“Not a chance, Commander. You got yours?” Karamov said in his typical black humor.
“Wonderful. Then we’d better get out of here as quick as we can,” Solomon said. He knew that it would only be a matter of time before a stray missile or shrapnel would hit the habitat membrane, and it would cause a whole lot more damage than what three repair drones could glue back together.
Looking down the streets of Armstrong, Solomon saw other Martians—those who weren’t wearing the red cloaks of the Chosen of Mars—hurriedly racing to what looked to be subway shelters or underground bunkers, and that more of the automated blinds were crashing down over windows or doors.
Not that it’s going to help them if a missile strikes… Solomon set off at a run.
“Where we going, Commander?” Karamov followed him.
“Kol should have taken Jezzy out of Armstrong ages ago to rendezvous with Malady. We need to get out of the bubble, and we need a way to do it without starving of oxygen or getting shot…” Solomon was saying as he ran. “And I only know one place on this accursed planet that can help…”
“Fela!” Karamov guessed.
16
Control Chip
“Commander! Commander, come IN!” Jezzy was shouting into the Armstrong air as she ran through the deserted streets. She was getting no response. None whatsoever—not from Specialist Commander Cready, or from Specialist Karamov.
Of course, she hadn’t bothered to try for Kol. The fracker, she thought.
“I’m ten seconds to ETA,” the metallic voice of Malady intoned in her ear as she ran. All around her, Jezzy saw the air-control shutters slamming shut and people disappearing underground. The Martians had long been prepared for this, she thought. Even the older citizens and the youngest toddlers knew that they had to get underground when their habitat was threatened, and it seemed that the Chosen of Mars must have been running drills for just such an eventuality.
“Ten seconds? Good. But I can’t raise the commander or Karamov...” Jezzy was calling, her side starting to feel stiff. But at least it still didn’t hurt.
“We can’t either. Which means that they have either lost their communicators, or…” This was from Lieutenant Vikram, sounding over their channel as Jezzy remembered that their Marine pilot also had access to their communications device.
“Can’t you, I don’t know, run a trace on him or something?” Jezzy wheezed.
“It doesn’t work like that, Outcast.” Vikram sounded annoyed. “These earbud communicators don’t even have GPS. They’re just short-band communicators. Barely enough room for a transmitter. And none of that will do any good if your commander and medical specialist have both had their heads blown off anyway!”
“You’re not helping, Vikram,” Jezzy snarled back as she skidded to a halt on the edge of a Martian square. It was cobbled and deserted, and in the center was a fountain with a statue of one of the first, early twenty-first century Martian discovery rovers. This was where she had agreed to rendezvous with Malady, and even though she was early, she was already impatient.
“I want solutions, not problems, Vikram…” Jezzy scanned the streets ahead as the skies above her came alive with fire and fury. The Martian saucer was taking direct fire from the smaller Marine Corps fighters, but even though it shook and wobbled under the missile explosions bursting across its exterior, it wasn’t enough to bring it down…
A lot of the smaller Martian rocket ships had come down though, Jezzy saw. For all of their aerial acrobatics, they were simply no match for the Marine fighters that were breaking into the atmosphere, released from their dropships and dreadnaughts above…
“Solutions!?” Vikram was shouting angrily. “I’m a Marine Corps pilot. A full Marine Corps pilot, Outcast, which puts me several paygrades above yours. I don’t have to answer to you lot!” he said, which inadvertently gave Jezzy just the idea that she needed.
“Then patch me through to someone who does know a thing or two about the Outcasts!” she said, as there was a fast-approaching whumping noise.
“What on earth are you talking about?” Vikram said.
“Your ship links up to the deep-space satellite network, right?” Jezzy said.
“Of course,” Vikram replied.
WHUMP! BOOM! Something hit the surface of Armstrong Habitat far above, and Jezzy saw a line of molten metal streaking down through the sky inside the habitat membrane, as the sound of hissing oxygen turned into a roar of wind. She was thankful that Kol hadn’t decided to take her ridiculous bubble-helmet from her, at least. But the habitat had finally been breached. How long before it became totally uninhabitable above the surface?
