Command Code

by James David Victor

  But she was moving too fast. The wreckage around her swept over her head and under her legs, and the Invincible grew larger to fill her vision in a matter of seconds.

  “Malady. Ratko. Where are you?” She scanned the broken buttresses and exposed supports as she was flung toward the vessel.

  No, not toward—past!

  She had cleared the tanks too late or too early. She hadn’t paid enough attention to astrophysics in study lounge. Jezzy was going to overshoot the Invincible by a matter of meters, and then—

  On the other side of the Invincible was the bright, stellar panorama of space. A hard ball of light shone in the far distance that Jezzy took to either be Earth or Venus.

  If I miss the Invincible… She realized that the only way to rescue her would be for Willoughby to fire up the Marine scout’s engines and come find her. A simple enough task, and Jezzy knew she would be okay with that outcome, but there was no guarantee that the ship even could use its engines anymore, after what it had been through.

  And wouldn’t a sudden burn of propellant and plasma attract the attention of the Ru’at jump-ships? She would have doomed Willoughby, and possibly her entire squad, to die.

  And Jezzy knew that she couldn’t do that.

  Thock! She was jolted as suddenly her DIY propulsion system emptied and atmospheric seals were restored.

  Oxygen Tank 1 Empty.

  Oxygen Tanks: WORKING (2.2hrs).

  “Which means I have to do this one myself.” Jezzy grabbed the butt of her Jackhammer, scanned for the nearest available target, and threw it with all her might.

  Everything looked so slow in space. The woman cursed as she saw the Marine Corps weapon revolving through the vacuum on its spooling-out length of cable—the metal cable that shouldn’t have been able to be sheared, as far as she knew—and prayed.

  The external carapace of the Invincible was starting to roll past her. Jezzy saw the vast slabs of bronze-lacquered armor plates, the giant stenciled words of the CMC, the constant myriad pockmarks and scratches of all the asteroids and space dust that the behemoth had sailed through.

  Suddenly, the poly-wire cable in her gauntleted hands went taut. The Jackhammer had caught! She had thrown it as best she was able into one of the burst-open levels of the Invincible. Jezzy didn’t know which deck it was, but she was glad when she felt the sudden jolt as her forward trajectory was halted.

  And, according to the laws of Newtonian physics, all her potential energy was transferred into centrifugal momentum. She swung on the taut cable toward the Invincible, a heck of a lot faster than she had expected.

  Frack!

  Jezzy managed to hit the cable release control, only for her body to suddenly spin like a yoyo unwinding on a string. But at least she was also losing speed at the same time, and so, when she thumped into the side of the ship, she didn’t break any limbs.

  “Urgh.” She started to bounce off the Invincible, and for a terrible moment, Jezzy had nightmare visions of going through all of this all over again—only this time without any cable or her Jackhammer.

  My weapon! Jezzy scrabbled at the hull like a hamster in a ball until she caught hold of one of the many metal handles that dotted the surface of every Confederate Marine Corps ship.

  Phew. She had done it. She was here. But now she had lost her gun somewhere in the belly of that beast, as the cable had followed the Jackhammer inside the ruptured darkness, and Jezzy knew that she didn’t have time to search for it.

  Whatever. She growled at her own stupidity. But this isn’t a combat mission. I might not need it.

  Even in her own mind, that sounded like wishful thinking. No, a lie.

  “But I’m hanging on the outside of one of the Marine Corps’ largest ever battleships,” she scolded herself. “If I can’t find a gun inside there, then why in the blue blazes do I call myself a Marine?!”

  “You shouldn’t talk to yourself, ma’am,” said a voice, and Jezzy grinned with relief.

  It was Ratko, sliding along the hull, moving only in small pushes so that she could catch onto the next set of handlebars as she made her way toward her.

  “How long you been listening?” Jezzy breathed, surprised at how relieved she was to see the diminutive, generally angry woman.

  “You came back into suit range when you hit the hull,” Ratko said, with a smirk clearly visible through the faceplate. Her face was lit up by the green and orange commands from her own internal readouts.

