Everyone’s hearing had finally returned by the time the light revealed their destination: a large, gray metal bulkhead reinforced by girders driven into the floor and surrounding a singular, elongated octagon of a door.
“There she is,” Kol said, still sounding worried as he peered behind them. Solomon wasn’t surprised, as he too was half-expecting to hear the pig-like grunts and roars of the Ru’at monsters at any moment.
“She’s old,” Rhossily said, gesturing to the ancient-looking push-button commands on the side of the door.
“Command code?” Solomon looked at Kol, who opened and closed his mouth a few times.
No way. Not after all this. Solomon could have cried. “Come on, think, Kol! You said you were brought here as a kid. This bulkhead looks old enough to be the same one. You must have seen your uncle input the code. Didn’t he tell you? Show you?”
Was it a trick of my imagination, or did I just hear distant scrabbling?
“Wait, give me some space… Let me think!” Kol’s face glistened with sweat. It was clear to Solomon that the young man had forgotten this part of the escape plan.
“We might be able to rupture the door pistons.” Solomon looked at the heavy cylinders in place. “That’ll release the door…”
“But we won’t be able to re-pressurize,” Rhossily pointed out. Airlocks worked by creating or subtracting a bubble of atmosphere from a hermetically-sealed room, Solomon thought quickly. If, like most of the times he had used them, it was to go out into a no-atmosphere situation, you walked in, got suited up, and then the air and the pressure was pumped out of the space, allowing you to open the external bulkhead door without any blowouts. If you were entering an atmosphere like moving from the vacuum of space to a secure ship environment, the opposite was true.
And that means if we break the inner door pistons and get inside, there would be no way to depressurize the outer room, Solomon realized.
There would be a catastrophic blowout of atmosphere from this cave as soon as they had managed to get the external door open. And from that entire cavern back there… Solomon thought.
“A catastrophic blowout,” he murmured, looking back the way they had come. He couldn’t see it of course, but in his minds’ eye, he saw the Ru’at monsters, and the fields of strange alien agriculture, and the floating pollen.
“Maybe we don’t want to re-pressurize this damn place,” Solomon said seriously.
Mariad Rhossily held his gaze for a long moment, turning her head to one side as she weighed the merits of destroying the Ru’at nursery.
“The cavern is huge. All of that atmosphere, forcing through here in seconds?” Rhossily looked anguished. “You are fully aware of what that would mean, aren’t you? We haven’t got a hope of surviving that. It’ll be like a shockwave and a tornado all rolled into one.”
“Maybe surviving isn’t the most important thing,” Solomon murmured.
“Spoken like a Confederate,” Kol growled at them both, walking forward to peer through the small thick-plate window at what lay beyond the airlock.
Solomon hoped that what the ex-Outcast was looking at was freedom.
It wasn’t.
“Oh,” Solomon heard Kol say.
On the far side of the airlock door was another small antechamber just like this one, Solomon and the others saw as they crowded around the small porthole window. At the far end was another bulkhead door with its own porthole window—through which shone the bright, slightly orange light of a Martian day.
But scattered all over the floor was a mess of debris—ripped bits of fabric and mangled bits of metal—and when Solomon looked, he could see that they must have spilled out of the two large metal locker-boxes set in the walls. The locker doors were twisted and open, and their contents appeared mangled and useless.
“Are you going to tell me that pile of trash is the spare encounter suits you were talking about?” Solomon said.
“The survival depot. Yeah,” Kol said, his voice cracking as the sudden despair of their situation hit home. “They try to set the depots up in a chain, leading to the nearest habitat. The next one should be…” Solomon saw the young man that he used to command grit his teeth. “…about three klicks away.”
Three klicks on an alien planet, without oxygen, radiation seals, or proper environmental suit protection, Solomon considered. Yeah, they would be dead in under ten seconds.
