Marine Cadet (The Human Legion Book 1) (24 page)

Bryant stared at the cadets, looking them up and down as if they were something foul he’d scraped off the sole of his boot. There was something wrong about the performance. When Rekka glared at you, her contempt ran solidly from her face down into the core of her soul. But not Bryant. He seemed worried.

For a moment, Arun nearly changed his mind again and confessed his suspicions about the cadet drugging. Then Bryant shook his head and hardened his face. The moment was gone.

“Learn your lesson well,” ordered Bryant. “Stay alive. Dismissed!”

As Arun saluted and marched off to his fate, he felt bile rise. He nearly choked with the horror of what he was about to walk into. All his life, the truth of his slavery had been something he could push to the perimeter of his existence. This was different. Beatings, torture, malnutrition, and kissing the boots of your mistress – that’s what awaited him. It wasn’t the prospect of pain and injury that twisted his gut: it was the shame.

How had humans sunk so low?

Then a far better question hit him, and a lightness came to his step.

How could humans rise up again?

Operation Clubhouse

Military Concepts

– Static defenses/ Defensive Warrens

If you’re not familiar with star system defense strategies, then you probably think that defensive warrens, such as the infamous Detroit – constructed for our predecessors and rivals, the Human Marine Corps, on Tranquility – are designed to defend against an invader.

It’s an understandable mistake. But you would still be wrong.

In fact, the primary objective of warren designers is to build a structure that will be destroyed.

Sure, the warren will have embrasures and powered hardpoints for heavy weapons, not to mention armor and force shields, and workshops buried deep beneath the surface capable of adding to the stockpiles of vehicles, weapons and ordinance.

And, yes, in addition to the broad spineways and transit corridors, wide enough for grav tanks to charge through, the narrower passageways twist and turn back on themselves so that invading troops will not only become lost, but will constantly be checking their rear for a counter attack that could come from any direction.

Then there is the key to the kind of strongly-garrisoned warren at Detroit: self-contained hab-disks that can seal themselves off for years before drilling their way to the surface and spilling out a company-sized unit of defenders bent on revenge. Hundreds of hab-disks will most likely survive the death rained from the skies by conventional munitions. They would be like weeds forever reappearing on a patch of ground you thought you’d cleared.

Warrens are built so strongly, that a better approach for an invader is to stay in orbit and play a longer game. They could douse the planet with so many dirty nukes that the planet is left a sterile, irradiated husk for millions of years to come – let’s see if the hab-disks can wait that one out!

Or, if you have the tech, you could use gamma beams rather than nukes to do the same job.

But simplest by far is to nudge the orbits of comets and asteroids to slam into the besieged planet, a rain of destruction unrelenting for years.

In other words, to destroy a defensive warren, you’ll probably have to destroy the planet.

Which is what the warren designers want.

Why?

Because forcing your enemy to destroy your planet denies it to him.

And if he can’t use your planet for himself, why bother invading in the first place?

Unfortunately for the defenders, that logic doesn’t always work: far too many wars are driven by hatred, not economic calculation.

And the story of how our galaxy’s civilizations rise and clash plays out over such extended timescale that they can scarcely be conceived by humans – at least the original ones derived from
Homo sapiens
.

But the aliens who design the warrens have been around far longer than us, long enough to know one thing with statistical certainty.

If they build their warren well, then the day will surely come when it will be destroyed, along with the planet it has doomed.

Further reading

If you delve deeper into Detroit’s history and design, you will soon smack up against security walls. It’s no secret that Detroit held a lot of secrets. And if you need to ask what they are, you definitely don’t need to know.

But whatever mysteries Detroit might have hidden in its depths, in its upper levels and hab-disks – Detroit was built as a defensive warren.

And when the invasion did finally come, it proved a tough nut to crack.

The domain of Auxiliary Team Beta lay through a restricted access side tunnel off Corridor 710 on Level 5. During their years at novice school, the cadets had used this corridor countless times, but there had never been a reason to explore the restricted passageways leading into the unknown.

