Outcast Marines Boxed Set

by James David Victor

  Rapid Response Fleet 1: …

  Rapid Response Fleet 2: …

  Each one of the group types had the same rundown of ship and vehicle types under the ‘composition’ tabs, as well as a long list of specific orders and function commands available for every type of vehicle, and finally an analysis section that appeared to be a log of design and use notes, if anything, Jezzy saw.

  She could see discussions about the use of a flight of CMC fighters in terrestrial and near-orbit missions, or the predicted efficacy of a battleship in various scenarios. Along with this came the technical schematics as well as the standard equipment loads for each vehicle.

  “Aha.” Jezzy grinned as she read down the controls on the inside of her helmet.

  Rapid Response Fleet 1: Cruisers, Command Vessels, and Battle-Carriers: CMC Invincible.

  There she was. The very ship they were standing on. A selection of images appeared in front of Jezzy’s eyes, picked out in faint green lines. “I got the schematic,” she said, ignoring Ratko’s confused expression as she found the three-dimensional line image and zeroed in on where they were.

  “We’re at Floor 23, just about the crew and recreation areas,” she announced as the steam stopped hissing and the lights above the internal bulkhead door blinked and flickered from their warning-orange to okay-green.

  “Straight ahead, Ratko, first right. With any luck, there will still be power to the elevators,” Jezzy said, following the three-dimensional image in the file as the door hissed open.

  And they walked straight into a waiting cyborg.

  “Frack!” Corporal Ratko, who was the Marine on point, managed to spin her Jackhammer up to slam it into the cyborg’s bulky arm just as it fired its strange particle-beam weapon.

  FZZZT! The purple, white, and blue beam of energy seared over their heads thanks to Ratko’s quick reflexes and discharged itself on the far wall, creating a black scorch mark and a mess of bubbling, melting metal.

  Thank frack that didn’t go through the airlock! Jezzy thought as she dropped to one knee, pulling her hardened steel blade from its holster by her boot. She really wished that she had her Jackhammer about now, but she also knew that this knife might be just as effective.

  PHOOOM!

  Ratko had reversed her grip on her own Jackhammer and fired it, point blank, into the thing’s chest. With a shower of sparks and black ichor like machine oil, the thing was shoved backwards into the waiting corridor, the fleshy part of its chest now in tatters, revealing that its innards were a hideous mixture of metal and pipework, all rolled into one.

  Had the thing been waiting for us? The paranoid thought crossed Jezzy’s mind. It had just been…standing there. As if it had expected them.

  Or it had been put on guard, Jezzy thought. She was already moving, crouching under Ratko’s wild swing with her Jackhammer as the cyborg regained its balance.

  Pha-BOOM! Another shot from Ratko, but the cyborg was too fast, pushing the Jackhammer to one side just as the corporal had done a moment before. Jezzy tried to close in with the thing, but the swinging arms of both her corporal and the cyborg were keeping her at bay.

  Ratko was locked into a hand-to-hand struggle with the much larger cyborg, and Ratko was no combat specialist. Thwack! The thing backhanded her easily against the side of the helmet, earning a resounding clanging noise as she was thrown against the far wall by the force of the thing’s metal tendons.

  But that only meant that Jezzy had a clearer line of attack now.

  The second lieutenant stepped in as the cyborg was turning to engage with her next, and easily ducked under the creature’s punch.

  Close in. Get inside their guard. Jezebel Wen remembered her training, both Yakuza and military, as she straightened up inside the reach of the cyborg’s arms—

  Thock!

  She slammed the knife up under the creature’s chin. It was the only sure-fire way to disable one of these walking robot creations, she knew. The only weakness they seemingly had was that all their command circuitry or central nervous system, or whatever it was that they really had, was located along the spine and the cortical base where the spine met the head. That was why every cyborg had metal ‘sheathed’ plates running over its spine at the back, but most of them also had a small window of bare flesh at the front of the neck—presumably so the thing could still turn its head, she thought as her blade slid home.

  Tzrk! The creature opened its mouth to let out a strange sort of guttural, electronic moan before its body shuddered and it fell to the floor, still shaking but also clearly dying.

