Outcast Marines Boxed Set

by James David Victor

  “We might be able to re-fire the engines manually,” Ratko said, already hitting the manual release from her harness. “I can do it.”

  “Stay where you are, pilot!” Jezzy ordered, surprised at her vehemence.

  “Why? None of the rockets or fans are going to work,” Ratko started to argue.

  “Corporal Malady is already in engineering. Get a private channel open to him and walk him through the procedure,” Jezzy said.

  “We could jump-start the battery servers,” Willoughby called out. “That would bring everything back online.”

  “Jump-start? With what?” Jezzy said. “You need power to spark power, after all.”

  “Batteries are closed-loop systems. They generate chemo- or pyzo- or radio- energy, send it around the system and they are recharged at the same time. There’ll be nothing intrinsically wrong with the mainframe, if we can just get some juice into it…”

  “And we already have juice. Willoughby, you genius!” Ratko said out loud.

  “Anyone care to fill me in?” Jezzy was saying, when she finally felt the shudder she had been waiting for. There was a terrible, bone-deep groan from the scout, and she could feel the pit of her stomach lurch, like descending too fast down a Space Elevator.

  “Oh no…” Ratko breathed.

  “What was that!?” Jezzy said, unable to keep the strain from her voice as she once again broke the ice under her arms and legs.

  -12C…

  “Without the main thrusters, we’ve finally lost our forward momentum. We’re entering freefall. The gravity well of the planet is just too strong,” Ratko said.

  And an uncontrolled, unassisted re-entry would break them apart just as surely as the Ru’at beam weapons could have done, Jezzy knew.

  “The juice! The jump-start! Where is it coming from?” Jezzy hissed quickly.

  “We’ve got the power, ma’am, in our suits!” Ratko was saying. “We could fire that into the battery initiators, try to get them to take a charge.”

  “I’m going.” Jezzy had already pulled the manual release from her X-harness and was rising into the air as the ship lost all gravity. Around her, the small, inconsequential items that always cluttered a ship—wrenches, data-pads, spare encounter suits—were also starting to do the same.

  “Lieutenant, we don’t know how much power it’ll need,” Ratko complained, twisting in her harness to try and see her commanding officer. “It could completely drain your suit!”

  “It’s my boat, and my job, Marine,” Jezzy said grimly, pushing her way down the central avenue of the scout, past the main hold as the ship around them started to tumble toward the Red Planet.

  “I’ll talk you through it, sir,” Willoughby said, sounding worried.

  Not as worried as Jezzy was, however. If she didn’t manage to get the battery injectors, or initiators, or whatever it had been that the corporal had called them, to work, then they would all be dead. All her struggling and fighting and striving would be for nothing.

  And General Asquew placed her trust in me, Jezzy thought about that tiny data-stick still safely locked inside Malady’s carry-port. What will happen to the Marine Corps after that?

  “Don’t think about it.” She shook her head as she grabbed the wall units to haul herself down the torturous gap between large, silent machines. Dials and screens were dark. Levers and needles remained stubbornly still.

  “There.” She saw the glow of Malady’s suit lights illuminating the hatch at the base of the largest of the units ahead of her. It was screwed shut, of course.

  “Frack it!” Jezzy cursed. “Anyone got a screwdriver?”

  “Here.” Malady did, of course. A small port whirred open on what would have been his utility belt, and he pulled a miniature titanium steel screwdriver from it and spun it end over end between the stilled machines for Jezzy to catch and start undoing the screws.

  “Who uses screws in the twenty-second century?” Jezzy muttered to herself as she worked.

  “Screws are a very underrated engineering tool,” Malady intoned.

  Wow, thanks for the clarification while we’re about to burn up in freefall, Jezzy thought irritably. With a smooth jolt, the hatch came off the unit, revealing a mess of cabling inside, nestled between small black modular units.

  “Okay. I have no idea what it is I’m looking at,” Jezzy admitted.

  “You should see a chain of battery initiators, right there in front of you!” Ratko called out as the ship juddered again. The lieutenant’s suit monitors picked up the low groan of complaining metal, sighing through the ship as the forces of gravity started to drag her down faster and harder.

