“This jump-ship will drop us a ways out from our target, and then we’ll be using the Marine scout’s silent running features to get closer to the planet,” Jezzy said. “Corporal Ratko? You’re going to be taking lead on this.” Ratko was their only technical specialist, which meant that she had a high level of expertise and training in all areas of Marine Corps technology and, in particular, communications and vehicles.
“You think you can operate this thing?” Jezzy nodded to their own, empty Marine scout cockpit.
“Sure thing, sir.” Ratko was grinning. She was the sort of woman who liked a challenge. “Once you’ve flown before, you never forget,” she added, although Jezzy didn’t know if that was a joke or an actual piece of Marine Corps advice.
“Good. Then that only leaves—”
PHA-BOOOM!
Whatever it was that Jezzy was about to say, the words were plucked from her mouth by a violent shudder that tore through the ship.
“What in the frack’s name was that?” she exclaimed, already reaching up to hit the release button for her harness.
Thuddudududuhr!
A deep, vibrational juddering jostled them, making Jezzy’s hands shake before she finally hit the release and sprawled forward onto the small middle deck as the other Gold Squad members fought to do the same.
“Computer! Report!” she shouted as she flung herself toward the cockpit.
THUDUDUDUHR!
The shaking was growing more violent, so bad that Jezzy could feel an ache in her teeth, but no ship alarms were going off. There was no sound of fire or smell of smoke…
Jezzy reached the cockpit at just the same time as the scout’s automated computer voice bleeped. She didn’t even hear it, as she was too busy looking in horror at the scene unfolding through the cockpit viewing window.
“Attention all crew. Brace for impact. Repeat: Brace for impact…”
“Dear mother of—” Ratko slammed into the back of one of the command chairs as she followed her commanding officer, looking up to swear at what was coming for them.
Both women knew that they should only be able to see one of two things: either the flashing, strange light of the Barr-Hawking field arcing around them as they skipped through space-time, or the hard, still lights of stars if they had reached their destination.
What they saw instead wasn’t even supposed to happen. The jump-ship was still there, still far ahead of them and surrounded by the corona of the Barr-Hawking field, but the corona of bent photons was narrow and small and growing indistinct by the moment, and around the Marine ship were the pulsing flashes of stars.
“We’re dropping out of jump?” Ratko breathed, as confused as Jezzy was before the answer became clear. Two of the magnet-lock cables that should have been attached to the nose of their ship from the jump-ship were flailing and spinning through the vacuum on their own.
“How is that possible?” Jezzy breathed, before she saw the reason.
There was a splash of light as a shape screamed overheard. A black cylinder larger than they were, with a pointed nosecone and three fast-rotating rings as black and shiny as obsidian around its body.
It was the Ru’at jump-ship, and as the two women watched, it fired a tight beam of its purple-white light, spearing their distant jump-ship and sending it end over end, tearing the cables from the nose of Jezzy’s craft.
The Marine Corps scout fell out of jump. Somehow, the Ru’at had found a way to attack other ships while they were in jump.
THUDUDUDUHR!
3
Running and Revelations
“Seize them!” The words of the clone-Tavin followed the group as they ran under the bulkhead and out of the main thoroughfare of the Ru’at colony. The brainwashed Martian humans moved slowly, forcing Kol and Solomon to shove them out of the way as the Imprimatur of Proxima seized Ambassador Ochrie’s hand and dragged her with them.
FZZZT! A line of blue, purple, and white fire exploded on the metal walls beside Solomon’s head. Tavin had dispatched his cyborgs after them.
And we only have one gun, Solomon remembered.
“Where are we going? What is happening?” Ambassador Ochrie called out, her face a pale mask of confusion.
“Never mind that! Just hurry up!” Mariad hissed as Kol led them, sliding around a corner in the complex and setting off again in a new direction.
