“Back in the day?” I ask.
“No real A.I.s anymore after the Harmony thing,” Eli says. “The scanner is a dumb scanner. Maybe it will see the fertilizer and it will be reported on a screen somewhere. Maybe it’s not even set to detect non-minerals.”
“What’s the worst case scenario?” I ask.
“If they rigged it to, say, beep an alarm or something when there’s an unsortable material inside.”
“I think we want a remote detonator,” I say. “There’s too much that can go wrong with a timed fuse.”
“Good thing with a timed fuse, though,” Andreas says, “is that no one can catch you holding a detonator. Plausible deniability.”
“This isn’t a fucking habitat, dumbass!” Eli shouts, pointing his pickaxe at Andreas. “You think we’re going to get a lawyer who is going to smile all smug-like when he points out that there is no hard proof we planted the bomb? They’ll just fucking kill all of us if they even suspect it.”
Thorsten grunts. “My Maruader lady is coming to visit me next week. Or should I say, she’s visiting to come. Can we make sure this all happens afterward?”
I sigh.
“We’ll need at least a week to get all the materials together,” Eli says. “At least. How is the gravity treating you two?”
“Hard,” Felicia says.
“You haven’t given in and adjusted it again, right?”
“No,” Felicia and I say in unison.
“In a week, you can probably lose the suits. “So let’s aim this whole business to take place on the day after Thorsten fucks his lady one last time.”
“Are we seriously planning everything around that?” Felicia asks. Their looks in response to my statement answer my question.
“I’ll let Kain know,” I say.
14 Kain
I take to the biosuit like a fish to water. I’d never used one in the past because it felt like a crutch. I had been so concerned with how others thought of me–how strong a warrior they thought I was. I didn’t really care about efficiently achieving an objective with the most suitable tool. No, I had to do it in style and show everyone just how strong I was while doing it. So I got good with a sniper rifle. I could pick people off before they even knew I was there, and I didn’t need a biosuit to do it.
Everything is different now. I don’t care what anyone thinks, I just want to get Kara out of here. If all goes well, I’ll never see a single person from Darkstar again in my life. To hell with what they think of me.
The most effective way to rescue Kara is to harness the full power of a biosuit, and I’m learning it much more quickly than Raius–or my brother–expected.
“Now,” Raius says, “this is one of the most difficult maneuvers–even on weak-ass Martian gravity. On Darkstar, one small error and you’ll hit the ground so hard you’ll liquefy. But if you can do this on Darkstar, you can do it anywhere in the solar system.”
We’re standing on a huge cliff outside the base. It’s a sheer drop off of at least five hundred meters. The gravity on Darkstar is so high and the atmosphere so thin that a fall like this is more deadly than jumping out of a plane on Earth. On Earth, once you hit a certain fall speed, the air prevents you from falling any faster: terminal velocity. On Darkstar, the acceleration has no cap, and it happens a lot faster. You just keep falling faster and faster until you splat on the surface.
“This time you’re just going to watch me do it,” Raius says. “Take careful notes, and try to get a feel for how it works.”
I grin up at Raius.
He gives me a confused look, but his eyes widen when I jump off the cliff.
I do take careful notes: the first note says that Raius makes no effort to save me. He probably hopes I will fail.
I blast at least two dozen tendrils out, straight down.
The second note: the ground comes up on me way faster than I’d ever have expected. Raius did try to warn me about that. I must not have been listening.
The tendrils reach the ground when I’m about halfway from where I jumped off the cliff and the ground. I feel the tendrils bonding to the ground, and at this point, only the bottom-most portion is solidified, while the greater length is a mushy gel-like consistency.
All 24 tendrils are spread out along a 50-meter-wide circle, converging up into me.
I will the tendrils to harden more at the bottom, and they become straight and solid.
If I make them too solid too fast, they will simply shatter, and I’ll plummet to the ground. If I harden them too slowly, they will slow my fall to a degree, but I’ll still hit the ground at a fatal speed.