  “What do they look like?” Jezzy called out.

  “I don’t know! Like battery initiators!” Ratko sounded terse and stressed.

  “Little black boxes?”

  “That’s it! You’ll see contact plugs at one end. Yellow and green,” Ratko replied.

  Jezzy moved closer, and the underlit environmental lights of her suit’s cowl showed her tiny strips of metal with small plastic edgings—yellow and green. “Got them.”

  “Right, so, now you need to find the reserve output supply on your suit. It’s…” Ratko was saying.

  “I know where it is,” Jezzy countered, remembering that she had kind of done this sort of thing before. Kind of.

  She had been trapped aboard the Oregon, a CMC battleship that had valiantly tried to stem the tide of cyborgs but had ultimately failed. There had been massive decompressions throughout the ship, just like what must have happened to the Invincible, and Jezzy had been trapped inside a bubble of corridor with collapsed hulls at either end. Her suit had been put out of action and she’d had to jump-start it by using what little reserve power was left inside the Oregon and jolting it through her suit, via the output port.

  The port flipped open with the merest touch, revealing a small, metal-lined tube no deeper than the tip of Jezzy’s little finger.

  “I need wires,” Jezzy said.

  “Here,” Malady announced, already throwing a heavy coil of thick red and black cables down the weightless avenue toward her.

  “Red and black? Why can’t they be green and yellow, just like the contacts? Is standardization really so difficult to achieve?” Jezzy muttered.

  “Red and green are live. Black and yellow are anything else,” Ratko said so fast that Jezzy wondered if she had anticipated her commander’s confusion.

  “Anything else doesn’t sound like a very technical explanation,” Jezzy mumbled as she unspooled the cables and realized that she only had one port on her suit. “Er…”

  “Just go with red and green! Red and green!” Corporal Ratko had once again anticipated her dilemma.

  There was another, much deeper roar of strained metal and a deep, rhythmic thumping from the ship—this time on the other side of the vessel.

  “We’ve passed the magnetosphere. Much longer and we’ll hit terminal velocity. We won’t have the thrust power to fight the gravity of Mars!” Willoughby shouted.

  Red and green it is, then. Jezzy jammed one end of the cable into her port, and the other she reached down to gently press onto the green-edged connector.

  Snap. Luckily, Jezzy was inside her power suit, so she was fully insulated from the effects of the powerful shock that she had transmitted to the ship. But even from within here, she heard an audible pop and felt the power kick through the cable like it was a hose that had been opened to full, all at once.

  But that wasn’t all. A spray of fine static electricity played across her hands, the cable, and the ship’s exposed innards. They looked like tiny tendrils and tentacles of lightning that made her see stars and a messy after-image as she blinked back tears.

  “Did it work?” she said, hoping that her suit was still operational.

  It wasn’t. Or not very much, anyway.

  POWER ARMOR… COMPROMISED

  USER ID: 2LT Wen, Ac. Sq. Comm. (Cmbt. Sp.)

  COMPANY: Outcasts, Rapid Re
sponse Fleet.

  SQUAD IDENTIFIER: Gold.

  SQUAD TELEMETRIES: COMPROMISED

  Bio-Signatures: COMPROMISED

  Atmospheric Seals: COMPROMISED

  Chemical, Biological, Radiological Sensors: COMPROMISED

  Oxygen Tanks: COMPROMISED

  Oxygen Recycle System: COMPROMISED

  “Frack! Frack! Frack!” Jezzy swore, pulling back and breaking the connection. Had she lost all power to her suit? How come she could still breathe? For a moment, she fought the urge to scrabble at her helmet as she felt the blind panic of being trapped inside a dead, lifeless shell.

  No. Breathe. Think. Jezzy centered her mind the way her Yakuza trainers had once told her to do. She knew what it felt like to have a suit that was completely dead. And that was mostly heavy, blindingly heavy…

  Which was obviously not the case here, so that meant that what must have happened was the transfer of power must have either drained her suit rapidly, or short-circuited something to do with her internal hologram display.

