“You b—” Solomon started to say.
“And you really should have taken those injectors, Solomon—if that is what you like to call yourself. It has the final iteration of Serum 21 in it, developed by my company and the Ru’at right here on Mars. It is the final dose to be administered to the human-Ru’at hybrids.”
“There is nothing in me that is Ru’at,” Solomon said seriously.
Tavin just smiled as he said, “Well, now is your time to find out.”
There was another blip from the opposite side of the room, and this time when Solomon turned, he saw there, high above the fence and the height of his head, a screen. Solomon didn’t know if it was a real, physical screen or a hologram projected like the walls, but it showed the unmistakable jewel of Earth in its center like a blue-green marble, and with it the smaller, bright glow of the Moon. It was still far away in the screen, but Solomon knew this must mean that the Ru’at or their allies had their eyes on his home planet.
“I thought you made a deal with Hausman?” Solomon grumbled, referring to the Commander of the Near-Earth Fleet who had taken control of the Confederacy, called General Asquew a traitor, and announced himself to be Earth’s ‘Commander-in-Chief.’
“In their wisdom, our saviors have decided to initiate the final stage of the plan to elevate the people of Earth,” Tavin said with apparent fervor and glee. “Earth is the home world. The cradle. It is only fitting that it, too, should have the opportunity that the colonies have.”
Solomon’s eyes were drawn to the screen once again as a dark shape eclipsed the Earth in the view of whatever drone or satellite was broadcasting the image.
It was the Ru’at mothership—the very same one that had attacked Proxima, and which Solomon had thought was still stationed on the edges of Confederate space.
Clearly, it wasn’t. The thing was an oval shape of complicated machinery. Solomon saw, for the second time, the strange modular sections of the ship as if it wasn’t one thing at all, but instead was something more like an engine—a collection of rotating, churning, hydraulic, and wired units that moved together as one. It appeared to have no external hull or shields whatsoever, and instead as it slid by, Solomon could see the many scrapes and impact craters where it had swum through asteroids, comets, and space dust.
I have to get a warning out. Solomon was catalyzed by the sight. But how? It meant that he had to survive. He had to get out of here. He looked at the energy fence that surrounded him, and the line of cyborgs standing, waiting, in the gallery. He couldn’t take them all.
“And now, Solomon Cready, as you seem so insistent to be called, the Ru’at have demanded a very particular fate for you,” Tavin called out. There was a burst of steam from the metal floor a little way off, and, rising on a column of metal into the arena, a stand bearing what looked to be a spear.
“What!?” Solomon looked at it in confusion. The weapon was about half the height that he was, with wide, leaf-like blades at either end so that it resembled a sort of paddle—a murderous one. Along the haft of its center were molded grips so that it could be used in either a two-handed or a singular fashion.
“What do you expect me to do with that?” Solomon frowned at the weapon.
“Personally, H21, I expect you to die, but our saviors want to see just how advanced you have become. How advanced their program of human adjustment has become,” Tavin said smugly as there was another hiss from the floor. This time, at the other end of the arena, a much larger panel broke free from the floor, sliding back as a creature rose on an internal lift.
As the creature crested the floor, Solomon saw the sudden glare of bright blue light from the Ru’at orb in its forehead. The creature rose higher and higher until it towered at some seven and a half feet high. Its skin was a deep, mottled black, brown, ochre, and gray, like the lichen some part of its anatomy had been grown from. Its long, orangutan-like arms reached past its hips and gleamed with metal. Down the line of its back and on the scaffolding around its hips was the strengthened exo-skeleton that Solomon and the others had seen driven into the thing’s body.
Solomon saw its backward jointed legs, similarly clad in silver and assisted with external supports, just as he saw the thing’s face—a wide, protruding lower jaw that was brimming with rows of small shark teeth.
It was the Ru’at cyborg, and Solomon realized that they wanted him to fight it.
18
Sacrifice and Thermo-Dynamics
“Not that wire!”
