“Rarrrgh!” Solomon felt his own arms starting to wrench and pull from their sockets. He held on for dear life. He couldn’t see the full tactical golem, but he just had to hope that Malady wasn’t unconscious—or dead. “Malady, the lift shaft!” he shouted as he seized Wen’s blade with both hands and wrenched at it where it was stuck
“TZZRK!” Another explosion of sparks scattered across his visor and suit from the mechanisms inside the robot as it awkwardly juddered from the internal damage and tried to flip its back—and the small human clinging to it—against the wall.
CRUNCH! Before Solomon became human pate, however, a force hit the robot’s legs, and the impact sent the robot scrabbling down the access hallway.
Looking down, Solomon saw that it was Malady, seizing onto two of the thing’s legs and charging as the golem bowed its metal and reinforced back and shoved the thing toward the broken open doors.
“Yes! That’s it!” Solomon seized Wen’s blade and once more tried to yank at it.
“TZRK!” More sparks erupted from the robot’s back, and the thing was scrabbling, first one of its legs and then another skittering over the open edge of the lift as it tried to maintain a hold.
“Oh no you don’t!” Solomon heard Malady roar over the suit channel. It was the only time he had ever heard any emotion from the golem-man as he shoved harder this time, sending the robot flailing and turning into the shaft. The momentum of Malady’s shove pushed it down—not falling, but tumbling through the zero-G.
With Solomon on its back.
Nothing I have is big enough to damage it, Solomon’s thoughts raced as he felt Wen’s blade suddenly loosen in his grip. But I have a Malady. And I have an entire ship to play with.
Jezzie’s blade suddenly came free, and Solomon was leaping up as the robot’s arms flailed and spun around him, reaching for him.
Solomon swung the blade in mid-air, his legs kicking in the vacuum.
CRACK! The combat specialist’s blade hit one of the metal cables, and, with a shower of sparks, the hardened poly-steel edge cut through it.
And nothing happened. Not for a moment, anyway…
That was the thing about Solomon. He had been a fast learner even before the addition of Serum 21, and a good part of his life had been about learning to make the most of his environment.
And the thing about lift mechanisms, Solomon knew, was that they were the same the universe over—one cable held at tension on a flywheel, the other held at rest. By pulling one or the other, you moved the lift. Even in zero-G, the rules of force still apply. If anything, they applied even more so than they do in the complicated world of gravity.
Lift mechanisms were also mechanical in essence. Not electrical. Which meant that you didn’t need an electrical current to make the cables work, they just held onto their respective tensions unless acted upon externally.
Solomon hadn’t cut the tense cable, which in a gravity environment would release the service lift to the pull of gravity and send it plummeting to the floor.
He had cut the slack cable, meaning that the flywheel suddenly pulled on the lift mechanism with all of its might, and with no counter-forces.
There was a distant series of lights from above Solomon and the thrashing robot. It had clearly not been designed to deal effectively with zero-G environments. At least not as well as Commander Cready could. The lights were flickering as they grew closer and brighter.
They weren’t actually lights. They were sparks as the giant metal service lift above was pulled down by the ever-tightening mechanical flywheel.
Oh double-frack. Solomon moved, swimming for the broken-open door once again as the lift above him sped ever closer, and closer.
I’m not going to make it. He couldn’t swim fast enough. The robot had punched one of its legs into the side of a wall and was hauling itself up again towards him.
“Gotcha!” A hand shot out of the murk, grabbed his and pulled him in, microseconds before the lift was pulled down to smash the climbing robot and continue hurtling toward the mechanisms far below.
TZZZZZRRRRK! A grinding, electron noise as the robot-thing’s metal was scrapped and mangled against the walls of the lift, before—
Whumpf. The lift tried to lock into place as it smashed into its own lift mechanics, but it had a large robot-thing in the way. Compressors in the silver robot burst, and circuits sparked, and there was a roll of red and orange flame as the thing exploded.
