The result, according to Ratko, was that it would use far less of the ship’s propellant resources but gave them a tremendous amount of momentum. Far more than the scout could utilize in low orbit alone, where it would constantly be fighting the giant gravitational pull of Earth’s brother.
But then, of course, there was the problem of the constantly sucking gravity as well, wasn’t there? Second Lieutenant Wen had heard the corporal’s explanation: that if they kept a low, minimal burn and the nose up, then they would essentially be combating freefall all the time. ‘The same principle that makes satellites stay in geosynchronous orbit,’ she had explained. ‘They’re trying to fall into the planet’s gravity well, but the momentum keeps them falling away.’
Whatever. Jezzy shook her head. She just wanted to know if it would make them go really, really fast.
It did.
“Did it work? Where are they?” Jezzy asked again, looking this way and that out of the portholes of the small craft. In front of her in the pilot’s seat sat Corporal Ratko, with Willoughby in the comms and navigational chair. That left only Corporal Malady still in the main body of the vehicle and strapped into his own X-harness seat.
Just a few minutes before, the bio-sensors had registered a curious and unique identifier.
Cready is alive, Jezzy knew. All Outcasts had a control device implanted at the base of their necks—a tiny series of electrodes and wireless transmitters that Warden Coates had used to give them paralyzing electric shocks if they dared to question his tyrannical rule.
And the bio-sensors had pinged off Solomon’s device, where it had been accelerating at speed across the Elysium Planitia—the Martian terminology for the Elysium Plateau. Jezzy and Ratko had only moments to come up with their plan to rescue Sol, but in order to do it, they had to distract the two Ru’at ships that were heading on an attack vector toward them.
An air burst. Jezzy hoped that it had been powerful enough to distract the Ru’at. They had used two of their remaining Hellfire missiles to fire down into the Martian atmosphere—missiles that were designed for space combat, not atmospheric combat.
We couldn’t use them to target the Ru’at themselves with any efficiency, Jezzy knew. Space-based weapons were terrible when introduced to the gases, vapors, and gravity magnetics of a planet, but they might be able to auto-destruct them close enough to give the Ru’at pause. Which was precisely what they had done.
Jezzy couldn’t see anything out of the portholes but the white and orange burn of near-entry. How long can the hull, already damaged, take this much punishment? she wondered.
“You tell me if it worked or not. Look!” Ratko said through clenched teeth as above them on the main viewing screen was a tactical display map of their sector. The globe of Mars appeared in green isomorphic lines, and Jezzy could see the almost opaque orange cones of their firing arcs keeping pace ahead and to the sides of them.
And there were two angry, red triangle vectors rising from the surface toward them.
Warning! Unknown Vessel on Attack Vector!
The computer bleeped at them, and Willoughby moved quickly to pull up an enlarged image from the sensors. As a scout vessel, it was equipped with some pretty high-end, top-of-the-range sensor equipment, used by the Confederate Marine Corps to provide enemy tactical data.
Which meant that the cameras locked onto the two vessels and held them steady in their camera view, overlaying thermal, radio, magnetic, and bio scans over the same image.
Two Ru’at jump-ships, accelerating fast toward them.
“Ah,” Jezzy said, feeling a shiver of panic or anticipation, she couldn’t be sure which. She could make out the blur of their obsidian rings, growing faster and faster as they accelerated, but they still weren’t traveling as fast as the Marine scout.
“Come on, my pretties, come to Momma…” Ratko crowed at the screen, which Jezzy thought was probably a highly unprofessional Marine Corps observation, but one that she echoed nonetheless.
It was all part of the plan, a plan that Corporal Ratko said could work, and Jezzy had told her had to work.
“They’re falling behind,” Willoughby said from her navigation seat.
“I knew it. The Ru’at ships aren’t adapted to atmospheric travel. They can’t use their FTL drives down there,” Ratko said. “Matching speed and velocity.”
