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

couldn’t make it out. So he brought the stock to his head and thumbed for the carbine’s AI to give an audio status.
    “Ammo feed impaired. Risk of explosion. AG-1 contents only partially utilizable.”
    Partial, eh? Arun squinted out of his hole. He saw aliens as far as he could see. He shrugged. Once the dumb bugs worked out that all they needed to do was widen the opening to his bolt-hole, he was going to die anyway. Partial would do just fine.
    Arun overrode the warning and fired into the waiting horde. He screamed incoherent sounds of battle fury as his weapon accelerated sporadic volleys of kinetic darts interleaved with frequent misfires. On and on he pumped death through the aperture of his hastily excavated hole, until he realized the ammo supply feed was clicking through an empty reservoir.
    Drop by splatter, the aerosol of ichor and soil succumbed to gravity and cleared, engorging the dark pools already on the floor.
    Recognizable fragments of carapaces, jaws, horns and legs poked out from the jumble of undifferentiated alien chitin… and… moved!
    Icy fear cooled his battle fury. Dead aliens moving… he’d heard of undead aliens in the morbid rumors that frequently washed over the human community on Tranquility. Arun reckoned that ninety-five percent of this scuttlebutt was drent. That left five percent with at least an undercurrent of truth, such as the tales of alien warriors who could not be killed. Every time you snuffed out their life, they reconstituted, coming back stronger than before.
    He shuddered. In front of him, as the spray of destruction cleared a little more, he could make out chitinous bodies jerking into movement, reassembling themselves. Returning to life.
    Relief flooded his body when he realized what was really happening. He slapped a hand on his bare thigh and laughed so hard that he had to sit down. The dead Troggie guardians weren’t coming back to life; it was their living nest-siblings removing their fallen comrades to clear the way for another attack.
    As if to reinforce that common sense was returning to his world after that fright, he noticed the Trogs had lost their earlier attack mania, and were now using their combat claws to widen the entrance to his hole. They frequently stopped to examine the walls and roof, feeling them with their mid-limbs. These were guardians, he reminded himself: the last stage in the Trog lifecycle. He guessed these vecks weren’t normally allowed to do any digging.
    Arun backed away the short distance to the rear of his hole and counted down his last moments before evisceration. He’d heard you were supposed to cry for his mother when you faced certain death.
    That didn’t seem to be working for him, so he closed his eyes and tried to bring up memories of his mother.
    She had been kind enough, but she had always known that one day she would be shipped out-system, leaving him behind. That she had kept her emotional distance was obvious to him now.
    He couldn’t even picture her face, just a name and rank: Sergeant Escandala McEwan.
    Inefficient yet remorseless, the Trogs dug him out. Arun kept his eyes shut, but the unceasing scraping noise told him they were almost within range of a claw strike. As he waited to be sliced, his thoughts drifted to Stephen Horden. The older cadet had claimed to be descended from the President Horden of Earth who had signed the Vancouver Accord and condemned the ancestors of the Human Marine Corps to perpetual slavery.
    Arun had never cared about lineage. What impressed him was how Horden had built quite a following with his secret teachings on Earth history, and compelling arguments about why Old Earth was something worth fighting for — worth humans fighting for — and, one day, returning to as free people.
    Horden had graduated the year before, part of a replacement list sent off to some garrison fleet around the mining system of Akinschet. Arun’s mother had been posted there. Perhaps the two would