“Down! Down! Down!” It was Jezebel Wen who had caught Solomon’s wrist and was screaming at him as she threw them both to the floor of the trashed laboratory as the flame roared past them and disappeared just as quickly.
There was another series of crashes as the lift, thrown by the exploding robot, once again was pulled down onto its body, and then, after sparks and flashes of light, there was apparent silence.
“I think you killed it, Commander,” Jezzie groaned, floating in the air beside Solomon.
Epilogue: Experimental Industry
“There were no survivors.” The words of Warden Coates met them on the screen of the small audience room on board the Marine transporter, where Solomon, Jezebel, Malady, Karamov, and Kol had been summoned before they disembarked, heading back home to Ganymede.
The warden looked, as ever, annoyed that he even had to perform a debriefing session with his schlubs, but on the split-screen beside him stood none other than Colonel Asquew with her stern and permanently tired expression.
“They deserve to know, Warden,” Solomon heard the woman say. “This is their battle, too,” she said, a phrase that made Solomon’s ears prick up, despite their ringing from all of the decompression and battering he’d had in the last few hours.
The experimental industrial robot was indeed dead, and right now was being dismantled by a team of Marine Corps engineers, dispatched by the arrival of one of the Rapid Response Fleet’s warships, which had taken jurisdiction over the Erisian situation.
The Outcasts were summarily dismissed, and for the most part, most of the adjunct crews had suffered a completely uneventful, boring search mission. A few—the ones who had ventured into asteroid field as Solomon’s Gold Squad had done—had encountered more raiders, all of whom were eager to try and get out of the Erisian field, as if there was something in there that scared even them.
As well it should, he thought as he read through the initial findings of the Marine Corps engineers. That experimental robot had been shipped from Proxima, a part of a new design that it wanted to offer to potential buyers on Mars, apparently. Or so the damaged mainframe of the Kepler had said. Something had gone catastrophically wrong mid-flight, though. The robot had started malfunctioning and had broken into the atmospheric laboratories to wreak havoc. The crew tried to contain it, but it was too large, and too dangerous. Then the thing had apparently damaged the pressure system, meaning that air and pressure built up inside the cargo hold, sucking it away from the rest of the ship. The crew had tried to get to their escape rafts, but were found, frozen and suffocated in the access corridors above.
Then who had we heard in the cargo hold? Solomon had asked.
“The robot apparently had a human-friendly interface,” Colonel Asquew said dryly. “A digital persona, if you will, that it could activate to make the operators feel at ease.”
“Wait a minute… Are you telling me that the robot used its own digital persona to lure us to Level 18?” Solomon said, flabbergasted.
“Its programming had gone haywire. It must have activated some sort of distress protocol, at the same time as running a defensive routine,” the colonel stated severely.
Solomon shook his head. “That doesn’t make sense. Why even program an industrial robot with defense protocols? It’s not a war machine, is it?” he asked out loud.
“That’s enough, Cready!” the warden snapped. “Or are you questioning your superiors?”
“No, sir.” Solomon shook his head. He still felt it odd, though. If he was a guessing sort of man
, it would seem to him that the robot had purposefully and deliberately set up an ambush for them, and then had worked its hardest to try and kill them!
And then there was the other problem that stuck in Solomon’s mind. The empty cargo hold of the Kepler. Had it just been transporting one of those robot things to Mars? Surely not. Then where had all the others gone? And who did the spare robot arm belong to?
Mars. Something stuck in Solomon’s mind. The planet where they had fought the separatists so recently. The separatists who had tried to kidnap the Confederate Ambassador from Earth. The separatists who had access to Marine Corps equipment and had clearly been planning something big. A civil war?
It could be a coincidence, of course, the fact of this robot’s destination and his own recent away mission. But Solomon was still left with a sour taste in his mouth as he considered just how dangerous the Martian separatists would have been if they had one of those gigantic killer robot-things on their side.
