Marine Cadet (The Human Legion Book 1) (44 page)

“I don’t think so, Carabinier,” said Zug, trying to put deference into his voice.

Umarov nodded at him to go on.

“I am sure you are correct that our officers have realized that fear and brutality are neither the best ways to instill fighting spirit, nor to train Marines who act intelligently. But I believe there is more to it than that. Our veterans and instructors give us such different explanations about our place in the galaxy. I guess it depends on when they were raised and where they have been stationed. But I do see a pattern. The more recently they have fought, the more likely they are to believe that we are fighting for a worthwhile cause. We fight for Earth’s dignity. For humanity’s right to be taken seriously by a hostile galaxy that regards us as the ultimate underclass. And it isn’t just the fighting. If I were called on to carry out the Cull on my comrades, I would do so without complaint because that is just as much a part of fighting for our dignity as rushing an enemy strong point.”

Umarov shook his head. “Just nine decades ago, we were farmed. I like to think we were a more specialist crop than wheat, for instance, but still a crop to be grown, harvested and shipped out to meet demand. Does a blade of wheat have dignity? Eh? Even if it did, would it make a blind bit of difference to its fate?”

Del-Marie gave his most expressive Gallic shrug. “Perhaps, Carabinier, the truth does not matter. If we
act
as if we have a purpose, if we pretend that we have dignity, then our lives as soldier-slaves are more bearable. Perhaps we are living a lie, perhaps we are…
chumps
, but surely that is better than the truth if that truth is unbearably hellish?”

Umarov closed his eyes. “You’re no longer human, are you? I mean, you’re probably right, Sandure, but God help me, you’ve moved on and left humanity behind. You’re all built like the back end of a destroyer, and other than you, Sandure, with your silly shrug, there’s barely a hint of expression on any of you except…”

Umarov pointed at Arun. Except that one. He thinks too deeply. And she…” He pointed at Springer. “She cares too much. Thinks she’s the great Earth Mother. And the rest of you? It’s like they cloned the most unimaginative drones of my generation, fed them super growth hormone, and have been interbreeding them ever since. What’s wrong with you? We’re in our dorm! Hello? It’s where you let off steam? I expect a little stupid banter, the stronger reminding the weaker ones who’s in charge, and I expect grumbling. A lot of grumbling. Soldiers should always grumble. It’s one of the basic laws of the universe.”

“
Les grognards
, Carabinier,” said Zug.

“Laygronyards? That’s the modern word for grumbling is it? What kind of dumbass word is that? One you never use, I’ll bet, because you’re all like machines on standby mode, waiting to be fully activated in the morning.” He shook his head. “
Laygronyards
? Shit! You fragging scare me more than the Jotuns.”

What was Zug playing at? He’d talked of these
grognards
before. It was a French word — meaning
grumblers
— that had been the nickname for a corps of elite French soldiers. Arun liked the name, though. It sounded very human.

Umarov grabbed a softscreen and started to figure out the controls. The rest of the room remained silent and motionless.

“What? Oh, for crying out loud,” groaned Umarov. “You’re dismissed. Go do whatever robots do in their free time. Just leave me the hell alone.”

Arun considered helping the Carabinier struggling with his softscreen, but decided to wait a while. He grinned. Like him, Umarov was an outsider, and one who saw immediately that there was something screwy about the attitude of the cadets.

Arun thanked Fate for bringing him a natural ally. Change was in the air, and that meant the next time he left his Scendence training, he might have something worth coming home to.

Striding along the curved corridor of sector F7 on his way to the shower tunnel, Arun grinned when he thought back to how Umarov’s arrival last night had shaken up the frigid atmosphere in his dorm.

Ever since that stupid tunnel exercise, his life had gone from drent to drenter. Zug and the guys could go vulley themselves for thinking Arun had brought it all on himself. So what if all their cold-shoulder drent was due to them being drugged? That wasn’t a good enough excuse.

Arun had made his choices but he stood up for them. Why shouldn’t he? He wasn’t a loser. It was just the universe trying to make him look bad by conspiring to trip him up all the time.

Well, nuts to the universe too, because he was feeling good right now. It was 06:42 and he’d just finished his solo morning workout: three circuits of Ring 7 – the second-longest ring in the hab-disk – followed by a half hour pushing and pulling against resistance channels in the gym.

