Outcast Marines Boxed Set

by James David Victor

  “Is there something wrong?” he asked, trying to turn his own concern into a joke. “Are you about to tell me that I’ve only got three days to live now, Doc?”

  “Don’t be facetious.” Palinov scowled, suddenly angry for no reason whatsoever. “We’re done here, Cready. Clean bill of health. You may return to your bunk,” she said, turning with her data-screen before pausing. “Oh, and please try to avoid any more fights in the future. Your body and your mind are the future of the Confederacy, so please remember to act like it. Don’t squander it!” she said, which made Solomon want to puke.

  The Confederacy doesn’t own me! Solomon thought angrily as he took off the various medical straps and devices. He eased himself from the chair to give a nod at the doctor, then headed for the door.

  It seemed that the door controls were only locked from one direction, Solomon noted, as Palinov’s room opened to let him out, as did the main reinforced glass doors to the main, unrestricted part of the Ganymede training station.

  The doctor saw something in my results, Solomon thought. His criminal training wasn’t just about how to override security systems and how to sneak around quietly. A healthy part of it was also learning how to read people. She had seen something in his results—whether biological or neurological—and it had surprised her enough to make her annoyed. But what!?

  Solomon knew that the Outcasts were being treated with some strange ‘Serum 21,’ but he still didn’t know what that was. And were his odd test results something to do with that? It had to be, right?

  He didn’t know the answers to those questions, but he smiled grimly to himself as he now knew a way to find out. Under his training suit sleeve, tucked against his wrist, hard-edged and cold, Solomon could feel the identity card that he had lifted from Doctor Palinov.

  Solomon might have been famous for breaking into hard-to-reach places, but that didn’t mean that he wasn’t a pretty good finger-smith, as well.

  He allowed himself a very small grin as he made his way back to the Outcasts dormitory, to shuffle along the food corridor and receive the rations he had missed out on earlier. He wasn’t thinking about the reprocessed protein and nutrient block, its taste, or how disappointing it seemed. No, now his mind was racing, planning, plotting, as he now had the means to find out exactly what was going on in this place.

  5

  No Possible Recompense

  When Jezebel Wen returned from her early morning training session, she found the bunkroom mostly deserted, apart from the few others who either had free shifts or were allowed, via special compensation from the warden or the doctor, to be convalescing.

  That was the way it went in this place, Jezebel knew. If you got something as simple as a sprain or a strain in your constant, daily training schedule, the warden wouldn’t automatically bust you out to the Titan prison camp.

  Well, he might do for Sol, she corrected herself as she towel-dried her hair with one of the Ganymede Confederate Marine regulated towels. Everything was regulated here, everything stamped with CMC or Confederate Marine Corps. Even the shower after her morning gymnasium training was regulated—precisely 4 minutes of warm water, precisely 2 minutes of scalding water, precisely 2 minutes of freezing water—so designed to have the maximum ‘metabolic effect’ apparently.

  The warden would let those adjunct-Marines that he was pleased with have a free period if the doctor thought that they could convalesce and get better.

  But it seemed as though some of the adjunct-Marines in here never did get better, Jezzie saw.

  “What’s going on?” she asked Henshi, another Outcast with a sprained knee who was allowed to beg off physical training for a few days. Henshi followed the woman’s eyes to the two bunks that were currently being cleaned out by a team of staffers, the mattresses being taken away, the small locker of personal effects and wall-cupboard being unlocked and opened for the clothes of two adjuncts to be taken away.

  “Two more bust out?” she asked, thinking of the three that the warden had made an example of just a few days ago.

  “I guess so.” Henshi frowned and shook her head. “I never heard anything, though. That’s Rogan and Cheval from Red and Green Squad, isn’t it?” Henshi added, turning on her bunk to look over to the emptied bunks, worriedly.

  Probably because she knows she has to get back to full fitness or else it might be her next, Jezzie thought.