“You’re dismissed, soldiers,” Coates prodded them from his screen, clearly not wanting to discuss this anymore. “Back to your seats, where the jump-ship will take you back to Ganymede. Don’t think that this gets you any time off!”
“Gold Squad did do very well, given the limitations on their scanners and limited numbers,” Asquew noted, earning a baleful glare from Coates at Solomon.
“Keep it up, Specialist Commander, and I’m sure that the Rapid Response Fleet will have a place for you,” Asquew said, throwing a casual salute down at the Outcast.
Solomon blinked, feeling oddly proud for a moment, before his mood darkened a fraction later. Would that be before or after Serum 21 kills me? he thought as he saluted and turned on his heel, to lead his Gold Squad back to their seats.
The Titan Gambit
Outcast Marines, Book 3
1
On Shaky Ground
Jezebel Wen ran over the frozen rocks of Ganymede, plumes of dust and laser-bursts scattering around her feet.
Move it, move it, move it! The woman breathed hard in her helmet-visor, wishing that she didn’t have to wear the cumbersome suit but doubly grateful that she was. To unlatch and unseal any part of her light tactical suit would mean a quick but certainly agonizing death. The reflected radiation being thrown up by Jupiter would probably have baked her skin in minutes. The moon Ganymede was large, but its thin envelope of atmosphere was barely thick enough to do anything to protect her from space radiation, whereas the freezing cold of the near-vacuum would ice up her lungs and crack her eyeballs.
Eurgh… The combat specialist didn’t like to think about it. She was used to always being a few moments from death, of course. The dragon tattoo that snaked unseen from her leg to around her midriff before sprawling, possessively, on her back and licking at her neck was testament to that.
Jezebel Wen had once been what the Yakuza call an ‘executioner,’ the person called up late at night or in the ghost hours of the forgotten afternoon, given a name and an address, or sometimes a digital photo if she was lucky, and told to get the job done.
Which she always had, before…
Before Ganymede. Before getting caught. Before being forcefully inducted into the new Marine Corps outfit known as the ‘Outcasts’—all ex-cons who had nothing more to look forward to in life than a long, slow death on the prison-moon of Titan. That was, unless they signed on the dotted line and gave the next twelve years of their sentence to the Marines of the Confederacy of Earth.
In truth, Jezebel Wen had been coming to almost like her new life up here on Jupiter’s largest moon, along with the other misfits and criminals. Her squad commander, Solomon Cready, was a sharp guy, an ex-thief, and she knew that she could rely on Malady—a walking metal mountain that had once been a full Marine, now forever imprisoned in his full tactical power suit like a metal golem.
But that was before the Boss caught up with me again… She snarled as the plate of rock she had been bounding across suddenly shifted under one foot.
Thab-thap! Small explosion-plumes of dust and ice burst on the ground next to her, sending jagged cracks along the plate. What she had thought had been a thin ‘shelf’ of alien rock—shale maybe, or something metamorphic—in fact turned out to be a frozen aggregate, as fragile as the ice and dust around her. Its surface had been burnished by the cosmic winds, giving it a dull silvered look that Jezebel had mistaken for something solid.
Only it really wasn’t, as she suddenly found the section of the plate she was bounding across starting to upend, sliding down into itself—
A sinkhole! Frack!
The live laser rounds continued to fall all around her as Jezebel leapt, the articulated metal of her power gloves seizing the edge of the ice and rock-dust plate as it rose above her—
No-no-no-no!
Luckily for Wen, Ganymede, although massive for a moon and almost classified as a planetoid, still had a lower gravity than Earth. Which meant that when she swung her leg up to crunch on the downward-sliding top-edge of the plate and kick outwards, her bounding leap sailed many meters higher and further than she ever could in Earth gravity.
Below her, a crevasse yawned open, and the ice plate fractured and split apart as it slid down into the darkness.
