Indigo Squad (5 page)

Freaks
most called them –
augments
was the formal term. Indiya and the others simply called themselves
specials
.

Loobie linked to Indiya’s mind, and sent a thought message:

Indiya couldn’t help herself. She laughed out loud.

“Is something amusing, Indiya?”

“No, petty officer. Not amused. Excited.”

Lock loomed over Indiya, squeezing her eyes into narrow slits, as if forcing out every last drop of displeasure, until her eyes disappeared beneath ridge lines of folded skin.

Indiya felt the hairs raise on the back of her neck. Despite her perpetual bad temper, Lock took good care of her team of augments. Knowing this, however, didn’t protect Indiya from shriveling in the searing heat of the petty officer’s anger.

It was wrong of Loobie to make fun of the way Lock looked. The specials were prototypes for several new augmentations, but all spacers had been adapted for life in sunless zero-g. Sometimes the bioengineering didn’t work as intended. The petty officer’s bloated body and brittle bones were one result.

Loobie didn’t help, the little sow. She sent a doctored image of the scene adapted from live security monitoring footage. The five augments were lined up in the docking bay, as in reality, but in Loobie’s version, they were naked except for their helmets held in front of them to protect their modesty. Indiya’s violet hair lengthened and streamed out behind her in a fake wind, the pale indigo tips gleaming jewels of light. Loobie’s breasts were twice their real size, and Furn and Finfth had grown a beard and horns. At first, Fant was unaltered other than losing his clothes, which made sense as Loobie thought he was perfect just as he was. Then Fant’s helmet started to fade out of the picture, a slow reveal of what lay behind.

Loobie!

Indiya shut out Loobie’s mind link, but too late to stop the little demon inside Indiya’s head making her grin. But Indiya didn’t get into trouble this time because Lock was distracted by the hammering sound of the Marines in their powered armor passing behind her on their way to the shuttle. Indiya couldn’t help backing away from the giant cyborgs. You could talk, joke, even flirt with the humans inside when they were vulnerable in their cryo pods, but put a group of them in their battlesuits and they were the quintessence of applied violence.

Lock turned her attention back to the away team. “Chief Petty Officer Deflector is waiting for you on
Bonaventure
. She will guide you through the captured ship and facilitate access to whatever you wish to investigate. The CPO has always hated you scheisse-munching freaks, and being ordered to play nursemaid to you will make her loath you with a burning passion. Any chance you get, you lick her boots, and wipe her arse. If she says jump, you leap as if your life depends on it, because maybe it does. I want you back here at 21:30, alive and well.”

Indiya felt the edges of her mouth tilt up.

“What’s this, freak? A smile?”

“Sorry, petty officer.”

“Explain!”

“Well… you said something nice about us.”

“Nice?” Lock’s face flushed red.
“Nice!
” A vein started throbbing at the petty officer’s temple.

Indiya accepted a new message from Loobie: an animation of Lock where the heat in her face grew so intense that her hair burst into flame and the skin peeled away to reveal a blackened skull. How
did
Loobie do that in real time?

“I want you freaks back safely because you’re
my
freaks,” snarled Lock. “That’s what distinguishes me from the chief petty officer.
Mader zagh!
Don’t ever mistake that for thinking I like you turd-wrangling, pig-licking slurry of bakri chod chod wixers.
Nice?
Unbelievable, Indiya. You’re on a charge for insulting a superior. Now get out of my sight, the lot of you.”

As per regulations when leaving or boarding the ship, Indiya and the others saluted before about turning and marching along the charged walkway that led to the shuttle.

Unlike regulations, though, Indiya was grinning all the way out of the docking bay.

Whatever Lock might think about her being a freak, Indiya was still too human to put a lid on her excitement. This was a chance of a lifetime – of a thousand lifetimes.

What the captain had renamed
Bonaventure
was a captured alien ship loaded with mysterious new technologies. Alien tech that
Beowulf’s
engineers couldn’t decipher.

Too bad. They’d had their chance.

Now it was the freaks’ turn to finally prove to everyone what they could do.

