And I was sentenced for murder. I was given life imprisonment here… He shuddered at the thought. How long would it take him before he ended up mute and crazy?
But thirty years was long enough, presumably, to learn every tunnel and intersection in this place. “Is there another way out? Through there?” Solomon leaned closer, trying to catch the man’s attention.
The architect of the Proxima resistance paused, his hands slowing then stopping, before he turned to look up at the adjunct-Marine commander looming over him. His appearance was ghostly behind the ridiculously outdated bubble helmet, but Solomon could see the straggle of white hair and beard, and rheumy, almost myopic eyes behind the plastic shell.
A nod, and the man turned back to the wall.
“That’s good enough for me,” Solomon muttered, turning to start helping the man claw at the collapsed boulders and blocks at the rear of the cave. In a second, Kol and Karamov had joined him, attacking the wall beside him as they hefted out rocks behind them.
“Come on!” Kol said over his shoulder, and, to a muted grumble, the other convict and the Proximians joined, forming a chain to remove the rocks ahead of them.
11
Light in Dark Places
Phbp! Phttt!
The ground in front of Jezzy exploded in plumes of dust, concrete, and ice as bullets sought out the escaping survivors.
They’re trying to keep us in that death trap. Jezzy grimaced. The rescued miners had scattered across the courtyard compound, heading for any upturned piece of fence or rover wreckage that they could to evade the shooter. Already, two of them were lying on the ground, bullets having found them in lieu of freedom.
“Ambassador!” Jezzy saw the shot-lines walking towards where the maroon-suited woman was bounding. The bullets were faster than human legs, but Jezzy was faster than the ambassador was.
She leapt, using every ounce of power from the assisted servos of her light tactical suit, as well as every hard-earned muscle in the last fifteen-odd years of physical training, as well as the lighter Titan gravity.
She broadsided the ambassador, her power gauntlet clamping around the woman’s shoulder as she knocked her out of the way of the bullets.
Ping!
Suit Warning! Impact Detected!
Light Tactical Armor Plating Reduced to Approximately 48% Effective Protection!
She had been hit. The thought hung in her mind as both she and the ambassador tumbled through the air, skidding along the floor and heading for a collection of outflow pipes, designed to pump dust out of the mines, but were now still and silent.
“Ooof!” She rolled, remembering to tuck her head down as she braced her arms around the ambassador’s more vulnerable helmet visor. The last thing she wanted was to accidentally crack the ambassador’s suit and have to explain to the generals how she had watched as the ambassador asphyxiated to death.
They crunched along the ground, with Jezzy’s back hitting the large metal pipe.
Suit Warning!
Light Tactical Armor Plating Reduced to Approximately 42%
She groaned, her head spinning, but she couldn’t give in to the pain or weakness. “Get up. Inside.” She dragged the ambassador bodily over the small lip and shoved her in the empty mouth of the pipe, before jumping in behind her.
By the stars… Jezzy flopped to the floor as she heard a ping and a crack on the outside of the pipe. They had managed to find cover, but for how long?
“Are you alright?” It was the ambassador, sitting up to wipe her suit and helmet of dust as she looked worriedly at Jezzy.
“Me? I’m fine, I think…” Jezzy followed the woman’s eyes that were looking at her in, quite frankly, amazement. What?
Then she saw what had happened. She had been shot by whoever was trying to kill them, but luckily, the poly-carbon and steel plates of her light tactical suit had saved her life.
But only just.
The front of her suit, where the plates segmented onto the battle harness, were crumpled and blackened, and she could see a broken splay of wires from where the nearest module of the harness had been destroyed, and there, lodged into its circuitry, was the snub of a bronze-colored bullet.
“Hey, well, that’s what they’re designed to do, ma’am.” Jezzy shrugged, although there was still a quiver in her voice. Of course, the light tactical suits were designed to protect them, but it was still unnerving to be able to see the bullet that would have disemboweled you, just sitting over your abdomen.
“Malady?” she radioed in to her colleague.
“Specialist Malady here… TZZK!” his returning voice was glitchy, and Jezzy could hear the thocks and thunks of battle happening around him.
“One target down. Two more. One due south of my location, another at the end of the ridge, opposite the mine entrance...TZZZP!”
Jezzy risked leaning out as far as she dared to get a quick look at the ridge on the other side of the ice mine. The yellow rolls of Titan fog were heavier up there, but she could see flashes that illuminated their undersides, like a strange alien storm. It had to be Malady, locked in a life-and-death gunfight with two of these highly-trained shooters.
And there is nothing that I can do! Jezzy could have screamed. She was pinned down, all the way out here, and she was also tasked with keeping this ambassador lady alive. She just had to hope that the imprimatur’s distress call got through, and that the Marine transporter was even now breaking the upper atmosphere in response—or that Malady managed to kill everyone ‘with extreme prejudice.’
She caught sight of the compound of the factory. There was the blackened and still-smoking hole, crater, and wreckage that used to be the rover. She was quite thankful that the destruction was total in many ways, as that meant she couldn’t see the remnants of the Warden Harj, the convict miner, or the body of the ambassador’s personal assistant.
