“Lure them?” Ratko grumbled. “With what? I don’t think I packed any sweets or breadcrumbs this time, Lieutenant.”
Jezzy ignored Ratko’s insolence. It was a battle, and that was the sort of woman Corporal Ratko was. The heavens knew that Jezzy felt the same way.
“I don’t know how, but I have ultimate faith in you, Marine,” Jezzy said, drawing her blade as Sergeant Ijuo beside her did the same.
Suddenly, Ratko opened fire.
I thought I told her to let the cyborgs advance!? Jezzy hazarded a glance to see that was precisely what she was doing. Willoughby had launched herself down the corridor as Ratko stepped out to cover her, before she jumped backwards.
The shots hit the two cyborgs, but they turned and swiveled in the air, lunging forward to get at the two Outcast Marines.
FZZZT! FZZZT! Two more lines of purple-white fire shot through the corridor.
Jezzy heard a scream. One of her Marines had been hit.
Outcast ID: Corporal Ratko (Technical Specialist)
Health: COMPROMISED.
“No-no-no!” Jezzy was shouting, but her plan was working. As Ratko and Willoughby met the end of the corridor and ducked out of harm’s way, they were chased by the two charging cyborgs, flying forwards, past Jezzy and Ijuo’s open doorway.
“Haii!” Jezzy stepped out, throwing her arm and the glittering silver blade that it carried in a deadly arc.
TZZRK! She felt pressure and a sensation of weight, and then the force of her blow was pulling her forward into a spin as the head of the first cyborg floated free from its body.
Ijuo had slightly less luck than Jezzy did as he rolled forward under Jezzy’s leap and struck upwards with his gladius. It caught the cyborg across the side and shoulder, missing the spine but sending it crashing against the rear wall.
The cyborg was already raising its particle arm as Jezzy continued in her spin, sweeping her blade in a deadly arc over Ijuo’s head to plunge it into the cyborg’s neck-
FZZZT! But not before it fired.
“Hgargh! A grunt of pain, and Ijuo was thrown backwards, back into the room he had rolled out of.
Outcast ID: Sergeant Ijuo (Combat Specialist)
Health: DECEASED.
“No!” Jezzy howled in frustration and despair. She had been meaning to save them. To save all the members of the company she had been asked to protect.
Because I’m just supposed to keep them alive until Solomon gets here, her thoughts continued as she stared at the ruins of the Outcast Marine sergeant whom she had known for only a brief few moments.
I’m supposed to look after them…
“Lieutenant, I’ve got your suit coordinates on my screen. You’re the closest to the hull breach. Starboard-forward to Storage Bay 4,” the colonel informed her.
Jezzy clenched her teeth in frustration. Her impulse was to follow Willoughby and Ratko, to see what help Ratko needed, and then there was the wounded Lance Corporal Francis behind her. Both of these were her men, and they needed her to get them out of there, didn’t they?
But I have orders from the colonel, Jezzy knew. And she also knew that if she didn’t fulfill them, then it wouldn’t just be her Outcasts who would be in danger, it would be the whole Oregon.
And there was no point saving lives on a ship that was about to break apart. Jezzy turned in mid-air, kicking out at the walls to swim her way forward through the empty corridor to where it ended in the larger storage bay.
Environmental Warning!
Her suit flashed an orange and red warning light moments before Jezzy felt the shockwave hit her body.
One of the walls of the storage bay suddenly crumpled inwards, tearing itself from the ceiling and the wall as the metal fatigue, hastened by the sucking, pressure-less vacuum, took hold.
And Jezzy could now see clearly past the wall to the layers of metal girders of the inner hull, and finally, the thick plates of the outer hull that had been scored and pulled open like a tin can.
And beyond that, stars.
“Colonel, the rip is too big!” Jezzy took a snapshot of the image and wirelessly transmitted it to the bridge. This wouldn’t be the simple case of a spot-weld in a few places, or even a team to cover the holes with the spare metal plates that every starship carried. This would require a major outfit and repair, at a station very much like the Last Call behind them.
