Conquest of Earth

by James David Victor

  Jezzy didn’t bother waiting. She didn’t want to give the Ru’at any chance to use their ship-puncturing beam weapons. “Fire!”

  Willoughby already had the two-handled firing trigger active and pulled close, and she seized the bars to squeeze the triggers. Jezzy felt the slight vibrations as the ship shook from the recoil of the vacuum rifles pumping shell after shell at the approaching Ru’at vessels.

  The overhead tactical screens showed the attack vectors matching and meeting the blinking red triangles, but the sensor cameras were much more useful. They showed the scatter of fire and bursts of flames as the multi-shot bullets struck in a barrage. Jezzy didn’t think that they would do any damage, and there were no resulting bursts of black smoke. The Ru’at vessels didn’t even bother to swerve out of the way.

  “We’ve thrown the line,” Ratko said. “Now it’s time to reel them in.”

  “Are you seriously using fishing metaphors at a time like this?” Jezzy asked, seconds before Willoughby shouted:

  “They’re firing!”

  The screen ahead of them showed the blurring rings churning faster, and the nosecones of their craft glittered as the light reflected off their opening weapon ports.

  “Evasive action!” Jezzy shouted.

  “Hard to starboard!” Ratko made a quick succession of movements from her chair, kicking pedals to fire propellant into the scout’s thrusters, as well as heaving on the flight wheel to cause them to spin out from the Martian atmosphere and toward the stars.

  Two brilliant lines of blue-white light lifted through the atmosphere in front of them, extending like searchlights. Deadly, baleful searchlights that wouldn’t so much as illuminate their vessel as cut it in two.

  “They’re accelerating,” Willoughby called.

  “Perfect.” Ratko grinned, raising her gauntleted hands in a thumbs-up gesture to Jezzy in the captain’s chair behind her.

  “Malady, ready on the ESR!” Jezzy shouted.

  “Affirmative, Lieutenant,” Malady’s somber voice returned.

  Jezzy knew that somewhere behind her, there would be the full tactical golem in the engineering compartment, readying the controls of the winch system that ran underneath the hull, where it was attached to the bulbous shape of the emergency survival raft that she had used to escape the Invincible. It had taken Malady and Ratko just a short while to run the tests and perform the necessary modifications to turn it into what they needed it to be:

  A bomb.

  Bigger than the air blast, Jezzy told herself. Ratko had short-circuited the ESR’s battery packs and energy systems, and then they had packed it with the remaining missiles.

  If it causes a big enough explosion, then we have a chance of defeating them, Jezzy knew. But if it doesn’t…

  Then they would be finished. That would be it. The Marine scout, already damaged from its interrupted jump and flying through the wreckage field, was no match for two Ru’at jump-ships, especially once they had achieved escape velocity and managed to get up into their home habitat of the vacuum.

  “On your command, sir,” Malady said over the suit-to-suit channel.

  “Willoughby?” Jezzy asked the navigation console.

  “They’re accelerating from their earlier velocity, but they’ll hit the magnetosphere in T-minus twenty-eight seconds,” the taller Outcast Marine stated.

  “And the Martian atmosphere will slow them down?” Jezzy asked. She didn’t want to misjudge this. Not by one nano-second.

  “By all estimates, yes. T-minus twenty-one seconds and counting…”

  “Do it now!” Ratko was hissing urgently.

  “Wait!” Jezzy gripped the armrests.

  “Eighteen seconds, sir,” Willoughby whispered. The camera sensors overhead showed the two Ru’at vessels rising like meteors in reverse—their nosecones burning and glowing with the force and heat of escape velocity, casting a long tail plume of smoke and fire.

  “Now, Malady!” Jezzy shouted. She heard the corporal’s aye-aye a moment before she felt a judder run through the ship.

  Behind her chair, Jezzy couldn’t see the full tactical golem pulling on the levers and hitting the buttons that released the external winch system. These scouts were true expeditionary vehicles, built to survive for weeks in orbit around hostile planets or moons, and with a wide variety of tools and equipment to help them best take advantage of their situations.

