“He might not be wrong about that part,” Solomon murmured, frowning deeply as he slumped forward and put his head in his hands. I have to try to get to the bottom of this. Why is Hausman saying this about Asquew? Why did his soldiers attack us?
“But to think that Asquew had anything to do with the attack on New York is just ridiculous. She is far too busy attacking Mars,” Solomon said.
“Hausman must have the wrong information,” the ambassador said. “If I can get to speak to him, then we can clear this up…”
“I don’t think that is going to help, Ambassador…” Max said as he pointed to the muted screen, where now the repeating newswire had been replaced by a live-feed picture of Hausman, sitting behind a desk and dressed in a pure white and gold ceremonial uniform. Behind him was the flag of the Confederacy in full color. Max gestured for the sound to come on again immediately.
“People of Earth and Luna, these are dark times indeed for the soul of the Confederacy and the fate of humanity! Whilst one of our planet’s greatest cities has been attacked, and the casualties are high, all is not yet lost!
“This is but one tragedy, and human history, if anything, has taught us that we are a species capable of reaching beyond such tragedies. Of turning their sorrow and hard iron lessons of the soul into the steel that we use to build bigger and better empires! To strike down our enemies, wherever they may be!
“But I do have some very grave news to tell you. It appears that only one of those closest to us could have attempted such a foul and complicated act. Someone who believes that there should be no Confederate Council, and no Confederacy, only herself!”
“No!” Solomon could guess where this diatribe was going, and he already didn’t like it as he half-rose from his seat.
“So, it with great sadness and after much deliberation that I have chosen to share this news with you: the perpetrator behind the bombing of New York, the criminal mastermind who would stop at nothing until she has dismantled all that we hold dear, is none other the Brigadier General Asquew, Commander of the Rapid Response Fleet.”
“Why is he saying that?” the ambassador was saying.
“Can you not tell?” Max, from his stool by the counter muttered grimly.
Solomon rather thought that they all could, but that no one wanted to believe what was about to happen next.
“Asquew’s sin is that of pride, ladies and gentlemen, in believing that she was above her station, and that she could know better than all the rest of us. She believes that SHE will be a better ruler for the Confederacy than any other, and she will use Mars as her base to attack Earth!’
“So, my fellow comrades and friends, I have made a decision. It falls upon me to muster the forces of righteousness and justice against evil. I have placed Earth and Luna under my own protective care, until I have eliminated the threat of General Asquew, whom I now shall strip of all rank and titles, and instead she will henceforth only be known as the traitor Asquew!”
“Oh my god.” The ambassador swept a hand to her mouth.
“Can you see what he is doing?” Max asked as he scowled at the camera. “He’s taking over. He’s just said as much. He’s taking over Earth and the Moon, over the Confederacy.”
“What he’s saying about Asquew isn’t true,” Solomon said fervently. It couldn’t be true, could it?
“Of course not,” Max said with a snort of disgust. “Hausman moved into Luna a few months ago, taking up offices here in the station, and ever since then, we’ve been having problems. I don’t trust him one bit to be telling the truth…”
“Problems?” the ambassador asked.
“People disappearing or getting intimidated by his Marines. Other people I know at Luna docks say that Hausman placed a special ‘securities levy’ on all ships leaving Luna surface.”
“That’s illegal! That’s against Confederacy regulations!” the Ambassador said quickly.
“Well, whether it is legal or not, Hausman did it. He started commandeering storage bubbles here and there all over the Moon, giving the companies that he liked special contracts, and moving his Marines and his equipment in, saying that it was a new positioning of the Near-Earth Fleet,”
“Or it might have been a way to make sure that he had a stranglehold on Earth when the time came…” Solomon said.
Who else had access to thermonuclear devices?
“Tell me, Max… Do you know anything of a company on Luna called Taranis? Taranis Industries?” Solomon suddenly thought.
“Taranis? Ha!” Max laughed and clapped his hands. “That was one of the first companies to be given one of the storage bubbles!”
