“Where are the others?” Solomon whispered, and he saw the traitor turn his head one way and then the other, scanning the walls.
“I think they were behind there.” Kol nodded to one particular section, proving Solomon’s hypothesis. “They’re alive,” he insisted. “But I don’t know for how much longer.”
Solomon struggled, trying to move, but he couldn’t. He knew that he wouldn’t be able to anyway, but he couldn’t lie there and do nothing. “Then why are you here?” Solomon said. Wherever ‘here’ really was in the Ru’at colony.
“I argued that I had to check on you, in case you swallowed your own tongue or something,” Kol muttered, looking warily around the room at the acres of pristine walls. Or holograms of walls, anyway.
“Well, I guess I should thank you,” Solomon muttered.
“Don’t mention it. I figured if we’re all going to die anyway, then I might as well do something useful,” Kol said, leaning back on his haunches. “Here.” He lifted a simple water bottle to Solomon’s lips. “It’s not going to get any better though, Sol…” he said, showing what he held in his other hand. A fistful of injector pens.
“They said that I had to inject you with these as soon as you woke up, but I reckon that seeing as there’s no one with a gun to the back of my head, I might as well offer you the choice.” Kol waved the injectors. “They said it was painkillers and stimulants.”
“Frack that,” Solomon chuckled, which was also painful. He didn’t know that laughing—even cynical laughing—could be painful. “I trust the Ru’at about as much as I understand them.”
“Heh. Not at all, then,” Kol agreed, putting the injector pens back into his pocket and tipping another dribble of water into Solomon’s mouth.
“He is conscious?” a voice that Solomon recognized called out from the apparently featureless walls. It was Tavin. Or the clone of Tavin, to be precise. “No cognitive deficits?”
“How would I know?” Kol murmured with a shake of his head, before calling out louder, “he always was an idiot, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Gee thanks, Kol,” Solomon said.
“Then step back to behind the line, Kol!” the mysterious voice of Tavin announced.
“Sorry, sir.” The traitor held his old commander’s gaze for a breath. “Looks like this is it. It was a pleasure working with you again, sir,” he muttered, standing up and moving out of Solomon’s view.
“Tavin, you disagreeable piece of space junk!” Solomon shouted with as much strength as he had, which wasn’t a lot. “Tell me what you’re playing at now!”
“You’re in no position to be making demands, Lieutenant,” Tavin’s voice came back. “And anyway, the choice isn’t mine to make. We’re all in the hands of higher powers now.”
“Don’t give me that ‘Ru’at are higher beings’ rubbish,” Solomon said, feeling a sudden shake as all of the magnet clamps de-energized and fell off his ankles and wrists. Groaning, he flopped over to one side and pushed himself up.
“Energy-field activated,” Tavin’s voice said, and suddenly a burning blue and white line, as thick as Solomon’s arm, cut across his vision just a few inches from his nose.
Fzt! Fzt! Fzt! Fzt! The line leapt around the room, where metal rods had risen silently from the floor. Solomon turned and tried to get his legs to move, but he stumbled as the thick line connected all the poles in a many-sided octahedron around the inner circumference of the room.
There was another hiss and sizzle of burning ozone as another ‘rung’ was added to the energy fence, and another, until a fence of particle beams completely ringed Solomon, with him on the inside and Kol crouched against the wall on the far side. Solomon had turned a full circle until he was looking back at where Kol slumped, in the two- or three-meter ‘avenue’ created between wall and fence.
“What the—” Solomon began.
“The injectors, sir?” Kol had drawn them out. “I can throw them over the fence to you—”
“No.” Solomon shook his head. He had meant it when he had said that he was through playing games with these creatures. “If you’re going to try and hypnotize or brainwash me again, then you might as well get it over and done with,” Solomon called out.
“Oh no, Lieutenant. Our masters have declared that they want something very different for you,” Tavin said.