All the hallways and corridors here looked the same. Solomon’s heart hammered. He had no idea which one led back to the Martian transport. But what are we going to do when we get there!? He panicked. This place was a Ru’at colony! It had taken a Ru’at jump-ship, using some kind of advanced tractor-beam technology, to bring the transporter in.
Even if we manage to get our damaged ship off the ground, we’d still never outrun, outclass, or out-fight one of those ships! Solomon felt hopelessness rise in his chest. There were plenty of times that he had been beaten and broken, but he had very, very rarely felt beaten. Maybe it was a quirk of his own mysterious genetics that had always made him think of a way out. Or maybe it was just that the younger Solomon had been dumber than he was now.
“This way…” Kol took another branching turn once again, and this time, the metal corridors had a lot less Martians inside. There were plain doors on either side of them, their only insignia a collection of lines and dots.
Was this part of the colony off-limits to most of the humans? Solomon wondered as Kol finally skidded to a halt at the next junction, panting and turning this way and that.
“Where are we? Where are we going?” Solomon unwittingly echoed the ambassador’s querying voice at the back of their group. There were still the sounds of distant clattering feet coming from somewhere behind them.
Clattering metal feet, Solomon thought gravely. “Can we hide in this place? Do the Ru’at use surveillance cameras?” he said, panting alongside Kol.
“I don’t know. I’ve only been here a couple of times.” Kol was checking the walls and the ceiling, looking for something. “Yeah, I think this is it…” He looked down at the center of the crossroads before kneeling to start digging at the edges of one of the tiles with a small tool from his utility belt.
“What is it? A hatchway? A trapdoor?” Solomon copied his example, using fingers in place of any tools, and in a moment, there was the hiss of releasing pressure from the floor tile, and Solomon could see where the edges of a large square had been disturbed.
“Help me get that up... Quickly!” Kol knelt to pry at the floor panel, revealing that it was in fact an access hatch, hinged at one end and with a steel ladder descending into the darkness below.
“What’s down there?” The imprimatur peered.
“Who cares! Do you want to be burnt toast?” The treacherous ex-Marine was already lowering himself over the edge and down the ladder.
“You next.” Solomon nodded to the Imprimatur.
“What? No. You’re more important…” Mariad shook her head. The sound of clattering metal feet had turned into thundering metal feet, heading their way.
“No, I’m not. You’re still the Imprimatur of Proxima. There are still Proximian refugees who need you,” Solomon said, wasting no time helping Rhossily over the edge as Ochrie stood motionless beside him, looking on in docile passivity.
As soon as the top of Mariad’s head was below the floor, Solomon turned and grabbed Ochrie’s hand. “You have to go down there, the Ru’at commands it,” he said in as heavy and as formal a voice as he dared.
“Yes, but…” Ochrie looked behind them. “That man back there. He said that we should stop.”
“It’s a test,” Solomon said quickly. “A test of loyalty to the Ru’at. Please, Ambassador, get down that hole!” Solomon said, and the older woman reluctantly obliged, moving terribly slowly as she did so. The cyborgs came closer and closer.
“Lieutenant, come on!” the muted voice of Rhossily came up to greet him as Ochrie was halfway down the ladder. The chasing cyborgs sounded so loud that they had to be in the
next corridor. They would be here in a heartbeat…
Solomon pushed himself over the edge, one hand letting go of the access hatch as he fell down the shaft, and the hatchway door clanged above him and plunged the falling body into darkness.
“Ooof!” Solomon hit a floor that was altogether uncompromising and unyielding. He was tipped forward onto his hands and knees as pain scraped up his shins and his hands slapped cold, solid…stone?
“Arg,” he groaned and hissed through his teeth. The drop had to be at least fifteen feet. If he had twisted mid-fall, then he could have easily broken a limb or smashed his head like an egg.
“Shhh!” This came from Kol, emerging in front of him in the dim bluish glow of a tiny penlight. The ex-technical specialist put his finger to his lips and pointed above them.
