Outcast Marines Boxed Set

by James David Victor

  And it would be risky getting three more encounter suits. Solomon’s command training kicked in.

  Identify the risks…

  Identify the capabilities…

  He knew that stealing three Martian encounter suits would probably be less risky than hijacking an entire rover, but once they were out of the shell of the colony, they would have a long walk to the nearest habitat.

  “A rover would get there faster,” he thought, looking down the avenue to the distant bulkhead. But that would mean walking past however many fanatically loyal Martians along the way.

  Which was a risk that they couldn’t avoid, anyway. He nodded to himself, turning quickly to the others. “Rhossily, you’re in front, then Kol, then the ambassador, and then me. I want you all to keep your wrists together and down in front of you, like they are magnetized. Shuffle. Don’t walk. You’re going to be my prisoners from here on out.” Solomon was the only one wearing a Martian encounter suit, and as soon as he pulled the release valve at the collar, his face was kinda obscured by the thick memory-plastic that rolled over his head.

  Solomon lowered the Martian laser pistol in his hands and gestured. “Move it, schlubs,” he said grimly.

  “You don’t have to sound like you’re enjoying it this much…” he heard Kol mutter as Mariad was the first to step out into the avenue and the running bodies of the Ru’at colony.

  Who paid her no apparent mind, as they were panicking to keep the colony’s essential systems online after the EMP.

  “Keep on walking,” Solomon hissed as the Imprimatur of Proxima stumbled, keeping her head low as she avoided all eye contact. The Martian bodies ran past her, brushing her shoulder with their own.

  “Out the way! Out the way!” someone was shouting as a trio of white-suited colonists ran down the avenue, pushing a large trolley with what looked to be stacks of reserve battery-servers.

  “Get back! You heard them!” Solomon wasted no time snarling at them all as they scattered to one side.

  “Ru’at hails you!” someone else was shouting amidst the confusion. A black-haired Martian woman in a white and silver encounter suit was pointing a finger at them from across the corridor.

  Oh frack! Solomon’s finger hovered over the trigger button. He didn’t know enough about the colony culture to determine if this woman held a higher rank than him or not, or even if any of the humans even had ranks.

  “Ru’at hails you?” he hazarded the response.

  A small nod in response from his opposite number. “Where are you taking those prisoners? We don’t have time to concern ourselves with them. The power surge overloaded main servers two, three, and four!” she said imperiously.

  Solomon might not know anything about this woman, but he recognized the air of assumed importance. It was the same sort of small-minded self-importance that Warden Coates had exhibited all the time.

  “These are high-level prisoners, ma’am,” Solomon said with a deferential bob of his head. “The Ru’at commands they be kept safe.”

  At the mention of their shared alien masters, the woman blinked a little, and then nodded. “As the Ru’at wills,” she said, and Solomon echoed her closing remark.

  “Okay, that was too close,” Solomon hissed to his charges, and then in a louder, more confident voice, “Pick up the pace, NOW!”

  It seemed that even fewer Martians paid attention to them when Solomon was treating his prisoners like dirt, so Solomon wasted no time in barking and cajoling them with threats as they walked stridently down the avenue.

  The larger bulkhead joined a crossroads of corridors with yet more people and trolleys running back and forth. Someone had managed to return power to at least this section of the colony. The lights here were bright and white, but they still flickered a little, if Solomon looked.

  “Left.” Kol stumbled into Mariad in front of him, and she led their group across the busy intersection to a wide, fat corridor with a door on either side.

  “Right door,” Kol hissed again as they stepped toward it to see that it was wide enough for two people to comfortably walk in. Through the door plate, Solomon could make out a collection of both large and small Martian rovers on their long spindle-axles and six ‘bubble’ wheels designed for navigating the many rocks and craters of the Red Planet’s hostile terrain.

  Except the door was locked.

  “Dammit!” Solomon whispered in alarm. There was a keypad beside the door, but that wouldn’t work now that the power was down, would it?

