A loud roar split the skies as the two Ru’at jump-ships screamed overhead, turning as they came back for an attack vector.
I thought they wanted me as their general! Solomon thought in fury before he was thrown into the air once again as the rover smacked into the ground, thankfully upright.
“Hit it!” Solomon shouted, and the Imprimatur of Proxima did just that, slamming her foot down as the rover surged forward.
FZT! This time, Solomon saw the twin lines of blue-white laser fire burst from the approaching Ru’at ships, slamming into the ground and sending up sprays of pulverized rocks before the beams raced across the crater floor toward them.
Mariad forced the rover in the only direction they had left—straight up the nearest crater wall, as the Ru’at laser fire raced behind.
“We’re not going to make it!” Rhossily gasped.
“We will! Go for it! We will!” Solomon shouted, wishing that there was something he could do.
There was a judder, and suddenly the Martian rover was lifting from the edge of the crater wall, launching into the air and rising in an uncontrolled arc. The viewing screen ahead of them showed only the dirty orange skies of the Red Planet.
Everyone inside the cab screamed, even Ambassador Ochrie, which Solomon might have taken as a good sign that she was coming out of her hypnotized state were it not for the fact that his ill-spent life was currently flashing before his eyes.
FTHWAP! Something hit them at the peak of their arc—a bright flash of light and a wave of force that spun them around, making even the enhanced genetics of First Lieutenant Solomon Cready feel nauseous and sick, before…
They crashed.
9
Ansible
The rover hit the orange dirt, sending up plumes of dust and sand as it rolled, end over end, across the Martian landscape, bouncing in the slightly lighter gravity of the Red Planet.
Solomon forgot which way was up, or down, or anywhere else for that matter. He felt like he was a bug trapped in a jar, being viciously shaken by a cruel child. Pain erupted into his consciousness from every outer part of his body—his knees and feet, his elbows and hands, and his forehead as other various parts of his anatomy smacked into various parts of the metal interior of the cab.
We’ve been hit. We’ve been hit… Even in his distress, his command training kicked in and a small, removed part of his brain assessed the damage.
We have stopped moving, and we’ve been hit. He was sure of that. What had that flash of light been? That sudden air blast that had dashed them against the rocks?
But a strike from one of the Ru’at ships would have sheared through the shell of the rover… He blinked, trying to open his eyes, but it was dark. He could smell burning rubber and the ozone smell that usually came with sparking electrics. Or Ru’at laser fire.
Then why aren’t I dead? For one thing, he could still breathe. He knew that he could, because he could smell. He had to have working lungs to push the air through his nose, right? But the Ru’at laser shot would have exposed them to the deadly low oxygen, high methane, and high carbon dioxide mix of the Martian atmosphere…
You’re in an encounter suit, you idiot, he told himself. That would be a good reason why he was still able to breathe. Maybe they were buried under a ton of rock. Maybe it was everyone else inside the cab here that had died…
“What the frack…” He was thankfully proved wrong by the sound of a groan coming from just a few feet away from him. It was a man’s voice, and it sounded an awful lot like Kol.
“Kol? Are you okay?” Solomon coughed.
“Do I look like I’m okay, chief?” Kol hacked, and there came the sound of moving debris as Solomon presumed the once-technical specialist sought to fight his own way out of the tonnage of red rocks.
“I can’t see you. I can’t see anything.”
“Fair enough. But who in the name of the sweet holies let the imprimatur drive this thing!?” Kol did not sound impressed, and for a moment Solomon was transported back, almost an entire year ago, to when it had just been him and Jezzy and Malady and Kol and Karamov. He had missed Kol’s caustic humor and boundless optimism, the lieutenant realized at that point.
They had been Gold Squad. The perilous and embattled Gold Squad of the Outcast Marines—the Outcast adjunct-Marines, he remembered, as that had been before General Asquew had lifted their entire regiment to full Marine status.
But remembering that they had been promoted also reminded Solomon of why they had been promoted.