  “You okay? Nothing broken?” Ratko asked.

  “One oxygen tank down, but a few hours is still plenty of time,” Jezzy said. Four times the amount of time that she had estimated to get this mission done. “But why are you here, Ratko? I thought I told you both to continue with the mission objectives.” Jezzy tried to regain her composure. “In fact, Corporal, I remember ordering you both to.”

  “You can file a disciplinary whenever you like, sir,” Ratko shot back. She wasn’t the sort of Outcast to ever be chastened or ashamed, Jezzy saw.

  And yeah, the likelihood of us ever having a command center and a military court and tribunal service ever again is pretty low, right? Jezzy found herself grinning even wider. Of course she wasn’t going to report Ratko and Malady, and the pair probably knew it.

  “Well, that’s settled, then. There’s only one thing that I’ve been wondering.” Ratko sounded worried as she helped her commander climb back up the way she had come. “You’ve lost your cable. How are we planning to get you back to the ship?”

  Oh frack.

  “We’ll think of something. We always do,” Jezzy said, wishing that her voice didn’t sound quite so uncertain.

  11

  Running the Gauntlet

  The cavern was narrow and started to gradually rise in front of Solomon. Through the bluish glow of the penlight he could see the deep red oxide in the walls, and the drifts of sand heavy on the floor.

  Everyone’s hearing had finally returned by the time the light revealed their destination: a large, gray metal bulkhead reinforced by girders driven into the floor and surrounding a singular, elongated octagon of a door.

  “There she is,” Kol said, still sounding worried as he peered behind them. Solomon wasn’t surprised, as he too was half-expecting to hear the pig-like grunts and roars of the Ru’at monsters at any moment.

  “She’s old,” Rhossily said, gesturing to the ancient-looking push-button commands on the side of the door.

  “Command code?” Solomon looked at Kol, who opened and closed his mouth a few times.

  No way. Not after all this. Solomon could have cried. “Come on, think, Kol! You said you were brought here as a kid. This bulkhead looks old enough to be the same one. You must have seen your uncle input the code. Didn’t he tell you? Show you?”

  Was it a trick of my imagination, or did I just hear distant scrabbling?

  “Wait, give me some space… Let me think!” Kol’s face glistened with sweat. It was clear to Solomon that the young man had forgotten this part of the escape plan.

  “We might be able to rupture the door pistons.” Solomon looked at the heavy cylinders in place. “That’ll release the door…”

  “But we won’t be able to re-pressurize,” Rhossily pointed out. Airlocks worked by creating or subtracting a bubble of atmosphere from a hermetically-sealed room, Solomon thought quickly. If, like most of the times he had used them, it was to go out into a no-atmosphere situation, you walked in, got suited up, and then the air and the pressure was pumped out of the space, allowing you to open the external bulkhead door without any blowouts. If you were entering an atmosphere like moving from the vacuum of space to a secure ship environment, the opposite was true.

  And that means if we break the inner door pistons and get inside, there would be no way to depressurize the outer room, Solomon realized.

  There would be a catastrophic blowout of atmosphere from this cave as soon as they had managed to get the external door open. And from that entire cavern back there… Solomo
n thought.

  “A catastrophic blowout,” he murmured, looking back the way they had come. He couldn’t see it of course, but in his minds’ eye, he saw the Ru’at monsters, and the fields of strange alien agriculture, and the floating pollen.

  “Maybe we don’t want to re-pressurize this damn place,” Solomon said seriously.

  Mariad Rhossily held his gaze for a long moment, turning her head to one side as she weighed the merits of destroying the Ru’at nursery.

  “The cavern is huge. All of that atmosphere, forcing through here in seconds?” Rhossily looked anguished. “You are fully aware of what that would mean, aren’t you? We haven’t got a hope of surviving that. It’ll be like a shockwave and a tornado all rolled into one.”

  “Maybe surviving isn’t the most important thing,” Solomon murmured.

  “Spoken like a Confederate,” Kol growled at them both, walking forward to peer through the small thick-plate window at what lay beyond the airlock.

