Tsssss…. There rose a very fine, high whistling sound from somewhere far above them.
“Commander?” Karamov muttered in horror beside him, and it wasn’t just his own men who were horrified at what he had done… The Outriders were looking panicked up and down the avenue, at their attackers, at the civilians still screaming and shouting.
BWAAAARRRM! Suddenly, klaxons blared across the habitat as red and yellow lights competed with the street and shop lights for their attention.
“HABITAT BREACH! ALL CITIZENS TO MAKE THEIR WAY INSIDE, IMMEDIATELY! REPEAT, HABITAT BREACH…” the speaker systems started to call out on repeat.
“What did you do!?” the Outrider guard in front of the fountain was saying. He looked half-convinced to order his panicking men to fire, and half-convinced that he wanted to flee indoors, even though he was already wearing one of the insectile encounter masks…
“It’ll take a while for all the oxygen in a habitat the size of Armstrong to bleed out.” Solomon shrugged. “I’m sure you guys have contingencies for that, don’t you? Repair drones? Spray-plastics? You Martians are a resourceful bunch, I’m sure you’ve dealt with this sort of thing before…” Solomon said.
“Us Martians…” the guard echoed Solomon’s words, sounding suspicious.
“Now release that kid, or else I will add another bullet to the hole up there. Which will mean that your repair crews have twice as much work to do, and Armstrong will be losing twice as much oxygen. Hey, maybe I’ll just keep on firing…” Solomon grinned.
“Gah!” The main Outrider guard—who must have been some kind of captain, Solomon thought—snarled at him in indignation and frustration, looking from the thieving boy to the man with the gun pointed at the thin skin of Armstrong Habitat.
“You know I’ll do it…” Solomon said with another wolf-like smile.
“He will. He’s crazy…” Kol added helpfully.
The Outrider guard who could be a captain looked between their attackers and the boy for a long moment, and then, with a shove, pushed the boy towards them. “This won’t solve anything,” the Outrider said. “We’ll find you. We’ll find the kid. The Chosen are unstoppable, and the Red never forgives!” the man snapped at him.
“Walk towards me, go to the nice lady with the gun,” Solomon said, nodding for the boy to hurry to stand behind Jezzy as he started to take a slow step back from the courtyard.
“You Chosen are unstoppable, huh?” Solomon called out as he started to quicken his pace, keeping his gun raised high at the Armstrong skin far above, as Karamov and Kol kept their guns on the four guards opposite them. “Tell that to the Marine fleet about to fall out of the sky on top of you.”
“You Martians,” the Outrider captain sneered. “You’re Confederates, aren’t you? What are you? Deserters? Freebooters?”
“I’d love to stop and chat, but, y’know…” Solomon nodded above them, where the hissing sound had now become a wail and a roar of wind. He wondered if he could even feel it getting cooler. “The atmosphere in this place sucks.”
They backed down the street, waited until they were turning the next avenue, and then ran.
“Dammit, Commander!” Kol was shouting as they sprinted as fast as they could down the avenue. “You fired bullets inside a habitat!”
“I didn’t really have much choice, Specialist!” Solomon countered as the habitat alarms and klaxons sounded behind them
BWAAARRM!
“HABITAT BREACH! ALL CITIZENS TO MAKE THEIR WAY INSIDE, IMMEDIATELY! REPEAT, HABITAT BREACH…”
“But you broke an entire habitat, Commander!” Kol pointed out.
People were scattering from the streets ahead and behind them, rushing into the nearest shops and buildings as fast as they could, no matter if they lived, worked, or were just passing by. Shop owners and residents were hurriedly pulling down the flimsy plastic frames with the rubberized seals over the doors and windows. Each and every building would become its one tiny little airlock, and all of those with air conditioning or air filtration units would at least have enough oxygen to wait out a serious crisis. The rest of the shops that didn’t would have to hope that the authorities fixed the hole in less than whatever time it took for them to use up their available oxygen.
“Hoi! There they are!” they heard shouts from behind them as the Outrider guards gave chase.
