“I want to take a closer look at seventeen degrees northeast spin-ward off pole,” Rhatnari called out the Proxima-centric reference point. It was easier, she knew, to always base their directions either on the direction of Earth far, far away from them, or else use the nearest object’s geography, like Proxima.
“I’ll move the cameras.” Edmunds said, reaching for the controls that would swivel their tiny, telescope-like scanning devices.
“No, I meant we need to get closer. Fly due spin-ward, off its northeast bow,” Rhatnari said.
What? Edmunds blinked. “We’re under orders not to engage…”
“I know that, Edmunds, I’m not asking you to fire at the thing, just fly a bit closer, that’s all!” his companion said. “And seeing as you reminded me, let me remind you that our orders were to collect information. I think that structure there could be some kind of propulsion system…”
“I’m not sure about this, Aliyah…” Edmunds started to say.
“Joe, come on. Through blood, fire, and fury, remember?” Rhatnari quoted the Marine Oath at him, and even Joe Edmunds had to admit that she was right. They had been tasked with gathering information because they were the best placed and the best trained for this mission. Who knew, there might even be a commendation in it for them. And wasn’t like the thing had even moved in the past forty-eight hours.
Maybe it’s dead, he told himself.
But it really wasn’t.
1
Inhuman Hands
First Lieutenant Solomon Cready stood at attention behind Ambassador Ochrie’s chair, looking at the black marble table that dominated the center of General Asquew’s audience chamber on board the dreadnaught Indomitable. His thoughts still circulated with what he had seen in Proxa, and before that, on Ganymede.
The sky on fire, metal man-things stalking through the Proximian streets, and the ruins of the Ganymede Training Facility. Of being overrun on Ganymede by the things, and having to order everyone to fight, just fight, wherever they stood and however they could.
The cyborgs did not hesitate. They did not slow down or suffer from exhaustion. One minute, they were statues, and the next, they were coming for you. Even with their limbs blown off, they would still come for you.
On the other side of the table sat the general herself, in deep red and gold battle-plate. The only other occupant at the table was Mariad Rhossily, the Imprimatur of Proxima, whom Solomon and his crew had rescued from her colony-world not seventy-two hours prior.
“Ambassador, Imprimatur.” Asquew nodded sternly at them both, before inclining a slight nod to Cready as well. “Thank you for coming at such short notice,” she said seriously.
It was short notice, Solomon thought. He swore he could still smell Proxa’s smoke in his nostrils, and he still hadn’t managed to find any time to clean and check his power armor yet. With the Ganymede Training Facility gone, the Outcasts had no base, no home, meaning they were bunking where they could in ad hoc rooms in the mega-ships of the Confederate Marine Rapid Response Fleet.
We got promoted to full Marine status, Solomon considered, but the Outcasts are a broken unit. They had, what, a little under a hundred ex-convicts who had somehow survived the insane training or the attack on Ganymede?
Just what difference can a hundred ex-cons make in a war? It was hard for Solomon not to feel disparaged, he had to admit, but the general was still talking, so he straightened his back and tried to pay attention.
“I am sure you must both be busy with the question of Proxima’s refugee crisis.”
“And all of Proxima’s citizens currently trying to get home, or trying to get away from home, or trying to find any word of what has happened to their home world,” Mariad Rhossily stated heavily. “And all the deep-field cargo ships that need to be alerted and diverted from entering Proxima space. The list goes on.”
“You have the full backing of the Confederacy,” Confederate Ambassador Ochrie said. It was her job to liaise with all of humanity’s colony-worlds and keep them happy enough to toe the Confederate line. Given the fact that Proxima had been muttering about independence for decades, and now that Mars had declared itself sovereign territory, Solomon could understand why Rhossily probably felt a little tetchy.
“Then why isn’t the Confederacy reacting faster to this threat to my home world!?” Mariad said with apparent weariness but evident frustration. Solomon figured that it was a complaint she must have already been making to the ambassador, general, and any other Confederate official who would listen over the past two days.
