Marine Cadet (The Human Legion Book 1) Read online

  Another blast of soil and diced bodies flung itself over his disabled visor, but more subdued this time. The grenade had tunneled through the pile of aliens and buried itself deeply into the tunnel wall behind. This blast had wreaked much less destruction, but had won him time by giving the body pile such a kick that many Trogs lost their footing again.

  The combat immunity drugs seemed to be trying to tell him something, to make him remember something from training. He didn’t exactly have time to sit down and hum a memory-inducing meditative mantra, so he blanked his mind and followed his instincts… to burrow!

  Instead of firing at the aliens, he turned his back on them, firing another grenade at the curve in the tunnel wall where he’d been flung by the first grenade.

  The blast buried itself into the wall, hurling a cloud of spoil out into the tunnel and coating Arun who’d flung himself to the ground just in time. Even before he’d gotten to his feet and wiped his visor clean of soil and sticky gore, he’d set another grenade to code 37H — emergency excavation blast mode, an implanted memory informed him — and fired again into the small alcove carved out of the wall by the previous blast.

  But it was all too little too late because he felt the impact of an armored claw slashing him from behind, just before the grenade blast blew him backwards off his feet to fall onto hard unyielding carapace and slide down onto the sticky floor. His smart battlesuit armor soaked up enough of these blows to keep him alive for now.

  Around him, the nearest aliens stirred feebly. Still half-stunned himself, Arun took a gamble. Instead of racing on into the hole his grenades had scooped out, he got himself up to a kneeling position and put one last 37H into the center of the cloud of alien body debris in front of him. This time he braced while the blast front rolled over him. Then he was staggering to his feet and stumbling on into the spray of soil and aerosol blood, and beyond into the hole the grenades had burrowed out of the soil. Clouds of spilling earth blinded him, but he judged he’d crawled in fifteen meters before the hole stopped and he could go no further. He abandoned his carbine, freeing both hands to burrow into the loosened soil, throwing it behind him like a gauntleted mole.

  Euphoria gripped him. He’d abandoned his firearm, a capital offense, and the Trogs would dice him into a hundred bloody chunks any moment now, but he couldn’t help but grin at the simple pleasure of using his hands like paddles. For this task, his combat immunity numbness actually seemed to help.

  Then he reached soil that was still too compacted to shift. Actually he’d hit that barrier several moments or minutes ago. The sense of time’s passage had numbed with most of his other senses. Even in the depths of confusion, one thing rang clear: Arun had nowhere left to run.

  He screamed. High-pitched like a child. His scream cracked, turning into some hybrid of a sob and a gasp.

  “McEwan, come in!”

  Nowhere to run! Flekked!

  “Report!”

  Those aliens had done this. Those Trogs. He’d make them pay…

  Arun twisted around and charged at the Troggie horde who’d gathered around the entrance to his hole.

  He’d rip their legs off their stinking alien bodies.

  “Report, cadet! Damn you! That is an order.”

  The irritation in Brandt’s voice reached through the helmet speaker and sent a jolt of challenge into Arun’s mind. He slowed as he wondered what the frakk he was doing charging along an alcove to head butt a pack of slavering aliens desperate to reach inside and kill him.

  Damn those experimental combat drugs.

  “I’m under heavy assault,” he whispered into the helmet mike, more interested in putting his brain back into order than following reporting protocol. “I seem to be alive. I feel rather good, actually, thank you for asking.”

  “I didn’t. I asked you to report.”

  “I did.”

  “I want a sit-rep. What’s happening? We came back when Osman reported movement, but now he’s dead and we’re pinned down. What are you going to do?”

  In front of him, Arun could see his carbine half-buried in the dirt where he’d dropped it. The gun looked so pretty there. Shiny. He wanted it. But the aliens were reaching into his hole, flicking their claws at him, and the gun was so close to the bad insects.

  Big, fat insects. They were too big to follow the human into his hole, and whatever had let them swim through the walls earlier wasn’t working here.

  Arun shuffled around until his feet were pointing at the aliens and slid his left boot towards the waiting creatures, ever so gently.

