All of this happened in a fraction of a second, and Solomon was already rolling to one side as he felt the warm wash of the painkillers, followed by the electric excitement of the stimulant flood through his body.
FZZZT! Another purple-white beam burnt the patch of grass he had landed on, and Solomon pushed himself up to his feet, raised his shotgun, and—
Click. It was empty.
Frack!
Luckily, however, Menier’s shotgun wasn’t empty. BOOM! He fired up at the balcony beside Solomon, pumping his shotgun for it to click uselessly as he, too, ran out of shells and then threw the shotgun to the floor in disgust, instead taking the rifles from his shoulder and throwing one to Solomon.
FZZZT! One of the cyborgs had managed to shoot out Arlo’s knee and he spun to the ground, grunting in pain.
“Menier!” Solomon hit the safety button and fired three, quick-fire rounds before running to his squad member. “Can you walk?”
“I’ll be fine,” Menier spat, growling in pain as Solomon seized him by the shoulders and dragged him to the nearest cover of an ornamental rock and tree.
“Look at this mess.” Menier pointed at the blackened and mangled shape that had been his left boot.
“Stay down,” Solomon said, turning to fire several more shots back at the advancing, implacable enemy.
“Frack that!” Menier hissed, pushing himself to a standing position, wincing in pain. “It’s not too bad. Not broken, I think, and the stimulants sure are helping…” POP! POP! He added a few more shots to Solomon’s.
He saved my life, he remembered. Out there on Ganymede. I owe this man the same. But what weapons did he have left that could save either of their lives?
Without the rest of the Outcast Marines there to keep their numbers in check, the palace terrace was now starting to fill up with more of the cyborgs. At least three had clanked and stumbled their way down the steps and were advancing across the gardens towards them.
“We need cover…” Solomon gritted his teeth. He refused to die out here. He refused to let anyone else he was supposed to be responsible for die.
Flak System. Activate.
Solomon took a leap of faith. He didn’t even know if this tactic would work with things like cyborgs, but he did it anyway. It was all that he had left, after all. He took three lunging steps out from the rock, seeing the cyborgs raise their particle-gun hands to track his movements—
And he fired the power armor’s internal flak system.
This time, it was like getting tapped by Corporal Malady, as he felt multiple ruptures from the shoulders of his suit and deafening bangs above his head.
Micro-weapons ports had opened on the shoulders of Solomon’s suit and fired tiny rockets like fireworks into the sky around him, where they exploded with streamers of metal wire, coils of foil, and smoke.
The sound of the multiple booming explosions was disorientating enough, and the smoke released quickly obscured the image of the palace in front of him as flashes of silver filled the sky like metal rain.
FZZZT! One bolt shot through the white cloud and missed Solomon by a wide mark, but another hit one of the falling metal fragments, suddenly creating a real fireworks display as the super-charged particles discharged, forming a spider’s web of lightning bolts that expanded to all of the near fragments of metal flak in the air between Solomon and the advancing cyborgs.
“Run, Menier! Solomon was calling, starting to turn and jog backwards.
Arlo Menier couldn’t run per se, but he managed to hop and collide with Solomon as they ran behind their bank of dispersing cover, across the lawn and towards the brick wall—
PHWOOOSH!
PHWOOOSH!
Something—or two somethings, to be precise—screamed overhead and exploded on the terrace of the imprimatur’s palace, sending cyborg bodies everywhere.
It was Malady and the ambassadorial ship, rising above the wall and moving forward to hover over the two Outcasts as it fired its few weapons at the attacking cyborgs.
“You waited? You idiots!” Solomon snapped up at them.
“We’re throwing you a line. Hold on,” Jezzy returned over the Gold channel as two metal wire lines were extended from the belly of the wedge-shaped craft for Solomona and Arlo to catch a hold of—
“No, sir,” Menier said, and Solomon saw that the man he had just tried to save refused to take the line offered.
