PHA-BOOM!
It seemed, at least, they were easy to kill. It was only that there were so many of them. And while the majority of the creatures were sticking to the path behind the humans they hunted, a few had separated off to bound past the pillars and through the vegetation on either side.
“Oh frack, oh frack, oh frack…” Solomon could hear Kol panting, as he was only a pace or two behind them.
A feral growl came from the undergrowth on their right and one of the creatures burst out, leaping straight for Ochrie.
“No!” Solomon jumped, slamming into the ambassador’s back and sending her flying forward a second before the creature hit him on the shoulder.
“Argh!” Pain tore through his shoulder as the thing’s claws swiped him on the way down, spinning him about and sending him sprawling into the undergrowth.
“Lieutenant!” the frantic voice of Rhossily ahead of them, and then—
“Keep on running!” Kol shouted in panic.
Solomon backflipped onto his feet to realize that the others had raced past him already. Kol hadn’t waited, was Solomon’s first, very cynical, thought.
No. Kol had to make sure the others got to safety, he corrected himself as he heard a growl and spun into a crouch.
The thing had leaped and was already mid-air as Solomon rolled forward.
The creature sailed over his head to crash into the ground on the other side of the path, snorting and shaking its head-mouth as it turned again.
Thwack! Solomon jump-kicked the thing across the face, earning a squeal as it was knocked to one side, but it was already turning to pounce back.
PHOOM! The Ru’at monster suddenly shot to one side as one of Kol’s shots hit it in the side. Solomon looked up to see that Kol had the Jackhammer leveled at him.
“Kol, wait!” Solomon managed to breathe.
“Down, sir!” Kol shouted, and Solomon dropped to his knees.
PHA-BOOM! PHOOM!
Two more shots sailed past Solomon’s head, and he heard two answering yelps of piggy-like pain from just a few meters behind him.
“Now, RUN!” Kol was turning again and racing ahead, as Solomon launched himself into a sprint.
Maybe it was Solomon’s enhanced genetic code. Or maybe it was the fact that he was a clone. Or maybe, more simply, it was just the fact that he was terrified, which lent speed and vigor to the Outcast commander’s limbs.
Solomon Cready’s focus narrowed to a tiny window of crystal clarity as the sounds of growling and thrashing and snarling behind him, as well as the screams and shouts of the humans ahead of him, faded to a muted blur.
Solomon’s world became forcing his legs to stretch further, his knees to pick up higher, and his back to tighten and arms to pump as he ran for his life. In front of him he saw the Imprimatur of Proxima hit the dirt, sending up plumes of reddish dust as she slid underneath the large outcrop of rock that loomed into the cavern.
Solomon’s adrenaline-enhanced sight could make out all the pinpoint details of her hair, and even her fierce expression of pain, concentration, and panic as she disappeared. There, underneath the lowest bulge of rock, was a low aperture like a letter box—large enough for a human to slide down.
“Get!” Kol did not waste time on niceties before shoving the ambassador after the imprimatur, and then hesitated for a heart’s beat as he fired another shot over Solomon’s shoulder.
The Outcast squad commander didn’t even flinch this time, knowing that the line between dying out here and living was so miniscule that anything might disturb it. He couldn’t afford to waste a second by ducking or dodging or flinging himself one way or another.
“Skraa!” His pinpoint determination was rewarded by the sound of a pained yelp from nearby, behind him. Very nearby behind him. The outcrop of rock was only eight or nine meters away now.
Ahead of him, Kol slid himself through the tunnel, leaving the way clear for Solomon.
The growls were getting louder, the crash of pounding claws closer. Solomon could swear that he could feel the hot breath of the things behind him, beating on his back.
“Please, by the stars!” Solomon threw himself forward into a slide, hitting the dirt and sending up dust and Martian gravel. Pain seared across his chest and arms as suddenly everything went dark.
“Ooof!” And he was rolling to a sudden stop as he hit something soft.
