Marine Cadet (The Human Legion Book 1)

by Tim C. Taylor

  “I’m stupid, sergeant. Too dumb to realize I was in a battle.”

  Gupta rocked back on his heels, as satisfied as he was likely to get any time soon. “That’s the correct answer. And stupid Marines are only one iota better than cowardly ones. Idiots get their squad killed. Today is your first real battle, McEwan. I will be watching you. If you show cowardice or stupidity, I will know. Understood?”

  “Yes, sergeant.”

  Gupta considered Arun for a few moments. “Eyes front,” he snapped. Then in a quieter voice he added: “Remember that no matter what you are called to do, whatever horrors you witness, you do it for the Marines. Most of all, we’re fighting for Earth. Got it?”

  “Yes, sergeant.”

  In perfect step, Gupta marched off to the front of Blue Squad, turned on his heels and faced his cadets. And waited with the rest of them.

  Over the coming minutes, Arun could sense small groups of people from the condemned battalions march to the front and return a little later. He daren’t get a good look after Gupta’s grilling. How had Gupta seen what he was up to? Was it a veteran’s sixth sense? Was he under invisible surveillance? Maybe it was just bad luck and his guilty face had given him away. Until he found out, he decided to act as if Gupta really did have eyes in the back of his head.

  Then it was Blue Squad’s turn. At a command barked by Gupta, they filed out in a neat column and followed him up to the platform. He thought back to that bawling out in Little Scar’s office and realized he was being filmed too. He pushed back his shoulders, squared his jaw, and marched with as much dignity as he could muster.

  Sergeant Bissinger stood alone on a stone platform raised about fifteen meters above the parade ground floor. It was a hexagon twenty meters across that had been carved out of the rock. Or rather, left behind when the parade ground had been carved. In front of the hexagon was a polished metal drum, and alongside, what appeared to be the kind of armory cabinet that was scattered around the hab-disks.

  Sergeant Gupta ordered the squad to halt. Then he separated off ten cadets and told them what to do. Arun wasn’t in that first group. He got to watch first.

  The picked cadets each put their hands into a hole cut into one end of the drum. They lined up, gripping something in their palms, but Arun couldn’t see what until Gupta ordered them to open up their hands.

  They were pebbles. Smooth round pebbles. Half were colored black and half white. The cadets replaced the pebbles in the drum. Those who’d picked white marched back to their place in the crowd. Those with black lined up in front of the armory cupboard.

  Sergeant Gupta opened the cupboard door. Inside was a firearm rack holding five SA-71s. It was just like what Arun was used to, except this cupboard had a feed from underneath. If these were the weapons of execution, they would need more than five. There must be a scores waiting out of sight to replace those taken from the cupboard.

  At Gupta’s signal, the five cadets each took a carbine in turn. At his next command, they armed them ready to fire. Four of them immediately returned their carbines to the cupboard, lined up again, and then marched back to the battalion’s place in the crowd.

  That left one cadet holding a carbine. Laban Caccamo, his name was, from Hecht’s Alpha Section. Dark hair, thick eyebrows, muscular, popular with the girls. In happier days as a novice, Caccamo joined in with any fun and games going around, especially if it involved playing pranks on his friends. He did what his training instructors told and he did it well, but not exceptionally.

  At that moment, Caccamo couldn’t help being exceptional. Every cadet in Detroit was watching him and what he would do.

  Caccamo snapped to attention, saluted, and then marched around to the back of the hexagon. He was lost to sight.

  Then it was Arun’s turn. His group of ten included all eight cadets from Delta Section plus Lewark and Bizzy from Beta Section.

  Gupta gave them instructions, but Arun wasn’t listening. He was hardly going to forget what he had just seen.

  By the time his turn came around to put his hand into the drum, he was convinced that it would be him joining Caccamo in the execution squad. He had to reach in deep to find it. The pebble he drew out was warm to the touch. Arun gripped it so tightly that he felt his hand bruise.

  He stood in a line facing the crowd. Cristina was to his left. Zug joined him on his right, the final cadet in that group of ten.