  “Ratko!” Now able to move forward, Malady had already crossed the space to the corporal’s body to start initiating her external medical systems.

  “How badly is she hurt!?” Jezebel cursed herself for not taking the lead. She had the map, after all. What was she even thinking?

  Outcast ID: Corporal Ratko (Tech. Sp.)

  Health: COMPROMISED (Stable).

  “Thank the stars for that,” Jezzy breathed as she saw Ratko’s suit identifiers come up inside her own helmet.

  “Administering cortizoidal, 0.4%” Malady intoned as his giant fingers delicately manipulated the small controls on Ratko’s suit.

  A cortical system stimulant, Jezzy nodded. It was actually a naturally occurring enzyme in any human nervous system, but the Confederacy had long since discovered how to synthesize it, and it had been added to the power armor of the Marine Corps ever since.

  “Hgnh… What the hell!?” Corporal Ratko suddenly sat bolt upright, her teeth bared in a rictus grin as the tiny amount of nervous system stimulant was carried through her bloodstream.

  “Corporal. Focus. Do you know where you are?” Jezzy asked as her sharp eyes scanned the woman’s armor. There was a hairline crack across her faceplate where the cyborg had backhanded her, but Jezzy didn’t think it had broken the air seal of her suit…yet.

  Nothing looks broken. Not even a graze on her forehead, Jezzy was relieved to see, and even more relieved when Ratko responded in her much more normal Ratko sort of way.

  “Of course I know where I am, sir. I am on a suicide mission, picking apart the bones of the best ship the CMC has, while a sea of alien monsters is trying to kill me,” she said, not very impressed at all. “Now let me get up before I fall asleep!”

  Maybe giving the already highly-strung Corporal Ratko cortical stimulants wasn’t such a great idea, Jezzy had to wonder as she picked up the woman’s gun and handed it to her. “You fit to move?”

  “That’s what I said, wasn’t it?” Ratko hissed through gritted teeth, already hauling herself to her feet.

  “I’m not going to argue with you. Behind me,” Jezzy ordered. “Malady, you’re rear-guard.”

  “Aye, sir,” the metal man intoned.

  “I don’t see why I have to be in the middle…” Ratko muttered, which Jezzy thought was probably exactly why she had to be the one in the middle.

  Motion Sensor Alert!

  Jezzy’s suit commands blinked at her, and, in the top right corner of her vision, her power armor’s basic scans showed a ninety-degree fan arc in front of her, with three red blips moving toward their position.

  Jezzy looked out through her faceplate. The corridor was long, meeting a T-junction at the far end, but there was another corridor joining this on their right before that.

  “You guys picking up company?” Jezzy asked, breaking into a run as she led her team down the first righthand turn.

  “Loud and clear. Twenty meters,” Malady stated.

  “They were waiting for us! It was a trap!” Ratko stated emphatically. Jezzy wondered how long it would take for the cortizoidal to wear off, so her corporal could return to her normal cantankerous personality rather than this super-heated one.

  “I don’t think so.” Jezzy scanned the next corridor. Another T-junction at the far end, and on the left, the service elevator that she had been looking for. “I think the same thing happened to the Invincible that happened to the
Oregon. I think the cyborgs swarmed it at the same time as the Ru’at jump-ships attacked it, and the cyborgs broke in and…” And what, deactivated?

  “They act like drones.” Jezzy hit the wall by the side of the elevator, nodding at Ratko to get the door working. This part of the Invincible had residual power, which meant that the overhead lights were a dull warning orange, and most of the non-critical systems would be offline.

  “At least I can be useful,” Ratko grumbled, attaching the wires from one of her technical modules at her belt and flicking through the commands on the data-screen by the side of the elevator.

  “Isolating power controls to this level. Lights. Doors…” Ratko said.

  “Incoming nine o’clock,” Malady stated calmly as Jezzy raised her head. Two cyborg forms turned around the end of the corridor they had just run down, raising their particle-beam hands.