“So…now what?” Rhossily asked, looking nervously over her shoulders. Solomon wondered if he could hear something back there again. A scrabbling? A yipping? Had the Ru’at creatures managed to break through into the tunnel?
“I guess we have no choice,” Solomon said, feeling a tide of frustration rising in him. It wasn’t that he wanted to make this choice, after all, but he didn’t like being forced into it.
Solomon had always been the one to find the way out. To find a solution to the problems that affected him, and to somehow come out on top. But now?
“We blow the doors,” Solomon said. “We use the Jackhammer shells to rupture the door pistons and blow this whole Ru’at farm or laboratory or whatever it is,” he said grimly.
At least if any good can come of our deaths, then… he thought. The resulting pressure wave would probably dash them against the walls or shoot them flying out of the external airlock many hundreds of meters onto the hostile Martian surface. Where, he knew, if they hadn’t already been crushed and pulverized by the storm of released oxygen, they would just as quickly asphyxiate or cook to death under the Martian skies.
Yay.
“But at least we’ll have set back the Ru’at’s plans,” Solomon continued his unspoken conversation out loud. Would it be enough to permanently impede the alien invasion?
Probably not, Solomon thought grimly, and it appeared that Kol felt the same as his face deepened into a scowl.
“I’m not going to die for no reason,” he snarled, turning back to the airlock porthole and scanning the room out there quickly. “I’d rather fight those things out there than throw my life away.”
“Well, it’s not like we have much choice,” Rhossily murmured. Her voice shook.
“We always have a choice,” Kol said, throwing a sharp glance at Solomon. “You told me that, sir,” he snapped, hefting the Jackhammer back to his chest. “And anyway. No one is going to take this off me. Not to blow any doors and throw our lives away!”
Coward. Solomon straightened up slowly, feeling his anger start to rise in his chest. “If I have to put you down to get that Jackhammer, you know I will, Kol,” the Gold Squad Commander murmured, his voice dropping to a dangerous growl.
“Try me,” Kol said, stepping back, and this time lowering the Jackhammer at Solomon.
“Gentlemen, stop this!” Rhossily breathed in alarm.
“You tried to do that once before, and you failed,” Solomon snarled back just as fiercely as he took a step forward.
“Don’t move, Lieutenant. You know I’m capable of it. I’ll blow a hole straight through your chest,” Kol said, backing another step.
“Gentlemen! We haven’t got time for this! We need to fight them, not each other!” Rhossily hissed in urgent panic at the sight unfolding before her.
“And then what? You’ll hand our bodies over to those Ru’at friends of yours? Ask for everything to be forgiven?” Solomon took another step toward the traitor. Maybe this was always how it had to go in the end. He felt a knot of rage and despair tighten in his gut.
Solomon had hoped that Kol had changed. He knew that he had, in many respects. The squad commander hoped that the young man had seen just what sorts of horrors he had participated in. Realized what he had missed the day he programmed that Marine transporter to crash into the training facility.
“I thought you were different, Commander,” Kol growled. “You seemed to have your head on your shoulders when I first met you. You knew back then that you could never trust the Confederacy. They’re all the same—policemen, judges, officers. They’re all
people trying to tell folks like us how to live our lives.”
“You’re a blind fool, Kol, and you’ve been played all along by the mega-corps and the Ru’at,” Solomon returned.
“Lieutenant! Kol!” Rhossily was begging them.
Kol had stopped stepping backwards, and it wasn’t because he had reached the wall. Solomon could see the resolve harden in the young man’s face. You can always tell when a man is about to kill someone, Solomon thought. Unless it was manslaughter or an accident, of course, but this wouldn’t be. A look of glassy indifference had settled on Kol’s features as Solomon knew he was mentally preparing himself to shoot the man he had once called a friend.
“It must be easier when you’re just remote-piloting something,” Solomon taunted him. “It’s much more difficult when you have to look them in the face.” He knew from experience.
