There was a shrug from the top end of the line.
“Pretty!” Ochrie sighed next to him, her voice so sudden that Solomon flinched, and looked up—
—to see a singular speck of one of the glowing pieces of alien pollen drift through the air where he had been standing and land on the side of one of the nearest mounds of moss and leaves.
“Oh.” Solomon felt suddenly foolish. Was that it? Was that what he was so worried about? It felt like being worried about the rain or snow. A natural phenomenon that didn’t mean him any harm, and there was nothing that he could do about it anyway…
Hsssttt!
The sound, again. Solomon turned abruptly, his hands itching for the gun that would have accompanied him everywhere as an Outcast Marine. But where did it come from? The squad commander’s eyes scanned the solid pillars of vegetation that stood all around them. Nothing was moving, apart from the delicate fronds and tendrils of the strange alien plants.
“I heard it too, this time,” Mariad whispered, and Solomon could see that her eyes were wide with fear.
“Come on, whatever it is, we should be going,” Kol muttered as he stood up.
“Pretty,” Ochrie said, and Solomon followed her with his eyes as she took a step toward the nearest pillar of vegetation.
“Ambassador, wait!” Solomon said urgently, instinctively. I don’t like this. There’s something out there. Something alien.
It was then that Solomon saw just what the ambassador was talking about. The pillar of vegetation they were walking past, the very same one that they had seen the speck of glowing spore hit, was starting to glow itself.
“Uh…people?” Solomon cleared his throat nervously.
The glow was unlike the pollen-spore glow in some ways. It was the same soft yellow-white, soothing to look at, but it was not made up of a rising cloud of small flecks. Instead, it was coming from inside the heart of the vegetation pillar itself.
“What the…” Kol said, stepping closer, and his confusion was echoed on the face of the Imprimatur of Proxima and, Solomon was sure, his own.
Not Ambassador Ochrie, however. She was staring raptly at the column of grasses, mosses, and leaves, as if seeing an active stellar nebula for the very first time.
The glow started to brighten, growing stronger from inside the column itself before diminishing again. When the cycle had completed, the pillar was once again just a static rise of vegetable matter. It did not look as though anything strange or ethereal had happened.
But then it glowed again, and again Solomon and the others saw the glow become brighter, brighter still, and then fade.
It’s like a heartbeat, Solomon had the sudden, incontrovertible belief. “I don’t like this at all,” he was saying, reaching out to lay a restraining hand on Ochrie’s shoulder. “We have to go, Ambassador,” he murmured to the entranced woman. “We should leave whatever this is alone.” He was about to add an obligatory ‘the Ru’at commands it’ to the end of that sentence, but Mariad’s voice interrupted him.
“What is that?” she said, with far more alarm than before.
“What is what-?” Solomon said, looking at the glowing pillar to see, just as it reached its crescendo of brightness, that there was a…shadow inside the glow.
What? Impossible! Solomon involuntarily took a step back, his heart hammering. For some reason, it reminded him of test tubes. Test tubes and laboratories, with things floating in solutions.
The glow seemed to be generated from the heart of the plant matter and was shining through the leaves, brackets, and frills in the same way that bright sun turns normal Earth trees into an almost translucent, viridian glow. But inside that glow was a silhouette, a shape that was curiously elongated and twisting, like a giant tadpole or a creature of some kind.
“I-I don’t understand,” Mariad said. “How is that even possible?”
“It’s the Ru’at.” Solomon cleared his throat nervously. This time when he set his hand on the ambassador’s shoulder, he firmly cajoled her away from the glowing thing in front of her.
“Well, you’re not going to like this,” he heard the ex-Outcast Marine Kol say, and the alarm in his voice was such that Solomon turned immediately to see what had caused it.
All the pillars of vegetation around them were glowing now, at different times and at different levels of brightness, but they were surrounded by the ethereal radiance.
And inside every one, visible when their glows had reached its crescendo, was the same large, squiggling shadow.
