Outcast Marines Boxed Set

by James David Victor

  POWER ARMOR: Active.

  USER ID: 2LT Wen (Ac. Sq. Comm.)

  COMPANY: Outcast, Rapid Response Fleet.

  SQUAD IDENTIFIER: Gold.

  SQUAD TELEMETRIES: Active.

  Bio-Signatures: GOOD.

  Atmospheric Seals: GOOD.

  Chemical, Biological, Radiological Sensors: ACTIVE.

  Oxygen Tanks: FULL (6hrs).

  Oxygen Recycle System: WORKING (1hr).

  “Good, all set,” Jezzy murmured, as much to calm her own nerves as to her three-man team. There was something deeply troubling about deciding to fly off into the vacuum of space, where the only weapons you had were your Jackhammer rifles against alien ships that could punch holes through dreadnaught-class Marine battleships.

  This was why Jezzy wanted to do this one by the book. Full suit operational. She needed her team to know precisely what they were going to do, when, and where.

  MISSION ID: Lifeline.

  MISSION PARAMETERS:

  Traverse wreckage field to the CMC Invincible…

  Locate salvageable oxygen tanks and return to Marine scout…

  Locate additional salvageable material as needed (lead: Ratko)…

  Locate CMC Invincible heavy munitions locker…

  Jezzy had planned their mission herself, running her command codes through her suit to update the squad with what she expected them all to do.

  “Everyone locked and loaded?” she breathed, watching the holographic overlay of controls and analysis that played across the inside of her helmet.

  “Aye, Commander,” both Ratko and Malady intoned.

  Outcast ID: Corp. Ratko (Tech. Sp.)

  Health: GOOD.

  Outcast ID: Corp. Malady (Full Tac.)

  Health: GOOD.

  Jezzy hung onto the edge of the airlock hatch on the back of the scout, waiting for any sign of danger or change of course from the distant Ru’at jump-ships. If they had spotted their movement or overheard their communications, they did nothing about it.

  Maybe we really are too insignificant for them to worry about, Jezzy hoped.

  She leaned over the edge, looking down into the small airlock, and gave a thumbs-up to the two faces behind their faceplates below. First, Ratko pushed off, grabbing onto Jezzy’s outstretched hand as she cleared the airlock, for her commanding officer to swing her around next to her, grabbing the rails that were built on the external hull of any Marine Corps ship.

  Next climbed Malady, twisting his prodigious bulk over the lip of the airlock as gracefully as a gymnast, to hold onto the rails on Jezzy’s other side.

  “Okay, good. Link up and take a deep breath, people. And look sharp. I want to know the instant one of those Ru’at jump-ships changes course,” she said as she spooled out the poly-filament wire from her suit’s utility belt, clipping the end onto Ratko’s belt, with Ratko passing her own climbing wire to clip onto Malady. None of them would fly alone out here, and Jezzy hoped that their combined momentum would help them move faster to their target.

  MISSION ANALYSIS: Lifeline.

  ETA to the Invincible… 4 mins 36 seconds.

  ETA to objective 1 (oxygen tanks)… 10 minutes.

  ETA to objective 2 (munitions locker)… 16 minutes.

  Deployment and return to ship… 25 minutes.

  Acting Squad Commander Jezzy had to guess just how long it would take to reach every mission objective, but she had purposefully given them a tight schedule. The chances of something going wrong or of them being discovered would increase the longer that they spent out there, and spending half an hour out of the relative safety of the ship already sounded too long.

  “Let’s do this,” she said, nodding to Malady.

  The largest member of their squad had a greater mass than the other two combined, so Jezzy had asked him to push out from the ship first, followed by Ratko and then Jezzy a split-second after.

  It was called a ‘Manual Unassisted Propulsion’ maneuver in the training guides, and Jezzy had only ever practiced it in zero-G simulators before. That had been way back on Ganymede—when Jupiter’s moon still had a Marine Corps training facility on it, and not just a blackened heap of metal.