The Outcast adjunct-Marines had been given their first full-battle experience in the ‘pacification’ of Mars, split off into their respective squads to perform various infiltration, expeditionary, and reconnaissance operations.
And it was during Gold Squad’s infiltration of the Martian Armstrong Habitat that Kol had betrayed them.
Not many of the adjuncts had made it out of their first true battlefield experience. Maybe it was poor planning, or maybe their skills were better suited to more discrete missions, but from almost a few hundred, they had been cycled back to Ganymede as less than a hundred and fifty.
And then, this technical specialist, who was cursing and groaning about how he couldn’t see anything and how everything hurt, had hacked into a Marine transporter and sent it crashing into the Ganymede Training Facility, killing more of his battle brothers and sisters. At the same time, Kol must have helped land a unit of the Martian-Ru’at cyborgs to clean up what was left, and Solomon, Gold Squad, and even the thug Arlo Menier—currently somewhere on Proxima, fighting a guerrilla war—had to fight for their very existence.
Not even a hundred Outcasts had survived the assault and the destruction of the training facility, and it was owing to their heroic, desperate actions on the surface of Jupiter’s largest moon that General Asquew had decided to award those who were left with full Marine status.
In a very sick and twisted sort of way, Solomon realized that all the Outcast Marines who were still alive had their current gold pips thanks to the actions of Kol.
But it wasn’t like Solomon was going to thank him. The lieutenant felt conflicted and jittery as he shook his head and freed his arms from something heavy that had been constraining them.
“The imprimatur saved our lives, Kol,” Solomon murmured. He could now hear a hissing sound, and the light had turned from black to a slightly lighter gray, giving him some hope that they weren’t completely covered in Martian rock. “You got eyes on the ambassador? Rhossily?” he grumbled as he started to feel through the dark and complicated shapes around him, until his gloved hands closed on something soft. Fabric.
“Ambassador?”
“Urgh?” It was Ochrie’s voice, and it sounded weak. She was a mature woman already, and Solomon was afraid. What would being thrown around in a rover, and possibly being struck by a Ru’at beam device, have done to her?
She was also our last link to the ‘old’ Confederacy, Solomon thought as he started to paw at the rubble, looking for a head, a face, fearing that his hands would come away wet and slick with the ambassador’s blood. The Confederate Council had been blown apart by General Hausman, and all that was left of the original apparatus of human-Earth was this groaning woman next to him, and General Asquew…wherever she was.
“Ambassador, can you hear me? It’s First Lieutenant Cready. Can you talk? Where does it hurt?”
He heard some tortured breathing return to his ears, until, “It hurts everywhere! Where did you think it was going to hurt, soldier?”
Relief flooded through Solomon. Not only was the ambassador talking, but she was also able to be annoyed—all good signs, considering what they had just gone through. But more than that, it was the fact that her voice had lost its slightly misty, confused cadence. She now sounded full-bore Ambassador Ochrie again: complaining, imperious, and annoyed.
“It’s you! You’re back!” Solomon said gratefully. His hands found her hand, which grasped his tightly as he pulled her from bits of seat f
oam and metal wall panel.
“Of course it’s me. Who were you expecting—the Queen of Sheba?” Ochrie was hacking and coughing. “Where are we? I thought we were in the Ru’at colony. What happened? Is the war over?”
She doesn’t remember anything of her time under the Ru’at’s control, Solomon realized. But that might be a blessing, he thought.
“Looks like all we had to do was to chuck her from a great height.” Solomon heard Kol chuckle nearby, presumably still clambering about the footwell.
“Kol, check on the imprimatur. She should be right beside you,” Solomon said sternly, to hear the young ex-adjunct Marine grumble under his breath, and the sound of more dirt shifting one way or another.