“I take it that the Marine Corps hasn’t been deployed against this aggressor yet?” she continued.
“Actually, that is why I called you here.” The general didn’t raise her voice or appear perturbed by the imprimatur’s angry questioning. “As well as Lieutenant Cready, given his and your close involvement with the invasion.”
“Invasion,” Mariad stated. “Is that what you’re calling it?”
“I don’t see any other name for what is happening, Mariad…” If Ochrie had tried to be comforting, she only came across as patronizing, the Outcast commander saw.
“Can it be an invasion if the company responsible were already living on Proxima?” Rhossily argued. “We all know that NeuroTech built the cyborgs, and we all know that the cyborgs attacked the second that ship appeared in orbit…”
“Excuse me, ma’am, but…” Solomon couldn’t stand for this stupidity any longer. “The cyborgs that also killed their own creator?” He remembered the moment when he had stepped forward to place Augustus Tavin, the CEO of NeuroTech, under arrest for selling the cyborg warriors to the Martian seditionists—only to watch the man gasp in surprise as one of his own creations shot him through the chest.
“I don’t know enough about cybernetics to know what happened, but it seems to me that all we need to do is to respond with the full might of the Marine Corps!” Rhossily banged her fist on the table.
She is upset, Solomon considered. Of course she was. The first time that he had heard about the Message from the alien race known as the Ru’at—a deep-space transmission kept silent for over a generation, containing within it the detailed schematics of cybernetic technology—well, he hadn’t wanted to believe it, either.
It would be so much easier to blame NeuroTech, Solomon almost sympathized. The mega-corporation might be powerful arms dealers, but they were also only human. They had bank accounts and offices and he was sure they liked going on holiday to Venus every year.
But the Ru’at? What on earth do they want? Solomon thought.
“We received this earlier this morning, a transmission from our scout ship, the Intrepid.” General Asquew fluttered her hands through the holographic displays, and a flickering image appeared, projected on the black marble table before them as if it were a data-screen.
It showed the dark edge of the ship with the bright glow of Proxima’s atmosphere in the background. The officials watched as the contrast from the bright surface of the planet flared and then diminished as whoever had taken this footage adjusted their settings.
“You sent a scout ship alone,” Mariad Rhossily said with incredulity, and Solomon could tell she thought the situation warranted a vessel with a lot more guns.
“Please, Imprimatur, just keep watching,” the general stated.
A different object eclipsed the view, before the scout ship swung past it to get closer and closer to the vessel. Solomon recognized the long launch tubes of Proxima’s missile defense system, hanging above the invading vessel and not doing anything about it.
“Why didn’t it fire?” he heard Rhossily murmur.
“Look,” Solomon murmured, noticing something about the Proxima space weapon. “No lights. No movement,” the young man said. “It’s been deactivated.”
“But…how?” the Imprimatur of Proxima stated.
The ship grew larger ahead of them as the Intrepid had drawn closer, and now the image revealed metal buttresses hundreds
of meters tall, support girders snaking with oddly-opalescent wires, and holding in place large ‘units’ like the modular components of a computer. It was a machine landscape, Solomon thought. He thought he recognized ceramic pipes—or some sort of material that looked ceramic, anyway—that were so wide, he could very well have flown a Marine transporter down the middle of them!
“It doesn’t have a hull,” Solomon realized.
“Lieutenant?” Asquew asked. “Observations?”
“It doesn’t seem to have any external sort of shell. That means it’s not worried about asteroid impacts.” Solomon gestured to where several of the metal shapes—from the rounded domes to the cylinders—were criss-crossed with scars and scratches from impacts. “And also that it’s not trying to keep a hold of an internal atmosphere…”
Across the table from him, Asquew nodded, as if she had already come to that conclusion but had been waiting for someone else to verify it.
