Human Legion: Marine Cadet Part 1

Marine Cadet.

The Human Legion.

Tim C. Taylor.

Extract from the NEW ENGLISH DICTIONARY, Patriot Publis.h.i.+ng, Human Autonomous Region, 2671CE human.

n. 1. An individual of the species h.o.m.o sapiens, possibly also of derivative species. See also: augmented-human.

adj. 2. Characterizing mankind, as opposed to aliens, animals, and machines (including AIs).

adj. 3. [meaning derived from common alien usage] oppressed, the ultimate undercla.s.s, the hopeless ones, unwashed : as in The Human Legion.

* PART I *.

Alien Lover.

* Chapter 01 *

Arun glanced into the darkness of the side tunnel as he thundered past with the rest of Delta Section. His eyes could see nothing in the branch, and his helmet visor didn't ping up any threats. No one said a thing. Arun was sure he wasn't the only one to feel the deep shadows of the side tunnel burning with threat, but what could they do other than ignore them?

Keep running. That was all they could do.

The rest of Blue Squad was pinned down by a Troggie redoubt. Delta Section had been tasked with pus.h.i.+ng ahead and left to outflank the enemy position. Every time they pa.s.sed a branch in the tunnel, Arun felt even more isolated, but there were only eight Marine cadets in the section. To peel off a pair to check out each fork in the tunnel network would be beyond madness. In this crazy twisting warren, there could be no such thing as a front line, not unless they had an entire regiment down here. The enemy could strike from behind at any moment.

He glanced across at Springer, her mottled gray battlesuit pumping her along at a steady 15mph, her SA-71 carbine just one safety away from spitting railgun death. The sight stirred his pride, and b.u.t.tressed his courage. Together they were strong.

"Halt!" called Cadet Corporal Brandt.

Delta Section braked. What was Brandt thinking of now?

As Brandt pondered his move, Arun's resolve began to drain into the dirt floor.

A moment ago, he'd been buoyed by the momentum of his armored unit. Seeing them stationary had the opposite effect. There was an old Marine saying, drummed into them since the start of novice school: stay still and die.

Arun scanned the walls and ceiling for signs of ambush.

Scuttleb.u.t.t had it that Trogs could swim through the soil as easily as a human diver through water. He s.h.i.+vered, imagining alien eyes observing him through the dirt walls. If that rumor were true, they were utterly flekked.

No point worrying about what you can't change, he told himself, but only half believed it.

Whether or not the Trogs were watching, Arun was certain that his superiors were. None of the humans had ever met a White Knight. Never would, either, but through their vast network of nano-spies, the White Knights knew everything that happened within their empire, and they had no room for disloyalty or incompetence, even when the source was as irrelevant as a seventeen-year-old human dumbchuck. Like Brandt, for instance.

"I don't like it, because..." Brandt's words died away as he tried to organize the dust motes floating around his brain into a plan.

Brandt was indecisive rather than stupid, but hesitation could get you killed just as readily as dumb orders. Brandt had only been made cadet corporal less than an hour before, a temporary promotion that didn't ent.i.tle him to be addressed by the rank, only as 'sir'. Cadet Lance Corporal Majanita, Arun's fire team leader, would've made a much better section commander.

"We've penetrated too far without resistance," spoke Brandt in his best semblance of authority. "You heard the briefing. The Troggie guardians we're facing have regressed mentally to the borders of sentience, but we mustn't mistake that for stupidity."

"Do you think they're creeping up behind us?" asked Del-Marie.

"Err, yes," agreed Brandt. "That's exactly what I mean. Osman, go three hundred meters back the way we've come. Check our rear is still clear."

"Sir!" Osman raced off to obey. He wasn't going to give any cause for complaint now, but give him a cup of grok in a rec-chamber, and Osman would cheerfully tell you exactly what he thought of Brandt's order. For starters, sending a lone cadet to check a position was against their training. They should go in a pair. Buddied up Marines could cover each other. They were more than twice as strong as two Marines on their own.

Everyone knew that.

"McEwan!"

Arun only allowed himself to hesitate for an instant before answering: "Sir!"

"Recce that side tunnel we've just pa.s.sed."

"Yes, sir."

And so Arun McEwan, a seventeen-year-old Marine cadet, chilled with foreboding, entered the shadows alone.