Solomon shared a dark look with the ambassador. General Asquew had been right. There had been a conspiracy at the heart of the Confederacy, and someone was working with both NeuroTech and Taranis to start a very lucrative war between Earth and the rest of the colonies.
Only it turned out that conspiracy was General Hausman of the Near-Earth fleet himself. “And in the process of making the corporates a whole heap of money, they must have promised Hausman that he would get to rule the Confederacy. He would get to rule Earth,” Solomon said in horror.
11
New Arrivals
1 hour: 13 mins: 28 seconds, the first, more optimistic timer read.
-16 mins: 44 seconds, the despairing one read. At least the second one was quite obviously, glaringly wrong, Sergeant Wen thought.
Jezzy had both timers direct-fed into her power armor telemetries, so that both countdowns flashed slowly just to the right of her eyes as she looked out at the mess that was Pluto.
The Last Call’s administrator had taken her sweet time, as far as Jezzy was concerned, in telling the cruise ships to disembark, and even now she could still see them in the distance, heading out like a pod of gigantic space creatures away from the small planet.
But there was still a lot to do.
“Forward more!” Jezzy called out over her suit radio. She currently hung in space, feeling perfectly warm and comfortable inside her armor, even if she did still feel just a little bit nervous at not having any solid ground beneath her.
In response to her command, the Plutonian tug rather sweetly named the Edith responded by firing its positioning rockets for two small burns, moving it about four hundred meters ahead.
“Haven’t you got enough yet?” said the rather annoyed voice of Fatima Ahmadi over Jezzy’s suit radio. That was another thing that she’d asked to have patched into her suit telemetries—that all communication for this field operation be collated by the Oregon’s mainframe, and then sent out to her suit. Being the acting field commander kind of gave her those sorts of perks.
Ahmadi herself was not on board the Edith, a friend of hers called Joe something-or-other was. Instead, Ahmadi was in the tug that hung above Jezzy and from which she was connected to by the thin lifeline of a poly-filament metal cord.
“Believe me, Ahmadi, when this begins, you’re going to wish that we had more,” Jezzy promised her.
Convincing Ahmadi that she needed to surrender all active duties and hand them over to the Marine Corps had been the easy part, as it happened. It was a marvel what having a colonel in the form of Faraday could do. Jezzy liked him. Faraday was a soldier’s sort of soldier, one who had campaigned for decades, the kind who had signed up as a grunt at the tender age of eighteen and kept plugging away at it until he was at his current high post, hovering somewhere around his early sixties.
In fact, Jezzy thought that Faraday rather reminded her of some of her old Yakuza bosses—the old family, true Japanese ones who had managed to quell a room with a look, and who seemed to exude authority through their very pores. It hadn’t taken long for Faraday to convince Ahmadi that something very big and very terrible was coming their way, but that she could be a part of that glorious struggle.
No, that wasn’t the hard part. What had been the hard part was telling Ahmadi just what it was that they were expecting.
“I stil
l don’t think they’re going to come,” Ahmadi muttered over her suit, as if to prove Jezzy’s reflections. “But, you know, I always had an inkling that one day something like this would come…”
“Really?” Jezzy said distractedly as she made small movements with her hands, ‘swimming’ through the vacuum to turn around and look at what she had managed to create. A field of eight small Plutonian tugs, designed to help the jump-ships in maneuvering the larger ships that came out here, re-provisioning before they jumped further and deeper. Would it be enough? Jezzy thought.
Absolutely not, she had to concede.
“Oh yeah, you know, I started out as skeptical as everyone else. Why would there be aliens after all? Why hadn’t we ever heard from them?” Ahmadi said.
But we did, didn’t we? Jezzy refrained from correcting her. She didn’t have time to disclose the full truth and deal with the emotional fallout. NeuroTech got the Message from the Ru’at first, somehow. They managed to translate it, turn it into useable technology. But still, she knew just what the station administrator meant. No obvious, friendly, deep-space signals like Morse code over the interstellar gulfs.
