“I, uh, what?”
“I’m the one who needs the fertilizer,” I say. “And if anyone–anyone–asks you again, or scares you slightly like I did just now, you pretend you know nothing. If I hear you ratted us out, I will kill you as slowly and painfully as I am able. Understand?”
He nods his head vigorously.
“Now,” I say. “Whatever Thorsten agreed to give you, you still get that. But in exchange, you need to give him twice the agreed amount of fertilizer. Every day. Understand?”
He doesn’t nod this time, just stares up at me with wide eyes. He finally summons the courage to speak. “Mr. Marauder, sir, I wasn’t being stingy with Thorsten, I’m just a coward. I don’t want to get caught! I don’t think I can sneak out anymore without risking getting ca–”
“I already caught you,” I say, voice full of menace. “Either you risk getting caught, or I kill you. Guaranteed. Sound like a fair deal?”
He nods this time.
“I will do my best to make sure you don’t get caught,” I say. “I can fudge the numbers, and if that asshole Marauder you report to gets too suspicious, I can rough him up. I don’t want you to get caught, Milo, so we work together to reach that goal.”
I grab him by the wrist and help him stand up.
“Thorsten will be back in the morning. Give him what he needs.”
The next few days pass by quickly. I find time to visit Kara every night, and we spend time hashing out the finer details of our escape plan. Then I fuck her rough and raw until she screams and collapses.
On the night before the escape, her exosuit is gone, and I have to fuck her a bit more gently than I did before, but all the same, she is much stronger than when I first met her. I hope she won’t need to be so strong ever again for the rest of her life.
The morning of the escape is my last training session with Raius. He doesn’t know it’s the last session, of course.
“You want to avoid close combat against other biosuits,” Raius says.
“Why?” I ask.
“Well,” Raius says, “that’s not actually always the case. It’s a general rule. If you know for a fact that you are stronger than your opponent because you’re wearing a biosuit, then you’d want to engage within tendril range straight away. But this is rarely the case. At long range, you have a chance to feel out your enemy. How accurate are his plasma beams? How on point is he with his shield? Is he trying to move closer to you or back away? These skirmishes give you time to assess his skill. If he’s stronger than you, you don’t want to get closer.”
“I see,” I say.
I’m just about equal with Raius right now. I can tell by his frustration during training. Whenever I do something well, he tries to prove to me he can do just as good–and he most always can. If I had a week–or even a few more days–I could surpass him, but right now? We’re even. I see him watching me, daring me to ask.
What do you do if you and your opponent are evenly matched? Does Raius generally prefer close combat to ranged combat? I don’t want to ask him either of these questions, but I know I’ll need to fight him in just a few hours.
“Do you mind if we cut this short?” I ask.
“I don’t mind,” Raius says. “But why?”
He hates training me. He hates seeing me get better than him. He’ll take any flimsy excuse to delay me becoming stronger than him.
“I have a nice surprise for my Seraphim army,” I say. “I need to prepare.”
“Interesting,” Raius says. “Maybe I’ll come take a look.”
I tell the Seraphim army that training for the morning is cancelled, but to be on guard for a drill. The drill will be me blowing the shit out of the refinery. I order them to treat any drill as a real threat, and to respond accordingly. This will send them all toward the explosion, and away from me, when the bomb goes off.
I walk through the hallway in the direction of the refinery, and when no one is looking, I jump into the wagon. The fertilizer to make the last bombs is already packed in there, and I lay on top of it. It smells like shit–it literally is shit–and I know the smell will stick to me. But no one ever came out of a battle smelling like roses.
I will my biosuit to seal my helmet, and I have it begin converting antimatter to oxygen.
The top of the wagon is open, but no one will come and look inside it. I wait there for around 45 minutes, until finally I hear it whir on, and it starts to move.
