“Sorry! No time for safe driving!” Rhossily called out from the front, earning another disgruntled growl from the lieutenant behind. The imprimatur had to turn the vehicle to avoid the next crater, and as she did, the sight of the Ru’at colony came into view.
It was a gleaming silver edifice that rose higher and higher to a silver-steel spike right in its heart. It spread out across the Martian surface like some sort of sea creature, with long, shining steel arms punctured by the dark shapes of airlocks.
It may have looked beautiful, but for Solomon, it made him sick. But he had no time for such worries as his mind churned over what he had seen. The fallen Ru’at jump-ships. Like they were discarded, useless, broken.
Solomon drew out the Ru’at orb from his pocket, finding it just as lifeless as the ships.
“It lost power when the EMP struck,” Solomon muttered. “But this thing wasn’t plugged into any power source…” He had thought that they must run on their own internal power source—and maybe they did—but somehow, the wave of electrons fired from the EMP—and whoever fired it, he thought—had caused it to lose all function.
I wonder… Solomon frowned deeply. “Kol? You’re the technical expert. When you cut off the signal to a wireless-controlled drone, it goes dead, right?” he asked.
“What? Yes, of course. What sort of question is that?” Kol said as he pointed out features to Rhossily in order to try and get a better bearing.
“But what if the wireless drone had an internal power unit?” Solomon asked.
“Then it would work, wouldn’t it?” the treacherous Outcast Marine snapped. “Unless, of course, the wireless signal has a master command function.”
“Who-what-now?”
“Master command. Superior override. The wireless channel is given the priority over every other executive function, meaning that the drone has to get the operational green light from the wireless signal before it activates its internal batteries,” Kol said condescendingly, as if this was a thing that even children should know.
Maybe it is, Solomon thought. He knew how to hotwire a spaceship and break electronic locks, and that was about the extent of his engineering proficiency. But what Kol had said had proved his theory, all the same.
“That EMP knocked out the Ru’at,” he said aloud.
“You don’t say.” Kol wasn’t impressed.
“No! You don’t understand,” Solomon said excitedly. “It’s not just that the EMP disrupted their communications or whatever, it’s…”
‘When the Ru’at first began their salvation of the galaxy, they soon encountered a problem: that of distance.’ Wasn’t that what the hologram-not-hologram human had said? Solomon connected the dots.
“—it’s the fact that the Ru’at aren’t even here!” he exclaimed.
“What?” Mariad shook her head.
“Uh, boss, have you seen everything that we’ve seen these last few days?” Kol didn’t sound convinced.
Solomon almost tripped over his words, he was so excited. “When I was being operated on, they lectured me, telling me that the Ru’at send these little seed-drone things—” he shook the silent orb in his hand, “—out across space, transmitting their Message, and hoping that some intelligent civilization like the Confederacy was dumb enough to take the bait!”
It all made so much sense to Cready now, as he explained it to the others.
“The Ru’at aren’t here. They get the to-be-conquered civilization to do all the legwork for them, to change their societies and cultures and develop cyborg technology and goodness knows what else, so that the actual Ru’at themselves don’t even have to arrive!”
“You’re forgetting, Lieutenant,” the Imprimatur of Proxima said, “that the Ru’at mothership firebombed my planet!”
“Yes, they did, but I don’t think there was even any living and breathing Ru’at on board.” Solomon remembered what the ship in question had looked like—its complicated arrays of mechanical parts, juddering and turning and moving ceaselessly. It had been grotesque in a way, making the lieutenant think that this was what it must be like if you stripped all the skin from a creature and could still see its organs moving.
“And it apparently had no hull, no life support, no need for internal atmospheres or graviton-production… No biological life!” Solomon said.
“And…what’s your point, Lieutenant?” Rhossily asked. The Outcast could tell from her tone that she didn’t care if there were actual little green men inside those ships pressing the firing buttons, or a computer program. The result was still the same: death and mayhem.