“Lieutenant!” It was Rhossily, grabbing him by his now-bloody arms and heaving him forward as something else hit the letterbox opening of the tunnel.
It was dark, but the filtered light of the Ru’at laboratory-nursery outside cut through in thin beams from the tunnel opening a few meters away. The letterbox mouth opened to a small cave that dropped away suddenly, leaving the strange monstrous claws at the tunnel entrance, scrabbling and digging.
PHA-BOOOOM! This time, when Kol reached up to discharge the Jackhammer point-blank into the thing, the sound of the gunshot was deafening in the confined space. Solomon felt his ears pop and instantly turn into a high-pitched whine.
“Ow!” Solomon said, but couldn’t hear himself speak.
At the mouth of the cave was a commotion of shadows and light, more scrabbling, as well as a spreading dark line of ichor from where Kol must have at least injured another of the things.
“Will they be able to dig past that?” Solomon said, his voice sounding distant and muffled, as if heard through a door. He knew that the shock-based ringing would subside in a few moments, but he didn’t have the time.
Kol was looking at him, shrugging, and when Solomon looked back up to the tunnel mouth, he could now see thin rivulets of gravel and dust falling as the Ru’at creatures dug.
“I don’t know if that will hold!” Solomon tried shouting, which was marginally better.
Kol was nodding that he understood, pointing further into the cave. “AIRLOCK!” He said the words loudly, and the rest nodded that they had received the message. Solomon took the lead this time, accepting Kol’s penlight to illuminate the way ahead.
They had survived the new menace, but only just, and for how long?
10
Manual Unassisted Propulsion, Part 2
“Lieutenant!” came the voice of Ratko over their suit’s telemetry band. Jezzy could see the pair clearly, but they were moving fast now—probably thanks to the sudden severing of their third and final member.
“You’ll be out of suit range in a bit. Retain your mission objectives!” Jezzy shouted after them.
“Lieutenant Wen, I might be able to—” Malady was saying, before his voice grew quieter and fuzzier in seconds, then finally clicked off altogether.
Suit Communications Error! Gold Channel Network Offline!
Jezzy’s power armor suit blipped the alert at her, and she wondered if she had been monumentally stupid by setting their squad channel to the narrowest, most restricted band she could find.
Never mind. You’ve got bigger problems… Jezzy was spinning head over heels thanks to the severed cable. In itself, the spinning and twirling wasn’t the worst part of the experience. Any Confederate Marine had to become proficient in zero-G maneuvers and operations early in their career if they were to make it to where Jezzy was now.
But what was problematic was that her spin made it hard to see the wreckage field in any detail. She flinched, after the fact, as a metal pipe the color of tarnished silver rolled past her, just a hand or so away from hitting her head.
“Think, Jezzy!” she berated herself. “Power suits are strong. They can withstand most impacts.” She tried to sound convincing, even as she remembered that the same logic hadn’t helped the cable at all.
“The cable!” It was still waving in front of her, connected to the blocky, built-up utility belt attached to her suit harness. Already the pair of spinning Outcast Marines seemed little more than children’s toys ahead of her, sparkling before the giant hulk of the Invincible.
“Newtonian physics,” Jezzy remembered. When set free, the ou
tward force will carry the centrifugal object perpendicular to the original motion… She recalled the study lessons that they all had to complete in basic training.
Simple astrophysics, she had joked at the time. What was so simple about astrophysics?
Quite a lot, as it turned out. The rules of physics in space were unreliable, of course, when it came to black holes and gravitational objects and the ripples of space-time itself, but when talking about basic movement properties, Jezzy remembered that it was actually far simpler than it was on the surface of a planet.
For one thing, you don’t have an entire planet’s gravitational effect pulling everything off course, she remembered in a heartbeat. And in space, you also had such miniscule resistance as to be statistically irrelevant. Which meant that Newton was a god out here. If you push something, it will keep on traveling in that trajectory until it loses momentum, which is itself related to its mass and velocity.
