Outcast Marines, Book 1

Prologue: New Kowloon, 2205

Solomon Cready sat in the small hotel room overlooking Hong Kong’s New Kowloon District, blue neon light streaming through the blinds, with blood on his hands.

It shouldn’t have gone down like this… The man’s dark eyes stared at the red that was flickering with the neon, at turns looking black, red, black, red…

He needed to get up.

He needed to get out of there.

It was impossible to tell if the rise of whining alarms outside the window were the Confederate Enforcers already coming for him, or whether they were just tracking any number of other criminals in the heavily over-populated mega-city. New Kowloon was like that—the largest slum in the Asiatic Partnership and second in size globally only to Dharavai, Mumbai. It was to New Kowloon that lowlifes like him went. Where they flourished. Where they died.

If you could get through the Enforcer perimeter walls, which was easy when you worked out which of the blue-suited, mech-assisted Enforcer guards were on the take of the Triads or the Yakuza or any other of the mobs that ran the streets, then New Kowloon could be the place where you made your million. You could be picking up contracts from those mobs as easy as asking for directions, or perhaps from any of the many mega-corps that had unofficial ‘offices’ down here, doing unofficial ‘work.’

But it was also in the electric-lit night of New Kowloon District—it looked like its own bright star when seen from space—that you could disappear. Many thousands of people did every year. Never to be seen again.

Just like Matthias, the young man thought as he looked at all the blood.

“Why did you have to go and stick your nose in!” he hissed in frustration at the memory of that awful night. But frustration couldn’t do anything for him now, especially not as the flashing blue light outside the window suddenly broke into a white glare.

CRASH! The door to his hotel room—eleven stories up, and with twenty more above even him—burst into wood fragments. No metal reinforcements or digital bolts for New Kowloon. And there, standing in its place, was a mecha. Four hydraulic limbs mounted on a stubborn metal chassis, its wide, vaguely canine head glittered with flashing red lights.

“Citizen Solomon Cready! This is the Confederate Enforcers! You are under arrest for the murder of Matthias Sozer!” the electronic voice of the Enforcer drone outside the window blared.

He could have tried to do something foolish—he could have jumped up and reached for the Beretta on the side table, the very one that had put three holes in Matthias Sozer. He could have tried to get a shot off at the mecha-hound in front of him and hoped to hit some vital part of its machinery before it chewed his face off, or the Enforcer drone outside shot its needle-point laser through his skull. He could have gone down in a hail of bullets and rage—

But Solomon Cready did nothing, except sit there and stare at his friend’s blood.

Sometimes, your actions catch up with you…

1

Leaving Earth

The dome of the Earth fell away, but its brilliance still illuminated the near vastness of space. The blue and green gem of humanity’s home world used to be praised for its beauty—at such low-orbital distances, everything looks lush and verdant, everything looks like wilderness.

Not so much anymore.

The cradle had become busy, with the continents that were turned away from the sun now a glittering spiderweb of yellow sodium and sharp white neon. Even the dark seas were crisscrossed with trailing lines of light, as the continual shipping-flotillas formed semi-permanent habitats; entire communities living, praying, eating, and dying on their continual trek from one Confederate mega-city to another. On the half of the planet exposed to the sun, the land was obscured by the gray skies of smog and atmospheric disturbance. The Earth of the ‘twenty-twos’—or AD 2205, to be precise—was over-populated, over-polluted, and still the most glorious thing in the sky.

Glorious, Solomon Cready thought as he looked out of the port window, because it was everything that he was not allowed to have anymore.

“Fracking bullcrap…” muttered the figure seated, and similarly shackled with solid metal magnetic bracers, beside Solomon. He hadn’t said his name or why he had been deported from Earth so far on their journey up the Shanghai Space Elevator, but it was clear to anyone just what he thought of the process.

The man was taller than Solomon’s somewhat athletic, reedy form by another good head and a half. His pale skin was crisscrossed with black-ink tattoos.

66 Cadre… Ace of Spades… Solomon read some of the insignia and figured him for a gangbanger. Not the typical sort that you’d expect to see in the Asian-Pacific Partnership, but hey, the world lived in a new era of globalization now, didn’t it? It was easy to catch a shuttle from one Earth hemisphere to the other. Or you could travel via the magnet-trains that sped under the earth’s surface, or, if you had a few Confederacy credits to spare, you could cut your travel time to hours by riding one of the three space elevators that sat just outside Virginia in the American Confederacy, Greenland in the Atlantic Confederacy, or the one that their transport had come up, the Shanghai Asia-Pacific Elevator.

Solomon didn’t pass comment on his fellow inmate’s opinion. Yeah, it was all bullcrap. But that was life in the twenty-two’s, right?

Solomon looked down at the roof of the world as their transport shuttle started to shudder as they passed through the upper atmosphere and the near gravity well. Earth was a frackhole, he had to admit.

And God knows that I messed up my time down there, he thought as he considered what awaited him for the rest of his days. Hacking away at the frozen CO2 ice of Titan, hoping not to hit a pocket of methane and blow himself up, never feeling the not-so-fresh, exhaust-laden breeze of Earth ever again, or ever leaning against one of the hydroponically grown trees in Kowloon’s Tranquility Park.

Frack.

“Pigeons, man,” grunted Gangbanger 66 beside him.

“What?” Solomon frowned. The two men shared their small space with half a dozen or so other deportees from Earth. Each of them wore the regulation gray one-piece suits that declared their status on their backs—’CONVICT’—and sat on benches with their hands clamped together, chained between their legs to the metal seat. Solomon could see men and women, everything from nervy eighteen-year-olds to gray hair and wrinkles. Earth had no space left for the mad, bad, and dangerous, but it did have plenty of work for them to do…. It just wasn’t on Earth anymore.

“I’m never going to see a fracking pigeon again,” 66 moaned. “I used to race ‘em… Guess I’m not going to see any birds now, right?”

Solomon was surprised at this moment of poetry from the big man beside him. A man who looked like he’d be much more comfortable throttling a man’s neck than feeding corn to a bird.

“But I made some bad choices, I guess…” the big man said.

Didn’t we all, Solomon thought. “Maybe you should have stuck to racing pigeons instead…” Solomon shrugged, earning a glare and a shift as the man strained to look down at the smaller, morose man by the window seat.

Solomon looked up and realized that he didn’t feel a thing. Not fear. Not intimidation. I’ve already seen the worst this life has to offer, pal, he thought.

“Ha!” Mr. 66 suddenly barked a guttural laugh, the tension easing from his shoulders. “You’re alright. Yeah, I guess I should have stuck to racing ‘em…” He started to guffaw, repeating his words to himself in what Solomon thought was a slightly hysterical manner.

Out-fracking-standing. Solomon turned back to look out the port window. If this was the level of conversation that he had to look forward to, being blown apart by frozen methane might just be a blessing…

Department of Corrections, Asia-Pacific Partnership (APP)

Fwd to:

Department of Justice & Defense, United Earth Confederacy

SUMMARY ORDER OF DEPORTATION

Case Ref: 2205/78001/05/5623

Commissioning Court: New Kowloon APP

Sentencing Judge: Justice Benebel Xin Sr

Convict Details: SOLOMON TOBIAS CREADY, male, Caucasian, 29 years.

Place of Birth: American Confederacy.

Crime:

Found guilty of the murder of MATTHIAS SOZER, male, Caucasian, 30 years.

Sentence:

Immediate Deportation to Department of Justice & Defense Work Program.

Recommended Sentencing: LIFE.

APPROVED

“ATTENTION ALL PASSENGERS!” The interior intercom system of the shuttle blared in a tinny, electronic voice. “Approaching Shanghai Orbital Platform, please ensure that your safety belts are secured, and we apologize for any turbulence…”

“They’re having a laugh, right?” muttered 66, pulling on his chained manacles. Prisoners didn’t get safety belts, apparently, but the other passengers of their shuttle did.

They were just one of a number of different tube-like craft attached with linking arms to the poly-metal cabling that stretched into the sky. A space elevator was a bit of a strange misnomer really, Solomon thought as he angled his glance down through the port window, seeing the bright white line that stretched back underneath them, all the way down to the bright earth. Distantly, he could make out another tubby shuttle racing out of the clouds beneath them, its top glowing a little with plasma and electromagnetic radiation as it broke the near-earth orbit.

The space elevator was more like one of those mountain ski-resort trams, Solomon considered—several static shuttles permanently fixed via wheels and clamps to their dedicated wires and sent endlessly up and down those wires around the central column to their destination. As it relied on traction and not propulsion, Solomon knew that space elevators were fantastically cheap on fuel, and they were faster than rocket-propelled ships as well, as there was next to no friction in space, and they didn’t have to contend with breaking the resistance of Earth’s gravity well.

But still… When Solomon had first heard about the elevators going up when he was a kid, back home in some middle-of-the road American agricultural town, he had imagined them to be more like the elevators of the distant corn harvesters he would see roaming the Midwest plains. Actual rooms that you stepped into with air conditioning and banal music that would smoothly bring you up to the top terrace.

This was more like being a bug in a bottle, which was then chucked into the sea. The shuttle shook and juddered—worse for the convicts of course, as their seating arrangements had no backrest, no armrests, and no cushions as they bounced and jostled against each other. Outside of one of the two metal doors at the end of their cabin, Solomon knew that there would be a very different sight indeed—rows of safety-buckled commuters, tourists, businessmen, and immigrants oohing and aahing from their comfortable upholstered seats.

Thudd-udh-duhr! From where their room was on the elevator shuttle, near the lowest edge, they got the brunt of the vibrations as the elevator slowed on its track, throwing the convicts one way and then another to their angry cries of alarm before a series of loud bangs and thumps shook the walls.

“Have we just punctured something or is that us docking!?” Gangbanger 66 called out nervously, earning worried responses from the other convicts seated near them, but not Solomon, who leaned his head against the reinforced glass and felt the shakes vibrate through his skull.

I’m only going to feel this a few more times in my life, he thought. That was what they said about being deported to distant Titan, wasn’t it? They shot you up there, you shot down, and then that was it. No more space flight. No more shuttle flight. Just wobbling about a freezing metal work base on some distant moon, before your body eventually surrendered to the harsh environment and you are found, floating on your own tether line to be added to the colony’s incinerators.

Solomon didn’t feel especially cheerful.

THUNK! A final bang shook through the hull, and their upward progress had finally stalled. Looking out his window, he could see metal struts and beams of the underside of the Shanghai Platform, and underneath that, the busy comet-like flashes of communications and security drones as they skated over Earth’s magnetic ionosphere.

“Listen up, you bunch of schlubs!” The door hissed open and a new voice barked at them, coming from the mouth-hole of a man who was surprisingly short, and who also looked surprisingly old.

This new figure wore the same regulation gray of their own uniforms, but his had a gold band running from shoulders, down the arms, sides, and legs. He also wore a small peaked black cap trimmed in similar gold, and with a singular brass star emblazoned on its center. His eyes were startlingly sharp, and he had one of those unnaturally healthy, yet wizened faces of those who spent a lot of their time in the gym.

“I guess he’s the big fracker around here, right?” Gangbanger 66 beside him muttered, still with a twinge of mirth from his earlier bout of laughing.

Solomon tried to make himself look uninterested and equally as unimportant beside the larger man, but it was no good. This new, angry little man had heard his companion.

“That’s right, you worthless piece of space junk!” the man bawled at 66, who just shrugged.

The small man in the cap pulled back a little, ramrod-straight back, Solomon noted. He was Enforcer or military all right.

“Oh, so it looks like we got ourselves a talker here?” the man said. “A real conversationalist, are you, Mr.…” He raised his hand to the small tablet that he held and nodded. “Convict 4301. Duke Ormskert, I got here…” The man slid the tablet into the breast pocket of his gray suit and smiled slowly.

Solomon had seen that sort of smile on people before. Hell, he realized that he had probably smiled like that himself from time to time. It was the sort of smile that a pack of hyenas might give a baby foal when they find it, lost in the Serengeti.

“Duke.” The man started to stalk toward their bench.

Oh, frack off, Solomon sighed.

“What a glamorous name you have there, son…” the man sneered as he stopped in the aisle across from them. Solomon knew that something bad was going to happen. It always did when you give sadistic people some power.

Just like me?

“How about you, Convict…7203?” The man’s eyes flickered over Solomon. “Mr. Cready, I see. American fourth-generation, is it? Still got the wheat between your ears?”

Solomon knew that he shouldn’t, he knew that it would do no good either way, but he just couldn’t help himself. I’ve lost everything already, he thought as he stared unapologetically at the little man.

“Oh, I see, a little pair of talkers we have here then…” the little man sneered at them both, slowly moving his hands to the holster on his hip, where he drew what looked to be an asthma inhaler.

You can frack right off with that, too… Solomon had no idea what it was, but he didn’t like the look of it.

“Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Warden Coates, of the Department for Justice and Defense. For the next however long I can stand to look at your ugly faces, I will be your god. Your alpha and your omega. I will be the voice that you get up for in the morning and the reason you go to bed at night. If you are hungry, it is me who will allow you to eat. If you are tired, thirsty, or whatever the hell else you miserable excuses for chromosomes can think of, it’s going to be my boots you have to lick if you want to get it, right?”

There was silence in the shuttle for a moment, and the warden turned back to Solomon and Duke’s bench to find Solomon still staring at him, but Duke with his head bowed.

I’m not scared of you, Solomon’s eyes said. He’d had Yakuza torturers on his trail. He once had to explain to the Triads why they should leave a particular part of town. One more jumped-up little sadist with a chip on his shoulder wasn’t going to faze him. The only difference was that this one had a uniform and a little hat…

“Your friend’s got some cajones at least, I take it…” Warden Coates said, still looking straight at Solomon as he jammed the inhaler-looking device into 66 Duke’s neck.

“Ach! What the hell?” The much larger man tried to raise his hands but obviously couldn’t. In a second, however, it was all over as the warden pulled the device back, leaving a thin rivulet of blood running from Duke’s neck.

“What did you do that for?” Duke was snarling, trying to writhe in his seat, but the warden ignored him as he spoke, still holding Solomon’s gaze.

“You’re all going to get a chip. It’s our little way of making my job easier.” The warden lifted the device and a fat thumb played over the settings there for a moment.

“Hgnh!” Duke 66 suddenly convulsed in his chair, as Solomon swore that he even heard a muted fizzing sound, but the large man had nowhere to go. He couldn’t contort with his hands in manacles in his lap, and he couldn’t hunch away from whatever pain was coursing through his body. Solomon saw the man’s jaw clench in a rictus, and his eyes roll back white…

“Just a small electric shock.” The warden talked over Duke 66’s convulsing body. “Not even that powerful, really. I’ve got loads more settings here…” Coates kept his eyes fixed on Solomon. “The chip acts as a tracker and can deliver enough of a shock to stop your heart, if I want to…”

“Grfhhhk…!” The big man started to drool. Solomon knew that Duke 66 was a bad guy, but all he could think about was that Earth was disappearing behind him and this guy had made some bad decisions just as everyone had, and now he would never get to feed one of his precious pigeons ever again.

“Look, it was just a joke…” Solomon heard himself say, feeling his heart start to pound. Don’t lose your temper, Solomon, don’t… the sanest knot of thoughts inside Solomon’s head tried to warn him.

“What did you say to me, Convict 7203?” the warden hissed. “A joke. Did you just tell me that you heard a joke?”

He’s a little man with his five minutes of power… Solomon’s jaw clenched. He had never liked people like that. “He’s got the message. Everyone has…” Solomon said.

“DO YOU SEE ME LAUGHING, CONVICT!?” the warden suddenly screamed, tapping the dial on his device for the shock in Duke Ormskert’s neck to suddenly ramp up in intensity.

“hgk—!” The large man was beyond even making intelligible noises now as his body trembled, his breathing came in rapid gasps, and blood started to run from his mouth where he must have bitten his tongue.

Don’t lose your temper, don’t lose your temper… Solomon breathed.

“No, you don’t.” The warden suddenly, inexplicably, clicked off the electricity with a twitch of his finger, and Duke slumped forward, panting. “Which I think sets the record straight for everyone!”

Solomon watched as the warden leaned over and put the device to his own neck, and he braced for the torment he was about to be put through. The entire shuttle around them was silent.

“Seeing as you two are such good buddies already, Mr. Cready—” Warden Coates jabbed the injector into Solomon’s neck.

“Ach!” He felt a stab of pain as it felt like a needle lodged itself straight into his spinal column. Maybe it had.

“—you’ll get to keep each other company on Titan until the day you die.”

Solomon gritted his teeth and waited for the electric shock, but it didn’t come. It seemed that the warden had made his point. He could make each and every one of their lives a living hell if he wanted to, whenever he wanted to…

2

Space Dreams

“Left, right, left, right, march! I’ve never seen such a bunch of disorganized schlubs in all my life!” The bark of Warden Coates followed Solomon and the others through Shanghai Platform’s entrance lounge.

Despite the glittering lights of the fast food outlets—McBurgers! Astro-Chilli! Hajaput Deli!—and the waves of welcoming synth music that greeted them, it was hard to not feel somber as they were marched through the main concourse, with other tourists and commuters scattering like fish from the shackled, gray-suited cadre.

“What do you think they done?” Solomon heard a boy whisper to his impeccably business-suited father.

“Don’t look at them. They are bad men,” was the response that Solomon heard, and found himself agreeing.

If they only knew. His eyes slid off the neon amusements, finding no excitement or pleasure in their temporary distraction. If only Matthias could see him now. If only Matthias was still alive.

Solomon sighed as he was jostled by the convict next to him as they passed beyond the visa checkpoint, being waved through by the large, exo-suited guards with their mecha-hounds standing, whirring and ready, at their sides. They were corralled into a long, silver-steel corridor that ended in one large. bulkhead-airlock door. The righthand side of the corridor was given over to long oval shapes, pods that stood out a little from the wall with white surfaces apart from one very small porthole near the top. They all looked suspiciously like coffins, or sarcophagi, to Solomon’s eyes, and when he cast a look inside one, he saw foam padding covering the interior.

“Left, right, march! Left, right, halt!” Coates followed them in and hit the door controls for the route back to the light and life of the Shanghai Platform.

This is it. Solomon felt the murmur of agitation pass through the assembled condemned, but no one dared move now that Warden Coates had the small chip-controller raised in the air for all to see.

“No funny business, right, ladies and gents?” the warden said, hitting a button that released the door mechanisms. The lids of each of the pods slid open to reveal just what Solomon had feared. They were sleep pods, intended to keep the human body alive—if just barely—as they traveled the many days, months, and weeks at sub-light speed. Solomon guessed that the Confederate Department of Justice and Defense didn’t go so far as to provide passage on an actual faster-than-light ship for mere criminals.

“I’m sure you all know what comes next. Step inside, if you please…” The warden’s eyes glittered over them, searching for any reason to use his stunner.

With a few muttered swear words, the deportees from Earth did as they were told, and Solomon found himself lying slightly back on a foam mattress that was almost comfortable—until the door hissed shut.

Never going to see Earth again… Solomon started to panic, sweat trickling down his brow as the door snapped shut, leaving him the small viewing porthole at the empty corridor beyond. I don’t want this, his nervous thoughts raced. What were the statistics of people dying in these things? Ten percent? Twenty? Didn’t he read some blog story once about how dangerous these things were…

I deserve this, a part of him answered back.

But the panic was too great, and he was just about to hammer on the lid of what was beginning to feel more and more like a coffin, when with a hiss, suddenly the foam padding around him inflated, squeezing his arms to his torso and his legs together. He couldn’t move.

Hssssss! A slightly opaque gas was being pumped into the chamber, and Solomon couldn’t do anything about it.

What had the warden meant earlier when he said that he had something extra special in store for me? He worried, trying to move his head, but it too was cushioned by the expanded foam.

“No—” he managed to grunt, just before the gas made its way into his nose, down into his lungs, and into his bloodstream. His thoughts felt fuzzy and thick. His eyes were closing—

And in that moment before sleep overtook him, Solomon thought that he saw the face and little peaked cap of Warden Coates appear in front of his porthole window, grinning victoriously.

“What, no time for duty-free?” Matthias, Solomon’s oldest—also his last—friend said with his trademark grin.

His friend was devilishly good-looking in a way that Solomon had always been envious of. Compared to Matthias Sozer with his flick of artfully messy brown hair and square jaw, even his taste in smart synth shirts, Solomon felt weedy and unimportant.

It had always been like that between them. Matthias being the handsome one, the charming one, the one with the gift of talk that could make the bargirls blush and draw people to his side as if he had known them his whole life.

Matthias had a way of putting people at ease that Solomon never would have, and Solomon knew it. When people saw Solomon, it was always as if they pulled back just a little. Maybe they could sense from the way that Solomon’s brows were in a near perpetual frown that he wasn’t to be trusted. That Solomon was looking for an edge, and that he might just use them to get it.

Which was true, of course.

But with Matthias, it was different, which was why they had made such a good team on the few times that Solomon had called him in. Matthias would sweet talk the agents or the bosses or the contacts, while Solomon did what needed to be done. Which usually involved quite a lot of sneaking, sometimes breaking past digital security, and very occasionally pointing a gun at people’s heads.

Just like I pointed a gun at someone else…

“No time for duty-free, man! Get your head in the game!” Solomon remembered saying as the pair walked past another kiosk full of cheap imported Saki and Japanese brandy. The credits that they were asking for here were pennies compared to what these things would go for down on Earth.

But Solomon ignored them, as his game was far larger than getting some cheap tax-free imports. He paused beside a newsstand and counted to five, pretending to read the flickering screens of stories that activated as soon as he drew near.

“No need to be so touchy, sheesh!” Matthias was like that. It didn’t matter if he was face to face with an Enforcer in their tactical exo-armor or in the middle of a firefight in downtown New Kowloon, he was always ready with a throwaway joke. “Say, look at this. Big re-development plan announced for New Kowloon.” Matthias gestured at the screen that lit up his face with its bluish-white light.

Dammit. The mayor had announced it already. That was bad news. Bad news for them, anyway. They would need to get moving fast, before the visa guards got the word to look for them…

“Come on.” Solomon nodded to the exit gates that led to the Shanghai Platform elevators, manned by the guards in their heavy exo-armor, looking almost like crabs with enough firepower to clear this entire floor if they wanted to. “You go first,” Solomon said tersely, slipping Matthias the identity card that he had made up for him. Matthias had to go first. He was the one who could sweettalk the devil, right?

“But…why…?” Matthias’s voice sounded strange, strangled and thick. He had never said those words there, and then.

“Come on!” Solomon urged him, reaching out to shake his friend’s arm.

“Sol…why are you doing this to me?” Again, Matthias’s words didn’t fit what had actually happened. He sounded scared, and Matthias never got scared.

Well, he had once…

“Fracking Hell, Matty!” Solomon pulled on his friend’s shoulder, for Matthias to stumble, turning away from the flickering light of the news screen and looking at him with his ruined face.

“Why, Sol?” Gone were Matthias’s good looks, replaced by an ugly, swelling bruise on one side of his face and blood from a split lip. But even that wasn’t the worst part… The other side of his face was a mess, as there was a terrible wound where his eye had been. The sort of wound that can only come from a Beretta.

“No!”

“Wakey-wakey, schlubs!” Solomon jerked awake with a sudden pain as something stabbed into his arm.

“Urk…” He gasped, coughed, and retched, but his stomach was empty, and his mouth felt terribly dry.

Where am I? Where’s Matty?

What did I do?

Oh yeah… He was in a sleep tube, on his way to Titan to spend the rest of his days carving ice from the face of the frozen planet… Only he wasn’t.

Solomon blinked, almost blinded by a harsh light from above. Hands were pawing at him.

“Gerr off!” he tried to say, but the operator ignored him. He was lying on a bed, in a white room next to other people on beds, all groaning and sitting up and doing their best not to throw up. It looked like he was the last in line for the medical examiner—a woman with sterile-blonde hair and a facemask in a white lab-coat who was even now gripping his head in her surprisingly strong hands and moving his head back and forth.

“Convict 7203. Conscious. No signs of embolism or stroke,” the woman’s voice, faintly Russian-sounding, cut through the noise. “Heartrate good, no major biochemical imbalances, an apparently high tolerance for pain…” the Russian voice considered as Solomon was poked and prodded. “Really, Warden, I have no idea why you tried to hide this one from us…”

Hide? Whose hiding me, and from what? Solomon thought as the blonde Russian doctor let go of his head to remove the IV line from his arm to replace it with a spray-on bandage.

“That one shouldn’t be here at all, Doctor Palinov. The department’s making a mistake…” It was the voice of Warden Coates, who was stalking across the end of the room as Solomon sat up and his head spun.

“The Department of Justice and Defense doesn’t make mistakes, Warden Coates,” this ‘Doctor Palinov’ stated heavily, before sighing as if this was an argument that she would rather not be having. “Anyway, he and the others should be ready to begin training as soon as the sedatives wear off, although some might need longer than others… In fact, I advise exercise for their trace muscle wastage…” she was saying to someone.

An annoyed bark of a cough from Warden Coates. “I see that I’m stuck with him then. But we’ll soon get them on their feet and ready!”

Muscle wastage? Solomon thought as he looked down at his body to see that it was still in the gray suit and didn’t particularly look any different to what he had enjoyed before. How long have I been under?

There was a ringing in his ears that he guessed must either be from the enforced sleep or whatever cocktail of drugs the doctor had been injecting them with, but there was also a curious lightness to his limbs. Wait… He rolled his shoulders, raised and lowered his arms. Yeah… There was something odd about this place, a little like being underwater—heavy and floaty at the same time. Reduced gravity?

The answer was behind Coates, who had stopped in front of the large, wall-length window arching over his head. Outside, Solomon could see what could only be described as a blasted landscape of pale ochres, pinks, and creamy white. Fantastic rock ridges rolled like frozen water, delicately orange and pink and speckled with silver flashes like captured starlight. The ground was mostly white and blue, riddled with rocks. It looked frozen.

Titan? Solomon thought.

“Attention! Get on your feet, schlubs, when I’m talking to you!” the warden barked at them, but the movement to vertical appeared a little too much for some of the convicts, who stumbled and fell—a fraction slower than normal—to the floor. Solomon was determined not to show weakness in the face of this nasty little man and took his time easing off the medical gurney to stand by the side of his bed, feeling his heart pound.

“Welcome to Ganymede, Outcasts…” Coates snapped, surprising Solomon.

“Huh?” one of the women convicts said, a shorter Asian-Pacific woman with dark hair tied back in a loose knot, and with the creep of a tattoo riding up her neck to lick at her jaw. Yakuza. Solomon recognized the reptilian mark immediately.

“I thought you said we were going to Titan,” the young Yakuza woman said uncertainly.

“I don’t think I said anything of the sort, Convict Wen,” the warden corrected her. “You’re on Ganymede, at the Marine Training Base.” The details of the medical lounge around Solomon started to make sense. The industrial-plate lettering on the walls, the small insignia that he could see next to them and on Doctor Palinov’s lab coat: a tiny golden eagle, surrounded by stars.

The Confederate Marines… Solomon thought. What under the dome of stars was he doing here?

He knew that the Confederacy of Earth was nominally the only super-power left, but in reality, he also knew that the picture was much more complicated than that. The ‘Confederacy’ was a top-level, administrative alliance of the various old powers of Earth, who had amalgamated into various partnerships, unions, and confederations—as in the Asia-Pacific Partnership that covered historical China, the Korean peninsula, Japan, and the South Pacific islands.

The Confederacy was supposed to be a way for all of the individual powers of Earth to continue their business of trying to get richer than each other, while at the same time exploring the new frontier of space. Earth had seeded itself to the near solar system at first, with colonies on the Moon, Mars, and a station outside of Jupiter. Just this last century, their faster-than-light drives had made it possible to set up colonies on the distant Proxima Centauri, Trappist, and in half a dozen other star systems.

The Confederacy, and its Marines, were a way for Earth to try and protect its putative colonies from the ravages of harsh environments—and the increasing attacks by rogue ships—as well as stake a claim on the fledgling interstellar nation.

But Solomon also knew that the Confederate Marines spent most of their time locked in border disputes and cargo inspections when they weren’t trying to chase off the rogue raiding ships that various criminal gangs had managed to get airborne. They were a force that was just as likely to be pointing their weapons at their own Confederate members as they were out into the night.

And what in all frack do they want with a bunch of criminals?

“All the rest of the deported have continued on their mission to Saturn and the ice-mining mission on Titan, but for some of you, the Department of Justice and Defense, in its infinite wisdom, has decided you would be better suited to a new work rehabilitation program,” Warden Coates said sternly.

Great, so not mining ice on Titan but on Jupiter’s moon of Ganymede instead? Solomon thought. Groggily, he looked around to see that there was only a handful of the convicts that he had shared the shuttle up the Shanghai elevator with. Not even ‘Duke’ 66 had made it here, apparently.

“During your sleep, you were submitted to various medical inspections, and your case files—your criminal records, along with every scrap of data we could pull from Confederate archives about each and every one of you—” Did the warden’s eyes hover over Solomon for just a moment? “—have been assessed by our psychological profilers. You small, incredibly lucky few have been found to be the ones fit enough, both mentally and physically, to become members of the recently established Marine Expeditionary Force, or MEF, for short—more commonly known as the Outcasts.”

At least they don’t hide what they think of us… Solomon thought.

“And what if we don’t want to?” grumbled a convict with thick dreads plaited down the center of his back.

The warden paused before answering him, as if coming to an internal decision. “Against my better judgement, I can tell you that you have two choices. Join the MEF here and now, or we will ship you off to Titan with the others.”

Solomon’s thoughts raced. What was better? Living and dying on some frozen moon hundreds of thousands of miles away from home? Or dying in some hideous starship explosion or skirmish, some hundreds of thousands of miles away from home?

“You should all count yourselves lucky to even be called to serve!” Warden Coates appeared to be having difficulty dealing with the convict’s lack of loyalty, Solomon thought. What did he expect?

“But you should perhaps know that your contract term as an MEF soldier will only be twelve years, compared to the life sentence you’d receive on Titan.”

“Twelve years!” the Yakuza woman, Convict Wen, burst out, and the astonishment in her voice was palpable. It wasn’t the astonishment of outrage or shock, though, but exultation. “And after? Can we go back?”

Back to Earth, Solomon thought.

Warden Coates managed to stand even straighter in his rigid posture, if such a thing were possible. Solomon rather thought that for a man like him, this must feel like he was having to negotiate with the very worst dregs that humanity had to offer.

Which is a pretty accurate summation of who we are, I suppose…

“Your deportation sentence will be…reviewed, depending on your military service,” Coates forced out. “But after your contract term is over, then technically, you will be at least free to travel and work in any of the colonies…and perhaps Earth…” Solomon heard the slight sneer in the man’s voice when he said the word ‘colonies.’ He wondered if relations between the Confederacy and the colonies were that bad, or whether Coates was just uptight.

“Well, I’m in,” Convict Wen said with a crooked grin. “Twelve years flying around, eating good, training…” She shrugged like it was an obvious choice.

Which it is, of course, Solomon thought. Twelve years compared to a life sentence, and then afterwards, he would be free to start afresh, to go wherever he liked. Not that he had any confidence that the Department of Justice and Defense would let a tried and convicted murderer back into its atmosphere. But for a resourceful man like himself, maybe he could indeed make a go of it on Proxima, or Mars, or…

But do I deserve it? That dark thought was like a kick to the guts, making Solomon wince at the memory of blood on his hands—and the look of terror in his friend’s eyes. He didn’t deserve freedom. He deserved to spend the rest of his life hacking at ice until his fingers fell off and his eyes frosted up with snow-blindness and he shoved a pick through a pocket of solid methane and…

But as much as he hated himself—and hated his past—Solomon already knew just what he was going to answer when it came time for him to decide where his future led.

If I choose the Outcasts, and if I even manage to survive for twelve long years in the cruel depths of space….

Then maybe, just maybe, he could make up for everything that had gone wrong. Every bad decision he had made.

Maybe he could make his old bosses pay for this mess.

And besides which, he thought as he saw Warden Coates’s fierce, disapproving stare. That little man doesn’t want me here, and I’m real good at doing things that other people don’t want.

“I’m in,” he said.

3

Schlubs

“Grab your arses and pick up your kit! You schlubs are gonna learn how to take orders!” The snarling bark of Warden Coates berated the new recruits of the MEF the second that the green alarm light of a new day flickered on over their dormitory door.

The warden had indeed become the voice that woke them up, that put them to bed, and generally made their lives miserable during the waking hours in between. It was a constant litany of anger that would seep into Solomon’s days until he barely noticed it anymore.

First off, the newest recruits to the Marines program were shown where they were to sleep—a bunkroom in one of the twin arms of Ganymede Military Base. The base itself was shaped like a flat-bottomed ‘U’ with the two wings holding what seemed to be laboratories, gymnasiums, medical bays, and of course, the sleeping quarters of the Outcasts.

Which leave a lot to be desired, Solomon had thought as he’d seen the basic metal bunks built into the walls of the long room. No portholes, no screens, just the bunkbeds and access doors to the washrooms at the far side. He had been surprised to see that his small cadre wasn’t alone when they entered the room.

“…fresh meat!” one of the bulky forms of an older Outcast recruit sniggered when Solomon, Convict Wen, and a handful of others walked into their new accommodations. Solomon heard Wen hiss back in anger and wondered when the first fight would be.

For himself, he was only partially worried about getting into scrapes—he’d spent the last three years working the streets of New Kowloon, where it was just as easy to get knifed in an alley for the data-pad in your pocket as it was to get shot by random gangbangers. He knew how not to look a victim, and he knew how to keep to himself.

What was it they always said about doing time? Keep your head down and do your own, not anyone else’s… he reminded himself. He wondered if that worked the same in military school as well.

The older recruits of the Outcasts wore black encounter suits banded with flashes of red at their shoulders and down their arms, which Solomon thought must be pretty stupid if that was to be their military costume. Wouldn’t red present a target for any enemy taking potshots at them? He saw men and women from all sorts of ethnicities and castes—some with shaved heads, some with face tattoos, one with a horrible scar seeming to split his face in two.

“Play nice now, mes chers,” growled a loud, gruff voice with a thick French accent, as one of the older recruits unfolded his over six-foot frame from one of the bunks. He was a tall man, built with slab-like muscles that Solomon and the others could easily see, given that he had stripped down the top half of his encounter suit. He had short-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, and a large handlebar mustache that he pulled and tweaked at as he leaned against the metal. He had two bunkbeds all to himself, and Solomon quickly surmised that he must be the big kahuna around here.

“Welcome to ze Outcasts.” The man smiled wolfishly. “My name is Arlo. I’m a regular, along with everyone else you see around you. Zat means, little fish, zat you recruits are at ze bottom of ze barrel,” Arlo said in a matter-of-fact way, and immediately began assigning them to their bunks.

At least he cuts straight to the point, Solomon thought. There was a sort of safety in knowing who thought they were boss, and who you had to avoid.

“You, Bunk Three. Share with Maria.” The big Frenchman nodded at Wen, who scowled back but she, too, seemed to know to not pick a fight on Day 1.

“You, Bunk Seven. You, Bunk Ten…” Arlo seemed to pause for a moment as he considered each of the six new recruits before him, appearing to match them up to their bunks according to some system that Solomon didn’t understand.

It came to Solomon’s turn as the other recruits were busy muttering and negotiating their arrangements with their new bunkmates.

“Merde,” Arlo said, as he realized that the only free bunk left was the one above his own, and he was clearly used to his privacy. Solomon looked at Arlo and said nothing.

“Here.” The big man suddenly shoved the spare foam mattress and blankets from the top bunk so that they fell to the floor with a heavy thump. “You can take it back there, next to Malady,” he said, and that was that.

I don’t think I want to really spend the next twelve years sleeping above you either, buddy. Solomon shrugged, picking up the mattress and blankets as he heard one of the other regulars already snickering at his misfortune, and proceeded to haul it to the back of the room, where a large, boxy booth appeared to be in place.

“Please don’t be a toilet or something,” Solomon grumbled as he walked towards it, to be surprised when tiny orange lights suddenly flickered on along the booth, and a shape broke from its interior—

The hulking shape stood up, and then unfolded itself.

“Holy frack…” Solomon froze.

He was looking at a full tactical. What the hell is that doing here? he thought in alarm. Full tacticals were the name given to the full-encounter suits that were more mecha than human. Still humanoid, but easily twice Solomon’s width, with metal-plated armor sheathing every available surface and servo-assisted joints. Solomon saw black cables snaking from between its suit plates before plunging into command and control nodes around the hip. The thing barely had a head, the shoulder pads were so large, but the hump of its helmet did indeed have a faceplate, through which Solomon saw the pale visage of human eyes.

“I am not a toilet, little man,” the full tactical said in a human voice that was modulated through electronic speakers, making it sound like a chainsaw might sound if it was given vocal chords.

“I’m sorry, I, uh…was just surprised to see one of you here is all…” Solomon said hurriedly.

“You and me both,” the full tactical warrior—a human soldier with so much cyborg adjustments that it was rumored they couldn’t even get out of their suits anymore—grunted.

“Uh… is it alright if I…” Solomon gestured to the empty floor space beside the booth that Malady apparently powered up in. He heard the grate of metal as the soldier shrugged, and he sat back down again, his suit reconnecting with the power points and the lights flaring to a dull standby mode.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Solomon said, setting the mattress and blankets near, but not too near, the mechanized human.

“I said, get your behinds in gear! Attention!” The words of Warden Coates were unremitting on the day their training began. No sign of the small man, but he apparently could see just how slow they were. Solomon learned quickly to copy what the other regulars did—get up, get dressed, and stand by the ends of their bunks until the green light started flashing. Even Malady sprang to life beside him, powered up and lumbering to stand in front of his booth. Solomon found himself surprised by that.

“Too slow. You recruits are going to have to do a lot of learning!” the voice barked, and that was apparently the cue for those assembled to start the business of getting washed and ready for the day, before marching out of the dormitory doors to a long white corridor beyond.

“You get your food here,” Solomon heard the large metal man in front of him in the queue say, as along both sides of the walls service hatches were whisking open, revealing a simple plastic cup of some sort of grayish liquid, next to a plastic-wrapped slab of berry-colored gunk.

“Blackcurrant today, my friends!” the guffawing voice of Arlo called from the head of the line as hands eagerly grabbed at the protein and mineral slabs and stuffed them in their mouths. The watered-down solution, Solomon realized, was full of electrolytes and tasted disgusting.

“Does it get any better?” Solomon asked.

“Not yet,” the metal man answered as the door hissed open and the queue, still chewing their slabs of breakfast, walked in to find themselves in a small hall with windows overlooking the surface of Ganymede. He followed Malady to the back as he saw the others moving to stand in rows before a raised platform. Black and red drapes of material broke the view of outside at regular points, and at the center of the platform was a small lectern, lit up by a spotlight.

Walking from one side of the platform came Warden Coates, still dressed in his gunmetal gray encounter suit with the gold banding and peaked cap.

“Recruits! Regulars!” The warden stood at attention. “Welcome to the Confederate Marine Expeditionary Force. In time, and after some extensive training, some of you may even make the grade as full Outcast officers,” the warden stated clearly, although his tone indicated that he also clearly doubted it.

Silence filled the room, and Solomon wondered that this had to be a regular thing—something that had become so routine that the regulars knew not to interrupt their superior.

“We have a new force of recruits joining us, so we will be starting with the basics. Again,” the warden droned, as the view of Ganymede behind him dimmed and the windows blackened, forming into data-screens instead. A schematic of the station appeared, turning slowly in place, with some sections in green and other sections in red.

“Red is for restricted clearance. Only myself, other MEF officers, or those of you who gain specialist status are given the command codes for those areas.”

The ranking structure for MEF training turned out to be simple, as the warden bluntly explained. Recruits eventually became regulars, and then a regular was either kept as an all-round regular Outcast soldier, or else some unique aptitude sent them to become a specialist in one of the various disciplines. Those designated commanders while still in training were called as such.

Once they became full Marines, they entered the full ranking structure but maintained their specialisms with their assignments. A trainee combat specialist may become a sergeant and squad leader, with a combat specialty.

“Pilot, command, medical, technical, and close-combat,” the warden stated, with all of their roles being fairly explanatory. The pilot specialism enabled the regular to spend a longer time training behind the command chairs of space-fighters, land-tanks, or any other sort of vehicle. Command was for those who had an aptitude for strategy and communications. Medical was for field medics and battle surgeons. Technical was for any with electronic and mechanical expertise. Close-combat did, Solomon presumed, just what it sounded like.

“Everything here in the Marines is run on excellence, and trust,” the warden bellowed. “Which does not mean to say that you get an easy ride at all. Or that I trust any one of you schlubs! You have to show yourself to be excellent in some way, and you have to earn my trust.”

And if we don’t? Solomon thought about that long future on Titan that awaited him should he mess up.

“If you can do that, then you will earn a specialism, and perhaps even an officer’s role. Better yet, I will be able to turn you into one of the best fighting forces seen since the Spartans!”

Solomon wondered if many of his fellow convicts even knew who the Spartans had been.

“I do not need to remind any of you that I still have you all chipped, and that your details have been uploaded to Ganymede’s mainframe. If any one of you breaks our codes or gets in the way of me doing my job, the mainframe will isolate you and shock you. Understood?”

“Aye, sir!” the crowd chanted.

“Then repeat after me, the Marine Oath…

“Through blood and fire, I will still stand strong.

“I will stand at the borders and the crossroads, I will stand strong.

“Even with the eternal night before me, I will be the flame!’

Solomon mumbled his way through the words, even though they made him feel uneasy. Why did the Confederate Marines have such a warlike mantra? He had thought that all they did was escort trade ships and chase off the occasional raider. He resolved to ask Malady about it, when he next got the chance—which wasn’t any time soon, apparently, as Warden Coates threw them into their first exercise.

“Now, Outcasts… Let’s see what you’re made of!”

I’m not made of a lot. Solomon gasped as he collapsed, his hands on his knees. He, along with all the other recruits and regulars, had just spent the last two hours in grueling physical training, the doors opening from the audience chamber to a long, sunken gymnasium apparently built under their wing.

And it was big, like, really big, Solomon thought. You could host an entire basketball tournament in here and still have room for a squash court at the far end. Their first wave of exercises had been nondescript but punishing—running lanes, first at a slow jog, then a sprint, then a jog, then a sprint, then a…

Solomon had always prided himself on keeping fit. You couldn’t do his job—my old job, he corrected—if you couldn’t run at certain key, life-threatening moments. But the sort of fitness required for the Confederate Marines was a whole new level to dodging and running through the alleyways of New Kowloon.

In fact, if Solomon wasn’t mistaken, he rather thought the whole point of these grueling exercises were to be broken and exhausted, not fit and healthy.

After the running came the squats and climbing—easier in the lower generated gravity, but still concerning when Solomon realized that he had climbed almost to the top of the climbing wall—some thirty feet up in the air. A fall from that height would still kill him.

“Let’s make this a little harder now, shall we?” The warden stalked down the middle avenue of the gymnasium steadily, his boots clicking on the smooth floor as he raised his control device.

Solomon winced.

TZP! He swore that he could feel the pop of electricity that burst its way into his spine as his arm muscles suddenly convulsed. Luckily, for all of those who were at or near the top of the climbing wall, the rictus muscles meant that their grips were now tight on their handholds, and so no one fell off…yet.

The pain of everyone’s chips did not appear to go away, however, and instead reduced to a dull, spasmodic ache that made Solomon feel faint and his stomach churn.

What sort of torture is this!? he thought as he started to ease himself down, his muscles aching in time to the throb of pain in his neck.

“Faster this time, ladies and gents…” The warden walked back and forth, back and forth, up and down the line. “As Marines, you’re going to have to put up with being scared, with being hurt, with being tired and in pain. What better way to train?” He tapped the control device one more time.

TZP! The jittery ache deepened, and Solomon heard several other recruits cry out. But not him. He wouldn’t give Coates the satisfaction of seeing him in pain, and when he looked around at his fellow would-be specialists, he saw that Recruit Wen, the Japanese Yakuza lady, was similarly unflinching as she bore the pain. She must have seen him looking, as she turned her head slightly to look at him with dark, fierce eyes, and nod.

Was that a threat or a hello? Solomon gritted his teeth against the pain as he forced his shuddering legs to stand up and once again reach for the climbing holds. It was a welcome thing to think about reaching for each hold in this slow and pained manner, instead of being reminded that he really should keep away from anyone involved with the Yakuza.

Which seemed a hard thing to do, especially when said Yakuza lady was busy scaling the wall next to him.

“Not bad, for an American,” the dark-haired woman growled through clenched teeth as she climbed faster than he did, and higher, to the small balcony under the roof. Solomon could see the pain she was in, as sweat was dripping down her forehead and her limbs were shaking. She was apparently much better at dealing with the constant surge of electricity.

“I thought we were all Confederates now?” grunted Arlo, the next one to reach the top despite the pain, as Solomon came in third, gasping as he rolled himself onto the balcony.

“Confederates? Pfft.” The woman just shrugged, climbing out from under the balcony to begin her descent.

Crikey, Solomon thought. That woman is as much a machine as Malady is!

The mechanized man was spared the disgrace of climbing, which would probably have been pointless for someone in a full tactical suit, as they were designed with servo-assist hydraulics, meaning that he could probably leap to the top in this gravity if he wanted to. Instead, the human-mecha hybrid had already moved onto the next of the physical challenges—multiple opponent combat.

At the far end of the hall, Solomon watched Malady fight as he stayed hugging the railing at the top of the climbing wall and caught his breath. Arlo had already just started making his way down.

The full tactical stood on a rounded metal circle that had raised itself some meter and a half from the floor, its edge flashing before the bout had begun. Solomon watched as holographic mecha-hounds suddenly coalesced into the air on various sides of the man.

I guess they didn’t want to waste real ones… he thought as he saw the mecha spin, extending a heavy metal claw in a chugging backhand that obliterated the first hologram into shards of light and color. The next, though, was already coalescing behind him, leaping toward his back—

Solomon watched as Malady dropped to one knee and hunkered down, throwing out his other arm to ‘catch’ the hologram in mid-flight, for it to similarly shatter into a thousand pieces. Another hologram of a mecha-hound, metal teeth open and snapping, leapt for Malady’s front, but the soldier merely dove forward, headbutting it into non-existence.

Fracking stars, Solomon thought. If the full tactical was that good in imaginary combat, he wondered if he ever wanted to see what sort of damage it could do in real combat.

But before Solomon would ever get the chance to find out, he would have to face the hologram battles himself.

Right! He saw the flickering lights of the mecha an instant before it was in existence. With muscles shrieking, exhausted, and still burning with electricity, he managed to swerve out of the way. The hologram soared through the space where he had been and vanished in a scintillating flash on the other side.

Solomon was too tired to fight anymore. He didn’t think that he even had the strength to raise his arms to punch or to stamp his feet at them, but he could still dodge and duck.

Behind me! He heard the sound of metallic growling as he dropped to one knee as he had seen Malady—who was still fighting on his own platform a little further away—do, but instead of attacking, he continued into a roll, pulling short of the edge as something suddenly slammed into his back.

“Agh!”

Only it hadn’t, not really, right? It had only felt like it had. Solomon reeled from the blow, his entire back feeling red and sore as if something really had just pounced on him.

The holograms must have had some kind of residual static or electric charge, which meant that when they hit him before he could hit them or dodge it, it would still hurt.

Solomon was already scrambling back from the edge and cursing the evil genius of whoever had designed this hologram generator, when another one suddenly slammed into his shoulder from his blindside.

“Ach! Okay, I give up! I’m dead!” he managed to gasp, not that it stopped the next hologram mecha-hound from vaulting from the air in front of him, landing square on his chest.

“Frack!” The hologram exploded into shards of light and color, of course, but this time, it also punched him with electric pain that was enough to make his head bounce on the metal floor and for everything to go black for a second.

Chime. The edge of his platform flashed red and a dull chime rang as his circle slowly lowered itself back into place on the floor. Solomon didn’t know how well he had done, as there were plenty of others who had crashed out like him, lying on red-lit circles while a couple of stalwarts still fought on.

Arlo and Wen, Solomon saw. The man-machine that was Malady had finally, eventually, crashed out after fighting longer than any of the recruits or regulars combined, and now Solomon could see that the machine had placed himself at the side of the wall, where it looked like a sort of docking port allowed him to recharge the servos and mechanisms of the tough exo-suit.

“Hyagh!” Arlo, large and loud, roared as he was hit by two of the holographic mecha-hounds attacking at the same time. He was a quick fighter, with a wide stance, but his bulk played against him as he couldn’t duck or turn in time and he fell to his knees. The tournament circle flashed red. He was out, which made Solomon grin just a little. It was always a pleasure to see bullies go down.

Which left Wen. “Ki!” The entire force of prospective Marines was now watching the Yakuza woman fight, spinning on her heel to throw a roundhouse kick through the heads of two hologram mecha-hounds, before striking a third, turning to backhand another—

“Enough!” a voice called. Wen’s circle flashed red and her tournament ended. It was the warden, walking toward the assembled tired and gasping soldiers, a grim smile on his face. “Recruit Wen, I think you have shown everyone your skills in close-combat. I will be considering you for the close-combat specialism program,” he stated, earning a celebratory grin from the recruit, but a sneer of disgust from Arlo.

The large man muttered something under his breath that Solomon couldn’t hear, but he thought sounded like a very negative assessment of the woman’s skills.

“Do you have a problem, Regular Menier? Do my recommendations disappoint you?” Warden Coates spun on his heel to face the large Frenchmen.

“No, sir,” Arlo grunted, although his eyes sparked with rage.

Here it comes, Solomon thought, preparing for the worst.

“Oh, please, do speak your mind, Menier, unless you want to climb up that wall in double-time for me?” Warden Coates had a funny way of motivating people, Solomon thought, watching as Arlo took a deep breath, again considering in that arcane and private way of his, before finally agreeing with himself that he was too tired to climb any more.

“I am a regular, Warden-sir.” Arlo puffed his shoulders as he said so, as if his bulk alone could be able to prove it. “I have much more experience zan Recruit Wen!”

“Oh, so you think that you should be rewarded with a specialism first, is that it?” Warden Coates said evenly.

Don’t say anything. If you value your skin, don’t say anything… Solomon thought. But he was very surprised when Warden Coates did not, indeed, punish Arlo’s impudence or for questioning the warden’s judgement at all. Instead, he seemed to reward Arlo’s arrogance.

“Fine. The Marines value self-belief. If you think you are ready, Regular Menier, then tomorrow, we will have a little test. A command assignment. You’ll be assigned groups with one of you acting as command and the rest as regulars, and you will have a mission to perform. You, Regular Menier, will be the command of your squad, which will feature…”

Warden Coates’s eyes swept over the exhausted and shattered men and women around him. “Hm. As you say, Regular Menier, you have been training here a long time. I am sure that a lot of these regulars already respect you. But the test of a good leader is one who can command loyalty even with those they have never worked with before…” His eyes alighted on Wen.

“Wen, you’ll be in Menier’s squad.” He smiled.

Is the warden mad? Solomon thought as he massaged his knees back to life. The two had apparently already had a falling out. Wasn’t their pairing just going to foster disaster?

“Regular Malady too.” Coates nodded. “If you are half as good a commander as you think you are, Menier, then you will have no problem working with a full tactical.” Solomon’s eyes swept to the metal man attached to the wall, who didn’t move or say anything. If it was happy or sad at the grouping, no one could tell.

“And finally…” Coates’s eyes kept searching the room.

Not me, the guy’s an idiot, not me… Solomon was fervently wishing. He didn’t play well with others at the best of times, and he wasn’t sure that he called his enforced training here the best times of his life at all.

“Recruit Cready,” Coates said finally, his eyes glittering coldly. “Maybe you can manage to teach some loyalty to Cready, Regular Menier,” the warden said pointedly.

What does that mean? Solomon almost asked, before a thought slid down his spine like a shard of ice. He knows. He knows why I’m here. He knows what I’m convicted of… The death of a friend. The murder of a friend.

“You all have a very colorful past, ladies and gentlemen,” the warden continued to drone, his voice as gleeful as a snake about to strike. “You wouldn’t be in the Outcast program if you didn’t, after all. But some of you have particularly bad pasts. And some of you really don’t deserve to be here.”

Don’t do it… Solomon glared back at the warden. Yes, he was in pain, and yes, he was tired, but he wasn’t scared of this little man and his electrical device.

Don’t lose your temper, Solomon. Don’t lose your temper… he kept repeating silently.

“What was it you’re here for again, Cready?” The warden raised an eyebrow.

Don’t lose your temper… That’s what this little man wants…

“Speak when your superior asks you a question, schlub!” The warden burst into a scream of sudden rage. Solomon really didn’t have a choice.

“Murder,” he said, his voice clear in the quiet gymnasium. What was more surprising was that here, amongst this crowd, that word didn’t elicit gasps of surprise or any sign of shock at all. Solomon wondered how many of his fellow would-be Marines were also here for murder.

“But not just murder, was it, Recruit Cready?” the warden pressed. “You killed your best friend, didn’t you? Someone who relied on you, who believed in you, I presume? Someone whom you were supposed to look out for…”

Solomon’s jaw tightened. Don’t lose your temper, Solomon. Don’t…

“The Marines can handle killers,” Coates hissed, although it was loud enough for everyone to hear. “We can handle thugs and yahoos and conmen and thieves. I can turn any of them into better men and women, fit to wear the power armor of the Marine. But I don’t like traitors, Recruit Cready,” he ended on an almost whisper of hate and loathing.

Which was nothing compared to what Solomon was feeling against Coates for spilling his secrets, and against himself for having them in the first place.

“Dismissed,” Coates said through a lip curl of utter contempt as he stared at Solomon. “Get yourselves washed up and fed, and to the study halls.”

CLANG-CLANG-CLANG! An alarm bell rang across the gymnasium, signaling the end of their physical training and breaking the spell of hatred that the warden had cast. Coates turned on his heel to stalk out of the room. Everyone groaned and stretched and stood up, and Solomon could feel the eyes of his comrades concertedly not looking at him. Solomon had the curious sense that Coates picking him out amongst all the others had left an indelible mark on him, like a black spot of ill-luck that no one else wanted to go near.

Or maybe no one wanted to be my friend, Solomon thought. Not that he could blame them, given his track record with friends.

“Cready.” A shadow loomed over him as Arlo appeared, his eyes cruel and malicious.

Not you as well, Solomon almost groaned.

“I do not give a frack what you did, although I should have guessed, from a sneaky-looking guy like you…” the big man said, before prodding Solomon painfully in the meat of his chest.

“Back off,” Solomon shot back. Don’t lose your temper, don’t…

“You won’t let me down tomorrow, Cready, will you? Because if for a second you try to undermine me, zen I will kill you,” Arlo said in a low rumble, before pushing him to join the others.

Wow. Solomon was left behind, the very last of the entire class, and no one looked back at him. I guess day one sucked, right?

4

Competencies

If the first day of training had started off terribly for Solomon, it didn’t get any better the second, at least as far as his integration into the would-be group of Marines went.

After washing and eating—more gunk, this time green and with a side slab of some type of reconstituted, high-carb biscuits—the criminals made their way through the pristine white corridors to another series of halls. ‘Study lounges,’ as their military-embossed name over the doorway stated.

The study lounges were, to Solomon’s eyes, the nicest part of Ganymede Military Base that he had seen so far. The lounges were each arrayed in a five-petaled manner around a hub where a metal column-computer sat glittering in the center, occasionally extending screens or arms in reference to inquiries or investigations. It was here that Solomon came face to face with some of the other residents of the base. None of them looked like soldiers in his eyes.

There was Doctor Palinov. The tall, blonde, Russian-sounding woman walked up to the computer column to tap on one of the outstretched screens, then the screens at her ‘face’ flashed and a small readout was printed, presumably with the information that she requested. Solomon paused to watch her consider the information, nod to herself, and then move to one of the five rooms and disappear behind its frosted glass doors.

“What are we supposed to do?” Solomon breathed, not so much talking to anyone since all the other recruits and regulars were doing their best to stay always at arm’s length from him. He was starting to feel like the town leper, until he was answered by the machine voice of Malady behind him, already striding past on automated whirrs towards the central hub.

“You type in your name, and Oracle gives you your study requirements for this session,” he said.

“Oracle?” Solomon hurried to catch up. Although he wouldn’t class Malady as a friend, it seemed that the others of their company avoided him/it as well, so Solomon felt a sort of shared isolation with the hulking metal golem.

“Primitive AI. Data-retrieval and systems analysis only,” Malady stated. Solomon watched as he extended one of the large metal claws of his index finger and it flipped open, revealing a tiny data-port that he slotted into an available interface.

One of the benefits of having cyborg-adjustments, he thought, as Malady downloaded his requirements directly.

“SOLOMON CREADY,” he typed onto one of the screens, free to use it now as the others were giving him a wide berth.

SOLOMON CREADY, the screen flashed, and a series of numbers and letters tracked across the screen until the lights flashed green, and a tiny strip of paper was printed from one of the thing’s many metal mouths.

LOUNGE 3. Cubicle 2. Core Intelligence and Induction.

“Is that it?” Solomon looked at the paper, wondering if everyone else had the same printout, and if so, why on earth did they have to do this separately? It seemed like a waste of resources, but he shook his head all the same and turned to the glass frosted door with ‘Lounge 3’ etched over it, which whisked open to admit him.

Inside was a vaguely oval room, with rings of free-standing cubicles of white, each with a chair, a screen, and above the screen what looked like a virtual reality headset.

Nothing but the best, he thought as he found the one with machine-plate ‘Cubicle 2’ written on it and sat down.

Thunk! Instantly, the screen flashed and there was a slight whir as the visor extended a few inches. “I guess you want me to put that thing on,” he murmured, taking the set of what looked like bulky sunglasses and sliding them on over his eyes and ears.

Instantly, the room washed a muted blue, but he could still see the cubicle around him and the screen under his fingertips.

STARTING…

The words appeared in a shimmering hologram in front of his eyes, although he was sure that if he took the VR headset off, they would disappear.

MATCH THE UNITS… TIME CONTROLLED.

There in the middle of the air in front of Solomon’s face and above the screen appeared a geometric shape, slowly rotating in space and glowing green. It looked a little like a selection of oblongs stacked onto each other to create a crazy, complicated knot of right angles.

“Huh?” Solomon thought, as suddenly there appeared, on the right and the left in smaller, less-bright glows, two more objects full of projections and right angles and corners, similarly rotating.

“Oh, mix and match…” he thought, swiping the screen under his fingertips first right and then left, swirling with his fingers to turn the smaller objects until he was sure that one of them would fit the larger one in the middle, then dragging it across.

The object joined, flashed a total green, and then changed. This time another shape, also made of complicated angles and towers, with two more attendant pieces to choose from.

This was the thing about Solomon Cready, and something which he didn’t generally like to boast about—well, he did, but this sort of skill was not something that he could ever admit to, as it was usually dedicated to working out the layouts of buildings and how best to avoid the various drone surveillance, trip-wires or infrared sensors…

But the fact was, he was really good at puzzles.

He didn’t know when this aptitude had started, not really, but he remembered always doing well in his ‘digital studies’ class, which was a catchall term that his local community college had for everything from computer programming to computer research and coding. He wasn’t a whiz kid by any stretch of the imagination, but there was something about Solomon’s head that could see the shape of a situation in front of him like a puzzle, and it was matched by his insatiable curiosity to figure it out.

It was this curiosity that had lead to his downfall, he recalled, having found a way to hack the surveillance cameras of the community college so that he could break into the mechanical laboratories to steal an experimental rocket-bike. He had been caught, fined, and expelled, but that hadn’t done anything to curb his curiosity.

It turned out that Solomon was good at evading the authorities, just as he was good at getting into places where he shouldn’t be. Every situation was a puzzle, and life was a game, he reflected as he matched the next set of shapes, and then the next and the next…

COMPLETED. 100% SUCCESS.

BEGINNING INDUCTION PROGRAM…

The screen flashed again, and the floating shapes disappeared, this time to be replaced by a flowing line of text, with key pull quotes expanding as his eyes moved over them, and interspersed with short videos, pictures, and interviews.

Solomon began to learn about the formation of the Confederate Marines, its capabilities and operational codes, as well as being introduced to a couple dozen different schematics and details for the various craft and equipment that the Marines were allowed to use.

CONFEDERATE MARINE SERVICE

OVERSIGHT: DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE AND DEFENSE

SUPREME OFFICER: Lord Admiral Dametz

APPROX PERSONNEL: 99, 000 (not including support, reserve, logistics and non-combatant roles)

COMPETENCIES:

Each Confederate Marine is equipped in two standard packages. Light tactical encounter suit or power armor, with light tactical being especially designed for reconnaissance, rapid search and deployment, and usually hot-world conditions. Able to withstand some low-caliber projectile weapons as well as impacts, strikes, melee weapons and most physical attacks. Power armor is designed for full-assault and battlefield conditions, is servo-assisted, and can double-function as a spacesuit and survival pod. Power armor also has a full range of chemical and biological filters in place to protect from most biological and chemical agents, and is able to withstand most commonplace projectile weapons, as well as melee and physical attacks from conventional attack vectors.

Each Confederate Marine, although specializing in their own particular weapons system, is automatically equipped with a Jackhammer rifle able to be modified to personal tastes, including: burst fire, grenade launch, close-attack bayonet, torch, flare deployment.

Any Confederate Marine, upon receiving their full Marine status, is also able to choose particular weapons systems to suit their aptitudes and the strategic requirements of their squad and current mission. This is not limited to, but could include: rocket launcher, micro-missile system, close-combat blade, machine pistols, heavy rifles, gun halberds, etc.

Each Confederate Marine comes equipped with a range of personal tools and equipment, not limited to, but not always including: combat knife, polyfilament climbing wire, personal medical kit including basic range of wound sprays, pain sprays, and stimulant injectors, personal data-node (inbuilt in both light tactical and power armor suits) enabling direct digital uplink with relevant superiors, shortwave transmitter/responder, as standard.

Each Confederate Marine is expected to be highly versed in both ranged (projectile) combat, as well as close-combat (hand-to-hand, including some weapons training) and have a working familiarity with craft operations, ensuring that despite operational challenges in the battlefield, there should always be a Marine capable of at least basic piloting skills present.

Each Confederate Marine reaches their point of deployment with the full, current array of viral, fungal, and disease inoculations and immune-system support.

MARINE FORCE COMPETENCIES:

Confederate Marines are split into the following four fleets:

Earth Fleet.

3 x Dreadnought-Class Warships, and attendant fighter-craft.

Responsible for the patrol and defense of Earth and near-Earth orbit.

Moon Fleet.

1 x Dreadnought-Class Warship, and attendant fighter-craft.

Responsible for the defense of the Moon, and to assist Earth Fleet.

Rapid Response Fleet.

3 x Warrior-Class Battleships, and attendant fighter-craft.

Stationed near Jupiter, tasked with responding where needed.

Borders Fleet.

4 x Dreadnought-Class Warships, and attendant fighter-craft.

3 x Warrior-Class Battleships, and attendant fighter-craft.

On constant rotation, tasked with securing trade routes and colonial safety.

“Huh,” Solomon murmured as he read up on the history and structure of his new organization. It was a little boring to be honest, but it was stuff that he assumed he had to know if he was going to make a go of it for the next twelve years.

A few things stuck out at him, though, like the fact that the Borders Fleet was larger than the Earth Fleet, telling him—like the puzzle that every situation was—that the Confederate Marines were more concerned with keeping the various colony worlds in check than they were the safety concerns near Earth.

Also, Jupiter… He reread the description of the Rapid Response Fleet, clicking on their title to bring up a list of its most notable battles and skirmishes. Jupiter is where I am, isn’t it? He was on Ganymede Military Base, and Ganymede was the largest moon of Jupiter—the largest moon in the entire solar system, in fact, almost a planetoid in its own right. So that meant, surely, that the ‘MEF’ or Marine Expeditionary Force—the Outcasts, he added—were going to be a part of the Rapid Response Fleet.

“What sort of stuff did they get into, again?” he muttered as he clicked through to the information, and then wished he hadn’t.

•Pacification of Olympus Mons, Mars

•Proxima Gate Battles, 2195

•Pacification of Tycho

•Huygens Orbital Station Battle, 2202

•Pacification of Hellas Chasma, Mars

•Battle of Cassandra Asteroid Cloud

•Moon Strike Deployment, 2173-2182

“Holy frack…” Solomon’s eyes slid down the list of most notable conflicts and campaigns that the Rapid Response Fleet had been on. It wasn’t that there was a lot of them, although there were, but what little he had heard of them back on the news wires and blog sites back on Earth.

The ‘pacifications’ were all, generally, the deployment of troops against insurgent forces and colonial radicals who had tried to declare themselves independent or generally attack Confederate power structures on Mars, the moon of Tycho, and so on. Solomon remembered the drone footage of occasional street-to-street fighting, the red air hazy with even more soot and dust than normal. It didn’t look like fun. At all.

The Proxima Gate Battles… That had been the most ‘warlike’ of all of the list, and it was when, only ten years or so ago, a coalition of raiders and smugglers had sought to close off the jump routes to the distant colony of Proxima, thus controlling all trade that flowed between the two worlds. It had been the fight for the very reason of the Confederacy’s existence, and it had been awful and bloody—proving what every pundit had already agreed upon: that the raiders, smugglers, and one-time looters were being financed and backed by some of the largest of criminal organizations right there on Earth. Or else, they had a lot of very influential friends in high places. Who else could go toe-to-toe against the Confederacy?

But it was also the type of deployments that the Rapid Response Fleet (and hence, his Outcast unit of the MEF) got sent on that was troubling Solomon. None of these missions looked to be run of the mill, boring space lane patrols, and it wasn’t even colony and station defense, or stopping the occasional trading ship and inspecting their cargo.

No, Solomon thought. This was all the nasty end of a soldier’s work. This Rapid Response Fleet was clearly designed to be there at the sharp and painful edge of every complicated conflict and battle, throwing themselves into situations where they would often be surrounded and outnumbered, but relying on their better training, equipment, and sheer ferocity to win the day.

How am I ever going to survive twelve years of that!? Solomon wondered.

Solomon was still mulling it over when his allocated study time was up, and the visor clicked off and powered down. He realized that he felt hungry and tired.

Just how long did I spend in there? he wondered, hanging the visor back into its cradle as the cubicle screen locked back into position. He stumbled to his feet, rubbing his eyes. Around him came other bleary-eyed recruits and regulars, as it seemed to Solomon that everyone must have had a similarly intense amount of brain exercise.

Their tiredness didn’t stop them from turning their shoulders away from him, though, even side-stepping when he came near. I guess that I’m still the leper in this community, he thought, shaking his head as he paused, sighed, and saw that someone was watching him.

It was Doctor Palinov, standing outside Lounge 3, with a speculative look in her eyes, bright blue behind her glasses.

What, you heard what I am capable of too, is it? He held her gaze for a moment, daring her to frown or scowl at him, but instead she just hurriedly looked away as if she had been caught doing something that she shouldn’t, before turning to hit the door release for Lounge 3 and disappearing inside once again.

What was all that about? he thought, falling in line behind the rest and following them out to the corridors, where their route was planned out by the bright green floor lights, leading them back toward the gymnasium.

Not again! He moaned, but luckily, the ‘evening’ session wasn’t as grueling as the first. There was no fighting this time, only running, climbing, and stretching, as well as using a host of exercise machines that slid out from the walls as they piled on. Over the next two hours, Solomon used resistance weights and rowing machines and was very much looking forward to his bed by the time the alarm CLANG-CLANG-CLANG went off.

He stumbled behind the others, seizing the protein gunk and shake on the way through. He could hardly taste it he was so tired on his way back to his foam mattress on the floor. It was a strange kind of tired, one that was borne of intense physical and mental activity, and not one borne of natural day and night rhythms. Solomon had the impression their days or ‘watches’ were shorter here than the usual eighteen standard sunlight hours of Earth, and his body felt jittery and electric as if he had been shocked with the warden’s control chip.

“Cready.” the large form of Arlo Menier suddenly moved to block his route to his bed.

“Yes, Arlo?” he said, feeling so exhausted that he couldn’t care what the big man had to say to him right now. The intense experience of the day, and all of the pain and exertion that he had been through, made him feel like he had known the people in this room for years, not just a few short hours.

“Just remember tomorrow,” the big man growled. “Don’t let me down.”

“Okay.” Solomon was too weary to get into this right now, and it wasn’t long before, as soon as he stripped and pulled the blankets over his aching and twitching body, he fell into a deep sleep.

Not altogether dreamless, though.

“You have to get out of this,” his good friend Matthias Sozer said, looking up at him from the desk.

“I can’t,” Solomon had said, and heard himself say, once again.

Matthias had shuttled in just that morning, using a fake journalist’s visa to get into New Kowloon and track down his old friend Solomon when he had called him in.

Usually when the two met up, there would be camaraderie, laughter, and then they would get on with the business of whatever had brought them together—a small money transport, a museum, a complicated industrial sabotage case, a wealthy businessman too stupid to hold onto his own fortune. The jobs could be as varied as a simple drop-off to a full heist. Solomon always knew that, on the jobs that he couldn’t do alone, there was only one person on the planet that he could trust to watch his back.

But today, it was different, as Solomon hadn’t called Matty in before the job, as was customary. This time, it was halfway through.

It was because of what Matty was looking at, on the desk, sitting atop an array of New Kowloon city maps and schematics.

It looked no bigger than an old-fashioned pen lid, or perhaps the end of a data-cable—a thin tube of uncertain materials, with tiny wires from one end, and a small blob of iridescent silvered data-nodes.

“And you’re sure it’s deactivated?” Solomon heard himself say, to which Matty nodded, picking up the tweezers that he had so carefully set down a moment earlier, still holding the tiny graphite diamond data-cell.

“Sure as frack.” Matty looked a little aggrieved that his friend could ever doubt his abilities. As well as being fairly brilliant with people, it turned out that his old friend Matty was also brilliant with machines.

Some people had all the luck, Solomon thought then and thought now—until he remembered.

Matthias doesn’t come out of this lucky…

“It’s not general military issue, and it’s certainly not civilian…” Matty frowned as he looked at the tiny sensor. “But I would say, from the craftsmanship, from the lack of serial numbers or identifying machine-marks…” He took a deep breath. “This has to be Intelligence. Government Intelligence. Or maybe a mega-corp, but it has to be one of the bigger ones. Who’ve you gone and annoyed this time, Solomon?”

Anyone? Everyone? Solomon could easily have answered, but he hadn’t. “Why would the fracking government want me under surveillance?” he had said, although mostly to hide his fear. Government Intelligence or the bigger mega-corporations. Those were the shadowy sorts of worlds that he really DIDN’T want to mess around with. They were the sorts of people who orchestrated crashes in the stock market or overthrew smaller Confederate powers just to secure a trade deal. What was he to them?

“Oh, I don’t know, Solomon, maybe it’s because—his test scores were high,” Matty said eerily.

“What?” Matty had never said that, a not-so-asleep part of Solomon’s brain thought. The Matthias that he had known had gone on to jibe him about being one of the best thieves in New Kowloon, and that it was only a matter of time before he started ‘playing at the big table.’ Whether he liked it or not.

“Very high,” Matty agreed with himself as he turned back to look at the tiny surveillance drone.

“We have to initiate Phase 2 now,” Matty cryptically said.

“What are you talking about?” Solomon heard himself say—although he had never said that, either…

“But half of them might crash out in the next round of tests!” Matty said, apparently having a whispered argument with himself as Solomon looked on, bewildered.

“This one is ready, at least. Do it. That’s an order,” Matty mumbled into the table as he turned the tiny thing one way or another. Solomon saw his old friend look up to give him that devilish, reckless grin that he had done before, but it wasn’t his old, living friend who was looking up at him, but the eyeless, bruised face of Matthias Sozer on the night that he had died.

“No!”

5

Commanded

Solomon woke the next day groggy and tired, and feeling like his body had been pummeled from head to foot by Malady. He wasn’t surprised to find the purple and ruddy mosaic of bruises already on his shins and arms from yesterday’s training, and he still had the healing red welts of the medical tests during his long sleep. He wondered how long a slower-than-light trip to Jupiter had taken… Three months? Six?

Enough time for the dust to settle back home, he thought, before realizing that no, he couldn’t call New Kowloon home anymore. He couldn’t call Earth home.

The point was made painfully clear when, on Ganymede, he went through the same routines as he had the day before: the alarm call waking them up to stand at the end of their bunk—or mattress, in Solomon’s case, then to get washed and to eat reconstituted protein food, and then on to the gymnasium, but this time, it was only a short exercise session, because their time was cut short by the CLANG-CLANG-CLANG of the station bell. Warden Coates appeared, along with two other figures in full power armor.

“Real Marines,” Solomon heard one of his fellow Outcast cadre whisper.

“Schlubs!” Coates greeted them with characteristic affection. “This is Colonel Asquew and Colonel Madavi of the Rapid Response Fleet, here to observe today’s training mission,” he said, looking tiny in his gray and gold suit next to the hulking Marines.

Neither of them were as large as the full tactical unit that Malady wore, but they were large enough to stand a head taller than any of the other non-suited recruits and regulars there. The power armor looked almost like a very old-fashioned suit of plate armor, in the way that every section of their bodies were covered with poly-carbon metal plates, ones that sheathed and interlocked with each other so that they could move with almost as much flexibility as if they wore general encounter suits.

But this power armor was heavier and larger than mere metal sheets, and Solomon remembered seeing some of the demonstration schematics in the study lounge the day before. Multiple layers of toughened alloys with thin strips of compacted, impact-reducing foam layers in between, as well as insulation and the internal system of thin heating and cooling pipes. Shoulder plates that almost dwarfed the wearer’s head, and round servo-assists at the knees and elbows. Solomon remembered hearing that just so long as you had power, you could be thrown out of airlock in one of those suits and survive for as long as the suit had recycling water.

The Marines of the Rapid Response Fleet wore the colors of burnt-copper red, with flashes of gold pips at their breast and on their all-encompassing helmets to indicate their command-level ranks.

“Is that a power-blade?” Solomon heard the recruit just behind him whisper. It was Wen, and she was looking greedily at one of the colonel’s weapons. It looked to be a long blade in a scabbard at the soldier’s waist, thin like a saber or a katana, but with a svelte collection of nodes and power units on the sheath.

I bet it is, Solomon thought. Power-blades were one of the most fearsome of bladed weapons, and he had seen one in action once. A Triad boss had somehow managed to acquire one—they were military-issue only—and used it to cut through tables and chairs and computers when he needed to scare the living daylights out of someone. Solomon knew that they were made of a strengthened polysteel, almost impervious, but that their special crystal glazing—so tough that it wouldn’t shatter when the sword met metal, brick, bones—was also connected to a power unit in the hilt, charging when ‘docked’ in the scabbard. This caused the blade to hum with captured energy when drawn, and to create explosions of light and sparks when it made contact with another object.

“Here is your list of commanders for the day!” the warden shouted, reading from his data-pad a list of names to mixed applause or dismay from the assembled others. Solomon, Wen, and Malady, of course, were sent to make up Arlo Menier’s squad, to which he welcomed them with his own characteristic charm.

“Right, you lot. It is simple. You follow my orders, or else… Got it?” the big man grumbled, his dark eyes glaring at each of them.

“That’s what we’re here for, Arlo,” Solomon said tiredly, to find that the front of his encounter suit was suddenly grabbed by the larger man in his meaty fists.

“Sir. You call me sir today, Cready.”

Solomon felt his heart thump with hatred for this man, and he was about to tell Arlo exactly what he could call the man instead, but there was a cough from Wen beside them, and the two men turned their heads to see that the Rapid Response colonels were already beginning to walk down the groups of people, seemingly to inspect the caliber of the would-be soldiers.

“Later, Cready,” Arlo promised, releasing him and side-stepping into a perfect salute. “Attention!” he snapped irritably at them as the colonel paced near in his heavy military-metal boots, and Solomon already knew that today was going to be a long day.

“Light tactical suits today,” the words of Warden Coates met them as the Outcasts filed into a room that Solomon had never seen before. It was some sort of launch bay out onto the Ganymedean surface, with access stairs down from the higher levels to a wide but narrow room with multiple vaulted metal archways at the far end. Everything had a bluish tinge down there, as the steel was lit by blue LEDs, giving Solomon the impression of twilight.

Kerthunk, thunk, thunk! Floodlights clacked on along the wall under the stairs, revealing what Solomon at first thought were more sleep tubes. This time, the tall oval coffin shapes were open-mouthed, and each one held a suit.

“Augh,” Arlo muttered disappointedly at the sight, and Solomon felt himself agree when he saw that they were indeed looking at Coates’ suggestion, and not the full power armor that the Marine colonels—who were now standing on one of the metal balconies on the side of the stairs—wore.

“Undermesh suit, jacket harness, wader boots, shoulder pads, armor gloves, and of course, visor…” Coates announced as the different squads of four approached the bays where their names were displayed on the screens.

I guess they’ve already figured out my size, Solomon thought as he picked up the first article of clothing—the black and steel-blue undermesh suit that looked fairly similar to any of the more lightweight all-in-one encounter suits that he might wear, with zips, air-seals, pockets, and port connectors for the other bits of attire that affixed on top.

“Each squad has their regulars who have used these before, so I want to see each of you sharing your knowledge, ladies,” Coates’s voice directed them as Solomon started to dress. The encounter suit alone was surprisingly lightweight, almost like hiking gear, and it was hard for Solomon to see how it would withstand the rigors of space. When he mentioned this out loud, his ‘sharing’ Regular Arlo just sneered at him.

“You junker-brain, Cready. Space is all about cold and pressure. These suits have internal pressure systems and triple insulation. Totally useless against any impact, but it means your blood won’t freeze or your skin pop out there.”

“Good to know,” Solomon muttered grimly, moving on to the jacket harness, which seemed to be a collection of bulky poly-carbon segments connected with some sort of cloth-covered wire mesh, which buckled at the front and, with magnet snaps, connected to the undermesh. Next came the waders. Really, they were heavy space boots with reinforced rims and an attached shin guard that snapped closed around his legs, and connecters that linked it into the harness.

“Here…” He felt hands on his shoulders and flinched, then realized that it was Recruit Wen, her black hair already tied back in an austere knot, as she helped manhandle the heavy shoulder pad into place on Solomon’s shoulder. Instinctively, he felt nervous at having someone so near to him. Someone who worked for the Yakuza, he thought, remembering the countless run-ins he’d had with them.

“You don’t have to, you know…” he grumbled as the pad—the only true bit of power armor—locked into place with his harness.

Wen looked at him funny for a moment. “Shut up. You’re going to help me with mine in a minute.” She shook her head at Solomon’s apparent shyness.

I’m not being shy, I just don’t know if I can trust you yet. If I can trust anyone yet… he was thinking, as Wen turned in her own undermesh and harness to present her shoulder for him to buckle on her own armor.

“Jezzie,” she said as the pad clicked into place. “Jezebel Wen, Shanghai.”

Is she trying to be friends with me? Solomon wondered, suddenly unable to deal with this situation. He hadn’t come here to look for friends. He didn’t deserve friends.

“Solomon,” he grunted, turned to slide on the heavy armor gauntlets with their metal-sheathed fingers and locking wristband.

“Where you from?” Wen asked, working beside him to do the same.

What do I say? He paused. “American Confederacy,” he said at last. Don’t let her know I’ve been in New Kowloon. She might know who I am. What enemies I have…

“Star-spit, Cready,” Wen said irritably. “I’m only trying to talk to you, because…” Her voice dropped to a whisper so that their commander couldn’t hear as he struggled with his own gauntlets beside her. “Because I don’t want to die out there today. We need to work together, because I don’t know if our new boss…”

“You two done yet?” Arlo straightened up, holding his helmet under his arm as he ‘inspected’ his squad. Solomon grabbed the helmet and slid it on over his head. The world flushed to a dull blue haze, then lightened as words scrolled across the inside of his visor-screen.

LIGHT TACTICAL SUIT: Active.

USER ID: Solomon CR.

BIO-SIGNATURE: Good.

SQUAD IDENTIFIER: Gold.

SQUAD TELEMETRIES: Active.

“Form up!” Arlo ordered, and his words were clearly amplified by Solomon’s helmet. On the screen of his faceplate, he saw the overlay of a faint golden arrow that he presumed meant them, as Arlo led the way along the arrow-path to where it stopped in front of the first of the archways. Jezebel Wen walked in front of Solomon, in her own slightly smaller light tactical suit, and the larger Arlo marched in front of her. The last of their squad had no need for special equipment, of course, as Malady was already inside his own full tactical mechanized suit, and he took up the rear.

“Simple mission today, teams,” the voice of Warden Coates was piped into their suit helmets. “Follow your squad arrows to your pre-chosen destinations, where there will be corrals of mech-walkers for you to power up and return to base. Each mech-walker can hold up to eight Marines, so each squad will have their own mech-walker to pilot…”

Solomon wondered at the glaring inconsistency in the plan. He didn’t know if any of them could pilot one of the four-legged servo-droids, but that didn’t seem to stop Coates as he initiated the mission countdown.

