“What is this all about?” The ambassador was panting before they got to the end of the service corridor that led down to the three major holds of the Helga.
“Those crates down there. This whole shipment. It isn’t just about iron,” Solomon quickly explained as he skidded to a halt.
Ship-wide Announcement: Jump completed. All personnel to their stations and prepare for the transfer.
The ship’s speaker system blared with its automated voice, and Solomon growled his frustration. They were ahead of the others, but it would only be by a few minutes. How much damage could he cause in that time?
“What are you talking about, Lieutenant?” Ochrie pressed.
Solomon skidded to a halt at the door that led to the ladder down, his hand on the release lever. “This shipment. It’s the cyborgs. And it must mean that Taranis Industries is still manufacturing them. They’re going to send them to Mars, to fight Asquew, because Hausman is the one funding the colonial war.”
“But if those cyborgs get activated…” The Imprimatur of Proxima paled. She had seen what hell they had caused to her entire city.
“Precisely. The Ru’at will take them over, I’m sure of it,” Solomon said, throwing open the door and jumping down the ladder to the gantry below to see—
—a whole load of burst-open crates, and a line of cyborgs standing in front of their empty plastic wombs, gleaming under the Helga’s ship lights and standing stock still, as if they had been there all the time…
“Ah, Lieutenant Cready, please do come down and join us,” a voice surprised the lieutenant, and it was coming from a man standing at the entrance to the Hold 2 as the containment doors hissed and slid into the floor.
The man was thin, and what some might call ascetic. He wore a formal midnight blue and black business suit, over a white shirt and black tie. Old-fashioned, but impeccable. At his side stood four more cyborgs, two on each side.
And the man was dead.
“Ambassador Ochrie, my pleasure.” The dead man nodded with a wide but thin-lipped smile. “And Imprimatur Rhossily, lately of Proxima! What a pleasure it is to see you all here. I do have to say that your timing is impeccable!”
“You’re…you’re dead.” Solomon couldn’t get over the fact that he had seen this man die, shot through the heart by one of his own creations.
The man in the blue suit looked puzzled for a moment, making an elaborate show of patting the breast panels of his suit and checking for injuries.
“No, I am very much alive, Lieutenant Cready. Surprised to see me?” asked Augustus Tavin—the CEO of NeuroTech…who had died on Proxima.
Alien Legacy
Outcasts of Earth, Book 7
1
Dead Not Dead
“Surprised to see me?” the thin man said. He wore an old-fashioned but impeccable blue and black tailored suit, white shirt, and black tie. And why aren’t you dead? Solomon was indeed surprised to note.
“Tavin,” Solomon growled from where he stood on the upper gantry next to Ambassador Ochrie of Earth and Mariad Rhossily, the Imprimatur of Proxima. All three wore the same service suits of a ‘General Luna Assistant’—although their camouflage hadn’t helped when the dead man below had seen through their disguises instantly.
Dead. The man should be dead. Solomon’s thoughts raced. He had seen Augustus Tavin, the CEO of the multi-planetary corporation called NeuroTech, die.
One of your own cyborgs shot its particle beam weapon straight through your heart! Solomon remembered. That had been the starting shot of the Ru’at invasion of Proxima, and human space entirely. The cyborgs had ‘woken up’ and overthrown their previous programming as they seemingly fought for the alien menace.
“I’ll take that as a yes.” The dead man smiled, showing a flash of white teeth as he gestured for them to come down to the floor of the hold. But Solomon wasn’t moving an inch, as on either side of the walking dead man stood a line of the cyborg warriors, freshly delivered on the very same transport that Solomon and his companions had stowed away on.
I have been such a fool. Solomon gritted his teeth. He didn’t have his Jackhammer with him—like his Marine power suit, it had been taken from him by the smugglers of Luna because it would have given him away instantly.
But I can’t let Tavin win… Solomon cleared his throat. “I’ll come down, but my friends are staying right here.” Away from you, Solomon thought.
