Outcast Marines Boxed Set

by James David Victor

  BWAAR! BWAAAAR! The flashing blue lights and the sirens were getting closer. The younger Solomon froze. The Confederate Enforcers were heading down the access road that linked up to the interstate on the other side of AgroMore’s land. It was the very same road that their lane met up with.

  Had they been spotted? Solomon’s eyes darted to the scruffy hedges and the occasional, shrubby sort of tree. It was still night, but the sky was a pale, silvery blue from the stars and the gibbous moon above. It wouldn’t take a lot for them to be spotted.

  What’s the penalty for trespass, again? Solomon asked himself.

  “They’ve spotted us,” Solomon said as he watched the approaching lights, getting brighter and brighter in his eyes. He was certain of it.

  BWAR! BWAAAR!

  “No way. Two small blips on the side of the harvester? No way they spotted us,” Matty said with a laugh.

  “But AgroMore might have had internal security cameras,” the younger Solomon pointed out, earning a sharp look from Matty.

  “True, I guess. Look. I know how to deal with the Enforcers. We’ll stay out of the way, but if they get close to us, let me do the talking, alright?” said the youth who would become Solomon’s lifelong friend, ally, and criminal accomplice—as well as the one person who would eventually betray him the worst.

  “Can I trust you?” Solomon asked again. This time, he couldn’t see Matty’s shaded face as the older boy turned to look at him.

  “Yeah, I told you, Solomon. You’ll always be able to trust me.” Matty’s voice was low and insistent.

  BWAAR—

  BWAAAARM!

  “—get away from me!” Solomon attempted to kick as the Ru’at orb lowered to an inch or so above his forehead.

  Solomon couldn’t have been more surprised when the lights flickered again, and the colony sirens went off in a constant barrage. The Ru’at orb abruptly dropped from its position to smack him in the center of the forehead and bounce off the table, its blue-white light off.

  Huh?

  BWAAARM!

  “I don’t understand…” the human-friendly man said, a look of incomprehension on his face. Solomon saw him tug at his sleeve and raise a hand to the side of his head. There, Solomon saw, was a sleek black implant, like a round piece of black glass.

  “A magnetic disturbance?” Solomon overheard the man say, and, “An EMP attack? Reserve systems, immediately!”

  BWAARM!

  Without explanation, the man turned and ran through the open door, leaving Solomon and the orb in the room and the door open. Solomon realized two things in that very instant: that the man’s boots made a noise on the gun-metal of the floor—meaning that he almost certainly wasn’t a hologram—and that the locks holding his limbs in place had de-magnetized.

  An EMP, Solomon thought. An electro-magnetic pulse. Clouds of chain-reaction particles that destabilized electronic systems in the blast radius. The lieutenant knew this because he had read the specs on several such weapons that the Confederate Marine Corps had at its disposal, ranging from ‘briefcase bombs’ that could be infiltrated into an installation and detonated to kill all security measures, to the sorts of low-orbit fission devices that not only created vast amounts of heat and light, but could also ruin a satellite network.

  “Someone’s knocked out the Ru’at colony.” Solomon’s mood shifted from bleak to hilarity in seconds. It had to be General Asquew, it just had to be! Solomon knew that the First Rapid Response Fleet above them was on the run—he had flown through the battle—but Asquew herself must have arrived to liberate Mars!

  “We’re going to be free!” he said, pulling the weak magnetic force apart as he stumbled off the metal bed and slapped cold feet on the floor.

  “Only I really could do with some clothes about now…” Solomon remembered that he was still naked and covered with the thin red lines where the Ru’at had done…whatever it was that they had done to him.

  “Breathe. Center yourself.” Solomon’s nudity was not a thing that bothered him at the moment. It was probably the fact that he was still very much a hostage of an alien super power, but also slightly because of the fact that, back in his old life in New Kowloon, Earth, there had been many times when he had to come up with quick solutions in uncompromising situations.

  What do I have? Solomon catalogued.