  Even without their helmets, the uprated vision of cadets in the farthest battalions let them see Arun’s plight. If they chose to. How many of them opted to see a defocused blur instead?

  “Show your hands!” ordered Sergeant Gupta.

  The cadets each raised a hand in front of them, palm up, and opened their fingers.

  Arun didn’t feel fear as his hand opened to reveal the color of his stone; he just felt numb. Sure enough, his stone was black. He quickly glanced around him. Zug had a black pebble too. Cristina’s was white.

  The five cadets with white stones wheeled right in readiness to march away. Cristina whispered hurriedly to him. “If you do it now, you’ll not spend the next two years fearing what it might be like.”

  Because I will already be dammed? He did not dare to speak the words in his mind. Cristina’s words were no comfort but the warmth of sentiment was. He couldn’t imagine the males in his squad offering any words of comfort.

  The line-up in front of the armory cabinet consisted of Arun, Zug, Springer, Lewark from Blue-4, and Del-Marie.

  Sergeant Gupta opened the armory cabinet and Arun picked out a carbine. He was so used to the heft of the SA-71 that it normally felt like an extension of his body, but this gun felt awkward. If the gun was a part of his body, then this was a part that had turned cancerous. It was sickening, alien. He wanted to throw it far away from him, but he steeled himself instead to hold it as if this were an everyday gunnery drill.

  And as with a gunnery drill, Arun flicked the switch to arm the carbine and read the ammo supply from the stock display. His gun was charged and an ammo bulb was in place, but the stock display was faulty.

  To his astonishment, only Del-Marie replaced his carbine in the cabinet and went back to his place in the crowd, presumably because it had no charge or no ammo. Arun and the other cadets picked for execution detail glanced at each other nervously. Then they gave smart salutes to Sergeant Gupta and marched around the back of the hexagon where the executioners were lined up, marshaled by a veteran Arun didn’t recognize.

  Every few minutes they were reinforced by blank-faced cadets, arriving in ones and twos, and occasionally in larger groups.

  As the selection played out over the next hour, it became clear that there was a strong random element to the selection. Sometimes all the carbines in the cabinet were armed and sometimes none. But over time the numbers began to average out and Arun saw the pattern that was emerging.

  There were around 175 cadets in a company, and the battalion had eight depot companies in the graduation year. That made 1,400 due to be Culled.

  The G-1 and G-2 years for 412/8 had another eight companies each, which made a pool of 2,800 executioners. The G-year cadets were to be decimated: one in ten would be executed. Arun had assumed that meant there would be 140 executioners picked, but instead there was to be one executioner for every member of the G-year. Did that mean they were all to be killed?

  They heard a hiss. From around the sides and top of the hexagon came clouds of lurid orange. The smell hit them. Arun swallowed hard, fought to keep control. Once he’d gotten over the shock of being gassed, it didn’t smell or taste so bad. And if it was toxic, it wasn’t so toxic that he could see anyone keel over. In fact it tasted of burned biscuits and almond flavoring.

  Human veterans advanced toward them from out of the billowing orange. For a moment, Arun thought it was his detail behind the hexagon that were to be killed, and the veterans their executioners. But the vets led them back around the hexagon and into the heart of the unfolding spectacle.

  Sergean
t Bissinger cleared her throat and addressed the parade. “Every world inhabited by our masters, the White Knights, is blessed by the Sacred Mists of Renewal, more commonly called the Flek. We cannot release the Flek here on Tranquility because it would kill us all. This orange vapor we release in emulation of the Flek as we…” She paused, just briefly but Arun caught it “…reach the climax of today’s ritual.”

  The release of the pseudo-Flek gas had been timed so that as Arun and the other executioners came around the hexagon they appeared to the waiting crowd to emerge from the mist at the moment Sergeant Bissinger finished her speech. The veterans led the execution detail to their places. They lined up facing the hexagon in 47 rows of 29 cadets. Each rank had a veteran to either side, veterans from other battalions.

