even the sheets are warm. Now quit stalling, Marine. Let’s go. Last one there washes the dishes.”
——
It turned out that compartment B02-09-A04 didn’t stretch to hot water and a private galley. It was pitch black inside, which made them jump out of their skins in surprise when they realized they weren’t alone in there.
“Mister McEwan. I was expecting you,” said a tiny voice in Arun’s helmet speaker. Arun hadn’t even realized he had a receiver. “They should have warned me you would be bringing a guest.”
The speaker revealed himself by turning a flashlight onto his face. It was a miniature robot with its own thrust pack, pincer claws for hands, and huge backlit eyes.
“Hello, my name is Darius.”
It looked like a child’s toy. Sounded like one too. An annoyingly cute one, about the size of Arun’s clenched fist.
Turned out that Darius was an AI project, a test rig created by Master Furnace, in other words, the tech-rat who was best friends with the ship’s security AI, and was in love with Indiya even more than himself.
Over the next few days, Darius introduced his cruder toy AI cousins who crawled or flew in to pass messages, bring food and remove body and heat waste.
The compartment was largely filled by a single-person survival bubble equipped with an airlock, heat and light, and even a crude zero-g latrine.
As a single-person emergency survival pod, it was a no-frills but workable. With Springer there too, the bubble was hideously cramped, even when they’d managed to wriggle out of their pressure suits and leave them in the airlock.
To begin with, Arun had assumed the cocktail of physical closeness, time on their hands, and shared danger, would lead to luxuriantly unhurried days of lovemaking.
It didn’t.
Being unable to scratch one’s ass without bumping your partner into the bubble wall kind of cramped his style.
They should have been talking through possible scenarios and battle plans – mentally rehearsing ways to capture critical ship controls and win allies.
Instead they shut down their minds,
This was engineered into their brains – a way to send the conscious mind on vacation while the unconscious and cyber-augmented parts of the mind kept alert during extended sentry duty.
Springer and Arun took turns to stay conscious. They called it ‘A’ Watch and ‘S’ Watch.
When it was his watch, Arun tried to activate the battle planner mode that was unique to his mind, as far as he knew.
Zilch.
Fed by Darius and his smaller cousins, Arun had enough data for his battle planner to work on. The ship’s crew were sullen, resentful of the takeover, which they blamed on the increasingly bullying Marines, despite several ship’s officers being amongst the mutiny’s leaders. No one had seen Captain Flayer since the day of Arun’s capture – presumed dead – and the reserve captain was confined to her quarters, which Indiya said she rarely left anyway.
The sleeping ranks of Marines were being thawed gradually, section by section, to ensure each additional group accepted the new order before waking the next. The drug mix was being altered, the effect reduced, trusted rebels being allowed to go drug free.
Of the one Marine Arun sought above all others as an ally – Staff Sergeant Bryant – there was no sign. He didn’t want to believe this, but Arun had to assume the veteran – who’d kept him alive in while he’d been a cadet – had been quietly vented to space.
All this to work on and still nothing. If the fancy part of his brain was still operating at all, it wasn’t playing ball. As the days passed, Arun had to accept that his emergency thaw had probably killed off any special ability he once possessed.
His battle planner had been a wildcard, something that might just give them a reason to believe they could defeat the overwhelming odds.
Without it… He didn’t share this thought with Springer, but as the days passed Arun became convinced that all they were doing was counting off the days until their recapture.
— Chapter 41 —
As he waited for the captains to initiate the meeting, Fraser McEwan’s mind drifted to his twin brother whose inevitable execution was on hold while he waited in his cryo pod on Deck 13, along with the rest of Indigo Squad. Despite the cruel façade he presented to the former lieutenant commander – now Captain Wotun – he took no pleasure from his brother’s doom.
Neither had he hesitated to eliminate the threat his brother had posed, for that was the unfortunate situation Fraser was born into. His ambition was nothing less than to nudge the future of the human race into one where humanity thrived rather than was extinguished. It was a dangerous gamble at the best of times and any act, no matter how ugly, was justified.
All the same, he couldn’t help feeling a glow of pride that here he was, Sergeant Fraser McEwan, attending a meeting in the captain’s conference room.
