Outcast Marines Boxed Set

by James David Victor

  As the two technical specialists worked to narrow down the subspace band that the drone Ru’at were using, the battle outside only intensified.

  Lines of blue-white fire lanced through space from the advancing wave of Ru’at drone fighters. There are so many, Lieutenant Colonel Solomon thought as he worked, sliding first one Nightjar group forward, and then the next around in a sweeping movement.

  The ECH controls were far better than the tactical commands that the scout had. They matched Solomon’s already-Serum 21-enhanced reflexes, and many kilometers away from him, the Nightjars could react at the same speed too.

  >Full Offensive

  His hand flickered through the attack mode, until he realized just what he was trying to do.

  Ahead of him flew a vast cloud of the Ru’at jump-ships, their obsidian rings blurring as they operated at much higher speeds than his Nightjars could.

  Group 1 Vessel 2 COMPROMISED

  Group 1 Vessel 4 COMPROMISED

  And compromised, Solomon could see, meant destroyed. This approach wasn’t working. Not against the faster and deadlier Ru’at jump-ships, and certainly not against the gigantic shape that had appeared behind it: the mothership.

  The idea of holding off the Ru’at with the automated ECH Test Fleet had been short-lived. The Ru’at jump-ships had swamped their position almost immediately, and now they were trading fire with the heavy fighters and bombers of both the ECH Test Fleet and the Second Rapid Response Fleet.

  And the Resolute. Solomon saw lancing missiles fire in salvos down into the Ru’at forces. There were so many of them that all the Resolute had to do was auto-detonate when they were in range—

  FZZZ!

  But then came a bolt of blue-white energy as the mothership fired—not against the ECH, but against the much larger Resolute hanging above them. It was the same sort of particle-beam weapon that all the Ru’at used, but it was much larger.

  On the viewing screens, Solomon saw the entire pyramid shudder as one of its corners was blown, and the entire thing started turn slowly to one side.

  And accelerate forward.

  “What is she doing!?” Jezzy shouted from where she worked beside Solomon, commanding the rest of the ECH Test Fleet. But Jezzy answered her own question. “She’s doing what the Oregon did…”

  Solomon was still struggling to keep his own Nightjars alive as he asked in a panicked voice, “What did the Oregon do!?”

  “It flew straight for the Ru’at in a suicide charge,” Jezzy said.

  “Oh, crap.” Solomon knew that Asquew was trying to buy them more time. The Resolute could probably soak up the most damage of all their ships.

  “Ratko! Kol! How we doing on that interference?” Solomon shouted as he directed the Nightjars forward.

  “We’re in a .5 frequency band! We’re almost there!” Kol shouted back.

  But will it be fast enough to save Asquew’s life, and countless hundreds of others?

  Solomon slid his hands to every ECH battlegroup he had at his disposal.

  >Protect

  He changed their attack mode and threw them forward around the Resolute in a glittering whirl of anger. Solomon’s enhanced synapses kicked in as he controlled the ships minutely and individually as best he could.

  Target Acquired!

  Fire.

  Solomon’s Nightjars opened fire on the jump-ships that sought to cut into the Resolute as it charged behind them. Rings blew apart under artillery shells, but many of the beams still got through, puncturing holes into the last dreadnaught they had.

  FZZZZZ!

  The mothership fired again, straight into the heart of the Resolute, where it shuddered and started to turn over, end over end, as its top cone began to separate. It spilled metal guts and squirming bodies out into the vacuum.

  “Got it!” Ratko shouted.

  “Initiate!” Solomon shouted desperately, and—

  —there was a flare of light from the ECH’s top antennae.

  As suddenly as it had begun, the war ended.

  Epilogue: A New Era

  Without their subspace frequency controlling them, the Ru’at ships—even the mothership—fell silent. Their strange propulsion systems refused to operate. Their murderous beam weapons refused to fire.

  But what was even stranger was the fact that the ships themselves started to fall apart, as if they had been held together by nothing more than—

  “Electromagnetism,” Kol said in awe.

  “Quantum-entangled electromagnetism,” Corporal Ratko corrected him.

  That had been why the EMP was so effective, of course, Solomon and the rest now saw.

