Warning! Structural integrity under threat.
Analysis: Hull plating has T-minus 4 minutes of efficiency at current stressors.
The words of the computer blared through their interlinked suit telemetries, as well as being projected in large orange letters at the top of the forward viewing screen.
“What in the frack does that mean?”
“It means that we’re falling out of jump without the Barr-Hawking field to hold us!” Ratko said as she moved to hit buttons and pull levers.
“What!?” Jezzy couldn’t speak engineering.
“Normal ships aren’t designed to go this fast!” Ratko settled for explaining as she hit the thruster controls again.
Controlled Main Thruster Burn: maximum propellant injection.
The commands appeared, hovering in the air on the screen for a moment as the scout was thrown forward, and the corona of light around the ship they were chasing grew just a little larger.
And rather counterintuitively, the scout stopped shuddering.
“I’m trying to match relative speeds with the jump-ship to keep us inside the Barr-Hawking field. If we slow, we’ll hit the back end of the field and be—”
THUDUDUDUDHR! The ship shook.
“Dammit!” Ratko screeched, firing the positional rockets at the same time. Jezzy felt the kick of the propulsion system, and the shaking subsided to a low, rocking tremor, as if the ship itself was a living, terrified creature.
“How long can we keep this up?” Jezzy said, not looking up as she ran another scanner sweep of the nearby space. But it was no use. The scanners would only pick up what was relative to their ship inside the energy bubble they were falling out of. Outside was a hazy blur.
That Ru’at ship intercepted us while we were midway through our jump. Jezzy was quite frankly amazed. How could it even scan for the arrival of a Marine jump-ship? How could it move so fast as to intercept them?
“Oh crap…” Jezzy heard Ratko say, a moment before the shaking started again, and this time, orange warning lights blared all around them. “We haven’t got enough juice!” she shouted.
“Then we’ll have to get the jump-ship to slow down, won’t we?” Jezzy opened a communications channel to the distant ship ahead, shining in the flare of bright white and yellow light. It would have almost looked beautiful, like a comet or an angel, Jezzy thought. That is, if the only reason we were looking at it had nothing to do with the fact that we’re going to break apart.
“Scout to Marine Corps jump-ship! Do you copy? This is Lieutenant Wen of the Outcast Marines, come in! We need you to SLOW DOWN. Repeat: slow down!” Jezzy shouted, and a moment later, the speakers glitched into life.
“Lieutenant Wen, this is— GZZZRK!” the speakers attempted to say, before crumbing into static.
“It’s the ion field generated by the Barr-Hawking generators. It’s just too strong. There’s no way—”
Warning! Incoming Vessel. Unknown Signature.
The computer warned them a moment before a small, bright spark of light grew larger and brighter in their viewing window. The shuddering of the scout had stopped, but Jezzy had no idea if that was because of Ratko’s skill as a pilot or because the distant Marine jump-ship had heard their distress call and was slowing down. Wen had more immediate concerns, anyway.
“Weapons, target that incoming craft,” Jezzy said.
Targeting... Targeting… The words flashed up above their heads, before—
Unable to Maintain Weapons Lock.
“No!” Jezzy could have screamed. The Ru’at were either moving too fast, or they might have had their own jamming technology. Jezzy didn’t know. Either way, they were sitting ducks.
The baleful star of the enemy vessel was growing larger and closer as it tore its own way through the fabric of space-time, toward them. Jezzy was starting to see the glint of metal on its carapace, the shining blur of the obsidian rings that constantly rotated around it…
“We’re slowing!” Ratko shouted. “They must have heard your message, Lieutenant!”
But it was already too late for them all. Jezzy sat, helpless to do anything other than witness the tragedy unfolding before them. The Ru’at ship grew larger, until it had progressed from the size of a fingernail to that of a tennis ball, on course to intercept them.
“That thing must be going fast. It’s catching up with a ship in a jump-field!” Ratko sounded awed and panicked at the same time.