“Three…two…”

Is it a race? The first to the mech-walkers and back? he wondered, his mind starting to buzz as he considered the mission ahead like a puzzle. He was sure that he could find a way to break into one. It was one of his specialisms—in his previous life, anyway. But did the encounter suit have tools? He would need a laser torch, probably, simple electronic equipment, a way to patch the mech-walker’s mainframe into his own suit’s. Or maybe he could just bypass the mech-walker’s computers altogether, deactivate its intelligence circuits, and just fire up the engines…

“One!”

The virtual gold arrow overlaying his vision flashed once, twice, three times, and then there was the sudden hiss of gases at the foot of the archways.

Oh yeah, decompression… he thought. Presumably, they didn’t want their recruits to be sucked out into Ganymede’s thin atmosphere, to orbit the planet a few times before being sucked down Jupiter’s gravity well, right?

The gases cleared, and Solomon felt his stomach lurch as the internal gravity and pressures of the launch bay matched those of outside.

TZ-Thunk! Tzz-Thunk!

He was about to rise off the floor when the heavy combat boots suddenly reacted, polarizing the mesh of magnets in their soles to create a very weak field, but one that was enough to ensure that he wasn’t totally at the mercy of the weak gravity as he felt his feet hit the ground more solidly.

The metal archways were opening, sliding up in rows of interlocking plates, revealing the ochre and creamy white surface of the moon beyond.

“Move out! Double-time!” Arlo was bellowing, and although Solomon could hear the distant, muffled echoes of the other squads beside them, it seemed that the suit telemetries amplified or zeroed in on communications between their own squad members, as he could also hear Arlo’s heavy, panting breath as the big man started to bound forward, and Wen’s shorter, controlled hisses as she broke into a run behind him.

Solomon followed, jogging out onto the Ganymede surface as other squads of four or five recruits and regulars did the same all the way along the opening archways.

The surface of Ganymede was strange. Every metal boot-strike crunched through a thick layer of permafrost, sending up slow-spinning clouds of ice and rock granules. Larger rocks that were oddly pocked and worn smooth by the astral winds and irregularities of the moon’s thin climate were scattered about underfoot as the would-be Marines found themselves running across the alien plain. There were deep solid ‘rills’ that striated across the plane like frozen waves, speckled with bits of mica and pockets of black rock dust.

Beyond this plain, and skirting its edges, Solomon could see gorge-like highlands of rocky outcrops—fantastically sculpted ridges, walls, and stands of rocks that were decorated with pink tendrils that had to be some sort of mineral deposit, but could have been anything to Solomon’s awareness.

Superimposed over their path was the flashing gold arrow, leading them to the left of the small plain, toward the first break in the encroaching ridges. Solomon dared to spare a look upward, seeing the dome of stars on his right, and on his left, the hulking mass of Jupiter—orange, red, and yellow, noble and kinglike—on the horizon.

Just run to a bunch of mech-walkers, hack in, and walk one back? Solomon was thinking, increasing his pace a little. How hard can that be?

A lot harder than he had assumed, apparently, as all of a sudden, the plain lit up with laser fire.

“Holy spit!” He heard Arlo grunt as the laser shots exploded the compacted rocks and ice all around them, sending up plumes of dust and steam.

“Who’s shooting at us!?” Wen had already rolled across the ground to one side, her leap in the extremely low gravity of Ganymede sending her farther than Solomon thought she might have liked.

He was surprised at the suddenness of the attack—laser shots were hitting the dirt all around them, in front of them, to either side and behind—but he found that he wasn’t surprised by it.

Just like downtown Kowloon, he found himself thinking as he skidded to a halt behind the nearest ridge of ice and rock, itself only three or so feet high, but enough for him to crouch up against.

“Automated guns,” Malady said over the suit’s communicator as, a second later, the metal man appeared out of the dust and spray behind them, still marching as a bolt of light exploded into sparks across his shoulder. Solomon saw him rock a little, but his step didn’t waver as he kept on marching.

Of course, laser shot isn’t even going to dent a full tactical, Solomon thought. Malady was the closest thing they had to a full Marine here with them, and his suit was even better than power armor.

“Malady, sorry about this, but can you…” Solomon thought quickly, remembering all of the times he had to use a passing transport to draw fire.

“It’s okay. It’s what I’m designed to do,” Malady grunted as he took a small leap and sailed over Solomon’s head. He landed between where Solomon huddled and Wen was similarly crouching, and kept on marching, drawing the laser shots that painted his feet with shards of light.

“Malady’s drawing them out.” Solomon rolled uncomfortably against the rock to be able to see the sparks of light from the nearest rocky canyon top. “If we make our way under these ridges, we might be able to get in under their arc of fire.”

“Good idea!” Wen called, already proceeding to worm her way along the frozen ‘wave’ of rock and ice.

“Arlo, I mean, sir?” Solomon said as he similarly started squirming in the same direction.

“Hguh,” Solomon heard a grunt from their temporary commander’s suit. “Fine. Let Malady draw ze fire, while we circle around,” he said quickly.

Whatever, Solomon almost laughed before he realized that was probably a hint of hysteria. Let Arlo think it was all his idea, just so long as I don’t get shot!

The squad rolled and crab-crawled quickly toward the nearest of the rocky canyon walls, as behind them and around them, Solomon could see other squads trying different tactics to get across the field of fire. He saw one regular hit square in the chest with an explosion of sparks and was lifted off their feet and thrown backwards in the thin gravity. They skidded along the ice, almost back to the base itself. Another was spun around by a glancing blow, thumping with a plume of particles. None of those hit appeared to be badly wounded, however, and Solomon wondered if it was more like getting kicked than burned.

One of the squads had tried to make a run for it straight to their own targets, with some success as it seemed to take the guns a few moments to reposition themselves and re-fire. Another squad had copied what they were doing, using the rills of frozen surface matter to take cover, while another was performing zigzagging maneuvers across the dirt with more success than any other squad.

Including ours, Solomon thought grimly. He still considered this to be a race.

“Come on!” he growled, half at himself and half at the others, as he slammed his back against the rocky canyon wall underneath the nearest of the guns, able to see the white bolts of burning light shoot across the sky to the other poor trainees below.

“Alright, move out!” Arlo was still ahead of them, running at a hunch along the rock wall to where there was a gap that opened out into another canyon. Solomon saw him pause and crouch at the edge, at least—he wasn’t stupid enough to make himself a target.

“Malady!” Arlo shouted over the comms, “get in zere!”

“Roger and out.” There was a distant vibration that Solomon could feel through his boots as he joined Wen and Arlo at the edge of the canyon, their superimposed gold arrow now flashing for them to go inside. Then the barrel-like shape of the full tactical man-mecha was charging ahead of them between the canyon walls, with enough laser fire dancing off his hide to give him his own personal halo before the shots abruptly flickered off when he had passed inside.

“Ha! Ze guns don’t have line-of-sight in zere!” Arlo said gleefully. “Wen, you’re in next.” He pushed the slightly smaller woman past the corner after Malady.

So much for a commander always leads from the front? Solomon thought, and waited. He wondered if Arlo was so much of a coward that he would want him to go next as well.

As it turned out, that was not the case. His commander held up a restraining hand to Solomon. “You wait here. I don’t want any surprises jumping at us from behind. If anything shows up, take it out.”

You want me to be bait? Solomon thought. Whatever. “Yes, sir,” he said, watching Arlo turn to follow Malady and Wen into the canyon, leaving him watching the light show behind.

We weren’t even given any weapons. How am I going to stop anything coming our way? he wondered grimly, just as there was a snarl over his squad communications.

“Mecha-hounds!” he heard Wen call out, and Solomon peered around the canyon edge to see.

It looked as though this mission was set up like an assault course, Solomon realized, his puzzle-fixing brain quickly connecting the dots. The first stage was the field of fire, and then each squad was making their way to their own particular openings in the rocky walls, presumably to face what Wen, Malady, and Arlo were facing right now.

The three fighters were in a wide avenue between the rocky walls, spread out with Malady in front, then Wen, and Arlo behind. As Solomon watched, he saw a hidden port burst open from one of the canyon walls, sending rock and ice fragments high into the air to reveal a meter-high porthole. A four-legged metal form with a clamping, metal canine jaw charged out.

I should have known, he thought as mecha-hounds burst from the rocks on either side of them, bounding through the air with a killer’s grace as they sought their targets.

I have to help them. Solomon half-rose from his crouch, before he suddenly realized.

Those three down there were the best hologram-mecha fighters I saw, he thought. They could hold out for a few rounds, especially if I…

Solomon had a new idea, and he turned on his heel and started scrambling up the rocky incline above him. He knew that he had crashed out in the virtual tournament just yesterday, and he knew that his body was still repairing itself. He wasn’t a terrible fighter by any stretch of the imagination—he’d been in plenty of fist fights in the various synth-bars of his miscreant home—but he also knew that he just wasn’t quick enough to deal with them. Not in the shape that I’m in at the moment, anyway.

Down below him, he saw Wen spin in the air, the lack of gravity lending a balletic quality as she roundhouse-kicked one of the charging mecha-hounds in the head with her metal boot. It went down in a sudden explosion of sparks. Arlo had picked up one of the larger rocks and was using it like a club to bash the head of another mecha-hound. The most impressive sight of all was Malady, with two mecha-hounds clamped to one arm and a third hanging off his opposing leg as he stamped and thrashed them against the moon’s surface with expert proficiency.

But there was still more coming out of the portholes in the ground, and Solomon knew only one way to take them out.

He lowered himself to a crawl and pulled himself onto the top of the rock, looking around until he saw what he was searching for. A flare of light as the static gun emplacement attempted to fire at some of the trapped squads behind him.

I got you now. Solomon belly-crawled around the nearest boulders, dragging himself forward so that he was attacking the gun emplacement from the back, and got to work.

These automatic guns looked like floor-mounted rifles, larger and heavier than the Jackhammer rifles that the Confederate Marines were allowed, with twin metal barrels that were almost as long as Solomon was tall, and a large control box on the back, sitting over the loading and movement gyros.

It shouldn’t be difficult, he thought, still wishing that he had his electronic tools as he instead settled for leaning back and kicking the back control plate with the metal of his combat boots.

Thunk! THUNK!

The guns were solid, but even the light tactical suit was strong enough to start to dent the metal of the gun as it wobbled and shook on its chassis.

“Cready, you coward! Get your ass down here!” Arlo was shouting at him in alarm, but Solomon ignored him, taking another kick—

CRACK! This time, the back plate cracked and one of the bolts sheared off.

Now, let’s see how good these power gauntlets are… Solomon seized the edge of the metal plate and pulled. He shouldn’t have been strong enough to tear sheet metal from its fixings, but he felt the magnetic whirr of his suit as the heavy gauntlets clamped shut, and he pulled with all of his might. The jacket harness tightened around his torso automatically, distributing the force and maximizing his effort, and the remaining bolts sheared and the plate was torn off.

“Cready! I’m going to kill you for sabotaging my mission!” Arlo was snarling.

“I’m not sabotaging. I’m helping!” he managed to gasp as he slid forward to the complicated world of wires, pipes, and controls inside.

“It does not look like it!” Arlo snapped over the suit’s communications. Solomon ignored him. No time. One of these has to be the automated controls, and one of these has to be the firing mechanism.

It was a puzzle. All of life was a puzzle. His eyes sought out the power unit, tracked the cables coming up out of it, to find one that plunged into the small memory chip connector, obvious thanks to its blue and viridian green circuitry.

Gotcha. He pulled the wire, and the gun suddenly shook and dropped its barrels, lifeless, to the rocky floor of the ridge.

Now all I have to do is… The firing mechanism was easy, as Solomon knew that the laser shot rifle had to rely on a battery that cycled to force, and then discharged. He found the battery connector, and the safety button which ‘test fired’ the battery, and the laser. Which is why there was always a delay as they re-tracked and recharged their shots, Solomon knew, gripping the gun top and whirling it around on its gyros until it faced down into the canyon where the rest of Gold Squad were fighting.

The gun might not have any computerized automated controls anymore, but Solomon didn’t need them. The battery pack had a small blinking green LED, which he presumed must mean that it was full already… He hoped.

And he pressed the test fire button.

THOOM! The gun’s recoil was next to nothing as its shock suspensors took up most of the bounce, and a bolt of burning light shot down to knock a mecha-hound that was just about to jump on Jezebel Wen’s back.

Yes! He looked down, to see that the battery light was now flickering red, flickering orange, and then…

Green.

THOOM! Another shot, and another of the attacking hounds was taken out. They moved fast, but Solomon was at least glad that the lack of gravity slowed everything down. It was like shooting fish in a barrel, he thought as he took out three more, and the rest of his squad down there finished the rest.

The gold arrow was still flashing for the squad to continue through the canyon, but as soon as Solomon started to make a move, Arlo paused and pointed up at him.

“Not you, Cready!” his gruff voice snapped through the suit’s communications system.

What? “Why ever not?”

Arlo was gesticulating at him back to the gun placement that he had hacked and taken over. “I want you manning zat thing and keeping an eye out for any more dangers, you got zat?”

“But I might be able to help with the mech-walker—” Solomon said, wincing as he heard just how childish he sounded. Arlo must have thought the same, as the temporary Commander of Gold Squad just laughed and started to bound with the others along the gold arrow.

What would be worse? Disobeying a commander on a training exercise? Solomon thought. Or not being able to prove that I’m pretty good at hacking electronics?

Whatever. Solomon thumped to his behind on the icy rocks, back safe behind the gun. Who was he trying to prove anything to anyway? Arlo? Warden Coates? Neither of them would ever recognize his abilities anyway, and the chances of Warden Coates—who apparently hated him—ever offering him a Specialism anyway was next to nil. So Solomon just sat, and he waited.

He didn’t have to wait long, however, before the ground beneath his feet started to shake with the heavy footfall of approaching metal. At first, Solomon thought that it had to be Arlo and the rest of Gold Squad, but he was surprised to see a shape rear itself on the other side of the field of fire where the laser blasts had now stopped, thanks to the fact that all of the squads had managed to either flee back to the safety of the base, or enter the mecha-hound challenge areas.

It was a four-legged mech-walker, looking a little like some sort of headless animal, with a large, bulky metal box studded with sensor ports and portholes. Solomon had seen their like in the news feeds. They were used primarily for alien environments, and particularly for worlds where the gravity was different than Earth-normal, as they were powerful enough to move through heavier gravity wells, or else the lighter gravity wells, where they could carry many times their normal load.

The mech-walker wasn’t huge, it didn’t dominate the skyline or the rocky ridges at all, but its tallest boxy top was probably the height of a regular two-story building. Solomon had no way of telling which of the teams had been the one to get the mech-walker operational, and his puzzle-hungry mind itched to be there to work it out. I wonder if they had to break the automatic computer controls, like I did with the guns.

That was it, he suddenly saw the shape of this challenge. That was the thing with puzzles. They always had a shape, a form, a way of doing things that meant when you understood what all of the component parts were, you understood how to beat it. It was like a well-executed heist: the building had certain entry points, each with their own difficulties, but each also provided opportunities. The first challenge, that of the guns, meant that if you succeeded, you could do as he was doing—learning how to use the guns to help the squad defeat the second challenge, the mecha-hounds.

“Clear our path!” Arlo said joyously over the suit communicator, as the ground shook with the arrival of Gold Team’s mech-walker.

“Huh?” Solomon was confused. Wasn’t the whole goal of the mission meant to be that the entire squad was supposed to be inside that thing? Which meant him, as well. He was fairly sure of that. “Warden Coates said that each squad had to retrieve a mech-walker and drive it back to base,” Solomon said with a degree of irritation. He didn’t want to miss out on coming in second as the first mech-walker had already entered the plain, and their mech-walker was only just making it through the mecha-hound canyon on steady, ponderous legs.

“Ze warden also said zat I was in command, are you ignoring my orders, Recruit?” Arlo snapped back as they entered the plain, a good few paces behind the first.

No, I guess I’m not. Solomon didn’t want to add mutiny to his already accomplished list of disagreeable traits that would see him shipped off to Titan instead of free at the end of twelve years.

“There’s nothing to clear,” Solomon said though, as he watched the race unfold ahead of him. The mech-walkers were slow, each mechanical leg rising and falling in slow-motion as the squads inside worked out how to manipulate the controls.

I’d have set Malady in the pilot and navigation seat, Solomon thought, remembering how Malady had a data-port in his fingertips. That meant he could probably think the controls and transmit them faster than Arlo or Jezzie could manipulate them by hand. So many reasons why he should have been inside that mech-walker, instead of stuck outside here!

“I said clear ze path. We have another one ahead of us!” Arlo said angrily. “We don’t have any weapons capability inside zis thing, and I’m not going to risk ramming zem!” He sounded annoyed.

Solomon realized what Arlo meant. At first, the young man had thought that Arlo might have been talking about the other static guns, which were silent anyway, or perhaps some stray mecha-hound, but there were none of those visible left either.

“He’s talking about the other Marine mech-walker,” Solomon muttered annoyedly. He wasn’t sure, but he knew that they hadn’t been given any weapons, and Warden Coates hadn’t said anything about this training exercise being a battle between the squads.

“Aren’t we all supposed to be Marines in this exercise?” Solomon asked out loud to Arlo. “We can’t go around attacking our own forces!”

“He’s right,” Solomon heard Jezzie say from wherever she was inside the mech-walker.

“Shut up, Wen. I’m in charge here,” Arlo snapped back over the open gold channel. “Solomon, you had better start firing zat gun of yours at ze other mech-walker, or I’ll report you for dereliction of duty!”

And I’ll get packed off to Titan, the first chance that Coates gets, Solomon thought, sighing and manhandling the gun so that it pointed at the first mech-walker.

But I can’t cause it to crash! He hesitated. What if it hurt the other regulars and recruits inside? If anyone died because of him, he was sure that it wouldn’t be Titan as his punishment… It would be the death sentence.

“Holy spit, Solomon! Zat’s it, I am reporting you to ze warden as soon as we get back!” Arlo sounded apoplectic with rage.

Solomon fired. He angled the gun at the nearest of the mech-walker’s rear legs, hitting just above the mechanical knee rondel and causing the mech-walker to wobble on the spot, but not stop its march.

“Zat’s it! Fire again!” Arlo was saying gleefully, as the gold mech-walker started to march quicker.

I’m not sure I can even damage that thing, Solomon thought, and instead waited for the exact moment that the opposing mech-walker had lifted its back leg and was about to put it down again, before firing straight at the knee rondel once more.

THOOOM! This time, the laser shot exploded to leave a blackened scorch mark on the gray-cream metal, but it wasn’t the damage of the blast that Solomon had been aiming for. The impact had knocked the descending leg off kilter, so in the light gravity, the leg moved out a little, and had only barely touched the ground in an awkward pose when the other rear leg started to automatically rise.

THOOOM! One more shot on the same, out-of-true leg, wobbling it slightly. It couldn’t bear the weight of the mech-walker and buckled, tipping backwards, the knee rondel bending slowly so that it looked as though the giant beast had sat on its haunches with a great thud that shook the plain.

“Yes! Yes!” Arlo was whooping as they breasted, then passed the crouching mech-walker, its joints rotating and rolling as it tried to get up again.

I hope that I did the right thing, Solomon thought, but he didn’t worry too much, as their mech-walker and Gold Squad marched back to the entrance of their archway and powered down.

The gold team had won.

“Disqualified,” said the severe voice of the Colonel Asquew, looking down at Arlo’s dismayed face, Solomon’s grimace, and Wen’s scowl—if Malady had any expression at all in the solid metal, Solomon couldn’t read it.

They were still in the launch bay of the station and were still wearing their light tactical suits—apart from Malady, of course—but now each of the trainees were holding their helmets under their left arm.

All of the squads had returned once Arlo and his squad had ‘won’ and the challenge was officially over.

Only we didn’t win, did we? Solomon thought miserably. He was even more aware of the surreptitious glares and hard glances from the other squads around them, standing in small rows spaced around the central area. Above them on the metal grate balcony stood the two Marine colonels still in their power armor, but similarly holding their fierce-looking helmets under their left arms.

Colonel Asquew was a woman with a gray and brown crewcut, and a bionic eye. She looked to be middle-aged, perhaps, but that didn’t mean that her face betrayed any sign of weariness. Her head appeared small against the mighty bulk of the suit around her, but her one good eye was bright was anger. Beside Asquew stood Colonel Madavi, a similarly middle-aged Indian man with a buzzcut and grey stubble over his grizzled chin. Warden Coates stood a little further back and to one side of the two colonels, the veins in his neck standing out as though his head might burst with rage.

“Disqualified!?” Arlo burst out. “But why? We came first!”

Bad choice, Arlo. Solomon winced, seeing the colonel’s power gloves clench just slightly on the railings above. He remembered how much trouble he had got into just for questioning the warden’s judgement back on the shuttle. With any luck, they’ll deport him to Titan quick-sharp.

But Colonel Asquew didn’t fly into a rage as Coates would have done. She just stared at the angry Arlo and stared some more until Arlo had to realize just who he had tried to argue with.

“Uh, I mean…” Arlo quickly backtracked. “Colonel-sir…”

Asquew gave a very minute nod to recognize the appropriate title and cleared her throat. “Your team has been disqualified from the challenge, Regular Menier, because you fired against one of your own side.” Her words were like thrown shards of glass. “This challenge was a test, and not only of your physical abilities but also your mental faculties,” she stated. “We are monitoring your emotional responses to stress and battle, your ability to react creatively and with excellence to a situation, but also your ability to remember your orders, and your self-discipline to stick to them. At no point did we say that you were meant to regard each other as enemy combatants, otherwise we would have given you laser rifles and let you shoot it out!”

I knew it, Solomon thought, to be surprised when Arlo rounded on him.

“Sir, Colonel-sir.” Arlo cleared his throat. “I was the assigned commander, and of course I take full responsibility for that role, but I would also like to bring your attention to the fact that I had extremely extenuating circumstances…” Arlo said.

“Extenuating circumstances, Regular Menier?” Solomon didn’t think that Arlo picked up the hint of dry sarcasm in the colonel’s voice.

“Yes, Colonel-sir.” Arlo nodded gravely, taking on the air of a very aggrieved party. “All throughout the mission, I was having to negotiate with Recruit Cready here, who seemed insistent on ignoring my commands and trying to undermine me.”

What!? Solomon rocked on his metal boots. Maybe he shouldn’t have been surprised that Arlo Menier would stoop so low, but this was beyond petty. It was an accusation that could see him getting shipped off to Titan!

“—I feel forced to point out that he abandoned us to fight the mecha-hounds, and instead damaged Confederacy property by seizing control of one of the guns, and then used it to fire on the enemy’s mech-walker.”

I can’t stand for this. Solomon knew that he had to say something, and his dreadful anger was once again starting to build. “It was your order to shoot at that mech-walker!” he burst out.

“And what about the gun?” Arlo snapped back, clearly thinking that he was still their ‘gold’ commander and in charge of them.

Well, you’re not… Solomon could feel his chest starting to swell with rage, and his fingers clenched the metal helmet under his arm. It was heavy enough that it would cause some damage were he to bring it down in an arc against the big man’s unprotected head…

“Trainees! At attention!” Asquew barked from above, and Solomon reluctantly dragged his eyes back to the balcony above, even though his ears were roaring with the pound of blood.

“If you cannot take criticism, then there is no place for you in the Marines,” Asquew stated heavily, and Solomon’s heart fell. This is it. I am going to get deported. We are all going to get deported, by the sound of it…

But Solomon couldn’t have been more surprised by what came next from the colonel’s mouth.

“As I stated, we were monitoring your progress and evaluating each of you through the challenge. Oracle has finished analyzing the results,” Asquew stated. “Which also means that we have a complete chat record of all recorded orders given, and orders ignored,” she stated precisely, and beside Solomon, the large Frenchman blanched white.

“It is never a good idea to lie to a superior officer, Regular Menier,” Asquew stated carefully, taking a breath. “We know that you gave the order to fire on your fellow Marines, and for that reason, your entire squad has been disqualified from the tournament, meaning that it is Blue Squad that rightfully won, and will be forwarded their specialisms based on their performance shortly…”

“YAAAS!” A jubilant cheer broke out from the standing line of other regulars and recruits which had, up until now, been the most morose of all of the trainees in the bay, as they were the ones inside the mech-walker that Solomon had fired upon. The colonels let them have their brief moment of celebration, whooping and laughing and thumping each other on the shoulders, before making a quieting gesture with her hand as she clearly had more to say.

“However, despite the gold squad’s apparent complete lack of operational awareness, my colleague Colonel Madavi has also made a recommendation about their trainees’ performance…” Asquew stated, passing over the job to the other Marine in full power armor, who stepped forward and stated, in a curiously still and gentle voice that Solomon hadn’t been expecting:

“Trainee Solomon CR is to be forwarded into the command specialism.”

“What!?” Arlo hissed, doing his best to turn his outrage into a sudden cough. He was not alone apparently, as the offended Blue Squad also fell quiet at the news, and Solomon saw several of the other trainee’s eyes once again return to their sport of staring daggers at him.

What? Solomon echoed the surprise.

“At several turns, we noted that Solomon CR managed to out-strategize the scenario, as well as pass on that insight to his squad: using the full tactical Malady to draw fire, using the contours of the land to avoid fire from the guns, proceeding to take control of one of the guns himself to secure the mecha-hound threat. He showed both use of strategy and tactics, as well as a concern for his fellow soldiers of his squad.”

“…but not ours,” one of the members of Blue Squad muttered, but Colonel Madavi ignored him and just carried on talking. “These are all command specialism traits, and Recruit Cready is the only soldier that we have seen so far who has displayed them.”

It was like Madavi was reading out a report, and Solomon couldn’t help but look over the older man’s shoulder to where Warden Coates stood, looking stunned.

“We expect the specialisms that we have ordained to be enacted immediately, and we look forward to our next observation session,” Madavi said, turning on his heel with a nod to Coates, before the pair of them, Madavi and Asquew, marched down the balcony and through an access door.

The room fell into an uneasy murmuring as soon as they had gone, and if Solomon could feel the enmity and hatred of the other trainees on him before, it was ten times worse now. But Solomon didn’t dare look around, as he had his eyes staring fixedly up at the only person left on the metal balcony—Warden Coates. Solomon watched as the little man stepped forward to the railing and said through a tight jaw, “Class dismissed.”

And that was it. Squads were breaking ranks and turning to their equipment lockers to start hanging up their kit and relax from the long day of exertion.

But Solomon stayed where he was, just as Warden Coates did above him, and the warden’s eyes bored into Solomon with utter contempt.

6

How We Do Things Here

For Solomon, the next days and weeks started to blur into one endless cycle of waking up, eating, going to the gymnasium, military exercises in the afternoon as well as either long hours spent in the study lounge, or else in his new specialism class—command.

Not that there were days, as such, on Ganymede. With the sun being just a distant—but still bright—star in the sky, the only source of constant light was the red, baleful glow of the gas giant Jupiter making the moon’s surface appear in a constant state of moody sunset.

Instead, there were military-style shifts, which Solomon was sure changed length from ‘day’ to ‘day.’ Some days, they would have time to perform all of their lessons before the final evening klaxon would see them stumbling back to the food delivery hall and bunks. On others, Solomon was sure that they had only had time to perform half of the lessons before they were once again stumbling back.

“Variable metabolic cycles,” Malady informed him, when he had mentioned this strange fact. “It helps the human body to function at peak, if daylight work hours are varied to increase hormone and endocrine function.”

Huh? Solomon thought. It sounded faintly creepy, to be honest, as if he was part of some sort of vast scientific experiment. Despite Solomon’s unease, he was pleased that the full tactical golem seemed to consider him something approaching a friend—not that the mechanical man was ever anything but pragmatic and monosyllabic, but it appeared that he ventured to talk to him, whereas most of the other recruits and regulars didn’t.

The regulars hate me because I have a specialism already and I’m still only a recruit, and the recruits think that I’m bad luck for them to be seen around. Solomon sighed, once again between his shifts.

The only other person who would voluntarily speak to him—usually to laugh at his not quite quick enough attempts at sparring in the gymnasium—was Jezzie Wen, his fellow gold-squad member and the only other recruit to be awarded with her specialism. Hers happened to be, of course, close-combat.

“You ready to lose again, Commander?” Jezzie called out as she approached Solomon and Malady down the food delivery hall between lessons. She looked tired and disheveled, in her tight-fitting training clothes that showed that she, like the others, had come from their ‘special’ lessons. Solomon had no idea if Malady had a specialism or whether being biologically sewn into his suit counted as a specialism all of its own. For himself, he knew that he had just spent two hours replaying hologram battles between glowing green and red markers, while Oracle, the station computer, narrated various ambushes, maneuvers, and famous tactics employed by the Confederate Marines in the past. It was tiring, and it wasn’t exactly what Solomon had been expecting, but he still found it intriguing.

It’s all a puzzle, he kept thinking. Every battle is an opportunity to use your resources in a way that would trick, outwit, and hopefully overwhelm your opponent.

Just like a well-planned heist, but when combined with the ceaseless physical training as well, it was more tiring than any criminal endeavor he had engaged with.

Which was one of the two reasons he shook his head at Jezzie. “I don’t think I’m fit for another bout of sparring,” he said, forgetting himself and almost actually smiling.

Dammit, Solomon, what are you playing at? he berated himself. Was he that starved of attention that he would make friends with a former Yakuza operative? That was reason two for not wanting to become too friendly with Jezzie. There were still Yakuza out there on Earth who wanted him dead, he reminded himself as he put the solid mask of disinterest on over his features.

“Oh, I see… Too scared of getting beaten up by a girl?” the woman said, her mouth playing a crooked smile. All Solomon could see was the way that smile pulled at the darting forked tongue of the dragon’s head that curved over her shoulder and up her neck…

“Oh. I get it.” Jezzie suddenly pulled herself upright.

Dammit, Solomon thought. She had seen him looking at the tattoo. She must know that he knew what it meant.

“It was a long time ago, now.” Jezzie’s smile faded into a flat grimace. “I should have thought that you of all people know that we can all make mistakes,” the woman said as she pushed past him forcefully.

Ouch. Solomon recoiled from the shove as if he had actually been hit. Maybe I deserved that, he started to think, before that other part of him—the watchful, wary part of him—broke in. It could all be an act. A way to get close to you, and then mete out Yakuza-style justice. He watched as the rather athletic form of Jezzie swaggered back to the bunk, sending others scurrying away from her in her bad mood.

“You should trust her,” grunted an electronically-amplified voice behind him. It was Malady, closing the small containment hatch on his side where he put the energy-gunk bars. Solomon had no idea what happened to them after that, and quite frankly didn’t want to know either. “She is trying to be your friend.”

Solomon was surprised that the large man knew much about friends. Wasn’t he mostly cyborg, now? Solomon was about to point that out, his temper rising in his chest so much that he wanted to lash out at someone. You can’t trust anyone. No one changes. Not really…

“Commander Cready,” a voice slurred behind him, and Solomon knew what was going to happen the moment he heard the angered tone in the Frenchman’s voice.

It was Arlo, still only a regular despite the days and weeks of training that they had all been put through. Solomon didn’t turn. Don’t give him the satisfaction, he thought, as ever since that training mission when it had been Arlo that had made all of the wrong choices, the Frenchman’s dislike of Solomon had seemed to fester into a deep, violent hate. And he had managed to spread that hate around too, always appearing to stand at the corners of the hallways with his beefy comrades, daring Solomon to pass them unarmed.

“Think you are better zan ze rest of us, Commander Cready?” Arlo whispered behind him. “Think you deserve your position, when you made ze rest of us look like a fool?”

I did no such thing! Solomon thought. “Not today, Arlo. I’m too tired for this star-spit…” He started to walk past Malady when suddenly there was an explosion of pain in his side.

“Urk!” Solomon stumbled to the side of the hall, grabbing the service ports to stop himself from falling to the ground. Arlo had kicked him in the side, just under the ribs, wounding him. You need to get up. Defend yourself. He was already moving, keeping his arms up in a defensive boxing position. He’d had enough beatings down on Earth to know how to protect himself. He knew that if they got him on the floor, it would only go ten times worse for him. It might even be fatal.

Thap! Another blow hit him, but this wasn’t coming from the larger Arlo in front of him, but on his right, where one of Menier’s goons had kicked out at him.

One in front, two at the sides… Solomon knew this game. As soon as he concentrated his attacks on one, the other would—

“Stop this,” Malady’s heavy voice cut in, and there was a clank of a metal foot as the mechanical golem-man shifted his position slightly. The attacks stopped, briefly.

“Stay out of zis, Malady,” Arlo snarled at him. “You know ze way it goes. You were a Marine before you got your butt kicked back down to the Outcasts, right?”

He was a full Marine? Solomon had a chance to wonder, peering from behind his raised fists to see that Malady had stepped forward slightly, shielding the convict with one side of his massive body.

But there were still four of them including Arlo, Solomon thought. But four unarmed guys wouldn’t be enough to bring down a full tactical, would it? He stood up a bit straighter, his arms relaxing a little to his sides as he stared at Arlo defiantly.

“Not here, Arlo. It’s not worth it,” he found himself saying, wondering where that reserve of common sense came from. Because one day, we will have to sort this situation out, one way or another, but neither of us want to end up on Titan for it, he figured.

“I don’t know about that, Sol,” said a new voice, as Jezzie stepped out from behind Malady. She had apparently heard the commotion and come back.

Don’t tell me you want a piece of me too, do you? Solomon’s heart froze.

But Jezzie didn’t join Arlo and his gang of stooges. Instead, the Yakuza combat specialist stood easily beside Malady, arms down and her body looking relaxed, but everyone there knew that she could explode into instant, vicious action the moment she desired.

It was three against four, and one of the three was twice the width of anyone here.

“Gah!” Arlo snarled at them, clearly seeing that this was a fight he wasn’t going to win. Instead, he very slowly raised his fingers to point at his own eyes and then at Solomon. “I’ll be waiting, Commander Cready.”

“You do that,” Solomon shot back, waiting for his attackers to trudge off to their bunks, before turning to Malady and Jezzie.

“You didn’t have to do that,” he said in a tight voice, still unsure just why they had done that. Jezzie was angry at me a moment before, and Arlo said Malady was a Marine. That both made them candidates for knowing that gangs have a way of sorting their own problems out, internally…

“No, you’re right. We didn’t.” Jezzie heaved a sigh. “But one of these days, Solomon Cready, you’re going to have to accept the fact that you’re here. On Ganymede. For the next twelve fracking years. I do not intend to die because I can’t trust one of my comrades,” she said, turning on her heel before pausing. “Besides, I like picking on Arlo,” she said in a throwaway manner and stalked back to her bunk.

“And you? What’s your excuse, big fella?” he asked Malady, who appeared as motionless as a statue. The metal man took a long time to speak, but when he did, the answer surprised Solomon.

“Menier was right. I was a full Marine, before I assaulted my superior officer. Hence why they sealed me in my suit and demoted me down to the Outcasts,” he said in his quiet voice. “He was right, that Marines have a way of sorting out their problems themselves. Away from the officers…”

“Then why did you stick up for me?”

Malady paused for a moment. “I don’t know. I thought I saw something in you, maybe. That you were an outsider here yourself, like me, and that you were willing to at least be civil.”

Solomon had never even thought that the golem was capable of human emotions, or of feeling left out, isolated. He had thought that the man inside the machine was little more than another part of the whole—a biological computer—but it seemed that he had been wrong. He was about to say so, when Malady had already turned and left the room.

Outstanding. Solomon stood there for a moment longer, unable to tell if he was happy that he finally seemed to have friends, or miserable that his friends knew he was a jerk.

“Well, you DO have a habit of making enemies, Sol…” Matty said, with his back turned to his friend as he stood in front of the bright window screen of Neon Vespers, one of New Kowloon’s very refined, but also very unheard-of, restaurants.

Solomon had walked there with his friend Matthias, who had spent three days tracking down information on the governmental intelligence tracking chip that Solomon had found in his apartment.

Matty, just like he always could, had managed to track down someone who knew something about why Solomon might be under governmental surveillance. That was precisely the sort of reason why Solomon had pulled him in on this in the first place. Well, that and the fact that Solomon was terrified.

“What are you talking about? I’m charming,” Solomon heard the memory-self of his dreams say. I must be asleep. A part of his brain was struggling to wake up. That is what is happening here, isn’t it? It was what had happened every night now for weeks. Dreams of his murdered friend. Dreams of murdering his friend…

“No, Sol, you’re not.” Matty laughed, turning to reveal his ruin of a face that he never had at this point in real life, but one the dream-Matty wore with apparent ease. None of the passing New Kowloon pedestrians seemed to mind or notice that this man was one of the walking dead.

“You’re a terrible, terrible person. Difficult to get along with. Sarcastic. Taciturn. And you fly off the handle whenever you think someone’s out to get you.” Matty was laughing, but there was an edge to his voice. “I mean, Sol, do you even trust me yet?”

“Course I do,” Solomon heard himself say. “You’re my brother, right?” By which he meant figuratively, but it was true, nonetheless. Solomon had known Matty for over ten years, easily. It was as close as Solomon Cready would ever come to having a real brother in his life.

“Right. I believe you.” Matty just laughed as the door to Neon Vesper’s lobby opened, spilling a dull green glow over the street as Matty and Solomon were ushered in by a tall man in a tuxedo with neon tattoos over one side of his face.

“Reservations?” The man took his place beside the lectern at one end of the lobby, in front of a set of frosted-glass doors.

“I was told that I would be able to contact Miss Cheung here tonight.” Solomon watched as Matty gave one of his winning smiles to the warden, who, like everyone else, was unable to resist Matty’s friendly nature.

“I will inquire as to whether Miss Cheung is receiving guests,” the warden nodded.

“Oh, she will be expecting us.” Matty nodded, still with half of his face a mess of viscera and gore.

The warden turned and exited through the glass doors, closing them with a soft thump to leave Matty and Solomon alone in the lobby for a moment.

“The situation is getting tense. We need to deploy now,” Matty said in a voice that was not quite like his own.

“Huh?” Solomon asked.

“I can get them biologically ready. A few more applications of the PEP Serum, in combination with their chips, and they should be ready,” Matty said, and Solomon felt a sharp jab of pain in his neck…

7

Delivery Systems

Once again, Solomon awoke to another carefully-calibrated, metabolic ‘day-shift’ on the military base of Ganymede feeling groggy and in pain.

This was becoming a habit. He coughed and sat up, massaging his limbs to life as around him the other recruits and regulars were also groaning and moaning to life.

Someone sneezed, and Solomon hoped that he didn’t catch whatever cold was going around.

“Attention, Schlubs!”

I really need to book myself into the medical lounge, Solomon thought as he stumbled to attention at the end of his mattress along with everyone else at the end of their bunks. He was tired of feeling, well, tired all the time. He knew that his body was a mess of bruises and scrapes, but this was starting to get to him. His brain burbled and thought in a vaguely sleepy manner, How long have I been here now? He wondered if it had been as long as it seemed. Two months? Three?

He waited for the green light to flash, which was their signal for them to start the day, and when it did, the thought struck him.

How can anyone on Ganymede get a cold?

“It probably came in the food shipments. You know that we don’t grow our own food, right?” Jezzie Wen was saying as they stood in line to get their protein slab.

“Clearly.” Solomon looked at his with apparent disgust. This time, it was a greenish sort of color, which meant that it would taste of vegetables and some kind of broth, somehow.

“Microbes have been found to survive in space. And the common influenza virus is the most adaptable type of viral agent known to exist,” Malady stated. “They even use it now for biological delivery of drug treatments.”

“Do they?” Jezzie asked as they shuffled down the line. The food hall was one of their few ‘recreation’ times, and it had fast become the place where the Outcasts could chat and bemoan their day’s training. It was to here that they returned at lunchtimes and evenings, for approximately half an hour.

“PEP Serum.” Solomon suddenly remembered the words from his dream. His nightmares, actually. He had been having them every sleep shift, and although they were always a different episode from his previous life, they were always heavy with one thing: guilt.

“What?” Jezzie frowned, as nearby one of the other regulars sneezed and groaned.

In fact, a lot of the others look under the weather. Solomon stopped in his tracks and looked around at the assembled. Not Arlo, of course, loudly cursing the food and claiming back when he had worked as a master chef at the Hilton, New York, he could have turned out better slop for half what it must be costing the Department of Defense and Justice.

“Not everyone is infected, but the majority of us are,” Solomon said. Not Jezzie apparently, or himself. He wondered if that meant that they were naturally immune. And not Malady. He figured that the full tactical suit must have its own air filters.

“Fzt-eww!” Malady suddenly made a strange, echoing electronic noise from inside the suit.

“Oh dear. It seems that I, too, must have caught this cold,” the mechanical golem said.

“Impossible!” Solomon stated. “You’ve got full chemical and bio filters on that thing, right?” He looked up at Malady’s pale and shadowed face inside the faceplate, perennially looking as though he was almost asleep.

“I do,” Malady said.

“Then how could you get sick?” Jezzie pointed out.

The nightmares, Solomon was thinking. Ever since what had happened to bring him there, he’d had disturbed sleep. He knew enough pop psychology to know that was all probably guilt. He wondered if his guilt was overworking his brain when he was asleep. Or maybe it was keeping a part of his brain awake while the rest of him slept.

“The chip and the PEP Serum…” He tried to remember the odd words that he had heard in his nightmares, always coming from his dead friend’s mouth. “Deployment. Initiate Phase 2…” he was murmuring to himself, under Jezzie’s confused looks.

“What if…” Solomon thought. “Now this is going to sound crazy, but bear with me. Do either of you remember being asleep last night? Or any night while we’ve been here?”

“I don’t sleep. I power down,” Malady said.

“Okay, not you then, Malady,” Solomon said exasperatedly as someone else further down the line coughed.

“I know they think your brain is commander material, Sol, but I think you’re common sense is fracked.” Jezzie flickered her sideways grin once again. “You don’t remember being asleep. That’s kind of the point of it, right?”

“I do. I think,” Solomon said, before shaking his head. Everything is a puzzle. You just have to figure out the pieces. “But anyway, that’s not important. What’s important is that no one talks about their dreams that I’ve heard. And we all sleep pretty soundly, I think, regular as clockwork…”

“You do know that most of the others don’t particularly like us, right?” Jezzie said. “No wonder they’re not sharing their bedtime stories with us.”

“Ha. Thanks for that reminder.” Solomon rolled his eyes. “But I mean it. We know that they regulate everything about us—how long each day is, what we eat, they give us person-specific mental tests via Oracle,” he continued. “What if that is not all that they’re doing to us? Experimenting on us while we’re asleep…”

“That’s crazy,” Jezzie laughed.

“Why did everyone wake up feeling so groggy and ill this morning?”

“It’s called an incubation period, genius.” Jezzie was now frowning a lot deeper.

“How did Malady here get sick, then!” Solomon burst out, his voice rising so that a few of the other bleary-eyed regulars around them turned to see if there was about to be another scuffle.

Just as the station-wide klaxon went off.

EEYAOOW-EEYAOOW!

8

Deployment

“ATTENTION!” The bark of Warden Coates was even more abrasive than normal, even though it wasn’t amplified at all. Their trainer and superior officer stood overlooking them on the metal balcony of the launch bay, and all of the Outcasts—regulars and recruits alike—stood in rows below him, wearing their normal gray or black and red encounter suits.

Solomon looked around and saw the slightly nervous, excited, and concerned expressions on the faces of his fellow Outcasts. He knew that he must be wearing the same.

“No time for niceties, Outcasts, as today we have a very special training exercise for you,” Warden Coates said. Even from this distance, Solomon could see the veins standing out on the man’s forehead.

He must be extra stressed right now, Solomon guessed.

“Live-fire,” Warden Coates said, which was ‘special’ enough, until the warden told them precisely what he wanted them to do.

“You’re going to Mars, ladies and gentlemen, to participate in a search-and-rescue mission on the Hellas Chasma.”

Hellas Chasma… Where have I heard that before? Solomon wondered. He hadn’t heard it, he’d read it. It was one of the larger skirmishes that the Rapid Response Fleet-their parent fleet—had been involved in a few years back. They had cleared out a nest of Mars seditionists, or those colonists who wanted an independent, self-governing Mars, free from Confederate influence.

Solomon almost approved of them, to be honest, which he knew was not an opinion that he could announce to anyone in this crowd. The Confederacy was corrupt, everyone knew that, and it tried to rule every aspect of its citizens’ lives, unless you managed to break out to one of the smaller pockets of miscreant freedom like one of the colonies, or New Kowloon.

“As such, you will be dispatching as soon as you’ve suited up, and the department is even putting up a jump-ship for you,” the warden stated, and Solomon heard gasps. Jump-ships were the primary means of faster-than-light travel in the Confederacy. Specially designed ships that were created to generate a Barr-Hawking collapsible field—more commonly known as a wormhole.

“Your mission parameters will be dispatched to your suits as soon as you go live….” Coates stated through clenched teeth. Solomon got the impression that Coates didn’t want them to go on this mission at all.

“Live-fire? That means we’ve got an enemy, right?” Solomon overheard one of the other trainees whisper.

Yeah, Solomon thought. You don’t order live-fire for a search and rescue, do you? Solomon frowned. There was something mighty suspicious about this.

“No talking in the ranks!” Warden Coates glared at them below. “Now, the final thing is, no trainee is allowed to be killed in the field of battle, according to department guidelines.”

Ha! Solomon quirked a smile. Are we under orders not to die? They would, for once, be orders that Solomon was more than happy to follow.

“So that is why, ladies and gentlemen, you are all receiving a class-1 upgrade in your status,” Warden Coates said with apparent difficulty. “From this moment onward, you will be fully classed as adjunct-Marines, and, if you do well today, then that status might be upgraded to full Outcast Marine status.” No sooner had he finished speaking, than a jubilant eruption came from the crowd.

Regulars and recruits whooped with joy and cheered themselves and each other. Everyone had trained so hard and given so much of their sweat and blood over the last few months to get to this point.

“We’re passing out of basic training. We’ve done it…” Solomon heard one of his fellow recruits say beside him. He caught Jezzie’s eye and was glad to see that she was frowning as deeply as he was.

I don’t trust this either. He nodded slowly at his newfound friend. First we got trained, then we get ‘treated’ with some special drug, delivered in our sleep…and now?

“That’s right, soldiers, but you are all still schlubs!” Warden Coates was not going to allow them to enjoy their sense of achievement for long, however. “You may indeed have passed out of basic training, but you will return to Ganymede—or those of you that don’t get yourselves killed, anyway—when you are done and we will continue your training, where I expect you all to be striving toward your specialisms! You’ve got a long way to go yet before you are worthy to wear the full Marine power armor!” He was almost spitting with outrage by the end. The warden wobbled on his heels, taking a deep breath and straightening his jacket as he calmed himself. “Now. Repeat with me the Marine Oath, and then you will be split into your active squads and be loaded onto the transporter.

“Through blood and fire, I will still stand strong.

“I will stand at the borders and the crossroads, I will stand strong.

“Even with the eternal night before me, I will be the flame!”

Undermesh suit. Combat boots. Jacket harness. Solomon clipped and buckled the equipment next to his squad, who he was pleased to see included Jezzie and Malady, and three other recruits—or adjunct-Marines, now. The light tactical suits were getting easier to wear and quicker to put on, he was pleased to notice. Almost like it was second nature after three months of training. Solomon flexed his shoulders and twisted on his hips a little, feeling the give and tension of the suit before nodding. Good.

Gold Squad 1, his suit internal helmet read, and next to his own identification number, Sp. Cmdr Cready. Specialist Commander Cready.

“Holy frack.” He paused for a moment as the realization that this was actually happening sunk in. He was to be the Specialist Commander for Gold Squad 1. His squad. My squad, he thought.

“Congratulations,” Jezzie’s voice greeted him as they waited for the transporter to dock at the launch bay doors. Other squads—all color-coded as they had been before—were forming up in front of the equipment pods around them, but all that Solomon cared about were the five people in front of him.

Combat Specialist Wen. He looked at the slightly smaller form of Jezebel Wen.

Tactical Specialist Malady. One half of their huddle was dominated by the large form of Malady, as impassive and as dominating as ever. Then came the three new recruits that he knew a little but had never fought alongside before. That was something that he would have to factor in. Were they easily spooked? How did they take orders?

Adjunct-Marine Petchel was a smaller soldier who appeared to already be taking direction. Adjunct-Marine Karamov. Adjunct-Marine Kol. It was hard to tell these two apart, other than their suit identifiers flaring into holographic view on his own visor whenever they were in his field of vision.

Solomon looked at Gold Squad 1, feeling nervous. This is just like a job back home, he told himself. You assemble your team, and you get to work.

“Right, listen up.” He cleared his throat, imagining how he would approach a complicated heist with a bunch of operatives that he had never worked with before. Get them on your side.

“This is new territory for all of us, both the mission and the squad, so I expect all of us—me included—to pay attention to what the rest of the squad is doing, above all things, okay?” he said, earning a nod from Petchel, Jezzie, and even Malady.

Solomon tried to remember the command classes that he had been taking every couple of days for the last twelve weeks. Clear chain of authority. Lead by example.

“We’re going to get our mission parameters soon, and whatever they say, I expect all of you to look after your squad members first, because that is what I am going to be doing,” he insisted. “This is a live-fire exercise, so we don’t know what sort of targets or dangers we might be facing, but it might mean we have to put a bullet in someone.”

Another round of nods, and this time, Karamov and Kol joined in, too. Good. You can listen to me, at least.

“We’re going to be running a straight-up combat routine, as far as I’m concerned. Which means I am going to trust each of you with your roles, and I want to hear from you if you have problems. If you spot something, then tell me, and tell the rest of the squad. If you think you know better, then I want to know why. I will listen to you,” Solomon said, wondering if that was too weak. Maybe he should bark at them like Warden Coates did, call them schlubs and tell them to obey him…

Nah. Solomon couldn’t do it. Not my style. He knew that you got more out of people who respected you than those who resented you.

“Specialist Wen? You’re our lead combat operative. Close and personal, hand-to-hand, and I want you liaising with the rest of us on combat operations, got it?”

“Aye, Commander,” he heard her say, and the words made him feel strangely embarrassed for a moment.

“Malady, you’re our tactical specialist, so I want you looking at infrastructure, demolitions, transport, buildings. Wen can mess the enemy up one-on-one, but I want you thinking about how we might have to stop anything larger than an enemy soldier.”

“Yes, Commander,” his metal voice said.

“Petchel, Karamov, and Kol, you’re with me. I want supporting and covering fire, and I want us four to watch each other’s backs and clear routes for Wen and Malady if they have to get their jobs done. I’ll be on point, and I want Petchel on my left, Karamov and Kol on my right. Got that?”

Standard formation, his specialism classes had told him. Being righthanded meant that his left was his possible blindspot, and Petchel seemed at least eager to listen.

The three new squad members nodded, and Solomon felt a temporary surge of relief. I can do this. We can do this.

“Just so long as everyone keeps their eyes peeled and keeps suit contact open, there’s no reason we can’t all get out of this happy and with all our limbs in place,” he said, meaning the last as a joke…but no one laughed.

Okay. Humor is out, then…

Each squad filed in line as the lights of one of the large archway docking doors flickered green. No hissing gases of decompression this time, which must mean that the transporter had docked with the station itself, its own bulkhead doors forming a tight air-seal lock with the bay. With a whine of hidden servos, the launch bay doors rolled back to reveal the large cargo belly of a ship, with rough seats and webbing along the walls.

“Here we go,” Solomon breathed.

“Gold Squad!” When it came time for them to enter, Solomon was surprised to see that the ramp up to the doors was flanked by other Ganymede station staff. Solomon hadn’t seen many of the other staff here, but he saw a line of grim-faced men and women in service black and gray encounter suits, each one handing out their final pieces of equipment to the adjunct-Marines as they boarded the ship.

“Jackhammer rifle, ammo clips, combat knife,” the staffer in line said as he passed the equipment into Solomon’s power gauntlets and showed him how to clip them onto his jacket harness belt.

“Thank you,” Solomon said, but the staffer had already turned to pick up the next set for Jezzie, behind him, forcing him to walk up the ramp to the next staffer.

It was Doctor Palinov and her white-suited crew. “Medical kit, including battlefield surgery,” the white-suited woman said, handing him the compact unit that locked into place on his belt, as Doctor Palinov beside her was apparently taking readings from each and every one of them with a data-pad.

What is she measuring? he wondered, but before he could ask, Palinov nodded and gestured for him to continue to the last two people in the line.

“Commander,” said the man on the right. Actually, the Marine. Solomon realized that he was looking at Colonel Madavi, the dark-skinned man in his full power armor who had vouched for him after their first disastrous training exercise.

“Specialist Cready,” said the figure next to him, the venom dripping from Warden Coates’s voice. The little warden was still wearing his regular encounter suit and ridiculous gold-starred, peaked cap, which made Solomon stifle a grin behind his helmet. You not fighting alongside us, Warden? he thought with more than a hint of scorn.

“Welcome to the Marines, son.” Madavi picked up from the hovering drone table behind him one of only a few small boxes, and when he flicked it open, Solomon blinked as he saw what was inside. It was a singular gold star, the first pip on his way to becoming a full, and real, Marine colonel like Madavi.

Solomon blinked, suddenly unsure of what to say. He’d had people compliment him on his work—usually when he’d made his clients a whole heap of money, of course—and he’d had people pay him bonuses for a job well done. This time, it seemed different. He felt suddenly unsure of himself, in a way that he wasn’t used to.

“Adjunct-Marines,” Warden Coates clarified. “This rank of specialist commander that we are awarding today is only for operational matters out on the field,” he said, and Solomon was surprised when Madavi half-turned with a frown to the warden.

There is a power struggle going on here, Solomon realized. The warden seemed to have total control while they were recruits and regulars, but as soon as they became full Marines… A ray of hope opened in Solomon’s mind. As much as he didn’t particularly appreciate being given orders by anyone, he would much rather be given orders by the likes of Colonels Madavi and Asquew, then the jumped-up little tyrant that was Warden Coates.

“Everyone who receives one of these deserves it. Make sure that you look after your squad.” Madavi had turned back to take the small gold star and settled it with a sudden thunk along the top of Solomon’s shoulder pad, where it seemed to chemically bond as soon as it touched the metal.

I’m a commander now, an actual commander, Solomon thought. Well, adjunct-specialist-commander, anyway. But it was a start.

“I will do my best, sir.” Solomon nodded his thanks to Madavi, and realized that he meant it as he walked past.

Only to be stopped by Warden Coates stepping forward, and hissing in a low voice, much to Madavi’s annoyance, it seemed. “There’s no room for traitors in the Confederate Marines, Cready. Just remember that today.”

Solomon didn’t know whether to nod or argue, but either way, Coates had returned to his place, where he and Madavi awaited every newly-appointed adjunct-Marine to give them their gold pip.

“What was all that about?” Jezzie whispered to him, opening a private suit-to-suit channel as Solomon led them to the nearest available set of seats, there to sit down and buckle the webbing over them.

Solomon came to a sudden decision. He didn’t want to spend any more time toiling under Warden Coates. It would only be a matter of time before the warden decided to make an example of him again.

“I’m changing my orders, Jezzie,” Solomon heard himself say. “We’re not going to just fulfill our mission parameters out there. We’re going to do it better than everyone else. If this is a search-and-rescue mission, then Gold Squad 1 is going to be the ones who do the rescuing.”

“Aye-aye, boss.” Of course, he couldn’t see her face, but Solomon was sure that he could hear his fellow soldier grinning just as fiercely as he was behind her helmet.

When all of the Outcasts were securely seated, the transporter ship wasted no time in disembarking. Solomon felt butterflies in his stomach, but he was well used to nerves. He was the sort of guy who was used to running on adrenaline most of the time, so he breathed through it as he had taught himself long ago and allowed the agitation to turn into excitement.

First, the ramp door slid shut, and with a series of dull whirrs and clicks, they locked and repressurized. Then came a grinding, whining noise from somewhere deep in the ship, and the entire cargo room shook and started to tilt.

Solomon couldn’t see what was happening outside—he didn’t even know what the transporter ship looked like—but the room that he and the other Outcasts were a part of was a large, low hall with steps that went up to a small raised area at both ends, leading to lifts. This must be the belly of the craft, he thought, imagining some bulbous, fat-bellied insect rising on thrusters.

Actually, the specialist commander wasn’t far off, as the Rapid Response transporter was a quad-craft, four adjustable thrusters at each corner point, with an extended blocky belly of gray metal that contained troops, equipment, and anything else that they required. It was ungainly and bloated as it took to the thin envelope of gases that surrounded Jupiter’s largest moon, wavering slightly on the twin jets of plasma and flame that sent up clouds of steam and smoke from evaporated ice and rock dust.

The transporter achieved equilibrium and started to ascend into the dark, away from the orange and red glare of Jupiter, moving faster and faster as it did so until the orb of Ganymede would have been visible to Solomon and the others—if the Department of Justice and Defense had given them portholes.

As such, the troops inside just had to guess what was happening, and Solomon found that he could almost predict it, as the vibrations that ran through the metal of the hull changed in both intensity and frequency.

We’re out of Ganymede’s gravity, he thought as their ride became suddenly a lot smoother, and he felt himself rise a little against the webbing harness that strapped him to the chair. Zero-G. The transporter didn’t have any graviton-engines, he saw. Not like the fancy colony ships that traveled to Proxima and Trappist.

No, this transporter was austere and functional. Every available bit of manufacture was given over either to defense or purpose. The walls were twin layers a meter thick, with galvanized steel framework between them. The corners of the rooms inside, as well as the sensor arrays and hatchways, were all right-angled and sharp.

Now free of the pull of Ganymede and using Jupiter’s own gravity as a slingshot, the four rocket thruster columns at each corner angled themselves and powered the vessel out into the inner system, heading sun-ward, away from the gas giant. The space that it headed toward was not dark, but silver and gray with stars.

The transporter had one destination in mind, and even though it appeared on the outside to be moving slowly, it was actually being thrown forward at many thousands of miles per hour in terrestrial terms.

Inside the transporter, the murmurs of the other Outcasts started up as they tried to second-guess what they were doing, and why.

“Search-and-rescue mission, the warden said…” Solomon heard one of the nearer soldiers say through his suit.

“That’s not all it is,” Solomon said, his voice, just like the others not on his squad, was only a muffled blur, but to his fighters linked into his suit, he was amplified and clear.

“Commander?” Petchel surprised him by saying.

“As soon as we get the green light, stay sharp and keep your rifles up,” Solomon said, holding his own Jackhammer across his lap. It was a heavy-barreled, stocky-looking thing with a range of empty ports for extra attachments. He also had one ammo clip already in place on the underside, plus another three that the Ganymede staffers had given him locked to his belt.

Solomon wouldn’t have said he was any sort of expert before he had started his military training, but he considered what he had been taught in the study lounge, along with the others. “Each clip holds, what, thirty rounds? We’ve been given four clips, so that’s a hundred and twenty rounds a piece,” he said aloud to Petchel and the others. “What sort of search-and-rescue mission requires a hundred and twenty rounds?”

Petchel nodded but said nothing. The tension in the air grew sharper.

Outside the hull, the transporter ship’s destination was becoming clearer: another vessel waited in the sweet spot where Jupiter’s gravitational pull was balanced out by the other planets. This was the place where the Barr-Hawking jump-ship could get as much traction as possible, and not waste any fuel.

Which was a good thing, really, considering what the jump-ship had to do.

The transporter was large, but the jump-ship was a fraction larger. It was a ring ship, with a central body extending forward like a beak, but with an entire ring around the rear of the ship, attached to its hub by four ‘spokes.’ This ring was a vital part of the configuration of the Barr-Hawking generator, with a series of super-massive particle engines that were synched to produce precisely the same amount of force, the same disruption to the spacetime layer, as each other. Any mistake between these linked particle engines meant that spacetime would be ripped and folded in unpredictable ways—probably ripping a hole straight through the jump-ship, whatever cargo they were hauling, and near space as well.

Pft! Pft! With tiny bursts of gas, tether cables made of strong steel burst from the surface of the ring and smacked onto the square face of the transporter, their magnet clamps locking to the metal as the jump-ship started to move.

Barr-Hawking jump-ships were a marvel, humanity’s key to opening up the cosmos, and they worked along an unnervingly simple principle. The jump-ship itself produced enough energy to create a ripple in spacetime. Just a small ripple, but one that folded near spacetime closer together, Solomon had learned through Oracle.

This ripple surged through local space like a bow wave, increasing in velocity and folding ever deeper levels of spacetime together until they broke the lightspeed barrier. The whole business of ‘jumping’ wasn’t really ‘jumping’ at all. It was merely taking a high-speed shortcut, Solomon mused. The ship was still traveling through conventional space, it was only that the gaps between conventional space were now much smaller thanks to the folded spacetime.

However, the Barr-Hawking particle engines were insanely difficult to build, as well as insanely expensive to run—even in the twenty-twos. It was the only hard limit placed on technology, one that the Confederacy was constantly trying to solve. Confederate labs had tried miniaturizing the technology to no avail, as well as using different primary fuel sources, none of which worked. All of that meant that there were only a limited amount of Barr-Hawking particle engines out there, and it was impossible to place them on every spaceship the Confederacy owned.

Instead, Solomon knew that their answer had been a simple one. They used the particle engines in the same way that old-time Earth had used tugboats for the much larger ocean-going liners. The jump-ship created the spacetime bow wave, and ships like the transporter or any other Confederacy-approved vessel got to hitch a ride to that bow wave and thus travel at the same speed. All without having to have particle engines or a ring-hull themselves.

Solomon was thinking about explaining all of this to his squad when all thought was blasted out of his mind as the first wave of vertigo washed over and through him.

Jump sickness, he recalled reading. It was a common ailment amongst all travelers, and there didn’t appear to be anything that the Department of Justice and Defense or the wider Confederacy could do about it. Because they were human, Solomon knew that their physiologies weren’t used to traveling at such high speeds. He was sure that there had to be some deep, instinctive, primitive part of their minds that knew what they were doing was almost breaking the rules of time and space. Almost.

If Solomon or any of the other adjunct-Marines in the cargo hold of the transporter had been able to see the view from the cockpit far above them, they would have seen the light start to do strange things around the jump-ship. The stars started to bleed and bend, like a time-lapse picture of a night sky, only one taken near one of the poles of the Earth. The stars quickly became glowing lines of brilliance, forming a circle, and then stretched to form an egg-like shape, then an orb that stretched its brilliance all the way back from in front of the jump-ship’s nosecone to encapsulate the hauled transporter ship behind.

The light grew brighter and more intense outside the ship as the dizziness inside the soldiers’ minds continued to escalate…

And then, rather abruptly, it stopped.

9

Evasive Action

ATTENTION! MISSION PARAMETERS CORRECTION!

Mission ID: HELLAS

Strike Group ID: Outcasts, Adjunct-Marines.

Parent Fleet ID: Rapid Response 2, Confederate Marine Corps.

Squad Commanders: Cready (Gold), Hitchin (Silver), Gorlais (Bronze), Hu (Red), Nndebi (Blue), Walters (Green)

GROUP-WIDE ORDER CHANGE:

Activate the jumper pack situated on your seat rest.

Automated jumper packs will deliver each squad to intended field of operation.

Await further squad-level orders there.

Equipment malfunctions should be reported to squad commander.

Solomon, and all the other adjunct-Marines that made up the Outcasts, read the scrolling words that flashed holographically in front of their eyes on their suit visors.

Jumper packs? Equipment malfunctions? Solomon had a brief moment of panic. This mission was getting very real very quickly. The nausea was fading from his stomach and the jittery feeling of vertigo was quickly draining away, leaving behind a cold sort of dread as Solomon quickly tried to assess just where the controls for this new piece of equipment even were.

I can’t even see whatever this ‘jumper pack’ thing is, he thought. Looking at the armrests of the cargo seat to see that there, along with several other depressed buttons, one was flashing red, with a ‘J’ embossed on it. At least the Marines like things straightforward, he thought as he punched the button, then felt the seat around him start to change. The first adaption was that the backrest extended two metal arms that swung down to fold themselves over his shoulders, clamping to his suit. At the same time, folding arms locked into place around his hips, and he felt the seat shift against him, the backrest now a padded back support.

“Commander?” he heard Petchel say, and he turned to see that all of Gold Squad had similarly figured out the controls and were now wearing a bulky unit that was also their seats.

Oh… A jump-pack. He had seen these before. They were the rocket-assisted backpacks that paratroopers used when deploying into hostile situations.

“Looking good, team.” He gave them an encouraging thumbs-up, then concentrated on the transporter’s movements, which was now bouncing violently.

“We must be entering Mars atmosphere,” he stated, as there was no other reason he knew to explain the turbulence. The Barr-Hawking jump-ship must have detached them, and their travel at faster-than-light must have thrown them across the solar system at incredible speeds, arriving above the surface of the red planet in a matter of minutes.

“Suit check. Equipment check,” he ordered his team, before adding the final command. “Lock and load.”

Each of the Outcasts quickly went through the standard suit checks that they had been taught and knew by heart by now. Tightening the buckles. Checking the magnet locks and the air seals. No one wanted to arrive in a near-toxic environment and find out that their helmets had been loose the entire time. Luckily, each Marine’s visor reported a readout of their suit’s current status, so they were able to check their safety according to a ‘loosen and tighten’ method.

ID: Sp. Commander Cready.

Atmospheric Seals: GOOD.

Oxygen Tanks: FULL (4 hrs).

Oxygen Recycle System: WORKING (1 hr).

Each suit had a distributed network of tubes filled with a liquid substance loaded with high concentrations of oxygen and water—the suit separated them and delivered them to the suit’s helmet and water nozzle accordingly. The light tactical suits also had a filtration system that would suck out any of the odd oxygen particles from a Marine’s breath, as well as drawing any in from the outside environment and using it to prolong the Marine’s life. It wasn’t as good a system as the power armor or Malady’s full tactical system, which could last almost indefinitely thanks to their complicated filtration, absorption, and storage methods, but Solomon knew that it meant that each of his squad had approximately five hours’ worth of available air. If the Hellas mission lasted that long, then he would have to consider how to get his team back to the transporter or to a secure habitat.

BLARP!

Over the three cargo bay doors, a red light suddenly blinked to a flashing green, and a klaxon swept through the ship.

I just wish that I knew what we were heading into! Solomon thought in annoyance, checking his Jackhammer rifle and securing his ammo clip as he stood up. He had been expecting the new jumper pack that he was wearing to be heavy on his shoulders, but some mystery either of the jacket harness or the pack itself meant that he couldn’t even feel it at all.

“Get ready! Eyes sharp!” He was already leading his squad to the nearest hatch as the other six commanders did the same, holding their combat rifles across their bodies and pointing down at the metal floor.

READY…

READY…

INITIATE DOOR CONTROLS IN 3…

2…

Solomon bared his teeth.

1… JUMP-JUMP-JUMP!

Each of the three archways rolled up, sending a vortex of wind and dust into the cargo bay and almost pulling Solomon off his feet. He looked down and saw an orange and yellow surface with plains and canyons that extended for as far as the eye could see.

Hello, Mars, Solomon thought, and jumped out of the transporter, hundreds of feet above the surface of the Red Planet.

Gold Squad was the first out, tumbling through the sky like a line of dropped seeds from the heavy-bellied ship above them. The orange-red surface didn’t appear to rush toward them immediately. For a moment, they could see the rise and fall of the landscape below like a panorama. A large crater surrounded by the steep walls of rocky highlands, everything cast in ochre and red hues.

And a trail of black smoke, from the far side of the crater where it met the highland.

Jumper Suit Activation!

Rockets 1, 2 Firing…

Stabilizers Firing…

Solomon didn’t need his suit’s notifications, because he felt the kick of the rockets behind him as, unseen to his eyes, two petal-ended rocket tubes extended from the base of the ‘seat’ and started to fire jets of burning white smoke. At the same time, two much smaller thrusters burst from the ‘shoulder’ sides of the suit and similarly fired, automatically tracking with the larger, fixed-position rockets below to manage their descent.

They weren’t falling anymore. They were flying.

GOLD SQUAD 1

COMMAND ID: Sp. Commander Cready.

ORDERS UPDATE:

Locate and Approach X23 Crash Site.

Solomon’s light tactical suit was updated with his local orders by the Rapid Response Fleet mainframe, which he assumed was transmitted via the transporter ship, even now rising back into the sky as its own four rockets sent it up into a safe orbit.

Well, maybe this won’t be so hard after all, Solomon thought, relaying the orders to his team.

“Gold Squad! The jumper suits look to be self-navigating, so no need to do anything there. We’re heading for the crash site,” he said over his suit controls as the wind howled around his helmet. “Malady, I want you on the north side. Hold position until we get a clearer picture of what’s going on. Petchel, Karamov, and Kol, you’re with me.”

“What about me?” asked Combat Specialist Wen, flying behind him with her arms by her side and looking like a human dart.

Good idea, he thought, and copied her. Suddenly his speed increased, and so he ordered his squad to do the same.

“We don’t know if this will be close-combat or ranged,” Solomon said as the billows of black smoke started to get closer and closer. On his suit monitor, Solomon could see the vector blips of the other five Outcast squads fanning out to various coordinates around the crater on their own unique missions.

“Until we know, I want you hanging back between Malady and us,” Solomon said, quickly laying out his plan. “Me and the other non-specialists will approach and lay down covering fire if needed. I’ll use your skills if we get into any nastier trouble…”

“Pffft…” He heard Jezzie’s opinions on her being held in reserve, but Solomon wouldn’t throw her in yet. She was much better up close, and they needed to secure the site first, if they could.

As it happened, the nastier trouble found them first.

PHEET! PHEEET!

Tracer lines erupted from the rocky walls of the crater near the crash site, heading straight toward them.

Solomon’s suit readouts suddenly blared into alarms and warning.

WARNING! ENEMY FIRE DETECTED!

INCOMING: North by Northeast.

But the jumper packs are automated, Solomon had a microsecond to think. What were they to do?

But Solomon Cready had one thing going for him, and that was his very quick mind—a mind that had allowed him to make decisions on the fly in the much more complicated streets of New Kowloon.

“Use your arms! Air brake!” he shouted suddenly, remembering how Jezzie’s arm and hand positions had changed their flight. He threw one arm out and felt the torment of the wind threaten to push it back, but it had the desired effect. The air resistance that it gained sent him in a spiraling arc. The jumper suit still powered him forward, but one of the two burning tracer lines of fire swept through the empty space where the specialist commander had been.

Jezz! he thought in alarm. Hadn’t she been right behind him? He spared a look behind him, just as he heard the worst thing possible.

“ARRG-ZZZT!” A scream almost deafened him over his communicator, before being cut off by sudden electric static.

No!

But he had no time to turn his head, as the red sand and rocks were coming up fast before his eyes, too fast, as his wild hand movement had changed the trajectory of impact.

Solomon might have been quick-witted, but he had no idea how to brace against a planet. Without thinking, he did what came naturally, throwing his arms to protect his helmet as he folded his legs

CRASH!

Maybe it was some trick of fate, or maybe the jumper suit’s internal controls really were far more advanced than he had given them credit for, but as he hit the surface of the angry planet, he rolled, exploding in a plume of sand before sliding some twenty meters across the surface. He hadn’t hit the ground at a steep incline, nor had he hit the larger boulders, but he had been skidded across the softer sands of the plains, and it still hurt.

WARNING! SUIT IMPACT!

DAMAGE ASSESSMENT: Armor Plating -30%

Solomon groaned, his mind still tumbling and turning, even as his body was still. There was the distant thuds and crashes of the rest of his team, and for a brief, hysterical moment, he wondered if they had all come in too hot and broken their limbs.

First hour of the first day of actual combat and look what I have achieved. His cynical thoughts struck home, before being replaced by a sharp stab of worry.

“Specialist Wen!” he shouted on the communicator, already turning and rolling himself from his deep furrow to try and find the nearest cover he could.

“What?” He heard Jezzie’s voice behind him. She was okay. Then who…

The answer was already visible on his suit readouts. There, along with the other Outcast vectors, and the warning orange exclamation marks where the enemy fire had come from, was the red and crossed out glyph of one of his squad.

Adjunct-Marine Petchel.

DECEASED.

“No, no, no!” Cready snarled, turning on his heel to raise his Jackhammer rifle up at the nearest of the enemy exclamation marks. His eyes couldn’t see them, and instead all he could make out was the rock walls looking like multiple ribs and columns of sandstone. Like a wall of bones sticking out from the desert, Solomon thought darkly as he squeezed the trigger.

BAP-PAP-PAP-PAP! The gun jumped in his arms as he cradled it. He knew how to take the recoil, and he kept it trained on the first exclamation mark for a burst of three seconds.

“Gold Squad, sound off!” he demanded. They had all landed, and he needed to know that none of them had in fact broken anything.

“Kalamov, okay.”

“Wen, annoyed as all hell.”

“Kol, okay.”

“Malady, functional.”

Well, that’s something at least. He didn’t let his mind go to the newer, smaller plume of black smoke rising from somewhere inside the crater, which he knew to be the remains of Petchel, struck by one of the enemy tracer rounds and immolating his jumper pack boosters.

But Petchel apparently wasn’t the only one, Solomon realized as he fired another short burst on the position. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see multiple such smoke trails now rising into the sky, and the dart of bright fire from the walls all around them.

They call this a search-and-rescue!? he thought angrily, as suddenly there was a strafing line of explosions as his fire was supported by Karamov and Kol.

“Mission parameters still stand. I’m going to check out the crash site,” Malady announced.

“I’m going with!” Wen chimed in, and Solomon was about to angrily tell them to dig in, until he realized that was precisely the plan. His plan. That he and the non-specialists lay down covering fire, while the specialists did the up close and personal work.

How many Marines have the Outcasts lost altogether? If only they hadn’t been coming in so visible in their jumper packs, he thought as he crouched behind a boulder as a couple of singular shots came from the walls behind. They were trading bullets with whomever the enemy was, as there appeared to be a series of caves in the rocky crater walls up there. They could get pinned down like this for hours, Solomon knew, unless…

The jumper pack!

It was still attached to his back, and now he had an idea.

“Karamov. Kol. On my mark, hold fire. Then, when you see the enemy fire again, concentrate your fire on them, okay?”

“Okay, but I don’t understand.” Karamov sounded stressed and uptight. “Isn’t that what we’re doing anyway?”

“Not like this you’re not.” Solomon turned to trade a few shots with one of the hidden snipers, then barked, “Hold!” At the same time, he fumbled with the belt controls of his jumper pack, knowing that somewhere on there, there had to be—

Phwoosh! The base rockets fired, catapulting him into the air and sideways, towards the walls.

PHEET! PHEET!

In another instant, when presented with such a close target, it seemed like Solomon had been right and that the two hidden shooters couldn’t help but open fire on it.

Open fire on me, he thought as he quickly threw out one of his arms just as he had done before, forcing his body to spiral through the air…

“Fire!” he shouted at Karamov and Kol as the enemies’ shots missed him as he tumbled, but now he had an altogether different problem. He was plummeting back to the ground, and this time, the base of the rocky walls was not smooth sand, but was littered with rocks.

“Oh frack—”

Crash! He hit the ground awkwardly, sliding and rolling down the grit and rock as his suit alarms once again went off.

WARNING! SUIT IMPACT!

DAMAGE ASSESSMENT: Armor Plating -60%

“Urgh…” he was groaning as he lay, looking up at the sweep of rocky walls above him and the trails of black smoke now crisscrossing the sky. But at least there was some good news in all of this.

“We got him, Commander!” Karamov was shouting excitedly. “He fell from the wall!”

“You don’t know it was him, Karamov,” Cready groaned. This time, his body hurt as well. “And there were two of them.”

BAP-PAP-PAP! Karamov and Kol concentrated their fire on the lines of caves for a moment, then waited. Solomon knew that he should get up, that he should move, but he felt like Malady had stood on him. He held his breath when his comrades finished their burst fire and waited for the return shot. None came.

Elsewhere on the plain, it seemed as though the rest of the Outcasts were having similar issues with their own snipers. But who were they? he wondered. Smugglers? Raiders? They had brought down ‘craft X23,’ which he presumed was the largest of the burning pyres of debris and smoke that Malady and Wen had gone to investigate. Which reminded him.

“Specialists Malady and Wen, report!” he said. He didn’t want to find out that they too had fallen to some random sniper.

“ZZZZT!” There was no reply from their channels but the whine of static.

No. No, Solomon started to think, pushing himself up, when his suit informed him.

Unable to Establish Connection. Electronic and Atmospheric Diffusion.

What did that even mean? he wondered, before realizing that it must be the crashed vehicle itself, and all the palls of smoke, messing with their suit’s short-range frequencies. He couldn’t even see Malady or Wen on his visor, so they must have moved around to the far side of the wreckage, cutting themselves off from Solomon’s line-of-sight.

Okay, don’t panic…yet, he thought, looking around him. This was all too crazy, and too strange. They had fulfilled the mission parameters as far as he knew, but not the mission. There were clearly more enemy combatants out there, and they seemed to have no qualms at all about firing on Confederate Marine forces.

If anyone even knows that we ARE Confederate Marines, Solomon considered. The Outcasts were a new unit, after all. Who were they fighting? Why had they brought down that ship?

None of these were questions that were going to be answered here, but Solomon saw a place where he might get them. A little further down, at the base of the cliffs, was what looked to be a rounded entrance into the honeycomb network of caves. Stacked at its base was a series of large, reinforced plastic cargo crates.

Whoever we’re fighting, this is their hideout. A base of some kind.

“Karamov and Kol, move out on me!” he called, breaking into a jog toward the crates. First, he would try to track down and stop any more nests of these snipers in the crater walls, as he and the other Outcast Marines below were effectively becoming target practice for them.

But it’s always a puzzle, isn’t it? And if he managed to get some clues on the journey, then all the better…

10

The Ambassador

Solomon jammed his combat knife into the seal of the ruggedized plastic crate and shimmied the blade, the strength of his suit and his power gauntlets working to snap the heavy plastic and provide more purchase for him to physically rip it open.

He couldn’t wait until he managed to get his hands on a proper power armor suit, as the things that he would be able to do in one of those would be incredible. Knock down walls. Knock a hole straight through a light spaceship maybe…

But it was the contents of the box that surprised him. There, stacked in their precision-molded foam trays and all separated out into their composite parts, was tray after tray of Jackhammer combat rifles.

“Commander-sir?” Karamov and Kol skidded to the walls of the cliff beside him, panting.

“Whoa, Commander, you look terrible,” Karamov said, and Cready figured that it must have been the multiple times falling on his head from his most recent jumper pack adventure.

“That’s sir terrible to you, soldier.” Cready managed a weary smile. But the point reminded him. “Jumper packs off. I don’t want any chance of suddenly exploding or attempting to fly under a mountain of rock,” he said, showing the two others where he had found the controls of the suit, and the large deactivation button. As soon as each of them had pressed it, there was a clicking sound and a whining as the magnet locks decoupled, the belt unclicked, and the rocket-propelled packs landed to the sand with heavy thuds behind them.

“That’s better.” Solomon rolled his shoulders and pointed at the crate. “You recognize these?”

“Of course,” Kol stated, looking from his own gun to the one below. “I thought they were military issue only?”

Yeah, so did I, Solomon thought, nodding to the inside of the cave and pointedly not telling them what he was actually starting to think. That maybe this entire Hellas Chasma mission was something cooked up by the Confederacy to see how good they were…or weren’t.

“Come on, follow me,” he said, turning and raising his own weapon as he stepped into the gloom.

“AIIII!” Someone jumped out at him.

“Frack!”

“—stars!”

The adjunct-Marines shouted in surprise as a shadowed form leaped toward Solomon, sweeping toward them what looked to be a long weapon—

A sword? Solomon dropped to one knee and raised his nearest arm, feeling the grating jar as the blade contacted with his greaves and skittered off his power gauntlet. It still hurt terribly, though.

“Agh!” he hissed in pain.

“Get back!” Karamov was shouting, as beside him, Kol apparently wasted no time at all in snapping up his own Jackhammer and firing it.

No! Solomon even had a split-second to think when he saw the muzzle flash of Kol’s weapon. He wanted this attacker alive, to see who it was. To demand why they had Confederate Marine weapons.

BRAP-PAP! The shots, however, did the deadly job that they were designed to do, and Solomon heard an agonized gurgle as their ambusher was thrown back against the opposing wall, to slide to the floor, dead.

Dammit! Solomon thought, but didn’t say. Kol hadn’t known any better. He hadn’t given the orders, which he did so now.

“Nice shooting, Kol. Quick. But I want to try and incapacitate from now on. Legs, arms. We need to bring them in for questioning,” he said, and Kol’s body inside the light tactical suit straightened a little as if he had been slapped.

Wonderful, Solomon thought. I’ve already managed to lose one of my squad, and the other two might really be dead as well, and now I’ve insulted one of my few remaining soldiers!

But he didn’t have time to spare the feelings of Kol, or anyone else. This was no longer a recuse mission. This was a battle.

“That’s an order, Kol,” Cready said as sternly as he could muster, earning a perfunctory nod from the sharpshooting adjunct-Marine.

“Aye, Commander,” Kol’s voice stated in a thick manner.

Whatever, Solomon thought. We can work it out later. Not now. Instead, he crossed over the small entrance cavern, past other stacked equipment crates looking suspiciously like the two outside, and to the body of the man who had tried to chop his head off.

Ill-prepared, was Specialist Commander Solomon’s first thought. Which was strange, given the high caliber of military armaments that they had available to them.

