Indigo Squad (22 page)

“Yes, sir.”

“Then you know of this mental faculty?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t look to me to solve your problems, boy. Right now the default outcome for our situation is that we’re all going to die. Very soon too. When they merge ships and redistribute the crew, they will sail back to Tranquility. Already, we have nearly completed our deceleration. But before the rebels go back in their cryo pods, they will clear up the one loose end. Indigo Squad will be thawed and killed. And before you are lined up in front of an execution squad, they will interrogate you.”

Arun pictured the dead Marine in the cryo pod that was supposed to hold him. Even if he didn’t break under interrogation, the trail would lead back to Indiya and the freaks.

“What do you need to activate your planning mind, McEwan?”

“Inputs. Our advantages. Our opponents’ weaknesses, habits, characteristics. How do they think? What do they want? Then I need something to stimulate my mind – to keep my conscious brain revving while underneath my planner works undisturbed. And space. I need much more space. I’m too cramped to think properly.”

“There is an obvious solution to that last issue,” said the reserve captain. She snarled at Tremayne, who showed no reaction. “But I have presented you with a less obvious one that will suffice for the limited time that remains to us. Thanks to Indiya, I also have your distraction, as you shall discover presently.”

Indiya bit her lip. Necessity demanded what she must do next. Didn’t mean she had to like it.

Everyone gave a summary of the situation, intending to kickstart Arun’s planner brain. Passing messages via Darius and the other AIs was clumsy, but there was little to be said that McEwan didn’t already know other than the latest updates on the merging with
Themistocles,
and a revelation from Finfth that he claimed to be able to fly any spacecraft
.

“Enough!” With a wave of both mid-limbs, the reserve captain brought the discussion to a close. “We have talked enough. One more matter and then you two must return. McEwan, step into my thrust station.”

“Yes, sir.”

Arun marched across the cabin into the bubble-like chamber that filled the rear of the cabin.

Indiya followed.

It was a bespoke construction. Part survival bubble, part acceleration-hardened thrust chamber, and also a life-extender: the reserve captain being too frail to risk a full cryogenic freezing.

McEwan waited until he’d crossed the threshold before he let loose. “What the hell does the reserve captain mean by a
distraction
?”

Once they were both inside, the Jotun sealed the unit. It was just the two of them in complete privacy.

Indiya felt a pang of regret at what she was about to do to Arun. Though probably, she told herself, the deeper feeling was guilt.

Bonehead.

Cyborg.

These were the names they called the Marines, but she understood now that it was unfair. They weren’t stupid and they weren’t without feelings. She’d played him, strung him along like a remote-controlled drone. Arun deserved better than that.

More importantly, her messing with his head and his body chemistry was probably the explanation for why his planner brain wasn’t functioning.

“Something bothering you?” he said, with a cheeky raised eyebrow.

“I’ll miss you,” she said.

“I
am
coming back, you know.”

She sighed and started removing a glove. “Give me your hand.”

He hesitated.
Guess he knows by now what I can do.
“I’m not your enemy,” she said. “How could I be? I love you.”

Arun’s eyes widened, but he let her press her hand against his and infuse him with nano-transporters loaded with a purge program that would strike out all the hormonal controls she’d left in him earlier. It was hardly surprising that he looked shocked: he was still in her thrall and she’d just said the words he most needed to hear.

She didn’t mean them, of course.

“What is it?” he asked. “Even for you, you’re acting weird.”

“I was just thinking about what the reserve captain told me,” she lied. “You’ve some kind of organic planning computer in your head, and Tremayne can see the future. And they call
us
freaks!”

He smiled. “You think
we’re
strange? Imagine what our children will be like.”

There was a teasing twinkle in his eye. And that didn’t make sense. Her army of nano-effectors should have cleansed his body of her instructions by now. He should be confused, swaying even, grasping for certainty. Not twinkling.

Madr zagh!
He must have the constitution of a Jotun. Had her instruction to love her embedded too strongly?

“Do you love me, Arun?” she tested.

