Max had spirited them out of Luna 1 just a short time earlier, waiting for a time when the patrols were at their lightest and leading his charges through a series of service elevators and access tunnels that were the domain of couriers, cleaners, and delivery staff, until they had entered their last hurdle—getting into Port 13.
“It’s a hoods terminal, meaning that you only get workers, porters, haulers coming through here. No tourists or civilians,” Max explained.
“Aren’t you a civilian?” Solomon asked.
“Ah…” He reached up to tap the lanyard on his neck, which had a picture of his smiling face and his ID reference numbers as a tradesperson of Luna 1.
“Luna Trade Guild. All self-owned businesses get to be on it. It gives me the right to use this port,” Max said as they stepped up to the white metal doors, the light above stubbornly stuck on red.
“Not the rest of us, though…” Solomon murmured dismally, standing in front of the small camera by the side of the door, angrily gesturing to the people behind him and pressing the door-release button.
Access Denied. The small LED screen flashed the words. Solomon groaned. He was not a member of the Lunar Trade Guild, quite clearly.
“Listen up, by order of General Hausman!” Solomon raised his voice to shout into the camera. “I have three prisoners here and I need access to this port for further investigations of illegal activity! Open up or I’ll get a demolitions team to burst our way in!” he said, adding some fire and grit into his voice as he did so.
“Sheesh, Lieutenant…” Max sniggered behind him. “I think you’re going to give them a heart attack. You almost gave me one!”
“Ah.” Solomon actually felt a little proud of his performance. Lying was something that he had been very good at, once. “Old skills.”
“You were an actor?” Max asked as they waited for whoever was on the other side to come to the decision that it was best to let the angry Marine in now rather than later.
“I suppose you could say I was a performer, of sorts…” Solomon shrugged, as the small LED screen suddenly flashed the words:
Access Granted.
There was a hiss, and the doors opened ahead of Solomon, revealing a line of rather large, burly men in the gray and blue tradesmen encounter suits, some with utility belts and a variety of small tools and modules attached, looking at them speculatively.
“They don’t look very happy to see us…” the ambassador whispered warily.
Are you really surprised? Solomon thought as he looked at the six or seven men standing in front of him, blocking his access and appraising him with all of the calculated menace of a boxing ring. These guys aren’t just tradesmen, Solomon recognized immediately.
Lieutenant Cready of the Outcasts had just found the smugglers of Luna.
13
The Invasion of Pluto
“Lieutenant Wen, get out of there!” Faraday was roaring over her suit.
Jezzy ignored him. The Ru’at jump-ships had ‘fired’ their cyborgs, apparently from specially-made launch tubes, and with their flesh being kept alive by cybernetic enhancements and controls, they had no need to encase them with protective suits or atmospheric helmets.
Instead, the cyborgs flew forward like living missiles into the wreckage field, and Jezzy was frozen for a moment in shock at this bizarre act of war. Didn’t the Ru’at know that the Marine Corps could just fire at them? Jezzy thought. The Oregon alone, a powerful—if aging—Marine Corps battleship, could probably fill this scrap field with missile fire.
But then Jezzy remembered the battle that she had fought alongside Solomon and a fraction of the Outcasts on Ganymede, back when Ganymede had been their training home and they had been called ‘adjunct-Marines’ not yet even worthy of full Marine status.
They had fought just a handful of the cyborgs on Ganymede’s frozen surface. A handful against almost double those numbers of trained Outcasts. And still the cyborgs had managed to overrun their position, decimating their numbers
And it was all because they didn’t stop. They don’t die when they are supposed to! Jezzy remembered with a snarl of rage. You could pour bullets into them, and those that did manage to get past the cybernetic plates didn’t even slow them down. You had to totally dismantle them or sever their spinal cord to stop them.
No wonder the Ru’at weren’t bothered about sending their cyborgs into battle first. The Ru’at cyborgs could probably walk, stumble, and crawl through a field of exploding missiles and still launch themselves at the ship that had attacked them.
