“Okay, I’ve done my basic piloting in command classes. Anyone here got better experience than that?” Cready asked.
“I used to pilot freighters between the satellites and the space elevators,” Kol surprised Cready by saying. It was weird thinking of any of them having a life before this, let alone the life of a space transporter pilot who had regularly traversed the complicated and busy spaceways from any of Earth’s three space elevators and the blanket of satellites that constantly moved through the upper atmosphere.
“Good enough for me. Think you can handle a Marine scout?” Solomon asked.
The suited Kol shrugged. “Can’t be more complicated than a two-person hauler, sir,” he said, and Solomon could hear the grin in his voice.
“Commander Cready,” this time it was the absurdly floating megalith that was Malady’s turn to speak. “I believe that, although not against regulations, the Marine Corps will expect that their own Marine training will be sufficient to perform any operation in an away mission.” Malady’s tone was precise and exact.
“Which I guess is your way of saying that it should be me piloting that thing, because I’m the one that has been given the simulation training?” Solomon said.
“I merely mean that if we wish to avoid the ire of our supervisors, Commander…” Malady corrected.
Well, Solomon could heartily agree with that sentiment at least. He knew that Coates, at least, would be looking for any dereliction of orders on his part, but he hadn’t been given a direct order to pilot the scout ship himself, had he? And besides which, he made up his mind. “Well, I take your point Malady, but right now, I would feel far more comfortable if we had a Marine behind the wheel of this ship who had actually flown a real spaceship, not just a simulation.”
“As you see fit, Commander,” Malady said, and that was that. When all of the squads were floating in front of their bulkhead doors, the lights over each turned green and steam suddenly hissed into the corridor.
“Brace!” Cready called out, as their room was pressurized and their metal combat boots thumped to the floor as the atmospheres inside and out equalized.
“Looks like they’ll even give us some breathable atmosphere when we’re out there!” Cready tried to sound ‘peppy,’ but none of his crew answered him. Fine. He started to wind the crank that released the bulkhead door. More steam followed as the inside of a small craft on the other side was revealed. Solomon suddenly realized it must be docked on the side of the transporter—alongside ten or twelve others—and not inside the transport at all.
“Kol, up front with me.” Cready jumped down into the craft to find that it was remarkably simple. A large, slightly wedge-shaped tube of a ship, with one pilot and co-pilot seat up front under the cockpit screens, in front of desks of controls and levers. Behind the piloting seats, the stations and instrumentation continued with another chair waiting to take one of the Outcasts, which Cready guessed had to be comms, navigation, or technical.
“Karamov, technical seat behind us,” Solomon indicated as he strapped himself into the co-pilot seat, allowing Kol to take the pilots seat.
Behind the ‘command’ end of the scout vessel was a very small bay area with storage lockers, a spare seat with no designation, and then a set of metal stairs leading to the engine rooms.
“Malady?” Solomon called.
“Aye, Commander, I understand. You want me to talk to the engines for you.” Malady thumped to the floor, barely fitting down the central bay, and disappeared down the steps to what must be the engine room.
Well, actually I wanted someone back there with enough protective armor who could handle it if there is a malfunction back there, Solomon thought. He also remembered the way that Malady had managed to talk to the Ganymede mainframe computer—Oracle—merely by connecting to one of the many ports on his suit. It paid having a cyborg member of your squad.
“Are you seriously trying to tell me that I have to play nurse, then?” Wen asked, moving to the only spare seat left, the empty one underneath the overhead storage lockers. There were apparently two pull-out medical gurneys, and a host of spare equipment fitted into storage boxes at foot level. “I bet it’s because I’m a girl, isn’t it?” She was not impressed, even though she did have the exact same first aid emergency training as the rest of them, and she would be able to cope admirably as a combat nurse when they came across the survivors of the Kepler.
“Not a gender thing, just short straw, I’m afraid,” Solomon said. “And besides which, if you look at the bay floor, I think that’s the exit hatch to disembark. That means you get to be the first to jump out at any enemies if we have to do something up close and personal.”
“Now you’re talking,” Wen muttered over the suit-to-suit controls, before settling into her seat.
Right. Everyone’s on board, we’re good to go, Solomon thought, looking around at the co-pilot’s dashboard as he tried to remember his lessons.
Which of course he could in perfect, crisp detail.
Solomon had never stopped to wonder how he could memorize the floor plans of museums and private corporate banks with such ease, nor how he could memorize the individual circuit diagrams of various security scanners and sensors, back in his previous job. It was one of the many natural aptitudes that had meant it was easy for him to become a thief, and easy for him to decide to go to New Kowloon, but now…
With the addition of Serum 21 to his own genetic structure, Solomon wondered if he had always been this good at recalling every detail, or whether it was his mutant, extra genes that was making it easy for him to pull up the schematics of the scout craft controls in his mind, from a memory of his study hall and command classes.
“This should be the one then.” It was like having an invisible manual inside his head, as he started running through the decoupling procedure.
The hatch that led to the transporter bulkhead clanged shut automatically and whirred into a pressure seal. Then there was the dull whumpf as the engines far behind them fired up.