“It means that what we’re facing is a robot fleet, a drone fleet, and that they must have some kind of wireless master function or whatever that thing was that Kol said, something that knits all of the ships and the orbs together, and something an EMP can disrupt!”
“So?” Mariad snapped as she turned the wheel angrily.
“Ha!” But Kol got the idea perfectly. “That means all we need to do is to find the central transmitter, the one that sends the original message, and knock it out, and all the Ru’at get shut down.” He howled in glee. “Oorah, sir!” Kol congratulated his old officer.
“Exactly!” Solomon joined in. “And you know what? I bet that master transmitter is on the mothership.”
“But wait! What you are saying is impossible. It takes our wireless signals hours, days, weeks to travel from one end of the system to another,” the imprimatur countered. “Are you telling me that the Ru’at—wherever they really are—are so far advanced that they can defy the laws of spacetime and make a wireless signal travel instantaneously across space? Across distances that we can’t even imagine?”
It was Kol who answered her. “They’ve got FTL, which is just about as near to magic as anyone can figure. Who knows what a civilization as old as theirs can do?” he mused. “But even back on good old Earth, the science academies are starting to ask whether they could use subspace to encrypt and encode messages.”
“Subspace?” Solomon didn’t know what that was.
“Oh, it just means a few iterations up from quanta,” Kol said, still baffling First Lieutenant Cready. “Electrons come in pairs and can transfer data between themselves no matter the distance, right? Well, subspace communication is the idea that because everything was once compressed to a point before the Big Bang, then everything is kinda connected to everything else. You just gotta find the right atomic particles, although electrons are still the best candidate.”
Solomon kinda got it. “You could transmit information across the galaxy using this ‘interconnected particles’ thing?”
“You got it, chief,” Kol laughed. “Although it took you a long while to get there.”
They were in the middle of this warm glow of success, of finally having a battle plan that might actually work, so Solomon almost didn’t feel the orb in his hand start to wobble.
“Hey, I’m sure that’s Elysium Mons, and that must be Hecates Tharsis!” Kol said, pointing to a rising mountain on the horizon, and a smaller mound next to it. “There’s a habitat out there, one with a space port. We can steal a shuttle and get the good news out there—”
The Ru’at orb once again shook in Solomon’s hand, but amidst all of the bouncing, shaking, and jostling that the Martian rover itself was doing, Solomon thought no more of it.
That was until, of course, light flooded the interior of the cab as the orb started to rise from Solomon’s outstretched hand.
8
Runaway Rover
The brilliant blue-white light filled the tiny cab as it hovered in the open air.
“What the crap is that?” Rhossily shouted, risking a look over her shoulder at the alien intruder in the vehicle. “Get that thing out of here now!”
“You brought one with you?” Kol shouted, obviously distressed. “What on earth possessed you?”
Well, we’re not on Earth, for starters… The thought flashed through Solomon’s mind. It must be the Ru’at Ser
um 21 that they had given him in the colony, sharpening his wits and giving him an insane level of self-belief.
“It’s the subspace network! They’ve got it up and running again!” Solomon shouted as he darted his arm forward—an arm that could now move as fast as a striking viper, muscles and tendons locking into perfect synchronicity a moment before.
FZZTHAP! The Outcast Marine had intended to strike the thing with an open palm, to grab it out of the air or at least bat it against the metal walls.
“Argh!” But instead, all that Solomon got was an almighty shock that pounded him back against the wall of the rover’s cab. There was a line of blue-white light spilling from the circumference of the Ru’at orb, and, if anything, Solomon was certain that it was getting brighter.
Like it was powering up for something.
Do these things have weapons?? What will it do when—
FZTHWAP! Another flash of light spread through the orb, and this time the entire rover was kicked to one side, coming off two of its side wheel-legs before slamming down again, sending up great gouts of Martian dust.
“Get that thing out before it kills us all!” Mariad shouted from the driver’s seat as Kol was already leaning over the back of his chair, armed with the unlikely low-tech addition of a long tire iron.
