Lucky Universe: Lucky's Marines | Book One

by Joshua James

  “You get that, Rocky? It sounds like you’re good to go.”

  “Oh good,” she replied. “I did it two minutes ago.”

  30

  Trouble

  “It’s dropping with a drone following. It’s going to shoot it when we get some distance from it.”

  “How big is it?” Lucky imagined a huge object composed of the same rock ore as the ship.

  Rocky showed him an image of a smooth pearl-white sphere, no more than fifty-centimeters across.

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it,” she said. “The ship AI tells me it should be quite a show.”

  Lucky jerked his head up. “Hey, Tech Specialists. You still got orbitals?”

  Malby shook his head, then stopped. “Wait, yeah,” he said. “Now that we’re nearing space, I see maybe,”—he paused, eyes unfocused—“two half-functional. Nothing weaponized.”

  “Can you get us visuals?”

  Malby frowned.

  A moment later, Rocky had pumped through the view from Malby’s AI to his mind’s eye.

  Lucky had the same strange out-of-body experience he always had when using far-range drones to look down on his own position. He could see the alien ship streaking out of the planet’s upper atmosphere.

  He could also see the massing Union destroyers now in low orbit with the other view. Several squadrons of skreamers were heading their way. They were in the same V-formation they had used to slice their own Empire destroyers into pieces just a few short hours ago.

  They were going to be easy pickings out here in orbit, especially if Rocky was right and this old bucket didn’t have weapons.

  And then something else caught his eye. A pinpoint of light near the planet’s surface.

  At first he thought it was another nuclear mushroom. More than two dozen were clouding the surface.

  Malby grunted. “Some weird reading on that … on that …” His voice trailed off.

  The pinpoint was expanding with lightning speed.

  “That isn’t possible,” said Malby.

  Distance and perspective made even the most dramatic scenes unfold in excruciating slowness from orbit. But not this. It was spreading faster than anything Lucky had ever seen.

  “What are we seeing?” Jiang asked.

  Wherever the bright flame danced, the planet’s surface retreated. It simply ceased to be. Everywhere matter existed, the leaping flame extinguished it. Within seconds, the hemisphere of the planet that had just been below them was gone.

  The effect on gravity was turbulence-inducingly immediate. Space shifted and twisted around them, unable to cope with the sudden deforming of matter.

  The flame continued onward across the surface of the planet, but as it did Lucky noticed the color was changing. It was growing redder. And moving closer to the view from the drone.

  “It’s riding up the atmosphere!” yelled Malby.

  Orton turned wide-eyed to Vlad, and for the first time it dawned on Lucky that the scientists couldn’t see what the Marines were seeing.

  “The antimatter is eating the planet,” he said. “It’s literally disappearing before our drone eyes. And now it looks like it is eating its way up through the atmosphere.”

  Orton’s face blanched.

  Vlad closed her eyes. “Yes,” she said quietly. “That makes sense. It will be hungry for matter. It’s going to gorge on the planet, but once that is gone it will turn on the particles in the atmosphere. It won’t stop until it reaches space.”

  Lucky didn’t like the way she was personifying the antimatter. He liked even less how she seemed to be enjoying the image of it happening.

  “And what if we are still in the atmosphere when that happens?”

  No one spoke.

  “How about it?” he said to Rocky.

  “We’re clear now. Technically.”

  “What do you mean, technically?”

  “Well, the end of the atmosphere is subjective. There are some lingering particles here in low orbit. If we really want to get to total vacuum, we have to go higher.”

  “And …”

  “And we need to go higher,” agreed Rocky, catching on.

  “Bingo.”

  “Hang on.”

  The ground shifted harshly once more, and again he felt the floor move and his own body rotate in midair as the gravity struggled to keep up. His stomach twisted in knots again.

  Nico looked warily at Orton, but the scientist managed to keep what was left of his lunch down this time.

  In his mind’s eye the flame was climbing higher, chasing their ship as it burned away from the atmosphere. It dawned on Lucky in that moment that he didn’t actually know how the ship was under power.

  “It uses the T’ket’ka in a perpetual energy pattern. They feed on a matter loop, and the energy is dispersed as matter and antimatter flip places.”

  “Sorry I asked. Just tell me we will make it.”

  Silence.

  Finally, he heard Rocky again.

  “We’re going to make it into space. After that, all bets are off.”

  In his mind’s eye, Lucky watched as the last of the planetoid burned away, simply vanishing, as if nothing had ever been there. Then he realized it was chaos in orbit.

  The drone they were using for visuals was spinning about, already losing its bearings without the orbital pull of the planetoid.

  The chaos extended to the Union destroyers, who were scrambling to find their bearings.

  The skreamers were nowhere to be seen. They’d been skimming at very low orbit and had been caught up in the last of the antimatter reaction and devoured.

  A shitty way to go, thought Lucky.

  “We got trouble,” said Rocky.

  The view in his mind’s eye now switched to the view from the nose of the ship. Lucky wondered idly how she got that view. Perhaps she had locusts riding shotgun. Perhaps.

  Three Union destroyers, safe from the carnage in higher orbit, were bearing down on them.