I know that the mining crew, Kara and Felicia included, are inside the passenger area, but I can’t hear them. They are already suited and sealed up, and communicating with each other through comms links. I won’t be able to talk to them until I put my tendrils into their suits and adjust their comms.
When the wagon stops moving, I jump out with the bags of fertilizer in hand.
All five humans look up at me, and I shoot out a tendril for each of them. I sink the tendrils into their suits’ computers, and I reprogram the comms links to feed into my biosuit.
I hear their voices all crackle on at once.
“Shit, shit, shit,” Thorsten says. “This is really happening, isn’t it?”
I toss the fertilizer to his feet. “Where are the bombs?”
Eli starts to lift some rocks, but I shove him out of the way and throw the rocks up. Human males are nearly as weak as the females.
I see the bombs neatly stacked. They are in white buckets.
“Gruel buckets?” I ask. “Seriously?”
“We’re prisoners, man!” Thorsten shouts. “What the fuck dido you expect? Red wine bottles? Caviar tins?”
“It’s fine,” I say. “They are just bigger than I had hoped for.”
“Will they work?” Kara asks me with concern, putting a hand on my back.
Her suit’s thick glove cuts out most of the feeling, but knowing that she is touching me gives me strength.
“They will work,” I say. “It’s decent camouflage. They’re big, but we can hide them more or less in plain sight with the other rations.”
I load the bombs into the wagon, and I grab a pickaxe and start swinging alongside the miners while Thorsten works on building the last two bombs.
“Never thought I’d see a Marauder swinging a pickaxe like some big purple slave,” Andreas says.
“He’s not like other Marauders,” Kara says.
“Right,” Thorsten says. “He cares deeply for you.”
“You showed them my note?” I ask.
“Eli snatched it out of my hands!” Kara says.
Eli laughs. “I cared deeply about my Marauder woman...but not as deeply as I care for good fucking food and a soft bed.”
“You were her man,” I say. “She was not your woman.”
“What’s the difference?” Eli asks.
“She owned you,” I say.
“Like you own Kara?”
I scoff.
“What’s that mean?” Kara asks.
“I don’t own you. But you are mine.”
“Marauder logic is all fucked,” Andreas says. “Get us the hell off this rock. Take me back to the habs where you fuckers aren’t welcome.”
“I will take you to Sankt Petersburg,” I say. “You can make your way wherever you’d like from there.”
“Direct ticket to Sankt Petersburg,” Eli says, whistling. “Fucking nice.”
“No,” I say, carefully placing a boulder into the wagon so that it doesn’t crush the bombs. “It’s not a direct flight.”
“What?” Felicia asks.
“We have to go to Titan first,” I say.
“Titan!” Thorsten shouts. He jumps away from the bomb and runs toward me.
“Turn around!” I shout. “Fucking finish the bomb!”
He stops, looks at me for a moment, realizes he can’t do a thing to me, and turns back around as I directed.
“But Titan…,” he says. “It’s a dead fucking world. Dead as this one!”
“You’ll have to trust me,” I say.
K
ara switches to a direct comm link with me. “Kain, what the hell?”
“I have confidence in this plan,” I say. “It will work...but I had to make compromises. I am still a peacekeeper.”
I hear her sigh.
“Trust me, Kara,” I say.
“I do trust you.”
I bump my head against her so our faceplates touch. “Saving you comes first, but saving the solar system is a very close second.”
She smiles widely at me, but then I see her face start to break up, and she bites her lip to stop herself from crying.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“Nothing’s wrong,” she says. “Except, like, almost everything.”
I squeeze her gloved hand. “At least some things are right.”
“It’s just...you’re eventually going to let go of me, and then I may never see you again. It’s terrifying.”
“You will see me again,” I say. “And soon.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
I force myself to turn away and climb into the wagon.
“Better not fuck this up, brother of Adus!” Thorsten shouts at me. “All our asses are on the line!”
“I won’t fuck anything up,” I say, “Except Darkstar.”
