Marine Cadet (The Human Legion Book 1)

by Tim C. Taylor

  “Look up Earth history,” Instructor Rekka had once told them, “for the contempt felt by Earth peoples for Roma, Jews, lepers and dalits. That’s how the others see us: unwashed, untouchable, unwanted. The word ‘human’ has been absorbed by alien languages, a byword throughout this region of the galaxy for the lowest of the low.”

  Arun wasn’t so convinced. Maybe all this humans-are-useless drent was a psych trick to produce Marines who were hungry to prove their worth.

  What made Sol so impossibly distant was the White Knight policy of keeping human Marine units well away from Earth. But why would they bother if humans were such a joke?

  Arun would go there if he could, but he suspected that was a dream that would sour if it ever came true. He’d heard tales of Earth soldiers marching through captured cities and welcomed as liberators by beautiful girls throwing flowers at their feet. As an armed representative of Earth’s oppressors, Arun guessed a more likely welcome would be a knife in the back in some dark alley.

  Sol hazed and then vanished behind Tranquility’s bulk as the planet swung across his field of view, but Sol was only one of myriad stars, and the circling heavens held endless fascination for those who really took the time to look.

  As an underground dweller, Arun equated the starscape with clouds: both provided spectacular sights, made all the more precious because he rarely had the chance to relax and enjoy them.

  “Listen up, squads. We head out in two minutes.”

  With a sigh, Arun reeled in the focus of his attention. Blue and Gold Squads were floating in the vacuum, like a snapshot of swarming insects. Close by was their target, a hulk of functional metal officially labeled Assault Training Vessel 2. The Spirit class warship was once a proudly gleaming wedge of metal, just under a klick long from bow to stern, and 300 meters from the viewing blister sprouting from the upper deck down to the main railgun slung under its belly. Now its off-white hull was scorched by beam weapon attacks and its skin riddled with holes drilled through for boarding exercises. As with most things in Detroit, the ship had been unofficially re-designated using an Earth name, Fort Douaumont, because — in reference to some obscure battle on Earth — the ship had been fought over countless times but never truly won.

  “Ninety seconds.”

  A grafted-on switch in Arun’s head told him that these words came over the command channel. There was no need, because Arun recognized the voice as belonging to Cadet Lance Sergeant Alice Belville, Gold Squad’s leader and designated commander for both squads in this exercise.

  Alice was okay. Sometimes Arun worried that she was a little too quick to press ahead without consulting with her section leaders.

  “Frame-reference on my position,” said Alice. “North to Douaumont’s bow. Center on her dorsal command blister. Green layer through ship axis. Layer height 200 meters.”

  Zero-g combat had no natural reference for up and down, left and right, so tactical commanders defined a frame-reference for their Marines, sometimes redefining it over the course of a fast-changing battle. With Fort Douaumont, the framing was often the same: north corresponded to forward, right to starboard, and so on.

  Arun glanced over to the two veterans observing the cadets. Their battlesuits were capable of stealthing their wearers against any means Arun had of detecting them. Today sergeants Gupta and Searl had set their suits to high visibility mode, flickering yellow and orange. They looked as if they were on fire.

  Alice issued each section their orders, and reminded the cadets that the vets had given them a ten-second start before activating Douaumont’s defensive lasers. That’s when the fun would begin.

  Madge would lead Arun’s Blue-5 fire team in an arc over the ship at a distance of around half a klick above the ship’s upper hull. Once in place, Blue-5 would watch for counter-attack, covering the backs of Alice and Brandt’s teams who would lead the main assault. Del-Marie and Blue-6 would take a similar position but slightly lower and facing aft.

  “All units to fire smoke at two klicks to target,” finished Alice. Frakk! That meant he would be exposed to laser fire for a klick before shielding his advance under cover of smoke. It also meant the smoke would be far denser supposing enough Marines made it that far. “Stealth at one klick. Any questions?”

  Alice had left about one minute for any debate. None of the other 54 cadets had any questions to ask, but Arun wondered whether the vets in their fiery suits were questioning why she was leaving her teams exposed for so long.