“Colonel?” Jezzy hailed him again.
There was silence from the other end of the line.
The hole in front of Jezzy was large, almost the height of herself and about as wide again. The inner and outer hull made up a four-meter length of twisted and shattered girders, crumpled past a narrow crawlspace that must have been the service shoot the cyborgs had broken into and used to worm their way through the hull of the Oregon like termites.
“Colonel? I need orders, now!” Jezzy said.
“Lieutenant Wen. Get you and your company out of there, now. I’m sending people to the escape pods,” Faraday said as a deep shudder went through the battleship. It was the sort of bone-deep, vibrational shake that made Jezzy’s teeth ache just feeling it move up through her feet and into her knees. It was the sort of structural groan that preceded some terrible collapse.
“Sir!?” Jezzy said.
“We’ve got decompression events on Floors 4 and 2, and more cyborgs pouring in. We’re compromised, Lieutenant Wen. We need to retreat and regroup.”
“Retreat and regroup!?” Wen burst out in shock. “How?”
“Get to the escape pods. There are several on your level, if they haven’t been damaged by the decompression,” she heard him say in a tight voice. “I’ve automated them to make planetfall on Pluto. You’ll have basic survival gear, and from there, you can regroup with the Plutonians and await rescue.”
“Sir?”
“The battle is lost, Lieutenant. We held the Ru’at here for a short while. We can only pray that it was long enough for General Asquew to pacify Mars and free up the rest of the fleet. Now, move it, Marine! That is a direct order!” The colonel clicked off their connection, and Jezzy was left hanging in space, in front of the stars, wondering just how it could have come to this.
“Jezzy!” It was Karamov on one end of the communicator. “We’re pinned down. Can’t make it past the entrance hall!”
“I’m coming,” Jezzy said, turning and launching back the way she had come as an emergency broadcast broke in over her suit communicators:
Group-Level Broadcast: Oregon Marine Detachment, Outcast Marines.
Sender ID: Brig. Comm. Faraday (Commanding Officer)
Message: Attention all personnel. Immediate evacuation order. Make your way to your nearest escape pods immediately. Repeat: Immediate evacuation order.
“Jezzy!? What was that?” Karamov sounded spooked, as well Jezzy thought that he might be, given the circumstances. She sure was spooked.
“Orders, Karamov. We all heard the man. I’m on my way.” Jezzy flew through the weightless corridor the T-junction at the far end, just as a line of purple-white fire clipped her boot.
FZZT!
Warning! Suit Impact Detected: Right Power Boot
Armor Plating Efficiency: -70%
“Ach!” Jezzy felt the flush of transferred heat and the pain of constricting metal as she was spun against the wall.
Adrenaline Injector System Activated.
Before Jezzy even had a chance to rebound off the wall, she felt a slight pinch of pain and then the enlivening, electrifying flood of adrenaline as her suit automatically compensated for her injury. All pain was gone, and she felt like she could do impossible things.
Which, right now, meant Jezzy kicking out with her damaged foot to force her body into a tight corkscrew spin, crossing the distance between the wall and her cyborg attacker as she lashed out with her strengthened-steel blade.
CLANG! She hit the thing’s metal arm, and the cascade of sparks and screaming metal indicated that she had nearly severed the limb from the crea
ture that owned it.
But Jezzy wasn’t done there. She punched out with her free power gauntlet—her Jackhammer still strapped to her back, where she had put it when she had taken to the sword—to grab the cyborg’s face with her own metal grip.
The power gauntlets of the Outcasts were only one step down from the full tactical suits like the one that Malady wore. That meant articulated, servo-assisted joints that could pile on pounds more pressure than her already-strong body could normally allow.
She seized the cyborg’s face, feeling vaguely disgusted by this close contact with the almost-dead human flesh, wrenching the cyborg’s head up and back so that she could slam her blade into the thing’s exposed neck.
