Human Legion: Marine Cadet Part 35

In combat situations, deploying Marines to the position where they were most needed was a seriously dangerous business. The buffer gel that filled all empty s.p.a.ces inside the amniotic bubble, and the suit itself, could protect a Marine against thirty second bursts of 16g acceleration while keeping at least 80% of the occupants conscious and no more than 5% fatal casualties.

Scuttleb.u.t.t had it that there were trialing a gibberball rated for 19g acceleration, The bubbles themselves were unaltered but the human occupants were upgraded by having their eyeb.a.l.l.s replaced with artificial versions that would not pop under extreme acceleration. The brain fluid too was pumped out and replaced with buffer gel before each a.s.sault.

Arun's amniotic bubble could, in theory, keep him alive for years. Zug often insisted that his was the future intended for their distant descendants. Zug was strangely at ease with the distant prospect of cyborg Marines, but even he accepted that being encased in buffer gel and so unable to move talk or breathe for more than a few days would drive anyone insane.

The TU continued to spin about its center in a spiraling pattern that placed each EVA chute back to its starting position every 4.8 minutes. Thanks to the d.a.m.ned counters and timers he could never turn off, Arun knew for a fact that the TU was on its 38th cycle since the exercise had begun.

On cycle 39, the fear he'd experienced almost as a curiosity began to really bite. This could be the White Knights' new mode of murder: to entomb marines in their amniotic prisons until their minds were ruined. But why? It made no sense.

By cycle 41 he had it. Aliens were cruel for a reason and he knew that reason now. Disobedience was punishable by death, the sentence carried out by the a.s.sault carbines of an execution squad formed from the friends and squad mates of the guilty Marine. At least it was quick. As for death in combat, every Marine cadet accepted that was their most likely fate, one day out there in the stars, fighting for a contract signed on Earth centuries ago. Death in s.p.a.ce combat was so quick you would never know you'd been hit. Anyone who couldn't cope with that prospect had been weeded out years ago.

But if a quick death was something they were prepared for, it would be something else entirely to be kept for a week or more in their gibberb.a.l.l.s. Once returned to the base on Tranquility and paraded as an example, their bodies would be physically healthy but once proud young men and women would be reduced to pitiful gibbering wrecks.

Pour encourager les autres, as Zug would say.

Arun fought against the sense of entrapment. He thought of Xin, imagined kissing those vital lips... but Xin was out of his league. His fancy battleplaner brain had caused only heartache. The idea of her falling in love with him was so improbable that he only felt even more of a loser.

Alone... Abandoned... Sacrificed...

And drugged! He should be able to handle the wait but whatever they were feeding the other cadets was driving his brain wild. He'd never make it.

Desperately, he replaced Xin in his mind with Springer. It was her lips he focused on, but not to kiss but to hear her speak words of comfort and reason. It helped. A little. He reinforced Springer with Zug, the calmest person he knew.

But all imaginary Zug would do was shrug and say repeatedly: "You must die to encourage the others."

That was it.

Arun broke.

He screamed!

Inside his helmet, stuffed with buffer gel, his scream sounded like distant thunder. Then the gel was pus.h.i.+ng itself down his throat, He was drowning. He swallowed a quant.i.ty of the tasteless gloop, but when his throat released, more gel had pushed into his mouth and stuffed itself down the back of his mouth, pus.h.i.+ng, suffocating, drowning. He knew he should shut his mouth but the need to scream and gasp for air was stronger than his sense of reason. He gagged, but the link between gagging and vomiting had long been removed, so he kept on choking and gasping and drawing in yet more gel that pushed further down into his gullet.

Arun was drowning. Every instinct screamed that he was on the cusp of death, that he must act now! He was drowning! Yet he couldn't die. The gel was supplying him with oxygen. He knew that, but what help was knowing because he needed to breathe and could only drown and keep on drowning?

Enough reason returned to his mind for him to order he EVA chute to launch.

It refused. Barney knew that the cadet inside him was ordering a launch for the wrong reasons. Only when the launch criteria had been met would Barney relay a launch instruction and Barney would know when Arun was lying.

And so Arun continued to scream, continued to drown...

And drown...

Drown...

Arun's mind became so lost in the hinterland of death that he had no idea how long he had been drowning before Barney snapped him out of his funk with the mental equivalent of pouring an ice-cold bucket of water over his head.

Around him, he saw a glittering halo of sparkles - gloops of buffer gel flash-frozen in the cold of s.p.a.ce. The others had launched!

He braced himself and then willed his EVA chute to launch.

Nothing happened.

He tried again. Come on, Barney. d.a.m.n you!