But with negligible resistance, that meant that the velocity and momentum of the object were virtually unchecked.
Which, Jezzy knew, was a very fancy way of saying that unless she did something to change course, she was going to be flying at right angles to her battle brother and sister for a long time yet.
“What do I have?” She had her Jackhammer. She had the cable. She had half a dozen small tools in her belt, and reserve oxygen.
I could discharge some of the suit’s reserve oxygen, Jezzy thought. Which would act as propulsion, but would the Ru’at detect the sudden movement?
“Well, they hadn’t detected three cartwheeling Marines—one of them almost as big as a car—so…” Jezzy thought, using the touchpad sensors on the inner mesh of her gloves to click open the suit’s controls. In a moment, green and orange holographic commands and functions scrolled down the inside of her faceplate.
Atmospheric Seals: GOOD.
Chemical, Biological, Radiological Sensors: ACTIVE.
Oxygen Tanks: FULL (5.5hrs).
Oxygen Recycle System: WORKING (1hr).
Underneath the main command notices, Jezzy swiped through to a schematic of her suit. It was made up of different line colors. Gray for armor and mechanical systems, red for medical, blue for water cycling and filtration systems, and finally, green for oxygen.
“I swear to the heavens that if I have to hack my suit one more time after this, I’m putting in a request for a technical specialism,” Jezzy growled as she cartwheeled. Being sarcastic was her way of not thinking about the possibility of imminent death.
There. She spotted the command for Clear Tank 1, 2… Of course, she knew that her power suit did not actually have ‘tanks’ per se. There were no large cannisters of pressurized oxygen sitting around her body somewhere, waiting for a stray shell to rupture it. Instead, the Marine Corps and most modern encounter suits used a liquid oxygen system—converting it to breathable air when it hit the helmet cowl through a process that Jezzy did not care to understand. All that she needed to know was:
“Where the frack does it vent from?”
Answer: Small of her back. Perfect.
She checked her distances. Now the two spinning Marines were nothing but shining blips against the bulk of the Invincible. She had moved quite a way out into the wreckage field. And I have no way of calculating the propulsion I’ll get, Jezzy thought. Spraying liquid air from behind her would give her forward thrust of a sort, of course, but she didn’t know if it would turn back into air. Would it create a jet, or immediately crystalize in its liquid state?
Dammit.
There was only one other measure she could take. She quickly unslung her Jackhammer and made a loose knot through its trigger with the end of her frayed cable.
Now I have a grappling hook!
Clear Oxygen Tank 1? Y/N
Y
It was like getting suddenly kicked in the back. Jezzy was thrown forward on an extending plume of freezing particles, at first going straight back the way that she had come, and then her trajectory altered as she started to spin.
But she was moving too fast. The wreckage around her swept over her head and under her legs, and the Invincible grew larger to fill her vision in a matter of seconds.
“Malady. Ratko. Where are you?” She scanned the broken buttresses and exposed supports as she was flung toward the vessel.
No, not toward—past!
She had cleared the tanks too late or too early. She hadn’t paid enough attention to astrophysics in study lounge. Jezzy was going to overshoot the Invincible by a matter of meters, and then—
On the other side of the Invincible was the bright, stellar panorama of space. A hard ball of light shone in the far distance that Jezzy took to either be Earth or Venus.
If I miss the Invincible… She realized that the only way to rescue her would be for Willoughby to fire up the Marine scout’s engines and come find her. A simple enough task, and Jezzy knew she would be okay with that outcome, but there was no guarantee that the ship even could use its engines anymore, after what it had been through.
And wouldn’t a sudden burn of propellant and plasma attract the attention of the Ru’at jump-ships? She would have doomed Willoughby, and possibly her entire squad, to die.
And Jezzy knew that she couldn’t do that.
Thock! She was jolted as suddenly her DIY propulsion system emptied and atmospheric seals were restored.
Oxygen Tank 1 Empty.
