Outcast Marines Boxed Set

by James David Victor

  “Thanks…” he coughed. He was still aware of the pain, and a sense of tightness around his side as Karamov got off him and allowed the man to sit back up again. But he couldn’t sit up fully, one side of his body—under his left arm and his hip—didn’t seem to want to obey him.

  What?

  “Commander, look at me. Listen to me.” It was Karamov, kneeling in front of him and looking at him with his wide dark eyes, gilded with the neon information lights of his own visor helmet. “You’ve been shot in the side. You’ve still got the bullet in you. These drugs will keep you on your feet for a bit, but you’re going to crash out unless we get you to a surgical facility, okay? I have no idea where the bullet is. One false step and it could rip something vital in there. You gotta be careful, you hear me?”

  Solomon nodded. His thoughts were a mixture of fastest-ever and warm-and-slow. It made it hard to know what he should do.

  “The Proxima delegates,” he croaked.

  “Fracking hell, Commander,” Kol said out loud, looming behind Karamov in the dark light. “Do you ever stop thinking about the job? You almost died, man!”

  “They’re fine. Scared, disorientated, but fine,” Karamov said, nodding beyond Solomon’s shoulder. When the commander—stiffly—turned his head, he saw that there indeed were the three white-suited Proxima delegates, and the two convicts that they had been talking to.

  One of which he recognized.

  It was the old man, still looking quiet and watchful, but perhaps a little subdued. The one who had pointed at the ambassador.

  “You.” Solomon coughed, and the older convict just looked back at him without saying a word.

  “Please, Commander, sirs?” said the first Proximian. Their helmets were domed like semi-circles, but Solomon could see their underlit faces inside. Young. Short-cropped, very smart hair. They looked too young to be negotiating a possible civil war.

  “We need to get these men out of here, officers…” the Proximian said, casting a hungry look at the shaft that Solomon and his two other Outcasts had just climbed down. “We were on our way back when that man stopped us. I think he was going to kill us…but you got here.” The young man with the perfect auburn hair nodded tearfully at Solomon.

  “Ha. Look where that got me,” Solomon wheezed as Karamov and Kol helped him to his feet, and then turned to help the others.

  “Kol, on point.” Solomon said. “But that shooter could be waiting for us up there. I know we haven’t got any weapons, but we need to get out of here anyway…”

  “Don’t worry about me, Commander,” Kol said fiercely, drawing his ridiculously small service knife and turning towards the shaft and its steps—

  WHUMPF! There was an almighty roar as the ground and walls started shaking.

  “Kol!” Solomon shouted, as the shaft went dark with the sudden in-rush of rocks and dust.

  10

  No Choice Left

  “We have to get you out of here,” Jezzy said to the ambassador. Her words had broken the worried silence that followed the dreadful, shuddering creaks and cracks that had rocked the building. Jezzy wondered if that was the worst of it, or if tunnels had collapsed and escape routes had become blocked far below them.

  Jezzy wondered if Solomon, Karamov, and Kol were still alive.

  “I’ve found it,” the imprimatur said. She was now braced against the back wall of the guard booth, clutching at the control desk as the entire platform had shifted on its moorings and tottered precariously over the ice pit.

  “The transmitter controls?” Jezzy asked. Her suit transmitter wasn’t powerful enough to get a message up and through Titan’s thick, noxious atmosphere. Their only hope was that the ice mine still had one that was remotely operational, and that they could use to call in support from the docking station above.

  “Does it have power? Jezzy asked worriedly, as she felt another judder go through the floor.

  “It has its own reserve power, and there’s enough residual power in the building’s generators to…” The imprimatur’s hands moved quickly over the board, turning dials and reverting circuit diagrams on the data-screens under her fingers.

  Thunk. An audible sound clearly heard over her suit amplifiers, and a set of overhead floodlights flickered on in the reception room.

  “Backup generator working. Feeding power to the transmitter…” the woman said, as far above their heads something twitched to life on the roof of the Titan ice mine.