“Lieutenant, no!” Ochrie narrowed her eyes.
“Do you trust me, Ambassador?” Solomon muttered under his breath.
The ambassador nodded.
“Imprimatur?” Solomon looked at Rhossily, who nodded.
“You got us off of Proxima in one piece,” the colony leader said.
Only just, and there’s no guarantees that I can do the same again this time. Solomon took a deep breath before descending the ladder to face the dead man.
“How very noble of you, Lieutenant Cready,” Tavin said. “Of course, you know that I can order my cyborgs to shoot your two companions any time I choose?”
Solomon said nothing as he crossed the empty space of Hold 3 toward the bulkhead entrance to Hold 2. His eyes scanned the large metal boxes for anything he could use as a weapon.
But there was nothing.
Oh, fracksticks. He had learned a lot in his short career as an Outcast Marine on Jupiter’s moon of Ganymede, but when push came to shove, his instincts always returned to his much longer training on the streets of New Kowloon.
I’ve been in plenty of scrapes and tight corners, he reminded himself. I haven’t died yet. And if there was one thing he’d learned, it was that the best weapon you have is your mind.
“What do you want from me, Tavin?” Solomon asked as he walked slowly forward. Maybe I can get near enough to get a chokehold on him, he thought. Or if Tavin has a weapon, I could snatch it and hold him hostage.
The Outcast commander wondered whether the cyborgs would pause before they killed him if he had their supposed creator by the neck.
“You could shoot them, Tavin, but I’m guessing that’s all going to depend on whether they’ll obey your orders.” Solomon kept on walking forward. “You know what happened the last time we met.”
“That’s quite far enough.” All humor dropped from the CEO’s voice as he raised a hand. The cyborgs on either side of him did precisely the same movement. “We don’t want you getting it into your head to try something heroic now, do we?”
“Heaven forbid…” Solomon muttered. He was still about five meters away. Too far for a quick attack. And the cyborgs are going to be quicker than me, Solomon knew. He had seen them in action. Although the cybernetic half-human/half-machines might be slow to start, performing simple, straightforward attacks, their machine learning was, quite literally, out of this world. What might start as a simple attack would quickly escalate into a devastating blister of moves as the cyborgs’ internal logic analyzed their opponent’s fighting styles and reaction times.
No taking on six cyborgs on my own, without weapons, then.
Solomon had to come up with a different plan. “So, you survived, Tavin. Good for you.” He always had been a good talker. It was probably the only skill he had that was better than his skill at stealing things. “But you must see that there’s no need to get the ambassador and the imprimatur involved in this. Let them go, and we can talk about what happens next.”
“What happens next? Oh, my dear fellow. How very quaint of you to think that you can start negotiating with me. But you know the old adage: you always have to negotiate from a position of strength,” Tavin said.
“But you don’t need them,” Solomon growled. I was tasked with keeping them alive. They are my responsibility. “And what are you going to do with them when you have them? Killing the ambassador will only make the Confederacy come for you with everything they’ve got. They’ll forget about the Martian separatists. They’ll just come for you,” he promised, although he had absolutely no idea if any of it was
true or not.
“And what of the imprimatur?” The dead man smiled bloodlessly.
“She’s not important to you. Whether you’re in league with the Ru’at or the Martians or neither or both, Imprimatur Rhossily is the leader of a conquered world. She has no leverage worth speaking of,” Solomon said evenly, wincing inwardly even as he said it. “And killing her won’t further any of your aims.”
“And how do you claim to know WHAT my aims are?” Tavin’s eyes flared in anger.
Bingo. Solomon kept his face still. I now know that he has a temper. The Marine wondered if he could make him act rashly—do something stupid—and give them an opportunity to escape.
“It must have really hurt when your own robots turned against you, Tavin. What was it? Faulty wiring?” Solomon eyed the distance between them. It wasn’t growing any shorter.
The man’s jaw clenched, and Solomon saw his hands twitch. Signs of frustration. He thought he was starting to get to the man, until Augustus Tavin opened his mouth next.
