Outcast Marines Boxed Set

by James David Victor

  No one’s ever won against the cyborgs, Jezzy thought. Even on Proxima, they had been beaten to a retreat. Even on the Oregon, all they could do was minimize the damage and retreat.

  Did the general really think that they could win this battle now?

  The moment of indecision lasted all of a heartbeat as Jezzy remembered Colonel Faraday, and Corporal Karamov—both having died to get her here. To get them all to this point.

  “I got it!” Jezzy slid under the swinging arm of the nearest cyborg before kicking out with her boots—one foot still feeling heavy and unmanageable—to roll through the air, landing on the next empty repeater cannon. In front of her was the burning, melting mess of airlock 3 and a line of purple-white fire scoring out of the metal as the cyborgs on the other side fought to gain access.

  “How do you fire this thing!?” she snarled as she shoved herself into the seat, quickly pulling the gun harness over her shoulder and seizing the firing mechanism.

  “Point and shoot, Lieutenant!” This out-of-breath gasp came from Ratko, still engaged in her own battle as she and Willoughby sought to distract and then disable their own attacking cyborg.

  “Point and shoot. Point and shoot…” Jezzy muttered, lifting the firing handles for the gun to respond in perfect servo-assisted motion

  Thunk! The door to airlock 3 fell into the room, slowly spiraling over Jezzy’s head—she involuntarily ducked, all the same—and revealing a horde of cyborgs, and behind them, the inky vastness of space.

  “Get some!” Jezzy found herself yelling as she squeezed the triggers.

  Thud-Thud-Thud!

  The long barrel burst with muzzle flash before it slid backwards and locked into its forward position again for every shot, taking up another of those massive shells as it did so.

  Even with all their suspension and shock absorbers, the recoil on the thing was insane, Jezzy thought, bouncing in her chair as the gun shook. She was glad that she had thought to put the harness on, at least, as the shaking of the gun probably would have thrown her back into the air.

  Thud-Thud-Thud!

  With every shot, Jezzy blew apart one of the cyborgs. But unless she hit center mass or directly to the head, the creature would still be grotesquely alive, only with fewer limbs. Jezzy kept on firing, but she watched in horror as one of the creatures with only the top half of its body seized onto one of the wall’s bulkheads to continue to crawl forwards.

  But the airlock ahead was starting to clear. The powerful shots of the gun were forcing the cyborgs back out of the open airlock at the far end, to revolve and spin in the vacuum of space.

  “Move forward!” Jezzy heard Asquew shout as the Marines exploited the gap created by Jezzy and the repeater cannon. There were still cyborgs to shoot at in airlock 3, but they were in a pitiful and half-demolished state, making them easy prey for Ratko and Willoughby, who landed amongst them, fighting them off with expert shots.

  Jezzy swung the gun around to start firing at the remaining horde in airlock 1. With every pound of the repeater cannon, they were punching holes through the enemy’s charge.

  “Okay, Wen! Let Harunabi take over. Get your Gold Squad out of here!” Asquew was at her side, already shoving one of her own strike force Marines to take Jezzy’s place on the guns.

  “Sir! Yes, sir!” Jezzy was panting and her arms hurt from the exertion of using the gun, but as soon as Harunabi got in the seat, the gun moved with a balletic grace that Jezzy hadn’t dreamed of.

  “Holy frack… That’s how to do it…” Jezzy murmured as she fell back with the general, enjoying the momentary lull in the battle to regain their breath.

  “We got this, Marine. I’ve signaled the Marine scout to home in on your suit identifiers,” the general was saying quickly, sparing looks over her shoulder at the fight raging behind them. “Just get out of that airlock, and it’ll come and pick you up and take you to my personal jump-ship.” Asquew nodded and turned to go.

  “General!” Jezzy said quickly. “How will I let you know what I find on Mars?”

  Asquew froze for a moment as she regarded Jezzy, then nodded to herself, clearly deciding something. “I was hoping that I wouldn’t have to do this. But here.” One massive metal gloved hand took out what looked like a small sliver of silver.