Arun had expected his punishment detail would have to cross a guard post or input a security code into a locked hatch. There was none of that. The only physical barrier to prevent the curious from exploring the area was the stench. Cadets were used to showering two or three times per day. They were now entering the realm of the unwashed.

“Hello!” called Springer. “Is anybody there?”

A minute later, a dreary figure in heavily soiled overalls, that might once have been dark blue, appeared from out of the poorly lit passageway and beckoned them to follow.

“Hi,” greeted Madge as they walked to meet the figure. “What’s your name?”

The Aux ignored her.

It was a woman, decided Arun, a girl. Like the cadets, she was probably still in her teens, though Arun found it impossible to be sure. The overalls hung very heavily over her shoulders, more like armor than clothing. Her face was gaunt and soiled, her hair crudely cropped.

If the spark of life had dimmed in Hortez’s eyes, it was guttering in the girl’s, kept alive by the simmering heat of sly resentment.

None of the cadets tried again to strike up a conversation. They followed the auxiliary in silence as she led them along a long corridor, ever deeper into their banishment.

To either side were mostly closed doors, but one door had been removed allowing Arun a glimpse of a vehicle park of sorts. Instead of the hovertanks and strike flitters he’s seen in other parks, here were trolleys on casters and sit-on cleaning trucks that actually looked kind of fun.

They hadn’t even reported in yet but already Arun was feeling an urgent need to lighten the mood of this death march. The Hardits were humorless bullies whose language translator AIs weren’t enough to stop them sounding like bumbling idiots when talking to humans. The next week was not going to be pleasant, but it would at least involve Arun mocking the hell out of the hairy monkey-vecks.

Just as he was thinking of something smart to say – anything to break the doom-filled silence – Springer beat him to it. She sprinted ahead and dodged through a door that had been left ajar.

Arun followed, hot on her heels.

A light flickered on as soon as Springer entered the room, revealing it to be a workshop. There were banks of metal boxes, neatly labeled. Tools and power sockets dangled from the ceiling over scarred workbenches.

“Hey, Arun,” said Springer. “Remember the workshops on Level 9?”

He grinned back. Their class had been shown around the workshops where repairs were made for weapons mounted on the orbital defense platforms. This Aux workshop was suited more to fixing shelves, or maybe a leaky tap. But that was all right. Taps and shelves weren’t as impressive as a 60 Gigajoule Fermi Cannon, but even such humble equipment had their own part to play in the life of the Corps.

Springer and Arun grinned at each other, a connection that extended for several invigorating seconds.
They were going to get through this okay
.

Wandering off for a few moments hardly counted as a great victory for oppressed humanity, but it put Arun in the mood for ripping the hell out of the Hardits.

Bring ’em on. I’ll handle them.

He rejoined Madge and the Aux woman. As they pushed farther along the corridor, the air filled ever thicker with the heavy odors of unsanitized humanity.

Eventually they entered a rectangular room that had the same dimensions as the dorms in the hab-disks, though this room appeared much larger at first because there were no racks, armory cupboards or head.

There was a far more serious difference: dorms in the hab-disks housed eight cadets. In this room were fifty human auxiliaries lined up in two rows. They were hunched, faded skeletons more than people. The men, and boys old enough, wore matted beards.

“You are slightly early.” The artificial voice came from the only Hardit in the room, a creature in dark blue overalls like the humans, except the Hardit’s was relatively clean and, while still rough material, hung more like clothing than semi-rigid armor. The voice was male, but Arun knew that didn’t prove anything.

“I am not impressed, though,” said the Hardit. “Your species cowers in filth of its own fear. It is this fear that drove you here double fast, not respect for your better. By the time I have finished with you, I will teach you respect and justify your fear. Now remove clothing.” The alien gestured at the Aux who had led them in. “Number 87 will provide you with new uniforms.”

The cadets started stripping off their fatigues while the girl who had led them here – Number 87 – went over to a box in the back corner of the room and came back bearing three sets of soiled overalls.

