“Fire at will!” Solomon called, leaning out and targeting the nearest cyborg he could see.
It was a heavy-set one, its human body a slightly bigger build than the others, although that was where any trace of individuality ended, as the thing had the same silvered arm, shoulder, part-face and legs as its colleagues.
Colleagues, Solomon scoffed. As if creatures like this know anything about solidarity.
He pulled the trigger, feeling the reassuring kick of the firearm against his shoulder as he gripped hard on the stock to stop it from jumping too much. BADA-BRAP-BRAP-BRAP! He was rewarded by the flash and flare of muzzle fire, almost simultaneously causing a shower of sparks and ricochets from the rising man-machine.
The cyborg staggered under the onslaught, the commander’s bullets forcing it back down the incline to the west of their position. Through the sights of his gun, Solomon saw the grisly image of the creature’s bullet-pocked body, freeing droplets of black machine oil into the Ganymede air.
The creature toppled back, hitting the frozen rocks hard and skidding back down to the edge of the plateau.
Yes! It felt like a victory, but the commander knew it was a limited one. He might have pushed it back, but with ceaseless determination, he saw the thing push itself back up on silvered metal arms and start to climb the incline once more—albeit slightly wobblier than before.
“This is insane!” he cursed, firing another barrage of Jackhammer shots at the thing, this time aiming for its belt and the legs. The cyborg didn’t make any pretense of dodging or ducking. It just took the bullets as stoically as it had every other time that Solomon had fired.
Suddenly, a shower of sparks hissed into the air from one of the thing’s knee-joints, and it was done, sliding back to the edge of the plateau, clearly with some kind of injury to its right leg.
“Well done, Commander,” Jezzy breathed tensely over the channel.
“Not good enough, though…” Solomon saw that the cyborg was once again moving. This time, it was hauling itself over the rocks by its arms since it could no longer stand up, but it was still coming for them.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Solomon breathed over the channel communicator as other Outcast Marines took up positions beside him and began firing—other survivors of the facility crash who had been guarding the buggy. They had a total of nine Outcasts up here now, all armed with Jackhammers, and they were facing a similar number of cyborgs.
Six… Seven… Solomon ducked a purple-white particle beam that seared overhead as he counted the approaching enemy. Enough to fill a small landing module, easily, and they had approached from the western ice shelf that lay beyond the facility, meaning that they hadn’t come from the crash site itself.
A scream burst over the shared channel as suddenly one of the rock formations on the brow of the ridge burst apart in a flare of burning light, and the particle beam from below that had super-heated the rocky elements and melted the gluing ice punched its way through to find the adjunct-Marine who had taken up position on the near side.
“Outcast down!” Solomon was calling, scrabbling down the safe side of the ridge to re-ascend it underneath the Outcast’s body. The sight was terrible—a darkened burn hole straight through the man’s chest. Acting on instinct, Solomon grabbed the body and pulled it backwards, away from the possibility of any more mutilation, and picked up the man’s spare ammunition to add them to his own, before re-ascending the ridge…
We can’t stop them, Solomon was thinking, just as there was another scream over the shared channel—this time from their eastern flank instead.
“Malady!” Solomon shouted. The full tactical had been guarding that wing of the battlefront, but he had been joined by other survivors. Looking across, he saw the shape of a body flying and tumbling through the air—a human body, an Outcast Marine who had been seized and thrown by an advancing cyborg as easily as if the man were nothing more than a twig.
“Contact east!” Solomon shouted as he realized what had happened. The cyborgs really did have deep machine learning circuits, didn’t they? Their blatant assault of the western side of the ridge had concentrated the Marines on them, as another small group must have crawled over the ice plateau below and up their eastern flank. They were being surrounded! Solomon brought up his Jackhammer—
—just as a heavy, dark shape barreled into the approaching cyborg. It was Malady, standing up to his full height and making a roaring sound over the shared communicator channel as he knocked the cyborg back the way it had come. Solomon saw the back and side plates of the full tactical flex like bronze-colored muscles, and the small wheels and servo-assisted pistons releasing steam all around him as he charged to the next approaching cyborg.
