“Martian comrades, more like!” Father Ultor muttered angrily.
“Perhaps, Father,” the ambassador conceded. “But while they’re still on Titan, they’re a Confederate responsibility. Which, in this room, and on this moon, would mean me. Now load up, soldier!” She was already stalking to the doors of the rover as Solomon spared a shrug with Warden Harj. There was clearly no arguing with the woman. Harj activated the rover controls, and the ambassador and her personal assistants stepped in.
“Malady, I want you and me on point, like before,” Solomon said, “Wen, Karamov, and Kol? Stay with the ambassador.” Solomon spared a glance at the Martian delegation. “And what of your men—will they help us?” he asked them, but Ultor was already blustering and heading towards the rover.
“They’ll help true Martian citizens. I’m not allowing the Confederacy to take the credit for this one!” he stated, barging in after Kol, but Solomon was pleased to see that Wen and his Outcasts had flanked the ambassador and wouldn’t let any of the Martians get to within touching distance of her.
Last to load up was Warden Harj, and then Solomon and Malady were the only ones left in the prison hangar, looking at the hissing steam as the door lock depressurized.
“Travel fast,” Solomon growled over his suit channel. “I don’t care what the Martians or the Proximians say. If we run into any trouble, whatever side they’re on, we’re not going to be taking names and addresses.”
“Understood.” Malady rolled his huge metal shoulder-pads. His commander’s message was clear: put down any would-be attackers with extreme prejudice first, and ask questions later…
The door opened, and Malady and Solomon bounded into Titan’s sulfurous light.
PHABA-BOOOM!
The rover and two attendant Marines had barely gotten past the outer gate when the ground shook and the southern horizon swirled with dense, dark clouds.
“What was that?” Solomon called.
“Commander…” It was Karamov, bouncing inside the rover vehicle next to the ambassador. “Warden Harj says that has got to be the air-processing plant at the ice mine. If it’s blown, the whole place will depressurize…”
Which means that everyone inside there, Proximinan negotiators and First Martians and assorted convicts, will all die in minutes… Solomon lengthened his stride. The rover beside them chugged forward over the black and orange rocks of Titan’s surface, but its electric motors didn’t allow it to go beyond six or seven miles an hour. In this light gravity, Solomon knew that he and Malady could get there faster.
“Change of plan,” he announced, “Me and Malady are going on ahead. We’ll secure the site. Rescue who we can. Wen stays with the ambassador at all times, rest of Gold Squad help when you arrive.” His voice sounded clipped and tense as he suddenly broke into a leap, kicking out at the Titan surface with his metal combat boots with all his might.
Solomon sailed through the air in a long jump as Malady did the same, bounding into the air behind him.
Oof! He hit the surface with both legs, the shock being absorbed by the suit’s compressor pistons at the ankles, knees, and hip, before hop-running two more steps and then kicking out again in a massive, low-gravity leap.
Behind them, the ambassador’s rover receded into the distance as Malady and Solomon ate up the short distance to the mine. Another couple of jumps, and Solomon realized that they were entering a patch of heavier mists and yellow fogs, laden with grit and rock dust.
Warning! Light Tactical Suit Warning!
Atmospheric Filters Report +62% Mineral Buildup.
No Radiation Detected.
“Outstanding,” Solomon growled to himself. All he needed now was for his suit filters to pack up, and then for him to die of oxygen starvation ironically inside his suit, rather than out of it.
Solomon quickly reached to his harness to activate the suit’s self-cleaning process, forcing precious air from his reserve oxygen tank to be forcefully expelled through the suit’s filters. It was a risky move, as losing too much oxygen could only ever be a bad thing in a hostile alien environment, but seeing as he had no idea how long it would take for his air filters to completely clog up from the dust of the explosion flooding its air system, he knew that he had no choice.
“One-second injection,” he said, flipping the catch that opened onto the small valve on his harness, and pulled.
