Marine Cadet (The Human Legion Book 1) (25 page)

This time, Arun was ready for it.

He hadn’t broken eye contact with the alien. It was a pathetically small victory, but at this point he’d take what he could get.

After that came a steady rhythm of slaps from the Hardit’s tail.

On the spectrum of torture implements he had steeled his nerve against, this slapping barely registered. In fact he suspected it hurt the creature’s tail more than his cheek. It was the surprise that had made him gasp.

But that didn’t mean it was easy. To stand and take a beating, however feeble it might be, filled Arun with shame.
What kind of Marine would crawl to these ugly creatures?
He bit his lower lip. His body started to shake with the effort to keep from punching that stupid alien veck between its three ugly eyes.

There was a bulbous projection on the end of the Hardit’s snout that he assumed was her nose. Arun pictured grabbing that nose in his hand and pulling with every ounce of strength. Would it come off? His hands clenched with the thought. He hoped it would only come half off. Yes, that was even better.

“Return to your place.”

Arun came back to himself, realizing his breathing was fast and shallow. He stepped back, still not breaking eye contact.

He was daring the alien to break eye contact with
him
.

“109, come here for whipping.”

Madge stepped up and Tawfiq started to beat her the same way.

Arun was still seething with humiliation, quaking with all the anger that had pumped through his muscles but had nowhere to go.

By contrast, Madge barely seemed to register what Tawfiq was doing, which only made Arun feel more humiliated.

Standing there and taking it was bad, but to watch his friend take her slapping was far harder. They were part of a team. Even though Madge thought him no better than pond scum right now, they still looked out for each other. But Arun could only stand there and shake with impotence.

“109 is female, isn’t that so, 106?”

“Right,” said Arun.

“She has long and yellow hair does not she?”

“Yes.”
Your translator isn’t worth drent, Hardit.

“And human males find that very attractive in human females, don’t you…
114
?”

114? That was Springer!

Springer didn’t answer. Arun couldn’t entirely blame her. Did this monkey creature really think she was a guy? Hadn’t Tawfiq just seen Springer naked? Actually, come to think of it, the alien hadn’t been paying much attention. Just wait till he got back and told Osman.

“Answer,” ordered Tawfiq. The voice coming through her speaker was calm, but the alien was twitching with agitation. “Are you attracted to this female’s hairs?”

“Yes,” said Springer. “Her yellow hairs fill me with such extreme lust that I often faint with the desire to caress them.”

Steady on, Springer. Don’t push it.

The alien paused, probably to translate Springer’s words, before addressing Arun. “And you, 106?”

“Sure,” he replied. “109 has pretty hairs and looks really hot.”

“I wonder,” said Tawfiq, “whether 109 will still
look really hot
by the time I have finished her whipping.” The Hardit sped up her tail swipes. “Shall we see?”

The artificial voice was expressionless, but Arun couldn’t help but imagine a sly quality to it. A gloating that Arun longed to smack out of the creature. He looked at the lineup of Aux, searching for support, but they glanced away, pretending not to see, or looked bored as if they’d seen it all before. Only Hortez watched from the back row, anger sketched onto his face.

“Keep watching, 106!” The Hardit’s artificial voice did not change its expression, but the alien’s anger registered as a louder volume. “This is only a gentle introduction to your program of torture.”

Madge began to blink. Then she sneezed. The tail had whipped her cheek unerringly but with the sudden movement of the sneeze, it cut into her nose, bringing out a stream of blood. The Hardit’s striking tail smeared the beads of red over Madge’s cheeks.

Arun bore it for another half dozen swipes, but the sight of his friend smeared in her own blood was too much.

“Okay,” he told the Hardit, “you’ve made your point.”

The alien stopped. “The human speaks. What does it mean?”

“I said you’ve made your point. You’re the boss. We’ll do what you say. There’s no point in carrying on hitting her.”

“Oh, but there is. You are just too stupid to understand yet. But you shall.”

Glaring at him all the time, Tawfiq’s tail curled around her waist and touched a device at her hip.

Every muscle in Arun’s body contracted at once. His diaphragm squeezed the air from his lungs. His knees pressed hard against his chest and he fell to the ground, unable to do anything but silently scream against the pain wracking his body.

