She had been trapped aboard the Oregon, a CMC battleship that had valiantly tried to stem the tide of cyborgs but had ultimately failed. There had been massive decompressions throughout the ship, just like what must have happened to the Invincible, and Jezzy had been trapped inside a bubble of corridor with collapsed hulls at either end. Her suit had been put out of action and she’d had to jump-start it by using what little reserve power was left inside the Oregon and jolting it through her suit, via the output port.
The port flipped open with the merest touch, revealing a small, metal-lined tube no deeper than the tip of Jezzy’s little finger.
“I need wires,” Jezzy said.
“Here,” Malady announced, already throwing a heavy coil of thick red and black cables down the weightless avenue toward her.
“Red and black? Why can’t they be green and yellow, just like the contacts? Is standardization really so difficult to achieve?” Jezzy muttered.
“Red and green are live. Black and yellow are anything else,” Ratko said so fast that Jezzy wondered if she had anticipated her commander’s confusion.
“Anything else doesn’t sound like a very technical explanation,” Jezzy mumbled as she unspooled the cables and realized that she only had one port on her suit. “Er…”
“Just go with red and green! Red and green!” Corporal Ratko had once again anticipated her dilemma.
There was another, much deeper roar of strained metal and a deep, rhythmic thumping from the ship—this time on the other side of the vessel.
“We’ve passed the magnetosphere. Much longer and we’ll hit terminal velocity. We won’t have the thrust power to fight the gravity of Mars!” Willoughby shouted.
Red and green it is, then. Jezzy jammed one end of the cable into her port, and the other she reached down to gently press onto the green-edged connector.
Snap. Luckily, Jezzy was inside her power suit, so she was fully insulated from the effects of the powerful shock that she had transmitted to the ship. But even from within here, she heard an audible pop and felt the power kick through the cable like it was a hose that had been opened to full, all at once.
But that wasn’t all. A spray of fine static electricity played across her hands, the cable, and the ship’s exposed innards. They looked like tiny tendrils and tentacles of lightning that made her see stars and a messy after-image as she blinked back tears.
“Did it work?” she said, hoping that her suit was still operational.
It wasn’t. Or not very much, anyway.
POWER ARMOR… COMPROMISED
USER ID: 2LT Wen, Ac. Sq. Comm. (Cmbt. Sp.)
COMPANY: Outcasts, Rapid Response Fleet.
SQUAD IDENTIFIER: Gold.
SQUAD TELEMETRIES: COMPROMISED
Bio-Signatures: COMPROMISED
Atmospheric Seals: COMPROMISED
Chemical, Biological, Radiological Sensors: COMPROMISED
Oxygen Tanks: COMPROMISED
Oxygen Recycle System: COMPROMISED
“Frack! Frack! Frack!” Jezzy swore, pulling back and breaking the connection. Had she lost all power to her suit? How come she could still breathe? For a moment, she fought the urge to scrabble at her helmet as she felt the blind panic of being trapped inside a dead, lifeless shell.
No. Breathe. Think. Jezzy centered her mind the way her Yakuza trainers had once told her to do. She knew what it felt like to have a suit that was completely dead. And that was mostly heavy, blindingly heavy…
Which was obviously not the case here, so that meant that what must have happened was the transfer of power must have either drained her suit rapidly, or short-circuited something to do with her internal hologram display.
“But without my internal holo-display, I’ll have no idea just how much power I’m giving to the ship,” Jezzy thought.
The ship started to shake and judder around them. That was its metal hide hitting the sea of heavier molecules of high mesosphere, she knew. They were almost at the point of no return.
“And the ship clearly isn’t firing its thrusters or using any internal lights, so…” Jezzy thought. Not enough juice. Nowhere near enough juice.
She put the red cable once more to the green connector, but this time on one of the adjacent battery initiators that sat nestled between the wires.
Snap! The same pop, the same judder down the cable, the same corona of static electricity—
“…emergency starter! Pump it again!” she suddenly heard Ratko’s voice shouting.
