It sounded like a planned sabotage, to Solomon’s ears.
Not that he could find any evidence on what that robot thing was, or where it had been built. Only that it came from Proxima colony. Was it a boobytrap? The Confederacy got on well with the colonies—still nominally under its power—or at least that was what the news wires had led Solomon to believe. The truth was that there were always separatists, seditionists, and freedom fighters bubbling under the surface.
But even so, Solomon thought. The notion that one of these tin-pot, idealistic fringe groups could ever get the money or resources together to design, build, and ship a robot like that, with the intention of killing everyone, was laughable.
The thing killed its own chances of ever reaching Mars, or Luna, or Earth… Solomon thought as he stared at the ACCESS DENIED sign, which cropped up every time he tried to find information pertaining to the Kepler, or what he had seen and fought inside of it.
If the killer robot had been meant as some sort of ambush, boobytrap, or gesture of defiance to the Confederacy, then whoever had programmed it had done a spectacularly bad job, as it hadn’t waited until it even got to Mars before unleashing hell on every carbon-based lifeform around it.
Unless… Solomon considered the fact that it hadn’t been intended to get to Mars, or Luna, or Earth at all.
What if it wasn’t an act of war at all…but a field test?
WAOWAOWAAAOO! Solomon jumped in his seat as the chimes of the station-bell ran through Ganymede, and he hurriedly clicked out of the Oracle database that he had managed to worm his way into and back to his very boring reading about gun barrel dimensions and forces of travel for various classifications of bullets…
“All members of Gold Squadron please report to the front audience hall immediately. Repeat: all members of Gold Squadron please report to the audience hall immediately. Out.”
Solomon stayed where he sat in the study lounge booth for a full three seconds. He knew because he timed it, and his heartbeat was hammering two to almost three beats a second all of a sudden. Had Warden Coates somehow found out that he was rampaging through the Oracle database? Or had Doctor Palinov reported her ID card stolen at last—which he had on him, right now, in his pocket? Or was this to be just the latest in a long line of shouting, scolding, and mocking addresses by the warden as to precisely how terrible, and how far below the standards expected of the Marines, that his squad was?
Solomon rather hoped that it was the latter option.
But as it turned out, it was none of the above.
“The warden isn’t best pleased…” warned Doctor Palinov as she met Solomon and the others outside the audience hall where the daily morning briefings were held. Solomon tried to distract himself from glaring at Palinov. Up here on Ganymede, there weren’t really any ‘mornings’ anyway. There was Jupiter Rising and Jupiterian Dusk, but that was about it. But still, the old traditions remained.
Just like, when someone is cheating you, you owe them payback… Solomon thought of another old tradition, but one from the criminal underworld, as he tried to avoid Palinov’s eye. She’s experimenting on us. She doesn’t give a frack if we drop down dead or not, right here! He breathed through his teeth to control his temper.
“Cready, are you feeling okay?” the doctor—a woman with an austere blonde bob, spectacles, and a faint Russian accent—asked delicately. She almost sounded concerned.
As if, Solomon inwardly scoffed. “Fit as a fiddle, thank you, Doctor,” he said, not wanting to give her any more excuses to poke needles into him.
“Well, your color is flushed, and I’d say your breathing is accelerated. If you still feel this way after the briefing, I will want you in the medical lounge,” she said with a nod and all the assured authority of someone a few ranks higher than he was.
“I’m sure the briefing will leave me feeling…enervated,” Solomon said with a thin-lipped smile, knowing that every encounter he had with the warden always left him flushed and his breathing—and temper—elevated.
“Speaking of which…” Jezzy cleared her throat beside him. She had been uncharacteristically subdued, Solomon noted. Normally, her salute to the doctor would be crystal-sharp, at least, and she would always spare a nod of respect in his direction, given that he was her specialist commander, after all. “You said that the warden wasn’t entirely comfortable, ma’am?”