Fraser sat at the triangular table fashioned from a polished stone in which deep swirls of green and red glowed like hidden jewels. At its apex was Captain Wotun, and at its base, Lieutenant Colonel Aurgelmir, who commanded the Marine battalion they carried as cargo. The new XO, Lieutenant Commander Ethniu, was there too, as was the chief tactical officer, chief cryo officer, and Ensign Purge, the ship’s human security officer. The two humans were dwarfs in the presence of the Jotuns, but they’d earned their place at this table.
It was just as well that the crisis had been averted and the ship won over, because even under fire, Jotuns always insisted on the correct protocols being observed at every meeting. That meant ten minutes sitting in straight-backed silence waiting for Captain Wotun to open his meeting.
Fraser frowned at Purge, trying to communicate to his colleague that she wasn’t oriented perpendicular to the floor. Purge didn’t seem to understand. Well, that was her problem if she didn’t know how to sit straight in zero-g.
Captain Wotun gave a wriggle to his shoulders that sent a ripple through his hazel-and-cream fur, and politely bared his teeth.
The meeting had begun.
When no one else seemed in a hurry to speak, Fraser placed a hand on the table – the protocol for claiming the right to speak – and made his play. “Sirs…” He bowed first to the ship’s captain, then the battalion colonel, continuing through the Jotuns in rank order. “Before we begin, may I take this opportunity to congratulate all of you on an effective and efficient takeover of this vessel?”
“Shut up,” said Wotun, not deigning to use his own voice. Fraser flinched at the rebuke but inwardly cheered at the form of words. That the Jotun was speaking in the human language was a victory in itself.
“You have some use,” said the colonel. “That is all. Do not believe you could ever be the equal of a Jotun officer. You will not speak again unless spoken to.”
To reinforce his contempt for the human, Wotun didn’t bother to snarl or hiss. To do so would indicate he thought of Fraser as a potential threat.
Fraser withdrew his hand from the table, sighing inwardly. They’d taken the first steps, but earning respect for humanity wasn’t going to happen overnight – wasn’t going to happen in his lifetime, for that matter.
Captain Wotun addressed the table. “I have called you here, so we have our scents blended before we meet our opposite numbers on Themistocles. First let me inform you of the latest situation in Tranquility System. The majority of system defense ships have rallied to our cause. The plan called for us to be part of that fleet from the beginning. Between ourselves and our sister ship we carry 9,400 human Marines. The Tranquility fleet loyal to our cause can only muster approximately 500 experienced human Marines and around the same number of
Jotuns, mostly Navy personnel. Despite our absence, the fighting raging through the system is still going our way. Our presence back in Tranquility will guarantee victory.”
Captain Wotun caught Fraser in his stare. After all these years working with the aliens, Jotuns could still turn his limbs to rubber. It was just as well there was no gravity pulling him down, because Fraser would crumble under that stare if there were.
“Sergeant of Marines,” said the captain, “there has been resistance. Can you assure me that all internal threats are now resolved?”
“All humans on board Beowulf are now loyal, frozen or dead, sir.”
The captain turned his attention to Purge and asked the same question. As soon as Fraser was released from that stare, he started trembling.
Ensign Purge concurred with Fraser.
“If the rest of the fleet waits for us,” said Wotun. “It will be to make use of your battalion, Colonel Aurgelmir. I know that Sector Command rushed them unfinished to garrison the Muryani frontier, but Sector Command is a collection of blind fools who should have been strangled at birth. Is your battalion a viable fighting unit or was Tranquility Command overestimating their true worth?”
Lieutenant Colonel Aurgelmir placed a mid-hand on the table “If we can keep them awake, drug free and training for another six months, the result will be a battalion I would be proud to die amongst.” He withdrew his hand.
“Ship’s resources can accommodate your request to keep your battalion in a waking state for that duration,” said Ethniu, the new XO.
“It’s a good idea,” added Wotun. “I will have all ship’s crew woken. That way none can hide. If these two humans are wrong and we do have pockets of resistance, they will reveal themselves and be dealt with.”
Fraser placed his hand back on the table.
Captain Wotun shot a fierce look that made Fraser quail but not withdraw. It was vital that Fraser was seen to contribute.
“Are you sure you wish to speak?” asked Wotun.
“Yes, sir.”
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