  Cannon pulses poured from their batteries, streaking across the vacuum.

  Lucky sighed.

  This was a more conventional way to go.

  But no less shitty.

  “Incoming!” he yelled.

  31

  Stunned

  The image in his mind’s eye blinked out.

  The ship rocked slightly.

  The Marines, all in various poses of bracing themselves against whatever they could around them, looked at Lucky quizzically.

  “Thanks, I guess,” said Malby.

  What the hell?

  “That was it?” he echoed.

  “You were hoping for more?”

  “So we’re home free? If that is all they have.”

  “The ore is strong, and those destroyer pulses were from distance and conventional.”

  “I’m not liking where you’re going with this.”

  “We have more skreamers inbound. We’ve seen what their ordnance can do. I’m not sure what it can do to us, but I’d rather not stick around to find out.”

  This time, he didn’t see with his mind’s eye. He didn’t need to.

  A light gathered across the banded rock walls, then focused on a point near the base of the alien script they had first passed as they crawled into the cavernous space in the belly of the ship.

  An image of space appeared, floating in air, and for an instant Lucky had the sensation of looking at the green terrain of his own mind floating over him from his nightmare.

  Now what he saw was the near-space around the ship.

  The others gathered around.

  “What are we seeing?” Malby asked.

  “Rocky?”

  “This was an option all along, I just had to … understand better what was on offer.”

  “I still can’t understand how you can interact.”

  “I can’t either. I didn’t have to do a handshake or follow any protocols. I just had access when I looked for it.”

  Lucky f
rowned. That was too fortuitous to accept.

  “It’s the best visual we are going to get in here,” he said to Malby and the rest of the group. “Let’s call it a ship’s eye,” he said, improvising.

  “Those skreamers are in formation again,” said Jiang.

  The others had been burned up in low orbit, but these were pouring down from the two destroyers bearing down on them from high orbit.

  “Can we outrun them?” Lucky asked, out loud this time for the benefit of the group.

  “No,” echoed Rocky.

  Lucky shook his head.

  “Of course not,” said Vlad. “This ship isn’t built for conventional speed.”

  “What is it built for?” asked Lucky, suspiciously.

  He hadn’t forgotten how quick she’d been to turn on him.

  “The second anomaly,” Vlad said.

  Orton looked up sharply.

  “This ship is designed to pass through that anomaly,” she said, nodding slowly at Orton. “It doesn’t need to move fast through space. It can pass through folds in space.”

  Orton’s eyes grew big. “The wormholes. They exist? But we never had anything definitive on that. We lost those operatives years ago.” He pursed his lips, his eyebrows drawn down and tight like a petulant child just learning his friends have better toys than him. “Why didn’t you share it with the team? How long have you known? What can we—”

  Vlad held up a hand. “Is now the time?” she asked, then turned to Lucky.

  Orton was left staring at the back of her head.

  “We have to get to the second anomaly. It’s our only chance to get out of here.”

  Lucky took a long hard look at Vlad.

  Not all military brainiacs were made the same. Some were soft, like Orton. Some were not. Vlad’s physique suggested regular exercise and a strict diet. A Marine first.

  He swung fast and tight.

  As he expected, she instinctively tried to step inside the punch, but he kept the swing compact. He caught her just in front of the ear. It was a glancing blow that should have just stunned her.

  At least, that was what he was going for.

  Vlad crumpled to the floor.

  32

  Clever

  “Damn,” said Malby, eyebrows raised.

  “You piece of shit!” yelled Orton, rushing over to Vlad.

  He glared at Lucky with an expression he probably thought was menacing.

  Lucky rested his palm on his rifle butt. Just as a friendly reminder.

  “I hated you damned white coats to begin with,” he said. “And you’ve been playing us for idiots. You have a lot more cards than you’re putting on the table. First it was these antimatter-whatever energy orbs. I get that. Fun to weaponize. The Empire brass will be swinging their dicks at half the universe with bombs that can eat entire planets.”

  Rocky giggled.

  “Now it turns out the Union is playing with wormholes?” Lucky said, stabbing a finger at Vlad. “And you have known about it?” He thumbed at the image of the skreamers that were growing larger at an alarming rate. “Right now, we need to get the hell out of this debacle. After that, you’re gonna spill your guts, or take a walk outside without a suit.”

  He turned and locked eyes with Orton. “Same for you, asshole.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” retorted Orton.

  He held up his data-harvester arm. It must have been transmitting because the coordinates flashed in his mind. “The anomaly is four thousand klicks out. We’ll never make it.”

  “Rocky?”

  “This is as fast as this thing goes in standard space.”

  Just great. And why the hell were they all looking at him again?

  “It might have something to do with punching people,” observed Rocky.

  “Not helpful.” He looked around. “Any ideas?” he said, surveying the Marines. “We won’t outrun those skreamers, and Rocky is sure that whatever they throw at us is going to be a lot more like what they did to our destroyers.”

  Jiang asked, “What weapons do we have?”

  “What you see is what you get, baby,” said Malby, hands up.