Behind Jezzy loomed Malady, looking as solid and as sullen as ever, and then behind him sidled the last two members of Gold Squad—Karamov (undesignated) and Kol, who had just received his technical specialism, meaning that he was about to become their unofficial engineer, mechanic, and all-round technology guy, Solomon noted.
The doctor shared a worried look at the double set of doors behind her and lowered her voice. “Someone has put in a request for Gold Squad personally.”
“What?” Solomon coughed. Can that even happen? He thought that they were supposed to be the dregs of the dregs, that the Outcasts were the laughingstock of the Marine Corps? And besides which, they were Marines weren’t they? Not mercenaries. Weren’t they?
“I don’t know any more than that, Specialist Commander. I’m only here to sign off on your physical readiness…” she said as she hit the door controls behind her and smoothly turned to walk into the audience hall.
It was an oval room, with the far wall given over to a triple-glazed and reinforced glass shielding, creating a view of the white, gray, silver, and pink Ganymede surface outside. It was amphitheater-like, with rows of wooden benches descending in terraced layers down to the lower speaking platform under the windows, where stood, ramrod-straight, Warden Coates.
“Late!” he snapped in a voice that appeared too loud to come from his small frame. The warden was a small man, and like many small men, he had learned to accommodate for that fact in other ways. His method was the Marine Corps, and his fanatical obeisance to its regulations and rules—no matter who they crushed in the way.
“Attention, Gold Squad!” he snapped again, and Solomon led his small team into the top terrace to stand shoulder to shoulder, where they all performed a near-perfect salute.
“Hm.” The warden nodded, looking if not precisely pleased, at least somewhat mollified. “At ease. Come down and take your seats.” He pointed to the front row directly opposite him, as the doctor demurely bowed her head and headed to the other side of the speaking platform, there to take a desk and her data-screen and start performing calculations, writing reports or taking notes.
“Specialist Commander Cready,” the warden said, not looking at Solomon directly but keeping his chin raised high as he looked above their heads.
“Sir, yes, sir?” Cready stood up immediately.
“Would you say that you are happy with the progress that your Gold Squadron is making?” Coates asked.
Er… That was not something that Solomon had been expecting at all. He chose the diplomatic answer. “We are always striving to be better, Warden sir,” he said, earning another appraising nod from Coates once and a gesture for him to return to his seat.
“Good. Because so far, the performance results of Gold Squad have been absolutely appalling. Do you hear me? Appalling!” He ended on an almost bark. Solomon and the rest of Gold Squad waited for the inevitable torrent of abuse, but it never came.
“Apparently, however, that has not stopped the Confederacy’s Ambassador to Mars from especially requesting your services, although heaven alone knows why!” Coates frowned.
The Ambassador to Mars? Solomon thought. That was the woman he had rescued at the Hellas Chasma on Mars. She had been captured and held hostage by the Mars Seditionists, and they were going to use her—or her death—to trigger a war between the Confederacy and Mars. Solomon remembered a tearful, terrified woman in her middling years perhaps, bound and gagged and only too happy to be released from her torment by him and his team.
“Your suits will be updated with all of the mission parameters, but I can tell you that you will be functio
ning as personal security and bodyguards to the ambassador and her people. I do not need to remind you that you will be representing the Marine Corps in all of your actions, just as the ambassador represents the Confederacy in all of hers. Understood?”
Not really, Solomon thought. What risks are there? Where are we going? When are we going? What sort of enemy might we be expected to face?
“You ship out in the hour to rendezvous with the ambassador at Nuryien Orbital.” The warden’s voice dipped on this last phrase, as if the idea of letting them out of his sight appeared to be anathema to him.
But…Nuryien? Solomon felt a spark of hope amidst the bleakness that was his time here. The Nuryien Orbital Platform was famous—a floating satellite-station that hung over Jupiter in high orbit. Although it had originally been designed as a scientific station, it had since been transformed over the last sixty years or so into a hub for wealthy Confederate tourists, who would pay seemingly anything to come and see the iron-rich atmosphere of Jupiter for themselves.
