Indigo Squad (9 page)

Her cryo-team comrades said she’d been upset. Her uncle had died – killed himself. They had sent Indiya back to her quarters to grieve.

“She won’t be there,” one of the cryo rats had said. “She’ll hide herself in her freak lab experiments.”

He’d risked asking questions openly but what else could he do? He was a Marine not a spy. All the crewmembers talked about Indiya and her fellow friends as hyper-intelligent weirdoes. A little too intelligent for comfort.

The more he heard about her, the more this Indiya sounded a right little veck, but if she were half as intelligent as people said, she would be better at this espionage drent than a poor grunting Marine like him.

There’s someone ahead!

His mouth dried and he lost his grip on the handholds.

Keep calm! It’s just another flyweight ship-rat.

As he sailed from one side of the passageway to the other, he tried to tell himself that his nervousness was nothing to be ashamed of. Ever since birth he’d done everything as a team. Now he was on his own, far beyond help. Even the ship felt alien. Flying through the dark and airless decks of training hulks was something he was very used to. But
Beowulf
’s passageways were all brightly lit, and they had air! And weirdest of all, the ship designers had added visual cues to suggest a sense of down.

Arun hit the passageway wall, grabbed and held onto the handholds on that side. While he built up speed again, he squeezed his eyes to zoom his vision onto the figure ahead. It was obviously a ship-rat, with elfin limbs, graceful and almost childlike… he stopped that last thought, cocking an eyebrow in amusement. Once he’d magnified the image enough, he could tell that was a woman, not a child… not by the way her flanks and thighs bulged against her pants. And her hair. Her hair was purple.

He pulled harder at the handholds.

“Indiya!” he yelled. “Wait up!”

He sensed by the way she’d hesitated that she’d heard. She chose to ignore him.

“Can we talk?” he asked when he’d caught her. “Somewhere private?”

“Later,” she said, half-turning her head toward him. It wasn’t much of an acknowledgment. “Sorry, I’m busy.” Even with the brittle edge she was adding, her voice had a lazy, creamy smoothness that was an exotic delight compared to the curt rapid fire of Marine speech.

“I appreciate you have your duties – and your grief – but I would really love to talk. And you did promise, back when you put me in cryo.”

She frowned at his mention of grief, but soon a curious change took her. A dozen conflicting emotions registered across her face before she gave a half-shrug and ended with a warm smile. Perhaps this expression revealed her natural state, the others being masks she’d tried on but didn’t quite fit. He hoped so.

“I did,” she said. “And I will.”

Arun groaned inwardly. Her honeyed voice and innocent eyes were melting his discipline like a bacteria bomb making a hull breach. For once in his life, he didn’t want a complicating obsession with an impossible girl. Not now.

Indiya looked him in the eye. “You’re intriguing, Arun McEwan. Even handsome for a … a–”

“A what?”

“A lumbering water buffalo.”

“Thank you.” Arun’s lips tightened as he tried not to laugh. He didn’t need to know what a water buffalo was to know she was gently teasing him. With a voice like that, she could tease him all day long.

“You’re welcome,” she said. “Really…”

Suddenly the warmth in her face snapped off to reveal the implacable hardness underneath. He’d seen the same look come over NCOs faces when he’d pushed familiarity too far and had to brace for the imminent shitstorm.

“But this isn’t the right time,” Indiya said bluntly. “That’s all. Now fuck off!”

She turned her back on him and set off.

He was so stunned by her sudden change that he’d let her go several paces before he came to his senses.

Arun laughed, a sound so forced it wouldn’t fool any human listening in. For the benefit of any pattern-recognizing security AIs who might be watching, he was trying to keep his body language open, congruent with engaging in flirtatious conversation. But this wasn’t a flirtation. He gambled everything by speaking the most dangerous words he’d uttered aboard this ship. “Your uncle wasn’t the first.”