It was like watching two rhinos attack each other. Solomon felt a moment of terrible awe as the two man-robots battled. Malady was clearly the bigger in every way, but the cyborg had an in-built particle-beam weapon. It was quicker than Malady, but not as strong.
“Enemy all around us!” Jezzy was shouting, and Solomon could hear the report of her own gun over the channel as she fought the western assault.
“Position overrun! Fight where you stand!” Solomon shouted the most terrifying words that he had never hoped to utter, but it was now already too late as something half-silver bounded through the light gravity past Malady to land between Solomon and his squad member. More cyborgs launched themselves into the air to similarly break apart the Outcasts line.
BADA-BRAP-BRAP! His weapon was still on burst fire, and Solomon fired straight up at the cyborg’s chest, giving it a full burst that knocked it back.
It’ll be back, Solomon knew, but he had no time to hunt it down, as he was pushing himself back to his feet, turning to see where another cyborg had landed near the center of their group.
This was a sort of fighting that Solomon hadn’t trained for. He was a commander, he was taught to think in positions and logistics and strategies, but this was just a bloodbath. Instead, his more distant, New Kowloon instincts kicked in.
Keep moving. Stay alive. He kicked out, somersaulting over the ridge to the far side as the rocks behind him exploded with purple-white light. He landed badly, half-stumbling before turning and firing a shot at the nearest cyborg to leap again.
Be fast. Take what chances you can. That was how you survived in the chaotic and complicated streets of New Kowloon, Solomon’s body knew, even if his mind didn’t. You had to be agile. Unpredictable.
“Arghhh!” another scream as one of the Outcast survivors that Solomon Cready had rescued was blown off the ridge by a bolt of purple-white light. Solomon turned to find the source of the attack, just as it was smashed to the ice by the leaping, charging Malady.
The specialist commander found himself in one of those surreal lulls in the middle of the violence that he had read about from other Marine’s biographies. All around him, people struggled and fought and died, and everyone was shouting, snarling, and screaming. The ground shook with the thunder of bullet-shot and the impacts of bodies.
The eastern flank is gone, Solomon saw. Only Malady, another Marine, and himself stood on this side of the battle, and there were Outcasts fighting cyborgs in the heart of the ridge as well, who appeared to be trying to push their way to the knot of survivors on the west with Jezzy and Karamov at their center. Solomon had no idea how they were managing to hold out against such an unstoppable enemy, but they were…somehow.
“Rally! Rally, my brothers and sisters!” Solomon held up his Jackhammer and started to bound towards that knot of fighters with Jezzy and Karamov. If they could reform there, then maybe they had a chance…
“Ach!” Something struck him on the side of the shoulder, spinning him around and sending him falling down the side of the ridge, bouncing in the low gravity as his attacker followed him down.
It was one of the cyborgs, who had apparently backhanded him with enough force to send him flying. The cyborg’s metal legs pulverized the rocks and ice as it landed, b
ut Solomon still hadn’t even pushed himself back up again yet, and his Jackhammer was gone! It had slipped from his fingers in the fall and was now slowly floating a few meters away.
The cyborg leveled its weapon-arm at the Gold Squad Commander. Solomon saw the cylinders spin in a blur and discharge threading miniature lightning bolts as it generated the charge necessary to—
“Not today, metal-man!” a voice shouted as something smashed down on the cyborg’s hand, knocking it down so that the light seared into the creature’s own leg, to a hiss of molten metal and steam. It had been a boulder. One of the Outcast survivors—a big one at that—had seized a boulder and thrown it, before reaching to pull up his own gun on the strap around his shoulder and fire point-blank into the thing’s face as they bounded forward.
