Outcast Marines series Boxed Set

by James David Victor

  No poly-steel blade. No Jackhammer rifle. She catalogued her inventory. Their kit was already stowed on the schooner, including the armor pieces to their suits. Which meant she only had what was a part of her basic harness provision.

  Which, unluckily for them, means that I have my service knife… Jezebel eased a hand down to her side, where the small knife was locked into place on the harness over her kidneys. It was something she had never had reason to use before, and she knew it was just a necessary precaution for all Marines to be able to cut wires or straps or webbing when they had to. The blade was barely as long as her forefinger, but cruelly sharp.

  It would have to do.

  Jezzy lay still, waiting for a gap in the firing before she moved.

  She only had microseconds to isolate her target, but she had listened to the gun reports, so she had an idea where the nearest must be.

  Southwest corner. She pulled herself up with one hand on the railing, already extending her throwing arm back and turning to the southwest.

  A heartbeat to differentiate between screaming citizen and shooter, but there they were. Not even hiding behind cover, as they must have thought that they had the upper hand. A figure in sandy robes and a hood that swamped their form, apart from the stubby-looking weapon they held.

  Is that a Jackhammer? The thought arrived at the same time her instincts kicked in. She threw the service knife with as much force as she could muster in her awkward position, just as the shooter registered her movement and was looking up, raising the barrel of the Jackhammer up to the balcony—

  “Urk!” the figure gave a guttural shout of pain as they fell back, Jezzy’s knife sticking out from where the hood met the shooter’s chest.

  Phbap! Phbap! More shots sparked off the railing beside her as Jezzy threw herself the other way. There was still the second shooter, and she was all out of knives…

  But not everyone was unarmed, apparently, as two figures emerged from the ambassador’s room beside their own, dressed in deep maroon and raising small handheld guns. It was the two personal assistants, Jezzy saw, and each one had been transformed into a graceful angel of death as they slipped around each other, taking up positions as they fired simultaneously on the second shooter.

  THADA-DAD-DAD! The muzzle flare from their small guns illuminated their pale faces, each one a mask of fury, and then everything was once again silent, aside from the hissing of the gases and the ticking of some damaged machinery somewhere.

  “Clear?” one of the women called.

  “I think so…” Jezzy called back. “That was some nice shooting,” she congratulated them, but the two women just ignored her as they swept their guns back and forth over the available avenues and balconies that joined this one. There appeared to be no other shooters, and for the moment, they appeared safe—relatively.

  “Gold Squad!” There was the sound of running boots, and it was Warden Coates, surrounded by a complement of Nuriyen security, as well as Malady, Karamov, and Kol, who must have been waiting at the ambassadorial schooner. “Report! How is the ambassador?” the warden called.

  “She’s fine, Warden.” The ambassador herself appeared, looking a little warily around her in the smoke. “Your team have already started work, I see…”

  “Cready! Get Her Excellency on board and ship out. Now!”

  “With pleasure…” Jezzy heard Solomon mutter under his breath as he turned to the ambassador. “This way, ma’am,” he said, raising his head to nod at Jezzy. “Rear guard?”

  “Aye, Commander,” Jezzy said, taking up a position behind the ambassador even though she had no weapons to use if they were attacked again.

  5

  Titan

  “Any intelligence on who the attackers might have been?” Solomon asked the ambassador as her schooner broke away from the platform and was already starting to put distance between it and the threat of the past.

  They stood on the flight bridge, with the two personal assistants now apparently functioning as pilot and technical officer. Solomon wondered where they had been trained, as they appeared to have an almost Marine-like efficiency.

  “Private contractors.” The ambassador saw him looking as she leaned against the small railing over the rest of the bridge. The schooner had a scattering of Confederate staff, Solomon saw, but it was a skeleton crew compared to the importance of its mission.

  “The ambassadorial section always travels light,” she had said when explaining the layout of the ship. “Delegations tend to get nervous if you turn up with a full battle fleet at your disposal.”