  “We’re dropping like flies,” Jezzie murmured, earning a sour grunt of agreement from Henshi beside her. Already, the bunkroom had been depleted of approximately one-fifth of its staff, bringing the total number down to around fifty.

  “The warden’s going to have to stop this attrition rate, though,” Jezzie murmured, keeping her voice low in case any of the other wounded or relaxing adjuncts decided to make an example out of her and report this possible questioning insubordination. “I mean, how are the Outcasts supposed to be an effective fighting force if we can’t even field a hundred soldiers?”

  “I don’t know,” Henshi muttered, clearly staying out of it.

  “I heard they got sick,” called out Erebus, a much larger adjunct who had apparently done so well at his technical specialism—which Jezebel knew meant anything from electronics to starcraft maintenance and mech-walker mechanics—that he had been given this free period every ten-day shift.

  “They got sick?” Jezzie asked, keeping her tone level as she made her way past the staffers to her own bunk. Hadn’t Solomon been talking about that weird flu that went around last cycle? He claimed that it was unusual—and that there shouldn’t be any viral contaminants on Ganymede—but what did he know? Weren’t viruses supposed to be, like, one of the most adaptable and hard-living organisms known to humanity or something?

  But he had been right about the fact that even Malady had got sick, and that walking cadaver has his own implanted air-filters, right?

  Still, Jezzie hadn’t been totally convinced by Solomon’s argument that it was some strange genetically-modified super-bug, released by the warden to do something to his beloved Outcasts.

  “Hmm,” Jezzie mused. The warden DID like to make a big, public showing when he busted someone out of the Corps, she reflected. It was the sort of man he was—a small man with a position that was too big for him, she knew. The sort that needed to make an example of his authority.

  “Excuse me, Adjunct-Marine Wen,” said one of the staffers in his gray and silver overall. One of the newly-vacated bunks was right next to hers after all, and she moved out of the way to let the man pull the mattress from the wire frame and heave it onto one of the trolleys.

  “Excuse me,” the man repeated again, even though Wen wasn’t in the man’s way. She looked up to see what the problem could be and saw that it was the same staffer who had confronted her just a few days ago—the Yakuza operative.

  “What do you want?” she hissed. Seeing him here, so close to where she slept, was like one of the warden’s electric jolts through her body. Her eyes slid to the other Outcasts, but none of them seemed to have noticed or even care what trouble Wen might be having with one of the staffers.

  Keep your own nose clean. Do your training. That appeared to be the unwritten law of the Ganymede training center, after all.

  What does he want? Should I shout? Could I expose him? All of those thoughts ran through Jezebel Wen’s mind, but none of them added up to anything other than her getting shipped off to Titan for daring to question or strike Marine staff. And out there on the frozen prison world, Jezebel knew that the Yakuza and the Triads and the Mob and the White Brotherhood and every other nasty little criminal syndicate had a far greater presence. The possibility of being knifed in her sleep here was at least unlikely, as it would raise too many questions. Out there, it was almost a given.

  A pleased, smarmy-sounding grunt from the man opposite her, and he just tapped a finger to the CMC regulation cap that had obscured his features beforehand, as he turned around to wheel the trolley away.

  He probably vol
unteered for that job, Jezebel thought. Just to put the scare on me. She knew the game with her old paymasters, after all. She had been one of them, so she knew that the build-up was always the same: intimidate, make a show of strength, and then ask the victim to do something they don’t want to.

  And if they don’t? Well, the Yakuza punishments for non-compliance were even worse than the ones that the warden doled out with relish. Only the crippling pain that the Yakuza delivered—that she herself had delivered to people on occasion—was usually life-changing: missing digits, missing limbs, bankruptcy, homelessness, debt, life-long scarring…

  Fracker. She gritted her teeth and turned back to her bunk.

  And that was where the message was. There, on her pillow, was a tiny curl of paper—no bigger than Jezzie’s thumbnail—that she knew only too well. She snatched it up as she lay on her bunk, pretending to catch twenty minutes of much-needed rest before the next training session.

