Lucky Universe: Lucky's Marines | Book One

by Joshua James

  Jiang nodded her head slowly. “And this whole innocent-researcher song and dance is a joke,” she said, pointing at Vlad. “For one, you’re military as hell. That much is obvious. I didn’t get to see the rest of your crew before this all went belly up, but I’m betting I’d get the same vibe from them.”

  Lucky nodded. Vlad was as fit as any fifty-year-old he’d ever seen. And the eye flutters were a dead giveaway for advanced wetwear.

  “And this one,” Lucky said, pointing at Orton but still speaking to Vlad, “with the desperately obvious over-the-top military hate? He needs acting classes. Badly.”

  Lucky looked back at Orton. “How are we doing, hotshot?”

  Vlad cleared her throat. “Alright, are we done with the guessing game? The point is we don’t—”

  “Holy hell,” said Malby. He was staring upward, eyes unfocused, hands over his head. “We have a problem.”

  “No kidding,” said Cheeky.

  “Spit it out, Malby,” said Lucky.

  “My AI has been monitoring for network activity,” he said, talking fast. “We don’t have drones up there, but we can put a network together down here and broadcast to see what bounces back.”

  He was rattled.

  “And?” said Lucky.

  “And we have nuclear signatures up there in orbit.”

  “What?” spat Orton, looking up sharply.

  Dawson and Jiang jumped to their feet.

  “Rocky?”

  “I’m reading his feed now,” she stated flatly. “Whatever happened up there is over. They’re turning their attention to us.”

  This was what Lucky had been afraid of. It was open season on them down here without support above.

  “How long?” asked Lucky.

  “There are hundreds of signatures,” Rocky noted unhelpfully.

  The scientists looked bewildered.

  “How long until what?” asked Orton.

  “Ten minutes until the first impacts. More or less.”

  Lucky stood up and put his hand on the butt of his pulse rifle. “Until you die in a nuclear fireball,” he said.

  Orton’s face blanched.

  It made Lucky’s day.

  21

  Dig In

  “Dig in or dust off?” said Jiang.

  Spoken like a true Frontier Marine—right out of the manual, thought Lucky.

  Orbital bombardment was something they trained for. The options were simple; find a deep enough hole to ride it out, or find a way to get airborne. Anything but standing still.

  But their options here were limited.

  “Dust off is a no-go,” said Lucky. “There are Union ships at the mining platforms, but we’d never make it.”

  Dig in it is, he thought.

  “I know this is Union tech, but do you have any AI access?” he asked Rocky. “Any schematics, anything?”

  He knew it was a long shot. There would be no reason to build a bunker under the stackshack, and at any rate, it would be much too shallow.

  “No-go,” replied Rocky. Lucky could practically see her shaking her head in frustration. “There is very little networking to begin with, and what there is just is Union gibberish.”

  Lucky looked over at Orton, who was still in shock. His equipment was interpreting Union data. “Is there anything here, like a bunker or underground base, that we can get to in five minutes?”

  Orton just stared, but Vlad answered for him.

  “Nothing like that, no. This is strictly an excavation site. We detected Union military buildup a few days before we arrived, but nothing more than basic field structures,” she said, nodding to the stackshack. “There is nothing deep or permanent here as far as we know.”

  “We’re screwed,” said Malby.

  “We can go into the crater,” offered Jiang.

  “It won’t give any cover,” said Dawson. His happy smile was gone. He was rubbing his wrist.

  “It’s better than nothing,” she snapped.

  “It could buy us some time if we don’t take a direct hit,” said Cheeky.

  “You think they don’t know exactly where we are?” asked Lucky.

  “What about that relic thingy? The spaceship,” said Malby. “You said it was made of rock.”

  “I said it was encrusted in rock,” Vlad replied. “It’s actually some ore from off-planet. We don’t know what it is, exactly. I didn’t say it could survive a nuke.”

  “I thought that ore was everywhere around here.”

  “That’s what I meant,” Vlad said absentmindedly.

  It didn’t sound like what she meant.

  But Vlad looked up sharply and snapped her fingers.

  “It already has.”

  “What already has what?” asked Lucky, bewildered.

  “This is taking too long,” barked Jiang, urgency in her voice.

  “You think?” asked Malby. He was near panic.

  “When those things attacked, the first time,” said Vlad, speaking fast and nodding to herself. “It was when our clone team went to inspect the anomaly. Orton and I stayed up here. We watched the whole … fight, from here. One of your Marines detonated a field nuke.”

  “A field nuke? That hardly compares to the ordnance we have inbound,” said Lucky.

  “No. But the nuke. It didn’t scratch the anomaly. Didn’t even chip the ore. I remember because I was so worried about the anomaly when we saw the blast from here. It threw the rovers all over the field, scattered them everywhere. But the anomaly…” she shrugged.

  Lucky looked around. They were all looking at him.

  “Our hero,” said Rocky.

  “What do you think?” he fired back, ignoring her jab.

  “I don’t have a better idea. And I’m pretty sure you don’t either.”

  “It’ll have to do,” he said. “How far?”