“What? Get on board right now, that’s an order, Marine!” Solomon said in alarm. He knew what Arlo was attempting to do.
“I said that I would stay and help Trade Minister Wylie survive. And fight.” The Outcast Marine was already hopping to the edge of the garden wall, following the line of retreating Proximians as they ran down the lanes and parklands beyond the palace. “I promised him, Lieutenant,” Arlo said with a shrug before disappearing.
“Lieutenant. Ship scanners indicate more cyborgs approaching from the city. If we’re going to go, we have to go now…” Jezzy was saying. “We have ten of the Proximians on board, and another ten went with Trade Minister Wylie.”
Solomon swore, casting one lingering look at the gap in the wall where Arlo Menier had so recently hopped through. Is that what this life is all about, this training? he thought. Learning how to keep your promises. Learning how to be an honorable man.
Solomon did not feel very honorable as he seized the wire rope and pulled. The internal winch system took up the slack and pulled him into the air, leaving Proxima behind.
Invasion: Pluto
Outcast Marines, Book 6
Prologue: The Visitor
The ship hung heavy over Earth’s sister planet of Proxima. A roughly ovoid black mark marring the otherwise pristine blues, whites, and greens of the generous planet.
The alien ship didn’t move, it didn’t fire positioning rockets, and it wasn’t dropping any more incendiary devices onto the planet’s capital city of Proxa. It was, however, staying in position, though the Confederacy and the colonists had no idea why.
The vessel had been like this for two Earth-normal solar days after its domination of Proxa, and after it had unexpectedly entered Proxima space without alerting either the space-based missile system or Proxima’s long-range telescopes. The cyborg army developed by the Proximian mega-corp NeuroTech had performed their task well and had pacified the planet in apparent tandem with the arrival of this strange behemoth.
But for now, it was still.
Not everything was motionless in the space around the planet though, as a small dark gray object, two cylinders attached at its middle to a set of four outboard thruster rockets, turned off its engines and continued to coast towards the giant craft. This new arrival was tiny compared to the much larger stain upon Proxima’s atmosphere.
But that was the point.
“Silent running activated,” whispered the stern man in the cockpit of the tiny vessel. His Marine Corps helmet was underlit by the glow of his scout vessel’s dashboard lights. The Intrepid had been tasked with gathering data on this new arrival in human space, and although it was well versed in covert operations, the Intrepid and her two-man crew had never seen anything like this.
Initial Scans Complete: Downloading Data…
Sergeant Joe Edmunds checked the Intrepid’s readouts while he waited for their preliminary scans to complete. The thrusters were off, and there was a shield system in place around the engines. There was little that he could do about the Intrepid’s electrical static, but the craft had been designed with graphite and rubber panels covering its internal structure, only allowing the scout vessel’s scans out in a narrow beam that would be hard to pick up.
Well, hard for any normal human vessel, anyway.
Approximate Diameter: 5.6 Kilometers…
Approximate Height: 500 Meters …
“She’s big,” Edmunds whispered. Even if his voice did not betray any emotion, the way that one of his hands tremored slightly did.
“What electrical readings you getting of
f of that thing?” murmured the only other occupant of the Intrepid, Edmunds’s long-term service buddy, a woman named Aliyah Rhatnari. They’d worked together for many years now, usually being catapulted to some far-flung colony like Proxima, or else ghosting past the deep-field ships as they picked up radio and electrical traffic.
Colonial imprimaturs might claim that they were spies for the Confederacy, and perhaps they wouldn’t have been wrong.
“We got a lot.” Edmunds clicked on the screen beside the flight sticks to show a digital display of the craft ahead of them in faux dayglow colors. Bright white spots like heat were scattered across the black mark, and the ovoid disk itself was colored a ‘noisy’ orange-yellow, with a large ‘cloud’ of red stretching beyond it into space.
