Marine Cadet (The Human Legion Book 1) (48 page)

“But, sergeant,” said Brandt, “our weapons–”

“Are training poppers only?” finished Gupta. “Did you really think they’d design and build you separate carbines just to be toy guns in training exercises? They’re fully functional except we haven’t given you any ammo bulbs. You’ve got two default modes we never told you about because you’re not meant to know this yet. There’s a pulse laser capability and an emergency railgun mode. Standby…”

Arun held his breath for 8.5 seconds until Gupta spoke again. “Your deployment starts in 72 seconds. Your suit AIs know how to unlock your carbines and have updated maps of the moon surface. Cadet Lance Sergeant Belville, you have command. Brandt is your deputy. Form up in the depression 4 klicks northwest of the mining base. I’ve marked it on your maps. We’ll land a second scratch team of veterans, Force Alpha. Wait for them to attack. Then move in and—”

A familiar jolt hit Arun like a hundred Marines in full armor jumping on his spine. Then he was tossed into space with the familiar sensation of gasping for air.

By the time he was alert and had stabilized his spin, Sergeant Gupta had finished his talk and the surface of Antilles, dusty gray rocks streaked with rust, was fast rising up to claim him.

He asked Barney to fill him in on his carbine’s capability. Quick as you like.

——

Arun had thought he knew all about the SA-71 carbine. Turned out he didn’t. The weapon was designed to be the ultimate in robustness and flexibility with a power pack that was so long lasting that it might as well be magical. What had been hidden from them was that there were two default modes for when the standard-fit ammo carousels were exhausted. He’d always dismissed the rumors that there was secret information they only trusted Marines with once they were already on a troop ship headed out-system.

Said a lot about how humans were viewed by their betters.

One of these hidden options was a pulsed laser beam that would rapidly eat away at even the SA-71’s battery charge. The strength of the laser pulses quickly degraded in an atmosphere, but in vacuum this was a credible weapon.

The second option was referred to as
shardshot
. The Marine grabbed whatever material was to hand, and packed it into a tube concealed within the weapon’s stock. A combination of grinders and laser drills would chop the toughest materials into dust, which would then be compressed into ballistic pellets and shot out of the barrel in railgun mode. Barney warned him that neither the gun nor the suit could counter the recoil from shardshot rounds.

The recoil would kick like an angry Hardit.

And selecting the right material was critical to achieve a decent muzzle velocity. Something with metal content would be good.

Arun grinned when Barney told him this. The mining bases were situated on Antilles because the moon’s rocky surface was rich in zinc, copper, iron, and manganese.

That should do it!

As he plummeted feet-first toward the moon, Arun could see other white smears falling like hail against the black of space.
And if he could see them…

Gold and Blue squads looked like gunnery training targets as they descended in their gleaming white suits.

Arun couldn’t help but imagine bright lines extend from the surface of Antilles, connecting a laser battery to each white blur in an obscene diagram of death.

Then Barney braked — hard enough to take Arun’s breath away and make his vision blur. When his senses returned he was ten meters above the moon’s cratered surface. Barney had braked early enough that he came down with only as much force as if he were stepping off a bottom stair back home.

Barney used a virtual arrow to indicate the rendezvous point and Arun was running there from his very first step on the moon.

Turned out running wasn’t easy. He kept jumping high above the ground and had to tell Barney to push him back down to the surface. It was frustratingly slow.

He was at home in zero-g where Barney could zip him around effortlessly. But in the moon’s low gravity, the suit’s motive power was much reduced. Barney could lob him over an obstacle, but couldn’t run for him.

Arun briefly considered scampering on all fours before finding a steady loping gait that would look ridiculous if anyone were there to see it. But Arun was on his own. Alice Belville had told them to stick to Local Battle Net, which meant tight line-of-sight comms only.

A few hundred meters from the rendezvous, Arun finally encountered another cadet: Tanweer Aburto from Gold squad. Seconds later, Barney added more dots to Arun’s tac-display as the suit AIs began to ping signals off each other.

Ahead Arun saw that what the sergeant had called a depression looked like a shallow quarry pit covered by a few centuries of dust.