There was a dull blip from the walls themselves, and a long section disappeared to reveal a gallery of sorts. On the top row stood a thick line of Martian-Ru’at cyborgs, and Solomon counted at least nine or ten up there.
On the bottom of the gallery, however, there were just three people—Tavin, Mariad, and Ochrie—and the clone-Tavin was the only one who was standing unaided. The two women were backed onto a metal sheet similar to the one that Solomon had been attached to, only theirs was standing up.
“Ambassador! Imprimatur?” Solomon rushed to that side of the fence, to see that the two women’s eyes were wide and staring straight back at him, but the rest of their bodies, even their heads, were immobile.
“Muscle spasmodics,” Tavin said beside them, even daring to give Solomon a cheery wave.
“If you hurt one hair on their heads, Tavin, I swear to the stars that I will—” Solomon began, feeling the anger rise in his chest again, like a black storm always threatening to capsize his sanity.
“If you survive what comes next, Lieutenant Cready. Or should I call you H21?” Tavin purred back at him.
“That’s not my name,” Solomon hissed.
“Neither is Solomon Cready. The real Solomon Cready died almost a hundred years ago, or haven’t you figured that out yet?” Tavin took a step forward and spoke in a low voice, as if eager to cast the last accusations and insults he could while he still had the chance. “He was the child that the real Augustus Tavin of AgroMore was observing. He died, very unfortunately, of a full-system collapse…”
“You b—” Solomon started to say.
“And you really should have taken those injectors, Solomon—if that is what you like to call yourself. It has the final iteration of Serum 21 in it, developed by my company and the Ru’at right here on Mars. It is the final dose to be administered to the human-Ru’at hybrids.”
“There is nothing in me that is Ru’at,” Solomon said seriously.
Tavin just smiled as he said, “Well, now is your time to find out.”
There was another blip from the opposite side of the room, and this time when Solomon turned, he saw there, high above the fence and the height of his head, a screen. Solomon didn’t know if it was a real, physical screen or a hologram projected like the walls, but it showed the unmistakable jewel of Earth in its center like a blue-green marble, and with it the smaller, bright glow of the Moon. It was still far away in the screen, but Solomon knew this must mean that the Ru’at or their allies had their eyes on his home planet.
“I thought you made a deal with Hausman?” Solomon grumbled, referring to the Commander of the Near-Earth Fleet who had taken control of the Confederacy, called General Asquew a traitor, and announced himself to be Earth’s ‘Commander-in-Chief.’
“In their wisdom, our saviors have decided to initiate the final stage of the plan to elevate the people of Earth,” Tavin said with apparent fervor and glee. “Earth is the home world. The cradle. It is only fitting that it, too, should have the opportunity that the colonies have.”
Solomon’s eyes were drawn to the screen once again as a dark shape eclipsed the Earth in the view of whatever drone or satellite was broadcasting the image.
It was the Ru’at mothership—the very same one that had attacked Proxima, and which Solomon had thought was still stationed on the edges of Confederate space.
Clearly, it wasn’t. The thing was an oval shape of complicated machinery. Solomon saw, for the second time, the strange modular sections of the ship as if it wasn’t one thing at all, but instead was something more like an engine—a collection of rotating, churning, hydraulic, and wired units that moved t
ogether as one. It appeared to have no external hull or shields whatsoever, and instead as it slid by, Solomon could see the many scrapes and impact craters where it had swum through asteroids, comets, and space dust.
I have to get a warning out. Solomon was catalyzed by the sight. But how? It meant that he had to survive. He had to get out of here. He looked at the energy fence that surrounded him, and the line of cyborgs standing, waiting, in the gallery. He couldn’t take them all.
“And now, Solomon Cready, as you seem so insistent to be called, the Ru’at have demanded a very particular fate for you,” Tavin called out. There was a burst of steam from the metal floor a little way off, and, rising on a column of metal into the arena, a stand bearing what looked to be a spear.
