Human Legion: Marine Cadet Part 25

It was time, he decided, to raise the matter that he dreaded most.

"Look, Hortez. I landed you in the drent because I frakked up in that exercise with the Trogs. I'm so sorry. I never knew it would be so bad here."

"Stow it, McEwan," replied Hortez. "You tried apologizing before. Don't try again."

"Fair enough. But I'm going to do more than say sorry. I'm going to ask our new company staff sergeant Bryant to have me swap places with you. It should be me festering in this h.e.l.lhole with those s.a.d.i.s.tic monkeys."

Hortez glared at Arun who had to look away. Arun could look the Hardits in the eye, but not his friend whom he'd let down so badly.

"Do you really think this Bryant would swap us?"

"Probably not," admitted Arun. "But I don't know that for sure. I can always try."

"Make sure you do," said Hortez. He froze, as if distracted.

"Get off the road," shouted Madge. "Now!"

Arun scrambled down the bank but lost his footing, rolling down and crashing into the waist-high wheat stalks. He turned to see what had spooked Madge. In the distance, back up the way they'd come, they saw a dust cloud and heard a rhythmic pounding. They didn't need image enhancers to know what that was: an approaching squad of Marines, thundering toward them at over 30mph.

He heard a cry of frustration and noticed Springer struggling with her trolley. She'd activated hover mode and was trying to guide the trolley down the bank.

Except the load was too heavy.

Springer was pulling back on the handles, trying to slow its fall, but all she managed was to chase it down the bank.

Arun got to his feet, and rushed into the path of the trolley, hoping to push from the front, but its momentum was too great. The load knocked him flying, forcing Arun to roll away desperately, only inches from being crushed.

The trolley righted itself and came to a stop, hovering cheerfully a meter off the ground as if nothing was the matter. The wooden crate that had been on top snapped its straps and kept going, tumbling over once, twice, three times, screaming as the wood splintered and tore at its fastenings.

"Are you all right?" Arun helped Springer to her feet.

"I'm not hurt, Arun. But my crate..."

The crate had come to rest with one corner buried deeply into the soft soil, and half its sides shattered.

Arun glanced at the onrushing Marines. They looked like a wavefront of a silver sea, about to crash upon them like a tsunami. The pure gold color of their ACE-2 battlesuits was distinctive enough that Arun had no need to see insignia close up. These were veterans of the 420th, led by two Jotun officers. To deviate around the abandoned hover-trolleys would be far beneath their regimental dignity. Any second now the tsunami would break over their abandoned cargo.

The Hardits had given them a simple task, and they had already failed.

The Jotun officers a captain and a major showed no signs of noticing the trolleys blocking their way. Cantering like centaurs on four of their six legs, ma.s.sive crested heads held high, they leaped cleanly over the first obstacle without breaking stride. As their trajectory brought them down onto the second trolley, they threw their front limbs in front of them. Their hands morphed, their armored gauntlets matching every change. What had been human-like five fingers and an opposable thumb, thinned, lengthened and bifurcated repeatedly. They now looked more like waving, long-tendriled fronds held out to either side.

The rubbery fronds. .h.i.t the cargo crate, pressing down against the wood like organic springs. The tension in their hands sprang back, propelling the aliens cleanly over the second trolley and the third too.

As the major and captain cantered away, a brace of senior human sergeants reached the obstruction. Running at this speed in powered armor was a skill the G-2 cadets of Arun's year had yet to master. When they had been out here as novices in their training armor, the motion had been more of a lope than a run. Not only were these Marines running, but the sergeants followed their officers' example and tried to leap over the abandoned trolleys.

Battlesuit AIs interpreted their wearer's intentions, amplifying human muscle power many-fold. The Marines soared over the first trolley like sh.e.l.ls from a howitzer.

Out in the emptiness of s.p.a.ce, the battlesuits could speed through a battlefield at crushing velocities. The gravity well of a planet enfeebled the propulsion units in the suits so that their flight capability was reduced to a short hop, such as over a tank.

But the officers hadn't activated their suits' flight capability and so neither could the humans who followed. They used augmented muscle power alone.

As the next rank of Marines jumped into the sky, the sergeants began to fall. The air pushed back against their bulky shapes, and the planet's gravity grabbed at the legs of their heavy armor.

Four hundred pounds of bone, muscle and poly-ceramalloy battlesuit bore down on the middle cargo crate through the armored ball of the sergeant's foot. Arun heard the crack and whine of splintering wood, but the wooden box was strong. It held.

For now.

Arun's brain had been trained and engineered to estimate troop numbers. Around five hundred Marines three companies of veterans were yet to clear the abandoned carts, and each one would follow their officers' example and go through rather than around.

They watched as Marines flashed past relentlessly, the smart surfaces of their battlesuits, which could make them invisible when stealthed in s.p.a.ce, were now set to shine in regimental gold, with company markings proudly displayed on helmets and squad markings on the knee segments. Streamers tied to knees and elbows flew behind in their slipstream. These were smartfabric ribbons of pulsating color that no cadet or Marine in the 412th would be seen dead in. At least not on a planet's surface where these streamers were no more than a gaudy affectation.

