Command Code

by James David Victor

  “A farm?” Rhossily gasped.

  She was right, Cready saw, but it wasn’t a farm with normal human crops and a picket fence, and with the sorts of agriculture that Solomon had grown up around. Been bred around, he corrected himself sourly.

  Instead, below him he could see that this vast space was given over to different types of chaotic vegetation, the majority of it rising no higher than a few feet from the cavern floor.

  “But that’s impossible.” Solomon stated. “Martian soil cannot support complex organisms. Everyone knows that…”

  “Just like faster-than-light travel is impossible?” Kol murmured. “This is what the Ru’at are doing. This is why they built their colony here.” He pointed down at the nearest patch of vegetation. Solomon could see a very fine layer of green-blue material covering every available surface, sprouting into gray and silver-flecked brackets the more concentrated it got.

  “That stuff is lichen. Or algae. Something like that.” Kol gestured. On the cavern ceiling far above them hung great banks of strip lights on chains, which Solomon saw was the source of the orange, yellow, and bluish light. Kol must have seen his ex-commander looking and nodded upward in their direction.

  “It turns out that good old chemical lights provide the best wavelengths for what the Ru’at want to grow. Blue shift for germination and younger sprouts, red shift for foliage growth…”

  “But what is it the Ru’at is growing?” Mariad peered below her. “I grew up on an alien world, remember, and not even on Proxima have I seen anything like this…”

  “I don’t know. But it’s doing something to the planet. It’s turning its dust and sand into soil.” Kol moved to the edge of the wall and tapped on the rock. “Look…”

  The humans followed him and saw that there were strange blemishes on the rock, like chemical stains—only they were concentrating on the seams of iron ore deposit and following them. As the humans watched, Kol scratched the surface of the whitened blemishes with his penlight, and they crumbled and flaked to the ground, releasing a mushroom, yeasty sort of a smell.

  Like dirt. Earth, Solomon thought as he turned his attention back to the farming cavern. The algae, or lichen or fungus or whatever it was, made up the overwhelming majority of the plant material, but out in the center, and dotted here and there, rose mounds of denser foliage. Giant, waxy green sorts of leaves with curious tendril-like climbers.

  “What’s that stuff?” Solomon pointed.

  Kol shrugged. “I have no idea. I only came down here once, and it freaked me out, so I never went down again. I think I only just realized what it was the Ru’at have been doing.”

  Solomon was about to ask him what it was, but then the realization struck him too. He had always been a fast learner, after all.

  The lichen, spreading along Mars’s vast iron ore seams. Eating the iron oxide up, converting it into nutrients…

  “They’re terraforming Mars,” Solomon said in horror. This is why the Ru’at probe first made landfall where I lived, out in the farmlands of the American Midwest. This was why the place turned into the bio-agricultural epicenter of America. Why AgroMore set up their giant harvesters there…

  The Ru’at were trying to transform this entire star system into a habitat for themselves.

  4

  Fall-Out

  “Ratko, what are the chances of us not being scattered all across Confederate space!?” Jezzy was saying as she swung herself over the back of the command chair and pulled up its firing triggers. They were like two handlebars that slid and locked into place in front of her, with triggers and buttons under the finger grips.

  “Slim at best, sir!” Ratko thumped into place in the pilot’s chair, quickly buckling herself in and pulling the flight stick.

  “Wonderful,” Jezzy growled. What sort of weapons do these scouts have, anyway? She checked the screens on her armrests. “Computer, full tactical command to my chair! Authorization: Second Lieutenant Jezebel Wen, Acting Squad Commander.”

  Jezzy hoped to the stars that General Asquew had seen fit to update the ship’s security protocols.

  Access Granted.

  She did, Jezzy thought with a modicum of relief.

  Loading Tactical and Strategic Display…

  The screens flickered, and then, scrolling down one side of the forward viewing screen, rolled a three-dimensional hologram of the space around them, with a small, perfect replica of the Marine scout picked out in green lines, along with all its available armament packages.