Cheap encounter suit. He looked at the drab tan-colored two-piece suit with its rather basic seals and close-fitting helmet-visor. It had a basic sort of cross harness over the chest, but no body armor on at all. In fact, it looks a little like… “A work suit?” he murmured.

“What’s that, Commander?” Karamov asked.

“This suit, it’s not military, and it’s not industrial. If anything, I’d say…” Solomon took a step closer, although he really didn’t want to, given the state of the deceased, and saw that yes, there on the shoulder was a padded shape that looked as though a patch had been ripped off and re-sewn. But the general shape could still be made out. A round shape with a line spearing straight down from it.

In fact, doesn’t that look a little like….

“Mars Construction,” Kol surprised him by saying. “Mars’s Logo is the red planet with a sword running down it. My uncle is in Mars Construction, working on habitat construction.”

Huh, Solomon thought. The man himself had been fairly stocky, with broad shoulders; he had filled out the suit well. “So, either we’re dealing with disaffected workers, or people who have stolen Mars Construction uniforms.” And who have access to military-grade equipment…

“Commander-sir!” His suit communicator came to life. It was Jezzie. Thank the stars, he found himself thinking instinctively. He had been worried that something might have happened to her.

“You secure? Malady?” he asked quickly.

“Well, it’s still a firefight out here, so I wouldn’t exactly say secure, but you should know that we’re at the crash site, and the X23 is a personal transport ship,” she said, her voice tense.

“So?”

“Malady says that it’s got Department ID numbers,” she reported, and Solomon guessed that she meant Department of Justice and Defense. “He says that it’s an ambassadorial transporter.”

“Oh, frack,” Solomon breathed. That would explain the sudden scramble to get them out here, and perhaps even why the Confederate Marines had sent in the Outcasts, an as-yet unknown, under-the-radar expeditionary group. If anything went wrong, they might be able to deny that it ever happened.

“So, where’s the ambassador?” Solomon asked.

“That’s the whole problem, Sol. The ship was shot down by something heavier than the personal rifles the enemy is using. Blew a hole through the fuselage and brought it down here. There’s no sign of any bodies in the wreckage, and the survival pod is gone.”

“Wonderful,” Cready growled. “The ambassador must have ejected at the last moment.” So they could still be out there, he thought. Or captured. “Okay, thanks. If there’s nothing else that you can do out there, come join us in the cave complex. We’re going to clear it and see if we can find this missing ambassador.”

“Sir? I think I saw something,” Karamov reported. The slightly taller and thinner non-specialist—Solomon was starting to be able to differentiate Karamov and Kol behind their light tactical suits—had moved to the end of the cave where another passageway opened up, heading upward into the cliff. It wasn’t dark, however, as numerous wind-sculpted holes had been bored through the cliff walls to light the passageway in a reddish Martian glow.

“Make it quick, Wen,” Solomon whispered, turning to hurry to Karamov’s side, crouching by the passageway. The distant sound of whumps and thumps could be heard from outside as the battle raged on, but Solomon could tell that they were becoming more sporadic. “What is it?” Solomon sighted down his Jackhammer into the ruddy passageway.

“I don’t know, I thought I saw a movement. A shadow cutting across one of those side passages.” Karamov indicated where a number of other openings ventured further into the cliffs.

What I wouldn’t give for some flash grenades, Solomon thought, knowing that he could just throw them down there and clear the area. Oh yeah, but I’m in a cave, he reminded himself. He’d probably end up bringing the whole thing down on himself. Okay, scratch that idea. We’ll just have to do this the old-fashioned way.

“Cover me.” He nodded at Karamov and Kol, who crouched on either side of the passageway, as he slipped forward at a low, hunched crab-walk.

From his left, shafts of reddish Martian sunlight cut across his shoulder and suit as he approached the darker openings on his right.

What’s the protocol? He could hear his heart thumping, the blood pounding in his ears. He couldn’t remember as he crouched by the first opening, wondering whether he should just jump around the corner with his rifle blazing or whether he should try to peek first.

A Marine would jump and shoot, he thought, but the other part of him—the criminal—knew that he would never willingly give his position away like that.

It is all a puzzle, he reminded himself. In fact, it was the sort of puzzle that he had played before, wasn’t it? There had been many times when he had to hide at the edge of corridors, waiting for security personnel to leave a room. What had he done back then?

Mirrors. Which was something that the Confederate Marines hadn’t thought to give them, of course, but that didn’t mean that Solomon didn’t have any reflective surfaces on him.

He angled his suit’s helmet just slightly, so that the shaft of ruddy Martian sunlight caught it, turning the outer edge of his face visor into a sort of reflective surface. He waited, breathing out, making small and minute movements with his head until he could get a picture of what was inside.

The opening went to a simple short passageway, inside of which was a larger cavern, and a low red LED light. They probably use red to match the Martian light, he thought. He could see the sharper edges of more crates in there, stacked next to each other. They have some very wealthy friends, Solomon thought. If that was all military equipment, that was.

He thought he saw a movement in the gloom. A shape? Two shapes?

ALL UNITS! MISSION PARAMETERS UPDATE!

The words scrolled across the interior of his screen, obscuring the faint reflection.

Dammit! Not now! He could have cursed, easing back around the edge of the wall. Whomever was in there must know that they had entered their hideout, Solomon thought, thanks to Kol shooting that first attacker. They probably thought that they could just hide.

Mission ID: Hellas Chasma Successful!

All Mission Parameters Met.

Immediate Return to Hellas Plain for Pickup.

No… Solomon gritted his teeth. Whatever the Rapid Response mainframe must have been thinking, they couldn’t know that there were still some of the enemy combatants hiding out here. If they left now, then Solomon assumed that they would just rebuild and re-equip, especially with all of that hefty military equipment they had lying about.

“Commander?” It was Kol’s nervous voice in his ear. “What do you want us to do?”

“The job’s not over yet,” he whispered, hoping that his voice was only carrying inside of his suit, and not out of it.

“But the orders, sir,” Kol repeated.

“Technically, Commander,” this came from Malady, speaking over their shared squad channel, “our mission parameters were to locate the crashed X23 craft, which we did.”

Trust Malady to think in such functional ways, Solomon thought. He was part machine, and worse still, he had been a full Marine at one point, following his orders all the way down to his metal bones inside of his shell.

“But the ambassador is clearly missing,” he whispered back. “You said so yourself.”

“Not our concern, Commander.” Malady appeared to be arguing with him. “The Fleet might have already located her, or there might be another team marked with her retrieval. We have fulfilled our mission.”

“But…” Solomon could have growled back at him, if he wasn’t so intent on being quiet.

Which was just about when he heard a scrape from behind him, coming from the moody red-lit room.

“Did the order go out?” His suit audio amplifiers picked up the muttered voices.

“Yes. They’ll leave you alone. We have her. They shouldn’t be any more trouble,” answered another mumbling voice, but this second sounded strange to Solomon’s ears. Not quite human, modulated by electronics. Like Malady. Or it could have been a screen that the figure inside was talking to.

They have her. Solomon tried to decode the message behind their words. They had to be talking about the ambassador, right? Someone shot down her ship and then what? They kidnapped her?

And ‘the order’ had gone out, meaning that they would be left alone. But which order? From whom?

There was only one order that Solomon thought it could possibly be. The Marine mission parameters, he thought. Whoever these fighters were, they had access to Marine equipment, and it appeared that they also had an ear on the Fleet’s communications.

“Commander, we’d better go…” Kol said, a little nervously.

Solomon breathed shallowly, wondering what to do. The Fleet must not know that the fighters were listening in on them. They must think that all the fighters are dead. And I’ve got no way of telling them, he thought, caught between doing his job and doing his duty.

If I disobeyed this command, then they’ll demote me just as soon as look at me, wouldn’t they? he thought. Or worse, ship me off to Titan…

“Calm yourself, Oortje,” the strangely electronic voice murmured again behind Solomon. “The war is inevitable now. Yes, we had to make a show of it. There had to be losses on both sides. That will give both the Confederacy and the separatists something to fight for. And the death of the ambassador will surely…” the rest descended into mumbling, so that even Solomon’s delicate helmet sensors couldn’t pick it up.

Separatists. That’s who these people we’re fighting are, he thought. That made sense. All the colonies had some form of independence, freedom-fighter, breakaway group, but Mars was always the most vocal and the most prolific. Solomon wondered if it was Mars’s warlike reputation that made its colonials so bloodthirsty.

“Hmkhr!” Suddenly a different sound came from behind Solomon in the room. A woman’s voice, muffled and strangled, as though she were either ill or bound or in pain.

The ambassador! It had to be her! Solomon was already half-rising from his crouch.

“Commander!” It was Karamov over his suit communicator. “I’m not getting shipped to Titan for this!” he said tersely.

Maybe Malady is right, Solomon thought. Maybe he should just accept the fact that he was a part of a larger mission, a larger force even, that he had to trust that the Marines knew that the ambassador was in there, and that they had a plan.

Trust? The thought stuck in his gullet. How could he trust the Confederate Marines? He had been forced into this life, hadn’t he?

No, I chose it, he argued with himself. Sp. Commander Cready, it read on his internal display. That was what he was now. And even though he couldn’t see it, he swore that he could feel the weight of that tiny magnet-linked gold star that sat on the shoulder pad of his suit. He might not have had much choice when it came to picking either dying on some frozen moon or spending the next twelve years fighting the Confederacy’s wars, but they—the Marine colonels had, anyway—had seen something in him. They had trusted him and his abilities.

That had to mean something, didn’t it?

Solomon couldn’t remember the last time that someone had trusted him. Really trusted him. That would have been Matty. And look how that had turned out…

“Someone’s sold us out,” Solomon muttered to himself, crouching behind the large steel refuse bins of Neon Vespers. He was tired, scared, and bloody. His shirt was torn, and he was sure that he would have to stop to look at the wound seeping blood down his leg before too long. He still held the heavy pistol in both hands in front of him as he tried to slow his panting.

They had waited about half an hour inside that elite restaurant to see the mysterious Miss Cheung before the shots had started flying.

Miss Cheung had been Matty’s contact. A woman that he had said had an ear in every office in New Kowloon, and had most of the Shanghai Departmental Authorities either owing her money or favors. She was the intelligence fixer par excellence in New Kowloon, and she would know why some deep-state surveillance program had targeted Solomon, Matty had said.

Solomon didn’t doubt it. Miss Cheung had been one of those small, older women that he often saw around there, usually sitting at the backs of sushi bars or laundromats, calmly knitting or playing backgammon, but to whom everyone paid respect. She was old school, he could tell. One of the uniquely New Kowloon matriarchs who ran their little empires with an iron fist and an even sharper tongue.

“Ah. Solomon Cready.” She had recognized him as soon as he and Matthias had walked in, the door warden ushering them to a small booth at the back of the not-very-crowded, dimly-lit restaurant. A tray of traditional tea was set on their table, along with a selection of sweet dumplings, steaming and looking delicious—not that Solomon had any appetite. It seemed to be a mere formality, either way, as Miss Cheung also did not make any attempt to either pour tea or eat.

“You are here about your little problem, I take it?” she had said, after a few moments of unnerving silence.

Solomon had nodded, saying he didn’t think that he was worth the effort.

“Oh, but you are Solomon Cready, you are.” Miss Cheung’s eyes had glittered with mirth at a joke that she did not share. “You have no idea just how valuable you are to a lot of people, Mr. Cready.”

But why? He was just one more criminal in a ghetto full of them! Just another gaijin white guy stumbling through the Asian-Pacific Partnership. This and more were all things that he had pointed out, and all he had gotten in response had been polite smiles and that mischievous look on the part of Miss Cheung.

Solomon, always one with a temper, had started to get annoyed. “Tell me what I did. Who I owe. Who wants me. What can I do to get them off my back!?”

“Nothing,” Miss Cheung said, finally stretching forward to start pouring some bitter-smelling tea into two cups. “This tea is a hundred years old. Aged and stored and incredibly expensive.” She had seemed to miss the point of their meeting, Solomon had thought. “It is a recipe of unique ingredients that go right back to the Han Dynasty, and the Court of the Emperor himself. Do take a cup.”

“I don’t want your tea!” Solomon had snapped, but his temper did nothing but increase Miss Cheung’s mirth.

“Always such a temper. It is amazing that you ever became such a careful thief, Mr. Cready, with a temper like that,” she observed lightly, and just when Solomon was about to show her just how much of a temper he really had, she interrupted him.

“This is a lesson, Mr. Cready. Think about it. This tea is very rare, and very old. Its precise ingredients and methods of preparation are passed down from tea master to student for generations. Every cup of tea is like a scientific operation, one that can produce vastly different results. Yet the tea master’s endeavor to always preserve the original. Quite astounding, don’t you think?”

Solomon had no idea what she was talking about, and told her so, quite bluntly.

“The tea is not responsible for what it is, what its history is, or what results it will have in the person drinking it,” she stated quite happily, adding some water to her cup and stirring it lightly, before taking one, two, and then a third sip. “And yet, it is still valuable to many people.” She fixed a look at him over her cup. “This tea is like you, Mr. Solomon Cready. You have done nothing to deserve your fate, and yet there it is all the same. Now, answer this: WHY is the tea valuable, and expensive? What has this cup, and these leaves, ever done to be worthy of that?”

“Riddles and games.” Solomon shook his head.

“Not at all, Mr. Cready. The truth is right there, if you will but look,” she said in her quixotic way. When Solomon just looked confused, Miss Cheung gave a small sigh and set her cup down.

“Think about it like this, Mr. Cready. How many years have you been in New Kowloon? When did you first arrive?”

Solomon thought. He was nearing the back end of his twenties, and he had fled the American Confederacy when he was near the back end of his teens. Too many bridges had been burned, and he had been suspected or outright wanted in several high-profile heists. The only answer had been to pack up his ill-gotten gains and get a ticket to the Asian-Pacific Partnership, and then sneak into the most deregulated and still-wild community of New Kowloon.

“Ten years, give or take,” he said.

“And hasn’t your time here been profitable?” Miss Cheung nodded.

Solomon had to agree. He had done very well for himself. While he might have suggested that he was just some ‘stumbling gaijin’ in a foreign land, prone to misunderstandings and mistakes, the truth was almost precisely the opposite. He was one of the best thieves in town.

“Isn’t it true, Mr. Cready, that you have ALWAYS had employment here. That even when a deal has gone sour, another, better opportunity has arisen? Don’t you find your apparent luck, and your opportunities, quite frankly incredible?” Miss Cheung had said.

Solomon was about to thank her very much for the compliment, but he knew that wasn’t what she meant. “You mean to say that someone has been looking out for me? Keeping an eye on me all this time?” he’d stated, earning a nod from Miss Cheung.

But who? Who cared at all about a lowlife like him? It was so maddening to talk in riddles, and Solomon just wanted a straight answer.

“The tea, Mr. Cready—” Miss Cheung tapped her cup. “—is valuable because of its formula. Its history. What it contains, even though it is entirely unaware of it. Just like you.”

What?

At that moment, Matty had excused himself to go to the bar. Solomon thought that perhaps his friend was trying to give Miss Cheung the illusion that she could speak in private to him.

“You are a very rare individual, Mr Cready—” Miss Cheung had started to say, just when the windows had burst apart under the hail of bullets.

Solomon had gone from confused and angry to panicked and angry in a heartbeat. Chaos reigned supreme as people screamed, and plaster burst from the walls. Blood was in the air, as was the smell of gunpowder and smoke. Whomever was shooting at them wasn’t using just the light gangbanger pistols that the kids used on their drone-scooters every night. These were high-powered, high-intensity rounds, Solomon knew. His ten years had afforded him quite a lot of experience, after all. Miss Cheung had definitely been right about that, at least.

“Get down! Get down!” He had been shouting at Matty, but his friend was already on the other side of the room, disappearing through the kitchen door.

That hurt for a second, that Matty—the guy that he had known for longer than he had been in New Kowloon—wouldn’t have waited for him, but he knew that it was also the sensible thing to do. No need for both of them to die here.

Miss Cheung was gone. Dead or whisked away to her own hiding place, he didn’t know. Still the shots were coming in thick and fast. There was no call of Enforcer action. No floodlights or mecha-hounds.

Solomon got the uncomfortable feeling it was something to do with the government surveillance chip that he had found in his apartment.

Whatever. Survive first, ask questions later…

And that was how he came to be crouching against the refuse bin at the back of Neon Vespers, panting and gasping and wondering where Matty had got to. He should be out here, shouldn’t he? Solomon had managed to crouch-run through the kitchen just as Matty had done, and he hadn’t seen his body or any other ways out.

Matty had run, Solomon thought. He had left him in there, which wasn’t like his friend. Matty might be a charmer, and he might be a bit obnoxious, but he was no coward. He was loyal.

But Matty had gotten up to go to the bar a minute before the shooting had started, Solomon’s cynical, puzzle-solving mind had told him.

And how did anyone know that he would be there? That he would be having a meeting…

Crouching beside the bin, Solomon’s heart thumped, and he felt like he was going to be sick. It couldn’t be true, could it? The whole world stopped for just a moment. He had always lived by the rule that you couldn’t trust anyone in this business, but he had thought that there was one person that he could trust: Matthias Sozer.

Had Matty sold him out?

You can’t trust anyone. Solomon’s jaw tightened. Petchel had died because of this mission—not that he had known the adjunct-Marine for long, but the man had put his faith in him as the commanding officer to keep him safe and look what had happened.

His death is on my hands, just like Matty’s is, despite everything. Solomon made up his mind.

“Sod the orders. I’m finishing this mission,” Solomon hissed, working quickly.

“What!?” Kol was saying.

“Commander, we did good today. Don’t throw that away!” Karamov agreed.

Don’t throw Petchel’s life away, you should be thinking. Solomon rolled his eyes and thought about what he could do. He had his Jackhammer rifle and a knife. He couldn’t sneak down the passageway because they would be sure to see him. They would either shoot him or kill the ambassador before he got there—or both. He needed a distraction.

But I don’t have anything! He could have cried out. All he had was his suit…

Unless…

It was a crazy idea, but that seemed to be the only sort that Solomon had left. These light tactical suits have four hours of oxygen in their tanks, don’t they? And the tanks were set up as tubes that ran through the jacket harness….

Moving quickly and as silently as he dared, he unclipped the jacket harness and shrugged it off. He instantly felt a lot lighter, but also a lot more exposed.

Warning! Light Tactical Suit Compromised! Unable to Read Sensors!

His helmet visor blared the warning at him, which Solomon thought was a little silly.

“Yeah, I know the suit is compromised,” he grumbled. The oxygen filter was in the helmet, and it could replace and restore his oxygen for approximately one hour. That should be enough time, shouldn’t it?

“Commander! What are you doing?” That came from Malady, but Solomon ignored him as he took a deep breath, trying not to think about the fact that he only had fifty or so minutes left of oxygen. He moved out.

He rolled his shoulder around the passageway opening, flinging the jacket harness with one hand as he raised the Jackhammer rifle with the other and fired.

What was the armor plating integrity down to? Solomon panicked, and wished that he had checked before he had decoupled the harness. Too late now. Was it low enough that his Jackhammer could burst the hardened steel and mesh shells to rupture the oxygen tanks beneath?

BRAT-TAT-TAT-TAT!

His gun jumped in his own hand, sending sparks across the passageway as the bullets hit the harness. Luckily for Solomon, he had fallen from a great height not only once but twice while wearing that thing so yes, a close-range, high-powered military rifle was enough to get past the metal plating—

PHSSSSSSS!

Plumes of white steam suddenly erupted into the passageway, filling it in a second as the pressurized liquid oxygen reacted with the thin Martian atmosphere. Solomon only had a moment before it evaporated, but a moment was all he needed.

“What the—” he heard someone shouting as he jumped up, charging through the smokescreen that he had created, and pounced into the room.

Expecting to see two people and the ambassador, he only saw a blank wall.

No, not blank. Solomon saw a sparkling light fading and realized that at the base of the wall was a hologram generator, precisely the same sort that he would expect to see almost anywhere in the Confederacy. The lights had been the form of a man, a man in a dark uniform—with brighter hair perhaps—who dissipated into shards of fading light.

No time to worry about that. There were two people in here, and only one of them was standing. He was stocky, dressed in the same tan and ochre work suit of Mars Construction, but Solomon could tell that the man was clearly the leader of their little group of separatists. For one, he had a lot more weaponry on him—a Jackhammer rifle in his hands and heavy pistols strapped to the front of his own harness and at his hip.

The other occupant of the room had to be the ambassador. She was in a simple emergency encounter suit, the sort you have to don if you are traveling interstellar or orbital ships with minimal safety procedures, but her suit white and sky blue, the colors of the Confederacy Diplomatic Corps. She was also trussed with heavy poly-fiber straps that crossed her arms, waist, legs, and ankles. The separatists had even gone so far as to wind some of the straps around her helmet visor so that when she shrieked in alarm, it came out just like a muffled groan.

Solomon swung his own Jackhammer around, but the separatist leader was too close, and too fast, flinging his own rifle up, and Solomon saw that he had modified his by adding a heavy combat blade to the barrel.

“Frack!” There was a clang as the separatist brushed aside Solomon’s rifle, instead turning his back towards Solomon’s unprotected body.

Oh no you don’t. Solomon had a lifetime of making crazy, reckless choices, because he knew precisely that sometimes, it was only the reckless choices that got you free. He let go of his own rifle instead of trying to sweep it back around to a firing position, seizing the man’s rifle instead.

BRAT-ATAT-TAT-TAT! The leader’s gun fired, and Solomon was sure that he would feel his legs or his chest being blown out from underneath him.

But no, he had managed to turn the barrel of the gun between them as they wrestled.

The separatist was strong, stronger than Solomon was, for sure. Fortunately, though, Solomon had Marine training, and three months or more of sparring practice, every day, day in and day out.

Solomon knew that the instinctive reaction when someone tried to wrestle a weapon from your hands was to pull it back or shove them away. Solomon pulled on the gun as the separatist easily pulled back, and then, when the separatist leader pushed out with all of his considerable strength to try and throw Solomon, the specialist commander pulled instead of pushed.

The leader came flying forward as Solomon turned a shoulder and dropped a hip, and the man neatly tumbled over him in a near somersault that spun him through the air to come crashing down on the floor—

“Gurr!” the man suddenly cried out in pain, and Solomon saw that, as they had twisted and Solomon held onto the rifle, it had reversed grip and, when the man had slammed into the floor, his own knife modification had slammed into his own encounter suit, right above where his heart was.

“Ach…” Solomon panted in shock for a moment, seeing the separatist leader’s body shake, then go still.

It was over. He had saved the ambassador. He, Solomon Cready, Specialist Commander of the Outcasts, had done it.

Epilogue: Ganymede, 2205

“Blatant disregard of mission parameters,” Warden Coates stated tersely, almost spitting as he stalked in front of where Solomon stood at attention, in one of the smaller audience halls aboard the Ganymede Marine Base.

Solomon had been summoned to this meeting as soon as the adjunct-Marines had returned from their Hellas Chasma mission on Mars, after they had attended the grim and austere Ceremony of Remembrance, where the names of those lost were read out as rockets were fired for each of the fallen.

Despite their apparent victory, it was still with a muted, somber air that the remaining Outcasts had returned to Ganymede. They had lost five of their number, and a further three were injured seriously enough to drop out of training. Solomon actually felt sorrier for those injured, as they would probably be sent off to Titan to do what menial work they could from their hospital beds.

After the ceremony, instead of being rewarded a very rare free period of rest and relaxation before bed, Solomon had been summoned to Warden Coates’s observation lounge—a round room with a domed ceiling that afforded a breathtaking view of the stars and Jupiter outside.

Where Solomon’s fate was to be decided—only luckily, not by Warden Coates alone. There also stood in the room Doctor Palinov, as well as Colonels Asquew and Madavi.

“The mission was cancelled, and he continued to fight, putting himself and his squad at risk. We can’t have that!” Warden Coates argued. “And one of his squad died! Adjunct-Marine Petchel!”

Solomon held his breath. There was that. Of the two charges against him, that was the only one that he cared about.

“He should be deported to continue his convict sentence immediately!” Warden Coates ended on a victorious note.

Solomon thought that all of this was a bit of a formality. Of course the warden was going to exile him from Ganymede. He had been waiting for an opportunity to do that ever since he had gotten there.

“Enough, Warden Coates,” Colonel Asquew said, frowning deeply. “Insubordination, and the inability to follow mission parameters, is a very worrying trait. It shows a degree of arrogance, and…a lack of trust,” the colonel said piercingly.

And she’s got me there, alright, Solomon thought.

“Doctor Palinov, what is your assessment?” Asquew said suddenly, surprising Solomon. What does the doctor have to do with anything?

“Physically, his test results are all within acceptable ranges. No major injuries that would warrant decommissioning him,” she read from a thin data-pad. “But then again, nothing to particularly recommend keeping him, either,” she offered.

Warden Coates’s face lit up in glee.

“However, it is his psychomotor test results that are truly…abnormal,” she said. “His ability to learn and pick up new skills is one of the best that I have ever seen, and his mental agility, as shown through the Oracle virtual tests—”

Those jigsaw shapes! Solomon remembered his many hours spent in the study lounge. I knew it!

“—is also phenomenal. For these reasons alone, I would recommend retaining him,” Doctor Palinov said.

“But he disobeyed orders!” Warden Coates burst out. “It doesn’t matter if he’s a superman if he can’t follow orders!”

“There is a difference, Warden Coates,” Madavi stated heavily, “between orders and principles, as I know that you are well aware. Whilst this man might have a long history of, uh, shall we say difficulty with orders, we can certainly say that he followed the principles of the Marine Code by continuing to pursue his goal and to rescue the Ambassador to Mars, even on his own.”

The warden’s face glowered at the rebuke, but he lowered his head.

“Then we are in agreement, it seems,” Asquew stated flatly. “Madavi and Palinov rule to retain Specialist Commander Cready as an Adjunct-Marine of the Outcasts, and Warden Coates, I presume, votes against?”

“I do.” The warden shot Cready a venomous look.

“Then it is decided. Two votes against one. Incidentally, I happen to side with my colleague Madavi.” Asquew nodded, then turned to address Solomon directly.

“You may remain here on Ganymede, amongst the Outcasts, Specialist Commander. You will continue to train and work until we feel that you are ready to become a full Marine. I have to warn you, though, that further disrespect of your mission parameters will not be met so leniently, no matter what your physical and mental competencies are. Understood?”

Solomon nodded that he did indeed understand. He felt something strange kindle in his chest.

It was pride.

The Kepler Rescue

Outcast Marines, Book 2

1

Break and Enter

“Gold Squad, go!” the electronically-filtered voice of Warden Coates barked in Specialist Commander Cready’s helmet, and the young man was already moving by the time the fuzz of static clicked off. His heavy combat boots—sheaths of hardened poly-fiber over rubber and mesh—hit the metal gantry, powering him towards the stars.

Cready didn’t waste time checking in with his squad members behind him to see if they had copied the order. By now, he knew that if any of the four adjunct-Marines had a problem, they would be sure to tell him.

There were perks to being the most-hated squad in the Outcast training program, he had a brief moment to think, as the cream and gray surface of Ganymede, shot through with pink striations, appeared underneath the roof of cold stars. We do things our own way. Argumentative, tough, difficult at times, but we stand together against all the others.

Behind him ran Jezebel Wen—or Combat Specialist Jezzie, as the Japanese Outcast and former Yakuza hitwoman was called. She wouldn’t take fools gladly and was just as likely to tell her commander to frack off as to obey an order if she thought there was something wrong with it.

Then came the heavy, full tactical golem named Malady. Built like a walking tank, with heavy domed shoulders and fully-automated limbs, somewhere inside of that suit—but only visible as a sleeping, cadaverous ghost behind the faceplate—was a human being, once a full Marine before he had been busted down to adjunct status for assaulting a superior officer. Another one who was roundly distrusted by the rest of the Outcasts and had nothing to prove to anyone.

Finally came Karamov and Kol, one slightly smaller than the other—and Cready would have had a hard time telling them apart in their suits if it weren’t for the holographic identifiers that flared in his visor every time he looked at another member of his squad. Both had a chip on their shoulder. Solomon had been worried that at least part of their obtuse nature was the fact that they had been assigned to Gold Squad in the first place—the squad that managed to get itself disqualified in a training exercise but had also managed to save the Confederate Ambassador to the Mars colony, but only by disobeying mission parameters.

Then again, both Karamov and Kol always obeyed Cready’s orders, so maybe they liked being part of the outcasts of the Outcasts.

It had been three long, arduous months at Ganymede since the Hellas Mission on Mars. Three months of grueling days stacked one on top of another. Two hours of physical training, followed by mealtime and study hall sitting in front of computer terminals powered by the Oracle mainframe, performing mental puzzles or learning Marine history, science, or flight procedures. After that came the specialist classes for those that were ‘lucky’ enough to be awarded them. Solomon was a specialist commander so he and a handful of others would be led to more computer terminals to replay and re-enact holographic battles, while Combat Specialist Wen went to the sparring circles, and so on. After that came more food, more weapons training and finally gymnasium work before crashing out to bed. It was a devastating regimen, and one which several other adjunct-Marines had already flunked.

Break your ankle in sparring? Flunked and sent to mine ice on Titan.

Bust a rib? Flunked and sent to mine ice on Titan.

Get into an argument with the warden? Have a nervous collapse? Flunked and… Everyone got the idea of what was expected of them now—which was everything.

The Outcasts were an experimental crew of ex-cons, affiliated to the Rapid Response Fleet of the Confederate Marines, training to be sent into all the dangerous, awkward situations where the Department of Justice might not want to send fully-trained, and very expensive full Marines. Not one of the sixty or so Outcasts left had any chance to argue their case. The choice was simple: Fight for the Confederacy or work out your sentence on the surface of distant Titan, probably dying miserable and freezing.

But the Outcasts had won a recent victory. Their first ‘away’ mission on Mars had neutralized the Martian Separatists. More importantly, the newswires hadn’t picked up on the distant gun battle on the red sands. So, they had performed perfectly according to parameters, as their superiors might say. Not that their training supervisor, Warden Coates, had spared them any time to celebrate their success.

Partial success, Cready had thought. There was still the question of how the Martian Separatists had gotten access to Confederacy military-grade hardware, and how they had managed to hack into the Confederacy communications systems, which presumably should have been the best encrypted information systems available to humanity…

Not that any of that was important right now, of course, as Solomon’s boot hit the end of the gantry and he jumped!

LIGHT TACTICAL SUIT: Active.

USER ID: Solomon CR.

BIO-SIGNATURE: Good.

SQUAD IDENTIFIER: Gold.

SQUAD TELEMETRIES: Active

Solomon’s vision was filled with the flaring neon holographic readout on the inside of his visor plate as his legs started to cartwheel through the near vacuum of Ganymede. He was twenty meters above the surface, jumping from one of the tall towers that stuck out of the side of Ganymede Marine Training Station. On either side of him, other specialist commanders were similarly scissor-kicking their legs as they leapt into the eternal night, trying not to think about what might happen if their light tactical suit malfunctioned, or any host of other things went wrong.

Training Mission ID: Break And Enter (Intermediate Level).

Strike Group ID: Outcast, Adj. Marine.

Parent Fleet ID: Rapid Response 2, Confederate Marine Corps.

Squad Commanders: Cready (Gold), Hitchin (Silver), Gorlais (Bronze), Hu (Red), Nndebi (Blue), Walters (Green).

GROUP-WIDE ORDERS:

Achieve Entry to Enemy Station.

Neutralize Enemy Markers.

Locate and Activate the Distress Sonar

This wasn’t the sort of training mission that Cready or any of the others were used to. So far during their time here, they had been performing training exercises every two or three days, which might include defending a location against holographic—or mecha and drone—enemies, or it might be just a race across Ganymede’s low-gravity, strange terrain.

Those previous training missions were difficult, of course, and taxing, but at least Cready hadn’t had to worry about being attacked by his own side. This mission was different, as each squad was allowed to shoot, grapple, wrestle, or generally make the lives of every other squad as difficult as possible.

Thank the stars they haven’t given us our Jackhammer rifles for this one. Cready knew at least one other adjunct-Marine who would happily fill him full of high-powered rocket shells as soon as he got the chance.

Arlo Menier. Even thinking about the man seemed to summon him, as Cready saw a large shape fling itself from one of the nearby towers—easily the largest of the Outcasts apart from Malady. It had to be Regular Menier, a balding Frenchman who claimed to have killed seven people and who blamed Cready for personally destroying his chances at being awarded a command specialism.

The man was leaping from the Blue Squad’s tower, and so should have been following his own Specialist Commander Nndebi to the surface of Ganymede below, but instead, he had angled his jump so that he shot out across the surface of the planet in a wide arc, heading straight for Cready.

Whumpf!

As delicate as Ganymede’s gravity well was, Jupiter’s largest moon was also the largest moon in the entire human solar system, and so even had a thin envelope of misty atmosphere. If Earth’s own Moon could exert such an influence on Earth’s oceans, then it stood to reason that Ganymede would still hurt when you jump off a twenty-meter-tall tower and expected your light tactical suit to suck up the shock.

“Argh!” Cready grunted in pain as his calves and knees jolted, and he immediately flipped his torso over into a roll to try and negate some of the downward force. He had no idea what the sense of this part of the training mission was—to get used to low-gravity environments? To see how far intricate joint suspensor units on his ankle, knees, and hips could withstand the impact?

WARNING! SUIT IMPACT DETECTED!

Armor Plating: Uncompromised.

Joint Suspensor Systems: Refilling…

Well, the suit can take the pummeling, Solomon thought as he sailed through the air, curling up on himself like a human beachball before bouncing on the low-gravity surface of Ganymede again, and again. His body shook, his jaw and neck ached with the vibrations, but his suit wasn’t compromised, and he thought that he would probably get away with just some heavy bruising.

More heavy bruising, he thought that he should say, as of late, his entire body had never stopped being a mosaic pattern of scrapes and lurid pigments. The only thing that did change was their location, as the light injuries rose and faded across his body in slow-motion, like the colors of a Martian sky.

Behind Solomon came the explosion plumes as Gold Squad, and the other squads beyond that, similarly landed and rolled. Some opted to bounce as he did, while others straightened out into a dive, trusting that the ice, grit, and dust would act as a break against their outstretched arms.

But Solomon skidded to a halt and coughed, lying for a moment looking up at the very faint diaspora of stars above him, next to the baleful dome of Jupiter itself.

Twelve years, he thought as his head finally stopped spinning. Or, in fact, 11 years, 5 months and three days left… That was his sentence with the Outcasts, after which he would once again be a free man.

If he survived that long.

WHUMPF! The ground shook and the outside of his faceplate was covered with a heavy layer of dust as something much larger than him landed from the tower.

Arlo! Cready rolled instinctively to one side, but the metal gauntlet that seized him was unstoppable.

“Urk!” He was lifted bodily into the air by the one hand on his shoulders, turned around, and shoved in a direction. The only thing that stopped Cready from kicking out was the fact that the internals of his suit visor flared the friendly green triangle marker of Adj.Marine MALADY before him.

The powerful, servo-assisted legs of the Full-Tactical golem had allowed it to jump further than Jezzie, Karamov or Kol, and also had stopped it from needing to roll or dive when it hit the surface. Instead, Solomon found himself looking at a widened circle of dust and rock fragments as Malady stepped out of two gigantic foot-shaped craters.

Sometimes it paid to be a walking man-tank.

“No time to lie around, Commander.” Malady’s own voice was modulated by electronics, and Cready had no idea if it had ever been based on the man’s actual vocal chords or not, but now it always made Cready think that a computer was talking to him.

Generally, computers don’t come equipped with their own bullet-reflecting, radiation-shielding, blast-protecting power armor, though, Solomon had to think as he saw Jezz bounce-rolling behind Malady, and Karamov and Kol coming into the final parts of their dive—

Clang! Something exploded off of the back of Malady’s ‘head.’ Well, Solomon considered it to be more of a continuation of the dome-like, part-bubble that was the mecha warrior’s shoulders and head. Malady’s face plate was set below this dome, giving the impression that he had no neck.

“What was that?” Specialist Commander Cready heard his squad member grumble, clearly barely even registering the impact. It wasn’t an explosion of sparks or metal fragments, however, as might have come from some more conventional weapon, but instead, Solomon saw that it had to be a rock that had been thrown and broke apart on impact.

But who would throw rocks at us? Is this part of the training mission? Cready thought, already crouching and looking around the plain, to see the form of Arlo Menier already bouncing off towards their destination.

“Menier!” Cready growled. “That schlub. He probably meant that rock for me…” And the rock might have even been able to damage the much less armored light tactical suit that he wore!

“Ignore him. The mission objectives,” Malady said in his machine-stoic fashion as Jezebel bounded up to them, quickly followed by Karamov and Kol.

“Boss, we’re falling behind!” came the worried chatter from Kol, the younger of the two, Solomon thought.

“You’re right. On me!” Cready turned so that the glowing holographic triangle that pointed the way to the enemy station—their objective, displayed on the inside of his visor—was directly ahead of him.

He started running. Or bounding, as it happened. Running in low-gravity was actually a lot of fun, if you weren’t also trying to not break an ankle. Every ounce of pressure that you spent pushing off from the ice and grit surface rewarded you tenfold, Cready knew. With next to no air friction or gravity resistance, you could vault for meters in a single, leaping stride. A distance any human long-jumper would be envious of.

Unfortunately, however, the mass of Specialist Commander Solomon Cready, as well as the mass of the near-planetoid moon of Ganymede, were still constants, which meant they still obeyed all of the boring old Newtonian laws of impact and energy transference…

Which was another way of saying that, although it felt like they were moving in easy, slow motion, almost dreamlike, their lack of resistance meant that they could travel very fast indeed, and that when they stopped, they would be hitting the surface of a rocky world that was still far denser than their bones.

But the Outcasts had been training in low-gravity situations for a while now, and they knew not to push themselves off too strongly in their strides, or if they did, then to brace for the inevitable impact by either rolling into a ball or being prepared to combat roll as soon as they landed. It was in this manner that Cready and all the other Outcasts were now engaged in a fast, leapfrogging race across the surface of Ganymede. Some managing to maintain a steady pace, others jumping too high or too wide, or too low. Slow-motion plumes of ice and rock dust burst across the plain like it was being bombarded by meteorites. Which in a way it was, only they were human, bouncing meteorites.

Kol had been right however, and Gold Squad was already being outpaced by several of the other squads, in a forward wave that ran toward the distant digital marker over the rills and ridges of Ganymede’s surface.

“Stay on me!” Cready barked at his crew as he ran. He wasn’t like the other, more frantic squads, though. He didn’t want to scatter everyone in a desperate race to some unknown ‘enemy station’ after all. Whatever Warden Coates had cooked up for them as the next part of their training exercise, he wanted his Gold Squad together when they faced it.

Which was going to be a little harder than he had first thought, Cready realized, when the first wave of attacks from the other squads came.

2

Break or Be Broken

“Kol!” Solomon had spun mid-air in his leap—just in time to see one of his squad members now spinning head over heels through the night, having been tackled by someone from Red Squad.

Oh, so that’s how this game is played, is it? he thought as he twisted abruptly and threw out his arms, slowing his landing on the surface and converting it into a skid.

His own suit internals lit up.

WARNING! IMMINENT COLLISION INCOMING!

Solomon knew what he would have done were he on the streets of his old haunts in New Kowloon back on Earth. He would have rolled or ducked, then jabbed out with whatever weapon he might have on hand. It was like that down in one of the Earth’s largest ghettoized territories. Street-fighting was a norm, as was random death thanks to one of the many ricocheting bullets that flew like June bugs at pretty much any time.

But here on Ganymede, with a fraction of the gravity of Earth?

Solomon turned his skid into a stamp and jumped—

“—!” He couldn’t hear the attacker of course, as his suit telemetries were keyed only into the rest of Gold Squad or the Marine mainframe itself. No squad member from any of the other units could contact them—which was what Solomon preferred as a rule—but he would have liked to have heard what the surprised Blue Squad attacker had just muttered, as the man flew through the air where he had been, landing awkwardly in an explosion-spray of dust and ice fragments, as Solomon’s leap came crashing back down again.

Thump! He landed just half a meter from where his failed tackler had rolled.

It would be so easy to leap into a flying elbow. Cready had a moment to assess the tactic but decided against it. Despite the fact that this was technically a ‘friendly fire’ mission, he had no great wish to end up trading blows with any other adjunct-Marine, and instead converted his momentum into a dive, seizing the Blue Squad attacker by the leg and flinging them bodily into the air—the low gravity really helped with being able to manipulate heavy objects.

It wasn’t that Solomon had any great love for his fellow Outcasts—none of them apart from his own squad had shown any loyalty or camaraderie to him, after all—and Solomon had never been averse to putting the boot into a mugger or punk who might have tried to rob him on the derelict streets of his previous home, but…

I need to get Kol out of that wrestling match, he thought, as the Blue Squad attacker rolled and flailed through the air, to come down with a thump twenty meters away. Far enough, and hard enough, that Solomon didn’t have to worry about him for a moment.

And I want to do well on this mission, he thought. He needed to do well, more like. Warden Coates had it in for him—thanks to the details of his criminal past—and Solomon was sure he was just waiting to use any excuse from insubordination to poor performance to bust him back down to everyday convict status and ship him off to Titan.

So Specialist Commander Solomon ignored the leaping attackers from Blue, Red, and even some of the Yellows who tried to target him. Instead, he viewed his leaping bounds like a game of dare, timing his leaps so that he sailed over their heads or else safely out of the way of those who sought to pummel him into the ground.

“Sir. Tactics.” Malady’s voice sounded completely unfazed as it came over Solomon’s suit audio. Cready could see that Malady already had two different squad members clinging onto him—one on his back and the other on his leg, attempting to bring him down.

The full tactical golem was calmly ignoring them.

“Don’t get bogged down,” Solomon said to his crew. “Push and divert. Don’t end up in a wrestling match.”

“Oh,” Karamov’s voice said, worriedly. “Someone should tell Jezzie that, then.”

Oh hell. Solomon was still bounding over to where Kol was on the ground, being straddled by another adjunct-Marine and repeatedly punched in the helmet. He glanced toward Jezzie, who was surrounded by three assailants and was apparently loving the attention as she jump-kicked one in the chest, used his weight to slow her landing, then turned to attack another. Satisfied she had her situation under control, he turned his focus to Kol.

“Hey!” Solomon shouted, although that didn’t make the man attacking Kol stop. Oh yeah, he’s not on my squad frequency, so he can’t hear me…

Instead, Solomon settled for increasing the speed of his bounding leaps, straight at the man, and this time, he really did throw himself forward into an elbow barge.

You’re not supposed to kill anyone! Solomon snarled as he collided with the man high in the back, and the momentum that he had garnered sent the man cartwheeling across the surface of Ganymede as Solomon himself skidded and rolled.

“Kol? Report. You okay in there, champ?” Solomon asked as he came to a stop.

“…yeah. Just shaken like a tin of beans, sir. I’m good…” Kol wobbled to his feet as a little ways away, Jezzie sent the last of her own attackers flying.

“Right. What now, sir?” She sounded out of breath but quite happy as she bounded over.

What he had hoped not to happen had happened. “Well, it looks like we’re about the last ones to reach the enemy station objective thanks to this little diversion,” he groaned, seeing the distant forms of the other squad members disappearing over the horizon.

That was probably their plan, he realized with a flare of anger. Various members of different Outcast squads had purposefully attacked them! Which they were completely allowed to do of course, but there had been so many, and from so many different squads, that it sure looked as though they had conspired to delay and distract Cready’s Gold Squad to make sure that they finished last.

“Well, we’re not out yet,” Solomon said, nodding towards the distant ‘enemy station’ marker. “Come on. The rest of those schlubs might have got there first, but that doesn’t mean that they’re going to win!”

Gold Squad of the Outcast Marines started to bound and leap across the surface of Ganymede.

Training Mission ID: Break And Enter (Intermediate Level).

GOLD-SQUAD STATUS:

Enemy Station Reached!

We’ve never been here before, Solomon thought as his bounding steps ate up the distance to the large, holographic arrow hovering on his visor.

Over the course of the last three months, the Outcast trainees had performed many training missions outside the safer confines of the Ganymede Military Base. Sometimes even boarding a heavy-bellied transporter to carry them to some distant part of the massive moon.

So far, they had only managed to repeat the same terrain twice, and this one ahead of them was completely new.

The lines of rilled ice and rock-like frozen waves were broken abruptly by the jagged lip of a massive crater. And as Solomon and the rest of Gold Squad slowed down to crab-crawl up to the edge, they saw what must be their objective.

The crater was large, filling the foreground. It was a very old impact crater, Solomon saw, as the sides sloping inwards were smooth and not sharp or burnt.

The center of the crater was occupied by a blocky shape that stuck out at a forty-five-degree angle to the surface of the moon. It was a ship. A crashed ship, to be precise. It must have been crashed on purpose, the Gold Squad Commander thought, as the vessel looked old, and had been stripped of all available pods and quite a few doors and hull panels as well. There were great swathes of darker, corrosive metal stains that striated across the blocky framework of what remained, and Solomon wondered if that meant it had been a battleship that had long since lost its purpose.

Small, sparkling LED floodlights had been set here and there about the frame, four on the topmost end around four large octagonal holes into the ship, which Solomon figured must have once housed rocket thrusters. There were several more over different, gap-toothed openings.

Other squads were already busy climbing the structure to make their way in.

Mission Objectives Updated! Solomon’s—and everyone else’s—suits blipped as the large holographic triangle faded away on their internal visor screen and was replaced by several much smaller orange triangles, superimposed over the large hulk.

“Those must be the enemy markers,” Solomon said. Which meant that the actual object of their mission—the distress sonar—wasn’t showing up on their suit holographics. Not yet, anyway.

“But if there is any reason to this mission, then I would suggest that a distress sonar beacon would either have to be on the bridge of the ship, or…” Solomon thought.

“No. Topmost corner,” Malady intoned beside him. His mech suit did not allow a crouch at all, so he just stood on the lip of the crater like a statue.

“Huh?” Solomon asked over their squad’s suit-to-suit narrow band communications.

“I was a Marine, don’t forget. And that’s an F-Class Heavy Bomber. Nautilus, they used to call them,” Malady said, and Solomon wondered if he could detect a hint of regret in the man-golem’s voice. “Unless the warden’s had it removed, then the distress sonar should be beyond the top thruster housing and along the ridge to the outer stabilizer fin.” The big metal man inclined his body a little to indicate where he meant. It was the topmost corner of the wreck, Solomon saw, and it made sense for the distress sonar to be somewhere near the outer edges of the craft when it was in motion—less chance of interference from the ship’s own shielding if the crew needed to activate it.

“Well, I’ll take your word for it, big man.” Cready looked at the crater, the hulk, and the other squad members currently beginning their arduous climb up the side of the vessel.

What is more important, the enemy markers or the ultimate objective, which is the Distress Beacon?

“There’s no way that we can get to all the enemy markers ahead of this lot,” he mused out loud, making up his mind. “Malady? What’s your force-per-inch again?”

“I beg your pardon?”

Solomon rephrased. “Physics. Aerodynamics. Or vacuum dynamics, in our case,” he explained, asking how many pounds of pressure the large man could exert by running. As it turned out, Malady’s size meant that it was a lot.

“About five hundred pounds per inch.” The large golem paused as he calculated.

“Ah. Good, then…” Solomon ran through the numbers in his mind. One of the many things that Solomon Cready was very good at was what the Marine Corps tests called ‘agile thinking.’ It was a skill that Solomon had never really considered to be special before. He just always had an easier time than others answering the daily quizzes on the data-streams, or planning a complicated heist, or working out how to trip the safety measures on a door lock.

Or making physics calculations in his head, it seemed. “You should be able to carry me, then.” He grinned and explained his plan.

The plan, as it turned out, was a simple one. Malady was to charge at the crater wall, with Specialist Commander Cready hanging onto his large suit—everything weighs a lot less in near zero-G, after all—and then jump, while Karamov and Kol would work to climb the hulk as the other squad members were doing, and focus on tearing their rivals off the metal structure and getting to the enemy markers themselves.

It’s not much of a plan, Cready thought. But he hoped that he had covered all possible angles. Jezzie, Kol, and Karamov would neutralize what enemy markers they could, hopefully satisfying at least one part of the mission, while Cready and Malady would go for the beacon. It meant splitting their forces, but he wasn’t overly worried about that. After seeing what Combat Specialist Jezzie was capable of, he rather pitied the rival squad members out there, in fact…

“If my calculations are right,” Solomon started to say, just as Malady started his lumbering run.

“Whoa!” All thoughts of numbers and figures fled from his mind as he concentrated on holding onto the large metal golem with all of the articulated might in his power gauntlets.

The Full Tactical Outcast Marine started slowly, its large bounds looking fairly similar to that of any other leaping, non-gravity-assisted body. Then the combined mass and momentum started to build up, and Malady was hurtling along like a train had been given springs. Great clouds of dust and ice exploded from each metal foot as he ran, and the crater walls yawned high above them, and then suddenly were down at foot level as Malady kicked out from the lip of the crater.

It was the sort of jump that no mere human could ever do without some sort of rocket assist. Even the fully-qualified Marines in their power suits didn’t have the concentrated power that Malady had with his powered exoskeleton.

As the other Gold Squad members similarly leapt from the edge of the crater wall, their arcs ended fast, sending them down into the crater to bound toward the bottom of the hulk as Malady and Cready kept on soaring high through the air.

The hulk grew larger by the moment and filled Cready’s vision as he hung on for dear life. The remaining metal plates, dented and scarred, with the shadows of old military stencils still visible, were rapidly growing larger. Cready had to hope that Malady remembered some of his old Marine training, as he wasn’t sure how they were going to land.

Kerrunch!

As it turned out, the metal golem-man did have a strategy for catching hold of the metal hulk that swam toward them.

It was to punch his own metal claws through the hull.

There was an almighty shockwave that swept through Solomon’s body as they crashed bodily against the side of the upturned hulk with Malady throwing his arms out at the last minute, the heavy fists of his own power gloves—many times the size of Solomon’s—punching through the thin, desiccated metal. It was all that Solomon could do to hang on as they slid down a foot, Malady’s strength ripping the metal before finally coming to a halt, dangling over the edge of the lower booster cavity.

Holy frack, holy frack. Solomon caught a glimpse of the surface of Ganymede, some fifteen or twenty meters below. Had we really jumped that far and that high? It was pointless to suggest otherwise, as Solomon wondered what constituted a terminal fall in low gravity. Would he survive if Malady slipped and lost his grip?

Well, certainly not if Malady lands on top of me, he thought, looking for where his nearest handhold had to be.

But before he could do that, and much to his surprise, there was movement as the servo-assisted motors in Malady’s joints spun lazily, and he started to claw his way up the side of the vessel, using just his hands.

“Holy heck, Malady. Just how strong are you!?” Solomon exclaimed, astonished but glad all the same.

“Is this the time to be telling you my pounds-per-inch?” Malady retorted flatly as he managed to dead-pull his body up the side of the bottom booster housing to where he could now also use his legs to speed the climb.

“Was that a joke?” Solomon had thought that the metal-mechanical man was beyond such things as humor.

“I have my moments,” Malady intoned, sounding as deadpan as if he were a news broadcaster reporting on an uneventful day.

The pair climbed—well, Malady climbed and the specialist commander just hung on—until they had rounded the bottom thruster housing and were crossing over the complicated iron girder work to the topmost one above it.

“Okay, hold up.” Solomon paused their ascent, dismounting from his strange steed and taking shelter in the mouth of the topmost booster cavity. “We’ll climb separately, so if anything happens to one of us, the other can finish the job, okay?”

“Aye-aye, sir—” Malady was just through saying when the order was almost immediately challenged. The metal golem started to turn where he stood, but he hadn’t moved.

What?! Solomon had a second to think before realizing that it was the metal girder that Malady was standing on. It was slow-motion bending and turning away from its seat, and Malady was even now starting to slip.

It was happening too fast, there was little Solomon could do.

“Take my hand!” he shouted, lunging forward as his other arm reached to grab onto the nearest strut support.

But Malady was a far, far greater mass than Solomon was. And even in near zero-G, a greater mass still meant one thing: greater acceleration.

Malady raised his heavy power gloves to reach for Solomon as he slid off the upturned girder. Their metal-capped fingers passed within an inch of each other before Malady was spiraling and tumbling down in slow motion.

“No!” Solomon shouted out, just before Malady hit the floor of the crater with a heavy crash, sending up a radiating circle of dust, and was still.

“Malady? Malady can you read?!” Solomon was shouting over his suit’s controls, as he stared now at the golem, lying motionless on its back far below, and as large in Solomon’s vision as his own hand.

He’s in a full tactical. Those things can survive nuclear blasts, can’t they? he thought. He hoped. He didn’t have time to think more about it however, as suddenly he was starting to slip sideways where he stood.

What!?

The housing frameworks of the boosters were little more than metal support girders, presumably riveted or magnet-locked into place, with metal sheets connecting them to form the thin, inner shell of the housing compartment. The bottom lip where he and Malady had been standing should have had a ‘stair’ of metal girders ready for the rockets to be mounted on, but now these girders were slowly breaking apart from the wall and tumbling to the surface of Ganymede below.

And straight onto Malady, Cready had a moment to think as he took a step on the twisting metal stanchion and leapt—not out or up but further inside the vessel. It was dark in there, save for the rivers of light that came in from the open booster entrance. As he soared, Solomon could make out a large, tube-like room, with more girders and the half-destroyed remains of metal stairwells leading up to the blankly open holes that had been porthole doors.

Slam! Solomon hit the metal floor and rolled forward. It wasn’t a bad impact. Nothing that his full tactical suit couldn’t handle. He bounced up and started to turn back to where the booster entrance was. He needed to see if Malady—

Whumpf! Something large and heavy hit him across the shoulders.

WARNING! SUIT IMPACT!

Light Tactical Armor Plating: 18%

Solomon recoiled as one of the metal girders rolled sedately off him through the near-frictionless space. Not so sedately, however, that its reinforced steel didn’t crumple one of the front mesh panels of his light tactical suit.

And there, leaping down after it, was the large form of Adjunct-Marine Arlo Menier.

“You idiot!” Cready said but realized a moment later that his words were useless as Menier was on Red Squad, so his Gold Squad suit telemetries didn’t match. It was clear what this was all about, however. Arlo had been, and still was, the local ‘big guy’ in the Outcast barracks. The tall and well-built Frenchman had spent the longest time as a part of the Outcast training program and had used his bulk and experience to seize control over the bunkroom.

He had also fully expected to be the next specialist commander, Cready knew as much because he had in fact told him that at every available opportunity. The fact that Cready, a newcomer, had been singled out along with the handful of other Outcasts to receive their first specialization—unique training categories that indicated rank as well as their future role in the Rapid Response Marine fleet—was half of the reason why Arlo hated him. The other was that Cready had been a part of one of Arlo’s unsuccessful squads, and Arlo had flubbed his own chance at receiving a command specialization.

And of course, he blames me… Cready pushed out with one hand to flip himself through the air as Menier landed just a meter away from him.

But as quick as Cready was, Menier, unwinded and with a fully operational suit, was quicker. He threw a hand out at the specialist commander, and Cready had but a moment to see that it wasn’t empty. He had within it a small device that looked a little like one of those ancient handheld blow driers.

He’s not looking to dry my hair, Solomon thought. It was a micro-welder, its open maw a glowing red nub of sparking plasma.

No wonder the girders fell away so easily. How did he get that out here? Did he smuggle it with his suit? Now that they had spent the best part of half a year at least, with some like Arlo there fourteen months and counting, Warden Coates expected them to suit up without supervision now. He must have brought it in then…

Cready managed to get one arm up, but Menier merely batted it back down, still following it as he landed heavily on top of Cready’s leaping body, slamming onto the metal floor.

“Get the hell off me!” Cready was shouting, as the much larger Menier knelt down on Solomon’s chest, one hand holding his outstretched arm down as he lowered the micro-welder to Solomon’s faceplate.

He’s going to kill me. He’d going to fracking kill me! Cready bucked and twisted, but it was no use. Menier was just too big and too strong, and the micro-welder was too close.

Thump! Menier thumped Cready’s outstretched arm against the metal again, and Solomon realized that Menier wasn’t actually killing him. He was just holding the micro-welder a few inches from his faceplate, where Solomon could see the condensation starting to rise on the inside as the heat started to transfer.

He could press that into the material any time he wants, but he’s not… Cready’s mind raced. That was probably what this is all about. The big guy didn’t want to kill him, not with a contraband weapon, anyway. That would only earn him a one-way ticket to Titan, or worse!

No… Solomon realized that Menier was just trying to intimidate him. Which was kinda working, to be honest.

“What do you want!” he shouted behind his faceplate. Despite the fact that Menier couldn’t hear him, he must have been able to see Solomon’s lips moving.

The large Frenchman just grinned, held the micro-welder for a few more seconds over Cready, before pushing himself up heavily, making sure that he stood on Solomon at least twice.

“Idiot.” Solomon scrambled away from the man, panting, already standing up in a defensive crouch, but Menier was already ready for any counter-attack, the welder held out. Solomon saw Menier shake his head slowly, and the message was clear. You don’t want to fight me now, I WILL kill you…

But Solomon, apart from having an apparently innate skill at ‘agile thinking’ also had the gift—or curse—of a flash-pan temper.

“You really think I’m going to let you get away with that?” he said, drawing himself up to his full height and starting to stalk towards Menier.

BWAOWAOWAO!! Suddenly, before he could make the Frenchman pay for his humiliation, a clanging alarm rang through Solomon’s suit, signaling the end of the training exercise.

Training Mission ID: Break And Enter (Intermediate Level).

ALL-SQUAD ORDERS:

Distress Sonar Sounded!

Stand down, all squads, and await Marine transport to your location.

“Dammit!” Solomon swore, not taking his eyes off Menier as the large man calmly relaxed the weapon in his hand, grinning.

It had been a ploy. Arlo had already known that someone was going for the distress sonar—perhaps one of his own Red Squad—and he had been waiting and watching for a chance to make sure that Solomon, his sworn enemy, didn’t get in the way.

Solomon saw the large adjunct-Marine shrug as if that was all just a part of the fun and games, as Solomon’s suit pinged with the notice that the Marine transporter was arriving outside. Should he say something about Menier’s actions? Should he fight Menier here and now?

No. Stupid moves, Cready, he berated himself, watching as Arlo started to slowly saunter back to the porthole door he must have come in through, to make his way down to the outside. Cready knew that Warden Coates wouldn’t care about what Menier had done to him, or had almost done to him, if it meant that Solomon might be kicked off the program. And to attack Menier now, with the Marine transporter and the attendant guards arriving outside, would only make his deportation that much quicker.

He was stuck, and Solomon hated being forced into any position he hadn’t chosen.

“Fracksticks,” he swore as he waited, panting in the dark for his heart rate to slow and his temper to ebb away. He had to check that Malady’s nuclear-resistant suit was actually that good anyway, he thought, turning to the open bulkhead which had so recently spilled the metal girders. A quick suit communications call to the big metal man confirmed what Solomon had been guessing.

“Undamaged and operational, Commander,” Malady’s dulcet electronic voice echoed in his ear, which was apparently the only piece of good news that would come out of today’s training mission.

3

A Job For You

Solomon’s been in a bad mood all week, Jezebel Wen thought as she eyed her commander. And whatever bilge that Warden Coates is about to spew probably isn’t going to help…

It was a few days after the ‘Break and Enter’ training mission, which had seen several of the other Outcast Adjunct-Marines receive specialization. It was a constant, rolling system of appraisal, Wen saw. A spectacular performance on any given day could mean that one of their sixty or so small force would be called for a private interview with the warden, the doctor, or the Marine colonels who regularly visited.

But now, however, Wen was standing at the back of the gymnasium along with about half of the Outcasts. The other half were alternating their lessons with either the study lounge work or their personal specialization classes.

As a combat specialist, Wen was tasked with performing double shifts in the gymnasium, and so when this next group of Outcasts came in for their regular martial training—with Solomon being one of them this round—she found that she was already tired.

The stalking clip of the warden’s boots across the gymnasium floor toward them wasn’t helping her sense of irritation, either.

“Schlubs! Attention!” he barked at them, using the normal slur that he had developed especially for ‘his’ Outcasts.

Wen, along with everyone else, snapped into a straight-backed salute and waited.

Beside the warden stalked the blonde-braided Doctor Palinov in her white suit, as well as two other gray-suited station staff. There were more subsidiary staff than Jezzie had first thought, and as she had spent more time there, she saw that the Outcasts were only a fraction of the people there at the base. All the gray-suited staff had that slightly rangy, either athletic or muscular look that told Jezzie that they probably had some kind of military training, but none of them had seemed eager to talk to the Outcasts, so she didn’t know for sure.

“Right! At ease!” Warden Coates snapped at them as he held out a hand for one of the gray-suited staffers to pass a data-pad to him. The warden was a small man, constrained and wound-up like a spring, with a small peaked cap on which was a singular gold star. He wore the gray suit of a staffer but had a gold band running down the lapels and arms to indicate his position.

“The results of your recent training exercise have been analyzed, and I can say that they were…interesting,” he said in a slightly more normal voice, but Jezzie still winced. What was interesting to the Warden might mean atrocious to anyone else, she thought.

“Hiu! Farnham! Gigi! Cready!” he called out a list of names from the pad, ordering them to take a step forward from the throng until almost a third of their number—ten people all told—stood in a line in front of him.

“Back of the gymnasium, hop to it!” He pointed for the group to move, which they did, quick-marching to the opposite wall and once again reforming into a line.

Oh no… Jezzie had a bad feeling about this. It was never a good sign if you got singled out by the warden.

It turned out that she was right.

“Outcasts,” the Warden sighed melodramatically. “Do you know why they call you that?”

It was a rhetorical question clearly, and thankfully no one actually dared to answer the warden.

“It was a joke.” He looked up at the group that he hadn’t called out, ignoring the ten men and women that had Cready in their number. “The Marine Commandant told me to call you that, because you were the dregs of society. The unwanted. The last-chancers.”

Wow. Great pep-talk, Warden, Jezzie glowered.

“But instead, I took that name and I have endeavored to create something…magnificent.” A rare smile from the warden’s face, and Jezzie strangely found herself feel a shiver of pride at that. If she had done well enough to make even the horrible and mean little Warden Coates proud, then wasn’t that a good thing?

“You, my schlubs, were hated and reviled by everyone,” the warden continued, apparently crowing with glee at the thought. “The rest of the Marines thought you would be no good. The Justice and Defense Department thought you were no good. The people of Earth turned their back on you.

“Only I have put my faith in you. In what you can be. Other people might see you as the Outcasts, but I call it a badge of honor! Let yourselves be different! Let everyone look in fear and envy at what you can do, above and beyond any other!” The warden snarled and goaded them, his throat swelling with passion, before taking a deep sigh and standing back, as if worried that he might explode. When he next spoke, his voice was soft and serious.

“And I can say that in many ways, my faith has been rewarded. Everyone here—” He spoke to the group in front of him, of which Jezebel Wen was part of. “—have been proving me right. You have excelled at your training and your studies. You are becoming the sort of fighting force that I had envisioned when I first proposed this idea to the Rapid Response Fleet. However…”

The warden half-turned to include the line of ten other Outcasts that he had separated against the back wall. “There are some of you who are not performing to the standards which I expect.”

Jezebel could swear that she could see the flicker of fear spread through the ten people standing there.

“Farnham. Gigi. Cropper. Step forward,” the warden barked at them, and the four adjunct-Marines snapped to attention, one step in front of the others.

“As you all know, we observe and collate every iota of data. Your physical performance, your mental stamina, your proficiencies with weapons or Marine procedures…” Warden Coates said. “And all of these ten people here have been falling behind.” There was a pause, and Jezzie’s thought chimed with everyone else’s in the room, even if she did not know it.

What punishment was going to come for this?

“Schlubs, I need you to understand one thing. That your success or failure—my success or failure—depends on your ability to perform. To perform as an individual Marine and as a group. If you cannot do that, then your failings are bringing down the rest of the Outcasts!” he said tersely, berating the ‘failures’ in front of their comrades.

“You three?” the Warden looked at Gigi, Cropper, and Farnham. “You’re out. Collect your things. Return all Confederate Marine property to the lockers and await immediate deportation.”

“What?” the adjunct-Marine named Farnham—a youngish man in his thirties with a good-looking, if slightly babyish face—burst out. “But, Warden sir, I can do better—” he started to say quickly.

“SILENCE!” Coates roared at the man, and Farnham immediately shut up as if slapped. There was a tense moment as everyone watched Coates watching the three, wondering what would happen, until the warden just cleared his throat.

“I thought I told you three to get your things and get off my base?” he said to them, and the cold realization hit. Yes, they had really just been dismissed from the Outcast training program, which meant for most of them a life sentence on Titan, never to see Earth or any green and growing thing ever again.

“But—” This time it was Cropper, a larger woman, who was frantic. Jezzie couldn’t really blame her, as when your only option was dying frozen and alone on a blasted ice-moon far from home, you might as well try to argue your case, right?

But Coates was having none of it. Without pausing, his free hand blurred and there, in its place, was the small handheld controller that he used to—

“Ach!” As the warden hit the dial, the three would-be Titaneers fell to the floor, writhing in agony. It’s the chip we all have in the top of our spinal column, Jezebel Wen knew, feeling suddenly hyper-sensitive of that spot at the base of her neck. They had all been injected with the micro-control chip, which was apparently a tiny drone, following their blood vessels to where the spinal column met the largest nerve cluster in the human body. Through it, Jezebel Wen knew—because she had experienced it herself—crippling electric shocks pulsed straight through the middle of the body, able to cause a minor discomfort or completely paralyze.

It was the paralyzed, drooling option that Coates went for this time as he stood over the three twitching bodies. Now it became clear what the gray-suited staffers were for, as they hurried forward at a nod from Warden Coates to pick up the twitching, rictus bodies and carry them out of the gymnasium.

“Let that be a lesson to all of you,” Coates called out. “You all need to perform better, but you six especially…” He frowned at the remaining failures, of which Solomon was one.

“So, because you six seem to be unaware of what it takes to be a Marine, and to be an Outcast Marine, I will leave you with a small lesson.” Coates hit the dial once more, and the remaining six failures all gasped and stumbled, before straightening up. The shock that he gave them wasn’t as crippling as the one that he had delivered to the dismissed Outcasts, but Jezzie could well imagine how painful it must have been. The six that stood there were twitching and shaking as they attempted to maintain their stances at attention. The combat specialist saw beads of sweat on Solomon’s brow as he gritted his teeth.

“Pain will make you better, Outcasts. Struggle will make you better. Better than you allow yourself to be!” the warden barked at them, turning on his heel and stalking back out of the gymnasium as their lesson resumed, leaving the six still being shocked behind him. Jezzie saw Doctor Palinov hesitate where she stood, looking at the retreating back of Warden Coates and then back at the six men—did she focus on Cready specifically?—before she, too, turned and hurried after her superior officer.

Oh hell, Jezzie thought, breaking into a jog to get to Solomon’s side as soon as the green light flared over their door, which signaled the start of their training.

“How bad is it?” Jezzie hissed as she held up the sparring gloves in front of Solomon once more.

Their lesson today was simple combat techniques, with all of those assembled—both the six failures and the twenty-odd ‘successes’—practicing or trading blows in pairs.

“Had worse,” Solomon grunted, his thin face still tense and with a waxy sheen of sweat that wasn’t just from the sparring lessons.

Coates was keeping the electric shock running on them, Jezzie realized, as she spared a look at the other five members of the disgraced, who all seemed to be in a similar state of agony.

“Hyurgh!” Solomon threw a punch, clearly meaning to capitalize on the moment that Jezzie was distracted with the other shocked Outcasts. But Jezzie was a combat specialist, and before that, she’d had a lifetime of sparring and fighting in the streets. Solomon was quick, but she was quicker, especially now that her commander was also battling muscle spasms and central nervous system pain. She stepped back with ease and raised the training pad once again.

“Nice try, bigshot,” she said, watching the man move as he took another swing at the offered pad this time. The pain was slowing him up, she saw, but he was resisting it remarkably well, keeping his eyes focused on her and what she was doing. This time, she accepted the blow on the fist-pad, and then swung her own other hand and strike-pad out as if it were a retaliating punch.

Smack! Solomon was supposed to duck it, rolling either forward or back on his hips, but he batted the attempted, lazy blow with his right forearm, and instead shot out a jab with his left, back at the pad.

Thump. A good, solid jab, but that wasn’t what this training exercise was about.

“Nice idea, champ, but keep your mind on the parameters,” she said, raising the pad once more and preparing to swing with her other fist again. A simple agility and counterstrike exercise, which she would speed up until Solomon’s body memory was able to duck and counterstrike at lightning-fast speeds.

That was the plan, anyway.

“Screw the parameters,” Solomon hissed through bared teeth, not striking out at the offered ‘target’ pad but instead blocking it by stepping in with his left forearm.

“Sol, what are you…” Jezzie was already on the returning, lazy counterstrike when Solomon blocked that with his right forearm and raised his foot to kick forward at Jezzie’s chest.

“Hey!” The woman jumped back easily, out of the way, but Solomon kept coming, this time swinging with his lead right arm in a powerful roundhouse.

It sailed harmlessly in front of Jezzie’s face, inches from her nose as she dodged the easy to recognize, broadcasted blow.

“Sol!” she snapped again. They weren’t supposed to be doing full sparring yet. It was supposed to be practice moves.

Another wild jab with Sol’s left, and this time, Jezzie met it with her own practice pad, already anticipating the uppercut which Solomon was sure to follow with, turning on her hip and dropping her shoulder so that she stepped inside his blow and gave him a hard shove with both hands on the chest.

“Oof!” She was stronger than she looked for a slight Anglo-Japanese woman, and Cready had been caught off guard. He slipped his footing as he stumbled backward, before landing on the floor with a heavy groan.

“What did you do that for?” Solomon gasped in pain, which Jezzie thought must be coming from the electrifying chip in his neck, not the fall.

“Get it together, Cready,” Jezzie said, a little out of breath. She offered him her fist-pad for him to grab, but he resolutely ignored it as he stood up on his feet again. “You can’t afford to stand out from the crowd right now,” she murmured to him, but his heavily shadowed eyes told her that he didn’t want to hear it.

“What does it matter anyway, right?” he muttered back at her. “You know Arlo smuggled a weapon into the last training mission, right?” he admitted.

“What?” Solomon had never mentioned that, and the ‘Break and Enter’ session had been almost a week ago now!

“Yeah. Just to try and intimidate me, I think. But one of these days, he’s going to try and kill me for sure.” Solomon’s face was a mask of fury. “I’ve got people here who want me dead, and Coates will find any excuse to bust me back down to convict, for sure.” He looked exasperated and upset. “And I know for a fact that my test results can’t be that bad. I’ve been acing the study lounge, and the command lessons.” He appeared to be working himself up into a fit of rage—another thing that Jezzie thought wouldn’t help his chances.

“Sol, calm down. Think. So, the warden is picking on you, right? Think it through. What are you going to do about it? How are you going to beat him at his own game? Use some of that amazing strategy advice you’ve been given in command!” Jezzie’s voice sounded harsher in her own ears than she would have liked.

I’m annoyed with him, she thought. Maybe too annoyed, but she knew that her would-be Gold Squad Commander couldn’t afford a moment of self-doubt or despair. He was right that the warden probably was picking on him for his past crimes. The warden had declared in front of all of the Outcasts that he didn’t trust someone like Solomon Cready—murderer of his own best friend.

“You gotta be better. You can’t give him any excuse,” she tried to explain, earning a jagged snort of disgust from Solomon.

“Change up,” he snapped, looking over to where the nearest sparring partnership had broken up, meaning that it was time to swap fight partners.

“Hold on, Sol, this is important…” she was saying, but Cready had already stalked over to the next partnership and was starting to square off against one of them, lowering his stance into a combat hunch.

There was nothing she could do, if she didn’t want to draw attention to Solomon’s erratic behavior, but she saw that the second person of that group that she was meant to fight was already begging off. The Outcast sat on the floor, holding his hand where he appeared to have strained or sprained a wrist.

“Fine, I could do with some water anyway.” She waved at the man that it was alright, and instead turned to stalk to the water dispensers at the side of the gymnasium. It had become customary to be able to break off a fight for injury or exhaustion, each Outcast being responsible for their own peak physical fitness, until they joined the sparring once again.

But Jezzie was still annoyed as she got to the large wall-mounted units and took one of the flimsy plastic cups and started filling and refilling the cup until she had quenched her thirst.

“Wen.” A voice startled her. She wasn’t used to being surprised and thought that she must be angrier with Solomon than she had thought.

“Yes?” When she turned around, she saw that it was, strangely, one of the gray-suited station staffers who was busy pulling a trolly loaded with water barrels towards the dispensers.

“Oh, sorry,” she murmured an apology and stepped out of the way. Almost ready to get back to the sparring, anyway, she thought as the staffer knelt beside the wall unit, and with a control pad started to transmit the codes that would unlock its interior workings.

It was at that point that the staffer muttered something down into his data-pad as he worked, which sent chills of recognition through Jezebel Wen’s spine, almost as if the warden had activated her implanted drone-chip.

“Boss Mihashi has a job for you.” The staffer didn’t even look at her.

“Boss Mihashi!?” Jezzie felt as though the station’s gravity had suddenly been turned off, and she was floating in surreal freefall even though she hadn’t moved an inch.

I came up here to get away from them. There’s no way they can reach me out here…

“You heard,” the staffer muttered under his breath as he worked, unloading the empty barrels of water to replace them with new ones from the trolley. If any of the other Outcasts even glanced over at them, they would simply see a gray-suited staffer apparently ignoring Adjunct-Marine Wen as she watched him work.

“But that’s impossible.” Jezzie felt faint in a way that no amount of training could do to her.

The staffer’s shoulders jumped as he apparently suppressed a chuckle. “You think the Yakuza can’t get off-world?” he asked lightly. Of course Jezzie knew that they could, as they constantly managed to smuggle weapons, people, goods, and services up and out of Shanghai’s space elevator, even though that platform was nominally under the control of the Chinese Triads.

But that wasn’t what the man was saying, was it, she thought. This staffer was Yakuza. Like her. Like she had been. She looked at the man now, really looked at him to see that he, like her, was Anglo-Japanese—the Yakuza had let their ‘ethnic purity’ standards slip in the last century or so, as the world had become a truly globalized metropolis.

Jezzie Wen was also willing to bet, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that were she to pull the guy’s work suit off right here and now, she would find some sort of coiling dragon racing up his body, just as she had a long-bodied Chinese water dragon curling from her left ankle, all the way up her thigh, around her belly, across her back and finally resting its watchful head on her shoulder and neck.

That dragon was the symbol of the most brutally punishing criminal group in the part of the Confederacy known as the Asia-Pacific Partnership—a cute, catchall term for the old nation-states of China, Japan, Korea, large parts of Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia—all the way down to the South East Asian islands. The APP, as it was more formally known, was a powerhouse of poverty and industry, with a booming population that controlled half the world’s industries—everything from machining cheap consumables to consuming said consumables in high-rise megaflats.

Of course, the Yakuza were only one of a number of criminal gangs and syndicates that operated in the APP, just as a whole range of underworld organizations ran the Anglo-American parts of the Confederacy too. The Yakuza ‘shared’—well, savagely fought to the death, Wen clarified—the APP with the Triads, and elements of both the American Mob and the Casa Nostra Families of Europe.

But none of the other criminal gangs in the APP had quite the same respect as the Yakuza. They might not have control over the elevator—yet—but they ruled the streets. There were no freeloaders or junkies in the Yakuza. Every one of their highly-selective members were expert fighters, and usually fanatically loyal to the Boss.

But the Yakuza numbers are small… Jezzie’s mind raced. Which was why they couldn’t control the other gangs in the APP. They were the best trained and offered the harshest punishments for any who got in their way, but their elitism and selectivity worked against them in some ways.

Which was why Jezzie had thought she would be safe up here, thousands of miles away through the vacuum of space. Why would Boss Mihashi send a valuable Yakuza asset all that way just for her?

“We’ll be in touch, Miss Wen,” the staffer said in a low growl, turning back to look at the utility machine as if nothing had happened between them at all, and leaving Jezebel still reeling in a state of shock.

Why would they send an operative all this way just for me? she thought, but Jezzie, unfortunately, already knew the answer. Because I used to be a VERY valuable asset to them. And what this gray-suited staffer was letting her know was that the Yakuza could not only get off-world anytime they wanted, but that they could also get to her anytime they wanted…

4

Old Habits Die Hard

‘Calm down,’ Solomon repeated to himself, shaking his head. He couldn’t believe that Jezzie, one of his own squad members, had told him to ‘calm down’ back there. The physical training had ended, and, exhausted but still filled with an electric energy, Cready was making his way back to the Outcast dormitory, feeling like he had a supernova about to go off inside his head.

I was better off on the streets of New Kowloon, he was thinking. If only he could find a way to get off this rock. Stowaway on one of the food transports, maybe…

In the reflective chrome walls of the corridors, the young man caught sight of himself—just one amongst many tired and bedraggled Outcasts, morphing out of shape and back in again as the steel didn’t quite give a perfect reflection.

A glint showed the gold band on his training jacket.

Ah yes, Specialist Commander Cready, Solomon scoffed at the blurry, gold image. He remembered feeling proud—absurdly so—when he had received the star from the Marine colonels, claiming that his quick thinking and character traits made him perfect for a command role. It was the first time that someone had believed in him. Well, someone who wasn’t asking him to steal money for them, that was.

Did his squad believe in him? He thought of the metal golem Malady, Karamov and Kol, Jezzie. The memory of Jezzie’s annoyed look hit him like a slap across the face. Clearly not.

His squad would probably be better off without him anyway. He grimaced as he tucked his head down and shuffled forward. The food vending units were coming up, and the crowd always slowed when it was time to start receiving the dispensed cubes of reconstituted goop that the staffers said were full of every sort of nutrient, mineral, enzyme, and protein that their bodies needed.

What he wouldn’t give for some New Kowloon street food. His stomach grumbled at the thought. Crispy duck. A honey and mustard dressing. Fresh noodles. Proper noodles, still steaming hot and spicy with chili, ginger, lemongrass…

“Here he is, Commander Cready!” said a French accent up ahead, making Solomon groan and open his eyes warily. It was, of course, Arlo Menier, leaning against the opposite side of the corridor with two handfuls of the nutrient cubes.

Who did he bully to get a second? Solomon wondered. He was already in a bad mood, and the jitters of the warden’s control chip still ran through his limbs.

And it’s probably all this big lug’s fault, isn’t it? Solomon realized. One of the reasons that the warden had singled him out for special punishment was the fact that Solomon had been the commander who had finished last, leading his squad to the lower rankings of the last training mission.

That had been because of Arlo cheating. Solomon’s eyes flared.

And met their match in Arlo, who was staring at him as steadily and as hungrily as a wolf might look at a lamb. Silence seemed to gather around the two men—Arlo large and built like an amateur weight-lifter, while Solomon was thin and wiry, and a good head shorter than the Frenchman. It seemed as though the rest of the Outcast Adjunct-Marines had been waiting for this confrontation, as they stepped back to form a space for them.

“You don’t deserve to be here.” Arlo’s first volley, which Solomon thought was pretty weak, to be honest.

“We’re all ex-cons. I don’t think any of us deserve to be here,” Solomon countered, and heard a small chuckle from somewhere in the crowd. He wondered if it was Karamov or Kol, rooting for him.

“You’re an idiot.” Arlo ignored his riposte, instead going for the direct insult.

“Maybe, but you’re ugly. At least I can pretend to be clever,” Solomon stated.

The Frenchman’s face turned a deeper shade of purple as his brain caught up with the insult, and he let out a strangled grunt of rage, stepping forward—

“Halt!” a voice cried out, and suddenly Solomon felt that sharp singe of pain moving from his shoulders to his neck and down his spine. He lost control over his legs and staggered into the nearest Outcast member, who was similarly gnashing their teeth in rictus pain as they slid down the wall.

“Gentlemen,” said an eloquent women’s voice, tinged with a Russian accent. The pain started to subside from Solomon’s and everyone else’s control chip, leaving them gasping for air. Solomon was able to blink aside the tears of pain to see that it was indeed Doctor Palinov, standing in the center of their circle in her white lab-coat and austere blonde braid, holding up a control device similar to the one that Warden Coates used.

Solomon’s heart was suddenly in his mouth. She will have to report this to the warden. Even if he hadn’t thrown a punch yet, he was sure that the warden wouldn’t care.

“Save your fighting for the gymnasium, please,” the doctor stated, turning on her heels to go, before pausing over Solomon’s huddled, pain-wracked body. “Cready. Get up and follow me.”

Oh no. Solomon managed to force himself to his feet even though every joint ached. He was certain that this was it, that she was going to take him to the warden, who would order his expulsion from the program.

I know that I wanted to get out of here, he chided himself. But that doesn’t mean that I want to spend the rest of my days on Titan!

Behind them, he heard the murmur of the other adjunct-Marines, similarly struggling to their feet, but with their eyes watching the downfall of Specialist Commander Cready.