“Then you can contact the Ganymede Training Facility, can’t you?” Jezzy said.
“Well, I could if I wasn’t right now flying my undercover merchant ship to the outskirts of a warzone and hoping that neither the Martians nor the Confederates mistake me for a freebooter!” Vikram said.
“Just do it, Vikram! Please!” Jezzy said. The whumping sound grew closer, and the ground started shaking as a large tank of a form bounded through the streets, every metal step cracking the cobblestones as Malady found Jezzy.
“Fine. Opening a channel. What do you want me to say?” The Marine pilot at the other end of the line sounded anything but happy about taking orders from a mere adjunct-Marine.
“Ask them if their control chips have GPSs. Which they should. And when they say yes, get them to take a reading on Commander Cready and Karamov, and relay the details back so we can rescue them from this frackhole,” Jezzy said.
“Doing it…” Vikram muttered as Malady came to a standstill in front of her, bits of metal dust and soot hitting his rust-colored outer hull. Even seeing the big metal golem made Jezzy feel more secure.
“You’re hurt,” she heard him coolly assess her staggering form as she collapsed against his side.
“You don’t say. You might have to carry me. I don’t think I can make it out of Armstrong on my own,” Jezzy wheezed. The painkillers were apparently wearing off, and in their place, the burning particle blast to her shoulder was once again igniting into white-hot agony.
“I can do that.” Malady scooped up the combat specialist in one gigantic arm, holding her close to his chest and shoulder as he turned first one way, then the next.
“Where are we going?” he said in his monosyllabic tones.
“I don’t know yet…” Jezzy said, waiting for Vikram to get back to her with a direct message from Ganymede.
“They patched through the GPS identifiers of your boys,” Vikram said—a little unhappily, Jezzy thought, “and I ran them through my own scanner to see that they’ve already left Armstrong—or two of them have, at least—and they are moving at a fair clip due east from Tharsis crater. Too fast to be on foot…”
“It’s only two I’m interested in anymore,” Jezzy said. “Cready and Karamov must have stolen a craft of some kind. Send the heading and direction to Malady and start making your way there. They might be free, or the First Martians might have captured them…” Jezzy said, exhausted as the pain overtook her. She didn’t hear Vikram giving her the okay, or Malady receiving the coordinates and headings, as he turned east and started pounding through the streets, smashing his heavy boots through walls, fountains, and gardens.
Although the outer hangar doors of Armstrong should have presented the man-golem holding the human Outcast with an interesting problem. In the end, it was only an opportunity, as the hangars doors had already been blown apart by some stray rocket. A little further out on the crater edge, Malady started to see the wreckage of downed Martian rocket ships and Marine Corps fighters. Both craft looked alike in their ruin, with burning machine oil and strange, twisted metals exuding thick black smoke.
It wasn’t until Malady had bounded down the crater wall that it became clear just where the commander and the medical specials of the Outcasts’ Gold Squad had got to. There, up ahead of them, was the large, tracked, red, tank-like carava
n of a water surveyor. Fela. And she was already hightailing it out of Armstrong and heading for the deep Red, with Tomas, Marshal, Solomon, and Karamov safely inside.
Well, as safe as anyone could be in times of war, that was…
Epilogue: Debrief
Commander Solomon sat in much more comfortable chair than he had previously enjoyed with his comrade-in-arms Specialist Karamov in the same room that he had so recently looked at from one end of a camera lens.
He was on board The Invincible, one of the two pyramid-like dreadnaught in the Rapid Response Fleet, and through the portholes, he could see the rest of this fleet arrayed in orbit over Mars, the surface of the planet flaring light and smearing black as war took it.