How had
Bonaventure
created artificial gravity? Gravity sensors estimated its displacement to be twenty times that of
Beowulf
, but its volume only twice as much. The evidence was beginning to suggest there was a black hole in the stern.

A black hole! Even listing the engineering challenges that implied made Indiya break into a sweat.

And they had captured or killed fewer than fifty crew. That was less than half
Beowulf’s
complement. How did a skeleton crew manage such a large ship?

Above all else, what the hell was a ship doing in White Knight space crewed by humans speaking the Human language better than the bonehead Tranquility Marines could manage?

They claimed to be
Amilx
. What kind of dumb name was that? An alien loan word?

These and a score of other questions flitted between the away team as they hung from their harnesses during the shuttle’s thirty-minute hop to
Bonaventure
. The same questions had obsessed them for the two days since the Marines had boarded and captured the Amilxi ship. Indiya filtered them out. There would be plenty of time for that soon enough.

Right now it was their companions on the shuttle who demanded her attention, the silent squad of Marines sent to relieve their comrades guarding the captured ship. Their presence – that sense of barely concealed threat – bent Indiya’s gaze their way and raced her pulse.
They terrified her.

The other specials weren’t so concerned. They didn’t know as much about the Marines as Indiya.

One of the special assignments allocated to Indiya by the reserve captain was to mine thousands of years’ worth of recorded battles, trying to come up with improved ship tactics. An early truth she had uncovered was that the very existence of human Marines was an aberration. Most races used combat-bots rather than living soldiers. For all the hardening of their redesigned bodies, human Marines could never withstand the same acceleration as a robot. Why, then, did the White Knights raise a Human Marine Corps?

There were many theories, of course, but the most popular was that humans were cheaper to build and far simpler to maintain than bots.

She laughed humorlessly. When Mamma had been a girl,
Beowulf
had contacted a human terraforming civilization. Their distant ancestors had been supplied with a survival dome and self-replicating machinery, and then left alone for a few centuries to get on with the job of transforming a barren, poisonous rock into a world fit for White Knight colonists.

The White knights loved the simplicity of low maintenance solutions.

Now she was staring the reality face-to-face, clamped against the bulkhead opposite, stacked in neat rows of six up halfway to the forward hatch. They reinforced Indiya’s personal explanation behind the Marine Corps’ existence: humans were the most violent species in the galaxy.

Motionless and silent inside their metal armor, the Marines appeared scarcely human. With the tubes, internal pouches and feeds taking care of many essential bodily functions, and the suit AI chips acting like a superhuman XO that really ran the show, the Marines were more cyborg than human.

She shivered. As soon as the Marine sergeant had verified his squad was in place, they had all…
switched off
. Without a purpose to activate them, they were just waiting in standby mode.

Which only made her boy, McEwan, even more mysterious. Back when she’d put him into cryo, something about her had shocked him. His robot mask had slipped – just long enough for her to glimpse the human underneath.

But this lot, hanging on the wall like bats, just gave her the creeps.

Petty Officer Lock and the other normals called Indiya’s group freaks, but these Marines had ceased to be human generations ago.

The harness straps tugged at Indiya’s shoulders, and her stomach cartwheeled as the shuttle pivoted around 180 degrees.

Her pressure suit was climate controlled, but the air inside suddenly felt very chilly.

The bulkhead at her back creaked in protest and rumbled with power as the engines applied maximum thrust.

“Merde!” she said, but no one was listening.

The shuttle’s flight plan was to accelerate for nine minutes to reach cruising speed, coast for ten, and then swivel around to use its main engine to brake.

Only six minutes had elapsed since they’d left the
Beowulf
. Something was wrong.

She set her helmet comm to general broadcast. “Hello? Pilot? Please advise status.”

There was no reply. On this shuttle she was cargo, not crew. The occupants of the flight cabin either weren’t listening or were too busy.

“What’s going on?” one of the Marines asked her. Not being a part of their suit-to-suit Battle Net, it took a while to work out which one was talking. He was several rows up, waving at her.

