Human Legion: Marine Cadet Part 37

"Follow."

The Hummer shimmered over to the far end of the room, to the portion that had been hidden behind the curtain. If the blob had lips, Arun would have kissed them because there was a pressurized accommodation bubble. Through the clear plastic walls he could see a table and chair. There was a hotplate with steaming sauce and meat..."

"There is beer too," said the Hummer. "I am told humans enjoy beer - although you soldier-children are denied the experience. And roast meat and other palatable items. There is plenty of air, and an inflatable bedroll for you to sleep upon. When you are refreshed, tell the shuttle to return you home."

Arun knelt down to unseal the outer door of the airlock. As he started to crawl through to this one-man chow-hall, the alien spoke through Arun's helmet speaker.

"Human!"

"What?"

"Your oath. Will you swear to protect my species? To guard and cherish us?"

What was this, a marriage ceremony? He supposed it was. Perhaps this was the most important moment in human history since President Horden signed the Vancouver Accords that had bought Earth White Knight protection by selling human children into slavery. Maybe this was even more important than Vancouver.

Or maybe this was the rambling of an intelligent blob driven insane by loneliness.

He sighed. On the far side of the airlock was dinner. That was far more real than all this speculation.

"Well," said the Hummer. "Do you swear?"

"I do so swear."

The airlock flashed a blue light and slid opened. Arun was inside, lifting off his helmet and smelling rich aromas of meat and vegetables and gravy. He shrugged. Aliens! If only they were all such dumbchucks.

* Chapter 52 *

"Since your return from the auxiliary, you have not spoken of traitors and drugging."

Pedro was lounging in the lamp heat of his basking station, his face regarding Arun with expressionless eyes as always. While the insectoid's face was physically incapable of smiling, frowning, snarling and all those other human expressions, Arun was certain he was learning to pick up on the alien's other cues, from body posture, linguistic phrasing, those tireless antennae and who knew what else?

If he was reading the signs right, Pedro was saying that this was a topic they had buried for too long.

Arun shook his head. "Not going to happen, big guy. Too dangerous."

If only they had somewhere private to talk then Arun would dearly love to ask his friend for advice. But that first trip to the orbit could be put down to meeting on neutral ground. Meeting there regularly would look like plotting insurrection.

"And I'll tell you another thing that's dangerous," Arun said, "continuing these little chats without you opening up. You won't tell me anything about your military capability, your population numbers, or give me a detailed map of your nest. h.e.l.l, you refuse point blank to tell me what they did with Hortez when he hung up his microphone. Colonel Little Scar hasn't yet asked me to report back on my liaison mission. But he will. So far it's been all one-way: I give you info; you confuse the h.e.l.l outta me. You've helped me, for sure, but you've given me nothing that I can give to the colonel. You call yourself my friend, but on this you've let me down. Badly. Possibly fatally."

Pedro's legs were folded underneath. Each pair in sequence now pushed him up a little before dropping back down. The result looked as if Pedro were bobbing atop ocean swell.

Arun knew this meant the insect was delighted at Arun's words. Dongwit aliens! He'd been trying to tell off the Trog.

"I am not permitted to reveal certain secrets," said Pedro when he'd finished bobbing, "but I have nearly finished the compilation of a dossier containing everything we know about ourselves, from our earliest history, through our pheromone language, and on to the best examples of our love poetry. Expressing the essence of my people using your human language proved more difficult than I thought, which is why this took far longer than my initial estimate. The greatest challenge was to transform information into understanding. Human understanding. The dossier will be uploaded to the base network tomorrow, and access granted to your softscreen account."

Arun didn't know what to say. The more he replayed Pedro's words, the more stunned he became. "You did all this," he said when the faculty of speech returned, "for me?"

Pedro curled his antennae in amus.e.m.e.nt. The bulky alien was laughing at Arun's expense. "No," Pedro said. "I did not do all this. A team of over five thousand a.s.sembled this for me. The majority of the nest's research capability was diverted to serve your needs. Now do you believe I have let you down? Badly. Possibly fatally."

Arun grimaced. "Sorry, Pedro. Horden's Children, big guy. Look at you. You're an overgrown ant, and yet you've made me feel ashamed. How the h.e.l.l have you managed that?"