  Ever since they’d emerged from the walls and ceiling, the Trogs had been slavering, chittering beasts climbing over themselves in desperation to rend him limb from limb.

  Now they froze. Arun froze too. His pulse was a dull drumming inside his helmet; there were no other sounds — until Brandt growled: “Well?”

  “I think I’m going to kill them,” Arun said. “Or maybe the other way around. I’m not sure yet. I‘ll report back when I know.”

  There was a way to turn off his comms unit, but he couldn’t think what that was right now. He asked Barney to switch it off, but Barney wasn’t listening for some reason. He tried out emergency eyeball gestures but they didn’t work either. If he could, he would have taken the frakking helmet off and buried it.

  Brandt was very annoying. If he couldn’t turn him off, Arun decided he would drown out his voice. So Arun began to sing, a stirring ballad about the beauty of Old Earth, the precious homeworld left so very far behind. The chorus was rousing; just the thing to belt out with your pals at the end of a rec-evening.

  His song got the attention of the Trogs. Each guardian shifted its head for the best reception of his singing voice. Perhaps his song was charming them to obedience, or sleep, or an even fiercer rage. Maybe they liked the words.

  Inch by inch, he shuffled toward them, trying to slip his toe through the strap of his carbine. Ever so slowly… almost there…

  “Are they coming in our direction? Report, McEwan!”

  Oh, frakk! Brandt’s voice had come out of his external suit speakers, spooking the Trogs so they were jumping around as if he’d rammed a red-hot poker up their butts.

  Arun abandoned his attempt to be subtle and slid towards the gun as fast as he could.

  At the same moment, the sea of alien motion flowed at his crude little tunnel and launched something at him, a dark blur of motion with hate in its alien head and coming right at him.

  Double dung!

  He’d wasted a precious heartbeat watching the thing come for him. The tip of his toe reached the gun strap. By yanking back his leg and contorting his torso so forcibly that this muscles spasmed, he whipped the gun his way and grabbed. Grabbed the barrel end.

  He started shuffling back as this new thing came close.

  Too late!

  As he was spinning the gun round to point the killing end at the attacker, the beast finally reached him

  Arun looked up from his gun. At first he thought his opponent was a Troggie child but it was difficult to make out because it moved so very fast, all flashing limbs and flailing body and jaws. It was so close that the beam of helmet light didn’t spread wide enough to pick out the limbs in detail.

  When the creature flicked a claw across his leg, a realization hit him with pointless urgency: guardians are the last stage of the Trog lifecycle. There’s no such thing as a guardian child.

  What faced him was an adult guardian with four of its limbs ripped out. Only the front two remained, held out in front of its head as combined motive force and assault weapons. This was the hive creatures’ answer to the narrowness of his crawlspace.

  Spikes of pain flickered up his legs as the mutilated Trog cut into Arun, using the young cadet’s flesh to pull itself closer until it could make a killing blow.

  Arun wiggled his toes. And laughed.

  Without most of its limbs, the Trog couldn’t get power behind its attacks. Seeing as he could still move his
toes, he probably wasn’t going to die from its claw strike. Not just yet.

  With a slightly firmer hold on his SA-71, he brought it to bear on this crazy alien. But the beast flicked the carbine out of his hands, which were still too numb from the combat immunity to grip properly.

  Helplessly, he watched his gun sail overhead, out of reach to land with a dull thud behind him, at the far end of the short tunnel gouged out by Arun’s grenades.

  Then the crippled guardian flopped its middle segment — its thorax, he supposed it was called — onto Arun’s legs, pinning him with its weight. Arun flung his body left then right in a frantic attempt to wriggle free. His legs slid slowly towards freedom but not quickly enough.

  The two-limbed Trog raised its legs up and sliced down, aiming in a coordinated attack that convinced Arun that these guardians knew a lot more about human anatomy than he’d given them credit for. It aimed that metal-sheathed claw directly at his heart.

  At the moment the claws started to bite into his armor, Arun screamed.

  He rampaged through his memories, trying to remember all of it while he still had a chance. He screamed all the way, only stopping when the realization hit him that he’d never properly been in love with a woman. It was so unfair to end it all now, when he was just getting his life started.