“Oh frack,” Jezzy said, skipping and turning in midair to fire a warning shot into the tub that held a bay tree beside the running Outriders. The tub exploded, showering the nearest guard with dirt as the spindly tree fell to the ground. It wasn’t enough to slow them down, but it did make them a little hesitant to be so quick…
“Up here. Follow me!” this came from the boy, already peeling off from the main pack and leading the others up a set of external stone stairs to the roof of one of the nearest buildings. Solomon didn’t hesitate to follow, and the rest of the squad piled after him.
8
Honor Amongst Thieves
There is no rain inside a habitat, and thus no need for a peaked roof, tiles, slates or guttering. There is also a lot of heat, which needs to be carefully conducted away at every point in the system.
Both were reasons why the members of Gold Squad found themselves chasing after a boy across a complicated arrangement of flat-roofed buildings, jumping between the small gaps in the buildings as much as hopping low container walls to the rooftop below, before continuing in a haphazard zigzag across the heights of Armstrong. Armstrong had long since taken lessons from the hot climate architects of the Mediterranean and the Middle East of Earth, who used wide, flat spaces to radiate heat back into the air, as well as allow the building to cool from as large a surface area as possible.
“Unnf!” Solomon jumped a container wall to land on the next rooftop, beside a line of red and ochre robes laying out on the warm stone.
“I think we lost them.” It was the boy, collapsed against the far container wall and panting, his arms over his knees. From below them, Solomon could still hear the worried and angered shouts of both the civilians terrified of them and the Outrider guards hunting for them. As the rest of the undercover—not-so-undercover anymore, Solomon thought—Gold Squad hunched and collapsed by the low retaining wall of the flat roof, they all held their breath as the shouts below moved off, to be replaced by the WAO of the station’s klaxons and the buzz of small robot drones rushing to repair the rips in the habitat fabric.
“Was that an entirely wise move, Commander?” said Kol, looking over at him as he slipped the ridiculous bubble-helmet of their borrowed suits on.
“Good idea, Squad.” Solomon cursed himself for not thinking about it sooner, gesturing for everyone to put on their helmets, just in case the robot repair drones up ahead didn’t get the hole in the habitat fabric fixed in time.
Until he looked over at the boy, hunched and large-eyed with worry sitting crouched across from him.
Nuts. “Here.” He started to throw off his orange robes and unzip the industrial worker’s encounter suit. “You need this more than we do, probably…” he murmured.
“Commander!” Karamov said suddenly in alarm, throwing a look above.
“What? You want this kid who just saved our lives to die because of us?” Solomon returned indignantly. He knew that he was acting waaay out of the official Confederate Marine rulebook, but what choice did he have?
“No, it’s alright…” Surprisingly, his offer of aid was turned down by the very youth who needed it the most. “They’ll get it fixed. They’re already spraying it with adhesives…” The boy shrugged, which Solomon thought was a remarkably resilient gesture for one so young. As a way of explanation, the boy added, “It’s nowhere near the first time that’s happened…”
“What, that someone shot a hole through the habitat?” Solomon left his suit on, but his helmet off. He trusted this kid, for some reason, which made him stop. Why? He was a little thief, wasn’t he? Supposedly stealing food rations from other Martians. Not
exactly the actions of a saint…
Because that is precisely what I would have done in his situation. Solomon grinned slightly.
“Well, there’s always a few nutters with guns on Mars.” Another shrug from the youth, looking up to watch the robot drones at work.
The kid was right, Solomon saw. It took four drones to do it, rising on small puffs of positional rockets before they clung to the translucent and milky panels of material—three to apparently ‘hold’ the stretched canvas taut, and the fourth one that stayed in the air, buffeting and swaying in the storm of winds up there, to spray the entire section of the membrane with some thick, viscous liquid. Within seconds, the howling wind had decreased to a low murmur, a whine, and then stopped.
As soon as the gale from the loss of pressure had stopped, Solomon and the others heard the hissing as great jets of steam—what he assumed must be pressurized oxygen—were released around the edges of the ‘walls’ of Armstrong Habitat as it automatically re-pressurized.
“Of course, now you lot are screwed, right?” the kid said with a sniff.
“I beg your pardon?” Jezzy said from her crouch by the wall, looking over the edge to keep an eye on the locked-down buildings outside.