“You know what, everyone?” Solomon’s voice sounded small in his ears. “I think we’ve tarried here too long…”
8
Manual Unassisted Propulsion
What if this doesn’t work? What if the Invincible was too badly damaged to have anything salvageable? Jezebel Wen’s mind was full of questions as she pushed off from the airlock of the Marine Scout.
Behind her in the airlock waited Corporals Ratko and Malady—Ratko because she promised she could find something out of that hulk, and Malady not so much for any particular engineering proficiencies, but because just having the sight of the large man-tank in his full tactical suit made Jezzy feel a whole heap better about life.
“Checking suit controls,” Jezzy said over the suit’s gold channel, directly linked to just her squad and set to close, narrow-band broadcast. Inside the Scout remained Willoughby, who had enough basic training to fly simple maneuvers if she had to. Jezzy prayed that she didn’t.
But as soon as we’re more than a few meters away, we’ll lose telemetries on her, Jezzy reminded herself. It wasn’t something that she liked to do at all, leaving one of her squad members in the dark without a way to contact her, but she told herself that it was necessary.
We have no idea what the Ru’at jump-ships are capable of, she reflected. Even though Ratko had assured her that a ship the size of the Ru’at’s would probably not even register three slow-moving bodies through the debris field, Jezzy was still taking no chances. Their communications were set to as quiet as possible, and they weren’t even using thruster packs to propel themselves toward the distant Invincible.
POWER ARMOR: Active.
USER ID: 2LT Wen (Ac. Sq. Comm.)
COMPANY: Outcast, Rapid Response Fleet.
SQUAD IDENTIFIER: Gold.
SQUAD TELEMETRIES: Active.
Bio-Signatures: GOOD.
Atmospheric Seals: GOOD.
Chemical, Biological, Radiological Sensors: ACTIVE.
Oxygen Tanks: FULL (6hrs).
Oxygen Recycle System: WORKING (1hr).
“Good, all set,” Jezzy murmured, as much to calm her own nerves as to her three-man team. There was something deeply troubling about deciding to fly off into the vacuum of space, where the only weapons you had were your Jackhammer rifles against alien ships that could punch holes through dreadnaught-class Marine battleships.
This was why Jezzy wanted to do this one by the book. Full suit operational. She needed her team to know precisely what they were going to do, when, and where.
MISSION ID: Lifeline.
MISSION PARAMETERS:
Traverse wreckage field to the CMC Invincible…
Locate salvageable oxygen tanks and return to Marine scout…
Locate additional salvageable material as needed (lead: Ratko)…
Locate CMC Invincible heavy munitions locker…
Jezzy had planned their mission herself, running her command codes through her suit to update the squad with what she expected them all to do.
“Everyone locked and loaded?” she breathed, watching the holographic overlay of controls and analysis that played across the inside of her helmet.
“Aye, Commander,” both Ratko and Malady intoned.
Outcast ID: Corp. Ratko (Tech. Sp.)
Health: GOOD.
Outcast ID: Corp. Malady (Full Tac.)
Health: GOOD.
Jezzy hung onto the edge of the airlock hatch on the back of the scout, wait
ing for any sign of danger or change of course from the distant Ru’at jump-ships. If they had spotted their movement or overheard their communications, they did nothing about it.
Maybe we really are too insignificant for them to worry about, Jezzy hoped.
She leaned over the edge, looking down into the small airlock, and gave a thumbs-up to the two faces behind their faceplates below. First, Ratko pushed off, grabbing onto Jezzy’s outstretched hand as she cleared the airlock, for her commanding officer to swing her around next to her, grabbing the rails that were built on the external hull of any Marine Corps ship.
Next climbed Malady, twisting his prodigious bulk over the lip of the airlock as gracefully as a gymnast, to hold onto the rails on Jezzy’s other side.