So, Solomon was surprised when Palinov turned right instead of left at the end of the corridor, leading him past the entrance to the study lounges and toward the double-plated, reinforced glass doors that led into the restricted medical lounge.

Palinov reached into her pocket and waved a small card of white plastic at the door controls. With a dull hum, their red restricted lights turned to green, and the doors slid open.

“This is more for your benefit than it is ours,” Palinov said as they swept through and the doors closed behind them. “We have all sorts of pathogens, diseases, viral and fungal antibodies…” she explained, gesturing up the large, industrial air filters and fans that were mounted in the ceiling at regular intervals. “We couldn’t have the lot of you getting sick on us now, could we?” she said lightly.

Just like the entire Outcast complement got sick with the flu—even Malady—and even though there was no way for the virus to be introduced to Ganymede? Solomon thought, but didn’t say. He already had his suspicions about that particular viral outbreak, and this might be just the chance that he got to confirm them.

The medical lounge was built like a scientific suite, with large glass windows and similarly locked doors in front of labs on either side of them as they walked down the pristine, chrome and white corridor. Solomon couldn’t help but look through the glass. There were rows of metal tables and white-suited staffers working at test tubes or screens. Other bays were filled with reclining medical chairs, stuffed with an array of instruments over their heads.

“Hmm.” Palinov noticed him looking and waved a hand as she strode forward. The windows darkened, the reactive chemical properties in the glass responding to some signal she gave.

“Can’t give away all our secrets,” she said in a slightly amused tone, which Solomon knew meant she wanted to sound as though she were being agreeable and talkative. It only made him suspicious.

She brought him to one of the rooms with now-darkened glass. The door hummed aside to reveal a more conventional doctor’s room—small, with a reclining medical chair on one side, next to a desk with a screen and walls mounted with test tubes and strange medical equipment.

“Hop on the bed, if you please, Mr. Cready,” Palinov suggested, while she turned to busy herself at one of the desks, laying out data-pads and donning sterile blue gloves.

“Is this, uh… Is this going to hurt?” Solomon asked. Stupid question. Everything hurts in this place. But even as he was worrying about what fresh hell the doctor had in store for him, he found that his eyes were also scanning the room in that way that he had taught himself, so many years ago.

He had been a thief back on Earth, in the part of the globe known as the Asia-Pacific Partnership, and more specifically, the largest ghettoized urban area called New Kowloon. But Solomon Cready hadn’t just been your run-of-the-mill mugger or snatch-and-run sort of thief. No pinching tourists’ handbags for him.

Solomon had been one of the very best, infiltrating mega-corporate laboratories and Confederacy museums, industrial factories and the elite penthouses of the rich and corrupt.

He was quite proud of that fact, to be honest.

Anesthetic. Antibiotics. Vaccinations. He studied the assembled bottles and jars and dispensaries. Not that he was particularly interested in stealing any of them—unless of course he could start to trade them with some of the other Outcasts for favors?

But then again, this isn’t prison, not really. What favors do I need from anyone in here? Solomon thought in disgust. Everyone here was in the same boat. He could possibly use them to bribe other Outcast Marines to stand with him against Arlo. Maybe he could bribe Arlo himself to get off his back….

Nah. That was a road that Solomon didn’t want to go down, as he knew where it would lead. Never be the person paying off the bigger guy, gang, or syndicate, his experience told him. You’d only end up more in debt.

So, no. He was still surreptitiously looking at the different cabinets and metal lockers when he saw something that did interest him. Doctor Palinov had reached down to wave her ID card once again over a set of steel cabinets. There was a dull, internal click and the metal doors slid back, revealing rows and rows of test tubes. Solomon squinted at them, seeing small labels with printed names. His suspicions were confirmed when Palinov riffled through the tubes to pick out one, and, as she stood back up, Solomon was sure that he saw the letters “CREA—” stamped on its side.

Cready. That’s me. But it wasn’t a blood sample, instead, it looked to be just a clear solution.

“What’s that?” he asked, as he knew that he would probably get more answers from what Palinov wouldn’t say than what she would.

“Just your antibiotic culture. We grow them now, using traces of bio-engineered viruses. Nothing to worry about. No side effects.”

Serum 21? Solomon thought. That was what he had overheard them talking about—this very lady, he was sure, just a few months ago, when they had thought that he had been asleep. They had said that it was part of a ‘program,’ but it wasn’t one that any of the Outcasts had been told about.

“Oh,” Solomon said, and tried to not flinch when she stuck a needle of the substance into his arm. He gritted his teeth and held his breath, waiting for whatever might happen, to happen.

But nothing did.

“See? I told you that there were no side effects. This will just keep your body in tip-top condition.”

Why me? Solomon thought. Why didn’t she call all of the Outcasts here for their supposed ‘antibiotic top-up’?

“Now, if you will just lie back and relax,” Palinov instructed, holding the small control device over his body.

“It’s fine. I’m complying,” Solomon was quick to say, but Palinov just gave a small shake of her head and ignored him. Cready saw that she was using the control device the way that others might use a detector of some kind. Not only could it communicate to the control chip implanted in his neck, Solomon realized, but clearly that chip must be able to send back readings as well. But readings of what?

“Hmm.” Palinov paused, picking up her data-pad as she synced the two devices and looked at the readouts. Her brow tightened a little, as if the test results were interesting, strange, or alarming.

“Tell me, Mr. Cready, do you remember any serious illnesses as a child?” she asked lightly, setting down both the data-pad and the control device.

Phew! Solomon was starting to get jittery around that evil little thing.

The doctor retrieved a variety of more mundane medical devices including bands that slapped onto his arms and forehead, and read such things as heartrate, blood pressure, temperature, etcetera.

“Not that I remember.” Cready shrugged. He had a rather uneventful childhood, from what he recalled. It was like his life had started when he had snuck into New Kowloon, desperate to make a name for himself and to put his talents to good use. He had dim, hazy memories of a time in the American Confederacy Midwest; long fields of genetically-modified golden corn, and the tower of the harvester in the background, slowly chugging away, night and day.

It had been so utterly boring, he told himself. So utterly boring that he had to get out.

There were other fragmentary memories, of course, like the technical college where he had studied electronic engineering. Again, boredom and wasted talent had turned that short escapade into mush. Better off forgotten.

“I see.” Palinov frowned, studying him for a moment, before retrieving a small visor that looked like a set of shades but with larger, pull-down screens attached. “Can you run through these initial tests for me? We need to keep an update on your cognitive functioning.”

I thought you did that every couple of days through Oracle? Solomon thought about the Ganymede mainframe: a low-cognizant AI—no personality, just data-sorting—that gave them ‘learning opportunities’ in their scheduled study hall lessons. Each session spent in the study hall was essentially the same. A personally-tailored education program, which always started with virtual-reality, holographic puzzles to ‘warm up the brain’ and then would switch to an investigation of a topic or event that they had been assigned. So far, Solomon had learned a lot about the general history of the Confederacy, and the Confederate Marine Corps, as well as been guided on several rudimentary introductions to jump theory, space travel, basic biology, modest spacecraft engineering, and other such subjects that every Confederate Marine was supposed to have a passing knowledge of. All of those lessons were child’s play for Solomon, especially compared to the far more advanced command specialism classes that saw him re-enacting battle strategies against holographic foes or studying troop deployment and inter-personal psychology.

Now, however, he was presented with a set of tests that he had never performed before.

There was a field of blue and red, with blotches of green in front of his face, projected by the virtual holographic sensors of the visor.

Hmm. What’s this all about? he thought, moving his hand just as he would in the study hall simulations to see a rippling, glowing cursor highlight over the colored swathes.

They were pixelated, he saw. Small islands of green surrounded by advancing ‘washes’ of red and blue blocks. It would sure help if there were some instructions for this, Solomon thought, but he guessed that was probably the point.

As soon as his ‘hand-cursor’ hovered over one of the colored blocks, he saw that he could control it, turn it in place, making it active or dormant. He did so, choosing some from the small green splotch, as for some reason he felt a little drawn to the underdog.

In response, the field flashed white, and he saw various red and blue blocks become active or dormant and thus Solomon started to understand what he was supposed to do. Immediately, he lost one-half of his green territories as the rival red and blue ‘spreads’ chose to become active against him.

But why didn’t my blocks take over theirs? Solomon thought, and two more turns made him see that it all depended on the ‘weight’ of the color behind the active block. If there were only two adjacent blocks of the same color, then the block could resist an attack, if there were five, then the ‘active’ block initiated a sort of ‘invasion’ mode.

It’s like checkers, or Mah Jong! Solomon realized that the goal of the game was to precisely activate certain blocks at certain times, not always if they could ‘invade’ the enemy territory, but sometime just to ward off an attack.

Solomon happily moved and changed his small green blocks about the field, losing one territory but managing to build a bridge between the other two so that he had a far larger ‘weight’ of color. By the time that Palinov called for him to stop, Solomon had managed to surround and almost take over most of the blue field, and he had left the red field to invade the blue from the other side.

“Very good.” Palinov turned off the simulation and took off the visor, looking at Solomon skeptically for a moment. “Not many people choose green. The weakest of the three colors,” she said lightly, although her voice was loaded with emphasis. “And not many people are able to turn around green’s fortunes if they do.”

“I did well?” Solomon asked.

“Hmm.” Palinov didn’t answer, but was once again back at her handheld data-screen, looking at something. He saw her blink once, twice, and look over at Solomon again. Was that surprise in her face?

“Is there something wrong?” he asked, trying to turn his own concern into a joke. “Are you about to tell me that I’ve only got three days to live now, Doc?”

“Don’t be facetious.” Palinov scowled, suddenly angry for no reason whatsoever. “We’re done here, Cready. Clean bill of health. You may return to your bunk,” she said, turning with her data-screen before pausing. “Oh, and please try to avoid any more fights in the future. Your body and your mind are the future of the Confederacy, so please remember to act like it. Don’t squander it!” she said, which made Solomon want to puke.

The Confederacy doesn’t own me! Solomon thought angrily as he took off the various medical straps and devices. He eased himself from the chair to give a nod at the doctor, then headed for the door.

It seemed that the door controls were only locked from one direction, Solomon noted, as Palinov’s room opened to let him out, as did the main reinforced glass doors to the main, unrestricted part of the Ganymede training station.

The doctor saw something in my results, Solomon thought. His criminal training wasn’t just about how to override security systems and how to sneak around quietly. A healthy part of it was also learning how to read people. She had seen something in his results—whether biological or neurological—and it had surprised her enough to make her annoyed. But what!?

Solomon knew that the Outcasts were being treated with some strange ‘Serum 21,’ but he still didn’t know what that was. And were his odd test results something to do with that? It had to be, right?

He didn’t know the answers to those questions, but he smiled grimly to himself as he now knew a way to find out. Under his training suit sleeve, tucked against his wrist, hard-edged and cold, Solomon could feel the identity card that he had lifted from Doctor Palinov.

Solomon might have been famous for breaking into hard-to-reach places, but that didn’t mean that he wasn’t a pretty good finger-smith, as well.

He allowed himself a very small grin as he made his way back to the Outcasts dormitory, to shuffle along the food corridor and receive the rations he had missed out on earlier. He wasn’t thinking about the reprocessed protein and nutrient block, its taste, or how disappointing it seemed. No, now his mind was racing, planning, plotting, as he now had the means to find out exactly what was going on in this place.

5

No Possible Recompense

When Jezebel Wen returned from her early morning training session, she found the bunkroom mostly deserted, apart from the few others who either had free shifts or were allowed, via special compensation from the warden or the doctor, to be convalescing.

That was the way it went in this place, Jezebel knew. If you got something as simple as a sprain or a strain in your constant, daily training schedule, the warden wouldn’t automatically bust you out to the Titan prison camp.

Well, he might do for Sol, she corrected herself as she towel-dried her hair with one of the Ganymede Confederate Marine regulated towels. Everything was regulated here, everything stamped with CMC or Confederate Marine Corps. Even the shower after her morning gymnasium training was regulated—precisely 4 minutes of warm water, precisely 2 minutes of scalding water, precisely 2 minutes of freezing water—so designed to have the maximum ‘metabolic effect’ apparently.

The warden would let those adjunct-Marines that he was pleased with have a free period if the doctor thought that they could convalesce and get better.

But it seemed as though some of the adjunct-Marines in here never did get better, Jezzie saw.

“What’s going on?” she asked Henshi, another Outcast with a sprained knee who was allowed to beg off physical training for a few days. Henshi followed the woman’s eyes to the two bunks that were currently being cleaned out by a team of staffers, the mattresses being taken away, the small locker of personal effects and wall-cupboard being unlocked and opened for the clothes of two adjuncts to be taken away.

“Two more bust out?” she asked, thinking of the three that the warden had made an example of just a few days ago.

“I guess so.” Henshi frowned and shook her head. “I never heard anything, though. That’s Rogan and Cheval from Red and Green Squad, isn’t it?” Henshi added, turning on her bunk to look over to the emptied bunks, worriedly.

Probably because she knows she has to get back to full fitness or else it might be her next, Jezzie thought.

“We’re dropping like flies,” Jezzie murmured, earning a sour grunt of agreement from Henshi beside her. Already, the bunkroom had been depleted of approximately one-fifth of its staff, bringing the total number down to around fifty.

“The warden’s going to have to stop this attrition rate, though,” Jezzie murmured, keeping her voice low in case any of the other wounded or relaxing adjuncts decided to make an example out of her and report this possible questioning insubordination. “I mean, how are the Outcasts supposed to be an effective fighting force if we can’t even field a hundred soldiers?”

“I don’t know,” Henshi muttered, clearly staying out of it.

“I heard they got sick,” called out Erebus, a much larger adjunct who had apparently done so well at his technical specialism—which Jezebel knew meant anything from electronics to starcraft maintenance and mech-walker mechanics—that he had been given this free period every ten-day shift.

“They got sick?” Jezzie asked, keeping her tone level as she made her way past the staffers to her own bunk. Hadn’t Solomon been talking about that weird flu that went around last cycle? He claimed that it was unusual—and that there shouldn’t be any viral contaminants on Ganymede—but what did he know? Weren’t viruses supposed to be, like, one of the most adaptable and hard-living organisms known to humanity or something?

But he had been right about the fact that even Malady had got sick, and that walking cadaver has his own implanted air-filters, right?

Still, Jezzie hadn’t been totally convinced by Solomon’s argument that it was some strange genetically-modified super-bug, released by the warden to do something to his beloved Outcasts.

“Hmm,” Jezzie mused. The warden DID like to make a big, public showing when he busted someone out of the Corps, she reflected. It was the sort of man he was—a small man with a position that was too big for him, she knew. The sort that needed to make an example of his authority.

“Excuse me, Adjunct-Marine Wen,” said one of the staffers in his gray and silver overall. One of the newly-vacated bunks was right next to hers after all, and she moved out of the way to let the man pull the mattress from the wire frame and heave it onto one of the trolleys.

“Excuse me,” the man repeated again, even though Wen wasn’t in the man’s way. She looked up to see what the problem could be and saw that it was the same staffer who had confronted her just a few days ago—the Yakuza operative.

“What do you want?” she hissed. Seeing him here, so close to where she slept, was like one of the warden’s electric jolts through her body. Her eyes slid to the other Outcasts, but none of them seemed to have noticed or even care what trouble Wen might be having with one of the staffers.

Keep your own nose clean. Do your training. That appeared to be the unwritten law of the Ganymede training center, after all.

What does he want? Should I shout? Could I expose him? All of those thoughts ran through Jezebel Wen’s mind, but none of them added up to anything other than her getting shipped off to Titan for daring to question or strike Marine staff. And out there on the frozen prison world, Jezebel knew that the Yakuza and the Triads and the Mob and the White Brotherhood and every other nasty little criminal syndicate had a far greater presence. The possibility of being knifed in her sleep here was at least unlikely, as it would raise too many questions. Out there, it was almost a given.

A pleased, smarmy-sounding grunt from the man opposite her, and he just tapped a finger to the CMC regulation cap that had obscured his features beforehand, as he turned around to wheel the trolley away.

He probably volunteered for that job, Jezebel thought. Just to put the scare on me. She knew the game with her old paymasters, after all. She had been one of them, so she knew that the build-up was always the same: intimidate, make a show of strength, and then ask the victim to do something they don’t want to.

And if they don’t? Well, the Yakuza punishments for non-compliance were even worse than the ones that the warden doled out with relish. Only the crippling pain that the Yakuza delivered—that she herself had delivered to people on occasion—was usually life-changing: missing digits, missing limbs, bankruptcy, homelessness, debt, lifelong scarring…

Fracker. She gritted her teeth and turned back to her bunk.

And that was where the message was. There, on her pillow, was a tiny curl of paper—no bigger than Jezzie’s thumbnail—that she knew only too well. She snatched it up as she lay on her bunk, pretending to catch twenty minutes of much-needed rest before the next training session.

The Yakuza were nothing if not old-school, she knew, and a scroll like this only proved it. Admittedly, they had made a few concessions in the recent centuries of the Confederate globalization of Earth—they now accepted part-Japanese gang members like Jezebel Wen, for example—but they were still in the High Edo Period when compared with such groups as the Triads.

When Jezzie unrolled the scroll, she found that it was just as she had expected, a set of minimal command statements written in tiny, Hyogo dialect. The Yakuza probably had the money to create special encoded transmissions or even spy-drones to deliver their messages, but they also knew that some of the oldest methods were the best. A message this small, although obvious, didn’t leave a trail of electronic breadcrumbs or transactions to follow. It could easily be disposed of, flushed-away, shredded, or eaten. Its secrecy relied upon the fact of the receiver’s professionalism and dedication to the Yakuza—not the sender.

Jezebel read the message, and her heart sank.

S. Cready owes. Judged. No possible recompense.

That was all that it said, but that was all that the small message needed to say for Jezebel Wen to understand precisely what her boss, Mr. Mihashi of the largest Yakuza clan in the Asia-Pacific Partnership, wanted her to do.

S. Cready = Solomon Cready, she mentally translated, her own Gold Squad Commander.

He had been judged, which meant that senior Yakuza elders had already met and held a secret trial over whatever crimes or evidence they had against him, which, Jezebel presumed, was money—although ‘owing’ could mean anything from a debt of service to a pact that he had yet to honor.

Not that he had time to honor it now. Jezebel frowned. The last part of the message had clearly stated what was expected of her. There was ‘no possible recompense,’ which meant that Solomon, somehow, had already gone past all of any other options of repayment in kind or of service, and now there was only one final option left.

Solomon Cready had to die, by her hand.

6

Serum 21

Solomon waited until he knew the coast was clear, which, for him, meant another two days of keeping his head down, trying his best to look normal while he trained and studied. During which time he had no major run-ins with Arlo Menier and his gang of stooges, which Solomon was grateful for, but the hairs on the back of his neck still rose every now and again, as if someone was following him.

Luckily, Solomon knew that he was good at planning a heist. He was very good, in fact. One of the best.

“You haven’t been in New Kowloon for very long, have you, Mr., uh…Cready?” said the man standing next to the younger Solomon, still in his early twenties with the ridiculous quaffed-but-ragged haircut he had sported back then.

In fact, Solomon had been in New Kowloon all of a week, and he needed Confederate credits again, having spent every last dollar he had to get smuggled into the Asia-Pacific Partnership’s largest metropolis-ghetto.

It wasn’t that New Kowloon didn’t have Confederate Enforcers, or that it wasn’t regulated—it was as much a part of the rest of the Asia-Pacific Confederacy as Shanghai or Tokyo or Seoul, after all—on paper, at least. It wasn’t that New Kowloon didn’t have laws, and rules, regulations or taboos…

It was just that at some point in the distant past, some enterprising criminal gangs had managed to infiltrate city planning and local governance, and even the Confederate Enforcers it was said, to make sure that those laws had massive loopholes, and anyone who had the power to do anything about it on the streets was already compromised.

Over the last sixty years or so since New Kowloon had come into its own, it had been designated a ‘Special Regulation Zone’ similar to an off-world colony, or the old Hong Kong of the twentieth century. Multinationals and mega-corporations and interstate actors flocked there to take advantage of some very lax trading and business laws, and from there, the rot only festered.

Down on the streets of one of the busiest slums on Earth, tax-deductible building investments had encouraged a diaspora of the poorest members of society to take advantage of the often hazardous but ridiculously cheap housing. Some strategists even claimed that had been a plan, as it meant that the economy was always off-kilter, with few actual opportunities for legitimate employment but plenty of opportunities for illegitimate employment.

There were no regular sweatshops and factories in New Kowloon. Instead, there were boiler-house basements producing knock-offs of American Confederacy computing chips, or else warehouse troll companies that were funded by shady ‘marketing firms’ to target rival politicians or entire Confederate territories for their political paymasters.

It was said that nothing happened in New Kowloon without some money being paid to someone, and that anything could be bought or sold somewhere or another on its streets. Which, so far during his week here, Solomon had found to be mostly true. It was actually a sort of gritty, grimy, dangerous paradise for the likes of someone with his skills.

It was here in New Kowloon that works of art or archaeology or gold bullion or any other artifact could be traded to lose its paper trail and return to the market ‘clean.’ It was here that the largest mega-corporations operated their riskiest laboratories, or tested out illegal prototypes, or performed high-level (and unseen) negotiations with rivals.

To the rich, New Kowloon was a playground where every vice could be administered to for the right price, and to the poor it was a place where, paradoxically, the American Confederate dream was at last true. Anyone COULD make it big in New Kowloon. All you had to do was have a talent, as well as be willing to pay a lot of bribes along the way.

Which was where this thin, unassuming man who stood next to Solomon—both of them leaning over the railings of the Ho Xing Tower to look at the cramped and complicated neon, concrete, and steel world below them—came in.

“Only a week,” the man repeated, his hair slick black and wearing a very unassuming, but also very finely made, black business suit stated, “and yet you have managed to find out how to contact us.”

“I have contacts,” Solomon admitted. Which was actually true. Only Matthias Sozer, his lifelong accomplice and ally ever since they had both grown up in the American Confederate cornfields, wasn’t even in New Kowloon, and wouldn’t be for several years still. Matthias had a good job back in the American Confederacy as a data-miner and programmer, and that was why Solomon knew that he would be able to find anything out that he needed to set up his new operation out here.

Such as getting Solomon the contact number for the largest Yakuza crew in New Kowloon.

“Obviously,” the man stated, not looking at Solomon. The young man hadn’t seen any of this man’s bodyguards, as all he had received was a simple, oneline postcard to meet here at this specified time. He had arrived nearly an hour early, but the man had been earlier still, and apparently alone—although Solomon was certain that he could feel people watching him from every window of the Tower’s restaurants. Even the taxi driver had seemed to know where he was going.

But Solomon guessed that he had better get used to that. He was trying to make waves in someone else’s territory, after all.

“Well, the people I represent have their contacts as well, and we have done some research on you, Mr. Cready.” A slight pause as he readjusted one of his emerald cufflinks. Solomon wondered if that was a signal? A sign? In any ‘normal’ person, it would be a sign of nervousness, but what would a representative of one of the three most powerful gangs in New Kowloon ever have to worry about?

“A very passable, but still only minor, thief, I am afraid.” The man stopped his fiddling and spoke in perfect English, clipped terms. “The people I represent aren’t sure if they need another gaijin criminal…”

“I promise you that I can be the very best that you have ever worked with,” Solomon said, and with absolute certainty. Admittedly, his point of reference had been the Midwest and the East Coast of the American Confederacy—and over there, they were a bit more…blatant about things—but something in Solomon knew that what he said was true. He could feel it in his gut the way that any young person can almost feel the limits of their ambition. He knew, too, with delight and glee that he had not reached them yet.

Solomon knew that he was fast on his feet, agile, a good climber, and not a bad street fighter—although he preferred to never be forced into a fight in the first place. He also knew that he had managed to outwit and think circles around just about everyone he knew. Even Matthias, unless it came to computer coding, of course, in which case Matthias had the clear upper hand.

It was one of the many reasons why Solomon had chosen New Kowloon of all places to come and put his skills to the test. He already had a string of suspicions and blurry surveillance drone pictures out on him back home, and, as good as he was, no one had a career in crime in the same place for very long. Time just wasn’t a luxury most thieves could enjoy.

But New Kowloon was different, Solomon had told himself. He felt like an athlete, not a criminal. It was the place where he could find out just how good he really could be. It was the place where legends could be born.

“A bold statement, Mr. Cready,” the man said in measured tones as he looked out at the vista in front of him. There was a moment of silence between the two men that seemed to stretch on forever, but eventually, the man seemed to make up his mind. “Luckily for you, the people whom I represent have also left me instructions for this eventuality. It is up to my discretion to offer you your first contract, and I personally appreciate a bit of confidence.” The man finally turned around to look at Solomon fully in the face.

He was a middle-aged Japanese man, his brow and around his eyes slightly lined. Solomon got the impression that he might be a lot older than he looked, though, as a very wealthy life could stave off the worst of time’s depredations. But when it came to his dark eyes, it was clear that there was no comfort or sense of laughter and relaxation in the man’s life. He looked at Solomon with as much sympathy as a shark would look at a floundering swimmer.

“You have a passing fair record, Mr. Cready. But you may find that the rules of the game are somewhat different out here than what you are used to,” the man said, his voice strengthening as he grew sure of his position. Every ounce of his stance and his voice told Solomon that he was in charge, and Solomon was there to take orders.

Solomon had forgotten how much he hated traditional crime gangs, with all of their talk of honor and loyalty and oaths…

“But you have shown yourself wise to approach us first. If you had started operating…independently, shall we say? Then you would have found out that either Triads, the Mob, or us would have been aware of it very, very soon. And we would have had to make sure you understood the dangers of freelance work in New Kowloon…

“And you have been perceptive to approach us, rather than either of our main business rivals because, of course, if we were to find you working for either the Triads or the Mob, then, well…” The man opened and closed his hands in a gesture that said that the results would have been unavoidable.

“But the people I represent, unlike the others, reward such loyalty, and such confidence. So…” The man extended his hand towards Solomon’s. “It is with great pleasure that I welcome you into the family.”

“The pleasure is all mine.” Solomon grinned and shook the man’s hand.

Yes. He had done it. Now all he had to do was to find a way to infiltrate their New Kowloon infrastructure, find out where some of their best hideouts and safe-houses and equipment stashes were…

And Solomon was certain that either the American Mob or the Triads—or both even—would pay him VERY handsomely indeed for that information.

You see, Solomon Cready was one of the best at what he did, and he wasn’t about to start taking orders from anyone. Not for long, anyway. He worked for himself, and always for himself. Who had ever even dreamed of ripping off the Yakuza? It might take years of careful work, of blood, sweat, and preparation, but he could do it. If he pulled this off, then it would prove to the entire world that he really was the best at what he did.

Solomon opened his eyes and lay still for a moment in the darkness. He could hear the soft, whistling snores of the other Outcasts around him. What’s left of them, anyway, he thought. To his right, there was a very slight electric hum, which he knew to be Malady sitting in his charging bay in a similar state of unconsciousness as everyone else.

Solomon counted to fifty in his head, and then counted to fifty once more. Past experience had told him that unless you were in the thick of it and bullets were flying everywhere, it was always better to be cautious. As cautious as possible, in fact. A good thief had to be patient, but able to be reckless, he reminded himself.

When he was sure that the sounds he was listening to were regular and, for the most part, expected, he made his move. He moved carefully, remembering to pick up the half-block of protein gunk that he had eaten the night before—meaning to dispose of it, somewhere. The young man was sure that was how they were dosing them every night, and, as his nights were usually uninterrupted until morning, he rather thought that they had laced their evening ‘meals’ with sedatives or hypnotics, as well.

Moving with a cat-like grace, his bare feet padded onto the cold metal floor and he stood up, wearing his lightweight undermesh thermals just the same as everyone else would be. He could have slipped to his locker to put on a warmer lightweight work suit, but he didn’t want to risk waking anyone else up, and neither did he want to risk looking out of place if he got caught.

This way, I can pretend that I just couldn’t sleep, he reasoned as he moved quickly and directly to the door, lightly jogging on the balls of his feet. Although he could have ghosted from each shadow of the bunkbeds, he knew that it was almost always better just to move quickly and confidently. Any hanging around or attempting to hide and to look surreptitious was generally a sign of an amateur.

If you look like you know what you’re doing, and that you’ve got somewhere to go, most people just believe you, he reaffirmed to himself. It was when you were ducking and hiding and pretending to hang around places looking suspicious that you got caught.

Whisk! The door out to the food hall opened and closed behind him with a slight thump, making Solomon wince. But he was in the brightly-lit corridor now, and he started walking, not jogging. Look like you belong, he reminded himself, as his hand curled over the small rectangle of white card in his hand—the ID card of Doctor S. Palinov.

Solomon was very good at what he did, but perhaps he was a little out of practice, or perhaps he should have spent a little longer than a hundred breaths before he had made his move, as, behind him in the darks of the Outcast bunkroom, there was a movement.

One of the adjunct-Marines behind him wasn’t asleep at all. They, too, hadn’t eaten their nighttime protein pack but for entirely different reasons. Worry and self-hate had been gnawing at Specialist Combat Wen’s stomach for the past two days since she had received her orders from Boss Mihashi.

She had been awake in her bunk, looking up at the metal gridwork above her and running through her mindfulness breathing practices. Ironically enough, it had been the very same Yakuza bosses she had come to hate who had taught them to her.

But a movement had interrupted her attempt to calm her mind and see through the dilemma she was in. She couldn’t do what the Boss wanted, could she? He was a few hundred thousand miles away. More, in fact! And she liked Solomon, in a way. He was arrogant and brash and cocky, but he was also smart, and he could be funny. And there had even been times in the last few training exercises that he had seemed almost, what… Loyal? Honorable?

But the Boss had people up here on Ganymede, the specialist knew. Where there was one Yakuza operative, there could always be more. There was no escape from him. And if she refused, then she probably would have some sort of fatal accident one day as an airlock mysteriously depressurized at the wrong moment, or she would have a catastrophic equipment failure, or…

Jezebel wasn’t so much worried about her own death, no more so than anyone else was. She had a very healthy respect for her own life of course, you don’t manage to survive as a Yakuza Enforcer without earning that, after all…

But what Jezebel Wen was far more worried about was what the Boss Mihashi might do if she refused. She still had family back on Earth. An estranged family, admittedly, and one that she hadn’t seen for the last ten years even before she came up here to Ganymede. They were still people that the Boss wouldn’t think twice about punishing for her crimes.

Jezebel Wen made up her mind in the dark. She slipped from her thin covers in a moment and ghosted toward the food hall, after Specialist Commander Cready.

Idiots. Solomon could have laughed if he had dared to make a sound. He should have known that Ganymede would have been like this—easy.

He had emerged from one end of the food hall, first hanging back from the glassed automatic door so he didn’t trigger it to open. He could see the much larger front atrium outside, with doors leading to the study lounges, the audience chambers, and deeper into the service, mechanical bays, and gymnasiums of the Ganymede Marine Training station. And the wide corridor with its reinforced glass doors that led to his destination: the medical lounges.

The place was brightly lit, so it should have been easy for any passing staffer or security drone to spot him, the only person up in his dark gray and blue undermesh suit. The light from the overhead wall lights were a little different though, he saw—not as ‘clean’ and bright as they were in the daytime, and with a slight reddish tinge to the spectrum. He imagined that it had something to do with what Malady had called the ‘metabolic regulation’ of this place. Every aspect from the length of the ‘day’ shifts to the light to the food that they ate was all carefully calibrated to get the most results out of their bodies.

But for all of their technology, it seemed to Solomon that the Confederate Marine Corps were still a bunch of idiots.

It was always the same in a place like this—a top-notch, top-of-its-game institution. They believed so much in themselves that they couldn’t imagine that any possible threat would come from inside their organization. Solomon had encountered companies like that before—usually academic or scientific institutions—back in New Kowloon.

Kinda naïve, really.

There were no internal security measures, apart from certain identity-locked doors. The Confederate Marine Corps were so passionate about their mission that they just couldn’t believe that they might need to have a watchful eye inside their own corridors, Solomon thought.

At least, that was what he hoped, anyway, as he stepped up to the doors for them to hiss open and for him to cross the front atrium and approach the medical lounge.

Inevitably, the small torrent of anxieties rose in him.

What if Doctor Palinov had noticed her ID card was missing?

Of course she had.

What had she done then? Had she figured that Cready had stolen it?

What if she had changed the security features on the doors?

Solomon paused, counted to five this time, and breathed. These sorts of anxieties and fears were natural for a guy in his position, and he had long since learned how to let them be. The trick was knowing that these thoughts would rise anyway, and that there was nothing that he could do about it now in any case. It was one of the reasons why he made a very good adjunct-Marine—his ability to parcel out his worries, to recognize them, and then get the job done anyway.

Now or never… He walked forward to the glass doors, raising his hand and as he did so—

Whisk!

The door hummed open just as normal, and Solomon almost did a doubletake. The Confederate Marine Corps really are idiots! He could have laughed as he strode forward…

Only to see that there were people in some of the rooms.

Frack!

Jezebel Wen waited for the shape of her Gold Squad Specialist Commander to move out from the food hall before she followed. She was no thief or burglar, but the skills of a Yakuza executioner had a lot of crossover. She knew how to move silently, and she knew how to listen to her body in a way that kept her calm and focused. Little did either Jezebel or Solomon know that their aptitudes in this regard were very similar. Both man and woman had settled into a self-awareness of their own breathing, the push and pull of their muscles, as well as a heightened sense of any possible threat. Would a piece of their suit snag as they walked past that wall? Where were the blindside entrances and exits around them?

But whereas Solomon’s mind had been washed with the anxieties of a thief, Jezebel Wen’s mind was clean. That was where her previous training had been far, far different than Solomon’s.

She had started with the Yakuza at a fairly young age—a not-so-tender nineteen years old. She was already the head of a notorious neo-punk girl gang that ran the Tokyo streets.

That was how she had come to the attention of the Yakuza, and her choice had been simple—join or be punished.

It had been no choice, really.

But of the many perks of her new family, one of them had been the rigorous and vigorous training that she had received both physically and mentally. The Yakuza prided themselves that they not only turned out excellent killers, but that they also taught their family members how to think.

And so, with the aid of many years of meditation and concentration exercises, Jezebel’s mind was now a calm, still pond as she ghosted through the food hall after Cready. To peer around the door just as he disappeared into the medical lounge.

Damn. A small disturbance in that clear pond of her mind. Cready must have found a way to fool the restricted area sensors, she thought as the ripples of her agitation settled once more into tranquillity.

Well, tranquil and deadly, anyway…

Solomon turned on one heel to swing his body to the side of the nearest window, breathing. He waited first for any signs or sounds of surprise, or any movement from the white-coated scientists inside. None. Then he waited a little more, in case one of the scientists was having second thoughts about whether they really did see a sedated adjunct-Marine out of their bunks.

No one did.

The problem was that there were also windows on the other side of the wide corridor. Even though Solomon couldn’t see anyone in them, he could see the ghostlike reflection of himself pressed against the wall in them.

Solomon’s eyes tracked the reflective glass until he found the blindspot that he had been looking for. That was another thing that he had learned from his criminal activities. Windows and mirrors are a pain, but people get used to looking at them. They get lazy and stop looking at any of the places that aren’t reflected. Solomon lowered himself to the floor and crab-crawled along the very middle of the corridor, underneath the level where the windows met the metal walls, and out of sight.

It was slow going, but he crawled all of the way to the end of the corridor to Doctor Palinov’s private medical suite, and he eased himself up to peer out of the lower corner, inside.

She wasn’t there. Good.

Whisk! Another wave of the good doctor’s ID card, and the door opened. He rolled inside as the door clicked behind him.

Now, time to get to work…

It took Solomon a couple of tries before he had mimicked the hand movement that turned Palinov’s window dark. I don’t want any chance staffer peering in and seeing what I’m up to, he thought as a line of darker and darker gray and then eventual black shimmered down through the glass.

Next, it was to the cabinets that held the ‘unique antibiotic cultures’ that the doctor had injected him with. He took the first few he saw, before hunting for his own, and moving to the desk to fire up the medical scanner.

Solomon had never used one of these machines before. It looked a little like a three-dimensional printer, crossed with a holographic generator with its bright white bed underneath two arching sensor arms. He had seen various medical staff using one before.

He set first one test tube on the bright bed and hunted for a ‘scan’ command—which turned out to be just a small green triangle—and hit it.

The bright underlit bed flashed once, twice, and a third time before the two robotic arms started to whirr and wind lower over the test tube, seeming to detect where it was on the bed. Tiny LED lights flashed on at the tips of the metal pointer-arms, and Solomon saw a haze of golden light flare into the test tube. He leaned back, half-expecting the thing to shatter from the apparent laser beam. This medical scanner, however, was far more sophisticated than a mere point-and-shoot laser, and he watched as the twin beams of laser light diffused into a broad glow, and then recalibrated until he was looking at two thin beams of shimmering reddish-gold light, penetrating the tube.

The nearest screen suddenly flared to life and started displaying the results.

COMPOSITION:

Poly-crystallite: 70%

Organic Rubber: 5%

Liquid Solution: 25%

ANALYSIS:

Poly-Crystallite… Widespread manufacture. Industry standard 4.3mm thick. Medical apparatus. CONCLUSION: Test tube.

Organic Rubber… Widespread processing. Heat resistant to 200degC. CONCLUSION: Cork.

Liquid Solution… PROCESSING… PROCESSING…PROCESSING…

H2O solution (base carrier).

Antibiotics – Cefitibrole, Valacin.

Vitamins – Thiamin, Niacin, Arginine.

Amino Complex – Creatine.

Minerals – Potassium, Phosphorous, Magnesium.

DNA Complex-strand variant 21.

“What?” Solomon frowned at the last element contained within the test tube. “What the frack is a DNA Complex-strand variant 21?” He could almost understand all of the others. Just as the doctor had said, the solutions appeared to be a mixture of minerals and nutrients and antibiotics designed to keep all of the adjuncts at peak physical performance.

But she didn’t mention anything about that last one, Solomon thought.

“Hmm…” He flicked through the screen into the medical database so he could run a search for this ‘DNA Complex-strand 21’ while he powered down the machine and ran the next test tube.

COMPOSITION…

ANALYSIS…

PROCESSING… PROCESSSING…

It turned out that each one was almost exactly the same except for the percentages of nutrients, minerals, and the exact quantities of the antibiotics. Palinov hadn’t been joking, apparently, when she had been talking about how each of these cultures were specifically tailored to each person.

The one thing that remained absolutely constant throughout each and every test tube that he checked was this ‘DNA Complex-strand 21’ thing. The amount that had been given to every adjunct-Marine was always, precisely, to the microgram, exactly the same.

Solomon came to the last test tube—his own—and paused for a moment before he put it on the medical scanner bed and ran the test. A part of him didn’t really want to know, but he knew that he had to. He had come this far, and there was every reason to believe that his results would be exactly the same as everyone else’s.

He hoped, anyway.

ENTRY: “DNA Complex-strand variant 21”

SOURCE: CMC Medical Database v5.1

Last Updated: 9 days ago.

OVERVIEW:

The Complex-strand variant 21 is a synthetic chain of DNA, able to be gene-edited and shaped to attach to specific parts of the host’s own genetic structure. Unfortunately, as any mammalian genetic structure is encoded throughout the body (in each individual cell), multiple and some might say excessive doses of said variant 21 have to be administered to get a full-spectrum coverage. Discontinued in 2183, for this reason, and for the Confederate Health Investigation Report 781, which claimed that such genetic-editing was tantamount to ‘a crime against the species of humanity’.

ORIGINATOR:

American Confederacy, Virginia.

USES:

Discontinued, but has led to the development of more site-specific gene-editing complex strands. Variant 21 was used as a means to increase metabolic rates, auto-immune functions, cell regeneration, and neurological development, as well as enhance general mammalian healing and recovery properties. Deemed too expensive to be of use and was taken off of public licensing database.

SIDE EFFECTS:

Brain seizures. Fits. Convulsions. Auto-immune system collapse. Neurological disorders (paralysis, fatigue, migraines). Death.

PROPIETOR:

NeuroTech Biofirm (originally); rights since bought by Confederate Marine Corps (current).

DEVELOPMENT:

Variant 21 has shown to produce astounding performance results in higher mammalian species, but has lacked the ability to maintain said higher results over time as the synthetic gene strands break down. Possible avenues of development have seen this lifespan of the effects spread for longer periods of time, but nothing longer than 12 years has been reported.

Continual administering has been the favored route of action, during which time individuals naturally plateau at their new levels of peak performance. Possible avenues of development include ways in how to administer smaller doses to have more permanent effects.

“Twelve years, eh?” Solomon frowned at the screen. Which was funny, because that was precisely the amount of time that the Outcasts were given as their military sentence. At which time they would be more or less free to return to civilian life, with their criminal records, if not expunged, then at least obscured a good bit.

The Confederacy had bought the rights to this experimental gene therapy drug. Solomon’s mind, honed and trained through years of working out complicated cons and now working out battle strategies, put the pieces together.

And then they created the Outcasts… Which were an experimental Marine outfit made entirely out of ex-convicts and attached to the Rapid Response Fleet of the Marine Corps. The unit who had to bust in first and do all of the dirtiest, messiest fighting in the name of Earth.

Who better than a bunch of lifelong criminals that Earth has already exiled to use as guinea-pigs for their experimental, illegal drug? Solomon saw. It made sense to use people that no one else cared about, right?

We get twelve years of being superhuman, Solomon realized. Superhuman in the name of Confederate Earth, that is, he corrected. And then when the drug started wearing off and their bodies gave up and returned to whatever shabby state that they had been before, that was when they got retired from the program.

And then what happens? If he was a betting man—which he wasn’t, at least, not with money anyway, only with his life—then he would say that one of the reasons why Warden Coates was pushing them so hard was to prove results from this Serum 21 to his paymasters further up the paygrades. If he could show that Serum 21 worked, then why not fund more development into it to make the results permanent? Or administer it to every Marine in the Confederate Corps?

Or maybe they’ll just pick up another batch of exiled cons set for Titan. Solomon thought that was a much more likely scenario. Why bother creating permanent superhumans, who one day would leave the service and could get in to all sorts of mischief out there, when you could just simply have any number of convict super soldiers for your little army?

The idea was pretty genius really, Solomon thought. He was annoyed that he hadn’t realized it earlier!

“But I’m not liking that list of side effects,” he muttered at the screen, as the scanner reached the end of its cycle on his own test tube.

“Paralysis. Fits. Brain seizures. Death,” Solomon sighed. He wondered if there was a way that he could stop eating the protein gunk. How many Outcast adjuncts had they already lost so far? Ten? Twelve? And not all of them had been busted out to Titan, either, he knew. Word was going around the bunks that some of those empty bunks had been the result of their occupiers being ill.

Had been having some sort of seizure, in fact… he thought with a fair bit of dread. Would he be next? Would one of his squad just never wake up?

The screen above him flashed as the readout of his own, uniquely-administered Serum 21 test tube appeared. He read through the exact same facts and names just as before, finding small differences in the amount of potassium or B-vitamin or antibiotic that the doctor thought his body needed.

And then he coughed out loud, and suddenly felt faint.

There was one huge difference in his own test tube results. Something that was different from each of the previous three other adjunct test tunes that he had seen. Their percentage levels of ‘DNA Complex-strand variant 21’ had been imperceptibly small. And always the exact same number: 2.3%.

A solution of 2.3% concentration of the gene-editing strand in each of the test tubes, all apart from his.

His stood at 48%.

“What!?” Solomon gasped as he looked at the screen. Surely there must have been a mistake. He read the numbers again, then scrolled back up to see that yes, the previous concentrations of the drug had all been exactly the same, apart from him.

He was sorely tempted to start going though each and every adjunct-Marine test tube that he had in the cupboard behind him to see if he was the only one, but he could feel, deep down in his gut, that he already knew the answer.

Doctor Palinov had been the one to defend my actions to the colonels, when they were arguing about whether to dismiss me and send me to the Titan prison camp. Solomon’s heart was starting to race. Was this what a seizure felt like as it started?

She must have known. She must have administered the high dose to him, after all. And she had argued to keep him here on Ganymede, under her watchful supervision so…what? So she would get a pet experiment to play with? Did she want to see how far she could push the drug? What would happen if she completely went beyond all safe limits?

Other Outcasts have already started dying thanks to this serum, Solomon thought darkly. Had they been on the 2.3% dose, or the same as him, the higher 48%?

He was busy having his own personal panic attack when the next thought hit him. Why am I not dead yet?

And a moment later, he heard the distant, muffled sound of footsteps coming down the hall.

“Frack!” He seized the test tubes, punched the computer off, and stuffed the tubes back into their cupboard as the footsteps got closer and closer. They weren’t pausing or halting beside one of the other medical laboratories. With a sickening feeling, he realized that whomever it was, they were coming right to him.

It has to be Palinov, he thought. Could he reason with her? Stop her from reporting him?

All hope failed in that eventuality, as Solomon could hear, muffled through the dark window, the angered tones of Warden Coates himself.

“…still don’t know why you couldn’t schedule the meeting for the morning, Doctor…” Coates sounded annoyed and tired.

Great, Solomon thought dourly, his eyes scanning around for somewhere—anywhere—to hide in this small room. The last thing he wanted was a grumpy Warden Coates in charge of his electro-shock command unit. It was bad enough when he was in a good mood.

There. The other side of the desk was half-walled with a line of metal container boxes, boxing off one corner of the room. So long as the warden and the doctor didn’t decide to do any furniture arranging during this meeting of theirs. He dove for the other side of the metal crates and wedged himself as small as he could against the corner of the wall, wishing that his heart wasn’t about ready to punch its way out of his chest.

“Strange, I don’t remember shading the windows last night…” the hiding Solomon heard Palinov mutter. “I must have been exhausted.”

“I hope this doesn’t mean that your work has been suffering, if you are allowing yourself to get exhausted all the time!” Warden Coates snapped at her in his usual snide voice.

He really isn’t a happy bunny when he’s missed his beauty sleep, is he? Solomon thought.

“Of course not, Warden,” Palinov’s voice floated over the metal medical crates as they walked into the room, and the door whisked shut behind them. She did sound tired, but more exasperated with the warden. Solomon could almost feel a sort of pity for someone in her position, having to work with such a nasty little man as Warden Coates But then again, she was the person who was experimenting on him and putting him in danger of imminent death at any moment of the day, so he wasn’t that sorry for her.

“Anyway. What is this all about?” the warden snapped.

Solomon heard their boots slapping forward into the room, and then scrape to a stop abruptly. He hadn’t turned the scanner off! The thought speared through him. Would she notice?

She did.

“Too many late nights,” he heard her mutter as lighter, softer feet moved swiftly to the other side of the desk, uncomfortably close to his hiding place. There was the diffusing hum of the medical scanner as Solomon presumed that Palinov had turned it off. There was an impatient sigh from behind her, and Solomon found himself thinking that it was almost encouraging to find that the warden was a complete prick to everyone he worked with and not just him.

“Well, you know the general told us to report back to him on the development of Serum 21,” Palinov said, her voice sounding tense.

Solomon’s ears pricked up. I knew it!

“Well, I just got the latest analysis through to my personal screen this morning, which is why I brought you down here. The results are…significant.”

“Explain,” Warden Coates said.

“Here, I can show you.” There was a flurry of tapping and typing, and the soft electric hum of one of the screens firing up. “You see, here…?”

“No, I really don’t, Doctor. What am I looking at exactly?” The warden was not a happy man when he first woke up, clearly.

“That is a radiological map of one of the gene structures, you can see the RNA and DNA strands here in red and orange…”

The warden made an interested, but exasperated, noise.

“RNA can be thought of as read-only memory. Like a data-stick. You plug it in and use it, and when it’s done what it is supposed to do, you don’t need it anymore, right?” the doctor said. “Whereas DNA is the unchanging, permanent codes that actually dictate how the body can function. Meta-commands, if you will. The problem with most mammals is that there is no efficient way to dispose of RNA. You end up clogging the gene structure with what they call ‘junk’ DNA strands—mostly RNA—and it’s this, uh, genetic static that leads to minute failures of communication, which leads to eventual gene atrophy and misalignment.”

“We’re not running a hospital here, Doctor. I didn’t hire you to find a cure for cancer.” The warden sighed.

“Understood, Warden,” Palinov said tightly. “But it is pertinent. Junk RNA leads to such things as cancer, growth defects, diseases, and what have you. It’s the reason why we eventually age and die, as the DNA can no longer transmit its meta-commands out to the rest of the system.”

“Like I said before, Doctor…” the warden warned.

“But here, you can see the complex-strand variant 21, colored in green…” Palinov said quickly. “It was designed as a complementary string of genes, see? Ones that attached onto the double-helix. And here, you can see something very interesting: it is replacing the RNA with its own superstructure!”

The warden grunted in confusion.

“It’s… It’s…” Palinov was apparently at a loss for words. “What I am saying is that this is incredible. It’s also spreading at a much faster rate than otherwise thought possible. It means that we’ve essentially found a way to create a new breed of human. One that unlocks specific parts of the DNA structure—that we can target!” she said proudly.

That seemed to get the warden’s attention, at least.

“So, are you telling me that if I wanted a unit of infantrymen who are strong, tough, resilient, we could program it?” the warden asked.

“We can tailor it, Warden!” Palinov said excitedly. “We can perform the work of twenty or even fifty thousand years of evolution overnight. Imagine this: Mars is roughly point-eight of Earth’s gravity. The moon is roughly point-four. Both are close enough so that humans can function, and our tactical suits mean that we can adjust for weight and mass, etcetera. But it still takes intensive training to get used to local gravity. That is why the colonists generally are better adapted to their environment. Their bodies have started to lose bone density with every generation, making them more adapted to moving around out there.”

“Get to the point, Palinov,” the warden demanded, clearly losing patience again.

“Well, in a few months, we would be able to create a special team of Outcasts perfectly suited to point-eight or point-four gravity, by tailoring their DNA. They would be able to perform better than any Marine ever has, with a fraction of the training!” Palinov stated.

“That is…interesting.” Coates finally sounded impressed. “It would give us an upper hand against the separatists, at least.”

“And of course, it will help against…” Palinov’s voice was a low murmur. She seemed hesitant to say just what the serum would be most useful for, and Solomon racked his brain to try and work out who she could mean. The space mercenaries who attacked freighters? Criminal gangs on earth?

“Perhaps. We don’t know enough about that yet.”

“Then take a look at this,” Palinov said, and there were more sounds of keys being hit. “These are the physical performance results of all of the Outcasts who have survived the treatment.”

A shuffle of feet, and a low whistle. “That is one hell of a performance spike, Doctor.”

“Precisely. Their recovery rates are going through the roof. They need less time to rest. Their reaction times are getting quicker.”

“What’s that one there? That spike?” The warden’s voice grew frighteningly close to Solomon as he must have leaned over to take a better look at the screen.

“That, Warden, is Adjunct-Marine Cready,” Palinov said lightly, and Solomon could well understand her hesitation, as suddenly there was the scraping sound of a chair being pushed to one side, angrily.

“Him! I don’t know what you and the colonels see in him!” Coates burst out irritably. “He’s a murderer. He’s arrogant. He doesn’t understand loyalty, or honor. And he has an attitude a lightyear wide!”

Well, at least I made an impression, Solomon had to consider.

“These results are what we see in him, Warden.” Palinov sounded…defensive, almost.

“If he’s turning into such an amazing solider, then why aren’t his training exercises showing the same uptick in performance then, huh?” the warden stated angrily.

“Well, most of these results are from his recovery rates and reaction times. But with Cready, there is something a lot more interesting going on. These results are his neurological response-times, the effectiveness that his neurons and dendrites in his brain transmit information.”

“He’s becoming smarter, is that what you’re trying to tell me? That is all I need!” the warden stated, apparently miserably.

Am I? Solomon thought, He didn’t feel smarter than he had ever been before—especially since all of his brainpower had led him to be currently wedged in a corner, trying not to make a sound at all.

“Intelligence is always hard to measure. There’s so many kinds—working intelligence, data-retrieval, memory-storage, image-processing, emotional intelligence,” Palinov said in a tone that was the equivalent of a shrug. “But it means that he can think quicker than anyone I’ve ever known. He’ll make an amazing strategist or unit commander one day.”

“Pfagh!” the warden scoffed. “I doubt that very much!”

“Warden, with respect, this is exactly the sort of result that the general wanted to know about. Why she sanctioned the Outcasts program in the first place,” Palinov said.

“We all know why she authorized the Outcasts program, Doctor. And why I was tasked with administering it!” the warden said. It appeared that Palinov had hit something of a raw nerve.

“The Message,” Palinov agreed.

What message? Solomon thought.

“Yes. And as much as I admire what you have done here, Palinov, I cannot ever imagine a future where I put my faith in that schlub of a man Cready to deal with it when we have to!” The warden was worked up now.

“But, Warden, do we really have a choice?” Palinov asked.

“Choice?” Coates apparently flipped, his voice rising further. “Nothing here is about choice, Doctor! You of all people should know that. You do not have a choice, you carry out orders!”

“Hgnh!” There was a sharp intake of pain, and the sound of shuffling bodies.

Had Coates slapped her? Solomon thought, his fear tripping over into indignation. He might not like Palinov overmuch, but at least she was in his corner. He felt his chest tighten and his muscles tense as he tried to control his anger and stop himself from jumping up and smacking the Warden then and there.

But no, the Warden hadn’t slapped Palinov.

“Yes. It’s been a long time since you’ve felt the snap of the command chip, isn’t it, Doctor?” Coates said, as Palinov’s loud breathing started to ease.

The warden must have shocked her. That meant that Doctor Palinov had one of the implanted chips just like all of the adjuncts, Solomon thought. Did that mean that everyone here in Ganymede—the Outcasts and the staffers—all could be shocked into submission at any time by the warden? Solomon started to reappraise the fate of all those around him a little.

“I’m sorry for questioning you, Warden Coates.” Palinov sounded subdued, but also sullen.

“Apology accepted. Just no more mention of this to the general. Not until I say so, clear?” the warden stated.

“Of course, sir.” Palinov’s voice was low and muted, followed by the sound of angered boots leaving the medical lounge.

Solomon waited and held his breath. Should he make himself known? Now that he knew that she was under the thrall of the warden just as he was, he wondered if that meant she was more likely to become an ally. Would she tell him what his mutated genes meant? What would happen to him in the future? Or what this ‘Message’ was?

“Prick,” he heard the Doctor mutter under her breath, clearly passing judgement on her superior officer, before there was the clatter of computer keys and the sound of things being moved around, tidied, and the hiss of the door as she exited the lounge.

Solomon waited, counted to a hundred, and then a hundred again, before he was sure that she had in fact gone and wasn’t about to suddenly return. He let out a long sigh of relief and slowly unfolded his limbs, wondering if the fact that they hadn’t gone to sleep or gotten pins and needles was another sign of his apparently enhanced genetic structure.

He cast a look at the terminals and the instrumentation. It was all dark now, and he considered for a moment staying around for a bit longer to try and ferret out more information. No. Don’t push your luck, his more criminal expertise told him.

Maybe I am getting smarter, he thought as he sidled to the door to make his escape back into the Outcasts bunkrooms. Because now I’m even going to follow my own discerning advice.

7

Decisions

The next day saw Jezebel Wen once again hitting the gymnasium at the crack of the day shift, running through her series of high-intensity exercises with a passion that she hadn’t exhibited before.

Now I’m the angry one, she considered ruefully, as she dared any of the other combat specialists to spar with her. No one was eager to volunteer to be the first victim, it seemed, as Wen was radiating annoyance in her savage roundhouse kicks and fast jabs on the training mannequins.

Unfortunately for the other adjunct-Marines, however, ‘choice’ was not a part of Ganymede vocabulary, and by the time the first two-hour shift had ended, at least three of the best fighters in their training circle were now walking with a limp or ringing ears from Wen’s furious blows.

Get it together, Jezzie, the specialist thought as the green light flared over the door, signaling the end of their shift and the turnover for the next set of regular gymnasium Outcasts to arrive. It also meant that she and the other specialists would have an hour off to recuperate and wash, before everyone came together in an hour and a half’s time for the next set of study lessons.

Jezebel knew why she was annoyed, of course, although she didn’t want to admit it to herself. The answer was unavoidable, however, as she saw that the next group of Outcast Marines—all there for standard gymnasium exercise—included her own Gold Squad Commander, Solomon Cready.

The man that I’m supposed to kill.

He arrived at the back of the group as usual, as Arlo Menier had already made it fairly clear that if any of the other Outcasts not in the Gold Squad were to make friends with his rival, there would be trouble. Not that everyone obeyed Arlo, but he was a big man in a very small world, and his word had enough weight to keep Solomon on his own most of the time.

Solomon had lost that chip on his shoulder today, Wen saw. He looked almost reflective and thoughtful as he kept to himself and headed for the cross-trainer machines. She wondered if she should say something to him.

But what exactly are you supposed to say to a man that you’re supposed to kill? This was the type of thought that she wasn’t used to having—not when she had been back on Earth, anyway. What was wrong with her? Was she growing a conscience? How messed up was she, that it took coming to a Confederate Marine bootcamp to grow one!?

“Jezzie!” She was startled out of her twisted thoughts to see that it was none other than Solomon himself, having seen her by the lockers and hurrying over.

Oh great. No, not now, Sol. She gritted her teeth and forced her face into a smile. Her previous meditative tranquility, the skill that she had exhibited so well last night, had apparently evaporated this morning. Don’t talk to me, Solomon. Don’t make me like you, for heaven’s sake!

“Jezzie, I hoped I would see you in here. Look, it’s about the serum. The one I was telling you about.” Solomon looked almost excited, if a bit nervous, which just made Jezebel even angrier.

“What is it? You mean that crazy conspiracy theory you have about us being secretly injected in the middle of the night?” Wen snapped. Maybe it would make this whole mission go easier if he remained an idiot, she considered.

“It’s not a conspiracy theory!” Solomon didn’t even look hurt or taken aback by her vehemence. If anything, he looked excited. “Look, I’ve got proof. Well, I haven’t actually got any proof, but I know where some is, and…”

“I don’t want to hear it, Sol,” she said, shaking her head. “Look. We’re here for twelve years. Twelve long years. Let’s just make sure we don’t go space-crazy before then, shall we?” she said irritably, walking past him and ignoring his surprised look.

Jezzie couldn’t talk to that man’s face right now. She couldn’t even look at it for any longer than she had to. She was annoyed at Solomon. Annoyed at him for being the mark of her current mission, and annoyed that it wasn’t easier than this. Why couldn’t she just hate him? Why couldn’t the Boss have sent someone else to do it?

I can’t kill Sol, she told herself once more. She had grown to, well, maybe not like him per se, but she had trained beside him and sparred with him and taken orders from him. She had argued and negotiated and listened—and all of that kind of built up empathy for someone, when you’ve both sweated together.

No, I won’t do it, she decided. How could she, really? Solomon was her commander, after all. He was almost her friend, if anyone even had friends up here.

But I have to! She thought about her family. Her hardworking engineer of a father she hadn’t seen for almost fifteen years. He worked as a fabricator in one of the northern province’s factories, churning out units for whichever mega-corp controlled the plant on a given week. He was a traditionalist, a conservative sort of a man who placed a lot of pride in the hardworking, straight and narrow life.

Which was why he had been the one to kick her out of the family home when he found out just what she was getting up to—running around the streets of Tokyo, beating people up. That was before the Yakuza, of course, when Jezebel had been young and defiant.

She had hated him back then, she considered as she made her way out of the gymnasium and back to the bunkrooms. She had hated him enough to spend the next fifteen years as a Yakuza executioner and hadn’t spoken to her father in all of that time.

Her mother had died when Jezzie was still a baby, a fact that Jezzie had always assumed her father had blamed her for. She had died of the same colicky-sort of cough that a lot of workers got in the northern industrial towns, but Jezzie knew that her pregnancy had weakened her.

Why should I care about him? Jezzie was thinking about her distant father, who had probably remarried by now, and probably had a whole new, better family than his first tragic one. Maybe he had even moved out of the Asia-Pacific Partnership altogether?

No, not Dad, Jezzie thought. His pride meant that he would stay in the house that he had bought for his dead wife probably until the day that he died.

What did she owe him, really, at the end of the day? Her loyalty? Her love? To a man who had done nothing but make her feel trapped, miserable, and ashamed—and then had kicked her out?

But if Boss Mihashi gets his hands on him… She knew only too well the sorts of terrible things that Mihashi would do to her father. And the idea that Boss Mihashi might not be able to find her father or might spare him out of the goodness of his heart was, of course, ridiculous.

If I don’t kill Solomon Cready, then my father will die. Probably a very slow and agonizing death, Jezebel thought, over and over.

“Wen.” Once again, a voice startled her from her torment. This time, it wasn’t her intended target, but it was none other than the staffer in the gray and blue jumpsuit that she knew hid his winding dragon tattoo.

The man that Wen was coming to think of as her Yakuza handler here on Ganymede was busy loading one of his service carts into one of the wall lockers. She could see an arrangement of cleaning products and ventilation pipes inside.

Jezzie considered just ignoring him, but the image of that tiny command scroll sitting on her pillow made her stop. This guy was able to get to her any time he wanted, after all, so there was no point in avoiding him.

“What do you want?” she muttered under her breath at him. Others of the Outcasts from her combat specialism session filed past her, completely ignoring them as they stood, apparently chatting.

“You’re taking your time,” the man stated, not looking at her.

So he knows just what my job was, she thought. That changed things. Usually only the higher-ups in the Yakuza knew everything about what the lower-down operatives should be doing, not the handlers. Does that mean that this guy is actually a captain of the Yakuza? He didn’t seem like one, though. Even despite his restrained and quiet menace, he didn’t swagger as they usually did. And no captain would ever deign to masquerade as a mere staffer, would they?

But him knowing the job also meant that he might become compelled to see it through himself, if she failed or refused. Which meant that Solomon would still be in danger, even if she told the man to go frack himself.

“I couldn’t do it last night,” she said lightly, remembering how she had waited for Solomon to return from whatever nefarious act he was up to last night. She still wasn’t sure if she had been waiting to kill him or simply talk to him. It was something that she hadn’t let her conscious mind work out yet. Unfortunately, she had been interrupted by none other than Warden Coates and Doctor Palinov, following after Solomon.

Jezebel was sure that her commander was going to get caught, but apparently not. He was better at that sneaking thing than I had given him credit for, she was forced to admit.

“I know. But there are always opportunities,” the man said lightly, fiddling with the cart to load it into some sort of self-powering battery charge unit, before drawing out a small personal data-screen and laying it angled on the top of the unit so that Jezebel Wen could clearly see the images on the screen.

It was surveillance footage. Of the station, which surprised her, as Jezebel hadn’t seen any such obvious cameras during her night jaunt.

From the angle of the image, it appeared to be coming from one of the light fittings, displaying an empty front atrium with all of the doors in and out clearly visible. Then a shadow moved at one of the doors, and it whisked open to show an image of Solomon Cready, moving fast and quietly across the screen to the medical lounges.

“This was taken from last night,” the man stated, wiping a hand over the screen to show the same image once again, but this time without Cready as another shadow emerged from the food hall door. Jezzie recognized herself as she had ghosted after Solomon, before being unable to follow thanks to not being able to pass through the medical lounge glass doors.

Oh no, Jezzie thought. If they had both been caught on internal surveillance cameras, then it was only a matter of time before Warden Coates would know.

Luckily for both Jezzie and Solomon however, that was not to be the case.

“This is the only footage on the station,” the man stated in an eerily calm voice. “I deleted and re-looped the cameras on the mainframe, thinking that last night was you fulfilling your orders…” A pause. “It clearly wasn’t.”

“I got disturbed, the warden and Doctor Palinov—” Jezzie started to hiss, but a cold, measured look from the staffer silenced her. Contained in that scowl were all the years of training of a Yakuza. There are never any excuses for the likes of us, it said.

“You have twenty-four hours,” the man stated, making the screen vanish with a wave of his hand and slamming the wall locker shut.

Twenty-four hours until what? Jezzie was thinking, too shocked to say anything, or to call out after the man as he turned to walk away. Until they kill her father? Or until he releases the footage of her out of her bunk in the middle of the night?

Or before he took matters into his own hands and decided to kill Solomon himself? None of the options were anything that she wanted to face.

8

Joachim

Solomon was now aware of his body in a way that he had never been before as he went through the rest of the day’s training sessions and lessons. His hour and a half of gymnasium saw him paying less and less attention to the other adjuncts around him as he tried to measure his own recovery rate, his strength, speed, and stamina to see if it really had improved.

He thought that they had, but it was hard to tell if that was from half a year of sustained physical training and the apparently ‘perfect metabolic environment’ that they were supposed to live in here, or from Serum 21.

It wasn’t until he saw Arlo Menier using just his arms to ascend the climbing wall that Solomon was starting to think that yeah, maybe there is something to all this Complex-strand DNA variant 21 stuff.

He knew that Arlo was a strong guy. After all, the Frenchman was built like a gladiator, tall and wedge-shaped. Once Solomon had started noticing it, though, he saw evidence of the Outcasts’ improved genetic code everywhere. To one side of the hall, Karamov—his own squad member—had just collapsed after circuit training. Solomon counted the seconds as he watched Karamov pant, wipe his brow for a couple of seconds, and then apparently jump up to his feet once more to have a final lap.

How’s that for recovery time? Solomon thought.

Still more adjunct-Marines appeared to be reaping the benefits of Serum 21. There was one Marine who had just apparently lifted his personal best at the weight sets as he loudly whooped and punched the air. There was a Green Squad member who had been on one of the available running machines solidly since they had all started their session and had apparently not slowed or stopped from his medium-fast sprint.

Holy crap, Solomon thought. He realized that he was truly looking at the Outcasts for the first time. Warden Coates, he hated to say, had been kind of right when he had said that he was going to turn them into an elite fighting unit, one of the best fighting units since the Spartans. Solomon looked around him in frank amazement as he saw his comrades and colleagues in comparison to who he had been back in new Kowloon.

If I had met any of these guys back then… Solomon thought that they would have appeared to be top-athletes, possibly even superhuman, to the likes of him.

Which was precisely when the price of their newfound abilities became painfully obvious as Joachim, one of the regular adjuncts without a specialism from White Squad, suddenly fell off his treadmill.

At first, no one reacted, but Solomon was already moving across the floor of the gymnasium by the time that everyone else noticed the white bubbles forming on the side of Adjunct-Marine Joachim’s mouth.

Solomon reached his side first, to find a man whose limbs were busy shaking and locking into tight positions every few seconds. “Joachim!” Solomon called out nervously. Weren’t you supposed to support their heads? He realized he had no idea what to do in this situation. “Medic!” he shouted, just as the other Outcasts started to realize that something very wrong was happening in their midst. “Someone get a medic!” Solomon shouted again.

The man’s hands were like curled claws as he was gripped by seizures and fits right there before Solomon’s eyes. Keep the airways open, Solomon thought, remembering his first aid training, and reached to steady Joachim’s head.

“Huh…” Just as Joachim’s shaking suddenly subsided, his body relaxed, and his eyes closed as gently and as peacefully as if he was going to sleep.

“No!” Solomon said, quickly reaching for a pulse, but it was already too late. Joachim from White Squad had died, right here in front of them.

CLANG! CLANG CLANG! The klaxons above the door sounded, and they hissed open to spill a small gaggle of fast-running staffers, heading straight to Solomon and Joachim, to separate them and push Solomon out of the way.

“ATTENTION, ladies and gents!” the very familiar and also very unwelcome tones of Warden Coates cut through the commotion. “Let the boys in gray work. Clear a space! That means you, Cready!” Coates was bawling at them, and although Solomon had no real wish to be electrocuted again, he didn’t back away from Joachim’s body as the warden strode forward into the room, behind the staffers.

“Cready! On your feet! Attention!” Coates and the others came to a stop just in front of him. The man was a walking steel rod, Solomon thought grimly as he looked up at Coates’s glare of indignation.

“You disobeying an order, Specialist Cready?” Coates said.

“This man is dead, Warden,” Solomon heard himself say. A surge of anger ignited in his chest, making him ball his fists and want to scream. Keep it together, Solomon, he told himself, even though every fiber of his being told him not to. Told him to scream and shout at the man that he knew just what they were doing—all of these experiments with Serum 21, which were slowly killing them, one by one.

And I’ve got the highest dose of anyone in here, Solomon thought, too, his glance moving to the glassy stare of Adjunct-Marine Joachim underneath him. It was probably even Coates’s idea, he considered. Dose me up, kill me off, then he wouldn’t have to think about how much he hated me.

“Pfagh!” a grunt of annoyance from Coates as he must have registered all the other adjuncts’ worried and shocked looks around him. “Get him up. Take him to the medical lounge, now!” Coates snapped at the staffers, who hurriedly moved to the dead adjunct’s body and lifted him between them. Solomon slowly stood up from his crouch, but he could not find it in himself to salute.

Coates held his eyes for a period, and Solomon saw the man’s lip twitching in a similarly barely-held-in-check rage. But whatever internal debate was going on inside the warden’s head—whether to shock Cready or just shout at him—it was overcome by what he had come here for.

“Adjuncts!” Coates shouted, using his training voice that echoed around the gymnasium. “We’ve had an urgent call from the Rapid Response Fleet. One of our station-ships has gone missing, and command deems it high time that you are put to the test!”

I thought our mission on Mars proved our worth, Solomon thought.

“Get to the launch hall, now! Light tactical suits everyone. Double-time!” he shouted, and, after the surprised second of confusion that followed, Coates shouted once. “WELL!? Move it!”

Around Solomon, all of the other adjunct-Marines broke into action, but Solomon stood still. He was scared that if he even so much as moved a muscle, it would only be to hit the warden in the face. Which would be very satisfying, of course, but it wouldn’t do him any favors…

“What about Adjunct-Marine Joachim, sir?” Solomon said as neither man moved. What are you doing, Solomon! a small, more sane part of him argued. Staring down at the warden is sure to only get you electrocuted!

The warden held Solomon’s glare for a moment, then shook his head in frustration. “Death happens, Specialist Cready,” Coates barked. “You’re in the Marine Corps now. You’d better get used to it.” And, much to Solomon’s surprise, the warden turned on his heel and followed the rest of the adjuncts and staffers out of the gymnasium.

What, no insult? No punishment? Solomon was deeply confused by this outcome as he broke into a jog. Did this mean that the doctor had been right? That the fact that he, Solomon Cready, was one of the best performing of the Serum 21 experiments meant that the warden wasn’t eager to punish him anymore?

I doubt that very much, he reflected as he skidded out of the door and turned to the lifts that went down to the launch level—large hangar bays where their suits and equipment were stored in personal identification lockers. As well as where the transporters docked, ready to take them into deep space.

Solomon wasn’t sure what this new reaction from the warden meant, but he was sure that he wouldn’t be able to push his luck much farther, either.

9

Kepler

LIGHT TACTICAL SUIT: Active.

USER ID: Solomon CR.

BIO-SIGNATURE: Good.

SQUAD IDENTIFIER: Gold.

SQUAD TELEMETRIES: Active.

Solomon’s vision flushed with a wash of neon greens and oranges as his light tactical suit activated, and he clicked the visor of his helmet into place. He stood in front of his booth in the main launch hall, and alongside him, their forms highlighted with the fading green line of his suit identifiers, were the rest of Gold Squad. As Solomon turned to survey how they were getting on with their own suiting up, he saw their identifiers flare above them on his visor screen, fading to almost transparent wording as he turned.

Sp. Adj. Marine MALADY

Enhancements: Full Tactical Suit

Sp. Adj. Marine WEN

Combat Specialist

Adj. Marine KARAMOV

Adj. Marine KOL

ALL GOLD SIGNS GOOD… SUITS ACTIVE…

As the specialist commander of their squad, his readouts held slightly different information than the rest. An overlay of strategic and tactical options rendered into faintly glowing green lines and arrows pointing their quickest route to the launch hall doors, as well as a minimal set of information on each of his squad’s life signs.

“All looking good,” he announced, his voice echoing slightly as it repeated across Gold Squad’s suit-to-suit channel. In front of him, his squad and the other squads of the Outcast Marines looked a little like humanoid beetles in their tactical suits. And these were even only the light versions, apart from the walking man-tank that was Malady, sealed inside his full tactical suit for crimes against the Marine Corps.

The suits were a second skin to Solomon and the others now. A light undermesh suit with ports and connectors for the harness that attached to the leg and arm part-plate armor, as well as the heavier jacket that looked like sheaths of different sculpted metals. It was actually a poly-composite material said to be superior even to sheet steel.

But there were still plenty of gaps between the plates and the joints of the harness, Solomon knew. Unlike the full poly-metal shell that Malady wore, the light tacticals were designed for faster movement and greater flexibility. The only overt display of power was the singular shoulder pad that each suit had over its right shoulder, emblazoned with the red ‘O’ of the Outcasts, the smaller Eagle-and-World insignia of the Confederacy, and whatever personal ranking identifiers that the adjunct-Marines might have. On Solomon’s shoulder was a small, magnetically-sealed gold star, for instance, which designated him as the specialist commander for this squad.

And also the one any enemy would want to shoot first, Solomon thought. But there wasn’t time for misgivings, as the holographic countdown on the inside of his visor was already hitting the last minute before they had to ship out.

“Grab your glad-rags, ladies and gents,” Solomon heard himself saying. It was weird, hearing himself slip into this role so easily. He didn’t remember when it had become so easy to pretend to know what he was doing as a commander.

Maybe it’s the super-smarts the serum is giving me? he thought wryly as he gestured to the equipment lockers. On the racks was an assortment of weapons from flashbang grenades to localized EMP charges, and even a few bladed weapons. Solomon stuck to the tried and true, pulling for himself the Jackhammer combat rifle that was standard issue.

“We don’t know what we’re facing out there today,” he said. In their infinite wisdom, the Marine Corps only gave them the details of the mission when they thought there was a ‘need to know.’

“…so I want you all to pick what you’re most comfortable with. No surprises this time, okay?” he said, seeing Karamov and Kol follow suit in picking the Jackhammer, but with Kol adding a selection of grenades to clip onto his harness.

Specialist Malady was a unique case, however, as he picked first two small Rotary MGs—small machine guns with rotating barrels that could spit out small, but very high-density bullets at a rate of three a second—as well as one much larger, tube-like apparatus that he slung over his rounded metal plate shoulder.

“A particle cannon? Really, Malady?” Solomon had never seen the walking metal golem use one of them before, and he wondered if Malady had been listening when he had said ‘no surprises’ just a second ago.

“I’m the only one who can handle the recoil. I fired them when I was in the Marines,” Malady stated in his deadpan, slightly electronic voice.

Specialist Wen, of course, picked a Jackhammer along with two polysteel blades. They looked like katanas but a little smaller, and she slid them into place in her thigh holsters.

“You ready?” Solomon asked her, still feeling a little wary around her as he hadn’t seen her since their argument in the gymnasium. Another reason I’ve got to talk to Malady and Wen, he thought. He was closer to those two than to Karamov and Kol—not that he didn’t trust anyone on his squad—and he still wanted to share his late-night findings with them about Serum 21.

That the Marine Corps is experimenting on us. And that any one of us might drop dead at any moment, just as Joachim had, Solomon thought.

“ATTENTION OUTCASTS! SQUADS ASSEMBLE!” the speaker system announced, and a golden-green vector line appeared over Solomon’s visor screen indicating the path that he was designated to take. As they jogged to their position, the other squads were doing the same until the sixty-odd Outcasts left were now formed into small groups of four to five adjunct-Marines. Each stood before the ramps that led up to the double-doors of the hangar bay.

“Right!” a voice bellowed, amplified from above. Solomon looked up to see that it was, of course, Warden Coates, standing on the balcony beside two other staffers with Doctor Palinov a few steps behind him. Solomon wondered if the doctor looked a little subdued today, as her head was down, studying a data-screen.

Probably checking our performance results, he thought with a twinge of unease.

“Listen up, schlubs! This order comes down from Marine Command, working directly under the Fleet General!” the warden barked. “The deep-field station-ship Kepler is a generational transport ship between Earth and Proxima. You all should know what that means.”

Solomon did. The ‘deep-field’ ships were a class of spacecraft designed to travel far into deep space, and to jump for prolonged distances on eternal round journeys that looped in and out of Earth’s system, delivering much needed materials and resources to the farflung colonies of the Confederacy. It was a necessity that even jump travel couldn’t get around, unfortunately. While it was possible to send smaller Barr-Hawking jump-ships back and forth from the colonies in a matter of days, the smaller ships could only manage to carry so much back and forth. Since the colonies were also important for extracting gold and rare minerals to be sent back to their buyers on Earth, then a large-scale, industrial transport network was needed.

Hence the deep-field ships, each fitted with their own Barr-Hawking particle generators, and able to perform multiple small jumps on their long journey across the hundreds of lightyears that separated the colonies.

But the Kepler deep-field was apparently also a station-ship, which meant that it functioned pretty much as a moving space station, with habitats and dormitories and recreational facilities. The warden had said that it was a generational ship, which meant that the Kepler had been designed as a miniature traveling Earth colony all by itself, with families of settlers running the ship for years at a time, before moving out to be replaced by a new family.

Solomon had seen the adverts back on Earth, of course. Glossy, airbrushed photographs of young moms and dads with their earnest teenaged children. ‘Are You Looking For A New Start In Life? Do You Want A Secure Future For Your Children?’ and so on. The deal was a five, ten, or fifteen-year contract that would see the families become expert station-ship operatives, and reward their children with specialist training skills such as astro-navigation, space craft maintenance, logistics, or communications.

It sounded like a pretty good deal for a young family, if you didn’t count the fact that the deep-field ships were also the ones most likely to be targeted by raiders—rogue bands of mercenaries and criminal gangs who had managed to launch their own spacecraft to seize, kidnap, or ransom the precious materials inside.

“We lost contact with Kepler just after the Erisian Asteroid Field, so your search will begin there. You will deploy in scout-class Marine ships, and when you have located the Kepler, you will attempt to ascertain what happened to it, and whether there are any survivors,” the warden barked. “This might be a case of emergency response, so I want every squad to be carrying a full medical kit. Or it might be a firefight against the raiders, so every squad has to be ready to respond with deadly force if threatened. Your goal is to locate the Kepler, and to return its crew and merchandise safely to Confederate hands. Got that?”

“AYE-AYE, sir!” the congregation of Outcasts roared.

“Then repeat after me, the Marine Oath.” Warden Coates led them in the standard litany that they recited every morning during their audience briefing.

“Through blood and fire, I will still stand strong.

“I will stand at the borders and the crossroads, I will stand strong.

“Even with the eternal night before me, I will be the flame!’

The lights over the hangar doors started to flash green, and steam hissed out from jets at their feet as the warden and the rest of the staff took their leave. It was a fairly short speech, Solomon thought, and he wondered if that counted as an inspirational ‘pep’ talk in Coates’ twisted little mind.

With a grinding noise, the double-doors creaked open, revealing the industrial-looking insides of the Marine transport ship on the other side. The cargo hold was filled with pull-down chairs with webbing attached to the walls that they were expected to clip themselves into, in squad order.

“GO! GO! GO!” the speakers blared at them, and Solomon was running forward, leading his Gold Squad to their second mission on behalf of the Confederate Marine Corps.

Just as before, their Barr-Hawking jump-ship awaited them in the sweet spot where the pull of Jupiter’s massive gravity well was met by the pull of Ganymede and the outer moons. It was in this place, where the different ‘tides’ of gravitons almost balanced each other out, that was the ideal place for the Barr-Hawking ship to fold spacetime.

Pfft! Pfft! Bursts of gas-propelled wires and magnet clamps were fired back from the giant ring that completely overshadowed the small ship, surrounding it like a god’s game of hoopla. With dull metallic thumps, they slapped onto the reinforced nose of the boxlike Marine transporter, and the four particle generators at each cardinal point of the ring started to fire.

If Solomon or any of the other adjunct-Marines had cockpits to view what was happening outside, they would have seen something strange starting to happen to the light around the Barr-Hawking ship. The distant stars on the other side started to double, refract, and split apart.

With all the balletic grace of deep space travel, the Barr-Hawking ship fired its thrusters and started to move forward. Its magnet clamps transmitted the exact overrides to its passenger’s engines and the other ship matched its forward propulsion. Behind them, Ganymede started to grow smaller and paler, and Jupiter became just one giant crimson eye.

And then, Solomon and all the other adjunct-Marines on board felt the first wave of vertigo that heralded space sickness, the primate awareness that you were doing something that your biology should never allow.

The particle generators of the Barr-Hawking vessel created enough turbulence at the subatomic level that it created a ripple in spacetime, a ripple that folded the fabric of space, allowing normal travel to eat up lightyears even as the body of the craft moved at its regular pace.

In his seat, Solomon felt as though he were shaking, although he and every other member of the Outcasts weren’t moving other than to shuffle uncomfortably in their seats. The webbing across their chests held them tight against the chair, and the main cargo hold was cold. No in-flight luxuries for the Outcast Marines.

Just as Solomon’s nausea spiked, and he was sure that he was going to be sick, the ship shuddered and appeared to have reached a stop.

Are we there yet? Solomon’s frazzled thoughts made him feel slightly hysterical, but he was answered anyway, as the holographic commands scrolled down the inside of his visor screen.

Mission ID: KEPLER

Strike Group ID: Outcasts, Adj. Marine.