  “Well, certainly not my pride,” he muttered, until his eyes fell on the motionless, silent, dark Ru’at orb. He snatched it up and padded silently to the door.

  Outside was a short corridor that ended at a T-junction. The entire colony appeared to be made of the same gray metal, meaning that the walls and floors were freezing now that the power had been turned off. The usually glowing white ceiling that provided the light was now a dull, weakened haze.

  “Get to the air filters!” he heard someone shout as a white-suited woman ran past the end of the corridor. They didn’t even spare a look in his direction. It had to be one of the brainwashed Chosen of Mars, who had come here thinking that the Ru’at would give the Red Planet its independence.

  But their loyalty had just turned into a new sort of slavery, this time to a different, alien god.

  Solomon saw what he needed to do. He moved down the short corridor, seeing that there were viewing plates in the steel walls looking into other rooms.

  Inside were people rising from low steel benches, their shackles having fallen off, shaking their heads in wonder.

  “Kol! Mariad, Ochrie!” Solomon hissed into the viewing plates at the people that he had come here with. Rather disturbingly, he noticed that his friends were also all clothed.

  Wow. Thanks, Ru’at, he thought dismally as he tapped on the plate and indicated that the door had to be open. “No power!” He mouthed the words, hoping that the ex-Outcast Marine on the other side would understand. Kol took one look at him and nodded, running to the door to start pushing and pressing against it until, with a creak of resistant metal, the door started to slide up.

  “Morning, Lieutenant. You always sleep in the buff?” Kol said as soon as he had scrabbled under the door.

  “Occupational hazard,” Solomon said in a disgruntled fashion as he indicated that they had to get the doors open to the next two rooms, where the ambassador and the imprimatur were currently banging on the metal.

  Kol immediately set to work, heaving and sliding the doors up as Solomon ghosted to the end of the corridor and awaited the sound of approaching feet—

  “Lieutenant?” he heard Maraid say with great puzzlement in her voice.

  “New Ru’at breeding program,” Kol snickered beside her.

  “No, not that! I mean, what are all those marks all over his body?” Solomon tried his best to ignore them as he was rewarded by the heavy stamp of feet. He stepped out just in front of the running, brainwashed Martian, lifting his hands.

  “Hi. I am a fully naked man,” Solomon said.

  The Martian’s sudden confusion hit him like a cold fish to the face.

  Thwack! Solomon’s arm snapped out, viper-quick, to crack the Martian around the side of the head with the powered-down Ru’at orb. The Martian went down with a small sigh, and Solomon busily got to work undressing him.

  “Good job, sir. No one wants to see that,” Kol said, earning a withering stare from the lieutenant.

  Solomon searched the man’s pockets and utility belt at the same time as stealing his encounter suit. The white and silver jumpsuit was too large for him, but with some heavy cinching at the waist and cuffs, he managed to make himself look slightly less like a balloon. Added to this new look were an oversized pair of boots and a belt with a collection of small tools—everything from wire snips to amp-meters.

  And one small handheld device that, if Solomon didn’t know any better, looked suspiciously like a gun.

  “Now we’re talking!” Solomon said, raising the thing to sight down its barrel.

  The weapon was a little smaller than a Marine service pistol, with a handle and a button for a trigger
. It didn’t apparently have any ammo clips, but instead had two tiny coils of a crystal lattice behind transparent plates on the body of the weapon. When Solomon examined the barrel, he saw that it was bulkier than any projectile weapon and was made up of small obsidian rings, ending around a tiny silver orb.

  “Huh?”

  “Sir, that looks a little like—” Kol started to say as Solomon fired.

  FZZT! A pencil-thin beam of white-blue light shot out the end and exploded into sparks on the opposite wall. It left a blackened soot mark where it had hit, a smell of burning ozone in everyone’s nostrils, and a tiny. running line of molten metal at the heart of the strike.

  “A Ru’at particle-beam weapon.” Solomon started to grin very widely indeed. “Let’s see if we can find a few more for the rest of you, shall we?” Solomon nodded in the direction that the man had run from, and the four set off at speed. Above their heads, the lights flickered and the colony sirens continued to blare.