He couldn’t see more than a few hundred meters into the depression due to the swirl of pebbles thrown up by the rebels as a defensive shield. From a distance the shield fragments looked like static. Barney speculated the pebbles were actually tailings from the ore crushers. Arun didn’t care. He could already see what he wanted to know: the pebble shield didn’t extend as far as the ground. There was a narrow gap underneath.

Up close, the pebble shield looked more like a miniature asteroid belt bent to the rebels’ will and sped up to lethal velocities.

Arun halted. If he kept to even this low gait, he would bounce high enough to be pulped.

Aburto had the solution. The Gold Squad cadet hit the deck and rolled. Laughing, Arun copied him. It was like being a four-year-old again. Arun clung to those memories as he rolled under the rock-storm, the silent blur of death.

The ground underneath was littered with rock fragments that had fallen out of the shield. Would his training armor stand up to any rocks falling out onto him? The rocks gave him an idea. As he spun forward, Arun grabbed some of the fallen rocks in his free hand, keeping his carbine low to the ground in the other. He’d only collected a few small rocks before he was spinning too fast. He brought his arms beneath him as he accelerated. He was inside the depression now; rolling down the edge and picking up speed.

Then he hit the bottom and bounced — tumbling and dazed out of control and heading for the blur of swirling rocks.

Barney stabilized Arun’s suit. Just at the moment that the sense of up and down began to reassert itself, the first rock hit Arun, spinning him helplessly. Then another strike.

But Barney had control now, enough to push Arun down out of the rock cloud. And once he’d touched down, Arun could run to safety because the depression was deep enough to give him plenty more headroom.

Seven other cadets were there already. He kept away from the others, keeping alert for anyone else in Delta Section to appear. Extended order drill demanded a minimum of five meters between each cadet and ten meters between sections, but that was difficult to make sense of when hardly anyone was here yet.

Some of the others appeared to be praying. Had their morale crumbled so easily?

Then he remembered about the shardshot ammo and realized they were filling their gun stocks with dirt. He joined in, using the rocks he’d grabbed out of the shield. Ore not moon dust. Barney gave Arun a virtual thumbs up, confirming that the shield pebbles were mineral-rich tailings. They would make excellent shard bullets.

Arun looked up and noticed Stok Laskosk from Blue Squad’s command section was nearby. He looked lost.

Arun walked over and patted Laskosk on the shoulder.

“Hey, Stopcock. Nervous?”

Heavy weapons specialist Laskosk, or Stopcock as he was universally known, looked at Arun as if trying to decide whether this was an insult. He shook his head. “It feels wrong. I always imagined I would have my missile launcher over my shoulder. Instead…” He held up his carbine. “We’re firing chewed up wads of moondust. Not what I expected.”

“Look on the bright side,” offered Arun. “Without your launcher you’re no longer a prime target for snipers.”

“What’s your problem, McEwan?” It was Lance Corporal Narcisco, also from the command section.

“Nothing, lance corporal.”

“Good. Then piss off like a good little boy. You’re bad luck, McEwan. Keep away from me.”

Arun retreated, almost stumbling into Springer.

“Don’t mind them, Arun,” she said. “Stopcock is scared, that’s all.”

“Are you?”

“No.”

Arun laughed. “Me neither. Well, scared of letting down my buddies. Not scared of getting killed.”

“Seventeen years of brainwashing and drugs and re-engineering didn’t go to waste after all. Guess we’re not so different from everyone else.” She paused. “I’m glad you’ve got my back, Arun. I think that fights off the fear.”

“I’m glad you’re here too, Springer.”

“Me too,” said Osman who’d just arrived. “I mean… now the shooting’s about to start. I guess I can’t stay angry at you, McEwan.”

——

“Keep minimum five meters separation,” snapped Majanita to everyone in Delta section, once they had all assembled in the depression. Privately she added for Arun’s benefit: “I know it’s not your fault that bad luck’s followed you around, McEwan. Right now, I don’t care. I think you’re a liability. Since I’m stuck with you, I want you to do everything you can to prove me wrong. Can you do that?

“Yes, corporal.”

“Good. The first thing I want you to do is shut the frakk up. I don’t want a peep until we contact the enemy.”

