Indigo Squad (16 page)

He’d tethered his lies to a truth – there really were genuine occasions where you saluted a lowly Marine because that lowly individual represented the authority of an officer.

Corporal Hecht frowned.

Wicked glee seized Arun. If an officer ever found out – and they probably would eventually – Arun was dead meat. He might as well enjoy this brief time in charge.

He faced off against the corporal. “You got a problem, Hecht?”

“No, sir.”

“Good. Corporal Hecht. Corporal Majanita. You are to take your sections and provide a guard detail for Captain Flayer outside her cabin. This is a genuine threat to the captain’s safety. Look sharp, Marines, and get there in double quick time.”

The two sections separated under their corporals and moved away.

Arun followed. “Faster,” he barked “Run!”

A grin spread over Arun’s face. He could get used to this.

——

“What do you mean, you’re taking over?”

“Relieved, Corporal Kalis. The word is
relieved
.
We
are relieving
you
.”

Kalis unsealed and lifted his helmet visor to scratch at his head. “But…” His voice tailed off, but he rallied his thoughts and tried again. “Sergeant McEwan told me to take my section and–”

“Yes, but that was before, when the sergeant thought one section would be enough. Now, he needs a larger guard detail. As you can see, I’ve brought two sections.”

“Yes, but–”

“You have one section. You can’t fulfill your duty with only one, and so: You. Are. Relieved.”

“I don’t know, Arun.”

“How dare you? I bear the authority of an officer. You will address me as if talking to a Jotun directly. To do otherwise dishonors the officer.” Arun leaned in close. “Are you deliberately being insubordinate, Kalis?”

“No, sir.”

“Shut up! Did I give you permission to speak?”

Kalis didn’t know how to respond to that. His bewildered face was pitiful to see.

“Why is your section still here, Kalis?”

“Sorry, sir.” Kalis selected a local command channel. “Alpha Section, we are relieved.”

Arun didn’t breathe until he saw Kalis’s section march away. That was the second time he’d tried that trick. He reckoned he’d pushed his luck as far as it would go.

Barney chimed in Arun’s mind, alerting him that Springer had set up a private channel.

“What’s happening?” she asked. “Umarov and I… we’re confused.”

“Don’t worry,” Arun replied. “All you have to do is make sure that Madge and Hecht stay here with their sections, and don’t let anyone else guard the captain. Keep the captain safe. That’s all you need to know.”

“Don’t shut me out, Arun.”

He clasped her shoulder. Through her armor she wouldn’t feel much, but he hoped she understood the comforting gesture. “Trust me, Phaedra.”

“I can break the door down. Would you prefer that?”

The Marine thumped on the door with his powered gauntlets. Each hammer pound pulsed through the Freak Lab and brought out a gasp from Indiya. Before the Marine had arrived demanding entry, the lab where ‘B’ Crew’s freaks were sheltering had been a place of refuge while Arun tried to win support from his brother.

Now the bulkheads seemed to be closing in. Her safe place had become a trap.

“Has anyone got a weapon?” asked Fant, resolve written in his clenched fists and squared shoulders. It would take more than Fant’s fists to hold back an armored Marine.

“I might have,” offered Indiya tentatively. Her secret weapon had crashed the suit AI of the reserve captain’s guard, but her supply was depleted.

After an exchange of suspicious glances between the specials, Furn answered: “I think all of us have something up our wrists.”

“But unproven,” added Loobie.

Finfth’s brow was creased in thought, but he said nothing.

“I have a weapon,” called the Marine from outside in the passageway. “Would that help? You do realize I can hear every word?”

“Go away!” shouted Fant.

“No problem. Let me in first, though. I need to tell you something.”

“Do you think he can break down the door?” whispered Loobie.

“Of course I can,” the Marine answered. “I don’t want to, though. I could kill you too, but I don’t want to do that either.”

Indiya gasped with the sharp pain that suddenly stabbed at her mind. Loobie, Fant and Furn were all trying to mind-link with her simultaneously. “Stop it,” she hissed. “Are you trying to fry my brain?”