  The mist cleared to reveal pale faces staring back at them. Twenty-nine cadets from the year of graduation stood with their backs to the hexagon, each a couple of paces apart. The other cadets due to be Culled awaited their fate a short distance to the left, already organized into ranks of 29.

  Twenty-nine executioners would fire their carbines at twenty-nine battalion comrades. Arun understood now why his stock readout wasn’t working. It was a cruel trick. All of the executioners would fire on a comrade, but only one in ten of the guns had live rounds. Arun had never fired a gun at another human being. That was just about to change. Whether he would kill his target was something no one would know until a split second after he fired.

  Arun was in the third row. At least he wouldn’t have to wait long to find out.

  The first rank of executioners moved forward a pace and spread out a little so that each faced their victim head on.

  Arun stared into the faces of the condemned, who awaited their fate with quiet dignity. In a few seconds, perhaps two or three would die. Maybe more or maybe less if this part of the Cull were as random as everything else. Most, though, would live.

  That still didn’t make this all right,

  Gupta had called this a battle. Arun wouldn’t flinch at going into battle with the possibility of ten percent casualties. But this wasn’t combat whatever Gupta might say. This was humans copying their betters, a foul mockery of an utterly alien ritual. Surely it was going along with killing your comrades that was stupid and cowardly, not questioning the murder?

  The front rank raised their guns.

  Was Arun prepared to defy orders? Was anyone here?

  The front-rank veterans faced in at their cadets, raised their arms… and then threw them downward.

  A ragged volley of shots rang out. Three of the condemned slumped to the bare rock of the parade ground, bloody chunks blasted out of their bodies.

  Dead before they hit the ground, thought Arun. Flenser rounds aimed at the heart. A quick death, but a messy one.

  He wondered why he was analyzing the execution in such cold detail, and then realized he was distracting himself from looking into the faces of the front rank of executioners as they filed back to the rear of the execution detail.

  He couldn’t look upon them because in a few moments he would have become one of them. He knew he wasn’t going to rebel. He didn’t have the will to disobey orders.

  When in doubt, obey orders. It was all he’d ever known. And if that meant he was a coward or stupid then so be it. What he did know for certain in that moment was that he was a slave.

  The 26 survivors of the Cull picked up the corpses of their fallen comrades and carried them round to the rear of the hexagon. Without delay they were replaced by the next group of 29 condemned cadets, stepping carefully so as not to slip on the gore-splatter rock.

  It felt dreamlike as Arun watched the front rank of executioners spread out to match their victims, raise their carbines and fire!

  This time, one cadet from 8-412 fell down dead.

  This time Arun did look at the executioners because something was wrong. The whole ritual was wrong, he thought, but now something had disrupted the smooth workings of the execution process.

  The veteran on the right of the front rank marched in front of her detail. She halted before one particular cadet. It was Olmer, one of the original members of Xin’s Scendence team.

  Olmer dropped her carbine. The sound of the ceramalloy-plastic blend striking the rock floor made Arun cringe. He’d never heard the sound of a dropped gun before.

  “I can’t do it!” Olmer screamed. “I can’t fire. You can’t make me.”

  If Olmer was panicking, the effect of this disruption on the cadet she had failed to shoot was even more dramatic. The condemned started to cry.

  The reason soon became clear.

  The veteran drew her sidearm from its holster and shot Olmer in the head. Then she turned to the condemned cadet who by now had slumped down onto her haunches, her head in her hands.

  The veteran shot her through the heart.

  Of everything he’d seen so far that day, the sight of the cadet slumped against the hexagon waiting her fate was the cruelest by far. If Olmer had obeyed orders, then the older cadet would probably still be alive. Everyone saw that drama unfold. Everyone got the message. Arun had never attended the Cull before, but he’d attended executions. It was always the same.

  Disobey orders and you will be killed.

  Breathe so much as a word of dissent against the White Knights, and it won’t be just you who is killed.

