Human Legion: Marine Cadet Part 13

It was only being polite really.

Judging by the roars of rage, Arun's message was received and understood.

Arun whistled cheerfully as he followed the tunnel round and round getting deeper with every turn. The helixes were the only route down for heavy equipment. If there was a major logistics operation going on in Helix 6, then Arun would be warned by the status map mounted on the walls at regular intervals. But today the helix was almost deserted. Being by himself for a short while was such a luxury that he decided it made up for missing the chow time that his comrades would be tucking into right now. By the time he got back, he'd only have the chance to grab a few sc.r.a.ps. And by then his squad would be going up the orbital elevator for an afternoon session of dropboat training. Another training session missed.

But Arun wasn't going to let that bother him today. This was the first time he'd ever cycled to these depths. Normally he met the Trog via one of the main surface entrances of the nest, in the forest to the southeast of Detroit. Today he was going to meet through the connection between the lowest level of Detroit and the nest.

Until last week he had no idea that the human base joined up with the nest. How many more secrets were waiting to be revealed?

Arun turned his mind back to his naming task. How about Whistler? Arun rolled the name around his mind, trying it out. He liked the idea: whistling was something only humans could do. It didn't sound right, though.

How about Bike? No. Peddler?

People said that bicycles were an entirely human invention, one that annoyed the Hardits in particular, given their specialism in technology and engineering. Mining human creativity was the reason Earth had been nurtured for millennia before begin fought over and eventually forced into the Trans-Species Union under the sponsors.h.i.+p of the White Knights. Technologically speaking, humanity was a million years or more behind the most advanced of their neighbors, but that also meant they didn't have a million years of precedent saying what works and what does not, stifling the ability to view old problems from an entirely new angle. Or so people said. But people said a lot of things that might be complete hok.u.m, as Gupta might say. Still, it made for a good story.

But Peddler didn't sound right either. The name sounded like a guy he knew from Dog Company: Pedro.

Peddler. Pedro.

The connection was obscure and it was dumb. But it was dumb in a human way and that was what Arun was after. Pedro it would be.

"What did you call me?" The scribe spiraled both antennae, thrusting one forward and the other back. Arun recognized this as an expression of bemus.e.m.e.nt.

"I called you Pedro."

"Why?"

"Because that is your new name."

"But why? Why Pedro? What does it mean?"

Arun shrugged. "Why does it have to mean anything? It's just a name. Your name."

"You mean that Pedro is neither descriptive nor has a functional purpose, such as to denote rank or role? The name is a product of pure whimsy?"

Arun rolled his eyes. Pedro could over-complicate the simplest things. "Yeah, that's what I just said, Pedro. It's a frakking name. Don't any of you overgrown bugs have names?"

Pedro touched one antenna to Arun's shoulder. "No one in our nest has a name. We only have... designations, I guess you would call them. Just as you name and number the pa.s.sageways and chambers of your tunnels. I cannot express how pleased this makes me. To be given a name is a great honor."

"Hold on. If none of you guys have names. How come it's a great honor to be given one?"

Pedro did that annoying gesture where he folded over his antennae in a loose approximation of human shoulders and then shrugged them. "Because I have decided that this is so. My house. My frakking rules."

"You what? Are you quoting me?"

"I often repeat your phrases, though do not seem to recognize this."

"Figures."

Pedro rose on all six legs and skittered around in a circle making sudden little leaps in the air as he did. He'd explained once that this was his way of burning off dangerously high levels of excitement.

Even armed with that explanation, Arun couldn't help but be very conscious of the excitable creature's bulk even if it was bounding around playfully. Pedro must weigh upwards of 300 pounds. If he slipped and fell on top of Arun there would be badly broken bones, and broken Marine cadets were not worth the trouble of fixing.

Arun fiddled with the pheromone emitter dangling around his neck. Pedro had organized delivery of the emitter to Arun's hab-disk, with a note explaining that this made him smell like a nest sibling. Without the device, the Trogs defending their nest entrance would have killed him.

He needn't have worried. Despite the chaotic appearance of Pedro's little dance, the alien never once lost his footing. Arun suspected that the tiniest detail of his over-excitement dance was perfectly ch.o.r.eographed in advance, a pattern stored in its memory ready for use. They were obsessive about the details of life these Trogs.

Pedro halted abruptly and turned to stare at Arun. "With this name, you have a.s.signed a gender to me. Do you believe that has significance?"

"I know it has no significance. It's you who are obsessed with s.e.x."

"I see."

"I see? What in Horden's name is that supposed to mean?"

"You say more than you know, friend McEwan. Sometimes your subconscious tells me more than you consciously say. That's how I learn so much from you."

"Sure. Well I'm glad to be so transparent. Tell me, Pedro, what do you want me to reveal subconsciously today?"

"Today I want to hear about a day in the life of a human Marine cadet."