I have to do it just right. Like Goldilocks. There’s a lot of wiggle room on Mars, less on Earth, and almost none here.
I feel my descent slowing as the tendrils steel themselves. When I’m about 100 meters up, I ramp up the hardening action, and I feel my stomach churn as my descent rapidly declines. I can feel the pressure–if I had ramped it any harder the tendrils would have shattered apart, and I’d still fall too hard to survive. But I balanced on the knife’s edge, and I continue to ramp up the tensile strength until it feels as if I’m falling so slowly that I’m on Earth’s moon. And when I’m about ten meters from the ground, I’m barely descending.
The tendrils reach 100 percent hardness when I’m only two meters from the ground. I pull them all back in and fall to the ground in a low crouch position.
A score of tendrils slam into the ground beside me, and I look up to see Raius falling at their epicenter.
Less than five seconds later, Raius is slowly lowering down. He touches all the way down onto his feet, in a perfectly gentle landing. No two-meter drop like I had.
He narrows his eyes at me. “You didn’t stick your landing, little brother.”
I smile, but I’m mad at myself.
He can still control the suit better than me. He’s been using it for over a year, so it should come as no surprise, but I know–given time–I’d quickly surpass him. But I don’t have time. I need to surpass him now.
It’s clear now that Raius is reporting back to Adus about me. It’s the main reason he’s been assigned to train me. Adus is up on the High Command ship, and when my plan is set into action, he’ll be too far away to intervene. Raius, however, always seems to be right on my heels.
When it comes time to escape, Raius will be the one who tries to stop me. And I’ll have to kill him, using this damn suit.
The plan so far–assuming those miners can make a bomb–is to blow up a wagon deep in the refinery. I’ll order my inexperienced Seraphim army to rush in with guns blazing, hopefully creating more chaos. In the ideal scenario, Raius goes to the explosion as well, but I have a gut feeling that if anything blows up, he’ll come straight for me.
So the realistic plan is that I have to kill Raius first, and then I can hijack a shuttle. After that...it doesn’t get any easier, but at least I’ll have Kara off of Darkstar. Anything that goes wrong from there, at least she will be directly under my protection.
But I’m still a peacekeeper, and I need to figure out what Adus is planning. Saving Kara while failing my mission as a peacekeeper means that I’m bringing her back to an unsafe solar system.
I have a plan for getting this information, but I’ll have to face Adus again and risk raising his suspicions.
I’m standing up straight with my hands behind my back while I watch the Seraphim punch and kick the shit out of each other.
“Losers all have to do 100 pull ups!” I shout.
One hundred pull ups normally isn’t too hard for a Seraph. But in Darkstar gravity, it’s brutal.
I’m training them to drop the human notion of a fair or honorable fight. Human males especially have this strange notion of not fighting to win. I saw this firsthand on Venus, in bars on Sankt Petersburg. A man would look the wrong way at another’s girlfriend, and they’d soon be up in each other’s faces.
Marauders would stare each other down as well, but the first att
ack would be to kill. It would come suddenly and mercilessly. If both Marauders were of equal strength, this first attack might be blocked, and from there it would be a brutal fight to the death. Choking, twisting the opponent’s balls off, biting out their throat–all would be fair game.
But humans? The two men in the bar would suddenly back up and raise their fists. They would then fight in a way that makes no sense to me. Trading punches and not using their feet. Sometimes I even saw a much larger man not using his weight to his advantage. He would trade punches and not grab the smaller man and crush him to the ground.
And Seraphim, as it turns out, have adopted this human quirk of nonsensical fighting. I am trying to correct it.
“If you kill your opponent,” I shout, “then he wasn’t good enough for Darkstar anyway!”
And this training has the nice side effect of high casualties. Of the 3,000 Seraphim I started with, 400 have already died in training.
