Outcast Marines Boxed Set

by James David Victor

  No. Get it together, Jezzy! she berated herself and coughed.

  “Sound off…” she whispered, and then, a little louder, “Marines, sound off!” She hoped that her power suit still worked.

  Suit Telemetries… Active.

  The blip of green and orange lights appeared over the inside of her own helmet, and then came the arriving voices of the survivors.

  “Corporal Malady. Ready for duty,” the voice of the big metal golem-man said.

  “Willoughby here and present, sir,” the lighter, slightly weaker voice of the female Marine said.

  “Corporal Ratko. In a whole heap of pain but still breathing,” the final member of her squad coughed. “And we bleeding well made it!” Ratko added, her voice so full of hysterical joy that Jezzy couldn’t help but join in the chuckling.

  “I do not understand what is so funny,” Malady, ever the stoic, intoned over the giggling voices of Ratko, Jezzy, and Willoughby.

  “I just managed to do what no other pilot in the history of the Confederacy has ever done, that’s what!” Ratko was saying, and now Jezzy could see the dim white glow of her suit environment lights flicking on, underlighting her face behind her helmet’s faceplate. The corporal was still strapped to her command chair—she hadn’t been thrown out, Jezzy noted—and was already hitting dials and buttons, trying to get the Scout to power up.

  “We’re on critical power only,” the acting squad commander heard the technical specialist say. “Life support and little else.”

  “Navigation?” Jezzy wondered aloud, pushing herself from the floor. Her head swam and she felt bruised and shaken. Now that she was up, she could see a fine haze of bluish smoke from the burst wires and control panels hanging in the room, and a thin, watery sort of illumination coming from the physical portholes.

  “Starlight,” Jezzy said, moving toward the nearest one.

  “No navigation. All our sensors are in shutdown mode. If I can get to the engine compartment, then I should be able to restart the subsidiary battery packs and get this boat up and running,” Ratko was saying, rising from her chair.

  “Get it done,” Jezzy ordered, turning to look out of the porthole. Please let us be somewhere I recognize, she worried as she wiped her hand over the condensation on the inner side of the porthole. Life support was on the bare minimum, she saw.

  Jezzy looked and saw a sight that was either the best or the worst in the world, depending on your perspective.

  Outside the porthole loomed the rust and orange orb of Mars, and in front of that was the wreckage field of the First Rapid Response Fleet.

  “Oh.” Jezzy swallowed nervously. She knew that the Rapid Response Fleet under General Asquew was split into two halves, with one usually patrolling the outer solar system, ready to jump and respond anywhere needed. The First Rapid Response Fleet, however, had been sent to oversee the pacification of Mars.

  And it was obliterated, but not still.

  Dark shapes swam through the wreckage, cylindrical and with slowly-turning gyres of their obsidian body-rings.

  The Ru’at jump-ships patrolled their kills and were in between Jezzy and the Red Planet.

  “Ah.”

  “Belay that order!” Jezzy hissed urgently to Ratko, audibly clanging and thumping things around behind them all at the rear of the craft.

  “Which one?” Corporal Ratko called back, her voice sounding muted thanks to the fact that the diminutive marine was currently half inside one of the computer panels, with bits of wires and tubes and devices splaying around her.

  “Restarting the engine! I don’t want any extra power running in this boat at all!” Jezzy said.

  “What?” Ratko reemerged from the hole in the wall. “We need the navigation systems to find out where we are… We need weapons systems online—”

  “Six torpedoes won’t give us a rat’s chance against what’s already out there.” Jezzy nodded to the portholes. “Take a look.”

  There was a grumbling and shuffling noise as the three remaining members of Gold Squad made it to the portholes to see what their commander had so recently seen.

  “Ah,” Willoughby said. “Is that…”

  “At least two Ru’at jump-ships, as far as I can see,” Jezzy confirmed. “And they look like they’re patrolling the wreckage. As soon as we light up our engines, they’ll be onto us.” How are we going to get to the surface of Mars now? She could have cried.