Oxygen Tanks: WORKING (2.2hrs).
“Which means I have to do this one myself.” Jezzy grabbed the butt of her Jackhammer, scanned for the nearest available target, and threw it with all her might.
Everything looked so slow in space. The woman cursed as she saw the Marine Corps weapon revolving through the vacuum on its spooling-out length of cable—the metal cable that shouldn’t have been able to be sheared, as far as she knew—and prayed.
The external carapace of the Invincible was starting to roll past her. Jezzy saw the vast slabs of bronze-lacquered armor plates, the giant stenciled words of the CMC, the constant myriad pockmarks and scratches of all the asteroids and space dust that the behemoth had sailed through.
Suddenly, the poly-wire cable in her gauntleted hands went taut. The Jackhammer had caught! She had thrown it as best she was able into one of the burst-open levels of the Invincible. Jezzy didn’t know which deck it was, but she was glad when she felt the sudden jolt as her forward trajectory was halted.
And, according to the laws of Newtonian physics, all her potential energy was transferred into centrifugal momentum. She swung on the taut cable toward the Invincible, a heck of a lot faster than she had expected.
Frack!
Jezzy managed to hit the cable release control, only for her body to suddenly spin like a yoyo unwinding on a string. But at least she was also losing speed at the same time, and so, when she thumped into the side of the ship, she didn’t break any limbs.
“Urgh.” She started to bounce off the Invincible, and for a terrible moment, Jezzy had nightmare visions of going through all of this all over again—only this time without any cable or her Jackhammer.
My weapon! Jezzy scrabbled at the hull like a hamster in a ball until she caught hold of one of the many metal handles that dotted the surface of every Confederate Marine Corps ship.
Phew. She had done it. She was here. But now she had lost her gun somewhere in the belly of that beast, as the cable had followed the Jackhammer inside the ruptured darkness, and Jezzy knew that she didn’t have time to search for it.
Whatever. She growled at her own stupidity. But this isn’t a combat mission. I might not need it.
Even in her own mind, that sounded like wishful thinking. No, a lie.
“But I’m hanging on the outside of one of the Marine Corps’ largest ever battleships,” she scolded herself. “If I can’t find a gun inside there, then why in the blue blazes do I call myself a Marine?!”
“You shouldn’t talk to yourself, ma’am,” said a voice, and Jezzy grinned with relief.
“How long you been listening?” Jezzy breathed, surprised at how relieved she was to see the diminutive, generally angry woman.
“You came back into suit range when you hit the hull,” Ratko said, with a smirk clearly visible through the faceplate. Her face was lit up by the green and orange commands from her own internal readouts.
“You okay? Nothing broken?” Ratko asked.
“One oxygen tank down, but a few hours is still plenty of time,” Jezzy said. Four times the amount of time that she had estimated to get this mission done. “But why are you here, Ratko? I thought I told you both to continue with the mission objectives.” Jezzy tried to regain her composure. “In fact, Corporal, I remember ordering you both to.”
“You can file a disciplinary whenever you like, sir,” Ratko shot back. She wasn’t the sort of Outcast to ever be chastened or ashamed, Jezzy saw.
And yeah, the likelihood of us ever having a command center and a military court and tribunal service ever again is pretty low, right? Jezzy found herself grinning even wider. Of course she wasn’t going to report Ratko and Malady, and the pair probably knew it.
“Well, that’s settled, then. There’s only one thing that I’ve been wondering.” Ratko sounded worried as she helped her commander climb back up the way she had come. “You’ve lost your cable. How are we planning to get you back to the ship?”
Oh frack.
“We’ll think of something. We always do,” Jezzy said, wishing that her voice didn’t sound quite so uncertain.
11
Running the Gauntlet
The cavern was narrow and started to gradually rise in front of Solomon. Through the bluish glow of the penlight he could see the deep red oxide in the walls, and the drifts of sand heavy on the floor.
Outcast Marines Boxed Set Page 95