“Those too, you dumb vecks,” urged 87, when the cadets hesitated to remove their underwear. “As if anyone cares here.”

Arun complied. But when, naked, he reached for his new overalls, his eyes popped wide. Number 87 had lied.
She
cared that they stripped off completely, but in a freak-out way. As soon as the cadets discarded their clothes, she scooped them up. Once she had the full set, she flung most them into a heap of sacking, blankets and clothing piled up in one corner of the room, but kept a few items to one side.

Was this a pile of bedding?

For the briefest of moments, the idea tickled Arun that one of these Aux would enjoy his underwear for a pillow tonight. Then he looked again at the occupants of the room. Were 53 people really going to sleep here in this one dorm? There was scarcely enough room for them all to stand.

“Hurry up or we’ll all be in the drent,” urged 87.

One of the Aux collapsed in a rasping sequence of coughs, attempting desperately to suppress them.

It was a reminder that Arun had new dorm-mates. He couldn’t help but begin to feel responsible for them.

When he stepped into his new clothes, they felt oddly familiar – like a flak jacket, which was a crude form of armor with overlapping scales of toughened ceramo-plastics sandwiched between ablative and reflective layers.

“Which one of you threw the light-bang bomb?” asked the Hardit.

Arun raised an arm.

“Your attack caused me mild discomfort. Very little actually. I almost did not notice.”

Liar!

“Nonetheless the idea that a human could attempt to harm superior sickens me to the tip of tail. Step forward!”

This was the moment Arun had dreaded. Worse! It hadn’t occurred to him that it would be Tawfiq Woomer-Calix herself who would meet them. This was going to be personal.

The Hardit reached into a pouch slung on her waist.

What was it going to be? A stunner? Slow-acting poison? A whip? Maybe the creature thought humans deserved a particularly primitive form of torture, and was about to bring out a rusty knife.

The prospect of pain was something he could bear, but to stand and meekly take it… he wasn’t sure he would be capable of that. The future that frightened him most was to end this punishment week alive but damaged. He would be no use as a cadet if he suffered permanent injury. They wouldn’t take him back; he’d be stuck here forever.

All three cadets had made a pact. No goading the Hardits; no rising to their bait. They would suck up every bit of drent they were given and get out of here in one piece… unless he saw an opportunity to make the monkey-like aliens look like buffoons. He bet Springer would do the same.

Madge wouldn’t. Even if a hidden traitor really was feeding his buddies with low-dose combat drug, it wouldn’t change her. When she needed to be, Madge was as hard as a kinetic torpedo. She would stay professional throughout while Springer and he would need to goof around to cope. That was why Springer was his best buddy and Madge was his section leader.

The Hardit brought out a phial of liquid, which she dipped her thumb into and then smeared over a square fabric patch stitched into the breast of Arun’s overalls.

Tawfiq replaced the phial and brought out two more – there were dozens in that pouch – mixed them together and smeared the resulting paste onto the fabric patch.

“You are designated number 106,” Tawfiq told Arun. “Return to your place.”

While Madge and Springer were given the same treatment, numbered 109 and 114 respectively, Arun looked at his breast. Of the alien’s fluid there was no sign, but now he looked closer he could make out his new name, 106, marked in faded human numerals.

“Approach your mistress, 106.”

Arun obeyed.

Tawfiq stared at him along her long snout. She appeared disappointed that he held her three-eyed gaze and glared back for all he was worth. Being a head taller than his all-powerful mistress made that a helluva lot easier.

“Keep looking into my eyes,” she ordered. As Tawfiq spoke, she lifted her tail and snaked it around behind her. Strips of the rough fabric used in their overalls were wrapped around her tail from its base to a hand’s width from its tip, which was left bare. The tip was flattened but curled in on itself like a rolled tongue.

Suddenly the tip whipped through the air and smacked into Arun’s left cheek. He was still gasping with shock when the tail whipped back behind the Hardit and slapped him on the right.