“Well, damaging a habitat is at least an exile from Mars offense. Off to Titan or the asteroid worlds for the lot of you,” the boy said, breaking into a grin.
“You little…” this came from Kol, apparently the most upset by what they had just taken part in.
“Marine,” Solomon quelled his anger with one word, before turning to the boy. “I wouldn’t worry about that, kid. We’ve already been to Titan, and I don’t think they want us back.”
“Well, the Chosen are talking about bringing back the Long Walk,” the boy said obstinately, as if there were an argument and he was going to prove just how brave he was compared to them.
Teenagers. Solomon rolled his eyes. He couldn’t remember what it had been like being a teenager, but he knew that he must have been just as difficult and sullen as this one. “Long Walk?” Solomon asked genially, not taking the bait. Youths like him—like the one Solomon had been—thrive on conflict and argument. Solomon figured that if he didn’t have the officials of Mars to be mad at them, he’d probably just as happily be mad with them if they let him.
“Yeah. It’s frontier justice out in the townships. But the imprimatur said it was illegal when she was here,” the boy said with a somewhat gleeful sense of macabre humor. “If someone does something really bad, then they kick you out of the habitat with whatever cheap-ass encounter suit you’ve got, and you have to figure it out for yourself. They won’t take you back in, but if you can manage to walk all the way to the next township habitat, then the Chosen reckon that the Red’s forgiven you, and you can start again.”
“How much oxygen do these suits hold?” Solomon wondered aloud.
“Not enough.” The boy shrugged. “But I ain’t worried. They’ll never catch me anyway…”
“Don’t say that,” Solomon said suddenly, and severely. “First rule, son: you always get caught, one day. Everyone gets caught. It’s just the luck of the game.” It was after all, Solomon considered, just why he had left the Midwest of the American Confederacy and traveled to New Kowloon. He was starting to get sloppy. He had to jump-ship to a new territory—the territory where a thief like him could make it big.
“You say that like you mean it,” the boy said defiantly, standing up and yawning.
Ah, the metabolism of youth, Solomon thought ruefully. His limbs still ached, and his side was a dull twinge of pain where it was still healing from getting shot. He envied the days when he could run across an Earth city or fall from a window as he escaped his crime and still get up five minutes later.
“I do mean it.” Solomon stood up as well, nodding for the rest of his squad to do the same. “All of us here had interesting lives before we came to Mars.” Before the Marine Corps, he almost said. “And one thing I know is this, son: if you want to keep on doing what you’re doing—getting away with it, I mean—then you gotta be prepared to face the consequences when it goes wrong. Because there is always going to come a time when even your luck runs out, or just that some other guy is luckier than you.”
“Not me, I’m the best in Armstrong,” the little thief said proudly.
“Yeah, I used to think the same thing too,” Solomon murmured. He liked the kid. He was tough, street-smart, and willing to take his own chances. Even if he was being stupid about it.
“Commander…” this time, the one to berate him was Karamov, looking at him without helmet and nodding to further inside the township. Solomon got his meaning. We don’t have time for this. There’s about to be a war.
And it was probably a war that could easily flatten this habitat, and this boy, Solomon thought grimly. “You know Marshal? He runs an electronics store in a market near here?”
“Old Man Marshal? Yeah. I know him. A real tight-ass,” the kid laughed.
“Ha. What, he caught you stealing from him, did he?” Jezzy said wryly. Even though all the Outcasts were once criminals and would-be convicts, Solomon had always thought that it was Jezebel Wen with her career in the Yakuza who he most acquainted with. Solomon didn’t know what wrongs Karamov and Kol had committed in their pasts to deserve the long stasis-sleep to Titan, and get derailed for Ganymede instead, but Solomon got the impression that their crimes weren’t in the same league as his and Jezzy’s.
“Something like that, lady…” the youth grumbled.
“Whatever. You’ll be safe with us,” Solomon said. “Can you take us to him?”
“What’s it worth?” the boy returned without a shadow of hesitation.
Smart kid, Solomon thought as Kol, still behind his bubble-helmet, burst out indignantly.