I watch as a smaller Seraph is pinned under a larger one. The smaller one punches the big one’s ribs, and judging from the big one’s face, his ribs cracked.
The little one head-butts him, and then bites out his throat while he remains still, stunned.
The blood oozes onto him, and the big guy’s lifeless body collapses and pins the smaller one to the ground.
He catches his breath and shoves the big corpse off of him, then jumps to his feet.
“Kain!” he says, smiling even though his face is covered in blood. “I guess that one wasn’t a real Marauder, huh?”
No, I think. The big guy definitely would have cut it as a Marauder, and I just denied Darkstar yet another soldier.
“Not compared to you,” I say. “Good work…”
“Jefa,” he says.
“Good work, Jefa. Throw his body onto the pile.”
I gesture toward the pile of bodies. There’s only six or so on it, but it will grow as training progresses.
Not all fights will end in death. Most won’t, in fact. It’s more common for a knockout blow, but the more aggressive Seraphim, like Jefa, always seem to end up in situations where a kill is needed to win.
“Kain, sir,” someone says behind me. He’s covered in blood, as well.
“Yes?”
“The bodies are piling up,” he says, panting.
I look over to where he was fighting, and there’s a lifeless body lying there.
“Looks like your opponent is dead. His body won’t pile itself up.”
“That’s the thing, sir, it’s not just a body, it was my friend.”
“You killed your friend?” I ask.
“You told us to, if it was needed to win….”
“If he was really your friend,” I say, “you could have found a way–”
“That’s the thing, sir,” he says. “He took what you said to heart, and he was trying to kill me. My instincts just took over, and now he’s dead.”
“Well,” I say, “good job. You’re a Marauder now. What’s your name?”
“Malcolm,” he says. “But sir, can I bury my friend?”
“The pile will go into the incinerator. Burying is for humans. Burying is used only to shame a Marauder.”
Malcolm bites his lip. “You said, sir, that anyone who dies isn’t a Marauder, so I guess my friend was a human. So I can bury him?”
“If you want to suit up and walk out onto the soil with a shovel carrying all that dead weight, you’re free to,” I say. “I do wonder what your comrades will think of that.”
“How do you mean?” Malcolm asks.
“A Marauder, respecting human traditions?”
He narrows his eyes at me. “Technically...we’re all half-human, sir.”
I’ve been fishing, and now he’s on my hook. I want to recruit some of these Seraphim to my side, but it’s dangerous. Malcolm is doing all the work for me, however.
“You could argue that the Marauder genes are dominant and that the human genes play a minor role in your anatomy,” I say.
He shrugs.
“When Earth is obliterated, and hopefully Mars and Venus as well, there will be so little left of humanity that the word ‘human’ will lose almost all meaning. You’ll be Marauder through and through.”
I watch his eyes. They widen just slightly, and his ears twitch, and then he forces a steel expression over his whole face. “Yes, sir.”
He turns and walks away.
I watch him as he carries his friend’s body out toward the airlock.
I should be able to recruit this one.
After training, Raius stops me on my way to see Kara.
“Going to visit your human?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“Bring her to the hangar,” he says.
I narrow my eyes at him. This cannot be good, but I have to avoid overreacting or showing him that I actually care about her.
“The hangar?” I ask.
“Yes, that’s what I said. I’ll meet you there. Hurry up.”
I nod and continue on toward the prisoners’ quarters.
Shit. The hangar? They never bring prisoners to the hangar. It makes no sense at all. It’s safe to assume that this order is coming from Adus. The hangar...it almost seems as if Kara is going to be brought to High Command.
But why?
I shove my way through the gruel hall and down the hallway to her cell.
I’m tempted to duck into Felicia’s cell and let her know what’s going on–why her sister will be gone–but they’ll see I opened her cell. It will show I care.
I open Kara’s door and see her smile up at me, but her cheerful expression dies when she sees the look on my face.
“What is it?” she asks.
“I’ve been ordered to bring you to the hangar,” I say. “I don’t know why, but I expect that Adus wants to see you.”
