Inside were people rising from low steel benches, their shackles having fallen off, shaking their heads in wonder.
“Kol! Mariad, Ochrie!” Solomon hissed into the viewing plates at the people that he had come here with. Rather disturbingly, he noticed that his friends were also all clothed.
Wow. Thanks, Ru’at, he thought dismally as he tapped on the plate and indicated that the door had to be open. “No power!” He mouthed the words, hoping that the ex-Outcast Marine on the other side would understand. Kol took one look at him and nodded, running to the door to start pushing and pressing against it until, with a creak of resistant metal, the door started to slide up.
“Morning, Lieutenant. You always sleep in the buff?” Kol said as soon as he had scrabbled under the door.
“Occupational hazard,” Solomon said in a disgruntled fashion as he indicated that they had to get the doors open to the next two rooms, where the ambassador and the imprimatur were currently banging on the metal.
Kol immediately set to work, heaving and sliding the doors up as Solomon ghosted to the end of the corridor and awaited the sound of approaching feet—
“Lieutenant?” he heard Maraid say with great puzzlement in her voice.
“New Ru’at breeding program,” Kol snickered beside her.
“No, not that! I mean, what are all those marks all over his body?” Solomon tried his best to ignore them as he was rewarded by the heavy stamp of feet. He stepped out just in front of the running, brainwashed Martian, lifting his hands.
“Hi. I am a fully naked man,” Solomon said.
The Martian’s sudden confusion hit him like a cold fish to the face.
Thwack! Solomon’s arm snapped out, viper-quick, to crack the Martian around the side of the head with the powered-down Ru’at orb. The Martian went down with a small sigh, and Solomon busily got to work undressing him.
“Good job, sir. No one wants to see that,” Kol said, earning a withering stare from the lieutenant.
Solomon searched the man’s pockets and utility belt at the same time as stealing his encounter suit. The white and silver jumpsuit was too large for him, but with some heavy cinching at the waist and cuffs, he managed to make himself look slightly less like a balloon. Added to this new look were an oversized pair of boots and a belt with a collection of small tools—everything from wire snips to amp-meters.
And one small handheld device that, if Solomon didn’t know any better, looked suspiciously like a gun.
“Now we’re talking!” Solomon said, raising the thing to sight down its barrel.
The weapon was a little smaller than a Marine service pistol, with a handle and a button for a trigger. It didn’t apparently have any ammo clips, but instead had two tiny coils of a crystal lattice behind transparent plates on the body of the weapon. When Solomon examined the barrel, he saw that it was bulkier than any projectile weapon and was made up of small obsidian rings, ending around a tiny silver orb.
“Huh?”
“Sir, that looks a little like—” Kol started to say as Solomon fired.
FZZT! A pencil-thin beam of white-blue light shot out the end and exploded into sparks on the opposite wall. It left a blackened soot mark where it had hit, a smell of burning ozone in everyone’s nostrils, and a tiny. running line of molten metal at the heart of the strike.
“A Ru’at particle-beam weapon.” Solomon started to grin very widely indeed. “Let’s see if we can find a few more for the rest of you, shall we?” Solomon nodded in the direction that the man had run from, and the four set off at speed. Above their heads, the lights flickered and the colony sirens continued to blare.
BWAAAARM!
5
Distractive Technologies
ESR Mainframe: Proximity Warning!
ESR Mainframe: Craft Compromised. Hull Damage at…
The bubble of metal that Second Lieutenant Wen was currently trapped inside shook and bounced. Its console screens glitched and its speakers blurted out multiple warnings, speaking over each other as the system tried to come to terms with what was happening to it.
Emergency Service Rafts were built to withstand the hazards of space travel—everything from being hit by space debris, to the heat of re-entry, to a planet’s atmosphere.
But Jezzy was seriously worried whether the thing could withstand a nuclear shockwave.
The shell of white exploded from just under the tip of the pyramid that was the Invincible. In awful detail, Jezzy saw the metal skin ripple up the length of the once-proud craft as the invisible line of force swept ahead of the expanding white globe.
Jezzy saw all the near fragments of the debris field wobble and shake as the invisible field swept over them, and then it hit her speeding craft. It was like some angry god had used the ESR as a soccer ball and kicked it with all their might.
Jezzy spun. She shook. She tried to use the ESR’s stabilizers and positional rockets, but the craft was swinging around so fast that it was impossible to know which direction to fire them in. All she could do was hold on and hope that she wasn’t slammed into the side of some bit of dead CMC ship large enough to crack the ESR like an egg.
Incoming Transmission: Gold Channel
SENDER: Corporal Malady
“Lieutenant, this is Corporal Malady on board the Marine scout. Lieutenant, come in,” the full tactical man-golem managed to sound at least a little perturbed by the situation. Which was a seismic change compared to his usually austere and soporific tones.
“I’m here, Malady. Course heading twenty degrees off Mars elliptic… No, wait, forty-five degrees… Now heading poleward, ah…” Jezzy tried to read out her positioning, but the way that the compromised ESR was performing made it incredibly difficult. “Malady, have you got Ratko? Did you get the oxygen?”
“All present and correct, sir—apart from you,” Malady informed her. “We have you on scanners. We’re coming for you.”
“No! Don’t get any closer to the blast!” Jezzy said.