Barney explained. Arun braced for launch. He calmed and relaxed his throat until the gagging eased. The idea of being deliberately driven insane seemed ridiculous now, the result of spending time in this gibberball while doped. To experience yet another equipment failure... maybe this really was a cyber-a.s.sault? That was bad, but not as bad as being murdered by your superiors.

He watched as Osman, Springer, Madge and the others converged on a jittering dot that his faceplate overlay said was Sergeant Gupta. His squadmates closed in on their target and chased it around the back of the TU and out of sight.

"Why have we not launched?" he said. Or tried to. Even Arun couldn't hear more than an incoherent grunting, and Barney made no reply.

Seconds turned to minutes.

Minutes stretched into hours.

He fought a rearguard action against the approach of insanity. He imagined resting his head on Springer's chest, his head cradled in her arms. Even in his imagination, Springer was p.i.s.sed at Arun for letting down his comrades again, blaming the sabotaged training bots on him. Too angry to speak any words of comfort, her embrace offered just enough comfort for Arun to keep a fingerhold on his sanity.

* Chapter 50 *

His legs kicking over the pit of despair, Arun held on to his sanity by his fingertips, time stretching beyond any meaning.

And then, without warning, he was hurled back into the physical universe in a frantic blur of events.

Nutrient and waste tubes retracted. The buffer gel pulsed out of his suit, his helmet, but not his throat. He chocked, panicked.

The skin of the EVA bubble blew out in a million tiny fragments and he was shot out into the vacuum, buffer gel freezing all around.

His lungs quivered, protested, screamed for the air flooding into his helmet but none could make it through the gel still clogging his gullet. Without the gel supplying air through his skin, he was choking to death.

He tried. He tried so hard but he could not breathe.

A tear came to his eye. It mustn't end like this!

Then a deeply embedded instinct took over. He gulped and belched simultaneously. It was confused and painful but whatever he'd done worked.

He was breathing.

He was alone.

Arun tried radioing the Yorktown, but Barney reported the warboat was refusing comms. He decided to scan the outside for a hatch, or better still a camera that he could wave into. Then he thought better of it. The Yorktown crew already knew he was here. His EVA port had just opened for frakk's sake.

His answer came when a bright speck detached from the starscape and came in on a looping trajectory around the Yorktown, decelerating to halt side-on a hundred meters away from Arun.

The distant speck had grown into a TS-32(c), a utility shuttle configured in troop carrier mode. The side of the main section facing Arun folded up, ready for boarding.

He couldn't imagine a more obvious invitation A whoop came from Arun's mouth, a sound as weak as he was exhausted.

That won't do, he decided. So he flipped his suit over in a series of somersaults, the zero-g equivalent of jumping up and down while punching the air in triumph.

Someone was going to a great deal of trouble to lure Arun to a time and place of their choosing.

He laughed. This was more like it. He was living an adventure and loved it.

Too many people whose opinion he valued had called Arun an idiot recently. Well, they could go vulley themselves because he was unlucky, not stupid.

He realized that what had sapped his morale these past weeks was the fear that he would die pointlessly and unremarked, his life amounting only to a few lines on the regimental records that no one would ever read. That shuttle was as clear a sign as he'd ever get that someone powerful thought Arun was important.

Earning the contempt of his battalion had hollowed him out, leaving him a void inside a brittle sh.e.l.l. But if he didn't die now, he was confident he'd claw back the trust of his comrades one day, refilling that void inside with the sense of belonging that had once sustained him. He was already making good progress with Springer.

As for teetering on the brink of destruction so many times recently, that only energized him.

What was it Hortez had said on that first trip to Alabama? Things happen around you, McEwan. Dear Hortez. How had his friend's ending played out?

Arun instructed his suit AI to head for the shuttle.

C'mon, Barney, let's prove Hortez right.

* Chapter 51 *

Arun watched the external video feed to the pa.s.senger cabin as the shuttle's AI touched the craft down gently. They landed on a mid-sized lump of rock that would once have been an asteroid much farther out from the sun, but had been captured and towed to a Lagrange point between Tranquility and one of its moons. The gravitational pull between planet and moon canceled out at these Lagrange points, making them an excellent place to dump things, such as old s.p.a.cecraft and tamed asteroids, because they would stay where you left them rather than clutter up the already crowded orbital paths around moons and planets.

This rock had a simple landing pad of fused and flattened rock, set a short walk away from a cavernous hole that led down into darkness.

Arun checked his suit comms. Only the shuttle's AI was registering as a node on his local ad-hoc network, and it was refusing to answer any of Arun's questions. The shuttle's cabin was airless and unpressurized, designed to disgorge a squad of armored Marines within seconds. With no one talking to him, the journey and landing had been silent, other than the sound of his own breathing.

Arun expected to be contacted by the AI controlling operations on this asteroid. But if such an intelligence existed, it was hiding from Arun. There was no sign of technology at all, other than the artificial nature of the crude landing pad.