“But you know, something starts to happen to you after a while of living out here…” the administrator confided. Fatima Ahmadi seemed to be one of those hard-working, mostly-sarcastic workers who didn’t have time for either fools or social niceties. She had clearly long since given up trying to pretend to be proper, or respectful to anyone other than herself.
“I guess it’s living on the edge of the solar system. Every shift, every hour, you get to look out at all of that…space out there, just doing nothing. All of those stars, galaxies, planets… I think that most people on the Last Call think as I do. That it’d be an awful waste of space out there for there to just be us,” Ahmadi said.
Jezzy was about to correct her that Proxima at least would have been a lot better off if the universe had stuck to its principle of cosmic loneliness, but she had to make sure that the eight tugs were in the right position, ready for the next stage of her defense plan.
WHAP!
Jezzy felt it before her human, primate eyes registered what had happened. A wave that rushed up through her body like a sensation of vertigo, spreading from her toes right up through her gut to the top of her head. It was a little like a sensation of nausea, but where had she felt that before?
She remembered what it was in the moment that her eyes registered what had appeared, and for her suit chatter to explode.
Jump Sickness.
“Holy mother of—”
“What is that? What IS that!?”
“Administrator, come in! I got a new arrival! Three klicks dead ahead!”
WHAP! WHAP!
WHAP!
More of the strange Ru’at ‘jump-ships,’ as she was coming to think of them, were appearing, and they did so with a small shimmer of light as they displaced ancient starlight as they traveled.
But it wasn’t like the shimmering fractals and light-illusions created by a Barr-Hawking particle engine, Jezzy could see. These strange cylindrical ships with a pointed prow and with three rotating obsidian rings around their bodies had appeared with the least amount of fuss and light that Jezzy could even imagine.
How many are there? Jezzy remembered to breathe and counted quickly. Ten, twelve, fourteen…
How many had Asquew said there were supposed to be? She couldn’t remember. Her heart had stopped beating.
Thud. Then it kicked back in, and with it, all of Jezzy’s instincts.
“Tug team deploy! Deploy all vessels, and then get the hell out of here!” she shouted over the suit communicator, just as she felt the line attached to her suit pull taut.
“And that’s my cue, lady,” Ahmadi’s voice sounded tight. “Whoever these newcomers are, I don’t think you’re going to like it if I drop a hundred tons of rubble on your head!”
No, Jezzy wouldn’t, she thought as she accelerated to the open airlock, to be hauled into the cone of blackness and thumped to the floor just as the airlock door closed after her, hisses of pressurization steam filling the chamber. Come on, come on! Jezzy was already impatient and standing despite the waves of vertigo and the sudden heaviness in her limbs. She had to get to the bridge of Ahmadi’s tug—the Gingko, strangely—and see if her plan was working.
“The Mary-Lou released!”
The urgent calls of the other Plutonian tug drivers sounded over Jezzy’s helmet as she climbed the short ladder to the cockpit of the Gingko, where Ahmadi was already pulling the levers to release her own lumpen cargo.
Jezzy’s feet shifted as the entire tug shuddered, and she saw the green indicator diagram on Ahmadi’s desk screen—a tiny, stylized depiction of the Gingko itself—start to empty.
Below their feet, the heavy lower hold doors of the Gingko and the other tugs were opening like the lower jaws of some draconian beast. They even spewed high-velocity gases as suddenly the traces of atmosphere inside the haulage holds normalized with that of the vacuum of space.
And with the gases came dark shapes of all sorts of sizes—from as small as the severely-cut nails on Jezzy’s hand, to the size of the cockpit she was standing in.
Pluto was a transport hub, essentially. Despite its growing eminence as a tourist attraction, its main purpose in the scheme of the Confederacy was the refitting, refueling, and repairing of the deep-field ships that stopped here before their long journeys to Proxima, Trappist, Barnard’s Star, and others.
Which meant, in no uncertain terms, that Pluto had a lot of mechanical engineers at the Last Call, and wherever there are mechanics, there had to be engine parts.