But right now, Jezzy had only one ship to worry about. The Esther.
She had no time to wait for the perfect matching trajectory. She fired the rockets of her harness and shot forward towards the spinning vessel as a cloud of cyborgs approached from the other side.
Woah! She narrowly missed a spinning metal rod, moments before she impacted the side of the Esther with a brutal, heavy THUNK!
“Ach!” Jezzy saw stars for a moment and her hands scrabbled, sliding down the hull of the tug as it turned over and over, before one of her power gauntlets finally caught something—one of the many external grabrails. She was no longer bouncing on the hull but was instead revolving with the Esther, hanging on like a limpet.
Wonderful. Now all I have to do is find the airlock.
Luckily for the acting field commander, the design of the tug was fairly straightforward—the grabrails she clung to led to the ladder, which in turn led to the dome of the airlock. The woman cursed how everything seemed slower in zero-G, as she grabbed the ladder bars and hauled herself up, one hand at a time.
KLUNK! She felt the vibration of an impact vibrate through the outer hull of the ship and froze for just a second. But the Esther kept on spinning on its axis, and there were no sudden explosions of gases or electronics. Whatever piece of junk had hit the ship, it wasn’t THAT bad, clearly… Jezzy thought as she continued her ascent, reaching the hexagonal dark gray dome of the airlock.
“Joe, I’m in place. You ready?” she asked.
“I’m inside,” he said, and her external suit microphones picked up a muted tapping on the inside of the airlock.
Right. Break the rubber coating, turn the wheel clockwise. No, wait, COUNTER-clockwise! Jezzy hooked one hand to the nearest ladder hold and studied the dome. There was a thick rubber seal running around the edge of the control wheel on the very top, but luckily, Jezzy had a tool for that.
Using the controls on her new harness, she moved the grabbing vice arms overhead down to the seal to pinch onto the squashed cake of rubber and press down, exerting more and more pressure.
She felt the pressure suddenly lesson as the vice-like pincers cleaved through the rubber, which burst from between wheel and outer airlock door. She released it, letting the rubber rotate away. She felt a twinge of ridiculous guilt at littering space, before remembering that she’d just poured eight tugboats full of metal into Pluto’s near space. That was going to require some heavy clean-up satellites to get rid of after all this.
Huh. I’ll consider myself lucky if there is going to be an ‘after’ and the worst thing that I have to think about is space junk, she thought.
Next, she lowered the grabbing pincer-arms to the wheel, latched on, and started to turn.
For a moment, the outer airlock controls wouldn’t budge an inch, until finally it did, moving in halting, juddering quarter-turns, until—
FZZZT! The bolt of purple-white light seared across Jezzy’s shoulder, severing one of the grab arms and flinging her backwards.
“Ach!” She was dangling from the airlock by just one pincer-arm of her harness as the form of a cyborg, its human flesh horribly blackened from the vacuum of space, appeared, climbing towards her from the other side of the Esther.
Frack!
Jezzy pushed the directional controller on her harness belt with one hand as her other moved to the trusty Jackhammer at her side. These guns were solid-units apart from the barrels, so that mea
nt they could fire in space, but firing a projectile weapon in a vacuum always had an extra level of complication…
PHOOM! She pointed the Jackhammer as the vice arm swung her to one side and fired, the recoil of the shot in zero-G moving her backward as much as the bullet pushed forward.
Thump! She hit the side of the hull and felt a judder run through her shoulders as the last remaining grab-arm snapped from its hinges.
Which means I’m not attached to the tug anymore… Jezzy realized in a flash of crystal-perfect awareness as she started to peel from the side of the still-turning Esther.
FZZT! Another line of purple-white light scored in front of her as Jezzy threw her shoulders forward into a roll that would see her return to the surface of the Esther.