Jezzy’s gauntleted hands tightened on the armrests of her chair. Every part of her instincts screamed: Is that really wise!? Shouldn’t they be accelerating away from the murderous alien ships? These were the very same ships that had taken out the dreadnaught Invincible, after all, right?
“If we match speed, won’t they be able to target us better?” Jezzy said through clenched teeth. The G-force they were experiencing was at the constant, gnawing level of juddering bones.
“Yup,” Ratko said.
“Well, isn’t that a bad thing?” Jezzy went on.
“Yup, but not as bad as if we let them breach atmosphere,” Ratko said. This was starting to look like the corporal’s style in any cockpit, Jezzy realized. She might be the one sitting in the captain’s chair, but really it was Ratko who called the shots.
“As you wish, sir,” Jezzy muttered, only slightly humorously. “Ready guns…”
“Armed and ready, sir,” Willoughby said. “On your order.”
Jezzy didn’t bother waiting. She didn’t want to give the Ru’at any chance to use their ship-puncturing beam weapons. “Fire!”
Willoughby already had the two-handled firing trigger active and pulled close, and she seized the bars to squeeze the triggers. Jezzy felt the slight vibrations as the ship shook from the recoil of the vacuum rifles pumping shell after shell at the approaching Ru’at vessels.
The overhead tactical screens showed the attack vectors matching and meeting the blinking red triangles, but the sensor cameras were much more useful. They showed the scatter of fire and bursts of flames as the multi-shot bullets struck in a barrage. Jezzy didn’t think that they would do any damage, and there were no resulting bursts of black smoke. The Ru’at vessels didn’t even bother to swerve out of the way.
“We’ve thrown the line,” Ratko said. “Now it’s time to reel them in.”
“Are you seriously using fishing metaphors at a time like this?” Jezzy asked, seconds before Willoughby shouted:
“They’re firing!”
The screen ahead of them showed the blurring rings churning faster, and the nosecones of their craft glittered as the light reflected off their opening weapon ports.
“Evasive action!” Jezzy shouted.
“Hard to starboard!” Ratko made a quick succession of movements from her chair, kicking pedals to fire propellant into the scout’s thrusters, as well as heaving on the flight wheel to cause them to spin out from the Martian atmosphere and toward the stars.
Two brilliant lines of blue-white light lifted through the atmosphere in front of them, extending like searchlights. Deadly, baleful searchlights that wouldn’t so much as illuminate their vessel as cut it in two.
“They’re accelerating,” Willoughby called.
“Perfect.” Ratko grinned, raising her gauntleted hands in a thumbs-up gesture to Jezzy in the captain’s chair behind her.
“Malady, ready on the ESR!” Jezzy shouted.
“Affirmative, Lieutenant,” Malady’s somber voice returned.
Jezzy knew that somewhere behind her, there would be the full tactical golem in the engineering compartment, readying the controls of the winch system that ran underneath the hull, where it was attached to the bulbous shape of the emergency survival raft that she had used to escape the Invincible. It had taken Malady and Ratko just a short while to run the tests and perform the necessary modifications to turn it into what they needed it to be:
A bomb.
Bigger than the air blast, Jezzy told herself. Ratko had short-circuited the ESR’s battery packs and energy systems, and then they had packed it with the remaining missiles.
; If it causes a big enough explosion, then we have a chance of defeating them, Jezzy knew. But if it doesn’t…
Then they would be finished. That would be it. The Marine scout, already damaged from its interrupted jump and flying through the wreckage field, was no match for two Ru’at jump-ships, especially once they had achieved escape velocity and managed to get up into their home habitat of the vacuum.
“On your command, sir,” Malady said over the suit-to-suit channel.
“Willoughby?” Jezzy asked the navigation console.
“They’re accelerating from their earlier velocity, but they’ll hit the magnetosphere in T-minus twenty-eight seconds,” the taller Outcast Marine stated.
“And the Martian atmosphere will slow them down?” Jezzy asked. She didn’t want to misjudge this. Not by one nano-second.
