Indigo Squad (7 page)

“Uncle, I’m not a child. We both know they’ve been doped.”

Purify’s expression hardened. Mamma used to talk with pride that her older brother had been the first human on the ship promoted to officer rank. Her uncle hadn’t achieved that by being nice.

“Explain,” he ordered.

Indiya wanted to, but should she? She wasn’t only talking to her indulgent uncle now, but the deputy commander of the cryo teams. Too late. She’d already incriminated herself.

“The Marines were given mind-altering drugs while in cryo,” she said. “I think they still are, even after thawing.”

“Who told you they were drugged?”

“No one. I saw it in the cryo diagnostics.”

“They were not drugged.” Uncle Puri articulated every word with exaggerated precision. “They were given growth factors.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You know perfectly well that these Marines are a work in progress.
Homo sapiens mutans
, remember? These militarized humans are ever
changing
. Each cargo has slightly different needs. Perhaps this batch is reacting unfortunately to their growth drugs. It needs tweaking but that is something for the Marines to work out for themselves. Do you see?”

“Yes, Uncle.”

His face softened and the ship’s officer became her uncle once again. “Nothing to worry about, my dear. Nothing to get involved with.”

“I understand.” But heat came to her cheeks.

Uncle Puri took her hands in his. “You are a hopeless liar, Indiya. I know that grieved your mother terribly. Not that she lied herself. She always told the truth no matter how ugly. Or unwelcome.” He sighed. “I miss her so.”

“Wait there, Uncle.” Indiya went to her kit cabinet and brought out a thumb-sized device.

“I’m an idiot,” she said with venom. “Stupid. Moron. Imbecile.”

Puri interrupted her self-directed abuse. “What does that do?”

“Shields us from security snoopers.”

“Really? Does it work?”

“I don’t know. Furn made it for me. I’ve never dared to use it, though.”

“If Spacer Furnace-Shield fashioned this device, I propose we assume it works. Tell me candidly of your suspicions.”

“The Marines are extremely suggestive, sir. They are overly aggressive and their critical faculties have been suppressed. As you said, only the battalion we carry as cargo has been brainwashed. The Marines in our ship’s detachment are as normal. A few in Charlie Company seem less affected but only one completely so.”

“Your young man, Arun.”

“Yes. And I’m not the only one to notice. Even when in cryo, someone was checking on his pod remotely all the time. I tried finding out who, but whoever they are had security locks so privileged that even Furn daren’t try to break them.”

“Say no more of this to anyone, Indiya. I mean it. Swear it on your mother’s name.”

“I swear. I won’t tell a soul.”

He nodded. His eyes looked younger, though focused far away. Planning. Plotting. “I shall make discrete inquiries. Leave it with me.”

Indiya flung her arms around Uncle Puri and crushed his old bones to her.

He’d lifted such a weight from her shoulders. Everything would turn out all right now.

In zero-g, the ACT-2 battlesuit – mainstay of the 412th Tactical Marine Regiment – could accelerate fast enough to crush even the enhanced physiology of the human Marine inside. Many of the human suit techs speculated that the propulsion system – which they maintained, but none would ever dare to admit they understood – was the same as that used in ship-to-ship missiles.

True or not, an armored Marine flying at speed in zero-g was a lethal kinetic missile from the perspective of anyone getting in their way.

To enable fast deployment of Marines, and crewmembers equipped with thruster packs, wide
deployment tubes
were cut through
Beowulf’
s decks and frame bulkheads: three running fore to aft, and two from beam to beam. Without intervening hatches to bar their way, Marines could fly through these highways at high velocity to within a short distance of wherever they needed to be.

When general quarters were sounded, any crew walking in the deployment tubes would scramble out the side hatches and dash to their stations through the ladders and smaller pressurized compartments that comprised the bulk of the ship’s interior.

On their way back from witnessing Arun’s punishment parade on Deck 14, Charlie Company was traveling up Deployment Tube Beta the slow way, marching in single file along the green walkway set into the wall. They looked like ants following a pheromone trail.