Then the pressure released enough for him to draw a breath, and relax the clamp that his jaw had become. No wonder the overalls hung so heavily; they contained an electro-shocker system.

Before he had time to speak, the pain was back and his own muscles had been turned against him again, compressing him into a ball. He rolled over in a feeble attempt to escape the Hardit, who he thought was kicking him, but it was difficult to know what was going on since all that mattered was the need to breathe because the Hardit veck was enjoying this too much to release him from the pain. Steam blew out his mouth. Something was smoldering. It might be his skin or teeth or maybe the hairs over his body but it didn’t matter anymore because…

Then he was breathing the sweet, sweet air. Gulping at it greedily, petrified that each breath would be his last.

It took some time for Arun to fully come back to his senses.

“Stand!” Tawfiq ordered.

Arun struggled to his feet.

“I assure you that I have not hit 109 while you were incapacitated.” Tawfiq advanced on Arun and pressed her snout up into his face. Her breath stank of stale cabbage and fresh feces.

She growled in her throat. Then the speaker attached to her collar elaborated: “I did not wish you to miss any of 109’s pain.”

Tawfiq went back to slapping Madge.

After only half a dozen swipes, the beating was interrupted when another Hardit walked in. Tawfiq switched off her translator unit and the two aliens argued in their own growling speech. Their tails touched and stroked each other. Then, without any change in their conversation, their tails stretched longer and thinner and snaked through gaps in their overalls to caress each other’s body.

When they began rubbing with their tails, the tone of their voices softened, taking on a crooning quality.

Arun managed to be both disgusted by the lewd alien display and grateful for the interruption to their torture.

The respite only lasted a minute or so before the two aliens broke off contact.

“I enjoyed your pain,” said Tawfiq in her artificial human male voice. “But we must save the rest of the female’s beating until later. Humans, you have work to do.”

Tawfiq gave out the day’s assignments. The newcomers were each paired with an experienced Aux, and Arun thought his luck had changed slightly when he realized he was to be paired with Hortez.

But then Madge thumped him painfully in the ribs as they walked out into the passageway.

“Thanks for nothing, you dongwit.”

“What? What did I do?”

“Monkey-bitch was obviously trying to goad you.
Watch me strike this attractive female. How does that make you feel?
Well, didn’t take long for us to find out, genius? Did it?”

“I got it worse than you, didn’t I?”

Madge grabbed him by the shoulders and span him around, forcing Arun to look into her beautiful, blood-spattered face.

“Tawfiq wants your ass. You’ve just let her know that beating me is a perfect way to get to you. So guess who’s going to get beaten and humiliated every chance that monkey-bitch gets.”

“Lay off him,” protested Springer.

At least someone doesn’t hate me,
thought Arun.

“Oh, I’m sorry, cadet. Did I say something horrible to your boyfriend?”

Springer stiffened at that but said nothing.

“What would you know anyway?” Madge snapped. “Monkey-bitch took one look and assumed you were a boy. If you ever wondered about your looks, then wonder no more, sister.”

Arun watched in horror as his friends squared up to each other, violence in their eyes.

“Keep your mouth shut, McEwan,” whispered Hortez. “Let them sort it out. I might be down and nearly out, but I still understand women better than you do. Besides, once you’ve finished being Tunnel-Aux scum, Madge will be your cadet NCO again. She needs to remind both of you who’s in charge.”

Springer and Madge broke contact and stormed off down the corridor so fast that the Aux they were supposed to be following had to run to keep up with their charges.

Hortez slowed, grabbing Arun’s sleeve to encourage him to do the same. “Let them go,” said Hortez “Try to make things right with them tonight. And don’t be too hard on yourselves. Breaking us is about the only pleasure the Hardits have. They’ve gotten quite good about it.”

Arun slapped his friend on the back. “I’m thinking,” he hissed.

It was good to hear his friend talk when he’d pretty much given Hortez up for dead, but Arun wanted quiet to think.

Most people when they got angry just wanted to hit something, their higher order cognitive functions on temporary leave of absence. Software system architecture design, problem solving, strategic planning – these were off the menu until the fight or flight hormones had been purged from their system.

