Indigo Squad (10 page)

Had he made an ally of Indiya or an enemy?

Probably the latter, but Arun didn’t know. He wasn’t sure about anything anymore. Other than that the alien had carved chunks from his shoulders which made every motion of his arms scrape his fatigues against the wounds. The damage inflicted by his own ally felt far worse than the combat wounds in his right arm that he’d sustained in the fight against the Amilx. Having his flesh torn by darts was becoming a habit.

Worse of all was that Arun was deep in the drent but had no clear allies other than the Jotun ensign who’d tortured his flesh. He’d swap the present situation for even worse odds if he could have Springer, or someone he knew he could trust, at his side.

In his first and most disastrous week as a cadet, he’d been summoned before his commanding officer. Expecting to be executed, instead Colonel Little Scar became the first of a succession of senior figures to drop hints that Arun’s destiny was to be a key actor in a drama foretold by the Night Hummers. There were other players too. Xin Lee wasn’t just the hottest Marine he’d ever seen, but she was deeply involved with this destiny drent. But Xin was on their sister ship,
Themistocles
, which was only light hours ahead, but in terms of getting to see or contact Xin, that was impossibly distant.

The Night Hummers had told the colonel of a third player, a ‘purple’ girl. He was certain that meant Indiya, but again: friend or foe? Arun shook his head. No one ever wanted to give him a simple explanation. He had no choice but to assume she would act on his side, because if she didn’t, he was already damned.

He had to work on her, but first he needed to return to his unit.

Corporal Majanita was either too befuddled to note Arun’s frequent absences from Delta Section, or had just enough sense to look the other way. Whenever he asked Madge if he could head off under his own agenda she would fix him with a suspicious stare but say yes.

But other eyes could be tracking his movements.

Indigo Squad was currently tasked with patrolling the ship in section–sized groups. To calm nerves after the power blackout and recent deaths. He’d been digging around, and seen clearly what Indiya couldn’t: that far too many junior ship’s officers had died over the past year, or been reassigned while in Tranquility System.

Sergeant Gupta’s orders were so vague these days that Delta Section had set off on patrol with neither a route nor a timetable. Lance Sergeant Brandt was supposed to back him up, but his mind was in an even worse state than Gupta’s.

Where would they be now?

Arun guessed that by this time, his section’s reserves of lucidity and purpose had already fizzled out. And when they did that, an irresistible attraction drew them to the place where most Marines always gravitated: the recreation deck.

Arun set off for the bars on Deck 11.

“No, wait! We can’t afford to fragment,” said Finfth once they’d all assembled in the Freak Lab. Indiya had activated the security gadget Furn had provided, and they’d commenced their meeting by skirting around with barbed pleasantries before Finfth had decided enough was enough.

“Indiya,” continued Finfth, “your body language says you would like to kick Furn out the nearest airlock and watch as he asphyxiates. We can’t afford secrets. Especially not now. What’s happened?”

Indiya looked from face to face. All five of ‘B’ Crew’s augments were here. ‘C’ Crew didn’t have any. Tizer and Freeze from ‘A’ Crew were safely frozen in their pods. Normally the Freak Lab was a place of refuge, where they could play with their special projects by grace of the reserve captain’s indulgence. Not today.

“Fern is a total bakri-chodding shunter,” Indiya growled. “He’s done something that he is ashamed of. The details aren’t important. Long after this crisis is over, I might forgive him. But that’s a long way off.”

“So it’s a crisis now,” cried Fant. “We had a power blackout and… your uncle, Indiya. I’m not belittling your grief but that’s not a crisis. Will someone explain what the hell is going on?”

“Quiet!” spat Loobie. Indiya could hug her. Leading Spacer Lubricant, to give Loobie her proper rank, always deferred to Indiya, but when Indiya was not in the right place to lead, her best friend would temporarily step in to run the group of augment freaks.

If only I were a real leader,
thought Indiya.
Loobie wouldn’t need to keep helping out.

“One step at a time, Furn,” said Loobie. “Give us all that little
gift
you explained to me earlier.”

Indiya mind-linked to Loobie.

am
the senior rating here, Indiya. That’s not entirely meaningless. Let me do my job.>

Furn stared at the two women intently. He couldn’t listen in to their mind-talk. Even if the girls had wanted him to, mind-linking was only possible between two individuals. Every time they’d tried multi-way linking, the result had been searing agony, and blood streaming from noses and eyes. Indiya shuddered at the memory.

“Take it in turns,” said Furn with bad grace. “Hold your hand out and let me explain mentally.”

Fant went first, which befitted his view of himself as the brave vanguard of any risky undertaking. He floated toward Furn, his ungloved hand out in front. When they touched, palm-to-palm, it looked like two space vehicles docking.

Indiya felt she should be speculating frantically to the nature of Furn’s gift. She didn’t. The chance to briefly allow her mind to rest was too precious to waste.

The five of them in the Freak Lab were the reserve captain’s super-augments, but they weren’t alone amongst the crew to be given control of their endocrine system. Even a few of the ship’s detachment of Marines could control their own hormones. The basic idea behind endocrine control was something other spacefaring species had used since the dawn of interstellar history. But humans had taken it further. Indiya was intensely proud of how humans had hacked the alien technology so quickly.