“It’s not a ship. It’s a machine,” Solomon said in astonishment.
The recorded image on the general’s desk flickered with lines of static, but then cleared to reveal that the Intrepid had gotten close, very close indeed.
The giant arms of stanchions, buttresses, and supports dominated their view as the Intrepid must have performed a very close fly-by. Solomon couldn’t see any lights flickering on the ancient metal, scarred and scratched. He also couldn’t see any obvious rivet or bolt joints. It was like every part of the vessel had been molded as a whole unit.
There was movement, however, from the hissing and escaping gases from vents here and there. The Intrepid paused, then drew closer, but their reasoning couldn’t be worked out or ascertained.
And that was when it happened.
Something moved in the innards of the vessel, like an internal organ pulsating.
“What is going on?” Solomon heard Ochrie breath.
“Wait,” Asquew stated, as the shadows and movement inside the strange invader continued. More hissing, and finally—
The giant metal girders were moving on unseen, internal tracks. It was like watching the thing give birth, Solomon thought with a shiver of revulsion.
Something dropped into the night—one of the modular units, roughly cylindrical and made of a dark rust-red metal. Around its body were three rings of reflective black obsidian, and they were each moving at different speeds, like a gyroscope.
“What is that thing?” Mariad whispered.
“What are those things,” General Asquew corrected her, as, in the distance, more of these cylinder-craft dropped from the belly of the invading craft.
How many was that? Solomon tried to count. Twenty? Thirty?
“It’s an invasion fleet,” Rhossily stated.
“Only thirty ships…” Solomon murmured. And none of them looked a match for the Marine Corps dreadnaughts, although they might be three times the size of the Intrepid, he guessed.
“Wait for it…” Asquew nodded once again at the picture as something started happening to each and every ship: the black obsidian rings were rotating faster and faster, creating a blur…
A blur like a Barr-Hawking engine, Solomon thought, before the first vehicle suddenly burst with light. White and bluish radiance spilled from the rotating rings around the nearest ship, and it shot forward, blurring as it did so and creating a glowing line of pure white like a comet’s tail, gradually fading from view as the energy, radiation, and radiance dispersed.
“It jumped,” Mariad Rhossily stated.
But it didn’t, did it? Solomon frowned.
“Perhaps. But not as we know the technology. It almost looks like a faster-than-light drive, and not the sort of jump-drive that we have….” Asquew muttered darkly.
As well she might be annoyed, Solomon thought. Faster-than-light was technically and practically impossible. Or at least, it was impossible for the likes of humanity so far. Their Barr-Hawking ships worked by creating a miniature event-horizon of super-charged particles so dense that they folded time and space. The Barr-Hawking jump-ship then just traveled the shorter distance between the two points.
Faster-than-light, or FTL, was merely theorized as a way of breaking the light barrier. Only neutrinos could travel faster than photons, but so far, humanity had never managed to create any sort of field or vessel that could withstand the pressures of even near light speed travel. You could feasibly cross entire solar systems near instantaneously.
“Is it faster than jump travel?” Solomon asked immediately.
“We don’t know. But the speed is not the biggest problem,” Asquew said. “It’s the fact that every one of these ships have that engine.” She nodded as, one by one, each and every ship vanished from the field of view, leaving the Intrepid and the mothership behind.
“Where did they go?” Rhossily asked.
“We just don’t know.” Asquew shook her head. “We received this footage two hours ago, and so far, there has been no sign of them again. But we have run projections on the footage.” She waved her hand, and the image was replaced by a star map of Alpha Centauri and its planets, with lines of light radiating out in a tight cone.
“If they maintained their courses, then this is where those trajectories would meet,” Asquew said in a low voice, as the star map suddenly zoomed out, and out again past the neighboring systems, the vast spaces between the stars, finally encountering the scatter-gram edge of the Oort Cloud, and then the Sol System’s very own outer asteroid belt.
