Large pieces of wreckage rotated, mixing with the smaller glints of industrial metal. It looked like an asteroid field in front of them as pieces collided, broke apart, and combined. Jezzy knew what she was looking at because she herself had planned that field.
But it didn’t do any good, did it? she thought miserably. The Ru’at jump-ships had appeared on the edge of Plutonian space, not far from the last Confederate refuelling station for light-years, The Last Call.
Jezzy and her team of Plutonian engineers and hauliers had had just enough time to spill their loads of junk metal, trash, and industrial supplies across the star-way in an expanding cloud of fragments, hoping to at least slow the advance of the alien ships.
And we failed.
Instead, the Ru’at jump-ships had acted in true Ru’at fashion, which meant that they did the completely unexpected. They had ‘fired’ their cyborg boarding crew into the field of debris, some of them dying in impacts with bits of ship metal, but most leap-frogging and propelling themselves over the obstacles to their eventual target of the Oregon.
Outside, it looked like what had been Jezzy’s best line of defense had instead turned into their graveyard. Jezzy flinched when she saw the distant tubular shapes of the Ru’at jump-ships, still hanging motionless on the far side of the wreckage, just as if nothing had happened at all.
The sight of such commonplace activities against such a tragic backdrop seemed to bring the colonel up short as well, as Jezzy saw the older man pause and rock slightly in place.
“A lot got out, before…” he confirmed quietly.
“Sir?” Jezzy dared to ask. “My squad? The rest of the Outcasts?”
Faraday shook himself inside his power suit, looking across at her with his slate-gray eyes. “Some of them were on Level Three fighting the cyborgs,” he said carefully.
“I know. I was there,” Jezzy said.
“But it’s good that you think of your men first.” Faraday gave her a ghost of a smile. “You will make a good official commander one day, Lieutenant Wen.” He nodded to the two side-by-side doorways that looked suspiciously like coffins.
“I just hope that we get to be alive to see it, Colonel-sir,” Jezzy said ruefully, performing a final sweep behind them with her Jackhammer as she hit the escape pod release button. The door slid upwards, revealing something that looked very similar to a cryo-bed.
The escape pod was padded with stiff leather, and barely bigger than a cupboard. No portholes on the walls, and as soon as Jezzy stepped in and turned around to lean against the back, manacle-straps fired and locked into place over her waist, chest, and ankles.
I’m going to make it out, she thought, feeling strangely nauseous at the prospect. Why do I get to live when so many died?
“These are pre-programmed to get you to the nearest rally point set up by whoever the senior officer out there is,” the colonel said as the door started to hiss closed in front of Jezzy’s face. He threw her a salute.
“Through blood and fire, Marine,” he intoned loudly.
“Through blood and fire…” she repeated, before realizing that he wasn’t stepping into the adjacent escape pod beside her. He was stepping back out into the atrium to watch her depart.
“Faraday!” she shouted, knowing that he would still be able to hear her over their suit comms. “What are you doing!? Get out of there!”
Clunk! The door hissed closed, and Jezzy could see that she did have a strip of a viewing window on the inner door of her escape capsule, before, with a grinding shudder, the entire pod suddenly jerked back into the hull and started to tilt, ready for launch.
“I have one mission left to do, Lieutenant,” Colonel Faraday said, still with his saluting hand motionless by the side of his temple. “You know the Marine Corps Regulations. No Marine technology is to fall into the hands of the enemy.”
“You mean a captain goes down with his ship!?” she said in alarm as the tilting stopped, and she could only see the distant commander of the Oregon if she peered down the length of her body.
Faraday said nothing.
He means to blow up the Oregon to stop it being salvaged by the Ru’at, Jezzy thought in alarm as three orange lights blinked over her head. In a heartbeat, one turned green, and then the second one, and then—
But we don’t even know if the Ru’at care at all about stealing Marine Corps tech, she could have screamed, but her words were plucked from her along with her breath as the final green light blinked on.