Jezzy froze with the small set of wire cutters that Corporal Ratko had given her. She was leaning over the open panel into the guts of the ISPBM—the Inter-Stellar Planetary Ballistic Missile—and about to cut one of the light green wires.
“What? I thought you said that this was the safety cutout,” she said, already confused.
The pair were in the nearest bay to the hatch that they had jumped through in the forward area of the Invincible. It looked a little like a long cubicle, with the nuke on its metal bed, waiting to be loaded into the firing tube in the wall in front of them. Ratko was at the singular command desk a few meters away, checking the launch dynamics, when she had suddenly called out.
“The yellow wire, sir, the yellow!” Ratko bustled to her position to easily trace the vines of wires that snaked through the innards of this part of the missile, indicating where a yellow wire met a relay attached to the missile’s wall.
“The safety control system. This connection is pulled apart at launch, usually, but seeing as you don’t want to launch it…” Ratko leaned into the deadly device, rummaged around until she had access, and snipped the wire expertly. “Now, you’re almost ready to blow us all to kingdom come!”
“That wasn’t exactly the point, Corporal,” Jezzy murmured, and then her brain registered what the woman had said. “Almost?”
“We need to arm it.” Ratko pointed at the nosecone.
“What? I thought it was already primed,” Jezzy said.
“Primed means it has active propulsion systems in place. It can be fired,” Ratko explained, already bustling to the front end of the missile, and with a handheld motorized screwdriver, started to unfix the panels. “Arming it is something different again. You really don’t know that much about technology, do you?” Ratko shook her head as she got the cone panel to flip up. It exposed what appeared to be a set of solid-looking pipes and metal boxes.
“I know it goes bang,” Jezzy murmured. Somehow, this diminutive woman had managed to make her feel like a luddite.
“Yeah, well, you’re not wrong there.” Ratko sighed. “All thermo-nukes rely on the thermo part, right?”
“Heat, I know that,” Jezzy said.
“Not a total loss, then,” Ratko teased. “Thermos are two-part incendiary devices. The radioactive material is further down there.” She waved her motorized screwdriver back down the body of the missile, disturbingly close to where Jezzy already stood. She instinctively backed away a step.
“It’s incredibly dense and incredibly tough. ISPBMs hark right back to the original Alameda tests. There has to be a powerful chemical heat to trigger a cascade in the fissile material,” Ratko explained. “The heat comes from a chemical chain reaction at this end. Small ignition charges ignite highly-explosive compounds, but their energy is forced to further explosive compounds, until it’s hot enough to spark the actual bomb.”
“So, all we have to do is light up that end?” Jezzy nodded to where Ratko stood.
“Yes and no,” Ratko sighed. “This end, as you so eloquently put it, is only connected after launch to the fissile material. Another safety measure to make sure that some crazy Outcast Commander can’t do exactly what it is we’re doing right now.” Ratko tapped the missile with her screwdriver. “We have to manually connect it, which is called arming, got it?”
“Not really, but just so long as you can make it go bang, on a timer, then I’m happy…” Jezzy said.
“Oh, the timer part is easy.” She reached back to t
he command console to pull her satchel bag of stolen tools, clanking and rummaging until she found a small timer device “How long do you want?”
“Long enough to get out of this hulk and back to Willoughby and Malady,” Jezzy said, thinking: Somehow.
“Twenty minutes, then?” She watched as Ratko set the timer and started to wire and solder the device in place. “I’m going to add an immediate detonation command connector as well,” she said, introducing new elements to the timer—a tiny wireless transmitter with its own crystal shard for an aerial. After that, Ratko moved to Jezzy’s suit to plug in with her engineering console into one of the many data-ports that every suit of power armor had around its cowl.
Data Transmission!
Sender: Sp. Ratko, Outcast Marines, Rapid Response Fleet 2.
Accept? Y/N
Y
Timer App Downloaded.
Controls: Set 5 minutes… 1 minute… 30 seconds… 10 seconds…
“Just press the ‘okay’ and it will override the external timer and count down from there,” Ratko explained, turning back to the cone. “Now, we need to connect up the chemical explosives.”