“What!?” Solomon looked at it in confusion. The weapon was about half the height that he was, with wide, leaf-like blades at either end so that it resembled a sort of paddle—a murderous one. Along the haft of its center were molded grips so that it could be used in either a two-handed or a singular fashion.
“What do you expect me to do with that?” Solomon frowned at the weapon.
“Personally, H21, I expect you to die, but our saviors want to see just how advanced you have become. How advanced their program of human adjustment has become,” Tavin said smugly as there was another hiss from the floor. This time, at the other end of the arena, a much larger panel broke free from the floor, sliding back as a creature rose on an internal lift.
As the creature crested the floor, Solomon saw the sudden glare of bright blue light from the Ru’at orb in its forehead. The creature rose higher and higher until it towered at some seven and a half feet high. Its skin was a deep, mottled black, brown, ochre, and gray, like the lichen some part of its anatomy had been grown from. Its long, orangutan-like arms reached past its hips and gleamed with metal. Down the line of its back and on the scaffolding around its hips was the strengthened exo-skeleton that Solomon and the others had seen driven into the thing’s body.
Solomon saw its backward jointed legs, similarly clad in silver and assisted with external supports, just as he saw the thing’s face—a wide, protruding lower jaw that was brimming with rows of small shark teeth.
It was the Ru’at cyborg, and Solomon realized that they wanted him to fight it.
18
Sacrifice and Thermo-Dynamics
“Not that wire!”
Jezzy froze with the small set of wire cutters that Corporal Ratko had given her. She was leaning over the open panel into the guts of the ISPBM—the Inter-Stellar Planetary Ballistic Missile—and about to cut one of the light green wires.
“What? I thought you said that this was the safety cutout,” she said, already confused.
The pair were in the nearest bay to the hatch that they had jumped through in the forward area of the Invincible. It looked a little like a long cubicle, with the nuke on its metal bed, waiting to be loaded into the firing tube in the wall in front of them. Ratko was at the singular command desk a few meters away, checking the launch dynamics, when she had suddenly called out.
“The yellow wire, sir, the yellow!” Ratko bustled to her position to easily trace the vines of wires that snaked through the innards of this part of the missile, indicating where a yellow wire met a relay attached to the missile’s wall.
“The safety control system. This connection is pulled apart at launch, usually, but seeing as you don’t want to launch it…” Ratko leaned into the deadly device, rummaged around until she had access, and snipped the wire expertly. “Now, you’re almost ready to blow us all to kingdom come!”
“That wasn’t exactly the point, Corporal,” Jezzy murmured, and then her brain registered what the woman had said. “Almost?”
“We need to arm it.” Ratko pointed at the nosecone.
“What? I thought it was already primed,” Jezzy said.
“Primed means it has active propulsion systems in place. It can be fired,” Ratko explained, already bustling to the front end of the missile, and with a handheld motorized screwdriver, started to unfix the panels. “Arming it is something different again. You really don’t know that much about technology, do you?” Ratko shook her head as she got the cone panel to flip up. It exposed what appeared to be a set of solid-looking pipes and metal boxes.
“I know it goes bang,” Jezzy murmured. Somehow, this diminutive woman had managed to make her feel like a luddite.
“Yeah, well, you’re not wrong there.” Ratko sighed. “All thermo-nukes rely on the thermo part, right?”
“Heat, I know that,” Jezzy said.
“Not a total loss, then,” Ratko teased. “Thermos are two-part incendiary devices. The radioactive material is further down there.” She waved her motorized screwdriver back down the body of the missile, disturbingly close to where Jezzy already stood. She instinctively backed away a step.
“It’s incredibly dense and incredibly tough. ISPBMs hark right back to the original Alameda tests. There has to be a powerful chemical heat to trigger a cascade in the fissile material,” Ratko explained. “The heat comes from a chemical chain reaction at this end. Small ignition charges ignite highly-explosive compounds, but their energy is forced to further explosive compounds, until it’s hot enough to spark the actual bomb.”
“So, all we have to do is light up that end?” Jezzy nodded to where Ratko stood.