And then it fired. A thin beam of purple-white light erupted from its nosecone, shooting straight out and forward—
—and cutting across the bow of the Marine scout, hitting the giant rear wheel of the jump-ship, with the four nodules of massive energy wave generators at the cardinal points.
The vacuum of space wasn’t supposed to make noise, but even in the quiet, Jezzy’s mind filled in the blanks. She imagined deafening explosions and screams as the line of fire flared brighter for a fraction of a second, describing a taut line of fire between the Marine and the Ru’at ships.
And then the giant wheel on the back of the jump-ship was breaking apart, and the crazy yellow-white corona of burning photons was stretching and diffusing.
THUDUDUDUDUDHR!
The imminent loss of speed contracted the Barr-Hawking field in a heartbeat, and the scout shook as it was thrown about. Jezzy and Ratko bounced in their command chair harnesses, and it felt to the Wen as if a petulant god were trying to shake their skeletons out of their bodies like coins caught in a money-box.
Ratko screamed.
This is it. We’re all going to die. I’ve failed everyone. Again… Jezzy’s eyes blurred with tears, but she could still see the Ru’at ship like a hard pinprick of light, growing fainter and fainter as it slowed.
“Everyone, hold on!” Jezzy shouted, just as their ship was kicked out of the jump-field, shaking and juddering, screens bursting and exploding with sparks.
And with a squeal of alarms, everything went black.
5
Growing Medium
“Is it okay to even touch this stuff? Mariad Rhossily asked as she picked her way carefully behind Kol.
The group had made their way down the cut stone steps to the cavern floor, and it was only from down here, surrounded by the high walls of ruddy rock and with his line of sight obscured by mounds of rising vegetation, did Solomon fully understand just how large this place was.
“When did you say you first came here, Kol?” Solomon said. It was still a temptation to call him ‘Specialist’ or ‘Marine,’ even ‘buddy,’ but Solomon resisted the urge. Kol had automated that transporter to crash-land smack on top of the Ganymede Training Facility, after all…
It still bugged Solomon. Of course it did. He wouldn’t have made it to squad commander if it didn’t.
It’s not that I can’t trust him, Solomon thought as he brought up the rear of their little expedition. Kol was on point, then Mariad, and then Ochrie. Solomon hadn’t wanted to leave the only two non-military personnel at the back of the group, especially seeing as one believed the Ru’at to be near-godlike…
Solomon knew a lot about trust. His old career had all been about abusing other people’s trust, after all. He had seen enough of life in all its desperate, hopeless, back-stabbing, cheating or innocent glory to know that trust wasn’t a finite resource. Some people you can trust in some ways, but not in others, he recalled. Once you got a Yakuza member’s word on something, they would rather die than break it. But that didn’t mean that they wouldn’t just as quickly break you if they were ordered to.
And then there were people like Matty… It still stung to even think about his closest, his only, friend.
Matthias Sozer had been his handler, Solomon now recognized. Who would do that to a kid? Solomon thought. Matty had only been a few years older than Solomon, and they had met in their later teen years.
He was barely a child himself, Solomon now considered. What did anyone know in their early twenties? Admittedly, Solomon Cready h
ad known how to break into safes and hotwire cars and pick locks… But not run a high-level intelligence gathering campaign on the behalf of some shadowy mega-corp and Confederate government alike.
Which was what Matty had done, he realized. His friend and accomplice had been guiding him on a journey throughout his entire life, or so the Ru’at had made him believe.
The Ru’at drone was even now sitting in Solomon’s pocket, and he felt the heft and the weight of it. He had an incredible urge to throw it as far and wide as he could, just as if he were playing dodgeball with Matty back in the mid-west.
No. The ex-thief, now squad commander, resisted the urge. He was still on a mission, of sorts. Even if that mission had once been to deliver Ochrie and Rhossily to the Confederate Council, who, presumably, were all now piles of irradiated dust. Now, Solomon regarded his mission as regrouping with General Asquew. Tell her everything he had seen, everything he had found out about the Ru’at—which wasn’t a lot, admittedly—and of course, to deliver this Ru’at drone to better minds than his.