WHOOOSH! The escape pod she lay in rocketed away from the viewing atrium and the remaining colonel. Jezzy saw flashes of light and metal archways blurring through her viewing window as she accelerated.
With a violent shudder, the escape pod burst out of the side of the twisting and dismantling Oregon. Suddenly, the shaking stopped, and Jezzy was looking up at stars.
And wreckage.
It was an oddly serene moment as the combat specialist was powerless to do anything other than lie back and watch, before the escape pod’s rockets fired, and the coffin-shaped pill quickly turned under the debris field and swooped away from the scene of their defeat.
But Jezzy could still see the leviathan-like shape of the Oregon as it shook, parts of its hull crumbled or collapsed. As the battleship grew smaller and smaller in her field of vision, she saw it start to turn, spurting gobbets of rocket flame and plasma as the battleship attempted to right itself.
“What are you doing, you crazy old fool?” Jezzy watched in horror as the Oregon managed to almost right itself and ended up pointing in the direction of the wreckage barrier and the distant Ru’at ships beyond.
As Jezzy watched, the Oregon fired every working rocket and thruster it appeared to have left. It moved slowly forward at first, gaining momentum and speed with every passing second.
It was growing smaller and smaller in her viewing window as the two craft moved away from each other, but Jezzy could see everything in the crystal clarity of space.
Small explosions erupted along its forward bulk as it started to flow through the metal trash field. It was getting faster and faster, shaking and tilting as it charged forward on a desperate kamikaze flight.
There was a slight flicker of light from the engines that was almost beautiful, like a reflection of bright Christmas lights, as tiny explosive charges were detonated by the colonel around the engine’s main casing.
Flash! With a sudden, widening halo of light, the Oregon blew up.
“Faraday… Sir…” Jezzy breathed. Her suit had filtered out the hard glare of the massive self-destruct sequence, but her vision was still obscured by tears. She didn’t know whether she had just witnessed the bravest or stupidest action she had ever seen.
“Through blood and fire, sir,” she murmured into the dark as her escape pod flew on.
9
S.O.L
“What was that!?” Colonel Austin of the Dauntless saw the plume of fire and eddies of smoke as his target disappeared into the thin atmosphere of Mars.
The old warrior knew that his ship wouldn’t be able to follow them to the surface, as much as he might have wanted to finish the job. The Dauntless was built in the vacuum of space and designed to stay there. The gravitational pull of a planet the size of Mars would break it apart with ease.
Not only that, but the torpedo and missile batteries wouldn’t be able to target the tiny craft against all the background planetary radiation. Not with any accuracy, anyway. One of the many problems with interstellar conflict was that it had to remain interstellar if it was to be of any use.
But what was at the forefront of the colonel’s mind was the stunt that the seditionist Martian transporter had just pulled off—a massive blowout of plasma and fuel, creating a momentary firestorm that had fooled his torpedoes.
“That is some seriously quick thinking…” he muttered. It was the sort of thing that you needed serious Marine Corps training to pull off.
“Colonel, sir! More of the Ru’at ships are rounding on th
e Indomitable, sir!” his tactical specialist announced.
“Turn us around!” Austin barked. “Navigation, I want course plotted to the nearest Ru’at threat. Weapons, I want every weapon module loaded by the time we get there. Engineering, try and get some more power out of the old girl!”
Colonel Austin knew just as well as everyone else on board that what they were doing was fighting a losing battle.
We’re going to go down with this ship, Austin thought gravely. But they would do so while in the service of the Confederacy.
It said something about the type of man Colonel Austin was that the thought left him feeling optimistic, not depressed.
“Colonel, sir?” called out his engineering specialist. The concerned tone alerted him to the fact that something was quite wrong indeed.
“Marine? Report!” Austin said as he took to his chair once again.