  “But without my internal holo-display, I’ll have no idea just how much power I’m giving to the ship,” Jezzy thought.

  The ship started to shake and judder around them. That was its metal hide hitting the sea of heavier molecules of high mesosphere, she knew. They were almost at the point of no return.

  “And the ship clearly isn’t firing its thrusters or using any internal lights, so…” Jezzy thought. Not enough juice. Nowhere near enough juice.

  She put the red cable once more to the green connector, but this time on one of the adjacent battery initiators that sat nestled between the wires.

  Snap! The same pop, the same judder down the cable, the same corona of static electricity—

  “…emergency starter! Pump it again!” she suddenly heard Ratko’s voice shouting.

  “What? Repeat, Ratko. What did you say?” Jezzy said, but there was no answer. And that was when she realized she had heard Ratko’s voice through the suit’s monitors, not through her internal channel system.

  And there was light all around her, she saw. Not a strong or a bright light, but the low, sodium-yellow of the emergency lighting.

  It worked! She removed the cable and pushed herself back from the hatch, just as she heard the familiar whine of the engines revving up and the high-pitched squeal of electrical systems starting.

  “It’s only my suit that’s compromised,” she thought gratefully, allowing herself to sink to the floor just as the mighty gauntlet of Malady reached down, picking her up as if she were no more than a kitten, and cradling her to his chest.

  “This will be a bumpy ride,” she heard him intone through her suit monitors, just as the gravity kicked in and the ship fought the dreadful pull of Martian gravity…

  But what if I was too late? Jezzy thought in horror.

  12

  DIY Meteors

  “They’ve gone,” Kol said, looking up suspiciously at the sky above them.

  “They have, but…” Solomon frowned. The skies of the Red Planet did not look like they should have. It wasn’t that they weren’t that usual mix of orange and gray that cloaked the planet—that had stayed the same—but he could also see the tell-tale signs of an orbital blast.

  Every now and again, a flash of light caught his eye. If he was quick enough, he would see a small, quickly evaporating fizz of fire and light. It was like watching a meteor shower in the middle of the day, except it happened too frequently, and in too many random places to make them think that it was a meteor shower.

  The Invincible, Solomon suddenly thought, adrenaline spiking through his system.

  “It’s the wreckage site up there. It must be breaking up,” he said, earning a grunt of agreement from Kol, audible over the short-wave suit-to-suit communicators of their emergency encounter suits.

  The CMC fleet had been totaled, Solomon knew, and it would only be a matter of time before all those bits started to get pulled down the gravity well of the Red Planet.

  “With any luck, most of it will burn off before—” Kol was halfway through saying, when there came a thunderous sonic boom from overhead.

  “Oh, frack.” Solomon saw one of the small pinpricks of light growing larger and larger as it was thrown towards the unyielding rock of the planet’s surface below. It trailed fire behind it, and a long tail of smoke followed soon after.

  “Is that…” Solomon looked at the falling star and saw the dark shape inside it, like a tube… As he watched, the thing jerked in mid-air, and something peeled away from it to scream through the air with a high-pitched whine. Solomon was sure he could see the flashing, tumbling curve. It was a section of a circle.

  A ring.

  “That’s a Ru’at jump-ship!” Solomon said, unable to keep the glee from his voice as he turned to the other members of his tiny expeditionary force.

  There was Kol, looking wary as he regarded the falling Ru’at ship above, and behind him was Ambassador Ocrie, standing beside the ad-hoc stretcher that they had cobbled together from one of the rover’s seats and belt straps, atop which was secured the unconscious Mariad Rhossily, Imprimatur of Proxima.

  Damn, we look like the last survivors at the end of the world, Solomon thought, and the thought even managed to sour his good mood at seeing a destroyed Ru’at ship falling from the sky. The idea that they could cross the Elysium Planitia itself—a vast orange and brown plain of dust and craters and rock to the distant headland of Elyisum Mons—appeared ridiculous.