PFFFFT! Solomon felt buffeted inside his suit, and his body staggered as jets of pure air burst from his visor and back, before he released the valve and felt it click back into place.
Atmospheric Filters Report +38% Mineral Buildup.
“Better than nothing, I suppose…” Solomon grimaced and pressed on into the murk.
The yellow clouds suddenly lifted, revealing a scene of devastation.
The ice mine had once had a tall chain-link fence surrounding it, but now that lay in pieces, its concrete stanchions pulled from the frozen Titan soil by the powerful tremors. Beyond their haphazard forms, Solomon saw a crater—no, not a crater, a pit—in the ground, on the side of which, leaning over the edge of the vast hole, had once stood a large, block-like metal building of many levels, and a tall cylinder that stretched high into the murk above them.
Which must be the drilling rig. Solomon saw that the different sections of the wide tube had whorls of threading, indicating that it twisted as it drove into the rock and ice.
But the metal levels of the main building were in disarray, two of the wall sections clearly crumpled from a sudden, catastrophic decompression event, and the building as a whole was slanting towards the ice pit below it.
“That whole place is going to go down.” Solomon saw it immediately. “We’ll lose everyone in there…”
On the far side of the pit were huge metal pipes, each one bigger than the distant prison rover behind them, rising from the pit and plunging into a dam-like concrete and steel structure. But these pipes were cracked, and jagged metal was bent back from the seal as rushes of steam poured into the air above.
That is what is clearing the nitrogen clouds around here, Solomon realized. That had to be the mine’s air-processing plant, extracting oxygen trapped in the frozen ice below and recycling it to keep the mine pressurized and livable.
She’s hemorrhaging air… But was it coming from the mine’s reserve tanks or straight from the ice extraction?
“Malady, you’re the only one of us big enough to do something about that.” Solomon pointed to the air-processing plant. “See if you can find a way to stop that from happening.”
Solomon had no idea how the full tactical golem would do such a thing, but he had to trust that Malady would find a way. Now was not the time for despair.
“Suit scanners on,” Solomon said as Malady broke into a bounding, leap-frogging run around the sides of the ice and rock pit to the broken air processors. Suddenly, Solomon’s visors flushed with a line of green as his rather basic sensors activated and sent out small echo-waves of particles.
Suit ID:
Radiation Scan… COMPLETE
Electrical Scan… COMPLETE
Radionics Scan… COMPLETE
Thermal Scan… COMPLETE
RESULTS:
Radiation Levels at Titan-Normal.
Electrical Signals: Multiple. Industrial Firmware. Personal Suit-ware Detected.
No Radio Frequencies Active.
Industrial Heat Signatures Detected. Multiple Individual Heat Signatures Detected.
“Good.” He saw an overlay of the results on the internal screen of his visor. There were at least three collections of heat signatures scattered from the inside of that building to below them. The mine must have service caves and tunnels down there, with still living—or still warm, anyway—convicts and delegates huddling together. That was confirmed by the multiple suit-ware electrical signals—prisoner and delegate encounter suits like the ones he had seen the others wearing before, still active and presumably doing all of the things that an encounter suit should
do: keep their occupant warm, filter oxygen for them, and shield against unwanted radiation.
But no radio frequencies. Solomon grimaced. That meant that there was no way to contact them. He would have to go in and find them.
And their suits could clog up with Titan dust at any moment if there is another explosion, he thought with a grimace, already moving towards the building.
“HALT!” His external speakers picked up the broadcast warning as he jumped into the concrete courtyard in front of the ramp that led up to the mine. The doors had been blown open by the sudden explosion and lay in mangled fragments down the ramp. Solomon could see the spark of broken wires and glitching electronics illuminating a hangar inside in strobe bright and dark effect.
And there, in the doorway, were two Titan wardens, their suits covered head to toe in the gray dust of the explosion and leveling their rifles at Solomon.
Great. Going to get shot by the very people I’m here to help.
“Specialist Commander Cready! Outcast Marines, attached to the ambassadorial delegation,” he called out quickly, raising one open palm to show that he meant no harm. “I’m here to help...”