“Now why the frakk would I do that?” said the Marine. “A right bunch of dumb twonks you are, but I need you, and I’m nearly out of time. Open the frakking hatch. Last chance.”

“We’ll call security,” said Loobie.

“No you won’t. You would already have done so if you were going to. Anyway, I’m here to do a favor, not kill you.”

“I believe him,” said Finfth. “Let him in.”

The others all looked to Indiya. She gave a curt shake of her head.

The specials had assembled around a table bolted to the aft bulkhead, which was serving as a floor. Indiya rose from her chair and plodded along the charged area of the deck to stand facing the hatch.

“Now I know you’re lying. Why would you do me a favor? You don’t know me from Adam.”

“Who’s Adam? Anyway, I never said I was doing it for you. I’m doing it for a comrade. I want you to help him because I owe him my life.”

“Who’s your friend?”

“Friend? What friend?”

Indiya mind-linked to Finfth.

replied the empath.

“You said you were doing this for a friend,” said Indiya to the Marine on the other side of the hatch.

“Scuttlebutt says you augments are super-clever. Guess that’s another rumor that isn’t true.”

“So you’re doing this for someone you owe a debt to who isn’t your friend?”

“You got there in the end.”

“But why come to us?”

“Because he’s in danger, and you might be able to help him. I know I can’t.”

“Let him in,” said Finfth. “Please.”

Even before he’d finished speaking, Finfth stood and pushed off toward the hatch control panel.

With a sinking feeling in her gut, Indiya realized that Finfth had been edging his way closer to the hatch for a while now. She lunged at him.

Indiya won a loose hold around his waist, tightening her grip with every iota of strength. Loobie was closing in to join the fight. She only had to slow Finfth for a few seconds before Loobie arrived.

She looked and saw the empath’s face was as steely as a Marine’s. He pushed his arms down inside her grip and snapped her arms away, nearly wrenching them from their sockets. Before she could grab him again, he’d curled into a floating ball with his feet jammed up against her jaw. When he pushed out with his legs, she went tumbling backward, sending jagged shards of pain through her neck when her head bounced against the deck.

Conservation of momentum said Finfth should be shooting off in the opposite direction.

He didn’t. He’d kept station, easily dodging Loobie’s attack before jetting off to the hatch control panel. She knew he’d worked on secret propulsion projects for the reserve captain. He must have cooked up some kind of hidden propulsion system.

“I’m sorry,” he called to Indiya as the hatch motors hummed into action. “You know I adore you, but we need to win the coming fight.”

Indiya rubbed at her neck as she helplessly watched the armored Marine in his silver armor advance into the lab. He flew up, taking station above them with his back to the overhead. His SA-71 carbine covered each of them in turn before settling its aim on Indiya.

She readied the kill package she’d used on the reserve captain’s guard, though she knew it was helpless. Even if she had a full supply, she’d seen Arun with a carbine like that on the shooting range. She’d be ripped to shreds with railgun rounds before she could get close.

The specials waited for the Marine’s next move, but he was in no hurry.

When the hatch auto-shut, the motion jerked him out of his fugue and he finally spoke.

“Which one of you ship-rats is called Indiya?”

Turned out that the little purple-haired bint’s name was Indiya. Stok had overheard Arun saying the name in conversation with his prongbuddy, Springer. Arun had always been a big headed veck. Recently he’d been talking like an officer in front of his squadmates, as if mere Marines could be spoken to as if they were of no consequence.

Just like his brother, then.

Yeah, Arun McEwan was an arrogant veck, but he had saved Stok’s life when he’d stumbled into the backblast of that breaching charge. The sooner Stok paid off that debt, the quicker he could go back to despising the little skangat.

Putting the safety back on his carbine, Stok secured his weapon to his back and told his suit AI – who’d been nagging him endlessly to contact Indiya – to release the pressure seals at the base of his helmet.

“Here,” he said, flying down and offering his helm to the girl. “The helmet should keep things private. Watch and listen to the message I recorded.”

The girl pulled herself up and into his helmet, which was nearly wide enough to fit over her shoulders. She looked ridiculous with her little pixie legs dangling beneath, wiggling as she floated there in zero-g.