“It’s got a huge electrical footprint. It must have some kind of internal reactor system in there. Possibly several…” Edmunds said uneasily as he tried to keep it together. Just gather the data, the young Marine told himself. There is nothing else you have to do. Gather the data for better minds to crunch…
“No observable thruster system,” Rhatnari said. “Although I’m definitely picking up evidence of hydrocarbons and radioactive particles.”
“Did the witnesses say that they saw positioning rockets?” Edmunds breathed. He couldn’t remember much of Brigadier General Asquew’s briefing, which itself was unusual, since Joe Edmunds had been selected for his role partly because of his ability to remember everything.
But it was the panic, he knew. He’d done the battle psychology classes, he knew what was happening. His mind was forgetting key facts, because it was trying to scream at him to turn the boat around and get the hell out of here, out of sight of that alien thing.
But I am not in danger. We’re not in danger. The mission is unthreatened, he reminded himself as he gritted his teeth and held onto the flight sticks a little tighter.
“No data on that,” Rhatnari replied. “No reports on how it got into orbit, or what was powering it.”
Wonderful, Edmunds thought. Without any way of knowing how it moved, or what its propulsion system could be, then they also had no way of knowing just what the craft was capable of.
Well, apart from being perfectly capable of leveling a city, that is, Edmunds remembered.
“It would happen to the Proxies, wouldn’t it…” Edmunds muttered. He didn’t like being out here—especially not as he hung in a tin can outside a devastatingly large unknown spacecraft—and he didn’t like the fact that the Marine Corps was expending so many resources to help out Proxima, of all people.
“Edmunds!” Rhatnari said in a low, scandalized whisper.
“What? I heard that Proxima probably built the thing itself. Maybe this is just some stunt,” Edmunds said, clutching at straws as he once again tried to disbelieve what his eyes were telling him. “This could be Proxima’s way of telling the Confederacy they’ve got some big, bad, technology…”
“And they flattened their own capital city to prove it?” Rhatnari hissed back. “Stop being willfully ignorant. You know what this is, you can see it as much as I can.”
“It’s not aliens, Aliyah. Come on!” Edmunds said a little too forcefully, a little too loudly. But even if his assertion sounded ridiculous to his partner, she could at least understand why he would cling to it.
Humanity had never encountered aliens. Not in a hundred and more years that they had been a spacefaring species. They had developed jump technology and had been able to seed their progeny all the way out here to Alpha Centauri, yet they still had never picked up even distant radio chatter of another species out there.
Humanity—which was to say, the Confederacy—had sent out probes and deep-field drone satellites to search for other forms of intelligent life. They’d constructed at least two more vast, space-based telescopes, one hanging out past Pluto, and another not so far from the edge of the Alpha Centauri System.
But still nothing. No distant lights on far-off worlds. No telltale chemical signatures of processed molecules discerned from radio telescopes.
Nothing.
Until now, that was.
But how did they get here? Do they have jump travel? The questions were maddening for Corporal Rhatnari. Even if they had some strange form of propulsion system that the Confederacy couldn’t detect, the sheer physics of it meant that the telescopes should have been at least able to see a vessel of that size coming for them.
Which only, really, left two conclusions for a clever woman like Rhatnari to come to…
That this vessel is so advanced, it might as well be a freaking act of God, or…
Proxima’s forward alert warning systems has been compromised…
Either way, Rhatnari knew that they were looking at something that could outclass anything the Confederacy had. She examined the pictures of the alien craft that their super-sensitive cameras were taking, all the time.
“Its surface is modular, I think…” The corporal toggled the images’ contrast and re-skinned it in different color modes to get a better look. She could see sections of what appeared to be metal on the outer side like tubes, boxes, chassis, shapes. More complicated, shadowed lines filled the spaces between the shapes. Pipes? Wires?
“Does it even have a solid internal body?” Rhatnari wondered aloud. It was like she was looking at the exposed parts of an engine, a solid structure from a distance, but was actually a modular system of parts placed alongside and on top of each other.