The cyborg swiveled and flew backward, its leg tattered and showering machine oil and sparks as it flew, and Solomon’s savior reached down to seize the specialist commander by the front of his light tactical and haul him to his feet.
The face inside the Outcast visor-helmet was not the one that Solomon had been expecting, however. It was Arlo Menier, a member of Red Squad and one of the Outcasts who had been determined to make Solomon’s life on Ganymede a living hell.
Adjunct-Marine Menier was a big Frenchman, with the build of a professional wrestler even before adding a light tactical suit on top. He had dark eyes and no hair, but a handlebar moustache that he was very proud of.
Solomon and the rest of Gold Squad had also had one training exercise with him as their commander before their final squad positions were allocated, and Arlo Menier had made every bad decision that a leader could make. Luckily, the visiting Brigadier General Asquew had noticed, ejecting Menier from the squad and giving the command to Solomon instead—which had started almost a year and a half of enmity, near fights, and small acts of cruelty from the large Frenchman towards him.
“Arlo!” he said in shock, unsure of what he should do. This man had tried to kill him out here once. Well, scare me, perhaps, he corrected. But holding a flaming arc-welder just a little away from the vulnerable visor mask of a fellow adjunct-Marine was just as dangerous as trying to kill one, right?
Solomon watched as the larger Menier reached down to snatch up Solomon’s Jackhammer from where it had been starting to settle on the ground. His nemesis held the gun in his spare hand for a moment, as if also wondering whether he was going to shoot his long-time enemy…
“Here,” Arlo grunted, passing the gun to the specialist commander and turning to fire at another approaching cyborg.
“On your left!” Solomon called, as the cyborg with the particle-burnt leg had managed to drag itself into a crouching position, once again raising its laser-generating arm and aiming at Menier.
Solomon reversed his grip and fired, hitting the thing’s ruined face to an eruption of sparks and machine oil. The neck twisted horribly, and the thing collapsed to the ground, unmoving.
Both Solomona and Arlo looked at the dead cyborg for a moment. Between them, they had done it. They had managed to kill one. It had taken two point-blank shots to the head and a self-application of its own particle laser to do it, but they had still done it.
“Thanks,” Arlo murmured gruffly at Solomon.
“Head shots,” Solomon breathed, wondering how they had managed to do the impossible, before realizing that each of the cyborgs that they had seen so far had platework silver-sheaths covering the backs of their heads down their spine to their belts. Even if their chests or shoulders or arms were bare of metal, each cyborg still had that ‘spine sheath.’
“It must have hit the central cortex or spinal column…” Solomon said. “Down their back… That’s where their control cables are—running down the spine!” he shouted excitedly as both men turned back in the direction of the battle to spread their good news, and to fight. Together.
10
Manna from Heaven
“Hold your positions!” Solomon shouted as he fired again, hitting one of the advancing cyborgs on the side of the shoulder. It wasn’t the hit he was looking for, but it was enough to spin it around, and for the Outcast beside him to target its spine. A direct hit! It went down, but their problems were far from over.
The survivors had been pushed back to the northern side of the ridge that overlooked the ice plain and the ruined facility behind them. They had lost a further two Outcasts and one staffer who had taken up a gun and joined them on the front line.
Solomon pulled the trigger for it to click impotently and the warning light to flare along its side. Dammit! He was out. He kicked himself backwards as he ejected the empty ammo case and reached for the next.
There was only one left on his belt.
Damn-damn-damn! He snarled, jamming it home and racking the first round.
The ‘front line’ was now in front of the buggy, parked halfway up the southern incline. The cyborgs had taken the ridge from them, cutting off the two Green Squad members at the practice hulk.
If they even still live, Solomon thought angrily.
BAP! BAP! The sounds of gunshots were loud over his suit communicator channel, whilst only being muted from his external suit mic. He realized that the person next to him was firing a Marine Corps service pistol, and that it was Warden Coates, stalking towards the front line as if his indignation alone could defeat the enemy. Solomon had never seen the small, wiry man fight, and he had automatically assumed that a man as cruel and as authoritarian as Coates would still be hiding in the buggy.