"A day in the life. You've been reading human books again, haven't you?"

Again with the shrugging antennae.

Arun sighed. "Get me some water, will you? I have long days. Better get my throat lubed up if you want to hear about them."

Pedro scuttled over to the water dispenser.

These sessions with Pedro had so inured Arun to the bizarre that he was only just starting to appreciate how weird this new room was. He recorded images through his eyes while Pedro was busy at the water dispenser the same kind that was dotted around the human areas of the base. The Troggie tunnels were dark, but this room was brightly illuminated with red-tinged lamps. Arun was sitting in a swiveling sofa chair, deeply padded and covered in red faux leather. It looked brand new. Hung on the walls and ceiling were framed photographs of cadets. Arun was in most of the photos. All of Delta Section were there too. So was Xin. He wasn't going to ask why Xin was there. He'd never mentioned her, had he?

"Do you like this chamber?"

"It's... I don't know. I guess it's a good attempt to make me feel" he glanced at Xin's photo "I don't know what exactly but it makes me feel something."

"Ahh. I see you like the photograph of your beloved."

"My be-what?"

"Your beloved. The female you love."

"She is not my beloved."

"Correction. Ah, but your language is so messy. It is a minefield. This female is not one you are loving but one you wish fervently that you shall love in the future. You are in love but not..."

Pedro paused to regroup. Arun felt his face flush, caught precariously between anger and laughter.

"Let me rephrase," said Pedro. "That Xin is one hot chick." That last sentence sounded suspiciously like it had been sampled from Arun's voice pattern. "I guess you'd love a piece of her action." So did that.

The problem about Pedro, Arun decided, was that his face was an impa.s.sive mask. He couldn't help but feel Pedro was laughing at him from behind that mask. Whenever the conversation touched anything sensitive or awkward, Arun just wanted to punch the alien to wipe the hidden smirk off its face, even though that was a totally dumb thing to wish for, given that Pedro was physically incapable of smirking.

Arun stepped back from confrontation. It wouldn't help. That it wouldn't help just made Arun want to hit Pedro even more and that made him feel... feel that he'd rather Barney was there for a little advice and maybe a sedative too.

"You got those words out of movies and TV shows, didn't you?"

"Correct."

"Do me a favor," he told Pedro, "don't mention anything about girls again. You're just annoying when you do. Anyway, if you know all this stuff, why do you need me? I sometimes think you know more about humans that I do. What's the point of these chit-chats anyway?"

"Because..." Pedro twisted his body into something approximating an S-shape. It probably meant something profound. "Because I have read facts about humans. This is not the same as understanding your species. The distinction could become vital one day. Our future may present opportunities for cooperation."

Yup! There we have it, thought Arun. Those stupid hints that I'm meant to be a messiah or freedom fighter or something. He bit down on saying the words aloud, remembering that Pedro had gone to the trouble of meeting him in a mothballed orbital platform to escape the surveillance that permeated Detroit. After that first meeting, Pedro had never again hinted that there could be ways to live other than as slaves.

He laughed instead, noticing the manic edge to the sound, but why should he care if a dumb insect heard it? Depending on who you talked to, Arun was too soft, too much of a worrier, or just too much of a loser to be a proper Marine. Well, his emotions might have run wild recently, but he was no coward.

No one had ever accused him of being sensible either.

"Am I special?" Arun asked. There, he'd said it. And somewhere an AI would hear and record his words. "Is there something special I'm supposed to do? Is there something unique about me, Arun McEwan?"

Pedro pointed his antennae at Arun and then stood motionless and silent for a good minute. He might be a dumb insect, but he was perfectly capable of making Arun feel dumber.

"We are all unique individuals, Arun McEwan." The insect's artificial voice was so quiet it was barely audible.

"Unique? Horden's Organs, you dumbchuck, you're a hive creature. A drone. Uniqueness is an alien concept that you're trying to learn from me."

"I see I have upset you," said the scribe. "I apologize."

The alien wandered around for a while. The movement looked confused and aimless. It probably wasn't, but Arun had no idea what it meant.

When he was done, Pedro clambered onto a shelf carved into one dirt wall. Dim orange lamps were directed at the shelf. Basking in the resulting heat was probably a sensual pleasure. Arun had no way of knowing for sure without asking and he wasn't about to do that. The session had already edged too close to the borders of friends.h.i.+p.

"Tell me about a day in your life," said the scribe.

"You mean like an itinerary?"

"Sure. However you want to do it is fine. Then I'll tell you about my day. Shoot."

"Okay. Well, we wake at midnight. That's the end of First Sleep. We're woken gently. Basically, a switch in our heads is turned on by our internal clocks. We might take a leak, have a slurp of drink, but basically we put on our training cap, check it's attached properly and that we've inserted our suit AI chip. Then we go back to sleep."

"This sleep-training cap what does it teach you?"