  One such tool was the external winch—a system of automated magnet locks on chains that could attach to damaged craft, lumps of rock, artifacts, or even cargo that needed to be brought back to where the operational headquarters of the Marine Corps happened to be.

  Currently, these magnet locks were clamped onto the octahedral ball of the ESR, and, as Malady’s mechanical commands ran through the vessel, the locks depolarized and the ESR started to drift away, rolling erratically as it was drawn down by the natural magnetic pull of the Red Planet.

  “Evasive action! Get us out of here, now!” Jezzy called, knowing that even if their plan worked, they would still need to be a very safe distance away from the blast when it went off.

  “With pleasure, sir!” Ratko kicked the pedals and pulled on the flight stick to throw the ship higher above the envelope of atmosphere around the Red Planet. “Full propellant injection!” Jezzy heard her say, and suddenly they were kicked forward as their main engines flared with a much more powerful plasma reaction than before.

  Jezzy’s eyes were focused on the camera sensors trained behind them, however, watching as the orb of the ESR twisted and spun, end over end, accruing to itself a reddening haze that quickly started to turn orange, yellow, white…

  “What if it breaks up in re-entry!?” Jezzy suddenly gasped. The ESR was already compromised. Heavily compromised. Could it even withstand that much?

  “It’s not going to enter the full atmosphere,” Ratko said as they accelerated away from the sight behind them.

  “Willoughby, time check!”

  “Ru’at entering magnetosphere in three, two—”

  “Detonate!” Jezzy called. Willoughby punched in the codes on her navigation console that sent a narrow band of information streaming to the ESR’s tactical sensors.

  It was a simple code, one that activated the circuits of Ratko’s many devices inside it, snaking along cables that erupted from underneath consoles and found their way, almost organically, into open floor and wall panels. Mounded by the main pilot’s chair—the very same one that Jezzy herself had shook and shuddered in when she had tried to escape the Invincible—were stacks of the Hellfire missiles, the long tubes of white and yellow, with more of Ratko’s cables daisy-chaining into them.

  The message hit the ESR and flashed through the raft’s computers and to the batteries, overloading and bursting them, as Ratko had disabled all circuit breakers, limiters, and safety measures. A massive amount of energy hit the ESR’s engines, causing them to overheat, and for their propellant mixture to boil in a heartbeat.

  And explode.

  Ratko had called it a chain-effect, which was technical physics speak for something having greater effects than the supposed energy that was put into the system. Which was of course impossible, since energy cannot be created nor destroyed, after all, just transformed from one state to another. But the commonplace reality effect was one of an exponential output of power.

  Jezzy knew enough science—and Ratko had tried to explain the rest to her—to know that it was because there was always a huge store of potential energy in any spacecraft, locked up in its batteries or its propellant mixtures. The trick was to get all that power to talk to the mechanical and electrical systems without burning it out—hence the use of limiters and filters and breakers.

  What Ratko had done was release all that energy and send it surging into the missiles.

  In the ship’s cameras, it looked as though Jezzy was watching some truly ancient bit of film footage, one that had been damaged and improperly edited. In one heartbeat, she was watching the
revolving sphere of the ESR as it tumbled, a halo of white plasma accreting around it, and two smaller shapes accelerating fast upwards toward it that had to be the Ru’at ships.

  And then the entire screen glitched into white static, and instead she was watching a thin blue sphere rapidly expanding, and at its heart, a steady, glowing white ball as the ESR tore itself apart.

  The thin, almost transparent field of blue hit the Ru’at ships first. She saw them wobble before they were engulfed by the expanding white orb.

  That was the thing with explosions, Ratko had told her. They all created electromagnetic radiation, even the chemical ones. Most of the time, the smaller ammunition loads would be just powerful enough to make your personal data services glitch for a moment—presuming, of course, that you weren’t inside the thermal heat wave or fireball—but if the explosive power was enough, then they would be powerful enough to disrupt radio waves, magnetic waves, and even entire satellites.

