And her eyes flashed to her foot in front of her to see—
One entire side of her boot was blackened with soot, and the metal ‘sheaths’ had crumpled and collapsed against each other where the dying cyborg had tried to tear her foot off. But some of the crushed plates must have formed a seal with her own blood and the slagged beads of rubber insulation, melted by the cyborg’s particle-beam hand. Together, they must have formed a plug that had sealed the fracture.
But for how long?
The sparks winked out, and Jezzy was plunged into darkness once more. But this time, she knew that she wasn’t going to freeze to death or depressurize any time soon.
Well, unless of course the blood dries or the rubber cracks… Jezzy thought, balletically spinning herself head over heels until she was approximately at the place where she thought the sparks were coming from.
Come on, come on, come on… She scrabbled around on the wall until she found it. The sharpened jag of metal and, on the other side of it, a torturous mass of cables, wires, and strange, bulbous units or crystalline tubes…
If there are sparks coming from this thing, Jezzy knew, then it means that the Oregon has power.
Her hands moved over the board, desperately trying to remember any scrap of her classes on Ganymede. They had covered a whole variety of things in their lessons—from military history to basic starship design and layout. She was sure that they had covered astro-mechanics.
If those blocky units are transistors, then that must mean that a power board can’t be too far away… Jezzy rummaged around in the guts of the battleship until she hit something firm, but with a slight give and covered in fine nodules.
Bingo!
Now, all she had to do was to find the damaged circuit. In the dark. Without any suit scanners to read heat, electromagnetics, or anything else.
Flash!
Sparks cascaded over Jezzy’s shoulder, blinding her momentarily with their brilliance. But she moved quickly, bringing up her damaged foot and allowing it to catch the falling sparks along the site of the damage.
It didn’t hurt at first, as the sparks harmlessly discharged themselves over the external framework of Jezzy’s suit. But then one of the pieces of molten light hit exactly where Jezzy had wanted it to—the rubber, blood, and metal spot of ruin, melting the softer layers and creating a more secure seal.
FZZZZT! It also happened to feel like stabbing her foot with a glowing hot poker.
She screamed into the dark.
3
Brother of my Brother
The cyborgs wore Solomon Cready’s face. All twenty of them, and they were all marching straight into the hold of the Helga.
“Hold it right there!” Solomon could hear a voice shouting from one of the other gantries that hung inside the other holds of the Helga. The Outcast commander recognized it as the shouting, bullying voice of the overseer of the general workers. The very same work team that he, the ambassador, and Rhossily were pretending to be a part of.
The cyborgs did not halt until they were standing well inside of Hold 1.
“I said hold it!” The overseer was either used to seeing cyborgs, Solomon thought, or he was just way too angry to care what had just seized control of his ship. Just the fact that someone had dared to do so without his permission.
“Who are you? Where’s that Martian iron that we’re supposed to pick up?” Solomon could hear the overseer was shouting down at them.
“Here is your Martian iron, Overseer,” said a voice that Solomon recognized, as, over the shoulders of the not-Tavin and his cyborgs, there stepped the obvious ringleader of the new arrivals.
Specialist Kol, lately of the Outcast Confederate Marines.
“Kol!” Solomon couldn’t help himself from bursting out as soon as he saw the young man.
Kol had been in Gold Squad from the very beginning. Back when they had still been lowly adjunct-Marines, and a part of the most hated squad in all the Outcast Company.
Solomon remembered him as eager, earnest, and a little too slight to be a Marine, but then again, all the Outcasts had started out as criminals, hadn’t they? He had been sharp, quick-witted, and friendly.
And he had betrayed them all to the Chosen of Mars—the separatists who had attempted to seize the Red Planet from the Confederacy.
“Kol, you son of a—” Solomon pushed forward and almost made it all the way to Tavin before the dead-not-dead man’s cyborgs closed ranks on him.
“Hey! Get off!” Solomon saw the flash of their silver arms and felt hands gripping him as strong as vices, pressing through the thin material of his cheap service suit and exerting more and more pressure… So much so that he swore he could feel them impacting the muscle beneath. Just when he was sure that the bones in his upper arms were about to snap under the cyborg’s ministrations, he cried out—
“Okay! Okay, I get the idea. Call your dogs off!” Solomon gasped at the man he knew as Tavin.
“That’s far enough.” The man nodded and although the cyborgs didn’t let go their various holds on the lieutenant, they did stop exerting any more pressure. Solomon was still in agony, though.
I really wish that I had my power suit on about now, he thought, and not for the first time. Not only would its strengthened steel plates and armor provide much more protection against the cyborg’s strength, but it would also, automatically, shoot him full of painkillers or stimulants whenever he needed.
Like now.
“Lieutenant?” said Kol at the other end of the hold.
“Just what is the meaning of this? You know this man, Assistant?” the overseer was shouting loudly in alarm. “And what are you doing to one of my staff, whoever the hell you are, anyway?!” The overseer had spotted what was going on in Hold 3, clearly, with Solomon seized by a gaggle of cyborgs and pushed to his knees in front of the man who wasn’t dead.
“Kol? Do you want to do the honors?” Tavin said.
