There was a scattering of smaller craft like the one that Solomon and the others had already seen crossing Saturn—patrol or scout ships, he assumed, as the prison moonlet was permanently classified a top priority risk.
And then came the colony ships.
The Martians had brought with them one of their characteristic saucers, half the size of the ambassador’s schooner and looking more like a russet-iron doughnut than an actual saucer. Its thick rim was a band of black grills, vents, sensors, and flickering positional thrusters, giving it an aggressive, growling appearance.
“That’ll be the asteroid belt.” Karamov nodded to the strangest looking craft—barely a space vessel at all but a stationary craft with its ‘T’ of modular tubes strung with support frames and booster rockets. The traders and mining communities of the asteroid belt, although drowning in rare Earth materials, were still the least sophisticated of all the colonial powers. Everything about their ship and their difficult way of life spoke of a harsh, industrial functionality.
Which was nothing like the final colonial ship in attendance. It was sleek and white, looking like one of the old Saturn 5 rockets, but with small wing fins dotted at intervals all the way around its body. Solomon realized that the main outer section of the craft was actually able to rotate, meaning it could generate its own gravity while the nose cone and the rear propulsion rockets stayed in place.
“Proxima,” Kol said without hiding his admiration.
Proxima Centauri was the closest of the bio-available Outer Worlds, which meant that by the time humanity had gotten there, they had discovered that it was already teeming with plant, fungal, animal, and insect life. It was commonly called the ‘Second Earth’ and was close to Earth in size, mass, density, and gravity. The only thing missing was the people.
As such, the colonists of Proxima Centauri under their Imprimatur Mariad Rhossily were the ones that were most vocal about pushing for their independence, while the Martians were the most violent about it.
Looking at the different ships arrayed against them, Solomon had the disturbing sensation that they were outnumbered.
ATTENTION ALL CREW! DOCKING PROCEDURE IMMINENT.
AMBASSADORIAL STAFF TO DOCKING BRIDGE 2.
“That’s us,” Solomon said, nodding to the others. “Let’s give them a show who they’re messing with, shall we?” he said with a grin, firmly holding his Jackhammer rifle across his chest as he quick-marched out of the hold, with the rest of Gold Squad behind him.
“Ambassador, an honor and a pleasure,” called the gruff voice of a man who met them on the other side of the Titan dock. He was a military man, large and barrel-chested in a somewhat shabby silver and black uniform some twenty years out of date. Solomon saw the seal of the Confederacy on his breast pocket, over a selection of gold stars, and a larger insignia underneath that of the CPS: Confederate Prison Services.
It looks like he’s been out here too long, was Solomon’s first thought as he looked at the man’s un-regulation shaggy brown hair and full beard. Solomon stepped up to stand at the ambassador’s righthand side, two steps away and ready for anything.
“Thank you, Warden Harj,” the ambassador replied as the Warden of Titan turned to beckon them into his station.
Cramped and noisy, Solomon thought, quickly surveying the available exits.
Too many. The Titan Docking Station was made up of large thoroughfare ‘tubes’ with two levels inside each, and a host of bulkhead doors that led off to smaller module rooms and cargo vaults. Steam was escaping and being released constantly at odd intervals, and the strung lights flickered here and there as announcements in different languages beckoned staff to this docking procedure or that loading one.
The main thoroughfare they were being led down was speckled with bistros and shops, Solomon was surprised to see, as each of the staff and baristas and waiters wore the gray suits of convicts.
“The tankers usually spend a shift or two here while they get loaded up. It made sense to be able to offer a modicum of entertainment,” Warden Harj explained. “It gives the convicts some life skills, and the Confederacy makes a little money…”
Solomon wondered if he was trying to impress the ambassador.
“Squad, stay sharp.” He cut his external microphone and spoke solely on their suit-to-suit channel. “I don’t like this…” he said. I can’t see any weapons on anyone. He looked. No open carry then, not on this station. Not that it stopped the assassins on Nuryien smuggling their own weapons in, however…
“Why?” he was surprised to hear Wen answer him irritably. “Because the staff here are convicts like us?”
