Human Legion: Marine Cadet Part 44

Why was no one giving orders? This wasn't a waiting game. It was a race to save his home from obliteration.

"Contact, 90 hostiles," he heard over LBNet.

Confirmation soon came from LBNet. Out on the moon's surface, the rebels had retaken their trenches and were shooting through the breach and into the bridgehead.

The cadets were pinned down and outnumbered. Surely they had to take the fight to the enemy without delay. And who was nearest to the enemy?

Arun was.

Cold fear struck through Arun's heart. He wanted his combat meds.

Brandt's voice entered Arun's helmet. "Gold Squad will defend the bridgehead. Blue will push through the enemy in the corridor. Blue Delta Section. You're point."

Arun took a deep breath. The moment he reached the turn in the corridor a dozen rifles would fire at him.

"Blue-5, advance along the ceiling," ordered Madge. "Take the corner. Blue-6, give pulse laser covering fire. Aim low. Ready on my mark."

Arun wanted to say something - anything - to Springer. But everything he could think of sounded demoralizing. So he kept his mouth shut and tensed his legs in readiness.

"Wait!" Madge ordered.

Arun didn't understand until he glanced at his tac-display. The Hardits were advancing.

"Fire on my command!"

The last Hardit attack had been hesitant. This time the Hardits came at the cadets in a rush.

Three of them had come round the corner. Five of them. Seven. And they weren't carrying rifles. They had SA-71 carbines. Oh, frakk!

The leading rank of rebels launched grenades.

"Fire!"

As he pressed the trigger to release the laser bolt, the enemy grenades exploded, filling the corridor incredibly quickly with thick smoke. Had the laser shots got off in time before the smoke grenades scattered them to harmlessness?

All he knew was that he couldn't see the end of his barrel but Barney insisted the Hardits were still coming.

Switching to shardshot, he raked the corridor. He extended his a.s.sault teeth too.

The Hardits were firing back. Fragments of the scrubber unit he was sheltering behind flew past his face. He felt a kick in his left chest, just below the collar bone.

Then the firing stopped, all sides unwilling to fire into the fog, fearful of hitting their own side.

Barney used the brief respite to inform Arun that he had been shot. That kick he'd felt was a kinetic dart pa.s.sing through Arun's body. Barney insisted he'd fixed the suit breach and anesthetized the wound. Nothing to worry about.

Good enough, though Arun. Out of the choking mist a looming blur rapidly solidified into a Hardit rebel, carbine at the ready.

He - or she - might be better armed than the first line of Hardit defense, but not better trained. The rebel scanned ahead for targets but wasn't looking up at the ceiling.

Arun spun his a.s.sault teeth and thrust down in to the rebel's shoulder. Let's see how you like that!

The needle-like teeth sank in through the vacsuit embedding into the soft tissue beyond. Then Arun set the teeth spinning at 1000 rpm, ripping a jagged hole through the suit that released a geyser of pulpy, red spray.

Before the dying Hardit had finished slumping to the floor, another attacker pus.h.i.+ng forward through the mist stumbled over its comrade. Arun jabbed at it with his a.s.sault teeth, but the rebel tripped before he could connect, falling headlong. The unexpected motion confused Arun. He missed. More rebels were pa.s.sing beneath all the time.

The atmosphere scrubbers must be pretty powerful because the smoke was starting to clear.

When they did, they would reveal Arun to be alone in a sea of rebels.

He glanced behind him, convinced he was about to be stabbed in the back.

With a last blind jab from his carbine, he snapped his attention back to his front. No one there either, just the thinning smoke.

Stay still and die. That what the Corps had taught him.

So he moved. Forward.

The closer he got to the end of the corridor, the thinner the smoke got. LBNet was still unavailable. He should probably try WBNet but he'd been ordered not to.

He could see a heap of Hardit dead below him. Around the turn in the corridor, Barney estimated a half dozen rebels - the enemy's final attack wave.

Was he really going to take them on alone?

Arun paused, then dropped down to the floor to plug in an ammo bulb from one of the fallen Hardits. If he going to die doing something stupid, he wasn't going to do so firing pellets of chewed up ore tailings.

"You are another hero, yes?" said a scratchy voice.

Arun looked up to see a cadet on the ceiling: the replacement, Umarov. "More like another idiot, Carabinier. Yes."

"Good lad."

Hearing another human voice was all he needed to restore his morale, despite the enemy waiting around the corner. And the army behind them.