“Yes and no,” Ratko sighed. “This end, as you so eloquently put it, is only connected after launch to the fissile material. Another safety measure to make sure that some crazy Outcast Commander can’t do exactly what it is we’re doing right now.” Ratko tapped the missile with her screwdriver. “We have to manually connect it, which is called arming, got it?”
“Not really, but just so long as you can make it go bang, on a timer, then I’m happy…” Jezzy said.
“Oh, the timer part is easy.” She reached back to the command console to pull her satchel bag of stolen tools, clanking and rummaging until she found a small timer device “How long do you want?”
“Long enough to get out of this hulk and back to Willoughby and Malady,” Jezzy said, thinking: Somehow.
“Twenty minutes, then?” She watched as Ratko set the timer and started to wire and solder the device in place. “I’m going to add an immediate detonation command connector as well,” she said, introducing new elements to the timer—a tiny wireless transmitter with its own crystal shard for an aerial. After that, Ratko moved to Jezzy’s suit to plug in with her engineering console into one of the many data-ports that every suit of power armor had around its cowl.
Data Transmission!
Sender: Sp. Ratko, Outcast Marines, Rapid Response Fleet 2.
Accept? Y/N
Y
Timer App Downloaded.
Controls: Set 5 minutes… 1 minute… 30 seconds… 10 seconds…
“Just press the ‘okay’ and it will override the external timer and count down from there,” Ratko explained, turning back to the cone. “Now, we need to connect up the chemical explosives.”
Clank!
Behind them came the sound of feet as, deeper inside the Priority 1 Weapons Locker, something moved. Both Ratko and Jezzy froze. It could only be one thing: cyborgs.
“How long?” Jezzy hissed.
“A couple minutes,” Ratko breathed.
Clank-clank! The sound of the heavy metal feet was coming closer.
“Get it done, then get out of here. You got one of those magnet grapple hook thingies?” Jezzy asked, knowing that Ratko did. She had made three of the grapples and pullcords, one for each of them.
“Right here, sir,” Ratko breathed as the sounds of the metal feet drew closer.
We’ve been discovered. The cyborgs must have come to check out the noise…
“Arm the ISPBM, get to the nearest airlock, and get out. No waiting around for me, and that’s an order, got it?” Jezzy whispered sternly.
“But, Lieutenant, what are you—”
“I said that’s
an order, Marine!” Jezzy said. “Here.” She swapped her own Marine service rifle for Ratko’s Jackhammer. Ahh. It feels good to be holding one of these again. “I’m going to buy you some time, and then I’ll follow you out. Understood?”
Ratko looked at her with wide, serious eyes before nodding. She understood perfectly what Jezzy was doing. “If you don’t make it out, sir, I’m installing the auto-destruct app on my suit as well.” Jezzy saw the woman jam the data-connector into one of her own suit’s ports as Jezzy nodded.
“Good. If she hasn’t blown by the time you get back to the ship, then activate it anyway—with or without me, you hear?” Lieutenant Wen said.
To her credit, the ever-cantankerous Corporal Ratko for once didn’t argue or tease. She just nodded. “Aye-aye, sir,” she said.
Clank-thud-clank! The sound of the advancing cyborgs was much closer now. They could only be around the next knotwork of pipes. Jezzy took a deep breath and ran to confront them.
And if I have to blow that thing while I’m still in here, I will, she knew as she raised the Jackhammer to her shoulder and went to confront the enemy.
19
The Champion’s Reward
The Ru’at cyborg looked different, and it wasn’t just the metal that now covered its body or the fact it was holding the exact same weapon that awaited Solomon. The double-bladed spear looked almost like a toothpick in the thing’s metal claws.
It’s intelligent, Solomon realized. It was still making a low, guttural growling sound, and Solomon could see its tiny, flap-like nostrils flaring as it scented the air, but it had lost all that animal, reactionary energy. It stood relatively contained and focused on the task at hand.
Command Code Page 12