“That’s the spirit!” Eli says.
One of them hits the button, and the wagon starts to move.
I consider digging the bombs toward the surface while the wagon moves back to the refinery, but I worry that the white buckets on top of all the dark ore will trigger some kind of alarm.
Then I reconsider. Probably a big purple Marauder laying on top of the rocks would trigger any kind of alarm, so a few buckets of gruel will be the least of my problems.
I shift the ore around until I see the first of the buckets, and I start to pull them out and spread them out across the surface of the rocks. I find the two detonators, which are locked and not activated, and make my biosuit form a concealed pocket for them. One of the buckets has a red ‘x’ on it, and it corresponds to the red detonator. The blue detonator will blow up all the other buckets. I cross my fingers that the miners didn’t mess up the detonators or the red ‘x’.
I feel the wagon slowing down, and I peek out to see the refinery’s giant airlock opening up to let me in. The wagon rolls inside, and even before the airlock seals, it starts to scan the wagon with me inside.
“326 kilograms of ore,” a robotic voice says. “One Marauder and ten buckets of gruel.”
I hold my breath, waiting for some kind of alarm to go off, or for the airlock to simply seal me in.
The outer door of the airlock seals, and still nothing happens. I start to count back from ten. If I make it to zero, I may have to try hacking the door open.
When I hit two, the inner airlock door starts to open up, and I sigh in relief.
The wagon rolls into the refinery, and it parks in a corner full of other automated mining equipment. I peek out of the wagon and see that there are no human slaves nearby, nor are there any Marauders.
I grab three bombs by the bucket handles and jump off the top of the wagon. There’s a big automated driller parked against the wall. It’s what they used before everyone became paranoid about Harmony infiltrating Darkstar–before slaves like Kara had to mine with pickaxes. It’s covered in dust, and I’m sure it hasn’t run in over a year.
I stack the buckets behind its front tire. No one will see them unless they are under the vehicle.
I jump back up into the wagon and grab three more bombs, then stack them beside the first three.
Before I get back up, a robotic arm from the ore purifier starts grabbing chunks of ore out of the back of the wagon. It’s unlikely the arm will take the bombs, but with all the advanced A.I. disabled, it’s hard to be certain.
I pick up the pace and risk tossing the bombs out of the wagon and letting them fall. Thorsten assured me they were stable, and that only the detonators would set them off. Hopefully he’s right.
I throw three of them down, and they land onto the hard ground with a thud, but no explosion. I take the last bomb, the one with the red ‘x,’ and put it into the wagon’s passenger area.
Now everything is set. It will take over an hour for this wagon to be fully unloaded and ready to ride out again. Another wagon has already deployed and driven itself back toward Kara and the others.
I set my biosuit’s timer for an hour, and I sneak through the refinery into the main hallway system.
It’s time to visit Malcolm, my Seraph warrior with a conscience.
“Kain?” Malcolm says, jumping out of bed.
“At ease,” I say.
“I don’t usually sleep after training, it’s just–”
“I said ‘at ease!”’
He nods, but doesn’t relax.
“I don’t have much time,” I say, “so I’ll get straight to the point. I’m already sure about you, but how many others are you plotting with?”
HIs ears don’t move, and his face remains ice cold.
“If you’re trying to pretend like you’re innocent,” I say, “you would still react. Not reacting at all is a rookie mis–”
He dives for his pillow and starts to raise a gun toward me.
I throw out a tendril, snatch the gun from his hand, and slam his throat against the wall with my real hand.
At least I was right, and that he was planning to betray Darkstar. If I had guessed wrong on that, I’d be forced to kill him.
“Fuck you!” he shouts, “I’ll never tell you a thing–”
“Listen,” I say. “Whatever you were planning, whoever your friends are, this is their chance.”
I pull one of the detonators out of my suit and hold it up to him. “I’m a peacekeeper working undercover. I was sent by Ramses, son of Aegus. This detonator is set to blow up a mining wagon, which will destroy the airlock in the refinery and expose it to vacuum….”
