Marine Cadet (The Human Legion Book 1) (30 page)

“I don’t mean asking Bryant to swap us around,” Arun added. “Sure, I
will
do that, but I don’t hold up hope. I mean something new. Something… something I haven’t thought of yet.”

Hortez’s stare held its scorn for a few more seconds before crumpling into laughter. “Arun McEwan, you sure are something! If anyone else had told me that, I’d have spat in their face. To give a hopeless man a false reason to hope – that’s about the cruelest thing possible in an unbearably cruel universe. But you… Things happen around you, McEwan. Like you’re blessed or something.” Hortez stilled his laughter and regarded Arun seriously.

Arun could see a stiffening of confidence in his friend’s face, in the squaring of his stance.

“I’ll hook all my remaining hope onto your rising star,” said Hortez. “It’s like Majanita said last night. If anyone can figure out a way to help me, it’s you.”

Arun patted him on back. “Yeah, man! We’ll do it.”

For a moment, Arun thought the group was going to whoop and dance. Inwardly, though, the weight of Hortez’s expectation was another burden dragging Arun to his knees. All he wanted to do was be one of the team. The half of the planet who didn’t wish him dead seemed to be queuing up to label him as some kind of savior, a hero. Now he’d added Hortez to that list.

He sighed. His one great talent was for vulleying up friendships, and what was heroic about that? Those gleaming warriors, flashing by at precisely regular intervals with streamers flying in their own slipstream – the men and women who were reducing their cargo to a pile of splinters and tortured metal – they were the heroes.

Not him.

——

Tranquility’s tactical Marine regiments had a nominal strength of 12 field and 8 cadet battalions, each organized into 24 companies of 6 squads plus command and heavy weapons sections. Each Marine weighed an average of 250 pounds of human meat packed into a 150 pounds of battlesuit armor, life support, motors, and powered exoskeleton.

In all, three companies stormed by, continuing on their way like a lightning bolt in slow motion, giving Team Beta no more acknowledgment than any other bolt of lightning would. What the friends had seen was probably the entirety of the 420th’s veteran force that was stationed on Tranquility and awake, rather than stored in freezer pods deep in the bowels of Detroit.

It was display of strength and discipline strong enough to stir Arun’s reluctant heart… and pulverize the middle cargo box and the trolley that had carried it. The other two loads on the path were damaged too: their wooden crates broken and their contents scattered.

The middle trolley was shattered far past the possibility of repair. The flat loading panel now sunken into the path was the only piece of the trolley still recognizable. Washers and bolts of metal and plastic had scattered like shrapnel, adding to the stones used by the engineers to construct the path. Amazingly, some of the boxes carried in the middle trolley were still intact.

Arun joined the rest of Team Beta in trying to salvage something from the mess, throwing cargo box shards, plastic fragments and twisted metal away from the path and onto the fields to either side. As they cleared the debris, they revealed more of the plain black boxes. None of them looked damaged.

Arun picked one up. It had a handle and indentations along its side, just like the kind of ammo case he was used to. It probably was the same design. Durable containers were humble but vital engineering patterns, so it made sense to reuse the same design for many purposes. A lock prevented him from getting inside so he gave it an exploratory shake instead. Even if the box was strong, he expected the shattered remains of its contents to rattle, but he heard nothing. Perhaps the load was okay after all.

The yellow writing stenciled onto the plain black box was written in an alien script. He had no idea what was inside. “Hey, what do you reckon these are?” he asked.

“Something illicit,” replied Hortez. “Gemstones, narcotics, the colonel’s art collection. Or maybe saucy Hardit lingerie.”

Arun laughed. “No. I reckon it’s Hardit underwear all right, but it’s
clean
. Anything that didn’t stink would be deviant fetish clothing to those filthy monkeys.”

“Shut up!”

“What’s the matter, Springer?” Arun asked

“I know what’s in them.”

“What?”

“See for yourself.”

Arun followed Springer’s pointing finger to where Madge had taken the lid off one of the plain dark boxes. The walls of the box were undamaged but the lock hinges on the lid had shattered, allowing Madge to slide off the lid.

Inside were plasma rifles, SA-71 assault carbines, even a flenser cannon lying on a bed of matte black squares. He’d seen squares like that before: composite armor plates on a hovertank.

