Indigo Squad (30 page)

Arun raised his voice above the laughter. “
Beowulf
might not be a ship of the line, but it is a fully functioning starship and we humans have shown ourselves capable officers. Why won’t you accept human Marine officers?”

“That’s enough, Marine,” snapped Lance Sergeant Brandt, who’d kept quiet until then. “The captain asked for you to be present, and I respect that, but you will remember your rank.”

Arun looked across at Gupta who looked angry but said nothing. “Yes, lance sergeant,” Arun replied.

“I prefer to hear him speak,” said Sergeant Nhlappo, the shaven-headed veteran’s eyes dissecting him. “I detest you, McEwan, but that is partly because your brain follows unorthodox tracks. I want to hear your thoughts, if only so I can use them against you.”

“Be quiet, all of you!” The reserve captain spoke through synthetic thought-to-speech. Arun wondered why. Indiya had said the ancient Jotun was relying more on her speech synthesizer as she drew down her final reserves of energy, that she was so exhausted Indiya feared that her long life had only days remaining.

Those were Indiya’s words, but Arun was getting to know the ship-rat girl and reckoned she was lying.

A more likely explanation was that the ancient Jotun had spirit in her yet, and was playing the humans to force them to take ownership of their plight.

“If we are to act decisively, we need leadership, goals, organization, retraining,” said the reserve captain. “We’ve argued enough. Does anyone deny my paramount authority here?”

She laid her ears flat against her skull and rammed her stare into the face of each person there. Under that ferocious scrutiny, all backed down and looked away.

“Very well. I shall commission one of you to take on officer rank, to lead not merely the Marines on this vessel, but any survivors we encounter in Tranquility System or beyond. As you said, Gupta, there has already been an Ensign McEwan. I think we need to do much better than that. Congratulations on your promotion, Major Arun McEwan.”

Arun watched the shock spreading across the onlooking faces like a deadly virus. The strange thing was that he didn’t share their surprise. He noticed Xin nodding at him and the sight warmed his heart… until he realized she was nodding at him to lift his jaw up from the deck and get the hell on with it.

“Thank you, reserve captain,” said Arun. “It is an honor and privilege to serve. I hope to–” He stopped when he saw the Jotun’s flicking ears and beginning of a deep rumble. The reserve captain’s meaning was clear:
cut the bullshit
. “We can run through the deep void,” Arun said hurriedly, “using the cryo pods to eke out our lives for centuries of pointless existence. Let’s rule that out right now. It’s cowardice. No Marine would ever consider such a course and I know none of you do so. I see two real options: to retake our home, which is about six months’ flight away, or to push on to our original objective at Wolf-3, about 36 years distant. Before I make my decision, I want to give you this opportunity to suggest a further course of action that hasn’t yet occurred to me.”

The Marine NCOs looked at each other uncertainly. Taking questions from Arun was easier than doing so from the Navy Jotun, but they still weren’t used to being consulted. Arun saw no weakness in consulting a selection of intelligent and experienced individuals before arriving at his decisions. By contrast, the ship’s crew were clearly used to this approach and tentatively began throwing up ideas. None of them were argued for passionately, it was more as if the crew felt the choices should be properly considered before being dismissed.

Arun resolved to learn from these ship-rats. They might be physically puny but they had much to teach the Marines.

Journeying to Earth, to the nearest neutral planet, contacting the White Knight homeworld: these lukewarm alternatives were quickly blasted away. With the FTL comm link to the fleet flagship either down or not being answered, Arun felt their only real crumb of advantage was that no one knew
Beowulf
had remained loyal. If the fleet at Tranquility had thrown their lot in with the rebels so quickly, there was a good chance that all they would find at Wolf-3 was another rebel fleet waiting to blast them into atoms.

“My mind is made up,” said Arun. “We return to Tranquility and fight, if… if…” The blood drained from his face. Here he was prancing around making decisions, and he hadn’t yet consulted the reserve captain.

“Major,” said the reserve captain’s synthetic voice, “the remnants of my crew can get you there – if you provide me with new recruits – but when we arrive, it will be your Marines who will fight. You also have the largest command. For both those reasons, I defer strategic command to you. What are your strategic objectives once we have retaken Tranquility?”

Xin winked at him, as if he hadn’t already realized the Jotun was feeding him his line.

And it wasn’t just any line. What Arun said next might be quoted in histories for thousands of years to come.

No pressure then.
He cleared his throat and addressed the assembly. “The time for running is over. Hiding our human potential from White Knight eyes is at an end. I declare my liberation. I am no longer a slave.” He pointed at Hecht. “You–” he pointed at his former instructor. “You, Sergeant Nhlappo, all of you – even the reserve captain – you are slaves no longer.”

He looked into the faces of his comrades and saw expressions of support that were respectful but fragile, as if frozen onto their faces with liquid nitrogen. Only the slightest knock would shatter their backing into a thousand fragments.

Xin looked horrified.

So they needed more encouragement. Arun suddenly knew exactly what to say. “We are caught in a civil war, people. You must have asked yourselves whose side are we on. I say we are on
our
side. In the chaos of civil war, sometimes a small disciplined force can be in the right place at the right time, transforming itself from an irrelevance into a key player.”