  “A data-stick?” Jezzy frowned in confusion as the general slid it into Jezzy’s suit ports.

  “It’s a safety precaution, Jezzy,” Asquew said, her voice was slightly softer than before. “It has the details of a secure Marine Corps base—one that not even Hausman knows about—where we will rendezvous, if we all survive.”

  “But, General, sir… What are we supposed to do then, in this base?”

  “No more questions, Wen!” Asquew said tersely. “We’ve already wasted enough time! We don’t know how many cyborgs are out there still. Just get your man Cready, get your intel, and get to that base. If I don’t make it, that data-stick will also unlock the access codes for all Marine Corps-wide higher command functions.”

  “What, sir!?” Jezzy said in surprise, but Asquew was already turning away and charging back into the battle.

  The higher command functions… Jezzy stood for a moment in shock at what Asquew had just told her. Had just given her.

  She knew what the higher command functions were, of course. They were the reason Jezzy couldn’t commandeer a battleship, why there had only been certain departments and rooms that she could enter back in the old Ganymede Training Facility.

  General Asquew had just given her all the access codes for the rank of a general. With these, Jezzy could take over entire battleships. Entire destroyers. Entire dreadnoughts. She’d be able to order orbital bombardments. She’d be able to fire nukes.

  And what’s more, Jezzy thought as she shouted for her squad of four to follow her through the breached airlock. What’s more was that this little data-stick meant that if Asquew fell, then the general was asking her to continue the campaign against the Ru’at and Hausman alike.

  Have I just been promoted? she thought as she flew through airlock 3, followed by Ratko, Willoughby, and Malady.

  Jezebel Wen felt that instinctual moment of vertigo and nausea that any human did when leaving the perceived safety of a space station or a spaceship. That sudden awareness that there was an infinite amount of down underneath her, just as there was also an infinite amount of up, left, right, forward, and back.

  The four surviving members of the Outcast Gold Squad left the embattled Plutonian station, flying away from the vast debris field behind them and the littered remains of bits of cyborg and Oregon alike.

  There was a flash in the distance as the long, arrow-shaped craft soared through the dark. The Marine scout was a small vehicle, with only two cylindrical compartments and a narrow prow, as well as a double set of fat triangular wings, meaning that it could fly both in atmosphere and space.

  “Am I glad to see you!” Jezzy heard Ratko saying as the ship slowed to intercept pace, and the Marines fired their small grappling lines from their belts to magnet-clamp onto the vessel.

  “She should be programmed to take us to the general’s personal jump-ship!” Jezzy announced over their gold channel, activating the belt-mounted winch system to pull her into the vessel.

  There were whoops of celebration and relief from the women behind her, but Jezzy couldn’t join in with their relief to be getting out of that hellish battle. As she clanked to the side of the ship along with the others, to disengage their grapples and clamber toward the small, rudimentary airlock, Jezzy paused, waiting for the slow-moving Malady to catch up with her.

  “Lieutenant?” Malady said when he saw her waiting for him. The two women had already entered the airlock and had shut the door behind them. Right now, they were cycling through the decompression procedure. “You did not need to wait for me, Lieutenant. I am completely capable of making a successful intercept with a slow-moving spacecraft,” Malady intoned in his vaguely electronic robotic tones.

  �
�I know you are, Corporal. It’s not that…” Jezzy reached a glove up to halt him. “There is something that I want you to take care of for me. But it is very, very important. Do you understand, Corporal Malady?” she said seriously.

  “Is this an order, Lieutenant Wen?” the giant metal golem of a man asked.

  Jezzy considered for a moment. “No. It’s not. It’s a request, from a friend. But you should know that what I am going to ask you to carry is probably the most dangerous information in all of Confederate space right now.”

  “Does the general know of this?” Malady didn’t move.

  “It was General Asquew who gave it to me,” the combat specialist said.