  Solomon hoped that what the ex-Outcast was looking at was freedom.

  It wasn’t.

  “Oh,” Solomon heard Kol say.

  On the far side of the airlock door was another small antechamber just like this one, Solomon and the others saw as they crowded around the small porthole window. At the far end was another bulkhead door with its own porthole window—through which shone the bright, slightly orange light of a Martian day.

  But scattered all over the floor was a mess of debris—ripped bits of fabric and mangled bits of metal—and when Solomon looked, he could see that they must have spilled out of the two large metal locker-boxes set in the walls. The locker doors were twisted and open, and their contents appeared mangled and useless.

  “Are you going to tell me that pile of trash is the spare encounter suits you were talking about?” Solomon said.

  “The survival depot. Yeah,” Kol said, his voice cracking as the sudden despair of their situation hit home. “They try to set the depots up in a chain, leading to the nearest habitat. The next one should be…” Solomon saw the young man that he used to command grit his teeth. “…about three klicks away.”

  Three klicks on an alien planet, without oxygen, radiation seals, or proper environmental suit protection, Solomon considered. Yeah, they would be dead in under ten seconds.

  “So…now what?” Rhossily asked, looking nervously over her shoulders. Solomon wondered if he could hear something back there again. A scrabbling? A yipping? Had the Ru’at creatures managed to break through into the tunnel?

  “I guess we have no choice,” Solomon said, feeling a tide of frustration rising in him. It wasn’t that he wanted to make this choice, after all, but he didn’t like being forced into it.

  Solomon had always been the one to find the way out. To find a solution to the problems that affected him, and to somehow come out on top. But now?

  “We blow the doors,” Solomon said. “We use the Jackhammer shells to rupture the door pistons and blow this whole Ru’at farm or laboratory or whatever it is,” he said grimly.

  At least if any good can come of our deaths, then… he thought. The resulting pressure wave would probably dash them against the walls or shoot them flying out of the external airlock many hundreds of meters onto the hostile Martian surface. Where, he knew, if they hadn’t already been crushed and pulverized by the storm of released oxygen, they would just as quickly asphyxiate or cook to death under the Martian skies.

  Yay.

  “But at least we’ll have set back the Ru’at’s plans,” Solomon continued his unspoken conversation out loud. Would it be enough to permanently impede the alien invasion?

  Probably not, Solomon thought grimly, and it appeared that Kol felt the same as his face deepened into a scowl.

  “I’m not going to die for no reason,” he snarled, turning back to the airlock porthole and scanning the room out there quickly. “I’d rather fight those things out there than throw my life away.”

  “Well, it’s not like we have much choice,” Rhossily murmured. Her voice shook.

  “We always have a choice,” Kol said, throwing a sharp glance at Solomon. “You told me that, sir,” he snapped, hefting the Jackhammer back to his chest. “And anyway. No one is going to take this off me. Not to blow any doors and throw our lives away!”

  Coward. Solomon straightened up slowly, feeling his anger start to rise in his chest. “If I have to put you down to get that Jackhammer, you know I will, Kol,” the Gold Squad Commander murmured, his voice dropping to a dangerous growl.

  “Try me,” Kol said, stepping back, and this time lowering the Jackhammer at Solomon.

  “Gentlemen, stop this!” Rhossily breathed in alarm.

  “You tried to do that once before, and you failed,” Solomon snarled back just as fiercely as he took a step forward.

  “Don’t move, Lieutenant. You know I’m capable of it. I’ll blow a hole straight through your chest,” Kol said, backing another step.

  “Gentlemen! We haven’t got time for this! We need to fight them, not each other!” Rhossily hissed in urgent panic at the sight unfolding before her.

  “And then what? You’ll hand our bodies over to those Ru’at friends of yours? Ask for everything to be forgiven?” Solomon took another step toward the traitor. Maybe this was always how it had to go in the end. He felt a knot of rage and despair tighten in his gut.