“Why you little— We just saved your life!”
“Yeah, that’s gotta count for something, right?” Solomon pointed out.
“Mhm.” The youth apparently would have preferred some sort of more physical sense of moral satisfaction, hopefully in the form of actual credits, but when he realized that he wasn’t going to get any of that, he just shrugged in the nonchalant manner of all youth and nodded. “This way.”
“Look, kid. I don’t even know your name…” Solomon said, meaning to give the boy one last piece of advice as they followed the youth over the side of the building to a set of stars that led back down to the quiet streets below.
“Tomas,” he said, not looking back.
“Just trust me on this, Tomas. I know you probably think that we’re old, and that we’re not as quick or as smart as you, and maybe you’re right…” Solomon wondered why he was even attempting to pass on this guidance to the kid. Would he have listened at the boy’s age?
Oh yeah, this place is going to erupt in fire and death from an orbital bombardment if we don’t stop it, Solomon kept on thinking. That is why I’m helping him. “But just hear this. Those Outrider guards—Chosen of Mars—whoever they are, really… They know your face, and they’ll be coming for you, because you showed them up. You made them feel stupid. It’s what people do, especially bullies. They can’t stand it when they’re beaten.”
“So? I’ve gotten away with it up until now…”
“Up until now, exactly,” Jezzy said harshly, and Solomon was surprised at the schoolmarm attitude he heard from his combat specialist. Maybe they did things differently in the Yakuza, after all?
The group were ghosting through the mostly quiet streets of the city as the warning klaxons continued overhead. It seemed that Armstrong had an automated system, and that the Martian citizens wouldn’t come out of their pressure-sealed houses and shops until the all-clear was sounded.
Which meant that there was probably going to be safety inspections and regulations to fulfill, even out here on the frontier planet of Mars, Solomon recognized. Good. That bought them some time.
“So? What’s the point anyway? The Chosen are only making everyone’s life a mise
ry, and the whole planet is going to be at war any day now, anyway.”
Any hour, more like. Solomon bit his tongue. They passed the plastic-sealed windows and doors of cafes and restaurants, everything looking eerie and strange. The Chosen haven’t told the people that there are two Confederate Marine Corps fleets in high orbit above the planet, he considered. That must be why the boy wasn’t panicking more.
“Like I say, kid. Every thief gets caught one day. You already did. It’s just the natural way of things… But the mark of a really clever one is what happens next. How do they get out of it? What can they offer? Trade? Do?” Solomon said. He couldn’t remember all the times that he had now been ‘caught.’ Not by the Confederate Enforcers of Earth—that had only happened once, and had set him on his path to here, after all—but he had been caught a whole heap of times by private security, or the American Mob, the Mafia, or the Yakuza. What had saved him was that he always had something to trade—a job for a job, information for his freedom…
“Look, you want to continue doing what you’re doing?” Solomon cut to the chase. “You want to be the best thief on Mars? Then start being smarter. There’s a water surveyor down in the hangars called Fela. Go and beg, plead, pray that she’ll take you on, and get yourself moving between the habitats for a living. That will keep you alive,” Solomon said.
If, of course, all of Mars doesn’t become a ball of smoking rock and ruins by next morning. He bit his lip.
“Really? Getting out of Armstrong?” The boy looked up at him with a new expression, and it looked like hope.
“Yeah, sure, why not?” Solomon said. “A smart lad like you should be able to make something work.”
The boy grunted and nodded, and that appeared to be as good a promise as any that Tomas would take his advice that Solomon was going to get. He hoped that he had managed to save the boy’s life, to get him out of the habitat before the war broke out for real…
“We’re here.” The boy stopped beside a large pagoda-like sealed tent that sat beside a dozen or so others, backed onto the stone buildings. They were in a long, cobbled avenue with more of the bay trees and Mediterranean shrubs in pots, and with a line of dimly-glowing LED lights set into the middle of the floor. As Solomon and the others scanned the area, the commander saw the detritus of what would have been a busy market if the entire habitat hadn’t been shut down by his actions: crisp packets and food wrappers beside scattered oddments and even a few credit coins.
Outcast Marines series Boxed Set 2 Page 7