“Got her, Sol,” the technical specialist’s voice came back. “She’s hurt. There’s blood…”
Oh, frack. If his number one priority—as a serving officer of the Confederate Marine Corps—was to the Confederate ambassador, then somewhere high underneath that would have been the welfare of the Imprimatur of Proxima. Proxima was—had been—Earth’s largest and most successful colony world, and the furthest away from the mother planet. Although there had been a lot of tension between the various colonies and Confederate Earth, the imprimatur was still technically a high-ranking Confederate official.
And her home world was the first to be attacked by the Ru’at, Solomon thought. They all owed her what their negligence had allowed the Ru’at to take.
“But she’s breathing!” Kol said with apparent relief. He wasn’t completely psychopathic, apparently.
“Good.” Solomon’s command training analyzed the situation.
We’re stuck. Trapped.
We could be fired upon by the Ru’at again, one final time, more than likely…
Outside is a hostile environment where I am the only one who can breathe.
“Right, Kol, you’re our technical guy. Can you make some air filters and bubble masks out of a wrecked Martian rover?” Solomon said. “We’ll need three—one for you, one for Rhossily, and one for Ochrie.”
“Well, thank you for not deciding to leave me to die in here,” Ochrie grumbled.
Back in top form, I see, Solomon deigned not to comment.
“Why can’t we radio in for assistance? Where’s the Rapid Response Fleet?” Ochrie said.
She really doesn’t remember. “Ma’am…” Solomon hazarded. “The First Rapid Response was destroyed by the Ru’at. We flew through their remains to get to Mars.”
“But we were supposed to rendezvous with General Asquew,” Ochrie said.
“She wasn’t there, Your Excellency,” Solomon said as he continued to work, shifting metal and the cab’s dislodged equipment boxes out of the way.
Equipment boxes! Solomon wrenched one of the metal lids open. He could hardly see anything inside, but he grabbed handfuls of anything he could to pull up to the gray-orange light.
“Bingo!” Solomon said. “We got emergency encounter suits. And, uh…a medical kit, I think…” He heaved the mass forward, hitting the back of a chair that was hideously bent backward and almost went over him before forcing it forward. “Kol, see if you can get these to work. Get inside, try not to tear them.”
“Sir. Yes, sir,” the technical specialist said with a drawl of sarcasm.
The encounter suits, he knew, would be the over-large, mostly shapeless bag-type things that made their wearer look like an anime bubble-creature. But they had air filters, environmental protection, a reserve air supply, and hopefully even basic short-range radio transmitters.
I last saw them used on Ganymede after the crash, Solomon thought. There was an odd sort of sadistic circularity to the fact that Kol, the man responsible for that, would also be the man to wear them and make sure that others survived by wearing them.
“If you can get me to a deep-space transmitter, then I know of somewhere we might be able to get help,” Ochrie said, and although he couldn’t see her face, he could hear the fierce snarl inside her voice.
“A deep-space transmitter? You’re having a laugh, aren’t you, lady?” Kol said in the darkness amidst the sounds of stretching polymer plastic. “The nearest one would be in Elysium Habitat, which, as you know, is held by us Martians—”
‘Us’ Martians? Solomon winced.
“And besides which, all the Red’s broadcast satellites were knocked out by the Marine Corps when they decided to nuke the planet!” Kol said, his voice rising to an almost-bark of pain and rage.
“Easy there, soldier,” Solomon growled. “We don’t know who’s above us.”
“They were demonstration shots. No habitats were fired upon—” the ambassador countered.
“A demonstration megaton nuclear explosion that still irradiated tens of kilometers of Martian soil—never to be used again!” Kol returned.
“Look, it’s done. Just get me to a deep-space transmitter, and I promise you that it doesn’t matter whether there are any satellites in the sky or not,” Ochrie sighed, sounding like a schoolteacher reacting to the petulant antics of a naughty child.
Solomon heard Kol’s strangled cough of anger, but he cut him off quickly before this descended into an out-and-out fight. “What do you mean, Ambassador? Without satellites, then there’s no way to get the message out to General Asquew, and any message sent might take hours to get to her, wherever she is.” If she’s even still alive, Solomon didn’t add.