“What? Repeat, Ratko. What did you say?” Jezzy said, but there was no answer. And that was when she realized she had heard Ratko’s voice through the suit’s monitors, not through her internal channel system.
And there was light all around her, she saw. Not a strong or a bright light, but the low, sodium-yellow of the emergency lighting.
It worked! She removed the cable and pushed herself back from the hatch, just as she heard the familiar whine of the engines revving up and the high-pitched squeal of electrical systems starting.
“It’s only my suit that’s compromised,” she thought gratefully, allowing herself to sink to the floor just as the mighty gauntlet of Malady reached down, picking her up as if she were no more than a kitten, and cradling her to his chest.
“This will be a bumpy ride,” she heard him intone through her suit monitors, just as the gravity kicked in and the ship fought the dreadful pull of Martian gravity…
But what if I was too late? Jezzy thought in horror.
12
DIY Meteors
“They’ve gone,” Kol said, looking up suspiciously at the sky above them.
“They have, but…” Solomon frowned. The skies of the Red Planet did not look like they should have. It wasn’t that they weren’t that usual mix of orange and gray that cloaked the planet—that had stayed the same—but he could also see the tell-tale signs of an orbital blast.
Every now and again, a flash of light caught his eye. If he was quick enough, he would see a small, quickly evaporating fizz of fire and light. It was like watching a meteor shower in the middle of the day, except it happened too frequently, and in too many random places to make them think that it was a meteor shower.
The Invincible, Solomon suddenly thought, adrenaline spiking through his system.
“It’s the wreckage site up there. It must be breaking up,” he said, earning a grunt of agreement from Kol, audible over the short-wave suit-to-suit communicators of their emergency encounter suits.
The CMC fleet had been totaled, Solomon knew, and it would only be a matter of time before all those bits started to get pulled down the gravity well of the Red Planet.
“With any luck, most of it will burn off before—” Kol was halfway through saying, when there came a thunderous sonic boom from overhead.
“Oh, frack.” Solomon saw one of the small pinpricks of light growing larger and larger as it was thrown towards the unyielding rock of the planet’s surface below. It trailed fire behind it, and a long tail of smoke followed soon after.
“Is that…” Solomon looked at the falling star and saw the dark shape inside it, like a tube… As he watched, the thing jerked in mid-air, and something peeled away from it to scream through the air with a high-pitched whine. Solomon was sure he could see the flashing, tumbling curve. It was a section of a circle.
A ring.
“That’s a Ru’at jump-ship!” Solomon said, unable to keep the glee from his voice as he turned to the other members of his tiny expeditionary force.
There was Kol, looking wary as he regarded the falling Ru’at ship above, and behind him was Ambassador Ocrie, standing beside the ad-hoc stretcher that they had cobbled together from one of the rover’s seats and belt straps, atop which was secured the unconscious Mariad Rhossily, Imprimatur of Proxima.
Damn, we look like the last survivors at the end of the world, Solomon thought, and the thought even managed to sour his good mood at seeing a destroyed Ru’at ship falling from the sky. The idea
that they could cross the Elysium Planitia itself—a vast orange and brown plain of dust and craters and rock to the distant headland of Elyisum Mons—appeared ridiculous.
But what other choice do we have? Solomon sighed heavily.
The small party looked exhausted already. Well, those that are standing up, anyway, the man thought. They had found that the Martian rover had indeed been blasted out of the sky as it had tried to escape the Ru’at. One side of its body had been scorched and hideously twisted, as if the Ru’at had fired upon them but narrowly missed.
The rover had skidded across the ground, piling up rock and earth around it in its very own do-it-yourself mausoleum. The fact that the portholes or windows or hull hadn’t ruptured was a fact that Solomon found incredible.
They had climbed out and fixed Mariad to the stretcher, but Solomon had to wonder if they really were in any better position than they had been inside the semi-submerged vehicle. The three members of his new team wore the ridiculously large and flappy white and yellow emergency encounter suits—little more than stiffened mesh and plastic bags with straps at the waist, wrists, and ankles, and a memory-plastic bubble helmet atop. It would have made Solomon laugh if it weren’t for the fact that the only other time he had seen people wearing them was in an equally distressing situation.