  But even then, Jezzy had only ever practiced it a couple of times, as it required a lot of space to perfect. But she knew that both Ratko and Malady must have also practiced the maneuver, and Malady—who had once been a full Marine before getting busted down to the lowly Outcasts—must have more experience than anyone.

  Malady’s greater mass helped pull the two women behind him, attached by the thin cable that stretched between them. As his trajectory slowed, first Ratko passed him by, the cable going slack and then starting to tighten once more as centrifugal force pushed them apart.

  At the maximum stretch of the cable, Ratko and Malady started to circle around each other according to Newtonian principles—just as now Jezzy passed Ratko, and the cycle began again. The maximum stretch of Jezzy’s cable pulled down the line, which converted to a ‘push’ for the much larger Malady at the far end.

  And then they were off, a trifecta of cartwheeling bodies, using each other’s momentum to cross the vacuum. The beauty of the ‘Manual Unassisted Propulsion’ maneuver was that it kept energy within their three-body system. It didn’t allow any one of them to completely lose their momentum and come to a halt, but every pull converted into a push for someone else.

  The downside, though, was that it resulted in spinning and twirling over and over, where even the most hardened Marine with hours of low-gravity training would start to feel nauseated.

  Suit Injector System Activated: Anti-Nausea Application…

  One of little alert lights on the inside of Jezzy’s helmet lit up indicating that the suit had detected abnormal signals from her metabolism, had diagnosed the cause, and had remedied it all in the space of a heartbeat. Jezzy felt a small pinch of pain around her abdomen as the power armor’s array of medical injectors delivered their payload straight into her bloodstream. Within a few moments, her stomach had settled, and her mind felt clearer.

  “Report! Anyone got eyes on the Ru’at?” Jezzy asked.

  ETA to the Invincible… 2 mins 16 seconds.

  Jezzy could see the spinning bodies of her fellow Gold Squad members in front of her, and behind them, the whirl of stars. Her view was suddenly blacked out every now and again as they passed a piece of wreckage from the First Rapid Response Fleet.

  Malady had run the equations on their flight, and all reason and sense had told him that as long as nothing changed too drastically in the debris field, this flight would take them straight to the Invincible.

  They swung past pieces of hull plating and engine carriages that could still be identified, as well as much more obscure pieces of wreckage that could not. Jezzy had the sudden memory of the debris field that she herself had created near Pluto, meaning to slow the Ru’at jump-ships’ attack. It hadn’t particularly worked, as the Ru’at had just seeded the wreckage with their own cyborgs, who had used it as cover before performing a hostile boarding procedure against the Marine Corps battleship known as the Oregon.

  Is this what all of space is going to look like now? Jezzy found herself thinking a little dramatically. Everywhere the Ru’at were found, would there be this kind of picture beside them?

  As Jezzy spun, her darkest fears turned what she and the others were flying through from the scene of a particular battle to a symbol of what was awaiting all of humanity in the future.

  If we let the Ru’at get away with it, she admitted.

  Jezzy imagined all near-Earth space—the busiest space lanes in the entire Confederacy—being nothing more than a metal and ceramic asteroid field, made up of the dead and broken bits of human civilization.

  Was that what all of Sol, all of the Milky Way, the entire galaxy was going to look like in a few years’ time?

  “I got one!” Ratko said enthusiastically as she spun past Jezzy. Jezzy saw her mime a direction further away as her shaking, revo
lving voice sounded in her ear.

  “Three o’clock. Wait, no, twelve… Ten…” Ratko said as they cartwheeled through the air. “Not changing course,” Jezzy was finally relieved to hear as they spun closer and closer to their target.

  The CMC Invincible was the flagship of the First Rapid Response Fleet, and the usual home for Brigadier General Asquew—before she had gone to lead the defense of Pluto. Every CMC fleet had a flagship, and they were always dreadnaughts—vast golden and steel pyramids, like entire cities floating in space.

  If anyone had asked Jezzy a year ago if she thought whether a CMC dreadnaught could ever be disabled, let alone damaged so badly that the crew had to abandon their ship, then the ex-Yakuza enforcer would have laughed in their faces.