"Well, I don't actually know, seeing as I'm asleep at the time. I seem to know a lot of facts that I never learned in cla.s.s or read in a book. I mean, we'll be training on a new weapon and I'll know burst radius, recoil strength, ammo variants and all that stuff, and yet I've never seen that kind of gun before. What else the caps do, we can only guess. Probably makes us super-brave and ultra-loyal to the White Knights."

"I expect that is correct."

Arun thought about that. He'd been joking, but he didn't think Pedro was. "So that's Second Sleep," he continued, "where they fill our brains with something. Then at 05:00, there's a buzzer sounds in our dorm. Doesn't give you any option but to be awake. I mean, if there were any corpses interred beneath the floor of our dorm then we'd know about it, because they would rise from the dead to complain about the noise."

"And who do you sleep with?"

"Hey! I thought I told you to keep off that topic."

"I have not gone on that topic. You have a dormitory, which I understand to be a separate room inside a habitation disk. Your hab-disk is designated 6/14 and houses Charlie Company and Dog Company from 8th battalion, 412th Marines. Is it always the same individuals who sleep in that dorm?"

"Oh, I see. Yeah. Now that we've graduated from the creche to be full cadets, we get to live in a hab-disk and the dorm members are fixed, far as I know. Two fire teams make a section and it's one section per dorm. That's eight cadets. Me, Springer, Zug, Brandt, Majanita, Osman, Del-Marie and Cristina."

Pedro seemed satisfied, so Arun carried on: "It's quite relaxed first thing. The hab-disk has its own gym and firing range. So we stretch and work out enough to get fit but not to tire us out before the day has started. Then we wash dress and clean ourselves ready for inspection between 07:00 and 07:30."

"You clean yourselves with water?"

"Sure we do. Why? What do you use to clean yourselves with?"

"Dirt. We sweat out toxins and scrub away by burying through dirt."

"Lovely. Don't you still smell?"

"We like to smell. We are our smell."

"O-kay. Anyway. Yeah, we have showers dotted around the disk. There's five of them. You can fit about ten people in each shower, twelve if you squeeze together. Sometimes you have to. It can get real busy at peak times."

"And these showers, males and females share the same facilities?"

"What is it with you? You're s.e.x-obsessed."

"Possibly. Remember, my species has no genders. If smell defines my people, I think gender defines yours. This gender distinction is so fundamental to your species and yet completely absent from mine. How can we be so different? I do not understand this yet."

The insect made a good point. But how could Arun explain to someone who has no gender the horseplay that went on at the top and tail of a cadet's day? About how they were given license to let off a little steam? How dorm mates might vacate their dorm to give a couple ten minutes of privacy?

"It's different," Arun said. "In the showers, I mean. At other times, taking clothes off can be a big deal, but everyone has to get clean first thing and have their protective spray. It's mandatory. You get on with it. It's no big deal." That wasn't always strictly true, but it would do for an explanation. "Anyway, your idea of gender and s.e.xual attraction is too simplistic. It isn't just a question of males liking girls and vice versa."

"What? You have more genders? Fascinating. Please elaborate... No, on second thoughts, leave that for another session. Please continue with your typical day."

Arun shrugged. "Like I said, inspection is 07:00 to 07:30. We stand by our racks which I guess you could call single-occupancy sleep pods. Our kit cabins are open. Everything is stripped clean, a.s.sembled, washed. Absolutely perfect. Of course on most days an instructor doesn't come to inspect us. There aren't enough of them to go around. But we have to be ready just in case. Same goes for evening inspection between 21:00 and 21:30."

"Thank you," said Pedro. "I have two more questions. Firstly how much time do you have to yourselves in the evening?"

"Well, depends what we got to do. Inspection ends 21:30. We're supposed to in bed by 25:00 hours and sleep all the way through the remaining five hours until midnight at 30:00 hours. That's three and a half hours to ourselves. We don't just goof around, though. Some of us practice for Scendence. Sometimes we meet up with seniors from our battalion who will help teach and train us. Our merit points help determine their Cull status, you see?"

"I do. Thank you. Final question. Who prepares food for you?"

"Well, the Aux of course. They do all the cooking and cleaning. Maintenance too. That sort of stuff."

"And these auxiliaries are lower caste humans, yes?"

Arun was about to deny that humans were so primitive as to have castes or a cla.s.s system. The words caught in his throat when he thought of how he treated the Aux. He always tried to be polite, he supposed, but there was never any doubt in his att.i.tude that he knew he was better than any Aux.

And from the vast majority of other cadets the best the Aux could hope for was indifference. Petty cruelty was more common because most cadets seemed to have had compa.s.sion bred out of them. They felt intense loyalty but struggled with the concept of kindness. And since the Aux were not part of their units, they might as well be aliens. Try as he might, Arun struggled to be so cold hearted. That made him a freak.