Not the case, however, as he saw his superior officer stride forward and take up arms with two hands, firing expertly in single shots to sever another cyborg’s spine sheath.
They were all down to single shots now, though. There wasn’t enough ammunition to go around and burst-fire from the Jackhammers was too imprecise to guarantee the kills that they needed.
How many are left? Solomon did a quick tally of the soldiers around him. He was relieved to see that all members of his Gold Squad had survived so far, although Karamov appeared to not be getting up from his crouch by a rock. Had his legs been injured? They were down to seven surviving adjunct-Marines versus five cyborgs. Although they had the greater numbers, and Malady, they were still a long way from winning. Solomon didn’t like those odds.
So far, the best tactic had been to gang up on the cyborgs. Two or three Outcasts firing on one, with one or two of the attackers firing shots to drive them to the ground, while the remaining Outcast went for the kill-shot on the thing’s back or neck.
But now that their numbers were pretty evenly matched, Solomon was starting to fear that they wouldn’t make it.
“Warden, sir! Oxygen check!” Solomon called out to Coates when the man slid to the floor and behind the boulder beside him as he reloaded his pistol. The man should have looked ridiculous in his flappy, cloak-like emergency suit, but Solomon was beyond resentments and grievances right now. We’ll have time to resume our usual hatred if we’re both alive at the end of it, he had decided, mostly thanks to the actions of Arlo Menier.
“Marine?” The warden’s voice was brusque, but Solomon heard him grunt in approval and watched him check the small reader on the side of his wrist. “I’m fine. But the rest will be running out in twenty minutes,” the warden said tersely, checking his pistol and standing back up to continue his sharp-shooting.
But you put your suit on at the same time as the other staffers, Solomon realized as he watched the man fight. That meant that Coates had only twenty minutes of oxygen left too, and that the warden didn’t care, just so long as he was still able to fight.
The understanding that they were all in this together spread through Solomon, and it was like a breath of fresh air, strangely.
I hated it here, he admitted to himself as he targeted another cyborg, attempting to push forward from the top of the ridge, but instead meeting a barrage of shots from him or the others around him. I hated Ganymede. I didn’t want any part of the Marine Corps.
And the ex-thief had good reason to hate it, perhaps. The training facility had been run on austere, demanding lines. Absolute commitment to regulation, alongside a dangerous genetic—and chemical—program that had seen almost a third of the total Outcast forces die of seizures and toxic shock.
Ganymede had seemed more like a prison camp than a military academy, he thought.
But now, in the baptism of blood and war, Solomon caught a glimpse of something else that had been hidden away here. It was in the way that Warden Coates fought alongside his men—well, attempting to put his men and women to shame with his fearless outrage, perhaps. It was in the way that, when death was a certainty, Arlo Menier had stepped up and saved his life, and then fought alongside him. It was in the way that the different colored squads had been forced to fight, and die, together.
And it didn’t come from Ganymede, or the warden’s commands, Solomon realized. This new thing, this camaraderie, this brotherhood of arms came from each other. From the other Outcasts who were all just like him, ex-convicts, the mad, bad, and dangerous whom Confederate society had sent to the prison moon of Titan for the rest of their natural lives.
Here, together, these outcast men and women had forged something new between them. A reason to stay alive, if only for each other.
Even Warden Coates, Solomon had to grudgingly admit, was a little bit of an outcast here, too. A man with a strangely powerless military title who only had authority over the most hated military brigade in the entire Corps, but who had given this project his all, just the same.
It was in that moment that hope broke over them all like manna from heaven.
Searing phosphorous stars were falling to the moon’s surface in streaks of boiling, burning white light along the ridge that illuminated the battlefield too sharply.
Illumination rounds, Solomon recognized, as the general band of his suit communicator burst into life.
Outcast Marines Boxed Set Page 56