Without a doubt, this was the most remote place Arun had ever been.

Untraceable would be another word for it.

All these thoughts floated through Arun's mind but failed to catch there. While he'd been trapped in his EVA bubble, his Marine's enhanced physiology had suppressed sleep, kept him concentrating on tiny dots in s.p.a.ce for hour after hour, and had filled him with such a sense of threat that his muscles had powered up ready to leap and bound, but had found themselves unable to push effectively against the entombing buffer gel that had drowned him relentlessly.

The elation he'd felt when he first saw the shuttle had consumed his final reserve of strength. Now he was exhausted almost beyond the capacity to care any longer. Whoever had set this up had gone to so much trouble that it was pointless to resist. Arun thumbed the door pad, and half jumped, half floated down onto the landing pad.

He took long, bounding jumps along the path to the cavern. After fifty paces stumbling through the winding cavern entrance, Barney switched his faceplate to infrared but there was no heat source to serve as illumination: the walls were as cold as s.p.a.ce.

He stopped and laughed. Out of habit, he'd been trying to avoid drawing attention to himself, but the idea of remaining undetected was silly, so he activated his helmet lamps.

The twin patches of illumination revealed a crudely hewn tunnel with a floor that was flattened and textured for improved grip. Arun had expected the entrance tunnels to be just large enough for him to carry out a long micro-g bound without cracking his head on the roof. It was far larger than that.

He searched his memory for zero-g mining. He knew almost nothing, but after a few seconds, facts vomited themselves out of a deep store, unpleasant to access but ready for use all the same. Whether this new knowledge came from artificial memory stores or had been implanted during Second Sleep he had no idea. But he did know that asteroids were normally a.s.sessed for mining potential by lozenge-shaped robots that would drill holes just large enough for them to drag themselves through. Larger tunnels could wait for when full-scale mining began. He saw images of asteroids being actively mined, and those fully mined out. But there were no signs of the equipment, tailings or port facilities he should be seeing in either scenario. So this wasn't a mining asteroid at all. But what was it?

It took another half hour of following twisting tunnels, and worrying whether he was circling round on himself, before he heard the hum. The tunnels were airless, but there was a faint vibration running through the floor that Barney picked up and fed in a cleaned and amplified form through his helmet speakers.

At first, Arun thought this was the electrical hum from a power source. Then, after immersing himself in the sound for a while, he changed his mind. It reminded him of listening to radio wave emissions from the sun. No, that wasn't quite it either. There was an organic quality to the hum. It was alive.

Whatever the hum's source, it gave him a beacon to aim for. Time seemed to speed up once he had a clear objective. Soon he emerged into a cavern painted with abstract symbols on its walls. Tracks ran along a ceiling, and from one of those tracks hung heavy brown drapes that ran across the room, hiding whatever lay behind from his sight. Barney was convinced that the hum's source was just behind the curtain.

"Approach the hanging barrier!"

The voice in his helmet was mechanical. Could it be a Trog? The voice was identical.

Arun walked to the curtain and then halted.

"Turn off your light and remain stationary."

Arun turned off his helmet lamps, but switched his faceplate to infrared. All he could see was a faint circular smudge right in front of him that s.h.i.+fted and swirled. It could easily be his mind playing tricks.

Whatever it was stayed motionless, throbbing gently in front of him. As the minutes dragged on, Arun became convinced he was making up the image, and yet something tangible was there: the hum. Under the fizz and swash, he heard or thought he did - an echoing thump. A double pumping sound, as if twin hearts were beating.

A flash of heat came from overhead. Switching back from infra-red to visible spectrum, Arun saw that the ceiling was glowing with a diffuse blue-tinged light, and that the curtain was drawing back to reveal a... creature of some sort. But if this were a living thing, its evolutionary route was not one that had led to limbs, spine, torso, and head.

The thing was a blob, colored an impenetrable blue-black, about eight feet tall and three wide. The blob was surrounded in a rough sphere of orange liquid that fizzed and bubbled. It looked as if the orange liquid kept its shape through surface tension alone, because it wasn't inside a container. At the top of the central blob - what Arun thought of as its head - tubes connected with the orange surround, pumping out ribbons of silver fluid. A similar setup at its 'feet' sucked darkened streamers back inside its central core.

"Thank you," said the blob through Arun's helmet. At least, Arun a.s.sumed it was the blob that was speaking, but there was no sign of a translation box, no mouth parts, and no nodes registering on his suit comms.

Conversations were so much easier when you stuck to sound waves through air.

"Why am I here?" Arun asked.

"I - we - wish to see inside you."

"What? Dissection? Isn't that a bit old school?"

"It is not your body that interests us."

"You're going to read my mind?"

"We read your destiny."