Indigo Squad by Tim C. Taylor Read Free Book Online

effects of decompression, just hanging there without a care in the universe.
    She hated being carried around like a baby. She wanted to ask what the hell was going on, but they were out of time.
    The shuttle bucked violently as the debris wavefront finally hit. If the compartment had still been pressurized, the impacts would make the shuttle ring like a bell, but the airless cargo compartment was eerily silent.
    She counted ten seconds of buffeting. Long enough to realize that she and her friends were cocooned inside a mass of Marines, the bulk of the formation between her and the wavefront. The brainless cyborgs were shielding her with their armored bodies. And when the debris reached the hold, the vacuum meant there wouldn’t be any pressure waves to rupture her lungs.
    Why didn’t I think of that?
    Then the flight cabin shielding gave way and the jagged shards of metal and poly-ceramalloys that had once been a starship burst through the flight deck and tore into the cargo bay behind.

— Chapter 11 —
    If Arun had thought he was getting used to life aboard Beowulf , the parade room on Deck 12 was a reality check.
    Strictly speaking, it was called a parade ‘deck’, but he couldn’t bring himself to use that term. Deck suggested a floor where Marines could stand, and look down at their feet (if they dared) and look forward at an officer (if they had any sense). But now that Beowulf was at cruising speed, and wasn’t using her main thrusters, down was mutable concept.
    The crew, and Marines when not in their battlesuits, got around by walking on marked areas on bulkheads that were charged, attracting their boots. Shoulder units called yokes were also attracted to the bulkheads, the downward push on the shoulders giving a better approximation of gravity than sticky boot soles alone.
    All the squads in Charlie Company were lined up across the starboard edge of the fore, aft, dorsal and ventral bulkheads, forming a hollow square facing the port side. Despite all his years of zero-g training, Arun’s brain insisted that Checker, Red, Arrow and Command Squads were standing on the walls, and that Black and Silver were hanging upside down from the overhead.
    He ignored the disconcerting configuration and concentrated on Ensign Krimkrak who faced them all, from just off the port bulkhead. Officer and humans alike wore dress uniforms. Normally the fatigues they wore took the form of functional olive green shirts and pants, distinguished only by subtle unit and rank insignia. When set to dress mode, the smartfabric fatigues transformed. The shirt took on a deep blue color and grew epaulets and buttons showing squad colors – Arun’s were indigo. His pants became formal trousers, cream with an indigo stripe down the outside leg. The fabric formed a sharp vertical crease and kept the legs taut despite the lack of any gravity to pull the material down.
    Officers kept their dress uniforms simpler: creased cream trousers, and a plain blue four-armed top marked on the shoulders with a single sun, donating the rank of Ensign. From what little he knew of them, Jotuns loved decoration, but in their dealings with humans they preferred plainness. The simplicity seemed to say that the aliens’ superiority was so innate that there was no need to draw attention to it.
    The exception to this simplicity was the officer’s dress hat, which was a stubby little thing with a flat top. The material was the same cream as the trousers, and with a black ribbon around its base with the battalion designation in gold: 88-412/TAC – 88th battalion, 412th Tactical Marine Regiment. The whole getup was for the humans’ benefit – after all, why else were the hat bands showing human numerals? But if it was meant to impress, the officer’s dress hat failed. Marines were mesmerized by these hats, wondering what mysterious mechanism kept them attached to the huge Jotun heads with their shaggy fur and the prominent ridge running from front to back. The