Ouch. What is her problem? Solomon thought as he scanned the wary eyes of the watching convict servicemen inside their food stalls and booths. Are they paying too much attention to the ambassador? Or is it just a prisoner’s interest in anyone new? Solomon couldn’t tell.
But then again, maybe Jezzy was right. If he had been about to assume that the convict staff here were a threat to the ambassador, then he might just as well put himself and the rest of Gold Squad under suspicion as well, right?
“Just stay alert, Wen,” Solomon growled back anyway, his chagrin only making him a little more annoyed as they walked forward.
Warden Harj was gruff and pragmatic, but not entirely uncouth, Solomon decided by the end of their short pilgrimage. He offered the ambassador and her people—the two private assistants that Solomon knew could shoot the wings off a fly if needed, as well as the five Outcasts and the small handful of ambassadorial support staff, carrying crates and wheeling trolleys full of clothes and computers—a choice of any food that they saw. But although Solomon would have ripped his own ear off for the chance to try some of the various offerings of street food from around the world, the ambassador wisely declined everything.
“I have my own cook, and I expect to sleep and dine aboard my ship during my stay here,” she said casually. “But it has been a short journey and I am not tired yet at all. Shall we begin immediately? The other delegates?”
“Ah…” Solomon saw the warden make a face as if the very word brought with it a foul smell. He was about to say something, before a commotion at one end of the thoroughfare interrupted him.
“Unacceptable!” boomed a voice as a small crowd approached them.
“Squad!” Solomon stepped forward.
It was a team of people wearing red-sandy-colored robes over undermesh encounter suits, Solomon saw. In their center was a tall, aquiline-looking woman with short black hair slicked back to her scalp, while next to her strode a smaller, rounder man with a bald head but an impressive handlebar mustache, similarly in the reddish over-robes.
Martians, Solomon recognized. It was the smaller, rounder, and rougher sort of man who was doing the shouting, and as he drew nearer—the other tanker crews and convict staff scattering out of their way as they did so—Solomon realized that the man only had one eye. The other was a dark metallic orb.
“Totally unacceptable, Ambassador Ochrie!” the angry bald man bellowed. “Have you seen the conditions that our people are kept in? No. Of course not. Another perfect example of the Confederacy’s complete lack of regard for the human rights of colonists everywhere!”
“Father Ultor, what a surprise to see you here,” the ambassador said, stopping and not moving an inch. Solomon could tell she wasn’t about to be intimidated by this angry man.
Four guards. Solomon saw the other robe-wearing men and women around the two central figures. They looked capable, bulky, rounded shoulders and short necks—undoubtedly mercenaries. He took another half-step forward as Malady stepped behind the ambassador and loomed.
“Oh, and is this supposed to make us meek and servile, is it?”
‘Father Ultor’ gave Solomon and the other Outcasts a dark look. Behind him, the four members of their own guard complement started to jostle on their feet.
“Easy, Father…” the taller, black-haired woman from the Martian delegation said, rai
sing one perfectly pale hand and resting it lightly on the man’s shoulder.
“Imprimatur Valance.” The ambassador nodded slowly.
The legal representative of Mars, Solomon realized. Apart from the robes, she didn’t look like a Martian. If anything, from her exact hair and carefully elegant robes, the imprimatur of the notoriously contradictory Martian colony looked every bit the Confederate.
“Ambassador Ochrie.” She didn’t say that it was a pleasure or an honor, Solomon noted as he looked at the four Martian bodyguards. Each one, two men and two women, were staring hard at him and the other Outcasts, daring them to make a move.
But we’re the ones with automatic rifles. Solomon rolled a shoulder and readjusted his grip on the Jackhammer slung across his chest, before grinning through his face visor at the nearest one. Go ahead, he thought. Let’s see how far you get with a bullet in your kneecap!