  The power is down. Of course. Solomon raised his pistol and fired point-blank into the keypad. There was a loud boom and a shower of sparks as the keypad burst open, spilling its wires like guts, and the door opened a few inches.

  “Solomon!” Rhossily hissed. His extreme actions had brought shocked expressions from the nearby Martians, but it appeared that no one stepped out of their way to reprimand him.

  “These are extreme times,” Solomon grunted, nodding at Kol and Mariad. “Right! Hold that door open—now!” His insistent bark of disdain at his ‘prisoners’ earned him the nonchalance of the Martians around him, as Kol and Mariad rushed to heave at the door and force it to creak back into the walls.

  Clank-clank-clank.

  A new sound met Solomon’s ears. It was different from the thuds and patters of the Martians’ boots. This was the uniform, regimented slaps of metal feet on metal floors. Solomon knew precisely what it was as he turned to look back the way they had come.

  There, over the jostling heads and shoulders of the frantic Martians, was a small contingent of Ru’at-human cyborgs. It seemed that they were still functional, Solomon thought dismally. And in their midst, right in the middle of their murderous company, marched the clone of Augustus Tavin.

  They were still tens of meters away, but the two clones locked eyes over the seething mass of panicked people.

  “Move it, now!” Solomon said, raising his pistol.

  “STOP THEM!” Tavin’s fine features twisted in rage as he bellowed down the corridor, raising not a gun but a finger to point at Solomon and the others.

  FZT! Solomon fired. He had been a fairly decent shot even before his Outcast training on Ganymede, and now he had both military expertise and an enhanced genetic code.

  Solomon’s rear leg swept back as he turned his shoulder, holding the pistol in both hands as he sighted down the ridiculously small barrel and fired.

  The shot burned past the racing Martians, exploiting a fraction of a gap between them.

  But Augustus Tavin was also one of the Ru’at clones. He also had an enhanced genetic structure. In split-second timing, Solomon saw the man starting to duck, and the shot that should have burned a hole right between his eyes instead only glanced along his temple and ear.

  “Ach!” With a gasp of pain and a spurt of blood, Tavin was thrown sideways to the floor. Solomon had no idea whether he had killed him, and if he had any thought that the cyborgs would stop operating without Tavin or would pause to tend to their group leader, then he had been wrong.

  The cyborgs were already raising their own particle-beam weapon-hands, and, unlike Solomon, they fired indiscriminately at anything between them and their target.

  Martians screamed and hit the deck, either that or were thrown into the air, their fragile bodies blown apart by the cyborg’s weapons.

  “Don’t hang around, boss!” Kol shouted, grabbing the lieutenant by the front of his encounter suit and dragging him into the garage as blue-white bolts of fire shot past Solomon’s shoulder.

  “Why on earth did you fire on him! You idiot!” Rhossily was shouting as soon as the two men stumbled into the room.

  The garage for the Ru’at colony was, for all intents and purposes, a hangar, Solomon saw, but one whose main body was given over to terrestrial vehicles. They stumbled down a set of metal stairs to where the different sizes of Martian rovers—tall, boxy cab-units suspended over six wheels with independent axle control—were kept. Solomon noted that all of them had th
e sword and red orb that was the insignia of the Red Planet, indicating that they must have been stolen from whatever Martian Habitat they had come from.

  The entire far wall was a large airlock-gate, and it was here that Kol had already sprinted to, trying to get the door working.

  “There’s no power, remember?” Solomon yelled. “We’ll have to blast our way out…” His words faltered as his gaze took in the far side of the room, where the wall was made of one entirely clear viewing plate.

  And on the other side were rows and rows of Ru’at ships, and each one was lying on its side.

  Huh?

  “I can get the hydraulics to release, but the outer airlock won’t automatically depressurize. Once we’re in and close this door behind us…” Kol was saying. He had managed to get one of the wall units to open, exposing pipes and pistons and large, red-handled levers. He pulled this down with a heavy thunk, and the large airlock-gate started to rise on its mechanical, rather than electronic, pistons.

