Not even a hundred Outcasts had survived the assault and the destruction of the training facility, and it was owing to their heroic, desperate actions on the surface of Jupiter’s largest moon that General Asquew had decided to award those who were left with full Marine status.
In a very sick and twisted sort of way, Solomon realized that all the Outcast Marines who were still alive had their current gold pips thanks to the actions of Kol.
But it wasn’t like Solomon was going to thank him. The lieutenant felt conflicted and jittery as he shook his head and freed his arms from something heavy that had been constraining them.
“The imprimatur saved our lives, Kol,” Solomon murmured. He could now hear a hissing sound, and the light had turned from black to a slightly lighter gray, giving him some hope that they weren’t completely covered in Martian rock. “You got eyes on the ambassador? Rhossily?” he grumbled as he started to feel through the dark and complicated shapes around him, until his gloved hands closed on something soft. Fabric.
“Ambassador?”
“Urgh?” It was Ochrie’s voice, and it sounded weak. She was a mature woman already, and Solomon was afraid. What would being thrown around in a rover, and possibly being struck by a Ru’at beam device, have done to her?
She was also our last link to the ‘old’ Confederacy, Solomon thought as he started to paw at the rubble, looking for a head, a face, fearing that his hands would come away wet and slick with the ambassador’s blood. The Confederate Council had been blown apart by General Hausman, and all that was left of the original apparatus of human-Earth was this groaning woman next to him, and General Asquew…wherever she was.
“Ambassador, can you hear me? It’s First Lieutenant Cready. Can you talk? Where does it hurt?”
He heard some tortured breathing return to his ears, until, “It hurts everywhere! Where did you think it was going to hurt, soldier?”
Relief flooded through Solomon. Not only was the ambassador talking, but she was also able to be annoyed—all good signs, considering what they had just gone through. But more than that, it was the fact that her voice had lost its slightly misty, confused cadence. She now sounded full-bore Ambassador Ochrie again: complaining, imperious, and annoyed.
“It’s you! You’re back!” Solomon said gratefully. His hands found her hand, which grasped his tightly as he pulled her from bits of seat foam and metal wall panel.
“Of course it’s me. Who were you expecting—the Queen of Sheba?” Ochrie was hacking and coughing. “Where are we? I thought we were in the Ru’at colony. What happened? Is the war over?”
She doesn’t remember anything of her time under the Ru’at’s control, Solomon realized. But that might be a blessing, he thought.
“Looks like all we had to do was to chuck her from a great height.” Solomon heard Kol chuckle nearby, presumably still clambering about the footwell.
“Kol, check on the imprimatur. She should be right beside you,” Solomon said sternly, to hear the young ex-adjunct Marine grumble under his breath, and the sound of more dirt shifting one way or another.
“Got her, Sol,” the technical specialist’s voice came back. “She’s hurt. There’s blood…”
Oh, frack. If his number one priority—as a serving officer of the Confederate Marine Corps—was to the Confederate ambassador, then somewhere high underneath that would have been the welfare of the Imprimatur of Proxima. Proxima was—had been—Earth’s largest and most successful colony world, and the furthest away from the mother planet. Although there had been a lot of tension between the various colonies and Confederate Earth, the imprimatur was still technically a high-ranking Confederate official.
And her home world was the first to be attacked by the Ru’at, Solomon thought. They all owed her what their negligence had allowed the Ru’at to take.
“But she’s breathing!” Kol said with apparent relief. He wasn’t completely psychopathic, apparently.
“Good.” Solomon’s command training analyzed the situation.
We’re stuck. Trapped.
We could be fired upon by the Ru’at again, one final time, more than likely…
Outside is a hostile environment where I am the only one who can breathe.
“Right, Kol, you’re our technical guy. Can you make some air filters and bubble masks out of a wrecked Martian rover?” Solomon said. “We’ll need three—one for you, one for Rhossily, and one for Ochrie.”
“Well, thank you for not deciding to leave me to die in here,” Ochrie grumbled.
Back in top form, I see, Solomon deigned not to comment.
“Why can’t we radio in for assistance? Where’s the Rapid Response Fleet?” Ochrie said.
She really doesn’t remember. “Ma’am…” Solomon hazarded. “The First Rapid Response was destroyed by the Ru’at. We flew through their remains to get to Mars.”
“But we were supposed to rendezvous with General Asquew,” Ochrie said.
“She wasn’t there, Your Excellency,” Solomon said as he continued to work, shifting metal and the cab’s dislodged equipment boxes out of the way.
Equipment boxes! Solomon wrenched one of the metal lids open. He could hardly see anything inside, but he grabbed handfuls of anything he could to pull up to the gray-orange light.
“Bingo!” Solomon said. “We got emergency encounter suits. And, uh…a medical kit, I think…” He heaved the mass forward, hitting the back of a chair that was hideously bent backward and almost went over him before forcing it forward. “Kol, see if you can get these to work. Get inside, try not to tear them.”
“Sir. Yes, sir,” the technical specialist said with a drawl of sarcasm.
The encounter suits, he knew, would be the over-large, mostly shapeless bag-type things that made their wearer look like an anime bubble-creature. But they had air filters, environmental protection, a reserve air supply, and hopefully even basic short-range radio transmitters.
I last saw them used on Ganymede after the crash, Solomon thought. There was an odd sort of sadistic circularity to the fact that Kol, the man responsible for that, would also be the man to wear them and make sure that others survived by wearing them.