He rolled the idea around for a few moments. “Yes,” he said hesitantly, “I think I do.”

Indiya’s muscles un-tensed. If he were still under her control, he wouldn’t have been so uncertain. “You don’t,” she said. “If you truly love someone, there’s no
maybe
.”

He shrugged. “I want to run my fingers through your wild, violet hair and kiss those beautiful lips from which you say such a stream of the unexpected. I want to unpeel you from your uniform and play with what’s inside. But what I’d really like to do is go EVA, just the two of us sharing the void in suits with powered motors. Hand-in-hand you would show me your home from the outside. To me,
Beowulf
is a box that moves across space, but if I saw her through your eyes, I feel certain your ship would capture me with her beauty.”

At first, Indiya didn’t know how to reply. Arun had just spoken the Marine equivalent of love poetry. “Sounds like love to me,” she whispered.

He drew near to her face. Close enough to feel the hot flow of his breath. “I’d like to say all those pretty things when I’m not running for my life because it would mean so much more. Peril makes a Marine randy. Didn’t you know that? It’s how we’re made.”

He brought her into his broad embrace, his fingers twining through her hair.

Heart pounding, she took deep breaths, giving herself to the anticipation.

When he leaned down and brushed his warm lips against hers, she closed her eyes and drew her head back just enough for him to get the message and loosen his hold.

Not that she wanted him to back off.

It was so unfair
. Everyone expected her to be totally in control, a deep-thinking leader with a heart of metal, and a sense of humor so tiny it could only be perceived at a quantum scale. Why couldn’t she ever kick loose and have fun making some mistakes? That’s what your youth was for, right? Like fooling around with boys. When was ever going to find the time to do that?

Indiya bit her lip. It seemed to do the trick because her comportment returned. Her task was to purge Marine McEwan’s mind of her control so his battle planner could operate effectively. And that was what she would do. First, she needed to keep him talking. “Doesn’t all this danger and uncertainty put you off… you know,
romance
?”

He laughed. McEwan should be staggering around punch-drunk. Instead he was exploding with a deep belly laugh, a beautiful sound that declared to her, impossibly, that everything would be okay despite all the crushing evidence to the contrary.

“Did that idiot, Finfth, tell you that?” he asked.

She held his hand, and sent a diagnostic into his bloodstream while he talked, seeking an explanation for why he wasn’t responding as expected.

“I’m a Marine, Indiya. For the rest of my life I’ll either be frozen in a cryo pod or about to go into battle. Have you ever wondered how Marine children are made?”

“Well…” She reddened. Loobie was the only other person she discussed that kind of thing with. “The same way as ship babies,” she stated.

That twinkle was back in his eye.
Why?

“I don’t mean the mechanics of
insert male part A into female part B
, you soft-headed donker. I mean…” He frowned. “You really don’t know, do you?”

Indiya shook her head. Why should she? Ship boys were a mystery. Marine men were off the scale.

“A discussion for another time,” he said. “Let’s just say that once you’ve put us to sleep on your transport ship, average waking-life expectancy for a male Marine is less than a year. And we make the most of every minute, as often as we can with whoever catches our attention. And this… this isn’t a moment for lovemaking. We’ve a job to do.”

A job to do.
If only he knew the truth of that. She suddenly wondered what he would do if he learned how she’d been controlling him. Would Arun be violent with her?

“Male,” she said. “Why did you say
male
Marines have only a year? Isn’t that true for women too?”

Thank Fate! The diagnostic returned. She allowed the layers added to her mind for such purposes to query the results while she concentrated on keeping McEwan talking.

“No,” he said. “Men don’t have babies.” When he saw the bewilderment on her face, he added: “Gestation happens when convenient. That can be many waking-years after conception, and objective-decades after the father dies. If a transport ship is moving to a new system, and if we men have done our job, a whole auxiliary battalion can be born, trained, and fully grown while in transit.”

“And the males sleep through it all?”

Arun stiffened. Seemed she’d hit a nerve. “We don’t have a choice. The Marine Corps is our family. The
only
family we are permitted.”