“Father Ultor here is my counsel,” the imprimatur said. “And he has legitimate concerns about the treatment of the Martian prisoners-of-war.”
“The Martian criminals, you mean?” Warden Harj said bluntly, glowering at the imprimatur.
“Prisoners of conscience!” Father Ultor burst out, looking ready to get into a fight with the Warden of Titan here and now if he could…
“Well. Then let’s waste no time in getting to the surface, shall we?” The ambassador didn’t even blink before turning to Warden Harj.
“The Proximians and the Belters?” she asked.
“Well, the Proximians have already made their way to the surface…” Harj looked uncomfortable. “…and the Belters won’t leave their ship.”
“I see.” The ambassador turned to speak to one of her two Valkyrie-like personal assistants. She didn’t bother to lower her tone or hide what she said from the warden or the Martians.
“Please send a message to the Asteroid Belters expressing my concern and gratitude for their arrival. Assure them that their questions will be answered, and tell them that if they don’t get their ass to the negotiating table at once, I’ll put a freeze on all commodities heading to their ugly little asteroid field,” she said with an icy smile, turning back to nod at the slightly aghast-looking Warden Harj and the enraged Father Ultor. The actual spokesperson of Mars however, Imprimatur Valance, didn’t appear upset or affected by the ambassador’s harsh words.
“Shall we?” The ambassador nodded at the sign that pointed the way to the surface transporters.
6
The First Martians
“I don’t like this,” Solomon said over his gold channel to the rest of his squad. They were packed into a small shuttle-transporter—little more than a rounded dropship that burned and juddered as it fell through the orange nitrogen, methane, and sulfur clouds of Titan on its way to the surface.
Through the use of carefully-timed rockets, as Solomon realized they couldn’t burn large amounts of fuel on Titan due to the moon’s mostly volatile compounds, they slowed their descent a fraction. As soon as they fell out of the cloud layer, everyone felt the sudden lurch of vast parachute sails being deployed.
Ugh. Solomon felt sick, but he managed to keep it together as he noticed that none of the delegates appeared to be faring much better.
But there are too many of us in one place. He concentrated on his job. Locked into their chairs were all the ambassadors and delegates, while the four-man Martian bodyguards and the five-man Outcast Marines stood, hanging on to the overhead handle grips.
This lady’s already been shot out of the sky once… he thought, starting to feel tense. As a way to try and calm his nerves, he cleared his throat and turned on his external microphone to speak to the warden.
“Warden Harj, can I ask your security arrangements here on Titan?” Solomon said. “I am sure that the ambassador and our friends from Mars will be grateful to hear it…”
“Friends from Mars!” snickered Karamov on the private suit-to-suit channel.
“Play nice, Karamov,” Cready returned, having to quickly turn his suit microphone off and on.
“Of course,” the warden replied. “Titan is a high-security facility, which means that the prisoners are in a state of constant lock-down—”
“Outrageous!” Father Ultor muttered.
“As such, any prisoners that you encounter will only be allowed in certain zones of the prison camp and factory, and they will be under watch by at least two other wardens.”
Two!? Solomon thought in alarm. “Only…two, Warden Harj?”
“Well, they are the only personnel with guns, so…” the warden said. “It is a system that works for us. Each prisoner has an identity bracelet that we can track from both the guard base here on Titan or the docking station above, and each bracelet transmits a code, which means only the doors to their permitted areas can be opened. Even if a prisoner was crazy enough to try to escape, they wouldn’t be able to get beyond the first barrier!”
Oh, there’s always a way, Warden Harj. Solomon knew that only too well. Although what he’d heard might ameliorate any other bodyguard’s concern, for someone with his previous experience, it only made him more paranoid. Identity bracelets that open doors. Presumably magnet-locked. But there are ways to break magnet locks, even if you don’t have a set of industrial clippers. And there are ways to steal someone else’s identity bracelet…
“PREPARE FOR LANDING,” the speakers announced, giving them a moment to brace as the dropship shuttle swayed, swung, and thudded to the surface of the alien moon.