Cold fear overcame the warm sun and sent shivers down Arun’s spine. Until that moment he had secretly believed against all realistic expectation that he would survive to shrug off the week as his
Aux Adventure
.

But now?

This changed everything.

He was part of a gun smuggling operation!

Were the Hardits the traitors?
With everything else falling to drent, Arun had nearly forgotten about Pedro’s hints: that someone was drugging the cadets.

He stared at one of the ammo carousels neatly stacked, ready to be slotted into an SA-71 and fired at – at what? – at Marines?

“This all fits,” Arun said to himself. Then he raised his voice and announced: “There’s something I need to tell you…”

——

“Traitors?” Madge’s way of getting her head around Arun’s tale of drugging and traitors was to storm up and down, looking like she wanted to smack something.

Arun looked to Hortez and Springer for support, but they were too lost in thought. “Corporal, don’t you think we’ve all been acting strangely recently?” he called out to Madge.

She stopped and stared at Arun. He couldn’t see her eyes properly through the stretched fabric of her worker’s hat. But he imagined contempt there. “What has changed, McEwan, is that we’re growing into Marines and you are not, and you never will do. Want to know why? Because you’re a coward. You screwed up. You aren’t as popular as you were. So you’ve invented this fantasy to justify why you’re being pushed to the edge of the team.”

“But it all makes sense,” Arun protested.

“Does it? What evidence do you have?”

Arun bit his lip.

“There. See? You’ve nothing.”

“If I’m right, then the drugs will wear off. The Hardits won’t be keeping up our supply. We’ll start to act differently any day now.”

“Enough chitter-chatter!” Madge commanded. “This topic is closed. Permanently. We’ve a job to do. Get to it!”

In grim silence they set about salvaging what they could of the cargo, stacking it on the three surviving hover-trolleys. They ripped off the damaged lids of the wooden crates but many of the crates still had sides intact enough to layer the additional contents within.

It was heavy work and the sun blazing down punished them for their lack of drink. Hortez took it worse, wilting by the minute, until Madge told him to rest.

“No need, I’m okay,” Hortez replied.

“You are not and you know it,” said Madge. “Neither are you, McEwan. I think that beating took more out of you than you knew. Go keep Hortez company, out of our way.”

“What? But corporal, I’m—” Arun was about to remonstrate further when Springer stomped on his foot.

He frowned a question at her.

“It’s a testosterone thing, dummy,” she whispered. “Hortez is weak but he won’t want to admit that in front of girls. You’re his cover. I told you we would be better off with single-sex units. Prove me wrong.”

The situation smelled false. Madge had no formal authority over Hortez, but she could browbeat him into doing whatever she wanted. The girls were up to something but any thought of protesting was cut short by a kick from Springer.

“Hortez needs rest,” she said. “Do this for him.”

Arun felt sure that when the time came to go into battle as a Marine, he would charge fearlessly at an enemy defensive position, gun blazing. But against the combined forces of Springer and Madge, he knew he was beaten.

He shrugged. Hortez allowed Arun to lead him away to sit on the bank with their backs to the sun, facing away from the girls.

They sat in silence but the noises of hard work coming from behind made him feel guilty, so Arun started up the conversation no one had yet dared to broach.

“Do you think we should report the guns?”

Hortez shook his head. “Negative. Feels like we’ve caught them red handed, doesn’t it? But we haven’t. By the time we found someone to listen to us, the Hardits will have covered up any evidence. The only thing we’ll be able to prove will be to the Hardits. We’ll convince them that we need to be murdered to stop us talking.”

“We could take some of the guns out and hide them.”

“Oh, yeah. How’s that gonna look?”

“Like we’re planning a rebellion,” Arun replied grimly.

“Exactly.”

“But isn’t that what the Hardits are planning? I can understand smuggling luxury items, or the means to produce them, but what use are guns other than to fight battles?”

“My friend, your thinking is too local,” said Hortez. “We don’t know what goes on out there in the wider star system, out amongst all those moons and asteroids, and the fuel processing plants in orbit around the gas giants. Tranquility is a small part of the system and the rest of it is dominated by the Hardits. Maybe it’s one faction fighting another for the best mining sites. Perhaps it’s protection against pirates.”

