Which buys me some time, she thought. But how much? Jezzy was already scrambling to her feet and stumbling down the narrow corridor. She was sure that the cyborgs would follow her, after all. There was no reason to turn and look inside the loading bay of the nuclear missile, was there?
Not if she made some noise.
“Hey! You glorified drone-dolls! Don’t you want a piece of me?” she shouted, clanging on the pipework walls as she turned away from the loading bay and its terrible denizens and toward where Ratko’s map led her. It was an obvious escape bay—a small alcove at the end of the corridor with a bulkhead door and nothing else. ESR 23 was stenciled in bold type over the door, and Jezzy went straight for it.
FZT! FZZZ—
Behind her came the sounds of the cyborgs cutting their way out of the collapsed tunnel and coming after her.
How much time? She flicked her fingers inside their metal power gauntlets, where lay the thin mesh gloves and touch-sensitive pads on the fingertips, which she used to navigate her suit’s holo-controls.
Timer App Downloaded.
Controls: Countdown
Set for: 5 minutes; 1 minute; 30 seconds; 10 seconds
It was the automatic detonation override that Ratko had coded and designed for her in moments, linked to the nuclear warhead, downloaded into her suit’s mainframe controls. All Jezzy had to do was to set the time and away it would go, but the clock was already running down on the device, cresting a little over a few minutes.
Grabbing the door release lever, she yanked as hard as she could. She could feel the metal wanting to resist her, but the assisted strength given to her by her suit’s servos and interior hydraulics made short work of that.
Jezzy pulled the door open and jumped inside, finding that there was just a small platform step and then another, already open door—straight into the ESR. She made sure to shut and lock the bulkhead door behind her all the same, knowing that the cyborgs could burn their way through it, but it was another obstacle between her and death, wasn’t it?
The ESR was an octoid sphere whose door hatch hissed shut behind her as soon as she stepped in, and the console unit in front of the piloting chair glared into life.
It was designed to register life signs and automate the escape procedure as soon as it’s entered. Jezzy was at least thankful for that. This way, she wouldn’t have to waste precious time working out how to use the damn thing.
A series of deep, vibrational shakes shuddered through the ESR as it completed whatever mechanical unlocking procedure it needed to. Jezzy sat in the pilot’s chair directly in front of the console. There were three smaller bucket chairs on either side of her set against the ESR’s walls, meaning that each survival raft was capable of comfortably holding seven survivors.
Lights started racing ahead of her on the other side of the viewing window, four lines of light in each of the corners of her vision, narrowing to a point before flashing once, twice…
Motion Sensor Alert!
Jezzy’s suit pinged her with the alarm as the small overlay map revealed two blinking orange vectors approaching, at speed, behind her. The cyborgs had made their way out of the collapsed tunnel. They had taken the bait. They could probably also see or hear or sense with whatever scanning measures they had installed the noise coming from the other side of th e bulkhead door.
Initiating ESR Main Thrusters…
This message appeared not in Jezzy’s suit, but instead on the lit-up console in front of her. The shaking and shuddering increased as Jezzy’s own motion sensors started to blink more and more rapidly.
Prepare for Launch…
She searched the consoles to find the command she wanted: 360-degree camera control. She switched it on with a wave of her hand just in time to see the bulkhead door that she had so recently jumped through being pulled off of its pistons. Its metal pistons, soldered and bolted to the metal superstructure of the Invincible itself.
No wonder the cyborgs were almost unstoppable—
The first cyborg stood there, one arm dangling uselessly at its side from the strain of ripping the door, as well as having a myriad of Jackhammer holes across its chest and legs. Behind it in the darkness, Jezzy caught a glimpse of the second cyborg as it raised its weapon-hand. In that awful moment that comes with high adrenaline, Jezzy could make out every detail on the ESR’s screen of the things myriad revolving wheels lighting up as it prepared to fire.