“We’ll never route them all out. Not for ten years or more…” Colonel Asquew said despairingly, standing by the porthole and looking grimly at the surface of Mars. “The Red Planet is a big place, and there are lots of places to hide a fanatical cult of freedom fighters…”
“Humanity’s first interplanetary war…” Solomon murmured, remembering the Ambassador of Earth’s deepest fear.
There was a moment of silence from the Commander before she turned around. “Actually, that might not be exactly precise…” she said ominously, gesturing for Solomon to take his seat beside the others on one side of her desk.
“Excuse me, ma’am, but…what?” Solomon said. He felt he had the right to be blunt in this situation. He hurt. Half his squad had been beaten up and shot at in a useless war that had been started not by the Martians or the Confederates, it seemed, but by NeuroTech, the mega-corporation.
But now that the dogs of war had been unleashed, Solomon saw, there was no way they could stop it. It didn’t matter if they shouted it from the stars that it was all NeuroTech’s greed. Mars was now locked into a war of attrition against the Marine Corps, and there were rumors that Proxima had formed its own blockade against Confederate ships approaching its space. It was only a matter of time before every human colony was going to raise the bloody fist of independence—or try to, anyway.
“There is something that I feel that it is time for you and your Gold Squad to hear, Specialist Commander Solomon. It has to do with NeuroTech, and their experimental robots, and even the Outcasts Training Program,” Colonel Asquew said heavily as a door hissed open, and in walked none other than Warden Coates and Doctor Palinov.
Solomon was about to wonder what over Mars they were doing here when they should be on Ganymede, but he didn’t have to wonder, as the colonel started to tell them a secret that the Marine Corps had been keeping from the rest of humanity, the Confederacy, and the colonies alike, for a long, long time…
Invasion: Proxima
Outcast Marines, Book 5
Prologue: Disturbing News
Specialist Commander Solomon Cready sat in a surprisingly comfortable chair, but his body shook with fatigue. It wasn’t such a long time ago that he had been shot, and although the wonders of the Confederate Marine Corps’ drugs and genetic serums meant that his side was healing, his recent battles on Mars were pushing him to a state of near total exhaustion. He wanted nothing more than to find a bunk, bench, or even just a spare corner anywhere on this super-massive Dreadnaught-class warship the Invincible, which hung like an inverted pyramid over the Red Planet.
Far below the leading ship of the Rapid Response Fleet, smoke and fury reigned over the surface of Mars. The haze of red-gold atmosphere was besmirched by the ugly black smoke of battle as the Confederate navies pounded their rebellious neighbour with both Marine attack fighters and orbital missiles.
At least they haven’t nuked anyone yet, Solomon thought blearily as he waited for the Commander of the entire Rapid Response Fleet, a stern and stony-faced woman named Brigadier General Asquew, to begin.
The specialist commander had been summoned to the audience chamber along with the rest of the people that made up his Gold Squad of adjunct-Marines, in the newly-formed regiment colloquially called the Outcasts.
Well, those of his squad who still remained, that was. Specialist Jezebel Wen (Jezzy for short) sat stiff-backed at his side, the look on her face betraying her similar exhaustion, but her rigid posture letting Solomon know that she was nervous about this debriefing. It was unusual for the general to single out such a lowly group of adjunct-Marines, but Specialist Commander Cready’s Gold Squad had set themselves apart from their contemporaries.
Maybe it was the fact we were the ones to first get attacked by the seditionists, Solomon considered. The young man wondered if that meant that they, particularly, had a hand in starting this terrible interplanetary war.
Or maybe it was the fact that they had been the ones to uncover the cyborgs and killer robots of the mega-corporation NeuroTech. Cyborgs and robots that the company was apparently willing to hand over to the Martian seditionists called the ‘First Martians’ to use against the Confederacy.
Or maybe it was the fact that they had been sent to infiltrate the Martian habitat of Armstrong, in the Tharsis Thocla crater, just at the eve of the war.
Whatever, Solomon thought tiredly. He knew that he should be more respectful. He knew that he should be anxious about this high-level debriefing, given the lowly status of his squad—his combat specialist Jezzy, the walking metal man-golem that was Specialist Malady, and Medical Specialist Karamov.