Arun was like that too – most of the time. But maybe Arun was an experimental rewiring, a test subject for the human re-engineering program. Because he could take all that anger and shunt the energy into his mind, making it whirl and dance in ways that were normally beyond him.

And that’s what happened now.

The Hardits had humiliated the cadets, but had revealed many weaknesses as they did so. Inside his head, Arun pictured a mindscape of possibilities. Opportunities to exploit those Hardit weaknesses were laid out across this mindscape, scores of them. Arun knew better than to box in his thinking with conscious thought, so he unleashed his mind to roam wherever it wanted, testing the strength of those possibilities, rejecting most, promoting some. Extrapolating. Dreaming.

By the time his mind calmed, its task completed, he’d only progressed ten paces along the corridor. He couldn’t point to any definite plan. Not yet. Nothing like that conviction that had told him to connect to Xin through Scendence. All the same, he was confident that seeds of revenge had been planted in his head, ready to sprout and bloom when the time was right.

He grinned, even though his mind felt bruised by its effort.

This was going to be a week the Hardits would never forget.

As far as Arun was concerned, when you pooped indoors, you did your business, flushed, and went on with your day. What happened after you flushed had never occurred to him.

Until now.

Banishment to the Aux underclass had already opened his eyes to some of the least glamorous aspects of life in Detroit.

Opened his eyes and made them water with the stench.

That first morning with Hortez, Arun learned what happened after you flushed.

Aux Team Beta was based near the regimental school on Level 5. At seven years old, the most promising kids were enrolled in the school as its new intake of novices. There the children fought, trained and competed to graduate as cadets at the age of 17.

Until a few weeks earlier, Hortez and the rest of Blue Squad had still been novices, sleeping in a 50-bed dorm not five minutes’ walk from Team Beta’s base. Now, for his first assignment as an Aux, Arun was back, helping Hortez to transfer novices’ rotting excrement from the collection vats into wheeled storage tanks. It had been one of these slurry carts that Hortez had been pushing when Arun had first chanced across him on his bike.

Tawfiq had tasked them with clearing out one latrine block in the morning and another in the afternoon. That hadn’t sounded too hard, but then Arun had assumed they would be cleaning out a single day’s filth.

They weren’t.

Underneath the latrines were collection vats where the output of several hundred novice backsides accumulated for 2-3 weeks before the Aux emptied them. The putrid stench hit Arun the moment he opened the door to the access passageway.

The vats were primed with an automated suffusion of bacteria, engineered to rapidly transform the dung into fertilizer, readily digestible by both the crops grown topside by human Agri-Aux, and the Troggie fungus farms in dark underground caverns.

For the first few trips, Arun and Hortez fitted hoses to drainage taps and allowed the lumpy liquid to drain into the tanks of their dung carts. The foul slurry stank and splashed but they wiped themselves off as best they could, and pushed the carts up the long looping main ramp of Helix 1, and then out past the watching Marines of Gate 5 to a topside facility. There they emptied their contents into wagons with sprayer attachments that would be towed by the Agri-Aux to their fields.

Arun had been grateful for the fresh air once they reached the surface, but Hortez had picked up pace, eager to get under cover. He’d already explained that without the protective spray of the shower block oils, Tranquility’s sun burned.

Arun thought his friend was making a drama out of all this sun-worry, especially after they emerged into a topside deeply shadowed by the mountains. Even in half-light, the peeling skin and weeping sore on Hortez’s cheek were now more obvious, more than enough to convince Arun to follow his friend’s example by pulling his hat low and keeping to the deepest shadows. He prayed they never sent him out beyond the protective shield of the mountains.

After their third trip, the latrine slurry stopped flowing and there was no choice but to open the hatch. They got in and shoveled, the brown goop slapping around their calves and sucking at their every step. The sight of endless gallons of semi-putrefied dung churned Arun’s stomach so much that he vomited the contents of his stomach into the vat. The wet slurping noise as they dug out another shovel-full was merely disgusting; far more sickening was the toxic stench. In the end, they took it in turns, one spending five minutes shoveling while the other recovered, breathing the air outside. The same putrid access passageway air that had so horrified Arun at the beginning was now sweet-smelling relief, compared with the miasma inside the vat.