Marine Cadet (The Human Legion Book 1) Read Online Free

With three-quarters of its limbs missing, and the first Trog still stuck to the battlesuit’s armored torso, the newcomer never stood a chance.
    By the time the second Trog managed to push its head and thorax past its companion, Arun had finally reached his gun. He fired a controlled burst of darts.
    The insect’s front limbs exploded into chunks. Wet shrapnel of head and jaws and thorax peppered the area.
    Arun released pressure on the trigger and inspected his handiwork. Both beasts were still twitching.
    He switched the gun’s ammo supply from kinetic darts to rocket rounds: bangers . The main purpose of bangers was to be fully recoilless, something very handy in zero-g combat out in deep space. But even here under a planet’s surface, the rounds still made a decent bang.
    Arun pumped ten seconds of fiery destruction into the two battered Trogs, imagining the blessed day when he would be issued with micro-nukes. Then the gun pinged that its ammunition was exhausted, and he remembered the downside of bangers: they were far larger than darts, so you couldn’t fit many into an ammunition carousel.
    After the black rain of chitin chunks had subsided, he tried cleaning his slick hands by wiping them on the walls, but the walls were soggy too. Maybe it was just as well they hadn’t issued him with nukes.
    The two mutilated Trogs that had attacked weren’t moving, weren’t even an obstacle any longer. Outside in the main tunnel it was a different story. An ocean of six-limbed aliens waited for him.
    “Should have evolved the opposable thumb,” he shouted at the enemy. As taunts went, it didn’t have much effect. He reached for fresh ammo to reinforce his message.
    Oh, drent!
    That was when he remembered he had squirmed from his battle dress in order to escape from the aliens pinning his legs. He was naked, save for his helmet and gauntlets. His ammo was still attached to the battlesuit that he’d discarded underneath the two Trogs, the same Trogs he’d just liquidized with a volley of explosive bullets.
    Frakk it!
    As he crawled over the slurry he’d created, he struggled to spot his battlesuit under its covering of gore. Something of vaguely the right shape was there, pushed farther up his hole toward the waiting Trogs.
    As he advanced, the Trogs outside stilled, and silenced. He preferred them manic; this was more menacing somehow. He ignored the guardians waiting just out of slashing range and wiped at the muck coating his half-buried suit. Arun flipped over the armor, which revealed shapes in the slurry underneath. Feeling with his hands, he found an intact fastening from an equipment pack, and two unused grenades. Underneath a shard from his drink bottle, he found an ammunition carousel. In a smooth and swift motion, he rammed the ammo into an unused socket in his carbine, took a kneeling posture, and fired.
    Instead of the soft whine of darts, Arun heard an angry whir as his carbine rejected the ammo carousel, and then a faint plop as it fell to the wet ground.
    When Arun crouched down to retrieve the bulb of ammunition, a wave of stench hit him: a Trog pheromone signal. It was an earthy smell; probably it carried layers of meaning to the aliens: taunts and an incitement to victory. To Arun it was remarkably similar to the pungent aroma of unwashed socks.
    Zug might know what that scent meant, but his friend wasn’t here. At this moment, his best friend was the AG-1 Ammunition Carousel, a dull-gray plastic bulb filled with bullets, darts and shells, a reservoir of sabot resin, and a power pack whose ability to recharge itself was as near as frakk to magical. Arun blew into the carousel’s opened feed interface. Dark goop spewed out, gobbing into his eye. He blinked furiously.
    Willing his tear-smeared eye to remain open, Arun snapped the slightly-cleaned ammo carousel into his carbine, which clicked and whirred hungrily… and carried on whirring. His gun was unhappy. A blue light lit up on its stock. He