  Phada-phada-phada-BOOM! Malady had already discharged his Jackhammer on burst fire, filling the corridor with round after round of the heavy shells in the direction of the approaching cyborgs. Many of Malady’s shots missed, but the scatter-shot approach meant that some hit, spinning them on the hips or driving one of them back.

  FZZZT! The lines of burning blue-white particles seared the air, but the impacts of Malady’s munitions meant that they missed, burning holes into the walls and causing the lights to explode in a shower of sparks.

  “Isolate elevators!” Ratko shouted, flinching with every sound of particle-beam nearby as the silver doors to the elevator hissed open.

  “In!” Malady shoved Ratko inside, and then followed her as more lines of burnt energy sought them out.

  FZZT! The doors were closing interminably slowly as one laser shot slammed through the gap, rupturing the metal wall of the elevator just a few inches from Jezzy’s head.

  “Down!” Jezzy commanded mostly for Ratko’s benefit, as it didn’t really seem as though Malady could crouch or duck in his full tactical suit. Jezzy lunged forward, dragging her finger down the internal data-screen all the way to the bottom as the doors closed, and the elevator started to hum as it moved.

  Phew. Jezzy slumped back against the wall. “That was close. Too close.”

  “We could have taken them.” Ratko was wrapping her wires back into her belt module and picking up her gun.

  “Maybe. Probably. But we haven’t got the time to waste, remember.” Jezzy checked her mission clock.

  MISSION ANALYSIS: Lifeline.

  ETA to the Invincible… 4 mins 36 seconds. COMPLETE

  ETA to objective 1 (oxygen tanks)… 8 minutes.

  ETA to objective 2 (munition locker)… 10 minutes.

  Deployment and return to scout… 44 minutes.

  Forty-four minutes? Jezzy saw in alarm. She’d managed to add almost fifteen minutes to her estimated schedule. That left Willoughby almost an hour out there alone, with a diminishing air supply.

  “And we don’t know whether or how these cyborgs can communicate with the jump-ships, either.” Jezzy regained her breath. “Many more encounters like that, and we might get one of those Ru’at ships coming over to check out what all the fuss is about.”

  “They’re welcome.” Ratko was grinning savagely, clearly not having come down from her powerful stimulants yet.

  “No, Ratko. They’re really not…” Jezzy said, just as the roof of the elevator exploded with noise.

  FZZT! A line of burning purple burned through the ceiling right in front of Ratko, who screamed.

  “Frack! They broke into the elevator shaft!” Jezzy cried out as her hand once again went to the empty holster at her side. Dammit!

  Fzzzzzzt! The line of fire cut through the metal roof like a welding torch, its glowing edges peeled back by chrome fingers. They were opening it up like a tin can!

  Pha-BOOM! BOOM! Jezzy felt worse than useless, as she had to wait while Malady and Ratko opened fire at the ceiling.

  No, not useless. She threw herself to the elevator’s data-screen, looking at the small green circle sweep down and down, past the different levels of the Invincible.

  Emergency stop? She hit the controls just as they crossed the next door. The elevator compartment was filling with the smell of cordite smoke and the roar of Malady and Ratko’s barrage. Their shots seemed to be keeping the cyborgs above them at bay, but another line of laser fire scored through the roof and buried itself in the wall.

  Kerthunk! The elevator shook and jumped as the brakes were applied by Jezzy’s command.

  “Oof!” Ratko was thrown against Malady, who of course remained as solid as ever. But what Jezzy was pleased to hear was the chorus of clanks and thuds as the cyborgs were thrown off balance overhead. They wouldn’t have a heartbeat of time, she knew.

  “Out! Out!” Jezzy hit the door release button, then leaned into the opening silver doors to force them open just that little bit faster as Ratko stumbled, and Malady backed out.

  FZZT! Fzzz! More burning particle-beams speared through the floor from above, as Jezzy hit the ground floor sigil on the data-screen and rolled between the closing doors to collapse at Malady’s broad metal feet.

  Jezzy groaned. She could hear distant clanking and the sound of muffled particle-beams from the other side of the elevator door, but it was growing quieter and quieter.