  The dreadnaughts were big. Pyramids of metal that were the largest achievement of the Confederate Marine Corps, though not the largest vessel in Confederacy, which would be the super-massive deep-field station-ships. But the dreadnaught class weren’t much smaller and functioned as entire stations and habitats, as well as devastating arsenals of power. As far as Jezzy was aware, the Martian insurgency was the first time that the dreadnaughts had been used in front-line battle, and each one was capable of decimating several major cities at once.

  We should have won this battle, Jezzy thought as she was in her ‘slow’ part of the cycle, waiting for Malady at the extreme end of the cartwheel to complete his arc. She looked at the shattered Invincible and wondered just what could have happened to it.

  It no longer looked like a giant gold and steel pyramid anymore. The last time that Jezzy had seen it, the general’s flagship had been pointing its peak at the planet below them, as flights of CMC fighters had been launching from the holds at the far, larger square base of the craft.

  Now it appeared a little like a crumpled hat. The cone at the peak was still intact, and there was still a baleful red light glowing from its very tip—a sign that she still had power, at least—but the rest of it was a mess. A great, ragged hole was torn from its side, ruining its equilateral shape. Jezzy could see entire levels up and down the structure that had burst apart or crumpled.

  The same thing that happened to the Oregon, Jezzy realized. Decompression events that had been mostly contained by the superstructure of the dreadnaught itself. This meant that it was like looking at a ladder with some of the rungs missing. Entire lines of hull had disappeared or crumpled, revealing the intricate spider-web architecture of the outer hull framework and the inner hull.

  On the Oregon, that had been caused by the cyborgs burning their way in, Jezzy reminded herself. Entire floors and levels had lost their atmospheric pressures, and the resulting strain on the Oregon had caused parts of it to crumple inwards or explode out.

  Cyborgs, Jezzy’s mind prodded her again, just as her line suddenly went unexpectedly taut—

  “Huh?” She looked, to see that Malady was completing his return arc, and the silver line was starting to slacken as it transferred its momentum to Corporal Ratko.

  But Ratko’s rear line, which should have stretched from her belt to Jezzy’s, was languidly swimming loose in space.

  What?

  Jezzy felt the momentum of the recent snag take her, rolling her over and over—away from the others and away from the Invincible. The culprit was a small, fast-moving piece of highly polished metal, barely as big as Jezzy’s gauntlet, that had amazingly managed to catch her cable at just the right moment of extreme tension.

  The cable that should have connected Lieutenant Wen to Corporal Ratko had been torn in two. Jezzy was floating free in the vacuum of space, without any propulsion mechanism at all.

  Frack!

  9

  Children of the Ru’at

  Hsssst. Thud!

  The glowing pillars of vegetation grew in radiance and darkened again, and every time they reached their crescendo, Solomon could see the dark, squiggling shapes of something alive inside of them.

  Hssst. THUD!

  As Solomon and others started backing away from this strange forest, he heard the unmistakable sound of a thud coming from inside one of them.

  Like whatever was inside was trying to get out.

  Like it’s about to hatch, Solomon thought. He remembered the lines of baby tanks that the Ru’at hologram had shown him in the judgement chamber. That laboratory had been back on Earth, masterminded by the mega-corporation called AgroMore. It had been a nursery for test-tube babies. For clones just like Solomon, who had their genetics rewritten by whatever strange processes the Ru’at contact had seeded into American soil.

  Rows and rows of babies in glowing tanks. Solomon’s heart started to hammer.

  “This isn’t a fracking Ru’at farm…” he hissed. “This is a Ru’at laboratory.” A Ru’at nursery, he added silently.

  “What?” Mariad Rhossily asked. The Imprimatur of Proxima looked at the lieutenant in alarm, then back to the alien forest around them, seeing the glow and the shapes, and hearing the chorus of thumps and thuds from inside each one.

  “Oh.” Her face blanched in the strange light all around them, making her look sick.

  THUD-THUD-Screeargh-kk!