“Engines working and all good to go,” Malady’s voice informed everyone over the suit-to-suit comms.
“Malady, I only want a fifteen-percent injection. Keep the engines on a low burn until we’re clear of the transporter,” Kol said, sounding suddenly calmer than Solomon had heard him sound for a long while.
I think Gold Squad just found our pilot. Solomon grinned, listening in as Kol directed Malady on the precise running of the thruster engines. The young criminal Outcast had taken to his position with ease, as he started warming up the positioning thrusters and counted down.
“Three…two….one…decoupling from parent ship. Decoupling now,” he called out loudly, lifting the flight handles very gently toward him and easing them away as the scout vessel juddered and suddenly felt—different. Untethered.
“Technical!” Kol called out with a little more urgency.
“I’m on it.” Karamov’s hands moved over his own controls as he at last figured out how to throw up the overhead display of the scout vessel’s sensors. Suddenly, Solomon could see screens of smaller graphs and images that showed a three-sixty view of the other scout vessels nearby plus the much larger transporter ship hovering behind all of them. To Solomon’s eyes, the scene looked like some alien mother-bug was sporing its insect offspring around it in a cloud of movement and activity.
“What are all those blips?” he asked, looking at the holographic overlay on the screens above him. In front of the scout vessels, there appeared to be a cloud of smaller markers, indicating…something.
“Ah.” Karamov didn’t sound very pleased. “That would be the Erisian Asteroid Field.”
10
Raid!
“Evasive action!” Kol called out. Solomon beside him in the co-pilot’s chair thought that he really should be feeling more of a reaction to this apparent emergency, but since it was the third time that Kol had called this, he just knuckled down and concentrated on working the sidereal positioning thrusters.
The Marine scout spun on its front right thruster, sweeping its larger engines up as though it were about to tip back over head, and narrowly avoided a large chunk of black and silver rock that had been about to take out their engine room.
Not that Kol and Cready’s quick maneuvers got them out of immediate danger, however, as they were now about to be sandwiched between two much larger asteroids rolling towards them.
“Fracking stars!” Solomon swore, as Kol punched the firing buttons to the main thrust engines, sending them shooting forward out of the way of the giant pieces of space rock.
“Three o’clock starboard!” Karamov called out, indicating that there was another imminent collision about to happen. Solomon hit the starboard positioning thrusters, and the vessel rolled out of the way, accompanied by Kol firing the main engines to throw them through an opening in the asteroid field.
Watch out! For an awful moment, Solomon didn’t think that they were going to make it. It would just be his luck to get flattened by a giant piece of space rock out here on the edge of the solar system.
Almost…
“YES!” With a whoop, Kol had managed to plunge them out of the underside of the field, and for a blissful moment, their screens cleared as they entered a much larger area of space, bare of murderous bits of rock.
“Technical?” Solomon didn’t waste any time returning to the mission parameters. “Any sign of our ship?”
“Scanning, Captain,” Karamov called out. He cast the scan results to the overhead cockpit screens as Kol repositioned the craft to look up at the asteroid field from their current position. Distantly, Solomon could see the small flashes of light from the other Outcast scout vessels as they bisected and quartered the field from above.
On the screens above, Solomon saw two images from Karamov’s scans. One was their own, a radiating green circle that did little apart from highlight just how many bits of metal-pounding rock lay above them. The other, however, was a much larger map of the Erisian Asteroid Field from above, with many such overlapping, radiating green circles.
“This is the Fleet scan chart,” Karamov called. “They’ve already covered about half, running from the Sol-ward end out.”
Solomon muttered his agreement that he could see. None of the other crews had apparently raised a hail or a distress signal, so he had to assume that no one had found the Kepler station-ship yet.
But how is a thing the size of a small town hiding out there? Solomon wondered. Even if some of the asteroids were so large as to be almost moonlets in their own right, the sensors should have been able to pick up the more complicated signatures of metal alloys and poly-plastic. Not to mention the electrical transmissions from the ship.
Unless it’s powered down, Solomon thought. That would explain the lack of radio frequencies to detect, but that still left the unexplained lack of unique metal signatures that made up the Kepler.
Oh, of course… Solomon suddenly realized. “Karamov, run a chemical analysis on that field, will you?”
“I’m already scanning for poly-steel, carbon-glass, and titanium alloy, Commander,” Karamov said. “Even if the Kepler has broken apart, we should be reading signatures.”
“Show me everything,” Solomon said. Why couldn’t everyone think as fast as he could, he thought in exasperation.
“Okay.” Karmov did as instructed and overhead, the green circle radiated once more before a line of scientific jargon began to scroll down the side just beside it. Solomon’s eyes scanned over the results.
“Carbon, iron, nickel, water-ice, magnetite, I knew it!” he said. “That’s why we can’t find the Kepler. The asteroid field is full of iron and magnetite. The whole thing is generating a low-frequency charge, messing up our sensors!” Solomon said. He was no engineer or scientist, but he knew basic chemistry, both from his stealing days and his strategy lessons on Ganymede.