To the occasional passing crewmember traveling along the yellow or red tracks – set at 120 degrees to the green walkway – one of those ants was swaying so much that it must have seemed drunk.

The tottering Marine was Arun, and he had more concerns on his mind to worry about looking an idiot in front of the ship-rats. The burning pain in his shoulders was excruciating, but that was only a stark backdrop to the certainty he’d been poisoned.

Without his shoulder yoke pressing down on his shoulders – he’d abandoned the yoke in the parade deck and had refused Springer’s offer of hers – every time he unstuck his boot from the charged walkway, his momentum threatened to pull him off the tube’s wall. More than once, Umarov, who was marching behind Arun, had to reach up and grab Arun’s feet before he floated away.

Every step was an effort of concentration. The dashed green line that ran either side of the charged area of walkway seemed to start moving, first forward them backward. Arun shut his eyes. When he opened them, the line still appeared to move. His sense of balance pitched forward and he flung out his arms because he was falling. There was no gravity. He knew his body was lying, but the lurching in his stomach screamed that he was falling… falling…

“What’s up with him?” said someone in the far distance. “Blood loss?”

“No. He hasn’t lost enough blood. Doesn’t make sense.”

Arun discovered he was curled into a fetal ball, his feet on the walkway. He uncurled a little and looked up into Springer and Umarov’s concerned faces.

“What do we do?” asked Springer.

“How should I know?”

Springer leaned in closer. “What is it Arun? What have they done to you?”

Poison
. The word echoed in Arun’s mind, but he’d lost the ability to bring it to his lips.

The concerned expression froze on Springer’s face.

Arun frowned. Then his stomach lurched again with a sudden sense of descending, down… down into an endless abyss. Everyone around him was frozen in place and yet he was falling… falling through a void now because the rest of the universe had vanished. The only truth of this nothingness was the searing pain in his shoulders. That felt real. He clung desperately to the pain, becoming one with it. If the pain left him all that would remain was oblivion.

Even the pain began to recede, fading into a dull ache.

No! I can’t die yet!

Arun sank down through his diminishing pain and dropped into… into himself.

The universe was a distant memory. Only his pain was real. With the utter absence of anything else in this void, the pain rose to agonizing levels, spreading to fill his reality.

Panic spiked in his gut.

So, he could still feel fear… that was something, at least.

Arun blinked.

Once again he could see the physical universe. He cast his gaze over a statue of Springer looking down at him confused. The confusion in Umarov’s furrowed brow was unchanging, as was the march of his Indigo Squad comrades back to Deck 4, caught in a moment of permanent awkwardness. The pain was manageable once more.

Arun’s body was as frozen as his comrades’. Which made no sense. If he couldn’t move, how could he shift his viewpoint? Was the entire universe solidified, leaving his eyes as the only moving part?

He felt something build in him, his brain heating.

Then a blinding white light exploded inside his mind, whiting out the deployment tube and everyone inside it.

“At ease, McEwan.”

“What?” He looked around but couldn’t see a source for the human voice.

“I am a simple AI, not Ensign Krimkrak. Nonetheless I represent his authority and therefore you are to afford me the same respect as if the ensign were physically present.”

A convincing image of Ensign Krimkrak eased into existence.

Arun gave a sharp salute. “What is this, sir? Where am I?”

“Silence! You would not speak to an officer unless spoken to.”

Arun shut up.

“Better. Listen carefully, Marine, because your body’s anti-toxin defenses will soon drive me from your bloodstream. What am I? A self-assembling wetware AI passed by the ensign into your bloodstream when he cut your shoulders. Why? We have to assume disloyal factions are monitoring communications at all times. You are experiencing a buffered conference at a virtual time rate sped to appear a thousand times normal. The outside universe hasn’t really slowed to a thousandth of its normal rate, but it will save us a lot of trouble if you assumed it had.”

The image of Krimkrak fizzed with static for a moment, long enough for Arun to notice that the AI had spoken with Arun’s own voice. Oh, well. One more slug of impossibility didn’t make much difference.

“McEwan, the ensign expects he isn’t your favorite officer right now, but assures you that you and he are fighting on the same side.”