Arun shut up.

Above him, the black sky was dominated by Tranquility’s huge disk, its planetshine bright enough to cast shadows even though it was day on Antilles. An angry ripple spread out from a hole in the froth of cloud cover as the first enemy projectile broke through the planet’s defensive shield. The fireball on the planet’s surface briefly lit up the clouds in shades of orange and red.

——

As ordered, Belville made them wait until Force Alpha had launched its attack.

It wasn’t difficult to see when that was.

Two balls of hot violet light exploded over the mass driver – a pair of plasma grenades. The explosions spread fingers of jagged light in an arc over the driver but never reaching closer than about fifteen meters from the target.

“Frakk! That’s some force field. Didn’t even scratch it.”

The words came from Force Alpha, the handful of veteran Marines deployed separately by the
Yorktown
. Until this point they’d been undetectably silent, but now they were noisy. In fact, they were making as much of a clamor as possible. Keeping the enemy’s attention away from the hidden cadets.

“Power drain must be staggering,” said another Marine. “If only we could get to the power source and shut it down.”

Arun winced because that was such a clumsy hint to the cadets. But then, as he reminded himself, his time as a Hardit slave had taught him most aliens weren’t interested in human languages. He had to hope there were no traitor humans listening in.

“Keep silent,” Madge reminded her squad. Then: “Advance to assault positions.”

The cadets scrambled up to the lip of the depression, ready to move out.

Sticking your head over a parapet was a surefire way to get your brains blown out. The designers of the ACE-2 battlesuit had solved this by providing periscope worms: an optical cable that extended out the top of the helmet. The cable was so thin that if an enemy could detect your periscope, you were as good as dead anyway.

Arun extended his periscope worm, and he saw for himself what the cadet scouts had already reported.

Gold and Blue Squads were deployed in an old quarry pit several hundred meters to the north-west of the rebel mining facility. The nearby pits had long been mined out but the buildings remained to service the mass driver. The driver was situated in a natural crater on the far side of the complex. A simple platform rested on the shallow slope of the crater. Superconducting hoops were mounted along the platform’s length.

Arun watched those hoops accelerate another ore package to such speed that even if the rock shield hadn’t hidden its progress from view, the projectile would have disappeared over the horizon within a handful of seconds, to make travel in a sub-orbital arc around Antilles before emerging behind them a few seconds later as it escaped the moon’s gravity on its brief journey toward Tranquility.

Between their position and the mine base, they could see trenches zigzagging in a ring around the buildings and extending out toward the mass driver.

Keeping to LBNet denied the cadets eyes in the sky. All they could tell was that some kind of defensive positions had been prepared for them. They might be facing an unoccupied trench, or a defensive hive protected by AI controlled GX-cannons and combat drones.

They hadn’t a lot of choice either way.

From the enemy positions concentrated around the driver, dozens of streaks suddenly shoot toward the Force Alpha Marines.

The missiles hit, lighting up the horizon with a series of explosions.

Force Alpha had launched two grenades. The rebels had replied with at least thirty missiles.

Arun jumped inside his suit when Barney unexpectedly lifted the worm’s eye to look up into space. The silver bullet of the mass driver’s previous launch reappeared overhead. It had traveled in a slingshot around the back of Antilles and was now on its way to his home planet.

From where he waited sinking in to the dust of Antilles surface, the projectile’s silent journey looked serene. It was difficult to believe that if this glowing spark reached Tranquility’s surface the impact would flatten a city.

“Look!”

It was Springer on a private channel.

Arun cut the feed from the worm and followed her finger pointing at the mass driver. He didn’t understand. Not daring to break Madge’s order to be silent, Arun raised a hand palm-up in a gesture of confusion.

“Look at their counter-fire.”

He watched as the rebels dug in around the mass driver fired another volley of missiles at Force Alpha. This time he saw what Springer meant. The missiles didn’t jink in the way that Stopcock’s would if he had his shoulder-mounted launcher with him. Instead the rebels’ missiles were traveling in straight lines, which meant they were crude rockets, not intelligent missiles. And rather than spread them out in a barrage pattern, the rockets were being fired straight at the firing positions the Marines had used to launch their grenades.