  Arun did what he always did. Suck up the anger and humiliation and stored it for the future. Everything on this planet was designed to control the slaves who lived here. But if he survived to graduate as a Marine, one day he would get away from Detroit.

  He made a vow. He swore it on the blood of his murdered cadet comrades, and on the hellish memories that their murderers would carry for the rest of their lives. Unlike Olmer, he would wait. Over time he would stack the chances in his favor. One day he would revenge all of humanity against the White Knights.

  And then he found himself lined up opposite a tall boy with hooded eyes staring back at him with quiet dignity. Arun recognized the face but didn’t know the name. Good, that made this a little easier.

  Arun raised his carbine and trained his sights on the cadet, aiming for his heart. Usually when he fired, he was wearing armor and had Barney to direct his aim. Manual aim was so much more personal and if he had to go through with this then Arun preferred to do it himself. To hide behind Barney would be disrespectful to the cadet, who was calmly looking at the business end of Arun’s carbine.

  I will revenge you, Arun promised the condemned cadet. He took off the safety, and heard the whine as the barrel charged in preparation to fling a shell at four times the speed of sound. The gun had already been set for the required distance of an execution shot.

  The Human Legion.

  Desperate to think of anything other than the horror all around him, Arun clutched at a speck of hope for the future. Gupta had talked of a Czech Legion that had survived impossible odds behind enemy lines, and Springer’s vision had hinted that it might be Arun’s fate to lead a modern-day equivalent. He’d been too busy trying to survive to think these treasonous thoughts. Now he could think of nothing else.

  One day, I swear, there will be a Human Legion. Arun made his vow in the privacy of his head and kept his mouth rigid. Even to mouth the words would be disastrous. The Human Legion will be a beacon of hope to all humankind, he continued silently, and I will play my part in that story. I promise you.

  Then the veteran gave the command and Arun squeezed his trigger.

  Flenser rounds consisted of an aerodynamic shell that broke apart about two meters before the target to release pairs of tiny blade-encrusted balls connected to each other by monofilament wire.

  They were designed to tear great holes through unarmored targets.

  Arun saw the results on human flesh. An micro-instant after he began to take in the sight, he heard the crack of the flenser casing open and the wet ripping sound as the casing’s contents struck home

  The cadet’s left chest disintegrat
ed, leaving behind scored bone, gristle, and tatters of bloodied cloth from the clean fatigues she had picked up from the laundry shelf a few hours earlier.

  Arun hadn’t shot her. This was the cadet alongside.

  An irritated whine and click came from Arun’s carbine as the gun tried repeatedly to select a round from the ammo carousel, but he knew it was empty. He’d been spared.

  He glanced up at the cadet that he had aimed at. He was looking back, not at Arun but at the person to Arun’s right.

  Arun followed his gaze and looked into Zug’s face. Zug who had just shot dead a cadet from his own battalion.

  Zug the Aloof, Arun had called him earlier.

  He wasn’t so calm now. He looked deathly pale. Then he started retching.

  Arun willed his old friend to keep it in.

  On the march to the rear of the execution detail Zug held it in about half way. Then he vomited, all over Arun’s back.

  Arun thought back to the boneheaded curse he had thrown at Zug in the shower earlier that morning.

  Sergeant Gupta had been right all along. Arun’s words in the shower had been those of a coward.

  And a stupid one too.

  Arun’s shame was complete.

  —— PART IV ——

  You’re all Marines

  Now

  Human Legion

  —— INFOPEDIA ——

  Terminology

  –MARINE

  The term, MARINE refers to both the soldiers and military organizations whose primary function is one or more of the following:

  * Close assault and boarding of space-faring vessels.

  * Defense of space-faring vessels against close assault and boarding.

  * Assault from space against the defended surface of a planet.

  The term is widely used to describe the relevant military forces of most political entities within the Trans-Species Union.

  The original Earthly military meaning of marine (water-borne rather than space-borne military forces) is now referred to as ‘littoral marine’ or ‘seaborne marine’. Referring to a member of such a unit as a ‘wet marine’ is a sure way to start a fight.