Clank!
Behind them came the sound of feet as, deeper inside the Priority 1 Weapons Locker, something moved. Both Ratko and Jezzy froze. It could only be one thing: cyborgs.
“How long?” Jezzy hissed.
“A couple minutes,” Ratko breathed.
Clank-clank! The sound of the heavy metal feet was coming closer.
“Get it done, then get out of here. You got one of those magnet grapple hook thingies?” Jezzy asked, knowing that Ratko did. She had made three of the grapples and pullcords, one for each of them.
“Right here, sir,” Ratko breathed as the sounds of the metal feet drew closer.
We’ve been discovered. The cyborgs must have come to check out the noise…
“Arm the ISPBM, get to the nearest airlock, and get out. No waiting around for me, and that’s an order, got it?” Jezzy whispered sternly.
“But, Lieutenant, what are you—”
“I said that’s an order, Marine!” Jezzy said. “Here.” She swapped her own Marine service rifle for Ratko’s Jackhammer. Ahh. It feels good to be holding one of these again. “I’m going to buy you some time, and then I’ll follow you out. Understood?”
Ratko looked at her with wide, serious eyes before nodding. She understood perfectly what Jezzy was doing. “If you don’t make it out, sir, I’m installing the auto-destruct app on my suit as well.” Jezzy saw the woman jam the data-connector into one of her own suit’s ports as Jezzy nodded.
“Good. If she hasn’t blown by the time you get back to the ship, then activate it anyway—with or without me, you hear?” Lieutenant Wen said.
To her credit, the ever-cantankerous Corporal Ratko for once didn’t argue or tease. She just nodded. “Aye-aye, sir,” she said.
Clank-thud-clank! The sound of the advancing cyborgs was much closer now. They could only be around the next knotwork of pipes. Jezzy took a deep breath and ran to confront them.
And if I have to blow that thing while I’m still in here, I will, she knew as she raised the Jackhammer to her shoulder and went to confront the enemy.
19
The Champion’s Reward
The Ru’at cyborg looked different, and it wasn’t just the metal that now covered its body or the fact it was holding the exact same weapon that awaited Solomon. The double-bladed spear looked almost like a toothpick in the thing’s metal claws.
It’s intelligent, Solomon realized. It was still making a low, guttural growling sound, and Solomon could see its tiny, flap-like nostrils flaring as it scented the air, but it had lost all that animal, reactionary energy. It stood relatively contained and focused on the task at hand.
Which was killing Solomon, apparently.
The thing is sentient now, Solomon thought, or the Ru’at orb controlling it is. Solomon’s mind, spurred on by the spikes of adrenaline and panic, started to accelerate. Unknown to him, the Serum 21 that was pregnant throughout his body clicked into gear, and complex chains of amino acids and enzymes were released to activate the Ru’at RNA he had unwittingly been born with.
The pain and weariness in Solomon’s limbs started to subside as the serum in his blood took over. He felt that roiling ball of anger in his gut start to rise once more as a black cloud of energy that would make his heart beat faster and would focus all his attention to a single pinpoint.
“Behold, Ambassador, Imprimatur,” Tavin called out, “the final product development. Which one will win? The cybernetically-enhanced Ru’at? Or the genetically-enhanced one? Two technologies masterminded by our saviors. But which one will determine the fate of the galaxy? Evolution, my friends. It is now ours to control!”
Solomon saw the Ru’at twitch its head toward the shouted words of the clone, and in that movement, he moved. The serum in his body made Solomon react out of instinct, faster than conscious thought, as he leaped forward to seize the blade waiting for him.
“Kol!” Solomon shouted as he saw the Ru’at cyborg start to move in the periphery of his vision. “Give me those damn injectors!”
The thing did not roar as a cornered animal might. It did not charge either, but merely hissed, its entire metal chest vibrating as it stepped from its place and started to stalk its prey.