No one decides to wear those things, Solomon thought. The fact that they had found them at all was, perhaps, one of their few lucky moments.
Another lucky moment was discovering the cache of Ru’at colony weapons in the rover. Now, they—apart from the imprimatur, of course—were holding the same small beam-weapon pistols.
But we still have a long way to go. Solomon looked out to the distant horizon, where the smaller mound of Hecates Thocla sat next to the larger Elysium Mons. He thought he could see a gleam of light up there. Reflection off the habitat they had to get to?
And infiltrate. And find their deep-space transmitter…. Solomon groaned. At least, he thought, none of them were wearing anything even remotely Confederate by now, and they were all battered, bruised, and haggard enough to not look like soldiers or Confederate officials anymore.
We can do this, Solomon thought. We have to do this.
In his pocket, he still held the broken Ru’at orb, and he folded one gloved hand around its cold metal. I just need to get this to General Asquew, and get everyone to this experimental command hub, and the mission will be successful.
Everything after that—the fight for Earth, the destruction of the Ru’at mothership, the emancipation of the Martian and Proxima colonists—had to be well above his paygrade, didn’t it?
“Err… Chief?” He was shaken from his thoughts by the urgent, worried tones of Kol beside him.
Oh, please don’t tell me there’s more Ru’at coming for us… They had barely managed to survive the last time, and with every encounter, they were just losing more and more resources, and having to improvise more and more. How long can we keep running on empty like this? the command and tactical side of his brain thought.
“Boss, look up!” Kol said again, and Solomon did so, seeing another falling star, surrounded by the corona of its freefall.
“Hopefully, that’s another Ru’at ship,” Solomon grunted, reaching down to pick up the straps of Mariad’s stretcher. “I’ll take the imprimatur for a bit. We’ve covered a couple of klicks, and I reckon that we have five or six times that to get to—”
Screeeee!
The shriek of the falling object was getting louder, even picked up by the very poor audio equipment of his suit. It was unmistakably getting louder, which meant that it was also getting closer.
Ah. Solomon looked up, moments before there was a deafening BANG from the skies above as the thing broke the sound barrier.
It was again somewhat cylindrical, but it had a more bulbous backend, and it was shedding flames that melded with the plume of rocket fire.
“Thrusters,” Solomon thought. That meant it wasn’t a Ru’at ship. That meant it was a human ship…
“And it’s not falling,” Solomon murmured. He was right. The small, dark shape was instead screaming through the skies, getting lower and lower as it flew toward them. Solomon squinted, trying to get a better look at the object, but it was too dark against the brighter sky. He thought he could see suggestions of a hull, and the general shape itself suggested something in his memory. A scout ship?
But even the Martians had scout ships. Solomon stared harder, but the hull was also blackened with soot and flames. He couldn’t see any insignia.
“What do you want us to do, Sol?” Kol said. He was already raising his Ru’at beam pistol, and then looked at the relative size of it compared to an entire vessel charging toward them and dropped his hand to hang uselessly at his side.
Yeah, if they want to open fire on us and kill us… Solomon looked around the empty plain that extended for miles in all direction around them. There will be nothing that we can do to stop them.
FZZT! “Lieutenant!? Lieutenant, do you copy? This is Second Lieutenant Jezebel Wen of the Outcast Marines, reporting for duty, sir.”
The cheap, wireless transmitter at Solomon’s throat glitched into life as a broad transmission was beamed down to the surface from the approaching vessel, and he had never felt so relieved in all his life.
13
Chain of Command
“No time for introductions!” Corporal Ratko had shouted at them as soon as Cready, Ochrie, the unconscious Rhossily, and last of all Kol had scrambled into the hatch of the Marine ship.