  Then another unexpected thought struck him: he still wasn’t dead.

  Looking down at his chest, he saw the claw embedded inside his ACE-2/T training suit, and it hurt like frakk, but… his smart armor had caught and held the blow. The constraints of the narrow tunnel dimensions, the lack of limbs… whatever the reason, the claw was stuck!

  The guardian thrashed madly, banging each side of the tunnel in turn, making Arun worry about a cave-in but allowing him to free his legs. All this time, the Trog made no sound at all except for the thudding of its carapace on the dirt walls.

  Then it abandoned that tactic and reduced itself to flopping back onto Arun, trying to pin him to the ground.

  “Only a matter of time before I get out, my friend,” said Arun, beginning the work again of wriggling free.

  The alien hissed at him. The sound was like a pressure valve release. Perhaps this meant challenge or hatred. It might be its death rattle or it might mean: “Well done, sir, for besting me.” How could he know? It was a drenting, skangat alien for frakk’s sake.

  With his legs about halfway to freedom, Arun heard an answering hiss from the main tunnel, and a second mutilated alien launched itself at him.

  One chance remained… Arun activated the emergency release on his battlesuit, gasping as the shock instantly hit his system. Emergency suit release felt like his body was turning inside out. Endocrine pumps retracted from insertion points. Myriad med-points detached from their hold through his skin. Waste pipes released his penis and slithered out of his anus. Clamps popped. Warm lubricants dripped.

  Arun slithered free of his clothing in a short series of slurping wrenches.

  The second Trog had reached its companion and tried to squeeze past. With three-quarters of its limbs missing, and the first Trog still stuck to the battlesuit’s armored torso, the newcomer never stood a chance.

  By the time the second Trog managed to push its head and thorax past its companion, Arun had finally reached his gun. He fired a controlled burst of darts.

  The insect’s front limbs exploded into chunks. Wet shrapnel of head and jaws and thorax peppered the area.

  Arun released pressure on the trigger and inspected his handiwork. Both beasts were still twitching.

  He switched the gun’s ammo supply from kinetic darts to rocket rounds: bangers. The main purpose of bangers was to be fully recoilless, something very handy in zero-g combat out in deep space. But even here under a planet’s surface, the rounds still made a decent bang.

  Arun pumped ten seconds of fiery destruction into the two battered Trogs, imagining the blessed day when he would be issued with micro-nukes. Then the gun pinged that its ammunition was exhausted, and he remembered the downside of bangers: they were far larger than darts, so you couldn’t fit many into an ammunition carousel.

  After the black rain of chitin chunks had subsided, he tried cleaning his slick hands by wiping them on the walls, but the walls were soggy too. Maybe it was just as well they hadn’t issued him with nukes.

  The two mutilated Trogs that had attacked weren’t moving, weren’t even an obstacle any longer. Outside in the main tunnel it was a different story. An ocean of six-limbed aliens waited for him.

  “Should have evolved the opposable thumb,” he shouted at the enemy. As taunts went, it didn’t have much effect. He reached for fresh ammo to reinforce his message.

  Oh, drent!

  That was when he remembered he had squirmed from his battle dress in order to escape from the aliens pinning his legs. He was naked, save for his helmet and gauntlets. His ammo was still attached to the battlesuit that he’d discarded underneath the two Trogs, the same Trogs he’d just liquidized with a volley of explosive bullets.

  Frakk it!

  As he crawled over the slurry he’d created, he struggled to spot his battlesuit under its covering of gore. Something of vaguely the right shape was there, pushed farther up his hole toward the waiting Trogs.

  As he advanced, the Trogs outside stilled, and silenced. He preferred them manic; this was more menacing somehow. He ignored the guardians waiting just out of slashing range and wiped at the muck coating his half-buried suit. Arun flipped over the armor, which revealed shapes in the slurry underneath. Feeling with his hands, he found an intact fastening from an equipment pack, and two unused grenades. Underneath a shard from his drink bottle, he found an ammunition carousel. In a smooth and swift motion, he rammed the ammo into an unused socket in his carbine, took a kneeling posture, and fired.