Warily, Solomon started to back around the circle, aware of the burning heat of the energy fence just behind him. He kept his eyes dead on the Ru’at cyborg, seeing that it was doing the same, moving closer but slowly circling him as he attempted to circle it.
“No chance of calling it a draw, I take it,” Solomon murmured as his limbs flooded with the rubbery, nervous excitement that always came before a fight.
The Ru’at cyborg just continued to hiss. Solomon could see its small, beady black eyes boring into him, watching his every move as a forked tongue flicked from between its teeth and lapped at the air.
“Lieutenant!” Kol threw the first injector high over the fence, arcing through the arena air until—
Got it! Solomon caught it with one hand, reversing his grip and plunging the silver injector pen straight into his neck.
“Ach!”
“Sss-crargh!” The Ru’at cyborg lunged forward in that moment of distraction, keeping its spear low in one hand until the last possible moment, when it flicked it up between them in a strike that would surely disembowel the Outcast.
Clang! Solomon managed to drop the injector pen and seize his own short spear with two hands just moments before the impact, driving his own weapon down to dash the thing’s to one side as they both leaped back again.
First blows, and no one has drawn blood. Solomon was panting, feeling an odd giddiness. Was he hyperventilating? What was causing this new sensation?
He couldn’t tell if the new and improved H21 serum that the Ru’at had loaded the pen with was starting to work or not. He had no idea just what the pure H21 serum would do to his body. Back on Ganymede, he hadn’t known it at the time, but he and the other Outcasts were continuously involved in performance tests. At least a portion of every day was spent in the gym or out on the surface of Jupiter’s moon, with Dr. Palinov taking daily blood samples to assess the impact of their own Serum 21.
I guess this has to be tested in the field, Solomon thought. All sensation of pain and exhaustion was gone, and if anything, his anger only amplified. It felt to Solomon like the storm cloud of his own negative emotions—what he had tried to force down and ignore ever since that fateful night in New Kowloon—was filling his entire body.
The Ru’at cyborg lunged forward once again, and Solomon’s eyes were filled with the glare of blue light.
Clang! Another parry sent shockwaves reverberating up Solomon’s arms. The creature was strong! Far stronger than Solomon.
Instead of pulling the short spear back and swinging again, the creature merely used the first parry to counterstrike with the other end of the blade. Solomon s
aw the line of razor-sharp steel descending in a line straight for his face.
“Ach!” He pivoted on one heel, allowing the Ru’at’s blade to sail inches past his nose as he lunged forward with the tip of his blade.
“Scrarghl!” He was rewarded with a roar of anger as he felt the blade scrape across the thing’s chest, hitting metal and dark flesh.
As soon as the hit was scored, Solomon jumped away again, hoping to see the thing spurt blood behind him, but it didn’t. Instead, only a thin trickle of blackish ichor appeared and ran down the creature’s chest as it spun around to roar at its attacker.
“First blood to the H21!” Solomon heard clone-Tavin call out, apparently just as pleased to have the human variant of the Ru’at’s creations win as the Ru’at itself.
Solomon panted, backing away from the beast as it closed in once again. He saw the metal pistons on the thing’s legs start to turn and churn as it sprang forward in a bounding step, spear held high.
Solomon ducked into a roll just as the Ru’at cyborg did something unexpected, leaping into the air and jack-knifing its body so that it spiraled as it spun, landing expertly behind Solomon.
No! The Marine was already committed to his roll and had too much momentum going forward. Solomon tried to twist his back, but he felt a sudden line of fire spread down his body from shoulder to hip.
“Sir!” he heard Kol yell as Solomon continued to roll out of the way, blood spreading down the back of his thin encounter suit. It wasn’t a fair fight, obviously, given that no one had offered Solomon metal plates like the Ru’at cyborg had.
“Behind you!” Solomon ended his roll as Kol shouted, and he heard the heavy thump of alien, clawed feet as the thing jumped after him.
It’ll bring the blade down to stab me, Solomon guessed, turning where he crouched on the floor, already raising the short spear in a two-handled grip.
Outcast Marines Boxed Set Page 101