  “Then it is because she trusts you to look after it, not me,” Malady said with undeniable logic.

  He was always such a stickler for the regulations, Jezzy thought. “Asquew trusts me to make the right decision, Corporal Malady. Which is why I am asking you—because you must be wearing half a ton more of the best combat-grade armor that the entire Confederacy has,” Jezzy said.

  “You have a point,” Malady agreed.

  “Good. Then just keep this safe for me, until…” Jezzy frowned.

  “Until you ask for it back?” Malady suggested.

  No. “Until there’s no hope left, and we have to use what is on that data-stick,” Jezzy said seriously.

  21

  Lie to This…

  Solomon threw himself forward at the strange man who appeared to be able to inspire memories and visions and command the very powers of the Ru’at themselves.

  Flash!

  And even though his fist was arcing toward the man’s face and impossible to dodge, the man disappeared with a flash of light, and Solomon was stumbling forward.

  “That was…unwise, H21.” The voice reappeared behind him, and Solomon, trained by the very best in the Confederate Marine Corps and with all of his enhanced genetic code, didn’t waste any time attacking again.

  “Hai!” He used his own momentum as he spun on the ball of one foot, lashing out with his lead leg in a devastating roundhouse kick.

  Flash!

  But the man wasn’t there, and Solomon fell forward into a combat roll.

  “I see. I am afraid that I will be forced to…” The voice had reappeared behind him, and Solomon backflipped to his feet once again, turning to see that the man in the silver suit was patiently standing behind him.

  FZZT!

  This time, the force that hit him knocked him clear across the room, slamming him against the opposing white wall and making him cry out in pain.

  “It is not unusual for our children fostered by the alien races to have certain behavioral…problems, shall we say.” The man took a step forward.

  “Your children!? Alien races!?” Solomon gasped. Just before—

  FZZT! This time, it was like getting hit by an entire starship. Solomon was flung into the air and slammed into the ground by the invisible force. His vision went black, and then full of stars, and then slowly grew brighter and brighter to the brilliance of the room once again.

  His children? Solomon was still thinking. Fostered by alien races!? What was this man talking about?

  FZZT! The next energy wave was nowhere near as strong as the preceding two, but it did slam his head into the floor and make him spit blood.

  His children. He means people like me. Those cloned from the poor victims of AgroMore. And from the site where the Message was first delivered.

  Solomon realized that he hadn’t been talking to some creepy old man at all, all this time. He was talking to one of the Ru’at, masquerading as a human.

  “What did you do to my head!?” Solomon was saying, his voice thick with blood and swollen lips. He wasn’t talking about the injuries, of course; he was talking about the visions. This man—this Ru’at thing—was either a hologram, or something else. A mind game? A hypnotism device? There was no man really here at all.

  “Show yourself!” Solomon cried out. “Is any of what you told me true?”

  “It was all true, H21. Why would one such as I need to lie to you?” There was another flash of brilliant white light from the walls, and there, in place of where the holographic man had been, hung the silver orb with a line of white fire scoring across its middle.

  “Are you… Are you the Ru’at?” Solomon spat out more blood.

  “I am a seed. I told you, H21. Why would I lie to you?” The thing bobbed as it said this in exactly the same voice it had used before.

  “Lie to this!”

  PHOOM!

  There was a movement from one side of the room and an explosion of muzzle fire. The metal orb sparked and was flung against the far wall. before falling to the floor.

  Solomon looked up…to see that it was none other than Kol.

  “Lieutenant, get up! Get up! We have to go!” The traitor’s face was tight with fear and anxiety, but in his hands, he held the smoking Jackhammer.

  “Kol? But— I don’t understand…”

  “I just saved your life! That is all you have to understand. Now get your ass up and get moving!” Kol kept his Jackhammer lowered at the shaking Ru’at orb on the ground as he seized Cready’s hand and hauled him back the way they had come. One of the pristine white walls glitched and vanished, revealing itself to be a hologram just like the man had been, and on the other side were the heavy veils.