  Arun concentrated his thoughts on an area of space about one half klick closer to Fort Douaumont until Barney acknowledged, adding a cream waypoint marker to Arun’s tac-display.

  “On my mark… 3… 2… 1… Mark!”

  A blur of frantic motion erupted into the void from all directions, every cadet performing a crazy dance of perfect unpredictability. Arun whooped with delight in the privacy of his own suit as he corkscrewed, reversed, accelerated and stopped in a complete jinkout maneuver. All he had to do was set the waypoint and enjoy the ride as Barney plotted a constantly changing evasive course.

  After about ten seconds, Fort Douaumont’s point defense systems were activated, immediately acquiring targeting solutions. Lasers opened up, fingers of instant death reaching out to pluck the cadets from their dance.

  Arun was under heavy fire, but it felt oddly unreal. It always did in space. With a ground assault you felt the crump of shellfire through your feet, and heard the whiplash crack of field railguns. Atmospheric dust would bloom beam weapons into brilliant light-shows, leaving a tang of ozone in the singed air, and an afterimage on survivors’ retinas.

  Not so in the serene vacuum of space. Here there were no shockwaves, the only sounds that of Arun’s own breathing and the commands coming through his internal helmet speaker. With no atmosphere to scatter their light, lasers were invisible unless you looked directly down the beam.

  Death was something that happened to someone else, until it happened to you. And even then, any weapon capable of slicing through battlesuit armor would kill the person inside before they knew they’d been hit.

  There were no wounded in void combat.

  Barney gave him a jolt whenever one of the cadets was hit. In the disorientating rush of the assault, that was the only way he could tell the lasers were finding targets. Arun hadn’t time to worry about them. He set Barney a second waypoint, closer to the ship.

  After another two seconds of exposing himself to point defense, Barney told him he was now two klicks from Fort Douaumont.

  Arun fired smoke. Yeah! He’d made it through the most nerve-shredding part of the mission.

  The defensive munitions canister flew from the launcher beneath the barrel of his SA-71. Moments later, the canister split in two, each section blasting off on different vectors. Those children split again, and then again into a total of 64 final capsules. The assault force launched around three thousand capsules, which exploded over the course of the next twenty seconds, lighting up the vacuum. Marines talked of firing smoke, but what really emerged was a mixed shower of decoys and material strips that unwound into streamers. The strips had a range of properties: highly reflective, thermally hot, radioactive, energy absorbent. All were designed to confuse enemy targeting systems and degrade beam strength.

  It worked: Arun sensed the rate of casualties slow to a near stop.

  Space seemed to have acquired a thousand new stars, a sequined shroud added to by the enemy lasers, which flashed in green or red bursts from myriad reflections.

  Arun told Barney to filter out these distractions from his visor, leaving him with the target ship and his waypoints. He was about to add a third waypoint when a gut-wrenchingly abrupt change of velocity grayed and narrowed Arun’s vision, robbing him of breath.

  It took a few seconds for Barney to ease his acceleration enough for the blood to start flowing properly in Arun’s head. As his vision returned, Barney explained that he’d made an emergency course correction to avoid colliding with another
cadet. The AI was now bringing him directly to the target.

  The constant jinking grew even more frantic for a few moments before slamming to a halt. Barney had matched velocity with the target ship, positioning Arun at the far left of his fire team’s patrol arc. The suit was now stealthed too.

  Arun tensed. If all went well, the smokescreen would have hidden his entrance so that when the cloud of defensive munitions had degraded, Arun could rely on his suit to keep him invisible. If the smoke hadn’t hidden him enough… he’d already be dead.

  Arun relaxed and looked around.

  Springer was in position to his right and Madge farther on. If Osman had made it through then he’d be farther still, hidden by the curvature of the ship’s enormous hull. Arun gave Springer a thumbs up.

  She ignored him.

  He had a sudden urge to talk to her, but couldn’t without breaking the training protocol. The only reason Arun could see his buddy was because the stealth function on these training suits was only a simulation. If this assault were real, Springer would be as invisible to him as to the enemy. That, and the point defense lasers would have opened up earlier and at lethal strength.

  Arun looked over his section of hull. There were hatches aplenty and concealed areas under the forward shield projector where an enemy counter-strike force could assemble before attacking. There was nothing to report.