Wearing ribbons in void combat was a different matter entirely; even the 412th trained for that. Inertia would spool out enormous ribbons of reflective and radar hard material behind Marines maneuvering through the vacuum. The possibility of becoming entangled with your squadmates' ribbons was a terror balanced, in theory, by the confusion they sowed in enemy targeting systems.

The Marines might only be from the 420th, but they still looked magnificent.

"Does the sight make you proud?" asked Hortez who had been watching Arun.

His companions looked at each other uneasily.

"I used to dream of being one of them," Hortez continued. "Of earning my own personal device to wear on the thigh of my suit. A bolt of lightning perhaps, or a n.o.ble hart. I wanted to belong. I used to think that was my inevitable destiny, an inalienable right. But only the best earn the right to be a Marine. Not everyone makes the grade."

"Stop it!" said Springer. "Don't you ever feel sorry for yourself. I know you're better than that. It's only bad luck that brought you here. You still deserve to be one of them." She pointed at the Marines clearing the abandoned carts.

"Sorry," replied Hortez. "You're right. But the end result is still the same. I didn't make it. There's no way back."

"I never bought into the whole Marine mythos," said Arun, wincing when a boot finally stove in the middle crate. "I'm not saying you're better off as you are, man, but life for a Marine isn't all shiny armor and the comforting heft of an SA-71. The reality is that you get stuffed into a cryo box and stored in a ship's hold. If you're lucky, then you might survive long enough to be awoken just in time to die in battle."

Arun was not a great liar. No one believed him. Even the steady thumping beat of armored feet pounding the ground sounded like the accelerated heartbeat of a super-being. The sight of the Marines, the hammering thump of their boots and faint whine of the armor muscle-amplification, even the sweaty smell vented from the exhaust outlets: everything about them filled his heart with pride.

"There's no shame buying into the dream of becoming one of them," said Hortez gently. "I did. But even if you think pride in your Marine unit is just macho dung, or Jotun brainwashing, it's still better to die young as one of them than live a lifetime as an Aux. Even if it's a short lifetime."

Arun grimaced. What could they say? Fate had dealt Hortez a hand of utter drent and they all knew it. "If I can, man, I'll get you out," he said. "I don't know how but I'll try."

Arun looked at Hortez, trying to let the sincerity show in his face, but his friend stared back with flinty disdain.

"I don't mean asking Bryant to swap us around," Arun added. "Sure, I will do that, but I don't hold up hope. I mean something new. Something... something I haven't thought of yet."

Hortez's stare held its scorn for a few more seconds before crumpling into laughter. "Arun McEwan, you sure are something! If anyone else had told me that, I'd have spat in their face. To give a hopeless man a false reason to hope that's about the cruelest thing possible in an unbearably cruel universe. But you... Things happen around you, McEwan. Like you're blessed or something." Hortez stilled his laughter and regarded Arun seriously.

Arun could see a stiffening of confidence in his friend's face, in the squaring of his stance.

"I'll hook all my remaining hope onto your rising star," said Hortez. "It's like Majanita said last night. If anyone can figure out a way to help me, it's you."

Arun patted him on back. "Yeah, man! We'll do it."

For a moment, Arun thought the group was going to whoop and dance. Inwardly, though, the weight of Hortez's expectation was another burden dragging Arun to his knees. All he wanted to do was be one of the team. The half of the planet who didn't wish him dead seemed to be queuing up to label him as some kind of savior, a hero. Now he'd added Hortez to that list.

He sighed. His one great talent was for vulleying up friendships, and what was heroic about that? Those gleaming warriors, flashing by at precisely regular intervals with streamers flying in their own slipstream the men and women who were reducing their cargo to a pile of splinters and tortured metal they were the heroes.

Not him.

Tranquility's tactical Marine regiments had a nominal strength of 12 field and 8 cadet battalions, each organized into 24 companies of 6 squads plus command and heavy weapons sections. Each Marine weighed an average of 250 pounds of human meat packed into a 150 pounds of battlesuit armor, life support, motors, and powered exoskeleton.

In all, three companies stormed by, continuing on their way like a lightning bolt in slow motion, giving Team Beta no more acknowledgment than any other bolt of lightning would. What the friends had seen was probably the entirety of the 420th's veteran force that was stationed on Tranquility and awake, rather than stored in freezer pods deep in the bowels of Detroit.

It was display of strength and discipline strong enough to stir Arun's reluctant heart... and pulverize the middle cargo box and the trolley that had carried it. The other two loads on the path were damaged too: their wooden crates broken and their contents scattered.

The middle trolley was shattered far past the possibility of repair. The flat loading panel now sunken into the path was the only piece of the trolley still recognizable. Washers and bolts of metal and plastic had scattered like shrapnel, adding to the stones used by the engineers to construct the path. Amazingly, some of the boxes carried in the middle trolley were still intact.