Pedro tilted his head down and folded his antennae flat against his head. He was in deadly earnest now. "It is not my people of the nest who have made you feel guilt, it is your human sense of empathy. This is important, Arun McEwan. You are important. We have offered similar information to the Jotuns on many occasions, but they lack the mindset to understand. You humans are far more socially elastic, you can accept and bond with us. Jotuns are admirable in many ways but they are culturally rigid, brittle even. They can only relate to you humans as dwarf Jotuns missing a pair of arms, and with limited intelligence. And it is because they relate to you as orphaned and mutilated Jotun children that they are so protective of you - more than you realize."

"And your lot? You're tunnel-dwelling colony beings. Jotuns can't relate to you at all."

"Precisely. Which is why they wish to use you as a conduit, an intermediary to interpret the information we give you because they cannot."

Arun was about to get up to convey his thanks by rubbing the insect's head. But he held himself back because Pedro's antennae were still tight against his head.

"I'm afraid I must raise again the subject of traitors and gun-running," said the Trog.

"No. I thank you for your help, but you know as well as I do that tunnel walls hear everything."

"That is not accurate," said Pedro - still in super-serious mode. "I do not know this as well as you. I know this far better than you do."

Arun barely heard the words. Despite the heat from Pedro's basking lamps, the air had chilled.

"I have never spoken to you about gun-running," he said.

"Correct. Listen, please, Human McEwan. This is important. It is not only tunnels that have ears. Did you believe the surface was unmonitored? And if your words have reached my ears, then any traitors who might exist will have heard them too."

Pedro sure had a knack for springing ugly surprises. The only way the alien could top this was if Xin came walking through the chamber entrance to see for herself how the color had drained from Arun's face. Arun trembled with fear. Any one of his comrades and NCOs could be a traitor. Give him someone to shoot at and he'd fire back, no problem. But he hadn't the courage to take this.

"I perceive you understand the danger," said Pedro.

"No kidding."

Pedro acted puzzled. "I agree. This is no time for humor. I believe that very soon, events will escalate into unconstrained violence. You need a refuge, and sending you pheromone pa.s.ses in the mail is inadequate."

Pedro sprang from his basking shelf, kicking a cloud of dust from the dirt floor. He jumped on Arun who was sitting in his leather sofa chair.

Arun was suddenly aware of how big his friend was. What did he weigh? Three hundred pounds? More?

Pedro ripped Arun out of the chair and flung his bulk onto the human's shoulders. Arun's vision exploded into stars when the back of his head thumped into the ground.

When the fight came back to Arun, it was too late. Pedro had him pinned down good and proper. He threw everything he had into a wild roll to the left, but he didn't move an inch.

Frakk! This Trog was strong.

A sharp claw appeared at the end of one of Pedro's upper limbs. Arun hear the claw snick through his shirt and then stared in disbelief as the claw peeled open his flesh. Then the pain hit him.

"Get off me! Get off!"

"Hold still!" Pedro ordered calmly. "This won't hurt a bit."

Arun relaxed a tiny degree. Then Pedro cut much deeper, flicking lines of agony into Arun's chest cavity.

"Agghh!" Arun screamed continuously until Pedro paused to reach for something in his thorax belt. "I thought..." hissed Arun through gritted teeth, "thought you said it wouldn't hurt."

"I said it won't hurt a bit. It will, in fact, hurt a lot. And if you struggle it will hurt a whole lot more."

"Frakk! Arun must have been around aliens too long because he actually believed Pedro. Whatever crazy thing Pedro was doing, he wasn't trying to kill him. Didn't mean it wouldn't, but it wouldn't kill him on purpose.

Arun activated his emergency meditation triggers, which transported him to a safer place in his mind, leaving the pain in his body.

No sooner had he left his body - or so it seemed - then Pedro leaped off him and the sights and sounds of the chamber colored and flavored once more.

"All done," reported Pedro.

"All of what done?"

"I have implanted a pheromone amplifier-emitter under your sternum."

"What the...? I mean, what makes you..." Arun sighed. Every word he spoke cost its weight in agony. "Why?

"For a start, you can throw this away." Pedro snapped off the pheromone identifier around Arun's neck. "Your new implant identifies you as a nest brother. Its scent charge should be good for about 160 years."

"For a start. You said, for a start." A wave of pain consumed Arun. They both waited until it ebbed sufficiently for Arun to speak. "What else have you done?"

"It is not only a dumb scent emitter. It is connected to your endocrine system."