“Out, out, out!” Solomon made sure that he and Malady moved quickly down the ramp, flanking each side of the flattened avenue that led directly to the gates.
Light Tactical Suit: Active and Fully Operational.
Atmospheric Controls: Active. Filtering Nitrogen, C02, Methane.
Backup Air Supply: 3.8 Hours.
The Titan facility looked absurdly similar to a human prison camp, with high steel walls—very high, given the low gravity of Titan—topped with razor wire, and a set of double-doors directly in front of them. Peeking over the top of the walls were regular metal guard towers like fingers pointing accusingly at the sky, and the dim sodium lights did little to illuminate the surface.
The ground juddered and shook underfoot as Solomon turned around to find the source of the noise. Don’t tell me I’m about to step on a damn cryovolcano! Solomon cursed, knowing that many of the Outer Worlds and moonlets did not have regular geology as Earth did, but instead could erupt into massive ‘ice volcanoes’ that could break rock and spew hardened ice and steam, just as deadly as magma if it hit you.
But what Solomon saw was a poisonous, toxic world. Everything was cast in an orange-yellow haze, which Solomon guessed was glare from the heavy nitrogen clouds above. A mist blanketed the middle distance, and from which emerged jagged rocks and bluffs, and not a hint of green.
The shaking appeared to be coming from south of their location, and Solomon saw the silhouette of a static shape through the mist: a giant box with a tall tower from which the vibrations were coming from.
“Ice mine,” Malady informed him, before electronically announcing, “All clear on the north side.”
“All clear on south,” Solomon said, although he felt a fraud for saying so. How could he even see anything through this murk?
“Ambassador Ochrie, good to go!” he announced as the dropship shuttle started to shake and transform. First, the ramp that Solomon and Malady had jumped down slid flat back into the ‘floor’ of the shuttle above its thrusters, and then the central housing of the shuttle started to move as different plates clicked into place. Solomon’s external microphone picked up the whine of gears as the entire middle section of the ship started to pull away from its seat, leaving an empty ‘shell’ of the dropship-shuttle behind.
When the middle oval was halfway removed, it extended four sets of tracked wheels from its underside, crunching them down on the surface of the inhospitable planet before disengaging completely. Solomon was now looking a
t a small surface rover vehicle, made out of the central body of the shuttle. Its portholes were now the viewing ports of the occupants inside, and it apparently had no cockpit or pilot, as it started to trundle on radio controls towards the gate, with Solomon and Malady bounding in Titan’s much lighter gravity on either side.
A flash of lights from the ‘roof’ of the shuttle-rover were answered by the blink over the door, and the double gates started to roll backward on hissing pistons, revealing a wide yard on the other side, already crowded with blocks of ice as large as Malady and a few prisoners standing in their bubble-helmets and protective encounter suits, looking at the approaching shuttle-craft. On the other side of them was another chain-link fence topped with more razor wire, leading to a narrow corridor through the fences to the main doors of a gunmetal gray building, studded with more sodium lights and slit-windows.
To think I came this close to calling this place home… Solomon shivered in horror as he eyed the nearest convicts.
“Your two o’ clock, Malady,” Solomon murmured.
“Spotted,” Malady returned. One of the prisoners who had been hauling the ice blocks into position for loading had paused, turned, and was taking large, bounding steps towards the shuttle with the giant ice pincers still in their hand.
“Welcoming party?” Solomon said, as Malady quickly bounded between the prisoner and the shuttle-car, dwarfing the convict by a factor of two, easily.
Solomon watched the exchange carefully as the convict stopped, looked Malady up and down, and then proceeded to wave the pincers at the shuttle-car anyway as it rolled steadily past them. Is it a threat? Or just one guy blowing off some steam?
Outcast Marines series Boxed Set Page 31
