But maybe that hadn’t been the whole reason, Solomon had to question himself. He still carried the shame of causing Matty Sozer’s death. He still carried the shame of failing the entire Outcast regiment.
Why am I so eager to throw my own life away? Solomon was forced to ask himself. There was a time, on the streets of New Kowloon, that he would never have dreamed of such a decision.
“There’s always a choice,” he murmured to himself. It had been his mantra, after all. There was always a way to get out from under an obstacle. Always a way to play the odds and win. That was what a lifetime of criminality had taught him.
I have to be cleverer than everyone else, he remembered the final part of the self-taught mantra.
“Quiet,” said an appreciative voice behind him, and Solomon flinched. He had forgotten that the brainwashed Ambassador Ochrie was even still there. When he turned, he saw that she was half-smiling, seeming to enjoy the relative stillness of the cave without Solomon and Kol and Rhossily shouting at each other.
And without the distant snarls and scrapes of those creatures, either, Solomon admitted.
“Come on, Ambassador,” he sighed wearily as he reached to guide her elbow. “Let’s try to get you somewhere safe, shall we?”
Although just where that could be in all of Confederate space was a mystery to Solomon just then.
12
Hulk
“We’ve got residual power,” Ratko breathed, standing outside of a very different airlock. One that led from a gutted viewing lounge into the belly of the Invincible itself.
“Do it,” Jezzy said from one side of the corporal as her eyes slid past the bulk of Malady to the rest of the ruined room. The viewing lounge would have contained one large window on the external hull, but the glass had broken during the Ru’at assault.
Now, Jezzy saw the eerie normality of the lounge—the low chairs and tables that were fixed into the floors, still with their faux-leather coverings in place. Cups still drifted through the lounge, and the drinks dispenser machine still sat against the wall, its lights cheerily announcing all the different sorts of beverages it could make.
Jezzy and the others had magnetized their boots and could walk freely amidst the floating detritus. It was a little like being underwater, Jezzy thought.
Blip! A blinking orange light initiated over the narrow airlock door, flashing slowly at first, and then glowing brighter and brighter and turning green as the airlock room flushed out the atmosphere on the other side.
“Good to go,” Ratko said, disengaging the wires that she had attached to the door panel and packing them away into her power suit’s utility belt.
The door hissed open, and the remaining members of Gold Squad stepped into a small oval antechamber, the airlock hissing shut behind them.
Initiating Airlock Pressure… The words flashed over the interior door as jets of steam rushed into the room around their feet.
The only problem they had to face now, of course, was captured by Corporal Ratko when she said, “The Invincible is big. Any clues where we might find the oxygen and the munitions lockers?” She turned to look at her acting squad commander.
I don’t know, Jezzy had to admit to herself. But she knew a way to find out. “Malady? Have you still got that thing I gave you?”
She was referring, of course, to the data-stick that General Asquew had given her at the Plutonian station of The Last Call. It was the general’s last act before sending Gold Squad on their way, and it contained all the high-level command functions and codes for the entire Marine Corps—or as much of it as the general was responsible for, anyway.
“What’s that?” Ratko asked as Malady ejected the small data-stick from the side of his wrist and handed it delicately to Jezzy.
“Dangerous,” Wen replied. She was still shocked by the very existence of this thing in her hands. She could understand why the general had handed it over, but that still did not make it normal for a woman like her—an ex-Yakuza enforcer, at that—to be holding the keys to the castle.
Asquew thought that she might die, Jezebel remembered. In fact, her superior officer might already be dead for all she knew, along with Administrator Ahmadi and a few hundred remaining Marines. They had been attempting to drive the cyborgs and the Ru’at ships back from their invasion of human space—too late now, of course, Jezzy thought dully when she considered just where they were—and there was no guarantee that Asquew would have made it out of there in one piece.
So, she gave me the command codes knowing that I was leaving the battlefield and might be able to put it to use, Jezzy remembered. The general had told her that there was a secret military outpost she could get to. A last stand of loyal forces, if it came to it.