"My what? My hormones? Are you telling me you've turned my hormones into scent signals?" The idea was hilarious. Arun vaguely noticed that the pain had gone, replaced with such giddy good cheer that the room was spinning, "Essentially, yes. In theory you could learn to control this. You could learn the rudiments of my language."

Look, pal. I'm seventeen. In a couple years, maybe five at most, I expect they'll ship me out on a troop ship. I don't expect to return. I'm not some kind of scribe. You're confusing me with another species. I'm a human. We shoot at people or we clean out the head. That's about the range of our career options."

"It seems that way now. Perhaps one day you could command whole legions of nest warriors with that device in your chest."

Arun stared. He waited for his friend's antennae to twist in amus.e.m.e.nt. When they didn't, he burst out in laughter that brought the pain crashing back over him.

Those visions everyone else kept having about him weren't right, after all. Arun wasn't going to become a great human freedom fighter, leader of the all-conquering Human Legion. Nope. Future annals of military history would record him as the great ant queen.

Arun the Ant Queen.

Frakk!

He was still laughing on his way back home when he was arrested on Level 7 on suspicion of taking narcotics.

He laughed all through the night in the detention cube. He laughed so much that each motion became agony, the muscles deep inside his chest bruised beyond purple and into ultra-violet.

He was still laughing as he cursed Pedro In the end the medics took him for an exploratory poke around in his chest to find out what the alien had done. He was still laughing as the anesthetic took him under.

He awoke with a head that felt like auto-cannons were laying down rapid fire inside. After a quick feel of his chest confirmed that Pedro's gift was still there, he groaned from something other than the pain. He was going to be a Troggie nest brother for the rest of his life.

What the h.e.l.l would Xin make of that?

* Chapter 53 *

Arun kept his buoyant mood all the way back from the Scendence team training session until the moment he turned off Corridor 622 and into the pa.s.sageway to his hab-disk. Being this close to his home soured things. He tried to wrest back his cheerfulness, but it was like grappling a cloud of smoke.

An alert in his head warned him that inspection was in only ten minutes. He stepped up his pace. Every night he practiced with Xin's Scendence team, and every time he stayed away later. Guess he was cutting it a little too fine.

He started to run.

Physical exertion usually made him feel good. So did Team Ultimate Victory. As the 8th battalion's only remaining entry in the championship, Xin and Arun's team were beginning to attract a fringe of supporters, helpers and wannabe coaches. For the first time this week, final year cadets had joined in. The next night even a few veterans had turned up to lend their support.

Despite these newcomers' seniority, no one questioned Xin's place as unofficial team leader. Arun might be the expert planner and strategist, but that was not the same thing at all as leadership. Xin took charge as naturally as breathing, and she insisted that all team members trained together, despite their different game roles.

Now that he was back in the team - Pedro having declared his appearance was a one-off - Xin had relaxed around Arun, even giving a few rare words of praise.

Arun remembered every glowing word.

And when her tight lips softened into a dimpling smile, all the threat and hardship of his life sloughed away. To catch fleeting glimpses of happiness - was that what the free people of Earth felt?

On the threshold of his dorm, with 130 seconds before inspection, Arun came to a halt. He took a deep breath. Xin might have softened, but his squadmates' coldness had solidified into ice, blaming him for all their troubles.

Only Springer backed him, although sometimes with lukewarm support from Madge.

This was an asymmetric cold war. Arun couldn't fight back because they were right to blame him.

Reluctantly, he entered his home.

"Here he is, McEwan the Maverick. Tell me, pal, is Team Ultimate Victory going to live up to its name?"

What the...? Arun took a moment to work out why his brain was buzzing in confusion. The question had come from a figure lying in Brandt's rack. But this wasn't the cadet lance sergeant. The voice was too rough, his body too slender. A novice? And why was no one ready for inspection?

The impostor sat up. His head was shaved, revealing a lateral scar burning a zigzag path across the top of his skull. He was small, but that face was too weathered to be a novice's.

"Who the h.e.l.l are you?" asked Arun.

Anger lit up the newcomer's eyes momentarily, rapidly fading into a look of resignation. "Man, I'm whacked. I've been asleep for ninety years, which works out well for you, pal, 'cos I'm too tired to beat the c.r.a.p out of you."

Arun looked to his comrades who were watching in silence. Hoping I'll trip up again.