  And Ratko, for all of her faults, at least knows what she’s doing… Jezzy thought. She had told them that if they could get a big enough explosion to detonate inside the magnetosphere of the Red Planet—the constant corona of electrons and radioactive particles that the planet kicked out—then it might just, if they were incredibly lucky, create a localized EMP, or electro-magnetic pulse.

  Just like the Invincible, Jezzy had agreed. It was the only weapon that they knew would work against the Ru’at jump-ships. Disabling them and perhaps even causing them irreparable damage…

  And Ratko had done her very best to make every bit of the ESR into something that would go bang with the greatest possible ferocity. Maybe she had done too well, even—

  “We’re too low! The EMP is expanding too fast!” Willoughby was checking her consoles readouts.

  “Oh, crap.”

  Their own EMP hit them, and the mainframe of the Marine scout gave its last, static-filled notification:

  Warning! Systems Overload!

  And then all the lights went out. And all the power.

  11

  Freefall

  Jezzy was surprised when the ship did not judder and shake and threaten to break itself apart. It was what her body had instantly suspected would happen, and she had tucked her head down and wrapped her arms over her chest instinctively.

  But instead, they were still flying forward—only in complete dark.

  “Full power outage!” Willoughby said, her voice high and tense.

  Oh frack, Jezzy thought. That means—

  Even inside her full Marine power armor, she could feel the temperature drop several degrees in nanoseconds. All the life-support systems were offline. There wasn’t even enough power coming from the backups to power the emergency lights.

  Warning! Environmental Hazards Detected…

  Jezzy’s armor, insulated from external shocks—and apparently removed enough from the EMP—blipped its alerts at her.

  Phew. Just so long as they had power still running in their suits, they could survive. For a bit.

  External Temperature Falling:

  -2C...

  -4C…

  -8C…

  Initiating Suit Thermal Shield…

  External Atmosphere Hazardous:

  Oxygen Levels -20%...

  Carbon Monoxide Levels +20%...

  Activating Reserve Air Tanks…

  The automated life-support systems that every spacecraft had to have in place had been taken offline by the blast, along with navigation, communication, sensors, and propulsion.

  The heated lubricants that kept the ship habitable by human life stopped flowing, as did the heat coils around the insulated pipes. There was no thermal shield between the internal habitat of the craft and the external hull, bare to the whims of space.

  Jezzy’s suit monitors picked up a sound like ripping paper, and when she looked down, she saw that, in the gray of the starlight streaming in from the portholes, everything sparkled white with frost. When she moved her arm, there was a momentary resistance and a crack as her arm broke the frozen layer of condensation threatening to glue her to her chair.

  It would be dangerous, possibly lethal, to take off their helmets now, as the oxygen tanks that she and the others had worked so hard to get had stopped cycling. All the noxious gases from their suit exhalations and the engines started collecting in the jump-ship in seconds.

  And, on top of all of that, there was no propulsion at all. The propellant injectors had frozen, and the battery servers that told the engines and positional thrusters to fire were comatose.

  “Two hours’ suit oxygen, people!” Jezzy called out. “I need solutions, now!”

  “We might be able to re-fire the engines manually,” Ratko said, already hitting the manual release from her harness. “I can do it.”

  “Stay where you are, pilot!” Jezzy ordered, surprised at her vehemence.

  “Why? None of the rockets or fans are going to work,” Ratko started to argue.

  “Corporal Malady is already in engineering. Get a private channel open to him and walk him through the procedure,” Jezzy said.

  “We could jump-start the battery servers,” Willoughby called out. “That would bring everything back online.”

  “Jump-start? With what?” Jezzy said. “You need power to spark power, after all.”

  “Batteries are closed-loop systems. They generate chemo- or pyzo- or radio- energy, send it around the system and they are recharged at the same time. There’ll be nothing intrinsically wrong with the mainframe, if we can just get some juice into it…”

  “And we already have juice. Willoughby, you genius!” Ratko said out loud.