  FZZT! FZT! Solomon flinched as lines of cyborg fire hit the door, and the sounds of shrieking outside intensified. The lieutenant was already moving toward the nearest rover—can’t be picky in times of alien invasion—but his mind was still pulling at what he had seen in the Ru’at hangar next door.

  The ships were lying on their side like discarded coffee cups, Solomon thought as he jumped the short ladder to the cab above. Why? It didn’t make sense to dock them like that, so there must have been another explanation. They had looked as if they had fallen, or were lifeless—

  Just like the Ru’at drone in my pocket, he thought as his hands closed around the metal orb there.

  The door to the cab, thankfully, operated similarly to the mechanical hydraulics and pistons of the airlock-gate. Solomon knew from his time on Ganymede—which was a mere scattering of mechanical and engineering training compared to Kol, who had once been their technical specialist—that most vehicles on hostile-environment planets had both electrical and mechanical fail-safes. Which meant that their essential doors and ports could be operated by cranking handles and levers. Within heartbeats, he had the door open and was helping Ochrie and Mariad inside before joining them in the cramped space.

  The Martian rover was designed just as a transport and courier vehicle, although Solomon rather thought that they must be like the Ford pickups of old Earth—able to be modified and retrofitted to almost any use. Solomon found himself sitting in one of two high piloting chairs, until the imprimatur gave a loud snort of disgust from behind him.

  “Do you even know how to drive one of these things?” Rhossily asked.

  “Do you?” Solomon retorted. Up ahead, the door had finally raised enough for them to drive in, and Kol was already racing to the inside of the airlock to prepare to close it behind them. No one wanted a massive blowout that would send them flying over the Martian landscape…

  “Actually, yes! Now move over, Lieutenant.” Mariad was already rising from the bench of seats at the back she had shared with the ambassador to clamber into the driver’s seat. Solomon climbed into the back to lean out of the cab and point his gun back at the garage door.

  With a heavy bounce and a jostle that almost set Solomon on his backside, Mariad Rhossily had the rover moving forward, its large wheels managing to screech as she threw it into a tight turn and into the airlock.

  FZZT! A cyborg appeared at the door to the garage, its weapon-arm already raised.

  But Solomon fired first. He had been anticipating this and despite the bouncing rover, he managed to score a hit. He had been aiming for the head and neck, but the crazy suspension of the rover jostled his arm, and instead the line of blue fire slammed into the thing’s midriff.

  CRUNCH! It flung against the opposite wall, its chest now a smoking ruin.

  “Holy frack!” Solomon looked at the little pistol. Was that the answer to the unstoppable cyborgs? Use their own weaponry against them?

  BANG! The rover shuddered and skidded to one side, even as it crossed into the airlock, when one of its six tires blew. What? It was another cyborg at the garage door, already tracking its weapon toward them.

  FZT! FZT! Solomon fired the Ru’at pistol, feathering the firing button so that it produced multiple shots like darts of glowing white plasma rather than one continuous line of light.

  Most of the laser shots hit the doorjamb and the wall, leaving scorch marks and bubbling metal, but at least two hit the thing’s legs, sending it crashing to the ground.

  “Kol, get in!” Solomon shouted.

  “Someone needs to operate the manual de-pressure procedure!” Kol shouted back. Already the airlock gate behind the rover was sliding down under Kol’s direction. As the heavy metal eclipsed his view, Sol saw another shape emerge in the garage door. It was the stumbling, half-crouched form of none other than Augustus Tavin, one hand held to the side of his face as he screamed.

  “There they are! They’re getting away!”

  Solomon took aim…just as the airlock-gate slid to a halt in front of them.

  “Dammit!” Solomon cursed. He didn’t know whether it would have made any difference in killing Tavin, as he was a clone and surely the Ru’at would just build another one, but the ex-thief knew that he would have felt mighty good about doing it. “Kol! Get your behind in here, now!” he shouted.

  “De-pressure, sir!” Kol reminded him.

  “Fool,” Solomon hissed as he swung himself out from the cab and jumped to the airlock floor to run to where Kol was. “I’m the one wearing the encounter suit. You get in there now!” he ordered, and was surprised when Kol obeyed him.