  It was a radio dish, almost as large as a person. It had been pointed back at the prison facility itself—powerful enough to send signals across space but dedicated to providing constant contact with its nearest neighbor.

  The gunmetal gray of the receiver/transmitter dish twitched on its moorings, breaking apart frozen ethane from its mounting as it started to jerk upwards in unsteady moments. It hadn’t been used to send a signal up into space like this…probably ever.

  “Thirty degrees off the elliptic, forty, fifty…” the imprimatur was muttering to herself. Jezzy imagined that she wanted to get the transmitter as close to a 90 degree straight-up angle to ensure the maximum chance that their transmission would be received by any rescuers above.

  “Sixty, seventy…”

  Ker-thunk! The humans couldn’t hear it, of course, but the transmitter, in place for over twenty years and suffering the daily freezing temperatures that could warp or constrict metals, twitched and stopped moving. It wasn’t going to go any further, as it pointed at an angle over the horizon.

  “Dammit!” the imprimatur hissed through her teeth. “It’ll have to do…” Her hands flickered over the controls, sending a message.

  “Ask for tactical support,” Jezzy said suddenly. “We saw a Marine transporter when we were coming in up there. It might not have a full squad of Marines, maybe only the drivers and engineers, but they’ll all have combat training, and the transporter itself has got enough firepower to give our attackers something to think about…”

  But entering atmosphere takes time, even for a dropship like the transporters, Jezzy thought. She had to hope that the building would last that long—

  “What are you doing? We have to get out of here!” an angered voice was shouting, as a group of people staggered up the downward ramp behind them.

  Sol? Jezzy thought wildly, but, as her eyes hopefully scanned the small and weary crowd, she saw that there were no Outcasts amongst them. It was Father Ultor, his guards, and a ragtag group of convicts, perhaps ten all in all.

  “I’ve picked up as many as I can find, but the caves are getting too dangerous,” the Martian priest announced heroically. “Come on, Imprimatur. We need to get back to the rover…” He and the others were already jogging across the room to the open ramp of the doorway that led outside—

  “Father, wait!” Jezzy called out, just as the sparks and puffs of concrete dust hit the ramp.

  Pheet! Thock! Phttt! The shooters were still out there, still keeping them inside.

  “Get back!” the father snarled, throwing his arms in front of the running group of convicts as the bullets raced up the main entrance. His group scattered, leaping and diving for the walls as a couple of shots hit the back of the wall.

  “What the hell is that!? Where is the rover?” Father Ultor was shouting.

  “We’re pinned down. The rover’s gone,” Jezzy shouted. “But we’re working on it. Calling in support.”

  “This whole place is going to go down any minute!” the father shouted back, and beside him, the combat specialist could see the worried faces of the convicts behind their own bubble helmets. They were close to deciding to make a run for it anyway, she thought.

  But she did have an ace up her sleeve. She hit the call button on her harness.

  “Malady? What’s the sit-rep?” she called to the only member of Gold Squad that she could actually reach at the moment: the metal man-golem currently bounding around the outside of the vast ice mine to attack the suspected positions of the shooters.


  “Found two foxholes,” the almost-man’s electronic, bare voice came back, as flat and as stern as always. Jezzy wondered if being surgically sealed in his full tactical power suit also meant that he no longer thought and felt like any other normal living human did anymore. No time to ask him that now, though.

  “Foxholes? No shooters?”

  “No. But they were dug in, as you said, occupying the eastern ridge around the mine. I found ground bolts, empty cartridge cases…”

  “Ground bolts.” Jezzy nodded to herself. They were the small, self-firing pins that would lock a heavy weapon into the ground, and a twist-off charge that released them. You only needed them for really large weapons—bigger than their personal Jackhammer rifles. Heavy machine guns. Personal missile launchers. Sniper rifles. Mortars… She listed off any of the possible armaments would require such equipment.

  “These guys are tooled up,” she said sourly.

  “What, you didn’t guess when they blew apart the rover?” the ambassador said at her side. Cathleen Ochrie was a strong woman, obviously, but it seemed that even she was starting to crack under the pressure.