Solomon watched the arrow-straight lines of light spear across humanity’s solar system, ending at one planet.
“Pluto,” Solomon breathed in horror.
“Precisely. These trajectories are too exact,” Asquew nodded. “We believe that, should the ships maintain their course, they will be attempting to establish a bridgehead on Pluto, our furthest planet, and from there, they will be free to attack all of the planets of the inner solar system with ease.”
The Ru’at mean to trap us within our own solar system, the Gold Squad Commander realized. Any movement that we make to rally our fleets or strike back would mean that we have to deal with Pluto first.
“Did the Intrepid get any scan readings on the vessels?” Solomon asked. “Propulsion, speed, weapons?”
“Ah, well…” Asquew gestured to keep watching the footage as the Intrepid moved closer to the underside of the vessel, where the craft had been ‘birthed.’
Solomon saw many, many roughly-hexagonal ports in the underside of the invading craft, from which these strange devices must have dropped. The Intrepid flew closer to the nearest, catching a glimpse of a tunnel leading up into the body of the craft, with not really internal walls to the tunnel, but instead strata of wires and pipes—
Flash! Something speared out from the invading crafts launch tubes: a light, bright and tinged with purple-blue, hitting the Intrepid straight—
The screen glitched and rolled into static.
“What was that? What happened?” Mariad asked quickly.
“More things that we don’t know,” Asquew grumbled. “That was the last transmission from the Intrepid, and no attempt to hail them or track them has led to any success whatsoever.”
“Are they dead?” Ambassador Ochrie looked up sternly, defiantly.
“We fear so, Ambassador.” The general shut down the frozen images on her desk and looked to the assembled. “It is clear in my mind that this is not the work of NeuroTech. No matter how much money they have, I am sure that they could not keep a construction like this secret for so long. This is the work of inhuman hands, and I fear that what we have just witnessed is the start of an inhuman invasion.”
The room fell silent as everyone considered what terrors the future would bring. Could they win against the Ru’at machine, as Solomon was now thinking of it?
While at the same time fighting a war with the Martians?
“Lieutenant Cready, I will be sending you to Earth with Ambassador Ochrie and Imprimatur Rhossily to present all of this
evidence to the Confederate Council,” the general stated. “I cannot trust this film to be transmitted in any way other than by hand. At the moment, the word of the invasion hasn’t spread across the Confederacy, but when those ships start arriving, everyone will know. I need you, Lieutenant, to convince the council that we must be prepared when the enemy comes for us.”
Earth. Solomon blinked. I am returning to Earth. But why? Confusion gripped him. Did I do something wrong? Is this a reprimand? Surely it would be better for him to be out there on Pluto, with his unit, defending humanity against the Ru’at?
“Sir? My squad, sir…. Will they be joining me as before, as an honor guard for the ambassador?” Solomon asked.
“Negative, Lieutenant. If our analysis of that footage is correct, then the first of the vessels will arrive at Pluto within the next few hours. The rest of the Outcasts will warp and be there to greet it when it does,” Asquew said.
“But, sir—” Solomon couldn’t believe it. They were going to send the Outcasts—his Outcasts—into battle without him?
2
Acting Field Commander
“Outcasts! At-TEEEEN-Hut!” snarled Warden Coates, storming into the suite of dormitory rooms that had been found for what remained of the Outcast Company. They were on board the general’s dreadnaught, still hanging over the surface of the embattled Mars.
Jezzy shot a measured look at Karamov as they ran to stand in line beside their brothers and sisters, everyone quickly falling into grim silence. Lieutenant Cready hadn’t returned yet from his debrief with the general, and a tense air hung over the Outcasts family.
Some of them were on deployment to Mars when Ganymede was attacked, Jezzy knew. They hadn’t been a part of the general’s battleship ceremony, but they received their own full Marine appointments after their recall when the Ru’at had appeared.
Outcast Marines Boxed Set Page 65