  Nico stood up. Lucky realized for the first time that he still had his hammerhead on. The rest of the team had shed theirs when they first arrived at the ship. Jesus, he had to be hot in it.

  “I can go out there and slow them down.”

  The kid was stupid, but he was up for a fight.

  Lucky was back to liking him.

  Malby rolled his eyes. “Yeah, right. You and a pea-shooter.”

  “And we collectively have less than half our locust drones still available,” Dawson said. “And they are mostly in here.”

  Lucky looked at Vlad, who was still rubbing her head. “Ideas?”

  “There are no conventional weapons on the ship,” she said.

  Again, Orton was looking at her strangely, as clearly surprised at her depth of knowledge as the rest of them.

  “Did we bring one of the battle drones on board?” asked Lucky.

  Dawson shook his head.

  “I think the kid is right,” said Jiang.

  Malby looked at her like she had just pissed herself. “What good does sending him out there do?”

  “Not him,” she said, rolling her eyes at Malby. “That.” She nodded at the kid. “We can send the hammerhead out. It won’t show on their scans like one of our drones will.”

  That was a fair point. But there was a reason for that. Malby beat him to it.

  “Of course not. What threat are they?”

  She looked at Lucky with a crooked smile.

  “That clever bitch,” Rocky said.

  Lucky shook his head. “What am I missing?”

  “Nico, shed that hammerhead,” she said.

  Nico stared.

  “Now!”

  “Ma’am!” the kid blurted, fumbling for the latches that appeared as his AI pushed his internal bots to release locks.

  “Malby,” she said. “Get your hot box and reprogram that thing. We don’t need precision, just need a hit on one of those incoming skreamers.” She looked at him. “Can you do that?”

  He shrugged. “I can try.”

  She looked at Lucky. “And now we just need—”

  Before she finished, a locust flashed into the room from a passageway about a quarter klick away at the far end of the cavernous space that Lucky hadn’t even identified. Actually, it was two locusts with an energy band between them. They were carrying a—

  “No!” said Vlad, forcefully. “We can’t afford to lose another one.” She looked at Lucky. “We don’t know how many we need to cross the fold. We can’t keep losing them.”

  Lucky realized what was happening now.

  “I don’t know what she has heard, but the ship isn’t worried, so I’m not.” Rocky said. “It isn’t happy, mind you, but it doesn’t seem like the end of the world.”

  The locusts dropped the single orb into the body cavity of the hammerhead. At the same instant, the hammerhead came to life.

  “Whoa, uh, maybe we should be careful with that,” said Malby, stepping back from his handiwork and eying the orb carefully. “Do you guys feel that?”

  Now that he said it, Lucky realized his head was buzzing.

  “My readings are all over the place,” said Malby.

  Jiang and Dawson nodded.

  “Freaky,” said Cheeky, who was holding his hands over his ears, eyes closed. The interference was getting louder and stronger the longer they stood near the orb.

  “We need to get that thing outta here,” Lucky said. “I don’t know how much more of this we can take.”

  Lucky hadn’t looked closely at it before, but now that he could see it, he saw it was semi-transparent. Minuscule wisps of light kept bouncing up and settling back down in a circular pattern. As it settled in the hammerhead, it pulsed and shifted like a water balloon ready to pop.

  His head was screaming now.

  The locusts that brou
ght the orb grabbed the hammerhead and rocketed off back down the corridor they had come from.

  Instantly, the pressure on his head subsided. He realized Rocky had been saying something to him, but he missed it.

  “Rocky, did you—”

  Malby yelled and dived.

  On the ship’s eye, the V-shaped skreamers had again formed the bright light at the front of the lead ship.

  A blue beam spewed out, slicing the space between the skreamers and the alien ship.

  A high-pitched whine came from the stern of the ship, and the projected image flickered.

  The floor fell away, and the gravity with it, and Lucky was left somersaulting weightlessly through the air.

  33

  Nothing

  The gravity rushed back in an angry instant.

  He fell several meters and felt his spiders pluck frantically in his mind. He heeded their call at the last second and brought his shoulder around to roll as the ground came up rapidly to meet his face.

  He bounced sideways, then felt the knot in his stomach as the gravity shifted around him again.

  He looked about.

  Malby was facedown and bloody. Dawson and Cheeky looked to be dazed.

  Jiang was holding her shoulder.

  Only Nico and Vlad looked like they had been able to brace themselves in time.

  Malby’s pulse rifle had slid across the floor in the craziness, and for just a split second Lucky saw Vlad’s eyes wander down to it.

  She was thinking about it, he thought. Then she glanced up at Lucky and quickly looked away.

  The ship’s eye flickered back to life.

  The kamikaze hammerhead carved lazily through space in big swooping turns.

  He was about to bitch to Malby about his technical skills when he realized the Marine was unconscious.

  “Get the hot box!” he yelled.

  Malby had dropped it.

  Jiang picked it up but turned immediately to Lucky. “How the hell does this thing work?”

  Hot boxes were a bit of a mystery to anyone unfamiliar with them. Most of the magic was performed at the nanobot level, and the only Marine here with the right gear baked into him was currently knocked out.