If the tunnels had been constructed by human engineers they would have been wider, well-lit, and level, but Trogs weren't human. As Arun cautiously penetrated the tunnel, he felt the wrap of alienness tighten around him with every step. He flicked his visor display to survey mode and confirmed one of his suspicions: the tunnel was rising and falling in its depth below the surface of the hill above. The change wasn't obvious as you walked, given the frequent twists and turns. Half-expecting an alien warrior to spring at him from out of the shadows, he quickly switched back to tactical mode, and breathed out when no threats were displayed, though it also told him that he was out of comms contact with his comrades.

Suddenly he was gasping, fighting to control his breath. Why hadn't Brandt sent Springer with him?

He calmed his breathing, but his instincts still told him he was in danger. With his visor tac-display showing no movement, no EM activity, and no inexplicable heat signatures, those instincts were indistinguishable from cowardice. To be afraid was inevitable, even for a Marine. To succ.u.mb to fear, though... that was punishable by death.

So Arun pressed on around a tight left bend and immediately came to a halt when he saw the tunnel narrow ahead. He would have to turn sideways to squeeze through the gap. Even if he were dressed in fatigues, it would be tight. The bulky battlesuit he wore meant he would have to force his way through.

Or try to. He could easily get stuck in there, deep inside enemy territory with no one to call for help.

He felt the crus.h.i.+ng weight of earth envelop him, driving the breath from his lungs. He bent over, hands on knees, and fought to even out his short, rasping gasps. The walls ahead seem to tremble, all the more eerie in the blue glow of his enhanced low-light display. That had to be his mind playing tricks.

Didn't it?

The tunnel was constructed from nothing more than trampled soil mixed with alien spit. The incalculable weight of soil overhead was not held up by some product of advanced materials technology, as with the human and Jotun Marine base. Just spit. Perhaps the shock waves from heavy weapons fire was bringing the hill down on top of him.

Arun wanted to go back. The fear was so intense he was on the brink of sobbing. If he triggered an ambush, then he'd die. If the ceiling collapsed he'd die. He'd been a cadet for just two weeks. What dungering use would dying be to anyone?

Flus.h.i.+ng these tunnels of Trogs was supposed to be a training exercise, but the enemy didn't know that. The danger was very real. He took a deep breath. And another. To push his fears away was beyond him, but he rose above them enough to find sufficient air and calm for his brain to kick in and think!

Brandt wanted a recce. To advance five hundred meters down the tunnel sounded acceptable. Even though Arun had lost his Battle Net connection, he daren't lie about how far he'd gone down the tunnel. The chance that the Jotun officers were recording everything was too great. He would get to the five hundred meter mark, count out ten seconds, and then run back.

Now that he had a plan, a little confidence returned.

Pace by faltering pace, Arun squeezed sideways through the gap, using his power-a.s.sisted musculature like hydraulic rams to force his way through.

The earth was darker here. Damper too. Bubbles of foam oozed from the soil and stuck to his battlesuit; loosened soil tumbled to the floor, piling up almost to his knees.

It felt like climbing into the throat of an immense and hungry beast.

After a final series of twists, the constriction opened up again. He began to breathe more normally until the very walls began to tremble in a freakishly organic movement, as if the tunnel itself were breathing. Perhaps that was exactly what the tunnel was doing. He'd seen no obvious sign of ventilation and who knew what these aliens were capable of? His battlesuit AI, Barney, confirmed the motion: whatever was happening to the walls wasn't a figment of his imagination. This was for real.

Great, he thought. Just frakking great.

He checked himself. He was a Marine, and Marines think. He might not know much about the Trogs, but the Jotuns did and they had selected this exercise. The older cadets he knew, those in Cla.s.s G and Cla.s.s G-1, had all lived through similar exercises, though they were not allowed to discuss the experience. They'd survived. Logic said he should too. Probably.

Cla.s.s G-1. Of all the cadets in the year ahead of him, Arun saw in his mind's eye the smooth oval face and dark midnight eyes of Xin Lee. She'd come through this alive. What would she think of him if she ever found out he'd gotten the scoojubbers in his first live fire exercise?

Emboldened by his logic - and thoughts of Xin - Arun switched his visor back to survey mode, and placed a target marker at the spot that Barney estimated to be five hundred meters into this tunnel. The target appeared as a glowing green cross slightly to his right, past a sharp bend, and an estimated distance to go of only sixty meters.

Once again the tunnel s.h.i.+mmered.

Switching his helmet to tactical didn't show up anything to fight.

"C'mon, Barney," Arun whispered to his suit AI. "Help me out."

Barney's response was to flash the green target marker at him again.

"Okay. Okay! I'm going."

The conviction that the walls were alive proved too much. Twenty meters short of his target, Arun lost his nerve. He turned and fled. The movement in the tunnel walls gave him something important to report. That was why he was withdrawing, he told himself, not because he was a coward.