Any shot of that thing will go straight through the thin shell of this craft, Jezzy knew. She wouldn’t be dead, because she would be in her power suit, but she would be equally as screwed.
Launch!
Suddenly, the image in her cameras was obscured by glaring white, and then a furious avalanche of orange, yellow, and red flames as the main thruster fired. The flames engulfed the cyborgs. For a hideous moment, the ESR sat perfectly still as it fed the thruster with propellant and sought escape velocity.
Jezzy could see the blackened outline of the first cyborg in the flames as its once-human flesh was boiled away, and its most tender pieces of metal started to boil.
FZZT!
Jezzy was punched back into her chair as the ESR rocketed forward, and multiple alarm sirens went off inside the craft.
ESR Mainframe: Craft Compromised. Hull damage at Rear Plate 13…
But in less time than it took to blink an eye, Jezzy and the octoid sphere that she sat in were hurtling forward. The four lines of lights flashed into a blur, and suddenly the sensation of force and propulsion was gone. She was shooting out of the side of the Invincible and into the wreckage field that had once been the Rapid Response Fleet.
ESR Mainframe: Proximity Warning! Undertaking Automatic Evasive Measures!
The console screen in front of her bleeped as the Marine saw the rising edge of a piece of Confederate Marine Corps battleship coming straight for them. With a gut-wrenching lurch, the ESR fired its left-hand positional rockets perfectly, spinning her view around as they shot past it, only to fire the rockets on the other side to avoid the next collision.
Jezzy was in the wreckage of an entire battlegroup of ships, set against the backdrop of the embattled Red Planet.
The Martian separatists—the ‘Chosen of Mars’ or the ‘First Martians,’ as they called themselves—had successfully fought off the Marine Corps’ attempts to return control of the Red Planet to the Confederacy, with the help of the Ru’at. But its surface was still scarred and smeared by ugly black clouds where the CMC (Confederate Marine Corps) had fired ‘demonstration’ nukes to force a capitulation.
It hadn’t worked, and when the actual Ru’at jump-ships had appeared in Martian space, they had made short work of the Confederate ships.
ESR Mainframe: Unknown Craft on Intercept Course!
The control console blared at her, and it was as if Jezzy’s worst nightmares had all come true at once. There, rising out of the wreckage, was one of the Ru’at jump-ships, and it was heading straight for her.
2
The Future of Humanity
“We have a winner!” Solomon Cready, First Lieutenant of the Outcast Marines, replayed the clone’s words in his head, over and over.
What? It was still as confusing now as it had been when he had first heard it, almost an hour ago on the arena floor.
Despite his current state of near-collapse, the exhaustion that shook his limbs, the glaring white light that filled his eyes, and the terrible wound that ran down one side of his back, Solomon found that his thoughts felt enervated and electric. They jumped and buzzed over his memories, recalling every word, every movement, every detail of the terrible deathmatch that he had just been a part of.
I wonder if this is what happens when you’re about to have a full-system collapse, he thought a little wryly. A last parting gift from his body’s enhanced genetics before he passed irrevocably into shock.
The lieutenant currently lay on his back on a cold slab of steel, trying to not look directly into the blinding white lights above.
He didn’t know how he had gotten here, but he remembered the clone’s final words after Solomon had won the fight against the cyborg Ru’at.
“The Ru’at have judged, and the Ru’at have decided. The new general of their invasion fleet, and the commander of their cyborg forces, will be H21 Solomon Cready!” the clone had announced with apparent glee, and perhaps even a little pride, Solomon had to wonder.
He was still in the Ru’at colony on Mars, stuffed full of cyborgs, clones, and apparently brainwashed Martians. The only ‘true’ alien that they had encountered had been Solomon’s challenger—a creature that he, along with the renegade Outcast Marine Kol, Ambassador Ochrie of Earth, and Mariad Rhossily, the Imprimatur of Mars, had seen ‘born’ from the strange bio-nursery under their very feet.