  More than a million miles away across the vastness of space, the cyborgs that had been attacking Luna fell to the ground, their metal and mechanical parts finally giving way to the wishes of their dead hosts.

  Further still on the Red Planet, the hundreds of meters of silver-steel of the Ru’at colony once again stopped working. The brainwashed Chosen of Mars stopped receiving their subliminal messages from the Ru’at orbs that fell lifelessly from their posts, and the humans started to shake their heads, looking around and wondering where they were and what had happened. Of course, they were immediately thrown into a fight for their very lives as they struggled to restart their air filters and atmospheric generators.

  But the largest piece of auto-destruction came from the Ru’at mothership itself. As Solomon and the others watched, it started to break apart, revealing that it really was made of nothing more that strange, modular machine parts and billions of crystal-tube fragments.

  It was these latter components that appeared almost surreal to the eyes of Solomon and the others aboard the ECH, as a fast-expanding cloud of glittering silver blew out from the mothership and the smaller Ru’at jump-ships like a fragile spider’s web, tattering and winking out as they grew more and more disparate.

  “I don’t like the look of that one bit,” General Asquew admitted from her glitching holo-form standing next to Chief Ochrie.

  Asquew had survived, somehow, even though almost half her crew aboard the Resolute had lost their lives. The command crew aboard the top of the dreadnaught had performed last-minute airlock procedures in order to keep fighting to the very last man, woman, and computer.

  “What comes next?” Solomon asked in a sort of awe as he watched the first and most devastating enemy of humanity fall to pieces.

  “We rebuild,” Jezzy said beside him, her face grim. Solomon knew that the task ahead was great, and that fractured humankind, more than ever, would have a lot of obstacles if it was ever to approach its former glory once again.

  And what was even worse was that Lieutenant Colonel Solomon Cready knew that even though they had halted the Ru’at in Confederate space completely, so they no longer would be able to FTL their drone fleets to attack them, the Ru’at were still out there somewhere, a hundred thousand systems away. The real Ru’at. The ones who had built these machines and seeded the galaxy with their orbs.

  To Solomon, this felt like a new era in more ways than one. Humanity now had all the pieces of Ru’at technology to salvage and reverse-engineer, which was what the Confederacy had been doing for the last hundred years anyway, right?

  But now they had access to the secret of subspace communication. Quantum-entangled electromagnetism. Cybernetics. Particle-beams. Tractor beams. And of course, faster-than-light travel.

  And we’re going to need all of that if we’re ever to face the Ru’at—or any other alien super race—again.

  “Colonel Cready?” Solomon turned to see General Asquew and Commander-in-Chief Ochrie regarding him strangely.

  “Yes, sir?” Solomon saluted them. He felt like a new man somehow, after everything he had been through.

  “Considering your efforts and achievements over your short military career,” the general began, “I would normally offer you some R and R for a job well done, but…” The hologram nodded to the wreckage ahead of them. “There’s work to be
done. Assemble your battle group, please. We need a trained military commander, one who’s good at thinking on their feet, to lead a rescue expedition to the people of Earth.”

  Earth. Solomon considered. The cradle of humanity. Our home. The place he had once been told he’d never get to return to. “It would be an honor, sir.” He saluted again, turning to Jezzy, Malady, Ratko, Willoughby, and even Kol.

  “Ready for another mission, schlubs?” he asked.

  “If it’s alright with you, sir,” Kol said, his eyes downcast, “I would like to stay here, on the ECH. Work on rebuilding everything that I helped destroy.”

  “Request granted, Corporal Kol.” Solomon nodded. It was probably for the best, anyway. He looked again at the remaining members of Gold Squad. “Anyone else want to beg off?” he asked, a trace of humor in his voice.

  “We’ll be ready to ship out within the hour, Colonel,” Jezzy said.

  Of course you will, Solomon thought. He knew they would give him a hundred percent.

  Because that’s what Marines did.

  THANK YOU

  Thank you so much for reading the Outcast Marines Boxed Set which contained the entire Outcast Marines series.

  Even though this is the end of the story for the Outcast Marines, there are many more stories to come, including a new series set several hundred years in the future. Be sure to check out all of our sci-fi adventures.

  Amazon Author Page:

  amazon.com/James-David-Victor/e/B073XH6BF6/

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