  The Yakuza were nothing if not old-school, she knew, and a scroll like this only proved it. Admittedly, they had made a few concessions in the recent centuries of the Confederate globalization of Earth—they now accepted part-Japanese gang members like Jezebel Wen, for example—but they were still in the High Edo Period when compared with such groups as the Triads.

  When Jezzie unrolled the scroll, she found that it was just as she had expected, a set of minimal command statements written in tiny, Hyogo dialect. The Yakuza probably had the money to create special encoded transmissions or even spy-drones to deliver their messages, but they also knew that some of the oldest methods were the best. A message this small, although obvious, didn’t leave a trail of electronic breadcrumbs or transactions to follow. It could easily be disposed of, flushed-away, shredded, or eaten. Its secrecy relied upon the fact of the receiver’s professionalism and dedication to the Yakuza—not the sender.

  Jezebel read the message, and her heart sank.

  S. Cready owes. Judged. No possible recompense.

  That was all that it said, but that was all that the small message needed to say for Jezebel Wen to understand precisely what her boss, Mr. Mihashi of the largest Yakuza clan in the Asia-Pacific Partnership, wanted her to do.

  S. Cready = Solomon Cready, she mentally translated, her own Gold Squad Commander.

  He had been judged, which meant that senior Yakuza elders had already met and held a secret trial over whatever crimes or evidence they had against him, which, Jezebel presumed, was money—although ‘owing’ could mean anything from a debt of service to a pact that he had yet to honor.

  Not that he had time to honor it now. Jezebel frowned. The last part of the message had clearly stated what was expected of her. There was ‘no possible recompense,’ which meant that Solomon, somehow, had already gone past all of any other options of repayment in kind or of service, and now there was only one final option left.

  Solomon Cready had to die, by her hand.

  6

  Serum 21

  Solomon waited until he knew the coast was clear, which, for him, meant another two days of keeping his head down, trying his best to look normal while he trained and studied. During which time he had no major run-ins with Arlo Menier and his gang of stooges, which Solomon was grateful for, but the hairs on the back of his neck still rose every now and again, as if someone was following him.

  Luckily, Solomon knew that he was good at planning a heist. He was very good, in fact. One of the best.

  “You haven’t been in New Kowloon for very long, have you, Mr., uh…Cready?” said the man standing next to the younger Solomon, still in his early twenties with the ridiculous quaffed-but-ragged haircut he had sported back then.

  In fact, Solomon had been in New Kowloon all of a week, and he needed Confederate credits again, having spent every last dollar he had to get smuggled into the Asia-Pacific Partnership’s largest metropolis-ghetto.

  It wasn’t that New Kowloon didn’t have Confederate Enforcers, or that it wasn’t regulated—it was as much a part of the rest of the Asia-Pacific Confederacy as Shanghai or Tokyo or Seoul, after all—on paper, at least. It wasn’t that New Kowloon didn’t have laws, and rules, regulations or taboos…

  It was just that at some point in the distant past, some enterprising criminal gangs had managed to infiltrate city planning and local governance, and even the Confederate Enforcers it was said, to make sure that those laws had massive loopholes, and anyone who had the power to do anything about it on the streets was already compromised.

  Over the last sixty years or so since New Kowloon had come into its own, it had been designated a ‘Special Regulation Zone’ similar to an off-world colony, or the old Hong Kong of the twentieth century. Multinationals and mega-corporations and inter-state actors flocked there to take advantage of some very lax trading and business laws, and from there, the rot only festered.

  Down on the streets of one of the busiest slums on Earth, tax-deductible building investments had encouraged a diaspora of the poorest members of society to take advantage of the often hazardous but ridiculously cheap housing. Some strategists even claimed that had been a plan, as it meant that the economy was always off-kilter, with few actual opportunities for legitimate employment but plenty of opportunities for illegitimate employment.