“Okay, good. Link up and take a deep breath, people. And look sharp. I want to know the instant one of those Ru’at jump-ships changes course,” she said as she spooled out the poly-filament wire from her suit’s utility belt, clipping the end onto Ratko’s belt, with Ratko passing her own climbing wire to clip onto Malady. None of them would fly alone out here, and Jezzy hoped that their combined momentum would help them move faster to their target.
MISSION ANALYSIS: Lifeline.
ETA to the Invincible… 4 mins 36 seconds.
ETA to objective 1 (oxygen tanks)… 10 minutes.
ETA to objective 2 (munitions locker)… 16 minutes.
Deployment and return to ship… 25 minutes.
Acting Squad Commander Jezzy had to guess just how long it would take to reach every mission objective, but she had purposefully given them a tight schedule. The chances of something going wrong or of them being discovered would increase the longer that they spent out there, and spending half an hour out of the relative safety of the ship already sounded too long.
“Let’s do this,” she said, nodding to Malady.
The largest member of their squad had a greater mass than the other two combined, so Jezzy had asked him to push out from the ship first, followed by Ratko and then Jezzy a split-second after.
It was called a ‘Manual Unassisted Propulsion’ maneuver in the training guides, and Jezzy had only ever practiced it in zero-G simulators before. That had been way back on Ganymede—when Jupiter’s moon still had a Marine Corps training facility on it, and not just a blackened heap of metal.
But even then, Jezzy had only ever practiced it a couple of times, as it required a lot of space to perfect. But she knew that both Ratko and Malady must have also practiced the maneuver, and Malady—who had once been a full Marine before getting busted down to the lowly Outcasts—must have more experience than anyone.
Malady’s greater mass helped pull the two women behind him, attached by the thin cable that stretched between them. As his trajectory slowed, first Ratko passed him by, the cable going slack and then starting to tighten once more as centrifugal force pushed them apart.
At the maximum stretch of the cable, Ratko and Malady started to circle around each other according to Newtonian principles—just as now Jezzy passed Ratko, and the cycle began again. The maximum stretch of Jezzy’s cable pulled down the line, which converted to a ‘push’ for the much larger Malady at the far end.
And then they were off, a trifecta of cartwheeling bodies, using each other’s momentum to cross the vacuum. The beauty of the ‘Manual Unassisted Propulsion’ maneuver was that it kept energy within their three-body system. It didn’t allow any one of them to completely lose their momentum and come to a halt, but every pull converted into a push for someone else.
The downside, though, was that it resulted in spinning and twirling over and over, where even the most hardened Marine with hours of low-gravity training would start to feel nauseated.
Suit Injector System Activated: Anti-Nausea Application…
One of little alert lights on the inside of Jezzy’s helmet lit up indicating that the suit had detected abnormal signals from her metabolism, had diagnosed the cause, and had remedied it all in the space of a heartbeat. Jezzy felt a small pinch of pain around her abdomen as the power armor’s array of medical injectors delivered their payload straight into her bloodstream. Within a few moments, her stomach had settled, and her mind felt clearer.
“Report! Anyone got eyes on the Ru’at?” Jezzy asked.
ETA to the Invincible… 2 mins 16 seconds.
Jezzy could see the spinning bodies of her fellow Gold Squad members in front of her, and behind them, the whirl of stars. Her view was suddenly blacked out every now and again as they passed a piece of wreckage from the First Rapid Response Fleet.
Malady had run the equations on their flight, and all reason and sense had told him that as long as nothing changed too drastically in the debris field, this flight would take them straight to the Invincible.
They swung past pieces of hull plating and engine carriages that could still be identified, as well as much more obscure pieces of wreckage that could not. Jezzy had the sudden memory of the debris field that she herself had created near Pluto, meaning to slow the Ru’at jump-ships’ attack. It hadn’t particularly worked, as the Ru’at had just seeded the wreckage with their own cyborgs, who had used it as cover before performing a hostile boarding procedure against the Marine Corps battleship known as the Oregon.
Is this what all of space is going to look like now? Jezzy found herself thinking a little dramatically. Everywhere the Ru’at were found, would there be this kind of picture beside them?