  Marine Scout Class: Viking.

  Forward Guns x2.

  Nosecone Weapons Module: 6 x Propulsion Reaver Torpedoes.

  “Is that it!?” Jezzy burst out. Six torpedoes. Six. She’d have as much chance of hitting the Ru’at jump-ship if she leaned out a window with a slingshot.

  “But at least they’re signal-tracking.” She swiped her hands into the controls, setting the torpedoes to detect heat, electro-magnetic, and for good measure, radio signals. Surely the Ru’at ships would emit at least one of those energy types. Just one would be enough for a torpedo to get a lock on it, but the Ru’at’s engines were far more maneuverable than the torpedoes.

  Especially if it can move off at lightspeed…

  “Where is it?” Jezzy shouted, scanning the hologram for the warning orange blip of the Ru’at ship. But it was nowhere to be seen.

  “I’m kinda busy trying not to have us separated into our constituent atoms right about now, Lieutenant!” Ratko snapped. She wasn’t one to care about the niceties in the middle of a combat zone, Jezzy knew.

  Up ahead, the corona of light around the Marine jump-ship was starting to diminish, and the shaking and shuddering of their own ship was only getting worse.

  Warning! Structural integrity under threat.

  Analysis: Hull plating has T-minus 4 minutes of efficiency at current stressors.

  The words of the computer blared through their interlinked suit telemetries, as well as being projected in large orange letters at the top of the forward viewing screen.

  “What in the frack does that mean?”

  “It means that we’re falling out of jump without the Barr-Hawking field to hold us!” Ratko said as she moved to hit buttons and pull levers.

  “What!?” Jezzy couldn’t speak engineering.

  “Normal ships aren’t designed to go this fast!” Ratko settled for explaining as she hit the thruster controls again.

  Controlled Main Thruster Burn: maximum propellant injection.

  The commands appeared, hovering in the air on the screen for a moment as the scout was thrown forward, and the corona of light around the ship they were chasing grew just a little larger.

  And rather counterintuitively, the scout stopped shuddering.

  “I’m trying to match relative speeds with the jump-ship to keep us inside the Barr-Hawking field. If we slow, we’ll hit the back end of the field and be—”

  THUDUDUDUDHR! The ship shook.

  “Dammit!” Ratko screeched, firing the positional rockets at the same time. Jezzy felt the kick of the propulsion system, and the shaking subsided to a low, rocking tremor, as if the ship itself was a living, terrified creature.

  “How long can we keep this up?” Jezzy said, not looking up as she ran another scanner sweep of the nearby space. But it was no use. The scanners would only pick up what was relative to their ship inside the energy bubble they were falling out of. Outside was a hazy blur.

  That Ru’at ship intercepted us while we were midway through our jump. Jezzy was quite frankly amazed. How could it even scan for the arrival of a Marine jump-ship? How could it move so fast as to intercept them?

  “Oh crap…” Jezzy heard Ratko say, a moment before the shaking started again, and this time, orange warning lights blared all around them. “We haven’t got enough juice!” she shouted.

  “Then we’ll have to get the jump-ship to slow down, won’t we?” Jezzy opened a communications channel to the distant ship ahead, shining in the
flare of bright white and yellow light. It would have almost looked beautiful, like a comet or an angel, Jezzy thought. That is, if the only reason we were looking at it had nothing to do with the fact that we’re going to break apart.

  “Scout to Marine Corps jump-ship! Do you copy? This is Lieutenant Wen of the Outcast Marines, come in! We need you to SLOW DOWN. Repeat: slow down!” Jezzy shouted, and a moment later, the speakers glitched into life.

  “Lieutenant Wen, this is— GZZZRK!” the speakers attempted to say, before crumbing into static.

  “It’s the ion field generated by the Barr-Hawking generators. It’s just too strong. There’s no way—”

  Warning! Incoming Vessel. Unknown Signature.

