Indigo Squad Read online

  Hoped to. The location of the targets was guesswork, given a veneer of plausibility by Beowulf’s spy probes that had sent back data about power routing and data traffic before being vaped by enemy lasers.

  The two sides of the pincer were uneven. Arun couldn’t help thinking of himself as a decoy, there to distract attention from the main force.

  Once they’d set things on course with the hull breaching charges, Arun had always expected the plan to fall apart as the boarding action unfolded, but not as quickly as it did.

  He followed Lance Corporal Del-Marie Sandure and a replacement Marine – a girl he didn’t know well called Sadri – down the breach. Straight away he knew something was wrong. Barney lost power to the suit propulsion. Arun stumbled and fell… to his right, onto the aft bulkhead.

  Fell! How could he fall in zero-g? This ship must have artificial gravity. Such a display of an impossible technology made him tingle with unease. Even if the reaction force feeling of gravity had come from engine thrust or rotation, that still didn’t explain why his suit propulsion had failed. It was only in genuine gravity fields that the ACE-2 suit propulsion barely functioned.

  He glanced behind him, expecting quadruped Muryani Marines to be waiting in ambush.

  They weren’t. Maybe this wasn’t even a Muryani ship. They didn’t have artificial gravity and weren’t supposed to be so close to Tranquility.

  None of this made sense.

  He tried to shake away thoughts about matters beyond his control, and focused instead on the practical. His compromised suit propulsion meant he would have to get around by walking and running. But the plan still held good.

  Arun switched off the safety on his SA-71 carbine and covered his squadmates who were falling into a heap on the bulkhead, filling the Local BattleNet comm channel with grunts of confusion.

  Suddenly an alarm started blaring so loudly that Arun’s head would have shattered if Barney hadn’t filtered out most of the sound.

  Better make that two weird things, he thought. The hull was open to the vacuum, but he was still hearing sounds. That meant the air was intact. Damn! They should have brought overblast grenades. Instead, they’d brought flash-bombs, to disorient an enemy before shooting them with railgun darts.

  All his training said you had to run with the crazy chaos of contact with the enemy and make your own luck. You had to keep an open mind and adapt your plan as you went.

  Sounded compelling in theory. In practice, his comrades’ mental faculties were so blunted that no one had the wit to mention the strangeness of their environment or adapt their plan.

  There’s no problem, he told himself. No dramas. No need to change the plan. Nothing has changed.

  But he didn’t really believe that. Either this was a class of Muryani vessel that he’d never seen before.

  Or this ship didn’t belong to their old foe, but a far more deadly threat.

  Only a few moments earlier, he’d thrown himself through the hull breach with excitement boiling in his veins.

  Now he felt only icy trepidation.

  Not fear for his own fate, but deep worry about how they would cope in this puzzle box of surprises.

  — Chapter 04 —

  After punching through four bulkheads on their way to the center of the enemy ship, Indigo Squad still hadn’t met resistance.

  That was bad.

  Once they’d recovered from the shock of encountering genuine gravity, and picked themselves up from the untidy heap they’d made on the aft bulkhead, the squad had pressed on with vigor. They might not be sharp, but every genetic rewiring, wetware augmentation and trained habit yelled at them to close and fight with the enemy.

  Four frames in and that initial impetus had dissipated.

  Horden’s backside! Caccamo and Bojin from Alpha Section were actually sitting down and talking. Chewing the fat in the middle of a battle.

  A few kicks from Arun’s boot were enough to communicate a sense of occasion to the two idle lizards, but it took sharp words from Lance Sergeant Brandt to get them moving again.

  Arun feared this loss of focus was only a sign of things to come.

  Frakk! The pair were so dopey they weren’t fit to clean out the head, let alone fight a battle.

  Arun shuddered. He’d been forced to shovel shit as an Aux slave worker. It was even less fun than it sounded.

  “McEwan!” barked Corporal Majanita – Madge – Arun’s section leader.

  “Corporal?”