  “A half klick, but we have to go over the ridge of the crater.” She paused. “And through those things,” she said, motioning outside.

  “That’s cutting it close. Let’s move, Marines. Combat formations, drones out.”

  Lucky started for the blast doors, where Cheeky and Jiang already had their rifles out.

  “We could dust off,” said Nico.

  Lucky didn’t stop. “How do you figure?”

  “We could use the drones,” Nico mumbled. “We did that in basic.”

  Lucky remembered that game. Four or five Marines would marshal all their locusts together and drag one of the rookies kicking and screaming into the air. Lucky could imagine Nico getting persecuted by that little number.

  Fun for what it was, but they had lost most of their locusts already, and they needed to do better than getting one Marine a few hundred feet in the air.

  Then again.

  He turned to Orton. “You said the other Marines were in here?”

  Orton nodded. “They set up the camp outside. They had a specialist with a backpack and he opened the blast doors, then they walked through the whole building. It was completely empty. We suspect everyone inside got the same Trojan.”

  Lucky looked at Jiang.

  The others were heading for the door, but she had stopped, already grasping what Lucky was getting at.

  “They won’t be able to carry us very far,” she said, shaking her head.

  “Don’t have to. Just over the lip of the crater. It won’t be pretty, but it will be fast.”

  Jiang shook her head again, but with less conviction. “Maybe.”

  Lucky shrugged. “Maybe has gotten me out of worse.”

  “Change of plans!” he yelled. The Marines stopped and turned.

  “We’re headed to the roof,” Lucky said.

  “Malby, get your kit,” Jiang said. “Time to earn your technical specialist badge.”

  Lucky nodded at Nico. “You can thank our rookie if this works.”

  22

  Giddy Up

  Lucky burst through the roof blast doors and took a deep breath. Then he looked up.

 
He squinted, imagining he could see the nuclear packages whistling through the thin atmosphere, their guidance systems making tiny adjustments to their glide paths.

  Not much different from our own approach here less than an hour ago, he thought.

  “Malby!” he yelled. “Where’s our ride?”

  “Gimme a second,” Malby said. He was sweating profusely as he worked over his hot box. It was a small gel pack that his AI coordinated with. Lucky didn’t understand it, but he knew all technical specialists carried them and they afforded them the ability to do all the fun things they did. “These aren’t designed to work like this.”

  “We’ll be dead in two minutes, so no pressure.”

  “Look out!” Nico shouted as he jumped back from the roof edge.

  A pair of cannon barrels the size of Nico’s head silently rose to eye level. Wave thrusters rippled the air as it gently rotated to face the roof.

  A moment later, another set of barrels came up to the same level beside it.

  It was the two stingray rail-gun drones that the landing party had brought with them. The twin rail-guns were mounted to the bottom of a rectangular platform. The topside of the platform wasn’t smooth. It had two handholds and an access panel, but it clearly wasn’t made for riding on either. “No Step” was stenciled in two places along the platform.

  “I’ll be damned,” Lucky said under his breath.

  “This should be fun,” echoed Rocky.

  Lucky slapped Malby on the back. “Do you have control?”

  Malby looked uneasy. The gel back of the hot box was glowing green in his hand, currents flowing through his fingers and into his nanobots.

  “I can tell them where to go. I can’t explain to them we’ll be along for the ride. It might be choppy.”

  “Understood.”

  “The rookie and I will take the brainiacs,” he said, motioning to the scientists. “Jiang, the Marines are with you.”

  Vlad looked dubious. Orton, standing behind her, looked sick.

  But Lucky took Vlad by the arm and guided her over to one of the stingrays.

  “Why can’t they just land on the roof?”

  “We’ll never take off. These things can’t support one person’s weight, let alone four.”

  Now Vlad stopped. “So how will we make it?”

  “We are forty meters up,” Lucky said. He nodded over the roof of the building. “We are one-hundred-fifty meters from the lip of the crater. We just have to get over that lip.”

  “And after that?”

  “After that, we keep falling.” Lucky looked at Malby, who shrugged. “Hopefully at a slightly slower pace.”

  Cheeky and Dawson shared a glance.

  “Giddy up,” said Cheeky, lips curled in a wicked grin.

  Jiang, Malby, Cheeky and Dawson formed a V-shape at the roof’s edge in front of their stingray.

  “Any activity down there?” Lucky asked Rocky.

  “Not yet.”

  Vlad was at the roof edge now, holding Orton’s hand. All his bravado was gone, and Lucky got the impression that the only way he would jump was with Vlad pulling him.

  Lucky put his arm on Vlad’s shoulder and nodded over at Nico, who did the same with Orton.

  Lucky took one last look at the sky and nodded at Jiang.

  Jiang nodded back and yelled, “Oohrah!”

  The other three Marines answered with a scream of their own, and all four leapt in unison onto the stingray.

  Lucky wanted to watch, to see what happened, to gauge his own actions based on how their jump turned out.

  But that was pointless. They were jumping either way.

  “Go!” he yelled as his grip tightened around Vlad’s arm. She hesitated for a second, but Lucky yanked her off her feet and into the air.

  Nico yelled as well and did the same with Orton.