“But do not think that this means you can take it easy!” Coates suddenly hissed severely, and this time, he really was glaring at Cready. “As part of the initial hand-over, I and a small team of Ganymede staff will accompany you.”
Oh. Solomon’s spirits fell. That was all they needed, a nanny in the form of Warden Coates.
“But now you have only fifty-four minutes in which to get your light tactical suits, undermesh suits, boots, gloves, and equipment squared away, operational and polished to the best I have ever seen in the history of the Confederate Marines!” he ended on a rising, supposedly rousing call to action. “You’re representing the Marine Corps now,” he repeated. “And what’s more, you Outcasts are representing me!”
As they were dismissed, to quick-march out of the audience hall and rush to collect and clean their kits, Solomon couldn’t help but hope that there was nothing in them that reflected Warden Coates at all.
3
The Nuryien Platform
Solomon tried, he really did, to shine and buff and oil his light tactical suit so that it looked ‘the best that any one had ever seen.’ He just didn’t know how he was going to get around the dents and scratches from the various scrapes, collisions, and outright combat that he’d had to endure in it.
He wasn’t surprised when his inspection in the launch hall, beside Jezzy, Malady, Kol, and Karamov, earned him nothing but a sigh of disapproval from the warden when it came time to embark.
The warden himself looked nothing if not dazzling—quite literally so, in a white suit with red and gold braid, and a different peaked cap with his gold star, but exactly the same format as his regular one that he usually wore. Beside him stood Doctor Palinov, apparently not attending as she wore the same white lab-coat with its set of pens sticking out of the breast pocket, as well as several other gray and silver-suited staffers, who apparently counted as ‘entourage.’
“All test results good. Better than expected, in fact,” Solomon overhead the Palinov murmur as she handed a data-screen to Coates, who looked at it cursorily, then dismissed the doctor with a nod. Solomon wondered just what it had said on that pad. Maybe their Serum 21 levels? Their chance of having a seizure during the ambassador’s state dinner?
“Well? What are you waiting for? Get on board!” The warden gestured to the hissing doors as the main hatch opened to reveal not the large cargo hold of the Marine transporter they were used to, but instead a much smaller box-like room—still with webbing and uncomfortable seats on one side, but this one had round portholes as well.
“Courier ship,” the warden explained. “No need to attract undue attention, is there? Come on, Commander, step to it!”
“Sir, yes, sir.” Solomon snapped to attention, before calling to his squad. “Gold Squad, after me…” He quick-marched into the room to see that it was broadly split into two levels, with the higher level containing crates and boxes, and a lift that must go up to the flight deck and engine rooms. Cready picked the furthest seat and stood by it as he waited for his squad to form up. Malady, Karamov, Kol…
He was one combat specialist down. “Where’s Wen?” he whispered at Malady next to him. “She was here just a second ago!”
And then Solomon saw her, seemingly frozen in the doorway to the hold of the courier, looking aghast up at the second level, where a team of Ganymede staffers were busy piling crates at Warden Coates’s orders.
“Jezzy!” Solomon hissed, trying to catch her eye before the warden saw her falling out of line. “Wen, get over here!” he tried again.
To which she slowly turned to face him as if only hearing him for the first time, shaking her head and quick-marching to her place beside Malady.
“What was all that about?” Solomon whispered. “You looked like you had seen a ghost.” Solomon nodded up to where Coates was busy berating the staffers for apparently not doing a tidy enough job.
“Oh, I just…” Jezzy frowned. None of them were wearing their helmets and had instead clipped them onto their belts, so Solomon could see Jezzy’s face flush pale, and then look at the metal grates of the floor. She’s worried, very worried, about something.
“Jezzy, c’mon, what is it!?” Solomon gave a fake, carefree laugh. Nothing could be that bad, right?
“I was just shocked at the amount of stuff the warden is bringing, that’s all.” Jezzy lied to him, and Solomon knew it.
But before he could press her further, the warden had shouted at them to stop dawdling and get strapped into their seats, as they were about to launch, and the journey wouldn’t take long at all.