  “Ah… Lieutenant?” Ratko called up from the lower, rear part of the small Scout given over to the engines and maintenance. “There’s something else you should know…”

  “What now?” Jezzy’s eyes were fixed on the giant, rotating walls of ruined Marine Corps craft outside, as well as the lazy shark-swimming of the Ru’at.

  “Oxygen tanks are low. Real low.” Ratko nodded back to the hole in the ship that she had just emerged from.

  “How bad is it? How much air have we got?” Jezzy said.

  “About forty-five minutes tops, probably,” Ratko shrugged. “And after that…”

  “We’ll be onto suit oxygen tanks.” Jezebel Wen nodded. They could survive. No one would die, just so long as they remained inside their suits, but she knew that getting air had now become a top priority for them. If they did manage to make it to the surface of Mars, there was no guarantee they would be able to steal or get access to another supply of oxygen, given that the entire surface was a warzone…

  “Solutions?” she asked her crew. Because right now, I am all out! she thought grimly.

  “Full engine burn,” Ratko said. “As soon as we power up the battery packs, we commit to a full propellant burn of whatever is left on the tanks. We’ll shoot toward the planet using the element of surprise.”

  “They’ll still be faster.” Jezzy winced. “And where will we get the oxygen from when we get to the surface?”

  “We’ll have to infiltrate one of the Martian habitats,” Ratko considered. “Just like I heard you did before?”

  “Armstrong Habitat.” Jezzy nodded. She remembered it too well. The Marine Corps had to drop them off miles away from the insurgent-controlled habitat, for them to rendezvous with a local Confederate sympathizer, to then be smuggled into Armstrong. And for Kol to leave me for dead under the surface of the city! Jezzy growled a little.

  “If we can’t outrun them, and we can’t fight them, then we have to distract them,” Willoughby murmured.

  Better. Jezzy nodded. “Okay. How are we going to distract them in a way that won’t bring every available Ru’at ship right down on top of us?”

  Willoughby opened and closed her mouth several times before shrugging. “We need something out there to draw their attention, something out in the wreckage field.”

  That was it. Jezzy clapped her hands together. “You’re a genius, Willoughby.”

  “I am?” the tall woman said, looking confusedly at her superior officer.

  Jezzy turned to stab at the window beside her in the direction of the largest piece of wreckage. It was what remained of the badly named Invincible, one of the two Rapid Response Fleet’s super-massive dreadnaughts.

  “On her,” Jezzy said. “That is where we find our distraction, and our oxygen.”

  7

  Seed-spore

  “Cover your mouths!” Solomon said urgently as the group of humans ran as fast as they could down the snaking dirt path through the alien cavern. Fleshy green foliage brushed and swayed at his calves and feet, and he could only hope that they weren’t poisonous.

  Behind them, the drifts of glowing pollen moved lazily, settling back down or eddying in the vault-like space.

  “How do we know it’s even toxic to humans?” Rhossily gasped as they tried to outrun the pollen.

  “Look around you. Do you want to risk it?” Solomon exclaimed, his voice muffled as he spoke through his sleeve. There was nothing about the Ru’at that would surprise him. And nothing that he trusted, either.

  Behind them, the glowing spore-like pollen appeared
to be settling again, losing its fierce brilliance in the overhead strip lights and becoming specks and glints, like stars seen in the surface of a dark sea.

  “I think… I think we outran it,” Kol wheezed as they slowed to a jog. They were now deep inside the middle of the alien farm, with tall mounds of vegetation rising to either side like grown-over anthills, and with some now taller than Solomon.

  “How do we get out of here?” Lieutenant Cready hissed. “You brought us down here! Why?”

  “I was saving our lives!” Kol snapped back. “And I told you, I was brought here before. When I was sixteen. There should be an airlocked tunnel on the far side of the cavern that leads out to the desert.”

  “What use is that going to do us?” Solomon gestured to the fine mesh encounter suit he wore, gray and dirty and with Luna General Assistant stenciled over the right-hand breast pocket. None of them—not even Kol—had suits with accompanying oxygen masks.

