Indigo Squad (2 page)

Themistocles
. She’s been in a fight.>

A chill crept up Indiya’s spine. No one had any idea the enemy were so close.

The Cat and the Wolf

Arun McEwan’s heart swelled with pride when he accessed the internal camera feeds, and saw himself lined up with the rest of Charlie Company in
Beowulf’s
dorsal hangar. The Marines twitched with eagerness to emerge and take the fight to the enemy.

Whoever the frakk they might be.
They were at war with the Muryani Accord, but the hostile didn’t display the power signature of a Muryani vessel.

It was fear, not pride, that made Arun so impatient to launch and get the boarding action over with. The prospect of facing hostile aliens in battle was exciting and nerve wracking, but what truly scared him was the possibility of revealing himself as different.

Fed a constant dose of combat drugs, even while in cryo sleep, all his other comrades were doped-out mental wrecks, left with as much initiative as the dumbest robot. Well, maybe not the slightly smaller armored figure to his left: Springer. Marine Phaedra Tremayne, known to Springer to anyone without a death wish, was his best friend and fire team buddy. The drugs had less effect on her, as with their comrade, Umarov, but they all acted as if they were as doped as the others. Hidden conspiracies swirled around Arun like a persistent stink. He’d hoped all that had gone away when he left Tranquility System on
Beowulf
, but here it was even worse and felt more urgent. Playing dumb now might just give Arun the edge he needed when the traitors made their move.

“Ready to launch on my mark,” ordered Staff Sergeant Bryant, on behalf of their silent alien officer, Captain Mhabali. Bryant had become an unexpected ally back on their depot planet of Tranquility, but now he too had succumbed to the drugs.

“Ten… nine… eight…”

From his camera feed, Arun watched the ACE-2 combat suits flick from field gray to matt black, shimmer and then disappear. Charlie Company had activated stealth mode.

“Seven… six…”

With the waiting over, Arun’s worries were draining away.

“Five… four…”

Arun McEwan had an advantage over everyone else in the company: his future had been foretold by the strange alien creatures known as Night Hummers. Unlike the others he had a destiny. The cause of human freedom would not let him die today.

“Three… two…”

Arun knew he would be coming back.

“One… go!”

Arun placed his life in the virtual hands of his battlesuit AI, Barney, who hurled him into space a split second after the hangar doors snapped open. The Marines emerged into a bloom of light across the electromagnetic spectrum as
Beowulf
simultaneously launched a barrage of kinetic torpedoes and blew smoke, both intended to cover the real attack, a close assault by the stealthed Marines.

The ‘smoke’, which consisted of sensor-reflective streamers, semi-intelligent decoy drones, and a dozen types of EMP flash-bombs, obscured
Beowulf
as the warship pivoted through 180 degrees and used her main engine to brake, applying enough power to keep out of effective firing range, but not so much that she fried Charlie Company in the quantum-effect cone extending hundreds of meters out of her zero-point engine.

Within minutes, Arun had left
Beowulf
far behind and drifted slightly to one side. The smoke had dissipated, and the kinetic torpedoes – which were on a parallel vector to the Marines – were dark in the visible spectrum, though still launch-hot in infra-red.

None of that mattered. What counted was whether the enemy warship had seen the Marines. That would determine whether most of them lived or died over the coming hours.

Beowulf’s
attack plan was simple. The enemy ship was 20,000 klicks ahead and Charlie Company was on an almost identical vector to the enemy ship, except the
Beowulf
had been moving slightly faster. That extra velocity was enough for the barrage of torpedoes to hit in about an hour, and the Marines to arrive, ready to board, about five minutes later.

Missiles and x-ray bombs from their sister ship,
Themistocles
, had crippled the enemy’s main propulsion in a brief firefight as she’d flashed past 26 days earlier. The hostile ship’s maneuvering thrusters could spin it in any direction and nudge to either side, but that made negligible difference to its velocity of nearly 15% lightspeed. Unless the enemy repaired his main engines, the target ship was essentially headed in a straight line that would not stop until the end of time.

