Marine Cadet (The Human Legion Book 1) (2 page)

Great, he thought. Just frakking great.

He checked himself. He was a Marine, and Marines
think
. He might not know much about the Trogs, but the Jotuns did and they had selected this exercise. The older cadets he knew, those in Class G and Class G-1, had all lived through similar exercises, though they were not allowed to discuss the experience. They’d survived. Logic said he should too. Probably.

Class G-1
. Of all the cadets in the year ahead of him, Arun saw in his mind’s eye the smooth oval face and dark midnight eyes of Xin Lee. She’d come through this alive. What would she think of him if she ever found out he’d gotten the scoojubbers in his first live fire exercise?

Emboldened by his logic — and thoughts of Xin — Arun switched his visor back to survey mode, and placed a target marker at the spot that Barney estimated to be five hundred meters into this tunnel. The target appeared as a glowing green cross slightly to his right, past a sharp bend, and an estimated distance to go of only sixty meters.

Once again the tunnel shimmered.

Switching his helmet to tactical didn’t show up anything to fight.

“C’mon, Barney,” Arun whispered to his suit AI. “Help me out.”

Barney’s response was to flash the green target marker at him again.

“Okay. Okay! I’m going.”

The conviction that the walls were alive proved too much. Twenty meters short of his target, Arun lost his nerve. He turned and fled. The movement in the tunnel walls gave him something important to report. That was why he was withdrawing, he told himself, not because he was a coward.

From behind him came the sound of scuffling, the dull sprinkling of falling soil.

Something was digging through the walls!

He ran faster, a risky maneuver in a battlesuit over uneven ground. Nothing would be worse than losing balance and tumbling headfirst into the alien dirt.

The frantic scurrying sound grew in volume until it drowned out the digging.

When he reached the narrow gap, he realized he’d been trapped. He turned to face whatever was coming for him from behind.

He saw a blur of black insectoid bodies scuttling toward him along the floor, ceiling and walls. Each creature was half as big again as a human, with a halo of barbed horns surrounding the head, and vicious fighting claws adorning the front pair of legs.

Troggie guardians.

These barely sentient aliens had no concept of the words ‘training exercise’. Only one thing drove the guardians: the burning desire to kill any intruder in their nest.

He didn’t need to ask Barney to know that they were coming for him faster than he could push through the narrow passageway.

Reason said that his only chance was to stand and fight.

But reason had fled even faster than the rest of Arun.

Fear drove him to bully his way through the narrow constriction, gouging out more clumps of slimy earth from the walls as he went.

Then he was through to the far side. Still alive.

“This is only an exercise,” he blurted to himself, but he knew death was only seconds away.

Fifteen meters ahead was a tight right turn and beyond that, the main corridor. He made it as far as the turning, but then his courage failed again and he had to turn and
see
.

Drawing on countless hours of combat drill, as he turned, he seamlessly readied his SA-71 carbine, bracing the stock tight in against his shoulder in readiness for the ferocious recoil kick he knew was coming.

Then he opened fire.

Every ten milliseconds the twisting railgun inside the barrel charged, launching a spinning kinetic dart out of the muzzle at Mach4. For the first two seconds of full auto fire, the darts whistled out the muzzle so gently it was as if Arun were blowing a stream of deadly butterflies. Then the recoil dampener tripped out. The carbine kicked and writhed with such fury that he couldn’t aim with more accuracy than to point in the right general direction. But he didn’t want sniper shots. He was after a withering barrage.

The SA-71 delivered.

Ichor and carapace fragments flew from the aliens. Horns shattered. Legs were chipped into fragments, making the insects trip and fall and stumble.

When the ammo carousel reported only 15% of the darts remained, Arun ceased firing. The alien advance was still pouring through the gap, drilling in and out of the solid walls as if swimming through a soil sea.
Would nothing stop them?
They powered around their fallen comrades. Every alien heart pumped hard to accomplish a single goal: to kill Arun.

Particulate matter from alien body fragments churned into a black fog that would have choked Arun if not for his helmet filters.

Oh, drent! His carbine wasn’t going to be enough. He needed the tripod-mounted beam weapons and missiles of the heavy weapons section.