No sooner had Ratko touched down on the surface than the humans had run to its side, careful to only touch the handlebars and not the still-boiling hull. The corporal had barely waited for the hatch to shut before igniting the positional pockets once again, sending them straight into the sky before firing the rear main thrusters and throwing them forward at a steep angle above the horizon.
“We have no idea when the Ru’at will recover,” Jezzy explained as Solomon collapsed against the wall of the main hold and slid into one of the X-harness seats. The Marine scout around him was only barely big enough for the addition of four more people, but Solomon didn’t mind being cramped. They were reunited. They were inside CMC technology. He might not be able to say that they were safe yet, but he did feel a lot better about his chances of not dying than he did ten minutes ago, that was for sure!
“Recover?” Solomon said as the G-force started to take them.
But Jezzy was no longer even looking at her lieutenant. She had frozen where she stood, hanging onto the overhead handlebars of the hold cabin as she looked at the last arrival to strap himself into one of the hold chairs.
“Kol,” Jezzy said in a low voice, releasing one hand and already reaching for the Jackhammer slung over her shoulder.
“I knew it!” Kol was struggling in his harness seat, reaching for the Ru’at colony pistol at his own belt.
Which would cause a lot of damage in a confined, pressurized cabin, Solomon thought in dire alarm.
“WAIT!” he bellowed, slapping the manual release of his harness and plunging forward between the two as the ship started to shake with the rigors of escape velocity.
“Weapons down, Marines!” Solomon slid and stumbled between the two armed and trained soldiers, one hand out at Jezzy, the other at Kol. “That’s a frack-damned order!”
“Step out of the way, sir.” Jezzy wavered in place from the fury of Ratko’s ascent, but her Jackhammer was crooked against her chest with her one free arm and pointed straight at Kol, through Solomon. “I’m still the acting squad commander on this boat, and that means—”
“Confederate Marine Code Regulation 201, soldier!” It was Ochrie, surprisingly, whose voice interrupted them.
“Huh?” Even Solomon had never heard of it.
“Special Considerations. Civilian members of the Tier 1 Group can assume operational control of military structures, even in times of conflict and imminent danger,” Ochrie said, her voice stark
and uncompromising.
Tier 1? Solomon thought, frowning.
“Members of the Confederate Council,” the ambassador said.
“Last I checked, you were an ambassador, Ambassador,” Jezzy said, and Solomon could see her eyes sparking with rage at what the traitor Kol had done.
Betrayed them. Threw a Martian transporter at Ganymede. Released a tide of Ru’at cyborgs on them. And what was worse, Solomon knew that Kol had left her, Jezebel Wen, for dead in the maintenance tunnels under Armstrong Habitat.
You never mess with the Yakuza, Solomon remembered from his time in New Kowloon. The Yakuza ALWAYS get what’s owed to them.
But Solomon had messed with the Yakuza, hadn’t he? He had cheated them and the Triads both. All it took was your wits.
“New York was nuked by Hausman,” Solomon said quickly, earning a nod from Ochrie that he was thinking along the same lines she had. “And the Confederate Council is gone. That means that the next senior officer of Confederate Command is…”
“Me,” Ochrie said sternly. “And, as I take it that you, Lieutenant Wen, are still loyal to General Asquew and the true Marine Corps, that means you fall under my direct command also. Or are you the traitor here?”
“Traitor? Me?” Jezebel looked fit to burst. “You know what he did!” She rounded on Solomon. “You were there! You saw how many of our people—good people—died because of that—”
“He saved my life, Jezzy,” Solomon said, shaking his head. “I know, I know… But—”
“But what? He saved your life just so that he could get a way off Mars! Just so he could save his skin!” Jezzy said.
“The commander-in-chief is correct, Jezzy,” intoned Malady from where he stood at one end of the hold.
The commander-in-chief, Solomon’s mind boggled. He meant Ochrie, didn’t he? The idea that he had been nursing the hypnotized and brainwashed leader of the entire Confederacy made Solomon gulp. He hoped that he hadn’t insulted her too many times.
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