  “Ambassador Cathleen Ochrie,” she then introduced herself. “And you may call me Your Excellency, ma’am, or Cathleen.”

  Solomon had elected for the first two options so far, as he still wasn’t sure how much power she held over his future—just that someone was trying to kill her.

  “Your Warden Coates is working with Nuryien Security,” Ambassador Ochrie read through the latest transmissions from the platform behind them. “It was an improvised explosive device, doubtless designed to cause more mayhem and panic than it was to actually kill me…”

  “The two shooters were the real assassins.” Solomon nodded. He had sent the rest of Gold Squad below decks to get themselves washed, ready, and kitted up in their light tacticals. Even though they should be safe on board the ambassador’s personal ship, being caught surprised on the platform meant that he didn’t want to take any chances again.

  “Yes, it looks likely. Still no positive identification on them, although it could be anyone. Luna unionists, Martian separatists, Proxima guerrillas…” She shook her head. “Their style, though…an explosion to cause maximum terror and chaos sounds more Martian to me than anything else…”

  Solomon nodded. Mars had long had a volatile reputation, and their own bands of separatists were the most outwardly violent of all, he’d heard before coming to Ganymede.

  “But why would they try to kill you, now of all times?” Solomon pointed out. “If you’ll excuse me being blunt, ma’am—”

  “That’s why I asked for you, after all, Commander Cready,” the woman said.

  “But you’re on your way to negotiate a favorable prisoner release for the colonies, aren’t you? And quite possibly a favorable trade deal for them, too… Why would they kill you now?”

  The ambassador shrugged as if the question was of no real importance. “Oh, a hundred and five reasons, Commander… It could be rival factions within one of the groups—one which wants their own outright war for independence—or it could be just an internal power-struggle between guerrilla gang chiefs.” She shook her head. “There’s no way of telling, but secessionists and separatists are always known for their rather erratic structures. Which is half the reason why we need to bring them into the Confederate fold, not isolate them…”

  “You’re still going ahead with the negotiations?” Solomon said out loud, surprised. “I mean, this was an act of war, wasn’t it?”

  “Don’t say that, Commander—at least not in my presence or anywhere near the colonists, or the press, you hear me, soldier?” The ambassador suddenly rounded on him, her tone like ice but her eyes sparking with fury and threat. Solomon could see that behind her approachable demeanor was a woman who was every bit as tough as the adjunct-Marines she was surrounding herself with. “It is talk like that, rumors and gossip of war, that begin real conflicts, Commander Cready. And no one here wants to go down in history as the person who triggered humanity’s first interstellar war, do we?”

  “As you wish, Ambassador.”

  “I told you, Cathleen or Excellency please, Cready. I can’t stand titles,” she said, dismissing him with a nod and turning back to her screens. “We’ll be jumping within the hour, tell your people to get ready. It’ll only be a short hop to Titan,” she called over her shoulder.

  As it was, Solomon barely had time to get his errant crew in their seats before the Barr-Hawking jump-ship had attached itself to the schooner and had
folded space and time before it, jumping the short distance to Saturn.

  Really, Solomon knew it was an extravagance to jump the short distance between Earth’s fifth and sixth planets. He imagined that it was all an effort to wow the colonists with how much energy and money the Confederacy had to burn.

  Raised from colonial taxes, no less… he thought as the space sickness washed up through him and he felt nauseous. No matter what sort of experimental gene therapy they were giving him, it was clear that it wasn’t doing anything to stop him from feeling sick every time his body was forced to travel through warp.

  They whumped into existence as if they had always been there, the flexible membrane of reality snapping back to its previously regular constitution.

  “Right, load up and suit up, squad!” Solomon was already decoupling himself from the webbing and pulling on his shoulder-pad, the breastplate, and his helmet. “Weapons at the ready.” He nodded to the stand that held all of their personal weapons.