“While I do appreciate your concern, Lieutenant Cready, it really is starting to annoy me,” the dead man said.
Solomon blinked in confusion.
“I did not get shot on Proxima,” the dead man said somewhat paradoxically.
“I don’t understand…” Solomon started to say.
“Lieutenant!” It was Ochrie, suddenly calling out from above them. “I don’t see how there can be any use in negotiating with a murderer. What do you want with us, Tavin?” The ambassador leaned forward on the gantry railings.
“Don’t you think that the lieutenant has a right to know?” The man who was and was not Augustus Tavin started to smile.
“Right to know what, exactly?” said Solomon.
“State your business, Tavin! None of us have any more time for games,” Ochrie said acerbically.
“But it hasn’t been me playing those games, has it, Ambassador?” the CEO who might have died on Proxima purred. “It’s probably time that you told the good officer here what the Confederacy has been playing at, don’t you think?”
“Lieutenant, come away from there. Now,” Ochrie said.
What? Solomon looked up at the bureaucrat. There was something that she didn’t want him to know. Something that Tavin clearly did know.
“I don’t think I can, ma’am.” Solomon looked at the six cyborgs, still with their weapon hands raised and pointing out at them.
“He was always supposed to be a clever one, wasn’t he?” Tavin said as there was the sound of hissing from behind him.
We’ve already docked with the Martian transporter, Solomon realized. That was how this Tavin-who-was-not-Tavin had come on board, right?
Wrong, Solomon realized as the external airlock doors to Hold 1 started to open to the stocked belly of the Martian transporter.
Clank. Clank. Clank. And a new line of cyborgs.
Each one had their faces almost entirely contained by the silver chrome of their kind. But their essential human features—their eyes, noses, and mouths—were all still biological.
And all looked exactly like Solomon Cready.
2
Float
Jezzy floated, and her body grew cold.
Jezebel Wen, Acting Field Commander of the Outcast Marines and trained combat specialist, did not know how long she had hung in the vacuum of space, but it couldn’t have been long.
If it had, she would have frozen to death and/or asphyxiated from the miniscule loss of pressure in her boot. The cyborg that she had killed had been strong, and the crushing grip of its servo-assisted metal hand had been enough to cause a tiny metal fracture in her combat boot. Her foot had already been hit by a glancing shot from one of the dead cyborg’s particle-beam weapons, and it was this damage that had allowed the fracture to spread.
“Suit, respond!” the second lieutenant hissed, although her lips didn’t want to move.
The automatic internal display of her power suit—the sort which should scroll holographic information over the inside of her helmet—was silent. It was like being inside a metal coffin, she thought.
My suit’s inactive. The realization acted faster on Jezzy’s pained and flagging consciousness than even the suit’s auto-stimulants would have. But her suit couldn’t deliver their life-saving payload anymore. Her power suit was dark.
But outside of Jezzy wasn’t.
There was a flash of electric-blue light, and Jezzy saw sparks erupt across the half-collapsed corridor that she, Karamov, and Malady had been fighting in.
Karamov. Jezzy felt the savage kick of grief to her chest. Karamov is dead.
Karamov—the somewhat taciturn, quiet, and serious Outcast member of Gold Squad who had become a medical specialist. He had been with them since the beginning—since they had all first arrived on the Marine Corps training facility on Ganymede. Even though he hadn’t chosen to be in Gold Squad, he had been assigned to the squad that seemed to get into all the worst fights, and Karamov had never complained. Not ever, Jezzy thought. Not once.
And now he is dead. And it is all my fault.
It was then, at her darkest moment, that Jezzy considered the unthinkable. Maybe she should just float here, watching the glitching sparks of the open panels in the corridor. Flash! Another escape of brilliance into the small space, before being plunged into darkness again.
It was kind of peaceful here, Jezzy thought. Perhaps it was fitting that the acting field commander, with a duty to protect her squad and her company, went down with the ship that she served on. Perhaps, she thought, it would be fitting that someone like her—an ex-Yakuza killer—should die here in the dark, if all of her skills and training couldn’t even have saved her friend.