The sensation of pressure in her skull told her that her diagnostic had finished reporting. She turned her attention inward to learn that… that her love potion had never taken hold! Something in his body had fought it off. Only another augment could do that. It must have been something Fraser had put into his brother.

Merde! She’d thought all this time that he’d been in thrall to her. She was a dumbwit bakri chodder, just like Petty Officer Lock always told her.

“Indiya, this isn’t the right time. We’ve got a ship to retake. But after… You promised me a talk when we first met. I’m still looking forward to finding out where that might lead us.”

She wanted to tease out this moment with him, but he was already back in the mindset of a disciplined military cyborg, tapping on the door for the reserve captain to let him out.

Inside the cyborg beat a lover’s heart; inactive now, but she’d glimpsed it shining warm and bright.

Did a sister heart beat inside of her?

Of that she was much less certain.

Arun couldn’t believe what he was seeing: a pair of empty ACE-2 battlesuits crawling through the door of their compartment.

Out of habit, Arun requested a full-system cyber-defense diagnostic. Then he remembered that Barney wasn’t there – that his sight was fed directly from his eyeballs and so should be immune to cyber-attack. He shook his head instead, but that didn’t help either, because through the condensation-slick wall of the survival bubble, he could still see the approaching ACE-2s.

It looked as if the empty suits were moving under their own ghostly power, but the light from the bubble occasionally glinted off little crawling beings of bizarre shapes.

“Darius has an even larger family than we realized,” Springer said. She was right. As they grew closer, he could see that a battalion of little devices were hauling the suits, marshaled by Darius who flitted back and forth, fussing over his team. Some of the little AI projects Furn had built were mounted on wheels, others on crawler tracks. They seemed to be attached to hard surfaces in the way that his boots could stick to charged walkways. But the walls of the compartment weren’t charged.

“Barney!” Arun exclaimed. “Is he in one of those suits? I’d never thought I’d miss him so much.”

A change came over Darius. Arun had the impression that the little AI was buzzing angrily around the outside of the bubble. But, of course, there was no air outside to actually buzz. Not much light, either.

“I regret, Master McEwan, that you must make do with us other
inferior
, yet still brave AIs.” Darius sounded pissed. “The suits are spares into which we have placed suit AIs from Marines who were victim to resuscitation attrition. Despite my inadequacies they have lowered themselves to informing me of their names, which are Athena and Saraswati. They are most eager to meet you. I have told them all about you.”

The preliminaries to meeting the suit AIs wasn’t as simple as a handshake and a hot drink. The suits were the reserve captain’s solution to the cramped conditions.

Arun tried putting on his suit first. After half an hour of desperate contortions inside the bubble’s airlock he gave up.

Having shared their cramped prison for so long, he was barely on speaking terms with Springer. Now, he had to admit defeat. He asked his partner for help.

Stripping down to put on a battlesuit was something they’d all done so many times that they felt no embarrassment. This was different. Twisting your body to present your body orifices to a friend so she could insert tubes and capture devices over or inside every attachment point was not an experience Arun wanted to repeat in a hurry.

After another two hours, the end result was worthwhile. Arun and Springer were inside their battlesuits and floating in the compartment outside of the bubble. By the time they needed to take them off again, they would either be dead or victorious.

In order for the Marines to operate them effectively, the suits needed AIs. Contrary to what Darius had suggested before making a smart exit, the AIs were in no hurry to talk to the humans.

“You know, if I hadn’t been stolen,” said Athena after a long period of silence, “I expect they would have put me on a shelf and left me there until I rusted.”

“You can’t,” replied Springer’s AI, Saraswati, who used an uninterested but husky woman’s voice that sounded as if she thought this was all beneath her dignity.

“Can’t what?”

“Can’t rust, dumbo. You aren’t ferrous.”

Arun wanted to smack something. Barney and the other AIs kept quiet until they needed to say something vital. Separated forever from their original human symbionts, the AIs in the borrowed suits were already breaching such boundaries. For a start, they were speaking audible words into the battlesuit helmets through a tight-beam comm link.