Outcast Marines series Boxed Set 2

by James David Victor

  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 immediately. 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.

  “Oxygen. I’ve got a team of people getting emergency evac suits from the bunker. That will keep people alive for a few hours, but…”

  Jezzy nodded. The commander didn’t need to spell out the dangers. What if there aren’t enough suits for the survivors trapped inside the facility? Do they have enough oxygen to last the hours it will take to get help?

  “We’ll find a way,” Jezzy growled in determination. They didn’t have a choice, after all. They had to, or else more people would die.

  “You three—Green Squad?” Jezzy heard Solomon barking orders at their three fellow adjunct-Marines, sheltering at the edge of the crash site. “Any of you got technical specialism? Deep-space telemetries?”

  One of them was a technical specialist, thankfully, and Solomon dispatched all three as fast as they could to the Break and Enter hulk to work on the beacon.

  “I’ll be quicker, Commander,” intoned a loud voice looming out of the dark.

  “Malady!” Jezzy found herself grinning in joy. “Am I sure glad to see you,” she said, and meant it. The man-golem had once been a full Marine and part of a heavy tactical unit, which meant that he looked less like a man and more like a walking tank, twice the size of anyone else and with no neck to speak of. The heavy tactical suits were the most aggressive of the Confederate Marine armor, a step up from the power armor of regular Marines and in another order of scale to the light tacticals that the fast-moving Outcasts wore.

  But Jezzy was also pleased to see that her friend had survived, as she saw his disturbingly placid visage behind his faceplate. For his crimes—attacking a superior officer, Specialist Malady—she had no idea if that was his surname or a nickname—had been biologically sealed into his full tactical suit and busted down several ranks to be a lowly adjunct-Marine Outcast, and his pale face behind the bullet-proof glass always looked like he was half-asleep.

  Only just survived, she thought as she saw the great scratches down the shoulder-pad that sheathed into the metal neck cowl and domed head, along with blackened burn marks all down one side.

  “What happened to you?” Solomon asked before Jezzy had a chance to.

  “Had to walk out of the facility,” he said in his usual robotic, dreary tone, devoid of emotion. “And I had to fight a cyborg.”

  “There’s more of them?” Jezzy said in alarm, but Malady didn’t know the answer to that.

  “No, Malady. I know that with those legs of yours, you’d move much faster than the Green Squad,” she heard Solomon reason beside her, “but I definitely want you back here with us if there’s even a chance that there are more of those things out here.”

  “They came on the transporter,” Malady said, again just as blandly. “The one I fought was stepping out of the ruined holding bay when we met.”

  ‘Met,’ Jezzy thought. What a polite way of describing what must surely have been a titanic battle between two beings more metal than man…

  “Commander Cready!” There was a shout over their suit channel, and Jezzy turned to see a small buggy bouncing over the surface of the moon at break-neck speed. The thing was in a classic suspended chassis shape, with four large ‘bubble’ wheels set out on splayed arms that could move independently, absorbing the shock of landing and bouncing over the difficult terrain.

  “Thank the heavens!” Solomon said. It was the two men that he had sent to the emergency bunker, who had found this buggy stationed inside and had loaded its interior with every bit of equipment that they thought could help.

  Ropes, battle harnesses, emergency evac suits… Jezzy looked through the crates that the two members of Red Squad were even now gesturing for them to investigate.

  “Now that’s more like it,” she heard Solomon say as the Outcast presented them with two Jackhammer rifles, able to fire repeating shots as well as singles. “Load up,” Solomon said to Jezzy and Malady, already reaching for the extra ammunition to secure to his light tactical suit. “I want everyone armed. Expect resistance. We’ve got two objectives: search and rescue, and neutralize any cyborgs that we come across,” he said, announcing the new mission parameters in the absence of their commands being downloaded directly to the holographic displays of their visor-helmets.