“Me?” she asks.
“It’s not about you,” I say. “It’s about me. I was gone for a long time, and they don’t trust me yet. You’re...a weak link in my armor.”
“Did you seriously just call me a weak link?”
I pull my ears back. “If my armor is metaphorical for...coldness, uncaring, then you are–”
“Forget it,” she says. “I know what you mean. Spare me the bad metaphors. Can we tell Felicia?”
“I can’t risk it,” I say. “You can give her a hand signal or something.”
“Come on, Kain,” she says.
“Cry,” I say.
“What?”
“Start crying, and I can say I knew letting you see Felicia would make you stop.”
“Seriously?”
“Males, human and Marauder alike, cannot deal with crying women.”
She scrunches up her face, and tears start forming.
“You’re scarily good at that,” I say.
She starts to make whimpering noises, and I open her cell door. I unlock Felicia’s door and push Kara inside.
“I will wait here. Hurry,” I urge, shutting the door behind her.
I cross my arms and wait. Time drags, and after a minute or two I open the door ] and grunt, “Come, woman!”
“Asshole!” Felicia shouts, and I pull Kara out by the arm.
“Enough,” I say. “And don’t dare cry again! I’m growing tired of you!”
Kara smiles up at me, but I scowl at her. She needs to get herself into character.
I drag her through the gruel hall and toward the winding halls.
Raius is standing impatiently when we reach the hangar, and a shuttle is waiting.
I am now sure that Kara will have to meet Adus. The burning question for me, one I’m afraid to even ask, is whether she will meet him alone.
Things will be much easier if I am there. If he brings Kara up alone, there’s a real chance she simply won’t come back down. If Adus and Raius do not trust me, they could do this–make Kara a hostage on High Command–while keeping me stationed on Darkstar. Escape would be nearly impossible in this situation.
“H
urry up,” Raius says. “Get her on the shuttle. Adus is waiting.”
I nod to Kara, and she takes a step onto the ramp.
Rather than asking Raius if I should board the shuttle, I simply step up onto the ramp, taking confident steps.
With each step, I worry he’ll ask me what I’m doing, but it never happens. He steps onto the bottom of the ramp when I’m at the top, and says, “You’ll have a lot to explain.”
That should worry me, but I sigh in relief knowing that Adus wants to meet with me, as well. The situation isn’t as bad as I thought.
I point to a seat for Kara to sit in–it’s located far away in the back of the room–and I sit down with Raius. I completely ignore Kara, which hurts me to do, but Raius is watching me too closely. I have to pretend indifference, that I don’t care about Kara.
He doesn’t speak for the entire trip. Adus must have told him not to give anything away. I’m fine with that though, as I have no real desire to talk to Raius, either.
We dock in the ship’s hangar and disembark in zero-g.
“Carry the human,” Raius says. “They adapt poorly to changes in gravity.”
I float back to grab Kara.
“Giving me the cold shoulder?” she whispers.
“I have to,” I say. “Stay in character. You don’t really like me, remember–you hate me–but you like fucking me.”
“That shouldn’t be hard to pretend,” she says. “At least half of what you said is true.”
I roll my eyes as I pull her toward the exit.
We float through the hallway until we reach the elevator, which takes us into the rotating mass of the ship. The gravity ramps up with each second that passes, the elevator moving slowly upward. I see Kara groan as the gravity surpasses that of Earth’s.
Raius escorts us back toward the High Commander’s office–toward Adus.
He knocks on the door when we reach it, and we hear Adus shout out, “Bring them in.”
When we enter his office, Adus is lounging back on a couch holding a drink in his hand.
“Mmmm,” he says. “Come here, brother. Let me see her.”
I walk toward him, but Kara lags behind me. I take hold of her arm and pull her up close to my side.
Marauder Kain: Scifi Alien Invasion Romance (Mating Wars Book 5) Page 9
