Indigo Squad (20 page)

“What weapons?”

Arun brought out a memory of the suit AI driven insane by one touch from Indiya. Battlesuits were super-hardened against cyber-attack. If she could do that to a suit, what could she do to the unarmored person underneath?

“Best I don’t reveal,” was all he would say.

“Then these rats shame me,” said Springer.

Arun glanced across in surprise. Her eyes glowed, beams of dazzling violet. Her knuckles were white and she looked as tense as a missile locked in and ready to launch. He’d been so wrapped in his anger, he hadn’t thought about hers.

“Here we are, barely able to control ourselves and those kids out there could end their humiliation at any moment. Such discipline! No wonder they think we’re animals.”

“Turn it off, Heidi,” said Arun. “We’ve seen enough.”

The screen shut off. The room was lonelier now. Darker.

Springer took Arun’s hand in hers and squeezed hard.

“You poor boy,” she said, squeezing his hand in her vise-like grip. “I have it so much easier than you.”

“How come?”

“I already know you get through this. I’ve foreseen it.”

“And you? You make it too?”

Springer didn’t answer.

——

The route to the starboard access hatch was an uneventful walk through a resentful silence. None of the rats would allow Arun to catch their eye – he couldn’t blame them. When he tried to plant a comforting hand on Indiya’s shoulder, she shrugged him off.

It’s ironic, he thought to himself. These rat-freaks are in love with sitting down and discussing their problems, and now they aren’t talking enough. If they had a destination or a plan, they weren’t willing to share either. Not yet.

Arun left them to their resentment.

It was only when they reached an airlock set into the starboard hull that the plan became clearer. Fant and Finfth brought them a pair of Marine-sized pressure suits that they’d hidden behind an oxygen tank. Loobie stayed outside, acting as lookout.

Unlike battlesuits with all the catheters, tubes and other bodily connections, pressure suits were designed for a wearer to put them on and get a good seal within seconds.

“Hide in compartment B02-09-A04,” said Indiya.

“Starboard nacelle,” added Fant.

“B02-09-A04. Aye,” confirmed Springer in a voice that gave Arun hope that she knew where the hell that was.

She put her helmet on, so she
must
know. He had no idea. He mentally went to ask Barney for a schematic of the ship… but, of course, Barney was missing.

Arun was about to put his own helmet on when he felt a small hand grip his shoulder…

——

Loobie accompanied her mind-link message with an image of four fat and squealing pigs waddling down the corridor, evil flashing from their demonic red eyes.

Indiya cut the link and set up a new one with Fant.

Arun had his helmet in his hands, about to lift it over his head. Once sealed inside, Indiya wouldn’t be able to talk with him, maybe never again. And the rescue had left too much unsaid.

Fant was on his way out to join Loobie but hesitated long enough to glare at Indiya.

Indiya reminded him.

He flashed her a look of betrayal before joining Loobie on decoy duty.

“Problem?” asked McEwan.

Problem?
Problem
? Where should she start? The latest humiliation at the hands of the Marines who were swaggering at will around her ship as if they owned it. Or Phaedra Tremayne? Freeing McEwan and replacing him with a victim of resuscitation hadn’t happened on a whim. Nor did their plans for keeping him alive afterward. It had taken a great deal of planning, and whenever she had rehearsed the rescue in her head the principal actors were herself and McEwan. Tremayne should be safely frozen with the rest of Indigo Squad, waiting to be rescued with the rest of them when Indiya had finished her adventure with Arun.

She glanced at the Marine girl, who was opening the airlock. Tremayne’s body had more curves and dips than Indiya could dream of, but the Marine was curved like an external fuel tank: hard and functional. Even Tremayne’s skin was covered in scar tissue from plasma burns. What the hell did Arun see in the half-broken skangat?

“Thank you,” said McEwan. “I never thanked you and I should have. Doubly so for bringing me Springer.”

An icy spear of jealousy stabbed at Indiya’s guts, twisting evilly. How could she be so jealous of a one-legged fuel tank that she couldn’t speak?

But she couldn’t allow Arun to go without telling him how she felt. She used his body to pull herself up so their lips were level, and then kissed.