Even with the zero-point energy drives and ability to mine power directly from the quantum foam of the deep void, mass and space on a starship were always in critically short supply. With journeys between stars lasting decades in objective years (time counted on calendars outside of the ship) a pressure valve was needed to release the unbearable social pressures borne by the crew cramped up together for so long. Sleeping during most of the journey helped but also caused its own mental pressures. Spending most of your waking life as a caretaker on a deserted ship with only a handful of other humans for company was just as bad for morale and mental health. Allowing the crew to direct their own endocrine system – the mechanism for transmitting hormonal message across their bodies – gave the crew the pressure valve they so badly needed.

The freaks’ augmentation system went further. Implants under the skin, normally on palms, but also sometimes under wrists, allowed nanoscale transport robots to leave the implants of the donor and enter the bloodstream of a recipient where their cargo would be released. Augments called this
gifting
.

This opened a whole new dimension to crew interaction. With physical space so limited, gifting opened up whole new universes of social possibility inside their minds.

The whole of ‘B’ Crew had been awakened for the adventure with
Bonaventure,
which was a departure from the skeleton watches who kept the ship ticking over during the long years between stars. The only time all three crews were awake was when arriving at their planet of destination.

Freeze was one of the two ‘A’ Crew specials. He’d gifted all the ‘B’ Crew freaks, giving them examples of how to do far more than communicate emotional gifts. Configuring your nano-transports as a short-wave microwave transceiver – mind-linking – was just one. Now that their ingenuity had been alerted to the possibilities, the ‘B’ Crew specials were all mining their implants to make them do things their designers had never conceived.

The last to take the gift from Furn’s implants was Indiya. < When you want Heidi to pretend she can’t see or hear you,> Furn told her

“Now we’re secure,” said Indiya when Furn had taken his palm away, “I want you, Furn, to explain why you called this meeting all that time ago this morning.”

“Because everything changed with the power blackout,” he said. “It was deliberately engineered. Heidi was taken off-line. When she reawakened, she was reporting to the chief security officer, not the captain.”

“Isn’t that what she always did?” asked Fant.

“No. Subtle difference. Previously Heidi talked with the chief security officer, Ensign Purge, and her team, but in Heidi’s mind they were acting on behalf of the captain. Now the AI is working directly for Purge.”

“What about Captain Flayer?” asked Loobie. “How does the AI view her now?”

“Like a lover Heidi has brutally wronged.” Furn grimaced. “Just as with humans who are internally conflicted, Heidi is emotionally scabbing over the mental anguish, turning it into a blind spot. She seeks out distractions. It’s not a stable setup, which makes me think the captain is in grave danger.”

“And,” said Finfth, “that the captain is not part of the consp–”

Fant clamped a hand to Finfth’s mouth. “Watch your language!”

“
Conspiracy!”
said Furn loudly
. “
No it’s all right,” he said. “Heidi really isn’t listening. We’re like her family. She’d do anything for us. She worships us.”

“An AI?” said Indiya. “Really?”

“Of course, an AI. This is the most exciting thing Heidi has ever done. I’ve explained to her that in helping us, she’s a participant in an open, free-form human game of make-believe.”

When he saw the stony faces looking back at him, Furn explained: “Imagine the satisfaction you’d feel if you invented an FTL stardrive. That’s what joining in with such a human activity means for Heidi. That signature scent I gifted you is our way of telling Heidi that we’re playing the game now. It’s the same idea as the privacy gadget I gave you, Indiya, but more subtle.”

“And this game is about mutiny and plotting,” said Finfth. “Is that your clever trick?”

Furn nodded. “Which makes Heidi’s ability to play our game even more impressive. So long as we don’t look as if we’re really going to blow up the engine or something, she’ll ignore what we say without flagging an alert. That’s the best I can do right now. I’m working on my own Heidi hack. It will need inducing our own power outage, but if I succeed, we can ask Heidi to prevent anything unusual from showing up on security footage. She’ll replace with something less suspicious. Heidi’s very good at being sneaky, if she thinks she’s acting in a good cause.”

Slimy shunter he might be, but Indiya was impressed with Furn. She nonetheless kept contempt chilling her words as she asked him: “Did Heidi record anything about Uncle Purify’s death?”

“No. He killed himself while… while Heidi was offline during the power outage…” Fern’s voice tailed off as he spoke, realizing the implications of his words as he said them.

“So,” said Indiya calmly, “McEwan was right. My uncle didn’t slit his wrists, he was
murdered
.”

“McEwan? Care to explain?” said Loobie. As she did so, she placed her hand on Indiya’s temple, gifting her a standard hormonal package of reassurance.

“I’d told Uncle that the Marines were doped. He wasn’t happy. He said he would look into the matter. Trying to keep me out of it to protect me.”

Silence…

“And McEwan…?” prompted Loobie gently.

“He came to me,” said Indiya. “Told me a whole legion of suspicions. I knew from my work in the cryo team that our passengers are being fed something that makes them dopey. McEwan thinks it’s deliberate, a suppression of their critical faculties so they won’t question the order to mutiny when it comes.”

When she spoke the words, they sounded melodramatic. She glanced at the others and smelled the hormone secretions in their sweat. She didn’t need to be an empath like Finfth to know that they believed her every word.

“Arun McEwan’s just an ordinary Marine…” she said, thinking out loud. She laughed “If you can imagine such a thing! He’s a teenager like us, but I think someone’s helping him.”

“Who?” asked Fant.

“Unknown. But I’m talking about other Marines. Jotuns maybe. Anyway, my point is that it’s not just a boy’s wild fantasy. I thought I believed him before Furn told us what he’s found. But my uncle killing himself? Now I’m certain McEwan’s right. If we don’t prevent it, there will be a mutiny on this ship, and our battalion of Marines will be the brute force that makes it happen.”