Ratko and Willoughby weren’t original members of the Gold Squad, but they had proved themselves loyal, all the same.
“Willoughby, glad to have you on board,” Jezzy said warmly.
“Glad to be here, sir,” the taller, fairer woman said from behind her own faceplate. Willoughby hadn’t made it to specialist grade yet, but Jezzy could see a sort of panther’s grace in the way she stood and held her back straight, and Jezebel Wen would have guessed that Willoughby would make it to combat specialist like her.
If any of us survive this, she added inwardly.
“Gold Squad, here are your orders: attempt to track down the whereabouts of Lieutenant Solomon and deliver him from danger. Also, you are to act as forward scouts on any and all Ru’at activity around or on Mars—”
And it was precisely at that point that all of The Last Call shook underfoot, and the air was split by the sound of multiple alarms.
18
Attacked!
BWAARM! BWAAAM! BWAAAR!
The lights in The Last Call flashed a warning red. Straight past the intermediary orange, Jezzy noted. That must have meant that something really bad was happening.
“Obs Team! Report!” Asquew was calling over the suit communicator, talking to whichever Marines she had assigned to the observation teams tasked with scanning for all signs of danger.
“I thought the Ru’at had gone?” Ratko was saying, already slinging her Jackhammer from her shoulder.
“They have.” Asquew was already moving, marching quickly in the direction of the hold. With a nod to her squad, Jezzy and the others fell in behind her.
“But the cyborgs…” Jezzy said. She had been hoping that the destruction of the Oregon had taken out the cyborg menace, but she must have been wrong. Maybe they had sought to flee the Oregon when they had seen it heading for their jump-ships. Maybe they had spent the last hour or so leapfrogging from bits of space-blown debris, just as they had before, and now they were here.
“Decompression breaches!” Jezzy said quickly as they turned the corner.
“Explain.” Asquew’s voice was machine-like, taut and precise.
“The cyborgs crippled the Oregon by cutting through its outer hull, leading to floor-wide decompression events. The internal structure of the Oregon couldn’t handle the change in internal atmospheres.”
“Okay. Solutions,” Asquew demanded.
“We blow out all the outer rooms,” Ratko, the technical specialist, said.
“What?” Willoughby looked aghast at the idea.
“It’s standard procedure in spaceship fires, sir,” Ratko explained as they ran in the baleful red glow, and the alarms of The Last Call sounded loud in their suit microphones. “You flush out the fire and any toxins in the affected levels, while maintaining internal seals in the innermost rooms,” she explained. “Think of every space vehicle as an egg.”
“An egg…” Jezzy muttered, thinking: fragile. Easily broken.
“What went wrong on the Oregon was that the decompressed levels went right through the center of the craft—like scrambling an egg—but if you can keep the yolk intact and only get rid of the white…”
“The internal pressure remains a constant. I see what you’re driving at.” Asquew nodded before calling across the open-band network.
“Urgent message for Station Administrator Ahmadi. I’m connecting you with Corporal Ratko. She’s going to talk you through what you need to do. Out.”
The group ran up the corridor toward the last ‘airlock’ service elevator, where there was already a team of other Rapid Response Marines waiting to fill the unit.
“Sir! General, sir!” they chorused at the sight of Asquew.
“You want me to what? Are you as insane as that other one!?” Jezzy heard Ahmadi’s furious voice on the other end of the open channel.
“Administrator, please. This will stop The Last Call breaking apart, as well you know—” Jezzy could hear her saying before she muted their channel to concentrate on what was in front of them.
“General, sir? Do you still want us to get off-station?” she asked abruptly. The woman in front of her had drawn her sword—a strengthened steel broadsword that was so large and heavy-bladed that only a person wearing the augmented strength of a power suit could wield one. In her other hand, she had her heavy machine pistol, and she took center space in the elevator with the rest of the Marines filing in around her.
They were all combat specialists. Jezzy saw the tiny, stylized gold sword under their main squad and regimental insignias. This was Asquew’s strike team.
“What are you waiting for? Get in, Marines!” Asquew snapped at them. It was a tight fit to get Malady in there as well, but they managed it, and the elevator hummed upward to the hold.
“Full environmental protection. Expect low gravity. Wait for my command,” Asquew announced to all of them. And then, more privately to the surviving four members of the Gold Squad, “You’re my eyes and ears out there—on Mars, I mean. I need to know how far the Ru’at have spread, and if there is any hope for Earth. We’ll clear a space. You will make your way to airlock three, where—if it is still operational, and hasn’t been attacked—there will be a Marine scout ship waiting to take you to the jump-ship,” she said.
There was no arguing with the woman, as Jezzy and the rest of Gold Squad announced, “Sir! Yes, sir!”
Thrum-click! The elevator juddered into its final position, and the doors started to slide open—
FZZZT! A bolt of purple-white fire shot through the opening door, and through the helmet of one of the strike team standing at the general’s side.
“Fire at will!” The general raised her pistol as they leapt into the hold.
“Protect the general!” Jezzy shouted to her squad as she somersaulted through the air. The hold had been transformed into an eerily silent battleground, save for the amplified noises from her suit’s pickups.