  “Fair point,” Jezzy said. “Okay, Malady. Keep on moving till you find them. We’re still pretty hot across here. There has to be at least one shooter trained on the mine entrance…” she said, which wasn’t very far, as it happened. She heard the sudden crackle of gunfire over Malady’s suit channel.

  “Mal!?” she called out desperately.

  “Contact. Two shooters, East-by-northeast and east-by-south. Responding with extreme prejudice,” the man-golem said, and Jezzy heard the booms as he opened fire with his own heavier particle cannon. He was the only one large enough to use it as a two-handed weapon.

  “The shooters have got company. It might be enough of a distraction—” Jezzy said

  Kerrraaack! A burst of dust as a crack suddenly burst through the concrete floor and ran almost all the way to the opposite wall.

  “I’m not dying here!” One of the convicts jumped up and ran for the door.

  “No! Wait!” Jezzy called out, but it was too late. The tide had already turned as the other convicts that the father had rescued from the mine scrabbled to their feet and bounded out.

  “Imprimatur, come on!” Father Ultor was shouting as he and his guards jumped up. “It’s better to have a chance of life out there than being crushed to death in here!”

  “I’m sorry, he’s right…” the imprimatur said, hitting the send button on the board and racing to join the father and his Martian guards.

  “Oh hell,” Jezzy cursed as the ambassador, too, started to rise to her feet. “Ambassador, I don’t know if the enemy is pacified…” she managed to say as she got to her feet to follow.

  “This building is the enemy now, Marine!” The ambassador was already moving, and Jezzy was caught like an insect in amber in a moment of total indecision. The rest of her squad—Karamov, Kol, and Cready—were still down there somewhere looking for the Proxima delegates. They could be trapped, behind a boulder wall, or they could be hurt.

  Or they could be dead already. Her training kicked in. As much as she wanted to run down the ramp to find them, to drag them out, every hour of Marine training and before that her Yakuza training dictated the same thing: save what you can, what’s in front of you. Don’t throw your life away on an uncertainty.

  I was supposed to be the one to kill Solomon Cready, she thought miserably as she turned to follow the ambassador. She had also been tasked to protect the Ambassador to Earth. In a way, I’m still killing him by abandoning him down there. She gritted her teeth as she ran, blinking back the tears that had suddenly sprung into her eyes.

  “Kol?” Solomon coughed. His throat felt scratchy, raw. That was a bad sign. The atmospheric filters on his suit must have been overcome, and now particles of rock dust were being circulated into his oxygen supply.

  Wonderful. Die of shock, crushed alive, or choking to death. His day wasn’t getting any better, but he hoped that it was worse than Technical Specialist Kol’s, who had been standing in front of the shaft that would lead them up to safety when it had caved in.

  “Kol!? Report back, damn it!” he said again into the murk.

  It wasn’t totally dark, however. There were thin beams of bluish light that he realized must be from his light tactical suit. The suit still had power then. Hood. He was lying on his back, and the room, in the hazy illumination of his suit, looked as though it had been rearranged. There were now the dark silhouettes of blocks and boulders everywhere that hadn’t been there a moment before.

  “Specialist Kol here, reporting for duty…” wheezed a lighter voice in the dark.

  “Thank the heavens. Are you okay? Can you move?” Solomon was asking.

  “I think so, Commander…” A grunt, and a scrape as detritus and rubble moved somewhere in the gloom. “Yeah, I’m good. Bruised, but most of the heaviest blocks filled the door and shaft tunnel, only over-spill came in here,” Kol said.

  “Good. Karamov?” Solomon asked.

  “Hurgh.” There was a groan, and then twin shafts of light as Karamov’s suit lit up. “Adjunct-Marine Karamov, still alive, I think.” Solomon saw in the increasing light that he had apparently been thrown to the back of the room by the blast. But he can stand up, which might be more than can be said for me… Solomon nodded to himself. His body was still flooded with the rubbery-warm feeling of stimulants and painkillers, but he was aware of a tight red pain hovering over his side whenever he attempted to move.