His words stunned the ship-rat. She twisted around and stared at him wide-eyed. Her face first went pale. Then her cheeks and neck colored.

Great
, he thought.
She’s not exactly a natural spy. She’s even more hopeless than me.

Indiya had taken them through an access tube to Compartment 08-10-03, which was just inside the hull on the starboard beam.

Beowulf’s
compartments that Arun was familiar with took the form of boxes and cylinders, but this was a far more confusing layout. Fuel tanks, access to a maneuvering thruster, egress airlock set into the hull, compressed atmosphere and other life support supplies, fire suppressant foams, an emergency shower, and machine stores: all were crammed into whatever space was available.

There were no flat surfaces. He was getting used to
down
being whatever the ship designers wanted you to think it was, but there was no down here.

Indiya floated over to a ledge used by engineers to access the control panel and valves for a large oxygen cylinder. She slotted her feet into the spaces scooped out of the ledge for that purpose.

Arun followed, discovering that there was space on the ledge for two.

“Speak freely,” she said.

“But the walls–”

“Have ears. Yes. Don’t you worry your pretty head about that.” She reached a gloved hand into a pocket. He couldn’t see for sure, but it looked as if she were setting a control on a hidden device.

“Those ears in the wall belong to my friend,” she said. He didn’t like her smug smile. It looked too close to a sneer. Horden’s Choice – this was a complicated girl. “I’ve asked my friend to turn those ears away. Speak quickly.”

Arun took a deep breath. He had no idea what she meant but Ensign Krimkrak had ordered him to act without delay. Urgency meant taking chances.

He glanced at the purple halo of hair sweeping behind her – the purple the Night Hummers had seen in their confusing prophecy – and decided he had to trust her.

He explained everything.

She did the same. So far as he could tell.

They discussed allies, suspicions, speculations, and the next likely targets for the traitors. They agreed to meet again in 48 hours. Indiya would find him.

Unburdening and sharing was such a relief, but a poignant one. Springer was his confidante. She should have been here. Secret assignations in storage compartments – counter-plotting against traitors – that was what he and Springer were built to do together. Her absence was so profound that it felt like a physical presence, looking over his shoulder.

“Are you all right?” Indiya asked him, her hardness softened a notch.

“I think my brother will be next,” said Arun.

“The Sergeant of Marines will be a key player in this affair,” she agreed. “Either he will be removed soon or he is already siding with our opponents.”

“My brother. No. He’s my twin. I know I’m no murderer. It can’t be him.”

She shrugged. “I guess you know yourself. So that makes your brother a likely target. On the ship side, I struggle to believe any senior officers are in on the plot, which means they must be targets soon.”

“Some of your officers must be in on it, or the mutineers would never have gotten this far.”

She kicked him in the shin. “Idiot! Don’t use trigger words like that, you might frighten Heidi. She’s pretending not to hear, but only because she’s clever enough to understand that all we’re really up to is playing naughty human fun and games.”

Arun took a moment to work through the coded meanings in Indiya’s strange words. “This Heidi. Is she the ship’s security AI by any chance?”

“We named her Hydra. But she insists on Heidi. Yes.”

“I like her already. Let’s show her some genuine human naughtiness. Just to reassure her.”

Arun grabbed Indiya and slid her feet out of their slot. He pushed off, aiming for the ledge alongside a matching oxygen tank mounted about twenty meters away behind and above their heads. As they spun gracefully on a slow transit to the far ledge, he kissed the ship girl.

Her lips were firm, almost hard, but there was a warmth behind them that made him eager to explore further, which reminded him… He hurriedly snaked his hand through her purple locks – which might look beguiling but evidently hadn’t been washed recently – and pressed the secret dot on his finger against the base of her skull.

Indiya pulled away. Excitement built inside him when he saw her reaction to the kiss was a slow, seductive smile.

He licked his lips at the sight of the curving line stretching up from her pout; it hinted at a woman of strong passions underneath an exterior that sometimes gave Arun the impression of an overly serious adolescent.