Parent Fleet ID: Rapid Response 2, Confederate Marine Corps.

Squad Commanders: Cready (Gold), Hitchin (Silver), Gorlais (Bronze), Hu (Red), Nndebi (Blue), Walters (Green), Mendez (White), Suriman (Orange), Khan (Purple), Lovelace (Gray), Molko (Fuchsia).

GROUP-WIDE ORDERS:

Proceed to Hangar Launch Docks.

Receive Command of Marine Scout Vessel.

Follow Search Protocol Pattern #3

Well, this is new, Solomon thought as the buckled straps of his webbing automatically unlocked, allowing him to float upward a little in his chair. “Damn, this ship hasn’t got any graviton generators, has it,” he muttered to himself, earning a wry chuckle from Karamov beside him.

On his visor, the flashing green-gold line indicated that he take his squad not to the main cargo doors that they had entered through, but instead up the metal stairs and through one of the doors in the balcony that overlooked their seating.

“We have our orders, Gold Squad,” he said, using his hands and feet to push himself off and swim through the air.

All of the adjuncts had been through hours and hours of zero-G and near-zero practice, but it wasn’t without a few muttered curses and collisions that Solomon managed to ‘swim’ his squad over the steps to hit the door controls.

The Marines really aren’t offering any luxuries on this flight, are they? he thought, realizing that they hadn’t even bothered to pressurize and atmospherically control the internal corridors of the transporter this time. He wondered if that meant that Marine Command regarded this as a real emergency.

Three or four squads were directed to each of the doors, and as soon as Cready had gotten his people through, he realized why. On the other side, there was a long metal corridor with chrome handrails on the inner side, and with four large bulkhead doors facing outwards, and pressure-sealed.

Those must lead to the scout vessels, Cready saw, following his holographic arrow toward the farthest door, there to float in the corridor, holding the rail as he waited for his squad to form up.

“Okay, I’ve done my basic piloting in command classes. Anyone here got better experience than that?” Cready asked.

“I used to pilot freighters between the satellites and the space elevators,” Kol surprised Cready by saying. It was weird thinking of any of them having a life before this, let alone the life of a space transporter pilot who had regularly traversed the complicated and busy spaceways from any of Earth’s three space elevators and the blanket of satellites that constantly moved through the upper atmosphere.

“Good enough for me. Think you can handle a Marine scout?” Solomon asked.

The suited Kol shrugged. “Can’t be more complicated than a two-person hauler, sir,” he said, and Solomon could hear the grin in his voice.

“Commander Cready,” this time it was the absurdly floating megalith that was Malady’s turn to speak. “I believe that, although not against regulations, the Marine Corps will expect that their own Marine training will be sufficient to perform any operation in an away mission.” Malady’s tone was precise and exact.

“Which I guess is your way of saying that it should be me piloting that thing, because I’m the one that has been given the simulation training?” Solomon said.

“I merely mean that if we wish to avoid the ire of our supervisors, Commander…” Malady corrected.

Well, Solomon could heartily agree with that sentiment at least. He knew that Coates, at least, would be looking for any dereliction of orders on his part, but he hadn’t been given a direct order to pilot the scout ship himself, had he? And besides which, he made up his mind. “Well, I take your point Malady, but right now, I would feel far more comfortable if we had a Marine behind the wheel of this ship who had actually flown a real spaceship, not just a simulation.”

“As you see fit, Commander,” Malady said, and that was that. When all of the squads were floating in front of their bulkhead doors, the lights over each turned green and steam suddenly hissed into the corridor.

“Brace!” Cready called out, as their room was pressurized and their metal combat boots thumped to the floor as the atmospheres inside and out equalized.

“Looks like they’ll even give us some breathable atmosphere when we’re out there!” Cready tried to sound ‘peppy,’ but none of his crew answered him. Fine. He started to wind the crank that released the bulkhead door. More steam followed as the inside of a small craft on the other side was revealed. Solomon suddenly realized it must be docked on the side of the transporter—alongside ten or twelve others—and not inside the transport at all.

“Kol, up front with me.” Cready jumped down into the craft to find that it was remarkably simple. A large, slightly wedge-shaped tube of a ship, with one pilot and co-pilot seat up front under the cockpit screens, in front of desks of controls and levers. Behind the piloting seats, the stations and instrumentation continued with another chair waiting to take one of the Outcasts, which Cready guessed had to be comms, navigation, or technical.

“Karamov, technical seat behind us,” Solomon indicated as he strapped himself into the co-pilot seat, allowing Kol to take the pilots seat.

Behind the ‘command’ end of the scout vessel was a very small bay area with storage lockers, a spare seat with no designation, and then a set of metal stairs leading to the engine rooms.

“Malady?” Solomon called.

“Aye, Commander, I understand. You want me to talk to the engines for you.” Malady thumped to the floor, barely fitting down the central bay, and disappeared down the steps to what must be the engine room.

Well, actually I wanted someone back there with enough protective armor who could handle it if there is a malfunction back there, Solomon thought. He also remembered the way that Malady had managed to talk to the Ganymede mainframe computer—Oracle—merely by connecting to one of the many ports on his suit. It paid having a cyborg member of your squad.

“Are you seriously trying to tell me that I have to play nurse, then?” Wen asked, moving to the only spare seat left, the empty one underneath the overhead storage lockers. There were apparently two pull-out medical gurneys, and a host of spare equipment fitted into storage boxes at foot level. “I bet it’s because I’m a girl, isn’t it?” She was not impressed, even though she did have the exact same first aid emergency training as the rest of them, and she would be able to cope admirably as a combat nurse when they came across the survivors of the Kepler.

“Not a gender thing, just short straw, I’m afraid,” Solomon said. “And besides which, if you look at the bay floor, I think that’s the exit hatch to disembark. That means you get to be the first to jump out at any enemies if we have to do something up close and personal.”

“Now you’re talking,” Wen muttered over the suit-to-suit controls, before settling into her seat.

Right. Everyone’s on board, we’re good to go, Solomon thought, looking around at the co-pilot’s dashboard as he tried to remember his lessons.

Which of course he could in perfect, crisp detail.

Solomon had never stopped to wonder how he could memorize the floor plans of museums and private corporate banks with such ease, nor how he could memorize the individual circuit diagrams of various security scanners and sensors, back in his previous job. It was one of the many natural aptitudes that had meant it was easy for him to become a thief, and easy for him to decide to go to New Kowloon, but now…

With the addition of Serum 21 to his own genetic structure, Solomon wondered if he had always been this good at recalling every detail, or whether it was his mutant, extra genes that was making it easy for him to pull up the schematics of the scout craft controls in his mind, from a memory of his study hall and command classes.

“This should be the one then.” It was like having an invisible manual inside his head, as he started running through the decoupling procedure.

The hatch that led to the transporter bulkhead clanged shut automatically and whirred into a pressure seal. Then there was the dull whumpf as the engines far behind them fired up.

“Engines working and all good to go,” Malady’s voice informed everyone over the suit-to-suit comms.

“Malady, I only want a fifteen-percent injection. Keep the engines on a low burn until we’re clear of the transporter,” Kol said, sounding suddenly calmer than Solomon had heard him sound for a long while.

I think Gold Squad just found our pilot. Solomon grinned, listening in as Kol directed Malady on the precise running of the thruster engines. The young criminal Outcast had taken to his position with ease, as he started warming up the positioning thrusters and counted down.

“Three…two….one…decoupling from parent ship. Decoupling now,” he called out loudly, lifting the flight handles very gently toward him and easing them away as the scout vessel juddered and suddenly felt—different. Untethered.

“Technical!” Kol called out with a little more urgency.

“I’m on it.” Karamov’s hands moved over his own controls as he at last figured out how to throw up the overhead display of the scout vessel’s sensors. Suddenly, Solomon could see screens of smaller graphs and images that showed a three-sixty view of the other scout vessels nearby plus the much larger transporter ship hovering behind all of them. To Solomon’s eyes, the scene looked like some alien mother-bug was sporing its insect offspring around it in a cloud of movement and activity.

“What are all those blips?” he asked, looking at the holographic overlay on the screens above him. In front of the scout vessels, there appeared to be a cloud of smaller markers, indicating…something.

“Ah.” Karamov didn’t sound very pleased. “That would be the Erisian Asteroid Field.”

10

Raid!

“Evasive action!” Kol called out. Solomon beside him in the co-pilot’s chair thought that he really should be feeling more of a reaction to this apparent emergency, but since it was the third time that Kol had called this, he just knuckled down and concentrated on working the sidereal positioning thrusters.

The Marine scout spun on its front right thruster, sweeping its larger engines up as though it were about to tip back over head, and narrowly avoided a large chunk of black and silver rock that had been about to take out their engine room.

Not that Kol and Cready’s quick maneuvers got them out of immediate danger, however, as they were now about to be sandwiched between two much larger asteroids rolling towards them.

“Fracking stars!” Solomon swore, as Kol punched the firing buttons to the main thrust engines, sending them shooting forward out of the way of the giant pieces of space rock.

“Three o’clock starboard!” Karamov called out, indicating that there was another imminent collision about to happen. Solomon hit the starboard positioning thrusters, and the vessel rolled out of the way, accompanied by Kol firing the main engines to throw them through an opening in the asteroid field.

Watch out! For an awful moment, Solomon didn’t think that they were going to make it. It would just be his luck to get flattened by a giant piece of space rock out here on the edge of the solar system.

Almost…

“YES!” With a whoop, Kol had managed to plunge them out of the underside of the field, and for a blissful moment, their screens cleared as they entered a much larger area of space, bare of murderous bits of rock.

“Technical?” Solomon didn’t waste any time returning to the mission parameters. “Any sign of our ship?”

“Scanning, Captain,” Karamov called out. He cast the scan results to the overhead cockpit screens as Kol repositioned the craft to look up at the asteroid field from their current position. Distantly, Solomon could see the small flashes of light from the other Outcast scout vessels as they bisected and quartered the field from above.

On the screens above, Solomon saw two images from Karamov’s scans. One was their own, a radiating green circle that did little apart from highlight just how many bits of metal-pounding rock lay above them. The other, however, was a much larger map of the Erisian Asteroid Field from above, with many such overlapping, radiating green circles.

“This is the Fleet scan chart,” Karamov called. “They’ve already covered about half, running from the Sol-ward end out.”

Solomon muttered his agreement that he could see. None of the other crews had apparently raised a hail or a distress signal, so he had to assume that no one had found the Kepler station-ship yet.

But how is a thing the size of a small town hiding out there? Solomon wondered. Even if some of the asteroids were so large as to be almost moonlets in their own right, the sensors should have been able to pick up the more complicated signatures of metal alloys and poly-plastic. Not to mention the electrical transmissions from the ship.

Unless it’s powered down, Solomon thought. That would explain the lack of radio frequencies to detect, but that still left the unexplained lack of unique metal signatures that made up the Kepler.

Oh, of course… Solomon suddenly realized. “Karamov, run a chemical analysis on that field, will you?”

“I’m already scanning for polysteel, carbon-glass, and titanium alloy, Commander,” Karamov said. “Even if the Kepler has broken apart, we should be reading signatures.”

“Show me everything,” Solomon said. Why couldn’t everyone think as fast as he could, he thought in exasperation.

“Okay.” Karmov did as instructed and overhead, the green circle radiated once more before a line of scientific jargon began to scroll down the side just beside it. Solomon’s eyes scanned over the results.

“Carbon, iron, nickel, water-ice, magnetite, I knew it!” he said. “That’s why we can’t find the Kepler. The asteroid field is full of iron and magnetite. The whole thing is generating a low-frequency charge, messing up our sensors!” Solomon said. He was no engineer or scientist, but he knew basic chemistry, both from his stealing days and his strategy lessons on Ganymede.

Magnetite was especially conductive of electrons. As was iron, he knew. Put the two together and you created an almost permanent-loop battery, which emitted a wave of ‘static’ that would effectively hide any ship that was inside it.

But it hasn’t affected our scout ships, because we’re all keeping above and below the field, not entering into it, Solomon thought.

There was really only one answer to the dilemma, in that case. “Kol? I want you to set a course for the darkest, largest bit of the field over there.” Solomon indicated the mess of asteroid boulders that were untouched by any of the ship’s scanners.

“As soon as we go in, we’ll lose contact with the rest of the group,” Karamov advised.

“We’re not going to find the Kepler hanging around out here on the edges, either,” Solomon said grimly. “Look’s like we’ll have to do this search the good old-fashioned way.” His hands flickered over the controls, and floodlights turned on all over the small scout’s hull, casting an eerie, sublime glow on the rocks around them.

“Take us in, Kol,” Cready said.

“Aye, Commander.” Kol’s face was set in a pinched mask of concentration as he engaged the main engine thrusters, and they moved forward into the dark.

“Twelve-percent injection,” Malady’s voice confirmed Kol’s recent request over their suit comms. The Marine scout slowed to barely a crawl, as all around them the large bodies of the asteroids rose like floating mountains, or icebergs.

There were whole canyons and gulleys in here, Solomon thought as they moved their careful way forward between the rocks. It was a landscape that was constantly changing, constantly moving, but at least here in the center of the asteroid field the movements were much slower and more sluggish. The high electron charge created a very weak gravity field, keeping these rocks moving only meters at a time, not tens of meters in the more disturbed edges.

The asteroids were much larger here as well, only a few smaller than the scout craft. Most were many times larger. Solomon saw the tracks of meteorite scars on the rocky walls, as well as impact craters and cracks through the schists of reflective rock. It was an alien place he was traveling through, and he couldn’t understand for the life of him why the super-large station-ship had ever dreamed that it could navigate through here.

Tock! A small sound made him look up at the screen. A tiny metal knock somewhere on the hull from outside.

It must have just been a bit of rock bouncing off the hull, he thought, thinking nothing of it until it happened again.

Tock-tock.

Solomon would have ignored the noise as everyone else was doing, peering at the screens or out of the portholes around them to see if they could get a visual on anything that could be a part of a Confederate deep-field station-ship.

But there was something about that small metal noise that was bugging Solomon.

Tock-tock-tock.

“Just a few rocks,” Solomon muttered to himself. Who goes into an asteroid field, after all, not expecting to get hit by bit of passing rocks?

Just not in the exact same place.

“Wen, get eyes on our rear starboard hull,” Solomon called out. That was what was bothering him. That those sounds were all coming from one position on the vessel. Which was crazy. What were the chances of them being hit in the exact same spot multiple times in a row?

And we’re under propulsion, as well… he thought. Which meant that either something must have come untethered and was attached to their outer hull, or that something was keeping pace with them.

“On it, Commander.” Wen jumped to the task, moving down the length of the small bay to the trapdoor that led to the low hold and external docking ports. While her voice disappeared from Solomon’s hearing, it reemerged a moment later in his suit-to-suit radio.

“Standard hold configuration,” she reported as she moved. “Lots of spare emergency equipment down here. Portholes on both sides, and decompression chambers that must lead outside…” she announced.

“Moving to the rear starboard porthole. What am I looking for, Commander?” Jezzie asked.

“Oh, anything that could have come loose, or—” Solomon was halfway through saying, just as he heard a small intake of breath and Wen’s radio suddenly crackled into static.

TSSSSSSS!

“Jezzie!” Solomon said, unclipping his harness and jumping up, just as all hell broke loose in the small hold of the craft beneath them.

BADA-THAB-THAB-THAP!

The bright flashes and the snapping bone cracks as someone fired weapons down there. “Wen! What the frack is going on?!” Solomon had already run to the bay trapdoor, just as there were loud CLANGS from all around.

“What the—” He looked up, just as Kol suddenly shouted.

“Holy frack!”

There, emblazoned on the front cockpit screen and clinging onto the outside of the vessel, was the figure of a human. Another silhouetted head and shoulders crossed in front of the wall portholes.

What’s going on? We’re being boarded! Solomon grabbed his Jackhammer in an instant.

The figures on the windows outside weren’t Confederate Marines. If anything, they didn’t look to be soldiers at all as their spacesuits bore no regalia or military emblems. Solomon did see that each one had some sort of red design on their chest. A smuggling gang? Mercenaries?

“Raiders!” Karamov called out in alarm.

Solomon cursed. He should have known. The raiders were notorious for doing this—lying in wait in out of the way asteroids or nebula fields, before launching lightning-fast raids to dismantle and overpower any ship deemed valuable. He’d heard that most of them were disgruntled colonists who had managed to steal a ship or two, but there were conspiracy theories out there that said that some of the raiders were actually funded by the colonies as a sort of illegitimate navy. Or even by various mega-corporations, as a way to target their competitor’s ships.

Whatever their origins, it didn’t change the fact that Solomon had to find a way to get them off his ship before they could do some real damage like cutting some vital cable or air supply.

“Hyurgh!” There was a grunt of exertion over his visor’s speakers, and the shooting from below stopped.

“Commander, I think we’ve got a problem,” Wen panted.

“You’re telling me!” Solomon growled as he jumped down through the trapdoor. He saw Jezzie holding one of her polysteel blades, dripping red, onto the body of a raider on the cold metal of the hold’s floor.

“Came out of nowhere. They must have breached the airlock,” Wen said, nodding to the pressure hatch at one end of the hold.

“Which means they could blow a hole through that hatch and depressurize the whole ship at any moment,” Solomon realized. It was a standard raider move. As soon as they figured out that you weren’t scared of a fight, they would just plant enough explosives to blow a hole in your hull, starving you of oxygen or at least gravity, before they came in and cleared up the mess.

The dead raider wore a motley collection of suit parts, cobbled together to form an incoherent whole. Here was a breastplate from some sort of colonial security firm. An ex-industrial undermesh suit, still complete with the extra pouches and pockets, and with its original factory identifier stenciling. His gear was topped off with large metal storm boots some decade out of date and a slim-fit helmet with front-loading air canisters.

Only now, the undermesh suit had a dirty red tear in its side from Wen’s blade.

“Come on.” Solomon had already moved to the pressurized hatch, checking the seal and controls. “It’s still reading that the chamber outside is intact. We have to act fast.” He raised his voice to shout over the suit radio. “Kol! Evasive maneuvers, as fast and hard as you can. Let’s shake ‘em about a bit!”

There was a distant, muted ‘Aye’ and suddenly, Solomon and Jezzie were thrown to one side to thump into the wall, as the scout craft started to spin on its axis as Kol fired first one set of positioning rockets, then another.

“That should give ‘em something to think about.” Solomon grinned inside his suit, hanging onto the metal bulkhead as the scout vessel shook and rolled.

After another nausea-inducing turn and a thump, Kol had apparently cleared the hull of the interlopers, and instead fired the rear engines to throw themselves forward.

Not that it got them out of trouble.

“We need to call this in,” Jezzie was saying. “The rest of the fleet will need to know it’s an ambush.”

“Our ship-to-ship communicators won’t work in here. We’ll need to leave the asteroid field to get a clear connection,” Solomon countered, just as the scout ship’s alarm split the air, and the ship shook from several much larger impacts.

AWAOWAOWAOOW!

Thump. Thump. Thump.

Warning! Marine Scout Vessel 17 is Under Attack!

Assigned to: Gold Squad (Sp. Cmdr. CREADY)

Hull integrity: 52%

The alerts scrolled over Cready’s visor in a warning orange as Scout Vessel 17, which they were inside, connected with their Gold Squad channel.

“Someone’s firing at us!” he heard Kol shout in alarm.

“We’ve got two raider ships coming up behind at our starboard four and seven o’clock,” Karamov announced a moment later.

Looks like they weren’t content with trying to swarm us. Solomon growled, racing back with Wen to the top deck, leaping over the body of the dead raider. Of course, the raiding party had to have been launched from somewhere, and as soon as he got to his seat, he could see on the screens just where that had been.

There were two craft flying toward them as Kol tried to swerve and dodge out of the way of their rockets. They weren’t heat-seekers or auto-guided missiles, at least, Solomon saw. They were single-thruster propulsion rockets launched from any one of the four ‘arms’ of the raider craft.

The enemy ships looked a little like dragonflies—a large ‘X’ with a long bulbous body sticking from the center. At the end of each of the arms was a positioning thruster, as well as a weapon’s pod that apparently fired salvos of their small rockets at them. On the screens above him, Solomon saw the raider craft rolling and swerving around the body of asteroids to try and get into a better firing position.

They’re just going to try and blow us up and pick through the carcass for anything useful, Solomon thought as the ship swerved and rolled once more.

“What kind of weapons do we have on this thing?” he growled, checking through the controls. Surely a Marine vessel—even a scouting one—had to have some kind of armaments, didn’t it?

MARINE SCOUT VESSEL 17:

Operational:

Guide-Laser (small-object orbital particle generator)

Weapons Pods x 2 (3 seek-and-destroy missiles per pod)

“Now that’s more like it!” Solomon found the interface between his suit and the ship, and used a series of eye movements to pull up the details on his visor screen, matching the graphics to the ones on the desk in front of him.

Guide lasers would be no use in a firefight, he thought, although they could pack a pretty powerful punch, as they were designed to send a super-heated radioactive particle beam to destroy rocks and obstacles in the way.

No, it was the seek-and-destroy missiles he knew that he wanted, as he clicked open the targeting window and swiveled the firing stick until it held one of the racing raider craft in its sights.

“Firing! Weapon Pod 1, full salvo!” he called out as his fingers pulled the trigger and there was a slight judder of recoil through the ship.

Outside the cockpit, on the underside of the scout craft, a bulbous dome of metal broke open to reveal the nasty, snub maw of a missile holder with three darkened ports set back at an angle. There was a glint of light and then suddenly—

WHOOOOSH!

Steam and fire burst from each of the three tubes as three small missiles—barely bigger than Solomon’s arm—erupted from their sanctuaries and performed an almost immediate turn in space in front of them, swinging back to dart underneath the scout and straight toward the first raider craft that was right on their tail!

“It’s a hit!” Karamov called out from his chair behind Solomon, watching as the small vectors of the heat-seeking, seek-and-destroy missiles smashed into two of the out-flung arms of the craft, while the third scored a direct hit on its central body.

Sensor screens don’t do justice to ship-to-ship combat, as all Karamov, Kol, and Solomon could see were the vectors and the sudden disappearance of the attacking raider craft. Their scout vessel was suddenly rocked by the first bow-wave of the explosion as outside, the four-armed raider craft broke apart in a plume of disappearing flames and escaping gases.

That left one raider ship.

“Spin us around, Kol!” Solomon called with a savage grin. “I want them running from us this time!” And I also want them to lead us back to wherever they’ve stashed the Kepler, Solomon thought. He felt the G-force pull on his body as Kol hit the forward propulsion rockets—which would normally make them go backwards—at the same time angling the rear engines and firing at the same time. The result was that they flipped end-over-head and were now facing the oncoming raider craft.

Guide Laser: Activate.

Solomon didn’t want to destroy this raider craft, not yet, so instead of firing the second weapons pod of missiles—which would surely destroy it at such close proximity—he hit the front nosecone’s guide laser button instead. The lights along the interior of the craft flickered as the engines experienced a momentary drain of energy, and then a scintillating beam of white, yellow, and red light burst out, missing the raider craft by ten meters or so, and burying itself in the asteroid wall behind it.

“You missed!” Karamov said in dismay.

“I wasn’t trying to hit it,” Solomon said.

His ruse worked. The sudden burst of a high-powered particle weapon, accompanied by the sudden loss of its fellow craft, were enough to make the raider vessel think twice about attacking this smaller, but clearly very well piloted, Marine vessel. It spiraled on its propulsion arms, performing a spaceship equivalent of a handstand before spinning off between two asteroid boulders.

“After her!” Solomon shouted, and Kol was only too eager to comply.

The scout burst into motion, spinning to avoid a narrowing gap between asteroids as it followed its spiraling target. The raider was fast, and clearly suited to maneuvering in tight spaces such as this, but the Marine ship had the advantage of far more sophisticated engines. The scout narrowed the gap between them, only for the raider to suddenly turn and duck down the flat rock face of an asteroid, screaming underneath it.

Kol matched his positional thrusters perfectly, but still, they came close to slamming into the asteroid wall, before they too were racing underneath the giant asteroid and then coming up the other side.

And then there, in front of them, was the deep-field station-ship known as the Kepler.

11

Ghost Hulk

“Whoa…” Kol sounded a little awed, and Solomon didn’t blame him.

“Is that it?” Wen was peering over their chairs at the cockpit screens in front of them.

“Not just it, apparently,” Solomon said, as it seemed that they weren’t just looking at a ship, but at a graveyard of ships.

The raider craft had spiraled high above the twisted and mutant metal in front of them and was even now disappearing up into the asteroid field above.

“Shall we go after them, Commander?” Kol asked distractedly.

“No need. We got what we came for. I think,” Solomon said, looking at the mess in front of them.

That was the thing about space, Solomon reflected. It held infinite wonders like folding spacetime, or time itself slowing to almost nothing around a blackhole. There were the wonders of particle fission in the hearts of super-massive star.

And yet, for the most part, it obeyed natural laws.

The Erisian Asteroid Field was out beyond the reaches of one of the furthest planetoids of humanity’s Sol System. Out here, the gravity of the sun was weak, and objects easily lost their drift towards the solar center. Instead, they congregated like flotsam around the nearest densest objects or formed their own instead.

What had been holding this field together was a graveyard of dead spacecraft, their dense metals and slowly decaying reactors creating a slow gravitational pulse that drew the Erisian asteroids to congregate around it.

Solomon wondered how many people knew this was here. He saw the partial remains of a large, blocky tanker-style ship, as well as several smaller tubes of the fast messenger-style rocket ships primarily used for super-fast planet-to-planet travel. He wondered if this had once been a decommissioning site, or a work yard for some corporation, before the asteroids came. Maybe the raiders themselves hauled all of their seized victories here, to better hide their presence?

By far the largest and most derelict of all of the craft here, however, was the large rhomboid shape scattered with pods and domes and blocky bulkhead doors. Rows and rows of porthole windows lined its hull, speaking of a complicated interior world of rooms, habitations. Enough for several families, at least.

And on the side of the craft, there was printed in giant machine-plate, industrialist lettering:

KEPLER DEEP-FIELD

“It’s got no engines,” Wen said, pointing out the great gouged and ragged holes near the back where several large engine blocks—each one larger than the scout vessel itself—used to reside.

“Those weren’t just propulsion engines, either,” Karamov confirmed. “That size? They’re Barr-Hawking generators.”

Jump engines. Solomon knew that each of the deep-field ships had them, although he had never seen them on any craft other than the hauler jump-ships like the one that had brought them out here.

And well, I guess I’m not looking at them now, either, he admitted. “They’ve been scavenged by the raiders, clearly,” he said, which was probably bad news for someone down the line, he figured. If the raiders had Barr-Hawking generators that size, then they could pretty much run their own deep-field ships, competing directly with the Confederacy for trade to the Outer Colonies.

But whatever, we’re not here for politics. Solomon shook his head.

“What happened to her? Raiders?” Kol asked.

“Looks like it,” Solomon started to say, before he stopped himself. The Kepler did indeed have blackened scorch marks pocked all over its nose and belly, betraying the fact that it must have had many of the raiders’ rockets fired at it. The ship was so large, though, that he knew that would be like gnats biting an elephant.

“Unless they boarded at the same time…” Solomon considered, sweeping his eyes over the vessel.

Wait a minute. “What’s that?” His gaze stopped on a broken section of the hull, which looked to be where the raiders had started to tear apart the metal walls for their own salvage mission.

Only, from the outward jags of blackened and twisted metal, it looked as though it had been burst apart from within, not from without. Almost like the Kepler had given birth to some monstrous, murdering child all its own out here in the depths of space. Solomon shuddered superstitiously.

“That’s an internal explosion.” He tapped his finger on the screen.

“Sabotage?” Wen considered.

“Could be. Or a malfunction?” Solomon shrugged. “It either means that the raiders got on board first and crippled her, or that the Kepler was in a bad shape anyway and had suffered an almost catastrophic accident by the time the raiders hauled her in here.”

There were no lights along the entire length of the Kepler, and short-range scans either returned with asteroid static or inconclusive results.

“Looks like we’re going to have take a closer look,” Solomon said, nodding to Kol to begin the approach. “Karamov, I want you staying here with Kol. Keep this boat in a tight scouting circuit around the Kepler. Flush out any more raiders if you can. Wen and Malady, you two are with me on the away mission.”

“At last!” Even though Wen had recently had the excitement and terror of hand-to-hand combat to the death in the hold of this very ship, it appeared that she was only too ready for some more.

Three vaguely humanoid shapes threw themselves from the airlock of the Marine vessel, arms and legs wide in star positions as their momentum carried them across the emptiness of space toward the jagged hole in the Kepler.

The three shapes looked almost like satellites themselves, the metal of their suits shining under the vessel’s floodlights, their collars glimmering with their own subdued suit lights.

“Ready?!” Solomon called from in front as he flew past the first twisted and half-slagged girder and into the belly of the metal beast. Behind him and slightly above was spread-eagled Specialist Jezzie Wen, and last of all, looking like a cannonball compared to the rest of them, powered Full Tactical Malady.

The bright, reflective glare of the Kepler’s outer hull vanished in an instant, to be replaced by a confusing darkness of shadows and shapes threatening to crisscross their flight path.

Solomon’s suit lights showed buckled girders thicker than he was wide, as well as plates of bulkhead metal that had been seemingly torn and pushed out with the force of some kind of explosion.

And then his suit lights revealed that they were floating through a large, empty space.

“Looks like some kind of holding bay,” he called out over the suit’s Gold Squad communicators.

“TZZZZRK! What’s that, Commander? I can’t…TZZZRK!” The fuzzy voice of Karamov in his ears, dressed in static, revealed that the Kepler was disrupting any attempt at long-range communication. They were on their own in here.

“I read you loud and clear, Commander,” Malady informed him.

“Aye, same here,” Wen confirmed. “We should be able to use shortwave suit-to-suit in here.”

The ‘in here,’ as it turned out, was much larger than Solomon had initially thought.

“No graviton generators working, clearly,” Solomon heard Malady say. “Depressurized. No oxygen.”

“I think we can see that, Mal.” Solomon even managed a joke as he floated through the center of the vast metallic cavern.

This was one of several holds in the ship, Solomon surmised, whereas the upper floors of the station-ship would be given over to workshops, domestic units, and even galleries of shops. Down there, in the massive vault space that could have easily fit several of the scout ships that Gold Squad had come in on, was where the hundreds if not thousands of tons of cargo would be stored. These deep-field ships were the caravans of the colonial Confederacy, hauling everything from raw minerals to prefabricated buildings, entire drone assembly units, or even spacecraft.

It was all gone.

“Where is everything?” Solomon asked. “Did the raiders really strip it that fast?” He couldn’t believe his eyes.

“Stealing stuff is what they are famous for, Commander,” Wen said dryly as she floated up behind him, making small, languid movements with her hands to direct her flight.

Solomon flinched a little at that. He wondered if he should feel some sort of strange criminal loyalty to the raiders that he had just fired upon, and doubtlessly had killed in the process. I was a thief once, too, he thought. Being a thief also gave him a little inside into the nature of this crime, though.

The hold was a large oblong room, whose walls were crisscrossed with metal gantries that led to bulkhead doors. Some of those doors would doubtless lead up into the more personal and human areas of the Kepler. He could tell easily which four, six, or eight-man doors were also the loading and unloading ports. When he craned his head up, he saw a whole forest of metal winches and grabbing arms stationed securely above, which would have been used to move containers around.

On the floor far below him were metal bars and bridges, which presumably would once sit between the different stacks of boxes, and to which the crates could be secured.

Solomon didn’t see one strap, webbing harness, or tie dangling anywhere.

“No way.” He shook his head. “This is too big. It would take a meticulous crew weeks to clear this out, if not months. And look at the sort of job they’ve done. Nothing is out of place, absolutely nothing. No packing materials left behind, no container crates, no ropes or ties that had to be cut or burned apart.” He was an idealist by nature, one of the universe’s eternal optimists in some ways, although it was very well hidden under a cynical demeanor.

But even so, even the reckless, best-thief-in-New Kowloon couldn’t believe that any gang had the skill or the audacity to perform such a feat.

“The ship must have been empty when they found it. The Kepler must have jettisoned its cargo,” he called out. The cargo that they were supposed to find, he remembered his mission parameters pretty much exactly.

“Excuse me, Commander, but that is unlikely,” Malady’s voice said in his suit’s ear. “The deep-field ships are simply too expensive to run empty. It would cripple the families who lived here, not to be paid at the end of a run. Traditionally, the deep-field ships leave with minerals and cargo, and return with their colonial equivalents to sell in Earth’s on and off-world markets.”

Then how did they achieve this? Solomon was thinking. “Malady, find a system computer. Patch yourself in and see if you can find the manifest. And the crew information.”

That was the other thing that was worrying Solomon. No crew. Anywhere. Not even body parts, or spatters of blood or signs of a firefight as far as he could see. Who wouldn’t defend their home, their livelihood?

Unless they mutinied, he considered, moving his hands in a swimming motion to descend through the gulf toward one of the gantries.

And then, of course, there was the hole that they had entered through. As his boots settled on the gantry and he held onto the railing, he looked again at the vast hole in the side of the Kepler and tried to imagine just what could have caused it.

“Some scorch marks, but not many,” he muttered to himself as Wen flew slowly around the vault room, and Malady made his laborious way to one of the bulkhead doors, sure to have some kind of computer screen access, if nothing else.

Solomon looked at the tears in the metal, the splintered and twisted girders. There was slagged and melted metal, but it appeared to be from the inner supports as far as he could make out. It was as if something had managed to rupture gas and power lines that threaded through the Kepler’s hull, further weakening it. But the inner walls were all buckled outward, twisted, and all…clean.

Just what in the name of Jupiter’s moons could cause that much of an impact that it ruptured the service cavity between the walls? Solomon wondered, slightly horrified.

And then, he saw something glinting down there, near the bottom of the opening into outer space. It was something that was out of place, a flash of reddish color in an otherwise sea of silvers, blacks, and grays.

Blood?

“Wen? On me!” Solomon called, vaulting over the gantry and propelling himself toward the small red mark, unhooking his Jackhammer and priming the cartridges as he did so.

“Ready, Commander.” Jezebel was already swimming up to rendezvous with him, not kicking with her legs but swimming like an eel or an otter through the vacuum.

As they drew nearer, Solomon saw that it wasn’t blood like he’d first thought. Instead, it was a fragment of plastic, slightly transparent, lying wedged at the bottom of the hole. It had some sort of lettering stenciled across it, and Solomon tried to read it as he swam forward.

“Near… Nova… Neo?” he hazarded a guess. “It looks to be some bit of packing container for whatever was in here, maybe?” he said.

“But why was this the only bit left behind?” Wen asked as her feet clanked on the floor and she reached down to pull at it.

“Wait!” Solomon called. It was all too obvious. What if this is a trap?

But Wen had already seized the piece of plastic that was almost as tall as she was and pulled. It shuddered where it had stuck against a twist of blackened metal, but then flew free with a scraping shriek—

Revealing an arm.

A very large arm.

“What the heck is that?” Jezzie let herself hover backward, away from the appendage.

It was a silvered arm. One that was entirely made of metal, and which clearly had servo motors, wires, and metal plates along its form. It didn’t have normal human digits, but instead just three vice-like metal claws and one clamping ‘thumb.’

“That’s a robot, clearly.” Solomon almost laughed at Jezebel’s reaction. He guessed that this place was spooking everyone out. Everyone apart from Malady, anyway. “Well, it’s a bit of a robot. Not an entire one.”

“Yeah, of course.” The combat specialist shook her head at her own overreaction. “It’s probably an industrial robot, used to lift stuff in here.”

“No. I think it was being shipped,” Solomon countered. “It was with that bit of corporate packing crate, right? I reckon it was one of the things that was being transported back to Earth.” Solomon had a thought. “Malady? Any luck with that computer? Where was the Kepler bound for?”

“I’m into the mainframe, but the systems are down, Commander,” Malady stated. “But, luckily for us all, I can speak machine code. I’m reading the BIOS data-files as we speak.”

“Look at you, multitasking,” Jezzie said dryly.

“Kepler deep-field, bound for Mars Colony, then Luna Colony, and finally Earth before looping around the sun on its return journey to Proxima,” Malady intoned a moment later. “Crew complement: one hundred and fourteen. All radio and telemetries contact ceased two Earth-standard days ago. No distress beacon activated.”

“Okay, but what was it carrying?” Solomon asked.

There was a small electronic sound from Malady’s channel, which Solomon took to be the metal human-golem’s equivalent of a snort of frustration.

“It doesn’t say. Restricted Access Only.”

“Restricted Access? We’re the stars-be-damned Marine Corps!” Solomon burst out. “Don’t we get an automatic override or something?”

“No one told me if we do,” Malady said. “Still Restricted Access Only. Whatever the Kepler was carrying, only the captain of the ship knew about it.”

Instinctively, Solomon knew that meant trouble.

12

Mayday

“TZZZRK! Come in. Is anyone there? Come in! TZZRK!” The cargo hold erupted with the sudden sound of radio static coming from the overhead speaker system.

“Malady, I thought you said the computers were down?” Solomon startled, looking around.

“They were, Commander,” Malady said. “A survivor appears to have found a way to run a generator, enough to run the speaker systems.”

“TZZZK! Please, I know you’re there… Please help… I’m in… TZRK!…eighteenth floor, and…TZZZZRK!”

As fast as it had come, the survivor’s message clicked out, leaving them wondering if they had even heard it at all.

“Uh… Commander?” Wen turned to look at him.

Someone is alive in here. Someone managed to stay alive. Solomon shook his head. “Malady, get those doors open. Blow them apart if you have to. We need to get to the eighteenth floor, quickly!” He was already swimming toward Malady to see the man-golem draw the cable from his wrist back into his metal body. The mech then seized the double bulkhead doors with metal, servo-assisted fingers—very much like the weird robot arm, Somolon thought—and heaved.

CREEEEEAK! Much to Solomon’s astonishment, Malady managed to force the bulkhead doors open, releasing a sudden blast of steam and gases from the other side as what little bit of atmosphere was left in the corridor behind the door escaped.

“Remind me to never annoy you, Malady,” Solomon said as he flew to the golem’s side, raising the Jackhammer to cover him.

“You’d know about it if you had annoyed me, Commander,” Malady said, which to Solomon wasn’t entirely encouraging, he had to be honest.

“Clear!” Solomon called, seeing the wide, empty corridor on the other side. The ceiling was vaulted with the heavy steel girders of the bulkhead. On both right and left, there appeared to be large service elevators. “This must be a loading hall.” Solomon pushed himself off the walls to float toward the elevators. “Malady, can you get the doors open?” he called, and the large golem-man seized the first of the lift’s doors to wrench them open, revealing a wide shaft with ladders around the outside and cables spearing down the center.

No lift, though. Solomon looked up and down until he saw industrial-plate markings stamped on the wall.

LEVEL 24 ACCESS: CARGO HOLD 1

“I guess we go up, then,” Solomon said, kicking out from the open lift door to languidly float into the elevator shaft, trying not to look down. Despite the Kepler’s current depressurized state, it was still unnerving to be floating inside a large and dark elevator shaft, with apparently a hundred meters or so of empty space under his feet.

Floating turned out to be quicker than using a lift, and Solomon had already started grabbing onto the cables and pulling himself up, ascending effortless meters with every handhold. Beneath him, Malady followed with a grace that he never had in gravity conditions. Combat Specialist Wen took up the rear.

23…

22…

21…

The floors swept by quickly, and even though Solomon kept his eyes peeled, he still couldn’t see any sign of whatever it was that had ripped a hole out of the ship. No burn marks on the walls, no signs of forced entry or exit on any of the doors.

Where did everyone go? he thought, before remembering that there had to be at least one person left alive inside here. And hopefully, they would get more information…

20…

19…

“Here we are,” Solomon whispered over the shortwave suit channel, slowing as he realized that there was something different happening at level 18.

LEVEL 18 ACCESS: ATMOPSHERIC REGULATION LABS

The lift door was open, and he saw a shaft of slightly grayer light hitting the back wall of the lift shaft, coming from the door. That meant two things. The hallway on the other side was depressurized just like he was right now, and also that someone must have tried to open them.

“Malady?” Solomon allowed himself to float upward until he was above the partially open door, keeping his Jackhammer trained on the crack of graying light as the full tactical clanked onto the inner side of the door. Malady braced his large metal boots on the frame and started to heave the door apart with his hands—

There was a sudden movement from the door. The graying light cut out, as if something on the other side had blocked it.

Slap! A metallic ringing sound as if someone had struck a bell made Solomon jump and look down.

“Unhand me!” Malady was roaring suddenly, trying to break free from the door.

A large silvered arm, just slightly longer and more prehensile than Malady’s own, had reached out through the open gap of the doors and seized the metal golem by the wrist.

“What the heck!” Solomon gasped, raising his Jackhammer. He couldn’t get a good line on it, though, without risking hitting Malady.

It’s that robot, Solomon saw. The same one who lost an arm? It’s gone haywire.

The chrome, steel, and silver arm held Malady’s wrist in the vice-clamp of its fingers. Despite the large metal man attempting to jump back from the partly-opened door, the robot arm held fast then suddenly yanked him back to smash into the lift doors with a grinding crunch.

“Malady! Get clear!” Solomon was shouting, skidding himself down the wall above his squad member as the golem was pounded against the lift doors again, making them buckle.

“Get off!” Solomon shoved the barrel of his Jackhammer into the gap between the doors, which was now almost a foot wide. He caught a glimpse of complicated steel and chrome shape on the other side, moving—a body?

BADA-DAP-DAP! The Gold Commander fired into the hole, causing an explosion of sparks as his high projectile bullets hit something on the other side and ricocheted off.

Phtock! Ping! Some of his own bullets spat past him to zigzag up the shaft as they bounced off the metal.

“TZZZRK!” Even though sound is almost nullified by a vacuum, there is still a modicum of noise as objects move, even in space, and Solomon’s suit amplifiers picked up the snarl of electric static from the other side. The lift doors were suddenly ripped inward as the robot arm dragged Malady with it.

CLANG-Klaaang! The doors rolled and bounced into the room, scattering around the giant silvered form that was even now lifting Malady and shoving him against the nearest wall.

The atmospheric regulation laboratory looked more like a factory, with large ceramic and metal pipes emerging from square, blocky units over stilled turbines, before plunging into the grated floor. It was a large space, but a complicated one as the giant pipes rolled and snaked through the room everywhere. And it was into here that Malady and the silver robot rolled as they wrestled and fought.

The thing is huge! Solomon thought as he rolled himself through the air, staying close to the ceiling to try and get an attack line on the thing. Beneath him, Jezzie was doing the same but along the floor of the laboratory, hoping to attack in a pincer movement against the beast.

It was vaguely humanoid, but only vaguely, taller than Malady and broader too. Its arms and legs weren’t really limbs at all, Solomon saw. They each articulated from the corner of the thing’s square body, meaning that when the thing charged against Malady, it looked a little like a table or one of the mech-walkers that had become dangerously sentient.

“Gragh!” The thing used its slab-like metal body to pin Malady against one of the pipes, driving its metal legs into the grate floor as it raised its two forward arms or legs, preparing to drive them down onto—or into—the metal golem.

“Hyai!” Suddenly, a shape from the floor somersaulted up to attack the thing. Jezzie, having made her way around the pipes of the floor to spin through the air, landed on the thing’s back and drove one of her blades in the thing’s arm socket.

Clang! TZZRK! There was a shower of sparks from whatever small gap Wen had found in the thing’s sheathed carapace, and it reacted violently, spinning around and throwing her from its back. Even in zero-G, being sent head over heels still meant that when she slammed against the nearest metal pipe, she rebounded and didn’t move.

“Jezzie!” Solomon shouted in alarm, opening fire.

The Jackhammer used high-propulsion bullets, each one having a tiny explosive charge in a miniature thruster-tube at the back. In effect, they mimicked tiny rockets as they speared down at the thing.

Thtock! Ping!

Oh crap. Solomon quickly saw his mistake and ceased firing. The Jackhammer’s bullets had exploded into sparks across the robot-thing’s back, before breaking apart and spinning off around the room. He couldn’t afford to fire in here and risk the ricochet possibly hitting Malady, Wen, or himself.

But the Jackhammer had done some damage, he thought, seeing pockmarks and dark scorches across the thing as it lurched and stumbled back from the onslaught. One of its leg-arms was held out at an awkward angle, and Solomon could see Jezzie’s blade sticking from its gears and servos at the top, still sparking.

THOCK! Now freed from where he was pinned, Malady swung his heavy metal fists into the body of the thing, making it roll onto its side with the force of the blow. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to seriously damage it and the machine swept out one leg, casually batting Malady to one side. The mech-man smashed through one of the ceramic pipes, causing a cloud of crystalline dust and steam to explode into the air around him with a dull roar.

We can’t fire at it. We don’t have any explosives. Think, Solomon! The Gold Squad Commander had a second of complete indecision as he tried to think of a way to overcome the behemoth. The escaping gases from pipes Malady had crushed were filling the laboratories with a roiling fog. Solomon only hoped that it wasn’t anything explosive. It obscured half of the room in moments, until Solomon couldn’t see the robot thing, or Jezzie, or anything apart from humped shapes in the confusion.

Think, Solomon! He forced his mind to catalogue what his options were.

Come on. That serum is supposed to make you brighter, isn’t it!?

But whichever way he looked at it, a Jackhammer, a small blade, and an emergency medical kit weren’t going to put a stop to that thing. There was nothing that they had that would injure it, he realized.

Nothing that I have, he realized, the thought forming like a seed in his mind, just as the gases rolled and leaping out came the gigantic robot-thing, straight for him, with one hand reaching to grab him. Unlike Malady inside his full tactical suit, Solomon knew that those vice fingers would easily crush his suit and the organs and bones that they protected within.

I don’t have anything that can hurt it. I’ll have to use something bigger than me then… Solomon reacted in an instant, throwing aside his arms so that he could jackknife through the vacuum as the thing’s undamaged leg-arm shot past him.

He was rolling over the thing’s arm and body. He reached down, feeling his suit’s power gauntlets grab the handle of Wen’s hardened polysteel blade, catch on, and he thumped onto the thing’s back, rebounding as the robot crashed into the wall after him.

“Malady!” Solomon screamed. There was nothing that he had that could hurt it. He needed something bigger.

“TZZRK!” If it was possible for robots to get enraged, then it seemed that was precisely what this thing was doing as it turned and tried to shake Solomon off of its back.

“Rarrrgh!” Solomon felt his own arms starting to wrench and pull from their sockets. He held on for dear life. He couldn’t see the full tactical golem, but he just had to hope that Malady wasn’t unconscious—or dead. “Malady, the lift shaft!” he shouted as he seized Wen’s blade with both hands and wrenched at it where it was stuck

“TZZRK!” Another explosion of sparks scattered across his visor and suit from the mechanisms inside the robot as it awkwardly juddered from the internal damage and tried to flip its back—and the small human clinging to it—against the wall.

CRUNCH! Before Solomon became human pate, however, a force hit the robot’s legs, and the impact sent the robot scrabbling down the access hallway.

Looking down, Solomon saw that it was Malady, seizing onto two of the thing’s legs and charging as the golem bowed its metal and reinforced back and shoved the thing toward the broken open doors.

“Yes! That’s it!” Solomon seized Wen’s blade and once more tried to yank at it.

“TZRK!” More sparks erupted from the robot’s back, and the thing was scrabbling, first one of its legs and then another skittering over the open edge of the lift as it tried to maintain a hold.

“Oh no you don’t!” Solomon heard Malady roar over the suit channel. It was the only time he had ever heard any emotion from the golem-man as he shoved harder this time, sending the robot flailing and turning into the shaft. The momentum of Malady’s shove pushed it down—not falling, but tumbling through the zero-G.

With Solomon on its back.

Nothing I have is big enough to damage it, Solomon’s thoughts raced as he felt Wen’s blade suddenly loosen in his grip. But I have a Malady. And I have an entire ship to play with.

Jezzie’s blade suddenly came free, and Solomon was leaping up as the robot’s arms flailed and spun around him, reaching for him.

Solomon swung the blade in mid-air, his legs kicking in the vacuum.

CRACK! The combat specialist’s blade hit one of the metal cables, and, with a shower of sparks, the hardened polysteel edge cut through it.

And nothing happened. Not for a moment, anyway…

That was the thing about Solomon. He had been a fast learner even before the addition of Serum 21, and a good part of his life had been about learning to make the most of his environment.

And the thing about lift mechanisms, Solomon knew, was that they were the same the universe over—one cable held at tension on a flywheel, the other held at rest. By pulling one or the other, you moved the lift. Even in zero-G, the rules of force still apply. If anything, they applied even more so than they do in the complicated world of gravity.

Lift mechanisms were also mechanical in essence. Not electrical. Which meant that you didn’t need an electrical current to make the cables work, they just held onto their respective tensions unless acted upon externally.

Solomon hadn’t cut the tense cable, which in a gravity environment would release the service lift to the pull of gravity and send it plummeting to the floor.

He had cut the slack cable, meaning that the flywheel suddenly pulled on the lift mechanism with all of its might, and with no counter-forces.

There was a distant series of lights from above Solomon and the thrashing robot. It had clearly not been designed to deal effectively with zero-G environments. At least not as well as Commander Cready could. The lights were flickering as they grew closer and brighter.

They weren’t actually lights. They were sparks as the giant metal service lift above was pulled down by the ever-tightening mechanical flywheel.

Oh double-frack. Solomon moved, swimming for the broken-open door once again as the lift above him sped ever closer, and closer.

I’m not going to make it. He couldn’t swim fast enough. The robot had punched one of its legs into the side of a wall and was hauling itself up again towards him.

“Gotcha!” A hand shot out of the murk, grabbed his and pulled him in, microseconds before the lift was pulled down to smash the climbing robot and continue hurtling toward the mechanisms far below.

TZZZZZRRRRK! A grinding, electron noise as the robot-thing’s metal was scrapped and mangled against the walls of the lift, before—

Whumpf. The lift tried to lock into place as it smashed into its own lift mechanics, but it had a large robot-thing in the way. Compressors in the silver robot burst, and circuits sparked, and there was a roll of red and orange flame as the thing exploded.

“Down! Down! Down!” It was Jezebel Wen who had caught Solomon’s wrist and was screaming at him as she threw them both to the floor of the trashed laboratory as the flame roared past them and disappeared just as quickly.

There was another series of crashes as the lift, thrown by the exploding robot, once again was pulled down onto its body, and then, after sparks and flashes of light, there was apparent silence.

“I think you killed it, Commander,” Jezzie groaned, floating in the air beside Solomon.

Epilogue: Experimental Industry

“There were no survivors.” The words of Warden Coates met them on the screen of the small audience room on board the Marine transporter, where Solomon, Jezebel, Malady, Karamov, and Kol had been summoned before they disembarked, heading back home to Ganymede.

The warden looked, as ever, annoyed that he even had to perform a debriefing session with his schlubs, but on the split-screen beside him stood none other than Colonel Asquew with her stern and permanently tired expression.

“They deserve to know, Warden,” Solomon heard the woman say. “This is their battle, too,” she said, a phrase that made Solomon’s ears prick up, despite their ringing from all of the decompression and battering he’d had in the last few hours.

The experimental industrial robot was indeed dead, and right now was being dismantled by a team of Marine Corps engineers, dispatched by the arrival of one of the Rapid Response Fleet’s warships, which had taken jurisdiction over the Erisian situation.

The Outcasts were summarily dismissed, and for the most part, most of the adjunct crews had suffered a completely uneventful, boring search mission. A few—the ones who had ventured into asteroid field as Solomon’s Gold Squad had done—had encountered more raiders, all of whom were eager to try and get out of the Erisian field, as if there was something in there that scared even them.

As well it should, he thought as he read through the initial findings of the Marine Corps engineers. That experimental robot had been shipped from Proxima, a part of a new design that it wanted to offer to potential buyers on Mars, apparently. Or so the damaged mainframe of the Kepler had said. Something had gone catastrophically wrong mid-flight, though. The robot had started malfunctioning and had broken into the atmospheric laboratories to wreak havoc. The crew tried to contain it, but it was too large, and too dangerous. Then the thing had apparently damaged the pressure system, meaning that air and pressure built up inside the cargo hold, sucking it away from the rest of the ship. The crew had tried to get to their escape rafts, but were found, frozen and suffocated in the access corridors above.

Then who had we heard in the cargo hold? Solomon had asked.

“The robot apparently had a human-friendly interface,” Colonel Asquew said dryly. “A digital persona, if you will, that it could activate to make the operators feel at ease.”

“Wait a minute… Are you telling me that the robot used its own digital persona to lure us to Level 18?” Solomon said, flabbergasted.

“Its programming had gone haywire. It must have activated some sort of distress protocol, at the same time as running a defensive routine,” the colonel stated severely.

Solomon shook his head. “That doesn’t make sense. Why even program an industrial robot with defense protocols? It’s not a war machine, is it?” he asked out loud.

“That’s enough, Cready!” the warden snapped. “Or are you questioning your superiors?”

“No, sir.” Solomon shook his head. He still felt it odd, though. If he was a guessing sort of man, it would seem to him that the robot had purposefully and deliberately set up an ambush for them, and then had worked its hardest to try and kill them!

And then there was the other problem that stuck in Solomon’s mind. The empty cargo hold of the Kepler. Had it just been transporting one of those robot things to Mars? Surely not. Then where had all the others gone? And who did the spare robot arm belong to?

Mars. Something stuck in Solomon’s mind. The planet where they had fought the separatists so recently. The separatists who had tried to kidnap the Confederate Ambassador from Earth. The separatists who had access to Marine Corps equipment and had clearly been planning something big. A civil war?

It could be a coincidence, of course, the fact of this robot’s destination and his own recent away mission. But Solomon was still left with a sour taste in his mouth as he considered just how dangerous the Martian separatists would have been if they had one of those gigantic killer robot-things on their side.

“You’re dismissed, soldiers,” Coates prodded them from his screen, clearly not wanting to discuss this anymore. “Back to your seats, where the jump-ship will take you back to Ganymede. Don’t think that this gets you any time off!”

“Gold Squad did do very well, given the limitations on their scanners and limited numbers,” Asquew noted, earning a baleful glare from Coates at Solomon.

“Keep it up, Specialist Commander, and I’m sure that the Rapid Response Fleet will have a place for you,” Asquew said, throwing a casual salute down at the Outcast.

Solomon blinked, feeling oddly proud for a moment, before his mood darkened a fraction later. Would that be before or after Serum 21 kills me? he thought as he saluted and turned on his heel, to lead his Gold Squad back to their seats.

The Titan Gambit

Outcast Marines, Book 3

1

On Shaky Ground

Jezebel Wen ran over the frozen rocks of Ganymede, plumes of dust and laser-bursts scattering around her feet.

Move it, move it, move it! The woman breathed hard in her helmet-visor, wishing that she didn’t have to wear the cumbersome suit but doubly grateful that she was. To unlatch and unseal any part of her light tactical suit would mean a quick but certainly agonizing death. The reflected radiation being thrown up by Jupiter would probably have baked her skin in minutes. The moon Ganymede was large, but its thin envelope of atmosphere was barely thick enough to do anything to protect her from space radiation, whereas the freezing cold of the near-vacuum would ice up her lungs and crack her eyeballs.

Eurgh… The combat specialist didn’t like to think about it. She was used to always being a few moments from death, of course. The dragon tattoo that snaked unseen from her leg to around her midriff before sprawling, possessively, on her back and licking at her neck was testament to that.

Jezebel Wen had once been what the Yakuza call an ‘executioner,’ the person called up late at night or in the ghost hours of the forgotten afternoon, given a name and an address, or sometimes a digital photo if she was lucky, and told to get the job done.

Which she always had, before…

Before Ganymede. Before getting caught. Before being forcefully inducted into the new Marine Corps outfit known as the ‘Outcasts’—all ex-cons who had nothing more to look forward to in life than a long, slow death on the prison-moon of Titan. That was, unless they signed on the dotted line and gave the next twelve years of their sentence to the Marines of the Confederacy of Earth.

In truth, Jezebel Wen had been coming to almost like her new life up here on Jupiter’s largest moon, along with the other misfits and criminals. Her squad commander, Solomon Cready, was a sharp guy, an ex-thief, and she knew that she could rely on Malady—a walking metal mountain that had once been a full Marine, now forever imprisoned in his full tactical power suit like a metal golem.

But that was before the Boss caught up with me again… She snarled as the plate of rock she had been bounding across suddenly shifted under one foot.

Thab-thap! Small explosion-plumes of dust and ice burst on the ground next to her, sending jagged cracks along the plate. What she had thought had been a thin ‘shelf’ of alien rock—shale maybe, or something metamorphic—in fact turned out to be a frozen aggregate, as fragile as the ice and dust around her. Its surface had been burnished by the cosmic winds, giving it a dull silvered look that Jezebel had mistaken for something solid.

Only it really wasn’t, as she suddenly found the section of the plate she was bounding across starting to upend, sliding down into itself—

A sinkhole! Frack!

The live laser rounds continued to fall all around her as Jezebel leapt, the articulated metal of her power gloves seizing the edge of the ice and rock-dust plate as it rose above her—

No-no-no-no!

Luckily for Wen, Ganymede, although massive for a moon and almost classified as a planetoid, still had a lower gravity than Earth. Which meant that when she swung her leg up to crunch on the downward-sliding top-edge of the plate and kick outwards, her bounding leap sailed many meters higher and further than she ever could in Earth gravity.

Below her, a crevasse yawned open, and the ice plate fractured and split apart as it slid down into the darkness.

Wen’s legs kept kicking, and then she tucked her head and arms into her chest, scissor-kicking to jackknife her near-weightless body into a roll and spin through the blackness until she hit the far side of the chasm with a heavy thud, sending up sprays of dust and rebounding back into the air again, before coming to a skidding halt twenty yards away.

“Urgh…” Wen groaned. I’ve failed. She was certain of it. The live-fire obstacle course that she and the rest of the combat specialists had been put on had been excruciating. So far, the fifteen or so adjunct-Marines—they were still awaiting graduation from the Ganymede Confederate Marine Corps Training Facility—had been dropped off in the Hubble Highlands just north of the facility and given no other orders but to race back home. No weapons to return fire. No medical kits. Just their legs.

They had barely gotten three steps when the automated gun emplacements burst into action, ice shattering from them in silvered clouds as they moved to fire their low-intensity laser rounds at the racing Marines. Wen had seen at least a third of their complement get knocked off their feet and sent spinning across the floor or into rock walls by the lasers—but not her. Not yet.

Wait a minute, you were in front. You might still be able to make it… Wen pushed herself up into a crouch, warily looking around her. Why weren’t the guns firing at her?

Just a little way south, she could see the silver-line of strata where the ice field ended, opening out into the open rock plain before the low, squat collection of buildings that made up the facility. Two hundred meters maybe?

The last section is a straight-up race, she realized. She’d passed the live-fire part of the exercise, by leaping to the other side of the chasm.

I can still make it!

She was just about to push off when a shape burst into view out of the corner of her eye. It was Erebus, the very large, meaty Outcast who barely fit into his light tactical suit. She hadn’t thought that he was second. He looked too large to be able to run as fast as her!

But her competitive streak turned to shock when she saw that her fellow Outcast hadn’t seen the chasm. He was making the same mistake that she had, mistaking the shelves of darkened ice for some weird alien rock plate—

“Erebus, no!” she called out, but the sound only echoed in her own helmet. Their suit-to-suit telemetries had been turned off. She had no way of contacting the other members of this challenge.

Erebus’s metal boot bounded onto one of the silver and black plates, just as the gun emplacements far behind him on the highlands burst into sparkles of fire once again.

THAP! THAB! This time, the combined weight of the larger combat specialist and the impacts of the laser shot broke the plate he was on much quicker than Wen’s. She saw the cracks radiating out from under his feet and the ground started to collapse around him.

The place is riddled with sinkholes and crevasses! Jezebel gritted her teeth in anger. How dangerous and foolish is that!?

Not that Warden Coates and the rest of their supervisors would care, obviously.

There was a silent thud as Erebus was upended onto the rising plate, before beginning to slide backwards, down towards the new gulf.

Normally, Wen might have ignored the plight of her fellow Outcast during a training exercise. Unless someone got a little too into the sparring, there was little chance of anyone walking away with anything worse than a broken limb. But over the last few days since getting back from the Kepler mission, it had seemed that Coates had only stepped up their training regime. This was now a live-fire exercise. And that chasm looks deep, deep enough to kill.

All these thoughts flashed through her mind in an instant as Jezebel found that she was already swinging into action, throwing herself onto the floor and sliding across the edge of the crevasse as she reached out with her hand.

“Erebus, grab it!” she shouted once again, unable to contain herself.

Her fellow adjunct-Marine was sliding past her, arms flailing, reaching out—

“Gotcha!” She seized his wrist and rolled, pushing out with her free arm and kicking at the floor at the same time. Ganymede had lighter gravity than Earth, which meant that you could carry far more than you usually could, even if it was just a handhold.

The star-filled sky appeared in Jezzy’s visor-plate as she flipped backwards from the edge, and the momentum was enough to swing Erebus out of harm’s way and send him floundering through the air over and behind her, for them both to thump and roll on the surface of Ganymede like a child’s bouncing ball before finally coming to a halt.

“Urgh…” Jezzy repeated, opening her eyes and reaching up to wipe the dust from the outside of her helmet. As she struggled back up to a crouching position to check that Erebus was okay, she saw that their recent adventure had at least done something other than save her friend.

Dust and ice burst into the air under the bounding feet of the first two Outcasts who had been close behind. They must have seen Jezebel almost falling, and then her desperate rescue of Erebus, because now it seemed that they were fully prepared for the chasms and crevasses and ice sheets. Jezzy saw them lengthen their strides into long, bounding hops, sailing over the unmissable holes ahead of them to land on the far side and keep on running.

“Looks like I really have lost then.” Jezzy frowned, before pushing herself back up to rejoin the race. She wouldn’t come in first, nor second, and from the speed that the rest of the Outcasts were gaining on them, probably not third or fourth either…

Tap-tap. It was Erebus, who had moved to her side to thump lightly on her shoulder pad.

“What do you want?” she said, knowing he couldn’t hear her but hoping that he could lipread.

The larger man pointed at the crevasse as another Outcast sailed over in a gravity-less high jump. Erebus pointed at Wen, and then at himself, and gave her an exaggerated thumbs-up sign.

“You’re welcome,” Wen sighed, shaking her head as she crouched into a sprint, and Erebus did the same. “I would tell you to buy me dinner, but there aren’t any fracking restaurants up here!” she grumbled to herself, before breaking into a fast, bounding run, down onto the flat rock plain, heading for the two, bright yellow glowing sticks that marked the finish line, already with two adjuncts lounging on the other side, and two more ahead of her.

Wen came in fifth, and Erebus sixth, but at least she consoled herself that they hadn’t died out there today.

“See now, thanks…” the mangled lips of Adjunct-Marine Tycho Erebus moved around the words, and Jezzy wondered if he was a man who was used to being grateful. A man like him probably never had much reason to be, she considered as she towel-dried her hair and adjusted her undermesh suit, having just stepped out of the changing rooms, along with the other combat specialists.

The others were loudly horsing around, those that had managed to make it to the finishing line congratulating each other, while the others who had been totaled by the laser shots nursed bruised limbs and winded torsos.

“Feynman, better get that to Doctor Palinov,” Jezzy called out to one of the smaller combat specialists, who was still sitting on the floor, rubbing his knee where it had taken a direct hit.

“Nah, I’ll be golden, see— Argh!” Feynman tried to walk on his damaged knee, and instead collapsed to the wall once again, muttering curses loud enough to turn the recycled air blue.

“Look, I get it,” Jezzy said. “You’re scared the doctor will find you unfit for duty, and they’ll pack you off to Titan… But that’s not going to happen.” She held Feynman’s eye. “I reckon you’ve got a sprain, maybe a hairline fracture. With the doctor’s treatments, she can get you in top condition in less than a week. Not worth the fuel cost it will take to exile you,” she said, although the younger combat specialist didn’t look particularly convinced. It was, after all, the threat that hung over all their heads every shift.

Break the Marine Corps rules and regulations? Get sent to serve out your sentence on Titan.

Perform so badly that the warden didn’t think you’d make full Marine? Get sent to Titan.

Get so badly injured that it will take you months to recover? Get sent to Titan.

It was a frack-show, she considered. But even under this pressure, it wasn’t as steep a learning curve as she’d had with the Yakuza. At least here, if you got exiled to the prison colony, you might be able to serve out your sentence or even try to escape. If you made a misdeed in the Yakuza, you’d end up in a rocket fuel tank, just as it is about to take off…

“Fine…” Feynman growled, wincing in pain as he hobbled along the wall to the door and eventually, Jezzy hoped, the Doctor Palinov’s medical lounge.

Even though Jezzy was the exact same rank as all the other combat specialists—one step up from adjunct-Marine, one step below specialist commander, and all of them underneath the coveted position of ‘full’ Marine—she had achieved a sort of seniority amongst this little cabal. Not one of them belonged to the same color squad as she did, but amongst the combat specialists, it seemed that the usual rules of mutual competition, intimidation, and jealousy wasn’t an issue.

Maybe it’s because we’re all learning how to deal with death on a daily basis, kinda puts the playground politics in perspective, Jezzy thought idly, turning back to Erebus. All the other adjuncts—specialists or not in their own disciplines of technical, medical, or command—generally hated everyone according to squad. The Reds hated the Blues, who hated the Greens, who hated the Silvers, who were always lording over the Bronzes, and just about everyone outside of this changing room hated her squad under Specialist Commander Cready—the Golds.

“Don’t mention it,” Jezzy said to the man she had saved from being crushed in the ice-caverns of Ganymede. Erebus was a large, well-built young man with mashed ears, nose, and more than a few teeth missing from his head. He had short, light-colored hair, and he looked as though he might have been a boxer or underground cage fighter before coming here.

I wonder what you got caught for, Jezzy wondered for a moment, and then shook her head slightly as Erebus turned back to his locker. I don’t want to know, she thought. Do your own training. Not anyone else’s.

She had enough things to worry about, anyway. Like how to keep her Gold Squad alive and performing well when Warden Coates had it in for her commander and seemed hell-bent on finding small ways to trip him up, punish him, or otherwise make his eventual dismissal a reality.

And Solomon has been running all over the base, getting obsessed with his Serum 21 thing, Jezzy thought as she picked up her kit, shut her locker, and made her way out of the sliding metal doors and into the front atrium.

Solomon was convinced that they were being experimented on by Doctor Palinov, and that Coates was in on it. He thought that was why plenty of the adjuncts had crashed out recently, suffering fits and seizures for no apparent reason.

Which made sense, Jezzy considered that piece of evidence at least. But either way, she was exasperated. What did Solomon want them to do about it? They couldn’t very well form a union and ask for International Health Rights, could they? They were criminals. They should all be either dead or exiled from Earth by now. Jezzy wasn’t even sure what their legal status was anymore. Did the Confederacy regard them as human beings now, or secondhand property?

“Wen,” a voice coughed from just behind her shoulder, and Jezzy’s heart sank.

This is the other reason why I am stressed as frack, she thought, standing still and wondering if she could pretend that she hadn’t heard him. But she had.

“Adjunct, I need help with those containers,” the voice said a little louder, so that when she followed the gray and silver-suited staffer under the peaked cap, it wouldn’t look out of place to the other staff and Outcasts.

“I’m really busy…” she tried to say lightly, even as ice gripped her belly.

“Make time,” the voice said, as the staffer pushed past her to pick up the first two of the poly-plastic crates and carry them into one of the side storerooms that opened out onto the front atrium.

Dammit. Jezzy walked towards the stack of boxes in slow motion, cataloguing what items she had on her.

Emergency medical kit.

Hand wrappings.

Toothpick.

That was about it. No weapons, she cursed silently as she bent down to pick up one of the crates and follow the staffer inside.

It was a narrow but long storeroom, with uniform cargo crates stacked on metal shelves up and down the walls.

“Here.” The staffer indicated an empty shelf and stood to one side as Jezzy very carefully, and very casually, eased the crate to its position, always keeping the man in her forward vision in case he made any sudden moves.

“You been avoiding me,” the staffer said in a low growl as Jezzy straightened. He was a bit smaller than her, with dark hair and dark eyes that burned into Jezzy’s. He wore the silver and gray jumpsuit of his position in Marine Corps society, studded with utility pockets and belts, as well as the small peaked cap. But his small stature belied what he was, Jezzy knew. He was the one who had made contact with her here, thousands of miles away from Earth.

He was a killer. He was her Yakuza handler.

“I’ve been busy…” she said defiantly. This, at least, was true. The warden had thrown them all into excruciating training sessions as soon as they had returned from the Erisian Asteroid Field and the hulk of the Kepler. She had hoped that their sudden call-out by the warden and the subsequent training would have meant that her handler would have cut her some slack. It didn’t.

“I gave you twenty-four hours. You didn’t get the job done. Boss Mihashi will be sorely displeased,” the man stated in exact tones. He wasn’t making a threat or a promise, he was just stating the facts.

“Twenty-fours hours? We were called on an away mission!” Jezzy said. “Constant supervision. A crazy enemy killer robot thing. Don’t you think that changes things?”

“You were on this away mission with Solomon Cready, I take it?” The staffer was indefatigable. “He is the commander of your squad still, isn’t he?”

“What do you want me to do!?” Jezzy almost burst out, before checking her voice and keeping it low in case anyone overheard. “I couldn’t very well put a bullet in his back out there, could I?”

“Couldn’t you?” the man said dispassionately. “You know the order. The Boss has judged Cready. And punishment must be delivered. And you are going to be the one to deliver it.”

“Isn’t a life spent waiting to get shot at or blown up punishment enough!?” Jezzy said, earning a cold silence from the Yakuza infiltrator in front of her.

I guess not, she thought. I should have known, after all.

“If you cannot perform your duty, Miss Wen, then you know what will happen,” the staffer said, before reaching into one of the pouches on his belt and drawing forth a small fold of paper to hand to her. “I have been authorized to give you this, as an…incentive.”

Jezzy took it gingerly, feeling the paper crinkle under her fingers as she unfolded it. For a moment, she wasn’t sure what she was looking at, and then she saw the name and her heart dropped.

WORK PERMIT ORDER #3301

ISSUING AUTHORITY: Asia-Pacific Partnership

SIGNING OFFICER: Snr. Development Officer-in-Chief Bien

Valid Until: Six Month Permit

NAME: Mr. Hoshu ‘Harry’ Wen

POSITION: Mechanical Engineer & Fabricator (Guildsman status)

EXPERIENCE: 34 years

DISCIPLINARIES: None

PAYGRADE: 0-4

UNIQUE IDENTIFIER: 23/01001b/389

Harry Wen. Jezzy looked at her father’s name as if it were the first time she had ever seen it written. Her father. Hoshu-Harry, as she had heard his work colleagues call him. They teased him for taking a Westernized name, and for allowing his daughter to take her own, too.

But he said that it brought in more business… She scoffed at the old man’s optimism. Hoshu-Harry was always trying to win ‘international’ clients for his engineering skills. He applied every year to the American Confederacy mega-corp factories, knowing that they had a much better rate of pay than the Asia-Pacific did.

And every year, you get turned down, she thought, well, at least as far as she remembered. She hadn’t actually spoken to the man since he had kicked her out of their hovel of an apartment for running around Tokyo getting into trouble.

That was before I even got with the Yakuza. He’d kill me if he found out what I’d been doing for the last ten years…

“What is this?” she said, holding the paper up.

“I would have thought that it is obvious.” Her handler didn’t even frown. “It’s your father’s work permit. The original, not a copy. It should show you that we have access to your father’s files, which means we know where he works, and we can use the unique identifier to trace where he lives, and…” The handler didn’t have to go any further.

“Are you threatening him!?” Jezzy crunched the paper into a ball in her fist and shook it at him. “Because…” she hissed, not knowing what she would say after that. What could she do, really? Her father was a jump-ship away. It would take days for her to get back to the APP, even if she did find a way to smuggle herself out of here. And then she would have to smuggle herself down the Shanghai Space Elevator somehow, avoiding all the Triad and the Yakuza operatives who would doubtless be looking for her…

“I should have thought that what we are doing is obvious,” the handler said wryly. “Get your job done, and no harm will fall on your father’s head, I promise.”

Jezzy still seethed where she stood, but at least she knew that much was true. The Yakuza were awful, terribly cruel, but they also kept their word above all things. If someone was given the all-clear, then no Yakuza would ever go near them again.

But if someone had been judged guilty… Jezzy hung her head at the futility of her situation. She had no intention of killing her commander. How could she? That would get her shipped off to Titan. But how could she let her own father die because of her morals?

I might not like my father. I might not get on with him, and I might not even know him anymore, but that doesn’t mean I want to see him dead!

“I see that you understand the situation now, Miss Wen,” the handler said casually, readjusting the last crate and slipping out beside her, leaving her to her dark thoughts.

What can I do? I have to buy time. I have to get a message to Earth. I have to…

Jezzy had no idea what it was she could do to save her father. Aside from kill Solomon Cready, that was.

2

A Personal Request

ACCESS DENIED!

The holographic display over Solomon’s visor flared a warning orange sign, and the young man bit his lip to stop himself from swearing.

Oh crap, Solomon Cready thought as he looked at the input box he had been trying to get past, as well as the warning sign flashing over everything. He sat with his head contained in one of the ‘learning visors’ of the study lounge, secluded in his own private booth, supposed to be learning from the mainframe called Oracle about various technical specifications of guns and equipment.

Yeah, I get it. Fire-y bit at the end, pully-trigger bit at the other end. Angry murder-bullets put in the middle, inside the cartridge… he told himself.

It was his designated study period in here along with approximately a fifth of the available adjuncts, and each of them were working through a set of problems as well as searching and referencing history available via the screens in front of them. The Oracle awarded each of them with unique lessons, based on their previous session of study and their latest performance reviews by the staff and the doctor.

Apparently, someone reckoned that I needed to know a heck of a lot more about how firearms are put together, where they come from, and how useful they’re not in the wrong situation. Solomon sighed. Probably because the very last time he had been in combat, he had to resort to using the boxy shell of a lift cubicle instead of a weapon.

But Solomon had better things to do than to study the relative merits of guns vs. a half-ton lift.

Like Serum 21, he considered. And this killer robot on the Kepler.

It had been a simple thing for his skills to create a small fake ‘ghost instance’ of his workroom here, and by creating a small code program that ‘refreshed’ the pages of information every few moments. Enough to fool Oracle that he was still hard at work, when in fact he was trying to crack into the restricted areas of Oracle’s memory.

Bizarrely, it had been relatively easy to find information on Serum 21—or as it was more scientifically known, ‘DNA complex-strand variant 21.’ It had been first dreamed up by a company called NeuroTech, who traded out of the American Confederacy before being deemed illegal by the Confederate Board for Health. There were too many side effects, such as seizures and dying spontaneously, and the implied results—the forced mutation and recreation of someone’s DNA—had been deemed far too ‘existentially risky’ to allow a private company to develop.

Which meant that the science boys in the Marine Corps got to play about with it all they wanted to, Solomon knew. The Marine Corps had bought the rights to the drug, and that appeared to be that. They now dosed him and all the other Outcasts up with it, in an attempt to turn them into ‘superhuman’ fighters for the Confederacy.

But against who? The Martian separatists? Solomon had to wonder.

If it was easy to find this much out about the drug they were being unwittingly exposed to, then it was impossible to find anything about what had happened on the Kepler.

The official line was—Solomon knew because he had been there—that the Kepler had suffered some catastrophic computer error, resulting in a loss of cabin pressure and the eventual death of all of her crew.

But what Solomon also knew was that he, Malady, and Wen had been fighting some sort of experimental robot that was being shipped from Proxima Colony all the way back to Mars.

The robot was large and unlike anything that Solomon had ever seen. It had also been entirely murderous, as well as apparently intelligent enough to mimic a human survivor’s voice, which it broadcast through the hacked Kepler’s internal speaker system to lure Solomon’s squad to its lair.

And let’s not forget that before we even got there, the thing had managed to damage enough of the atmospheric laboratory to cause a blowout that took out half the Kepler itself, dooming the crew, Solomon considered. None of that sounded like the random actions of a faulty industrial robot.

It sounded like a planned sabotage, to Solomon’s ears.

Not that he could find any evidence on what that robot thing was, or where it had been built. Only that it came from Proxima colony. Was it a boobytrap? The Confederacy got on well with the colonies—still nominally under its power—or at least that was what the news wires had led Solomon to believe. The truth was that there were always separatists, seditionists, and freedom fighters bubbling under the surface.

But even so, Solomon thought. The notion that one of these tin-pot, idealistic fringe groups could ever get the money or resources together to design, build, and ship a robot like that, with the intention of killing everyone, was laughable.

The thing killed its own chances of ever reaching Mars, or Luna, or Earth… Solomon thought as he stared at the ACCESS DENIED sign, which cropped up every time he tried to find information pertaining to the Kepler, or what he had seen and fought inside of it.

If the killer robot had been meant as some sort of ambush, boobytrap, or gesture of defiance to the Confederacy, then whoever had programmed it had done a spectacularly bad job, as it hadn’t waited until it even got to Mars before unleashing hell on every carbon-based lifeform around it.

Unless… Solomon considered the fact that it hadn’t been intended to get to Mars, or Luna, or Earth at all.

What if it wasn’t an act of war at all…but a field test?

WAOWAOWAAAOO! Solomon jumped in his seat as the chimes of the station-bell ran through Ganymede, and he hurriedly clicked out of the Oracle database that he had managed to worm his way into and back to his very boring reading about gun barrel dimensions and forces of travel for various classifications of bullets…

“All members of Gold Squadron please report to the front audience hall immediately. Repeat: all members of Gold Squadron please report to the audience hall immediately. Out.”

Solomon stayed where he sat in the study lounge booth for a full three seconds. He knew because he timed it, and his heartbeat was hammering two to almost three beats a second all of a sudden. Had Warden Coates somehow found out that he was rampaging through the Oracle database? Or had Doctor Palinov reported her ID card stolen at last—which he had on him, right now, in his pocket? Or was this to be just the latest in a long line of shouting, scolding, and mocking addresses by the warden as to precisely how terrible, and how far below the standards expected of the Marines, that his squad was?

Solomon rather hoped that it was the latter option.

But as it turned out, it was none of the above.

“The warden isn’t best pleased…” warned Doctor Palinov as she met Solomon and the others outside the audience hall where the daily morning briefings were held. Solomon tried to distract himself from glaring at Palinov. Up here on Ganymede, there weren’t really any ‘mornings’ anyway. There was Jupiter Rising and Jupiterian Dusk, but that was about it. But still, the old traditions remained.

Just like, when someone is cheating you, you owe them payback… Solomon thought of another old tradition, but one from the criminal underworld, as he tried to avoid Palinov’s eye. She’s experimenting on us. She doesn’t give a frack if we drop down dead or not, right here! He breathed through his teeth to control his temper.

“Cready, are you feeling okay?” the doctor—a woman with an austere blonde bob, spectacles, and a faint Russian accent—asked delicately. She almost sounded concerned.

As if, Solomon inwardly scoffed. “Fit as a fiddle, thank you, Doctor,” he said, not wanting to give her any more excuses to poke needles into him.

“Well, your color is flushed, and I’d say your breathing is accelerated. If you still feel this way after the briefing, I will want you in the medical lounge,” she said with a nod and all the assured authority of someone a few ranks higher than he was.

“I’m sure the briefing will leave me feeling…enervated,” Solomon said with a thin-lipped smile, knowing that every encounter he had with the warden always left him flushed and his breathing—and temper—elevated.

“Speaking of which…” Jezzy cleared her throat beside him. She had been uncharacteristically subdued, Solomon noted. Normally, her salute to the doctor would be crystal-sharp, at least, and she would always spare a nod of respect in his direction, given that he was her specialist commander, after all. “You said that the warden wasn’t entirely comfortable, ma’am?”

Behind Jezzy loomed Malady, looking as solid and as sullen as ever, and then behind him sidled the last two members of Gold Squad—Karamov (undesignated) and Kol, who had just received his technical specialism, meaning that he was about to become their unofficial engineer, mechanic, and all-round technology guy, Solomon noted.

The doctor shared a worried look at the double set of doors behind her and lowered her voice. “Someone has put in a request for Gold Squad personally.”

“What?” Solomon coughed. Can that even happen? He thought that they were supposed to be the dregs of the dregs, that the Outcasts were the laughingstock of the Marine Corps? And besides which, they were Marines weren’t they? Not mercenaries. Weren’t they?

“I don’t know any more than that, Specialist Commander. I’m only here to sign off on your physical readiness…” she said as she hit the door controls behind her and smoothly turned to walk into the audience hall.

It was an oval room, with the far wall given over to a triple-glazed and reinforced glass shielding, creating a view of the white, gray, silver, and pink Ganymede surface outside. It was amphitheater-like, with rows of wooden benches descending in terraced layers down to the lower speaking platform under the windows, where stood, ramrod-straight, Warden Coates.

“Late!” he snapped in a voice that appeared too loud to come from his small frame. The warden was a small man, and like many small men, he had learned to accommodate for that fact in other ways. His method was the Marine Corps, and his fanatical obeisance to its regulations and rules—no matter who they crushed in the way.