“I ran a scan on the fireball that the Martian ship gave off, just in case it might have been a threat to us.” The Marine sounded worried. “But I’ve been getting some very strange readings from it,” he said, looking over at the colonel.
“So? It’s done. They escaped. Our battle-brothers and sisters are in danger! To your duties, Corporal!” Colonel Austin was not one who had what you might call a curious mind.
“Sir… I am sorry, but this really is unique. There are organo-compound signatures in that blast, dissipated now of course, but they are…” The man shook his head. “It’s almost as if they’re spelling out a message.”
Colonel Austin might not be a curious sort of man—he had learned a long time ago that a curious soldier was usually a dead soldier—but he was no fool, either.
“Unusual? How unusual?” Another thing about Colonel Austin was that he trusted all of his crew. If a specialist thought that something was important enough to tell him, then he would hear the man out, at least.
“Highly unusual sir. I’m sending the details to your desk and copying to comms,” the man said, flicking his fingers through the holographic controls.
“Comms? You really are sure that this was a message then?” Austin looked at the data. All he could see at first were burn and expansion rates, chemical makeups, and direction of force.
And then he saw it, the chemical analysis indicated that there were complex chemical compounds inside the outer wave of that explosion. They had been destroyed and dissipated within micro-seconds, of course, but the highly-advanced scans of the Dauntless had picked them up in that fraction of time all the same.
“Complex compounds that shouldn’t be anywhere near fuel propellant,” the engineering specialist said.
“An accident? Dangerous?” the colonel asked.
“No, sir, not dangerous at all, but they must have been injected on purpose into the fuel tanks,” the engineer said.
“Wait, Colonel!” This was from the tactical/comms desk as the man there analyzed the results. “These compounds are all repeated strings of molecules…”
“Go on,” the colonel said.
“Simple molecules that can be found anywhere in the ships, but they were drawn from the oxygen filtration system. Trace elements of selenium, oxygen, and lytase. Or Se, Ox, Ly.”
“I thought you said that this was a message? Seoxly?” The colonel started to shake his head. Maybe the battle and the arrival of an alien war fleet was too much for them? Should he relieve them of their duty?
“S.O.L,” the comms specialist said. “It’s too unique to be random. Those elements shouldn’t have been combined in that way either”
“And they were injected on purpose into the propellant, don’t forget!” the engineering specialist said. “It’s a message. It has to be. A message for a craft able to scan that explosion, sir.”
“A message for us, you mean,” the colonel said seriously. “Okay. I’m listening. S.O.L. The name of our system? Our sun? What does it mean? Theories?” the colonel asked, but none of the bridge crew could get to the bottom of it.
“Sol… Sol….” Colonel Austin shook his head. “Forward the details to General Asquew. Let her figure it out. We have a war to fight!”
10
City of Heaven
“Brace!” Solomon shouted, attempting to throw the Shield of Aries into a spin to get away from the Ru’at ship’s attack.
But the Shield had already suffered too much damage from the collision, and the available propellant in the rocketry systems was already running low after the blowout that Solomon had engineered.
It couldn’t move fast enough. The particle beam hit…and nothing happened.
We’re not dying. Solomon froze in his seat. Why aren’t we dying?
The forward viewing window was glaring bright with blue-purple light, and there were no alarms from the automated computer system. No warnings of the hull being burnt through, or of an atmospheric breach.
“What’s going on?” Solomon whispered.
“You have so much to learn about our friends, Lieutenant,” clone-Tavin stated, and even though Solomon wasn’t looking at him, he could hear the man’s smirk.
Their perilous descent to the surface of the Red Planet had seemingly halted. And still no alarms were going off. In fact, past the glow of the particle beams, Solomon could see through the windows that the Shield hung some two hundred meters over the desert surface, completely motionless.
“Is that…” Solomon couldn’t believe his eyes—or what was happening. “Is that a stars-be-damned traction engine?” he breathed in awe. “But those things are impossible. It’s just a silly science fiction story!”