But she wasn’t interested in these brainless Neanderthals. They were only good for the kind of problem you could shoot at.

Instead she used the microwave comm system in her head to hack into the shuttle’s AI.

“It’s
you!”
said the Marine.

She was in. Full telemetry, sensor feeds, flight vectors. Even with all her augmentations, straining her mind to encompass all the shuttle’s information simultaneously was painful. She didn’t need long, though, the situation was chillingly clear.

“Mader zagh!” she said, with feeling.

“What’s up?” asked Loobie.

The words choked in Indiya’s throat. How could she tell her dear friend that they were all about to die?

“Sitrep!”

It was that annoying Marine again, barking an order at her.
Congratulations for being the only one with an IQ in double figures. Afraid you will have to collect your prize in heaven.

“Frakk you, purple girl. I need sitrep. Now!”

“Shut up!” she screamed back. “It’s not something you can hit or shout at. Guess that makes our situation beyond your comprehension.”

“You promised to talk with me. Remember?”

Indiya looked up at the Marine. Was that her mystery guy? He made his visor go transparent, but he was too far away to see his face properly. Unlike them, she didn’t have ocular zoom.

“Yes, I’m Marine Arun McEwan. I can’t solve this if I don’t know what’s going on.”

She had to wait for bubbles of excitement to finish coursing through her before replying. “
Bonaventure
has exploded,” she broadcast. “Total destruction. There’s a debris wavefront hurtling our way.”

“How long before the shockwave hits?” asked McEwan.

“Twenty-four seconds.”

“What? You tell me this now!”

Ever since meeting him, she’d dreamed of adventure, of dangers shared alongside this deadly warrior with a human heart. For a moment she’d thought her fantasies were crossing into real life, that this was McEwan’s chance to rescue her. But as the seconds counted down, the hope she’d invested in this Marine drained away, leaving nothing but bitterness. McEwan said nothing, did nothing. He simply hung in silence, waiting for the end along with all the other dormant warriors.

Finfth asked, thinking his words.

“Nothing,” Indiya snarled back through clenched teeth. Her mind could barely form words now. The engines were thrusting so hard that the harness was threatening to rip her arms off; the blood was draining from her head, her heart unable to pump that far.

The pilot’s efforts were hopeless. Despite all this frantic expenditure of delta-vee, all the engines could do now was slow their velocity toward the onrushing wavefront.

The world was fading away from her oxygen-deprived mind. Perhaps she would black out before the end. That would be for the best.

Then her head exploded with light. She was dizzy, the universe spinning. But not spinning away… the world was hurtling back into view.

The shuttle had spun around again and shut off the engines. Now she was weightless and the ship’s bow was facing the oncoming debris head on.

“The pilot wanted to slow us down,” said McEwan, “but that wasn’t going to be enough.”

Indiya gasped when the Marines launched away from the bulkhead, aiming at Indiya and the specials. God, they were fast! She put her hands protectively in front of her face, feeling like a fly about to be swatted.

“I persuaded her of a better plan,” said McEwan. Indiya dropped her hands, and saw that he was releasing her from the harness. “The bow has some shielding.”

“Not nearly enough,” she protested as he manhandled her through the cargo bay, moving so fast she couldn’t track what he was doing.

“We’ll soon see,” he said.

Then there was a scream of wind and she gasped as her respirator switched to suit air. They’d opened the cargo bay doors to space! She ought to be sucked out into the void, but the Marines seemed immune to the effects of decompression, just hanging there without a care in the universe.

She hated being carried around like a baby. She wanted to ask what the hell was going on, but they were out of time.

The shuttle bucked violently as the debris wavefront finally hit. If the compartment had still been pressurized, the impacts would make the shuttle ring like a bell, but the airless cargo compartment was eerily silent.

She counted ten seconds of buffeting. Long enough to realize that she and her friends were cocooned inside a mass of Marines, the bulk of the formation between her and the wavefront. The brainless cyborgs were shielding her with their armored bodies. And when the debris reached the hold, the vacuum meant there wouldn’t be any pressure waves to rupture her lungs.