Clank, clank, clank… The sound of the marching feet above them echoed down the tunnel. In the dim light of Kol’s penlight, Solomon could make out drifts of dust coming from above, in time to the marching feet. They didn’t stop, they didn’t hesitate, and thankfully, they didn’t pause, either.
Solomon looked at the rounded eyes of Kol in front of him and nodded. He had done well. So far.
They appeared to be in a tunnel cut into the stony fabric of the Red Planet itself. The rocks were shot through with competing lines of quartz-glitter and dark rust. Iron ore, Solomon thought. It was what this planet was famous for, after all. The whole of Mars was shot through with base metals, thanks to its geological past.
“But we can breathe…” Solomon looked around. Just one tunnel, seven or eight feet high and rectangular, and running mostly in the direction that the corridors above had carried on in.
If we can breathe, then that means this tunnel is airlocked somewhere, Solomon realized. And that a human-friendly atmosphere must have been pumped down here especially.
Which meant that the Ru’at had wanted humans to come down here—wherever ‘here’ was. “Where does it go?” he murmured to the ex-Marine.
“You’ll see. You won’t believe me if I told you.” Kol turned and started trudging down the tunnel, and with nothing better to do than to follow, Solomon, Rhossily, and Ochrie followed him.
They hadn’t gone too far when Solomon realized there was another glow coming to meet them. His instincts screamed from his basal brain cortex: How could you trust this man? He’s a traitor! It’s a trap!
But what choice did any of them have now, anyway? In his pocket, Solomon could still feel the unsettling weight of the Ru’at orb. They had managed to overpower one of the emissaries of the aliens, and now they had a piece of its technology. If he could get it back to General Asquew, then maybe they could work out what weaknesses their enemies had.
If they have any at all…
But the glow ahead of them was stationary. It was them who were moving toward it. None of the humans said anything as they kept walking, following the Marine who had betrayed an entire moon and killed probably hundreds of his fellow Marines.
I should ask him about Ganymede, Solomon thought. How could he have done that? Was he brainwashed? What could have caused him to kill so many? Didn’t he care about his brothers and sisters who had shed their blood with his?
The glow up ahead was strange. Not a clean white light, but also not the more usual purple of either LEDs or the Ru’at. This had an orangish tinge, and the shadows on the walls were a deeper blue. It reminded Solomon of those neon-eye pictures that made you try to see two different things at once.
“More Ru’at trickery,” Solomon grumbled.
“Not quite, this time,” Kol breathed as they walked forward into the glow. It wasn’t bright enough to blind them, so Solomon could clearly see that the tunnel had come to an end, at the edge of a much larger cavern.
“It’s straight-up phosphorescent and florescent lighting,” Kol explained as they stood on the lip of the tunnel’s edge. At their feet were wide stone steps cut into the rock, leading down into—
“A farm?” Rhossily gasped.
She was right, Cready saw, but it wasn’t a farm with normal human crops and a picket fence, and with the sorts of agriculture that Solomon had grown up around. Been bred around, he corrected himself sourly.
Instead, below him he could see that this vast space was given over to different types of chaotic vegetation, the majority of it rising no higher than a few feet from the cavern floor.
“But that’s impossible.” Solomon stated. “Martian soil cannot support complex organisms. Everyone knows that…”
“Just like faster-than-light travel is impossible?” Kol murmured. “This is what the Ru’at are doing. This is why they built their colony here.” He pointed down at the nearest patch of vegetation. Solomon could see a very fine layer of green-blue material covering every available surface, sprouting into gray and silver-flecked brackets the more concentrated it got.
“That stuff is lichen. Or algae. Something like that.” Kol gestured. On the cavern ceiling far above them hung great banks of strip lights on chains, which Solomon saw was the source of the orange, yellow, and bluish light. Kol must have seen his ex-commander looking and nodded upward in their direction.