“You done? I think we’ve got enough material….” Edmunds was saying, his hands itching to get out of there. He didn’t want to admit that what he was looking at was an alien spacecraft ahead of him. It was too mechanical, too industrial, and too freaking large!
“Shouldn’t aliens all be light, glowing lights and ethereal music, anyway?” Edmunds muttered, remembering some ancient childhood Confederate film.
“No, that’s ghosts you’re thinking about. Or angels, maybe,” Rhatnari said. “Aliens can be anything the universe can make them to be.”
Which was the maddening thing about when she looked at the thing in front of her. It was obviously a constructed thing. Some machine or what passed for alien hands must have formed those pipes, must have welded that metal together, must have extracted the minerals and ores to get there, must have thought about what the best way to achieve their vision was.
But there doesn’t seem to be any provision for life support at all, Rhatnari thought. Or at least not for any oxygen-breathing, 1:1 Earth-normal gravity sort of life, she conceded.
There was a complicated snarl of shapes, however, like processors and pipes that struck across one-half of the ovoid and ended in an uneven set of metal plates at one end… Outlets? Grills? Exhausts?
“I want to take a closer look at seventeen degrees northeast spin-ward off pole,” Rhatnari called out the Proxima-centric reference point. It was easier, she knew, to always base their directions either on the direction of Earth far, far away from them, or else use the nearest object’s geography, like Proxima.
“I’ll move the cameras.” Edmunds said, reaching for the controls that would swivel their tiny, telescope-like scanning devices.
“No, I meant we need to get closer. Fly due spin-ward, off its northeast bow,” Rhatnari said.
What? Edmunds blinked. “We’re under orders not to engage…”
“I know that, Edmunds, I’m not asking you to fire at the thing, just fly a bit closer, that’s all!” his companion said. “And seeing as you reminded me, let me remind you that our orders were to collect information. I think that structure there could be some kind of propulsion system…”
“I’m not sure about this, Aliyah…” Edmunds started to say.
“Joe, come on. Through blood, fire, and fury, remember?” Rhatnari quoted the Marine Oath at him, and even Joe Edmunds had to admit that she was right. They had been tasked with gathering information because they were the best placed and the best trained for this mission. Who knew, there might even be a comme
ndation in it for them. And wasn’t like the thing had even moved in the past forty-eight hours.
Maybe it’s dead, he told himself.
But it really wasn’t.
1
Inhuman Hands
First Lieutenant Solomon Cready stood at attention behind Ambassador Ochrie’s chair, looking at the black marble table that dominated the center of General Asquew’s audience chamber on board the dreadnaught Indomitable. His thoughts still circulated with what he had seen in Proxa, and before that, on Ganymede.
The sky on fire, metal man-things stalking through the Proximian streets, and the ruins of the Ganymede Training Facility. Of being overrun on Ganymede by the things, and having to order everyone to fight, just fight, wherever they stood and however they could.
The cyborgs did not hesitate. They did not slow down or suffer from exhaustion. One minute, they were statues, and the next, they were coming for you. Even with their limbs blown off, they would still come for you.
On the other side of the table sat the general herself, in deep red and gold battle-plate. The only other occupant at the table was Mariad Rhossily, the Imprimatur of Proxima, whom Solomon and his crew had rescued from her colony-world not seventy-two hours prior.
“Ambassador, Imprimatur.” Asquew nodded sternly at them both, before inclining a slight nod to Cready as well. “Thank you for coming at such short notice,” she said seriously.
It was short notice, Solomon thought. He swore he could still smell Proxa’s smoke in his nostrils, and he still hadn’t managed to find any time to clean and check his power armor yet. With the Ganymede Training Facility gone, the Outcasts had no base, no home, meaning they were bunking where they could in ad hoc rooms in the mega-ships of the Confederate Marine Rapid Response Fleet.
Outcast Marines series Boxed Set 2 Page 26