“Attention, Gold Squad!” he snapped again, and Solomon led his small team into the top terrace to stand shoulder to shoulder, where they all performed a near-perfect salute.

“Hm.” The warden nodded, looking if not precisely pleased, at least somewhat mollified. “At ease. Come down and take your seats.” He pointed to the front row directly opposite him, as the doctor demurely bowed her head and headed to the other side of the speaking platform, there to take a desk and her data-screen and start performing calculations, writing reports or taking notes.

“Specialist Commander Cready,” the warden said, not looking at Solomon directly but keeping his chin raised high as he looked above their heads.

“Sir, yes, sir?” Cready stood up immediately.

“Would you say that you are happy with the progress that your Gold Squadron is making?” Coates asked.

Er… That was not something that Solomon had been expecting at all. He chose the diplomatic answer. “We are always striving to be better, Warden sir,” he said, earning another appraising nod from Coates once and a gesture for him to return to his seat.

“Good. Because so far, the performance results of Gold Squad have been absolutely appalling. Do you hear me? Appalling!” He ended on an almost bark. Solomon and the rest of Gold Squad waited for the inevitable torrent of abuse, but it never came.

“Apparently, however, that has not stopped the Confederacy’s Ambassador to Mars from especially requesting your services, although heaven alone knows why!” Coates frowned.

The Ambassador to Mars? Solomon thought. That was the woman he had rescued at the Hellas Chasma on Mars. She had been captured and held hostage by the Mars Seditionists, and they were going to use her—or her death—to trigger a war between the Confederacy and Mars. Solomon remembered a tearful, terrified woman in her middling years perhaps, bound and gagged and only too happy to be released from her torment by him and his team.

“Your suits will be updated with all of the mission parameters, but I can tell you that you will be functioning as personal security and bodyguards to the ambassador and her people. I do not need to remind you that you will be representing the Marine Corps in all of your actions, just as the ambassador represents the Confederacy in all of hers. Understood?”

Not really, Solomon thought. What risks are there? Where are we going? When are we going? What sort of enemy might we be expected to face?

“You ship out in the hour to rendezvous with the ambassador at Nuryien Orbital.” The warden’s voice dipped on this last phrase, as if the idea of letting them out of his sight appeared to be anathema to him.

But…Nuryien? Solomon felt a spark of hope amidst the bleakness that was his time here. The Nuryien Orbital Platform was famous—a floating satellite-station that hung over Jupiter in high orbit. Although it had originally been designed as a scientific station, it had since been transformed over the last sixty years or so into a hub for wealthy Confederate tourists, who would pay seemingly anything to come and see the iron-rich atmosphere of Jupiter for themselves.

“But do not think that this means you can take it easy!” Coates suddenly hissed severely, and this time, he really was glaring at Cready. “As part of the initial hand-over, I and a small team of Ganymede staff will accompany you.”

Oh. Solomon’s spirits fell. That was all they needed, a nanny in the form of Warden Coates.

“But now you have only fifty-four minutes in which to get your light tactical suits, undermesh suits, boots, gloves, and equipment squared away, operational and polished to the best I have ever seen in the history of the Confederate Marines!” he ended on a rising, supposedly rousing call to action. “You’re representing the Marine Corps now,” he repeated. “And what’s more, you Outcasts are representing me!”

As they were dismissed, to quick-march out of the audience hall and rush to collect and clean their kits, Solomon couldn’t help but hope that there was nothing in them that reflected Warden Coates at all.

3

The Nuryien Platform

Solomon tried, he really did, to shine and buff and oil his light tactical suit so that it looked ‘the best that any one had ever seen.’ He just didn’t know how he was going to get around the dents and scratches from the various scrapes, collisions, and outright combat that he’d had to endure in it.

He wasn’t surprised when his inspection in the launch hall, beside Jezzy, Malady, Kol, and Karamov, earned him nothing but a sigh of disapproval from the warden when it came time to embark.

The warden himself looked nothing if not dazzling—quite literally so, in a white suit with red and gold braid, and a different peaked cap with his gold star, but exactly the same format as his regular one that he usually wore. Beside him stood Doctor Palinov, apparently not attending as she wore the same white lab-coat with its set of pens sticking out of the breast pocket, as well as several other gray and silver-suited staffers, who apparently counted as ‘entourage.’

“All test results good. Better than expected, in fact,” Solomon overhead the Palinov murmur as she handed a data-screen to Coates, who looked at it cursorily, then dismissed the doctor with a nod. Solomon wondered just what it had said on that pad. Maybe their Serum 21 levels? Their chance of having a seizure during the ambassador’s state dinner?

“Well? What are you waiting for? Get on board!” The warden gestured to the hissing doors as the main hatch opened to reveal not the large cargo hold of the Marine transporter they were used to, but instead a much smaller boxlike room—still with webbing and uncomfortable seats on one side, but this one had round portholes as well.

“Courier ship,” the warden explained. “No need to attract undue attention, is there? Come on, Commander, step to it!”

“Sir, yes, sir.” Solomon snapped to attention, before calling to his squad. “Gold Squad, after me…” He quick-marched into the room to see that it was broadly split into two levels, with the higher level containing crates and boxes, and a lift that must go up to the flight deck and engine rooms. Cready picked the furthest seat and stood by it as he waited for his squad to form up. Malady, Karamov, Kol…

He was one combat specialist down. “Where’s Wen?” he whispered at Malady next to him. “She was here just a second ago!”

And then Solomon saw her, seemingly frozen in the doorway to the hold of the courier, looking aghast up at the second level, where a team of Ganymede staffers were busy piling crates at Warden Coates’s orders.

“Jezzy!” Solomon hissed, trying to catch her eye before the warden saw her falling out of line. “Wen, get over here!” he tried again.

To which she slowly turned to face him as if only hearing him for the first time, shaking her head and quick-marching to her place beside Malady.

“What was all that about?” Solomon whispered. “You looked like you had seen a ghost.” Solomon nodded up to where Coates was busy berating the staffers for apparently not doing a tidy enough job.

“Oh, I just…” Jezzy frowned. None of them were wearing their helmets and had instead clipped them onto their belts, so Solomon could see Jezzy’s face flush pale, and then look at the metal grates of the floor. She’s worried, very worried, about something.

“Jezzy, c’mon, what is it!?” Solomon gave a fake, carefree laugh. Nothing could be that bad, right?

“I was just shocked at the amount of stuff the warden is bringing, that’s all.” Jezzy lied to him, and Solomon knew it.

But before he could press her further, the warden had shouted at them to stop dawdling and get strapped into their seats, as they were about to launch, and the journey wouldn’t take long at all.

The small Marine courier, with its sharp nosecone over two fat triangular ‘wings,’ burnt through the short distance between Ganymede and her mother planet, Jupiter. From their place in the seats, Solomon and the others could see the red giant growing larger and larger in their view, its baleful blur eventually turning into the complicated bands of orange and red, ochre, yellow, and ruby gasses that constantly circled the planet.

The gas giant grew larger and larger until it almost seemed too impossibly big, its strange light illuminating everything in their cabin with its malefic glow. If Solomon was a superstitious man, he might have thought the shiver that ran down his spine was for what was to come, but he wasn’t.

Soon the stars were blotted out from their place above the horizon, and the courier was skimming the upper atmosphere of the gas giant, heading towards a small dark shape that grew, turning into a disk, a star, a platform—the Nuryien.

From a distance, the Nuryien looked like an impossible snowflake spread-eagled above the clouds of Jupiter. Its metal ‘arms’ stuck out in five points, each with smaller access-tubes or habitat modules branching off of them, and in the center, a rising tower that pointed away from the surface of the planet, where already a number of other vessels were docked, and still a few more hung in orbit outside of the platform.

Lights on the platform flashed a complicated staccato rhythm as they were greeted by Nuryien’s flight bridge, and the Marine vessel answered in its own coded rhythm of lights. The authorization and the code-lights accepted, one small green light started to blink on the northern poleward side of the tower, over a docking bridge, extending out into space. With effortless skill, the courier maneuvered itself into position using its positional thrusters, gently thumping against the extended rectangle, which clamped around the courier’s doors with magnetic locks.

Docking Procedure Initialized….

Pressure Seals: Activated…

Normalizing Atmosphere: Checked…

The words spilled out over the vessel’s speaker system, before the orange light over the door buzzed green, and the warden and his team appeared on the upper level of the cargo deck.

“Attention, Outcasts! This is it. Formal march, on my command. And, march!” the warden snapped. Solomon and the others rose to their feet as the door opened to reveal the long corridor of the docking bridge, where a blinking line of recessed floor lights indicated their route straight down the avenue. Solomon led the way at a fast-paced but stiff-legged ‘formal’ march, as it was called, with the warden and the rest of the staffers falling in behind.

WELCOME TO NURYIEN PLATFORM.

ALL VISITORS PLEASE REPORT TO CHECKIN.

NO BIOLOGICAL FOODSTUFFS, PLANT MATERIALS ALLOWED.

TIER-3 HEALTH CHECKS MANDATORY.

HOME OF THE JUPITER EXPERIENCE! PLEASE ENJOY YOUR STAY…

The words glitched into life on either side of them as the Outcasts fast-marched down the corridor to the doors at the other end, already hissing open with the escape of steam to reveal color and noise on the other side.

“Att-eeeen-HUT!” the warden called as soon as Solomon and the others had emerged though the doors and were halfway down the ramp on the other side. They snapped into a line on the ramp, Specialist Commander Cready at the lead, then Specialist Malady, Specialist Wen, Specialist Kol, and finally Adjunct-Marine Karamov.

The tower of the Nuryien platform was an open structure on the inside, with wide balconies spiraling down the inside, each of which held a ramp out to a docking bridge interspersed up the tower levels. The noise of advertisements and the glare of glowing neon holograms assaulted Solomon’s eyes, and he realized for the first time in almost a year just what sort of austere life he had been living on Ganymede.

This was supposed to be normal. He remembered the downtown streets of New Kowloon, with its constantly blaring advertisements and synth-pop.

It was busy in here, every level a murmur of people—both Confederates and colonists. Solomon saw the flowing robes of Martians, the generally white uniforms of Proxima, alongside all the chaotic diversity and exuberance of the Confederacy. People moved in and out of the docking bridges, or accessed the small information terminals on the walls, or else used the lifts that shot up and down the center of the tower to the rest of the platform.

“Gentlemen, ladies,” said a voice, and Solomon found that he was looking at a face that he recognized. The Ambassador to Mars, wearing her small gold circlet and deep maroon business suit, was standing at one end of the ramp, flanked by two impossibly tall and thin women wearing robes in a matching maroon color.

The last time Solomon had seen her, the woman in her early fifties with dark hair and a sprinkling of wrinkles around the eyes, had been teary and pale, terrified that she was about to be executed. He remembered her asking short, practical questions: Are we safe? Are there more of them coming for me? What can I do?

For just a moment, the eyes of the specialist commander and the ambassador connected, and she gave him the briefest of nods. It was a small act, but one that left Solomon feeling oddly touched.

“Ambassador, a pleasure to finally meet you.” Warden Coates stepped forward, followed by his small team of staffers carrying the crates. “I am Warden Coates, acting Commander of the Outcasts, I hope that there is somewhere that we can speak in private?” he said sternly.

Weren’t you supposed to be more respectful to ambassadors? Solomon thought, wondering how this woman would take to Coates’s abrasive demeanor.

“No need, Warden. I understand why you are here…although I did not request your presence,” she said with a brittle smile, and Solomon had to bite his lip to stop himself from grinning. “You wish to negotiate for more funding on behalf of your Ganymede Training Facility,” she pre-empted him. “Please, send the funding forms into the department, and I will be sure to send in a recommendation.” She nodded, and that appeared to have concluded that.

“I, uh… Of course, Your Excellency.” Coates scowled deeply.

“But please, feel free to stay here at Nuryien for the watch, and you can return at second shift.” She smiled just as icily.

Wow, the ambassador really is made of tough stuff, Solomon thought. She just told the warden that she didn’t have any use for him, and could he please leave!

“With greatest respect, Ambassador, I also must discuss with you the details of the mission that you require my Gold Squad for…” Warden Coates quickly recovered his aplomb, tugging his brilliant white jacket into perfect position as he stood a little straighter in front of the woman.

“Of course,” the Ambassador sighed dramatically. “We’ll be having a dinner in under an hour, you and your men and women are of course invited to attend, where I will fill you in on my requirements of them…”

“No need to invite the squad, ma’am!” Coates said, surprised. “They will take your orders no matter what—”

“I would prefer it if they were there, Warden Coates,” the ambassador cut him off. “I never want to have people guarding me who do not know me, thank you.”

Well, she sure told him! Solomon threw a look at the rest of his squad, to see Malady looking dispassionately forward, as always, but Karamov and Kol had very small smirks on their faces. Jezzy Wen, though, was looking as stoic and flat-mouthed as Malady was.

What is up with her!? Solomon thought in frustration as the ambassador and her two staff turned to leave, and the warden barked at them to follow in formation.

Yeah, I could get used to this—if this was what it really meant to be an Outcast! Solomon thought. Maybe the constant threat of having a seizure and dying wasn’t so bad, if he also got to eat salmon and brie canapes and drink the odd glass of Cava at the same time.

He and the rest of Gold Squad stood awkwardly at the side of a room that was opulent and dripping with finesse. An authentic Persian rug was draped across one wall, as the other held small stands of art or interesting artifacts designed to impress: a Picasso; a Neo-Turner watercolor painting of Jupiter; a small replica model of the Apollo 13 sitting next to the Hubble Mark III telescope.

These were the ambassador’s private rooms on board the Nuryien, one of many such suites that Solomon presumed she and the other Confederacy officials must enjoy as they traveled through human space meeting delegations and settling trade disputes.

The ambassador herself sat at one end of a glass oval table, while Warden Coates sat at the other, and in between them the two tall women with the white skin and auburn hair—who Solomon figured must be some kind of personal assistants to the ambassador—had sat down, after laying the table with platters of food—everything from the canapes that Gold Squad were eating, to plates of sushi, a bhaji and pakora mix, fresh bread rolls, steamed Chinese dumplings…

“How the other half live…” Kol whispered under his breath, earning a chuckle from Solomon. They still wore most of their light tactical suits but had been persuaded, and grudgingly allowed by the warden, to dispense with their shoulder pads, weapons, helmets, and breastplate-harnesses. Chimes of delicate gong and bell music emerged from hidden speakers somewhere, and Solomon wondered how much money the younger him would have made if he had robbed this place.

Millions of credits? Billions? He eyed the Picasso…

“The Outer Space Alliance?” The warden frowned as he responded to what the ambassador had just said. “I’m afraid that I am not aware of…”

“Don’t mention it. I don’t expect Ganymede to keep up to date with current affairs.” The ambassador smiled once again in her icy, cat-like way. She’s a sharp operator, Solomon thought. Far sharper than he had thought her to be before. “They only formed this last year—an alliance between the colony worlds to represent their interests against the Confederacy.”

“But…but…they are the Confederacy!” the warden spluttered on his salmon roll. “We are all the Confederacy.”

“Not quite all of us, apparently.” The ambassador took a sip of wine. “But it was bound to happen sooner or later. It is a contingency that the department has been planning for, for some years.”

“You’ve been planning for a seditionist movement?” The warden scowled deeply.

The ambassador smiled wryly. “Ah, well… How long can we claim that the riots on Mars, the sabotage on Luna, the repeated tax hikes on Proxima are the result of seditionists and subversives, Warden?” she asked rhetorically. “Sooner or later, they will start calling themselves a breakaway faction, or a freedom-fighter movement, and then we really do have to deal with them.”

Solomon listened into their conversation as he ate another canape. As far as he saw, the seditionists on Mars did not appear to be anything but fanatics, and dangerous ones, at that.

“So now, the Imprimatur of Mars, Joseph Valance, and the Imprimatur of Proxima, Mariad Rhossily, as well as half a dozen of those asteroid guild people, have formed what they call the Outer Space Alliance, and they have asked for neutral territory to discuss where we go next.”

“Where we go next? The gall of them!” the warden burst out. “Does Marine Corps Command know all of this? I’ll tell the generals, and they are sure to send the Rapid Response Fleet to round them all up and throw them away on charges of treachery!”

The ambassador said nothing for a moment, just played with her dining fork on her china plate, leaving the warden’s comment to hang in the air as if it didn’t deserve a response. Ultimately however, she did respond.

“Yes, I can see why you might think that, Warden. But it is on the advice of the generals of your beloved Marine Corps that I am in fact meeting with them.”

“But…” the warden spluttered once more, and Solomon relished his confusion. The warden was a career military man. He was as fanatical about ‘the Corps’ as Solomon assumed the seditionists were about their independence. Solomon wondered what it meant to the warden to understand that his beloved, patriotic Corps had decided to allow the colonists to talk openly about defying the Confederacy and not just throw them all in jail instead.

“It is the future, Warden Coates. It is a time of changes, and the Confederacy needs to re-evaluate its position,” the ambassador said. “Sheer economics alone dictate that we cannot enforce trade tariffs and taxes as heavily as we would like on colonial goods. As soon as Proxima cracks the Barr-Hawking generator system, then they will build their own jump-ships and can completely bypass Confederacy control…” She shrugged.

“But…but Proxima is sworn to Earth!” The warden’s small mind still tried to clutch onto the foundations of his world. “As is Mars, Trappist Star, the asteroids… Every station and colony and ship is sworn to the Confederacy!”

“A Confederacy which is itself made of numerous power-blocks on Earth alone, Warden. Regional presidents and senators, protectorate districts, special interest zones… And then there is the entire society of the mega-corporations, who are always trying to maneuver for or against whichever Confederate group they like…” the ambassador continued, leaning forward as she seemed to finally warm up to explaining her dilemma to the warden.

“You see, the Confederacy is a band-aid. You should know this. A thin plaster holding together all the rebellious, difficult nations and creeds and beliefs of humanity. It is only the fact that the Confederate machine works and that we can maintain our place with our jump technology and our Marine Corps that has kept the Confederacy from breaking apart a generation ago!” She tapped her fork on her china plate as a rhythm to her words.

“I aim to show this Outer Space Alliance that the Confederacy of Earth is a very broad church indeed, and that there is room enough for their interests inside it. If I can prove that to them, then they won’t secede.” The ambassador yawned and leaned back in her chair, “And besides, the Marine Corps has already supplied me with five of their best young soldiers.” She nodded at Solomon and the others. “I am sure that when the Imprimaturs see that I have the total confidence of the Marine Corps on my side, they will think twice about leaving us.”

It was a small compliment, one that was intended to butter up Warden Coates, Solomon knew, but it was charming nonethe-less. He found himself smiling into his flute of wine, the only time that both he and the warden actually felt the same positive emotion at the same time.

“Mostly, I want this complement of Outcasts to be at my side, looking ready to deal out Marine Corps justice whenever I cough,” the Ambassador moved on. “Obviously, there are always the natural security concerns for someone in my position. I will need bodyguards to secure rooms, neutralize threats, be vigilant against assassination or kidnap…” Her voice wavered on that last word, and Solomon knew that her ordeal of a few months ago must still be fresh in the woman’s mind. “…but on the whole, it is a show of force that I want to portray, and I know that these young men and women are very good operators.”

If only the warden could see that as well, Solomon thought.

“There is one added risk I should mention, however.” The ambassador cleared her throat. “The Outer Space Alliance has demanded that the neutral talks start with a gesture of goodwill on the Confederacy’s part.”

“The arrogance!” Coates muttered across the table.

“Yes, perhaps. But that is what diplomacy is all about: arrogance and gestures. So the talks will take place on Titan, where we will also be orchestrating the release of some twenty-five colonial seditionists to be repatriated to their colonies,” she explained.

Solomon felt the flicker of fear in his gut at the merest mention of that dreadful planetoid. Titan. The place where criminals go to die.

“A prisoner release?” Coates was shaking his head. “Unthinkable…”

“Unavoidable, Warden. As I say, this is the business of diplomacy. Just so long as the Outer Space Alliance continues to pay their taxes and import duties, then my superiors really do not care what they ask for…within reason. But the added threat of the prisoners and the fact that Titan is a prison planet has forced me to consider armed protection.” Another nod in the Outcasts’ direction.

“That will not be a problem for them, will it?” she inquired. “They are trained enough to ensure that they can meet these risks?”

“Oh yes,” the warden said, too quickly for Solomon’s liking. “They are some of the best fighters that I have ever trained in all my years of running Ganymede’s training programs for the Corps,” he said. Solomon wondered if he was talking about them, Gold Squad, or just about the Outcasts in general…

“And besides which…” The warden turned to glare at the Outcasts. “I am sure that it will do them all good to experience what life on Titan is really like.”

Wow, thanks, sir. Solomon managed to keep his face calm as he returned to sipping his drink.

4

A Job to Do

Jezebel Wen was feeling something that she wasn’t used to: fear. It wasn’t like the ex-Yakuza operative hadn’t felt fear before. Such thoughts of dying and pain had been a daily part of her ‘professional’ existence for as long as she could remember, but never before had she felt a dread like the one she was feeling now.

It’s because there’s nothing that I can do about it… she thought as she rechecked and re-packed her kitbag. They had been given the all-clear from Nuryien flight bridge to depart, and she was now supposed to be heading along with the others to the ambassador’s personal transporter—an elegant ‘schooner’ as they called them, large ships made up of one round habitat at the end, connected to a docking bridge and a rotating ring of solar sails over the propulsion rockets. They were almost as large as the larger Marine transporter ships, but they were designed to carry only a fraction of the people—giving the ambassador plenty of space to wine, dine, and run circles around any guests that she had to entertain on behalf of the Confederacy.

Like I care what she’s up to, Jezzy thought irritably. It was one of her many failings, she sighed as she refolded a spare undermesh suit and stuffed it into the kitbag. She had always found it easier to lash out at someone who probably didn’t deserve it when she was stressed.

Which she was. Because he was here.

My handler, she thought with scorn as she zipped and latched the kitbag. She was already late, and the rest of Gold Squad were assembling outside to board the ambassadorial schooner.

She had seen him the moment she left Ganymede. The short and wiry Asia-Pacific Partnership man who was also the Marine Corps staffer, who had managed to get signed up to the warden’s logistic staff, somehow.

He’s come to make sure that I get the job done, she thought. That I kill Solomon Cready and spare my father.

But that was never the way that it worked, was it? She straightened up, adjusted the harness of her light tactical suit, and looked at her reflection in the mirror of the small room that they had been given to freshen up in before leaving.

She saw a lithe young woman looking back at her in her mid-twenties, looking good for all of the terrible things that she had been through in her life. Jezzy fixed a stray strand of her dark hair back into her braid. “You can do this,” she whispered to her reflection, who did not appear convinced.

Her reflection seemed to be telling her silently that she should know better. That as soon as you give in to Yakuza demands, then it never ends, does it? I should know, after all. She could kill Cready somehow, and her father would be safe for a while, but then what? Then Boss Mihashi would want something else to get done on Ganymede, and evidence of her father’s danger would once again be brought to her, but maybe next time, it would be one of her father’s fingers, or an ear…

“No, you can’t give in. You have to shut down the situation, at once.” She tried to think like her old self—what the Yakuza in her would have done.

But that was a long time ago now, almost a year, and she was finding it harder and harder to be dispassionate and cold about these matters.

But it’s still my father! Her reflection wavered a little opposite her, shook by extreme emotion. Could she brazen it out? Could she call the Boss’s bluff?

But the Yakuza never bluff, her reflection knew. That was the key to their strength. They were unforgiving, they were cruel, and they were always exact.

What do I do!? Jezzy could have screamed at the other Jezzy in the mirror, but the other Jezzy just returned her look of confusion and misery back at her. She didn’t have any answers either.

“With any luck, that guy will be returning to Ganymede with the warden…” She breathed through her nose, trying to see a way out of her predicament. This away mission would buy her some time to think what to do. She might even be able to come up with a plan—

But in the next moment, it seemed that someone else already had a plan all of their own.

WHA-BOOOOM!

“Cover the ambassador!” Jezzy heard Solomon’s voice ringing out over the hiss of spitting wires and escaping gas.

Escaping gas. Not oxygen, please no, don’t let the platform be ruptured… Jezzy thought as she staggered through the door, which wouldn’t open properly and had got stuck halfway.

On the other side, their balcony was in chaos. The railing was buckled and bent, and below it, in the main thoroughfare of Nuryien, the combat specialist saw a scene of devastation. Doors had been buckled, shopfronts had been smashed, and the wide, usually well-lit room was now covered in detritus and alternating between red emergency lighting and darkness. She heard sobbing from somewhere and realized that there were people down there in the wreckage. What had happened?

“Wen! You okay?” Solomon emerged from the smoke, similarly not wearing all of his light tactical and his face smeared with soot and ash. “You’re on point, with me. We’re going to get the ambassador to her schooner and get her airborne. Clear?”

Jezzy nodded. “Aye… Weapons?”

Solomon had already half-turned back to the smoke, covering his nose and mouth as he mumbled, “No time. They should already be on board. We’ll just have to get creative if…”

Phbap! Phbap! Sparks exploded beside Solomon and Jezzy’s heads, and they dropped to the floor instinctively.

Those weren’t sparks, Jezzy thought. They were bullets. “Permission to get creative, sir?” she said.

“By all means!” Solomon was already combat-crawling back under the smoke to the next door, similarly stuck, where he started kicking it and forcing it open.

It must be where the ambassador was preparing to depart, Jezzy thought. Someone is trying to kill the ambassador. All previous thoughts of her own worries vanished as the cold, calculating mindset of the executioner took over Jezebel Wen’s mind. She was pinned down on a balcony as shooters—at least two—were down in the main thoroughfare. They were the ones who had probably planted the bomb, hoping to kill the ambassador?

No polysteel blade. No Jackhammer rifle. She catalogued her inventory. Their kit was already stowed on the schooner, including the armor pieces to their suits. Which meant she only had what was a part of her basic harness provision.

Which, unluckily for them, means that I have my service knife… Jezebel eased a hand down to her side, where the small knife was locked into place on the harness over her kidneys. It was something she had never had reason to use before, and she knew it was just a necessary precaution for all Marines to be able to cut wires or straps or webbing when they had to. The blade was barely as long as her forefinger, but cruelly sharp.

It would have to do.

Jezzy lay still, waiting for a gap in the firing before she moved.

She only had microseconds to isolate her target, but she had listened to the gun reports, so she had an idea where the nearest must be.

Southwest corner. She pulled herself up with one hand on the railing, already extending her throwing arm back and turning to the southwest.

A heartbeat to differentiate between screaming citizen and shooter, but there they were. Not even hiding behind cover, as they must have thought that they had the upper hand. A figure in sandy robes and a hood that swamped their form, apart from the stubby-looking weapon they held.

Is that a Jackhammer? The thought arrived at the same time her instincts kicked in. She threw the service knife with as much force as she could muster in her awkward position, just as the shooter registered her movement and was looking up, raising the barrel of the Jackhammer up to the balcony—

“Urk!” the figure gave a guttural shout of pain as they fell back, Jezzy’s knife sticking out from where the hood met the shooter’s chest.

Phbap! Phbap! More shots sparked off the railing beside her as Jezzy threw herself the other way. There was still the second shooter, and she was all out of knives…

But not everyone was unarmed, apparently, as two figures emerged from the ambassador’s room beside their own, dressed in deep maroon and raising small handheld guns. It was the two personal assistants, Jezzy saw, and each one had been transformed into a graceful angel of death as they slipped around each other, taking up positions as they fired simultaneously on the second shooter.

THADA-DAD-DAD! The muzzle flare from their small guns illuminated their pale faces, each one a mask of fury, and then everything was once again silent, aside from the hissing of the gases and the ticking of some damaged machinery somewhere.

“Clear?” one of the women called.

“I think so…” Jezzy called back. “That was some nice shooting,” she congratulated them, but the two women just ignored her as they swept their guns back and forth over the available avenues and balconies that joined this one. There appeared to be no other shooters, and for the moment, they appeared safe—relatively.

“Gold Squad!” There was the sound of running boots, and it was Warden Coates, surrounded by a complement of Nuriyen security, as well as Malady, Karamov, and Kol, who must have been waiting at the ambassadorial schooner. “Report! How is the ambassador?” the warden called.

“She’s fine, Warden.” The ambassador herself appeared, looking a little warily around her in the smoke. “Your team have already started work, I see…”

“Cready! Get Her Excellency on board and ship out. Now!”

“With pleasure…” Jezzy heard Solomon mutter under his breath as he turned to the ambassador. “This way, ma’am,” he said, raising his head to nod at Jezzy. “Rear guard?”

“Aye, Commander,” Jezzy said, taking up a position behind the ambassador even though she had no weapons to use if they were attacked again.

5

Titan

“Any intelligence on who the attackers might have been?” Solomon asked the ambassador as her schooner broke away from the platform and was already starting to put distance between it and the threat of the past.

They stood on the flight bridge, with the two personal assistants now apparently functioning as pilot and technical officer. Solomon wondered where they had been trained, as they appeared to have an almost Marine-like efficiency.

“Private contractors.” The ambassador saw him looking as she leaned against the small railing over the rest of the bridge. The schooner had a scattering of Confederate staff, Solomon saw, but it was a skeleton crew compared to the importance of its mission.

“The ambassadorial section always travels light,” she had said when explaining the layout of the ship. “Delegations tend to get nervous if you turn up with a full battle fleet at your disposal.”

“Ambassador Cathleen Ochrie,” she then introduced herself. “And you may call me Your Excellency, ma’am, or Cathleen.”

Solomon had elected for the first two options so far, as he still wasn’t sure how much power she held over his future—just that someone was trying to kill her.

“Your Warden Coates is working with Nuryien Security,” Ambassador Ochrie read through the latest transmissions from the platform behind them. “It was an improvised explosive device, doubtless designed to cause more mayhem and panic than it was to actually kill me…”

“The two shooters were the real assassins.” Solomon nodded. He had sent the rest of Gold Squad below decks to get themselves washed, ready, and kitted up in their light tacticals. Even though they should be safe on board the ambassador’s personal ship, being caught surprised on the platform meant that he didn’t want to take any chances again.

“Yes, it looks likely. Still no positive identification on them, although it could be anyone. Luna unionists, Martian separatists, Proxima guerrillas…” She shook her head. “Their style, though…an explosion to cause maximum terror and chaos sounds more Martian to me than anything else…”

Solomon nodded. Mars had long had a volatile reputation, and their own bands of separatists were the most outwardly violent of all, he’d heard before coming to Ganymede.

“But why would they try to kill you, now of all times?” Solomon pointed out. “If you’ll excuse me being blunt, ma’am—”

“That’s why I asked for you, after all, Commander Cready,” the woman said.

“But you’re on your way to negotiate a favorable prisoner release for the colonies, aren’t you? And quite possibly a favorable trade deal for them, too… Why would they kill you now?”

The ambassador shrugged as if the question was of no real importance. “Oh, a hundred and five reasons, Commander… It could be rival factions within one of the groups—one which wants their own outright war for independence—or it could be just an internal power-struggle between guerrilla gang chiefs.” She shook her head. “There’s no way of telling, but secessionists and separatists are always known for their rather erratic structures. Which is half the reason why we need to bring them into the Confederate fold, not isolate them…”

“You’re still going ahead with the negotiations?” Solomon said out loud, surprised. “I mean, this was an act of war, wasn’t it?”

“Don’t say that, Commander—at least not in my presence or anywhere near the colonists, or the press, you hear me, soldier?” The ambassador suddenly rounded on him, her tone like ice but her eyes sparking with fury and threat. Solomon could see that behind her approachable demeanor was a woman who was every bit as tough as the adjunct-Marines she was surrounding herself with. “It is talk like that, rumors and gossip of war, that begin real conflicts, Commander Cready. And no one here wants to go down in history as the person who triggered humanity’s first interstellar war, do we?”

“As you wish, Ambassador.”

“I told you, Cathleen or Excellency please, Cready. I can’t stand titles,” she said, dismissing him with a nod and turning back to her screens. “We’ll be jumping within the hour, tell your people to get ready. It’ll only be a short hop to Titan,” she called over her shoulder.

As it was, Solomon barely had time to get his errant crew in their seats before the Barr-Hawking jump-ship had attached itself to the schooner and had folded space and time before it, jumping the short distance to Saturn.

Really, Solomon knew it was an extravagance to jump the short distance between Earth’s fifth and sixth planets. He imagined that it was all an effort to wow the colonists with how much energy and money the Confederacy had to burn.

Raised from colonial taxes, no less… he thought as the space sickness washed up through him and he felt nauseous. No matter what sort of experimental gene therapy they were giving him, it was clear that it wasn’t doing anything to stop him from feeling sick every time his body was forced to travel through warp.

They whumped into existence as if they had always been there, the flexible membrane of reality snapping back to its previously regular constitution.

“Right, load up and suit up, squad!” Solomon was already decoupling himself from the webbing and pulling on his shoulder-pad, the breastplate, and his helmet. “Weapons at the ready.” He nodded to the stand that held all of their personal weapons.

“Are we expecting trouble, sir?” Kol asked, always the slightly nervier of their team.

“Well, the ambassador did just survive a bomb plot on a safe Confederate station, so I’m taking no chances,” he said. “From here on in, we have to treat everyone as a potential threat to the ambassador. This might be the ambassador’s chance to make some friends…or it might be some separatist fanatic’s chance to kill her.”

“Deployment plan?” This came from the sullen Wen, her voice deadpan as she slid her helmet over her head.

Something is still bothering her, but what? Solomon thought, before realizing that now was not the time anyway.

“We’ll play it loose for the moment, until we know what sort of rooms she’ll be meeting in, who else is there. For now, we flank her and just be ready to carry her out of there and back to this boat as soon as things get hairy.”

“Very good.” Wen nodded and clicked her helmet into place.

“Any more questions anyone? No? Then I guess we should all take a moment to savor the sights!” Solomon called as he clicked his own helmet into place.

LIGHT TACTICAL SUIT: Active.

USER ID: Solomon CR.

BIO-SIGNATURE: Good.

SQUAD IDENTIFIER: Gold.

SQUAD TELEMETRIES: Active.

Sp. Adj. Marine MALADY

Enhancements: Full Tactical Suit

Sp. Adj. Marine WEN

Combat Specialist

Elevated heartrate

Sp. Adj. Marine KOL

Technical Specialist

Adj. Marine KARAMOV

ALL GOLD SIGNS GOOD… SUITS ACTIVE…

Mission ID: TITAN

Strike Group ID: Outcast, Adj. Marine.

Parent Fleet ID: Seconded to AMBASSADORIAL SECTION

Squad Commanders: Cready (Gold).

GROUP-WIDE ORDERS:

Protect Ambassador Ochrie

The inside of Solomon’s helmet visor flared and scrolled with holo-projections of suit and squad information. The mission order was ridiculously simple: ‘protect the ambassador.’ That made Solomon almost chuckle. Protect her from what? Everything? Food Poisoning? Saying the wrong things?

He was worried again by Wen, and he turned his head slightly so that the green holographic arrow of her identifier showed up on the inside of his screen, hanging over her head. Elevated heartrate, he read, staring at her form critically where she stood on the other side of Malady. She wasn’t slouching or leaning, but neither did she appear jittery or nervous or agitated. Of course, he cursed that now he couldn’t get a better look at her face, to see if maybe she was coming down with something. The last thing they needed was to contract a space-virus out here.

Suddenly, Jezzy moved, half-turning her shoulder to him in an obviously dismissive way. Had she seen me looking at her? Is she annoyed with me? he wondered. It might, in fact, explain her weird behavior the last few days, the specialist commander considered. Maybe that was all it was—she had a bone to pick with him.

Whatever. He felt the schooner move and did as he had invited the rest of his squad to do: look out of their portholes at what was awaiting them.

Solomon was immediately struck by the grandeur of Saturn. It was a smaller world than super-massive Jupiter, of course, but it was no less impressive for it. Its ochre, orange, and almost umbral green surface was a constantly dancing sea of gases and vapors, and there, spearing across their vision, was its famously banded ring.

Solomon wondered if he was simply getting bored of life on Ganymede. Just as he had felt overwhelmed walking into the Nuryien platform, he felt overwhelmed now at the mere sight of another planet.

Which wasn’t alone.

Something scudded in front of them, a tiny black object that caught the light every now and again, revealing a sleek metal hide on powerful twin rockets. It was a small passenger craft, little more than a rocket with positional thrusters… He followed its trail as it crossed in front of Saturn, becoming smaller, more indistinct, and harder to see against the backdrop of space. Only its flashing navigational light gave it away as it crossed over the top of the ring and underneath one of Saturn’s many near moons—Rhea or Enceladus maybe, Solomon thought, until it neared…

Titan. One of the few moons in the solar system with an atmosphere—like Ganymede, ironically, but Titan’s atmosphere was far denser. Solomon wondered how the early Italians, Venetians, or Greeks must have viewed Titan when they first spotted it in the age of space observation—with wonder and awe perhaps.

But to him and the rest of Gold Squad, it had entirely different connotations.

It was yellowy, blushed with a burnt orange and much lighter, whiter brilliances in its atmosphere. But that didn’t stop it looking sulfurous to Solomon Cready, like a little droplet of Hell itself had been thrown up into the sky and waited for his inevitable downfall.

Titan was where the bad people go to die, he remembered the old joke amongst criminals on Earth. It was true. If you had performed a serious enough crime—anything from grand theft to major fraud, and any violent crime with no remorse or hope of rehabilitation—that horrible little poisonous orb was where the Confederacy exiled you to. Solomon gritted his teeth at the injustice of it.

It was where the warden had argued for him to go ever since he had arrived on Ganymede. No one ever came back from Titan. Even if your sentence was only a paltry seven or eight years, no one came back. Many people speculated that meant that they just died out here, and that the working conditions on Titan were so tough that to be exiled here was effectively a death sentence.

Although, Solomon also knew that those ‘released’ might also have just as easily decided never to return to near Earth or Luna ever again. I mean, why would you return to the planet that deemed you so much of a risk that they sent you most of the way around the solar system?

Down there under the nitrogen and methane clouds, Titan was a frozen wasteland of rock mountains, canyons, flood plains of liquid ethane, toxic rivers, and ice mountains…

But the damn place is stuffed full of nitrogen, Solomon knew, and paradoxically, the purest, cleanest water that you would ever find, if you could drill down through the surface, past the ice plates to the subsurface oceans.

Which was where the exiled convicts came in. Nitrogen-processing plants shipped out enough of the compound to contribute to humanity’s colonies and terraforming efforts on distant worlds, while the fresh water was drilled and pumped and tested, then used to supply the fleets. In a cosmos where a human-friendly habitat was rare, Solomon guessed that the Confederacy was making every attempt that it could to maximize every useful resource it could. ‘Titan not ready for crop cultivation? Fine, we’ll strip it of its nitrogen and sell it to Proxima instead…’ Solomon imagined some Confederate bigwig declaring.

Only working in lakes and rivers of flammable ethane or combustible methane, with a subsurface ice plate that could crack under the immense pressures that it only barely held in check, was dangerous business. So dangerous that none of the mega-corporations wanted to work it, or risk igniting the whole moon in some terrible industrial accident.

So, the Confederacy uses criminals instead. Solomon’s eyes scanned the sulfurous-looking orb, as if he might be able to see the plight of his fellow kind. People like me, he was only too aware of this fact.

Looking at Titan was like staring at his own judgement.

The ambassadorial schooner had no way of landing or breaking atmosphere in Titan, as it was designed as an interstellar craft alone. Luckily, Titan had its own docking station—a rough ‘H’ of metal modules with solar panels peeling from it like an iridescent, golden fungus.

PERMISSION TO DOCK…GRANTED

The static-laced radio made the announcement, and the schooner moved past the other circling vehicles to maneuver itself into position. From his place with the others in one of the holds, Solomon and the rest of Gold Squad scanned the other craft that waited outside, trying to figure out which one was likely to be from which colony.

A sizable amount of the waiting craft were logistics or criminal transporters, though. Solomon even saw one large, blocky Marine transporter, looking like a snub-nosed rectangle with four rotational thrusters at each end.

Probably here to offload another batch of prisoners. Solomon grimaced.

Beside that was a tanker, by far the largest of all the craft here, with its steep keel and long, bloated body. Those things cruise all over Confederate space, depositing or picking up fuel. Solomon considered it was probably here to harvest more of Titan’s precious nitrogen for the Outer Worlds.

There was a scattering of smaller craft like the one that Solomon and the others had already seen crossing Saturn—patrol or scout ships, he assumed, as the prison moonlet was permanently classified a top priority risk.

And then came the colony ships.

The Martians had brought with them one of their characteristic saucers, half the size of the ambassador’s schooner and looking more like a russet-iron doughnut than an actual saucer. Its thick rim was a band of black grills, vents, sensors, and flickering positional thrusters, giving it an aggressive, growling appearance.

“That’ll be the asteroid belt.” Karamov nodded to the strangest looking craft—barely a space vessel at all but a stationary craft with its ‘T’ of modular tubes strung with support frames and booster rockets. The traders and mining communities of the asteroid belt, although drowning in rare Earth materials, were still the least sophisticated of all the colonial powers. Everything about their ship and their difficult way of life spoke of a harsh, industrial functionality.

Which was nothing like the final colonial ship in attendance. It was sleek and white, looking like one of the old Saturn 5 rockets, but with small wing fins dotted at intervals all the way around its body. Solomon realized that the main outer section of the craft was actually able to rotate, meaning it could generate its own gravity while the nose cone and the rear propulsion rockets stayed in place.

“Proxima,” Kol said without hiding his admiration.

Proxima Centauri was the closest of the bio-available Outer Worlds, which meant that by the time humanity had gotten there, they had discovered that it was already teeming with plant, fungal, animal, and insect life. It was commonly called the ‘Second Earth’ and was close to Earth in size, mass, density, and gravity. The only thing missing was the people.

As such, the colonists of Proxima Centauri under their Imprimatur Mariad Rhossily were the ones that were most vocal about pushing for their independence, while the Martians were the most violent about it.

Looking at the different ships arrayed against them, Solomon had the disturbing sensation that they were outnumbered.

ATTENTION ALL CREW! DOCKING PROCEDURE IMMINENT.

AMBASSADORIAL STAFF TO DOCKING BRIDGE 2.

“That’s us,” Solomon said, nodding to the others. “Let’s give them a show who they’re messing with, shall we?” he said with a grin, firmly holding his Jackhammer rifle across his chest as he quick-marched out of the hold, with the rest of Gold Squad behind him.

“Ambassador, an honor and a pleasure,” called the gruff voice of a man who met them on the other side of the Titan dock. He was a military man, large and barrel-chested in a somewhat shabby silver and black uniform some twenty years out of date. Solomon saw the seal of the Confederacy on his breast pocket, over a selection of gold stars, and a larger insignia underneath that of the CPS: Confederate Prison Services.

It looks like he’s been out here too long, was Solomon’s first thought as he looked at the man’s un-regulation shaggy brown hair and full beard. Solomon stepped up to stand at the ambassador’s righthand side, two steps away and ready for anything.

“Thank you, Warden Harj,” the ambassador replied as the Warden of Titan turned to beckon them into his station.

Cramped and noisy, Solomon thought, quickly surveying the available exits.

Too many. The Titan Docking Station was made up of large thoroughfare ‘tubes’ with two levels inside each, and a host of bulkhead doors that led off to smaller module rooms and cargo vaults. Steam was escaping and being released constantly at odd intervals, and the strung lights flickered here and there as announcements in different languages beckoned staff to this docking procedure or that loading one.

The main thoroughfare they were being led down was speckled with bistros and shops, Solomon was surprised to see, as each of the staff and baristas and waiters wore the gray suits of convicts.

“The tankers usually spend a shift or two here while they get loaded up. It made sense to be able to offer a modicum of entertainment,” Warden Harj explained. “It gives the convicts some life skills, and the Confederacy makes a little money…”

Solomon wondered if he was trying to impress the ambassador.

“Squad, stay sharp.” He cut his external microphone and spoke solely on their suit-to-suit channel. “I don’t like this…” he said. I can’t see any weapons on anyone. He looked. No open carry then, not on this station. Not that it stopped the assassins on Nuryien smuggling their own weapons in, however…

“Why?” he was surprised to hear Wen answer him irritably. “Because the staff here are convicts like us?”

Ouch. What is her problem? Solomon thought as he scanned the wary eyes of the watching convict servicemen inside their food stalls and booths. Are they paying too much attention to the ambassador? Or is it just a prisoner’s interest in anyone new? Solomon couldn’t tell.

But then again, maybe Jezzy was right. If he had been about to assume that the convict staff here were a threat to the ambassador, then he might just as well put himself and the rest of Gold Squad under suspicion as well, right?

“Just stay alert, Wen,” Solomon growled back anyway, his chagrin only making him a little more annoyed as they walked forward.

Warden Harj was gruff and pragmatic, but not entirely uncouth, Solomon decided by the end of their short pilgrimage. He offered the ambassador and her people—the two private assistants that Solomon knew could shoot the wings off a fly if needed, as well as the five Outcasts and the small handful of ambassadorial support staff, carrying crates and wheeling trolleys full of clothes and computers—a choice of any food that they saw. But although Solomon would have ripped his own ear off for the chance to try some of the various offerings of street food from around the world, the ambassador wisely declined everything.

“I have my own cook, and I expect to sleep and dine aboard my ship during my stay here,” she said casually. “But it has been a short journey and I am not tired yet at all. Shall we begin immediately? The other delegates?”

“Ah…” Solomon saw the warden make a face as if the very word brought with it a foul smell. He was about to say something, before a commotion at one end of the thoroughfare interrupted him.

“Unacceptable!” boomed a voice as a small crowd approached them.

“Squad!” Solomon stepped forward.

It was a team of people wearing red-sandy-colored robes over undermesh encounter suits, Solomon saw. In their center was a tall, aquiline-looking woman with short black hair slicked back to her scalp, while next to her strode a smaller, rounder man with a bald head but an impressive handlebar mustache, similarly in the reddish over-robes.

Martians, Solomon recognized. It was the smaller, rounder, and rougher sort of man who was doing the shouting, and as he drew nearer—the other tanker crews and convict staff scattering out of their way as they did so—Solomon realized that the man only had one eye. The other was a dark metallic orb.

“Totally unacceptable, Ambassador Ochrie!” the angry bald man bellowed. “Have you seen the conditions that our people are kept in? No. Of course not. Another perfect example of the Confederacy’s complete lack of regard for the human rights of colonists everywhere!”

“Father Ultor, what a surprise to see you here,” the ambassador said, stopping and not moving an inch. Solomon could tell she wasn’t about to be intimidated by this angry man.

Four guards. Solomon saw the other robe-wearing men and women around the two central figures. They looked capable, bulky, rounded shoulders and short necks—undoubtedly mercenaries. He took another half-step forward as Malady stepped behind the ambassador and loomed.

“Oh, and is this supposed to make us meek and servile, is it?”

‘Father Ultor’ gave Solomon and the other Outcasts a dark look. Behind him, the four members of their own guard complement started to jostle on their feet.

“Easy, Father…” the taller, black-haired woman from the Martian delegation said, raising one perfectly pale hand and resting it lightly on the man’s shoulder.

“Imprimatur Valance.” The ambassador nodded slowly.

The legal representative of Mars, Solomon realized. Apart from the robes, she didn’t look like a Martian. If anything, from her exact hair and carefully elegant robes, the imprimatur of the notoriously contradictory Martian colony looked every bit the Confederate.

“Ambassador Ochrie.” She didn’t say that it was a pleasure or an honor, Solomon noted as he looked at the four Martian bodyguards. Each one, two men and two women, were staring hard at him and the other Outcasts, daring them to make a move.

But we’re the ones with automatic rifles. Solomon rolled a shoulder and readjusted his grip on the Jackhammer slung across his chest, before grinning through his face visor at the nearest one. Go ahead, he thought. Let’s see how far you get with a bullet in your kneecap!

“Father Ultor here is my counsel,” the imprimatur said. “And he has legitimate concerns about the treatment of the Martian prisoners-of-war.”

“The Martian criminals, you mean?” Warden Harj said bluntly, glowering at the imprimatur.

“Prisoners of conscience!” Father Ultor burst out, looking ready to get into a fight with the Warden of Titan here and now if he could…

“Well. Then let’s waste no time in getting to the surface, shall we?” The ambassador didn’t even blink before turning to Warden Harj.

“The Proximians and the Belters?” she asked.

“Well, the Proximians have already made their way to the surface…” Harj looked uncomfortable. “…and the Belters won’t leave their ship.”

“I see.” The ambassador turned to speak to one of her two Valkyrie-like personal assistants. She didn’t bother to lower her tone or hide what she said from the warden or the Martians.

“Please send a message to the Asteroid Belters expressing my concern and gratitude for their arrival. Assure them that their questions will be answered, and tell them that if they don’t get their ass to the negotiating table at once, I’ll put a freeze on all commodities heading to their ugly little asteroid field,” she said with an icy smile, turning back to nod at the slightly aghast-looking Warden Harj and the enraged Father Ultor. The actual spokesperson of Mars however, Imprimatur Valance, didn’t appear upset or affected by the ambassador’s harsh words.

“Shall we?” The ambassador nodded at the sign that pointed the way to the surface transporters.

6

The First Martians

“I don’t like this,” Solomon said over his gold channel to the rest of his squad. They were packed into a small shuttle-transporter—little more than a rounded dropship that burned and juddered as it fell through the orange nitrogen, methane, and sulfur clouds of Titan on its way to the surface.

Through the use of carefully-timed rockets, as Solomon realized they couldn’t burn large amounts of fuel on Titan due to the moon’s mostly volatile compounds, they slowed their descent a fraction. As soon as they fell out of the cloud layer, everyone felt the sudden lurch of vast parachute sails being deployed.

Ugh. Solomon felt sick, but he managed to keep it together as he noticed that none of the delegates appeared to be faring much better.

But there are too many of us in one place. He concentrated on his job. Locked into their chairs were all the ambassadors and delegates, while the four-man Martian bodyguards and the five-man Outcast Marines stood, hanging on to the overhead handle grips.

This lady’s already been shot out of the sky once… he thought, starting to feel tense. As a way to try and calm his nerves, he cleared his throat and turned on his external microphone to speak to the warden.

“Warden Harj, can I ask your security arrangements here on Titan?” Solomon said. “I am sure that the ambassador and our friends from Mars will be grateful to hear it…”

“Friends from Mars!” snickered Karamov on the private suit-to-suit channel.

“Play nice, Karamov,” Cready returned, having to quickly turn his suit microphone off and on.

“Of course,” the warden replied. “Titan is a high-security facility, which means that the prisoners are in a state of constant lockdown—”

“Outrageous!” Father Ultor muttered.

“As such, any prisoners that you encounter will only be allowed in certain zones of the prison camp and factory, and they will be under watch by at least two other wardens.”

Two!? Solomon thought in alarm. “Only…two, Warden Harj?”

“Well, they are the only personnel with guns, so…” the warden said. “It is a system that works for us. Each prisoner has an identity bracelet that we can track from both the guard base here on Titan or the docking station above, and each bracelet transmits a code, which means only the doors to their permitted areas can be opened. Even if a prisoner was crazy enough to try to escape, they wouldn’t be able to get beyond the first barrier!”

Oh, there’s always a way, Warden Harj. Solomon knew that only too well. Although what he’d heard might ameliorate any other bodyguard’s concern, for someone with his previous experience, it only made him more paranoid. Identity bracelets that open doors. Presumably magnet-locked. But there are ways to break magnet locks, even if you don’t have a set of industrial clippers. And there are ways to steal someone else’s identity bracelet…

“PREPARE FOR LANDING,” the speakers announced, giving them a moment to brace as the dropship shuttle swayed, swung, and thudded to the surface of the alien moon.

“Out, out, out!” Solomon made sure that he and Malady moved quickly down the ramp, flanking each side of the flattened avenue that led directly to the gates.

Light Tactical Suit: Active and Fully Operational.

Atmospheric Controls: Active. Filtering Nitrogen, C02, Methane.

Backup Air Supply: 3.8 Hours.

The Titan facility looked absurdly similar to a human prison camp, with high steel walls—very high, given the low gravity of Titan—topped with razor wire, and a set of double-doors directly in front of them. Peeking over the top of the walls were regular metal guard towers like fingers pointing accusingly at the sky, and the dim sodium lights did little to illuminate the surface.

The ground juddered and shook underfoot as Solomon turned around to find the source of the noise. Don’t tell me I’m about to step on a damn cryovolcano! Solomon cursed, knowing that many of the Outer Worlds and moonlets did not have regular geology as Earth did, but instead could erupt into massive ‘ice volcanoes’ that could break rock and spew hardened ice and steam, just as deadly as magma if it hit you.

But what Solomon saw was a poisonous, toxic world. Everything was cast in an orange-yellow haze, which Solomon guessed was glare from the heavy nitrogen clouds above. A mist blanketed the middle distance, and from which emerged jagged rocks and bluffs, and not a hint of green.

The shaking appeared to be coming from south of their location, and Solomon saw the silhouette of a static shape through the mist: a giant box with a tall tower from which the vibrations were coming from.

“Ice mine,” Malady informed him, before electronically announcing, “All clear on the north side.”

“All clear on south,” Solomon said, although he felt a fraud for saying so. How could he even see anything through this murk?

“Ambassador Ochrie, good to go!” he announced as the dropship shuttle started to shake and transform. First, the ramp that Solomon and Malady had jumped down slid flat back into the ‘floor’ of the shuttle above its thrusters, and then the central housing of the shuttle started to move as different plates clicked into place. Solomon’s external microphone picked up the whine of gears as the entire middle section of the ship started to pull away from its seat, leaving an empty ‘shell’ of the dropship-shuttle behind.

When the middle oval was halfway removed, it extended four sets of tracked wheels from its underside, crunching them down on the surface of the inhospitable planet before disengaging completely. Solomon was now looking at a small surface rover vehicle, made out of the central body of the shuttle. Its portholes were now the viewing ports of the occupants inside, and it apparently had no cockpit or pilot, as it started to trundle on radio controls towards the gate, with Solomon and Malady bounding in Titan’s much lighter gravity on either side.

A flash of lights from the ‘roof’ of the shuttle-rover were answered by the blink over the door, and the double gates started to roll backward on hissing pistons, revealing a wide yard on the other side, already crowded with blocks of ice as large as Malady and a few prisoners standing in their bubble-helmets and protective encounter suits, looking at the approaching shuttlecraft. On the other side of them was another chain-link fence topped with more razor wire, leading to a narrow corridor through the fences to the main doors of a gunmetal gray building, studded with more sodium lights and slit-windows.

To think I came this close to calling this place home… Solomon shivered in horror as he eyed the nearest convicts.

“Your two o’ clock, Malady,” Solomon murmured.

“Spotted,” Malady returned. One of the prisoners who had been hauling the ice blocks into position for loading had paused, turned, and was taking large, bounding steps towards the shuttle with the giant ice pincers still in their hand.

“Welcoming party?” Solomon said, as Malady quickly bounded between the prisoner and the shuttle-car, dwarfing the convict by a factor of two, easily.

Solomon watched the exchange carefully as the convict stopped, looked Malady up and down, and then proceeded to wave the pincers at the shuttle-car anyway as it rolled steadily past them. Is it a threat? Or just one guy blowing off some steam?

Whichever it was, one man with a set of pincers against the full power-suited man-golem that was Malady wasn’t anything for him to worry about, so he turned back to check the perimeter.

The gates had closed behind them, and there were no prisoners flanking them, but when he turned back, he saw that the shuttle had stopped because another of the working convicts stood solidly in front of it.

“Commander, do you want me to disengage from this one and…” Malady said, still looming over the pincer-wielding prisoner.

“No, I got it,” Solomon said. With a short hop and a larger bound, he jumped over the shuttle-rover and landed with a thump on the far side, standing up slowly in front of the prisoner.

Who looked just like the others, in their gray and brown encounter suits, several years out of date, and the ridiculously large, bubble helmet. This one didn’t have a set of pincers and wasn’t doing anything but standing there.

Solomon flicked on his external microphone and prayed that all the prisoners’ encounter suits were wired to pick up external noise. They had to be, surely. Since when would the Confederacy pay to install expensive suit-to-suit communicator channels for a bunch of exiles?

“Stand down,” he said, his voice sounding oddly muted in the misty, heavy atmosphere. Solomon released and gripped his Jackhammer across his chest as he made it obvious that he meant business.

The figure didn’t move at first, but very slowly raised one hand to point its bulbous glove straight into one of the porthole windows. Solomon caught a flash of the man’s face behind the bubble helmet. He was old, dark-skinned, and with eyes as dead as a fish.

“I said, stand down!” Solomon took a step forward, his Jackhammer coming up to point at the man’s chest in one smooth move.

The man continued to point over Solomon’s shoulder, before slowly moving his focus to his aggressor. Solomon saw the man’s dark eyes clearly, and for the first time, in his life it felt like he was staring into the abyss. This man held no expression or spark of hope or life or humanity at all. How long has he been up here to get like that?

“Can you hear me?” Solomon shouted louder this time.

The convict held Solomon’s gaze without a flicker of fear or even anger, before slowly lowering his hand and stepping out of the way.

“What the hell was that all about?” It was Kol, speaking over their suit-to-suit channels. Solomon figured that he must have been watching from inside the shuttle-rover.

“I have no idea. Maybe some crazy guy.” Solomon shook his head, before jumping lightly out of the way as the shuttle-rover rolled forward.

But then again… “Kol, did you see which window he was pointing into?” he asked as he watched the rover roll through the opening chain-link gates and move up the ramp to a hangar bay inside the prison facility itself.

“Yes, Commander, straight at our ambassador. Which is weird, because the porthole is behind her. The man could only see the back of her head, surely,” Kol said. “Maybe he recognized her robes?”

The prisoners don’t get the newsfeeds out here, I shouldn’t think… Solomon thought. How would that man know just who the ambassador was? If he did, that is… “Probably just a lucky guess, and he was just randomly pointing at anyone he didn’t like the look of…” Solomon figured, although the entire event had spooked him, he wasn’t too proud to admit.

But maybe I’ll go ask a few questions… Solomon looked around as Malady bounded past him into the hangar, but of the strange, older pointing convict, there was no sign at all.

Hey, where is he? Solomon was confused, before the flashing lights over the hangar alerted him to the fact that the door was hissing closed, and he had better get in if he didn’t want to join the convicts. Solomon turned and bounded towards the facility as the chain-link gates and the hangar doors auto-shut and locked behind him.

“Here we have the hangar and deployment halls.” Warden Harj took them on a brief tour of the prison facility when they had finally pressurized the hangar and were able to step into the building without the use of helmets.

Not that Solomon and the rest of Gold Squad had taken theirs off, though. They remained fully suited and would remain so until they were allowed to stand down.

“And next we have general population.” Harj swiped his identity card through the door locks.

Another thing that could be easily stolen at the right time by the wrong person, Solomon thought grimly.

“General population!?” Solomon said out loud from where he stood at the ambassador’s side. He was alarmed. Was the warden really going to take one of the highest-ranking officials in the Confederacy into the general hustle and treachery of the convicts here on Titan?

“Oh, don’t worry, Commander Cready. They’re all on lockdown, as I say. No criminals beyond trusted volunteers allowed out of their rooms,” the warden said as a klaxon went off somewhere deep inside the building, and the audible thump as the doors released open.

Revealing on the other side a hellish, austere world of off-white painted walls, broken by the rows of barred rooms.

“Gerrayh!”

“Get out of here!”

“We don’t want’cha!”

They were met by the shouts and screams of the prisoners as the warden ignored them, leading them across the bottom hallway.

“You see, all entirely safe. Locked into their cells, with no hope of getting out…” the warden stated proudly, but Solomon didn’t like it. It looked like Ultor felt much the same way, but for different reasons, as it turned out.

“These people are not animals, Warden!” the Martian Councilor stated loudly, raising a fist in the air as he strode after us. “Friends! I am Father Ultor, and I have come to hear your confessions!” he roared.

A true demagogue, Solomon thought, easing his hands on the Jackhammer as he turned around to keep an eye all around them. The convicts were everywhere, above and beside them, peering and jeering down from their cells. If they were to break out right now, there would be nothing I could do to save the ambassador…

Although it seemed that breaking out was the very last thing on any of the prisoners of Titan’s mind, as most of them started to whisper and gasp, before starting to murmur, then to chant…

“Ultor. Ultor. Ultor…ULTOR!”

“Just who the hell is this guy?” Solomon murmured, looking at the way Ultor beamed and strode back and forth, now with two fists in the air instead of just the one.

“No idea, Commander…” Karamov said, and Wen grunted a similar monosyllabic dismissal.

“The First Martians.” It was the Ambassador who responded to him, and Solomon realized that he had left his external suit microphone on! Dammit! Not such a great start for a diplomatic mission. But at least the ambassador had information.

“Father Ultor is their spokesperson, with a following largely across the poorer elements of Martian colonies. They have an almost religious belief that they are the chosen of Mars,” the ambassador said under her breath.

“I can see why you weren’t too pleased to see him with the imprimatur then…” Solomon whispered, knowing that the din from the chanting prisoners would at least mask his derision. “But wait…not all of these prisoners can be Martians, can they?”

There was an awful lot of chanting going on around and above him, Cready thought. But not all. At least half of the prisoners were silent, or else were jeering and cheering for no other reason than to cause a scene for their warden, it seemed.

“Mars has been very active in its independence efforts,” the ambassador said lightly, a moment before the first object pinged off Malady’s suit.

Oh, come on! Solomon thought, as it was followed by an enamel cup, bouncing along the floor, and then a plastic fork. “Your followers are getting a bit excitable, Father…” Solomon called out loudly, although none of the thrown objects appeared to be falling anywhere near him and the Martian group, he saw.

“They merely wish to express their disapproval of the Confederacy, I am sure…” The father laughed a loud, echoing roar as this time another cup, followed by a tube of toothpaste, hit the floor at Ambassador Ochrie’s feet.

Well, I know this doesn’t exactly count as danger, but still… Solomon had enough. “Right, that’s it. Warden Harj? Where’s our exit, please? I’m taking the ambassador out of here,” he said loudly, for the warden to quickly usher them towards the gate at the rear of the room, followed by the cheers, jeers, and catcalls of the prisoners behind them.

“Patience, brothers and sisters!” Ultor boomed at his flock as he followed the rest of the delegation. “The day is soon coming when you will all be free, as citizens of Mars!” He raised a fist to a rousing cheer, and then the door clanged in front of him and the ambassadorial delegation moved on.

7

Ice Mining

“You see? Totally, absolutely unacceptable!” Father Ultor, the ‘pastor’ and leading figure of the Chosen of Mars, berated the ambassador as the delegates continued their hasty ‘tour’ of the Titan prison facility, under the somewhat nervous eyes of Warden Harj.

In any other circumstance, Solomon would probably be inclined to agree with the father—were it not for his belligerence. Titan wasn’t a ‘nice’ place. They viewed the canteen kitchens, where food was dispensed by other prisoners through a hole in the wall, and prisoners were fed in shifts of fifty at a time, with no talking allowed. Next came the ‘recreation facilities,’ which was essentially a gymnasium with static exercise machines to help the prisoners maintain their bone density in the lighter gravity and extreme conditions.

“And what of radiation!?” Ultor demanded of Harj. “How many of my confederates are going to develop some wasting disease by the time they are forty?”

“We dose the prisoners rations with iodine and B-vitamins, according to Confederacy-approved guidelines…” Warden Harj was growing less and less patient with the upsetting priest, and Solomon saw him now answer in a high-minded and officious air.

Which didn’t go down well.

“Oh! The Confederacy-approved guidelines which dictate half of what the average Martian needs in order to maintain a healthy immune system?” Ultor questioned. Underneath his bravado and bluster, Solomon saw that there was actually a very sharp mind as he reeled off facts and figures to the put-upon warden.

“These men and women are prisoners, uh, Father,” the warden stated—unwisely, in Solomon’s opinion. He had met people like that when working in New Kowloon. Never argue. They don’t like it when you argue with them…

“They are enemy combatants at best!” Ultor stated as they marched down a drafty, freezing corridor to their next site. “And we all know what the Universal Convention of War states…”

There was a mumbled cough from Imprimatur Valance beside him, and Solomon noticed that the father immediately shut up. So, the imprimatur is still the one who calls the shots in your relationship, is she? That might be a useful piece of information for later, Solomon considered.

“Are you suggesting that Mars is currently at war with Earth, Father Ultor?” the ambassador asked lightly. “Because if that is the case, then I am sure that I can leave the negotiations up to the generals of the Marine Corps instead.” She gave the man a brittle smile. Her meaning was obvious: negotiate or fight.

“No, well…not at war of course…” Father Ultor grumbled into his mustache.

“Really, Ambassador,” Imprimatur Valance finally broke into the conversation. “How can Mars be at war with anyone, when everyone knows that Mars does not even have any of its own military forces? We all rely on the Marine Corps for our protection.”

Not what I saw on Hellas Chasma. Solomon gritted his teeth. Those Martian separatists had weapons—Marine weapons—and knew how to use them. Which meant training. Someone was training them. Is it you, Imprimatur? He studied the woman with the black hair, but she remained inscrutable to his observations.

“And you are suggesting that Mars, and by extension all of the rest of the colonies, require their own defense forces?” the ambassador asked levelly.

“We are all prey to raiders and mercenaries, Your Excellency… Sometimes, the Marine Corps, even these brave boys and girls of the Rapid Response Fleet—” The imprimatur turned to nod at Solomon and the Outcasts. “—even they can often arrive too late when they are responding to a colonial call rather than an Earth one.”

That touched a nerve. Solomon saw the ambassador stop in her tracks. “Are you suggesting that the Marine Corps is willing to sacrifice colonial security, Imprimatur Valance?”

“They are willing to charge us with batons and shock-sticks whenever we raise our head out of the dirt!” Father Ultor muttered darkly.

“I wouldn’t dream of saying so,” Valance said casually. It was kind of fascinating, Solomon thought, watching these two women go head-to-head in this way. Both were clearly fiercely intelligent, and very good at what they did. And they knew it.

“Nevertheless, there really is no need to waste time. We all know why we have been asked here: a full pardon and a release of colonial prisoners in return for some goodwill.”

“A cessation of hostilities by colonial seditionists,” the ambassador said firmly, to which imprimatur nodded. Father Ultor didn’t, Solomon noted. This was the game, wasn’t it? Everyone knew that the Mars, Proxima, and asteroid governors must have some say over their ‘terrorist’ factions. But no one was willing to point the finger in case they, as Solomon had heard Ambassador Ochrie herself say, ‘be the person who started humanity’s first interstellar war.’

“I never said anything about a full pardon, however,” the ambassador added, almost as an afterthought.

“What?” The imprimatur finally took the bait and lost her temper. “I beg your pardon, Ambassador?”

The delegation had come to the end of the rooms after viewing the Orwellian control room—a tower with armed guards on permanent patrol, protecting a room wallpapered in screens, showing every possible angle of the facility and the nearby ice fields—and Warden Harj seemed impatient to hurry them along.

“I’ll be taking you out to one of our ice mine facilities, where the Proxima delegation are currently inspecting…” he spoke a little too loudly, as if he hoped to break the looming argument between the imprimatur and the ambassador.

“None of the prisoners released from Titan will receive pardons or clean records.” The ambassador ignored Harj. “I thought you were already aware of this, Imprimatur? Their citizen identity cards will record that their sentences have been served, but they will not vanish.”

“You are dooming fifty-six Martian nationals to a life of factory work with records like that, and we all know that Earth operates a no-tolerance policy to criminal convictions. Those men and women will never be able to visit their relatives who still live on Earth, and they will be unlikely to ever earn enough money to allow their children to, either…” the imprimatur spat.

“Outrageous…” Ultor growled.

“Necessary,” the ambassador countered. Harj was busy trying to use the door communicator to call up another rover, and the delegates were organically, primally forming two sides of a circle—with the Martians and their guards on one side, and the Earth Confederacy Ambassador, her personal assistant, and the Outcast Marines on the other.

This could turn nasty, Solomon thought, eyeing his opposite guards. Are they the sort to fire? To start that interstellar war if the imprimatur tells them to?

Not the Martian Imprimatur, Solomon thought. But they might do for Ultor. He was the firebrand. He was the figurehead that the seditionists must look up to, with the imprimatur just pulling the strings.

“Earth cannot afford to have violent offenders—those ideologically opposed to the Confederacy—with clean records, applying for jobs in our own space lanes, or as border Marines, customs officials, or occupying places of authority. That would be insane!” The ambassador laughed, making it sound as though the Martians were just being childish.

“What would happen if, five years from now, one of those good and loyal Martians takes a job on a Lunar transporter and decides to crash it into New York Island?” she scoffed.

It’s a good point, Solomon thought.

“Imprimatur, Father, you are both intelligent people, you realize that there always have to be checks and balances. You will get your wayward citizens back—on the provision that they are never able to have anything to do with Earth ever again. That is my offer,” the ambassador stated and turned to where Harj had finally succeeded in getting through to someone at the next facility.

“What do you mean something’s gone wrong over there!?” Harj had tried to whisper the words into the wall communicator, but the lull in the conversation and the empty, drafty metal hanger that they stood in meant that everyone heard it perfectly.

“There’s been an explosion at the ice mine. The Proximians are trapped…” Solomon looked at Warden Harj’s ashen face. His mustache and beard quivered. The tough prison guard looked about ready to faint. This was clearly something that the warden had never expected to happen on his watch.

“Then we go rescue them,” Ambassador Ochrie said without hesitation. “I have the Outcast Marines here at my disposal. With their help and your wardens, we can get them out, come on…” She was already moving towards one of the parked rovers.

“But, Ambassador…” Solomon felt himself impelled to say. I am supposed to be her security consultant, after all. “It’s going to be dangerous out there. We should get you back to your ship first…”

The ambassador spun on her heel. “Not going to happen, Commander Cready. Those Proximians are technically the guests of the Confederacy, and those prisoners are Confederate citizens…”

“Martian comrades, more like!” Father Ultor muttered angrily.

“Perhaps, Father,” the ambassador conceded. “But while they’re still on Titan, they’re a Confederate responsibility. Which, in this room, and on this moon, would mean me. Now load up, soldier!” She was already stalking to the doors of the rover as Solomon spared a shrug with Warden Harj. There was clearly no arguing with the woman. Harj activated the rover controls, and the ambassador and her personal assistants stepped in.

“Malady, I want you and me on point, like before,” Solomon said, “Wen, Karamov, and Kol? Stay with the ambassador.” Solomon spared a glance at the Martian delegation. “And what of your men—will they help us?” he asked them, but Ultor was already blustering and heading towards the rover.

“They’ll help true Martian citizens. I’m not allowing the Confederacy to take the credit for this one!” he stated, barging in after Kol, but Solomon was pleased to see that Wen and his Outcasts had flanked the ambassador and wouldn’t let any of the Martians get to within touching distance of her.

Last to load up was Warden Harj, and then Solomon and Malady were the only ones left in the prison hangar, looking at the hissing steam as the door lock depressurized.

“Travel fast,” Solomon growled over his suit channel. “I don’t care what the Martians or the Proximians say. If we run into any trouble, whatever side they’re on, we’re not going to be taking names and addresses.”

“Understood.” Malady rolled his huge metal shoulder-pads. His commander’s message was clear: put down any would-be attackers with extreme prejudice first, and ask questions later…

The door opened, and Malady and Solomon bounded into Titan’s sulfurous light.

PHABA-BOOOM!

The rover and two attendant Marines had barely gotten past the outer gate when the ground shook and the southern horizon swirled with dense, dark clouds.

“What was that?” Solomon called.

“Commander…” It was Karamov, bouncing inside the rover vehicle next to the ambassador. “Warden Harj says that has got to be the air-processing plant at the ice mine. If it’s blown, the whole place will depressurize…”

Which means that everyone inside there, Proximinan negotiators and First Martians and assorted convicts, will all die in minutes… Solomon lengthened his stride. The rover beside them chugged forward over the black and orange rocks of Titan’s surface, but its electric motors didn’t allow it to go beyond six or seven miles an hour. In this light gravity, Solomon knew that he and Malady could get there faster.

“Change of plan,” he announced, “Me and Malady are going on ahead. We’ll secure the site. Rescue who we can. Wen stays with the ambassador at all times, rest of Gold Squad help when you arrive.” His voice sounded clipped and tense as he suddenly broke into a leap, kicking out at the Titan surface with his metal combat boots with all his might.

Solomon sailed through the air in a long jump as Malady did the same, bounding into the air behind him.

Oof! He hit the surface with both legs, the shock being absorbed by the suit’s compressor pistons at the ankles, knees, and hip, before hop-running two more steps and then kicking out again in a massive, low-gravity leap.

Behind them, the ambassador’s rover receded into the distance as Malady and Solomon ate up the short distance to the mine. Another couple of jumps, and Solomon realized that they were entering a patch of heavier mists and yellow fogs, laden with grit and rock dust.

Warning! Light Tactical Suit Warning!

Atmospheric Filters Report +62% Mineral Buildup.

No Radiation Detected.

“Outstanding,” Solomon growled to himself. All he needed now was for his suit filters to pack up, and then for him to die of oxygen starvation ironically inside his suit, rather than out of it.

Solomon quickly reached to his harness to activate the suit’s self-cleaning process, forcing precious air from his reserve oxygen tank to be forcefully expelled through the suit’s filters. It was a risky move, as losing too much oxygen could only ever be a bad thing in a hostile alien environment, but seeing as he had no idea how long it would take for his air filters to completely clog up from the dust of the explosion flooding its air system, he knew that he had no choice.

“One-second injection,” he said, flipping the catch that opened onto the small valve on his harness, and pulled.

PFFFFT! Solomon felt buffeted inside his suit, and his body staggered as jets of pure air burst from his visor and back, before he released the valve and felt it click back into place.

Atmospheric Filters Report +38% Mineral Buildup.

“Better than nothing, I suppose…” Solomon grimaced and pressed on into the murk.

The yellow clouds suddenly lifted, revealing a scene of devastation.

The ice mine had once had a tall chain-link fence surrounding it, but now that lay in pieces, its concrete stanchions pulled from the frozen Titan soil by the powerful tremors. Beyond their haphazard forms, Solomon saw a crater—no, not a crater, a pit—in the ground, on the side of which, leaning over the edge of the vast hole, had once stood a large, block-like metal building of many levels, and a tall cylinder that stretched high into the murk above them.

Which must be the drilling rig. Solomon saw that the different sections of the wide tube had whorls of threading, indicating that it twisted as it drove into the rock and ice.

But the metal levels of the main building were in disarray, two of the wall sections clearly crumpled from a sudden, catastrophic decompression event, and the building as a whole was slanting towards the ice pit below it.

“That whole place is going to go down.” Solomon saw it immediately. “We’ll lose everyone in there…”

On the far side of the pit were huge metal pipes, each one bigger than the distant prison rover behind them, rising from the pit and plunging into a dam-like concrete and steel structure. But these pipes were cracked, and jagged metal was bent back from the seal as rushes of steam poured into the air above.

That is what is clearing the nitrogen clouds around here, Solomon realized. That had to be the mine’s air-processing plant, extracting oxygen trapped in the frozen ice below and recycling it to keep the mine pressurized and livable.

She’s hemorrhaging air… But was it coming from the mine’s reserve tanks or straight from the ice extraction?

“Malady, you’re the only one of us big enough to do something about that.” Solomon pointed to the air-processing plant. “See if you can find a way to stop that from happening.”

Solomon had no idea how the full tactical golem would do such a thing, but he had to trust that Malady would find a way. Now was not the time for despair.

“Suit scanners on,” Solomon said as Malady broke into a bounding, leapfrogging run around the sides of the ice and rock pit to the broken air processors. Suddenly, Solomon’s visors flushed with a line of green as his rather basic sensors activated and sent out small echo-waves of particles.

Suit ID:

Radiation Scan… COMPLETE

Electrical Scan… COMPLETE

Radionics Scan… COMPLETE

Thermal Scan… COMPLETE

RESULTS:

Radiation Levels at Titan-Normal.

Electrical Signals: Multiple. Industrial Firmware. Personal Suit-ware Detected.

No Radio Frequencies Active.

Industrial Heat Signatures Detected. Multiple Individual Heat Signatures Detected.

“Good.” He saw an overlay of the results on the internal screen of his visor. There were at least three collections of heat signatures scattered from the inside of that building to below them. The mine must have service caves and tunnels down there, with still living—or still warm, anyway—convicts and delegates huddling together. That was confirmed by the multiple suit-ware electrical signals—prisoner and delegate encounter suits like the ones he had seen the others wearing before, still active and presumably doing all of the things that an encounter suit should do: keep their occupant warm, filter oxygen for them, and shield against unwanted radiation.

But no radio frequencies. Solomon grimaced. That meant that there was no way to contact them. He would have to go in and find them.

And their suits could clog up with Titan dust at any moment if there is another explosion, he thought with a grimace, already moving towards the building.

“HALT!” His external speakers picked up the broadcast warning as he jumped into the concrete courtyard in front of the ramp that led up to the mine. The doors had been blown open by the sudden explosion and lay in mangled fragments down the ramp. Solomon could see the spark of broken wires and glitching electronics illuminating a hangar inside in strobe bright and dark effect.

And there, in the doorway, were two Titan wardens, their suits covered head to toe in the gray dust of the explosion and leveling their rifles at Solomon.

Great. Going to get shot by the very people I’m here to help.

“Specialist Commander Cready! Outcast Marines, attached to the ambassadorial delegation,” he called out quickly, raising one open palm to show that he meant no harm. “I’m here to help…”

“Thank god,” one of the guards stated. “It was an explosion in the entry level. We don’t know how it happened. It must have been a gas leak or—”

Phbp. The noise picked up by Solomon’s suit amplifiers was small and would have easily been missed amidst the chaos, were it not accompanied by the sudden dispersal of red mist around the back of the talking warden, and the effortless way that he crumpled to the ground.

“Shooter!” Solomon called out, already jumping to one side and skidding along the concrete floor as something sparked off one of the bits of door.

“Who is it!?” he heard Wen calling along the gold channel, sounding alarmed.

Oh, gotten over your bad mood now that I’m about to get shot, is it? He squeezed himself under the raised bit of door as another shot pinged off its surface.

“Don’t know. It seems to be coming from the facility…” Solomon’s quick mind calculated. The guard was shot in the back. He was facing out of the open door towards him. He risked peeking around the edge of the metal fragment to see that the accompanying warden had also been dropped, similarly shot in the back.

“Stars damn it!” he growled. I don’t have time to get pinned down here, not when the entire building could slide into the pit!

Luckily for Solomon, he was a quick thinker. He had always been a quick thinker. It was, after all, what had made him the most daring thief in New Kowloon. And the other advantage was that in lower-gravity environments, you can carry much heavier stuff…

He pushed the large door piece he was huddling behind up as its front pinged with more shots. Finding the handle on the underside, he lifted the eight-by-four foot solid piece of metal in front of him like a shield and bounded up the ramp to the facility.

Ping! Ping! The bullets ricocheted off the front, sending angry shockwaves into Solomon’s hands as he turned and threw the door forward at the last minute. It spun and clattered against a half-moon booth in the center of the room where Solomon presumed there had once been guards in position, overseeing the workers coming and going on their shifts.

And a perfect place to take cover in. Solomon jumped, following the door as he burst through the already shattered glass to land on the other side of the desk.

“Gargh!” He heard a snarl as someone rose beside him, a warden’s rifle in one hand and a massive service wrench in the other—

It was one of the prisoners, Solomon saw that in the blink of an eye as he recognized the man’s gray and brown, out-of-date suit and bubble helmet.

Ask questions later, he had told Malady. The specialist commander shoved the butt of his Jackhammer into the man’s helmet and heard a satisfying crack and the sudden wailing hiss of steam.

“Arghhh!” The prisoner staggered, dropping the rifle and the wrench as his gloved hands immediately swept to the leaking cracks in his helmet.

Solomon kicked the weapons away, then kicked the man in the shins, bringing him to the floor with a heavy thump.

“Stay down!” he snarled as he leaned on the convict’s chest, already reaching for his utility compartments on his suits harness as he radioed in. “Karamov, get your medical kit ready. I got one combatant here incapacitated with oxygen starvation and pressure sickness.”

“Aye, Commander.”

Cready found what he was looking for—the polyfilament metal wire. He wrapped it around the man’s hands, before clicking the small magnet locks closed. He wasn’t going anywhere.

“The leak’s not bad,” he hissed down to see a man’s terrified face on the inside. He didn’t look like a terrorist or a trained killer of any kind. Just a prisoner who saw his chance and took it.

“I’d say you’re going to run out of oxygen in two minutes, maybe three. Maybe my squad will get here in time to treat you, maybe they won’t,” he said, leaving the man tied up with an expanding stream of oxygen escaping from his visor.

As harsh as he knew he sounded, he knew that the rover couldn’t be more than a minute out anyway. This man would survive. Probably.

But Cready had more pressing matters. He had to find the others and hoped that the people he had come to save weren’t as difficult to rescue as this first one had been.

“Situation report,” he breathed as he jumped back over the desk to survey the room. “Clearly an explosion. Centered on…” He looked at the scorch marks on the floor, and the spread of debris. The main entrance hangar of the mine was a wide room, with a balcony around the rear half of it, leading apparently to the more technical workings and guard rooms. Down here on the ground floor was a wide-open corridor that led down into darkness.

