There was a sudden movement from the door. The graying light cut out, as if something on the other side had blocked it.
Slap! A metallic ringing sound as if someone had struck a bell made Solomon jump and look down.
“Unhand me!” Malady was roaring suddenly, trying to break free from the door.
A large silvered arm, just slightly longer and more prehensile than Malady’s own, had reached out through the open gap of the doors and seized the metal golem by the wrist.
“What the heck!” Solomon gasped, raising his Jackhammer. He couldn’t get a good line on it, though, without risking hitting Malady.
It’s that robot, Solomon saw. The same one who lost an arm? It’s gone haywire.
The chrome, steel, and silver arm held Malady’s wrist in the vice-clamp of its fingers. Despite the large metal man attempting to jump back from the partly-opened door, the robot arm held fast then suddenly yanked him back to smash into the lift doors with a grinding crunch.
“Malady! Get clear!” Solomon was shouting, skidding himself down the wall above his squad member as the golem was pounded against the lift doors again, making them buckle.
“Get off!” Solomon shoved the barrel of his Jackhammer into the gap between the doors, which was now almost a foot wide. He caught a glimpse of complicated steel and chrome shape on the other side, moving—a body?
BADA-DAP-DAP! The Gold Commander fired into the hole, causing an explosion of sparks as his high projectile bullets hit something on the other side and ricocheted off.
Phtock! Ping! Some of his own bullets spat past him to zigzag up the shaft as they bounced off the metal.
“TZZZRK!” Even though sound is almost nullified by a vacuum, there is still a modicum of noise as objects move, even in space, and Solomon’s suit amplifiers picked up the snarl of electric static from the other side. The lift doors were suddenly ripped inward as the robot arm dragged Malady with it.
CLANG-Klaaang! The doors rolled and bounced into the room, scattering around the giant silvered form that was even now lifting Malady and shoving him against the nearest wall.
The atmospheric regulation laboratory looked more like a factory, with large ceramic and metal pipes emerging from square, blocky units over stilled turbines, before plunging into the grated floor. It was a large space, but a complicated one as the giant pipes rolled and snaked through the room everywhere. And it was into here that Malady and the silver robot rolled as they wrestled and fought.
The thing is huge! Solomon thought as he rolled himself through the air, staying close to the ceiling to try and get an attack line on the thing. Beneath him, Jezzie was doing the same but along the floor of the laboratory, hoping to attack in a pincer movement against the beast.
It was vaguely humanoid, but only vaguely, taller than Malady and broader too. Its arms and legs weren’t really limbs at all, Solomon saw. They each articulated from the corner of the thing’s square body, meaning that when the thing charged against Malady, it looked a little like a table or one of the mech-walkers that had become dangerously sentient.
“Gragh!” The thing used its slab-like metal body to pin Malady against one of the pipes, driving its metal legs into the grate floor as it raised its two forward arms or legs, preparing to drive them down onto—or into—the metal golem.
“Hyai!” Suddenly, a shape from the floor somersaulted up to attack the thing. Jezzie, having made her way around the pipes of the floor to spin through the air, landed on the thing’s back and drove one of her blades in the thing’s arm socket.
Clang! TZZRK! There was a shower of sparks from whatever small gap Wen had found in the thing’s sheathed carapace, and it reacted violently, spinning around and throwing her from its back. Even in zero-G, being sent head over heels still meant that when she slammed against the nearest metal pipe, she rebounded and didn’t move.
“Jezzie!” Solomon shouted in alarm, opening fire.
The Jackhammer used high-propulsion bullets, each one having a tiny explosive charge in a miniature thruster-tube at the back. In effect, they mimicked tiny rockets as they speared down at the thing.
Thtock! Ping!
Oh crap. Solomon quickly saw his mistake and ceased firing. The Jackhammer’s bullets had exploded into sparks across the robot-thing’s back, before breaking apart and spinning off around the room. He couldn’t afford to fire in here and risk the ricochet possibly hitting Malady, Wen, or himself.
But the Jackhammer had done some damage, he thought, seeing pockmarks and dark scorches across the thing as it lurched and stumbled back from the onslaught. One of its leg-arms was held out at an awkward angle, and Solomon could see Jezzie’s blade sticking from its gears and servos at the top, still sparking.
THOCK! Now freed from where he was pinned, Malady swung his heavy metal fists into the body of the thing, making it roll onto its side with the force of the blow. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to seriously damage it and the machine swept out one leg, casually batting Malady to one side. The mech-man smashed through one of the ceramic pipes, causing a cloud of crystalline dust and steam to explode into the air around him with a dull roar.
We can’t fire at it. We don’t have any explosives. Think, Solomon! The Gold Squad Commander had a second of complete indecision as he tried to think of a way to overcome the behemoth. The escaping gases from pipes Malady had crushed were filling the laboratories with a roiling fog. Solomon only hoped that it wasn’t anything explosive. It obscured half of the room in moments, until Solomon couldn’t see the robot thing, or Jezzie, or anything apart from humped shapes in the confusion.
Think, Solomon! He forced his mind to catalogue what his options were.