But Jezzy wasn’t interested in that—not yet, anyway. She was fairly sure that any data-stick with that much power would also have the schematics of the Invincible in it, or would be able to pull them from the Invincible’s computers.
Jezzy inserted the data-stick into the small reader on her own belt and waited as the auto-play program loaded.
Loading External Data….
Warning! Ultra-Black Code Access Required!
“Dammit!” Jezzy hissed in alarm. Had General Asquew forgotten to give her the codewords necessary to open this thing? She panicked before an instant later…
Ultra-Black Code Access Granted. Special Administrator Privileges Loading…
Contents:
Fleet | Personnel | Munitions | Bases | Operational Parameters
Jezzy breathed for a moment. This was it. The keys to the kingdom. As tempted as she was to check into the Operations and Bases tabs, Jezzy refused to do so. Not until she had to. For now, she clicked on the ‘Fleet’ tab to find:
Near-Earth Fleet: Composition | Orders | Analysis
Rapid Response Fleet 1: …
Rapid Response Fleet 2: …
Each one of the group types had the same rundown of ship and vehicle types under the ‘composition’ tabs, as well as a long list of specific orders and function commands available for every type of vehicle, and finally an analysis section that appeared to be a log of design and use notes, if anything, Jezzy saw.
She could see discussions about the use of a flight of CMC fighters in terrestrial and near-orbit missions, or the predicted efficacy of a battleship in various scenarios. Along with this came the technical schematics as well as the standard equipment loads for each vehicle.
“Aha.” Jezzy grinned as she read down the controls on the inside of her helmet.
Rapid Response Fleet 1: Cruisers, Command Vessels, and Battle-Carriers: CMC Invincible.
There she was. The very ship they were standing on. A selection of images appeared in front of Jezzy’s eyes, picked out in faint green lines. “I got the schematic,” she said, ignoring Ratko’s confused expression as she found the three-dimensional line image and zeroed in on where they were.
“We’re at Floor 23, just about the crew and recreation areas,” she announced as the steam stopped hissing and the lights above the internal bulkhead door blinked and flickered from their warning-orange to okay-green.
“Straight ahead, Ratko, first right. With any luck, there will still be power to the elevators,” Jezzy said, following the three-dimensional image in the file as the door hissed open.
And they walked straight into a waiting cyborg.
“Frack!” Corporal Ratko, who was the Marine on point, managed to spin her Jackhammer up to slam it into the cyborg’s bulky arm just as it fired its strange particle-beam weapon.
FZZZT! The purple, white, and blue beam of energy seared over their heads thanks to Ratko’s quick reflexes and discharged itself on the far wall, creating a black scorch mark and a mess of bubbling, melting metal.
Thank frack that didn’t go through the airlock! Jezzy thought as she dropped to one knee, pulling her hardened steel blade from its holster by her boot. She really wished that she had her Jackhammer about now, but she also knew that this knife
might be just as effective.
PHOOOM!
Ratko had reversed her grip on her own Jackhammer and fired it, point blank, into the thing’s chest. With a shower of sparks and black ichor like machine oil, the thing was shoved backwards into the waiting corridor, the fleshy part of its chest now in tatters, revealing that its innards were a hideous mixture of metal and pipework, all rolled into one.
Had the thing been waiting for us? The paranoid thought crossed Jezzy’s mind. It had just been…standing there. As if it had expected them.
Or it had been put on guard, Jezzy thought. She was already moving, crouching under Ratko’s wild swing with her Jackhammer as the cyborg regained its balance.
Pha-BOOM! Another shot from Ratko, but the cyborg was too fast, pushing the Jackhammer to one side just as the corporal had done a moment before. Jezzy tried to close in with the thing, but the swinging arms of both her corporal and the cyborg were keeping her at bay.
Ratko was locked into a hand-to-hand struggle with the much larger cyborg, and Ratko was no combat specialist. Thwack! The thing backhanded her easily against the side of the helmet, earning a resounding clanging noise as she was thrown against the far wall by the force of the thing’s metal tendons.