“Pirates!”

“Why not? If something’s valuable it means it’s worth stealing. Stands to reason. So long as the Hardits sling their ore packets out to their destinations I doubt the White Knights care too much about how the Hardits manage their own affairs. Whatever the guns are for, it’s nothing to do with us. Don’t make it into our problem, Arun.”

Arun said nothing. He was a Marine cadet. If anyone was taking weapons then that was something he couldn’t ignore.

He decided to say no more about it for now. If he lived through today then he would be seeing Pedro tomorrow. He’d never looked forward to their meetings before, but he couldn’t wait to see the insect this time. Arun had a lot of questions.

Other than the occasional dot in the distance, the party didn’t see any Agri workers until the squat block of the main Alabama Depot building hove into view. Three Agri-Aux in a field of barley were sheltering in the shade of a portable canopy only a hundred paces from the path.

The Agri-Aux reminded Arun of a picture he’d seen in an Earth history book in which glamorous ladies posed in voluminous skirts, wide-brimmed hats, and long sleeves with flapping cuffs topped off with leather gloves. The ancient women seemed immensely proud of a stick-like device of unknown function called a parasol. He couldn’t recall the name of the historical epoch – Victovian perhaps? – but the ornate nature of their fashion could not hide a functional design imperative: the clothing was designed to cover and shade the skin, protecting against solar radiation.

These Earth Victovians must have lived through a period of intense solar flares or ozone layer depletion.

The bombardment of high energy particles from the sun was a constant on Tranquility, which was why the Agri-Aux dressed like those ancient Earth dwellers. Multiple layers of skirts dragged along the ground, veils hung from their wide-brimmed hats, and their gloves were partially shaded under bell-shaped sleeve cuffs. Unlike the variations of lace and patterned fabrics the ancients had worn, the Agri-Aux clothing was white shot through with a fine tracery of pink. It looked as if their clothes were connected to their blood supply, feeding a network of capillaries through the cloth.

Perhaps it was.

Humans were entrusted to use the military and other technologies provided on Tranquility, but the principles that explained how they worked were forbidden knowledge.

The four Team Beta Aux took it in turns to push the three surviving hover-trolleys in single file along the path. Madge took the lead. She called over her shoulder to Hortez, who was walking behind her, without a trolley. “What are they up to?” Madge asked him.

“How should I know?” he replied.

He looked entirely uninterested but Arun hadn’t lost his curiosity. Neither had Springer, who was in front of Arun.

“Carrying out some kind of tests,” she said. “Soil samples or gene tests?”

“Maybe they’re checking for insects or disease,” Arun suggested. Then he added: “Do Tranquility’s native pests and diseases attack Earth plant species?”

No one could answer. As far as Arun was concerned, food was something born fully formed on a plate. How it got there was a mystery.

“We’re not meant to be here,” said Madge, vaguely as if her internal thoughts had accidentally spilled out.

Arun frowned. What had that to do with pests?

“Just look at us,” she continued. “Then look at them out there in their protective gear.”

“We’re oversupply,” said Hortez. “Why waste effort on preserving our health when they prefer us dead?”

“No, she’s right,” said Springer, bursting with sudden enthusiasm. “Shut your sad-mouthing, Hortez, and think a moment. Tawfiq and our Hardits don’t give us suits because they’re smugglers and we’re their expendable mules. They won’t want to leave an evidence trail by requisitioning protective gear for non-existent workers to carry out tasks that don’t officially exist. I don’t suppose the Hardits who manage those field workers are any more big-hearted than ours, but they must treat them better if they provide protective suits.”

“Let’s see,” said Arun. He shouted at the Agri workers. “Hey!”

They ignored him.

Under the canopy and their veils, he couldn’t see their faces but Arun sensed from the way they’d momentarily frozen that they’d heard all right.

“Leave them be,” hissed Hortez. “No good will come of this.”

Arun ignored his former squad leader. In a hostile new environment, gather information before committing to a strategy. That’s what they’d been taught and that’s what he was doing now. “I know you heard,” he yelled. He parked his trolley. “I just want to know whether the Hardits look after you? Do they treat you well?”