As Jezzy spun, her darkest fears turned what she and the others were flying through from the scene of a particular battle to a symbol of what was awaiting all of humanity in the future.
If we let the Ru’at get away with it, she admitted.
Jezzy imagined all near-Earth space—the busiest space lanes in the entire Confederacy—being nothing more than a metal and ceramic asteroid field, made up of the dead and broken bits of human civilization.
Was that what all of Sol, all of the Milky Way, the entire galaxy was going to look like in a few years’ time?
“I got one!” Ratko said enthusiastically as she spun past Jezzy. Jezzy saw her mime a direction further away as her shaking, revolving voice sounded in her ear.
“Three o’clock. Wait, no, twelve… Ten…” Ratko said as they cartwheeled through the air. “Not changing course,” Jezzy was finally relieved to hear as they spun closer and closer to their target.
The CMC Invincible was the flagship of the First Rapid Response Fleet, and the usual home for Brigadier General Asquew—before she had gone to lead the defense of Pluto. Every CMC fleet had a flagship, and they were always dreadnaughts—vast golden and steel pyramids, like entire cities floating in space.
If anyone had asked Jezzy a year ago if she thought whether a CMC dreadnaught could ever be disabled, let alone damaged so badly that the crew had to abandon their ship, then the ex-Yakuza enforcer would have laughed in their faces.
The dreadnaughts were big. Pyramids of metal that were the largest achievement of the Confederate Marine Corps, though not the largest vessel in Confederacy, which would be the super-massive deep-field station-ships. But the dreadnaught class weren’t much smaller and functioned as entire stations and habitats, as well as devastating arsenals of power. As far as Jezzy was aware, the Martian insurgency was the first time that the dreadnaughts had been used in front-line battle, and each one was capable of decimating several major cities at once.
We should have won this battle, Jezzy thought as she was in her ‘slow’ part of the cycle, waiting for Malady at the extreme end of the cartwheel to complete his arc. She looked at the shattered Invincible and wondered just what could have happened to it.
It no longer looked like a giant gold and steel pyramid anymore. The last time that Jezzy had seen it, the general’s flagship had been pointing its peak at the planet below them, as flights of CMC fighters had been launching from the holds at the far, larger square base of the craft.
Now it appeared a little like a crumpled hat. The cone at the peak was st
ill intact, and there was still a baleful red light glowing from its very tip—a sign that she still had power, at least—but the rest of it was a mess. A great, ragged hole was torn from its side, ruining its equilateral shape. Jezzy could see entire levels up and down the structure that had burst apart or crumpled.
The same thing that happened to the Oregon, Jezzy realized. Decompression events that had been mostly contained by the superstructure of the dreadnaught itself. This meant that it was like looking at a ladder with some of the rungs missing. Entire lines of hull had disappeared or crumpled, revealing the intricate spider-web architecture of the outer hull framework and the inner hull.
On the Oregon, that had been caused by the cyborgs burning their way in, Jezzy reminded herself. Entire floors and levels had lost their atmospheric pressures, and the resulting strain on the Oregon had caused parts of it to crumple inwards or explode out.
Cyborgs, Jezzy’s mind prodded her again, just as her line suddenly went unexpectedly taut—
“Huh?” She looked, to see that Malady was completing his return arc, and the silver line was starting to slacken as it transferred its momentum to Corporal Ratko.
But Ratko’s rear line, which should have stretched from her belt to Jezzy’s, was languidly swimming loose in space.
What?
Jezzy felt the momentum of the recent snag take her, rolling her over and over—away from the others and away from the Invincible. The culprit was a small, fast-moving piece of highly polished metal, barely as big as Jezzy’s gauntlet, that had amazingly managed to catch her cable at just the right moment of extreme tension.
The cable that should have connected Lieutenant Wen to Corporal Ratko had been torn in two. Jezzy was floating free in the vacuum of space, without any propulsion mechanism at all.
Command Code Page 5
