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how to contact Ensign Krimkrak had been driven into him. When the officer had cut Arun’s shoulders, he’d left more than the wetware construct. A tiny communication device was embedded into the flesh of his shoulder. Arun would have to dig it out before the wound healed over it, but it promised stealthy comms that couldn’t be intercepted.
    He blinked… and was back in reality, crouched on the green walkway of the deployment tube, looking at the scores of Marines backed up behind because they couldn’t figure out how to progress around this obstacle of a fallen Marine.
    Arun picked himself up and set off after the rest of Charlie Company. Those in front of him had pushed on over a hundred meters up the tube, oblivious to the disturbance behind.
    Find allies amongst the crew . Those were his orders, and he knew just where to start: that pretty ship girl with the acid tongue and purple hair. He needed to find her and quickly.
    She was Indigo Squad’s only hope.

— Chapter 14 —
    Indiya activated the recorded feeds taken from Beowulf’s external sensors, and tried to relax her mind into the state of loose alertness where it would be ready for anything. What she was looking for, she didn’t know. That was the problem: there were far too many strange goings on for comfort and she had only two threads to pick at. One was that Marine, Arun McEwan, and the other was Bonaventure’ s destruction.
    The captured ship had been monitored by ship’s engineers, patrolled by Marines, and snooped on by nano-spies. If a bomb had been set off, a powerplant gone critical, or an attack come from a hidden ship, all those fates should have been detected and recorded.
    But none were.
    Cause of explosion: unknown.
    Oh, you pig-licking moron!
    She’d just spent several seconds staring at an array of softscreens tacked to the Freak Lab bulkhead before she noticed the screens were blank. The recordings weren’t streaming into her lab because she’d forgotten to tag her request with the correct security token. What was wrong with her?
    She already knew the answer. That fucking boy was distracting her.
    And she never allowed herself to be distracted, especially when working on a project. And by a boy, of all things.
    Indiya slapped the bulkhead in annoyance, which – in the absence of gravity – had the effect of propelling her backward to float toward the opposite wall at a crawling pace.
    Frakk that McEwan. What was it about him?
    Sighing, she bowed to reason and did something she should have done weeks ago. She used auxiliary memory crystals in her head to replay memories of the seventeen year old Marine at the same time as running a medical self-diagnosis.
    She was testing for love.
    Arun was the same age as the three boys in ‘B’ crew’s freak squad. Furn, Finfth, and Fant all had a permanent adolescent crush on Indiya. Unlike Indiya and Loobie, the three boys had been orphaned as infants, taken in and experimented upon by the reserve captain, who especially prized Furn and Fant because they were brothers. The ancient Jotun had renamed them: Furnace-Shield, Food-Synthesizer, and Fusion-Plant, double names like the Jotuns’ bifurcated nouns. And nouns not verb, which made them girls’ names. She’d never dared to ask the reserve captain whether she’d deliberately burdened Furn, Finfth and Fant with such feminine names.
    Maybe their lack of a normal childhood explained why all three were so emotionally needy. The boys had worshiped Indiya since they were young kids, an attitude that had matured over the years, taking on a sexual angle.
    The one augmentation that was consistent between all the specials was their ability to communicate hormonal messages via skin contact. The result was the freaks could never keep their feelings secret. Indiya did not desire any of the boys, and they knew the platonic nature of her affection down to the last, brutal decimal point.
    At eighteen, Fant was slightly older and prided himself on his