  “When you’ve finished playing footsie with Alpha Section, bring your ass over to get us through this bulkhead.”

  As he raced over, Arun grabbed a breaching charge from the utility attachment patch over his rear hip and looked for a spot on the wall that was as far as possible from any bracing.

  The breach pack was shaped like a small lime-green plant pot that oozed sticky green slime over its flat attachment surface. The slime ran through Arun’s gauntlets like harmless alien sweat, but when he placed the charge at chest height against the bulkhead, and held it in place for the required seven seconds, the bond it made was strong enough to withstand a plasma torch.

  Arun glanced behind to check everyone was standing back.

  “Keep clear,” he shouted. “Breach charge in five!”

  He activated the charge, shifting well to the side.

  Barney set the countdown running visibly in his visor.

  At ‘3’ Arun saw a Marine walking into the path of the charge’s backblast.

  He charged at the dumb veck, relying on Barney to boost his acceleration at the right moment.

  Barney couldn’t do much in the gravity field, but it was enough. Arun tackled the Marine, sending him flying an instant before flames roared from the back of the charge. Arun felt his flesh sear as he was blown along the deck, skidding along on his chest.

  Even before he’d smacked against the far bulkhead, Barney had given him a status report:

  So he’d literally had his ass roasted, which was just what he was going to do to the stupid dumbchuck who’d walked into the backblast.

  Tac-display said it was Marine Stok Laskosk, one of the heavies.

  Stopcock. Figures…

  For some reason, the Heavy Weapons Section had only been armed with their carbines. Without his missile launcher resting over his shoulder, Stopcock was lost at the best of times.

  Stopcock looked uninjured. He’d picked himself up and… frakk! The big Marine was striding purposefully toward Arun.

  Great. Stopcock didn’t exactly rate Arun highly at the best of times, and the stupid skangat was probably fuming about getting knocked over.

  “Hey, McEwan!” called the big guy.

  Arun braced, ready to throw the other Marine.

  Stopcock came to grapple.

  Arun shifted down, ready to throw Stopcock over his shoulder but stopped himself at the last moment, when Stopcock made his visor go transparent and Arun could see the smile beaming all over his face.

  Stopcock embraced in an armored bear hug. “Thanks, McEwan. Didn’t know what came over me. I owe you.”

  “Don’t sweat it, Stopcock. I’d do the same for any brother or sister.”

  The heavy weapons specialist drew back a little, looming over Arun. He tapped Arun on the helmet, hard enough to make it ring.

  “Don’t be disrespectful, McEwan. When I say I owe you, it means something. Okay?”

  “Got it,” said Arun. “Thanks.”

  “Grenade!” shouted Madge as she tossed a flash-bomb through the breach Arun had opened in the wall.

  Just as well they hadn’t encountered resistance. His squad mates had been standing like dumb shooting range targets, watching his exchange with Stopcock rather than concentrating on whatever was on the far side of that bulkhead.

  Overblast grenades would have been better, but the flash-bomb in an enclosed space was still a serious munition.
Anticipating what would happen, Barney turned Arun’s world black just before the bomb lit it up with retina-searing flashes in visible, UV, infrared, radio and microwave bands. The noise too set his teeth on edge.

  Even before the bomb went off, Arun was running toward the hole in the wall. As it went off, he dove headlong into the gap. Suit and Marine massed 400 pounds together, but they’d practiced this endlessly. Arun rolled like an acrobat and came up with carbine ready to fire.

  “Don’t shoot!”

  Arun hesitated, finger over the trigger.

  “We surrender!”

  The compartments they’d cut through had been unoccupied by defenders and mostly empty of equipment too, but this looked like an infirmary with beds and terrified people deafened and blinded by the flash-bomb. The people were holding out their arms in surrender.

  People.

  Human people!

  Zug arrived through the breach next. Arun dropped his own carbine and launched a flying kick at Zug’s SA-71, which sent a burst of darts into the overhead.

  “Cease fire!” shouted Arun.