  “Are we expecting trouble, sir?” Kol asked, always the slightly nervier of their team.

  “Well, the ambassador did just survive a bomb plot on a safe Confederate station, so I’m taking no chances,” he said. “From here on in, we have to treat everyone as a potential threat to the ambassador. This might be the ambassador’s chance to make some friends…or it might be some separatist fanatic’s chance to kill her.”

  “Deployment plan?” This came from the sullen Wen, her voice deadpan as she slid her helmet over her head.

  Something is still bothering her, but what? Solomon thought, before realizing that now was not the time anyway.

  “We’ll play it loose for the moment, until we know what sort of rooms she’ll be meeting in, who else is there. For now, we flank her and just be ready to carry her out of there and back to this boat as soon as things get hairy.”

  “Very good.” Wen nodded and clicked her helmet into place.

  “Any more questions anyone? No? Then I guess we should all take a moment to savor the sights!” Solomon called as he clicked his own helmet into place.

  LIGHT TACTICAL SUIT: Active.

  USER ID: Solomon CR.

  BIO-SIGNATURE: Good.

  SQUAD IDENTIFIER: Gold.

  SQUAD TELEMETRIES: Active.

  Sp. Adj. Marine MALADY

  Enhancements: Full Tactical Suit

  Sp. Adj. Marine WEN

  Combat Specialist

  *Elevated heartrate*

  Sp. Adj. Marine KOL

  Technical Specialist

  Adj. Marine KARAMOV

  ALL GOLD SIGNS GOOD… SUITS ACTIVE…

  Mission ID: TITAN

  Strike Group ID: Outcast, Adj. Marine.

  Parent Fleet ID: Seconded to AMBASSADORIAL SECTION

  Squad Commanders: Cready (Gold).

  GROUP-WIDE ORDERS:

  Protect Ambassador Ochrie

  The inside of Solomon’s helmet visor flared and scrolled with holo-projections of suit and squad information. The mission order was ridiculously simple: ‘protect the ambassador.’ That made Solomon almost chuckle. Protect her from what? Everything? Food Poisoning? Saying the wrong things?

  He was worried again by Wen, and he turned his head slightly so that the green holographic arrow of her identifier showed up on the inside of his screen, hanging over her head. Elevated heartrate, he read, staring at her form critically where she stood on the other side of Malady. She wasn’t slouching or leaning, but neither did she appear jittery or nervous or agitated. Of course, he cursed that now he couldn’t get a better look at her face, to see if maybe she was coming down with something. The last thing they needed was to contract a space-virus out here.

  Suddenly, Jezzy moved, half-turning her shoulder to him in an obviously dismissive way. Had she seen me looking at her? Is she annoyed with me? he wondered. It might, in fact, explain her weird behavior the last few days, the specialist commander considered. Maybe that was all it was—she had a bone to pick with him.

  Whatever. He felt the schooner move and did as he had invited the rest of his squad to do: look out of their portholes at what was awaiting them.

  Solomon was immediately struck by the grandeur of Saturn. It was a smaller world than super-massive Jupiter, of course, but it was no less impressive for it. Its ochre, orange, and almost umbral green surface was a constantly dancing sea of gases and vapors, and there, spearing across their vision, was its famously banded ring.

  Solomon wondered if he was simply getting bored of life on Ganymede. Just as he had felt overwhelmed walking into the Nuryien platform, he felt overwhelmed now at the mere sight of another planet.

  Which wasn’t alone.

  Something scudded in front of them, a tiny black object that caught the light every now and again, revealing a sleek metal hide on powerful twin rockets. It was a small passenger craft, little more than a rocket with positional thrusters… He followed its trail as it crossed in front of Saturn, becoming smaller, more indistinct, and harder to see against the backdrop of space. Only its flashing navigational light gave it away as it crossed over the top of the ring and underneath one of Saturn’s many near moons—Rhea or Enceladus maybe, Solomon thought, until it neared…

  Titan. One of the few moons in the solar system with an atmosphere—like Ganymede, ironically, but Titan’s atmosphere was far denser. Solomon wondered how the early Italians, Venetians, or Greeks must have viewed Titan when they first spotted it in the age of space observation—with wonder and awe perhaps.