“Thank god,” one of the guards stated. “It was an explosion in the entry level. We don’t know how it happened. It must have been a gas leak or—”
Phbp. The noise picked up by Solomon’s suit amplifiers was small and would have easily been missed amidst the chaos, were it not accompanied by the sudden dispersal of red mist around the back of the talking warden, and the effortless way that he crumpled to the ground.
“Shooter!” Solomon called out, already jumping to one side and skidding along the concrete floor as something sparked off one of the bits of door.
“Who is it!?” he heard Wen calling along the gold channel, sounding alarmed.
Oh, gotten over your bad mood now that I’m about to get shot, is it? He squeezed himself under the raised bit of door as another shot pinged off its surface.
“Don’t know. It seems to be coming from the facility…” Solomon’s quick mind calculated. The guard was shot in the back. He was facing out of the open door towards him. He risked peeking around the edge of the metal fragment to see that the accompanying warden had also been dropped, similarly shot in the back.
“Stars damn it!” he growled. I don’t have time to get pinned down here, not when the entire building could slide into the pit!
Luckily for Solomon, he was a quick thinker. He had always been a quick thinker. It was, after all, what had made him the most daring thief in New Kowloon. And the other advantage was that in lower-gravity environments, you can carry much heavier stuff…
He pushed the large door piece he was huddling behind up as its front pinged with more shots. Finding the handle on the underside, he lifted the eight-by-four foot solid piece of metal in front of him like a shield and bounded up the ramp to the facility.
Ping! Ping! The bullets ricocheted off the front, sending angry shockwaves into Solomon’s hands as he turned and threw the door forward at the last minute. It spun and clattered against a half-moon booth in the center of the room where Solomon presumed there had once been guards in position, overseeing the workers coming and going on their shifts.
And a perfect place to take cover in. Solomon jumped, following the door as he burst through the already shattered glass to land on the other side of the desk.
“Gargh!” He heard a snarl as someone rose beside him, a warden’s rifle in one hand and a massive service wrench in the other—
It was one of the prisoners, Solomon saw that in the blink of an eye as he recognized the man’s gray and brown, out-of-date suit and bubble helmet.
Ask questions later, he had told Malady. The specialist commander shoved the butt of his Jackhammer into the man’s helmet and heard a satisfying crack and the sudden wailing hiss of steam.
“Arghhh!” The prisoner staggered, dropping the rifle and the wrench as his gloved hands immediately swept to the leaking cracks in his helmet.
Solomon kicked the weapons away, then kicked the man in the shins, bringing him to the floor with a heavy thump.
“Stay down!” he snarled as he leaned on the convict’s chest, already reaching for his utility compartments on his suits harness as he radioed in. “Karamov, get your medical kit ready. I got one combatant here incapacitated with oxygen starvation and pressure sickness."
“Aye, Commander.”
Cready found what he was looking for—the poly-filament metal wire. He wrapped it around the man’s hands, before clicking the small magnet locks closed. He wasn’t going anywhere.
“The leak’s not bad,” he hissed down to see a man’s terrified face on the inside. He didn’t look like a terrorist or a trained killer of any kind. Just a prisoner who saw his chance and took it.
“I’d say you’re going to run out of oxygen in two minutes, maybe three. Maybe my squad will get here in time to treat you, maybe they won’t,” he said, leaving the man tied up with an expanding stream of oxygen escaping from his visor.
As harsh as he knew he sounded, he knew that the rover couldn’t be more than a minute out anyway. This man would survive. Probably.
But Cready had more pressing matters. He had to find the others and hoped that the people he had come to save weren’t as difficult to rescue as this first one had been.
“Situation report,” he breathed as he jumped back over the desk to survey the room. “Clearly an explosion. Centered on…” He looked at the scorch marks on the floor, and the spread of debris. The main entrance hangar of the mine was a wide room, with a balcony around the rear half of it, leading apparently to the more technical workings and guard rooms. Down here on the ground floor was a wide-open corridor that led down into darkness.