  “These levers and that wheel, sir!” Kol pointed to the exposed mechanical controls as he ran for the rover. Solomon quickly got to work, slamming the wide-handled levers down to hear the ground and walls shudder as exit valves were opened and the air started to flood out of the airlock.

  Next came the wheel, a blue-gray industrial shape that looked as though no one had touched it for years. Usually, Solomon knew that airlocks were run on an automated basis—they detected the suit signals entering or leaving, and then they proceeded to perform whatever task was necessary, pumping the atmosphere out of the space or in. But, as with the Martian rover and other terrestrial vehicles in hostile environment worlds, airlocks usually had a manual option. By turning the wheel, he would crank open the filters and valves between the inside of this room and the Martian climate outside.

  “Rargh!” Solomon heaved at the wheel, and it started to slowly move a centimeter, and then a little more. What the man didn’t know was only his enhanced genetics had allowed him to even get this far. His Ru’at DNA activated and sent adrenaline through his system, as well as a much more efficient synthesis of nutrients and proteins.

  Thud-thud-thud. The inner door started to shake with muffled explosions, and Solomon guessed it had to be the cyborgs on the far side trying to get at them. Even as he watched, he saw several small patches of the inner airlock gate start to lighten in color, turning from dark blue-gray to a lighter blue, then silver, and then warm to a super-heated red.

  “They’re burning through!” Solomon shouted, forgetting that he didn’t have the others on his more familiar Gold Channel. He hoped that they could hear him anyway as he threw himself at the wheel and pulled. He could feel all the muscles in his back tightening and stretching, before suddenly the airlock filled with steam and condensation as Solomon broke the seal and the outer airlock door started to rise.

  Got it! The lieutenant couldn’t see how close the cyborgs were to burning their way through the airlock, but they would be in for a surprise when they did, as they would effectively perforate the Ru’at colony! Solomon ran for the cab as the rear engines roared and the cab bounced, starting to roll forward.

  “Get in, get in!” he heard the dim, muffled shout of Kol, leaning out of the cab and holding out a hand as Solomon vaulted up, to be grabbed by the traitor to the Outcast marines and dragged inside, the cab door slamming and auto-locking
behind them.

  “Buckle up if you can, ladies and gentlemen. This isn’t going to be scenic,” the Imprimatur of Proxima growled as she kicked down on the foot pedals and the Mars rover surged forward, scraping the roof of its cab across the bottom of the rising door as it bounced into the burnt landscape of the Red Planet outside.

  We did it. We escaped. We survived. Solomon braced himself against the door and one of the pilot’s chairs as Kol took his seat beside Mariad up front. He had once been a technical specialist, so Solomon didn’t begrudge having all the expertise up front.

  But how far can we run? Solomon’s command-strategy mind was already calculating. And how long can we survive?

  7

  Master Command Function

  “Where am I heading?” Mariad shouted over the chug and whine of the rover.

  These things are about as comfortable as if we had chosen a catapult for a mode of transport, Solomon groaned inwardly. No, in fact, a catapult would have been more comfortable. He had no comprehension how Kol could look so calm in his seat, gazing out of the viewing windows in front and to the side as he jostled and jumped, narrowly missing banging his head on the metal ceiling.

  Bleeding Martians, First Lieutenant Cready was inclined to say, but he didn’t. He rather thought that they would all need some of that Martian grit before they were free.

  “Wait up, wait up, let me see…” Kol was looking out the windows. “We came down in the northern hemisphere, just past Syrtis Planitia…”

  Meanwhile, Solomon craned his neck to look through the viewing porthole. Outside, the landscape of Mars wasn’t red, but it was hellish. It was a mixture of ochre oranges, yellows, and browns with black rocks scattered everywhere.

  And craters… Solomon was suddenly thrown into the air as Mariad forced the rover across the edge of a not very large one, but with only five of its six ‘legged’ wheels available, it bounced.

  “Ach!” Solomon hit the floor heavily, smacking his knees.