  He glanced down and aft to where most of the cadets in the assault force were already swarming over the boarding points, simulating breaching by holding a boarding patch to the hull and pressing down until the patch turned green. Only then could they jump through the pre-drilled holes into whatever awaited them.

  There was nothing he could do for the boarding teams now except guard them from surprise attack while they were busy. Arun turned his attention back to Fort Douaumont’s bow.

  From a distance, the training ship was a sleek wedge of metal, but up close the hull was much messier. The original hull design had been infected by a boxy, urban landscape that had risen, been cleared away, and then rebuilt countless times over the centuries to leave heat exchangers, gun emplacements, storage lockers, shuttle docks, maintenance bot housing, and retro-fitted defensive munition launchers.

  If the blocky hull surface betrayed that Fort Douaumont had never needed to cut through the thickness of a planet’s atmosphere, the forward shield projector was evidence that it had to press through a far more deadly medium: interstellar dust and debris. From a human perspective, the void was a vacuum. But the gulf between the stars was not quite devoid of matter, and even a tiny dust particle would hit with the force of a fusion grenade when the ship slammed into it at its top speed of 0.7 lightspeed. The apex of the filigree crown of shield rails extended nearly two klicks forward of the bow. In flight, the shield rails charged the interstellar medium, rolling it along the ship’s beams in a magnetic slipstream.

  Beneath Blue-5, the shield power array was laid out like a fan-shaped forest with its narrowest point aimed directly at the boarding point. If he were a defending officer, planning to sally forth against a Marine attack on the upper hull, Arun would deploy his counter-attack through this forest, which consisted of scores of the ten-foot high spiny boxes that powered the two upper shield projectors. Then he’d wipe out the boarding teams, taking them by surprise.

  Arun hung above the power array, screwing up his eyes as he tried to penetrate the crimson-tinged black shadows cast by light reflected off Antilles, the nearest of Tranquility’s moons. When the cadets had launched their attack on the orbiting ship, they had kept to the cover of the Tranquility’s shadow. For this simple exercise, Fort Douaumont’s belly had been oriented toward the planet’s surface, which shrouded the upper deck in that same shadow.

  He switched to infra-red, but the power array was partially charged, meaning it glowed bright blue in his visor. Looking for the bots in infra-red was like looking for a flashlight on a star’s surface.

  It was no good. He switched back to the visual spectrum, but despite all the augmentations that uprated his sight, and Barney’s best efforts to refine the image in his visor, all Arun could see were shades of black. He tried forcing his brain to concentrate harder. He was in so much drent already that he couldn’t afford any mistakes. One more vulley-up and Staff Sergeant Bryant would kick him back down to the Aux levels. Alerting his section to an attack that wasn’t there would be enough to earn that kicking. But the harder he made himself peer into the dark, the more it shimmered, his mind imagining fleeting patterns that weren’t actually there.

  What he needed were the sensors in his suit, but he was running his systems cold: active sensors could give away his position. So he left his eyes unfocused, relying on their natural motion-detection ability.

  “Contact. Blue-4 going firm.” The warning came from Mbizi Sesay. Arun had been good friends with Bizzy, close enough to hear the worry beneath his seemingly calm voice. “Eighteen hostiles bearing 350. Range 120 meters.” Bizzy’s voice cut off but that didn’t mean he was dead. By broadcasting his warning, he’d also revealed his location underneath the ship. Bizzy could be moving to a new position, the g-forces unleashed squeezing off his ability to speak.

  Alice’s voice came over the command channel. “Gold-4 peel left. Gold-5 peel right. Enfilade hostiles in contact with Blue-4.”

  The temptation to turn and watch the action threatened to wrench Arun’s head around, but he had his orders and they hadn’t changed. Checking what was going on elsewhere in the battle was Madge’s responsibility. Instead, he settled back into a watchful gaze. He’d spent countless hours in this state playing stealthsuit cat and mouse games set up between rival squads. That was good. That was routine, and routine was something he could sink into and ignore the fighting that raged behind and beneath him.