Bits of industrial machinery, both new and old, were dotted around the facility—giant segments of pipes, a stack of metal stanchions presumably used for shoring up tunnel walls. It was huddling behind and beside these that Jezzy could see the rest of the survivors. Convicts dotted here and there in ones and twos, and then a huddle of the Martian delegates, their guards and the imprimatur crouching by the stack of the metal stanchions.
We’re safe…for now, she thought
Ping! Another ricochet off their pipe, this time hitting near the edge, and Jezzy quickly swung back into its sanctuary of darkness.
Ker-thunk! The final block shifted, releasing a small avalanche of grit and causing the boulders beside it to shudder and shake before re-settling. Solomon winced, leaning back, although he knew that if the wall decided to cave in on them now, there would be hardly anything they could do about it.
But the wall held, thanks to Malcom Jeckers carefully pointing out which boulder to pull and which to leave. His skill had paid off, clearly, as there was now a clearly visible hole through the collapsed wall to the rest of the tunnel beyond.
“It’s still a dead end,” said the other, scarred convict, but Jeckers was already worming his way through.
“Hey, wait up!” Solomon said. The old man was too wiry, and Solomon’s body still wasn’t quite responding to his demands as well as it should.
“The Proximians after me, then you—” Solomon nodded to the convict. “—then Karamov and Kol.” He gave the order before following Jeckers through the small tunnel that they had created.
“Argh!” Suddenly, his side flared with pain as he pulled and kicked through the narrow aperture. I thought the painkillers were supposed to take care of this, he thought, but they were clearly starting to wear off. Either that or he had done some other, terrible sort of damage inside of him.
“Commander, you okay in there? You stopped moving.” This was Karamov over their suit channel.
“I’m fine. Just…fine.” Solomon forced the words through clenched teeth as he reached up to the far edge of the tunnel—
—as hands clasped his wrist
s and pulled.
“Whoa!” The pain was excruciating, but it lessened as soon as he popped from the other side of the tunnel like a cork and could once again lie on the floor and not have to put any pressure on his bullet-ridden side.
“Thanks,” he breathed, looking up to see the shadowed, eerie form of Malcom Jeckers looming over him.
“They received the Message,” the old man said over his own suit speakers, stooping close. “They received it, but they don’t know what to do with it. I do. I know. That is what this is all about,” the old man went on before turning suddenly as the first Proxima delegate appeared at the lip of the hole and pulled themselves clear.
“Phew! That was a tight squeeze!” the delegate said a little self-consciously, before turning to help their colleague through the hole behind them.
But Solomon’s ears were only listening to the old man’s words. “What Message?” he asked out loud, forcing himself, through hissing and wincing steps, to follow the man to the far side of this cave, where a sheer and blank rock wall appeared to completely cut off their escape.
“See? I told you! This is a dead end!” the other convict had now made her way through after the three Proximians, and Solomon saw the glint of Karamov or Kol’s suit lights as they made the journey through as well…
“What Message?” Solomon repeated, approaching where the old man was fumbling at the wall, as if searching for something. He looked mad.
Maybe he is, Solomon considered. Was that what this was all about, really? That he had been spooked by one crazy old timer here on Titan—the place that had haunted his nightmares ever since he’d been on Ganymede?
But Malcom Jeckers said something about a Message, and I’ve heard someone mention ‘The Message’ before now, too… But who? Where? Solomon leaned against the wall, panting as Karamov stepped up to his side.
“More drugs, Commander.” He inserted another injector pen into the commander’s suit catheter, and once again, Solomon felt the slight sting and the spread of fuzzy warmth roll through his body. The pain in his side lessened, became distant, and then just became a warm ache.
“That’s the last I can give you though, Commander, unless you want to fall unconscious,” Karamov said heavily, his eyes looking worried behind their visor-plate.
Unconsciousness right now didn’t sound that bad, Solomon almost conceded, but no, he had a job to do. “Thanks,” he said, turning back to the old man.
The Message.
That was it. The memory swam back to the top of Solomon’s mind. That was right. It was Doctor Palinov and Warden Coates. He had overheard them arguing, and Palinov had said that ‘The Message’ was the reason why the Outcasts had been formed in the first place, and that ‘The Message’ was why the Outcasts were being treated with a dangerous, experimental genetic drug.
But what is it?
“Malcom. Mr. Jeckers… I need to know…” Solomon was saying, just as the man hit the wall with a rock held in his gloves.
Thunk!
“You see, the old fool has gone mad. He probably got confused, thought this was another tunnel entirely…” the scarred woman said derisively, and the worried stares of the Proxima delegates thought that maybe they thought the same thing too, as Malcom Jeckers struck the wall again with his rock.
For a section of the wall like a thin plate to crack and fall off.
“It’s not solid rock,” Solomon saw. “We’re down at the level of pure ice. That’s just an overlay of rock dust…” He started to grin. The old man had been right, he saw when he examined the walls and the floor.
“We’re in a rock tunnel, but with a block of ice blocking it.” He pointed out the difference in the sheen of the walls and the floor. “You still got that ice cutter?”
Of course, the convict had it, pulling out the long-handled contraption that had been strapped to her back and leveling it against the wall. It looked like a lance, but with a sort of curved blowtorch at the end.