That creature was a monster, Solomon thought. A wide and pronounced predator’s jaw, mottled ochre and black skin, backwards-jointed legs, and double-elbowed arms. But that was only the start of the thing’s strangeness. Their Ru’at captors—who had so far only revealed themselves in the form of a floating drone sphere—had then encased the creature in steel and silver, turning it into an alien cyborg the likes of which neither Solomon nor any other Marine Corps officer had ever encountered.
And I beat it, the young man thought. Although any human physician would probably say that it had killed him in the process, given his current condition.
“Patient is secure,” a voice purred into Solomon’s awareness, and it was a voice that he recognized.
“You…” he managed to croak, flopping his head to one side to see the familiar form of the older human man with frosted white hair, dark skin, and a perfectly white-silver encounter suit.
“You’re not real,” Solomon murmured as he thought of the first time that he had met the man. It had been when he and the other human captives were first brought to the colony. Each of them was meant to enter the Ru’at ‘judgement chamber,’ where they would be brainwashed into serving their new alien masters in every possible respect.
That was what had happened to Ochrie, after all. Solomon attempted to struggle, but his ankles, wrists, and midriff wouldn’t budge.
This man had been a ‘human-friendly’ hologram generated by one of the Ru’at orbs, who had explained to the lieutenant how he wasn’t ‘Solomon Cready’ at all. He was in fact ‘H21’—an experimental bio-program who had been cloned from the original Solomon Cready back on Earth.
“Begin the procedure,” the human-friendly hologram said with a hint of a smile. He appeared in every respect to be considerate, kindly, even empathetic as he regarded the clone-Solomon on the table.
“Frack you,” Solomon coughed. It was starting to hurt when he breathed. The wound on his back was like a line of molten lava igniting into life every time he tried to fill his lungs. “What procedure?”
“H21, First Lieutenant Cready,” the man finally addressed him directly.
“Solomon. My name is Solomon…”
“The Ru’at are pleased with your performance. There have always been two camps within the Ru’at—those favoring machine and cybernetic solutions, and another that posits that no machine can be as complex or as adaptable as bio-genetics,” the man said in a grandfatherly, lecturing sort of way. “You are the proof that the latter camp is, in fact, correct.”
“Let me go! Why should I care at all what weird politics you monsters have?” Solomon hissed.
“You don’t have to, of course,” the man purred in his rich, warm voice. Solomon wondered if the Ru’at had projected him here just to make him more accepting.
“But it doesn’t particularly matter what you care for or not, Solomon.” The holographic man nodded when he used his real name. “This is who you are. What you are. What you were always meant to become.”
“Frack you,” Solomon managed. He knew it was a petty revenge, and that insults were always the least intelligent way to make a point, but he sure did feel a whole lot better for it, all the same.
“You will understand soon, H21. You have come home. To your real family.”
Suddenly, pain lanced into Solomon’s body. He thought it was originating somewhere around his legs, but he couldn’t be sure, given the omnipresent waves he was experiencing.
“Ach!”
“You must let go, H21. Let go of the human that you think you are.”
Solomon’s mind fluttered toward consciousness, heavy with the words of the hologram.
He opened his mouth to speak, meaning to say something like ‘What are you talking about?’ but instead all that came out was a wordless sigh.
(What have you done to me!?)
“The genetic structure that is written into your DNA is only partly the product of Earth,” the voice continued. Solomon couldn’t see anything but white light. He wasn’t even sure if his eyes were open, or if all of this was somehow being transmitted straight into his brain.
But the pain had gone. In fact, all sensation had gone.
“The Message that we sent to Earth a hundred Sol-cycles ago carried with it the technology to alter rhizomatic and bacterial development,” the voice continued.
Rhizomes… The part of Solomon’s mind that was still Solomon tried to remember his scant astrobiology lessons. Rhizomes were a sort of fungus, weren’t they? Microscopic life inside Earth soil that allowed plants to talk to each other, wasn’t it? Solomon distantly remembered the Oracle—the study computer of the Ganymede Training Facility—opening a lesson with the words ‘rhizomes were the basis of all life.’