“It was just the door,” Solomon realized. The rest of the room, although flooded with rocks, dust, broken glass and debris, had not suffered significant damage. The balcony was still intact. There were no burn marks on the corridor that led down into the rest of the mine facility.

“Someone blew the doors open,” Solomon knew. That wasn’t a gas leak, or an accident. That was too precise and methodical. Someone knew that if you took out the pressure-sealed door, it would start a catastrophic ‘blowout’ of pressure and air, which had probably caused the entire building to slump as it did…

“Which means we’re looking at an act of sabotage,” Solomon thought. “Could be prisoners trying to escape, or…”

There had been another explosion on the Nuryien platform, Solomon thought suspiciously as he started to run down the corridor towards the next set of heat signatures on his scan. Explosions seem to follow the ambassador around, don’t they?

8

The Savior of my Enemy is still my Enemy

The ramp must have been designed for carrying the massive blocks of ice up from the pit below, Solomon thought as he saw the deep track ruts in the concrete floor. It was dark up ahead of him as he bounded downwards. Even the power to the emergency lighting had gone off, leaving just Solomon’s suit lights available to illuminate the way.

“Commander Cready, we’ve just arrived at the mine. Securing the wounded prisoner now,” Karamov reported over the gold channel.

“Good. Follow me down when you can. Keep an eye on the Martians. Wen stays with the ambassador,” Solomon reiterated his commands as the walls shook.

Frack! The entire mine complex was unstable. He had to be quick.

“Hello!” He turned his suit amplifiers up to maximum and his voice boomed into the darkness. Did he hear something in response? A ticking noise. Could that just be the damaged pipes and lights?

Tap-tap.

No…there. Solomon reached the first crossroads that leveled off in front of him, before the corridor continued to plunge downward, turning as it did so to zigzag its way through the rock. The walls were a jigsaw of metal plates screwed onto girders, spaced between the brown and white composite of rock and ice.

And one of the crossroads was completely blocked by a jumble of rocks and girders.

Thermal Scanners… Three Signatures.

His scan results revealed three dull-red forms on the other side of the rock, and without knowing what else he could do, Solomon started to attack the boulders, clawing at them with the articulated fingers of his power gauntlets.

Thunk! The outer boulders weren’t that difficult to move, thanks to the lighter gravity, and Solomon soon saw a thin jet of mist escaping from one end of the cave-in.

Air. Oxygen from the other side of the tunnel.

“HOLD ON!” he shouted, grabbing the twisted end of one of the girders and pulling.

It didn’t budge. The weight of the rocks against it was just too much.

“Dammit!” Solomon was desperate, just as he picked up the sound of running bounding down the corridor behind him.

“Commander!” It was Karamov and Kol, followed by Father Ultor and his five Martian heavies. The ambassador, Warden Harj, and the imprimatur must still be up top, secured by Jezzy, Solomon was glad to note. Jezebel Wen was strong enough to keep the ambassador safe—and everyone else, if she had to.

“Take heart! We’ll get you out of there!” Ultor was shouting, as three of his guards seized the girder alongside Solomon, and together they heaved.

“On three. One…two…and pull!” Father Ultor shouted, and Solomon was surprised at the man’s apparent willingness to get his hands dirty. Maybe it was the fact that Mars was an overwhelmingly industrial world.

KERRRRUNCH! The girder shifted, and there was a rumbling noise as the rocks around it shifted, falling apart, and sending up plumes of steam and smoke as the oxygen in the next chamber was forced out.

But it left a hole, barely big enough for a person to squirm through.

“Get out of there!” Solomon shouted, and the three trapped convicts wasted no time pushing and shoving each other to haul themselves through the hole to collapse on the other side. Their bubble helmets were scraped and scratched, but all of their suits looked to be in working order, Solomon was glad to see.

“How many more of you are there?” Father Ultor was saying.

“Where are the Proximians?” Solomon added.

“Stuff the Proximians!” Ultor snapped. “These are fine and good Martians we need to save!”

Solomon ignored the man, as the first, gasping convict’s voice rose from his own suit’s speakers.

“They were on an inspection—the Proximians, I mean. Some of their people were working at the lower levels, so they went to interview them. Then there was an almighty explosion and…” The convict was panting.

“What’s the quickest route down? That corridor there?” Solomon nodded to the downward-sweeping ramp.

“No. That switches back and forth under the surface mantle. There’s a shaft back through…” The man pointed to the hole he had just crawled out from. Back into the collapsed tunnel.

“Where are the Martian convicts?!” Ultor was demanding, but Solomon had no time for petty allegiances.

“Karamov? Kol? Come on. Let’s go stop a diplomatic incident…” He grabbed the lip of the boulders and squeezed himself through to the tunnel beyond.

“The commander’s last report suggested sabotage, Ambassador.”

Up on the surface, Jezebel Wen spoke carefully to the woman beside her, as she stood in front of the rover parked in the main courtyard, with Harj and the imprimatur already helping to load the injured prisoner on board the rover.

The ambassador and her singular personal assistant stood looking at the open maw of the mine, her face shadowed by the sleek black visor helmet that all the delegates had found stowed away on the rover.

“It wasn’t us,” the imprimatur called out from within her own visor helmet. “You should know that, Ambassador. This wasn’t Mars’s doing.”

“And I doubt whether Proxima would kill off its own negotiators…” The ambassador’s voice sounded like a scowl. “Prisoner breakout then?”

“Absolutely not, Ambassador!” Warden Harj called loudly.

Then who did this? Jezzy thought. It had been the Martian separatists who had bombed the Nuriyen. And now the ringleader of those separatists was down there in the dark with Solomon.

Why would Father Ultor go down there with his men, if he was planning an assassination attempt? Jezzy thought. None of this made sense.

It was at that point that the rover, along with Warden Harj and the injured prisoner, was thrown up into the air by an explosion that threw the imprimatur, the ambassador, her personal assistant, and Jezzy to the ground.

“Ambassador! Report!” Jezzy was hissing in pain. Something had hit her leg. Is my suit compromised? She rolled over, looking down to see that the leg guard had buckled and now had a deep dent that looked as though it was impacting her calf. Not good.

But no time to worry about her own pain. Was the Ambassador still alive?

The scene in front of her was terrible: a blackened circle of wreckage, and the still-recognizable bits of a tracked wheel, a wall. Someone had blown up their rover, and that meant either someone had planted a bomb, or…

Phfft! A small plume of ice and dust a little way from her, followed by another. Almost like it was raining… Only it wasn’t rain, was it?

“Shooters!” she shouted.

“Hgnh… Wen?” It was the ambassador’s amplified voice as her maroon-robed form twitched and moved from the spot where she had been flung. On the other side of her lay a very mangled, very dead personal assistant, eliciting a sob of angered misery from Ochrie. “No!”

The shooters had targeted their position not from the mine, but from the rising rocks on the opposite side of the ice pit, Jezzy saw. They were sitting ducks. “Get inside!” she barked at whoever could listen, jumping forward to seize the ambassador with one hand as she pointed her Jackhammer rifle out at the line of sulfurous rocks and fired a quick, staccato burst. She had no intention of actually hitting anyone, just of forcing their attackers to keep their head down.

Warden Harj was dead, as was the prisoner he had been tending to and the Ambassador’s personal assistant. Jezzy, the ambassador, and the Imprimatur of Mars bounded up the ramp and into the relative safety of the mine building as it continued to shake and judder…

“Is this wise, Commander?” Karamov was saying as they felt their way through the darkness, their suit lights revealing a tumble-down world of boulders on the other side. It was surprisingly quiet in here, no hissing or ticking or screaming, Solomon thought as they searched for this shaft that would lead down to the other delegates.

“Probably not, soldier,” Cready said, as his hands suddenly disappeared into darkness. A hole.

More than a hole, an opening half-covered by rock, leading to a shaft with steps cut into its surface. Under the suit lights, the walls and steps gleamed a dull, opaque white.

“We’ve reached the ice layer,” he said. “And I guess that’s where we need to go…” He stepped over the rocks and started taking the steps three at a time, as fast as he dared without falling down the shaft himself.

“Situation report: found the access to the Proximians. Going down,” he called out on the gold channel, at least expecting to receive some sort of ‘aye-aye’ or an okay from Jezzy far above.

But there was no response. Funny, he thought, checking the suit telemetries.

There was his own suit identifier (SOLOMON CR) as well as the bright green blips of Karamov and Kol following along behind him. But of Malady or Jezzy Wen, there was no sign.

Had they been attacked?

“Jezzy! Malady! Come in!” Solomon ordered suddenly. No… Their suit telemetries would still be visible. Even if they were dead, it would come up with a warning message on their names…

“It’s the rocks, sir…” Kol, their technical specialist, told him. “These Marine suits are good, but they haven’t got the space for a full-strength transmitter-receiver. A few hundred feet of rock and ice like this will kill the signal quicker than pulling the plug.”

“Just great,” Solomon grumbled to himself as he continued to bound down the steps, already raising a sweat. How long had they been descending for? A minute? Two? How far down did this thing go, anyway?

“Hello?” The sound was slight, but Solomon’s suit picked it up. It was a voice, echoing up to them from below.

“I got something!” Solomon redoubled his pace, and in a few minutes, he saw that they were coming to the end of the shaft, as there was light dimly glaring from below.

“This is Confederate Outcast Marine Solomon Cready, Commander. We’ve come to help!” he called out as the glow grew brighter, revealing itself as an opening at the bottom of the stairs.

“Thank god…” an amplified voice said from the other side. Solomon found himself stepping into a rough-hewn room without the metal walls and girder supports this time, forming a long gallery through the ice and rock. One side of the avenue looked like a child’s game of blocks—rectangular and oblong sections had been cut from the wall and apparently dragged out of an opening that had completely caved in.

There were people in the room, a selection of three white and silver-suited people in sleek visor helmets, as well as two convicts in their drab brown. They were huddled against the cave-in, sitting on the floor.

“Why didn’t you climb out up the shaft?” Solomon was the first to say, bemused, when he suddenly realized why.

A shadow detached itself from the wall on the other side of the entrance and something flashed in the darkness. Muzzle flare, as a bullet at point-blank range slammed into Solomon’s back, and the world went dark. He was unconscious before he even hit the floor.

9

Buried Alive

“Commander? Commander!” Jezzy shouted over her suit communicator. But it was to no avail. There was no response at all. “Karamov? Kol? Malady?”

“Malady here,” his electronic drawl arrived. “I’ve secured the air-processor. Resealed the crack, but it won’t hold if there is another blowout. Moving on enemy position now.”

“You saw the attack? Someone killed the warden and almost killed us!” Jezzy said. Beside her, the ambassador and the imprimatur sat, shoulder to shoulder, their faces nervous behind their visors.

“Short-range personal missile. I saw the tail-flare. Attackers are in the ridge of rocky highlands around the mine. I am making my way to their presumed location now.”

“A personal missile system??” Jezzy said out loud. Well, that would certainly kill a rover, she thought. But surely no one on Titan had access to such armaments, did they? Not even the wardens would have a battlefield weapon like that, would they?

“Okay. Just…be careful. Whoever these people are, they’re trained, and they mean business.”

“So do I,” Malady stated in his deadpan way before clicking out.

“Marine?” The ambassador was pushing herself up, sounding fierce. “I need to open a channel to Confederate Command. This is a military matter.”

“It wasn’t us,” Imprimatur Valance repeated.

“I don’t care who it was right now, just so long as we catch them…” the ambassador stated.

“As you wish, Ambassador…” Jezzy hit her suit telemetries system, using a mixture of hand gestures before fiddling with the controls on her belt.

Light Tactical Suit Telemetries:

Short-Range Radio…

Short-Range Wi-Fi…

Transponder GPS…

“Dammit!” she cursed out loud.

“What is it?”

“These suits… They’re no good unless we’re in closer contact to a transmitter station,” Wen explained. “Usually there would be a battle cruiser or a Rapid Response Fleet ship hanging around with its own signal boosters, able to field and respond to calls, but my suit just isn’t powerful enough…”

“Maybe this command unit has a transmitter…” Jezzy and the ambassador were surprised when the imprimatur immediately turned around to sweep the rubble from the desk they hid behind and start hunting for a long-range radio transmitter.

“Why are you helping us to contact the Confederate Marine fleet?” the ambassador asked.

“Because maybe I don’t want to die down here, Ochrie!” the imprimatur’s suit hissed back at her. “And I think we’ve clearly seen that just as many Martian convicts have probably died down there as Confederate ones, so it can hardly be said to be Mars’s fault, can it?!”

Jezzy had to admire the politician, she thought. She was willing to work with her supposed enemies to secure their safety. But we’re not safe, are we? She frowned as she thought through the ramifications of what had just happened.

“Someone first set off some kind of explosive device in the ice mine, while the delegates from Proxima were down there…” she said out loud.

“And then they fired on the Imprimatur of Mars and the Ambassador for Earth…”

“Destroying any chance of escape,” the ambassador agreed.

“Oh my frack.” Jezzy looked at the open door, and the burnt-out shell of the rover clearly visible outside. “This is a trap. Someone wanted to force us all inside the building.”

The building that was at any moment going to collapse.

CREEAAACK! The walls and the supports groaned and shifted a little bit more…

“You heard me, soldier! I said if anyone moves, I’m putting another bullet in him!”

Solomon rose through layers of numbness to awaken to pain.

“You can’t shoot all of us. Not before we get you.” That was Karamov, Sol recognized his voice even through the fuzz of his suit’s speaker system and the acres of pain between him and reality.

It was dark. Was he dead? This certainly wasn’t Heaven, so he presumed that this must be Hell…

He had been shot.

The thoughts arrived in fragments, none of them fitting together very well. All he knew for certain was that his body felt heavy and full of pain.

He had been shot. That was bad, wasn’t it? It was hard to know anymore, given that his whole recent life had been bad. Was this worse than getting electrocuted by Warden Coates? Than worrying if he was going to wake up with Arlo Menier’s service knife sticking out of chest? Or worse still, waiting for the inevitable seizure that would shake loose his spinal cord, thanks to the cocktail of illegal drugs that the Confederacy were feeding him?

Yes, Solomon, this is worse. Much, much worse. The small, almost-sane part of his psyche informed the rest of him, and the pain flowed up through him like a dark blood-red sea, that he could no longer hide from or block out…

“You’re probably right, but at least your commander will die, and maybe one of you two, as well. Which one of you wants to be the last man standing? Come on, step up, soldiers!” The voice was modulated through its suit, but the mocking and sarcasm was clear enough.

Just shoot them! Solomon tried to say the words, but all that came out was a thin whine of air. There was something in his mouth. Spit? Blood? If it was blood, then he really was in a bad way. That meant that the bullet had somehow gotten under his armor, past his battle harness and through the undermesh suit to penetrate his lungs. He would drown in his own blood before he died of shock.

How about starving of oxygen? a capricious, devilish thought informed him.

Oh yeah. He had been shot, he remembered, while on Titan. The alien moon with its poisonous atmosphere. A hole in him meant a hole in his suit. Which meant that his general options for the future were: he could either drown in his own blood, his system could shut down because of shock, or he could die of asphyxiation.

Of the three choices, Solomon would rather not have to do any of them if he was being honest—which, given his pained circumstances, he had nothing better to be.

“Wise choice, lads.” The shooter once again sounded contented. “You just stay there, keep your weapons where I can see ‘em, that’s it…”

There was a shuffling sound and the scrape of metal on rock. The shooter has taken their guns, Solomon thought raggedly. Anything to take his mind off the pain. Now the shooter will execute them, one by one…

“Sayonara, dirtbags!” There was the slow tread of feet, and then silence.

“Frack,” Solomon heard someone say. He thought it was Kol. It was hard to tell them apart once again.

“We couldn’t let him kill the commander,” said the other one. Which must be Karamov. “How’s that seal?”

“Hmm.” The voice grew louder, and Solomon felt a shadow fall over his face, although he was still having trouble seeing anything but indistinct pictures. “Hold on, I’ll put some more sealant on it.”

There was a popping sound, and then a high-pressure spray, and Solomon gasped as cold seeped into him from his side.

“Well, throw me down a black hole, the commander’s still in there!” he heard Kol say, excitedly, and then the same voice much closer once again. “Hang on in there, Commander. We’ve stopped the bleeding and patched up your suit. You won’t die of asphyxiation.”

Great bedside manner there, Kol, Solomon would have cursed him, but it hurt too much.

“Here,” this was from Karamov. “I got a stimulant injection. That should get him up on his feet, and a painkiller injection.”

“Ace,” Kol responded.

Ah yeah, I told Karamov to bring his medical kit with him, didn’t I? Solomon remembered. Something was happening to his forearm. It was being lifted and the access patch to the small compressed-valve catheter lifted. It was one of the marvels of the Marine Corps that they had already thought of the need of a wounded soldier, in a poisonous or near-vacuum environment, to have life-saving injections. The valve kept the inside of the suit pressurized, creating a small pocket of air underneath a rubber seal. Once the injector pen was attached and sealed in place, the valve could be opened, ‘accepting’ the pointy end of the injector into the same pressure as the rest of Solomon’s suit.

Just like an airlock, but one made of fabric, rubber, and a simple brass valve, Solomon thought, before wondering why he was thinking about it. Oh yeah, because of the pain—

“Ow!” The first injection was painful enough. What size needle are they using?! A stars-be-damned harpoon?! Solomon could have shouted.

And then his heart pumped and his blood flushed around his body, flooding his veins and drawing along his arteries, hitting his organs and his lymph nodes and his blood-brain barrier…

And his blood was now loaded with some of the sweetest military-grade stimulant that the Marine Corps could afford. And the Marine Corps had a budget of billions.

“Hgzzkrgk!” Solomon shot up to a sitting position, almost headbutting Karamov in the process. Vitality and energy flooded through him, making him grind his teeth, making him feel invincible. But there was a ringing in his ears… What was that?

Oh, it’s not ringing. Solomon panted as the drug held him. It was the hammering of his heart. It must be going at easily one-fifty, one-eighty beats a minute…

“Whoa there, Commander! You’re a long way before you’re out of the woods yet,” Karamov was saying, trying to bring the second injector pen down to Solomon’s suit catheter.

“I don’t need painkillers. I don’t feel anything,” Solomon said, grinding his words as his teeth refused to part fully.

“Ha. You say that now, but in five minutes, the pain will kick in.” Karamov forced Solomon’s hand to the floor, leaning on his commander’s elbow as Cready’s over-stimulated body twitched and jerked. “And this painkiller will take the edge off the stimulant. Don’t want you going psycho on us, Commander.” Karamov punched the second injector pen into the rubber seal and released the brass valve one more time.

This time, Solomon didn’t feel the sting of the injection—probably thanks to the drugs circulating his system—but he did feel the slowing down of his thoughts, and the warmer, fuzzy feeling that crept up his arm until his entire body felt elastic. It was a little like being slightly drunk, but without any of the giddy humor, he thought.

“Thanks…” he coughed. He was still aware of the pain, and a sense of tightness around his side as Karamov got off him and allowed the man to sit back up again. But he couldn’t sit up fully, one side of his body—under his left arm and his hip—didn’t seem to want to obey him.

What?

“Commander, look at me. Listen to me.” It was Karamov, kneeling in front of him and looking at him with his wide dark eyes, gilded with the neon information lights of his own visor helmet. “You’ve been shot in the side. You’ve still got the bullet in you. These drugs will keep you on your feet for a bit, but you’re going to crash out unless we get you to a surgical facility, okay? I have no idea where the bullet is. One false step and it could rip something vital in there. You gotta be careful, you hear me?”

Solomon nodded. His thoughts were a mixture of fastest-ever and warm-and-slow. It made it hard to know what he should do.

“The Proxima delegates,” he croaked.

“Fracking hell, Commander,” Kol said out loud, looming behind Karamov in the dark light. “Do you ever stop thinking about the job? You almost died, man!”

“They’re fine. Scared, disorientated, but fine,” Karamov said, nodding beyond Solomon’s shoulder. When the commander—stiffly—turned his head, he saw that there indeed were the three white-suited Proxima delegates, and the two convicts that they had been talking to.

One of which he recognized.

It was the old man, still looking quiet and watchful, but perhaps a little subdued. The one who had pointed at the ambassador.

“You.” Solomon coughed, and the older convict just looked back at him without saying a word.

“Please, Commander, sirs?” said the first Proximian. Their helmets were domed like semicircles, but Solomon could see their underlit faces inside. Young. Short-cropped, very smart hair. They looked too young to be negotiating a possible civil war.

“We need to get these men out of here, officers…” the Proximian said, casting a hungry look at the shaft that Solomon and his two other Outcasts had just climbed down. “We were on our way back when that man stopped us. I think he was going to kill us…but you got here.” The young man with the perfect auburn hair nodded tearfully at Solomon.

“Ha. Look where that got me,” Solomon wheezed as Karamov and Kol helped him to his feet, and then turned to help the others.

“Kol, on point.” Solomon said. “But that shooter could be waiting for us up there. I know we haven’t got any weapons, but we need to get out of here anyway…”

“Don’t worry about me, Commander,” Kol said fiercely, drawing his ridiculously small service knife and turning towards the shaft and its steps—

WHUMPF! There was an almighty roar as the ground and walls started shaking.

“Kol!” Solomon shouted, as the shaft went dark with the sudden in-rush of rocks and dust.

10

No Choice Left

“We have to get you out of here,” Jezzy said to the ambassador. Her words had broken the worried silence that followed the dreadful, shuddering creaks and cracks that had rocked the building. Jezzy wondered if that was the worst of it, or if tunnels had collapsed and escape routes had become blocked far below them.

Jezzy wondered if Solomon, Karamov, and Kol were still alive.

“I’ve found it,” the imprimatur said. She was now braced against the back wall of the guard booth, clutching at the control desk as the entire platform had shifted on its moorings and tottered precariously over the ice pit.

“The transmitter controls?” Jezzy asked. Her suit transmitter wasn’t powerful enough to get a message up and through Titan’s thick, noxious atmosphere. Their only hope was that the ice mine still had one that was remotely operational, and that they could use to call in support from the docking station above.

“Does it have power? Jezzy asked worriedly, as she felt another judder go through the floor.

“It has its own reserve power, and there’s enough residual power in the building’s generators to…” The imprimatur’s hands moved quickly over the board, turning dials and reverting circuit diagrams on the data-screens under her fingers.

Thunk. An audible sound clearly heard over her suit amplifiers, and a set of overhead floodlights flickered on in the reception room.

“Backup generator working. Feeding power to the transmitter…” the woman said, as far above their heads something twitched to life on the roof of the Titan ice mine.

It was a radio dish, almost as large as a person. It had been pointed back at the prison facility itself—powerful enough to send signals across space but dedicated to providing constant contact with its nearest neighbor.

The gunmetal gray of the receiver/transmitter dish twitched on its moorings, breaking apart frozen ethane from its mounting as it started to jerk upwards in unsteady moments. It hadn’t been used to send a signal up into space like this…probably ever.

“Thirty degrees off the elliptic, forty, fifty…” the imprimatur was muttering to herself. Jezzy imagined that she wanted to get the transmitter as close to a 90 degree straight-up angle to ensure the maximum chance that their transmission would be received by any rescuers above.

“Sixty, seventy…”

Kerthunk! The humans couldn’t hear it, of course, but the transmitter, in place for over twenty years and suffering the daily freezing temperatures that could warp or constrict metals, twitched and stopped moving. It wasn’t going to go any further, as it pointed at an angle over the horizon.

“Dammit!” the imprimatur hissed through her teeth. “It’ll have to do…” Her hands flickered over the controls, sending a message.

“Ask for tactical support,” Jezzy said suddenly. “We saw a Marine transporter when we were coming in up there. It might not have a full squad of Marines, maybe only the drivers and engineers, but they’ll all have combat training, and the transporter itself has got enough firepower to give our attackers something to think about…”

But entering atmosphere takes time, even for a dropship like the transporters, Jezzy thought. She had to hope that the building would last that long—

“What are you doing? We have to get out of here!” an angered voice was shouting, as a group of people staggered up the downward ramp behind them.

Sol? Jezzy thought wildly, but, as her eyes hopefully scanned the small and weary crowd, she saw that there were no Outcasts amongst them. It was Father Ultor, his guards, and a ragtag group of convicts, perhaps ten all in all.

“I’ve picked up as many as I can find, but the caves are getting too dangerous,” the Martian priest announced heroically. “Come on, Imprimatur. We need to get back to the rover…” He and the others were already jogging across the room to the open ramp of the doorway that led outside—

“Father, wait!” Jezzy called out, just as the sparks and puffs of concrete dust hit the ramp.

Pheet! Thock! Phttt! The shooters were still out there, still keeping them inside.

“Get back!” the father snarled, throwing his arms in front of the running group of convicts as the bullets raced up the main entrance. His group scattered, leaping and diving for the walls as a couple of shots hit the back of the wall.

“What the hell is that!? Where is the rover?” Father Ultor was shouting.

“We’re pinned down. The rover’s gone,” Jezzy shouted. “But we’re working on it. Calling in support.”

“This whole place is going to go down any minute!” the father shouted back, and beside him, the combat specialist could see the worried faces of the convicts behind their own bubble helmets. They were close to deciding to make a run for it anyway, she thought.

But she did have an ace up her sleeve. She hit the call button on her harness.

“Malady? What’s the sit-rep?” she called to the only member of Gold Squad that she could actually reach at the moment: the metal man-golem currently bounding around the outside of the vast ice mine to attack the suspected positions of the shooters.

“Found two foxholes,” the almost-man’s electronic, bare voice came back, as flat and as stern as always. Jezzy wondered if being surgically sealed in his full tactical power suit also meant that he no longer thought and felt like any other normal living human did anymore. No time to ask him that now, though.

“Foxholes? No shooters?”

“No. But they were dug in, as you said, occupying the eastern ridge around the mine. I found ground bolts, empty cartridge cases…”

“Ground bolts.” Jezzy nodded to herself. They were the small, self-firing pins that would lock a heavy weapon into the ground, and a twist-off charge that released them. You only needed them for really large weapons—bigger than their personal Jackhammer rifles. Heavy machine guns. Personal missile launchers. Sniper rifles. Mortars… She listed off any of the possible armaments would require such equipment.

“These guys are tooled up,” she said sourly.

“What, you didn’t guess when they blew apart the rover?” the ambassador said at her side. Cathleen Ochrie was a strong woman, obviously, but it seemed that even she was starting to crack under the pressure.

“Fair point,” Jezzy said. “Okay, Malady. Keep on moving till you find them. We’re still pretty hot across here. There has to be at least one shooter trained on the mine entrance…” she said, which wasn’t very far, as it happened. She heard the sudden crackle of gunfire over Malady’s suit channel.

“Mal!?” she called out desperately.

“Contact. Two shooters, East-by-northeast and east-by-south. Responding with extreme prejudice,” the man-golem said, and Jezzy heard the booms as he opened fire with his own heavier particle cannon. He was the only one large enough to use it as a two-handed weapon.

“The shooters have got company. It might be enough of a distraction—” Jezzy said

Kerrraaack! A burst of dust as a crack suddenly burst through the concrete floor and ran almost all the way to the opposite wall.

“I’m not dying here!” One of the convicts jumped up and ran for the door.

“No! Wait!” Jezzy called out, but it was too late. The tide had already turned as the other convicts that the father had rescued from the mine scrabbled to their feet and bounded out.

“Imprimatur, come on!” Father Ultor was shouting as he and his guards jumped up. “It’s better to have a chance of life out there than being crushed to death in here!”

“I’m sorry, he’s right…” the imprimatur said, hitting the send button on the board and racing to join the father and his Martian guards.

“Oh hell,” Jezzy cursed as the ambassador, too, started to rise to her feet. “Ambassador, I don’t know if the enemy is pacified…” she managed to say as she got to her feet to follow.

“This building is the enemy now, Marine!” The ambassador was already moving, and Jezzy was caught like an insect in amber in a moment of total indecision. The rest of her squad—Karamov, Kol, and Cready—were still down there somewhere looking for the Proxima delegates. They could be trapped, behind a boulder wall, or they could be hurt.

Or they could be dead already. Her training kicked in. As much as she wanted to run down the ramp to find them, to drag them out, every hour of Marine training and before that her Yakuza training dictated the same thing: save what you can, what’s in front of you. Don’t throw your life away on an uncertainty.

I was supposed to be the one to kill Solomon Cready, she thought miserably as she turned to follow the ambassador. She had also been tasked to protect the Ambassador to Earth. In a way, I’m still killing him by abandoning him down there. She gritted her teeth as she ran, blinking back the tears that had suddenly sprung into her eyes.

“Kol?” Solomon coughed. His throat felt scratchy, raw. That was a bad sign. The atmospheric filters on his suit must have been overcome, and now particles of rock dust were being circulated into his oxygen supply.

Wonderful. Die of shock, crushed alive, or choking to death. His day wasn’t getting any better, but he hoped that it was worse than Technical Specialist Kol’s, who had been standing in front of the shaft that would lead them up to safety when it had caved in.

“Kol!? Report back, damn it!” he said again into the murk.

It wasn’t totally dark, however. There were thin beams of bluish light that he realized must be from his light tactical suit. The suit still had power then. Hood. He was lying on his back, and the room, in the hazy illumination of his suit, looked as though it had been rearranged. There were now the dark silhouettes of blocks and boulders everywhere that hadn’t been there a moment before.

“Specialist Kol here, reporting for duty…” wheezed a lighter voice in the dark.

“Thank the heavens. Are you okay? Can you move?” Solomon was asking.

“I think so, Commander…” A grunt, and a scrape as detritus and rubble moved somewhere in the gloom. “Yeah, I’m good. Bruised, but most of the heaviest blocks filled the door and shaft tunnel, only over-spill came in here,” Kol said.

“Good. Karamov?” Solomon asked.

“Hurgh.” There was a groan, and then twin shafts of light as Karamov’s suit lit up. “Adjunct-Marine Karamov, still alive, I think.” Solomon saw in the increasing light that he had apparently been thrown to the back of the room by the blast. But he can stand up, which might be more than can be said for me… Solomon nodded to himself. His body was still flooded with the rubbery-warm feeling of stimulants and painkillers, but he was aware of a tight red pain hovering over his side whenever he attempted to move.

He tried not to think of the ugly little bullet, still lodged somewhere in his flesh. He failed.

“How about everyone else?” Solomon asked, to hear a series of coughs, grunts, and groans as the two convict miners and the three white-suited delegates from Proxima emerged from the rubble. Or they had once been white-suited, everyone and everything was now coated with an ochre and gray layer of dust.

“All present and breathing. No major injuries,” Karamov confirmed, as lights were switched on and suits fiddled with until they could once again see each other, crouching and leaning in a considerably smaller chamber than they had been occupying before, with their only exit now filled with blocks of rock and ice.

“We could melt through it,” one of the convicts said—a burly, youngish woman with a scar running across her forehead. “We should have our block cutters under this mess here somewhere…”

Oh yes, these miners had been busy cutting out blocks of rock ice, to be refined and for the nitrogen, oxygen, and water to be extracted, Solomon thought.

“Won’t work,” Kol burst their bubble by saying.

“What? Are you the miner now?” the convict woman turned on Kol immediately. Solomon wasn’t going to have a seniority contest, not stuck a good few hundred meters underground. “No, but he’s my technical specialist. Adjunct-Marine Kol has my total faith,” Solomon said severely as he forced himself to stand up, next to his two brothers-in-arms. Their weapons might have been stolen, but they were still Outcast Marines. They still had some authority, he hoped.

“I reckon there must be a good few tons of rock ice filling that up.” Kol moved and bobbed his head as he examined the blocked-up entrance. “Your cutters will melt the water content for sure, but you’d only be weakening the landslide from below—meaning more will fall in the more you cut…”

“Well, what better idea do you have?” the convict woman snapped back. “Stay in here and pray?”

Not with the building about to fall on top of us. Solomon remembered the sight of the entire mining facility above. It had been slowly sliding downwards, halted by the concrete plugs of its massive stanchion legs, but for how long?

No, we need to get out of here before a factory falls on our heads… Solomon tried to think through the options, but it was hard to with his body thrumming with chemicals and the echoes of pain. We have no weapons. Our transmitters don’t work down here.

Scrape-thunk! A sound drew his eye—it was the other convict, the much older silent man who had pointed at the ambassador.

What is he doing?

He was crouched at the rear of the cave, using his over-large, barely-sealed leather gauntlets that the convicts wore to pull and tear at the blocks on the other side of the tunnel.

“Hoi! What’s through there? Do you know a way through?” Solomon asked, as all eyes turned to the old man, ignoring the rest of them.

“It doesn’t go anywhere, it just leads to a dead-end,” the scarred woman said in annoyance. “An old works tunnel that they had to abandon before my time here. Look, I know you guys are supposed to be the rescue party, but it looks like you haven’t got any answers, so…” the woman was saying, but Solomon’s mind had seized upon one throwaway comment.

Before her time here… Solomon moved to the old man’s side, doing his best to crouch down.

“But not before your time, huh, old man?” he said in a low voice, still clearly audible to the others.

“That’s Malcom Jeckers,” one of the Proximians said. “He was one of the architects of the Proxima Constitution. A real firebrand in his early days. Almost had a shot at becoming the Imprimatur of Proxima, before the Confederacy…”

“How long has he been here?” Solomon asked, since Malcom appeared to be ignoring them as he tore at the rocks.

“He was the first to call for Proxima independence. He was deemed too dangerous by the Confederacy to ever set foot on Proxima again,” the younger delegate said. “He’s been here thirty-off years…”

Thirty years. Solomon couldn’t even begin to imagine it. Is this what I would turn out like, if I had been sent here instead of the Marine Corps? Solomon was fully aware that he along with every other Outcast should have ended up here, had it not been for the Doctor Palinov selecting the criminals from their transporters and sending them to Ganymede instead, according to their health results. Solomon didn’t even know if anyone down on Earth knew that he wasn’t on Titan, doing what the rest of these convicts would be doing, day in, day out.

And I was sentenced for murder. I was given life imprisonment here… He shuddered at the thought. How long would it take him before he ended up mute and crazy?

But thirty years was long enough, presumably, to learn every tunnel and intersection in this place. “Is there another way out? Through there?” Solomon leaned closer, trying to catch the man’s attention.

The architect of the Proxima resistance paused, his hands slowing then stopping, before he turned to look up at the adjunct-Marine commander looming over him. His appearance was ghostly behind the ridiculously outdated bubble helmet, but Solomon could see the straggle of white hair and beard, and rheumy, almost myopic eyes behind the plastic shell.

A nod, and the man turned back to the wall.

“That’s good enough for me,” Solomon muttered, turning to start helping the man claw at the collapsed boulders and blocks at the rear of the cave. In a second, Kol and Karamov had joined him, attacking the wall beside him as they hefted out rocks behind them.

“Come on!” Kol said over his shoulder, and, to a muted grumble, the other convict and the Proximians joined, forming a chain to remove the rocks ahead of them.

11

Light in Dark Places

Phbp! Phttt!

The ground in front of Jezzy exploded in plumes of dust, concrete, and ice as bullets sought out the escaping survivors.

They’re trying to keep us in that death trap. Jezzy grimaced. The rescued miners had scattered across the courtyard compound, heading for any upturned piece of fence or rover wreckage that they could to evade the shooter. Already, two of them were lying on the ground, bullets having found them in lieu of freedom.

“Ambassador!” Jezzy saw the shot-lines walking towards where the maroon-suited woman was bounding. The bullets were faster than human legs, but Jezzy was faster than the ambassador was.

She leapt, using every ounce of power from the assisted servos of her light tactical suit, as well as every hard-earned muscle in the last fifteen-odd years of physical training, as well as the lighter Titan gravity.

She broadsided the ambassador, her power gauntlet clamping around the woman’s shoulder as she knocked her out of the way of the bullets.

Ping!

Suit Warning! Impact Detected!

Light Tactical Armor Plating Reduced to Approximately 48% Effective Protection!

She had been hit. The thought hung in her mind as both she and the ambassador tumbled through the air, skidding along the floor and heading for a collection of outflow pipes, designed to pump dust out of the mines, but were now still and silent.

“Ooof!” She rolled, remembering to tuck her head down as she braced her arms around the ambassador’s more vulnerable helmet visor. The last thing she wanted was to accidentally crack the ambassador’s suit and have to explain to the generals how she had watched as the ambassador asphyxiated to death.

They crunched along the ground, with Jezzy’s back hitting the large metal pipe.

Suit Warning!

Light Tactical Armor Plating Reduced to Approximately 42%

She groaned, her head spinning, but she couldn’t give in to the pain or weakness. “Get up. Inside.” She dragged the ambassador bodily over the small lip and shoved her in the empty mouth of the pipe, before jumping in behind her.

By the stars… Jezzy flopped to the floor as she heard a ping and a crack on the outside of the pipe. They had managed to find cover, but for how long?

“Are you alright?” It was the ambassador, sitting up to wipe her suit and helmet of dust as she looked worriedly at Jezzy.

“Me? I’m fine, I think…” Jezzy followed the woman’s eyes that were looking at her in, quite frankly, amazement. What?

Then she saw what had happened. She had been shot by whoever was trying to kill them, but luckily, the poly-carbon and steel plates of her light tactical suit had saved her life.

But only just.

The front of her suit, where the plates segmented onto the battle harness, were crumpled and blackened, and she could see a broken splay of wires from where the nearest module of the harness had been destroyed, and there, lodged into its circuitry, was the snub of a bronze-colored bullet.

“Hey, well, that’s what they’re designed to do, ma’am.” Jezzy shrugged, although there was still a quiver in her voice. Of course, the light tactical suits were designed to protect them, but it was still unnerving to be able to see the bullet that would have disemboweled you, just sitting over your abdomen.

“Malady?” she radioed in to her colleague.

“Specialist Malady here… TZZK!” his returning voice was glitchy, and Jezzy could hear the thocks and thunks of battle happening around him.

“One target down. Two more. One due south of my location, another at the end of the ridge, opposite the mine entrance…TZZZP!”

Jezzy risked leaning out as far as she dared to get a quick look at the ridge on the other side of the ice mine. The yellow rolls of Titan fog were heavier up there, but she could see flashes that illuminated their undersides, like a strange alien storm. It had to be Malady, locked in a life-and-death gunfight with two of these highly-trained shooters.

And there is nothing that I can do! Jezzy could have screamed. She was pinned down, all the way out here, and she was also tasked with keeping this ambassador lady alive. She just had to hope that the imprimatur’s distress call got through, and that the Marine transporter was even now breaking the upper atmosphere in response—or that Malady managed to kill everyone ‘with extreme prejudice.’

She caught sight of the compound of the factory. There was the blackened and still-smoking hole, crater, and wreckage that used to be the rover. She was quite thankful that the destruction was total in many ways, as that meant she couldn’t see the remnants of the Warden Harj, the convict miner, or the body of the ambassador’s personal assistant.

Bits of industrial machinery, both new and old, were dotted around the facility—giant segments of pipes, a stack of metal stanchions presumably used for shoring up tunnel walls. It was huddling behind and beside these that Jezzy could see the rest of the survivors. Convicts dotted here and there in ones and twos, and then a huddle of the Martian delegates, their guards and the imprimatur crouching by the stack of the metal stanchions.

We’re safe…for now, she thought

Ping! Another ricochet off their pipe, this time hitting near the edge, and Jezzy quickly swung back into its sanctuary of darkness.

Kerthunk! The final block shifted, releasing a small avalanche of grit and causing the boulders beside it to shudder and shake before resettling. Solomon winced, leaning back, although he knew that if the wall decided to cave in on them now, there would be hardly anything they could do about it.

But the wall held, thanks to Malcom Jeckers carefully pointing out which boulder to pull and which to leave. His skill had paid off, clearly, as there was now a clearly visible hole through the collapsed wall to the rest of the tunnel beyond.

“It’s still a dead end,” said the other, scarred convict, but Jeckers was already worming his way through.

“Hey, wait up!” Solomon said. The old man was too wiry, and Solomon’s body still wasn’t quite responding to his demands as well as it should.

“The Proximians after me, then you—” Solomon nodded to the convict. “—then Karamov and Kol.” He gave the order before following Jeckers through the small tunnel that they had created.

“Argh!” Suddenly, his side flared with pain as he pulled and kicked through the narrow aperture. I thought the painkillers were supposed to take care of this, he thought, but they were clearly starting to wear off. Either that or he had done some other, terrible sort of damage inside of him.

“Commander, you okay in there? You stopped moving.” This was Karamov over their suit channel.

“I’m fine. Just…fine.” Solomon forced the words through clenched teeth as he reached up to the far edge of the tunnel—

—as hands clasped his wrists and pulled.

“Whoa!” The pain was excruciating, but it lessened as soon as he popped from the other side of the tunnel like a cork and could once again lie on the floor and not have to put any pressure on his bullet-ridden side.

“Thanks,” he breathed, looking up to see the shadowed, eerie form of Malcom Jeckers looming over him.

“They received the Message,” the old man said over his own suit speakers, stooping close. “They received it, but they don’t know what to do with it. I do. I know. That is what this is all about,” the old man went on before turning suddenly as the first Proxima delegate appeared at the lip of the hole and pulled themselves clear.

“Phew! That was a tight squeeze!” the delegate said a little self-consciously, before turning to help their colleague through the hole behind them.

But Solomon’s ears were only listening to the old man’s words. “What Message?” he asked out loud, forcing himself, through hissing and wincing steps, to follow the man to the far side of this cave, where a sheer and blank rock wall appeared to completely cut off their escape.

“See? I told you! This is a dead end!” the other convict had now made her way through after the three Proximians, and Solomon saw the glint of Karamov or Kol’s suit lights as they made the journey through as well…

“What Message?” Solomon repeated, approaching where the old man was fumbling at the wall, as if searching for something. He looked mad.

Maybe he is, Solomon considered. Was that what this was all about, really? That he had been spooked by one crazy old timer here on Titan—the place that had haunted his nightmares ever since he’d been on Ganymede?

But Malcom Jeckers said something about a Message, and I’ve heard someone mention ‘The Message’ before now, too… But who? Where? Solomon leaned against the wall, panting as Karamov stepped up to his side.

“More drugs, Commander.” He inserted another injector pen into the commander’s suit catheter, and once again, Solomon felt the slight sting and the spread of fuzzy warmth roll through his body. The pain in his side lessened, became distant, and then just became a warm ache.

“That’s the last I can give you though, Commander, unless you want to fall unconscious,” Karamov said heavily, his eyes looking worried behind their visor-plate.

Unconsciousness right now didn’t sound that bad, Solomon almost conceded, but no, he had a job to do. “Thanks,” he said, turning back to the old man.

The Message.

That was it. The memory swam back to the top of Solomon’s mind. That was right. It was Doctor Palinov and Warden Coates. He had overheard them arguing, and Palinov had said that ‘The Message’ was the reason why the Outcasts had been formed in the first place, and that ‘The Message’ was why the Outcasts were being treated with a dangerous, experimental genetic drug.

But what is it?

“Malcom. Mr. Jeckers… I need to know…” Solomon was saying, just as the man hit the wall with a rock held in his gloves.

Thunk!

“You see, the old fool has gone mad. He probably got confused, thought this was another tunnel entirely…” the scarred woman said derisively, and the worried stares of the Proxima delegates thought that maybe they thought the same thing too, as Malcom Jeckers struck the wall again with his rock.

For a section of the wall like a thin plate to crack and fall off.

“It’s not solid rock,” Solomon saw. “We’re down at the level of pure ice. That’s just an overlay of rock dust…” He started to grin. The old man had been right, he saw when he examined the walls and the floor.

“We’re in a rock tunnel, but with a block of ice blocking it.” He pointed out the difference in the sheen of the walls and the floor. “You still got that ice cutter?”

Of course, the convict had it, pulling out the long-handled contraption that had been strapped to her back and leveling it against the wall. It looked like a lance, but with a sort of curved blowtorch at the end.

“Out of the way, Jeckers,” Solomon heard the woman grumble before firing the trigger piston at the far end, just as a boiling red ember of heat sparked and fizzed at the extreme end. When she set it to the ice, it started fizzing and bubbling immediately, and she was able to start pushing the long contraption into the wall.

They were going to make it. They were going to get free! Solomon saw the hole in the ice block start to grow wide as a steady rivulet of water flowed from the cut. The ice cutter made a high-pitched fizzing sound before suddenly changing timbre as it shuddered in the woman’s hands.

“We’re through to the other side. This plug isn’t wide at all. They must have left it here and forgotten about it…” she was muttering in a frustrated way, probably annoyed that she had been proven wrong, Solomon thought.

“We got…” The convict had put her helmet to the heat-smoothed tube she had created through the wall of ice, peering at the other side. “I see stairs! Metal stairs. Old and pretty grimed up, but that is definitely a stairway heading up!”

We’ve done it, Solomon thought, looking at the other Gold Squad members, and then at the three Proximians with their own exhausted and gleeful faces. They had managed to rescue the negotiators, and now there wasn’t going to be humanity’s first interstellar war.

Little did Solomon Cready know just what was about to happen, but at least he had this hopeful thought as the building above them started to collapse…

12

Crash

There was a rumbling sound that at first Jezzy didn’t even register, modulated as it was by the pings of attacking bullets, the shouts of the convicts, and the static that her own suit amplifiers produced, trying to replicate the rising winds of Titan’s alien landscape.

But the sound grew louder, turning into a high, screeching whine.

“That’s a ship!” Jezzy sat bolt upright in the tube where she sheltered beside the ambassador. “Say what you like about the Martians, but right now, I could kiss their Imprimatur Valance!” Jezzy whooped.

“Just because she called in the cavalry for us, it doesn’t mean that she’s on our side…” the ambassador said glumly.

“I don’t care what side she’s on. If she just called in air support, she’s got my vote.” Jezzy knew that she was being a bit facetious, but her giddiness at the turnaround of her fortunes was overwhelming. She dared to sidle to the edge of the outlet tube, looking up into the sky—

—to see a bruise of darker color just a little way off from them, which she knew had to be the breaking bow wave of the ship that had come to rescue them. Maybe they have deep scanners that will be able to locate Sol and the others, she said, as out of the corner of her eye she saw flashes along the ridge. Flashes of gunfire as Malady tried to eliminate the combatants, all on his own.

FZZT! Even this far away, the scalding sound of Malady’s particle generator could be clearly heard through Jezzy’s suit pickups. The light illuminated the dark shadows of the rocks, and where it touched, there was an explosion of ice and dirt.

I hope you got one, the combat specialist thought savagely, as the ground started to shake with the vibration of the approaching stellar craft. For all of humanity’s advancements, their jump-ships and their genetic technologies, some things were still unavoidable—and the massive release of energy as a craft breaks into an atmosphere was one of them.

Jezzy kept looking up as the bruise in the sky grew uglier and darker, then became scored with flashes of its own light like an answering storm to the one that Malady was creating far below.

That would be the flames of gases burning off as the super-hot hull of the craft meets the thin gases of Titan’s atmosphere. But as soon as it was out of the upper atmosphere, she knew that the ship would cool down rapidly. That was what they were designed to do, after all, and the Marine Corps had more money to throw at engineering and development than most of the colonies put together.

Only it wasn’t a Marine Corps ship that burst its nose through the yellow clouds, positional rocks firing from its wide, circular body.

“That’s not a Marine transporter,” Jezzy said, feeling as though the rug had been pulled out from underneath her feet. “That’s a stars-be-damned Martian saucer.”

Jezzy’s assessment of the facts was one hundred percent correct. It was a stars-be-damned Martian saucer. It was the exact same one, in fact, that she had seen traveling into Saturn space—the one that the imprimatur and her people had come here on.

To call them saucers was perhaps a bit optimistic, but ‘Martian doughnut’ or ‘Mars burger’ didn’t really have the same ring to it. It was indeed faintly burger-shaped, almost as high as it was round, but with a domed top and bottom, with the middle ‘ring’ being a circlet of black grills, rockets, and instrumentation—of which Jezzy was sure that she could see the rounded noses of weapons pods scattered at regular intervals.

“I tried to warn you. The imprimatur has betrayed us!” the ambassador hissed in alarm.

Jezzy looked across the battle scene, her eyes hunting for the standing stack of metal girders where Valance and her people were huddling from the shooter, who seemed to have gone suspiciously silent now that a vast Mars saucer had arrived. She could see the imprimatur clearly, her helmet looking up at the sky in anticipation. She had never used the ice mining factories’ transmitter to hail for help from the station far above at all. She had merely called in for her own people to come and collect her.

“Imprimatur!” Jezzy turned her suit amplifiers up to maximum and shouted across the distance. She saw the woman flinch and turn in her direction, but if she shouted anything back, it was lost in the rumbling roar of the Martian saucer.

“I still need to keep you safe, Ambassador,” Jezzy said, gritting her teeth. “And I need to find out where Sol and the others are. Maybe the Martians will agree to help…”

“For a price!” the ambassador sneered savagely. “I came here to negotiate a cessation of their hostilities, masked as radical fighters, against the Confederacy! If I go crawling to them for help, and they get to leave here with their Martian convicts, then we will send a message to every colony that all you have to do is stand up to the Confederacy!”

Jezzy was stunned by this response from the woman. Could she not see the predicament they were in? Half of Jezzy’s own squad was still trapped down there. They had been attacked by experienced fighters of an unknown origin, and there were goodness knows how many dead convict miners already!

And she wants to worry about politics!? Jezzy shook her head. “To be blatantly honest with you, lady, I don’t care. If those people up there can save my friends, then…”

“Don’t. I order you not to, Adjunct-Marine Jezebel Wen.” The ambassador’s voice was low and stark. “I understand that this is a terrible moment for you, but this is not just about you or me. It is about the fate of humanity. Of Earth! We need to think what will happen if the colonies break away from Earth. If there is a war. Who could say who would win? What would they stop at?” The ambassador had started defiantly angry, but ended on a frustrated, pleading note.

It was almost enough to convince Jezebel, but Jezzy shrugged. She had always had too many problems much closer to home to worry about the fate of entire planets. The combat specialist opened her mouth to tell the ambassador where to frack off to, knowing full well that she was probably about to sign her own dismissal and exile notice from the Outcast Marines—

When the decision was taken from her as another vessel crashed through the atmosphere to a deafening roar, the force and fury of its thruster rockets creating billowing jets of stream and making the tube they sat in shake.

Another craft was breaching the Titan clouds, a little ways away from the imprimatur’s Martian saucer. Both Jezzy and the ambassador looked up to see the glowing points of light at each corner of the craft resolve into thrusters, with the wide, blocky metal belly slung between them. It was larger than the Martian saucer, but only by a little bit. It was also not a dedicated combat craft.

It was the Marine transporter.

ATTENTION, MARTIAN VESSEL!

The transporter boomed its message out across the Titan landscape.

YOU ARE AN ILLEGAL VESSEL IN A RESTRICTED-ACCESS FACILITY! LEAVE IMMEDIATELY OR WE WILL BE FORCED TO FIRE UPON YOU!

“Oh frack,” Jezzy muttered under her breath. “I thought you said the point of all of this was not to start an interstellar war?” she said to the ambassador, looking over to see that the woman’s face behind her helmet-visor was tight and pale with concentration.

But what nobody on the surface or floating above it had accounted for was the effect that the arrival of two atmosphere-ripping craft had on the fragile, complicated plates of rock and ice of the Titan surface. In particular, the complicated plates that had already been burrowed into by thirty years of Titan convicts and had recently suffered a catastrophic air-pressure explosion.

With a rumbling sound, the ice mining factory tipped sideways, its railings and balconies and satellite dishes looking absurd for a moment as they pointed down into the pit. One of the building’s massive steel legs started to creak and twist, wresting itself from the concrete plug that had been frozen, cracked, and weathered for years.

“No… You idiots…” Jezzy breathed. The building had been about to go down anyway. All it had taken was a few sonic booms of approaching craft and—

The ice mine broke into two sections. There was a painful shriek of metal agony as the steel stanchion sheared from its concrete seat, and the building thumped down onto the edge of the pit, sending up gouts of dirt.

Thick porthole windows—each one designed with almost a foot of solid glass—cracked and burst from their sockets. Flashes of sparking, exploding electricity terminals flickered along the building’s body and inside of it. Jezzy watched in stunned horror as the large, blocky building slowly crumpled and tipped forward, sliding down to the inner ledge of the pit and pausing briefly…

Before falling over the edge.

Absurdly, the last remaining object was the drill tower, its controls and access bridges sheared from its surface as its parent building disappeared into the deep ice pit. Naturally, Jezzy’s eyes swam up to watch as it wobbled in place, the cylindrical sections around the drill grooves spinning lazily on their own.

And then it too crashed downwards, joining its squat parent as they both shook the ground underfoot and sent up great clouds of black dirt and dust into the atmosphere.

It was over. Solomon, Karamov, Kol, and the Proxima delegates and any remaining mine workers down there were dead.

“No,” Jezzy whispered at the rising clouds of devastation.

The groaning sound was getting louder, and it brought with it a shaking vibration that Solomon and the others could feel through their very bones.

“What is that!?” the scarred convict said as Solomon felt a trickle of icy fear run down his spine.

“I think that is the sound of the factory falling on our heads…” he said, frozen for a moment before the fear alchemically transformed into action. “Come on! Move it! Move it or die!”

So far, they had barely managed to make an aperture that Kol could fit through—he was still the thinnest amongst their number, despite the bulky outline of his light tactical suit. As the ground started to shake, the convict with the ice cutter set to work with renewed vigor—not working on the same hole she had melted already, but instead igniting the plasma at the end of the lance to start a new hole, a little below and off to one side.

The wait was excruciating, and it was made worse by the shaking that Solomon could feel coming up from the floor and through his legs. He watched as the woman made just one incision, a fraction of the depth of the larger hole, and then moved to the left a few feet and started again.

Hsssss! Steam billowed out into the cramped room, making a fine layer of condensation that stuck to their visors and helmets.

Thock-thud. Even through the medium of their suits, their amplifiers and microphones could pick up the dull roar as the internal rock and ice bones of the mine started to collapse, tumble, and crumble.

How far down are we? How far in the mantle are we? Will it hold? All these thoughts were swimming around Solomon’s mind like panicked goldfish as the woman set to the wall again, and again. Much smaller perforations. Not enough to climb through, at all.

“No time to widen the hole. We’re going to fracture it…” she said, pulling back and wobbling on her feet as the room suddenly shifted, the floor now dropping twenty degrees.

One of the Proxima delegates yelped, sliding to the edge of the room where a crack had appeared between wall and floor. Kol was the closest, his hand snapping out to grab her shoulder before she could trip and fall in.

“Hgh!” The convict woman was now using the ice cutter lance as a battering ram, knocking at the wall with its perforated series of holes around the opening.

“Grab what you can, everyone!” Solomon seized one of the tumbled rocks and, even though his side felt tight with a red weight, he hit the solid ice wall with the rock and heard the silvered chink as something fractured.

Crack! Thunk! As soon as his blow had finished, Karamov was hurling himself bodily past him, using the large metal shoulder-pad of his suit and his own body as a human battering ram. “Ach!” He thumped into the wall and slid down, but the crack widened, branching out to join the next burnt perforation and up across the block.

Thock-thock! The Proximians and the convicts battered at the wall with rocks, fists, any tool that they could find on their bodies, before there was a resounding crack like a bone breaking—

Schliiiikt! Blocks of ice were falling back into the room, across their feet as the hole in the ice plug spread, breaking along the perforated holes that the ice cutter had made until it was wide enough for someone to jump through.

“Convicts first,” Solomon ordered, already grabbing the woman, as disagreeable as she was, and nearly shoving her into the hole.

“Hey!”

“The delegates!” Karamov hissed, his amplified voice sounding funny as their bodies shook and the room tipped once more.

“The miners are innocent in this,” Solomon said grimly, forcing himself to take the time to help the old man through the hole after the woman. “Just run. Climb as fast as you can. Don’t wait or look back!” he called after them, before grabbing the first Proximian delegate as Kol got on the other side of him, and together they started nearly throwing themselves through.

THUDUDUDUDAO! The sound was deafening, even with the automatic cutouts on the Marine suit speakers. With a crash, a plume of smoke suddenly erupted into their antechamber from the trapped room on the other side. Had it collapsed?

CRACK! Another explosion of dust as the roof of their room suddenly dropped by about a foot.

“Commander—” Karamov was gesturing towards their escape route.

“You know the rules, Marine.” As much as everything inside of him was screaming to get running, Solomon knew that he couldn’t. “Captain goes down with the ship last…”

“Balls to that, sir. You’re a commander anyway, not a fracking captain…” Kol said, pushing him towards the hole.

“Hey! That’s an order!” Solomon managed to say, but Karamov joined him and together, they forced the resisting commander through the ice plug as the room shifted around them.

“Give me your hand!” Solomon said as soon as he felt the other side. It was indeed another shaft with a set of metal steps bolted into the wall, similar to the one that they had climbed down before. He grabbed Kol’s wrist, pulling him through, and then reached in for Karamov, just as an explosion of dust and smoke filled the room.

“Ach!” Karamov was yelling.

Solomon had grabbed onto a part of him, but in the murk, he couldn’t see what it was. He pulled as the roaring sound increased—

—for a very scared adjunct-Marine to land on top of him, sending daggers of pain up through his side as the roaring stopped.

“You okay?” Sol hissed painfully, one elbow held tight above his hip.

“I think all my limbs are in the right place, but are you okay?” Karamov whispered. The roaring sound had stopped, and when Solomon looked back through the aperture that they had all successfully managed to climb through, it was dark on the other side. The room had completely collapsed.

“I’ll be better when we’re out of this dump,” Sol said through gritted teeth. “Come on…”

Their other companions had already disappeared up the stairs, and Solomon could hear the frantic clank of their boots on the metal and see the awkward, thin hazes of their suit lights already above.

The collapse doesn’t seem to have spread to this part of the mine, Solomon saw, his mind starting to kick into a near-delirious overtime. It was probably the pain that he wasn’t allowing himself to feel—either that or it was the first sign of system shock as his brain stem started to overload.

This shaft was tunneled out of solid rock, not ice and rock particles like a lot of Titan’s mantle. Which meant it was less prone to fracturing. He hoped.

Solomon started to climb, forcing his resisting body to move as the other adjunct-Marines followed him.

MARTIAN VESSEL! YOU ARE REQUIRED TO LEAVE TITAN AIR-SPACE IMMEDIATELY UNDER ORDER OF THE CONFEDERATE GOVERNMENT OF EARTH!

The Marine transporter’s words boomed across the broken surface of Titan as Jezzy looked at the broken ruin of the ice mine. The shooting had stopped, but Jezzy couldn’t bring herself to care about the danger as she stepped from the pipe and started to walk in a disorientated haze towards the edge of the pit.

“Marine! What are you doing?” The ambassador had emerged from her safety inside the outflow pipe behind her, sounding angry and anxious at what was happening.

As well she should, Jezebel Wen thought. There was about to be a war, and what was worse… “They’re all dead,” she said under her breath, her suit transmitting the words—not that anyone could hear her or was paying attention to what the combat specialist was saying.

No one, that was, apart from Malady.

“Dead? Have we got visual confirmation of their bodies?” the man-golem said in his characteristic unemotional drawl.

“Well, unless you want to go down and start sifting through a few thousand tons of rubble, Mal…” Jezzy said. I’m in shock. That is what this is, she thought as she stood on the broken edge of the mine and looked down to see that the ice pit, with its terraced layers of rock and ice, was now half-filled with boulders, concrete, and twisted metal.

There was no way that anything could survive down there.

“They could still be trapped…” Malady stated, and Jezzy was surprised at the optimism in the golem’s voice. She didn’t think that he was capable of human emotions anymore.

“Right,” she said cynically.

“The last shooter is neutralized. I’m returning.” Malady said, although Jezzy wasn’t listening. What did it matter now? She was probably going to get busted out of the Outcasts anyway, thanks to this. Which meant, perversely, that she would end up here. Maybe she should just check herself into the prison facility right now.

And Solomon and the others are dead. Jezzy didn’t care about her mission to protect the ambassador. It seemed futile, especially now that the Martians and the Marines were about to go to war with each other over their heads anyway…

“Open a channel!” Jezzy heard someone shouting behind her, and she dimly recognized the voice as the imprimatur. “You! Specialist Wen! Open a channel to your superiors!” the imprimatur shouted.

“Why?” Jezzy turned to see that the imprimatur was taking large, bounding steps towards her. Behind her, Father Ultor and his guards were looking up nervously at the confrontation in the sky.

The Marine transporter will win, of course, Jezzy thought dispassionately. Her emotions seemed numb to her. But it would be a tough fight. Martian saucers were supposed to be fast, very fast, but there had never been a direct confrontation between Martian ships and the Marines, and the transporter wasn’t a full battleship, was it?

“Get a channel open to those lugheads up there and tell them that we have a duty to repatriate our citizens!” the imprimatur was demanding.

Jezzy just looked at the older woman, a slight frown on her face. She wants me to do what now? “I think you’ve forgotten which side I’m on, ma’am,” she said in a careful whisper.

“Imprimatur, stand your forces down. This is ridiculous,” the ambassador was shouting through her own suit speakers.

“We had an agreement, Ambassador! Repatriate the First Martians, in return for an end to hostilities!” The imprimatur turned on the other woman. It was like watching two titanic forces fighting, Jezzy thought a little distantly. Both were strong women, and neither of them were going to back down.

“How can you talk about repatriation at a time like this? We’ve been under attack ever since we got here, and we have no idea who by. For all we know, it could have been Martian backed—” the ambassador was saying.

“Idiot,” the imprimatur snapped the word as if she had cut it from ice. “More Martian citizens have died today than any Confederate… Do you really think I would endanger my own people so recklessly?”

“Some would say that illegally funding terrorist actions against Confederate supply camps and transports is pretty reckless…” the ambassador countered.

“Then give us a fair share of our own resources!” The imprimatur was nearly at the screeching-phase of the argument, and Jezzy could recognize in both woman’s body language—even through the bulky medium of their encounter suits—that they were barely managing to contain their rage with each other. Thank the heavens neither of them has a gun, Jezzy thought.

But she did.

Click. She unslung and pulled the stubby, cruel form of her Jackhammer and casually, just as if she were about to clean it, examined it for malfunctions, before leveling it at the Imprimatur of Mars.

“Valance? Please tell your people to get the hell out of here,” Jezzy said calmly.

The combat specialist was surprised at how calm she actually felt right then. It was like she was in the very eye of a storm. As the turmoil of losing friends and imminent war broke around her, she was the only one on stable ground.

“Lower your weapon, Confederate!” screamed a voice, and Jezzy heard the clicks as the five Martian heavies around Father Ultor had seen what was happening and been ordered by Father Ultor to level their weapons at her. “We’ll fill you full of Titan atmosphere before you pull that trigger!” Ultor snarled.

“I doubt that,” Jezzy said casually.

“Specialist Wen? This might not be the best time…” the ambassador was saying, holding her hands up towards the Martian guards.

“Shut up,” Wen said to the Ambassador in a matter-of-fact way. She could hear the hiss of startled aggression from the woman’s suit.

“Someone should have done this a long time ago,” Wen continued, looking back at the imprimatur. “You see here, lady. I don’t give a frack about your politics, or your planet. I just saw my friends die, thanks to who knows what. But I’ve had enough. We can have a shoot-out if you want, and I will probably die, as will the ambassador here, but so will you. So will your ‘First Martians’ or whatever it is you want to call yourselves.”

“Now. If you really want to do your people a favor, then you tell your saucer up there to back off, and then no one else has to die, capiche?”

“Specialist Wen, this is not wise…” the ambassador said.

“I thought I told you to shut up?” Jezzy didn’t take her eyes off the imprimatur as she snapped at Ochrie.

Not a sound came from the ambassador’s suit.

The moment stretched long between them.

ILLEGAL MARTIAN VESSEL! COMPLY IMMEDIATELY OR FACE THE CONSEQUENCES!

“Fine.” The imprimatur sighed, the shoulders of her suit slouching suddenly as she waved a hand at Father Ultor. “Weapons down, everyone,” she said before Jezzy saw her put a hand to where her helmet’s ‘ear’ was, clearly fiddling with the transmitter settings on her own suit.

Just like the Outcasts’ suits, Jezzy thought. The Martian encounter suits probably had their own narrow-band channel designed to be picked up by their own people.

“This is Imprimatur Valance. This channel number should verify my identity…” everyone heard her say. “Stand down, stand down. Code: Red Gold.”

For a moment, nothing happened, and then there was the hiss and roar of rockets as the saucer started to slowly spin on its central hub, turning and rising into the yellow smog of Titan’s atmosphere. The clouds rolled and billowed behind her, and then it was gone, save for the diminishing noise of its thrusters.

“There. That wasn’t so hard, was it?” Jezzy said lightly.

Above her, there was another sound of hissing as bulkhead doors popped open in the Marine transporter above and figures burst from hatches, tethered to the boat above with polyfilament lines. The transporter didn’t have a full complement of Marines, probably not even a full squad, but the engineers, staff, and pilots had all had their basic training as a part of the Corps. And now those that the ship could spare had donned their own light tactical suits, their arms full with their own Jackhammer rifles, and were coming to pacify the situation.

ATTENTION, CITIZENS! THIS SITE IS UNDER THE SPECIAL JURISDICTION OF THE MARINE CORPS, CONFEDERATE CODE 301! ALL WEAPONS TO BE PLACED ON THE GROUND! ALL MARTIAN PERSONNEL TO BE TAKEN INTO CUSTODY!

Jezzy waited for the Martian heavies to place their own weapons on the ground before she did the same and stepped back. Although she shouldn’t technically be in trouble, as she was only doing her job, she also knew that she would be.

“There will be ramifications for this!” the imprimatur spat at both the ambassador and Jezzy.

Ambassador Ochrie, however, just shook her visor helmet at the woman, clearly reserving her scorn for Jezzy. “The imprimatur is right, Specialist Wen. What have you done? This was supposed to be a peace negotiation, not a war.”

Jezzy thought about the collapsed mine behind her, hiding the bodies of her fellows. “Too late for that, ma’am.”

Am I going to make it? Solomon was having serious doubts as he climbed up the metal stairs. The pain was starting to come back, and his entire left side felt like it was on fire. Had the bullet shifted position when Karamov tumbled on him? Was all this stair-climbing just forcing it deeper into his body?

“You okay up there, Commander? You look a bit wobbly on your pins there…” Karamov said over their suit channel.

“I’m fine. Fine…” Solomon said as he leaned against the rock wall once more, panting. He really wasn’t fine at all.

How much fracking further? He looked up to see that there was light up ahead.

And silence.

Hang on a minute. Where were the others? he thought as he paused. Maybe they had already found a way out and were—

THA-BANG! The gunshot was amplified by the tunnel that he was climbing up, splintering into a hundred echoes. And it came from above.

“No,” Solomon hissed in dismay as he heard Karamov and Kol’s frantic questions. Who was firing? What at? What side were they on? Who had been hit?

The fear lent a newfound energy to Solomon’s body as he vaulted up the steps, taking advantage of Titan’s lower gravity to move faster and quicker than he would reasonably dare to in such icy and treacherous conditions. He could hear startled voices above him, sobbing as he saw that the stairs climbed up into a small antechamber cave just above him with a light-filled archway leading out.

“What did you do? Why did you do that? Who are you?!” It was one of the Proxima delegates, nearly hysterical.

“He’s dead… They’ve killed him… He’s dead,” one of the other delegates was saying.

Solomon remembered at the last moment that he had no weapons. They had been stolen from him and his crew by their own mysterious attacker. Solomon had thought that it might have been an irate prisoner at first, but now all of the pieces started to fall together into the jigsaw.

No prisoner did this, Solomon knew as he moved. No time for careful and brilliant plans. Whoever the attacker was would have already heard his clanking boots on the stairs. He would probably already have leveled his gun at the archway, maybe.

This was a tactical hit, Solomon thought. Someone—either the Martians or some rogue element of the Proxima delegates or the Belters—had decided to go ahead and start a war on their own, and this was where it began…

Solomon didn’t have a plan. He was too mad with pain to develop one. He knew that he would probably get shot as he mounted the final stair and lunged towards the archway, but what was he to do? Hide down there as the attacker killed everyone in the room and just fire down the mineshaft until he killed Sol’s men as well?

No, I’m as good as dead anyway, with this bullet in my side, Solomon thought in a flash. At least he could provide a distraction, a diversion for Karamov and Kol to seize the initiative—

“Hyurk!”

PHP-BANG!

But Solomon wasn’t the only one to think about distractions and diversions. As he leapt through the archway into a small cave that was open to the yellow Titan atmosphere at one side, half-filled with crates, someone else clearly had the same idea.

The Proxima delegation was clustered around the body of one of the convicts—the old man, Malcom Jeckers—and standing over them was a man dressed in a shabby encounter suit similar in style to the prisoners’ suits but with extra arm and leg greaves. They wore a superior visor-helmet too, not the bubble-helmet of the prisoners.

And in their hands was a military-issue Jackhammer, which could even have been one of the guns that had been stolen from Gold Squad themselves…

The attacker raised the Jackhammer at the leaping form of Solomon as he cleared the threshold.

And the only other person in the room, the woman prisoner with the scarred face, swung her ice cutter at the shooter, igniting the plasma torch at the end as she did so.

“I worked with him!” she screamed in fury as there was a sudden hiss and a scream as the white-hot plasma torch met the attacker’s suit, and he fired.

“Ooof!” Solomon grunted in pain as he bowled into the shooter, narrowly avoiding the ice cutter himself as both people tumbled to the entrance of the cave, limbs flying everywhere.

Hssssss! From somewhere, there was the whine of escaping gases. It must be the shooter’s suit. The ice cutter must have burnt a hole, Solomon was thinking. How long did they have before they lost all their internal suit pressure? Would it be quick enough?

“It’s over!” Solomon grunted as he scored a punch on the tumbled, struggling figure, his own side starting to radiate agony like it was an atomic core.

“Grargh!” Another shout and the shooter’s boots were kicking Solomon across the head, then in the side—

“Ach!” The pain was excruciating as the shooter’s boot hit the sealed spot in his suit over the concealed bullet. Even with the cocktail of drugs that the Commander had taken, both the ones that Karamov had given him and the experimental ones he had been subject to as a part of the Outcasts, it was still too much for him to bear and he doubled over, coughing.

“He’s getting away!” one of the Proxima delegates was shouting, and Solomon forced himself up into a crouch to, yes, see that their attacker was bounding out of the cave and into the yellow air of Titan, running awkwardly as a jet of white steam, laden with his precious oxygen, was bursting from his chest.

He won’t get far, Solomon thought, but then in the next moment, he remembered his own suit, which Kol had managed to seal. This operative could easily perform something like that.

The Specialist Commander of Gold Squad seized the man’s dropped Jackhammer and sighted along the barrel. Every movement with his arms was a torment, but he knew that he had one shot.

The racing figure was starting to become blurry and indistinct as they merged into the fogs.

Solomon fired.

“Ach!” A small, muffled sound, and the shadow thumped to the ground. It really was over.

13

The Day We’ve Had

“They killed Malcom Jeckers, the architect for Proxima independence,” Jezzy said in a subdued voice.

“You look worse than me,” Solomon attempted to joke, but the effort pulled strangely on his ribs and he ended up wincing in pain instead. He was currently lying on a medical bed in the Marine transporter’s medical bay, a room filled with brilliant white light and bleeping machines.

It had been Malady who had found them, as their suit telemetries popped up onto the grid as soon as they had emerged from Titan’s subsurface. Then had come the shouting and being surrounded by Marine guards as they tried to identify the shooters from the traitors and the prisoners.

Solomon remembered being loaded up onto a stretcher, attached to poly-wires and hoisted into the air into the belly of the Marine transporter, where everything had gone dark.

“Two hours of surgery, Commander,” Karamov said, sitting on the low bench opposite him. Neither him nor Jezzy—or Solomon, for that matter—were wearing their busted, scarred encounter suits anymore and had instead reverted to their spare undermesh suits, which were the only things about them that looked intact, their faces blotchy and pinched with worry and stress.

“Did they find it?” Solomon wheezed.

“Yeah. Found and removed the bullet, cauterized the damaged veins. You were about a couple inches away from an artery, so you’re a lucky man, Commander,” Karamov said, toying with something in his hands, which he then threw to land with a soft thud on the commander’s white-sheeted bed.

It was a small bullet, about the size of Solomon’s little nail.

“This is the little beast, is it?” The commander painfully reached to pick up the small bronze bullet, lightly striated where it had ripped through his suit. I’ll keep it as a reminder. He clenched his fist around it. Be more careful. Be sharper.

No one had killed him yet, and this bullet was going to be a reminder. A reminder that Karamov and Kol saved my life, he thought. He had been intent on trying to escape from his life on Ganymede, from its psychopathic Warden Coates and the constant fear of reprisals from Arlo Menier, but now, feeling the ugly little weight of that fragment in his fist, he realized that it wasn’t just about him.

I never wanted to rely on anybody, but they saved my life in the end anyway, he thought. It made him feel humble, and proud at the same time. And defiant.

Arlo isn’t going to be the one to put me down, Solomon promised himself. And the warden isn’t going to do it either. If this murderous little bullet couldn’t kill him, he wasn’t going to let anyone else do it either.

“We’d better let you sleep, Commander. It’s going to be a short jump back to Jupiter, but I bet we’re all going to have a debrief with the warden when we get back.” Karamov was standing up, running a hand through his dark brown hair. “And I could really use a nap after the day we’ve had.”

“Karamov,” Solomon called the retiring man as he was about to leave. “I don’t know how much power I’ve got in all this, but, if I can…I’m going to put you forward for a specialism. Medical. You saved my life out there today. You are good at the medical stuff.”

Karamov shrugged. “My father was a doctor. You pick things up along the way.” He threw a half-assed salute and a wry smile, his way of taking his leave as he walked through the automatic doors, leaving Jezzy and the commander behind.

Now, I guess I should figure out what has been eating up my combat specialist for this entire mission… Solomon thought. Even though he was tired, he felt confident. Like he had been given another chance. Like he had been made anew.

“Jezzy, you did really good out there today. You kept it together. You kept the ambassador safe,” he pointed out to the woman, who appeared to be staring into space.

“Huh?” When she turned to look at him, the glassy look in her eyes told Solomon that she wasn’t really looking at him.

“Jezzy, what’s up? You’ve been out of sorts ever since we left Ganymede,” Solomon said. “We survived. Everyone survived. You saved the ambassador.”

The woman just looked at Solomon for a second, before shrugging. “The ambassador is going to file a complaint about me. I’ll be court-martialed and dismissed from the Outcasts, and probably end up here,” she said, before adding, “where I suppose that the only saving grace is that I won’t be doing any ice mining any time soon…”

“I think the ambassador’s got a whole lot of other trouble on her plate right now, to worry about one adjunct-Marine,” Solomon said, nodding at the small data-screen on the wall.

MAJOR TERRORIST INCIDENT AT TITAN PRISON CAMP…

The words scrolled over the newswires.

IMPRIMATUR VALANCE OF MARS HELD FOR QUESTIONING…

“It wasn’t the Martians.” Jezzy shook her head.

“No?” Solomon wasn’t so sure. “The last time we fought the separatists, they had the same Marine equipment as these ones did,” he pointed out.

“But why would they risk killing their own imprimatur? Or Father Ultor, the leader of the Chosen of Mars?” Jezzy said, although it didn’t really seem as though her heart was in it.

She’s probably worried about the possible disciplinary, Solomon thought. “Look, I’ll speak to Doctor Palinov. She almost likes me,” he said. In fact, she thinks I’m a useful lab rat, but there you go… “And I’ll even speak to the warden. I’ll make them keep you.”

“Huh. Good luck with that.” Wen stood up, pausing as she half-turned to the door. “For what it’s worth, Solomon, it was good to see you alive.”

“Where are you going?” Solomon asked.

A shadow passed over her features. “I, uh…” Her eyes went far away once more. “I’ve got a job to do,” she said, before walking out of the room.

What is up with her? Solomon was left looking at the closed door for a longer moment, before the news on the data-screen dragged his attention away. It was one of the general channels, widely distributed across the satellite networks and run by Confederate Earth.

RIOTS ERUPT ACROSS MARS, AS PEOPLE DEMAND THE RETURN OF IMPRIMATUR VALANCE AND FATHER ULTOR, SPOKESPERSON FOR THE ‘FIRST MARTIANS’…

THE SPACEPORTS AT OLYMPUS MONS AND HYSPERIA HAVE BEEN BLOCKADED. MARTIANS CLAIM THAT THEY WILL NOT RELEASE TRADE OR GOODS UNTIL ALL MARTIAN PRISONERS HAVE BEEN FREED ACROSS CONFEDERATE TERRITORIES….

WITH TENSIONS MOUNTING BETWEEN THE TWO SIDES, THE MARINE CORPS HAS BEEN CALLED IN TO ORBIT MARS…

The door hissed open as one of the transporter staffers walked in, pushing ahead a small cart with cleaning products stacked inside. He was a small man in a gray and silver suit, with a cap of the Marine Corps staffers.

“Evening, Specialist Commander Cready,” the man said brightly, before taking out the mop.

“Is it evening? I never know any more these days…” Solomon said. He guessed that it could be evening, in the sense that it could be a part of the shift where most of the trainees were supposed to be asleep. But in the void of space, when traveling under permanent artificial light, it seemed a little silly to have such distinctions.

“The job never ends, does it?” Solomon said with a weary smile, nodding at the cleaner’s mop.

“You are quite right, Mr. Cready. The job never ends.” The man calmly slid the metal mop through the handles of the door, wedging it shut.

“Now, this won’t take a moment.” The man turned back, and in his hand, he held a thin-bladed knife, looking ridiculously sharp. “Please don’t make this difficult, Mr. Cready. Boss Mihashi does hate complications, so…” the man said, stepping towards Cready’s bed…

I have to kill Solomon, was all that Jezzy could think throughout their entire conversation. Over and over, the words played out inside her head, repeating and repeating until she thought she was being driven mad.

She should have been happy that her commander had survived, as well as the others. But in some ways, that had only returned the awful weight to her shoulders. It was a burden that she thought she had forgotten, in the heat of battle and the panic of protecting the ambassador on Titan. It had felt good, actually, to forget everything that she should have been worrying about—her father, Ganymede, Boss Mihashi.

One of the workers walked past her, pushing a cleaning cart, as Jezzy’s thoughts were wrapped up in themselves.

But now, I have to be the one to kill him if I am to save my father… The thought was unavoidable. But how could she? How could she kill the man who had placed his trust in her?

But by not doing so, that would only mean that her father would be killed.

Jezzy couldn’t choose between the two. It was no choice really, just two equally appalling events.

Kerthunk. There was a distant thud and the sound of breaking glass, muffled and far away, that caught Jezzy’s attention. Given the sort of day that she’d recently had, she was inclined to ignore it, but then her mind suddenly caught up with itself.

The cleaner had been a small man, in a cap.

Just like her Yakuza handler.

The one who had been assigned to the ambassador’s Marine-logistics detail.

Oh frack. Jezzie turned, breaking into a run.

“I don’t owe him anything!” Solomon struggled with his assassin, hissing the words as he held onto the man’s wrists, both of them writhing on the floor and trying to get the upper hand on the killer’s knife.

The medical bay was in disarray, with tables broken and beakers smashed as Solomon had fought back with everything that he had. The Marine staffer had lost his cap, and instead had a bleeding graze on his forehead where Solomon had thrown some unidentifiable medical instrument at him. It hadn’t been enough to stop the Yakuza operative, however.

“Oh, I am afraid that you do, Mr. Cready.” WHAM! His attacker managed to flip Solomon on his side, causing pain to radiate out from the still-healing wound in his side. Solomon thought he could feel his stitches burst…

“The Boss takes your treachery of his New Kowloon family very seriously indeed…” the man hissed, leaning closer as he straddled Solomon, pushing with all of his weight on the knife.

Solomon couldn’t spare the energy to shout, or yell, or scream. Sweat beaded on his forehead as he felt the pain withering his muscles, forcing the knife lower and lower towards his throat.

“Hai!” There was a shout and the sound of splintering glass as the double-doors exploded inwards, and Jezzy landed on her feet. She had kicked the panel of reinforced glass in and didn’t stop to jump through into the room, shattering the remaining panes of glass still further as she raced to the commander’s aid.

“Sol!” she shouted, aiming a kick to her handler’s head where he crouched atop her commander.

But the handler was quick, and he wasn’t exhausted from either being shot or spending the last twenty-four hours running around a collapsing mine. He rolled easily out of the way, bouncing up onto his heels in a perfect martial-arts pose, knife still in hand.

“Jezzy, no!” Solomon wheezed, panting in pain on the floor.

“With greatest respect… Get out of the way, Commander.” Jezzy dropped into a matching stance opposite the man, her hands up in front of her as she started to circle. She had no weapon, but then again, Jezebel Wen didn’t need one, did she?

“He’s got a knife!” Solomon gasped as he managed to crawl under the bed.

“You don’t think I can see that?” Jezzy had a chance to say, just as the man made his move.

Her handler didn’t lead with a stab, of course. He was far too good for that. He instead performed a roundhouse kick that Jezzy easily skipped out of the way of, before pressing his advantage in a series of blisteringly quick moves—strikes, knees, stamps, and kicks.