FZRK! More sparks and gobbets of machine blood, and the body was falling away, revealing the final corridor before the entrance hallway to Level 3, which was filled with three more cyborgs, already turning to confront her.
“Where’s Ratko and Willoughby!?” Jezzy managed to shout, the panic at having three of these monstrous things to deal with on her own finally overcoming her mania-inducing adrenaline rush.
She was going to die. No one had ever fought three cyborgs on their own before. Well, no one had done that and survived, anyway.
“Ratko and Willoughby made it through to us. But we can’t—” she heard Karamov respond, before there was another flash of purple-white light from around the end of the corridor.
Jezzy raised her blade at the nearest cyborg in traditional samurai style, just as her Yakuza mentors had taught her, and she leaped.
18
Contraband
Don’t say anything… Don’t say anything… Solomon prayed as he overheard one of the nearest general assistants on the Helga try to ask the imprimatur a question.
So far, the jump had been going on for approximately twenty or thirty minutes. They couldn’t be that far off from arrival, and Solomon was sure everyone was awash with jump sickness.
But Solomon had heard that there were those who actually enjoyed the paroxysms of anxiety and nausea, of sweaty and aching limbs and clenching jaws. He wasn’t sure if any of the general assistants around him fit that category, but they certainly were a lot more able to withstand the pressures of a Barr-Hawking field.
“So, how long you been at the Luna Station, huh?” one of the assistants behind her leaned forward in his webbing, clearly taking an interest in the aristocratic-looking Mariad Rhossily.
“Oh, just a few days,” the imprimatur said, which was almost truthful. Solomon had to complement her resourcefulness.
“Really? I haven’t seen you in the mess hall. What bubble they got you in?” the man asked.
Shut the conversation down! Solomon was inwardly screaming. He didn’t want to come so far only for it all go wrong here and now.
“Ah, well…” Rhossily wavered. Solomon could tell that she didn’t know enough about the Luna Station, its layout or internal procedures to be able to lie effectively. Should he step in?
“Anyway, I heard that we’re going to get paid BIG for this cargo. What are you going to do with your cut, lady?” the man went on.
“Hssst!” The assistant next to him suddenly elbowed the talkative worker in the side. “No mentioning that, you hear!?”
But it was too late. Solomon had already overheard it. Hadn’t Tomas the Luna Station smuggler said that the Helga was on a pickup mission, not a delivery? That it needed an empty hold so that it could fill with Martian iron for Hausman’s corporate backers?
Solomon considered the possibility that Tomas had lied to them, which was of course, a very real possibility. And not one that he could do much about.
But I don’t think he did. Solomon frowned. Call it a hunch. And there had been those large, cubicle-style boxes that he had seen down in Hold 3 of the Helga. Cubicle-style boxes that he had seen somewhere else before, if only he could remember where…
Eris. Solomon’s nausea-addled mind suddenly worked.
The Erisian Asteroid Field, when he and the rest of the Outcasts had been sent to find out what had happened to one of the Confederacy’s deep-field ship-stations—giant cruiser-type civilian ships that traveled slowly but incredibly far on their own Barr-Hawking drives, with an intergenerational crew who quite as often lived, married, and died on their long-distance ships. The ships were major carriers of the Confederacy’s import and export goods, traveling from one farflung colony world to another.
But this one had a secret in its heart. It had only been transporting one thing: a war robot manufactured by NeuroTech on Proxima and sent to Mars. It had ‘woken up’ just as the cyborgs on Proxa had mysteriously ‘woken up,’ and then it had proceeded to cause a catastrophic life support system failure on the ship, killing all of the crew, and then mimicking their distress calls to lure the Outcasts to their doom.
And there had been crates like those down below our feet alongside it. The memories all came rushing back to Solomon. Those crates had been empty on the deep-field station-ship, but the exact same ones that Solomon had seen in the First Chosen of Mars hideout hadn’t.
They had been filled with the slumbering bodies of the cyborgs, newly fashioned from NeuroTech offices, Solomon realized.
