Invasion- Proxima

by James David Victor

  She’s not here, he thought.

  “You two!” he barked at two dazed and confused Green Squad Outcasts, and even though he didn’t even know what rank either of them were—anyone could be a specialist commander just like him—he gave them orders all the same. “You can walk. Get up to the emergency reserve bunker on the ridge.” He pointed to the dark shape of a low building that the Marines had built and stocked for emergencies just like this. Well, probably not THIS, Solomon knew. Not the crash of an entire transporter into the facility itself… “We need emergency evac suits. As many as you can get,” he demanded of them, and surprisingly, the two immediately raced off to get the light-weight ‘survival sack’ style suits that could be thrown on in seconds.

  Not that it will help most people already out here. Solomon growled inwardly in frustration as he saw one staffer emerge from the facility, already stiff and frozen.

  But it gives those two something to do, and we’ll need the suits when it comes time to rescue any left inside, Solomon thought as he continued to jump from scarred wreckage to rock. They would need satellite communication. The bunker might have a mobile unit. They would also need to set up some kind of pressurized emergency habitat somehow, and they would need some cutting equipment to get those trapped inside out before all their oxygen ran out.

  But as he was giving orders and rounding up any he came across in the mayhem, he saw what had happened to his combat specialist.

  Jezzy Wen was standing amidst a burning field of wreckage, trying to fist-fight a burning, gleaming figure that was stalking out of the fires.

  It was one of the cyborgs.

  4

  To Save A Life

  Jezzy lunged—but not at the soot-stained, silver man-thing bearing down on her. Instead, her mesh gloves seized one of the broken bits of alloy pipe sticking out of the ice where it had been thrown when it ripped off the transporter.

  The cyborg moved at the same time, stepping out of the jet of flame that burned itself out in an instant and reaching for the combat specialist with one four-fingered claw of a metal hand. The creature wasn’t entirely made of metal—the blackened silver of the creature’s hand ended just beyond the wrist to reveal the pallid, almost yellowing cadaverous flesh of a bare arm and shoulder, obscenely shot through with chrome cables that burst from its frozen flesh like veins.

  The rest of the cyborg was the same motley of metal and flesh, with its entire lower half given over to bionic legs, as well as one half of its chest and its left side.

  None of that was as distressing as the thing’s face, however, which was horrifyingly human…albeit with sightless, staring dead eyes. A silver cap extended from just above its brow to form a river of metal down the thing’s neck and spine, Jezzy saw as she spun on her heel, bringing the pipe up in a wide arc to connect with the creature’s head—

  CLANG! Although she couldn’t hear the impact, she felt the shock of it vibrate down the length of her arm, and the creature was turning to one side—the metal of its head scratched, and its more human cheekbone ruined.

  The blow would have been enough to kill any mere mortal, but on the cyborg, it had just worked to bend the pipe almost to a forty-degree angle.

  Frack! Jezzy swore, already turning as she knew that the cyborg would counter-strike.

  It did, flinging a fist out in a backhand blow that would have killed her, she was sure, if she hadn’t anticipated the move.

  No weapons, Jezzy cursed as she allowed the lighter gravity to take her, leaping back a few paces and circling her opponent. This had just been an exercise run, so no one was packing any firepower.

  But Jezebel Wen had been in tight spots before, and she had often had to get creative in the worst of situations. She leaped forward, one encounter boot hitting the top of an upturned storage box thrown from the wreckage, which she used as a springboard to leap, jackknifing her body in a head-over-heels motion in mid-air. That was one of the few advantages to fighting in near zero-G—Jezzy could use all the martial arts techniques she had learned as a young woman and do impossible things with them.

  As she spun, she swung out with the pipe once more, her rotational force lending more fury to the blow as it struck the cyborg coming for her, and it was enough to knock it backwards.