But where does Kol fit into that? Solomon’s thoughts cycled back to their starting place. Kol had betrayed the Marine Corps. He had killed a heck of a lot of Outcast Marines.
They’ll never accept him back into the fold, if that is even what the young guy wants. Solomon pulled a face at his own musings.
I could trust Matty with my life, so long as I was playing the game according to his plan, he now believed. He wondered if it was the same with Kol. Maybe he could trust the Martian insurgent only so long as Kol thought that he would get his ‘free and brave Mars.’
Which meant, as far as Solomon could see, that at some point or another, he would have to tell Kol that wasn’t going to happen. Not with him, anyway. It wasn’t that Lieutenant Cready cared one way or another if Mars declared itself a sovereign planet. All the more luck to them, he thought as he carefully stepped around the latest trench of thick, glossy green and alien leaves.
But right now, the only way to defeat the Ru’at would be to wipe this place off the face of the Red Planet, Solomon thought grimly. A lot of First Martians were going to die. A lot were going to take up arms against the Rapid Response Fleet.
And Kol would have to choose which brothers he wanted to fight, and possibly die, alongside. Either the Marines, who would kill his fellow freedom fighters, or the Martians, who were brainwashed to serve the Ru’at.
“Lieutenant, watch it!” Solomon stumbled, pulling up short under Kol’s bark of alarm.
Solomon looked around in confusion. He had been so deep in thought that he hadn’t realized he’d stepped off the slight dirt path—real dirt! Rich and brown and black like the soil back home—and had walked several meters into the underbrush.
“Oh, frag…” Solomon looked down. Luckily, the vegetation around this area was still the low-lying blue-green lichen, encrusted with silvery brackets like tree moss. It clustered a little over the top of his boots, and when he retraced his steps, it felt springy and soft.
Almost good enough to take a nap in, Solomon thought, before shaking his head. That was an insane thought! Why did he think that? He had no idea what properties this alien stuff had. Had the Ru’at brought it with them from another star? Or had they created it? In the same way that AgroMore/NeuroTech/Taranis Industries had created him?
“You asked when I first came here?” Kol said, his eyes piercing into Solomon’s.
Sol nodded and saw Kol look away, ashamed.
Aha! So the boy could feel guilty, after all…
“I was sixteen,” Kol said.
“Wait. What?” Rhossily turned back around sharply from where she had been looking out over the alien landscape. “The Ru’at only arrived this year.”
“That’s, uh…not technically true,” Kol said, again managing to look suitably embarrassed.
“What!?” the Imprimatur of Proxima stated.
“He’s telling the truth.” Solomon recounted the tale of the strange memory-visions that the Ru’at drone had given him in the ‘judgement’ room. Decades before the Message had arrived through deep space, the Ru’at had already visited the Sol system. They had sent an orb just like the one that Solomon had in his encounter suit pocket—well, without being busted and with its strange wiring half hanging out. Maybe it was even the one that he still had on his pocket.
And there they had changed that quiet little patch of mid-western Earth somehow… Solomon stopped there, because he didn’t want to go into the details of his own heritage, forgetting that the clone Tavin had already spilled them.
“That was where you were…born?” Mariad said cautiously.
Born. Solomon rolled the word around in his mind. “Kind of.” He shrugged.
Solomon took a deep breath and said, “They told me that I was an experiment. That NeuroTech and AgroMore and whomever else were working with the Confederate Council to study the Ru’at phenomena, and somewhere along the line, they had decided to make clones of the inhabitants of that original town.” He was one of them. Tavin was another.
Mariad looked at him, her eyes hard and fierce.
Believe me, lady. I don’t feel any better about it. “Apparently, the Serum 21 in my blood—the same stuff that the Marine Corps dosed the Outcasts with to help create a breed of super-soldiers—all came from me. Or the original me, anyway,” Solomon continued. “The boy who was affected by the Ru’at point of contact.”