From behind him came the sound of scuffling, the dull sprinkling of falling soil.

Something was digging through the walls!

He ran faster, a risky maneuver in a battlesuit over uneven ground. Nothing would be worse than losing balance and tumbling headfirst into the alien dirt.

The frantic scurrying sound grew in volume until it drowned out the digging.

When he reached the narrow gap, he realized he'd been trapped. He turned to face whatever was coming for him from behind.

He saw a blur of black insectoid bodies scuttling toward him along the floor, ceiling and walls. Each creature was half as big again as a human, with a halo of barbed horns surrounding the head, and vicious fighting claws adorning the front pair of legs.

Troggie guardians.

These barely sentient aliens had no concept of the words 'training exercise'. Only one thing drove the guardians: the burning desire to kill any intruder in their nest.

He didn't need to ask Barney to know that they were coming for him faster than he could push through the narrow pa.s.sageway.

Reason said that his only chance was to stand and fight.

But reason had fled even faster than the rest of Arun.

Fear drove him to bully his way through the narrow constriction, gouging out more clumps of slimy earth from the walls as he went.

Then he was through to the far side. Still alive.

"This is only an exercise," he blurted to himself, but he knew death was only seconds away.

Fifteen meters ahead was a tight right turn and beyond that, the main corridor. He made it as far as the turning, but then his courage failed again and he had to turn and see.

Drawing on countless hours of combat drill, as he turned, he seamlessly readied his SA-71 carbine, bracing the stock tight in against his shoulder in readiness for the ferocious recoil kick he knew was coming.

Then he opened fire.

Every ten milliseconds the twisting railgun inside the barrel charged, launching a spinning kinetic dart out of the muzzle at Mach4. For the first two seconds of full auto fire, the darts whistled out the muzzle so gently it was as if Arun were blowing a stream of deadly b.u.t.terflies. Then the recoil dampener tripped out. The carbine kicked and writhed with such fury that he couldn't aim with more accuracy than to point in the right general direction. But he didn't want sniper shots. He was after a withering barrage.

The SA-71 delivered.

Ichor and carapace fragments flew from the aliens. Horns shattered. Legs were chipped into fragments, making the insects trip and fall and stumble.

When the ammo carousel reported only 15% of the darts remained, Arun ceased firing. The alien advance was still pouring through the gap, drilling in and out of the solid walls as if swimming through a soil sea. Would nothing stop them? They powered around their fallen comrades. Every alien heart pumped hard to accomplish a single goal: to kill Arun.

Particulate matter from alien body fragments churned into a black fog that would have choked Arun if not for his helmet filters.

Oh, drent! His carbine wasn't going to be enough. He needed the tripod-mounted beam weapons and missiles of the heavy weapons section.

Without really thinking about what he was doing, he'd turned away from the enemy guardians. Stumbling into a run, he unsnapped a grenade from his hip and rammed it into the launcher underneath his SA-71's barrel.

He swung around.

The lead Trog was about eight meters away.

He fired.

In that half-instant before the grenade blew, he saw more guardians emerging from the ceiling on his side of the defile, burrowing out from the earth. Their numbers were too great to count, but he saw enough to know that any aliens he slaughtered would be more than replenished.

Then the grenade's blast wave hit him, followed by a shower of alien ichor and gore.

Arun too sailed through the air and landed against a curve in the tunnel wall, his ears clearing enough to hear the hard body fragments clatter to the floor like frozen leaves in the fall.

Roof and walls began to drip with purple slurry in which black and brown rubbery chunks were mixed with clumps of falling soil. Then a half-dozen aliens fell through the top of the roof, bringing more showers of earth with them. Flailing all six limbs as they fell, they landed on the jumble of chitin below, skidding down to join the ungainly heap of living aliens scrabbling to right themselves.

The hordes behind kept coming, slipping and slithering into an ungainly ma.s.s that could not win purchase, only impede itself.

The grenade's shaped blast front had left Arun dazed but relatively unscathed. His visor had cracked, its display unavailable, including its low-light enhancers. Smart armor had reduced fatal shrapnel to punis.h.i.+ng bruises, but his left knee was numb and unbending.

When his senses came back, Arun hurriedly switched on the lights at the side of his helmet. One of them worked, revealing that the wavefront of alien death had slowed more than he'd hoped. He estimated that his grenade had won him a fifteen second remission before he was sliced to a b.l.o.o.d.y pulp with those front-limb claws, or impaled on the wicked horns.