Indigo Squad (26 page)

Before he could complete his sentence, stabs of white heat pierced his side.

His last sight was the crimson smartfabric of his officer’s uniform mixing with the red of his blood.

All three railgun darts hit the target.

Fraser collapsed.

Arun felt a pang of regret: his brother would never know who had killed him.

The senior officers on their platform scattered.

But they weren’t fast enough.

That was the thing about officers. They got to strut about in dress uniforms while the human Marines were lined up like machines, encased in armor with food and drink sent in by tubes and their waste carried away by more tubes. Officers were set apart, unencumbered. That wasn’t to their advantage now.

Arun pumped darts into every officer still standing on the platform. The less senior Jotuns were in their battlesuits with their units. He’d have to figure out what to do with them later.

More darts were screaming into the crush of officers from Springer’s position setting up a devastating crossfire. He could see her fire!

Out in the void, stealthing was so effective it was almost magical. But in the atmosphere of Hangar A, it was impossible to hide the telltale whine of a dart’s trajectory as it tunneled through the air.

Plasma blossomed on a shuttle hull beside him, hot enough to sear his skin through his suit and cause the craft to shift in its damaged harness.
He’d been spotted.

Arun didn’t wait for the next shot to reach him. He somersaulted across the air, flinging himself to a new firing position.

Down in his target area the heap of bloodied fur spilled over the officers’ platform. The officers in their braid and flattop hats were now a mass of crudely butchered animal carcasses.

First objective met. Arun only had several thousand rebel Marines to contend with now. Former brothers and sisters who weren’t in control of their own minds.

After throwing himself through a few random positions without firing, Arun paused to take a better check of the situation.

Most Marines were standing there as if nothing had happened, the mind control drugs still dulling their initiative. The rebel NCOs and lower-ranking Jotuns, all of whom were armed, were already airborne, jinking constantly to avoid making themselves targets.

Arun shifted position again, unwilling to stay in one place for more than a few heartbeats.

Without warning, all the inert Marines suddenly took to the air like a startled flock of birds. Whether instinct had made them move, or orders had finally penetrated their confusion, he neither knew nor cared. What mattered was that the Marines made perfect cover for what Arun needed to do next.

Zigzagging through the flocking Marines to get closer to the Hangar Control Room, Arun saw a traitor NCO spin around as she took a hit. Springer was still alive, then. Arun tried not to worry about her.

Fant and Finfth were hugging the bulkhead near the control room, curled into balls with arms over their heads. He hoped their terror was an act.

In contrast, the rebel guard stood resolutely before the hatch, scanning for threats.

“Sorry, pal.” Arun put dart after dart through the control room guard, glad he didn’t know the Marine’s name. He was loyal to the Free Corps, but was probably a decent guy, just a poor grunt caught up in events; the same as Arun.

He still had to die.

By the time his shots had penetrated the armor enough for the guard to topple gently to the ground in the low gravity, Arun had revealed his position.

Bolts of agony pierced his left leg.

Everything grayed and dulled, but only for a few moments. Athena had taken over, tossed her Marine around the hangar at crazy speeds that only an AI could have managed without colliding into the buzzing Brownian motion of Marines. Arun tensed, but the cover from their random motion was good enough that a second volley of hits never found him.

He relaxed a notch. “What’s the damage, Athena?”

“You’re the best.” He felt his suit AI glow with pleasure. “Activate Stage Two!”

Arun dropped, Athena making it look as if his suit had lost all power. In the low-g he was like a falling leaf.

He fell into a group of Marines he didn’t recognize. Their suits identified them as from
Themistocles
: Xin’s battalion.

One of the Marines leaned over as Arun sprawled on the deck, groaning. She blanked her visor, letting him see the concern on her face as she touched Arun’s suit diagnostic patch.

“You’re hit bad, Brown,” she said, buying Athena’s exaggerated report on Arun’s status, and that he was the stolen suit’s legitimate owner.