  He tried not to think of the ugly little bullet, still lodged somewhere in his flesh. He failed.

  “How about everyone else?” Solomon asked, to hear a series of coughs, grunts, and groans as the two convict miners and the three white-suited delegates from Proxima emerged from the rubble. Or they had once been white-suited, everyone and everything was now coated with an ochre and gray layer of dust.

  “All present and breathing. No major injuries,” Karamov confirmed, as lights were switched on and suits fiddled with until they could once again see each other, crouching and leaning in a considerably smaller chamber than they had been occupying before, with their only exit now filled with blocks of rock and ice.

  “We could melt through it,” one of the convicts said—a burly, youngish woman with a scar running across her forehead. “We should have our block cutters under this mess here somewhere…”

  Oh yes, these miners had been busy cutting out blocks of rock ice, to be refined and for the nitrogen, oxygen, and water to be extracted, Solomon thought.

  “Won’t work,” Kol burst their bubble by saying.

  “What? Are you the miner now?” the convict woman turned on Kol immediately. Solomon wasn’t going to have a seniority contest, not stuck a good few hundred meters underground. “No, but he’s my technical specialist. Adjunct-Marine Kol has my total faith,” Solomon said severely as he forced himself to stand up, next to his two brothers-in-arms. Their weapons might have been stolen, but they were still Outcast Marines. They still had some authority, he hoped.

  “I reckon there must be a good few tons of rock ice filling that up.” Kol moved and bobbed his head as he examined the blocked-up entrance. “Your cutters will melt the water content for sure, but you’d only be weakening the landslide from below—meaning more will fall in the more you cut…”

  “Well, what better idea do you have?” the convict woman snapped back. “Stay in here and pray?”

  Not with the building about to fall on top of us. Solomon remembered the sight of the entire mining facility above. It had been slowly sliding downwards, halted by the concrete plugs of its massive stanchion legs, but for how long?

  No, we need to get out of here before a factory falls on our heads… Solomon tried to think through the options, but it was hard to with his body thrumming with chemicals and the echoes of pain. We have no weapons. Our transmitters don’t work down here.

  Scrape-thunk! A sound drew his eye—it was the other convict,
the much older silent man who had pointed at the ambassador.

  What is he doing?

  He was crouched at the rear of the cave, using his over-large, barely-sealed leather gauntlets that the convicts wore to pull and tear at the blocks on the other side of the tunnel.

  “Hoi! What’s through there? Do you know a way through?” Solomon asked, as all eyes turned to the old man, ignoring the rest of them.

  “It doesn’t go anywhere, it just leads to a dead-end,” the scarred woman said in annoyance. “An old works tunnel that they had to abandon before my time here. Look, I know you guys are supposed to be the rescue party, but it looks like you haven’t got any answers, so…” the woman was saying, but Solomon’s mind had seized upon one throwaway comment.

  Before her time here… Solomon moved to the old man’s side, doing his best to crouch down.

  “But not before your time, huh, old man?” he said in a low voice, still clearly audible to the others.

  “That’s Malcom Jeckers,” one of the Proximians said. “He was one of the architects of the Proxima Constitution. A real firebrand in his early days. Almost had a shot at becoming the Imprimatur of Proxima, before the Confederacy…”

  “How long has he been here?” Solomon asked, since Malcom appeared to be ignoring them as he tore at the rocks.

  “He was the first to call for Proxima independence. He was deemed too dangerous by the Confederacy to ever set foot on Proxima again,” the younger delegate said. “He’s been here thirty-off years…”

  Thirty years. Solomon couldn’t even begin to imagine it. Is this what I would turn out like, if I had been sent here instead of the Marine Corps? Solomon was fully aware that he along with every other Outcast should have ended up here, had it not been for the Doctor Palinov selecting the criminals from their transporters and sending them to Ganymede instead, according to their health results. Solomon didn’t even know if anyone down on Earth knew that he wasn’t on Titan, doing what the rest of these convicts would be doing, day in, day out.