Matty Sozer. The memory threatened to unman him, but Solomon rammed it down again into the darker recesses of his heart. He didn’t want his last thoughts to be regrets.
“Stop this at once!” Rhossily said.
“I think I can manage it,” Kol snapped, his gloved hands twitching toward the trigger—
“THEY’RE GONE!” Rhossily suddenly screamed at them both, earning a worried look from Ochrie.
What? Solomon had no idea what she was talking about.
“Huh?” Kol muttered, obviously sharing Solomon’s confusion.
“The Ru’at. Or their dog-things. Listen, you pair of idiots!” Rhossily stamped straight across Kol’s line of fire to the entrance to the tunnel that led back toward the nursery.
“You’re wrong,” Kol started to say angrily.
“Am I? How long have we been down here, arguing? Why haven’t they broken through and attacked us yet, hmm? Have you thought to ask yourselves that?!” Rhossily reprimanded them both.
“I thought I heard something a little while ago,” Solomon murmured.
“Well, do you hear anything now?” Rhossily arched one eyebrow.
Solomon blinked, tilting his head. No, I don’t. He shook his head. “But that doesn’t mean that they’re not still out there…” he started to say.
“Or it means that they’ve been called off to whatever they were supposed to be doing anyway!” Rhossily said. “Think about it. That place back there is some kind of nursery ground. The Ru’at have created those things—hey, for all I know, they could even be the Ru’at—and for what? To just keep them down there for all time?” Rhossily rounded on Kol next.
“You said you came here as a kid. And that this place was here. That means the Ru’at have been planning this for a long time. A long time. They wouldn’t create a new race of dog alien things just for the fun of it, would they?” she said.
She has a point, Solomon had to agree. But how did any of that help them?
“Look. I am going back out there, and I am going to see if there is another way out of this place—one which actually might give us a decent chance of surviving and beating the Ru’at, you got that?” Rhossily berated them both.
“If you two idiots want to stay down here and kill each other, then be my guest, but I used to be an imprimatur of a colony world. I saw Proxima get trashed. I saw my people die—the people that I was supposed to be protecting. And all that means is that I am not content with being killed down here and having them win, nor am I content with not stopping the Ru’at,” Rhossily said, turning on her heel and stalking back the way that they had come without even a light to guide her.
Solomon stood for a moment, breathing hard as adrenaline and shame ran through his system. He looked across at Kol to see that the younger man’s eyes were wide with similar emotions.
“She kinda has a point,” Solomon begrudgingly said.
“She’s a colonial.” Kol nodded, his voice full of pride. “Just like the Martians. We’re survivors,” he said, following Rhossily back into the tunnel.
Solomon stood still for a moment, feeling like he had been slapped in the face and not sure why. I was trying to find a solution, he thought, outraged. And it had seemed like the only solution had been to try and blow the airlocks.
But maybe that hadn’t been the whole reason, Solomon had to question himself. He still carried the shame of causing Matty Sozer’s death. He still carried the shame of failing the entire Outcast regiment.
Why am I so eager to throw my own life away? Solomon was forced to ask himself. There was a time, on the streets of New Kowloon, that he would never have dreamed of such a decision.
“There’s always a choice,” he murmured to himself. It had been his mantra, after all. There was always a way to get out from under an obstacle. Always a way to play the odds and win. That was what a lifetime of criminality had taught him.
I have to be cleverer than everyone else, he remembered the final part of the self-taught mantra.
“Quiet,” said an appreciative voice behind him, and Solomon flinched. He had forgotten that the brainwashed Ambassador Ochrie was even still there. When he turned, he saw that she was half-smiling, seeming to enjoy the relative stillness of the cave without Solomon and Kol and Rhossily shouting at each other.
And without the distant snarls and scrapes of those creatures, either, Solomon admitted.
“Come on, Ambassador,” he sighed wearily as he reached to guide her elbow. “Let’s try to get you somewhere safe, shall we?”