“Don’t worry about me,” said Arun in a deliberately strained voice. He pointed up at one of the Stork-class shuttles. “Get the veck who did this. I glimpsed him hiding behind that shuttle.”

Athena reported the Marine’s name was Francesca de Guzman. She pursed her lips and gave Arun a black look crimped by suspicion.

“Stay alive,” she said, “
Elizabeth
.”

De Guzman launched into the air in the direction Arun had pointed. The other Marines around Arun followed in her wake.

“Err, Athena? What was your previous human partner’s name?”

Arun ignored Athena’s hurt feelings and lifted himself up, readying to sprint toward the control room. Another impact smacked into his left leg, felling him. It didn’t feel as bad as the darts he’d taken earlier.

Shardshot
. The pellets were perfect. They would sow confusion without killing anyone in armor. Except the firer. Springer was even more likely to reveal herself with shardshot than darts.

Arun gritted his teeth against the pain and tried rising to his feet.

Athena wouldn’t let him. She locked the legs of his suit, sending him clattering to the deck again.

Springer manages with just the one leg
, Arun thought. He rolled onto his stomach to get a look at the control room, and saw he was too late anyway.

Fant hadn’t waited for him. The damned fool was always trying to impress Indiya with his heroics. Now the stupid veck was stepping through the hatch into the Hangar Control Room, Furn with his silly hovering toy robot just a pace behind.

Whatever faced them, they would have to overcome it by themselves.

“Come on,” Fant yelled at Furn as soon as the guard had slumped under McEwan’s withering railgun volley. “Arun’s done his bit, let’s move.”

“No.” Furn’s voice trembled. “Wait for the Marine. This is exactly what we needed him for.”

“Look up at that chaos,” Fant snapped at his cowardly brother. “He’s never going to get through that.”

Without waiting for a reply, Fant dashed for the hatch and thumbed it open. There were no windows. What awaited him inside?

The answer was a Free Corps Marine in crimson armor who was reaching for a carbine in the weapon rack by the hatch.

Fant took advantage of the low-g to launch himself at the bonehead’s neck, ungloved hands outstretched, his implants primed to inject the battlesuit-frying cocktail Indiya had equipped them with.

The Marine’s neck was twice the diameter of Fant’s thigh, armor-coated flexi-seals over sinews as strong as steel cables. For a brief, triumphant moment, Fant thought he’d gotten the hold he needed. The implants under his palms burned as they dumped their lethal cargo of nano-transporters into the battlesuit.

But the bonehead had his own secrets. The suit turned frictionless and Fant found his momentum was pivoting him around and then behind the traitor, flying toward a bulkhead covered in viewscreens where a technician gaped slack-jawed at the invasion.

Before Fant’s head crashed into the screens, the Marine grabbed his legs, powered gauntlets clamping around his shins with such power that his bones splintered.

The Marine swung Fant around his head in a dizzying blur before releasing him headfirst at the hatch.

Fant’s final, grim thought before impact was that he’d failed his beloved Indiya.

Unaware of Fant’s desperate status over in the hangar, Indiya was buzzing with artificially induced confidence as she pushed past the Marine who had been guarding the approach to the Combat Information Center. She could hear the AI inside his suit scream from the poison she had injected through her ungloved hands.

Inside the CIC, the skeleton watch crew were on edge. By the look of the viewscreens showing deadly chaos and carnage in Hangar A, it wasn’t difficult to see why.

She peered up at the CIC’s upper decks where Sensor, Damage Control, and other teams would be present when the ship was in active status, feeding detailed analysis through to their senior representative on the main CIC deck. They were unoccupied.

The watch officer and three juniors, all human, sat at their stations on the main CIC level.

The pilot was the most observant. Tall and furtive, Pilot Officer Vernier never missed much. She’d spotted Indiya’s missing gloves straight away, and was reaching for the sidearm at her hip.

It was now or never
. “Reserve captain on deck,” announced Indiya, standing at attention and stuffing her voice with as much authority as she could summon.