  “I sent them down to the ground floor…the lowest level of the Invincible,” Jezzy panted. “Unless they know how to work lifts, it’ll take them hours to find their way back up here.”

  “And where is here, exactly?” Ratko looked around.

  The elevator door was one of several that opened out into a broad balcony, overlooking an even wider workshop.

  “Mid-Level Engineering and Repairs,” Jezzy said, checking her map. “It’s not where I wanted to go, but it’ll do. It’ll have what we need.” She pointed out across the hall below them that was as long as a standard football pitch.

  On the opposite wall was a selection of three giant external bulkhead doors, which Jezzy could tell from the map led to their own airlocks, from and to which the smaller CMC craft could be brought for customary maintenance. The Invincible was such a large vessel that it didn’t have to concentrate all its different departments in one place, but instead had several engineering decks, as well as several medical bays, crew quarters, and the like.

  Mid-Level Engineering was tiny in comparison to Jezzy’s real target: Main Engineering Holds 1-5 located at the ‘bottom’ of the Invincible, along with the main propulsion system. But having a smaller workshop deck halfway up the pyramid meant that they could continue the normal maintenance and repair work that an operational battleship needed.

  “Good thinking, sir,” Ratko said, scanning the floor. There was a collection of engineering pits and bays, some only as large as Malady, with others many times that size. Gantries and cranes were stacked against the walls, able to be brought out to attend to every square inch of any spacecraft brought here.

  “And there I see some of the gorgeous stuff!” Ratko pointed to one corner. Entire metal cages of oxygen bottles were stacked there, with large ceramic pumping stations behind them.

  “Go get them, Corporal. Malady, how much can you carry?” Jezzy said.

  Malady turned to look at the six-foot stacks of liquid oxygen containers. “One,” he said.

  “One?”

  “One stack.” Malady nodded.

  “Do it. We have no idea when we’ll get the chance to refuel again,” Jezzy ordered. “We’ll make exit through the main port doors there. So, get the job done, people, and get ready to get out of here.”

  Ratko, high on stimulants, was already jogging to the steps down to the workshop floor, but Malady remained behind for a pause.

  “But, Lieutenant. The second mission objective,” he intoned.

  The munitions locker. The distraction? Jezzy nodded. “I know all that, Corporal, no need to remind me,” she said. “I already have a plan. I’m taking lead on that. You go pick up a few tons of the air we need, alright, big guy?”<
br />
  “Sir. It is my duty to inform you that we still have to determine a way to get off this hulk, as well as initiate some sort of distraction to allow our ship to escape.”

  Jezzy thought of General Asquew’s data-stick and precisely what it contained.

  Rapid Response Fleet 1: Cruisers, Command Vessels, and Battle-Carriers:

  CMC Invincible… Composition | Orders | Analysis

  “Don’t worry, Corporal Malady. I’ve already got it covered.” Jezzy nodded. If I can find a working console.

  “As you wish, Lieutenant,” Malady said and turned to follow the hyper corporal. If it was possible for the man-golem Malady to sound skeptical—as every one of his bodily functions, including his voice, was augmented and modulated through machine circuits—then he had managed to sound so now.

  Which is all just as well, Jezzy had to agree, because she didn’t particularly feel very confident in what she was about to do either.

  Her eyes kept darting back to that line of data still glowing down the inside of her helmet, already open to the only branching line of information that Jezzy needed.

  CMC Invincible… Composition. |

  Structure…

  Superstructure…

  Propulsion…

  Mainframe and Electrical…

  Life Support…

  Munitions>>>Priority 1 Weapons>>>Thermonuclear Warheads…

  13

  Evolution

  “I can’t hear anything,” Mariad Rhossily murmured. The Imprimatur of Proxima was already a few meters down the path, with Kol and Ochrie moving to join her as Solomon scrabbled out from under the outcrop of rock and back into the Ru’at nursery.

  “What the frack is that!?” Solomon heard Kol saying, lowering the Jackhammer at a dark shape by the side of the path.

  “Wait. Stand back,” Solomon was saying, but Kol had already stepped forward to prod the dark shape half-hidden in the moss and vegetation with his boot.