Marine Cadet (The Human Legion Book 1) (47 page)
Read Marine Cadet (The Human Legion Book 1) Online
Authors: Tim C. Taylor
And, we would argue, an insult to our ancestors, for we were not the first Marines by a long way.
Seaborne marines were critical in ancient Earth history. In the Battle of Salamis (-480CE) Greek Marines played a crucial role in defeating the much larger Persian forces, helping to set the cultural underpinning of what would later be called Western Civilization.
A ship-boarding technology called the
corvus
enabled Roman Marines to win naval supremacy in the Mediterranean Sea (around -250CE), ultimately meaning the Romans defeated their arch rivals the Carthaginians to become the dominant regional superpower for many centuries.
The next major innovation in seaborne Marine forces came two thousand years later with the development of a much larger self-contained, combined-arms Marine army that could fight wars almost unaided. This was the United States Marine Corps.
It is widely speculated by modern-era Marines that the military units formed from human slaves following the Vancouver Accord were inspired by the US Marine Corps. Others regard this as wishful thinking, pointing out that while the Human Marine Corps might draw inspiration from the fighting spirit of their US ancestors, the segregation and racism inherit to their command structure more closely follows the army of the British East India Company in the early 1800s CE.
Whatever the truth of that argument, we the Marines of the Human Legion acknowledge the rich heritage of our Earthly military ancestors, and indeed those from other planets. We recognize their example and transcend them, because the Human Legion is not based in the past. We have a single mission: to fight for a better
future
. A future for us all.
Freedom
can
be won.
Chapter 56
——
Scorched, perforated and abused for decades — despite all that,
Fort Douaumont
’s long, lazy tumbling caught the sunlight and gleamed like an unwinnable jewel for an instant… and then the moment was gone and the training hulk was space dross once more.
Fort Douaumont
teased Arun. He couldn’t take his eyes off her in case he missed another glint of hidden beauty.
Frakk, I must be bored!
It had been less than a day since the Cull — since Zug had shot dead an innocent cadet. After drent like that went down, the powers that be liked to split up the cadets and keep them busy.
So they’d shipped Blue and Gold squads up to Gupta’s old TU, the
Yorktown
, where they’d stuck the cadets into EVA gibberballs.
An orange and red flashing blob marred the serenity of the silent scene of beauty laid out before him: Sergeant Gupta with his battlesuit set for high visibility. The NCO was sitting on a flitter waiting for the exercise to begin. Hell, he must be just as bored as Arun, wishing he were wherever Gold Squad’s Sergeant Searl had ended up.
They might have rushed them up here, but now the cadets were trapped in the amniotic gel bubbles, those in charge were in no hurry to launch them.
Instead of the robot defenders they normally faced, the old hulk would be defended by veteran marines, one of whom was Arun’s brother, or so Gupta had said.
The exercise should be a blast. Why didn’t they get it started already?
Arun had now spent hours in this gibberball trying and eventually failing to be interested in his brother. Hell, he didn’t even know the guy’s name. It wasn’t as if he’d ever talked with his family. Instantaneous communication was possible to each Marine ship, but was far too expensive to waste on humans. Why would you care about anyone out-system anyway? You had your family right here on Tranquility.
The Corps is your family. You need no other.
It dawned on Arun why he kept thinking about family. He wasn’t just bored; he was lonely too.
But talking wasn’t easy when you were stuffed inside a bubble of buffer gel. After his last experience of endless drowning, he wasn’t going to open his mouth no matter how much he needed to talk.
But maybe there was another way.
The TU was essentially spherical with the EVA chutes recessed into the hull, but with the outer surface of the amniotic bubbles pushing out from the warboat’s hull like festering pustules on a victim of the red pox. But there were also vanes sticking out from the hull. He’d always assumed they were radiator fins. He should be able to bounce a tight comm beam off them. See if he could raise Springer.
Arun had plenty of experience of talking with aliens who used thought-to-speech to communicate in the human language. In theory you could do the same with a suit if its AI knew you well, and so did the AI of the person you wanted to talk with.
He tried to form the idea in his mind, to explain to Barney what he wanted. He pictured Springer. Cute freckles, a cautious smile and violet eyes.
Then he spoke the words slowly in his head.
Arun had an urge to change the subject.
<—ever give up—>
<—on you.>
Arun choked on a swell of adoration for Springer. Buffer gel pushed down into his mouth. Not again! He froze — not breathing — not even daring to think. When eventually he relaxed again, the gel hadn’t pushed in far. He wasn’t drowning. But the link to Springer was broken.
Maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. They had strayed onto the most dangerous topic, and who knew might be able to listen in? Especially with Arun unreliable due to his oversupply of emotions that ambushed him constantly. What had he meant just then with Springer? Was he in love with her? Was he reaching out for any human contact? Or was he just scared?
Arun pushed against the gel to shake his head. Man, he was such a vulleyed-up wreck, and he had no idea how much he could blame that on the mind-altering drugs he was being given. He’d sidestepped execution somehow but it could only be a question of time before he was kicked out of the Marines… probably through an airlock without a suit.
Damn these long stretches encased in the gibberball.
He’d rather face an enemy battle fleet than the thoughts in his own head.
Something flew past, too quick to see properly.
Was the gibberball finally making him see things?
But when he asked Barney to replay and slow down the image — it was real all right. Something was moving very fast toward Tranquility.
Barney interrupted the playback to show a real-time view of a second object flashing past. The interval between the two: 11.4 seconds.
Arun had only a limited view from inside the gibberball. Whatever had whizzed past had disappeared out of his left field of vision. He couldn’t see Tranquility either, except in the planetshine brightening the side of
Fort Douaumont
that faced his home world.
