Indigo Squad (6 page)

Why didn’t I think of that?

Then the flight cabin shielding gave way and the jagged shards of metal and poly-ceramalloys that had once been a starship burst through the flight deck and tore into the cargo bay behind.

If Arun had thought he was getting used to life aboard
Beowulf
, the parade room on Deck 12 was a reality check.

Strictly speaking, it was called a parade ‘deck’, but he couldn’t bring himself to use that term.
Deck
suggested a floor where Marines could stand, and look down at their feet (if they dared) and look forward at an officer (if they had any sense). But now that
Beowulf
was at cruising speed, and wasn’t using her main thrusters,
down
was mutable concept.

The crew, and Marines when not in their battlesuits, got around by walking on marked areas on bulkheads that were charged, attracting their boots. Shoulder units called yokes were also attracted to the bulkheads, the downward push on the shoulders giving a better approximation of gravity than sticky boot soles alone.

All the squads in Charlie Company were lined up across the starboard edge of the fore, aft, dorsal and ventral bulkheads, forming a hollow square facing the port side. Despite all his years of zero-g training, Arun’s brain insisted that Checker, Red, Arrow and Command Squads were standing on the walls, and that Black and Silver were hanging upside down from the overhead.

He ignored the disconcerting configuration and concentrated on Ensign Krimkrak who faced them all, from just off the port bulkhead. Officer and humans alike wore dress uniforms. Normally the fatigues they wore took the form of functional olive green shirts and pants, distinguished only by subtle unit and rank insignia. When set to dress mode, the smartfabric fatigues transformed. The shirt took on a deep blue color and grew epaulets and buttons showing squad colors – Arun’s were indigo. His pants became formal trousers, cream with an indigo stripe down the outside leg. The fabric formed a sharp vertical crease and kept the legs taut despite the lack of any gravity to pull the material down.

Officers kept their dress uniforms simpler: creased cream trousers, and a plain blue four-armed top marked on the shoulders with a single sun, donating the rank of Ensign. From what little he knew of them, Jotuns loved decoration, but in their dealings with humans they preferred plainness. The simplicity seemed to say that the aliens’ superiority was so innate that there was no need to draw attention to it.

The exception to this simplicity was the officer’s dress hat, which was a stubby little thing with a flat top. The material was the same cream as the trousers, and with a black ribbon around its base with the battalion designation in gold: 88-412/TAC – 88th battalion, 412th Tactical Marine Regiment. The whole getup was for the humans’ benefit – after all, why else were the hat bands showing human numerals? But if it was meant to impress, the officer’s dress hat failed. Marines were mesmerized by these hats, wondering what mysterious mechanism kept them attached to the huge Jotun heads with their shaggy fur and the prominent ridge running from front to back. The headgear was one of the wonders of the universe.

Ensign Krimkrak and his little white hat had kept Charlie Company waiting in silence for nearly an hour now, long enough for Arun’s concentration to wander. Every now and then, his brain would suddenly notice afresh that people were standing on the overhead, and send a stab of panic to his guts to alert him that something had gone fundamentally wrong with the laws of physics.

If only the other physical worry could be brushed aside so easily. The heat! His zero-g training had been on ancient hulks open to the frigid void but
Beowulf
was the opposite. The ship fought a constant battle to dump the heat it generated out to space fast enough to avoid cooking its occupants. His hip flask felt like it weighed as much as a miniature planetoid, but he daren’t drink from it. Not on parade.

Precisely one hour after the parade had formally begun, the six-limbed alien officer cleared his throat… and 144 thirsty Marines begun to hope their ordeal might soon be over.

“Honor your fallen comrades,” ordered Ensign Krimkrak. When he’d cleared his throat, Arun had thought the officer would speak with his own voice, but instead the order came through a human voice synthesizer. Arun had heard Colonel Little Scar speak once. The commander of the 412th Marines had sounded as if he’d swallowed a box of razor blades, and gargled with grit.