Each of the tugs stationed between the Last Call and the arriving Ru’at fleet spewed collections of metal that they had been transporting from one hulk to another, or else picked up from the various ‘holding zones’ where collections of scrap and reusable metal were kept, magnetized to stationary drone satellites. There were nuts and bolts, any of which could cause a catastrophic collapse if they hit the right ship in the perfectly wrong place.
But that wasn’t all. There were also girders that had been shorn from their craft after failed the rigorous safety tests, or entire plate sections of outer hulls, as well as the omnipresent flexible steel and rubberized insulation that the Confederate starship engineers packed into the spaces between outer and inner hulls.
The mass of detritus, powered by the differences in pressure, rolled and rotated outwards from each tug as they slowly rose out of the debris field and started to pull away.
Is it going to work? It was a haphazard and a desperate plan, Jezzy knew. But then again, she also knew—as well as Colonel Faraday knew—that their job here was to launch a first ‘last’ stand. Faraday had seen the footage of the Ru’at jump-ships and the Ru’at mothership. They both knew just what was expected of them: to stand and fight for as long as they were capable, if the Ru’at showed the first sign of attack.
“Fatima! Oh frack, I’ve got a problem… The bay doors won’t open!” Ahmadi’s console lit up with the incoming message. It was Joe, Fatima Ahmadi’s friend piloting the Esther, one of the furthest of the tug ships.
“Oh crapsticks…” Fatima’s hand blurred as she selected the scanners to magnify the picture of her friend’s ship on the desk-screen.
There was the Esther, still exuding gas and bits of scrap metal, but she was slowly starting to spin on her axis as her haulage hold doors had only opened a few meters—not the ten or so meters required for proper deployment. As Jezzy watched, she saw the Esther firing her positioning rockets to keep out of the enlarging debris field that they had created.
All the other tugs had flown safely away from the mess that they had created. That had been the trickiest part of the whole procedure, Jezzy and Fatima knew. She had needed experienced tug pilots to be able to leave the manmade asteroid field as soon as they had created it and before the spiral dynamics of vacuum-objects saw the bits of metal colliding with their own ship!
Behind them, the Ru’at jump-ships were remaining stubbornly inactive, as if they were amused by this palsied effort of humanity to stand in their way.
Ahmadi zoomed in more, and the close-up image of the Esther’s partially-opened hold doors grew on the desk as Fatima fought to keep the cameras trained on the twisting tug ship.
“Joe. You got a blockage. Starboard front corner. Something’s jammed against the door pistons!” Ahmadi was saying, and the image showed a chunk of scrap metal that hadn’t rushed out of the hold as it should have done but had somehow become wedged against the large pistons that opened and closed all hold doors.
“What? I’ve still got a half-full hold. I can’t fly out of here like this— TZZRK!”
Suddenly, the large image was knocked out of view, and Joe’s incoming message snarled into static.
“Joe! Joe, come in! Repeat: Esther, respond to hail!” Ahmadi was shouting down the archaic microphone that these old tugs were equipped with. Jezzy looked out of the cockpit window to see that the Esther had slumped to the side, its front maw still losing debris at a slow rate, but there was now also a plume of gases from the far side, turning the tug over and over.
“Joe!”
“TZZZK” I’m okay, boss… I got hit by some of the debris. I’m losing atmosphere!” Joe’s shouted.
Oh no, Jezzy thought. She had known that this might be a possibility, that the tug drivers themselves would be performing a very tricky and exacting maneuver. Fatima had assured her that her pilots were good enough.
“Do they come equipped with escape pods?” Jezzy asked in horror, one eye still on the motionless ships. This was not how she wanted her first exercise in command to go, with the sudden and senseless death of a civilian.
“Yes, but that would be a bad idea…” Fatima was already pulling levers and firing her own positional rockets to rise high above the debris field, arcing towards the front line. “As soon as Joe’s escape pod fires, it’s bound to hit some of that wreckage. It might survive, but those things don’t have any navigational abilities. They just automatically fly to the nearest safe harbor.”
Outcast Marines series Boxed Set 2 Page 32
