She didn’t answer.
“You’ve got a lot of potential, and I don’t just mean as a Marine.” I found my hands clenching into fists at my sides. “You could be a hell of a woman, probably already are. Hell, you’ve already impressed me, and I’ve only known you for a few hours now. That isn’t easy for me to say, given that I sort of fucking hate you.”
“It's mutual,” she muttered.
I didn’t need this right now. None of us did. We had a mission. Sure, the mission had changed, and we were about to head deep into this cave, which yes, was something I absolutely had no interest in doing. That didn’t matter though.
What mattered was surviving this goddamned mission, and to do that, we needed to be on the same damned page. I was at a disadvantage. Artemis Squad knew each other intimately. They knew what they were capable of and what their strengths were. What was more, they trusted each other.
I might have just gotten saved by Mina from certain death, but I didn’t have their trust. I hadn’t earned it the way she had and this infighting, this female pissing contest I was witnessing, wasn’t going to make any of it better. I needed to be sure I could trust these women, and more than that, they needed to know they could trust me.
So, instead of telling Claire she was being unreasonable and completely ridiculous at a time when we definitely didn’t need that from her, I swallowed my pride and did what I thought would work best to get me out of the ‘hated’ zone I seemed to be in.
I gave in.
“You have a point.” I looked over at Mina, hoping she could see the motive behind my eyes before I turned back to Claire. “You’re a Marine, just like the rest of us.” I looked over at Jill. “Both of you are, and you’ll be treated as such. Doesn’t mean you don’t have to take orders from your commanding officer, but I’m not her.”
I shrugged. “In fact, I’m not anything in terms of this squad. You know the rules. I have no jurisdiction outside any squad I wasn’t handed. You could, for all intents and purposes, toss me out of this cave and go on about your business. You’d have done nothing blatantly illegal.”
“You know I’m not going to do that,” Claire scoffed, though there was some understanding finally seeping into her eyes. “I’m not saying I don’t have anything to learn from you. I’m sure I do. Hell, I’ve learned more than a lot from Mina, and people say you’re almost as good as her.”
“I take issue with the use of the term almost, but I appreciate it,” I said, nodding firmly. “And I’m not entirely sure I’m done learning yet either. So, while we’re here and forced together by circumstance, maybe we all can do our best to learn from each other.”
Claire nodded at me tersely, then looked to the ground.
“If that’s finished,” Mina said, shaking her head. “Can we get back to the issue at hand? Judging by these coordinates, they want us to venture deep into this cave, which means we’re about to deal with some of the most dangerous things I can even think of.” She sighed. “Angry mothers.”
“Mothers?” Jill asked, looking from me to Mina and back again.
“Only one reason the Alliance would want us darting off our path and into a cave,” I said. “They found something there, and the only things that are in these kinds of caves worth anything to those people are—”
“Oh God.” Jill slumped against the wall. “Eggs. We’re going after a nest of Acburian eggs, aren’t we?”
She looked up at me, suddenly aware of how dangerous this really was going to be and ran a hand through her violet hair. “Things are about to get sticky. I hate sticky.”
23
I took a deep breath and studied the women around me, taking stock of just who they were and what they had to offer, as I saw it anyway.
Mina was easy. She was every bit as accomplished as I was, a fierce woman with enough fire in her eyes and steel around her heart to charge up any mountain or stare down any insect. Better than that, I didn’t have to worry about her. Unlike my own ill-fated crew for this mission or even, to a lesser extent, the rest of the Artemis Squad, I trusted Mina could take care of herself. She was smart and seasoned enough to know what needed to be done, and she was impressive enough to know how to do it.
One looked at her lithe and toned body told me she took this every bit as seriously as I did. Her form was a thing of beauty and, more than that, a work of function. She had trained long and hard so all the weak spots on her physique had been honed into a perfect weapon. She caught me looking at her, at the way her suit hugged the curve of her hips. Maybe it was the fact that we had just been through so much together, or maybe it was just that I was too damn tired, but I didn’t turn away.
Her eyes locked onto mine, dragging them up from the tempting shape of her torso over the hills of her breasts and right to her face. She blinked at me wordlessly for a moment and turned away.
The motion drew my eyes to Claire. She was a red-haired firecracker with energy to spare. She was inspecting the whip I’d convinced her to buy; wrapping it around her hand and pulling it tightly. If she hadn’t been wearing her armor, it would have torn her fingers off. She bit her bottom lip as she looked the thing over, presumably satisfied with its size. A thought crossed my mind, a very different one about whips, but I pushed it aside.
Finally, there was Jill. Purple-haired, astute, and eager to please, she was the perfect Marine on paper. I hoped she had it in her to get down and dirty when the chips were down. That was the thing I had found more often than not. People who follow the rules have a hard time learning not to and sometimes breaking from what you think is right is the only thing that will keep you alive.
“We need to move,” I said, swallowing hard and turning my attention back to Mina.
She blinked at me, as if she was purging herself of the moment we’d just shared. Instantly, the steel was back up, the commander was back in charge.