Barney estimated they would reach long range for beam weapons in approximately ten minutes. Until then, Arun was alone with only the sound of his breathing, and the fears in his mind for company.

He tried to get a visual on the target, but at this range it was no more than a faint dot. So he stared instead at home: Tranquility, or rather its sun. Still less than a light year away, it was the brightest object in the blackness of interstellar space. He thought back to happier times, messing around with his mate, Osman, in novice school, and chatting late into the night with Springer. Then there had been that night on the moon when he held in his arms the most beautiful woman he’d even known.

But his maybe lover, Xin Lee, was on
Themistocles
, less than a light day distant, but the difficulty in matching vectors meant she might as well be a galaxy away. As for Osman, he had been killed in the rebellion Arun had helped to put down. Springer lost her leg in the same fight, and was out there now, practically within touching distance, but as invisible to Arun in her stealthed battlesuit as, hopefully, they all were to the enemy.

He smiled. Thinking of Springer always made him smile. Arun’s life had mysteries and threats by the bucketload – not least the mysterious purple girl that the pre-cog Night Hummers had talked of – but thinking about them wouldn’t help him now.

Springer would be by his side in the fight.

As she would be afterward, when they celebrated victory.

That was more than enough.

After closing for fifteen minutes, when the target vessel had grown enough for Arun to see it was a rough cuboid shape, the enemy opened up with lasers.

The kinetic torpedoes were dumb bullets with limited maneuver capability of their own, which made targeting them child’s play.

Unlike in an atmosphere, there was nothing in space to scatter a beam weapon, robbing it of power. What limited a laser’s effective range was diffraction, the inevitable spreading out of beam diameter. What started as a tight beam at the laser’s focal point, had spread to a five-meter diameter disk by the time it played over the torpedoes.

Diluting the laser’s energy over a wider area turned it from a death beam to a pleasant heat lamp.

Nonetheless, in the near-absolute cold of space, that relentless heat lamp was deadly, warming the torpedoes in an uneven way.

After another ten minutes, secondary lasers opened up, pulsing their energy, so that the torpedoes rapidly heated then cooled.

It didn’t take much longer before the outer surface of a few torpedoes cracked. The material pitted, ejecting little plumes of debris.

To Arun, the effect looked so gentle, but it was enough. The torpedoes slowly tumbled and drifted.

There! The first collision. One torpedo had knocked into another, causing both to fly off on a new vector, narrowly missing others on their way out of the barrage spread.

And with every meter they grew closer to the enemy ship, the business ends of the laser beams narrowed, increasing their effect.

Arun grinned. The torpedoes were only a distraction, cover for the most deadly weapon in
Beowulf’s
armory: its complement of human Marines.

The fact that the enemy hadn’t fired on the Marines meant they hadn’t seen them.

Yet.

Oh, but they would do soon.

By the time they were ten minutes away, Arun was counting down the seconds before boarding, impatience adding a rasp to his breath.

He’d been bred and engineered to fight.

3,000 klicks and closing.

He couldn’t wait!

Indigo Squad boarded on the port beam and made for the CIC, the command nerve center of the enemy ship. The two Charlie Company officers commanded the other five squads who would breach the upper hull and work their way down to the main powerplant. Both targets were amidships. By coming at them from two directions, the battle planners hoped to maximize confusion in the minds of the enemy.

Hoped to
. The location of the targets was guesswork, given a veneer of plausibility by
Beowulf’s
spy probes that had sent back data about power routing and data traffic before being vaped by enemy lasers.

The two sides of the pincer were uneven. Arun couldn’t help thinking of himself as a decoy, there to distract attention from the main force.

Once they’d set things on course with the hull breaching charges, Arun had always expected the plan to fall apart as the boarding action unfolded, but not as quickly as it did.