  BWAAAARM!

  5

  Distractive Technologies

  ESR Mainframe: Proximity Warning!

  ESR Mainframe: Craft Compromised. Hull Damage at…

  The bubble of metal that Second Lieutenant Wen was currently trapped inside shook and bounced. Its console screens glitched and its speakers blurted out multiple warnings, speaking over each other as the system tried to come to terms with what was happening to it.

  Emergency Service Rafts were built to withstand the hazards of space travel—everything from being hit by space debris, to the heat of re-entry, to a planet’s atmosphere.

  But Jezzy was seriously worried whether the thing could withstand a nuclear shockwave.

  The shell of white exploded from just under the tip of the pyramid that was the Invincible. In awful detail, Jezzy saw the metal skin ripple up the length of the once-proud craft as the invisible line of force swept ahead of the expanding white globe.

  Jezzy saw all the near fragments of the debris field wobble and shake as the invisible field swept over them, and then it hit her speeding craft. It was like some angry god had used the ESR as a soccer ball and kicked it with all their might.

  Jezzy spun. She shook. She tried to use the ESR’s stabilizers and positional rockets, but the craft was swinging around so fast that it was impossible to know which direction to fire them in. All she could do was hold on and hope that she wasn’t slammed into the side of some bit of dead CMC ship large enough to crack the ESR like an egg.

  Incoming Transmission: Gold Channel

  SENDER: Corporal Malady

  “Lieutenant, this is Corporal Malady on board the Marine scout. Lieutenant, come in,” the full tactical man-golem managed to sound at least a little perturbed by the situation. Which was a seismic change compared to his usually austere and soporific tones.

  “I’m here, Malady. Course heading twenty degrees off Mars elliptic… No, wait, forty-five degrees… Now heading poleward, ah…” Jezzy tried to read out her positioning, but the way that the compromised ESR was performing made it incredibly difficult. “Malady, have you got Ratko? Did you get the oxygen?”

  “All present and correct, sir—apart from you,” Malady informed her. “We have you on scanners. We’re coming for you.”

  “No! Don’t get any closer to the blast!” Jezzy said.

  “We are far enough out not to— SCHZZZZKT!” The message suddenly glitched out, and Jezzy just had to pray that it was because the signal had been disrupted by the nuke’s EMP. All nuclear devices also created an EMP effect, she knew. Back in the bad old days before the unified Confederate Earth, Jezzy knew that the nations of the world had spent inordinate amounts of time researching the effects of firing nuclear bombs in the upper atmosphere of their very own planet, just so they could measure the effects of the subsequent EMP blast on towns below and satellites above.

  The ESR swung and shook once again, and a resounding CRASH turned the craft around completely so that she was facing backwards from the Invincible’s blast.

  The shockwave had disrupted the wreckage field around the Red Planet, and Jezzy could see the tiny flares like fireworks as pieces were dragged into the pull of planetfall. Luckily, most of them would burn up before they got anywhere near the surface of Mars and the Martian Habitat bubbles below. She hoped.

  But what was even more terribly entrancing was the expanding ball of white that was growing above Mars. It hurt her eyes to even look at it, but Jezzy couldn’t look away. She wondered if this was what looking into the face of God was like.

  How big was that bomb? she wondered as the white ball kept on growing larger and larger, wider and wider. It looked too big to be a ‘simple’ nuke—not that nukes were ever that simple.

  Are nuclear explosions bigger in space? Was it something about the vacuum that accelerated their growth and destructive potential?

  The Ru’at, she thought. They had been gaining on her, following her as she had sought to swerve them toward the Invincible. Had she managed it? Were they now caught up in that ball of white light out there?

  Jezzy hoped so. If there was anything that she would like to have as her epitaph, managing to destroy half the fleet of an advanced alien super civilization would be quite a fitting one.

  “Well, I guess it sure was a distraction, all right…” Jezzy murmured to herself as the ESR shook and wobbled.