  And then it happened. One of the largest of the pillars of vegetation shook, and instead of a thumping noise, there then came a horrible tearing sound.

  “They might be… Might be…” Kol was saying, stumbling back with the only gun that their party had raised before him. “They might be…pets?”

  “Would you call that a pet!?” Rhossily screeched as the tearing pillar of vegetation dissolved into a heap of moss and lichen, losing all internal structure and releasing clouds of dust and pollen-like particles…and a shape.

  It was indistinct at first, surrounded by the glowing pollen of its former shell, but quickly its movements and eventual shape became apparent.

  Solomon had never seen anything like it. He didn’t think that any human had ever seen anything like it, in fact.

  The creature had dark mottled skin, brown and russet patches over a deep gray and black surface. It was undeniably organic, undeniably skin. It wasn’t made of the metal that the Ru’at-controlled cyborgs were, but neither was it entirely normal according to any Earth standards of biology.

  As the thing wobbled and shook itself to its feet, Solomon saw that it had elongated back legs—much longer than its front legs, and backward-jointed like a dog or a cat. At the end of these back legs were large paws with three black, shining talons as big as Solomon’s entire fist.

  Its body was narrow in the middle, rounding out into a barrel of a chest with the same mottled viscera, and the humps and nodules of strange skeletal structures underneath. Its front two arms weren’t backward jointed, however, and in fact…

  They look almost human, Solomon’s mind registered in alarm. Almost, because they still had the strange skin tone and color, as well as the obscene bumps and nodules rippling along their surface. Where these forward legs met the ground, however, were two large ‘hands’ with five clearly visible digits, each one ending in another of the large, shining black talons.

  But none of this was even the worst feature of the creature, as it raised itself up on its hind legs, with its smaller ‘top’ arms—still longer than the average human’s, it had to be said—flaring out on either side.

  No, the worst feature was its neck and head.

  The neck was somewhat sinuous, a hand’s length longer than a regular human, but its head…

  The thing had no face to speak of. That was because the entirety of the creature’s head was a pulsating maw, fringed with smaller tentacles that waved and flared in the pollen-light around them.

  “Holy frack!” Solomon heard Kol say, and then—

  PHOOOM! The treacherous ex-Outcast Marine shot it with his Jackhammer. Kol reacted instinctively; he didn’t pause to put on burst or repeater fire. Instead, he had given the creature both barrels of the heavy Marine Corps weapon, and with a reassuringly pained shriek, the creature was thrown back into the
first of glowing pillars.

  Thud-thud-thud-teeeear! More pillars started to collapse as they tore open in their own clouds of glowing pollen.

  “Get moving! All of you! Now!” Solomon said, seizing Ambassador Ochrie’s hand and running down the track.

  “Kol! Where’s this depot? The way out!?” Solomon shouted, and Kol spared a quick glance back, pointing to the furthest wall.

  “Under that sticking-out bit of rock. There’s a crawlspace—”

  “Kol! Twelve o’clock!” Solomon saw one of the strange creatures behind Kol’s anxious face, leaping out of the pollen-light straight at him.

  PHABOOM! The Martian sympathizer turned and fired at the thing in mid-leap, just in the nick of time. With a grunt and a grotesque, pig-like squeal, the attacking Ru’at monster was thrown out across the ‘farm.’

  But more shapes were already struggling and rising on wobbling legs in front of them.

  Did the Ru’at plan this? Is this some sort of a trap, or are we just exceptionally unlucky? Solomon stumbled, pushing Ochrie ahead of him with Mariad ahead of her. “There! That rock!” Solomon guessed. It was the nearest wall, and the only large rust-red boulder that stuck out anywhere nearby.

  Pig-like growls and yips came from behind them as the group of humans ran for their lives.

  Solomon and Kol, who had both been trained on Ganymede and had both also been dosed with the gene-enhancing Serum 21, easily outpaced the two women, but Solomon kept his speed in check so he was always behind them, and even Kol pulled back, spinning on his heel to fire another shot at the next closest Ru’at creature.