It was weightless in here, owing largely to the fact that the main outer doors of airlock 1—the very same one that Jezzy herself had come through in her escape pod—were wide open.
Ammo casings spiraled through the gravity-less atmosphere, along with droplets of red and the machine-oil ichor of the attacking cyborgs. But there were also bodies and weapons slowly somersaulting through the air, caught in the eddies of velocity and motion.
FZZZT! Lines of purple-white fire burned through the hold, coming from the horde of cyborgs that were attacking through the open airlock.
“They’ve already breached!” Jezzy called to her own squad, even though she knew they could probably see that fact already. But she wanted to do everything perfectly this time, and it wasn’t just the fact that she was fighting beside the general herself, the victor of over a dozen conflicts.
It’s because I have to get back out there. To Solomon. To Mars.
The cyborgs were jumping and spinning through the open airlock, but they had a hard time taking the main hold. Jezzy saw the situation instantly—the Marines who had been there had been surprised, and there was still a gaggle of the original technicians and obs team attempting to hold their ground, sheltering behind one or other of the available bulkheads.
We have the smallest window of opportunity to bottleneck the enemy. The cyborgs’ only option was to flood the hold with bodies and particle beams. But if they could push them back and force them to fight in a confined space—
FZZT! A purple-white line of fire burst just past Jezzy’s shoulder as she jackknifed through the air, raising her Jackhammer.
PHOOM! PHOOM! Two good shots at one of the flying cyborgs. It threw it off his murderous trajectory, spinning it over, but the thing was still moving…
“Back of the neck and spine is a kill-shot!” Jezzy announced, firing another volley at the next nearest cyborg. She wasn’t attempting the precision kill-shot that she had called for. Her plan was just to push them back.
“Blood and fire!” Asquew, apparently, had much the same idea as she landed in th
e center of the hold, sweeping her broadsword around in a wide arc that smacked a cyborg and almost cut him in half. He silently sprayed machine parts and ichor as he was thrown against the nearest bulkhead, and Asquew fired into the face of the next one.
But she was too exposed! She was in the center of the line of attack from the enemy.
“Malady!” Jezzy shouted as she pushed out from the bulkhead she had landed against, arching through the air back toward the middle of the room.
Clank! The arrival of the full tactical Marine, magnetizing his boots so that he could stand his ground, was like the sudden appearance of a bull in a china shop. He hit the hold floor a few meters away from Asquew before seizing one of the cyborgs out of the air as if it were a thrown rag and flinging it back the way it had come.
“Gold Squad! On me!” Jezzy shouted as she skidded across the floor on the other side of Asquew. Her right foot still felt oddly numb, thanks to all the drugs the medic had pumped into her system. She ducked as the general’s broadsword sailed overhead to strike sparks from another cyborg.
PHOOM! Jezzy fired into the face of one of the silver menaces before it had a chance to land on her, and then used her Jackhammer as a bat to sweep out the legs of the next nearest one.
There was no gravity in here, so the cyborg didn’t fall, but it did start to cartwheel in the air, swinging its particle-beam weapon around to fire at the Outcast Marine.
Thwack! Jezzy hit it with the butt of her Jackhammer in the softer, unprotected and still-fleshy part of the throat. It was a clear design flaw in the cyborgs, as the augmented strength of her suit and the accuracy of her martial arts training severed the thing’s spinal column. It twitched and spun slowly backwards, dead.
“Nice strike, Marine!” she heard Asquew hiss as she gasped for breath beside her. Jezzy looked up to see that Malady had moved forward, with at least three of the cyborgs hanging off his carapace. Even as she watched, she saw one of them raise its particle weapon, about to fire at point-blank range directly into Malady’s helmet.
“Get off him!” someone screamed as the smaller shape of Ratko launched through the air, colliding with the about-to-fire cyborg and spinning through the vacuum as she ripped it off Malady.
“Ooof!” Jezzy heard Ratko’s grunt of pain as the pair slammed against the bulkhead wall, and then Willoughby was there, forcing her Jackhammer into the gap between the struggling Ratko and the cyborg, and firing directly into the thing’s face.
PHOOM! Another dead killer robot.
But there was still a whole lot more coming their way. Jezzy gritted her teeth and raised her gun, ready to fight to the death.
19
Revelations
Solomon Cready stepped into the booth—or rather was pushed into it by the metal arm of the cyborg behind him.
“Hey!” He found himself in an alcove barely bigger than he was, arched at the top, and facing a heavy red veil just a few paces in front of him. The space made Solomon think of a coffin.
It was dark in here, too dark for what was in effect an open box, and when Solomon turned his head, he saw that the thoroughfare behind him looked muted and washed-out, as if seen through a foggy window.
“What the—” It wasn’t just his eyes that this place was playing hell with, either. He could no longer hear the sounds from the colony behind him. Not that the brainwashed Martians made much sound anyway, but this was different.
Dampeners? He had heard of high-end military hardware that could create noise-cancellation and interference, like a jamming system that cut out radionic and electromagnetic frequencies to ensure that you weren’t detected.
But this was technology being deployed in what was by all accounts an open booth. He had never heard of damping technology like this.