  “Gold Command has boarded,” said Alice. “Brandt has secured the upper two decks, and I’m forming up for attack on Target 1. Gold-3 follow. Gold-6 remain stealthed as reserve. Blue-6 maintain position. Let’s show those vets what we can do, Marines!”

  Not only was Alice still alive but she sounded like she was having fun. That was a good sign. ‘Target 1’ was the bridge. Even though the Corps’ alien enemies weren’t expected to understand the human language, and even though battlesuit comms had encryption beyond the ability of human crypto-experts to explain, much less decrypt, the Jotuns insisted that Marines used code words for tactical objectives.

  Arun’s confidence lifted still further when Bizzy reported over the command channel that the enemy counter-attack had been repulsed with minimal casualties.

  Arun sensed victory, but only for a few seconds. Down there… in the shield generator array… he thought he saw movement.

  He strained his eyes trying to tell whether this was an attack, but he couldn’t be sure. He had to get nearer.

  To remain in stealth mode, albeit simulated, his suit could only move slowly. Arun approached the suspicious area as fast as he dared, snapping a flash-bomb off the equipment patch on his hip, and slotting it into the launcher beneath his carbine.

  There was something there all right.

  Directly below him, hatches had opened in the hull, spilling hostiles into the cover of the shield array generators. The enemy were scurrying spider-like training bots, the size of a human child but with lasers attached to two of their limbs. A fist-sized plate was grafted onto the central ‘body’ of the robots. If you hit that with your laser, the robot would deactivate — a combat casualty.

  Already he could see dozens. More were spilling out by the second, forming up ready to rush the boarding party. The counter-attack on Bizzy had been a feint intended to commit the cadets’ reserves.

  Should he warn the others? He readied his carbine to fire the flash-bomb at the bots, but he daren’t reveal his presence by broadcasting a warning as Bizzy had done. Instead he asked Barney to find a tight-beam comms route. Although he could turn around and see Springer, the stealth training protocol meant Barney pretended she was invi
sible. The AI simulated firing tight-beam pings at the probable location of his comrades, hoping to strike it lucky before being noticed by the enemy.

  “Hold fire, McEwan. Activate LBNet.” Madge had found him first, bouncing her order off Springer’s suit.

  The instant Arun switched to Local Battle Net, Barney changed Arun’s visor to tactical-display mode, adding five blue dots to indicate the positions of his section comrades. Delta Section should have seven other cadets: Brandt had been promoted out, and it looked like Zug hadn’t made it through point defense.

  LBNet continuously connected everyone in the team using tight-beam links. It was risky, but more secure than broadcasting on Wide Battle Net. With the suit AIs now able to share what their wearers could see, and add what the AIs suspected, scores of enemy red dots erupted like an infestation over the terrain below.

  “Hey, Springer,” Arun called out. “Join me at the hatch? We can drop grenades in and then take the bots from the rear.”

  “Negative,” Madge replied. “Assigning orders.”

  As Barney sketched an outline of Madge’s intentions, Arun scooted off to comply, while Madge used words to duplicate her orders.

  The shield generator array was a funnel aimed at the boarding point, but the funnel drained between a pair of shield array projectors. The shield rails that charged the interstellar medium fed out of these 30 meter diameter tubes, which were pointed forward, angled toward the starboard and port bows. Each of the two Delta Section fire teams would take a position on top of a shield projector. When the bots passed below, the Gold fire teams at the boarding point would pin them down, and then Delta Section would rake the bots with flanking fire.

  It was obvious, though he hadn’t seen it.

  And that was why Madge was section leader.

  By the time Arun was in position, lying prone atop the starboard shield projector, and using the ridge that ran along its crest as cover, Barney was telling him the bots were already beginning to swarm on the other side of the projector.

  The temptation to stick his head over the ridge to see for himself was powerful, but the fear of screwing up the operation was greater. He glanced to either side. Osman and Springer had rolled onto their sides, checking their flanks for bots. They appeared calm, but of course it was impossible to be sure in their ACE-2/T training suits. He turned back to face the enemy. Blue dots showed Madge, Del-Marie and Cristina on the reverse slope of the other projector — the two fire teams keeping in touch by means of signal repeaters slapped over the ridges.