  “You’re telling me! Hell, even I’m distracted!” came the voice of the very cantankerous but apparently very elated Corporal Ratko.

  “Corporal! Report! How come I can hear you? Didn’t the nuke’s EMP knock out our shortwave communications?” Jezzy was surprised.

  “It did, but long story short, I’m a damned genius. I bounced the ship’s signal off the largest reflective bits of wreckage to get to you. Your receivers aren’t picking up a band of information; they’re getting a pinpoint strike of radio waves!” Ratko said.

  “I have no idea what you just said, Ratko, but I am very glad that you did whatever it was you just did,” Jezzy breathed.

  “We’re coming in on your planetward side. We’ll get you out of there in no time, sir,” Ratko said, and Jezzy thought that was going to be the end of the conversation, until she heard her diminutive corporal take a breath.

  “Sir, there’s something else that you should probably know as well,” she said.

  Oh no. Jezzy sighed. “Go ahead, Ratko. Hit me.”

  “Well, it’s about that pretty ball of light that you’re looking at.” Ratko sounded a little embarrassed.

  “Do I really want to know this, Corporal?” Jezzy said.

  “Probably not. But my analysis shows that it’s got far more combustive force than any normal, singular warhead should have.”

  “I was beginning to think the same, actually. What’s causing it?”

  “Well, maybe we should have moved the armed and primed device before we set it off,” Ratko said.

  “Why? I don’t see— Oh.” Jezzy remembered where they had found the ISBM—or Inter-Stellar Ballistic Missile—in the forward munitions locker, where all the other Priority One weapons were kept.

  “All those nukes,” Jezzy whispered in horror. The locker hadn’t been large, not as large as the Invincible’s forward guns would have been. Jezzy tried to remember how many missile cubicles or silos she had run past on her way out. Three? Four? Six?

  Even at its lowest estimate, that would still be four times the distraction she had been hoping for.

  “And so, Lieutenant,” Ratko went on, “the upshot of that is that we’ve probably killed all of the facing hemisphere of Mars’s electronics. An EMP that big might even knock out an entire planetary communication grid.”

  But Jezzy wasn’t unhappy or shocked by this news at all. In fact, that was the very best thing she had heard all day.

  “You know what, Corporal Ratko? I think you’ve just delivered the distraction we were looking for.” Jezzy grinned as the thin envelope of metal she was inside shook.

  6

  Escape
Velocity

  “Kol, you know this place,” Solomon whispered. “Which way is out?”

  The Outcast lieutenant was currently pressed against one of the metal walls, a few inches away from the junction that connected to a much wider avenue inside the Ru’at colony. The lights were still flickering and dim, but at least someone had managed to turn off the siren. Other white and silver suited Martians were running back and forth, and First Lieutenant Cready could hear them shouting.

  “Get reserve power to the air filters!”

  “Make sure the airlocks are on automatic shutdown!”

  “Bring that emergency battery pack up here!”

  And each and every command or suggestion was met by the singular, repeated phrase that was really starting to get on Solomon’s nerves.

  “Ru’at hails you.”

  It was like a benediction as well as a greeting, as well as the colony equivalent of ‘aye-aye, sir,’ as if the humans here thought that their Ru’at masters were gods for their little world. Solomon found himself surprised to see that despite that these Chosen of Mars were entirely brainwashed, or hypnotized, it didn’t stop them from acting fast in an emergency.

  He cursed. He was kind of hoping they would be at least a little dopey, which would give them the advantage.

  “Straight across will take you to an airlock.” Kol nodded across the avenue where the embattled Martians raced and ran. “But down there…” He nodded down the length of the avenue to where it met a much larger bulkhead. “Down there is the garage. There’s rovers and transport craft we could use.”

  Solomon growled slightly under his breath. He was the only one who was wearing one of the Martian encounter suits, with its blow-up bubble mask in the collar and a pretty basic air filter. He might be able to survive out there on the Martian atmosphere, but the rest of them wouldn’t.