Come on. That serum is supposed to make you brighter, isn’t it!?
But whichever way he looked at it, a Jackhammer, a small blade, and an emergency medical kit weren’t going to put a stop to that thing. There was nothing that they had that would injure it, he realized.
Nothing that I have, he realized, the thought forming like a seed in his mind, just as the gases rolled and leaping out came the gigantic robot-thing, straight for him, with one hand reaching to grab him. Unlike Malady inside his full tactical suit, Solomon knew that those vice fingers would easily crush his suit and the organs and bones that they protected within.
I don’t have anything that can hurt it. I’ll have to use something bigger than me then… Solomon reacted in an instant, throwing aside his arms so that he could jack-knife through the vacuum as the thing’s undamaged leg-arm shot past him.
He was rolling over the thing’s arm and body. He reached down, feeling his suit’s power gauntlets grab the handle of Wen’s hardened poly-steel blade, catch on, and he thumped onto the thing’s back, rebounding as the robot crashed into the wall after him.
“Malady!” Solomon screamed. There was nothing that he had that could hurt it. He needed something bigger.
“TZZRK!” If it was possible for robots to get enraged, then it seemed that was precisely what this thing was doing as it turned and tried to shake Solomon off of its back.
“Rarrrgh!” Solomon felt his own arms starting to wrench and pull from their sockets. He held on for dear life. He couldn’t see the full tactical golem, but he just had to hope that Malady wasn’t unconscious—or dead. “Malady, the lift shaft!” he shouted as he seized Wen’s blade with both hands and wrenched at it where it was stuck
“TZZRK!” Another explosion of sparks scattered across his visor and suit from the mechanisms inside the robot as it awkwardly juddered from the internal damage and tried to flip its back—and the small human clinging to it—against the wall.
CRUNCH! Before Solomon became human pate, however, a force hit the robot’s legs, and the impact sent the robot scrabbling down the access hallway.
Looking down, Solomon saw that it was Malady, seizing onto two of the thing’s legs and charging as the golem bowed its metal and reinforced back and shoved the thing toward the broken open doors.
&nb
sp; “Yes! That’s it!” Solomon seized Wen’s blade and once more tried to yank at it.
“TZRK!” More sparks erupted from the robot’s back, and the thing was scrabbling, first one of its legs and then another skittering over the open edge of the lift as it tried to maintain a hold.
“Oh no you don’t!” Solomon heard Malady roar over the suit channel. It was the only time he had ever heard any emotion from the golem-man as he shoved harder this time, sending the robot flailing and turning into the shaft. The momentum of Malady’s shove pushed it down—not falling, but tumbling through the zero-G.
With Solomon on its back.
Nothing I have is big enough to damage it, Solomon’s thoughts raced as he felt Wen’s blade suddenly loosen in his grip. But I have a Malady. And I have an entire ship to play with.
Jezzie’s blade suddenly came free, and Solomon was leaping up as the robot’s arms flailed and spun around him, reaching for him.
Solomon swung the blade in mid-air, his legs kicking in the vacuum.
CRACK! The combat specialist’s blade hit one of the metal cables, and, with a shower of sparks, the hardened poly-steel edge cut through it.
And nothing happened. Not for a moment, anyway…
That was the thing about Solomon. He had been a fast learner even before the addition of Serum 21, and a good part of his life had been about learning to make the most of his environment.
And the thing about lift mechanisms, Solomon knew, was that they were the same the universe over—one cable held at tension on a flywheel, the other held at rest. By pulling one or the other, you moved the lift. Even in zero-G, the rules of force still apply. If anything, they applied even more so than they do in the complicated world of gravity.
Lift mechanisms were also mechanical in essence. Not electrical. Which meant that you didn’t need an electrical current to make the cables work, they just held onto their respective tensions unless acted upon externally.
Solomon hadn’t cut the tense cable, which in a gravity environment would release the service lift to the pull of gravity and send it plummeting to the floor.
He had cut the slack cable, meaning that the flywheel suddenly pulled on the lift mechanism with all of its might, and with no counter-forces.
There was a distant series of lights from above Solomon and the thrashing robot. It had clearly not been designed to deal effectively with zero-G environments. At least not as well as Commander Cready could. The lights were flickering as they grew closer and brighter.
They weren’t actually lights. They were sparks as the giant metal service lift above was pulled down by the ever-tightening mechanical flywheel.
Oh double-frack. Solomon moved, swimming for the broken-open door once again as the lift above him sped ever closer, and closer.
I’m not going to make it. He couldn’t swim fast enough. The robot had punched one of its legs into the side of a wall and was hauling itself up again towards him.
“Gotcha!” A hand shot out of the murk, grabbed his and pulled him in, microseconds before the lift was pulled down to smash the climbing robot and continue hurtling toward the mechanisms far below.
TZZZZZRRRRK! A grinding, electron noise as the robot-thing’s metal was scrapped and mangled against the walls of the lift, before—
Whumpf. The lift tried to lock into place as it smashed into its own lift mechanics, but it had a large robot-thing in the way. Compressors in the silver robot burst, and circuits sparked, and there was a roll of red and orange flame as the thing exploded.