FZAP! The orb pulsed once more, and it somehow directed the pulse of invisible power at the new threat. Kol was thrown against the side door with a pained grunt.
But he had dropped the tire iron, and Solomon still had the Ru’at pistol in his belt. His hand moved to the handle just as the orb darted forward to hover a foot or so away from his face. It was clear that in silent Ru’at orb speak, it was saying the equivalent of I wouldn’t even dream of it…
Solomon froze, his chest rising and falling as he panted in tense concentration. “Alright, what do you want? How do I make you go away?” Solomon snarled.
From somewhere in the driver’s section, there was a dull bing of electronics, and Mariad started swearing profusely. Across from her chair, the insensate form of Kol was crumpled in the footwell. Solomon hoped that the thing broken his neck.
“It looks like that little darling nugget of evil has been calling its friends,” the imprimatur broke from her torrent of verbal abuse to share with the others. “We’ve got two of the Ru’at jump-ships appearing on the horizon.”
The orb bobbed and shook occasionally as it floated in front of Solonom. “It’s injured,” the man said. “I don’t think it’s at full operational capacity yet…”
“It doesn’t seem that ill to me!” Mariad was incensed as she threw the rover into another swerve, this time throwing them down the side of a steep crater. The human members inside the cab were all thrown forward, but the Ru’at orb just continued to bob and weave a little unsteadily.
“The ships are gaining fast,” Solomon could hear Rhossily say through clenched teeth. “But they’re not running their FTLs.”
“They probably can’t inside atmosphere,” Solomon murmured, keeping his eyes on the floating thing in the wagon. Now that it had managed to call its bigger, much more dangerous brothers in the form of the Ru’at jump-ships, it seemed that it was content to not zap anyone any more.
It probably spends too much power doing that, Solomon thought. And, he realized, it was a drone, wasn’t it? It ran on machine logic. Why should it expend energy when it could just get two much faster, larger, and better equipped jump-ships to do its dirty work for it?
If I can get it to run low on power, I might be able to disable it, Solomon thought, seeing the tire iron just a few inches from his outstretched hand. Of course, that would still leave the problem of two very large and angry alien spaceships coming for them, but Solomon had always been a one-problem-at-a-time sort of person. It was all he knew how to be.
It’s going to shock me. It might even break some bones, but I need to get it to use up a lot of its internal power… Solomon started to take a deep breath.
Just as Ambassador Ochrie’s outstretched hand folded around the orb.
“Huh,” she said nonchalantly. “Did you want this, Lieutenant?” she said in her low, slightly drowsy voice.
She was brainwashed by the Ru’at, Solomon realized.
“What is she doing? What is she doing with that thing?!” Rhossily was once again shouting as she threw the rover into a tight turn around the canyon wall that connected this crater with the next.
“Maybe that means it doesn’t see her as a threat,” Solomon murmured. The blue-white light was still spilling from between the ambassador’s hands, but it seemed to have dimmed somewhat from its fiercer glow a heartbeat before.
“Well, I certainly see it as a threat!” Mariad—rather unhelpfully, in Solomon’s view—clarified.
“Ambassador?” Solomon closed his hand around the tire iron and started to edge his way forward. “I want you to do something for me.”
“Of course, Lieutenant.” Her voice was slightly slurred, but there was still a spark of that same, cantankerous woman in there somewhere. Solomon wondered briefly at the fact that the Chosen of Mars back at the Ru’at colony hadn’t appeared to have it as bad as she did. Maybe, given the fact that Ochrie was the Ambassador of Earth, the Ru’at had decided to imprint their message of servility deeper into her consciousness.
“When I say now, I want you to throw the orb into the air. Not hard, and not fast, just as if you were tossing an apple.” Solomon slid to a crouch, readying the tire iron over his right shoulder. “Can you do that for me, Ambassador?”
“I should think so, but…why?”