  Jezzy’s eyes flickered to the two Red Squad Marines. Will they even follow his orders? But she was surprised when she saw that they did, and they continued to do so as Solomon delegated tasks. One of the Red Squad members stayed inside the buggy to drive it alongside them as the other stayed in the back of the chassis, ready to dole out equipment or grab the injured they came across.

  He’s a natural, Jezzy realized as she looked at Solomon giving out orders. The young man may have fought ever becoming a leader, but he was good at it, she had to admit. He was firm and abrupt when the situation needed confidence and direction, but he never barked and insulted his fellow soldiers the way Warden Coates did.

  In fact, Jezzy thought, if she didn’t know better, she would say that this was exactly the sort of thing that Solomon Cready was born to do.

  They set off at a bounding run toward the ruined training facility.

  7

  Landing Module

  “Can you walk?” Solomon said to the latest survivor that they found. It was one of the staffers who worked in logistical positions throughout the facility and the Corps in general. He had managed to throw on a basic encounter suit and helmet when the facility depressurized.

  “I-I think so…” The man nodded.

  “Good. Start moving with the others to the practice hulk on the other side of that ridge…” Solomon was directing everyone he could into one of two unofficial groups. If they were combat-ready, then they would be given one of the spare guns and told to join their line of rescuers. If not, Solomon wanted them to get to the site of the distress beacon immediately.

  The problem was, however, that they had no way of knowing how long it would take for the rescue effort to get there. And in the meantime, they might have more cyborgs to face, as well as lives to save.

  In the midst of the rescue effort, surrounded by twisted and blackened metal, Solomon paused and straightened up, looking at the ruin of Ganymede. Their training facility was unusable. What remained of any of the modular buildings were mostly dented, blackened, and crumpled inwards.

  The decompression forces must have been incredible… Solomon thought sadly. It was no surprise that the central hub was collapsed, charred, and broken—now just a mess of concrete blocks, wires, and sheets of chrome. It was hard to tell which part of the detritus came from the Marine transporter and which came from the facility. The two had become twisted twins of destruction.

  But the forces of internal and external pressure had ripped through the wings of the facility as well, collapsing corridors and domes as the precautionary airlock system must have failed, or been compromised.

  “How could anyone still be alive in there?” Solomon murmured, looking at the flattened walls. But either way, we have to find out, he thou
ght as Malady lumbered toward the nearest partially-standing module and banged on the twisted porthole with metal fists.

  “TZRK!” Solomon’s communicator glitched and buzzed in his ear, making him flinch. “Come in! This is Warden Coates. Is that you banging!?”

  Solomon felt a mixture of relief and regret that his cruel and paranoid superior officer had survived. That man had showed Solomon nothing but pain and distrust so far…

  But I can’t very well leave him in there to die, can I? Solomon groaned inwardly before responding.

  “Warden, Sir, this is Specialist Commander Cready. I have a crew of twelve out here. Minor injuries. Combat Ready,” he replied.

  “I don’t care how ready you are! Get us out of here, Cready!” the warden snapped.

  “Aye, sir.” Solomon rolled his eyes. “How many of you are there?”

  “Seven. Myself, Doctor Palinov, a couple of medical staff, and three more,” Warden Coates said. “Have you activated the distress beacon yet?”

  “We’re working on it, sir,” Solomon said. “The facility’s beacon must have been destroyed in the crash, so I’ve sent a team off to the hulk practice site to—”

  “Yes, yes, I don’t want to hear excuses. Don’t waste my time or yours, Cready!” the warden did not appear to be overjoyed to be rescued. Maybe I should have not answered his call, Solomon thought as he instructed the team to set up the emergency evacuation tent that they had found in the supply bunker.

  It was a simple design, really—a tube of collapsible mesh material, laced with wire, and at either end a magnet clamp hoop and seal. They attached it around the twisted airlock door before attaching the other end to the Ganymede buggy airlock, using the air processors inside the buggy to inflate it with breathable oxygen, hopefully getting it as close to normal air pressures enjoyed inside the facility.