  Solomon had hoped that Kol had changed. He knew that he had, in many respects. The squad commander hoped that the young man had seen just what sorts of horrors he had participated in. Realized what he had missed the day he programmed that Marine transporter to crash into the training facility.

  “I thought you were different, Commander,” Kol growled. “You seemed to have your head on your shoulders when I first met you. You knew back then that you could never trust the Confederacy. They’re all the same—policemen, judges, officers. They’re all people trying to tell folks like us how to live our lives.”

  “You’re a blind fool, Kol, and you’ve been played all along by the mega-corps and the Ru’at,” Solomon returned.

  “Lieutenant! Kol!” Rhossily was begging them.

  Kol had stopped stepping backwards, and it wasn’t because he had reached the wall. Solomon could see the resolve harden in the young man’s face. You can always tell when a man is about to kill someone, Solomon thought. Unless it was manslaughter or an accident, of course, but this wouldn’t be. A look of glassy indifference had settled on Kol’s features as Solomon knew he was mentally preparing himself to shoot the man he had once called a friend.

  “It must be easier when you’re just remote-piloting something,” Solomon taunted him. “It’s much more difficult when you have to look them in the face.” He knew from experience.

  Matty Sozer. The memory threatened to unman him, but Solomon rammed it down again into the darker recesses of his heart. He didn’t want his last thoughts to be regrets.

  “Stop this at once!” Rhossily said.

  “I think I can manage it,” Kol snapped, his gloved hands twitching toward the trigger—

  “THEY’RE GONE!” Rhossily suddenly screamed at them both, earning a worried look from Ochrie.

  What? Solomon had no idea what she was talking about.

  “Huh?” Kol muttered, obviously sharing Solomon’s confusion.

  “The Ru’at. Or their dog-things. Listen, you pair of idiots!” Rhossily stamped straight across Kol’s line of fire to the entrance to the tunnel that led back toward the nursery.

  “You’re wrong,” Kol started to say angrily.

  “Am I? How long have we been down here, arguing? Why haven’t they broken through and attacked us yet, hmm? Have you thought to ask yourselves that?!” Rhossily reprimanded them both.

  “I thought I heard something a little while ago,” Solomon murmured.

  “Well, do you hear anything now?” Rhossily arched one eyebrow.

  Solomon blinked, tilting his head. No, I don’t. He shook his head. “But that doesn’t
mean that they’re not still out there…” he started to say.

  “Or it means that they’ve been called off to whatever they were supposed to be doing anyway!” Rhossily said. “Think about it. That place back there is some kind of nursery ground. The Ru’at have created those things—hey, for all I know, they could even be the Ru’at—and for what? To just keep them down there for all time?” Rhossily rounded on Kol next.

  “You said you came here as a kid. And that this place was here. That means the Ru’at have been planning this for a long time. A long time. They wouldn’t create a new race of dog alien things just for the fun of it, would they?” she said.

  She has a point, Solomon had to agree. But how did any of that help them?

  “Look. I am going back out there, and I am going to see if there is another way out of this place—one which actually might give us a decent chance of surviving and beating the Ru’at, you got that?” Rhossily berated them both.

  “If you two idiots want to stay down here and kill each other, then be my guest, but I used to be an imprimatur of a colony world. I saw Proxima get trashed. I saw my people die—the people that I was supposed to be protecting. And all that means is that I am not content with being killed down here and having them win, nor am I content with not stopping the Ru’at,” Rhossily said, turning on her heel and stalking back the way that they had come without even a light to guide her.

  Solomon stood for a moment, breathing hard as adrenaline and shame ran through his system. He looked across at Kol to see that the younger man’s eyes were wide with similar emotions.

  “She kinda has a point,” Solomon begrudgingly said.

  “She’s a colonial.” Kol nodded, his voice full of pride. “Just like the Martians. We’re survivors,” he said, following Rhossily back into the tunnel.

  Solomon stood still for a moment, feeling like he had been slapped in the face and not sure why. I was trying to find a solution, he thought, outraged. And it had seemed like the only solution had been to try and blow the airlocks.