“Now!” Solomon didn’t want to give the befuddled woman a moment for her conditioning to kick in. He assumed that it was only his authoritarian bark of command that made the brainwashed ambassador do as he ordered.
Ochrie opened and bobbed her hand upwards, releasing the Ru’at orb.
Solomon swung—
Inside his clone body, his Ru’at genetics read his high cortisol levels and fierce concentration. They activated, chemicals and tailor-made enzymes surging through his body. Solomon could feel every muscle across his back unlock and stretch, producing a rippling line of force that surged through his shoulder and down his arms.
The Ru’at chemicals made it seem to Solomon as if time itself was slowing down, but they weren’t that magical. It was the cocktail of enhanced neurochemicals that made him aware of his unfolding arm in the very moment that the orb rose into the air and started to turn on its axis toward him.
But he was too quick. His wrist and hand were already pivoting with all the momentum of his arm and shoulders and back, and, at just below full stretch, the tire iron made a humming noise as it sliced through the air.
FZZZ! The orb had time to suddenly grow brighter, a moment before the iron connected with its metal skin.
Solomon roared in rage and effort—and pain. The thing’s final parting shot electrified his metal weapon as it connected, and—
THWAP! Both the Ru’at orb and the lieutenant were thrown backwards, with the orb smacking millimeters above the driver’s window before bouncing on the dashboard and into the footwell.
Rhossily screamed, but it sounded more like from shock to Solomon’s ringing ears as he fell against the cab door, his body twitching and shivering.
“Lieutenant?” Ochrie was saying with apparent worry as she moved—not altogether quickly—to his side.
“Is it dead? Is it dead!?” Mariad shouted in the confined space as Solomon groaned and pushed himself up from the floor. He scrabbled forward, hand burning and arm tingling, to see that yes, the orb was lying in the footwell of the rover, and its blue-white light was snuffed. It was broken open along the middle circumference line, displaying the strange silver and crystal lattice of wires that Solomon had seen before.
Still, even given the fact that it just looked like some sort of technological bauble that Kol or Ratko might have dreamed up, Solomon was loath to touch the thing. But he knew that he had to, so he seized it
and stuffed it into his pocket.
“Urgh…” Solomon slumped back. He never wanted to have to do that again, but he also didn’t want to throw the orb away. It was a piece of Ru’at technology. It wasn’t something that had been hybridized or hacked by human corporate engineers like the cyborgs were—at least, as far as Solomon was aware. That meant that it might yet have useful information inside it on how to best combat the Ru’at menace.
“Hold on!” Mariad shouted, a moment before the entire rover shook and jumped. The door windows lit up with blue-white light, and Solomon heard the thunder of rocky debris hitting their roof.
“The Ru’at ships are firing on us,” Mariad said, kicking out with one foot against a lever at the same time as she leaned down hard on the steering wheel.
In response, the rover swerved just as there was another flash on their other side.
“They’re less maneuverable in atmosphere!” Solomon called, pushing himself up to crane his head along the side of the window. His Ru’at pistol was in his hand, but he doubted that even the Ru’at weapon would do anything against a much larger ship.
Mariad threw them halfway up one of the crater walls only to spin them down again, sending up a great spray of red dust and gravel high into the air. The fast turn and downward charge gave them speed, but both Solomon and the woman in the driver’s seat knew they couldn’t keep this up for long. The Ru’at would get a lucky shot eventually. Either that or the imprimatur would start to tire.
FZZT! There was an almighty blast from up ahead as the jump-ships did not fire directly at them, but at the crater walls ahead of them, where erosion had caused a large outcrop of rock.
“Frack!” the imprimatur swore once again, throwing the rover into a spin as tons of rock and dust smashed into the ground ahead of them.
The rover lifted on the side where it only had two wheel-legs, and all the occupants were thrown around inside the cab as it came perilously close to tipping over. Solomon had dreadful images of them hitting the red dirt with their legs in the air, as helpless as a bug.
Outcast Marines Boxed Set Page 107