  He hit the stingray platform and felt it immediately give way, sliding at an angle for a moment before Nico and Orton hit it too.

  He leaned forward as the drone began to spin around like a top, swinging wildly from side to side.

  Vlad shoved her hand in one of the handholds, but Lucky wasn’t so fortunate.

  He laid his body as flat as possible, trying to get as much friction on the smooth surface as he could.

  The stingray’s rudimentary AI adjusted for the imbalance, and Lucky found himself sliding back toward the center of the platform. He and Orton collided headfirst, and Orton began slipping back off the edge.

  Lucky grabbed a handful of his hair with one hand and wrapped his other arm around the access box in the center of the platform.

  Nico finally got purchase on the other handhold and reached over to put his hand around Orton’s waist.

  “I got him!” Nico screamed in his face.

  Then the stingray plummeted several meters, leaving all four of them swinging upward in the air before crashing back down onto the platform.

  What the hell was—

  “Damn,” Rocky said urgently. “Multiple contacts!”

  A flurry of blue energy beams flew past the stingray. His spiders were bouncing around, but for once he ignored them.

  “They’re coordinating their shots.”

  A thought flashed at Lucky. The eggheads had been right.

  They were being controlled from a central point.

  23

  Over the Edge

  The stingray lurched at a steep angle, quickly losing altitude. It was angling to fire its big guns.

  “Malby!” Lucky screamed into his all-comm. He didn’t know where the Marine was or where the other stingray was. “Get us moving!”

  “We are!” Malby screamed back.

  Lucky glanced up to see the second stingray just above and to the left of their own. He could only see a pair of legs hanging off one end that looked like Dawson.

  Malby’s disembodied voice continued. “I can only give them the destination … I can’t alter their specific maneuvering!”

  The stingray cannon rumbled and the platform lurched as it fired. A moment later, a pair of rovers was lifted partially off the ground in an eruption of dirt.

  The maneuver cost them altitude. He felt the stingray pull its nose up, its rudimentary AI adjusting to its sluggish flight path. But they were dangerously low now.

  Another stream of blue energy flashed past the platform.

  Lying on top, Lucky was blind to the fire coming from below. He heard a pop and grunt from above him and looked up to see a huge hole rip open in the stingray platform the Marines rode on. It swayed, and another pair of legs swung wildly off the side.

  “Grab my hand,” said Jiang.

  “Cheeky, grab his—”

  A loud crack was followed by a second pop, and an entire corner of the platform gave way.

  As the edge swung downward, Lucky saw Malby claw desperately at the edge of the platform.

  His fingers got purchase on the access panel door. Then a third crack, and the panel door came free and Malby fell back with the access door still in his hand.

  “Hot box!” shouted Rocky desperately in his head.

  Without Malby they couldn’t override the rail-gun drones, and there was no telling what they’d do. They certainly wouldn’t continue over the lip of the crater and down to the base of the artifact.

  “Catch me!” he fired back at Rocky.

  He lunged from the edge of the platform. Malby was falling backward and upside down. Lucky reached out for anything he could grab and felt the cool metal of Malby’s combat gear on his fingertips but knew he wouldn’t be able to hold him. Malby was a goner. He’d never get him.

  And then something smashed into his hand, and he clamped down with all his strength.

  He looked upward—which was straight down now—to see Malby’s combat boot in his hand. In the same instant, he felt his own foot yanked backward.

  He looked back to see one of Rocky’s drones wedging his boot into the barrel of one of the giant rail-gun cannons. As he watched, t
wo more locust drones slammed into their cousin, totally lodging his boot into the giant muzzle.

  “Really?”

  He hung upside down with his foot wedged in the business end of a cannon.

  “Best I could do on short notice,” said Rocky.

  He glanced back at Malby who stared up at him with wild eyes.

  “Keep that hot box hot, Malby. We’re almost there.”

  “I don’t fucking care!”

  Fair point.

  Lucky didn’t feel that optimistic, his lack of optimism matched by the dwindling distance to the rovers below.

  And then he felt a warming sensation in his boot.

  The rail-gun was about to fire.

  “Rocky!”

  He looked back down to Malby. “Malby!”

  Screaming names didn’t actually seem to be helping, but he was running thin on ideas.

  Then he heard his own name.

  “Lucky!”

  He looked up to see Nico, who had crawled under the platform and was hanging from the rail-gun, hand extended.

  In one motion, Lucky grabbed his wrist and rotated his body to release his boot from the rail-gun that was about to fire.

  Swinging back, he watched as the three locusts that had lodged his foot swung below him to give Malby a boost, who was treating Lucky’s outstretched hand like a rope ladder, clawing his way up.

  The stingray fired, a hot blast washing over Lucky’s face. The platform shuddered, and a shaft of blue light flared up from the ground below him.

  And then something hard smashed into his leg, which was dangling now that he’d swung around to put his weight on Nico.

  The top of a rover had smashed every bone in his leg.

  He swung wildly, and for a moment thought he might pull Nico down with him, but he saw Malby struggling for purchase on the bottom of the rail-gun. He had the hot box between his teeth.