“Out of the way, Jeckers,” Solomon heard the woman grumble before firing the trigger piston at the far end, just as a boiling red ember of heat sparked and fizzed at the extreme end. When she set it to the ice, it started fizzing and bubbling immediately, and she was able to start pushing the long contraption into the wall.
They were going to make it. They were going to get free! Solomon saw the hole in the ice block start to grow wide as a steady rivulet of water flowed from the cut. The ice cutter made a high-pitched fizzing sound before suddenly changing timbre as it shuddered in the woman’s hands.
“We’re through to the other side. This plug isn’t wide at all. They must have left it here and forgotten about it...” she was muttering in a frustrated way, probably annoyed that she had been proven wrong, Solomon thought.
“We got…” The convict had put her helmet to the heat-smoothed tube she had created through the wall of ice, peering at the other side. “I see stairs! Metal stairs. Old and pretty grimed up, but that is definitely a stairway heading up!”
We’ve done it, Solomon thought, looking at the other Gold Squad members, and then at the three Proximians with their own exhausted and gleeful faces. They had managed to rescue the negotiators, and now there wasn’t going to be humanity’s first interstellar war.
Little did Solomon Cready know just what was about to happen, but at least he had this hopeful thought as the building above them started to collapse…
12
Crash
There was a rumbling sound that at first Jezzy didn’t even register, modulated as it was by the pings of attacking bullets, the shouts of the convicts, and the static that her own suit amplifiers produced, trying to replicate the rising winds of Titan’s alien landscape.
But the sound grew louder, turning into a high, screeching whine.
“That’s a ship!” Jezzy sat bolt upright in the tube where she sheltered beside the ambassador. “Say what you like about the Martians, but right now, I could kiss their Imprimatur Valance!” Jezzy whooped.
“Just because she called in the cavalry for us, it doesn’t mean that she’s on our side…” the ambassador said glumly.
“I don’t care what side she’s on. If she just called in air support, she’s got my vote.” Jezzy knew that she was being a bit facetious, but her giddiness at the turnaround of her fortunes was overwhelming. She dared to sidle to the edge of the outlet tube, looking up into the sky—
—to see a bruise of darker color just a little way off from them, which she knew had to be the breaking bow wave of the ship that had come to rescue them. Maybe they have deep scanners that will be able to locate Sol and the others, she said, as out of the corner of her eye she saw flashes along the ridge. Flashes of gunfire as Malady tried to eliminate the combatants, all on his own.
FZZT! Even this far away, the scalding sound of Malady’s particle generator could be clearly heard through Jezzy’s suit pickups. The light illuminated the dark shadows of the rocks, and where it touched, there was an explosion of ice and dirt.
I hope you got one, the combat specialist thought savagely, as the ground started to shake with the vibration of the approaching stellar craft. For all of humanity’s advancements, their jump-ships and their genetic technologies, some things were still unavoidable—and the massive release of energy as a craft breaks into an atmosphere was one of them.
Jezzy kept looking up as the bruise in the sky grew uglier and darker, then became scored with flashes of its own light like an answering storm to the one that Malady was creating far below.
That would be the flames of gases burning off as the super-hot hull of the craft meets the thin gases of Titan’s atmosphere. But as soon as it was out of the upper atmosphere, she knew that the ship would cool down rapidly. That was what they were designed to do, after all, and the Marine Corps had more money to throw at engineering and development than most of the colonies put together.
Only it wasn’t a Marine Corps ship that burst its nose through the yellow clouds, positional rocks fi
ring from its wide, circular body.
“That’s not a Marine transporter,” Jezzy said, feeling as though the rug had been pulled out from underneath her feet. “That’s a stars-be-damned Martian saucer.”
Jezzy’s assessment of the facts was one hundred percent correct. It was a stars-be-damned Martian saucer. It was the exact same one, in fact, that she had seen traveling into Saturn space—the one that the imprimatur and her people had come here on.
To call them saucers was perhaps a bit optimistic, but ‘Martian doughnut’ or ‘Mars burger’ didn’t really have the same ring to it. It was indeed faintly burger-shaped, almost as high as it was round, but with a domed top and bottom, with the middle ‘ring’ being a circlet of black grills, rockets, and instrumentation—of which Jezzy was sure that she could see the rounded noses of weapons pods scattered at regular intervals.
“I tried to warn you. The imprimatur has betrayed us!” the ambassador hissed in alarm.
Jezzy looked across the battle scene, her eyes hunting for the standing stack of metal girders where Valance and her people were huddling from the shooter, who seemed to have gone suspiciously silent now that a vast Mars saucer had arrived. She could see the imprimatur clearly, her helmet looking up at the sky in anticipation. She had never used the ice mining factories’ transmitter to hail for help from the station far above at all. She had merely called in for her own people to come and collect her.
“Imprimatur!” Jezzy turned her suit amplifiers up to maximum and shouted across the distance. She saw the woman flinch and turn in her direction, but if she shouted anything back, it was lost in the rumbling roar of the Martian saucer.
Outcast Marines Boxed Set Page 36