“We are far enough out not to— SCHZZZZKT!” The message suddenly glitched out, and Jezzy just had to pray that it was because the signal had been disrupted by the nuke’s EMP. All nuclear devices also created an EMP effect, she knew. Back in the bad old days before the unified Confederate Earth, Jezzy knew that the nations of the world had spent inordinate amounts of time researching the effects of firing nuclear bombs in the upper atmosphere of their very own planet, just so they could measure the effects of the subsequent EMP blast on towns below and satellites above.
The ESR swung and shook once again, and a resounding CRASH turned the craft around completely so that she was facing backwards from the Invincible’s blast.
The shockwave had disrupted the wreckage field around the Red Planet, and Jezzy could see the tiny flares like fireworks as pieces were dragged into the pull of planetfall. Luckily, most of them would burn up before they got anywhere near the surface of Mars and the Martian Habitat bubbles below. She hoped.
But what was even more terribly entrancing was the expanding ball of white that was growing above Mars. It hurt her eyes to even look at it, but Jezzy couldn’t look away. She wondered if this was what looking into the face of God was like.
How big was that bomb? she wondered as the white ball kept on growing larger and larger, wider and wider. It looked too big to be a ‘simple’ nuke—not that nukes were ever that simple.
Are nuclear explosions bigger in space? Was it something about the vacuum that accelerated their growth and destructive potential?
The Ru’at, she thought. They had been gaining on her, following her as she had sought to swerve them toward the Invincible. Had she managed it? Were they now caught up in that ball of white light out there?
Jezzy hoped so. If there was anything that she would like to have as her epitaph, managing to destroy half the fleet of an advanced alien super civilization would be quite a fitting one.
“Well, I guess it sure was a distraction, all right…” Jezzy murmured to hersel
f as the ESR shook and wobbled.
“You’re telling me! Hell, even I’m distracted!” came the voice of the very cantankerous but apparently very elated Corporal Ratko.
“Corporal! Report! How come I can hear you? Didn’t the nuke’s EMP knock out our shortwave communications?” Jezzy was surprised.
“It did, but long story short, I’m a damned genius. I bounced the ship’s signal off the largest reflective bits of wreckage to get to you. Your receivers aren’t picking up a band of information; they’re getting a pinpoint strike of radio waves!” Ratko said.
“I have no idea what you just said, Ratko, but I am very glad that you did whatever it was you just did,” Jezzy breathed.
“We’re coming in on your planetward side. We’ll get you out of there in no time, sir,” Ratko said, and Jezzy thought that was going to be the end of the conversation, until she heard her diminutive corporal take a breath.
“Sir, there’s something else that you should probably know as well,” she said.
Oh no. Jezzy sighed. “Go ahead, Ratko. Hit me.”
“Well, it’s about that pretty ball of light that you’re looking at.” Ratko sounded a little embarrassed.
“Do I really want to know this, Corporal?” Jezzy said.
“Probably not. But my analysis shows that it’s got far more combustive force than any normal, singular warhead should have.”
“I was beginning to think the same, actually. What’s causing it?”
“Well, maybe we should have moved the armed and primed device before we set it off,” Ratko said.
“Why? I don’t see— Oh.” Jezzy remembered where they had found the ISBM—or Inter-Stellar Ballistic Missile—in the forward munitions locker, where all the other Priority One weapons were kept.
“All those nukes,” Jezzy whispered in horror. The locker hadn’t been large, not as large as the Invincible’s forward guns would have been. Jezzy tried to remember how many missile cubicles or silos she had run past on her way out. Three? Four? Six?
Even at its lowest estimate, that would still be four times the distraction she had been hoping for.
“And so, Lieutenant,” Ratko went on, “the upshot of that is that we’ve probably killed all of the facing hemisphere of Mars’s electronics. An EMP that big might even knock out an entire planetary communication grid.”
But Jezzy wasn’t unhappy or shocked by this news at all. In fact, that was the very best thing she had heard all day.
“You know what, Corporal Ratko? I think you’ve just delivered the distraction we were looking for.” Jezzy grinned as the thin envelope of metal she was inside shook.
6
Escape Velocity
“Kol, you know this place,” Solomon whispered. “Which way is out?”
The Outcast lieutenant was currently pressed against one of the metal walls, a few inches away from the junction that connected to a much wider avenue inside the Ru’at colony. The lights were still flickering and dim, but at least someone had managed to turn off the siren. Other white and silver suited Martians were running back and forth, and First Lieutenant Cready could hear them shouting.
“Get reserve power to the air filters!”
“Make sure the airlocks are on automatic shutdown!”
“Bring that emergency battery pack up here!”
And each and every command or suggestion was met by the singular, repeated phrase that was really starting to get on Solomon’s nerves.
“Ru’at hails you.”
It was like a benediction as well as a greeting, as well as the colony equivalent of ‘aye-aye, sir,’ as if the humans here thought that their Ru’at masters were gods for their little world. Solomon found himself surprised to see that despite that these Chosen of Mars were entirely brainwashed, or hypnotized, it didn’t stop them from acting fast in an emergency.
He cursed. He was kind of hoping they would be at least a little dopey, which would give them the advantage.
“Straight across will take you to an airlock.” Kol nodded across the avenue where the embattled Martians raced and ran. “But down there…” He nodded down the length of the avenue to where it met a much larger bulkhead. “Down there is the garage. There’s rovers and transport craft we could use.”
Solomon growled slightly under his breath. He was the only one who was wearing one of the Martian encounter suits, with its blow-up bubble mask in the collar and a pretty basic air filter. He might be able to survive out there on the Martian atmosphere, but the rest of them wouldn’t.
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 ba
rking 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.
Conquest of Earth Page 4