Without really thinking about what he was doing, he’d turned away from the enemy guardians. Stumbling into a run, he unsnapped a grenade from his hip and rammed it into the launcher underneath his SA-71’s barrel.

He swung around.

The lead Trog was about eight meters away.

He fired.

In that half-instant before the grenade blew, he saw more guardians emerging from the ceiling on his side of the defile, burrowing out from the earth. Their numbers were too great to count, but he saw enough to know that any aliens he slaughtered would be more than replenished.

Then the grenade’s blast wave hit him, followed by a shower of alien ichor and gore.

Arun too sailed through the air and landed against a curve in the tunnel wall, his ears clearing enough to hear the hard body fragments clatter to the floor like frozen leaves in the fall.

Roof and walls began to drip with purple slurry in which black and brown rubbery chunks were mixed with clumps of falling soil. Then a half-dozen aliens fell through the top of the roof, bringing more showers of earth with them. Flailing all six limbs as they fell, they landed on the jumble of chitin below, skidding down to join the ungainly heap of living aliens scrabbling to right themselves.

The hordes behind kept coming, slipping and slithering into an ungainly mass that could not win purchase, only impede itself.

The grenade’s shaped blast front had left Arun dazed but relatively unscathed. His visor had cracked, its display unavailable, including its low-light enhancers. Smart armor had reduced fatal shrapnel to punishing bruises, but his left knee was numb and unbending.

When his senses came back, Arun hurriedly switched on the lights at the side of his helmet. One of them worked, revealing that the wavefront of alien death had slowed more than he’d hoped. He estimated that his grenade had won him a fifteen second remission before he was sliced to a bloody pulp with those front-limb claws, or impaled on the wicked horns.

Last chance, then.

He activated
combat immunity
, the emergency combat-med that would numb all sensation within three seconds, and allowed him to keep focused on killing, even if he were critically wounded. He used his right leg to push up from the floor, feeling his left knee crunching as he did. By the time he’d gotten to his feet, the pain was gone and he charged at the onrushing insectoids. Grinding noises came from his left knee; he heard his leg tearing and splintering. He smelt the moldy stink on the aliens.

By the time he’d brought up the next grenade, and engaged it in the launch attachment, the pain had gone —
all
feelings had gone. He pressed his gun’s trigger with his numb fingers and was lowering his head — too late — before the soil and chitinous armor blew over his face, almost burying him. Reaching round to the utility attachment patch on his back of his battlesuit, he snapped off another grenade, setting it to a new blast mode while he clicked it into place.

Barracks rumor — allegedly from older cadets — hinted that carrying extra grenades would be a good idea for this exercise, and that blast mode 37H might get you out of a tight spot in a Troggie nest. Whether his senseless fingers had actually punched the right code was another matter. Normally he’d tell Barney to set weapons modes, but his suit AI wasn’t in a fit state to listen.

He had been trained since birth to be a Marine, bred for it, in fact. Between the years of drill and the combat meds, his mind was not much more than a spectator as he fired the grenade at the mass of aliens.

Another blast of soil and diced bodies flung itself over his disabled visor, but more subdued this time. The grenade had tunneled through the pile of aliens and buried itself deeply into the tunnel wall behind. This blast had wreaked much less destruction, but had won him time by giving the body pile such a kick that many Trogs lost their footing again.

The combat immunity drugs seemed to be trying to tell him something, to make him remember something from training. He didn’t exactly have time to sit down and hum a memory-inducing meditative mantra, so he blanked his mind and followed his instincts…
to burrow!

Instead of firing at the aliens, he turned his back on them, firing another grenade at the curve in the tunnel wall where he’d been flung by the first grenade.

The blast buried itself into the wall, hurling a cloud of spoil out into the tunnel and coating Arun who’d flung himself to the ground just in time. Even before he’d gotten to his feet and wiped his visor clean of soil and sticky gore, he’d set another grenade to code 37H —
emergency excavation blast mode
, an implanted memory informed him — and fired again into the small alcove carved out of the wall by the previous blast.