His lips were still cracked and cold after his freezing. Maybe that was why he hesitated before kissing her back.

She closed her eyes and abandoned herself to the soft crushing of his lips against hers. He was delicate – her gentle giant – and yet she also felt his raw power. She spread her arms as far as they would go around his powerful torso and hugged him, the sense of barely controlled power oozing from his presence made her skin tingle.

She broke away and sighed.

“Come back for me, Arun.”

He nodded, once again a soulless military machine. Then he sealed his helmet over his head, cutting her away from him.

She watched him follow Tremayne into the airlock, wondering how the coming days would play out. If he evaded detection, Arun would be cooped up with a woman he loved at some level. Indiya knew Marines rutted like animals, given half the chance, assuming that this behavior had been bred into these soldiers whose average waking life expectancy after shipping out of their depot planets was probably measured in scant days.

But Indiya had something that Tremayne didn’t.

Still spinning through Arun’s bloodstream was the hormonal cocktail she’d placed in him all those weeks ago in the shooting range. She’d summoned the hormonal state of her choice and locked it in his mind to be forever associated with her, a high tech love potion.

Would it be enough?

After the thousands of hours he’d spent in hard vacuum, Arun wasn’t expecting what awaited him on the void side of the airlock after leaving Indiya.

Terror!

His guts knotted and re-knotted ever tighter, squeezing his breath into short, panting bursts.

He was falling off the edge of the world!

He’d grabbed at the first handhold he could find and held on. But his hands were gripping so tightly they had gone numb. His eyes were squeezed shut.

He was afraid to open them. What if he’d drifted away, beyond all hope of rescue? Doomed to relentless asphyxiation in the deep void.

Springer grabbed his shoulders and crab-walked around his torso until she was hanging underneath, her legs wrapped around his hips. She brought her helmet to kiss against his so she could talk using the vibration of her helmet against him, a way of talking that couldn’t be overheard.

“Let me guess,” she said, her voice sounded far away. Distant and pissed. “No suit propulsion. No suit AI. No map. No weapon. No tether. Limited air and no backup. If you lose your grip you’re dead. You can be just two meters away from the ship but you might just as well be two light years distant because without a suit motor there’s no way back.”

“Shut up. You’re making it worse.”

“No, you shut your dumb mouth until you learn to load it with something worthwhile. I haven’t finished yet, mister. No loyalty. No respect.”

What did she mean,
no loyalty
? Arun’s terror started shifting toward anger.

Springer was relentless. “Del-Marie. Madge, Zug, Sergeant Gupta. Our Indigo Squad comrades are on ice, waiting to be tortured, interrogated, and then murdered. They’re relying on you. I can’t do this alone, Arun. If you lose your nerve now, you condemn all of us to death.”

Arun’s breath stretched from gasps to groans, but he had nothing to say. How could he? Everything his buddy was saying was true.

Then Springer twisted the knife. “What would Hortez say if he could see you now?”

Hortez! Arun’s terror completed slewing around, transforming to anger directed at himself.

Arun’s friend had been kicked out of the Marines due to a mistake Arun had made. Hortez had chosen to sacrifice himself so that Arun could send a message of hope to Detroit’s human Aux slaves.

Arun peered through a tiny gap in his eyelids to see Springer’s violet eyes boring into him across the bulge of her helmet. Her voice had been flinty contempt, but her eyes spoke only of concern.

“Hortez would say he’d died for nothing,” said Arun.

Springer nodded inside her helmet. “Come on then, Cadet Prong. Grab my ankle. You’ll be fine.”

——

To Arun’s eternal surprise, Springer was right. At first, he grabbed her only ankle and flew behind her like an unresponsive tail.

Which meant he’d transformed Springer into a space mermaid. The thought was so ludicrous that it chipped away at his funk.

Before long, his fear of falling off the hull, caved in to the concern that Springer’s grip was having to support their combined momentum. He let go and scurried from handhold to handhold across the hull, soon letting the thrill of the escape melt away his fear. It was like the rock climbing they’d all had to do as cadets. The hull was littered with pipes, tethering rings, storage boxes, and mounting ports. Every so often, you looked ahead to select the next few handholds and pushed yourself along.