Wen’s legs kept kicking, and then she tucked her head and arms into her chest, scissor-kicking to jackknife her near-weightless body into a roll and spin through the blackness until she hit the far side of the chasm with a heavy thud, sending up sprays of dust and rebounding back into the air again, before coming to a skidding halt twenty yards away.
“Urgh…” Wen groaned. I’ve failed. She was certain of it. The live-fire obstacle course that she and the rest of the combat specialists had been put on had been excruciating. So far, the fifteen or so adjunct-Marines—they were still awaiting graduation from the Ganymede Confederate Marine Corps Training Facility—had been dropped off in the Hubble Highlands just north of the facility and given no other orders but to race back home. No weapons to return fire. No medical kits. Just their legs.
They had barely gotten three steps when the automated gun emplacements burst into action, ice shattering from them in silvered clouds as they moved to fire their low-intensity laser rounds at the racing Marines. Wen had seen at least a third of their complement get knocked off their feet and sent spinning across the floor or into rock walls by the lasers—but not her. Not yet.
Wait a minute, you were in front. You might still be able to make it… Wen pushed herself up into a crouch, warily looking around her. Why weren’t the guns firing at her?
Just a little way south, she could see the silver-line of strata where the ice field ended, opening out into the open rock plain before the low, squat collection of buildings that made up the facility. Two hundred meters maybe?
The last section is a straight-up race, she realized. She’d passed the live-fire part of the exercise, by leaping to the other side of the chasm.
I can still make it!
She was just about to push off when a shape burst into view out of the corner of her eye. It was Erebus, the very large, meaty Outcast who barely fit into his light tactical suit. She hadn’t thought that he was second. He looked too large to be able to run as fast as her!
But her competitive streak turned to shock when she saw that her fellow Outcast hadn’t seen the chasm. He was making the same mistake that she had, mistaking the shelves of darkened ice for some weird alien rock plate—
“Erebus, no!” she called out, but the sound only echoed in her own helmet. Their suit-to-suit telemetries had been turned off. She had no way of contacting the other members of this challenge.
Erebus’s metal boot bounded onto one of the silver and black plates, just as the gun emplacements far behind him on the highlands burst into sparkles of fire once again.
THAP! THAB! This time, the combined weight of the larger combat specialist and the impacts of the laser shot broke the plate he was on much quicker than Wen’s. She saw the cracks radiating out from under
his feet and the ground started to collapse around him.
The place is riddled with sinkholes and crevasses! Jezebel gritted her teeth in anger. How dangerous and foolish is that!?
Not that Warden Coates and the rest of their supervisors would care, obviously.
There was a silent thud as Erebus was upended onto the rising plate, before beginning to slide backwards, down towards the new gulf.
Normally, Wen might have ignored the plight of her fellow Outcast during a training exercise. Unless someone got a little too into the sparring, there was little chance of anyone walking away with anything worse than a broken limb. But over the last few days since getting back from the Kepler mission, it had seemed that Coates had only stepped up their training regime. This was now a live-fire exercise. And that chasm looks deep, deep enough to kill.
All these thoughts flashed through her mind in an instant as Jezebel found that she was already swinging into action, throwing herself onto the floor and sliding across the edge of the crevasse as she reached out with her hand.
“Erebus, grab it!” she shouted once again, unable to contain herself.
Her fellow adjunct-Marine was sliding past her, arms flailing, reaching out—
“Gotcha!” She seized his wrist and rolled, pushing out with her free arm and kicking at the floor at the same time. Ganymede had lighter gravity than Earth, which meant that you could carry far more than you usually could, even if it was just a handhold.
The star-filled sky appeared in Jezzy’s visor-plate as she flipped backwards from the edge, and the momentum was enough to swing Erebus out of harm’s way and send him floundering through the air over and behind her, for them both to thump and roll on the surface of Ganymede like a child’s bouncing ball before finally coming to a halt.
Outcast Marines Boxed Set Page 26