  Instead of the soft whine of darts, Arun heard an angry whir as his carbine rejected the ammo carousel, and then a faint plop as it fell to the wet ground.

  When Arun crouched down to retrieve the bulb of ammunition, a wave of stench hit him: a Trog pheromone signal. It was an earthy smell; probably it carried layers of meaning to the aliens: taunts and an incitement to victory. To Arun it was remarkably similar to the pungent aroma of unwashed socks.

  Zug might know what that scent meant, but his friend wasn’t here. At this moment, his best friend was the AG-1 Ammunition Carousel, a dull-gray plastic bulb filled with bullets, darts and shells, a reservoir of sabot resin, and a power pack whose ability to recharge itself was as near as frakk to magical. Arun blew into the carousel’s opened feed interface. Dark goop spewed out, gobbing into his eye. He blinked furiously.

  Willing his tear-smeared eye to remain open, Arun snapped the slightly-cleaned ammo carousel into his carbine, which clicked and whirred hungrily… and carried on whirring. His gun was unhappy. A blue light lit up on its stock. He couldn’t make it out. So he brought the stock to his head and thumbed for the carbine’s AI to give an audio status.

  “Ammo feed impaired. Risk of explosion. AG-1 contents only partially utilizable.”

  Partial, eh? Arun squinted out of his hole. He saw aliens as far as he could see. He shrugged. Once the dumb bugs worked out that all they needed to do was widen the opening to his bolt-hole, he was going to die anyway. Partial would do just fine.

  Arun overrode the warning and fired into the waiting horde. He screamed incoherent sounds of battle fury as his weapon accelerated sporadic volleys of kinetic darts interleaved with frequent misfires. On and on he pumped death through the aperture of his hastily excavated hole, until he realized the ammo supply feed was clicking through an empty reservoir.

  Drop by splatter, the aerosol of ichor and soil succumbed to gravity and cleared, engorging the dark pools already on the floor.

  Recognizable fragments of carapaces, jaws, horns and legs poked out from the jumble of undifferentiated alien chitin… and… moved!

  Icy fear cooled his battle fury. Dead aliens moving… he’d heard of undead aliens in
the morbid rumors that frequently washed over the human community on Tranquility. Arun reckoned that ninety-five percent of this scuttlebutt was drent. That left five percent with at least an undercurrent of truth, such as the tales of alien warriors who could not be killed. Every time you snuffed out their life, they reconstituted, coming back stronger than before.

  He shuddered. In front of him, as the spray of destruction cleared a little more, he could make out chitinous bodies jerking into movement, reassembling themselves. Returning to life.

  Relief flooded his body when he realized what was really happening. He slapped a hand on his bare thigh and laughed so hard that he had to sit down. The dead Troggie guardians weren’t coming back to life; it was their living nest-siblings removing their fallen comrades to clear the way for another attack.

  As if to reinforce that common sense was returning to his world after that fright, he noticed the Trogs had lost their earlier attack mania, and were now using their combat claws to widen the entrance to his hole. They frequently stopped to examine the walls and roof, feeling them with their mid-limbs. These were guardians, he reminded himself: the last stage in the Trog lifecycle. He guessed these vecks weren’t normally allowed to do any digging.

  Arun backed away the short distance to the rear of his hole and counted down his last moments before evisceration. He’d heard you were supposed to cry for his mother when you faced certain death.

  That didn’t seem to be working for him, so he closed his eyes and tried to bring up memories of his mother.

  She had been kind enough, but she had always known that one day she would be shipped out-system, leaving him behind. That she had kept her emotional distance was obvious to him now.

  He couldn’t even picture her face, just a name and rank: Sergeant Escandala McEwan.

  Inefficient yet remorseless, the Trogs dug him out. Arun kept his eyes shut, but the unceasing scraping noise told him they were almost within range of a claw strike. As he waited to be sliced, his thoughts drifted to Stephen Horden. The older cadet had claimed to be descended from the President Horden of Earth who had signed the Vancouver Accord and condemned the ancestors of the Human Marine Corps to perpetual slavery.