  But what other choice do we have? Solomon sighed heavily.

  The small party looked exhausted already. Well, those that are standing up, anyway, the man thought. They had found that the Martian rover had indeed been blasted out of the sky as it had tried to escape the Ru’at. One side of its body had been scorched and hideously twisted, as if the Ru’at had fired upon them but narrowly missed.

  The rover had skidded across the ground, piling up rock and earth around it in its very own do-it-yourself mausoleum. The fact that the portholes or windows or hull hadn’t ruptured was a fact that Solomon found incredible.

  They had climbed out and fixed Mariad to the stretcher, but Solomon had to wonder if they really were in any better position than they had been inside the semi-submerged vehicle. The three members of his new team wore the ridiculously large and flappy white and yellow emergency encounter suits—little more than stiffened mesh and plastic bags with straps at the waist, wrists, and ankles, and a memory-plastic bubble helmet atop. It would have made Solomon laugh if it weren’t for the fact that the only other time he had seen people wearing them was in an equally distressing situation.

  No one decides to wear those things, Solomon thought. The fact that they had found them at all was, perhaps, one of their few lucky moments.

  Another lucky moment was discovering the cache of Ru’at colony weapons in the rover. Now, they—apart from the imprimatur, of course—were holding the same small beam-weapon pistols.

  But we still have a long way to go. Solomon looked out to the distant horizon, where the smaller mound of Hecates Thocla sat next to the larger Elysium Mons. He thought he could see a gleam of light up there. Reflection off the habitat they had to get to?

  And infiltrate. And find their deep-space transmitter…. Solomon groaned. At least, he thought, none of them were wearing anything even remotely Confederate by now, and they were all battered, bruised, and haggard enough to not look like soldiers or Confederate officials anymore.

  We can do this, Solomon thought. We have to do this.

  In his pocket, he still held the broken Ru’at orb, and he folded one gloved hand around its cold metal. I just need to get this to General Asquew, and get everyone to this experimental command hub, and the mission will be successful.

  Everything after that—the fight for Earth, the destruction of the Ru’at mothership, the emancipation of the Martian and Proxima colonists—had to be well above his paygrade, didn’t it?

  “Err… Chief?” He was shaken
from his thoughts by the urgent, worried tones of Kol beside him.

  Oh, please don’t tell me there’s more Ru’at coming for us… They had barely managed to survive the last time, and with every encounter, they were just losing more and more resources, and having to improvise more and more. How long can we keep running on empty like this? the command and tactical side of his brain thought.

  “Boss, look up!” Kol said again, and Solomon did so, seeing another falling star, surrounded by the corona of its freefall.

  “Hopefully, that’s another Ru’at ship,” Solomon grunted, reaching down to pick up the straps of Mariad’s stretcher. “I’ll take the imprimatur for a bit. We’ve covered a couple of klicks, and I reckon that we have five or six times that to get to—”

  Screeeee!

  The shriek of the falling object was getting louder, even picked up by the very poor audio equipment of his suit. It was unmistakably getting louder, which meant that it was also getting closer.

  Ah. Solomon looked up, moments before there was a deafening BANG from the skies above as the thing broke the sound barrier.

  It was again somewhat cylindrical, but it had a more bulbous backend, and it was shedding flames that melded with the plume of rocket fire.

  “Thrusters,” Solomon thought. That meant it wasn’t a Ru’at ship. That meant it was a human ship…

  “And it’s not falling,” Solomon murmured. He was right. The small, dark shape was instead screaming through the skies, getting lower and lower as it flew toward them. Solomon squinted, trying to get a better look at the object, but it was too dark against the brighter sky. He thought he could see suggestions of a hull, and the general shape itself suggested something in his memory. A scout ship?

  But even the Martians had scout ships. Solomon stared harder, but the hull was also blackened with soot and flames. He couldn’t see any insignia.

  “What do you want us to do, Sol?” Kol said. He was already raising his Ru’at beam pistol, and then looked at the relative size of it compared to an entire vessel charging toward them and dropped his hand to hang uselessly at his side.