“BRACE!” Solomon shouted as the wreckage hit.
The giant iceberg of metal hit the forward prow of the Shield and scraped along it, driving the transporter beneath it as sparks and fire blew from the line of destruction.
“BWAAARM! Collision alert!” the automated computer screamed at them.
“You’re not kidding…” Solomon growled.
“Forward hull compromised! Losing pressure to crew cabins! Auxiliary power banks 1-4 compromised! Water recycling unit compromised!”
The computer kept on blurting out the list of systems that the wreckage had destroyed as it swung over the top of them and the Shield swooped out and away, trailing bits of metal.
“How bad?” Solomon shouted at the comms.
“Our forward hull integrity is about forty percent, Capt— I mean…” The Martian woman stopped herself from giving the hostage the dignity of his position. “We can’t take another hit like that, let alone those Confederates.”
Those Confederates who are my battle-brothers and sisters, and who have no idea that I’m flying this thing! Solomon gritted his teeth and concentrated on the screen in front of him. There were more pieces of wreckage coming their way. The engine housing of a Confederate ship. Masses of hull debris.
Solomon flew. He wished that he was in a Marine Corps vessel, not only because that would mean that he wasn’t a prisoner, but because it would have much more advanced readouts of this ship’s capabilities.
But Solomon had always been a quick thinker. It was the one gift that had allowed him to be taken on as an Outcast Marine rather than being sent to a penal colony, after all.
The Shield’s computers weren’t clever enough to compensate for the damaged booster rocket behind them. That meant that Solomon had to do it by hand.
Breathe, Cready… he told himself, performing one of the basic Marine centering and concentrating techniques. He tried to feel what the ship wanted to do through the way that the flight sticks jerked and pulled, attempting to disobey his every command.
It was the right one that felt the worst. There was a resistance there, and every time he pulled or pushed on it to fire the positional rockets down that side of the Shield of Aries, the rear of the transporter started to kick out. The damage must have been extensive on the rear right side, he thought.
Instead, he concentrated on keeping the righthand rockets as still as possible as he fired the left-hand ones in tiny movements. The Shield started to pirouette and swoop around and over the wreckage coming their way.
And straight into the path of one of the remaining CMC craft.
“Lieutenant!” The voice of the clone-Tavin was loud in his ear, and Cready felt the nudge of the cold muzzle of the man’s pistol against his temple. “No surprises, please,” he whispered.
“Surprises? Just what do you expect me to do?” Solomon shouted, pulling on the left-hand stick to veer them away from the CMC battleship bearing down on them. Behind it was the disparate line of other CMC fighting craft, engaged in battle with the Ru’at jump-ships.
“Just get us to the surface of Mars. In one piece!” Tavin snapped.
I think keeping us alive is my first priority… Solomon kicked down on the pedals at the base of his chair, but the Shield only sputtered forward marginally faster than it had been flying before.
The battleship was gaining on them. It looked like a rough hexagon of metal, with stubby wings on either side and a prow extending from the front that curved slightly downward, giving the ship a vaguely bird-like appearance.
But luckily for Solomon and the rest of the crew of the Shield, it was also damaged. Solomon looked up at the overhead screen as he flew, seeing the ugly black marks seared along its body and the small clouds of metal fragments like plumes of smoke that fell from it as it chased them.
“BWAARM! Targeting controls detected!” the computer panicked—unhelpfully, in Solomon’s opinion.
“She’s still got torpedoes. We haven’t got a chance!” the comms officer was shouting.
“We always have a chance,” Solomon growled. That was one of the things he had learned on the streets of New Kowloon. Surviving and winning wasn’t about being the best thief, or the best fighter, or the fastest escape artist—although Solomon had been good at all of those.
It’s about taking advantage of opportunities.
“BWAARM! Weapons lock detected!”
“She’s firing!” the comms officer said as plumes of gas and steam erupted under the curving nosecone of the vengeful battleship, and their rear scanners displayed the small silver darts burst from the weapons ports and rocket toward them.