Something strange had passed through the land of that place, through the soil, and infected the humans who had lived there. Changed them.
What was it the hologram Ru’at had called me? Solomon considered. My child.
“I think the Ru’at tried to terraform Earth, and to create a new breed of humanity themselves…”
“Until the mega-corps got wind of it and turned the technology to their own use?” Rhossily nodded. “Just like they did when the Message arrived, and they created the cyborgs.”
Solomon nodded. “That’s it in one. The Ru’at have been hungry for the Sol system for the last two hundred years, give or take.” Solomon looked further down the path, across the acres and acres of green-blue alien fungus. “And now they’re finally here…”
“It wasn’t just Earth, though,” Kol continued. “I grew up on Earth, but I had family on Mars. One summer when I was sixteen, my family got enough money together to send me up the space elevator, and on one of the cruise ships here to meet them.” The young man fell silent, clearly remembering happier times. “My uncle brought me here and swore me to silence.” Kol took a deep breath and let it out raggedly. Solomon could see how much it cost him to admit that.
“My uncle wasn’t the only Martian who knew it was here. Loads of people did. Father Ultor did.” Kol nodded. “There was no colony here then, of course—nothing but a closed-off cave with a pocket of atmosphere in it.” Kol shook his head at his apparent young naivete. “All the Martians who knew about it said that it was proof that Mars could sustain life, that Mars had sustained life in the past. That was the seed that sparked the whole independence movement.”
You poor suckers, Solomon thought. The Ru’at had played them as much as they had played Earth. “The Ru’at were terraforming Mars, too,” Solomon said. “And they were making their own little tame colony of humans all the time.”
“But who—what—could even think like that?” Rhossily burst out. “We’re talking a propaganda and covert invasion plan a few hundred years in the developing? How intelligent are these Ru’at? How old?”
That was the million-dollar question, Solomon had to agree. He wasn’t even sure that they had encountered the Ru’at, the true Ru’at, not their machines or their transmissions or their deep-space drones. Is this what they did? he asked himself. Did they send out drone ‘seeds’ to any life-supporting planet they could detect, hoping to one day colonize?
It was all too much to even contemplate, he thought. How under the heavens could they ever hope to beat an enemy that arcane and that patient?
> “Pretty,” a new voice broke into their depressing analysis of the situation. It was Ambassador Ochrie, and all eyes turned to see that during their discussion, the Ambassador for Earth had walked a little further down the path and was peering beyond one of the large mounds of alien vegetation.
“What is it, Ambassador?” Mariad was the first to her side, reaching out to touch the ambassador’s shoulder before suddenly recoiling in horror.
Oh, frack, Solomon thought. What now!? He made it to the two women and saw just what they were so equally stunned by—albeit one of the women was shocked, and the other entranced.
Lights were spreading through the Ru’at vegetation, from the Ru’at vegetation. For a moment, to Solomon’s eyes, they almost looked like pollen rising on the wind, until he realized that there was no breeze down here. And since when does pollen glow like that?
Drifts of tiny yellow-white particles were lifting from the blue-green, swaying in the air before slowly wafting across the cavern floor.
Straight toward them.
6
Not Invincible
Tsss….
Jezzy opened her eyes to discover that she was still alive. Which she hoped was an improvement. It was dark, and the only light came from the sparking of a control panel. A control panel that I should have been sitting at, she thought as she realized she was lying on the cockpit floor.
I’m not dead. I didn’t get my atoms scattered halfway from here to Neptune… The thoughts coalesced groggily.
TZRK! A brighter explosion of sparks sent beads of molten light scattering across the deck. She couldn’t see the viewing screen, which meant either it had broken or that there wasn’t anything to see.
In her barely conscious state, Jezebel Wen was suddenly consumed by the fear that the ship hadn’t managed to survive falling out of the Barr-Hawking field. Maybe they were trapped in some nightmarish almost-space between the ripples and folds of lumpy space-time.
Outcast Marines Boxed Set Page 92