But it was all too little too late because he felt the impact of an armored claw slashing him from behind, just before the grenade blast blew him backwards off his feet to fall onto hard unyielding carapace and slide down onto the sticky floor. His smart battlesuit armor soaked up enough of these blows to keep him alive for now.

Around him, the nearest aliens stirred feebly. Still half-stunned himself, Arun took a gamble. Instead of racing on into the hole his grenades had scooped out, he got himself up to a kneeling position and put one last 37H into the center of the cloud of alien body debris in front of him. This time he braced while the blast front rolled over him. Then he was staggering to his feet and stumbling on into the spray of soil and aerosol blood, and beyond into the hole the grenades had burrowed out of the soil. Clouds of spilling earth blinded him, but he judged he’d crawled in fifteen meters before the hole stopped and he could go no further. He abandoned his carbine, freeing both hands to burrow into the loosened soil, throwing it behind him like a gauntleted mole.

Euphoria gripped him. He’d abandoned his firearm, a capital offense, and the Trogs would dice him into a hundred bloody chunks any moment now, but he couldn’t help but grin at the simple pleasure of using his hands like paddles. For this task, his combat immunity numbness actually seemed to help.

Then he reached soil that was still too compacted to shift. Actually he’d hit that barrier several moments or minutes ago. The sense of time’s passage had numbed with most of his other senses. Even in the depths of confusion, one thing rang clear: Arun had nowhere left to run.

He screamed. High-pitched like a child. His scream cracked, turning into some hybrid of a sob and a gasp.

“McEwan, come in!”

Nowhere to run! Flekked!

“Report!”

Those aliens had done this. Those Trogs. He’d make them pay…

Arun twisted around and charged at the Troggie horde who’d gathered around the entrance to his hole.

He’d rip their legs off their stinking alien bodies.

“Report, cadet! Damn you! That is an order.”

The irritation in Brandt’s voice reached through the helmet speaker and sent a jolt of challenge into Arun’s mind. He slowed as he wondered what the frakk he was doing charging along an alcove to head butt a pack of slavering aliens desperate to reach inside and kill him.

Damn those experimental combat drugs.

“I’m under heavy assault,” he whispered into the helmet mike, more interested in putting his brain back into order than following reporting protocol. “I seem to be alive. I feel rather good, actually, thank you for asking.”

“I didn’t. I asked you to report.”

“I did.”

“I want a sit-rep. What’s happening? We came back when Osman reported movement, but now he’s dead and we’re pinned down. What are you going to do?”

In front of him, Arun could see his carbine half-buried in the dirt where he’d dropped it. The gun looked so pretty there. Shiny. He wanted it. But the aliens were reaching into his hole, flicking their claws at him, and the gun was so close to the bad insects.

Big,
fat
insects. They were too big to follow the human into his hole, and whatever had let them swim through the walls earlier wasn’t working here.

Arun shuffled around until his feet were pointing at the aliens and slid his left boot towards the waiting creatures, ever so gently.

Ever since they’d emerged from the walls and ceiling, the Trogs had been slavering, chittering beasts climbing over themselves in desperation to rend him limb from limb.

Now they froze. Arun froze too. His pulse was a dull drumming inside his helmet; there were no other sounds — until Brandt growled: “Well?”

“I think I’m going to kill them,” Arun said. “Or maybe the other way around. I’m not sure yet. I‘ll report back when I know.”

There was a way to turn off his comms unit, but he couldn’t think what that was right now. He asked Barney to switch it off, but Barney wasn’t listening for some reason. He tried out emergency eyeball gestures but they didn’t work either. If he could, he would have taken the frakking helmet off and buried it.

Brandt was very annoying. If he couldn’t turn him off, Arun decided he would drown out his voice. So Arun began to sing, a stirring ballad about the beauty of Old Earth, the precious homeworld left so very far behind. The chorus was rousing; just the thing to belt out with your pals at the end of a rec-evening.

His song got the attention of the Trogs. Each guardian shifted its head for the best reception of his singing voice. Perhaps his song was charming them to obedience, or sleep, or an even fiercer rage. Maybe they liked the words.