Take advantage of opportunities… Solomon counted tensely: “Three…two…”
And then he pulled on the right-hand control stick as hard as he could, knowing that the results would be unpredictable. There was a grinding, heavy sensation as the Shield attempted to swerve—
And then rolled end-over-nose, spinning in a barrel-roll through space as the torpedoes shot past the erratic movements of the craft.
“BWAAARM! Forward anti-shock stabilizers compromised!” the computer helpfully told him as Solomon fought to retain control of the ship.
“Yes!” the Martian communications officer shouted at her desk.
“We’re not out of the woods yet,” Solomon growled. Ahead of them rose the giant orb of Mars. At this close range, it looked more orange than it did red, scudded with yellows and browns. “It’s going to take us twenty minutes or more to get into Martian atmosphere,” Solomon called out, knowing that the Marine Corps battleships weren’t designed to enter planetary atmospheres—their mass and size meant that they would break apart if they even dared.
But this Martian transporter could.
“Northern hemisphere, quadrant eleven,” clone-Tavin said. “That is where we’ll be—”
“BWAARM! Targeting detected!” the not-so-helpful computer bleeped at them.
“Why couldn’t the damned automated voice network go offline instead?” Solomon growled.
The CMC craft might have been damaged, but it was bigger than they were. It had bigger engines, and thruster rockets that actually worked, rather than the wrecked and haphazard state that the Shield’s main propulsion systems were currently in.
It was gaining on them.
“Do that thing again!” the Martian officer implored Solomon.
“There’s no guarantee the ship will take it!” Solomon said. He didn’t have the engine readouts on his console, but he could feel through the way the Shield was being pushed to its limits. Another top-over-end maneuver like that might just break it apart.
“You have to do something!” she snapped.
Take advantage of opportunities… Solomon had an idea.
“Can you send me the engine controls? Booster fuel-loads? Liquid mixtures?” Solomon said as he pulled at the flight sticks, forcing the Shield of Aries to swerve and slice through the vacuum in an effort to shake off the eventual torpedo lock.
“Forwarding command overrides,” the comms woman shouted, hitting what remained of the controls on her desk before crossing quickly to the captain’s desk seat and finishing the operation.
Command Override Granted!
Solomon’s desk bleeped, and a holographic list of green and orange specifications scrolled over his board. Solomon saw what he wanted immediately.
Ship Schematics > Engineering > Rocketry and Propulsion > Command Override Controls
The lieutenant could see the list of blinking red rocketry parts that had been knocked offline, or completely destroyed, in the collision. Half of his positional thrusters—tiny rocket systems that could be fired independently to change course and position—were down.
But that wasn’t even the worst news that met his eyes. His bank of main thruster rockets was severely compromised. They were firing on two out of three, and one of those remaining was firing sporadically.
“No wonder I can’t control this bucket,” Solomon growled as his ha
nds blurred.
“BWAAARM! Target lock detected!”
The automated computer still wasn’t doing anything for Solomon’s nerves, but he did his best to ignore it.
He navigated back to the engineering commands, quickly running a different algorithm for the fuel mixture that the rockets combined and fired.
“Whatever you’re going to do, Cready, I suggest that you do it now!” Tavin was saying in alarm.
“I’m doing it!” Solomon moved into the rocketry and propulsion commands, selected all the main thrusters, even the malfunctioning ones, and hit the burn activation.
Outside the Shield, the CMC battleship the Dauntless was bearing down on the escaping Martian craft. The Dauntless was an old-time battleship, with an old-time sort of commander.
The slightly vulture-like ship was already heavily damaged, but that didn’t stop it from pursuing the ship that was clearly a part of the resistance.
Under its downward-arching prow, weapons ports opened to gusts of steam once more, followed by flashes of light and gouts of gases as tiny silver shapes burst from their seats and arced away.