“By all estimates, yes. T-minus twenty-one seconds and counting…”
“Do it now!” Ratko was hissing urgently.
“Wait!” Jezzy gripped the armrests.
“Eighteen seconds, sir,” Willoughby whispered. The camera sensors overhead showed the two Ru’at vessels rising like meteors in reverse—their nosecones burning and glowing with the force and heat of escape velocity, casting a long tail plume of smoke and fire.
“Now, Malady!” Jezzy shouted. She heard the corporal’s aye-aye a moment before she felt a judder run through the ship.
Behind her chair, Jezzy couldn’t see the full tactical golem pulling on the levers and hitting the buttons that released the external winch system. These scouts were true expeditionary vehicles, built to survive for weeks in orbit around hostile planets or moons, and with a wide variety of tools and equipment to help them best take advantage of their situations.
One such tool was the external winch—a system of automated magnet locks on chains that could attach to damaged craft, lumps of rock, artifacts, or even cargo that needed to be brought back to where the operational headquarters of the Marine Corps happened to be.
Currently, these magnet locks were clamped onto the octahedral ball of the ESR, and, as Malady’s mechanical commands ran through the vessel, the locks depolarized and the ESR started to drift away, rolling erratically as it was drawn down by the natural magnetic pull of the Red Planet.
“Evasive action! Get us out of here, now!” Jezzy called, knowing that even if their plan worked, they would still need to be a very safe distance away from the blast when it went off.
“With pleasure, sir!” Ratko kicked the pedals and pulled on the flight stick to throw the ship higher above the envelope of atmosphere around the Red Planet. “Full propellant injection!” Jezzy heard her say, and suddenly they were kicked forward as their main engines flared with a much more powerful plasma reaction than before.
Jezzy’s eyes were focused on the camera sensors trained behind them, however, watching as the orb of the ESR twisted and spun, end over end, accruing to itself a reddening haze that quickly started to turn orange, yellow, white…
“What if it breaks up in re-entry!?” Jezzy suddenly gasped. The ESR was already compromised. Heavily compromised. Could it even withstand that much?
“It’s not going to enter the full atmosphere,” Ratko said as they accelerated away from the sight behind them.
“Willoughby, time check!”
“Ru’at entering magnetosphere in three, two—”
“Detonate!” Jezzy called. Willoughby punched in the codes on her navigation console that sent a narrow band of information streaming to the ESR’s tactical sensors.
It was a simple code, one that activated the circuits of Ratko’s many devices inside it, snaking along cables that erupted from underneath consoles and found their way, almost organically, into open floor and wall panels. Mounded by the main pilot’s chair—the very same one that Jezzy herself had shook and shuddered in when she had tried to escape the Invincible—were stacks of the Hellfire missiles, the long tubes of white and yellow, with more of Ratko’s cables daisy-chaining into them.
The message hit the ESR and flashed through the raft’s computers and to the batteries, overloading and bursting them, as Ratko had disabled all circuit breakers, limiters, and safety measures. A massive amount of energy hit the ESR’s engines, causing them to overheat, and for their propellant mixture to boil in a heartbeat.
And explode.
Ratko had called it a chain-effect, which was technical physics speak for something having greater effects than the supposed energy that was put into the system. Which was of course impossible, since energy cannot be created nor destroyed, after all, just transformed from one state to another. But the commonplace reality effect was one of an exponential output of power.
Jezzy knew enough science—and Ratko had tried to explain the rest to her—to know that it was because there was always a huge store of potential energy in any spacecraft, locked up in its batteries or its propellant mixtures. The trick was to get all that power to talk to the mechanical and electrical systems without burning it out—hence the use of limiters and filters and breakers.
What Ratko had done was release all that energy and send it surging into the missiles.