Umarov s.h.i.+fted around so he was standing on the right hand wall of the corridor. "Stand on the wall opposite me," he ordered.

While Arun moved to comply, Umarov dropped his carbine and drew a combat blade in each hand. They were like nothing he'd never seen: crescent moons attached to either end of a hand grip, the blades glistening with drips of what looked like fluorescent puss.

"Let's see what they make of old-fas.h.i.+oned poisoned carbon. Suppress them until I engage. Go!"

This was it.

Arun ran along the corridor wall, to meet his fate. At the last moment, he told Barney to select rocket rounds. He hadn't many, but they would make more of a show for the untrained rebels.

Then he was rounding the corridor and firing. His finger didn't release from the trigger until the rocket rounds were spent and he was firing kinetic darts so fast that his recoil limiter tripped out.

And still he was running at the Hardits.

Umarov was on them now, limbs extended in a whirlwind dance of cuts and kicks. Killing elegance.

Umarov had their full attention now, which meant somehow Arun had survived against all odds.

He extended his a.s.sault teeth to join Umarov in the melee.

But the Hardits seemed to be getting farther away, not closer.

And gravity felt as if it were strengthening.

His legs were weakening.

What's happening Barney?

His suit AI brought up a damage summary. He'd been shot five times. Barney had sealed his suit. Fixing the holes in Arun's body was another matter entirely.

But what about the Night Hummer prophecy? I thought the future needed me?

He clung to that protest as everything slowed.

And went black.

* Chapter 59 *

A bell rang for Arun, beckoning him to his place in the afterlife.

He hadn't expected this.

To be dead: yes. But afterlife? He'd a.s.sumed that was Jotun propaganda.

"Yes, that's it. Welcome back."

The voice came through his helmet speaker. It didn't have the gravitas of a supernatural being. It sounded familiar He opened his eyes onto the medic tapping Arun's helmet with her gauntlet. It was Puja, or Lance Corporal Puja Narciso as she'd become. She was command section's medic.

He'd had a thing for her in novice school. She'd felt the same way too. Briefly.

She smiled. "I've still got it, ain't I, Arun?"

"I guess so, l... lance-"

"No!" She put a finger to his lips, or as close as his helmet would allow. "Don't 'lance' me. Not yet. You shut up and rest for a minute."

"Am I dying?" Arun croaked. He couldn't feel pain. But his body felt as if all its life-force had leeched away, leaving nothing more than dust held together by a memory of once-strong flesh and bone.

Puja paused, working out her story. She sighed. "You've taken multiple hits. A lot of trauma and blood loss. But I've patched you up and given you a transfusion. Bottom line: Stay in bed. Light duties for minimum three weeks. I'll check up on you in the morning."

"Seriously?"

"Of course not, you donker. We're heavily outnumbered and most of us are already dead. You're good to carry a carbine and that's all you need to know right now. Corporal Majanita can fill you in on the rest in a minute. Just as well you aren't human."

"What do you mean, I'm not human?"

"Well, have you ever studied a pre-Contact medical textbook?"

"No, of course not."

Puja grinned, making her visor transparent so Arun could see. "Good. Don't bother, 'cos you'd be wasting your time. Whatever the h.e.l.l we are, we aren't h.o.m.o sapiens, that's for sure. You'd be dead if you were."

Puja's grin, flas.h.i.+ng that cute gap between her incisors. Yes, he remembered her smile.

"McEwan?"

He tried to work out where he was but he couldn't see properly. Hey, did someone say most of them were dead?

"Frakk! Spoke too soon."

He didn't want to think of dead friends.

"Arun. Come back to me, Arun!" begged a memory of a girl who'd for an intense few weeks had meant the universe to him. Puja had been his first kiss. It seemed a lifetime ago. He closed his eyes and dreamed memories of better days, of a teenage girl back in the days when she wore too-tight fatigues, not a poly-ceramalloy battlesuit.

* Chapter 60 *

"You're alive then."

Arun opened his eyes. He was in a room he didn't recognize, his back propped up against something. A lot of people were rus.h.i.+ng around. People in battlesuits. And they were glowing vision-enhancement blue because there was very little light. One battlesuit was standing over him. Inside was a woman.

"Puja?"

"Dream time's over, lover boy. I'm not Lance Corporal Narciso." She studied him for a moment. "Do you recognize me?"

The woman made her visor go clear. He squinted at her face. It seemed familiar. "Corporal... You're Corporal Majanita."

"d.a.m.n right I am."

"You don't want me."