The four torpedoes from the Dauntless were some of the last in the ship’s forward battery, but its commander was past the time for caution. Colonel Austin, already an aging man who had served General Asquew for more than thirty years, knew that they had lost the battle for Mars.
But his superior officer had left him with one command: To protect the Confederacy from the forces aligned against her.
In short, Colonel Austin of the Dauntless just wanted revenge against anyone and anything that had a part in the Fleet’s downfall.
The torpedoes charged forward on the super-bright blue jets of their own rocket propulsion systems, curving in the vacuum as their internal computers adjusted to their sensors. They were targeted and locked on the massive engine signal ahead of them. There was no way that they would miss it now.
Half a klick… They sped closer to the struggling, juddering Shield.
Forty meters…
Thirty…
Suddenly, something happened at the back of the Shield. Instead of the constant burn of one of the main thruster rockets and the off-and-on burn of the second, all three suddenly flared a crimson red, turning an ugly purple as a massive cloud of fire and plasma erupted from the back of the ship.
Unknown to the commander of the Dauntless, the Gold Squad Commander had injected a highly volatile and dangerous mix of propellants into the available rocketry systems and had opened all the injectors.
The sustained, super-charged burn of the Shield’s thrusters threw her forward like nitrous oxide in a conventional combustion engine.
But that wasn’t all. The quickly expanding and evaporating plume of fire from the back of the Shield acted like a vast heatwave, diverting the torpedoes’ target lock. As soon as the four darts entered the heat-field, they believed that they had reached the engine itself and detonated.
The result was a massive flash of fire and light, extinguished in moments but impressive nonetheless. The Shield of Aries shot forward ahead of the fireball and straight into the upper atmosphere of Mars, where the Dauntless couldn’t follow it. In moments, they would be racing over the surface, and the CMC ship couldn’t afford to waste valuable resources on just one ship. Not when there was still an alien fleet attacking their brothers and sisters.
The Shield of Aries had escaped.
“What was that?” the Martian comms officer shouted with joy.
As relieved as Solomon was about the whole not-dying business, he couldn’t spare time for the congratulations. The Shield was shaking and rocking as it hit reentry, and already all of the forward portholes and viewing windows were flaring orange-red with the burn.
“Head in the game, soldier!” Solomon snarled at her, doing his best to try and pick up the nose of the Shield before it hit a terminal velocity and plunged into the Martian sands.
“We’ve lost most of our propellant system. The positional rockets are just about useless. We’re going to have to old-time physics this one!” Solomon was shouting.
Which meant gliding and allowing the ordinary laws of aerodynamics to reduce their speed. Solomon would usually have tried to use the forward positional rockets to counter their velocity, as well as diminishing the burn rate to the rear thrusters to slow them down.
No such luck now, though, he growled to himself as he fought the damaged flight control system.
“If I can raise the nose, then we’ll be skating over the thermals. They’ll help to slow us down,” Solomon said through gritted teeth. He heard an affirmative from the comms officer at his side and was glad that she hadn’t actually asked about the landing procedure yet.
The best we’ll be able to do is to glide into the deserts. His mind raced. Perhaps they would survive it, but the Shield was already pretty badly beaten up. There were no guarantees that it wouldn’t break apart on impact.
The nose started to rise in response to Solomon’s frantic use of the controls. They juddered and shook a fraction less, and the burnt horizon of the planet appeared at the top of their screen.
“We’re still coming in too hot and too fast!” the comms officer called.
“You think I don’t know!?” Solomon countered.
It was at that point that something appeared over the Martian sands, and it was moving toward them.
It was a black cylinder, and around its body were three quickly-rotating wheels, flashing an eldritch blue and purple color.