In the ship’s cameras, it looked as though Jezzy was watching some truly ancient bit of film footage, one that had been damaged and improperly edited. In one heartbeat, she was watching the revolving sphere of the ESR as it tumbled, a halo of white plasma accreting around it, and two smaller shapes accelerating fast upwards toward it that had to be the Ru’at ships.
And then the entire screen glitched into white static, and instead she was watching a thin blue sphere rapidly expanding, and at its heart, a steady, glowing white ball as the ESR tore itself apart.
The thin, almost transparent field of blue hit the Ru’at ships first. She saw them wobble before they were engulfed by the expanding white orb.
That was the thing with explosions, Ratko had told her. They all created electromagnetic radiation, even the chemical ones. Most of the time, the smaller ammunition loads would be just powerful enough to make your personal data services glitch for a moment—presuming, of course, that you weren’t inside the thermal heat wave or fireball—but if the explosive power was enough, then they would be powerful enough to disrupt radio waves, magnetic waves, and even entire satellites.
And Ratko, for all of her faults, at least knows what she’s doing… Jezzy thought. She had told them that if they could get a big enough explosion to detonate inside the magnetosphere of the Red Planet—the constant corona of electrons and radioactive particles that the planet kicked out—then it might just, if they were incredibly lucky, create a localized EMP, or electro-magnetic pulse.
Just like the Invincible, Jezzy had agreed. It was the only weapon that they knew would work against the Ru’at jump-ships. Disabling them and perhaps even causing them irreparable damage…
And Ratko had done her very best to make every bit of the ESR into something that would go bang with the greatest possible ferocity. Maybe she had done too well, even—
“We’re too low! The EMP is expanding too fast!” Willoughby was checking her consoles readouts.
“Oh, crap.”
Their own EMP hit them, and the mainframe of the Marine scout gave its last, static-filled notification:
Warning! Systems Overload!
And then all the lights went out. And all the power.
11
Freefall
Jezzy was surprised when the ship did not judder and shake and threaten to break itself apart. It was what her body had instantly suspected would happen, and she had tucked her head down and wrapped her arms over her chest instinctively.
But instead, they were still flying forward—only in complete dark.
“Full power outage!” Willoughby said, her voice high and tense.
Oh frack, Jezzy thought. That means—
Even inside her full Marine power armor, she could feel the temperature drop several degrees in nanoseconds. All the life-support systems were offline. There was
n’t even enough power coming from the backups to power the emergency lights.
Warning! Environmental Hazards Detected…
Jezzy’s armor, insulated from external shocks—and apparently removed enough from the EMP—blipped its alerts at her.
Phew. Just so long as they had power still running in their suits, they could survive. For a bit.
External Temperature Falling:
-2C...
-4C…
-8C…
Initiating Suit Thermal Shield…
External Atmosphere Hazardous:
Oxygen Levels -20%...
Carbon Monoxide Levels +20%...
Activating Reserve Air Tanks…
The automated life-support systems that every spacecraft had to have in place had been taken offline by the blast, along with navigation, communication, sensors, and propulsion.
The heated lubricants that kept the ship habitable by human life stopped flowing, as did the heat coils around the insulated pipes. There was no thermal shield between the internal habitat of the craft and the external hull, bare to the whims of space.
Jezzy’s suit monitors picked up a sound like ripping paper, and when she looked down, she saw that, in the gray of the starlight streaming in from the portholes, everything sparkled white with frost. When she moved her arm, there was a momentary resistance and a crack as her arm broke the frozen layer of condensation threatening to glue her to her chair.
It would be dangerous, possibly lethal, to take off their helmets now, as the oxygen tanks that she and the others had worked so hard to get had stopped cycling. All the noxious gases from their suit exhalations and the engines started collecting in the jump-ship in seconds.
And, on top of all of that, there was no propulsion at all. The propellant injectors had frozen, and the battery servers that told the engines and positional thrusters to fire were comatose.
“Two hours’ suit oxygen, people!” Jezzy called out. “I need solutions, now!”
Outcast Marines Boxed Set Page 109