  “This place was like a pilgrimage for the Chosen of Mars, once,” Kol said seriously, and Solomon saw the young man’s eyes spark in indignation at daring to be questioned.

  He can’t still really believe all that nonsense about the Chosen of Mars, can he? Solomon shook his head. After everything we learned today?

  “It means that there’s a depot not far from the cave entrance,” Kol said. “Or there used to be. Stocked with emergency survival kits.”

  Solomon nodded, knowing what he meant. One of the many examples of Martian self-sufficiency had been their efforts to create caches of life-saving equipment and supplies across the surface of Mars. As the Red Planet was such a harsh environment—with no surface water and sandstorms that could scour skin from bones—the Martians had taken it on themselves to create safe ‘bolt holes’ for any haphazard surface travelers caught between habitats, a lot like the early mountaineers had done in the remote and inaccessible mountain ranges of old Earth.

  “And when we’re equipped, we can hike across the desert to the next nearest habitat, steal a shuttle-ship,” Kol suggested, earning a begrudging nod from Rhossily and Solomon alike.

  “Okay. Well. I suppose that’s a better option than going back up there,” Solomon had to agree glumly.

  But first, they had to cross the alien landscape and get to this distant depot. The lieutenant sighed, gesturing for Kol to lead the way as he had before, and for Solomon to take up the rear of the procession.

  They picked their way carefully between the mounds of vegetation that had now grown taller on all sides. It was a little like walking through a maze, but whose walls were made of living green material.

  The sound became muted as the pillars of leaves and lichen closed in all around them. Even the fierce light from the overhead strip lights had dulled and seemed to forsake them.

  “I don’t like it,” Ochrie murmured to anyone who would hear. Solomon was actually glad to hear the ambassador register dislike for their current situation, and for anything that remotely connected back to the Ru’at. Might that mean there is a way to break her conditioning? Solomon asked himself. Maybe. If she could look at Ru’at technology and be repulsed by it, then there had to be something of the old ambassador left inside there, didn’t there?

  “I don’t like it either, ma’am,” Solomon breathed as he stepped carefully behind her.

  Hsttt…

  “What was that?” Ochrie suddenly stopped, looking around.

  Solomon had heard it too. Something like a rustle of vegetation. “Was that one of you?” he whisper-called out to Mariad and Kol ahead of them.

  “Huh?” Kol turned to ask. “What was that you said?”

  “We thought we heard a noise. A movement in the undergrowth.” Solomon had stooped to a crouch, and he watched as Kol was the first to do the same, and then Mariad, with Ochrie standing in place.

  “Could the cyborgs have come down here after us?” Solomon breathed the words, exaggerating his mouth movements so Kol might be able to read his lips.

  There was a shrug from the top end of the line.

  “Pretty!” Ochrie sighed next to him, her voice so sudden that Solomon flinched, and looked up—

  —to see a singular speck of one of the glowing pieces of alien pollen drift through the air where he had been standing and land on the side of one of the nearest mounds of moss and leaves.

  “Oh.” Solomon felt suddenly foolish. Was that it? Was that what he was so worried about? It felt like being worried about the rain or snow. A natural phenomenon that didn’t mean him any harm, and there was nothing that he could do about it anyway…

  Hsssttt!

  The sound, again. Solomon turned abruptly, his hands itching for the gun that would have accompanied him everywhere as an Outcast Marine. But where did it come from? The squad commander’s eyes scanned the solid pillars of vegetation that stood all around them. Nothing was moving, apart from the delicate fronds and tendrils of the strange alien plants.

  “I heard it too, this time,” Mariad whispered, and Solomon could see that her eyes were wide with fear.

  “Come on, whatever it is, we should be going,” Kol muttered as he stood up.

  “Pretty,” Ochrie said, and Solomon followed her with his eyes as she took a step toward the nearest pillar of vegetation.

  “Ambassador, wait!” Solomon said urgently, instinctively. I don’t like this. There’s something out there. Something alien.

  It was then that Solomon saw just what the ambassador was talking about. The pillar of vegetation they were walking past, the very same one that they had seen the speck of glowing spore hit, was starting to glow itself.