Keeping his mid-limbs pointing at his feet, Krimkrak flung out his upper-left arm. On the bulkhead behind him and to the left appeared images of the two officers killed in the boarding action on
Bonaventure
: Lieutenant Balor and Ensign Geror. At a similar gesture from his upper-right arm, the remainder of the port bulkhead cycled through images of the human Marines killed in the same action, and Marine Giorgio Yakubov who had perished the day before when the shuttle had been caught in
Bonaventure’s
explosion.

“Too many died,” announced Krimkrak after a few minutes contemplation. “Your performance was unacceptable.” The alien began swiveling his trumpet-like ears, a sign of agitation. “One of you distinguished himself, both in the capture of
Bonaventure
and in an incident yesterday when we lost a shuttle. A mere Marine – the lowest among you – took initiative. Assumed control.” Krimkrak snarled. “Decided your fate.”

In his own razor-grit voice, the officer added: “And his.”

Without warning, the ensign shot across the parade deck like a railgun dart. He must have been wearing a maneuvering harness under his dress uniform.

From sweltering heat, Arun suddenly felt a paralyzing chill of fear. Krimkrak had swooped to a halt ten meters away. An unarmored Jotun weighed more than a human in a battlesuit. A primitive instinct told Arun that he was prey, and had better run.

“Come here, Marine McEwan.”

Arun pushed away from the bulkhead, slowly somersaulting to match the orientation of the officer, who was at right angles to Indigo Squad.

Krimkrak grabbed Arun’s shoulders, arresting the human’s momentum as surely as if he’d slammed into a battlecruiser. The rubbery suction-tipped tubes that passed for a Jotun’s default hand configuration looked soft but gripped forcefully enough to make Arun wince; his arms could pop out of his shoulder joints at any moment.

It hurt so much that Arun bit his lips hard enough to draw blood. He sucked at the blood as it leaked out, frightened of the repercussions if it slipped out and stained the officer’s uniform.

“Are you a sergeant, McEwan?”

Arun hesitated while he pushed away the agony in his shoulders. “No, sir.”

“Oh, I see. Then you imagine yourself an officer. An ensign, perhaps.” He snarled, hurling hot alien breath across Arun. It smelled like burned sugar. “No. Command to you is so natural. You deserve a higher rank, I think. Lieutenant perhaps? What should you be? Which officer rank are you?”

“I am not an officer, sir.”

“You are correct. You are human. Humans have never been officers. Until now.”

Where was Krimkrak going with this?
Arun licked his lips and found the bleeding had stopped.

“In light of your actions on
Bonaventure
, I promote you.”

Arun was so stunned it felt as if the entire galaxy had moved far away, leaving just him behind. Then he had to fight back the thrill that threatened to make him punch the air in triumph. Was this the moment when his destiny came to call? Was this where it really started?

“Congratulations on your new rank,
General McEwan
.”

Arun’s nerves fluttered. For a moment, the resilience of his dreams convinced him this was real. That wounded man on
Bonaventure
had called him General McEwan. Then the edifice of his hubris began to crack. Seriously? A general?

His dreams of destiny collapsed into dust, leaving behind only the conviction that Ensign Krimkrak did not mean him well.

“We do not have uniform insignia instructions for a general,” said the ensign. “This is an exceedingly elevated rank. So much so that none of you would recognize the insignia marks even if we did have them. Instead, I will make do with old insignia once used by generals on Earth. Stand still, McEwan, as you receive your reward.”

Krimkrak reached out with his hands. After removing Arun’s yoke from his shoulders, each of the alien’s twelve finger tubes turned inside out and then split in two. The ends of all twenty-four fingers twisted and hardened before sprouting three-inch claws from their tips.

The alien’s claws flicked across Arun’s shoulders in a blaze of pain.

Arun kept his posture rigid but couldn’t help growling in the hot pain of his torture.

Krimkrak withdrew his bloodied claws to inspect his handiwork.

Around Arun’s head, blobs of his blood mixed with the eddying swirls of tattered smartfabric fragments, a confusing blur that matched the shocked fuzziness in his head.

But Krimkrak wasn’t finished. Arun remained at attention as he allowed the ensign to tear into his bloodied flesh once more. Knowing what was coming made this much harder second time around.

Arun squeezed his eyes half shut and pinched his mouth, but this time did not utter a sound even though the pain was worse. This time he was prepared.