  “Anyone care to fill me in?” Jezzy was saying, when she finally felt the shudder she had been waiting for. There was a terrible, bone-deep groan from the scout, and she could feel the pit of her stomach lurch, like descending too fast down a Space Elevator.

  “Oh no…” Ratko breathed.

  “What was that!?” Jezzy said, unable to keep the strain from her voice as she once again broke the ice under her arms and legs.

  -12C…

  “Without the main thrusters, we’ve finally lost our forward momentum. We’re entering freefall. The gravity well of the planet is just too strong,” Ratko said.

  And an uncontrolled, unassisted re-entry would break them apart just as surely as the Ru’at beam weapons could have done, Jezzy knew.

  “The juice! The jump-start! Where is it coming from?” Jezzy hissed quickly.

  “We’ve got the power, ma’am, in our suits!” Ratko was saying. “We could fire that into the battery initiators, try to get them to take a charge.”

  “I’m going.” Jezzy had already pulled the manual release from her X-harness and was rising into the air as the ship lost all gravity. Around her, the small, inconsequential items that always cluttered a ship—wrenches, data-pads, spare encounter suits—were also starting to do the same.

  “Lieutenant, we don’t know how much power it’ll need,” Ratko complained, twisting in her harness to try and see her commanding officer. “It could completely drain your suit!”

  “It’s my boat, and my job, Marine,” Jezzy said grimly, pushing her way down the central avenue of the scout, past the main hold as the ship around them started to tumble toward the Red Planet.

  “I’ll talk you through it, sir,” Willoughby said, sounding worried.

  Not as worried as Jezzy was, however. If she didn’t manage to get the battery injectors, or initiators, or whatever it had been that the corporal had called them, to work, then they would all be dead. All her struggling and fighting and striving would be for nothing.

  And General Asquew placed her trust in me, Jezzy thought about that tiny data-stick still safely locked inside Malady’s carry-port. What will happen to the Marine Corps after that?

  “Don’t think about it.” She shook her head as she grabbed the wall units to haul herself down the torturous gap between large, silent machines. Dials and screens were dark.
Levers and needles remained stubbornly still.

  “There.” She saw the glow of Malady’s suit lights illuminating the hatch at the base of the largest of the units ahead of her. It was screwed shut, of course.

  “Frack it!” Jezzy cursed. “Anyone got a screwdriver?”

  “Here.” Malady did, of course. A small port whirred open on what would have been his utility belt, and he pulled a miniature titanium steel screwdriver from it and spun it end over end between the stilled machines for Jezzy to catch and start undoing the screws.

  “Who uses screws in the twenty-second century?” Jezzy muttered to herself as she worked.

  “Screws are a very underrated engineering tool,” Malady intoned.

  Wow, thanks for the clarification while we’re about to burn up in freefall, Jezzy thought irritably. With a smooth jolt, the hatch came off the unit, revealing a mess of cabling inside, nestled between small black modular units.

  “Okay. I have no idea what it is I’m looking at,” Jezzy admitted.

  “You should see a chain of battery initiators, right there in front of you!” Ratko called out as the ship juddered again. The lieutenant’s suit monitors picked up the low groan of complaining metal, sighing through the ship as the forces of gravity started to drag her down faster and harder.

  “What do they look like?” Jezzy called out.

  “I don’t know! Like battery initiators!” Ratko sounded terse and stressed.

  “Little black boxes?”

  “That’s it! You’ll see contact plugs at one end. Yellow and green,” Ratko replied.

  Jezzy moved closer, and the underlit environmental lights of her suit’s cowl showed her tiny strips of metal with small plastic edgings—yellow and green. “Got them.”

  “Right, so, now you need to find the reserve output supply on your suit. It’s…” Ratko was saying.

  “I know where it is,” Jezzy countered, remembering that she had kind of done this sort of thing before. Kind of.