Even being an engineered freak, courtesy of centuries of White Knight tinkering, had its plus points. Did the humans on Earth feel such a flare of unquenchable energy first thing in the morning? From what he’d heard, they mostly fell reluctantly out of bed in a semi-torpor that would hold them for hours. Whereas, thanks to his augmented body, Arun felt not just that he could climb a mountain before breakfast, but that he needed to, or else his body would explode from all the pent up energy inside his muscles.

He walked into the F7 shower room, giving a vague wave of greeting to the other cadets stripping off on their way in, or on their way out, putting on fresh underwear and fatigues from the bins provided by the Aux.

Arun had his shirt off and was about to tug down his gym pants when he saw Zug and Osman up ahead, naked and about to enter the shower tunnel. When they spotted Arun, they glanced at each other and then grabbed gym pants from the bin and put them on.

“What’s up?” asked Arun. He spoke carefully, not wishing to antagonize them.

Zug and Osman faced off against him.

Osman folded his arms. “You’ll have to wait,” he said. “Springer’s in there.”

Arun shrugged. “So?”

“So you wait till she’s dressed. The tactical order chart says you’re a member of our squad, but you aren’t part of our team. You’ll need to give our women their privacy.”

“
Your
women? You’re crazy, Osman. What, you think you own Springer? That she’s stripping off for your pleasure? She’s just getting clean, man. Stop being such a…
chump
.”

“Yeah, I’m with Bryant’s blue-eyed boy,” said a voice from behind: Lance Corporal Yoshioka from Gold Squad. She threw her gym clothes in the bin. “I don’t care about your lovers’ tiff. Stupid Blue Squad guffoons. I do care about whether I stink. Get out the frakking way!”

Osman stepped aside.

Yoshioka strode into the shower tunnel, giving Osman a shove for good measure on her way in. She still blamed Blue Squad for letting the combat bots shoot her from behind in that frakked-up boarding exercise on
Fort Douaumont
.

Arun dove for the gap she had opened between Zug and Osman, but they were waiting for him. Osman pushed him back so sharply that Arun slipped on the wet floor and fell onto his backside.

“It would be best for you,” said Zug, “that you make an effort to be polite, whether or not you believe our request for privacy is justified.”

Arun felt the anger boil over inside him. Anger directed at Zug. It was Osman who’d pushed him, but Osman had always lived life to binary extremes. You were his mortal enemy or greatest friend, sometimes both on the same day. Back before he became a cadet, any unresolved disagreements would torment Osman such that he couldn’t sleep, but the next day, Osman would shrug and forget whatever had troubled him so badly the day before

That was what made Osman such fun to be around, or used to. It also made him the exact opposite of Zug. Calm, considered, consistent, it was Zug’s disapproval that had really turned the squad against Arun.

He couldn’t get his revenge on Zug here. But he would. Oh, yes. Zug —
Zhoog
as he insisted it was pronounced — would get his just deserts soon enough. But for now…

“Fine,” said Arun, still sitting on his butt. “I’ll wait.”

“Make sure you do,” said Osman, his anger burning so hot that he could barely speak.

Osman and Zug threw their clothes in the bin and followed Yoshioka into the shower tunnel. Arun hovered just outside, feeling increasingly uncomfortable as a steady stream of cadets entered the shower room, or emerged naked at the other end.

The F7 shower room wasn’t reserved for Blue and Gold Squads, but it was nearest to their dorm rooms, and so Arun knew most of the cadets coming into the room and giving him some hard stares.

No one said anything. They didn’t have to. He was acting like some kind of deviant, lurking in the shower to steal glimpses of nude flesh.

Arun shut his eyes and clenched his fists. How had it come to this? Only moments ago he’d been buzzing.

Now Zug and Osman had ruined his morning.

Skangat lizards!

Arun stripped off and walked into the shower tunnel.

As he lifted his arms to accept the spray of foaming detergent, Arun felt eyes watching him warily. One of the girls from Gold Squad turned her back on him.

This was getting ridiculous.

Arun yelled through the spattering noise of the shower jets. “Hey! Hey, Zug!”

The big guy turned around.