  “Come on, you glorified can-opener!” she growled into her mask as she landed, her boots sending puffs of ice and rock dust around her. She didn’t waste any time and jumped forward once more, raising the shorn pipe in a two-handed grip over her head to bring it down in a fearsome blow against the creature that was already attempting to stand once more.

  Thunk! Both her and the cyborg fell to the ground, bouncing in the thin gravity as Jezzy’s weapon plunged straight through the fleshy part of the creature’s chest. Jezzy rolled away from the tumble, scrabbling to her feet to turn back.

  Around the fighting pair was chaos. The ground that had once been humped with rills of frozen ice in places and flattened in others with wide avenues for the mech-walkers to transit was now a broken, churned mess. Great cracks had appeared along the frozen surface, and in places, vast plates of ice-rock had been forced up and sat jagged, pointing towards distant Jupiter.

  Bits of wreckage from both the Marine transporter and the training facility littered the plain in terrible confusion. Flashes of light still exploded into the dark as some room, building, or electrical component was ruptured by decompression or heat.

  And the cyborg that Jezebel Wen had been fighting was already pushing itself back up to its feet, with a bent metal pipe sticking straight through its body. Even though Jezzy had been briefed that these things were hard to kill, and she had even seen what it took to overwhelm one, it still alarmed her as she saw the creature get back up.

  Though Jezzy had been trained to be a killer, that didn’t mean she did not feel fear, far from it, but she could ignore it if she had to. It’s just an energy. A chemical reaction, she told herself, allowing herself to breathe deep as she focused her mind and remembered what the Yakuza martial arts instructor had told her.

  This is the fight. This is real. You are strong enough. Use the energy.

  Opposite her, the cyborg seemed to pause for an absurd moment to tap the metal pipe sticking out of its chest almost tenderly, before its hand dropped to its side, and instead it raised its other hand—the one that ended in the rotating cylinders of some kind of particle weapon….

  Oh frack. Jezzy had forgotten that these things had those. She jumped to one side as the creature fired.

  The wheels of the cyborg’s hand spun as vast amounts of force were generated in an instant, white lightening sparks spilling from the friction, before a beam of purple and white light shot forward at the space where Jezzy had been. This was not the de-focused, wide-angle glare of force that Jezzy had seen on the training videos, but it was instead the same pinpoint narrow focus beam that could burn through flesh and light tactical suits that Jezzy knew too well, having already been shot by one.

  Unfortunately, the problem with particle-beam generators, even tiny ones like this one, was that they were not one-shot projectile weapons. They had no shells, cartridge cases, or bullets. They kept firing a constant beam until the energy supply effectively turned off.

  Jezzy rolled over the churned ice, her visor-helmet scraping rocks as the line of purple fire erupted behind her, and followed her rolling, leaping form, burning rocks and cutting through the ice just feet from where she was. How long could she stay ahead of the thing? What was she going to do? She began to panic…

  “Oof!” She heard a grunt, and for a moment, she didn’t realize where it came from. Not from outside, as you could hardly hear anything in the near-vacuum of space.

  No, the sound was coming over her suit communicator. It was Specialist Commander Solomon Cready, who had thrown himself in a flailing body-check against the cyborg, and the pair of them were tumbling head over heels through the wreckage. The beam of purple laser-light seared through a stand of metal, flashing up int
o the sky, and then clicking off.

  “Commander!” Jezzy called, already bounding towards the pair. There was no way that Solomon would be able to survive in a fist-fight against one of the cyborgs. Those things had muscles augmented by what looked like mechanical hydraulics and servo-assisted power mechanisms. They wouldn’t suffer muscle fatigue or exhaustion, they wouldn’t tire, they wouldn’t make mistakes.

  The commander might have saved her life, but Jezzy was sure that he had done it at the cost of his own…

  5

  Street Lessons

  “Urgh!” Solomon rolled, and the world spun around him. He felt impacts on his shoulders and back, but he couldn’t tell if it was the ground or wreckage or the metal man he was fighting.