Magnetite was especially conductive of electrons. As was iron, he knew. Put the two together and you created an almost permanent-loop battery, which emitted a wave of ‘static’ that would effectively hide any ship that was inside it.
But it hasn’t affected our scout ships, because we’re all keeping above and below the field, not entering into it, Solomon thought.
There was really only one answer to the dilemma, in that case. “Kol? I want you to set a course for the darkest, largest bit of the field over there.” Solomon indicated the mess of asteroid boulders that were untouched by any of the ship’s scanners.
“As soon as we go in, we’ll lose contact with the rest of the group,” Karamov advised.
“We’re not going to find the Kepler hanging around out here on the edges, either,” Solomon said grimly. “Look’s like we’ll have to do this search the good old-fashioned way.” His hands flickered over the controls, and floodlights turned on all over the small scout’s hull, casting an eerie, sublime glow on the rocks around them.
“Take us in, Kol,” Cready said.
“Aye, Commander.” Kol’s face was set in a pinched mask of concentration as he engaged the main engine thrusters, and they moved forward into the dark.
“Twelve-percent injection,” Malady’s voice confirmed Kol’s recent request over their suit comms. The Marine scout slowed to barely a crawl, as all around them the large bodies of the asteroids rose like floating mountains, or icebergs.
There were whole canyons and gulleys in here, Solomon thought as they moved their careful way forward between the rocks. It was a landscape that was constantly changing, constantly moving, but at least here in the center of the asteroid field the movements were much slower and more sluggish. The high electron charge created a very weak gravity field, keeping these rocks moving only meters at a time, not tens of meters in the more disturbed edges.
The asteroids were much larger here as well, only a few smaller than the scout craft. Most were many times larger. Solomon saw the tracks of meteorite scars on the rocky walls, as well as impact craters and cracks through the schists of reflective rock. It was an alien place he was traveling through, and he couldn’t understand for the life of him why the super-large station-ship had ever dreamed that it could navigate through here.
Tock! A small sound made him look up at the screen. A tiny metal knock somewhere on the hull from outside.
It must have just been a bit of rock bouncing off the hull, he thought, thinking nothing of it until it happened again.
Tock-tock.
Solomon would have ignored the noise as everyone else was doing, peering at the screens or out of the portholes around them to see if they could get a visual on anything that could be a part of a Confederate deep-field station-ship.
But there was something about that small metal noise that was bugging Solomon.
Tock-tock-tock.
“Just a few rocks,” Solomon muttered to himself. Who goes into an asteroid field, after all, not expecting to get hit by bit of passing rocks?
Just not in the exact same place.
“Wen, get eyes on our rear starboard hull,” Solomon called out. That was what was bothering him. That those sounds were all coming from one position on the vessel. Which was crazy. What were the chances of them being hit in the exact same spot multiple times in a row?
And we’re under propulsion, as well… he thought. Which meant that either something must have come untethered and was attached to their outer hull, or that something was keeping pace with them.
“On it, Commander.” Wen jumped to the task, moving down the length of the small bay to the trapdoor that led to the low hold and external docking ports. While her voice disappeared from Solomon’s hearing, it re-emerged a moment later in his suit-to-suit radio.
“Standard hold configuration,” she reported as she moved. “Lots of spare emergency equipment down here. Portholes on both sides, and decompression chambers that must lead outside…” she announced.
“Moving to the rear starboard porthole. What am I looking for, Commander?” Jezzie asked.
&nbs
p; “Oh, anything that could have come loose, or—” Solomon was halfway through saying, just as he heard a small intake of breath and Wen’s radio suddenly crackled into static.
TSSSSSSS!
“Jezzie!” Solomon said, unclipping his harness and jumping up, just as all hell broke loose in the small hold of the craft beneath them.
BADA-THAB-THAB-THAP!
The bright flashes and the snapping bone cracks as someone fired weapons down there. “Wen! What the frack is going on?!” Solomon had already run to the bay trapdoor, just as there were loud CLANGS from all around.
“What the—” He looked up, just as Kol suddenly shouted.
“Holy frack!”
There, emblazoned on the front cockpit screen and clinging onto the outside of the vessel, was the figure of a human. Another silhouetted head and shoulders crossed in front of the wall portholes.
What’s going on? We’re being boarded! Solomon grabbed his Jackhammer in an instant.
The figures on the windows outside weren’t Confederate Marines. If anything, they didn’t look to be soldiers at all as their spacesuits bore no regalia or military emblems. Solomon did see that each one had some sort of red design on their chest. A smuggling gang? Mercenaries?
“Raiders!” Karamov called out in alarm.
Solomon cursed. He should have known. The raiders were notorious for doing this—lying in wait in out of the way asteroids or nebula fields, before launching lightning-fast raids to dismantle and overpower any ship deemed valuable. He’d heard that most of them were disgruntled colonists who had managed to steal a ship or two, but there were conspiracy theories out there that said that some of the raiders were actually funded by the colonies as a sort of illegitimate navy. Or even by various mega-corporations, as a way to target their competitor’s ships.
Outcast Marines series Boxed Set Page 23