“When the Ru’at first began their salvation of the galaxy, they soon encountered a problem—”
Good! Solomon didn’t say.
“That of distance. Consider this. Sol’s tenth planet, Eris, lies some fifteen BILLION Confederate-standard kilometers from Earth. A few hours’ hop in one of your jump-vehicles, perhaps, but still all communication you have available to you takes hours to reach the home world.”
So?
“Of course, the Ru’at’s faster-than-light drive—what might translate into human English as a photon wave generator—makes short work of Sol distances, but they are nonetheless staggering.”
Solomon knew what the hologram must be getting at. And the Sol system was only average, a small to medium system floating in the sea of space. The distances to the nearest star of Alpha Centauri and the Confederacy’s most distant colony of Proxima would be many, many times that fifteen billion kilometers.
And as yet, Solomon realized, they hadn’t even begun to discuss how far the Ru’at home world was. It could conceivably be only a little further along in their own spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy, and still it would be impossible, given those sorts of distances, to ever communicate with them.
Well, to communicate, and for a message to reach them at anything under a hundred years or so, Solomon knew. Which he guessed was why the Ru’at had started their invasion process a hundred years ago, with the physical orb-like probe known as ‘The Message.’
“In their superior wisdom, the Ru’at realized that it was impossible to spread their offer of civilization to the rest of the galaxy through the clumsy, and painstakingly slow, habit of negotiation and debate,” the voice said.
“But what they realized was that there was another way.”
Solomon wondered if he really wanted to hear this. Unsurprisingly, it turned out that he didn’t have much choice.
“The idea of sending a representative, or an ambassador, over lifetimes of space just to engage in a futile and shocking negotiation is unproductive,” the voice continued, “especially if we consider the fact that there are many other forms of communication, and data. Biology is communication. So is code. The Ru’at realized that they could send their message of hope to the furthest reaches of the galaxy by encoding it inside one of two types of information: machine language or genetic coding.”
So, that was what this was all about? Solomon thought. Their sending an alien probe to his home world, to alter the very biology of Earth,
was the Ru’at version of a hello!?
“I can tell from your facial expressions that you are resistant to this idea. But you will understand its significance shortly. You must stop seeing yourself as an individual homo sapiens, but as a part of a wonderful and rare force. Biology. Life.”
The hologram went on, much to Solomon’s annoyance.
“Life is rarer than you think in the universe. The Ru’at should know. They have done this many times. The Ru’at seek to preserve life itself, and to encourage it. To help it to adapt and grow into the type of organism that can withstand this dangerous cosmic cradle we find ourselves in.”
It was all very well and good. Solomon could have growled if he had any control over his face, but this was all pretty, flowery language and poetry for what was essentially an alien invasion, wasn’t it?
Why didn’t the Ru’at allow humanity to develop on their own? Become their own sort of inter-stellar organism? What gave the Ru’at the right to act as gods with Earth’s essential genetics?
“As I indicated before, the Ru’at have long debated the merits of using machine code as a form of information, which worked spectacularly well here in Sol, given the uptake in cybernetic technology thanks to the Message. But you—yes, you, H21—are the proof that it is biology itself which will prove the Ru’at’s crowning accomplishment.”
Solomon didn’t want to be anyone’s crowning anything.
“You have marked an epochal shift in Ru’at direction, and quite possibly the future of intelligent civilization throughout this galaxy, at least!”
Yay me, Solomon thought.
“We are remaking your body, H21. The Ru’at are activating your still-as-yet dormant RNA and DNA, as well as eliminating all of the non-essential junk-gene fragments inside of you. You will become a new man, a new being. You will become everything that homo sapiens and the Ru’at were meant to achieve—together!”
Outcast Marines Boxed Set Page 103