Grab! She reached out to seize one of the ladder rungs, pulling herself tight to the craft and sparing a look above her to see that the cyborg itself was still grimly clinging on, just as she was, on the other side of the airlock. The thing was spreading thick, black gobbets of its machine-oil blood from the wound she had inflicted in the bare part of its chest.
It was nowhere near enough to stop the thing.
“Lieutenant! We have multiple enemies approaching through the field! I can fire on them, now!” Faraday’s voice joined her inside her helmet.
“Not yet! A bit busy here, sir!” Jezzy said. She swung herself to one side as the cyborg once again fired the particle-beam hand across the hull at her, for the purple-white laser shot to spear into the night behind her.
She was a sitting duck here, unless—
Jezzy let go of the ladder at the same time that she fired the harness’s positioning rockets, full force, straight out behind her.
The combat specialist, acting field commander, and temporary first lieutenant was thrown forward like she was one of the cybernetic torpedoes herself, covering the distance between them in a fraction of a second and reaching a hand down to grab onto the wheel of the airlock as her other fired point-blank at the cyborg.
PHOOM! The recoil from the blast once again threw her back the other direction, but it had the desired effect. The power of the shotgun shell at such close range was enough to peel the cyborg from his grip and send him spiraling end over end through the night.
Thunk! Jezzy landed back on the hull with a heavy thump, coughing as the force of the shock winded even her.
“Lieutenant? You still out there?” she could hear the desperate words of the tug driver Joe on the other side of the door.
“Urgh. Only just.” She pulled herself back to the wheel and now, with no vice-like grabbing arms on her shoulders, she instead had to use both hands to turn the wheel, bracing her legs against the side of the hull for traction.
Creeeak. The wheel turned another quarter, and then another quarter—
KER-LUNK! This time, she saw the cyborg that hit the hull of the spinning Esther, bouncing and skidding across the hull until it caught a hold, a little way beyond the prow.
“Come on, come on, move, you miserable piece of trash!” she shouted as she hauled at the airlock wheel, waiting for the cyborg at the other end of the boat to start firing at her at any moment.
“Joe, you did depressurize fully in there, right…” she gasped as she heaved at the wheel again, a fraction of a moment before suddenly steam and gases enveloped her as the airlock door burst open—
She’d managed to break the seal of the airlock, and physics had done the rest.
And no, the inside of the airlock decompression chamber was clearly not decompressed.
“Agh!” Jezzy was thrown head over heels back as something collided with her, rocketing out of the airlock.
“Help!” It was Joe, a Plutonian worker in a drab black and tan encounter suit, a ridiculous bubble-helmet at one end, wrapping his gloved hands over her shoulders and clinging on for dear life as they spun through the debris field.
“Wait, Joe! I need to see!” Jezzy shouted as they tumbled, and her stomach lurched with the G-forces. She managed to tear one of his hands from her shoulder, instead gripping the worker around the wrist with her powerful gauntlets as she kicked out with her legs, trying to right their tumble.
“Oof!” Joe’s back suddenly hit the discarded plate of metal they had been hurtling towards, and Jezzy hit it a second later.
Warning! Suit Impact.
Rear Shield Plate Armor: -13%
Her suit registered the damage across the interior of her helmet, but Jezzy didn’t need the holographic controls to know that her body was aching and once again out of breath.
Maybe I should have turned down this command position, Jezzy groaned inwardly as her free hand grabbed the edge of the rusted piece of metal that they had collided with, while in front of them was the Esther, still spinning.
She was lucky that she had power armor on for that impact, Jezzy thought, before suddenly realizing that Joe, the man she still held by the wrist beside her, hadn’t made a sound or a move yet.
Joe the Plutonian tug driver did not have power armor on.
Frack! Jezzy pulled him towards her to find his body floppy and lifeless, his eyes closed inside of his suit. “Please don’t be dead, please don’t be dead…” Jezzy was whispering frantically as she checked her suit controls, then cursed when she remembered that this man wasn’t even in the Marine Corps, let alone in a Marine-friendly encounter suit. Usually, all members of her squad would show up as identifier tags on the inside of her faceplate whenever she saw them, along with a health bar indicating general biological fitness. Power armor suits constantly monitored their wearer’s vital signs.