He followed Lance Corporal Del-Marie Sandure and a replacement Marine – a girl he didn’t know well called Sadri – down the breach. Straight away he knew something was wrong. Barney lost power to the suit propulsion. Arun stumbled and fell… to his right, onto the aft bulkhead.

Fell!
How could he fall in zero-g? This ship must have artificial gravity. Such a display of an impossible technology made him tingle with unease. Even if the reaction force feeling of gravity had come from engine thrust or rotation, that still didn’t explain why his suit propulsion had failed. It was only in genuine gravity fields that the ACE-2 suit propulsion barely functioned.

He glanced behind him, expecting quadruped Muryani Marines to be waiting in ambush.

They weren’t. Maybe this wasn’t even a Muryani ship. They didn’t have artificial gravity and weren’t supposed to be so close to Tranquility.

None of this made sense.

He tried to shake away thoughts about matters beyond his control, and focused instead on the practical. His compromised suit propulsion meant he would have to get around by walking and running. But the plan still held good.

Arun switched off the safety on his SA-71 carbine and covered his squadmates who were falling into a heap on the bulkhead, filling the Local BattleNet comm channel with grunts of confusion.

Suddenly an alarm started blaring so loudly that Arun’s head would have shattered if Barney hadn’t filtered out most of the sound.

Better make that two weird things
, he thought. The hull was open to the vacuum, but he was still hearing sounds. That meant the air was intact. Damn! They should have brought overblast grenades. Instead, they’d brought flash-bombs, to disorient an enemy before shooting them with railgun darts.

All his training said you had to run with the crazy chaos of contact with the enemy and make your own luck. You had to keep an open mind and adapt your plan as you went.

Sounded compelling in theory. In practice, his comrades’ mental faculties were so blunted that no one had the wit to mention the strangeness of their environment or adapt their plan.

There’s no problem
, he told himself.
No dramas. No need to change the plan. Nothing has changed.

But he didn’t really believe that. Either this was a class of Muryani vessel that he’d never seen before.

Or this ship didn’t belong to their old foe, but a far more deadly threat.

Only a few moments earlier, he’d thrown himself through the hull breach with excitement boiling in his veins.

Now he felt only icy trepidation.

Not fear for his own fate, but deep worry about how they would cope in this puzzle box of surprises.

After punching through four bulkheads on their way to the center of the enemy ship, Indigo Squad still hadn’t met resistance.

That was bad.

Once they’d recovered from the shock of encountering genuine gravity, and picked themselves up from the untidy heap they’d made on the aft bulkhead, the squad had pressed on with vigor. They might not be sharp, but every genetic rewiring, wetware augmentation and trained habit yelled at them to close and fight with the enemy.

Four frames in and that initial impetus had dissipated.

Horden’s backside! Caccamo and Bojin from Alpha Section were actually sitting down and talking. Chewing the fat in the middle of a battle.

A few kicks from Arun’s boot were enough to communicate a sense of occasion to the two idle lizards, but it took sharp words from Lance Sergeant Brandt to get them moving again.

Arun feared this loss of focus was only a sign of things to come.

Frakk! The pair were so dopey they weren’t fit to clean out the head, let alone fight a battle.

Arun shuddered. He’d been forced to shovel shit as an Aux slave worker. It was even less fun than it sounded.

“McEwan!” barked Corporal Majanita – Madge – Arun’s section leader.

“Corporal?”

“When you’ve finished playing footsie with Alpha Section, bring your ass over to get us through this bulkhead.”

As he raced over, Arun grabbed a breaching charge from the utility attachment patch over his rear hip and looked for a spot on the wall that was as far as possible from any bracing.

The breach pack was shaped like a small lime-green plant pot that oozed sticky green slime over its flat attachment surface. The slime ran through Arun’s gauntlets like harmless alien sweat, but when he placed the charge at chest height against the bulkhead, and held it in place for the required seven seconds, the bond it made was strong enough to withstand a plasma torch.