“Two days!” the purple rat screamed at him when she’d finished hearing his report on the meeting between Sergeant McEwan and the Navy officer. “Two days you took to bring me this!”

She was an angry thing all right. He laughed. If this little firebrand really was Arun’s vulley-dream, he would be getting a regular ear bashing. Served him right.

“What the fuck’s so funny, you boneheaded moron?”

Stok gritted his teeth. He didn’t have time for a fight, but this little scrap of a girl was spouting fighting talk. “Boneheads are Assault Marines,” he explained, trying to ease the tension, “not Tac-Marines like my unit. Boneheads have thick skulls because they’re specialized for assaulting planets from orbit. Gene-spliced with Neanderthals we reckon.”

Indiya ignored him and addressed the other rats. “This bonehead overheard Fraser McEwan, Arun’s brother. Fraser is… playing for the other side. He can’t track Arun through Heidi, but he’s found another way.”

“What can we do?” asked the boy who’d let Stok in.

“Warn Arun,” said another one.

“But it’s too late, he’ll be at Security HQ already,” said another girl. She was taller than the purple one. A bit of a looker for a rat too, especially when anger fired up her gray eyes with a touch of green. Good enough for Stok to stick around for another moment or two. Stok had followed Arun enough to know he was hanging out with these rats at every opportunity. Maybe there was something in McEwan’s attraction to these waifs?

Stok tried talking sense into the rats. “Arun used to be like you whining lot before his brother fixed him with this weird gifting thing. He was always talking about his feelings when he should have shut up and acted instead, like a proper Marine. I know you’re only rats, but you need to think more like a Marine.”

They all stared at him like he was mad, even the good-looking one.

Stok lost interest. He shrugged inside his suit. “Have it your way. My job’s done. Debt paid. I’ve got to get my ass back to my unit. The whole of Charlie Company is being put on alert and I can’t be seen talking to the crew.”

Stok was in a stirring hurry, but the look of jaw-dropping consternation on the ship-rats was so bizarre that it made him pause.

“What? What did I say?”

But the ship-rats were too stupid to speak and the pull of his orders too strong.

“Don’t know what McEwan sees in you,” grumbled Stok as he put his helmet back on. “And for your information, he’s not gone directly to Security HQ. I saw him on the way here. Looked like he was going back to our squad mess.”

“Can you warn him?” asked one of the boys. “On a secure Marine channel?”

Stok sniffed. These rats didn’t know squit. “Line of sight only, pal.” When the rats gave him that clueless look, he added: “There’s a ship-wide radio comms blackout, and the intra-ship comm system is out too. Don’t you rats know anything?”

Stok left them to it. By the time he’d put two decks between himself and the Freak Lab, the memory of the encounter had dissipated, leaving behind only a vague sense that a weighty obligation had lifted from his shoulders.

If Heidi ever spoke in words then Indiya was not privy to them. Heidi spoke to her in other ways.

Indiya ducked, hid, crawled, and flew through the ship, taking shortcuts to reach Arun before he gave them all away to his treacherous brother.

Via the access console viewscreens scattered throughout the ship, Heidi showed Arun’s current position and the route ahead of Indiya. If the way ahead was clear, Heidi bathed her display in soft green and yellow; spiky red warned of danger.

Whenever possible, Indiya used the polished silver bracelet Finfth had loaned her. It looked like a genuine adornment, albeit large and masculine, but was far more. She’d always known Finfth had a natural aptitude for engineering, and propulsion systems in particular. With only the faintest of power hums, this pheromone-controlled bracelet could zip her around the ship as quickly as a Marine in her battlesuit. Maybe Finfth had reverse-engineered a battlesuit’s propulsion system.

It seemed everyone dear to her had been keeping powerful secrets. The fact that they were now all revealing them gave her a feeling as if crawling social insects were marching around her insides. Where they were crawling she didn’t know, but the sense of approaching her inevitable fate clung to her like a dark cloud.

Indiya shook aside these unhelpful thoughts, certain that Arun and the Marines didn’t suffer from such worries. She had to get to Arun before he reached the Security HQ. Nothing else mattered.