  The computer warned them a moment before a small, bright spark of light grew larger and brighter in their viewing window. The shuddering of the scout had stopped, but Jezzy had no idea if that was because of Ratko’s skill as a pilot or because the distant Marine jump-ship had heard their distress call and was slowing down. Wen had more immediate concerns, anyway.

  “Weapons, target that incoming craft,” Jezzy said.

  Targeting... Targeting… The words flashed up above their heads, before—

  Unable to Maintain Weapons Lock.

  “No!” Jezzy could have screamed. The Ru’at were either moving too fast, or they might have had their own jamming technology. Jezzy didn’t know. Either way, they were sitting ducks.

  The baleful star of the enemy vessel was growing larger and closer as it tore its own way through the fabric of space-time, toward them. Jezzy was starting to see the glint of metal on its carapace, the shining blur of the obsidian rings that constantly rotated around it…

  “We’re slowing!” Ratko shouted. “They must have heard your message, Lieutenant!”

  But it was already too late for them all. Jezzy sat, helpless to do anything other than witness the tragedy unfolding before them. The Ru’at ship grew larger, until it had progressed from the size of a fingernail to that of a tennis ball, on course to intercept them.

  “That thing must be going fast. It’s catching up with a ship in a jump-field!” Ratko sounded awed and panicked at the same time.

  And then it fired. A thin beam of purple-white light erupted from its nosecone, shooting straight out and forward—

  —and cutting across the bow of the Marine scout, hitting the giant rear wheel of the jump-ship, with the four nodules of massive energy wave generators at the cardinal points.

  The vacuum of space wasn’t supposed to make noise, but even in the quiet, Jezzy’s mind filled in the blanks. She imagined deafening explosions and screams as the line of fire flared brighter for a fraction of a second, describing a taut line of fire between the Marine and the Ru’at ships.

  And then the giant wheel on the back of the jump-ship was breaking apart, and the crazy yellow-white corona of burning photons was stretching and diffusing.

  THUDUDUDUDUDHR!

  The imminent loss of speed contracted the Barr-Hawking field in a heartbeat, and the scout shook as it was thrown about. Jezzy and Ratko bounced in their command chair harnesses, and it felt to the Wen as if a petulant god were trying to shake their skeletons out of their bodies like coins caught in a money-box.

  Ratko screamed.

  This is it. We’re all going to die. I’ve failed everyone. Again… Jezzy’s eyes blurred with tears, but she could still see the Ru’at ship like a hard pinprick of light, growing fainter and fainter as it slowed.

  “Everyone, hold on!” Jezzy shouted, just as their ship was kicked out of the jump-field, shaking and juddering, screens bursting and exploding with sparks.

  And with a squeal of alarms, everything went black.

  5

  Growing Medium

  “Is it okay to even touch this stuff? Mariad Rhossily asked as she picked her way carefully behind Kol.

  The group had made their way down the cut stone steps to the cavern floor, and it was only from down here, surrounded by the high walls of ruddy rock and with his line of sight obscured by mounds of rising vegetation, did Solomon fully understand just how large this place was.

  “When did you say you first came here, Kol?” Solomon said. It was still a temptation to call him ‘Specialist’ or ‘Marine,’ even ‘buddy,’ but Solomon resisted the urge. Kol had automated that transporter to crash-land smack on top of the Ganymede Training Facility, after all…

  It still bugged Solomon. Of course it did. He wouldn’t have made it to squad commander if it didn’t.

  It’s not that I can’t trust him, Solomon thought as he brought up the rear of their little expedition. Kol was on point, then Mariad, and then Ochrie. Solomon hadn’t wanted to leave the only two non-military personnel at the back of the group, especially seeing as one believed the Ru’at to be near-godlike…

  Solomon knew a lot about trust. His old career had all been about abusing other people’s trust, after all. He had seen enough of life in all its desperate, hopeless, back-stabbing, cheating or innocent glory to know that trust wasn’t a finite resource. Some people you can trust in some ways, but not in others, he recalled. Once you got a Yakuza member’s word on something, they would rather die than break it. But that didn’t mean that they wouldn’t just as quickly break you if they were ordered to.