It was one of the Ru’at jump-ships. It seemed clearly capable of operating inside a planet’s atmosphere as well as deep space as it lashed forward toward them. Solomon’s heart skipped a beat. Did it know that they were its allies? Who knew what the Ru’at believed or valued…
The ship grew larger as it was about to intersect their path, and then—
From its nosecone, they were so close that Solomon could see a tiny port opening, and the flare of a blue-purple light. The Ru’at jump-ship, the enemy of humanity, had fired its devastating particle-beam weapon straight at them.
8
The Last Flight of the Oregon
FZZT! Jezzy rolled as the bolt of blue and purple light shot past her to hit the closed airlock door. There was a resounding whumpf as the metal buckled inward and scorched to black, but it held.
Thank the stars, Jezzy thought.
The combat specialist could barely think as she combat-rolled to one side of the corridor, raising her Jackhammer to fire a return salvo.
PHOOM! She didn’t even have time to aim, so she only managed a winging shot that ricocheted off the cyborg’s shiny shoulder. In any ordinary battle, the trained fighter knew that merely firing the Marine weapon would probably have been enough to send her adversaries ducking for cover—or at least flinching.
The cyborg, however, didn’t even blink as it swung its arm back toward its target.
Frack! Jezzy’s body was filled with the warm jitter of adrenaline and her suit stimulants. She didn’t feel all the aches and pains that she had sustained over the last twenty-four hours, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t suffering their effects. She tried to kick off from the wall, but her body wasn’t reacting fast enough. Maybe it was the fact that she was tired, or anxious, or maybe she just hadn’t adjusted to the pressurized atmosphere and the near Earth-normal gravity yet.
Whatever the answer, time appeared to slow as she watched the cyborg raise its firing arm much faster than she was moving. In times like this, Jezzy could feel her senses sharpening. Her eyes picked up even the smallest detail of the shiny metal form and the necrotic flesh.
Jezzy saw the metal cords of the thing’s arm—what might have once been its tendons—flex as it fired. She saw the wheels that housed the particle mechanism turning, clicking faster.
Pha-BOOM! The cyborg was thrown sideways in an explosion of viscera and sparks.
What?
“Lieutenant Wen!” It was Colonel Faraday, lurching from the intersectin
g corridor and holding his own smoking Jackhammer, which he had just fired almost point-blank at the thing’s head. “You’re alive. Good. I don’t know how many more of those things are on my boat. On me!” He raised his gun again and turned to sight back down the corridor he had come from.
“Sir. Yes, sir. Where is everybody?” Jezzy said as she scrambled to her feet and ran to his side, taking up position about a meter away from his left side, her own gun raised as she peered down the sights.
“Textbook move and clear,” Faraday barked, setting off with wide and quick paces, moving his rifle from side to side as he continuously scanned every doorway, bulkhead, or intersecting corridor mouth.
“Sir. Yes, sir.” Jezzy moved in tandem, keeping to his left, and half-turned on her hip so she could sweep her Jackhammer rifle behind them.
Even moving like this, Jezzy was surprised at how much ground they covered in a short time. Faraday set a punishing pace even in his advanced years, and Jezzy had to wonder how many stimulants and chemical augments he was running on.
“Clear,” he said when they passed a medical bay.
Jezzy cast a second eye in to confirm, to see that the white-tiled room was smashed and ruined, with several ugly black marks on the walls.
“The cyborgs wormed their way through my entire ship before we had a chance to contain them!” Faraday snarled, pausing before a corridor, breathing out sharply and then swinging out to sweep the empty space.
“Clear.”
“I know, sir,” Jezzy managed to stutter in response. That was my fault. The colonel had asked me to contain the boarding party.
Although ‘boarding party’ was a bit of an optimistic term. In truth, the cyborgs had simply flung themselves through the void of space at the Oregon. They had no need to breathe. and the strange cybernetic adjustments meant that they didn’t freeze or pop in the vacuum of space. Upon grappling with the large battleship, they had cut their way in with their particle-beam weapons, causing multiple hull breaches and floor-wide decompression events, before burning and clawing their way through the hull to infect every part of the battleship.
Outcast Marines Boxed Set Page 81