“It turns out that good old chemical lights provide the best wavelengths for what the Ru’at want to grow. Blue shift for germination and younger sprouts, red shift for foliage growth…”
“But what is it the Ru’at is growing?” Mariad peered below her. “I grew up on an alien world, remember, and not even on Proxima have I seen anything like this…”
“I don’t know. But it’s doing something to the planet. It’s turning its dust and sand into soil.” Kol moved to the edge of the wall and tapped on the rock. “Look…”
The humans followed him and saw that there were strange blemishes on the rock, like chemical stains—only they were concentrating on the seams of iron ore deposit and following them. As the humans watched, Kol scratched the surface of the whitened blemishes with his penlight, and they crumbled and flaked to the ground, releasing a mushroom, yeasty sort of a smell.
Like dirt. Earth, Solomon thought as he turned his attention back to the farming cavern. The algae, or lichen or fungus or whatever it was, made up the overwhelming majority of the plant material, but out in the center, and dotted here and there, rose mounds of denser foliage. Giant, waxy green sorts of leaves with curious tendril-like climbers.
“What’s that stuff?” Solomon pointed.
Kol shrugged. “I have no idea. I only came down here once, and it freaked me out, so I never went down again. I think I only just realized what it was the Ru’at have been doing.”
Solomon was about to ask him what it was, but then the realization struck him too. He had always been a fast learner, after all.
The lichen, spreading along Mars’s vast iron ore seams. Eating the iron oxide up, converting it into nutrients…
“They’re terraforming Mars,” Solomon said in horror. This is why the Ru’at probe first made landfall where I lived, out in the farmlands of the American Midwest. This was why the place turned into the bio-agricultural epicenter of America. Why AgroMore set up their giant harvesters there…
The Ru’at were trying to transform this entire star system into a habitat for themselves.
4
Fall-Out
“Ratko, what are the chances of us not being scattered all across Confederate space!?” Jezzy was saying as she swung herself over the back of the command chair and pulled up its firing triggers. They were like two handlebars that slid and locked into place in front of her, with triggers and buttons under the finger grips.
“Slim at best, sir!” Ratko thumped into place in the pilot’s chair, quickly buckling herself in and pulling the flight stick.
“Wonderful,” Jezzy growled. What sort of weapons do these scouts have, anyway? She checked the screens on her armrests. “Computer, full tactical command to my chair! Authorization: Second Lieutenant Jezebel Wen, Acting Squad Commander.”
Jezzy hoped to the stars th
at General Asquew had seen fit to update the ship’s security protocols.
Access Granted.
She did, Jezzy thought with a modicum of relief.
Loading Tactical and Strategic Display…
The screens flickered, and then, scrolling down one side of the forward viewing screen, rolled a three-dimensional hologram of the space around them, with a small, perfect replica of the Marine scout picked out in green lines, along with all its available armament packages.
Marine Scout Class: Viking.
Forward Guns x2.
Nosecone Weapons Module: 6 x Propulsion Reaver Torpedoes.
“Is that it!?” Jezzy burst out. Six torpedoes. Six. She’d have as much chance of hitting the Ru’at jump-ship if she leaned out a window with a slingshot.
“But at least they’re signal-tracking.” She swiped her hands into the controls, setting the torpedoes to detect heat, electro-magnetic, and for good measure, radio signals. Surely the Ru’at ships would emit at least one of those energy types. Just one would be enough for a torpedo to get a lock on it, but the Ru’at’s engines were far more maneuverable than the torpedoes.
Especially if it can move off at lightspeed…
“Where is it?” Jezzy shouted, scanning the hologram for the warning orange blip of the Ru’at ship. But it was nowhere to be seen.
“I’m kinda busy trying not to have us separated into our constituent atoms right about now, Lieutenant!” Ratko snapped. She wasn’t one to care about the niceties in the middle of a combat zone, Jezzy knew.
Up ahead, the corona of light around the Marine jump-ship was starting to diminish, and the shaking and shuddering of their own ship was only getting worse.
Outcast Marines Boxed Set Page 91