No Specialist Kol, though… Solomon grimaced. Their youngest squad member had defected to the seditionists, meaning they would be seriously down on firepower in the next confrontation.
What sort of leader doesn’t see that coming? Solomon cursed himself. He should have registered the fact that Kol had known more about Mars than anyone else. He should have been smarter.
But right now, Solomon Cready didn’t feel very smart at all. He felt like whatever experimental genetic serum that the Outcasts were being dosed with clearly had stopped working on him. He knew he should sit up straighter as General Asquew returned to her desk, but he was too exhausted. He could barely keep his eyes open.
“Specialist Commander Cready…” Asquew greeted them, her face grim as she took her seat behind her palatial desk. On the wall behind her was the Confederate flag, and to Solomon’s eyes, she appeared to be someone out of a painting, or a statue. “Soldiers.” She nodded at the rest of his squad as well. What she said next surprised them all.
“There is something that I think you and your team have earned the right to know…” She nodded at the door for it to hiss open, and in walked Warden Coates, Head of Training the Outcasts at their facility on Ganymede, as well as Doctor Palinov, the woman responsible for dosing the Outcasts with her experimental serums, to try and create the ‘ultimate’ space Marine.
What are they doing here? Solomon thought as he saw them both stand at rigid attention. Solomon had never seen either of them with looks of such stark determination on their faces before.
Whatever the general is going to tell us next, this is going to be bad… the specialist commander thought.
And he was right.
1
The Worries of Jezebel Wen
3 Days Later
“I still don’t understand… How can this be possible?” Jezzy said in low, urgent tones to the leader of the Gold Squad.
Who was not particularly looking as dazed or as confused as she herself felt, Jezzy thought. Her world had been turned upside-down during that debriefing by the commander of the fleet herself. Everything that she had thought she knew about the Confederacy, about the colonies – and even the Outcast Training Programme – all of it had been wrong.
“Just what are we expected to do with information like that? How can we fight it?” Jezzy continued to murmur as they walked down the hallway to their next session. They were back on Ganymede now, but even way out here on the largest moon of Jupiter, there was no time for the regular allotted training sessions that they’d received before the war.
The colonial war permeated everything invisibly; the corridors of the facility around t
hem appeared deserted as most of the Outcast squads were still engaged on the front line at Mars. All that was left here were the squads like theirs who had been rotated out from the campaign, and then the wounded.
So, no prolonged study lounge sessions of working out complicated holographic puzzles or learning military strategy for them now, and no large-scale exercises featuring dummy rounds and mission objectives. Instead, Jezzy and Solomon were about to take part in the regular daily 6k run that all Outcasts were expected to do if they could.
After which, I would normally be sent to combat training, Jezzy thought, and Solomon beside her would be sent to lessons in military tactics and history. But the war meant that their schedule was entirely dependent on what came down the newswires. They might be corralled into loading up more Marine Transporters with equipment to be sent to the front line, or else unloading the next wave of wounded from the transporters coming back.
Jezzy knew that she should have felt good about the run ahead of her, as she pulled on her light tactical encounter suit—undermesh shirt fixed to the battle harness, over which locked their boots, gloves, and close-fitting visor-helmets. No shoulder-pads or breastplates for the space run today. Running in near zero-G always helped the ex-Yakuza executioner forget about her past. To become just another tired and striving body amongst others. She didn’t have to worry about her father, or her orders. She wouldn’t have to think about anything beyond her own stride.
But not now, of course.
Being told that there were aliens out there, and that they could be coming for you at any moment, kind of made everything else seem a little meaningless.
“Solomon? What are you thinking? What do you make of what the general told us?” Jezzy prompted, standing up and jumping a little to settle her suit as the other uninjured Outcasts around them were doing the same, or approaching the hangar lounge airlocks.
Outcast Marines series Boxed Set 2 Page 13