  Madge came through next.

  Arun stood in front of her. “Cease fire.”

  He picked up his carbine. “Cease fire,” he shouted again.

  “What?” Madge sounded confused.

  Sergeant Gupta was drugged too, but a veteran’s instinct told him something was wrong. “What’s the delay?” he asked from the far side of the breach.

  “Hostiles are human, sergeant,” replied Arun.

  “Say again.”

  “We’ve broken into a medical facility. The wounded here are all human.”

  “So?” said Madge.

  The rest of Delta Section was flooding through now.

  “We’re supposed to be at war with the Muryani,” said Arun, speaking quickly. “I don’t know who the hell these people are, but I think our officers would want to find out. So probably best not to shoot them first, yes?”

  “Yes, I can see that,” said Gupta who was in the room now, peering at the frightened humans in their infirmary beds.

  “Good thinking, McEwan,” said the second-in-command, Lance Sergeant Brandt.

  Arun recorded the scene in the memory stores linked to his optic nerves. Watching the armored Marines milling around the beds was bizarre to put it mildly.

  They’d expected their enemy, the Muryani: oversized quadrupeds with flat heads shaped like a shovel. What had the wounded humans in the bed been expecting? They were shocked – the flash-bomb would have that effect – but surprised? No, they seemed to know the Marines were coming.

  “Should we continue the advance, sergeant?” asked Corporal Hecht who led Alpha Section.

  It took twenty seconds for Gupta to collect his thoughts enough to reply. Then he was back to his old self, barking out orders “Hecht, Caccamo, watch these vecks. If any of these lizards move, shoot to kill. Beta Section, you’re point next.”

  When Beta Section’s leader didn’t immediately move, he walked over to her and smacked her helmet. “What the frakk is wrong with you, Khurana. Move!”

  While the others were busy trying to breach the next wall, Arun hung back. Stung into action by the shortness of time available to him, he questioned the man who’d first surrendered.

  “What the hell are you doing here, fighting on behalf of humanity’s enemies?”

  “I could ask you the same question, Marine.” The man’s face suddenly crumpled in shock, and he grabbed weakly at Arun’s arm. “Your voice… General McEwan,” he whispered. “Is that really you, sir?”

  “General? I’m human, you dumb veck.” Arun shook away the man’s grasp. “How could I possibly be a general?”

  “My apologies. The bomb. It was deafening.”

  “I’ll give you more than ringing ears if you don’t answer my question.” Arun was angry enough to hit this guy hard. Arun had saved his measly life, his continued existence hung by a thread and yet this man had the arrogance to turn Arun’s question against him.

  “You have no right to hurt me. We are all human.”

  “So what? Your being human, is of interest. Doesn’t give you any rights, though. Why the hell should I care?”

  The man grew red in the face. There was anger in his voice. “We should all be championing human causes, not serving as plasma fodder for aliens.”

  “That’s a forbidden fantasy,” countered Arun, “which makes you a dangerous idiot.”

  Arun turned to hurry after his section, but he couldn’t resist one last question: “Are you claiming to be fighting for human causes?”

  “I know I do so.”

  “But you fight for the Muryani.”

  “No. We serve humanity,” the man said in a voice that oozed with contempt.

  “As do we,” spat back Arun. “In our way.”

  “You do not. You fight for the White Knights.”

  “As you fight for the Muryani,” said Arun. Ancient human wars on Earth often featured nations who fought as mercenaries on both sides. It should be no surprise if humanity’s role in the Muryani-White Knight frontier wars were the same.

  “You misunderstand,” said the man. “We do not fight for the Muryani at all. We are Amilx.”

  “I’ve heard that word. But I don’t know what it means.”

  The man hesitated, as if he’d gone too far. “It’s only meaning of relevance is that we are human. That is all you need to know.”

  Arun wanted to ask more, but Madge was screaming at him to hurry up.

  “Later, pal,” he said. “This isn’t over.”

  He put the Amilx mystery from his mind and raced after the rest of Delta Section.