  He held on grimly to the creature’s firing arm, pushing it up and away with all of his might to find that it felt like he was trying to break the Hoover Dam with nothing but his hands.

  Instincts flared in him. Basic moves that he thought he had forgotten were brought to life once again by the struggle of the moment. Specialist Commander Solomon Cready had once been one of the best thieves in the Asia-Pacific Partnership, and in particular in the de-regulated ‘ghetto-zone’ of New Kowloon City, the sort of place where you can end up in a street-fight very easily indeed. In the cramped and neon-lit streets of New Kowloon, you learned how to use every weapon at your disposal to get away.

  Solomon scraped his boot down the cyborg’s shin, an act which would have sent any normal human howling back in pain, but his own metal boots just sparked against the creature’s metal legs.

  Solomon kneed the thing in the fleshy part of its hip, where the thing’s kidneys should be and would have caused a winding pain that would allow him to break free—

  But the blow only thumped against the thing’s dead flesh, and the cyborg didn’t even flinch.

  Solomon jabbed the creatures’ chest, only to hit one half of a chrome breastplate. “Argh!” he howled in pain as his knuckles met unresisting metal.

  And now the cyborg’s arm was implacably pushing down his own arm, easily overpowering mere biology.

  “Why don’t you just die!” Solomon snarled at it, not really knowing what he was saying, just bursting with anger and expletives as he felt the cyborg’s other hand seize his back in a one-armed bear hug and lift him up.

  Solomon’s back and chest was on fire as the cyborg leaned back, lifting the human’s feet off the ground as it attempted to bodily crush him. And it was going to succeed, anyone could see, as Solomon gasped and cried out inside his visor-helmet.

  The struggling pair stood in a circle of debris in front of the training facility, fractured rock and ice all around them. For a moment, Solomon managed to lift his head to see the unarmed form of Jezzy Wen bounding towards him. What was she going to do to save him? What could anyone do?

  But that was the thing about Solomon’s instincts.

  He had been picked to be a commander for a reason. Doctor Palinov and General Asquew had seen something in him all those long months ago. It was partly his reaction times, his tenacity, and his ability to think creatively under fire.

  In New Kowloon, Solomon had learned that you never win every fight. It was one of the first lessons that you learned on the streets. Some fights you are going to lose, so all you can do is make sure that you have an exit strategy—and that you don’t die.

  That was why you had to always make sure the odds were in your favor.

  “Frack this!” Solomon grunted, grasping onto the cyborg’s shoulders with both hand and using the creature’s own strength as a lever, to jerk and kick the thing with all the power he had left in his feet.

  It was enough to make the cyborg unbalance the metal man just a tiny bit, especially as it was bending back in an effort to crush its human prey in bio-mechanical arms. The cyborg wobbled and was forced to take a small step backwards, but a small step was all that was needed for the creature’s heavy metal boot to plunge into the crack in rock and ice that had opened when the transporter had hit the facility.

  The cyborg, and the human it carried, toppled backwards into the narrow abyss.

  6

  What You Were Born to Do

  “Commander!” Jezzy slid across the plain to the gap in the ground as the training facility shook in front of her.

  You fool! You idiot… Jezzy felt something roll down her face, before realizing that it was tears. Solomon had sacrificed his life for her.

  “Why? You stupid, stupid fool…” she cried as she dragged herself to look over the edge, mortified by what she might see when she looked down, but all she could see was the blue and gray plates of ice descending into a twisted darkness where the fault line had fractured through the permafrost and the frozen mantle of Ganymede’s upper surface.

  How far down did it go? It was impossible to tell. She hadn’t studied xenogeology either at the training facility or before, so she had no way of knowing if there was solid rock down there, or dirt, of more water. Something in her memory told her that Ganymede’s outer crust was unlike other planetoids and moons. Its massive size and thin atmosphere meant that it was able to keep large amounts of moisture under the blanket of space, but that moisture would be frozen and refrozen in plates of super-hardened ice that could be as thick as she was tall, and strong enough to build houses on. But how deep was that frozen crust? Ten meters? Fifty? A hundred?