A moment later, the reserve captain swept in, trailed by Loobie. The half-muffled roar of the ancient Jotun’s chair motors added to the sense of confusion.

The pilot officer’s hand was on her weapon grip, but she flicked her attention from Indiya to the reserve captain and back without drawing.

Indiya stood still as the reserve captain advanced through CIC, aiming for the raised central area, the holy of holies: the command deck.

The human Watch Officer, Ensign Dock, raised himself out of the command chair and stared down at the Jotun from underneath his thick, white-flecked eyebrows. Indiya could taste the fear in the ensign’s sweat, but he did not relinquish command. The reserve captain clanged to an angry halt just short of the command deck ramp.

Both officers presented a defiant posture at the other, daring the other to back down in a silent battle of wills.

To Indiya’s eyes, the two officers looked evenly matched, each drawing on different strengths. The reserve captain looked physically and mentally drained. She was hunched over in her life support chair, but she was still a Jotun and carried a Jotun’s threatening physical superiority. If she could only unstretch her gnarled old bones, she would tower over the human officer. And, nominally, the Jotun was Ensign Dock’s superior.

But the ship had been taken by mutineers. Old lines of authority were no longer firm.

The watch officer would not give way.

Pilot Officer Vernier saw how this was playing out and picked sides. She drew her gun and pointed it at Indiya.

Furn ducked as Fant flew headfirst toward him. Had the rebel Marine tried to use his brother as a missile to kill him too? If so, he missed, Fant’s skull connecting with the hatch frame instead. Furn knew that he’d never be able to purge the sights and sound of that sickening impact from his memory.

He dove at the Marine, aiming low.

The power in the traitor’s SA-71 hummed and whined as it repeatedly released its electrical charge across the carbine’s rails.

Furn skidded along the deck, unharmed. The Marine had fired high.

As he reached out to grab the armored ankle, Furn felt his ribs constrict with despair.
He wasn’t going to make it.

Then the same ribs cracked as the Marine lashed out with his boot, sending Fant flying. Fant’s hands closed on empty air, the deadly cargo under his skin unused.

He slithered across the bloody deck before slamming against a control bank.

A tight groan escaped his lips. Every breath was agony. Unwilling to give up, he activated a pain-numbing program, but with the uninjured Marine covering him with his carbine, the situation was hopeless.

They’d always known Arun McEwan’s plan was brittle, but not even Furn could think of a better one.

Defeated, he dropped his gaze, but as he did so his eyes caught a hideous sight. Fant’s skull had cracked, the throbbing soft flesh inside pulsing the message that Fant was not quite dead yet. He prayed his brother was unconscious.

Fant’s eyes began to blink away the river of blood. The poor veck was stirring.

“Need help?” the flight tech asked the Marine.

“All under control.”

“Good. Locking hatch anyway. Keep them covered.”

“Why bother?”

“Fair point,” said the tech. “Kill them!”

Furn gave him a final defiant glare, only to see the tech hesitate and then fling up a cautionary hand. “Hold fire! I recognize them. They’re augments. Freaks. They’re valuable but… Mader zagh! Their gloves are off. Did they touch you?”

The Marine replayed his memory. “I guess.”

“Merde!”

The Marine lurched to one side, whirling his arms, which sent his carbine hurling into poor Fant’s body. Snatches of incoherent machine agony screamed out of the battlesuit speakers. Then the human inside the suit began screaming too. Human and machine: each sounded like the other. It was as Indiya described, the nano-poison he’d injected had struck at the symbiotic mental interface that made the human/AI link so effective. The suit AI had been corrupted, driven insane, and now it was frying the meat components of the brain it was coupled with.

The tech drew his sidearm. “Pig-licking, bakri-chodding, fucking freaks!” Revenge blackening his face, he fired at Furn.

By chance the careering Marine suit was in the way. The round glanced off the armor and… Furn looked down. The round had smashed his thigh, punctured his femoral artery. Even through his pain blockers, Furn could still feel the wound as if a distant, half-remembered memory of utter agony.