  And then there were people like Matty… It still stung to even think about his closest, his only, friend.

  Matthias Sozer had been his handler, Solomon now recognized. Who would do that to a kid? Solomon thought. Matty had only been a few years older than Solomon, and they had met in their later teen years.

  He was barely a child himself, Solomon now considered. What did anyone know in their early twenties? Admittedly, Solomon Cready had known how to break into safes and hotwire cars and pick locks… But not run a high-level intelligence gathering campaign on the behalf of some shadowy mega-corp and Confederate government alike.

  Which was what Matty had done, he realized. His friend and accomplice had been guiding him on a journey throughout his entire life, or so the Ru’at had made him believe.

  The Ru’at drone was even now sitting in Solomon’s pocket, and he felt the heft and the weight of it. He had an incredible urge to throw it as far and wide as he could, just as if he were playing dodgeball with Matty back in the mid-west.

  No. The ex-thief, now squad commander, resisted the urge. He was still on a mission, of sorts. Even if that mission had once been to deliver Ochrie and Rhossily to the Confederate Council, who, presumably, were all now piles of irradiated dust. Now, Solomon regarded his mission as regrouping with General Asquew. Tell her everything he had seen, everything he had found out about the Ru’at—which wasn’t a lot, admittedly—and of course, to deliver this Ru’at drone to better minds than his.

  But where does Kol fit into that? Solomon’s thoughts cycled back to their starting place. Kol had betrayed the Marine Corps. He had killed a heck of a lot of Outcast Marines.

  They’ll never accept him back into the fold, if that is even what the young guy wants. Solomon pulled a face at his own musings.

  I could trust Matty with my life, so long as I was playing the game according to his plan, he now believed. He wondered if it was the same with Kol. Maybe he could trust the Martian insurgent only so long as Kol thought that he would get his ‘free and brave Mars.’

  Which meant, as far as Solomon could see, that at some point or another, he would have to tell Kol that wasn’t going to happen. Not with him, anyway. It wasn’t that Lieutenant Cready cared one way or another if Mars declared itself a sovereign planet. All the more luck to them, he thought as he carefully stepped around the latest trench of thick, glossy green and alien leaves.

  But right now, the only way to defeat the Ru’at would be to wipe this place off the face of the Red Planet, Solomon thought grimly. A lot of First Martians were going to die. A lot were going to take up arms against the Rapid Response Fleet.

  And Kol would have to choose which brothers he wanted to fi
ght, and possibly die, alongside. Either the Marines, who would kill his fellow freedom fighters, or the Martians, who were brainwashed to serve the Ru’at.

  “Lieutenant, watch it!” Solomon stumbled, pulling up short under Kol’s bark of alarm.

  Solomon looked around in confusion. He had been so deep in thought that he hadn’t realized he’d stepped off the slight dirt path—real dirt! Rich and brown and black like the soil back home—and had walked several meters into the underbrush.

  “Oh, frag…” Solomon looked down. Luckily, the vegetation around this area was still the low-lying blue-green lichen, encrusted with silvery brackets like tree moss. It clustered a little over the top of his boots, and when he retraced his steps, it felt springy and soft.

  Almost good enough to take a nap in, Solomon thought, before shaking his head. That was an insane thought! Why did he think that? He had no idea what properties this alien stuff had. Had the Ru’at brought it with them from another star? Or had they created it? In the same way that AgroMore/NeuroTech/Taranis Industries had created him?

  “You asked when I first came here?” Kol said, his eyes piercing into Solomon’s.

  Sol nodded and saw Kol look away, ashamed.

  Aha! So the boy could feel guilty, after all…

  “I was sixteen,” Kol said.

  “Wait. What?” Rhossily turned back around sharply from where she had been looking out over the alien landscape. “The Ru’at only arrived this year.”

  “That’s, uh…not technically true,” Kol said, again managing to look suitably embarrassed.

  “What!?” the Imprimatur of Proxima stated.