Joe wasn’t a Marine, and Joe’s suit wasn’t connected to hers. With this guy, Jezzy knew that she would have to be a bit more inventive to find out if he had died in her hands or not.
Activate Suit Thermal Imaging.
Her faceplate screen glitched a scrolling green, to be replaced by the bright white warmth of the body of the man, muted by his suit, and disappearing completely as his bodily warmth could not transmit into the freezing vacuum of space at all.
His body was still warm, which was a good sign… But then again, it only just happened, didn’t it?
Jezzy turned the suit imaging back to normal and leaned in until she was almost clanking helmets with the tug operator. She watched his face with eagle eyes, looking for any telltale signs of life…
Condensation. The inside of his bubble-helmet had a tiny patch of condensation on the inside, and, as she watched, it faded to almost nothing, before coming back a long moment later.
Condensation that could only come from warm breath in a cold suit, Jezzy thought. Such tricks wouldn’t have worked with her own suit, she knew, which had every available insulation and moisture-capturing technology and air filter.
But with these old service encounter suits? Jezzy was very pleased that Joe was wearing one for the first time since she had met him.
“Okay, probably concussion. Just so long as you don’t throw up in there, you’ll be fine…” Jezzy muttered to herself, wedging the man’s unconscious body between her and the slowly-revolving bit of metal she was clutching onto, before using her free hand to attach the man’s belt to her own with her poly-filament metal rope.
“Right. Now let’s see about getting you home,” she said, daring to haul herself up to the edge of the scrap plate of metal—
FZZZT! A line of purple-white fire shot past her and she ducked back again. It was the cyborgs, they were out amongst the debris field, and at least one of them had spotted her.
Jezzy banged the back of her helmet against the metal as she waited for the answer to come to her. As the metal slowly rotated and spun—thankfully not colliding with anything else yet—she could see the distant half-silvered forms of more of the cyborgs as they leapfrogged just as she had done from wreckage to wreckage, making their way across the field.
But why? Who brings troops to a spaceship battle? she thought with frustration. Either way, she had to move, and she had to take the
unconscious Joe with her.
And it was at that point that she remembered that she still had the positional rockets of Ahmadi’s harness. “Okay, buddy…” she said with a frown to the unconscious face of the tug ship driver. “It’s probably better that you’re not going to see this.”
She turned around so that both her hands were holding onto the ends of the sheet of hull metal, and Joe was pressed between her and the sheet.
Then she fired her positioning rockets, full force, behind her.
The bit of rusted and dented hull took a few moments to get up to speed, but once it conquered its own inertia, it moved at a fair speed, like it was being ‘pushed’ by the outstretched hands of Jezebel Wen.
FZZT! FZT! Sparks exploded from one edge of the hull plating as one of the many cyborgs moving across the field took a shot at her. A fraction of an instant later, another shot narrowly missed her.
“Lieutenant? Where in the name of Jupiter’s moons are you going? I’m forty degrees off your port-ward shoulder.” It was Ahmadi, still flying somewhere beyond the debris field and trying to find a way to get close.
“Wait, I’ll angle the trajectory…” Jezzy swung her legs to one side and the corresponding angle shifted the direction the sheet metal was flying in, as—FZZZT!—it collected more fire from the cyborgs that they passed.
When Jezzy raised her head, she could see the looming undercarriage of the Gingko above her, getting bigger by the moment. She felt once again that curious impression that she was deep underwater and was rising to the hopeful surface that was the Ginkgo.
CRASH! Something hit her sheet of scrap metal and they started spinning wildly. It was all Jezzy could do was to grip onto the metal with all of the augmented might of her power gauntlets.
They must have hit some piece of debris, Jezzy thought. Something that was traveling fast enough to send them into a spin
Outcast Marines Boxed Set Page 72