“It was just the door,” Solomon realized. The rest of the room, although flooded with rocks, dust, broken glass and debris, had not suffered significant damage. The balcony was still intact. There were no burn marks on the corridor that led down into the rest of the mine facility.
“Someone blew the doors open,” Solomon knew. That wasn’t a gas leak, or an accident. That was too precise and methodical. Someone knew that if you took out the pressure-sealed door, it would start a catastrophic ‘blow-out’ of pressure and air, which had probably caused the entire building to slump as it did…
“Which means we’re looking at an act of sabotage,” Solomon thought. “Could be prisoners trying to escape, or…”
There had been another explosion on the Nuryien platform, Solomon thought suspiciously as he started to run down the corridor towards the next set of heat signatures on his scan. Explosions seem to follow the ambassador around, don’t they?
8
The Savior of my Enemy is still my Enemy
The ramp must have been designed for carrying the massive blocks of ice up from the pit below, Solomon thought as he saw the deep track ruts in the concrete floor. It was dark up ahead of him as he bounded downwards. Even the power to the emergency lighting had gone off, leaving just Solomon’s suit lights available to illuminate the way.
“Commander Cready, we’ve just arrived at the mine. Securing the wounded prisoner now,” Karamov reported over the gold channel.
“Good. Follow me down when you can. Keep an eye on the Martians. Wen stays with the ambassador,” Solomon reiterated his commands as the walls shook.
Frack! The entire mine complex was unstable. He had to be quick.
“Hello!” He turned his suit amplifiers up to maximum and his voice boomed into the darkness. Did he hear something in response? A ticking noise. Could that just be the damaged pipes and lights?
Tap-tap.
No…there. Solomon reached the first crossroads that leveled off in front of him, before the corridor continued to plunge downward, turning as it did so to zigzag its way through the rock. The walls were a jigsaw of metal plates screwed onto girders, spaced between the brown and white composite of rock and ice.
And one of the crossroads was
completely blocked by a jumble of rocks and girders.
Thermal Scanners… Three Signatures.
His scan results revealed three dull-red forms on the other side of the rock, and without knowing what else he could do, Solomon started to attack the boulders, clawing at them with the articulated fingers of his power gauntlets.
Thunk! The outer boulders weren’t that difficult to move, thanks to the lighter gravity, and Solomon soon saw a thin jet of mist escaping from one end of the cave-in.
Air. Oxygen from the other side of the tunnel.
“HOLD ON!” he shouted, grabbing the twisted end of one of the girders and pulling.
It didn’t budge. The weight of the rocks against it was just too much.
“Dammit!” Solomon was desperate, just as he picked up the sound of running bounding down the corridor behind him.
“Commander!” It was Karamov and Kol, followed by Father Ultor and his five Martian heavies. The ambassador, Warden Harj, and the imprimatur must still be up top, secured by Jezzy, Solomon was glad to note. Jezebel Wen was strong enough to keep the ambassador safe—and everyone else, if she had to.
“Take heart! We’ll get you out of there!” Ultor was shouting, as three of his guards seized the girder alongside Solomon, and together they heaved.
“On three. One…two…and pull!” Father Ultor shouted, and Solomon was surprised at the man’s apparent willingness to get his hands dirty. Maybe it was the fact that Mars was an overwhelmingly industrial world.
KERRRRUNCH! The girder shifted, and there was a rumbling noise as the rocks around it shifted, falling apart, and sending up plumes of steam and smoke as the oxygen in the next chamber was forced out.
But it left a hole, barely big enough for a person to squirm through.
“Get out of there!” Solomon shouted, and the three trapped convicts wasted no time pushing and shoving each other to haul themselves through the hole to collapse on the other side. Their bubble helmets were scraped and scratched, but all of their suits looked to be in working order, Solomon was glad to see.
Outcast Marines Boxed Set Page 33