  — Chapter 05 —

  Control consoles tipped onto their sides, overturned equipment boxes with wheels still pointing at the overheard where pipes and electrical conduits had been ripped down through missing ceiling panels: the defenders of what Marine intel said was the Combat Information Center had clearly built their barricade in haste.

  Judging by the way the crescent-shaped barrier curved out toward Indigo Squad’s breaching point, they had seen Beowulf’s Marines coming, despite Indigo Squad’s efforts to jam any surveillance.

  Arun was still in the neighboring compartment, waiting his section’s turn to enter. His map of CIC was put together by Indigo Squad’s suit AIs who constantly bounced updates on sightings and guesswork to each other. LB Net, the squad’s distributed group-mind, extended through the breach to paint a picture of CIC onto the tac-display inside Arun’s visor.

  The 11 red dots of the defenders were outnumbered by the 31 blue markers of Indigo Squad. After letting off a few wild shots at Alpha Section, who had made it through the breach first, the defenders had cowered behind their defenses. Should be a walkover.

  “Let’s ask them to surrender,” said Arun on Delta Section’s comm channel.

  No one acknowledged his suggestion. He wasn’t surprised. Prisoner-taking was an unnatural concept they’d never trained for. He had only been speaking his thoughts aloud.

  The passivity of the defenders had caused a curious lull in the fighting. Beta Section took advantage to filter through the breach into CIC.

  Sergeant Gupta unleashed hell with a single word: “Go!”

  Proper flight was impossible in this strange gravity field, but Alpha Section still had some power in their suit motors and used this to leap high, spraying the far side of the barricade with flash-bombs and high volume bursts of railgun darts.

  Under this lethal covering fire, each of the two Beta Section fire teams worked around a flank of the barricade. Arun’s Delta Section charged into the CIC through the breach in the bulkhead. Alongside them was the heavy weapons section.

  The Marines were so heavily doped, they had all the initiative of a tinned cabbage. But they didn’t need their brains clear for a squad assault against a prepared position, because so many years of training had made this as natural as breathing.

  Arun squeezed through the breach
into a cacophony of noise and light from the flash-bombs, expecting his tac-display to show crosses through the enemy dots. Instead, by the time he was inside, ominous crosses overlaid six of the blue dots that represented his comrades. The enemy was unscathed.

  “They’re wearing armor,” said Gupta, then more quietly, “our darts can’t penetrate. What can we do?”

  Fury erupted throughout Arun. Not at the defenders, but at the traitors within his Marine Corps family who had blunted his sergeant’s mind, turning him from a fearsome NCO – ten times the Marine Arun would ever be – into a pathetic imbecile.

  “Here’s what we frakkin’ do!” shouted Arun on the squad-wide channel. “Extend teeth and mince those maggots. On my mark, Beta Section fire from the flanks. Everyone else, leap the barricade. We’re going over the top.”

  Arun took a moment to check Indigo’s reaction. To say it was not his place to issue orders was the understatement of the century. But everyone, even the sergeant, obediently extended teeth – the crown of rotating monofilament needles that extended out the end of their carbine barrels.

  A chill of horror crossed Arun, making him shiver. All he needed to do was give an order like he meant it, and the doped Marines would obey without question. What would happen if he gave an order to murder their officers and take over the Beowulf? Was that what the traitors were planning? Maybe Arun should set up his own mutiny first.

  He shook away those terrifying thoughts.

  “Ready! 3… 2… 1… Go!”

  Arun ran three paces and then jumped.

  On his own!

  No, not quite, he realized, just before he crested the barricade. Alpha and Delta Sections had stood and looked at his example for a second before copying him.

  But that still meant the guns of every defender would be trained on him alone.

  Evade! Evade!

  At his command, Barney shoved him sideways and then up before stalling and crashing into the barricade. He bounced off a flexible pipe hanging down from the overhead before landing on his back atop a plastic crate.

  His tac-display was already reporting the enemy were all dead.