  There were no regular sweatshops and factories in New Kowloon. Instead, there were boiler-house basements producing knock-offs of American Confederacy computing chips, or else warehouse troll companies that were funded by shady ‘marketing firms’ to target rival politicians or entire Confederate territories for their political paymasters.

  It was said that nothing happened in New Kowloon without some money being paid to someone, and that anything could be bought or sold somewhere or another on its streets. Which, so far during his week here, Solomon had found to be mostly true. It was actually a sort of gritty, grimy, dangerous paradise for the likes of someone with his skills.

  It was here in New Kowloon that works of art or archaeology or gold bullion or any other artifact could be traded to lose its paper trail and return to the market ‘clean.’ It was here that the largest mega-corporations operated their riskiest laboratories, or tested out illegal prototypes, or performed high-level (and unseen) negotiations with rivals.

  To the rich, New Kowloon was a playground where every vice could be administered to for the right price, and to the poor it was a place where, paradoxically, the American Confederate dream was at last true. Anyone COULD make it big in New Kowloon. All you had to do was have a talent, as well as be willing to pay a lot of bribes along the way.

  Which was where this thin, unassuming man who stood next to Solomon—both of them leaning over the railings of the Ho Xing Tower to look at the cramped and complicated neon, concrete, and steel world below them—came in.

  “Only a week,” the man repeated, his hair slick black and wearing a very unassuming, but also very finely made, black business suit stated, “and yet you have managed to find out how to contact us.”

  “I have contacts,” Solomon admitted. Which was actually true. Only Matthias Sozer, his life-long accomplice and ally ever since they had both grown up in the American Confederate cornfields, wasn’t even in New Kowloon, and wouldn’t be for several years still. Matthias had a good job back in the American Confederacy as a data-miner and programmer, and that was why Solomon knew that he would be able to find anything out that he needed to set up his new operation out here.

  Such as getting Solomon the contact number for the largest Yakuza crew in New Kowloon.

  “Obviously,” the man stated, not looking at Solomon. The young man hadn’t seen any of this man’s bodyguards, as all he had received was a simple, one-line postcard to meet here at this specified time. He had arrived nearly an hour early, but the man had been earlier still, and apparently alone—although Solomon was certain that he could feel people watching him from every window of the Tower’s restaurants. Even the taxi driver had seemed to know where he was going.

  But Solomon
guessed that he had better get used to that. He was trying to make waves in someone else’s territory, after all.

  “Well, the people I represent have their contacts as well, and we have done some research on you, Mr. Cready.” A slight pause as he readjusted one of his emerald cufflinks. Solomon wondered if that was a signal? A sign? In any ‘normal’ person, it would be a sign of nervousness, but what would a representative of one of the three most powerful gangs in New Kowloon ever have to worry about?

  “A very passable, but still only minor, thief, I am afraid.” The man stopped his fiddling and spoke in perfect English, clipped terms. “The people I represent aren’t sure if they need another gaijin criminal…”

  “I promise you that I can be the very best that you have ever worked with,” Solomon said, and with absolute certainty. Admittedly, his point of reference had been the Midwest and the East Coast of the American Confederacy—and over there, they were a bit more…blatant about things—but something in Solomon knew that what he said was true. He could feel it in his gut the way that any young person can almost feel the limits of their ambition. He knew, too, with delight and glee that he had not reached them yet.

  Solomon knew that he was fast on his feet, agile, a good climber, and not a bad street fighter—although he preferred to never be forced into a fight in the first place. He also knew that he had managed to outwit and think circles around just about everyone he knew. Even Matthias, unless it came to computer coding, of course, in which case Matthias had the clear upper hand.

  It was one of the many reasons why Solomon had chosen New Kowloon of all places to come and put his skills to the test. He already had a string of suspicions and blurry surveillance drone pictures out on him back home, and, as good as he was, no one had a career in crime in the same place for very long. Time just wasn’t a luxury most thieves could enjoy.