“You don’t watch your clock, do you?” she asked, shaking her head at me.
“Goddamn it,” I muttered, realizing what she was talking about.
Internal clocks were a way for the Alliance to safeguard themselves against legal blowback should a soldier go into battle too tired or without enough rest or sustenance. From the instant our feet touch down on an alien planet, a clock starts ticking. We have twelve hours to get what we need to get. Anything beyond that is deemed too aggressive a schedule. To enforce that rule, our suits are placed on timers.
Once the clock runs out, the suit stops functioning for a minimum of three hours, the time allotted by the Council for Human Health and Development as the least amount of rest a body can get and still be able to function. There are exceptions, of course. If you are in a dangerous or time-sensitive situation when the timer gave out, the suit would still work and, if you found yourself attacked or otherwise endangered during the rest period, the suit would roar back to life as well.
Outside of that, you could try every trick in the book, and the damned thing wouldn’t restart.
Since all of us landed on this moon at the same time, it made sense that our timers were synced up. Given what Mina had just said, I had to imagine they were running out.
I pulled the clock into my line of site. It had run down to twenty minutes, not nearly enough time to complete our mission.
“I figured the top of the hill would serve as a good spot,” Mina explained, shrugging after waiting just long enough for me to look at the timer. “We would have been able to see for miles in any direction from there.” She looked back and forth. “As it is, we’re kind of sitting ducks here.”
“No, we’re not,” I answered. “Annabelle, I need cyber-netting on the entrance to this cave as well as the far end leading off into the cavern.”
“Affirmative,” she answered in my ear.
“Make it tight. I don’t want anything getting through.”
“Affirmative,” she related.
“You have cyber-netting?” Mina asked, actually sounding a little impressed.
“You ca
n never be too careful.”
Blue, web-like netting sprung from either of my armored sleeves. It covered the entrance and the mouth of the cavern, giving us a moderately sized space to rest in that would be reasonably safe. The stuff was, like so much of our gear, nanite-made and pretty durable, as well as being wirelessly connected to my band. If something punched through, I’d get an alert about it.
“There are a few flues to duck into,” I said, motioning to three separated ducts in the interior cave wall. “You three can stay in either of those. I’ll keep a watch on things out here.”
“The netting won’t stop the wind, Mark,” Mina pointed out. “You’ll catch your death out here. The girls will stay together. You can have your own space, though I appreciate the gesture.” She nodded at me before looking over at the girls. “You heard him. We have three hours. Get all the rest you can.”
I nodded, moving to my flue. After I settled down, I lay there for a long time after that, a single light from my suit (the only thing on it that still worked) illuminating my tiny cavern room.
Thankfully, I had opted for upgraded camping gear and, before Annabelle cut me off, I pulled out an inflatable mattress and thick blanket. I lay wrapped in it, with my suit retracted into the small metal emblem that hung in a pendant around my neck.
I had stripped my clothes off too, right down to my lucky duck-print boxers. Mina might have been concerned about me freezing to death, but I’d always slept hot, even since I was a kid. That wasn’t going to change now. Even if it did, my suit would deploy to shield my body from the elements if it deemed my core temperature had dropped too low.
My mind was racing as I looked up at the cavern ceiling, thinking about eggs, bugs, and Billy Langham. This was supposed to be in and out. It was supposed to be an easy mission, and now it had turned into something else entirely. Who knew what the future would bring at this point?
“You up?” a hushed voice said from the opening in the flue.
My body tensed as I lurched forward, sitting up in bed.
“I’m sorry,” the voice said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
Looking forward, I saw in the glow of my suit light, Claire standing at the duct entrance. She was wearing a black t-shirt that hung just past her thighs and nothing else, save for her suit, also retracted into an emblem on her neck. Her red hair hung over her left shoulder, and her now dormant whip was still balled around her right hand.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, swallowing hard.
“I couldn’t sleep.” Not bothering to ask if she could enter, she made her way toward the foot of my mattress. “I didn’t put in for the camping gear. Trying to save my coins and all. I have to share with Jill, and that girl is a cover hog if I ever saw one.”
I chuckled to myself. “I’m sorry to hear that. I’d offer to share, but—”
“Would you?” she asked, narrowing her eyes at me. “Because, the way I see it, you were pretty hard on me out there before.” She bit her lip again. “You really let me have it.”
“I was just trying to make a point.” I was unsure of where she was going with this and a little hypnotized by the expanse of milky white skin that was her legs.
“You succeeded. How would you like it if I did that to you?” She settled right at the foot of my bed.
“If you made a point?”
“If I let you have it?” she corrected, her wire whip unspooling from her hand and hanging in the air in front of me like a threat. No, not like a threat, like a promise. She lifted her left leg and placed it on my mattress. It dipped down just as her shirt rose. I caught a glimpse of red panties as she swung the whip gently back and forth in her hand.
“What’s going on here, Claire?” I asked, feeling my muscles tense under my blanket.
“You know, Jill’s not the only one who had a poster of you up on her wall growing up.” She smiled, her lower lip still pressed between her teeth.