“If you can get me to a deep-space transmitter, then I know of somewhere we might be able to get help,” Ochrie said, and although he couldn’t see her face, he could hear the fierce snarl inside her voice.
“A deep-space transmitter? You’re having a laugh, aren’t you, lady?” Kol said in the darkness amidst the sounds of stretching polymer plastic. “The nearest one would be in Elysium Habitat, which, as you know, is held by us Martians—”
‘Us’ Martians? Solomon winced.
“And besides which, all the Red’s broadcast satellites were knocked out by the Marine Corps when they decided to nuke the planet!” Kol said, his voice rising to an almost-bark of pain and rage.
“Easy there, soldier,” Solomon growled. “We don’t know who’s above us.”
“They were demonstration shots. No habitats were fired upon—” the ambassador countered.
“A demonstration megaton nuclear explosion that still irradiated tens of kilometers of Martian soil—never to be used again!” Kol returned.
“Look, it’s done. Just get me to a deep-space transmitter, and I promise you that it doesn’t matter whether there are any satellites in the sky or not,” Ochrie sighed, sounding like a schoolteacher reacting to the petulant antics of a naughty child.
Solomon heard Kol’s strangled cough of anger, but he cut him off quickly before this descended into an out-and-out fight. “What do you mean, Ambassador? Without satellites, then there’s no way to get the message out to General Asquew, and any message sent might take hours to get to her, wherever she is.” If she’s even still alive, Solomon didn’t add.
“Super-black satellites,” Ochrie said.
“What?” Solomon frowned.
“Oh, I see…” Kol groaned.
“Would you like to tell me?” Solomon was starting to lo
se his temper with the young traitor. He had thought that they were coming to some sort of understanding. That Kol had seen the error of his ways. Maybe I was very wrong about my ex-specialist.
“There’s always been talk of how the Marine Corps seeded the system with super-black satellites—drone transmitters in stationary or geosynchronous orbits that have so many levels of electronic dampening and interference that they don’t show on any known scanners. They just sit there, completely motionless but hoovering up data and information, until activated by some higher-up.”
“Sounds like just the sort of thing we need right about now,” Solomon said.
“It’s the Big Brother state!” Kol, who was apparently ever the revolutionary, pointed out.
“I don’t care what it is, if it can get us out of this mess,” Solomon said, turning to the dim shadow of Ochrie. “Ambassador, the message will still take hours to get where it needs to go and back. We’ll have to find a way to hide out on the Martian surface.”
“Not necessarily hours. You haven’t waited to hear the other part of my plan,” Ochrie said harshly. Apparently being rolled over in a Martian rover wasn’t just responsible for snapping her out of her hypnotism, but also gave her a pretty mean streak, as well.
“Oh, here we go,” Kol grumbled, but both of the Confederate officials ignored him this time.
“I said that I knew a place that could help us. Help me to activate the super-black satellites, and I will be able to get us to the experimental command hub.”
“The experimental command hub,” Solomon said the words slowly. Didn’t anyone think to tell him about this a year ago?
“It’s the space equivalent of a command-one bunker. A secret space station where we were to evacuate all of the Confederate Council and coordinate disaster relief efforts in the case of a planet-killing event, like an asteroid…”
“Or the Ru’at,” Solomon said.
“Indeed, or the Ru’at. The ECH not only has access to the super-black satellite network, but also a range of technologies currently in development.”
“I knew it! The Confederacy has been withholding scientific advances from the colonies for years!” Kol said egregiously.
“Shut up, Kol. Now is not the time to talk politics,” Solomon shot back.
“He’s right, we have. But now we need to use it.” The ambassador sounded nonplussed at the accusation. “If it’s operational, and if the Ru’at haven’t already found the ECH, then it has on board a prototype ansible that we have been working on…”
“An ansible?” Kol didn’t sound outraged this time, he sounded amazed.
“What the frack is an ansible?” Solomon, a man more used to cheating art dealers and Triads out of their credits, was clearly out of his depth.
“You remember what we were saying about the faster-than-light drives? Subspace?” Kol said quickly. “An ansible works on the same interconnected subspace principle. It could feasibly send information across millions or billions of miles in the blink of an eye. But I thought it was just science fiction!”
“Most things start out as science fiction, before Confederate scientists turn them into fact.” Ochrie even managed to sound smug.
Solomon took a deep breath. “Okay then,” he said. “It looks like we’ve got a new mission. Get Ochrie to Elysium and a deep-space transmitter, and get this ansible thing to work on some super-secret, black-ops space station,” he said. It felt good to have a direction to go, a path toward hope.
But the lieutenant was very much aware that he had to do all of this with three people in the flimsiest of encounter suits, with a sky filled with alien spaceships, and with one of their number currently unconscious.
They never promised an easy life in the Marine Corps, did they?
10
Friends in High Places
“Did it work!?” Jezzy said, attempting to crane her head from the seat that she was strapped in, an X-harness across her chest. She could have gone for the more usual ‘belt’ option, but Ratko—currently piloting the Marine scout—had demanded that everyone inside go for maximum operational safety.
Which was understandable, given that Corporal Ratko was more or less using the craft to hydroplane across the noxious atmosphere of the Red Planet. What would that be called? Jezzy had a distractible moment to wonder. Aeroplaning?
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 o
ut 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.”
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