  Kol dragged the man he had betrayed through, and they started to run for their lives.

  Command Code

  Outcasts of Earth, Book 8

  1

  The Price of Trust

  “Run!” Kol, the ex-Outcast Marine, yelled as he hauled Lieutenant Cready to his feet.

  Outcast squad commander, Solomon Cready, hurt everywhere. He had forgotten what being beaten up while not in his Marine power armor was like. But he remembered how he had always dealt with the knocks and scrapes of a criminal life in New Kowloon: Grin and bear it. Then hit them back harder.

  “Kol!? What are you doing?” he grunted through gritted teeth. The muzzle of his ex-colleague’s Jackhammer was still smoking blue-gray, and the—Alien? Seed? Device?—that had been attacking him still shook and sparked from the other side of the pristine white judgment room.

  They were in one of the inner sanctums of the strange Ru’at colony on Mars. The Ru’at—with the help of their cyborg armies and the Martian separatists—had built this place in a fraction of the time it would normally take to build such a massive structure, and it was unlike any place that the lieutenant had been throughout Confederate Space. The walls and halls and modular rooms all obeyed the same austere, functional machine logic that animated the cyborgs.

  And the humans here…

  Solomon had seen what this very room had done to Ambassador Ochrie. She had walked into the ‘booth’ that led here and walked out a brainwashed believer of their new ‘saviors’—the alien species known as the Ru’at.

  But the strange memory-visions that the Ru’at orb had instilled in her hadn’t managed to do the same to Solomon. Either the strange metal sphere that could seemingly project holograms as real as if you were talking to a living, breathing person hadn’t got to the sanity-reprogramming bit with him yet, or…

  Or I am immune, he thought. Because of my heritage.

  “Well, I can leave if you want, Lieutenant, but I don’t think you want to be left in here with that thing, right?” Kol said, breathing hard as he leaned against the heavy veil that was all that separated them from the main thoroughfare outside—and the waiting cyborgs of clone-Tavin.

  “No, I meant I thought you were one of the Chosen of Mars. I thought you had given your allegiance to that…thing,” Solomon said. His head was still pounding, and he wished that he had his suit on with its built-in pain-relieving injectors and its several inches of armor plate and shock-absorbers. He spat out blood and hoped that he hadn’t lost any teeth in the Ru’at’s attack. The thing had thrown him about the room with the same kind of tractor-beam technology that t
hey had apparently developed. It had been like trying to fight a giant.

  “It’s like you said outside, sir—the Ru’at won’t give us our independence, just another sort of slavery…” Kol said.

  BRZZZZ! The orb on the other side of the room shook and sparked once more, shakily rising from the floor on its own arcane power…

  “Come on. That thing will bring down all the cyborgs on us, and then we’ll be in for it.”

  You have to hit them harder than they hit you. Solomon growled with bloody teeth and ruined lips. “Hang on. Give me your gun.”

  “Lieutenant?” Kol hesitated. Solomon wasn’t surprised. He had once promised to make Kol pay for his treachery. For remote-operating an entire Marine transporter to crash land into the Ganymede Training Facility. How many deaths is Kol responsible for? Solomon remembered. He had left Jezzy—his sergeant and the person he trusted most in the entire program—for dead.

  “We gotta go.” Kol took a step away from the bloody, fierce-looking squad commander.

  Yeah, you probably should be nervous around me, traitor. Solomon felt the heat rising in his chest like it always did. A miniature mushroom cloud, a chain reaction about to go supernova…

  Solomon had always been tetchy. It was one of the hallmarks of having such a high IQ, or so people had told him over the years. He was in a constant state of frustration and annoyance at how slow everyone else appeared to think. Added to that now was the fact that he—and Kol, as it happened—had been dosed with the genetically-altering Serum 21, a serum derived from Solomon’s own, original body, which allowed him to think quicker, move faster, endure more damage…