“Was that naughty enough?” he said.

Indiya didn’t answer, but when the gracefully spinning couple bounced gently against the oxygen tank, she immediately thrust back against the curve of the cylinder, spinning them along a new axis back across the compartment.

As Indiya nibbled his ear, her moist breath against his face, Arun felt a tingle in the pit of his stomach. He began to imagine the possibility of finally indulging in zero-g lovemaking. He tried to remember Zug and Osman’s advice on the subject.

Pain interrupted his steamy dreams. Indiya had bitten his ear. Hard!

He felt the blood welling, forming a floating trail of crimson globules.

Indiya whispered into his ear. “The only reason I don’t kick you into infertility, is to avoid frightening Heidi.” He believed every word, but the warm cream in her voice melted his heart anyway. “Kiss me again,” she added, “and I’ll kill you.”

She drew back, smiling as innocently as a contented three-year old.

Arun anchored them by grabbing hold of a rung on the far bulkhead.

“Did I ever tell you I have a thing for unobtainable women,” he said. “Nothing leads me on more.”

“Let’s get this clear, McEwan. You’re an engineered weapon. As expendable as a bullet. No, worth even less. They have to make new bullets to replace the spent supply, but you Marines are designed to self-replicate. You breed like vermin in the underground nests of your Marine farms. I hear you rut so incessantly that they have to cull you.”

She must have seen the sudden coldness in his face because she softened her words. “I’m sorry. That’s too cruel a matter to speak of lightly, but it only emphasizes my point. Our distant ancestors might have shared the same genome, but we sure as fuck don’t.”

“Finished?”

“We never started. I’ll find you in 48 hours. Now get out my way.”

He let her wriggle free, trying not to enjoy the sensation of her rubbing against him but… hell, she was lithe! From his vantage point on the ledge, he studied her all the way back to the hatch, trying to puzzle out this strange, foul-mouthed girl who was so full of contradictions.

“I think I’m in love,” he said dreamily, laughing when she reached behind and gave him the fist-twisting gesture that meant she wanted to rip his heart out.

He sighed. She already had.

A sense of deep foreboding followed Indiya along the passageway.

Your uncle wasn’t the first.

This clumsy pig, Arun McEwan, sounded as if he was as much a victim of all this crap going on as she was. But that didn’t mean he was on her side. He was on his own.

Merde!

All this talk of sides! Until she’d spotted the attention someone had lavished on McEwan while he was asleep in his cryo pod, Indiya hadn’t even an inkling that there even were any sides. Now she knew something was going on, but – she smacked her palm against her head – she was no closer to knowing what. Not exactly. McEwan had spoken of mutiny and rebellion, but she wasn’t entirely convinced. Evidence was what they needed. And if she wanted a hand in directing events, she had better find some dammed quickly.

It was Furn, and by the sounds of it, just coming into mind-message range.

she asked. Mind messages weren’t like sound waves: she couldn’t tell what direction they came from.

She unstuck her boots and made a clumsy about turn. Furn had been using the handholds to speed along the corridor, his legs flung behind by inertia like a missile. He was slowing down now.

She’d come out of that stupid incident with McEwan frustrated that he was such a pig-licking donk, but she wasn’t scared. Now, though, the significance of Furn’s actions slammed into her, setting her teeth on edge. You were supposed to use the charged walkways and Furn
always
followed the rules – except in an emergency. The air felt colder all of a sudden.

he asked.

Now that he was getting closer, she saw a wildness in his eyes that she had never seen there before.

she asked, but as soon as she did, she knew exactly who Furn meant.

she said.

before
I’d even bumped into McEwan?>

He had no answer other than the guilt written all over his face.

keep tabs
on me then?>

He colored.

Although he stood only a few feet away, Indiya fought to limit her words to mind-link. What she really wanted to do was scream out loud at the dirty little shunter.