Arun joined the rest of Team Beta in trying to salvage something from the mess, throwing cargo box shards, plastic fragments and twisted metal away from the path and onto the fields to either side. As they cleared the debris, they revealed more of the plain black boxes. None of them looked damaged.

Arun picked one up. It had a handle and indentations along its side, just like the kind of ammo case he was used to. It probably was the same design. Durable containers were humble but vital engineering patterns, so it made sense to reuse the same design for many purposes. A lock prevented him from getting inside so he gave it an exploratory shake instead. Even if the box was strong, he expected the shattered remains of its contents to rattle, but he heard nothing. Perhaps the load was okay after all.

The yellow writing stenciled onto the plain black box was written in an alien script. He had no idea what was inside. "Hey, what do you reckon these are?" he asked.

"Something illicit," replied Hortez. "Gemstones, narcotics, the colonel's art collection. Or maybe saucy Hardit lingerie."

Arun laughed. "No. I reckon it's Hardit underwear all right, but it's clean. Anything that didn't stink would be deviant fetish clothing to those filthy monkeys."

"Shut up!"

"What's the matter, Springer?" Arun asked "I know what's in them."

"What?"

"See for yourself."

Arun followed Springer's pointing finger to where Madge had taken the lid off one of the plain dark boxes. The walls of the box were undamaged but the lock hinges on the lid had shattered, allowing Madge to slide off the lid.

Inside were plasma rifles, SA-71 a.s.sault carbines, even a flenser cannon lying on a bed of matte black squares. He'd seen squares like that before: composite armor plates on a hovertank.

Cold fear overcame the warm sun and sent shivers down Arun's spine. Until that moment he had secretly believed against all realistic expectation that he would survive to shrug off the week as his Aux Adventure.

But now?

This changed everything.

He was part of a gun smuggling operation!

Were the Hardits the traitors? With everything else falling to drent, Arun had nearly forgotten about Pedro's hints: that someone was drugging the cadets.

He stared at one of the ammo carousels neatly stacked, ready to be slotted into an SA-71 and fired at at what? at Marines?

"This all fits," Arun said to himself. Then he raised his voice and announced: "There's something I need to tell you..."

"Traitors?" Madge's way of getting her head around Arun's tale of drugging and traitors was to storm up and down, looking like she wanted to smack something.

Arun looked to Hortez and Springer for support, but they were too lost in thought. "Corporal, don't you think we've all been acting strangely recently?" he called out to Madge.

She stopped and stared at Arun. He couldn't see her eyes properly through the stretched fabric of her worker's hat. But he imagined contempt there. "What has changed, McEwan, is that we're growing into Marines and you are not, and you never will do. Want to know why? Because you're a coward. You screwed up. You aren't as popular as you were. So you've invented this fantasy to justify why you're being pushed to the edge of the team."

"But it all makes sense," Arun protested.

"Does it? What evidence do you have?"

Arun bit his lip.

"There. See? You've nothing."

"If I'm right, then the drugs will wear off. The Hardits won't be keeping up our supply. We'll start to act differently any day now."

"Enough chitter-chatter!" Madge commanded. "This topic is closed. Permanently. We've a job to do. Get to it!"

In grim silence they set about salvaging what they could of the cargo, stacking it on the three surviving hover-trolleys. They ripped off the damaged lids of the wooden crates but many of the crates still had sides intact enough to layer the additional contents within.

It was heavy work and the sun blazing down punished them for their lack of drink. Hortez took it worse, wilting by the minute, until Madge told him to rest.

"No need, I'm okay," Hortez replied.

"You are not and you know it," said Madge. "Neither are you, McEwan. I think that beating took more out of you than you knew. Go keep Hortez company, out of our way."

"What? But corporal, I'm-" Arun was about to remonstrate further when Springer stomped on his foot.

He frowned a question at her.

"It's a testosterone thing, dummy," she whispered. "Hortez is weak but he won't want to admit that in front of girls. You're his cover. I told you we would be better off with single-s.e.x units. Prove me wrong."

The situation smelled false. Madge had no formal authority over Hortez, but she could browbeat him into doing whatever she wanted. The girls were up to something but any thought of protesting was cut short by a kick from Springer.

"Hortez needs rest," she said. "Do this for him."

Arun felt sure that when the time came to go into battle as a Marine, he would charge fearlessly at an enemy defensive position, gun blazing. But against the combined forces of Springer and Madge, he knew he was beaten.

He shrugged. Hortez allowed Arun to lead him away to sit on the bank with their backs to the sun, facing away from the girls.

They sat in silence but the noises of hard work coming from behind made him feel guilty, so Arun started up the conversation no one had yet dared to broach.

"Do you think we should report the guns?"

Hortez shook his head. "Negative. Feels like we've caught them red handed, doesn't it? But we haven't. By the time we found someone to listen to us, the Hardits will have covered up any evidence. The only thing we'll be able to prove will be to the Hardits. We'll convince them that we need to be murdered to stop us talking."

"We could take some of the guns out and hide them."