Arun gestured at Sergeant Gupta. “We have precedent. A human precedent. Those of us in Indigo Squad who were in 8th Depot Battalion, Charlie Company Blue and Gold Squads have heard this before from Sergeant Gupta.”

Gupta gave the barest of nods.

“We invoke the spirit of the Czech Legion who, centuries ago, were stranded in the upheaval of the Russian Civil War on Earth. To signify that, we will take their name as an inspiration. Henceforth we are no longer the Human Marine Corps nor the Free Corps of the rebels.”

He paused, holding the assembly in the palm of his hand.

“We are the Human Legion.”

Hecht looked daggers. Nhlappo managed somehow to look sullen and impressed at the same time. A few amongst the ship’s crew rolled their eyes in dismay and most of the remainder were stony faced. But more and more of the other Marines looked at each other with rising excitement on their faces. Heartbeat by heartbeat, belief and pride blossomed. Faces flushed with the possibility of what they could achieve together.

The Marines on
Beowulf
were few in number but they could absorb stragglers from the civil war and grow. Nothing was impossible because they were Marines. Marines of the Human Legion.

They started to believe.

This was it! This was the moment when the human race took a different course. All those prophecies and hidden watches others had made over Arun. They had all led to this moment.

Everything was possible
.

His resolve wavered when he saw the look of horror on Xin’s face grow into a look of betrayal, but his confidence was bolstered again when he saw intoxicating confidence bubbling in the breast of nearly every other Marine there.

That confidence grew into an irrepressible force that had to be released.

It finally emerged as a bellow of sheer belief.

“Oorah!”

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Category: Terminology - starships:

— Compartment numbering conventions

Dirt treaders boarding a starship for the first time are usually confused by the compartment numbering conventions. You’re asked to report without delay to compartment A02-02-05. Where the hell is that?

The problem is worse for sea sailors and atmosphere flyers, because to them, the life of a starfarer is twisted out of whack. Specifically, 90 degrees out.

Here’s why.

Most starships are roughly tube shaped. The shield projector is mounted in the bow, and extends a magnetic field at high speeds to deflect the interstellar medium harmlessly around the sides. The main engine or engines are mounted in the stern. There will be attitude adjusting maneuver engines mounted at other points, but the main engine provides the thrust to reach the interstellar cruising speed of half lightspeed or more.

Starships do not produce practical amounts of gravity. However, when the engines are thrusting, a reaction force is experienced that feels like gravity. On a planet the analogous reaction force pulls you down toward the planet’s center; on our ship the force pulls you back toward the stern.

The ship will spend most of its journey time cruising, not accelerating. Without thrust from the engines, the ship will experience what is commonly referred to as zero-gravity, freefall, weightlessness, or zero-g.

In terms of ship layout, that means the crew (and equipment) spends most time in zero-g, but will experience periods of pseudo-gravity in which the aft bulkheads (those facing toward the back of the ship) are perceived as ‘down’.

The simplest starship layouts have
decks
running from the bow down to the stern, and
frames
running perpendicular to the decks from the top (ventral) hull down to the lower (dorsal) hull.

[See
variant frame design
for alternative designs. For simplicity, we have referred to frames as planes running from the ventral to the dorsal hull. In practice there is often no ‘top’ or ‘bottom’ to our ship tube, other than arbitrary labels used to help us navigate the ship layout. Nor do frames or decks need to be planes. For example, some starfarers who evolved in their home planet’s oceans flood their ships and navigate the craft’s interior with reference to artificially induced currents. For that matter, some ocean dwellers do away with frames altogether, the strength and rigidity that frames give the ship’s hull being provided by the combination of support struts and the resistance to compression of the pressurized fluid medium they live within.]

Starship layout is different from waterborne ships where decks are a series of horizontal planes running from the main deck down to the keel, and frames that are perpendicular to decks, running from bow to stern.

Thus to a water sailor, the layout of a starship looks at first like a tall office block tilted on its side, and with an engine strapped to its base. The crew either floats in weightlessness or stands, miraculously, with feet glued to the wall, even though the building has been tilted through 90 degrees. Once our hypothetical sea sailor actually boards a starship, his or her mind readily acclimatizes to the new reality and it will soon appear as if it is the waterborne craft that are unnaturally tilted on their sides.

Let’s take
Beowulf
as an example of a famous ship with a standard layout.
Beowulf’s
decks run from 0 (bow) to 20 (stern). Like many ships,
Beowulf
has nacelles (housings separate from the main part of the hull). Decks on the port and starboard nacelles are A00 through A06, and B00 through B06 respectively.

There is no equivalent to the water ship concepts of forward perpendicular or aft perpendicular, and so frame numbering is simply from 00 (port-most) to 16 (starboard-most)

The third compartment identifier refers to an imaginary plane running through the center of the ship, as measured from its upper (dorsal) hull down to its lower (ventral) hull. Number sequence is outboard (running from amidships out to the ventral/ dorsal hull). Odd numbers are on the dorsal side and even on the ventral side. The first compartment on the dorsal side of the centerplane is 01, the second 03, third 05 and so on. The third compartment to the ventral side of the centerplane, for example, is 06 (being the third even number).
Beowulf
’s run from 01 to 19.