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from their harnesses during the shuttle’s thirty-minute hop to Bonaventure . The same questions had obsessed them for the two days since the Marines had boarded and captured the Amilxi ship. Indiya filtered them out. There would be plenty of time for that soon enough.
    Right now it was their companions on the shuttle who demanded her attention, the silent squad of Marines sent to relieve their comrades guarding the captured ship. Their presence – that sense of barely concealed threat – bent Indiya’s gaze their way and raced her pulse. They terrified her.
    The other specials weren’t so concerned. They didn’t know as much about the Marines as Indiya.
    One of the special assignments allocated to Indiya by the reserve captain was to mine thousands of years’ worth of recorded battles, trying to come up with improved ship tactics. An early truth she had uncovered was that the very existence of human Marines was an aberration. Most races used combat-bots rather than living soldiers. For all the hardening of their redesigned bodies, human Marines could never withstand the same acceleration as a robot. Why, then, did the White Knights raise a Human Marine Corps?
    There were many theories, of course, but the most popular was that humans were cheaper to build and far simpler to maintain than bots.
    She laughed humorlessly. When Mamma had been a girl, Beowulf had contacted a human terraforming civilization. Their distant ancestors had been supplied with a survival dome and self-replicating machinery, and then left alone for a few centuries to get on with the job of transforming a barren, poisonous rock into a world fit for White Knight colonists.
    The White knights loved the simplicity of low maintenance solutions.
    Now she was staring the reality face-to-face, clamped against the bulkhead opposite, stacked in neat rows of six up halfway to the forward hatch. They reinforced Indiya’s personal explanation behind the Marine Corps’ existence: humans were the most violent species in the galaxy.
    Motionless and silent inside their metal armor, the Marines appeared scarcely human. With the tubes, internal pouches and feeds taking care of many essential bodily functions, and the suit AI chips acting like a superhuman XO that really ran the show, the Marines were more cyborg than human.
    She shivered. As soon as the Marine sergeant had verified his squad was in place, they had all… switched off . Without a purpose to activate them, they were just waiting in standby mode.
    Which only made her boy, McEwan, even more mysterious. Back when she’d put him into cryo, something about her had shocked him. His robot mask had slipped – just long enough for her to glimpse the human underneath.
    But this lot, hanging on the wall like bats, just gave her the creeps.
    Petty Officer Lock and the other normals called Indiya’s group freaks, but these Marines had ceased to be human generations ago.

— Chapter 10 —
    The harness straps tugged at Indiya’s shoulders, and her stomach cartwheeled as the shuttle pivoted around 180 degrees.
    Her pressure suit was climate controlled, but the air inside suddenly felt very chilly.
    The bulkhead at her back creaked in protest and rumbled with power as the engines applied maximum thrust.
    “Merde!” she said, but no one was listening.
    The shuttle’s flight plan was to accelerate for nine minutes to reach cruising speed, coast for ten, and then swivel around to use its main engine to brake.
    Only six minutes had elapsed since they’d left the Beowulf . Something was wrong.
    She set her helmet comm to general broadcast. “Hello? Pilot? Please advise status.”
    There was no reply. On this shuttle she was cargo, not crew. The occupants of the flight cabin either weren’t listening or were too busy.
    “What’s going on?” one of the Marines asked her. Not being a part of their suit-to-suit Battle Net, it took a while to work out which one was talking. He was several rows up, waving at