“Down! Down! Down!” It was Jezebel Wen who had caught Solomon’s wrist and was screaming at him as she threw them both to the floor of the trashed laboratory as the flame roared past them and disappeared just as quickly.
There was another series of crashes as the lift, thrown by the exploding robot, once again was pulled down onto its body, and then, after sparks and flashes of light, there was apparent silence.
“I think you killed it, Commander,” Jezzie groaned, floating in the air beside Solomon.
Epilogue: Experimental Industry
“There were no survivors.” The words of Warden Coates met them on the screen of the small audience room on board the Marine transporter, where Solomon, Jezebel, Malady, Karamov, and Kol had been summoned before they disembarked, heading back home to Ganymede.
The warden looked, as ever, annoyed that he even had to perform a debriefing session with his schlubs, but on the split-screen beside him stood none other than Colonel Asquew with her stern and permanently tired expression.
“They deserve to know, Warden,” Solomon heard the woman say. “This is their battle, too,” she said, a phrase that made Solomon’s ears prick up, despite their ringing from all of the decompression and battering he’d had in the last few hours.
The experimental industrial robot was indeed dead, and right now was being dismantled by a team of Marine Corps engineers, dispatched by the arrival of one of the Rapid Response Fleet’s warships, which had taken jurisdiction over the Erisian situation.
The Outcasts were summarily dismissed, and for the most part, most of the adjunct crews had suffered a completely uneventful, boring search mission. A few—the ones who had ventured into asteroid field as Solomon’s Gold Squad had done—had encountered more raiders, all of whom were eager to try and get out of the Erisian field, as if there was something in there that scared even them.
As well it should, he thought as he read through the initial findings of the Marine Corps engineers. That experimental robot had been shipped from Proxima, a part of a new design that it wanted to offer to potential buyers on Mars, apparently. Or so the damaged mainframe of the Kepler had said. Something had gone catastrophically wrong mid-flight, though. The robot had started malfunctioning and had broken into the atmospheric laboratories to wreak havoc. The crew tried to contain it, but it was too large, and too dangerous. Then the thing had apparently damaged the pressure system, meaning that air and pressure built up inside the cargo hold, sucking it away from the rest of the ship. The crew had tried to get to their escape rafts, but were found, frozen and suffocated in the access corridors above.
Then who had we heard in the cargo hold? Solomon had asked.
“The robot apparently had a human-friendly interface,” Colonel Asquew said dryly. “A digital persona, if you will, that it could activate to make the operators feel at ease.”
“Wait a minute… Are you telling me that the robot used its own digital persona to lure us to Level 18?” Solomon said, flabbergasted.
“Its programming had gone haywire. It must have activated some sort of distress protocol, at the same time as running a defensive routine,” the colonel stated severely.
Solomon shook his head. “That doesn’t make sense. Why even program an industrial robot with defense protocols? It’s not a war machine, is it?” he asked out loud.
“That’s enough, Cready!” the warden snapped. “Or are you questioning your superiors?”
“No, sir.” Solomon shook his head. He still felt it odd, though. If he was a guessing sort of man, it would seem to him that the robot had purposefully and deliberately set up an ambush for them, and then had worked its hardest to try and kill them!
And then there was the other problem that stuck in Solomon’s mind. The empty cargo hold of the Kepler. Had it just been transporting one of those robot things to Mars? Surely not. Then where had all the others gone? And who did the spare robot arm belong to?
Mars. Something stuck in Solomon’s mind. The planet where they had fought the separatists so recently. The separatists who had tried to kidnap the Confederate Ambassador from Earth. The separatists who had access to Marine Corps equipment and had clearly been planning something big. A civil war?
It could be a coincidence, of course, the fact of this robot’s destination and his own recent away mission. But Solomon was still left with a sour taste in his mouth as he considered just how dangerous the Martian separatists would have been if they had one of th
ose gigantic killer robot-things on their side.
“You’re dismissed, soldiers,” Coates prodded them from his screen, clearly not wanting to discuss this anymore. “Back to your seats, where the jump-ship will take you back to Ganymede. Don’t think that this gets you any time off!”
“Gold Squad did do very well, given the limitations on their scanners and limited numbers,” Asquew noted, earning a baleful glare from Coates at Solomon.
“Keep it up, Specialist Commander, and I’m sure that the Rapid Response Fleet will have a place for you,” Asquew said, throwing a casual salute down at the Outcast.
Solomon blinked, feeling oddly proud for a moment, before his mood darkened a fraction later. Would that be before or after Serum 21 kills me? he thought as he saluted and turned on his heel, to lead his Gold Squad back to their seats.
THANK YOU
Thank you so much for reading The Kepler Rescue, the second story in the Outcast Marines series. The Outcasts are starting to become a team, sort of, but they have a long ways to go if they’re going to save the day because there is definitely something fishy going on.
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The next story in the series is going to be called The Titan Gambit. We are working on the final edits now and the story will be available soon on Amazon.
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The Kepler Rescue Page 13