The small Marine courier, with its sharp nosecone over two fat triangular ‘wings,’ burnt through the short distance between Ganymede and her mother planet, Jupiter. From their place in the seats, Solomon and the others could see the red giant growing larger and larger in their view, its baleful blur eventually turning into the complicated bands of orange and red, ochre, yellow, and ruby gasses that constantly circled the planet.
The gas giant grew larger and larger until it almost seemed too impossibly big, its strange light illuminating everything in their cabin with its malefic glow. If Solomon was a superstitious man, he might have thought the shiver that ran down his spine was for what was to come, but he wasn’t.
Soon the stars were blotted out from their place above the horizon, and the courier was skimming the upper atmosphere of the gas giant, heading towards a small dark shape that grew, turning into a disk, a star, a platform—the Nuryien.
From a distance, the Nuryien looked like an impossible snowflake spread-eagled above the clouds of Jupiter. Its metal ‘arms’ stuck out in five points, each with smaller access-tubes or habitat modules branching off of them, and in the center, a rising tower that pointed away from the surface of the planet, where already a number of other vessels were docked, and still a few more hung in orbit outside of the platform.
Lights on the platform flashed a complicated staccato rhythm as they were greeted by Nuryien’s flight bridge, and the Marine vessel answered in its own coded rhythm of lights. The authorization and the code-lights accepted, one small green light started to blink on the northern pole-ward side of the tower, over a docking bridge, extending out into space. With effortless skill, the courier maneuvered itself into position using its positional thrusters, gently thumping against the extended rectangle, which clamped around the courier’s doors with magnetic locks.
Docking Procedure Initialized….
Pressure Seals: Activated…
Normalizing Atmosphere: Checked…
The words spilled out over the vessel’s speaker system, before the orange light over the door buzzed green, and the warden and his team appeared on the upper level of the cargo deck.
“Attention, Outcasts! This is it. Formal march, on my command. And, march!” the warden snapped. Solomon and the others rose to their feet as the door opened to reveal the long corridor of the docking bridge, where a blinking line of recessed floor lights indicated the
ir route straight down the avenue. Solomon led the way at a fast-paced but stiff-legged ‘formal’ march, as it was called, with the warden and the rest of the staffers falling in behind.
WELCOME TO NURYIEN PLATFORM.
ALL VISITORS PLEASE REPORT TO CHECK-IN.
NO BIOLOGICAL FOODSTUFFS, PLANT MATERIALS ALLOWED.
TIER-3 HEALTH CHECKS MANDATORY.
HOME OF THE JUPITER EXPERIENCE! PLEASE ENJOY YOUR STAY…
The words glitched into life on either side of them as the Outcasts fast-marched down the corridor to the doors at the other end, already hissing open with the escape of steam to reveal color and noise on the other side.
“Att-eeeen-HUT!” the warden called as soon as Solomon and the others had emerged though the doors and were halfway down the ramp on the other side. They snapped into a line on the ramp, Specialist Commander Cready at the lead, then Specialist Malady, Specialist Wen, Specialist Kol, and finally Adjunct-Marine Karamov.
The tower of the Nuryien platform was an open structure on the inside, with wide balconies spiraling down the inside, each of which held a ramp out to a docking bridge interspersed up the tower levels. The noise of advertisements and the glare of glowing neon holograms assaulted Solomon’s eyes, and he realized for the first time in almost a year just what sort of austere life he had been living on Ganymede.
This was supposed to be normal. He remembered the downtown streets of New Kowloon, with its constantly blaring advertisements and synth-pop.
It was busy in here, every level a murmur of people—both Confederates and colonists. Solomon saw the flowing robes of Martians, the generally white uniforms of Proxima, alongside all the chaotic diversity and exuberance of the Confederacy. People moved in and out of the docking bridges, or accessed the small information terminals on the walls, or else used the lifts that shot up and down the center of the tower to the rest of the platform.
Outcast Marines Boxed Set Page 28