“Is that right?” My heart sped up more than a little. “I got the impression you weren’t a fan.”
“Maybe I just didn’t want to admit how big a fan I really was. It’s hard to meet your heroes.”
“You didn’t have a problem meeting Mina,” I said, leaning forward even more and bridging the gap between us.
She was staring at me now. “Mina was different.”
“You didn’t have a poster of her on your wall?”
“I did,” she answered. “I just didn’t kiss it every night before bed.”
With one sharp tug, she pulled the blanket off me, leaving me exposed in my boxers.
“I used to dream about you,” she said breathlessly, her chest heaving with each word.
“What did you dream about?” I asked, close enough to her now to feel her breath on my face.
“Let me show you.” She ran her hands through my hair while her lips pressed into mine. She flicked at the whip, wrapping it around my arm. If it had been powered, well, I wouldn’t have had an arm anymore. In this instance, though…
“No,” I said gruffly, pulling the whip off and throwing it against the cave wall. “I already told you.” Grabbing her forcefully, I turned her onto her back and pushed my body against hers. “I’m in charge here.”
Then she kissed me again.
24
“Wake up!” Mina’s voice, boomed through the cave, startling me awake. My body tensed, my first thought being of Claire lying beside me.
I was a grown man. I didn’t need to justify my actions in the bedroom to anyone, even if that bedroom was a cave in the middle of an alien moon, and certainly, I owed Mina John no explanation about what I did during my off hours. Still, I would have been fooling myself if I didn’t admit that sexual activity between Marines in the field, while not expressly forbidden, could prove to be quite sticky.
Mina probably knew that. In fact, it was probably part of the reason why she only worked with women. No pesky men around to go poking around the hen house and stirring up trouble. I guess I screwed that up.
As my eyes flew open, I found the spot next to me where Claire had just been lying, all naked and satisfied, to be completely empty. Looking up, I saw she was standing behind Mina, right next to Jill, suited up and ready for action.
My eyes met hers. Instead of seeing a newfound connection beneath them, I found the same barely disguised disdain she’d had before jumping in my bed and having her way with me.
“Has it been three hours already?” I asked, a little taken aback by Claire’s lack of transformation after last night.
“It’s been a little over that.” Mina looked me up and down as I sat up on my mattress. “I’ve been looking over the maps we were given, trying to come up with a better pathway to our objective.”
“And?”
“And I’m not having this conversation with you until you’re wearing pants,” she answered, her eyes dragging over me.
Looking down, I saw that, while I was thankfully wearing my boxers, Claire must have pulled the blanket off of me on her way out because it lay on the cave floor, leaving me exposed.
Mina blinked at me, her eyes trained on me before she continued. “Get your clothes on and get out here. We’re already running late.”
With that, she turned and walked away. Claire turned too, not sparing me even the slightest look. Jill did though. Her eyes, as nervous as they were purple, lingered on me for a lot longer than was completely necessary. It sent a nervous tick through me.
“Hope you had a good night,” she said in a hushed whisper before walking away herself.
As I watched her go, I wondered what Jill knew, but decided I didn’t much care. Focusing on her right now would be nothing but trouble, and given that I was on a bug-infested moon, that was the last thing I needed.
I dressed quickly and moved toward the mouth of the cave as my suit revved to life. Mina and the girls were out in the main pathway of the cave waiting for me.
“Glad you made it quick,” Mina said, nodding to me. “Now get your
netting and let’s go.”
“On it,” I said, collecting my netting balls. They had served us well seeing as how nothing had snuck in to kill us in our sleep. “You find anything?”
“The path the Alliance has us going down is shorter, but it strikes me as being a bit more dangerous,” she said, tapping her band twice, the sign of sending a message.
“Message request from Mina John,” Annabelle said.
I nodded my consent to have the message shown to me. A map appeared in my line of sight. Notes that Mina had made showing a better path were scribbled across it. Beside the map, was a message.
What I say here isn’t to be spoken aloud. The pathway the Alliance has us going down is rife with trouble, none of which I can’t handle. There are some pretty intense closed in spaces along the way. That’s to be expected from caves, but I’m afraid Jill doesn’t work too well with them. She’d slow us down, even on a shorter path. She’ll try to be a hero if we bring this up to her. She’ll assure us she can handle it, and she’ll be convincing. I know her though. We’re better off taking the long way around if it means we don’t have to deal with her claustrophobia. I need you to back me up on this.
I looked up at Mina and had a couple of thoughts at once. I had already watched Jill nearly come apart when our helmets came off, and now I was learning she had a crippling fear of enclosed spaces. These sorts of things were what made weak Marines. That, coupled with Claire’s problems with authority, led me to a strange conclusion. Mina had picked these girls herself, handpicked them to be part of a permanent team. Why would she choose two Marines with such obvious problems, with such inopportune limitations?
Not that any of that mattered. Mina asked me for something and, by God, I was going to oblige. This was her team, and if she thought a new route was for the best, I was going to go along with it.
“See what I mean?” she asked, blinking at me.
Doomed Space Marine: A Space Adventure (Bug Wars Book 1) Page 15