“Super-black satellites,” Ochrie said.
“What?” Solomon frowned.
“Oh, I see…” Kol groaned.
“Would you like to tell me?” Solomon was starting to lose his temper with the young traitor. He had thought that they were coming to some sort of understanding. That Kol had seen the error of his ways. Maybe I was very wrong about my ex-specialist.
“There’s always been talk of how the Marine Corps seeded the system with super-black satellites—drone transmitters in stationary or geosynchronous orbits that have so many levels of electronic dampening and interference that they don’t show on any known scanners. They just sit there, completely motionless but hoovering up data and information, until activated by some higher-up.”
“Sounds like just the sort of thing we need right about now,” Solomon said.
“It’s the Big Brother state!” Kol, who was apparently ever the revolutionary, pointed out.
“I don’t care what it is, if it can get us out of this mess,” Solomon said, turning to the dim shadow of Ochrie. “Ambassador, the message will still take hours to get where it needs to go and back. We’ll have to find a way to hide out on the Martian surface.”
“Not necessarily hours. You haven’t waited to hear the other part of my plan,” Ochrie said harshly. Apparently being rolled over in a Martian rover wasn’t just responsible for snapping her out of her hypnotism, but also gave her a pretty mean streak, as well.
“Oh, here we go,” Kol grumbled, but both of the Confederate officials ignored him this time.
“I said that I knew a place that could help us. Help me to activate the super-black satellites, and I will be able to get us to the experimental command hub.”
“The experimental command hub,” Solomon said the words slowly. Didn’t anyone think to tell him about this a year ago?
“It’s the space equivalent of a command-one bunker. A secret space station where we were to evacuate all of the Confederate Council and coordinate disaster relief efforts in the case of a planet-killing event, like an asteroid…”
“Or the Ru’at,” Solomon said.
“Indeed, or the Ru’at. The ECH not only has access to the super-black satellite network, but also a range of technologies currently in development.”
“I knew it! The Confederacy has been withholding scientific advances from the colonies for years!” Kol said egregiously.
“Shut up, Kol. Now is not the time to talk politics,” Solomon shot back.
“He’s right, we have. But now we need to use it.” The ambassador sounded nonplussed at the ac
cusation. “If it’s operational, and if the Ru’at haven’t already found the ECH, then it has on board a prototype ansible that we have been working on…”
“An ansible?” Kol didn’t sound outraged this time, he sounded amazed.
“What the frack is an ansible?” Solomon, a man more used to cheating art dealers and Triads out of their credits, was clearly out of his depth.
“You remember what we were saying about the faster-than-light drives? Subspace?” Kol said quickly. “An ansible works on the same interconnected subspace principle. It could feasibly send information across millions or billions of miles in the blink of an eye. But I thought it was just science fiction!”
“Most things start out as science fiction, before Confederate scientists turn them into fact.” Ochrie even managed to sound smug.
Solomon took a deep breath. “Okay then,” he said. “It looks like we’ve got a new mission. Get Ochrie to Elysium and a deep-space transmitter, and get this ansible thing to work on some super-secret, black-ops space station,” he said. It felt good to have a direction to go, a path toward hope.
But the lieutenant was very much aware that he had to do all of this with three people in the flimsiest of encounter suits, with a sky filled with alien spaceships, and with one of their number currently unconscious.
They never promised an easy life in the Marine Corps, did they?
10
Friends in High Places
“Did it work!?” Jezzy said, attempting to crane her head from the seat that she was strapped in, an X-harness across her chest. She could have gone for the more usual ‘belt’ option, but Ratko—currently piloting the Marine scout—had demanded that everyone inside go for maximum operational safety.
Which was understandable, given that Corporal Ratko was more or less using the craft to hydroplane across the noxious atmosphere of the Red Planet. What would that be called? Jezzy had a distractible moment to wonder. Aeroplaning?
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