Although just where that could be in all of Confederate space was a mystery to Solomon just then.
12
Hulk
“We’ve got residual power,” Ratko breathed, standing outside of a very different airlock. One that led from a gutted viewing lounge into the belly of the Invincible itself.
“Do it,” Jezzy said from one side of the corporal as her eyes slid past the bulk of Malady to the rest of the ruined room. The viewing lounge would have contained one large window on the external hull, but the glass had broken during the Ru’at assault.
Now, Jezzy saw the eerie normality of the lounge—the low chairs and tables that were fixed into the floors, still with their faux-leather coverings in place. Cups still drifted through the lounge, and the drinks dispenser machine still sat against the wall, its lights cheerily announcing all the different sorts of beverages it could make.
Jezzy and the others had magnetized their boots and could walk freely amidst the floating detritus. It was a little like being underwater, Jezzy thought.
Blip! A blinking orange light initiated over the narrow airlock door, flashing slowly at first, and then glowing brighter and brighter and turning green as the airlock room flushed out the atmosphere on the other side.
“Good to go,” Ratko said, disengaging the wires that she had attached to the door panel and packing them away into her power suit’s utility belt.
The door hissed open, and the remaining members of Gold Squad stepped into a small oval antechamber, the airlock hissing shut behind them.
Initiating Airlock Pressure… The words flashed over the interior door as jets of steam rushed into the room around their feet.
The only problem they had to face now, of course, was captured by Corporal Ratko when she said, “The Invincible is big. Any clues where we might find the oxygen and the munitions lockers?” She turned to look at her acting squad commander.
I don’t know, Jezzy had to admit to herself. But she knew a way to find out. “Malady? Have you still got that thing I gave you?”
She was referring, of course, to the data-stick that General Asquew had given her at the Plutonian station of The Last Call. It was the general’s last act before sending Gold Squad on their way, and it contained all the high-level command functions and codes for the entire Marine Corps—or as much of it as the general was responsible for, anyway.
“What’s that?” Ratko asked as Malady ejected the small data-stick from the side of his wrist and handed it delicately to Jezzy.
“Dangerous,” Wen replied. She was still shocked by the very existence of this thing in her ha
nds. She could understand why the general had handed it over, but that still did not make it normal for a woman like her—an ex-Yakuza enforcer, at that—to be holding the keys to the castle.
Asquew thought that she might die, Jezebel remembered. In fact, her superior officer might already be dead for all she knew, along with Administrator Ahmadi and a few hundred remaining Marines. They had been attempting to drive the cyborgs and the Ru’at ships back from their invasion of human space—too late now, of course, Jezzy thought dully when she considered just where they were—and there was no guarantee that Asquew would have made it out of there in one piece.
So, she gave me the command codes knowing that I was leaving the battlefield and might be able to put it to use, Jezzy remembered. The general had told her that there was a secret military outpost she could get to. A last stand of loyal forces, if it came to it.
But Jezzy wasn’t interested in that—not yet, anyway. She was fairly sure that any data-stick with that much power would also have the schematics of the Invincible in it, or would be able to pull them from the Invincible’s computers.
Jezzy inserted the data-stick into the small reader on her own belt and waited as the auto-play program loaded.
Loading External Data….
Warning! Ultra-Black Code Access Required!
“Dammit!” Jezzy hissed in alarm. Had General Asquew forgotten to give her the codewords necessary to open this thing? She panicked before an instant later…
Ultra-Black Code Access Granted. Special Administrator Privileges Loading…
Contents:
Fleet | Personnel | Munitions | Bases | Operational Parameters
Jezzy breathed for a moment. This was it. The keys to the kingdom. As tempted as she was to check into the Operations and Bases tabs, Jezzy refused to do so. Not until she had to. For now, she clicked on the ‘Fleet’ tab to find:
Near-Earth Fleet: Composition | Orders | Analysis
Outcast Marines Boxed Set Page 96