“‘There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio…’” clone-Tavin murmured the quote. “People thought that cybernetic technology, even jump technology, was a fairy tale, once upon a time. And now here we are, with the Ru’at cyborgs across all colonies of human space, and with the Ru’at jump-ships able to travel faster than light.” Tavin lowered his pistol from Solomon’s temple, satisfied that any threat of escape from the man was now gone.
“You should read what was in the Ru’at Message, Lieutenant Cready. Technologies the likes of which even those silly science fiction stories could not make up!”
Really? Solomon’s eyes narrowed. “Are you going to show me the Message then, Tavin?” he said, giving up on the pretext of attempting to find out the clone’s ‘real’ name. The cloned CEO of NeuroTech Industries didn’t seem to mind, this time.
“I think we will leave that decision to our saviors, don’t you?” Tavin nodded to the screen, where the horizon was starting to shift as the Shield of Aries was pulled by the cylindrical Ru’at jump-ship.
The Martian transporter picked up speed in the glow of the Ru’at’s strange technology, and Solomon could see the surface of Mars beneath them start to blur as they sped forward faster and faster. In the distance, the lines of Martian craters and mountains appeared.
We’re heading north by northeast. Solomon recognized the terrain. He didn’t know Mars well, but his earlier incursion into the Armstrong Habitat in the Tharsis Thocla Crater had seen him study, along with the rest of Gold Squad, the broad geographic areas of Mars.
The map of secessionist activity didn’t have much up here, Solomon thought. “There aren’t any habitats this far northeast,” he said.
“Not that the Confederacy is aware of.” Tavin’s voice once again sounded like a smirk.
“Have you...seen them?” Solomon heard the Martian communications officer say in worried awe.
“The Ru’at do not believe in the same importance of physical meetings as humans do,” clone-Tavin said in a considering tone.
That’s a no, then, Solomon thought.
“But the Ru’at will certainly make their presence felt to you, when they feel that they need to,” the clone beside him said. “You’ll see in due course, I’m sure.”
With that rather unsettling prediction, Solomon started to wonder if there was any way he could escape from his current situation. He had sent the organo-compound signature t
o his friends in the CMC. If they picked up on that message, then they’ll know that I’m here. That they have a man on the inside.
But Solomon knew that the chances of them coming to get him, the ambassador, and the imprimatur were slim. Even if his message did manage to get through to General Asquew, there was no guarantee that the last remaining General of the Confederate Fleet would be able to do anything about it.
Solomon knew that he and his two companion hostages were now in the eye of the storm. They were on their own.
At that dreadful point, the colony of the Ru’at on Mars appeared on the horizon, and its metal surfaces shone in silver and bright, bright light. It was like looking at some heavenly citadel.
It looks too beautiful for an alien race that are so good at killing people, the lieutenant thought.
Just how on earth—or Mars—am I going to get myself, the ambassador, and the imprimatur to escape from that!?
11
The Last Call
“Get those doors sealed!” the small, dark-haired administrator of Pluto’s The Last Call station was shouting. Fatima Ahmadi moved across the large, now-empty space of the station’s holds.
Usually, this place would be filled with commuters and workers, each and every one busy and hurrying from either the deep-field station-ships or the cruise ships, or else working logistics for the station. The Last Call might be Confederate Earth’s most far-flung station before the colony worlds of Trappist, Barnard’s Star, and Proxima, but it was also a very busy one.
Or would have been, once, Fatima growled to herself. It felt unnatural, to be walking through the halls and corridors of her home where she had lived for the past twelve years, taking constant injections of calcium and magnesium and attending the gym twice a day every day to ensure that she kept a proper bone density ratio.
She was used to The Last Call being filled with noise—the chime of bells as the cruise ships announced their departure cut across by the speaker announcements from some work team or another, asking for mechanics or fabricators or hauliers to move to this airlock or that one.
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