“I guess another thing that we’ll have the Ru’at to thank for…” Solomon muttered through gritted teeth. His hands twitched at his hip, wishing that they could curl around the trigger of his trusty rifle. Instead, they only found dead air.
There was a sigh of movement in front of him, as if a wind had blown at the edges of the veil. Solomon thought he saw a figure. Was this the Ru’at? Or one of their representatives?
“Who’s there? My name is Lieutenant Solomon Cready of the Outcast Marines,” Solomon started to say as the veil twitched again, and a deep, mellifluous voice intoned.
“Enter.”
Was this how it had been for Ambassador Ochrie? Solomon already thought that he had been in here longer than the ambassador had. Did that mean that the aliens had something special designed for him?
Heaven knows that I’ve tried to make their life as difficult as I can, Solomon thought. What with destroying their initial cyborgs and walking robot platforms, and leading the refugees of Proxima off-planet.
“Enter,” the voice repeated, and Solomon took a deep breath.
“Let’s have it, you starfrackers…” he said, pushing aside the heavy veils and stepping forward.
Into light.
Bright, dazzling blue-white light that filled Solomon’s vision until he couldn’t see anything. Even when he raised his hands to shield his eyes, all he could detect was a faint, graying shadow that must be his own limbs.
“I said my name is Solomon Cready, Commander of the Outcast Marines, and I want answers,” he burst out.
“You want answers, Solomon Cready?” the rich voice returned, and with it, the harsh glare started to fade away. Solomon didn’t know whether his eyes were adjusting to what he could see in front of him, or it was some controls being manipulated.
But he found himself looking at a tall—well, human.
“What?” Solomon blinked in confusion.
Both the speaker and Solomon were standing in a pristine white room, circular, with the walls and the ceiling emitting a constant white light, making it hard to tell where the floor ended and the walls began.
The person who stood in front of him was tall, wearing a silver encounter suit that contrasted strongly with his dark, umber and chocolate-colored skin.
And he’s old, Solomon saw. The short, tight curls of his hair had long since given up their black and instead turned into a frosting of platinum silver, matching his suit. His eyes were deeply lined, but bright and clear, and he held his hands in front of him.
“Who are you?” Solomon demanded. “Where is the Ru’at?”
“Where? A better question would be what, Solomon Cready,” the man said, separating his hands and slowly raising one long finger toward Solomon’s face. It was such a graceful, slow movement that Solomon didn’t even think to pull back as the finger moved up past his nose and lightly touched him on the forehead.
FZZZT!
Solomon was standing on the edge of a golden field. Tall heads of wheat swayed in front of him, and the sky held the deep pink-indigo of approaching dusk.
“This is…” Solomon recognized this place. It was home. The American Confederacy—more specifically, the central belt of the Mid-West.
Solomon Cready knew where he was. He was at the top entrance to the AgroMore farm lot number 21, one of many such giant parcels of land that the tower-like harvesters slowly trundled through, harvesting and analyzing and experimenting.
The ground at his feet was bare earth, a wide entrance track that swept down to the bowl of land that lot 21 occupied. On his right and left were the low, rolling hills that he had played on as a kid.
Although Solomon couldn’t remember exactly what games he had played.
There was the first twinkling of stars across the dusk ahead of him. It was peaceful and quiet.
No bird sound marred the evening. No sound of the distant corporate harvesters. Not even the wheat heads in front of him made a noise as they swayed.
“Is this…a hologram?” Solomon asked himself.
One of the stars in front of his view grew stronger, brighter, and it wasn’t due to lack of clouds. As Solomon watched, it grew to the size of a quarter, and then to the size of a golf ball.
> That was no star.
The burning light in the sky reached the size of a baseball, and now Solomon could see its trajectory as it shot across the darkening sky, not making a noise, lowering its trajectory more and more as it passed behind the low hills.
Solomon expected to see an explosion. A plume of smoke, or at least a shockwave of air. That thing had been moving so fast! What had it been—a meteorite? A satellite?
But there was no sound of the impact, and as Solomon looked back to the space in the sky where it had seemingly come from, there was a sudden flash that was dazzlingly bright.
FZZZT!
When the light died down, Solomon realized that he was no longer standing on the edge of lot 21, but rather, he was inside it. A good way inside it, in fact.
He stood surrounded by the tall tops of wheat, following one of the many small avenues between the planted rows. The sky was darker now above him, but a strange radiance was up ahead, shining through the plants like a floodlight.
Moving as if in a dream, Solomon started to trudge forward.
The light grew brighter the closer that he got to it. Solomon could see that there was an opening up ahead in the wheat. It had been flattened in a wide circle, and he could see the exact way that all the stalks had been pushed and bent to the floor in a mat, like there had been an explosion, except it was one without heat or furious energy.
And there in the dead center of the crop circle, hanging just a little higher than his head, was a blue-white orb.
“What the frack!?” Solomon burst out.
This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be happening, could it? He was still standing inside that strange room in the center of the Ru’at colony. This was some sort of a recording, or a full-immersion hologram, or hypnosis…
Outcast Marines Boxed Set Page 87