“Oh frack!” He shot upright on his chair.
19
Battle-sister
“Hai!” Jezzy spun, her blade flashing silver through the weightless corridor. It was hard to exert any great force in her strike, but the magnetized weights at the end of her boots helped, giving her leverage to push her highly-toned muscles against.
Muscles that had not only been trained by the Marine Corps Outcast Training Program on Ganymede, but also by the Yakuza, and augmented by doses of Serum 21, the biological ‘medicine’ that all of the Outcasts had been given.
TZRK! There was a spray of sparks as her blade came down on the raised metal arm of the first cyborg to strike at the cyborg’s face. It wasn’t enough. In any normal encounter—say, with an actual stars-damned human, Jezzy thought—it would have been enough of a severe injury to make the wearer fall to the floor, howling in agony.
As it was, her opponent just swung his heavy metal fist around, heedless of the half of his face that was hanging off.
Jezzy tried to duck, but the weightlessness made it difficult. All she could do was swim, leap, and glide—
Thump! The blow hit her on the side of the helmet, spinning her in mid-air to the opposite wall of the corridor she was trying to fight her way through and bouncing her head off the inside of her own armor.
Warning! Suit Impact Detected: Helmet, Left Side
Armor Plating Efficiency: -40%
“Eurgh…” Jezzy’s vision swam as she started to bob and float in the air. It was hard to see anything but stars. Even the warning notifications of her own suit appeared to be doubling.
Move. Move! MOVE! A desperate and angry part of her demanded her attention, and she opened her eyes just in time to see the half-faced cyborg raising his weapon arm to fire once again, straight at her chest.
Power Boot Controls: Activate Magnets 60%
Jezzy’s fingers twitched and in response, the tiny data-pads sewn into her inner mesh gloves indicated to her suit what commands she wanted to deliver to it. Power was shunted through the magnets at the soles and balls of her boot, surging them into life and slamming the acting field commander to the floor.
FZZZT! The purple-white bolt of fire shot inches from her helmet to buckle and burn the metal wall behind her.
Move! Attack!
Jezzy was already heeding her own advice, lashing out with her blade to hit the cyborg’s knee joint. There was a clang and a hiss of escaping steam as she must have ruptured some sort of hydraulic system, and the cyborg twisted on its hips, falling to the floor in front of her.
Power Boot Controls: Activate Magnets 10%
Jezzy was already kicking off the floor as she readjusted the magnets in her boots with whisper-quick finger movements. The combined effort of her legs and the sudd
en lighter weight of her body helped her to somersault over the falling cyborg in front of her as it shot into the wall space she had occupied.
“Urgh!” She kicked out at the second cyborg that was waiting for her, and one more behind that.
Her kick sent the second cyborg careening back into the third, buying her a heartbeat of time.
“Ach!” Pain ripped up her leg.
Warning! Suit Impact Detected: Right Power Boot
Armor Plating Efficiency: -100% COMPROMISED
The cyborg with half a face, instead of firing up at her as she had thought it would do, had instead swung around to grab her wounded ankle that had earlier been hit by one of the particle beams.
At the time, she had been lucky that the laser shot hadn’t melted a hole straight through her suit, but her luck ran out this time.
Hsssss!
Environmental Warning! Suit Pressure Compromised!
Pressure Loss: 2%
Oxygen Loss: 8%
It wasn’t just the loss of oxygen and the asphyxiation that Jezzy Wen was terrified of, it was the sudden freezing cold that penetrated her foot and felt like someone was attacking her with icicles.
I’ll get frostbite in minutes.
I’ll starve of oxygen in minutes.
My foot will freeze and shatter.
These dark thoughts raced through Jezzy’s head in the time it took for her to lunge down with the blade still in her hand at the almost-prone cyborg.
It was a reaction, and an angry one at that. She couldn’t afford to take her eyes off the cyborgs behind her, but what choice did she have? It was a direct blow, under the cyborg’s chin and straight through the neck to its spine.
Invasion- Pluto Page 12