Malcolm’s eyes widen, and his ears twitch.
“There you go,” I say, “That’s how you react.”.
“Now,” I say. “If you and your boys want in, there are nine more bombs that I need planted, and I don’t have the time to do it myself.”
He doesn’t move.
“I need a ‘yes,’ or a ‘no,’” I say.
“Yes,” he nods, and I let go of his throat. “What do I do?”
“The bombs are in the refinery, under the automated driller. You have about 45 minutes to get them out. Plant them onto nine of the ten dropships, and make sure that you and your squad are on the one that isn’t rigged to blow.”
“On the ship?” he asks. “We aren’t scheduled to–”
“When this all goes down,” I say, “you will be sent to Titan. As soon as the fighting starts, kill as many of your Seraphim squad as possible.”
“Where will you be?”
“I will be on Titan,” I say. “Your squad can meet up with me and join our side. This isn’t a suicide mission. Don’t risk exposing yourselves now. Stay undercover until the fighting breaks out, and get those bombs planted.”
“Yes...yes sir!” Malcolm says.
“I’m going to go steal a ship now. No matter what happens, don’t expose yourself. If I die, I need you guys to succeed.”
I hand him the detonator and point at the red button. “Press this button right as your ships are landing–before the ramps go down.”
He takes the detonator from me and nods in understanding, but then he narrows his eyes at me. “How do I know this isn’t some kind of trap, to flush out traitors?”
“When the refinery explodes, you’ll know it’s real, so get the bombs out of there before it happens. The refinery will seal itself off from the main hallway system once the airlock is blown open. The drill I told you all to be ready for earlier today? This is it. You and your squad plant the bombs while the other Seraphim scramble.”
I grab his gun and put it back into his hand. “And keep this shit hidden better. Under your pillow? Are you k
idding me?”
He grins. “Sure thing, boss.”
I leave the barracks and move toward the hangar. I’ve planted a piece of my biosuit in the refinery’s airlock, and it will alert me when the wagon comes back out. In the best case scenario, I will be in a ship and ready to fly when the wagon blows.
I walk down the hallway toward the hangar. I expect to see Raius at any moment. I actually half expect him to simply attack me from behind, but he’s curiously absent. Normally I’d have spotted him creeping behind me by now, even if I wasn’t the one who was up to something.
Just as I enter the main portion of the hangar, my comms beeps. It’s Raius.
“Kain,” his voice rasps.
“Yes?”
“You’re to report immediately to the High Commander. Bring your human.”
“Didn’t we just do this?” I ask, not hiding the irritation from my voice.
I hear Raius sigh. “The High Commander will not settle for the sister. He wants your female. Now.”
“Do you want to ride up there with me?” I say. “I can meet you at the gruel hall in an hour.”
“I’m already up there,” Raius says.
“You’re on the High Command ship?” I ask in surprise.
“Yes.”
Unbelievable luck. Raius was called up to Adus on the day I make my escape. I might be able to clear Darkstar without even triggering the plasma turrets. It might be hours before they realize I’m gone.
“I’ll get her and bring her up there as soon as she’s back from work,” I say.
“No,” Raius says. “Go get her now. Adus is hungry.”
“Will do,” I say, killing the comm link.
I’ll get her now all right, but I’ll take her as far away from this hell as I can. Adus will never lay a hand on her again.
When I enter the hangar bay, there are some human slaves working on various ships. It looks like they are pulling parts out of old ships and transplanting them into newer ships. Darkstar lacks real manufacturing capability, and their fleet is largely running on recycled or stolen equipment. Their failed attack on Titan will be a crippling blow to their economy.
One of the slaves looks up at me, and when I see him about to question me, I glare at him sternly.
Marauder Kain: Scifi Alien Invasion Romance (Mating Wars Book 5) Page 11