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

suckers. Definitely not like an insect. The pre-mission briefing had mentioned these suckers, describing them as analogous to an Earthly elephant’s trunk.
    Although he wasn’t one of the few who resisted the Earth-centric obsession, sometimes Arun thought it went too far. What kind of dumb veck thought it was a clever idea to compare Trogs to an animal on a far-off planet that none of the human Marines would ever encounter?
    “I mean,” he told the scribe, “really, it would make far more sense to describe an elephant’s trunk as like a scribe’s limbs, rather than the other way around.”
    On the scribe’s motionless head, its two pairs of eyes blinked. Then it raised its antenna into a frenzy of wriggling.
    Without warning, those feelers telescoped outward, directly at Arun’s head.
    He jumped back, settling into a loose crouch, ready for unarmed combat. But the feelers stopped their advance and Arun amused himself with the thought that he’d never been taught unclothed combat.
    The antennae retracted slightly into a fixed pattern, a square shape that it maintained for a few seconds before saying: “I agree. I have read the same human texts. As if anyone on this planet would ever encounter an elephant!”
    “That’s exactly what I was thinking!”
    Arun’s squadmate, Zug, studied aliens with a passion. He’d be able to make sense of this conversation later.
    “So…” Arun continued, wondering how you were supposed to change subject with an alien species you’d never met before, except to shoot at. (Arun glanced nervously at the carnage around him). “Er… did we win?”
    “You failed to meet the success criteria of this exercise. We do not know the detailed assessment that will be forthcoming from the Jotuns and your senior humans. Our own assessment is that too many small-unit commanders proved inadequate, and your company commander lacked imagination. Most disastrous of all, you failed to keep reserves. The concept of a front line is tenuous when contesting a three-dimensional tunnel network. Counter-attacks can come from any direction. Have you not been taught the concept of a mobile reserve?”
    “Oh.” Arun’s shoulders slumped. This was the scenario every human on the planet hated: being made to feel like children by older races that had seen it all before. He tried to put every iota of assertiveness into his voice and asked: “Were there any casualties?”
    Speaking those words made him think of his fire team buddies: Osman, Madge and Springer. Were they dead? Properly dead?
    “There were four minor injuries,” the alien told him. Arun relaxed. “And one fatality. Name of Isabella de Grouchy.”
    Arun pictured bouncy brown hair, a hooked nose set into a serious, freckle-dashed face that was often frowning. De Grouchy had flashed him a momentary half-smile once; they’d never spoken but he’d seen her enough to paint a vivid picture of her in his mind’s eye. And now she was gone.
    Isabella hadn’t exactly been the first to die. Not when Arun considered all those who hadn’t survived to graduate from novice school as a cadet.
    He glanced at the guardians still crowding the tunnel, apparently in deep sleep.
    Arun idly flicked the larger chunks of mess off his body. He felt a throb of pain to his left leg and torso. He squeezed his right eye shut against the fierce pain that stabbed through it. Sensation was returning. And he was injured.
    He froze, his wounds forgotten. He realized he’d just flicked a piece of Troggie body onto the scribe. Trogs lived in nests. Nest members, the briefing had said, were almost a gestalt entity, a hive whose members were far closer to each other than any human twin.
    “Were…” Arun cleared his throat. “Were there many tropied on your side?” He winced, unable to stop himself glancing around at the combat slurry.
    He could have phrased that better.
    “A little over a thousand nest-siblings were… tropied . Is that the right word? You do mean