  And Solomon gave his life for me. Jezzy’s heart hammered. Even though the man must have known that without weapons, there was no way that a mere human body like his could have even dented the undead cyborg thing.

  “You were just meant to be a stars-be-damned thief…” she whispered into the darkness. A fact that when she had first met him had meant he had occupied a low position in her estimations, but now seemed to her to be a commendation of how far the man had come.

  The Solomon I had first met would never have done that, she thought. He had apparently been convicted of killing his best friend in a deal gone wrong, after all—or at least that was what Warden Coates had crowed with scornful delight during their early days on Ganymede. Solomon was regarded as the lowest of the low in the warden’s estimations. A man without honor. Without courage.

  “Well, that sure changed, didn’t it…” Jezzy muttered angrily at the hole in the ground, barely able to see from the tears welling up in her eyes. What was she supposed to do now? She hadn’t realized just how much she had relied on her fellow squad members until they had started falling. Petchel had died on Mars in the Hellas Chasma attack. Kol had betrayed them. And now, they had lost their commander. Their ‘Gold Squad’ was down to three members and did not seem quite so golden as it had been before.

  “Stop whining and give a guy a hand, will ya?” croaked a voice in her suit communicator, and Jezzy looked down to see the camouflaged-metal of a glove appear on the frozen lip of rock beside her.

  It was Solomon, legs dangling over the abyss and clinging to the underside of the ice plates where he must have snagged himself.

  “Commander!” Jezzy immediately hauled him out of the abyss, where they both collapsed on the edge and panted.

  “I think it’s dead. I don’t know…” she heard Solomon’s voice say over her suit transmitter. “Maybe those things can’t even die at all, but it’ll get crushed by the walls of ice when the plates re-form, at least,” he grumbled, already pushing himself to his feet as he looked around, tapping his suit communicator controls on his belt, Jezzy saw, in an attempt to widen the available frequencies.

  Jezzy was only too happy to hide her face and not show her relief or her gratitude as she turned into a crouch, looking around for signs of any more of those things.

  “How did it get here? Was it in the station all the time?”

  “I don’t think so…” Solomon shook his head, before listening for a pause. “No other transmission I can pick up on this. No emergency broadcast on our frequencies, anyway…”

  He meant the Ganymede facility, Jezzy thought i
mmediately. A station like Ganymede, able to communicate to the ships that docked in orbit, was sure to have some kind of emergency distress beacon. Weren’t they supposed to broadcast on all frequencies when triggered?

  “Okay. That means station comms are down.” Solomon sounded frustrated. “Which is going to make patching a station-wide call to all the survivors difficult,” he said, and Jezzy nodded. Their light tactical suits had communicator systems that patched to the nearest main transmitter, which in times of war would be the battle-group flagship or the command unit, but right now should be the facility’s central servers. Without that central hub, each tactical suit could only send short field bursts of transmissions to its line-of-sight neighbors, and usually keyed in to specific squad frequencies.

  But there was another distress beacon, Jezzy realized, remembering one of their early field exercises. It had been a simple ‘capture-the-flag’ game with the different squads racing each other—and fighting each other—to get to a downed craft kept just two klicks away or so, and the main goal had been to activate a distress beacon kept stationary on the top.

  “Break and Enter,” Jezzy said quickly, for Solomon to look at her strangely for a moment, before breaking into a grin.

  “You absolute genius. The field exercise we took part in?” Solomon said.

  “Yeah. The hulk has a distress beacon. If we can get to it, someone must have enough technical experience to calibrate it to send a message out to the rest of the Rapid Response Fleet,” she said. The Rapid Response Fleet that was currently in stationed a long way away around Mars.

  But they had jump-ships out there, she knew. They would be able to get here in hours, which Solomon must also have realized, as his mind was clearly moving onto the next problem.