“Absolutely,” the ex-Outcast said loudly, stepping forward.
“I see that you ditched your uniform, Kol. Feel better, do you?” Solomon hissed through gritted teeth.
“Explain yourselves, now, or I’m calling the general!” the overseer started to say.
“Your Martian iron is here, in the form of these cyborgs, Overseer,” Kol called out. “Your shipment will go ahead as planned. You are to return these to the Luna Station and General Hausman.”
That had been the plan all along… Solomon realized what he had just heard. General Hausman, Protector of Earth, must have been in league with the mega-corporations!
Solomon cursed himself for being so stupid. Someone had been supplying the Martian separatists with Marine Corps hardware, hadn’t they?
Hausman must have started the war so that he could seize control while Asquew and the Rapid Response Fleet were out of the way!
“These three are coming with us,” said Tavin, gesturing to Solomon, the ambassador, and the imprimatur.
“Over my dead body.” Solomon hissed.
The man who wore Augustus Tavin’s face burst out laughing. “Well, haven’t you worked it out yet, Lieutenant?” He took a step closer to the knot of cyborgs restraining the Marine. “There’s plenty more where you came from.” He nodded to Kol’s shipment of twenty cyborgs that all bore Solomon’s face.
“Serum 21,” Solomon growled. All those medical experiments that the Outcasts had been subjected to by Doctor Palinov on Ganymede. They must have…cloned him? Was that what the Outcast program was really all about? Creating a clone army? Were Doctor Palinov and Warden Coates working with Hausman and the mega-corporations too? How deep did this conspiracy go?
“Maybe there was a defect in this one’s upbringing,” the Tavin who was not Tavin said speculatively as he eyed the growling Lieutenant Cready. “And here I was told that he was the smartest of the lot. Look for yourself …” He nodded to the empty packing crates that had been on board the Helga. Seven of them. Six for the cyborgs, and one for…
&n
bsp; “You?” Solomon blinked.
“Ah, comprehension dawns,” Tavin said as Kol’s shipment of cyborgs clanked into the hold and lined up by the back wall in perfect unison.
“I am like you, Lieutenant Cready. More like you than you would care to admit. We two are brothers, of a kind…”
“Tavin!” Ambassador Ochrie called out in alarm.
“I think the man deserves to know, don’t you, Ambassador?” Tavin nodded, and two of the cyborgs broke free from holding Solomon down to point their particle-beam arms up at the two women. “It is time for you to come down now. Either that or die.”
“Solomon!” Imprimatur Rhossily gasped in fear, but it was no use. They couldn’t run, and they couldn’t hide. After a few muttered words, Ochrie and Rhossily started the slow climb down the ladder to join the lieutenant and the others.
They had been beaten. They had been captured.
“Lieutenant Solomon Cready,” Tavin rolled the name off his tongue. “It’s a good name. But it wasn’t the one that either you or I were given at birth. I was given a number. Just like you were.”
“What do you know about my life?” Solomon growled. “I don’t know what’s happening here, or why those cyborgs are wearing my face, but I am nothing like you!”
“Really?” Tavin chuckled to himself. “Tell me, Solomon Cready… What do you know of your life, really? Do you remember your childhood? Do you know why the Confederate government had been tracking you ever since you were a child?” Tavin’s voice dropped low.
“Do you know why you killed your best friend, Matthias Sozer?”
4
Jump Start
“Fracking hell!” Jezzy gasped at the pain radiating from her boot. The entire righthand side of her body no longer felt freezing cold, but that was little consolation given the fact that it now pulsed with the agony of scorched flesh. Jezzy wondered if she had managed to melt her boot to her foot.
At least… Even her thoughts gasped. …it’s a seal. She wouldn’t lose any more oxygen or die from de-pressurization any time soon.
But she still hung in the dark of the dead spaceship and waited for the next illumination of sparks from the power board she had found.
FZZZTT! When it next came, Jezzy was prepared, shielding her visor so that the she could see the control board quickly—follow the frayed wires to their connectors and scan the board for the thick black coil, striped with red.
Gotcha!
It was the main power input to this piece of electronics. She seized it as the corridor went dark again, and pulled. For a moment, it stayed stubbornly in place, and then—
FZZT! She was showered with more sparks, harmlessly dissipating across the surface of her suit. But she had the black length of cable in hand as she fumbled at her utility belt. The metal fingers of her glove barely transmitted the pressures to her internal mesh gloves, but she found the access port she was looking for.
To the power suit’s energy hookup.
“I hope this is going to work…”
Jezzy twisted in the zero-G environment to get into a better position and wished that she had paid much more attention in her technical study lessons.
Don’t you need a positive and a negative? She hesitated. Wasn’t that how you jump-started an engine?
But power suits weren’t exactly engines, were they? She just had to hope that fighting with the cyborgs had only knocked a connection loose, or that her suit’s power had run down in the time that she had been floating here, unconscious.
She jammed the live electrical cable into the access port and screamed.
FZZZZT!
Soothing, soft green and orange lights flared in the darkness, illuminating the still, unconscious form of Jezebel Wen.
Emergency Reboot System Initializing…
The glowing green words flashed, and a percentage bar shot up from empty to full.