“This is all your fault, man.”

“No, my friend,” said Zug. “It is your own doing.”

“I’m not your friend.”

“Yes, you are.”

“You’re wrong. And I’ll tell you one thing, Zug the Perfect – Zug the Frakking Aloof. You’ll know what it feels like one day. Maybe right now the universe is stacking the deck to deal you a frakked-up hand. Sooner or later you’ll have a run of bad luck”

“I am certain you are right. One day.”

“One day? Nuts to that. I don’t want bad luck to happen to you one day. I want it
now
. Do you hear, Zug? I hope today is the worst frakking day of your life.”

But the cadet who still called himself Arun’s friend had already turned away and was lost behind the steam and spray of water.

Arun was on his own.

——

On his way back to the dorm room, someone leaped out of a side passageway and grabbed him by the shoulders.

Arun was about to deck his assailant when he recognized something in that touch. That scent.

He turned and stared wide-eyed into Springer’s face.

Her eyes glowed violet with emotion.

Well, Arun was emotional too. He was furious at Zug and disappointed at Osman. But his anger was all jumbled up with regret and loneliness, and he’d never been angry with Springer. Everything inside churned into such a confused mess that his jaw moved up and down but he didn’t know what to say.

He didn’t think he needed to. Springer looked into his face and seemed to understand what he was feeling better than Arun did himself.

“Help me?” he whispered.

“I heard what happened in the shower,” she said. “You need to sort this.”

Arun bellowed in rage. His pulse raced, his limbs shook. “How the frakk can I do that?” Arun couldn’t keep the anger out of his voice. His shoulders slumped. He hadn’t wanted to bark at Springer.

Springer didn’t scream back; she laughed as if this were all a game. “You’re not alone, Arun.” She shook her head in mock pity. Which was weird. Arun had never seen her act like that before. “It’s you boys. It’s your testosterone making you into idiots. I was talking this over with Majanita last night. She said she thought they give you Marine boys added testosterone to bulk you up, make you fight better. But they give you too high a dose. If not testosterone,
then they must be giving you something similar
.”

Arun nearly missed Springer’s emphasis. She wasn’t talking about testosterone. “I’m surprised Madge bought into your theory,” he said, a flash of understanding connecting them as he looked into her eyes.

“I’ve been working on her for a while,” Springer replied. “She’s finally on board.”

“You’re amazing. I ever tell you that?”

“Not nearly enough, Arun.”

“Guilty as charged.” He just about managed a grin. “But I still don’t see how that helps me.”

Springer shook her head. “That’s because you’re a guy. You’re no different from Zug, Osman and the others. You boys are acting as if all you understand is confrontation. Instead of a frontal assault, switch the direction of your attack. Try empathy instead.”

“You mean, see it from a girl’s perspective?”

“Frakk it, Arun! You’ve got a lot to learn. No, not at all, but if it helps you to think of it that way then, yes, try thinking like a girl.”

Arun started by taking in deep breaths through his nose, holding and then blowing out a smooth stream of spent air through his mouth.

“Not now, sweetie,” Springer teased. “Have you forgotten? Gupta switched schedule to put us up in orbit.
Again!
We move out in fifteen.”

“I know. It’s like he’s deliberately keeping us off planet.”

“That’s not important now. Just think on something Madge said to me. It might help with Zug and the rest. She said we’re all gene-modified, brainwashed, drugged-up combat kids. But deep down we’re still the same species as our Earth ancestors. They evolved a set of social behaviors to cope with the challenges of life on Earth. Sometimes our minds decide they recognize the problems we face on Tranquility and reach for the bag of coping behaviors we brought with from Earth. We act a certain way even though we don’t always know why.”

“So you’re saying that Zug is acting like a pre-tech savage and doesn’t even know it?”

Springer frowned. “Majanita sees it like this. The boys in the squad are treating me like I’m their little sister. They’re closing ranks to protect me, a female, against the unwanted attention of the outsider male who wronged me, who dishonored the clan. That’s you, in case your brain hasn’t woken up yet. If you reason or fight them you will only make it worse. The one way to resolve this is to earn the right to rejoin the clan. Do something dramatic that proves your loyalty. Does that make sense?”

Arin nodded. “Is that all?”