After a few more seconds of flesh-carving, Krimkrak wiped his bloodstained claws on a clean part of Arun’s uniform and withdrew a short distance from the cloud of crimson debris around the Marine.

“I have etched three general’s stars into each shoulder,” said the ensign. “Let the pain remind you of your place, human.”

“Yes, sir,” replied McEwan through gritted teeth.

Krimkrak shut off the images of the dead Marines and shot away out of the hatch, leaving the humans in their hollow parade square.

The Marines were used to their officers walking off and leaving their human NCOs to dismiss their unit. But the NCOs were as drug-addled as their Marines. Indigo stood there, eyes glazed, unsure what to do.

That gave Arun plenty of time to wallow in the agony the officer had carved into his shoulders. Thanks to his robust Marine physiology, the blood flow from his wounds had already slowed to a stream of red drops ejected by blood pressure away from his skin, and slowed by air resistance to cloud and clump around him like an aerial oil-slick.

He needed first aid, but first he had to escape. He thrashed his body, but couldn’t reach the bulkhead where his comrades stood watching him.

“Springer,” he yelled, “grab my feet.”

She reached out, but Arun was too far away.

“Umarov,” Arun said, “help her.”

Umarov pushed off the bulkhead to act as a bridge between Arun and Springer, who reeled them both back to the charged floor.

By then, a homing instinct had told Charlie Company to march back to their mess quarters on Deck 4, even without Staff Sergeant Bryant’s instructions. Arun and his comrades fell in with the rest. None of them spoke, but each pace brought a wince of pain from Arun that grew worse with every step.

The trauma from the cuts was painful enough, but Arun had been wounded many times before and knew it would take more than a few deep claw-slices to damage him permanently. But the wounds felt hot and itched unbearably. His body’s defenses were telling him they were fighting off toxins or infection.

The wounds were not clean and it felt as if something had been inserted into his flesh.

Had the officer poisoned him?

“When I heard your shuttle had been lost… I… I couldn’t bear to lose you too.” Deputy Chief Cryo Officer Purify peered over his thick glasses at Indiya, concern evident in his rheumy old eyes. “Thank goodness you’re all right, my dear.”

After a moment of feeling insulted to be called
my dear,
she wrapped her arms around him, burying her face into the crook of her uncle’s neck. Even his scratchy white beard felt comforting today.

“It’s a good job I was with Marine McEwan,” she said from inside the embrace.

Uncle Puri drew back, embarrassed by the physical nature of her affection. “Arun McEwan?” he absent-mindedly took off his glasses and rubbed at one eye. “I’ve heard him mentioned. Did you know the Sergeant of Marines is his brother?”

She considered this news. “No I didn’t, and I can’t see how that’s significant. I do know that my McEwan was the only one of them with enough initiative to save us. None of the other Marines could possibly have thought that through because their minds are so tainted.”

“Er, yes. Yes, I assumed it was just me who thought that. Our ship’s detachment of Marines appear normal to me, but the battalion we are carrying as passengers does seem a little… sluggish. Even for
Homo sapiens mutans
. Or should that be
Homo sapiens giganteus?”

Indiya was about to admonish her uncle for running off on a linguistic tangent. But when she thought about it, Uncle had always found comfort in puzzle games, and distraction was what he needed.

She tried to give a genial laugh. “Yes, I suppose we can’t really call them human. What does that make us, though?
Homo sapiens astorum?”

Uncle Puri tilted his head and tugged endearingly at his beard. “Does that mean star humans?”

Indiya shrugged. “Maybe. When I was a girl you taught me useful things, such as how to blend cryo fluids to match an individual’s physiology. You never had time to teach Latin.”

“My dear Indiya, I hope I encouraged you to think. That is far more important than knowing transitory facts that could become obsolete as you progress through your life’s journey, let alone a language dead for so long that the dust that first settled upon it has become rock. But back to your Marines. Please don’t judge them harshly. Not only are they a more simple-minded form of human than ourselves but, like you, our current cargo are not yet out of their teens when judged in standard years. Unlike you they are not ready to carry out their tasks, rushed into their combat suits before they’re fully trained. It is only natural that they should lack initiative.”