  But to him and the rest of Gold Squad, it had entirely different connotations.

  It was yellowy, blushed with a burnt orange and much lighter, whiter brilliances in its atmosphere. But that didn’t stop it looking sulfurous to Solomon Cready, like a little droplet of Hell itself had been thrown up into the sky and waited for his inevitable downfall.

  Titan was where the bad people go to die, he remembered the old joke amongst criminals on Earth. It was true. If you had performed a serious enough crime—anything from grand theft to major fraud, and any violent crime with no remorse or hope of rehabilitation—that horrible little poisonous orb was where the Confederacy exiled you to. Solomon gritted his teeth at the injustice of it.

  It was where the warden had argued for him to go ever since he had arrived on Ganymede. No one ever came back from Titan. Even if your sentence was only a paltry seven or eight years, no one came back. Many people speculated that meant that they just died out here, and that the working conditions on Titan were so tough that to be exiled here was effectively a death sentence.

  Although, Solomon also knew that those ‘released’ might also have just as easily decided never to return to near Earth or Luna ever again. I mean, why would you return to the planet that deemed you so much of a risk that they sent you most of the way around the solar system?

  Down there under the nitrogen and methane clouds, Titan was a frozen wasteland of rock mountains, canyons, flood plains of liquid ethane, toxic rivers, and ice mountains…

  But the damn place is stuffed full of nitrogen, Solomon knew, and paradoxically, the purest, cleanest water that you would ever find, if you could drill down through the surface, past the ice plates to the subsurface oceans.

  Which was where the exiled convicts came in. Nitrogen-processing plants shipped out enough of the compound to contribute to humanity’s colonies and terraforming efforts on distant worlds, while the fresh water was drilled and pumped and tested, then used to supply the fleets. In a cosmos where a human-friendly habitat was rare, Solomon guessed that the Confederacy was making every attempt that it could to maximize every useful resource it could. ‘Titan not ready for crop cultivation? Fine, we’ll strip it of its nitrogen and sell it to Proxima instead…’ Solomon imagined some Confederate bigwig declaring.

  Only working in lakes and rivers of flammable ethane or combustible methane, with a subsurface ice plate that could crack under the immense pressures that it only barely held in check, was dangerous business. So dangerous
that none of the mega-corporations wanted to work it, or risk igniting the whole moon in some terrible industrial accident.

  So, the Confederacy uses criminals instead. Solomon’s eyes scanned the sulfurous-looking orb, as if he might be able to see the plight of his fellow kind. People like me, he was only too aware of this fact.

  Looking at Titan was like staring at his own judgement.

  The ambassadorial schooner had no way of landing or breaking atmosphere in Titan, as it was designed as an interstellar craft alone. Luckily, Titan had its own docking station—a rough ‘H’ of metal modules with solar panels peeling from it like an iridescent, golden fungus.

  PERMISSION TO DOCK…GRANTED

  The static-laced radio made the announcement, and the schooner moved past the other circling vehicles to maneuver itself into position. From his place with the others in one of the holds, Solomon and the rest of Gold Squad scanned the other craft that waited outside, trying to figure out which one was likely to be from which colony.

  A sizable amount of the waiting craft were logistics or criminal transporters, though. Solomon even saw one large, blocky Marine transporter, looking like a snub-nosed rectangle with four rotational thrusters at each end.

  Probably here to offload another batch of prisoners. Solomon grimaced.

  Beside that was a tanker, by far the largest of all the craft here, with its steep keel and long, bloated body. Those things cruise all over Confederate space, depositing or picking up fuel. Solomon considered it was probably here to harvest more of Titan’s precious nitrogen for the Outer Worlds.