But that only meant that Jezzy had a clearer line of attack now.
The second lieutenant stepped in as the cyborg was turning to engage with her next, and easily ducked under the creature’s punch.
Close in. Get inside their guard. Jezebel Wen remembered her training, both Yakuza and military, as she straightened up inside the reach of the cyborg’s arms—
Thock!
She slammed the knife up under the creature’s chin. It was the only sure-fire way to disable one of these walking robot creations, she knew. The only weakness they seemingly had was that all their command circuitry or central nervous system, or whatever it was that they really had, was located along the spine and the cortical base where the spine met the head. That was why every cyborg had metal ‘sheathed’ plates running over its spine at the back, but most of them also had a small window of bare flesh at the front of the neck—presumably so the thing could still turn its head, she thought as her blade slid home.
Tzrk! The creature opened its mouth to let out a strange sort of guttural, electronic moan before its body shuddered and it fell to the floor, still shaking but also clearly dying.
“Ratko!” Now able to move forward, Malady had already crossed the space to the corporal’s body to start initiating her external medical systems.
“How badly is she hurt!?” Jezebel cursed herself for not taking the lead. She had the map, after all. What was she even thinking?
Outcast ID: Corporal Ratko (Tech. Sp.)
Health: COMPROMISED (Stable).
“Thank the stars for that,” Jezzy breathed as she saw Ratko’s suit identifiers come up inside her own helmet.
“Administering cortizoidal, 0.4%” Malady intoned as his giant fingers delicately manipulated the small controls on Ratko’s suit.
A cortical system stimulant, Jezzy nodded. It was actually a naturally occurring enzyme in any human nervous system, but the Confederacy had long since discovered how to synthesize it, and it had been added to the power armor of the Marine Corps ever since.
“Hgnh… What the hell!?” Corporal Ratko suddenly sat bolt upright, her teeth bared in a rictus grin as the tiny amount of nervous system stimulant was carried through her bloodstream.
“Corporal. Focus. Do you know where you are?” Jezzy asked as her sharp eyes scanned the woman’s armor. There was a hairline crack across her faceplate where the cyborg had backhanded her, but Jezzy didn’t think it had broken the air seal of her suit…yet.
Nothing looks broken. Not even a graze on her forehead, Jezzy was relieved to see, and even more relieved when Ratko responded in her much more normal Ratko sort of way.
“Of course I know where I am, sir. I am on a suicide mission, picking apart the bones of the best ship the CMC has, while a sea of alien monsters is trying to kill me,” she said, not very impressed at all. “Now let me get up before I fall asleep!”
Maybe giving the already highly-strung Corporal Ratko cortical stimulants wasn’t such a great idea, Jezzy had to wonder as she picked up the woman’s gun and handed it to her. “You fit to move?”
“That’s what I said, wasn’t it?” Ratko hissed through gritted teeth, already hauling herself to her feet.
“I’m not going to argue with you. Behind me,” Jezzy ordered. “Malady, you’re rear-guard.”
“Aye, sir,” the metal man intoned.
“I don’t see why I have to be in the middle…” Ratko muttered, which Jezzy thought was probably exactly why she had to be the one in the middle.
Motion Sensor Alert!
Jezzy’s suit commands blinked at her, and, in the top right corner of her vision, her power armor’s basic scans showed a ninety-degree fan arc in front of her, with three red blips moving toward their position.
Jezzy looked out through her faceplate. The corridor was long, meeting a T-junction at the far end, but there was another corridor joining this on their right before that.
“You guys picking up company?” Jezzy asked, breaking into a run as she led her team down the first righthand turn.
“Loud and clear. Twenty meters,” Malady stated.
“They were waiting for us! It was a trap!” Ratko stated emphatically. Jezzy wondered how long it would take for the cortizoidal to wear off, so her corporal could return to her normal cantankerous personality rather than this super-heated one.