The journey was exhilarating until he remembered that without a map he didn’t know where he was going.

“We’re headed for the starboard nacelle,” he said. “I remember that bit. But where exactly?”

With a jolt, he realized he didn’t have comms either.

Out in the void he normally felt superhuman because… well, that’s what he was. Inside his armor, he was a human-machine cyborg with the acceleration of a missile and a suit AI to control his maneuvers and every function of the battlesuit, an AI that had always been with him. The relationship with Barney had been so intimate, Arun couldn’t tell when he spoke commands, thought them, or Barney anticipated them. Barney knew what Arun wanted and always delivered.

He’d just have to get along without Barney for now.

Arun pushed ahead and tapped Springer on the shoulder. When she looked his way, he pointed to a gun turret that was a little way to port.

Springer answered with a thumbs up.

Soon they were sheltering in the lea of the turret, helmets kissing.

“You know where we’re going, Springer?”

“More or less.”

Arun checked the display built into the wrist of his pressure suit. “I’ve three hours of air left.”

“I’ve four. Plenty.”

“I assume when we reach our destination, we go back inside for more air.”

“I’m not so sure. Your girlfriend planned all this and planned it well. There will be something waiting for us at compartment B02-09-A04.”

“She’s not my girlfriend.”

“Really? Does she know that?”

Arun let it go. “It’s not a nice thought,” he said with a grimace, “but if you know where we’re headed, you should tell me now, in case…”

“In case I lose my grip and drift off into space. Welcome back, yourself, Arun. That’s a good point.”

“Deck B02 is on the starboard nacelle,” said Arun. “Third deck to aft. I got that much. Where’s Frame 09?”

“That places it slightly to port of the centerline running through the nacelle.”

“Okay. What’s the ‘A’ in ‘A04’?”

“The number says where it is in terms of a line running from the dorsal hull down to the ventral hull. ‘A’ means it’s outside of the ventral hull.”

“Outside? Perhaps they’ve left air for us there.”

Springer punched him playfully. “See? It’s not too hard. I’d already figured that.” She frowned. “There is one thing I do
not
understand. The bottom-most compartment on the ship is A02. Even if we had a map, it wouldn’t show our destination because A04 doesn’t officially exist.”

“A secret hiding place.” Krimkrak had been right to tell him to seek allies amongst the ship’s crew. He was impressed.

So was Springer. Her face brightened, regaining the carefree look he’d seen so rarely since the injury that had taken her leg and burned her skin. “You see? I told you your girlfriend would take care of everything. She’s probably put a shower in there and a welcome barrel of beer. Bet you even the sheets are warm. Now quit stalling, Marine. Let’s go. Last one there washes the dishes.”

——

It turned out that compartment B02-09-A04 didn’t stretch to hot water and a private galley. It was pitch black inside, which made them jump out of their skins in surprise when they realized they weren’t alone in there.

“Mister McEwan. I was expecting you,” said a tiny voice in Arun’s helmet speaker. Arun hadn’t even realized he had a receiver. “They should have warned me you would be bringing a guest.”

The speaker revealed himself by turning a flashlight onto his face. It was a miniature robot with its own thrust pack, pincer claws for hands, and huge backlit eyes.

“Hello, my name is Darius.”

It looked like a child’s toy. Sounded like one too. An annoyingly cute one, about the size of Arun’s clenched fist.

Turned out that Darius was an AI project, a test rig created by
Master Furnace
, in other words, the tech-rat who was best friends with the ship’s security AI, and was in love with Indiya even more than himself.

Over the next few days, Darius introduced his cruder toy AI cousins who crawled or flew in to pass messages, bring food and remove body and heat waste.

The compartment was largely filled by a single-person survival bubble equipped with an airlock, heat and light, and even a crude zero-g latrine.

As a single-person emergency survival pod, it was a no-frills but workable. With Springer there too, the bubble was hideously cramped, even when they’d managed to wriggle out of their pressure suits and leave them in the airlock.

To begin with, Arun had assumed the cocktail of physical closeness, time on their hands, and shared danger, would lead to luxuriantly unhurried days of lovemaking.