POWER ARMOR… Active.
USER ID: 2LT Wen
COMPANY: Outcast, Rapid Response Fleet.
SQUAD IDENTIFIER: Gold.
SQUAD TELEMETRIES… Active.
Bio-Signatures: COMPROMISED
Atmospheric Seals: COMPROMISED
Chemical, Biological, Radiological Sensors: ACTIVE
Oxygen Tanks: MINIMAL (1:33:18)
Oxygen Recycle System: COMPROMISED
The lights blipped and scrolled over Jezzy’s sleeping face as the power suit, jump-started by the Oregon, tried to correct the vast amounts of damage that both it and its occupier had sustained.
Emergency Stimulant Injector Deployed…
0.3micro grams Anti-inflammatory Deployed…
Painkiller Injector Deployed…
Dotted around her body, nestled against the undermesh, were the suit’s various injector modules. Working in tandem, they started firing in sequence, selecting the appropriate medicines stored inside the armor’s carapace and delivering them in quick jabs.
Environmental Suit Controls: ACTIVE
The underlit lights of her helmet’s cowl flared to life, at the same time as Jezzy’s heart started pumping furiously and her brain chemicals surged.
Jezzy gasped and coughed, feeling at once very, very exhausted and filled with an electric sort of energy. She could no longer feel the pain emanating from her foot, nor the various scrapes and knocks that she had sustained during her fight. The last of her suit’s medicines had seen to that.
“It worked!” She was astonished, but also very grateful. She had managed to jump-start her suit, and now she watched as its holographic readouts and controls flowed over the inside of her helmet.
“The oxygen recycler isn’t working…” she muttered. That meant that her suit could not attempt to recapture and convert her breath, nor any spare molecules from the surrounding space to siphon for oxygen.
Meaning that I only have what is left in the tanks… An hour and a half. Not enough to get to Pluto from here, she knew, but enough to get out of this corridor.
Now that she could see, Jezzy performed a proper study of the space she was trapped in. Crumbled, twisted, and burnt metal at both ends of the corridor. I might be able to twist that out of the way, with help from the power armor, she thought. These suits weren’t as impressive as full tacticals, but they still had a wide range of useful features—such as the servo-assisted gloves, arms, and back plates that meant she was now many times stronger than she had been as a biological human.
There were the chrome body parts of at least one of the cyborgs, twisting out of the wreckage. Jezzy smiled grimly at her own handiwork, before—
“Aha! Now we’re talking!” It was her Jackhammer rifle, snagged on one of the bits of twisted girder.
Jezzy swam over to snatch the rifle up quickly.
Jackhammer Personal Rifle…
Weapon: OPERATIONAL
Ammo: 7 Bullets
“Damnit!” She read the available ammo left in the rifle, updated on her suit commands as soon as she picked it up. Seven bullets wouldn’t be enough if she had to fight her way past any more of those cyborg things. But it’s better than a kick in the teeth, she had to agree with herself.
But first, before she did anything else, Jezzy opened her suit telemetries and gestured for a broadcast.
COMPANY-WIDE BROADCAST;
SENDER: Second Lieutenant Jezebel Wen, Acting Field Commander, Outcast, Rapid Response Fleet
“Hello? Call in! This is Second Lieutenant Wen… I am still on board the Marine Corps battleship Oregon and seeking a way out. I do not know how much of the Oregon is operational, or even still intact—or how many of my company remain alive. Respond with full situation report if you receive this, over and out.”
The silence that met her broadcast was deafening.
5
Hospitality
“Lieutenant? Solomon?” said Mariad Rhossily, looking at the man with fear in her large, brown eyes.
She has a right to be afraid, Solomon thought. I know what I did.
“Come on now, th
is isn’t one of your reception parties, Imprimatur,” the Tavin-clone was saying as he led the three humans, flanked with his six cyborgs, through the hold of the Helga and into the waiting dock of the Martian transport ship.
The crew of the Helga, including the overseer, watched in stunned silence as the changeover was made. Six cyborgs delivered with the clone-Tavin for twenty Martian-built ones, destined for Luna Station and Commander-in-Chief Hausman’s service.
The Martian transporter was much smaller than the Marine Corps ones that Solomon was used to. Its hold was a fraction of the size, and he could clearly see the flight deck on the level above them, separated by a glass wall.
“Over there, Lieutenant,” sneered Kol, directing them to the side of the hold where the cyborgs pushed them into chairs to be strapped in forcefully.
“It must be strange taking orders from me, huh?” said the man who had been the youngest of the Gold Squad Marines.
Solomon didn’t say anything. His mind was on other things. Like Matty Sozer.
“C’mon, Lieutenant, you haven’t got anything to say? Cat got your tongue?” Kol teased as the bulkhead doors connecting them to the Helga hissed shut and the ships prepared to separate.
“Leave him alone,” Rhossily snapped, earning a mocking chuckle from the ex-Marine.
“Oh, trust me, lady, he’ll be alright. It is, after all, what he was designed to be. Ain’t that right, Lieutenant? Always end up on top, right? Always get back on your feet?”
Outcast Marines Boxed Set Page 78