But who will be the one to tell Solomon the news? Jezzy thought. She was a creature of honor, after all. Even with all the killing she had taken part in, the Yakuza still prided themselves on being honorable, even if it was a twisted sense of honor.
Solomon has the right to hear about Karamov’s death—and my failure—from my own lips, Jezzy realized.
The Oregon, a Marine Corps battleship, had been attacked by a wave of cyborgs, dispatched by the waiting Ru’at jump-ships. Jezzy had seen the cyborgs—who had no need for oxygen or water or any sort of life support that she knew of—flying through the debris field outside Pluto to latch onto the Oregon like locusts.
Once there, they must have used their particle-beam hands to burn holes straight into the Oregon, thus causing the massive decompression event that had occurred over several floors. Which was why the corridor she was currently in was weightless.
How much of the Oregon’s crew survived? Jezzy thought in her misery. Had Corporal Malady gone, too?
The Outcast Marine who wore the monumental full tactical carapace had been trying to help her, Jezzy remembered. He had joined her in her fight—too late to save poor Karamov, of course—but he had killed one of the cyborgs before the ceiling had crumpled.
Was Malady still there? Jezzy looked at the tangled mess of metal and wire that flashed into brilliance with the sparks. Nothing could survive that, surely? But Malady was big. Very big. He might have got trapped on the other side…
It was around about this very time that Jezzy realized she hadn’t died yet. She always knew that she wasn’t dead, of course, but what was different was that she hadn’t been expecting to last this long.
The hole in my combat boot should have sucked all the oxygen out of my suit by now, Jezzy knew. She had done basic astro-medical training as a part of her Outcast training. Nowhere near as advanced as poor Karamov had gotten, of course, but enough.
And the loss of pressure between the vacuum of this corridor and the internals of her suit would have expelled all the moisture in her body as she froze to death.
But it hadn’t.
Why am I still alive? Jezzy puzzled, before changing it to: How am I still alive?
She breathed in small sips and tried to remain calm. The air smelled and tasted stale, bu
t she didn’t have any compulsion to cough or retch or struggle for more air.
Check 1. I have some oxygen, at least, she told herself. She had to be running on the spare oxygen tubes that cycled their way through her power armor. Even if the armor itself had shorted out, the suit’s reserve tank valves should still be open and feeding into the main oxygen supply. What would that give her? An hour? Two?
Again, Jezzy cursed the fact that she had succumbed to unconsciousness when the corridor had crumpled. Whatever section of wall or ceiling or floor had hit her must have been powerful enough to knock out some vital connection in her suit. And she didn’t know how long she had been in here, alone. Jezebel Wen had no idea if her oxygen would last another sixty minutes, or just another two.
Check 2. My foot…
That was the other puzzler. Why hadn’t she frozen to death, if she had a hole in her boot? Jezzy leaned the top half of her body forward, allowing herself to flip forward slowly. Mustn’t raise the heartrate, she told herself. The anxiety of being trapped in a slowly fragmenting battleship with an alien menace the likes of which they had never seen before was enough to raise it far enough.
But a higher heartrate means quicker respiration, she knew. Which meant less oxygen.
Something banged against her outstretched hands, and she moved the fingers of her power gauntlets fitfully. It was a smooth surface. It clanked when she touched it, so it was probably a wall or the ceiling—if those terms even meant anything anymore to the crumbling hulk of the Oregon.
She waited, tried to breathe deep.
Flash! Then it happened. The sparks that she had been waiting for erupted once again from the broken-open bit of wall panel, illuminating the space where she was and the ruin of her combat boot.
The corridor had become a tiny oval with jagged messes of metal at either end, tapered and squeezed around the nearest bulkheads. She had been saved by the impact-resistant design of the Oregon, as it had created a small pocket of safe corridor between the two crumple-zones.
Outcast Marines Boxed Set Page 77