“Sir, which side is that?”

Virtual Krimkrak looked peeved at the interruption before nodding – which was strange because that was a specifically human gesture.

“That is an important question. I am on the side of Colonel Little Scar, and Sergeants Bryant and Gupta. Of your ally amongst the insectoids of the moon Antilles, whom you call Pedro. Do you accept our shared allegiance?”

Arun imagined shrugging. “I don’t recognize we have a side, a team with an agenda, but I do recognize those individuals as having tried to keep me alive. I guess if you knew who they were and you were hostile to me, I would already be lost.”

“That is a logical position. You should trust me because the alternative is to assume that you are already doomed.”

“Agreed.”

“You must work with the ensign to defeat mutiny on
Beowulf
. On
Bonaventure
, Lieutenant Balor and Ensign Geror were murdered by human Marines acting on orders from traitors. We must assume that Captain Mhabali is the leader or at least prominent in the rebel group.”

The odds seemed insurmountable. Captain Mhabali commanded Charlie Company. With the rest of the battalion in cryo, that made him the most senior active Marine on the ship.

Did it even stop there? “Do you think there are rebels amongst the ship-rats too?” Arun asked.

“Do not interrupt.”

“Or what?”

“Do not question your superiors.”

“Superior? No, you go vulley yourself. You’re a wetware construct here to communicate. The most efficient communication is two-way, so frakk your stupid sense of superiority and answer my damned questions.”

The virtual officer hesitated, but only for a moment. “Very well,” it agreed, “I believe members of the crew are involved too.”

Krimkrak vanished.

“Come back. Tell me what I need to do.”

“Can’t you see me?”

“No,” screamed Arun.

“Shit.”

That shut Arun up. He’d never heard an officer swear before. Theoretically, they didn’t even permit bad language to corrupt the mouths of their Marines, although there they realized they were messing with the laws of nature.

“Having killed the other ‘C’ Company officers,” said the wetware construct, “I expect the rebels’ next step will be to remove opposition from the Navy officers and then murder me.”

“What must I do?”

“Act swiftly. You must take risks. Sergeant Gupta was a good ally but he is unreliable now. The ship’s cryogenics teams are still feeding the drugs to the sleeping Marines. The must know they are doing this. Try from your end to uncover who’s doing the drugging and why. Look for the unusual that your comrades cannot see. Distrust your fellow Marines; they have been compromised. Make allies instead with the human ship crew. Don’t move until we have evidence so that we know whom to go to and evidence so that we can prove what is happening. At most, we w – ggg– ddd”

“What? You’re breaking up. I can’t hear you, AI.”

Arun heard only static and then silence.

He looked around at the featureless white of the conference world. What was he supposed to do now?

“…we will get one chance to do this right.” The words swirled around Arun’s head, the illusion of someone speaking to him had died. “Here’s how to contact me…”

Arun felt a spike rammed through his mind. The knowledge of how to contact Ensign Krimkrak had been driven into him. When the officer had cut Arun’s shoulders, he’d left more than the wetware construct. A tiny communication device was embedded into the flesh of his shoulder. Arun would have to dig it out before the wound healed over it, but it promised stealthy comms that couldn’t be intercepted.

He blinked… and was back in reality, crouched on the green walkway of the deployment tube, looking at the scores of Marines backed up behind because they couldn’t figure out how to progress around this obstacle of a fallen Marine.

Arun picked himself up and set off after the rest of Charlie Company. Those in front of him had pushed on over a hundred meters up the tube, oblivious to the disturbance behind.

Find allies amongst the crew
. Those were his orders, and he knew just where to start: that pretty ship girl with the acid tongue and purple hair. He needed to find her and quickly.

She was Indigo Squad’s only hope.

Indiya activated the recorded feeds taken from
Beowulf’s
external sensors, and tried to relax her mind into the state of loose alertness where it would be ready for anything. What she was looking for, she didn’t know. That was the problem: there were far too many strange goings on for comfort and she had only two threads to pick at. One was that Marine, Arun McEwan, and the other was
Bonaventure’
s destruction.