  “Uh…people?” Solomon cleared his throat nervously.

  The glow was unlike the pollen-spore glow in some ways. It was the same soft yellow-white, soothing to look at, but it was not made up of a rising cloud of small flecks. Instead, it was coming from inside the heart of the vegetation pillar itself.

  “What the…” Kol said, stepping closer, and his confusion was echoed on the face of the Imprimatur of Proxima and, Solomon was sure, his own.

  Not Ambassador Ochrie, however. She was staring raptly at the column of grasses, mosses, and leaves, as if seeing an active stellar nebula for the very first time.

  The glow started to brighten, growing stronger from inside the column itself before diminishing again. When the cycle had completed, the pillar was once again just a static rise of vegetable matter. It did not look as though anything strange or ethereal had happened.

  But then it glowed again, and again Solomon and the others saw the glow become brighter, brighter still, and then fade.

  It’s like a heartbeat, Solomon had the sudden, incontrovertible belief. “I don’t like this at all,” he was saying, reaching out to lay a restraining hand on Ochrie’s shoulder. “We have to go, Ambassador,” he murmured to the entranced woman. “We should leave whatever this is alone.” He was about to add an obligatory ‘the Ru’at commands it’ to the end of that sentence, but Mariad’s voice interrupted him.

  “What is that?” she said, with far more alarm than before.

  “What is what-?” Solomon said, looking at the glowing pillar to see, just as it reached its crescendo of brightness, that there was a…shadow inside the glow.

  What? Impossible! Solomon involuntarily took a step back, his heart hammering. For some reason, it reminded him of test tubes. Test tubes and laboratories, with things floating in solutions.

  The glow seemed to be generated from the heart of the plant matter and was shining through the leaves, brackets, and frills in the same way that bright sun turns normal Earth trees into an almost translucent, viridian glow. But inside that glow was a silhouette, a shape that was curiously elongated and twisting, like a giant tadpole or a creature of some kind.

  “I-I don’t understand,” Mariad said. “How is that even possible?”

  “It’s the Ru’at.” Solomon cleared his throat nervously. This time when he set his hand on the ambassador’s shoulder, he firmly cajoled her away
from the glowing thing in front of her.

  “Well, you’re not going to like this,” he heard the ex-Outcast Marine Kol say, and the alarm in his voice was such that Solomon turned immediately to see what had caused it.

  All the pillars of vegetation around them were glowing now, at different times and at different levels of brightness, but they were surrounded by the ethereal radiance.

  And inside every one, visible when their glows had reached its crescendo, was the same large, squiggling shadow.

  “You know what, everyone?” Solomon’s voice sounded small in his ears. “I think we’ve tarried here too long…”

  8

  Manual Unassisted Propulsion

  What if this doesn’t work? What if the Invincible was too badly damaged to have anything salvageable? Jezebel Wen’s mind was full of questions as she pushed off from the airlock of the Marine Scout.

  Behind her in the airlock waited Corporals Ratko and Malady—Ratko because she promised she could find something out of that hulk, and Malady not so much for any particular engineering proficiencies, but because just having the sight of the large man-tank in his full tactical suit made Jezzy feel a whole heap better about life.

  “Checking suit controls,” Jezzy said over the suit’s gold channel, directly linked to just her squad and set to close, narrow-band broadcast. Inside the Scout remained Willoughby, who had enough basic training to fly simple maneuvers if she had to. Jezzy prayed that she didn’t.

  But as soon as we’re more than a few meters away, we’ll lose telemetries on her, Jezzy reminded herself. It wasn’t something that she liked to do at all, leaving one of her squad members in the dark without a way to contact her, but she told herself that it was necessary.

  We have no idea what the Ru’at jump-ships are capable of, she reflected. Even though Ratko had assured her that a ship the size of the Ru’at’s would probably not even register three slow-moving bodies through the debris field, Jezzy was still taking no chances. Their communications were set to as quiet as possible, and they weren’t even using thruster packs to propel themselves toward the distant Invincible.