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

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    Fighting for humanity … as he waited to die a pointless death on behalf of uncaring alien masters, he wondered what it must be like to fight for a cause you could believe in, a new kind of Human Marine Corps that actually fought for humanity.
    Without warning, every Trog simultaneously emitted a screech like poorly lubricated wheel brakes. A few seconds later came another pheromone-laden smell. Like rotten fruit this time.
    Guess that meant contemplation time was over.
    He opened his eyes. The guardians had withdrawn from his hole, standing motionless in the main tunnel corridor. Great! They must have found some digging-caste Trogs to get at him safely without bringing the roof down.
    “Cease fire, humans!”
    The voice seemed to be coming from within the tunnel walls, not from a single source but diffusely spread throughout this area of the hive. “This exercise is concluded. Cease fire!”
    Within moments, the guardians calmed to a stop, listing woozily. If the notion wasn’t so absurd, he’d say they had grown sleepy.
    A ripple spread through the insectoid mob. The disturbance came from a new kind of Trog. Smaller and more lightly colored, this one lacked the halo of sharp horns. When the newcomer had pushed through the crowd and stood at the entrance to Arun’s little cave, he could see its carapace was as black as the guardians but covered in fine red hairs that looked unexpectedly delicate, when picked out in the beam of his helmet lamp. Instructor Rekka had explained in her briefing that this was a Trog in an earlier stage of the lifecycle: a scribe .
    “The guardians will not harm you now,” spoke the scribe via a box hanging around its neck, which whirred with gears as it generated a mechanical version of a human voice.
    Arun wasn’t convinced. But, what the hell? It beat cowering. He got down on hands and knees and slithered through the floes of spent sabots floating in a carnage sea. It was like crawling through a midden pit dug for an outdoor field exercise, except now he was so close to the chopped aliens, he smelled a tang of sweetened metal.
    This had only been a training exercise.
    But when he looked around at corpses of his supposed allies, killed by his own hand, he wondered whether the scribe would see things the same way.

—— Chapter 02 ——
    The alien scribe stood motionless amidst the scene of combat carnage. Two pairs of glassy black bulbs — Arun assumed they were eyes — stared at Arun. If the creature was showing any kind of emotional reaction to the death of its fellows, it wasn’t in a form a human could recognize.
    Arun’s combat drugs were beginning to wear off, enough for him to reason that the best thing for him to do was shut up, keep still, and await orders…
    Thinking of orders… why wasn’t Brandt shouting at him through the comms link in his helmet? Was Brandt dead?
    “I have given them a pheromone order to render them dormant,” said the scribe’s box after a while. “You too should take on a dormant state, human Marine cadet.”
    He waited for the scribe’s box to say more, but the creature had said all it intended to for now. The hairs on the insect thorax looked so soft, he wanted to reach out and stroke them. Although the alien made no menacing moves, Arun kept his hand to himself, worried that his sudden urge for intimacy might be connected to coming down from the combat drugs.
    After the gnarled bulk of the guardians, the scribe seemed as cute as a cooing baby. It was only seven feet long rather than a guardian’s nine plus, but still had the same three-segment body arrangement that looked like the head, thorax, and abdomen of Earth insects.
    Arun was all too familiar with real insects. When his distant ancestors had been transported from Earth, the little buzzing, biting but pollinating pests had come too. The scribe only looked superficially like an Earth creature, though. It carried itself on three spindly pairs of limbs that ended in flexible