“I don’t think so.” Jezzy scanned the next corridor. Another T-junction at the far end, and on the left, the service elevator that she had been looking for. “I think the same thing happened to the Invincible that happened to the Oregon. I think the cyborgs swarmed it at the same time as the Ru’at jump-ships attacked it, and the cyborgs broke in and…” And what, deactivated?
“They act like drones.” Jezzy hit the wall by the side of the elevator, nodding at Ratko to get the door working. This part of the Invincible had residual power, which meant that the overhead lights were a dull warning orange, and most of the non-critical systems would be offline.
“At least I can be useful,” Ratko grumbled, attaching the wires from one of her technical modules at her belt and flicking through the commands on the data-screen by the side of the elevator.
“Isolating power controls to this level. Lights. Doors…” Ratko said.
“Incoming nine o’clock,” Malady stated calmly as Jezzy raised her head. Two cyborg forms turned around the end of the corridor they had just run down, raising their particle-beam hands.
Phada-phada-phada-BOOM! Malady had already discharged his Jackhammer on burst fire, filling the corridor with round after round of the heavy shells in the direction of the approaching cyborgs. Many of Malady’s shots missed, but the scatter-shot approach meant that some hit, spinning them on the hips or driving one of them back.
FZZZT! The lines of burning blue-white particles seared the air, but the impacts of Malady’s munitions meant that they missed, burning holes into the walls and causing the lights to explode in a shower of sparks.
“Isolate elevators!” Ratko shouted, flinching with every sound of particle-beam nearby as the silver doors to the elevator hissed open.
“In!” Malady shoved Ratko inside, and then followed her as more lines of burnt energy sought them out.
FZZT! The doors were closing interminably slowly as one laser shot slammed through the gap, rupturing the metal wall of the elevator just a few inches from Jezzy’s head.
“Down!” Jezzy commanded mostly for Ratko’s benefit, as it didn’t really seem as though Malady could crouch or duck in his full tactical suit. Jezzy lunged forward, dragging her finger down the internal data-screen all the way to the bottom as the doors closed, and the elevator started to hum as it moved.
Phew. Jezzy slumped back against the wall. “That was close. Too close.”
<
br /> “We could have taken them.” Ratko was wrapping her wires back into her belt module and picking up her gun.
“Maybe. Probably. But we haven’t got the time to waste, remember.” Jezzy checked her mission clock.
MISSION ANALYSIS: Lifeline.
ETA to the Invincible… 4 mins 36 seconds. COMPLETE
ETA to objective 1 (oxygen tanks)… 8 minutes.
ETA to objective 2 (munition locker)… 10 minutes.
Deployment and return to scout… 44 minutes.
Forty-four minutes? Jezzy saw in alarm. She’d managed to add almost fifteen minutes to her estimated schedule. That left Willoughby almost an hour out there alone, with a diminishing air supply.
“And we don’t know whether or how these cyborgs can communicate with the jump-ships, either.” Jezzy regained her breath. “Many more encounters like that, and we might get one of those Ru’at ships coming over to check out what all the fuss is about.”
“They’re welcome.” Ratko was grinning savagely, clearly not having come down from her powerful stimulants yet.
“No, Ratko. They’re really not…” Jezzy said, just as the roof of the elevator exploded with noise.
FZZT! A line of burning purple burned through the ceiling right in front of Ratko, who screamed.
“Frack! They broke into the elevator shaft!” Jezzy cried out as her hand once again went to the empty holster at her side. Dammit!
Fzzzzzzt! The line of fire cut through the metal roof like a welding torch, its glowing edges peeled back by chrome fingers. They were opening it up like a tin can!
Pha-BOOM! BOOM! Jezzy felt worse than useless, as she had to wait while Malady and Ratko opened fire at the ceiling.
No, not useless. She threw herself to the elevator’s data-screen, looking at the small green circle sweep down and down, past the different levels of the Invincible.
Command Code Page 8