What he
could
see on the extreme left of his viewpoint was a dot Barney identified as Orbital Defense Platform 74. Twelve streaks of white curled and twisted away from the platform, gyrating wildly but with only one possible target.
Horden’s bones! If the defense platform had launched missiles then this was for real. Tranquility was under bombardment.
And Arun was at war!
Chapter 57
——
Four objects had been launched against Tranquility, at 11.4 second intervals, followed by… nothing.
Was the attack over?
Arun tried to form another link to Springer. Perhaps she had a better view of what was going on.
Barney wasn’t playing ball, though, refusing to make the comm link.
After 41 seconds, he learned that the bombardment hadn’t ceased. A streak of light on a new trajectory etched a line across Arun’s vision pursued by a spread of missiles from Orbital Defense Platform 74.
This time he saw the explosion as two of the defensive missiles blew up the projectile.
Yes!
His elation froze a moment later. The missiles hadn’t contacted the projectile far enough away… some fragments from the explosion must have carried on. Platform 74 flared into a brilliant blue-white bloom that forced Barney to dim Arun’s visor. Platform 74 was gone.
If a brace of missiles couldn’t stop those projectiles, they must be moving with a staggering amount of momentum. Was this the nightmare scenario they used to scare each other with as kids? A bombardment by the mass drivers that should send ore shipments across the stars? But there were failsafes. The system defense fleet could shut down mass drivers remotely. Had they turned traitor too?
Finally someone spoke. “We’re all seeing this. Standby.” It was Gupta, still out there somewhere on his flitter. He’d stealthed his suit but was connecting to Wide Battle Net, which enabled Barney to mark the sergeant’s position with a blue dot even though he remained unseen.
The next shot slammed into
Fort Douaumont
.
The projectile passed straight through the old hulk. Arun imagined the disappointment of whoever was firing at them when the old ship didn’t explode. It had no main armament, fuel or air to blow up, but the old ship was crippled all the same, just not in such a showy way. The hull twisted, sheared, broke asunder. Then another projectile hit the stricken ship, sending fragments of metal weighing thousands of tons shooting in all directions, leaving a glittering halo of shimmering shards.
The power of the projectiles was almost beyond human comprehension, but whoever was launching them didn’t have much military sense. Why waste time taking out a useless abandoned hulk? Then a shock hit him when he remembered
Fort Douaumont
hadn’t quite been abandoned. His brother had been on board.
Arun’s concern for a brother he’d never met didn’t have time to take root, because if the enemy were trying to take out the threat from nearby ships, that meant the next target was the TU!
There were mass drivers scattered on moons throughout the system, essentially the same as the railgun inside his SA-71 carbine except scaled up to the enormous degree necessary to fling packages of refined ore across the gulf of interstellar space to be received by resource-hungry star systems. Transit times between star systems were measured in centuries. But if the mass driver was on one of Tranquility’s moons, its projectiles would be only seconds away from the planet.
Arun knew he was ceasing to be a bystander when, even through the buffer gel, he could feel the TU throb with a massive power build up.
Sergeant Gupta’s voice came into his helmet. “Listen up, cadets. You haven’t impressed me so far.”
Arun’s view blurred. And then settled. The TU had spun around. He was facing the dusty red ball of Antilles, the largest of Tranquility’s moons.
“My advice to the
Yorktown
’s captain is to leave you where you are,” said Gupta, “that you’re a liability. She says that if we’ve spent all that training budget on you over the past 17 years…”
Then the
Yorktown
was moving. Man, was she
moving!
Even stuffed with buffer gel, the breath was being crushed from Arun’s body. Lump hammers pounded his skull tirelessly. He closed his eyes. He’d never experienced such acceleration before. It felt like he was being squeezed into a sticky dot on the
Yorktown’s
outer hull.
Then the lump hammers softened into wooden mallets; the vice crushing his chest mellowed into the fists of a Jotun warrior pummeling his ribs, and Gupta continued his words. “After 17 years of training you should damned well be a useful asset. The
Yorktown
is moving to assault the traitors who took out
Fort Douaumont
and are bombarding our homes on the surface. We compromised and decided to offer you a choice. Are you going to take this opportunity to prove to me you’re Marines? Or are you going to be spectators? Which is it to be?”
“We’re Marines, sergeant.”
As far as Arun could tell, every cadet in the Blue and Gold squads had answered in the same way at the same time. Himself included.
Maybe he wasn’t so different from the others.
A bubble of pride put a little grin onto his face.
The TU corkscrewed sickeningly as it approached Antilles.
“Very well,” Gupta growled after a few seconds. “It makes my guts crawl to call you sorry lot Marines, but here’s the plan. Rebels have taken over a mass driver on Antilles. We think their main target is Detroit. Defense Command estimate a 90% chance that their defense shield can keep out a direct hit for the next hour. After that our shield effectiveness degrades rapidly, and everything that breaches the outer atmosphere is going to hit
something
. If we’re lucky we might have as much as two hours to shut them down before the upper levels of Detroit are turned to slag, or buried under shattered mountain fragments.”
The
Yorktown
lurched sideways so unexpectedly that Arun’s heart and lungs were left miles behind. Another bombardment shot past.
“Here’s our problem,” continued Gupta. “The rebels have thrown a thick cloud of rock fragments — pebbles really — above and around their base. We don’t know how they’ve done it, but it makes for an effective barrier. The
Yorktown
’s weapons can’t penetrate that rock cloud, but the enemy can shoot out. They’ve created a force tunnel through their shield that provides a launch window for their mass driver, but we can’t get a firing solution through it. Friendly system defense boats are hours away. There are no other combat vessels nearby. We need boots on the ground. You!”