Jezzy countered, ducked, blocked, and dodged where she could. The two fought at a speed that Solomon hadn’t even thought possible. He had always known that his combat specialist was good, but this was insane. The two also fought in near-silence, just the occasional hiss and grunt as the silver of the knife flashed and fell.

“Hyugh!” Jezzy jumped back suddenly, a line of red breaking into life just above her eye and starting to run down her face.

“Jezzy, no!” Solomon breathed.

The attacker—her handler—moved in for the kill….

But it had been a ruse. Jezzy was wounded, but it took more than a scratch to slow her down. As the Yakuza handler relaxed his vigilance for just a second and stepped forward, Jezzy stamped out his knee in a cracking snap of noise that reverberated around the room.

The man screamed.

Thock-thack! Another two blows from Jezzy—sharp, quick blows to the sternum and neck that saw him stagger backwards, gasping for air, his hand automatically dropping the knife. It spun through the air, glinting silver—

Thump! Jezzy caught it and slammed it into the handler’s chest. The man wavered in place for just a moment, gurgling as he looked down in astonishment at his own blade sticking out of his chest, before collapsing to the floor, dead.

A moment later, Jezzy collapsed to her knees too, exhausted and panting.

“What the hell…. What the hell…” Solomon emerged, his eyes round as he looked at Jezzy.

“Commander? I think we need to talk,” Jezzy groaned wearily.

“Can we do it after people stop trying to kill us?” Solomon said.

Jezebel considered. “Given the sort of day that we’ve had so far? Probably not.”

The Martian Incursion

Outcast Marines, Book 4

1

The Ides of March

“What the frack did you DO, Matty!?” Solomon screamed at his lifelong friend and accomplice, Matthias Sozer.

The younger Solomon Cready stood in his scuffed and torn short-sleeved shirt and vest, his sharp features glitching with the swathes of neon advertisements from the megaplexes overhead. He could feel the comfortable weight of the heavy pistol tucked into the waistband of his jeans, and his fingers itched to pull it out.

The young man didn’t think that he had ever been so angry. Not when the Triads of New Kowloon had burned out his shell investment firm—a cheap ghost-hack that filtered 0.5 Confederate Credits to one of his accounts every time the stocks fluctuated. It wasn’t the biggest and best scam he’d ever played, but it kept him in cheap shirts.

He’d come close to being this annoyed when the Yakuza had treated him like a child, though they appeared to treat every gaijin westerner in their ghetto-city of New Kowloon that way.

And then there had been finding the government transponder, buried in the skirting board of his apartment. A tracking device, one that Matthias Sozer had said was deep black government intelligence, and that he knew someone who knew what was happening.

That had been Miss Cheung, a top-level Kowloon Fixer who had contacts and fingers in every dirty little deal running from the laundromat franchises along Water Lilly Street to the backroom deals of New Kowloon administrators.

But then they had been attacked. Government snatch-squad, Solomon reckoned. Confederate Intelligence Services maybe. Someone had sold him out. But who?

Who knew about this meeting apart from the only two people who had set it up: Miss Cheung and Matty?

And just why the frack were the Confederate Intelligence Services interested in a crook like him? He was a very good crook—he was proud enough, or maybe arrogant enough, to admit that. He was already winding up his takedown of the Kowloon Yakuza family—and all because he could. A person like him, a cat-burglar, thief, confidence artist, and industrial spy, thrived on the chaos that job would bring him. A criminal always needs a healthy dose of chaos, Solomon knew, and they hated monopolies by anyone—be it the Yakuza, the Triads, or the Confederate government.

But really, as much as he excelled on living on his wits and calling quick choices, what was happening was crazy.

“I’m not that good for the CIS to take an interest,” Solomon was saying, his voice coming out in hitches like he was about to burst into tears. But he wasn’t about to cry. It was the anger that constricted his throat and his ground teeth that chopped up his words and made Matty Sozer, his friend for over ten years, look over at him from the doorway to the cheap apartment with wariness in his eyes.

“Why you scared, Matty?” Solomon heard himself say. He felt as if the whole world had moved three steps away, and that he was watching himself in slow motion, unable to stop the terrible events that he knew had to unfold just as they always did, night after night in this nightmare…

“What did you do?” he asked again, a sort of calm settling over him. A dreadful, unavoidable decision.

“Why are the CIS after me? What did you DO, Matty!”

“Sol!”

The young man, older now than in his dreams but not by much, floundered into wakefulness as the loud, booming voice of Malady reached his ears.

Solomon blinked, looked up at the rounded metal figure that was adjunct-Marine Specialist Malady—once a full Confederate Marine but who had been busted down to ‘adjunct’ status the same as the rest of the Outcast outfit on Ganymede, as well as being sealed inside of his full tactical suit, kept alive through the suit’s systems but changing him irrevocably.

“Wake up,” the electronic-modulated voice of the metal golem said, looming over the Gold Squad Commander. Solomon could clearly see the man’s ashen and apparently half-sleeping face behind the faceplate of his suit. He looked like a living cadaver. The suit punched directly into his brain stem, bypassing the need for such silly little things like eyeballs or vocal cords.

“What time is it? I didn’t hear the alarm…” Solomon groaned, sitting up just as his side suddenly twitched in white-hot agony. “Ach!” The pain was short-lived, just a twinge, but a reminder that his body was still technically recovering from a bullet that had lodged itself about two inches away from his liver.

That had been out on Titan, when all of this mess had really started. The memories came rushing back to Solomon as the nightmare of last night faded. Titan the prison moon. The place he would have ended up if he hadn’t been pressganged into the Outcasts. Tasked with protecting the Confederate Earth’s ambassador as she negotiated a peace treaty with the Outer Space Alliance—the coalition of colony worlds, with Mars being the most vocal opponent of Confederate Earth control.

But it had all gone belly up, hadn’t it? The echo of the pain in his side was testament to that. Someone had attacked them. Someone had killed convicts and politicians alike.

And the Martian Imprimatur—the spokesperson for humanity’s second founding colony—had been blamed.

“No alarm. News feed. You will want to hear this.” Malady moved off, the whining servo mechanisms in his lower back, hips, and knees hissing and screeching as he turned to where the screen over the door was playing the news.

Solomon and the metal man weren’t the only Outcasts who had woken early from their slumber, the commander saw. In fact, the entirety of this shift in the bunkroom appeared to be blearily getting up, transfixed with horror at the large screen. Silence hung over the men and women of the Outcasts—which itself was unusual, as there was always some muttered argument or almost-scuffle about to break out between the ex-convicts.

CONFEDERATE NEWS WIRE: Andrea Gibson Reporting, LIVE from OrbiSat 1

“Disturbing news today, as the Confederate blockade of Mars enters its third week…

“Martian colonists and Martian separatists—many flying the banner of the ‘Chosen of Mars’—have ransacked and set fire to the three largest ore depots on the Red Planet, all of which are owned by the Confederate Mega-Corp TransCorp, which was awarded the leading contract in the extraction and transport of Martian resources.

“While this could well be a crippling blow for the TransCorp company, our analysts have indicated that it shows a sophisticated and calculating move on the behalf of the Martians, whose message is clear: unless they receive all of their Martian detainees back from the Confederate Marine Corps, including the Imprimatur of Mars herself, Dr. Valance, and the spokesperson of the First Martians/Chosen of Mars group, Father Ultor, then they will continue to hurt Confederate interests…

“In response, the Confederate Marine Corps has confirmed that they are dispatching battlegroups from Earth and the Rapid Response Fleet to put more pressure on the Martians to comply, although with tensions similarly simmering amongst the colonists of Proxima and the Asteroid Belt, can the Marine Corps really afford to stretch its fleet across such vast distances? Our expert, Professor Vladjic Trajan, examines the issues…”

“Oh frack…” Solomon heard someone say, as the data-screens showed low-orbit news satellite pictures of the three burning depots.

They had once been white geodesic domes, designed to perfectly withstand the pressures of the Martian environment, entirely sealed with an internal atmosphere. The images showed they even contained entire business parks, trees, and corporate buildings beside the warehouses and loading modules.

Each one was now broken and burst apart like the shells of cracked eggs, with torrents of black smoke boiling out of the domes and forming localized mushroom clouds over the orange sand. Solomon imagined how it must have gone—maybe there were actual explosive devices, or maybe the separatists had shelled the domes directly. Either one would have only caused a fraction of deaths compared to what must have happened as soon as the pressure seals of each dome had been breached.

There would have been a catastrophic loss of oxygen, a wind-storm of air that blew apart windows and doors and entire bulkheads. Computer systems and pipelines would have ruptured, creating a firestorm that only those in full protective suits could have survived. Unless, of course, the separatists had sent an evacuation warning, the commander hoped.

He wasn’t looking at just a tactical ‘statement’ against the power that the Confederacy had over the Red Planet, but instead at a massacre.

“The Confederacy won’t let this stand,” Solomon breathed.

“Damn right!” one of the other Outcasts called out in response. Solomon thought it was Specialist James, from Green Squad. “We’re going to frack them into oblivion! Bombard the damn rock from space until they give in, or wipe them off the dust and start again, that’s what I say!”

Maybe the Marine Corps had heard Specialist James’s recommendations, because no sooner had he spoken than the alarms went off, echoing through the Ganymede Training Facility that the Outcasts had called home for the better part of a year.

WAOWAOWAO!!

ATTENTION ALL OUTCAST MARINES! ASSEMBLE IN THE MAIN BRIEFING ROOM IMMEDIATELY FOR MISSION PREP!

“Here we go,” Solomon whispered. This was it. This was the war that he had feared would come, but even as he rushed to grab his light jacket and over-wear pants, the young man already knew that he wouldn’t be heading straight to the main briefing room. In this mad scramble of the other Outcasts, no one would notice if he made a detour.

He had to speak to his combat specialist, Jezzy Wen.

2

A Dark Sort of Hope

Jezebel Wen, the young combat specialist of Gold Squadron, sat with one leg hanging over the edge of a fifteen-meter climbing wall. Her body shivered, although she wasn’t cold. Her mesh vest top and leggings regulated her temperature perfectly, actually wicking away the heat that her finely-honed body was producing as needed.

She’d just climbed the wall not once but three times, all in an attempt to get to this point where her body was exhausted and rubbery with adrenaline, hoping that her mind would follow suit.

It hadn’t.

He’s going to die, she kept thinking, the thoughts rolling around and around every finger and toehold, written in every scream of tortured muscles in her calves and back.

Her father was going to die. And it was all her fault.

Jezzy considered performing a double-quick climb down and back up again, in order to stop these thoughts. To batter her recalcitrant mind into submission. But what would be the point? She couldn’t escape the guilt and the shame. It coursed through her body as the burn of lactic acid was starting to seep into her muscles.

I shouldn’t have killed him. She remembered that moment, slamming the undercover Yakuza’s knife into his neck back on board the Marine transporter just out of Titan. She didn’t recall the event with anything but a sort of dark glee, as she had finally put an end to his blackmail and intimidation of her.

Only she hadn’t, had she?

The man had been masquerading as a Marine Corps staffer—one of the basic training logistics and support staff that kept the fighting units, their stations and their ships, as well as every other mundane aspect of the Marine’s life, running. But he had also been Yakuza, just like Jezebel Wen had been before being caught by the Confederate Earth Enforcers. She would have ended up on the prison moon of Titan, just like every other Outcast, if the Marines hadn’t found a ‘more appropriate sentence’ for her here on Ganymede as one of the fledgling Outcasts.

The planning that Boss Mihashi must be capable of boggled Jezebel. How long did it take to put someone through Marine Corps basic training? And it had to be someone who would remain fanatically loyal to the Earth Yakuza during those five or six long years, and who also had a clean enough record that the Marine Corps wouldn’t suspect a thing.

Jezzy had only been funneled into the Ganymede Training Facility in the last year, which meant that Yakuza agent had been sent here way before that. Did the Boss already know that Jezzy would get caught—for doing his dirty work, she grumbled—years in advance? Or had he been working to infiltrate the Marine Corps anyway, just as he had many of the mega-corporations operating out of Earth?

Either way, it didn’t really matter. She had killed the handler, and she was here now. She carefully pulled out the scrap of paper that the Yakuza agent had given her, as proof of her predicament. She kept it on her person at all times now, even though she knew that she should destroy the evidence of Yakuza collusion, but it was her only piece of evidence of the Yakuza’s plans. It was a work authorization order for a Mr. Hoshu ‘Harry’ Wen—her estranged father—that clearly showed his unique identification number and address.

And the fact that Boss Mihashi can have him fired any time he wants…or killed. The Boss already knew his address, and it wasn’t as if the Yakuza had any qualms about delivering their honor-bound ‘punishments’ on the next of kin of those that had wronged them.

I’ve killed my father, the moment I sunk that blade into the operative’s neck… Jezzy thought. And there wasn’t a damn thing she could do to warn him, at least without alerting the psychopathic Warden Coates, who ran the Outcast training program with an iron fist and electric stunners.

I’ll get deported to Titan, she knew. It had been hard enough concealing the ‘staffer’s’ body on the Marine transporter that had jumped them back ‘home’ here on Ganymede. Luckily, the one benefit of a spaceship was that she had a choice of either airlocks or incinerators. She had gone for the incinerators.

“Jezzy!” someone shouted from below. She shook her head and wiped her eyes to see the tight, worried face of her squad commander, a fellow ex-con like her, Solomon Cready.

“Don’t make me climb up there, for heaven’s sake…” he tried to make a joke, half-rising an arm to indicate where he had been shot.

“Hmph.” Jezzy was in no mood for talking, but she knew that she had to move. The station alerts had gone out just a minute ago, calling for everyone to go to the main briefing room. She had stayed up here out of a sort of despairing spite at her own position. A part of her perversely wanted to get into trouble.

I deserve it, she thought, before unslinging her leg and rolling her shoulder and body over the restraining bar to nearly fall over the edge—

“Whoa!” Solomon gasped.

But Jezzy was very good at this kind of stuff. She caught the bar on the way over, swinging herself down to the next handhold and, barely using her feet at all, crab-crawled down the wall faster than many people could jog in a straight line.

She landed on the balls of her feet beside Solomon, sweating and breathing fast. The exertion still hadn’t done anything to put her mind to rest.

“You heard the alert?” Cready nodded at the screens that hung over the doors.

“Don’t tell me you came to collect me, Sol…” Jezzy said as they turned towards the door.

“Nope. I came to, uh, ask…” Jezzy could feel him looking at her with those owlish eyes that he had when he was worried. She hated it. It made her feel weak, like he was pitying her.

“Spit it out,” Jezzy said, wanting to get this over with. Three weeks. It had been three weeks since they had started an interstellar incident, and she still hadn’t heard anything from the Yakuza or about her father.

“That guy who had come to kill me, the Yakuza operative…” Solomon was muttering under their breath as they quick-walked through the gymnasium and out into the still-busy corridors beyond. “You said he had a hold over you. Your father…”

Jezzy nodded, but her face was a flat, stoic line.

“I’ve been doing some thinking, and I think that there might be a way we can help. From here,” Solomon whispered.

“You’re crazy,” Jezzy said. “It’s been three weeks anyway. He’s already dead. The Yakuza don’t hang around.”

“I don’t think he is,” Solomon countered, a reaction that made Jezzy’s blood boil with anger. She stopped mid-walk, even as the last of the other Outcasts were entering the briefing room ahead of them. She rounded on her commander.

“You wait three weeks to come up with a plan? Who do you think you are, Solomon Cready? Why do you think that I need your help? Just who are you to tell me about how the Yakuza do things!?”

Solomon’s eyes flickered nervously to the closing door. They had to get in there if they didn’t want to incur the wrath of the Warden Coates, but…this was important.

“Look, the Marine Corps elected me to be the specialist commander of our squad, right? That’s because they know that I’ve got the mind for it,” he said. It was bravado and bluster, Jezzy thought, but he was right that the Marine Corps, along with their armies of doctors and scientists were the ones to order and orchestrate every facet of their development here.

“And I’m telling you that in every strategy or game theory that I can devise, and I’ve been running a lot on your case…” he hissed hurriedly.

“You have?” Jezzy was surprised that he would spend valuable command training hours devoted to her father.

“Of course I have. We’re a squad. You saved my life. More than once. And thinking is what I can do…”

“Debatable…” Jezzy muttered, unable to help herself.

“Ha. Maybe so. But here: it doesn’t make any sense in any scenario that I have run that the Yakuza wouldn’t tell you that they had iced your father…” he said quickly, already starting to move towards the closed doors.

But Jezzy didn’t move. She couldn’t move. What her commander and supposed friend had just said was too awful. “Is that it? You reckon that you’ve got an insight into Boss Mihashi just because he hasn’t gloated in my misery yet?”

“The Yakuza are a performance company.” Solomon shook his head, clearly frustrated with how slow he thought her to be. “I used to work for them too, remember?”

“And the Triads, and the American Mob, from what I heard…” Jezzy pointed out.

“Exactly my point. I know what I’m talking about. All of those groups only exist as long as they can get the job done and people are scared of them. If no one knows that they have performed a statement murder, then the whole thing is pointless,” Solomon said. “The Yakuza’s only hold over you is fear. And they need to reinforce that fear either by showing you what they have done or threatening to do more. And they haven’t done either yet…”

Jezzy felt confused. The man had a point. The Boss wouldn’t waste any opportunity for gain, and that meant that they probably would have sent her father’s ear in the post or something by now. A miserable thought.

But they hadn’t. Did that mean that the Boss didn’t know that she had killed the operative and go-between out here a few hundred thousand miles away?

It was a dark sort of hope that Solomon was offering her, but it was hope, nonetheless.

It was just a shame that the warden didn’t share Jezzy and Solomon’s small modicum of optimism.

“YOU TWO SCHLUBS!” the voice of the small man roared at them from the open door. “Attention when spoken too! What are you doing out here, conniving and conspiring? Are you disobeying my commands?”

“No, sir…” both Solomon and Wen murmured.

“THEN GET IN THERE WITH THE OTHERS!” the warden screamed.

3

Old Skills, New Tricks

“Right! Listen up, schlubs!” Warden Coates barked from the front of the room. The briefing room was a small, semi-circular room with a podium at the far end under the plate glass that looked out onto the strange Ganymede surface of whites, grays, and pinks.

Start with an insult, what a way to make friends… Solomon thought irritably where he stood at the back next to Jezzy, with all the other squads of Outcast Marines standing on the descending terraces to the floor.

Warden Coates may have been a small man, but he was no small presence in the room. He seemed able to fill the very air with vitriol. That was usual for him, but today, there was something else as well.

Is his uniform extra shiny today? Solomon wondered. There was a tense nervousness that emanated from him.

It’s the war, a primitive part of Solomon informed him. That was what was happening. This was what it felt like to be at the start of a war…

“You’ve all heard the news. You all know what is happening on Mars. The separatists have attacked Confederate resources, and the powers that be can’t have that,” the warden stated severely. “What the Martians have done is an affront to the Confederacy’s good nature and our patience. So, you will be tasked with joining the 2nd Rapid Response Marine Fleet in their efforts to pacify Mars.”

There. Solomon blinked, slightly surprised at how simple it sounded. Pacify Mars. It made it sound as though they were just going to go down there and hand out cupcakes.

“Randulph, Bizei, Lo-Pao, walk to the aisles, please.” The warden surprised them all by singling out three of the Outcasts. What is this? Solomon watched the three men look around worriedly, then walk to the aisles where they stood to attention. It was never good to be singled out by the warden.

“I believe you three are originally Martian?” the warden stated.

Oh no… Solomon’s heart fell.

“Aye, sir.”

“Yes, Warden-sir…”

The three men slowly affirmed that they had, indeed, been born and raised on the Red Planet.

“Your services are no longer required for this mission. You will remain in training here on Ganymede,” the warden stated firmly.

“But…” said one of them, Bizei, Solomon thought.

“Any further questioning of my orders will lead me to assume that you have a reason to want to go to Mars,” the warden stated quite simply. His implication was clear: they couldn’t be trusted. They were Martians.

“Uh…no, sir…” One by one, the three men shook their heads in confusion.

“I have endeavored to instill in all of my Outcasts a sense of loyalty and duty. To the Corps, to each other, and most of all, to me. I hope that I have done a good job in that, but unfortunately the higher-ups, in their infinite wisdom, have ruled that no full Martian citizen will be allowed to fight alongside a Confederate for the duration of this conflict. You three are dismissed. Back to your regular scheduled lessons.”

Bizei, Lo-Pao, and Ranulph looked at each other in confusion, just as the eyes of all the other Outcasts watched them with renewed suspicion. Was it true? Solomon could almost see the poison take hold in the glances of his comrades. Were all Martians the enemy now?

The warden waited for the three disregarded Outcasts to leave the room before resuming. “One and all, please stand and salute for the Colonel Asquew.” He stepped aside and neatly into a regimental salute, as the glass of the wall behind him started to darken and was replaced by the flickering holographic display of the older Marine Commander Asquew of the Rapid Response Fleet.

Asquew was a strong woman, older by far than the warden, Solomon judged, but she also had that same buttoned-down preciseness that the warden and all of the senior Marines had. He wondered if anyone would ever look at him and think the same thing. Probably not. The Lord Marine Commander appeared to be busy, walking back and forth and consulting with objects or people not pictured in the holo display. Solomon saw a blonde woman with short hair and piercing blue eyes, wearing a slightly lighter version of the full power suit that the fully-commissioned Marines wore.

“Outcasts, at ease,” she said, almost casually, as she had the luxury to disregard formalities. “Thank you, Warden Coates.” She nodded in his direction, before turning to address the Outcasts.

“Adjunct-Marines. Many of you have been on away missions of some kind or another, but what follows next will be your trial by fire. This is an actual, live-combat situation, which has many subtleties that I will be expecting you all to be aware of,” she stated, half-turning to have a muted conversation with someone out of the holo picture, before turning back.

“The Martian populous at large is generally hostile to the Confederacy, and to the Marine Corps in particular. They are deemed to be hostile non-combatants in this instance. However, we must also distinguish between colonists and separatists, although the lines blur when we consider that any Martian could also be a separatist, and any Martian colonist could also be a member of the group known as the ‘First Martians’ or the ‘Chosen of Mars’.”

She’s telling us not to shoot everyone we see, but be prepared to, Solomon thought. It left a sour taste in his mouth, as he thought, Who are we to judge?

“I expect extreme precautionary measures to be taken by each and every one of you to differentiate between the two,” the colonel said, although Solomon noted that she hadn’t said just what precautionary measure they could take. Ask them if they have a First Martian flag on them?

“You will be deployed on various missions throughout the Martian habitat. Some of you will be in supporting roles to the Marine Corps, while others will be acting alone. You will form a party of a first-wave tactical strike team, aimed at neutralizing the Martians’ abilities to further coordinate attacks,” Asquew said severely, then took a long breath as if she were considering just what she was about to ask of them…

“The Warden Coates here has assured me that you are as ready as a fully-capable fighting force, although I would have rather given you a further six months basic training before sending you into live action in the field…”

Some of us have already done that, Commander. Solomon thought about Titan, and the Erisian Asteroid Field.

“I want you all to know that I am immensely proud of what the warden has achieved in you, and I look forward to reading your progress reports over the coming days and weeks. If you equip yourselves admirably, and you remember the Marine Corps Code at all times, and you do your best, then I know that victory will be in all of our grasp, and I can see no impediment to awarding full Marine status to all of you.”

That was her carrot, Solomon thought. The piece of information that was supposed to make them hungry for action and the glory that would come once they were full Marines.

Did it mean that they would leave Ganymede and the Outcasts? Would they be dispatched into various regiments of the Rapid Response Fleet? Solomon wasn’t quite sure how he felt about that.

It could just signal the end of seeing the warden’s face every morning, and that was something that Solomon could certainly get behind!

But there is also always the stick, as well, Solomon thought. And in this case, it would be being among the first expeditionary forces to wage a war on an alien planet and trying not to get blown up, shot, or lynched by the locals in the process.

Fun, fun, fun, Solomon thought sarcastically. He would have been more impressed if the colonel had offered them all free holidays to Bermuda.

“Each squad is to form up and receive your orders,” Asquew stated, giving the multitude one final nod. “The Code, Outcasts…”

‘Through blood and fire, I will still stand strong.

“I will stand at the borders and the crossroads, I will stand strong.

“Even with the eternal night before me, I will be the flame!”

In groups of four, five, six or more, the various squads formed up and marched to the front of the briefing room to receive special, closed-circuit orders from the warden and the colonel herself. Solomon presumed that this included details of what was to be expected of them, where they were going, and who would be their acting chain of command.

In the press and push of the other Outcasts, Solomon found the rest of his Gold Squad, where they stood in a huddle at the back.

“Well, this is all going to be a great steaming pile of…” Solomon started his own, miniature address as he looked at his crew. As uncertain as he was about this mission—about what they were going to do on Mars, and to whom—he knew that he had to give his people at least a little bit of hope, of something to make them think about each other first.

“Because we’re all we’ve got.” Solomon nodded, meaning to sound loyal, but apparently not quite managing it.

“Well, that is the most depressing pep talk that I’ve heard, Commander!” sniggered Kol. Now Technical Specialist Kol, Solomon knew. He was the youngest and smallest of their group, but he had a way with machines that had seen him given the technical specialism just as Solomon had been given command, and Wen had been given combat, and Karamov had been given medical, and Malady—

Well, Specialist Malady was a walking tank, so Solomon knew that the Marine Corps had really given him a specialism because he could withstand mortar rounds.

Next to Kol was Karamov, slightly taller and slightly older, with darker hair. He was a little more sensible than Kol, Solomon remembered. He could finally tell them apart, after almost a year of working with them. Then came Combat Specialist Jezebel Wen, still with her shadowed eyes looking angry and haunted from their earlier conversation about her father.

Which is something else I have to get done, Solomon inwardly groaned. Pacify Mars. Save Jezzy’s dad. Try not to get killed. He had a very busy to-do list, apparently.

“Gold Squad! Step up to the podium,” the colonel’s voice called out, and Solomon nodded at each of his crew in turn.

“We got this,” he mouthed the words to them. “Whatever it is, I know you lot can do it.”

Whether we’ll want to or not is another matter… Solomon thought as he slapped on his most officious smile and quick-marched to the podium with the rest of his Gold Squad behind.

“Specialist Commander Cready, a pleasure to see you again,” Asquew stated with a nod, which made Solomon feel a little off-guard. He had known that it had been Asquew and her fellow colonel that had championed his cause when it had come to whether he should be given a command specialism at all, but other than that, he had never particularly thought of her as a friend.

“The exploits of Gold Squad have traveled far and wide in some circles,” Asquew stated, looking down and shuffling what appeared to be papers or data-screens from wherever she was stationed. Gold Squad stood in a line in front of her, with the warden standing to one side. If the colonel had been worried about anyone else overhearing each squad’s orders, she did not appear to make any great effort at secrecy, and Solomon rather thought that no other squad in the room cared what was happening up here when it wasn’t to them.

“Saving the Ambassador of Earth in the Hellas Chasma, finding the remains of the Kepler deep-field ship in the Erisian Asteroid Field, and just recently, combating the Martian subversives on Titan,” the colonel summarized whatever reports she was reading.

Only they weren’t Martian subversives, were they? Solomon shared a worried glance with Jezzy on the other side of him. They had been certain that the ones who had attacked them hadn’t been Martians, because it had been the Martian delegation themselves who had come under fire, and it had been the Imprimatur of Mars who had willingly tried to save the convicts on Titan, despite the danger she had been put in.

Of course, she then called a Martian saucer to try and take all her people off of Titan, which didn’t go down too well. He wondered if they might not even be in this mess if the imprimatur hadn’t been so hot-headed. As it was, she and Father Ultor were now languishing in some Confederate lockdown facility, and Mars was howling for their release.

Solomon nodded that this was all correct.

“Then you already have a good degree of experience in these, ah, more delicate matters. Which is why I have selected the Outcasts’ Gold Squad, under Specialist Commander Cready, to have a very special role in the coming offensive.”

Oh no… Solomon’s face fell.

“What do you say, Specialist Cready?” Warden Coates snapped at him.

“Thank you, sir?” Solomon hazarded. You want us on point. First boots on the ground. First likely to get shot?

“We have intelligence that the separatists have an important base in Armstrong Habitat, one where they store a lot of their key digital records—records which may involve attack plans, schematics of Martian structures, citizen identifiers, as well as friends or allies outside of the Red Planet. I will be sending Gold Squad into Armstrong to secure that data and transmit it to a dedicated Marine Corps server.”

That is insane. Solomon saw the flaw in this plan immediately. It was, after all, a pretty big flaw.

“Excuse me, Colonel, but you want us to assault an entire habitat?”

The Martian habitats existed as vast networks of ‘bubble’ domes—geodesic structures that were simple to manufacture, and over the decades could be expanded and replaced to reflect each habitat’s growing wealth. They were the cities and townships of Mars, sometimes filled with tens of thousands of people, whereas other smaller dome ‘townships’ just enjoyed a few hundred.

And I heard that Armstrong was one of the original habitats on Mars. Solomon felt his heartrate pick up. Which meant that it was tantamount to a capital city.

The colonel wants us to waltz into the capital city of Mars and demand that the separatists hand over some data-drives?

“Are you questioning the colonel, Cready!?” the warden bellowed at him.

“No, sir!” Solomon threw a quick salute.

“It’s fine, Warden. Even I would be a little reserved if someone were to ask me to do the same.” Asquew gave the briefest flicker of a wry grin. “However, as much faith as the warden here has in his Outcasts, I would not dream of asking five soldiers to assault an entire habitat—even if one of them is in a full tactical suit.”

Was that a joke? Solomon wondered.

“You will be infiltrating the habitat, working with contacts that we already have on the inside, to secure the data and get out. I believe that…” Solomon watched as Asquew picked up another data-screen and scanned its contents. “…that getting into secure places and retrieving objects of high value is actually an expertise of yours, Cready?”

Well, she has me there, Solomon had to admit. Even if the Marine Corps hadn’t prepared him for this, he rather hoped that his previous life had. He felt a flare of his old professional pride.

“I can do it, Colonel. I can get into anywhere.”

The warden made a small, strangled noise. It was apparently unusual to boast about one’s criminal endeavors to one of the colonels of the entire Marine Corps.

“I’m counting on it, soldier,” that same colonel said.

4

Camouflage

This time, the deployment felt different, even though all the procedures that the Outcasts had to run through were precisely the same.

OUTCASTS DISEMBARK 07:00 HRS…

ALL OUTCASTS TO CARRY BASIC EQUIPMENT…

BLUE SQUAD REPORT TO TECHNICAL BAY 4…

RED SQUAD TO REPORT TO MEDICAL…

Ganymede’s internal speaker systems clattered with updates and repeated orders as the various members of the Outcasts rushed about their business, preparing in what little ways they could. There was an air of taut expectation, even worry, Solomon realized as he finished applying machine oil to the gears and servo joints in his battle harness and made sure that his personal first aid kid was topped up with all the requisite bandages, freezing sprays, and tranquilizer sprays.

“Spare oxygen cannisters…check,” he murmured as he assembled with the rest of Gold Squad in the main launch bay, located on the ground floor of the facility and looking like a large warehouse with three separate ramps leading up to thick bulkhead doors. Already there was steam rising from the vents around the doors as the ships outside connected and repressurized the seals to allow secure transit.

Apart from Malady, who lived in his suit, each squad member stood in front of the booth that contained their encounter suits, which had their identifier nametags over the frame on scrolling LEDs.

Sp. Cmdr. CREADY (S.)

The light tactical suits had a liquid oxygen mix stored throughout the harness and the undermesh suit in a series of tubes, which converted the pressurized material into breathable air, as well as having environmental filters on their helmet visor that could recycle and suck oxygen out of any near-Earth environment, like Mars. But Solomon still made sure that he clipped an extra cannister, which looked more like a silver ampule, into his harness, just in case.

“We don’t know how long we’ve got down there, but I don’t want to take any chances…” he was saying, as beside him the others shrugged into their undermesh suits and reached for their battle harnesses. These acted like a light, close-fitting flexible frame of intelligent materials on which to connect the heavy combat boots with servo-assisted joints and sheaths that stretched halfway up the thigh, as well as the power gauntlets, the breastplate, collar, and shoulder pads.

OUTCASTS DISEMBARK 07:00 HRS…

GOLD SQUAD TO REPORT TO HANGAR BAY DOOR 1 IMMEDIATELY…

“Oh crap, give a guy some time to get dressed!” Kol, ever the comedian, said just as all of the scrolling LED lights over their booths flashed red.

“What now?” Solomon growled. When he tried to pull his helmet visor from its seat, he found that it was locked in place. “Hey!?”

“Gold Squad?” said a voice, and they turned to see that it was one of the many staffers who were hurrying delivering last-minute changes or supplying the adjunct-Marines with requested final pieces of kit.

“Order change from the Lord General. Your suits will be transported alongside you, but you will be wearing civilians for your mission,” the staffer said, delivering the orders succinctly before rushing off.

“What?” Karamov coughed. “No tactical suits? We won’t last five minutes…”

But it’s an infiltration mission, isn’t it? Solomon remembered. If they weren’t allowed to wear their tacticals, then that meant they really were going to go in undercover…

But as much as Solomon felt the same trickle of doubt run through him, he knew that he also needed to give his squad some confidence in their abilities. “You heard the man, Squad. Leave everything where it is and get over to Hangar 1. I always thought those things slowed us down, anyway…” he tried to joke, turning to jog—

“Excuse me, Commander,” said an electronic, deadpan voice. It was Malady, surgically sealed into the gigantic man-tank of his full tactical suit.

Ah. Solomon considered his options, before deciding on the classic Marine Corps response, “I have no idea what they’re planning to do to camouflage you, big fella. I say we let the higher-ups worry about it.”

“As you wish, Commander.” Malady managed to not sound very pleased as the shutters on the Gold Squad booths banged closed, and they were threading their way past the other squads to be the first to assemble at the ramp of Hangar 1, where Solomon’s heart fell when he saw the warden, Doctor Palinov, and a handful of other staffers waiting for him.

“Sir?” Solomon managed to bite down on the scorn. The warden had made no attempt to hide his hatred for Solomon, claiming that the murderer and thief had no right to be there, but so far, Solomon had managed to scrape through and even win friends amongst the colonels, it seemed.

“Gold Squad!” Coates snapped at them. “You heard your orders. Infiltrate and extract. You will be traveling separately to your rendezvous point, and you will find all the equipment, including weapons, you need in the ship,” Coates nodded to the hissing doors beside him. “Your light tactical suits will be shipped alongside you and deposited at a safe location, in case you require them. Any questions?”

“Ah…” Solomon looked at Specialist Malady. “Just one point of confusion, sir…”

“Specialist Malady will stay with the tactical suits drop-off location and will be your back-up in case things…get interesting,” the warden stated.

Wow, they really are playing this one by the book. Solomon suppressed another shiver of annoyance. The colonels had even planned how they were going to tackle this mission, instead of leaving it to him to figure out. Which he was sure that he would do a better job of, given his long history of sneaking into places where he shouldn’t be.

We’ll just see what happens on the ground, Solomon promised himself.

“Injections.” Doctor Palinov stepped forward.

Solomon flinched. He knew precisely what was in some of those injector pens, and he also knew the cost.

“Something wrong, solider?” the blonde-bobbed doctor looked at him strangely over her glasses.

“Just nerves,” Solomon lied. And Serum 21. The mutagenic gene-virus that added layers of RNA to their own DNA strands, allowing them to heal faster, react quicker, be stronger and tougher… And also collapse and die at any given moment, Solomon thought, knowing that he couldn’t refuse to be injected, but also not wanting to have any of that toxin in his system.

Solomon knew that he alone, of all of the Outcasts, had a much higher dose, as well. His solution read 48% percent, whereas everyone else’s were in the low tens. He was still trying to work out if it was the doctor trying to kill him off quickly by giving him an increased chance of the deadly side-effects, or whether he was just a ‘lucky’ guinea pig.

“Just your unique antibiotic, anti-viral strains, plus a touch of steroids for the mission ahead,” the doctor lied, reaching up to apply the injector pen to Solomon’s neck.

“Hsst!” A stab of pain, and then that was it, he was done and Doctor Palinov had stepped back, watching him intently. Solomon breathed. He didn’t collapse.

“Good. Well… Next?” Palinov said quickly, looking almost embarrassed at this deception. None of the Outcasts were supposed to know about the illegal gene-therapy they were undergoing out here, but Solomon did.

“Cready! You heard the doctor, move it!” the warden shouted at him, and he did, reluctantly, step back and turn to the ramp, where the doors were hissing open.

Mars, here we come. Solomon stepped through the steam and towards a war.

The warden had been right that they were traveling separately to all of the other squads. Gold Squad merged into a small airlock and out the other side into a cramped hold far smaller than the spacious warehouses of the Marine Transporters. The hold was already partly filled with crates and boxes strapped to the sides of the walls, with a set of metal stairs leading to the decks above, down which was already rushing a man in sandy-colored robes over an undermesh suit.

He didn’t have any military insignia visible, but from the way that he moved and his general build—and buzzcut, Solomon thought, he could see all the hallmarks of military training radiating from the man.

“Gold Squad? I’m Lieutenant Vikram, and I’ll be leading you into Armstrong. You got robes, weapons, and personal communicators in the crates by the launch seats there. Make sure you check your equipment and get dressed. We’re on a small privateer merchant vessel the Bluebird, and we’ll be heading straight for deployment,” Vikram said, sparing them all a glance before stopping when he saw Malady.

“Oh,” the man said, and that was all he had to say on the matter as he turned back to the others. “I’ll be relaying your mission parameters as we go, working from the Bluebird to liaise with Marine Command on our encrypted frequency to you as you make your way through Armstrong to the target, clear?”

Not really, Solomon thought. “What about enemy contact? How many? What are our evacuation procedures?” he said, remembering his command lessons. This mission was nothing like what he had been trained to expect.

“Enemy contact?” Vikram gave a short, wolf’s bark of a laugh. “If any of you start shooting up the place in there, then you’ll be surrounded by thirty-odd thousand enemy contacts! And the evacuation procedure is simple: I guide you to your target using communicators, you get the job done, you hightail it back to the Bluebird as soon as you can, and I get us off planet before all hell breaks loose. That’s our evacuation plan.”

“We were told our light tacticals would be dropped off in case we needed them.” Along with Malady. Solomon felt a lot securer knowing that Malady would be waiting with an array of combat suits that they could hop into as soon as the bullets started flying, and he had no doubt that they would, as they always did.

“They will be. They’re being loaded in the secondary storage bay as we speak.” Vikram gave Solomon a dead-eye stare, as if the man didn’t like being questioned. “But I’ll only know the drop-off location when I get eyes on the ground. This is a highly fluid situation and we might need to change at the last moment…” Solomon made a face. Too many variables, he thought. We are going into this mission almost blind…

“Anything else? No? Good.” However, Vikram was not apparently going to offer them anything else, as he moved to re-climb the stairs and disappear through one of the doors.

Solomon stood for a moment longer, feeling uncertain, before shaking his head and nodding to the crates. “Let’s get them open, see what they’ve given us…”

Mostly, it appeared to be a selection of robes, clothes, backpacks, and that seemed to be about it.

“Really?” Karamov said miserably. “They expect us to face armed insurgents with this?”

But Solomon knew better. He might not have done anything so volatile or so threatening with so little equipment, but he had certainly managed to pull off impressive heists with little more than a lockpick and a set of gloves. “Hold your judgement, let’s see…” He popped the slight pressure seals and pulled the bag open to see that it contained a set of poly-fiber gloves, a strand of climbing rope, and various perhaps-useful devices such as carabiner clips, flashlights, handheld drills, first aid kits and a basic toolset.

What else was in there, though, was a bulky pistol and holster, spare ammunition magazines, and a small plastic wallet which, when opened, revealed a falsified identity card and a plastic envelope.

GEO-SAT SHORTWAVE COMMUNICATOR, MODEL 3x

Solomon read the packaging and ripped it open to reveal a small earbud that nestled perfectly in his right ear.

GEO-SAT TECHNOLOGIES… INITIATING…

Connection Made!

Node 1 (CREADY) Active…

Node 2 (MALADY) Active…

Node 3 (WEN) Active…

Node 4 (KARAMOV) Active…

Node 5 (KOL) Active…

Establishing Connection… SUPERVISOR NODE (VIKRAM) Active…

The tinny electronic words whispered into Solomon’s ear, accompanied by dull bleeps and hums. The small communicators would read the vibrations and movements of Solomon’s jaw as he whispered or talked, transmitting them to speech to the other nodes in the chain, looked after by their ‘supervisor,’ Lieutenant Vikram.

They were a far cry from the fully-developed systems of the visor-helmets, which displayed washed-out holographic commands, updates, battle schematics, and suit readouts on the inside of the faceplate, but at least Solomon could talk to the rest of his crew now if they got separated.

“Hey. They couldn’t find the right size?” Kol was saying mournfully as he started pulling on the costumes over his undermesh suit. A simple rigger jacket, faux reinforcements at the elbow pads and collar, along with rough, baggy trousers with multiple pockets. The jackets and trousers varied in cut and style and even color a little between the four human Gold Squad members, but they were all largely similar in affect. When they had finished dressing, Solomon looked up to see that his adjunct-Marine squad had been transformed into modestly poor Martian factory or station workers. Nothing special stuck out from any of them. Apart from Malady looming over everyone and looking about as camouflaged as a walking ballista.

Next came the sandy, ochre, and red robes—again in a variety of colors, cuts, and styles. Some were little more than ponchos, while others were styled more like a long dressing gown with sashed belts that locked and cinched at the front.

The colors of the Red Planet, Solomon thought as he adjusted his own reddish poncho robe. The colors of the Chosen of Mars, he corrected himself.

The pistols went under the robes, Solomon preferring his just above his hip, Wen strapping hers under the arm, and Karamov and Kol electing for the more traditional small-of-the-back concealed position. Each Marine wore their backpack either under or over their robes, giving them a humped appearance and only adding to the impression of the harried, already-busy worker.

“Look at us. Martians,” Solomon said with a grin, holding out his arms and turning around.

“GET YOURSELF STRAPPED IN! LAUNCH in Five…Four…Three…Two…”

The voice of Lieutenant Vikram sounded over the speaker system and their earbuds, and the floor of the hold was already starting to shake and rise as they scrambled for the chairs in place along the walls and buckled themselves in.

This was it. They were going to war.

Outside the semi-circular building of the Ganymede facility, a set of blocky vessels hissed and extruded steam. Two of them were the large square Marine transporters with their four corners displaying large omni-directional thrusters. Still more of these large ships were lowering themselves through the thin Ganymede atmosphere in holding positions.

Solomon and the rest of the Gold Squad had never seen Ganymede look so busy, and for a moment, he suddenly received an intimation of just how vast the machine of the Confederate Marine Corps really was. At times of haphazard ‘peace’—if that was what he could call the last confusing, dangerous year—it had seemed that Ganymede stood on its own, with few visitors or contact with the outside world. True Outcasts indeed.

Now, however, it looked to Solomon that the rest of the CMC had just been biding its time, as he saw lights flickering in complicated arrays of signaling between the control towers of Ganymede and the approaching craft above. Still further out from the porthole of the Bluebird, Solomon could see the large terrestrial mech-walkers converging on the storage dumps around the base, moving in complicated patterns as the facility swung into full-action stations.

The Bluebird wasn’t like the other craft that swarmed Jupiter’s moon, however. It was a fraction of the size and shaped like a small, elongated wedge of black and red metal, with a protruding belly crisscrossed with external loading straps and two fixed-state wings displaying directional thrusters, indicating that it could travel both in atmosphere and between the stars.

With roars from its two largest wing thrusters, the Bluebird was the first to ascend of all the craft locked onto the launch bay, rising on twin jets of fire and smoke before hovering in the night a few hundred feet up. Its thrusters revolved in place until they were pointed straight out as the smaller positional stabilizers fired in bursts.

WHOOOM! And, with a vibrational roar that the Gold Squad members could feel inside the craft but was silent outside, the Bluebird exploded into motion. It had none of the tonnage of the Marine transporter rockets, and so required speed as well as force to break even the thin envelope of Ganymede’s gravity.

Inside the small hold, designed for a small merchant crew to make shipments between the stations, everything shook and juddered as the Bluebird climbed, before suddenly going still as they entered true space and glided between the moon of Ganymede and its father, the gas giant Jupiter.

They couldn’t see ahead of them, but what would have surprised Solomon—if he stopped to care about such things—was what lay ahead of them. In the small patch of null space where the gravity wells of Jupiter’s competing moons cancelled each other out was stationed not one but three of the Barr-Hawking jump-ships, looking like rings attached to a small torpedo-like cockpit.

The Barr-Hawking jump-ships were insanely expensive to run, and only the deep-field and the largest of the dreadnaught battle cruisers also had their own internal Barr-Hawking particle generators.

But three had been reserved for the Outcasts alone, and one had been assigned to the tiny Bluebird, even though the fuel expenditure alone would have been worth a space station. That, if nothing else, would have confirmed just how much importance the Colonel Asquew placed on their mission—even if she had only given them heavy pistols to defend themselves.

With precise balletic grace, the Barr-Hawking was already moving ahead of the Bluebird, starting to cycle the outboard ring as it matched its trajectory and speed with the merchant craft. Gases puffed as the magnetic clamps were thrown out on cables to attach to the Bluebird’s nose and body, before the cables pulled tight and the jump-ships started to perform their own special kind of scientific magic.

The outer wheels turned faster, and the particle engines fired, creating a steady stream of electrons and gravitons that refracted the light—and therefore space—just in front of the jump-ship. The Barr-Hawking created a dip in the fabric of the spacetime continuum. It was a common misconception that they ‘tore a hole’ or ‘created a wormhole,’ which was impossible.

No, what the Barr-Hawking did instead was utilize the intrinsic properties of spacetime itself, which is malleable and ‘globby.’ Time runs differently near high sources of mass and gravity than it does in the spaces between the stars.

Riding on a bow-wave of folded spacetime, the particle generators fold distance itself in front of the jump-ships as they pulled their precious cargo behind them, and the ripple effect elongated space itself behind them. In short, it was like taking a normal step, but that one step was hundreds of thousands of miles long. The Barr-Hawking field didn’t travel underneath or go through spacetime, but instead, they allowed vessels to skip along on top of it like stones skimming and hopping over the surface of the sea.

This natural wonder was lost on the occupants of the Bluebird’s cargo hold, however, as they experienced the one thing that was always a constant: space sickness. It was a result of the primate mammalian mind realizing that it really shouldn’t be doing this at all.

Solomon and the others felt vertigo, nausea, dizziness, and eyestrain for the brief period that they were inside the Barr-Hawking field, and then they were out the other side, the particle generators on the jump-ships shutting down as the rings started to slow. The magnetic clamps decoupled, allowing Vikram inside the cockpit to angle his vessel underneath the sweeping-away jump-ship towards an entirely different scene.

The Marine Corps blockade of the Red Planet.

5

Planet of War

JUMP COMPLETED!

The Bluebird’s internal speakers announced this in the electronic voice of the ship’s automated system, and the strap locks on Solomon and the rest of the team flicked from orange to green. They could remove them now if they wished, and Solomon was the first to do so, holding onto the overhead webbing as he moved to the nearest porthole to get a look at what lay ahead of them.

Which was an entire flotilla, from the looks of it.

The Red Planet hung in space like a vengeful god, its surface ruddy and crimson near the bottom, but bleaching a yellow-white near the top, which made Solomon think of bones left out in the desert, stained and desiccated for all eternity.

But even that wasn’t the most foreboding image in front of them. The Red Planet was smeared with black smoke from the fires at the depots that had ripped apart the domes and were furious enough to be seen even from space.

And outside the planet circled the Marine Corps fleets.

There are at least two fleets here, Solomon saw quickly. Two of the massive Dreadnaught-class battleships, looking like vast triangles and flickering with lights and heavy with weapons pods, slowly revolving on their axes. From various hangar ‘levels’ of the metal pyramids, there moved a constant stream of smaller craft—mostly transporters and courier vessels heading out to the cigar and wedge-shaped battleships of the line that hung over Mars, pointing downward.

One pyramid was directly underneath them, further back from a cloud of battleships, while Solomon saw in the distance another such pyramid hanging over Mars’s far sun-ward side, surrounded by its own miasma of battleships.

“There’s enough here to level a planet,” Solomon mumbled in awe. How on earth did the Martians ever think they could win against this much firepower?

But it wasn’t done yet. As the light sparkled and the stars did strange, elongating things further out around them, Solomon saw still more ships—logistical torpedo-shaped ships as well as wedge and boat-shaped battle cruisers, being pulled by their own much smaller Barr-Hawking ships as they jumped into Martian space.

“They’re not messing about, are they?” Solomon heard Karamov whisper as he joined his commander at the porthole.

“No, they’re not…” Solomon said.

BROADCAST FREQUENCY: Marine Channel XCon-gb3H

ANNOUNCE: Bluebird, Lt. Vikram (PILOT)

DEPLOYMENT: Rapid Response Fleet, Outcast Gold Squad

ORDERS RECEIVED:

Proceed to Kasei Valles, Lunae Planum. Cross Planum to Mount Tharsis Tholus and Armstrong Habitat.

SIGNED: Colonel Asquew, Rapid Response Fleet High Command

The Bluebird started to move, angling away from the pyramid ships of the Marine Corps and instead scribing an arc that would take them towards the northern hemisphere, towards a place on the Red Planet already clustered with lights.

“They’re going to see us coming!” Solomon hissed in annoyance, but if Vikram could hear them through microphones of the earbud communicators, he made no acknowledgement.

Mars was a large planet. Not as large as others in Earth’s solar system, but sizeable nonetheless, and it was mostly rock, desert, and canyon. Just under the start of the northern hemisphere, cutting across its middle like a waistband that didn’t quite fit, was the Wallis Marineris—a giant canyon system deeper than Earth’s Grand Canyon, and stretching for far longer. The highlands around it were a labyrinth of smaller gorges and rock formations, standing over the sweeping plane of the Lunae Planum.

Standing high over the ‘Sea’ of the Moon, on the other side of the Wallis canyons, sat a series of peaks like crouching gods. The largest, and furthest in the distance, looked like Mount Doom to the naked eye—the giant extinct volcano of Olympus Mons, whose peak kissed the near orbit of space.

In front of the great king of Mars were scattered a range of smaller such mountain siblings, like islands rising out of a desert sea—the Arsia, Pavonis, and Ascraeus Mons mountains. And in front of them stood a much smaller but no less impressive shield volcano, the smallest one on the edge of the Lunae Planum plains—Tharsis Tholus.

But the ancient volcano was now topped with a cap of off-white and grey: Armstrong Habitat, built inside the crater to use its natural geology and rich volcanic minerals to create the perfect habitat. Shafts had been drilled in decades ago to tap into the thermal vents of the old volcano, pumping water available from the Mars aquifers to create abundant energy and even life inside the pressurized dome.

Armstrong was one of the first of the Martian habitats to be built, and at the time was deemed one of the most expensive, and the most audacious. Geo-engineering was a relatively young science then, but as Armstrong grew from strength to strength as the unofficial ‘capital’ of Mars, it expanded to fill the Tharsis crater entirely, running off the heat generated by the old volcano to create a world within a world, filled with trees, gardens, and buildings.

Lines of buildings, depots, and smaller dome habitats were scattered out from the entrance to the Tharsis shield in a plume of civilization. Down on the surface of the red planet, there was a constant hive of activity as the giant tracked ‘Mars Trains’ moved back and forth across the surface on their constant industrial or human business. Lights flickered in the dark of the Lunae Planum from the directional beacons and depot stations that had been built over the last hundred years of successful Mars occupation.

“This is crazy…” Solomon murmured as the occupants of the Bluebird started to shake with the burn and glare of reentry. Their view of the heavily-civilized Tharsis was occluded as their porthole became awash with burning gases as well as Mars’s thin, ionized atmosphere.

Karamov went back to buckle into his seat, but the commander stayed where he was, peering out at the myriad colors of fire and plasma that flared over the windows. He ignored the shuddering in his jaw as he held on and waited for the flames to clear.

Just like when they were leaving Ganymede’s gravity well, but this time in reverse. The shuddering and bouncing and everything. The roar and the flames ceased as suddenly as they had arrived when the merchant vessel broke through the lower levels of Mars’s atmosphere and was now scudding over the Wallis Marineris, towards the long orange desert plains of the Lunae Planum.

Vikram was angling their vessel lower and lower over the red dirt, hitting the positional thrusters as he did so to stabilize and slow their flight as they came closer and closer to the last of the rocky outcrops.

“We’re good. Landing in three…two…” Vikram’s voice doubled over their in-ear communicators and the ship speakers. Their pilot and supervisor had picked one of the last lines of rocks behind which to conceal the Bluebird, and it now swung around the blackened spires of basalt and granite, carefully moving until it could descend straight down on its directional thrusters into a nest of sand.

The roar and the whining continued for several long moments after they had reached touchdown, and Solomon could see the red localized sand devils and storms that they had themselves created by daring to disturb the sand with their rockets.

“Landing complete.” They touched down with a slight wobble before settling lower in the dirt and finally stopping altogether. Solomon and the others held their breath as they waited for the engines to wind down, but eventually they did, leaving them looking out of the portholes at an alien planet. The surface of Mars itself.

“So, the plan is…stroll over to Armstrong and ask if anyone knows where the secret Chosen of Mars hideout is, if you please?” Solomon Cready was not impressed with what he was hearing. Possibly because he hadn’t given Lt. Vikram the opportunity to explain it fully. It’s the space sickness, he thought. It always makes me cranky…

“No. If you’d listened, you’d have heard this. The Marine Corps wants you to trek west by northwest until you find one of our contacts—a water surveyor caravan under a lady called Fela, and she will take you into Armstrong.” Vikram sighed distractedly.

“And everyone wonders why Solomon’s got the reputation he has…” Wen muttered under breath.

She must just still be annoyed that I dared to come up with a plan to save her father, Solomon thought. Which he hadn’t, technically, but he’d dared to burst her bubble of self-misery and give her some hope and sometimes that was enough to make people hate you in the twenty-second century.

“And then what, walk around hollering?” Solomon ignored his combat specialist, but inadvertently proved her point. He could be difficult—cantankerous, even—but he wore it well.

“No. Fela has the name of a contact on the inside who knows the entrance to the database that the seditionists are using to coordinate their attacks,” Vikram explained, again.

“But I don’t understand why you can’t just tell me the name of this contact in the habitat,” Solomon pointed out. He had at first been proud that Colonel Asquew had recognized his squad’s achievements and had even selected them for this very special mission…

Until it started to look like we were just being led along like puppets on a string, Solomon thought. It offended his professional—well, criminal—sensibilities to be so far in the dark on the specifics of this heist.

Solomon had liked to know every detail of a job, back in his former life. He would take painstaking hours recreating the floorplan of the proposed, soon-to-be burgled site. He would take weeks surveying the joint if he had the time, getting to know all the work habits of the workers or the people who lived there—when they were about to go out for a cigarette, or what days they always took off to go to the local betting shop….

Details are where the money is, he repeated to himself another aphorism that he had picked up along the way. He had learned by hand the internal mechanisms of over thirty of the most common mechanical and automated locking systems, practicing them over and over again in whatever dive of an apartment in New Kowloon he was using as his hideout at the time, until he could unlock each one in the dark and with his eyes closed.

People thought stealing—or sneaking into places—was a crime of passion, or exuberance, but Solomon thought of his previous life more like an extreme sport. His body and mind were that of an athlete, and it took multiple run-throughs and studying and training to make sure that he could perform every move precisely when and as he needed to.

But the Marine Corps was asking him to do this—the very thing he was an expert in—without even allowing him to know half the information he needed!

“I can’t,” Vikram said nonchalantly. “I can’t tell you the name of Fela’s source because Fela herself won’t tell me. It was a requisite of her deal with the Marine Corps—that she gets to keep her contacts in the Chosen of Mars, and we don’t ask. That means that when they get burned, or she does, the damage is always localized.”

“Sounds like a silly way to do it,” Solomon had to say, although on reflection, he could understand why. “Fine. West by northwest trek across the Martian desert. Try not to die of heatstroke. Please tell me that we’ve at least got encounter suits?”

“Don’t worry, you’ll be equipped with civvie encounter suits,” Vikram said, motioning to one of the crates to pull out thin, voluminous baggie overalls, with rubberized pressure seals on the edges.

“And here…” He kicked open a ship’s locker to reveal a rack of very old, and very out-of-date, bubble-helmets.

“You’re kidding me. They fog up in no time! If we run into trouble…” Solomon was saying.

“Then don’t get into trouble,” Vikram said with a slight hint of iron to his voice. There was clearly no arguing with the man, and there was no way that Solomon would be able to convince him to let them wear their light tacticals under their robes.

“Fine,” Solomon grumbled, removing his poncho robe and dragging on the overalls, before chucking the robe over the top again. Instantly, he felt as though he were overheating, and he realized that these cheap, basic emergency civvie suits had no internal air conditioning. If he got too hot in there, he would just faint and die.

Outstanding.

“If anyone stops you, your story is that you’re mercenaries looking for work. You came to Mars because there’s about to be a lot of need for mercenaries. That will explain your attitude, at least…” Vikram said, before clapping hands in a ridiculously patronizing gesture. “Come on then, the war isn’t waiting on you!”

He’s charming, too… Solomon growled, before turning to the rest of his squad. “Malady?”

“When I’m sure that we haven’t been spotted, I’ll move the full tactical and your encounter suits to a suitable location nearer Tharsis and radio you the details… But you shouldn’t need them…” Vikram said.

“That full tactical has a name.” Solomon had had enough of Vikram’s attitude, never mind people complaining about his own. “Specialist Malady.”

“Okay, whatever you say, Outcast…” Vikram threw a mock salute and headed up the steps, back to the cockpit.

“Malady… The guy’s a fracking idiot, but, y’know, you have my permission to push him out of an airlock while we’re away,” Solomon offered.

“That would be against regulations, Commander…” the metal golem stated, true to character.

“I’m sure it would,” Solomon sighed. “Just do me a favor and stay alert on our communicator. If we run into trouble that we can’t handle, I know that I for one will feel a hell of a lot better knowing that I can call on you.”

“Same,” Wen echoed.

“Aye, sir,” the metal man said, and Solomon wondered if he could detect a note of humility in his voice.

“As for the rest of you, we’re but lowly mercenaries, wandering aimlessly across the Martian deserts looking for something to shoot at. Everyone got that? Feel free to ad lib as required…” Solomon rolled his eyes inside the over-large, ridiculous bubble-helmet that had gone out of fashion almost seventy years ago.

The inner airlock hissed open, and Solomon led his squad inside. Malady resealed the door, and they waited for the depressurization cycle to complete before cranking open the outer doors of the Bluebird.

Ahead of them, the gold and red sands of Earth’s sister stretched beyond the last of the black basalt spires. Even though Solomon had been here before, he had never had time to appreciate the sheer, austere grandeur of such a place. The sands seemed endless, broken by ridges of higher land from which plumes of the iron-laden stuff spewed in tufts and sprays. The mound of Tharsis gleamed, topped with the gray and white silver of the Armstrong dome, and the skies above were a light haze of cream. Out in the distance, far to the extreme west, there was a rising shadow on the horizon—a dark umber god with its head in the clouds: Olympus Mons.

Maybe I would have liked to come here one day, Solomon thought briefly. Maybe he could take the small tourist monorails that climbed up the side of that planet-dominating mountain. Look down from the heights, get his picture taken at the top with one of those stupid digital stickers on it ‘I Climbed Olympus!’

But none of that is going to happen now, is it? Solomon thought. Not in this lifetime, anyway.

“Come on then, Squad. Let’s go stop a war…” he called out on the earbud communicators.

“Or start one,” Wen, ever the optimist, said darkly.

6

The Red Never Forgives

Martian gravity was lighter than Earth-normal, but it wasn’t that light. In the literature, Solomon had heard it referred to as ‘butterfly gravity’ on more than one occasion, thanks to the belief that if humanity were ever able to successfully terraform it, the slightly lighter gravity would make the Red Planet (perversely) a perfect habitat for butterflies, dragonflies, and any other flying insect.

In short, it was annoying. While Solomon could keep up a good bounding jog, taking advantage that his body felt about 25% lighter than normal, it wasn’t enough of an advantage to actually stop him getting tired, for his side to not ache after the first hour, or for their human bipedal bodies to cross as much ground as he would have liked.

It might be lighter gravity and on an alien planet, but Mars is still a fracking desert! Every footstep shlucked into the sand if he wasn’t careful, and he didn’t know enough about survival training to be able to pick which areas of the plains were actually on firmer rock aggregates and which were just stilled seas of the finest sand you’d ever had the misfortune to see.

And it’s gotten into my damn helmet! He cursed at some point during their third hour of continuous jogging, now slowed to a loping walk. He had no idea how that had happened, since any hole that would let the Martian sand in surely would have led to a catastrophic loss of pressure in the rest of his stupid emergency encounter suit, right?

But there it was, Solomon was certain that his eyes felt dry, and that his face itched from the sand’s constant abrasion—even though he had no idea how that was possible.

“Commander!” It was Wen, her voice sounding small and electronic in his ear. “We got company, coming up fast on our two o’clock.”

“Fela?” he wondered out loud, turning to his right to see that his combat specialist had sharp eyes. Sharper than his.

It’s this damned suit! It didn’t have any self-cleaning mechanism like the more sophisticated Marine Corps visor-helmets. He wiped the layer of dust and sand from the outside of the helmet, to see that yes, there were two dark shapes racing over the ground towards them and throwing up plumes of dust behind them.

“They’re riding…hover-bikes?” Solomon winced at the glare as the figures wavered and broke apart in the heat waves.

“Some kind of hover-bike.” Kol, their technical specialist, stepped up to peer at them. “Not Earth-normal, must be Martian-produced…”

In fact, the two riders looked to both be on contraptions that were more like boats than bikes, but the way they were sitting forward on the high seat, leaning forward over the prow, made it look like a bike—apart from the rubber skirt that extended forward and back under the seat, and the round turbine behind the rider.

“One-person hover-craft,” Kol said as they grew larger and larger in their field of vision. “Clever…”

“No time to ogle alien technology, Kol! Anyone see insignia? The Chosen banner? Martian colors?”

“Everything is Martian colors down here, sir…” Wen said grumpily, and although she was being facetious, she was right. The approaching riders wore the same collection of drab browns and oranges that Solomon and his ‘mercenaries’ did, although they had added a bright red sash, as red as blood—the color of Mars.

“What’s the Chosen insignia again? Anyone?” Solomon once again wished that he’d had time to get properly debriefed on the situation.

“Hammer on top of the Red Planet,” Kol said, squinting behind his mask. “And uh… It’s not something I can see…”

So they could either just be proud patriots, Solomon thought, in which case they could be in trouble, or they could be undercover seditionists, in which case they were certainly in trouble.

Either way, and whatever faction of Mars that these riders represented, there was no mistaking the fact that they were making a beeline straight for Gold Squad, in the featureless expanse of rippled sand.

“I guess they want to say hello,” Solomon said carefully, one hand moving to the bulk of the pistol under his poncho robe.

“Halt! In the name of Mars!” The first rider was broadcasting over their suit’s speaker systems as the sand billowed around them as the hover-bikes settled.

“No resistance!” Solomon said, holding up a hand to them. The other he kept half-folded next to his hip, just in case… He was lying, of course. He was fully prepared to offer every bit of resistance that he had to at the first sign of trouble. And we outnumber them, two to one, he considered.

But one of the riders already had their long rifle unslung and covering them, as the speaker slowly powered down their bike and dismounted.

“Who are you? What are you doing out here!?” the Martian demanded, his strangely faceted, almost insectile helmet making him appear alien. A true creature of Mars.

“We’re, ah…” Solomon thought quickly. The cover story that Lieutenant Vikram had given them was a joke. They were supposed to be out-of-work mercenaries, wandering around the dunes of Mars? Where is our transport? How did we get here? How come we’ve only got pistols? Solomon knew that none of that would fly. And he had much more experience in lying to the authorities than he thought dear old Vikram did.

“Water surveying…” Solomon said with a shrug.

He heard Wen cough behind him.

“Water surveying,” the speaker said, his helmet turning to look them up and down. “Where’s your equipment? Seismic sounders? Drills?”

“Ah…” Solomon shrugged. “Well, we ran into a little problem with our, uh, our boss, Fela?” he said awkwardly.

“Fela…” the speaker said flatly, already reaching for a communicator on his belt.

“Yeah. We had a difference of opinion as to where to look…” Solomon said.

“Because you’re an idiot,” Wen muttered, loud enough for the speaker to hear, who looked between the woman and Solomon for a moment, before making a call.

“Survey vessel 15? This is Outrider Jacques, on the Lunae Planitia patrol… I got a team of people here saying that they belong to you…” he stated.

“If you’d only thought a bit more, then maybe she wouldn’t have abandoned us out here!” Wen said hotly, accusing Solomon. “You’re always doing this, boss! How many times do we have to run around after your harebrained schemes? When are you going to stop thinking that you know better than everyone else!?”

Ouch, Solomon thought. No need to cut quite so close to the bone…

“Easy there, lady…” The speaker waited for confirmation at the other end of the line as he looked at the irate Jezzy Wen. “No need for arguments out here. You know the saying…”

“The Red never forgives…” Kol supplied, earning a momentary look of confusion from Solomon.

“Yeah, that’s right. The Red never forgives. If you annoyed your overseer so much that she decided to teach you a lesson by dumping you out here, then maybe you should pick another job for yourselves, aye?” The speaker sounded annoyed.

Believe me, pal, if I could pick any other job right about now than I really would… Solomon thought, just as the radio crackled.

“What? What are those eejits doing all the way out on the Planitia!? I’m two klicks out of Tharsis!” The Outcasts could clearly hear the glitchy sound of a very irate woman on the other end.

“Well… Unless you want to get your license revoked, Fela, then I suggest you turn your caravan around and come pick them up. I don’t care how much they annoyed you. You can’t just dump people out in the middle of a desert in the middle of a fracking war!” The speaking Martian sighed, clicking off as the woman on the other end grumbled.

“You lot were lucky. You probably could have made it back to Tharsis in one piece, but then you’d probably only block up the clinics as they pumped you full of liquids and treated your heatstroke!” the man said indignantly. “Try to take some pride in yourselves, for heaven’s sake!” the man berated them as the other lowered his rifle.

The crisis was over. Solomon and Wen had managed to convince them that they were idiots.

“We haven’t got time to search the desert for disgruntled employees. At any moment, the damn Confederacy could start orbital bombardment, and then we’ll all be in the frack. Got it? Now get your heads screwed on right!” the Outrider—what Solomon presumed was some kind of highway patrolman—snarled angrily at them as he got back onto his hover-bike, and together, the two of them roared off back over the sands.

“Well, that went easier than I expected!” Solomon eased his hand away from where it had been hovering over his pistol.

“Only because we didn’t have to lie too much,” Wen said grumpily.

As it turned out, Fela was even grumpier than Jezebel Wen, especially as she didn’t hesitate to start berating them using her caravan’s loud speakers as soon as they could make it out trundling over the hot sands towards them.

“You stars-damned idiots! What are you doing, walking around out here!? Do you think my job is worth this hassle that you’re putting me through!?”

The woman rode at the top and front of a large structure that looked a little like a tank. Wide tracks that looped up the sides of rhomboid red-iron structure crunched slowly over the plains, with the shrouded woman sitting in a small driving booth at the very front. Solomon saw that the ‘caravan’ was actually a mobile living module as well as a workshop, with a bulkhead airlock on the side, solar panels on the roof, and rafts of metal pipes and equipment strapped all over its side, probably designed so that each water surveyor could live for months at a time out in the deserts as they searched for the easiest subsurface aquifers that the Martian populous needed.

“Goddamn idiots…” The woman was still grumbling as she pulled the caravan to a halt and swung herself over the small ladder, climbing down to greet them in person.

Fela was an older woman from the sound of her, with the same insect-style helmet over her head, and a number of light shawls and robes hanging over her encounter suit. She paused to pull one of the poles from the side of the vessel and plunge it into the ground, fiddling with the top to extend a small, rotating contraption like a wind measurement device.

“Might as well make it look as though I’m doing work, for all the good this will do me…” she muttered, clicking a few buttons on the small control panel of the pole, before heaving it back out of the ground and stowing it on the side of the vehicle.

“Ah, Fela…?” Solomon approached her a little cautiously. He wasn’t entirely sure of how to introduce himself—as a Confederate Marine or an errant water surveyor.

“I know who you are. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t,” Fela said, ignoring him as she stalked around the large caravan, pulling valves and checking readings before turning to look up at Solomon. “Well? You lot going to get in or what? I haven’t got all day!” She banged on the airlock release button, which did nothing. “Blooming thing…” She hit it again, harder this time, and the airlock started to cycle open, revealing a small airlock on the other side—more like a booth.

“I’ll ride with you,” Solomon said immediately. I don’t like the idea of us being inside this thing without any way of knowing if Fela is going to take us to Tharsis or sell us out, he thought.

“Will you now?” the old woman said somewhat caustically as Karamov, Kol, and Wen clambered into the small airlock and Fela banged the door shut behind them. There was the hiss of escaping gases, and then the hum of the emergency booth on the inside repressurizing, before presumably opening out into the main hold of the vehicle on the other side.

“Alright?” Solomon mouthed the words, knowing that the earbud would pick up the vibrations of his jaw and transmit it as speech to the members of his squad inside.

“Yep, we got a fairly standard cargo hold. Lots of equipment, a sleeping cot, microwave…” Karamov’s voice said into his ear. “She’s legit.”

Good, Solomon thought, following Fela up the ladder to the open-air booth and sitting beside her on the bench.

“Make yourself useful, hotshot.” She thumped a pair of binoculars against his chest. “Keep an eye out for any more Outriders. The little devils are getting uptight what with all this…” He saw her helmet nod up at the sky, which looked yellow and blotchy white, revealing the threat of the super-massive dreadnaughts stationed far above.

So this is what it is like to be in an occupied warzone, Solomon found himself thinking. He was surprised that both the Outriders and Fela weren’t more worried than they were. He knew that he would be if he thought that his home was in danger of getting blasted from the planet at any possible moment.

They’re a tough people, Solomon considered. Because they had to be. The Martians were insanely proud of the fact that they had taken an uninhabitable world and made a living out of it. Had even thrived, by some standards. At least Proxima has breathable oxygen and Earth-normal gravity, Solomon thought. The Martians had to spend their entire life wondering if a pressure leak would kill them all, or a solar flare, or a desert storm, or any other equipment malfunction.

No wonder Fela is grouchy.

“It would take us the better part of an hour to get to Armstrong, but it’s going to take me three. And no arguing!” Fela stated defiantly, as if Solomon had accused her of something when he hadn’t even opened his mouth.

“The Outriders and the Red Senate are on high alert, so any change in my routine might raise suspicion. So, you are going to help me conduct my near-Tharsis survey, and then we’re going to trundle back to the docking port just like normal, you okay with that?”

“Do I have a choice?” Solomon said. Will the Marine Corps wait for three hours before they begin their attack, he was thinking.

“Nope. You’re on Martian time now,” Fela said, her voice sounding smug. She settled into her seat as she looked out over the gold-red horizon and started the engines.

They crunched forward at an excruciatingly slow pace as the skies above them swirled lighter and darker with high sand-winds. Occasionally, Solomon saw small blips of buildings on the horizon, and through the automatic telescope, he could range-find and zoom in to see tiny way stations with antennas that flickered with beacon lights.

“The Red is a deathtrap. Still an entire sixty percent of the planet not seen a human boot on it,” Fela murmured to him when she saw him looking.

Occasionally a light on the front of her driving booth would flash, and she would power down the caravan’s engines, climb down the metal ladder, pull out one of the seismic rods, and once again plunge it into the Martian soil to take a reading, before pulling it back out again, loading the pole into the outboard cradle, and moving them off to their next position.

“There’s enough water down there to flood about a fifth of the surface, if you could get the water cycle right,” Fela explained after the third such survey. “But it’s trapped in a labyrinth of porous rocks and water tunnels. It moves around under there, and these surveys help to determine where the hidden water is flowing—which formation of rock will be saturated this week, next month, this season…”

“Mars has seasons?” Solomon was surprised out of his worry to ask.

“Does Mars have seasons? Pfagh!” Fela cackled derisively. “Do you lot not read up on the places you’re going to invade? Yes, Mars has seasons. We have Stupid Hot season, and then the Dust Storms from Hell season, and then the Stupid Freezing season, before another batch of Even Worse Dust Storms from Hell.”

Solomon didn’t know if she was being serious or not, but he decided that it was probably best if he just said nothing. After all, he wasn’t here to talk about Martian climate, but something else entirely…

It seems my attempts to get on the good side of Fela have failed, Solomon thought around hour two. So I might as well just…

“Who’s our contact, Fela?” he came right out and asked it.

“Hsss!” The woman jumped in her seat, the insect helmet looking at him for a moment, before she revved the engines a little louder and they moved a little faster.

“Fela?” Solomon prompted. “I know this might be awkward for you, but this is something that we need to know…”

“I know,” Fela sighed. “Just so long as your lot keep your end of the deal.”

“What deal?” Solomon said stupidly.

Fela stamped her foot on the brakes and the caravan lurched to a halt.

“Hey!” There were thumps and sounds of people falling over each other from Solomon’s earbud communicator.

“Do you mean to tell me that you don’t know?” Fela was looking up at him again, and then didn’t give him any time to answer. “Why am I surprised. Always the Confederacy. Keep everyone in their little boxes… Only tell them what they need to know to keep doing their jobs…” she grumbled.

Sounds about right, Solomon thought, if the Ganymede Training Facility was anything to go by.

“A hundred thousand Confederate credits, in a Confederate off-world account. Luna, maybe. And…” Fela started the engine again. “I want you to promise me that you’ll put an end to all this Chosen ‘First of Mars’ nonsense.”

“You don’t agree with them?” Solomon said. “I thought they were, like, the mainstream religion here on Mars.”

“They’re not a religion!” Fela said hotly, throwing the caravan into a fast swerve over a dune. “They’re a bunch of fanatics under that Father Ultor character. Thugs is what they are. Mars don’t need anyone to tell us we’re special, and that we can have everything we want… That Father Ultor is a liar and a cheat, and he’s stirring up trouble for all of us…”

“Well, he’s sitting in a Confederate max security cell right about now, him and your imprimatur…” Solomon said, hoping to find some way to appease the woman. Maybe she would give him the name of the contact they were supposed to meet.

“And that’s where you lot messed up. The people here will fight for Father Ultor—the fanatics will, in any case—but they will die for Imprimatur Valance. That’s your real problem. You give her back, and then maybe she can bang some sense into everyone’s heads….” Fela considered for a moment. “You can keep Father Ultor, though. Throw him out an airlock at the first opportunity.”

“Something that I have considered before,” Solomon murmured, remembering the awkward and bombastic priest during the terrible negotiations on Titan. He had been spoiling for a fight with the Confederacy even then.

“Ha. Good. At least we can agree on that, then…” Fela stated. “Marshal. That’s the name of your contact. He runs an electronics store in Manhattan Square. He’ll be able to take you to the Chosen’s hideout.”

7

I Hate to Burst your Bubble…

Tharsis Tholus rose ahead of them as Fela’s caravan made its slow way up the ramp to the opening in the cliff walls, where low hangar bays stretched across the gap.

“It’s busy…” Solomon said over his communicator, his eyes watching the ships and the hover-craft that were busy surrounding the entrance to Armstrong Habitat. A steady line of other caravans were arriving and leaving, and there appeared to be a whole lot more of the Outriders standing at the hangar bay doors, inspecting and checking papers. Solomon could see red flags hanging from every available banner pole and aerial, many of which had the hammer over the planet sigil of the Chosen of Mars.

“They’re preparing for war,” Fela answered him grimly. “You have to get below, here…” The older woman shifted in her seat and kicked at the back panel she had been leaning against, for it to open to reveal a tiny, one-person airlock. “Get in!”

“What if they ask to see your cargo?” Solomon asked worriedly. “We already have our story straight…”

“Let me deal with that, soldier…” Fela growled, nodding at the airlock hatch once more. “Now get in, before they spot you!”

“Fela… I need to know…” Solomon growled. Was the old woman going to sell him and his team out? How much would she be rewarded for capturing Confederate Marines—even the Outcasts?

“Solider-boy. You have to trust me, or else this isn’t going to work.” Fela’s insect helmet looked at him steadily.

“Trust you?” Solomon couldn’t even remember the time that he last trusted someone. Trust wasn’t a resource that he was particularly rich in.

“Just as I trust you not to get me killed, I hope that you will do the same courtesy. Now get!” she demanded, and it seemed that Solomon had no choice, as Fela was already wheeling their caravan into the line.

Dammit! Solomon crawled into the cupboard-like space as the water surveyor banged the hatch behind him, and he heard the pressure seals cycle, then a green light came on and there was a cranking sound. In a moment, he was blinded by the glare of the caravan’s internal lights, and Kol was pulling him from the booth to spill out into the cramped hold, next to crates and boxes and bits of equipment.

“How ya doing, boss?” Kol clapped him on the shoulder, grinning. In front of him, Jezzy and Karamov were seated on large crates, holding their pistols and looking as worried as he felt. Only the youngest of their party, Kol, appeared to be relishing the adventure.

“We’re sitting ducks,” Jezzy proclaimed after Solomon had removed his helmet and explained what was happening. Even through the thick metal hide, they could hear the whine and burn of the machines around them as the caravans shunted forward and dropships swam over the habitat like a horde of very busy and very angry hornets.

“And this Marshal… Did Fela explain her connection to him? How she knew him? How come he knows all the Chosen’s secrets?” Jezzy was demanding, to which Solomon could only shrug.

“I don’t like it any more than the rest of you…” he said, just as there was a knock on the outside metal of the caravan, and they fell silent.

Solomon crept to the hidden airlock cupboard he had just cycled through, to hear murmuring from above as the Outrider guards questioned, and he was sure that he recognized the crackly voice of Fela answering.

More bangs on the hull of the caravan, moving around them in a circle. Solomon’s eyes tracked the sounds as he took out his pistol, and very, very slowly released the safety.

What’s Marine Corps protocol for getting captured? he asked himself. Name and rank, wasn’t it? That was what his command lessons had taught him. That they all had the right to a fair and free trial under a martial court, and they couldn’t be mistreated…

But then again, we did just kidnap and incarcerate the leader of the Chosen of Mars as well as the spokesperson of the entire planet… Solomon considered as the banging approached the main airlock door and stopped. I wonder how forgiving they will be when they realize who we are.

Everyone held their breath. They waited for the airlock to hiss open, for people with rifles to step in, for there to be a shout of alarm, or a warning klaxon—

Thump-thump! But then someone shouted and thumped on the hull a couple of times, and they were moving again—but to where?

“Everyone, just be cool…” Solomon whispered as the sounds outside grew more muted. Had they entered Armstrong? With just silent nods and gestures, Solomon arrayed his team around the airlock door, crouching behind the packing crates and in the corners of the rooms with their pistols leveled at the entrance, and waited.

Kla-Thunk! With a hiss of steam, the door opened, and they were looking through the small airlock booth at the now un-helmeted face of an older woman with long hair that had once been black but was now giving over to silver and gray.

“Huh. Should have known you wouldn’t trust me,” she said dismissively when she saw the guns, shrugging as she turned from the open door.

“Looks like we’re here,” Solomon said, and led the way as he gingerly exited the caravan. They had arrived in a city about to go to war.

“Straight up that ramp,” Fela directed them to the largest concrete avenue that led upwards from the underground hangar bay that their caravan and numerous others were parked in. The air was filled with the smell of machine oil and lubricants, mixing a little sickly with the scent of roasting meat and fresh coffee as the other caravan workers settled down in their machines for the night.

“Where’s this place we have to get to? Manhattan Square?” Solomon was asking, clipping his helmet to his belt. Armstrong was entirely pressurized, he was glad to see, and it was warmed by the geothermal vents in the old volcano far below them.

“Just keep on going. The ramp leads up to Sena Avenue, and you’re going straight down that until you see a statue, and you turn right. Manhattan is the next square along,” Fela grumbled, already turning back to the caravan and starting to unload bits of equipment from its hull. “Just remember what you promised!” she muttered to Solomon. “Put an end to this mess. Stop it from happening.”

“We will,” Solomon said, although he knew that he couldn’t promise such a thing. He was about to turn when, no… He forced himself to turn back and speak to the old woman.

“Ma’am? Fela. One thing.” He stepped up to her to speak in a low voice. “What about you? When the Marines come…” Solomon remembered the image of the super-large pyramid dreadnaughts. They could firestorm this habitat from high orbit. They could land their entire battle group around Tharsis, and there wouldn’t be anything that Mars could do about it…

“That’s what you’re here for, right?” Fela looked at him in annoyance. “What do you want me to do? Hightail it out of Armstrong and live out there on the Red for the rest of my life? How long do you think one old woman will survive, even with my caravan?” Fela shook her head, her anger dissipating into seriousness. “Just get it done. Stop the war. Put an end to this fool madness that’s taken over everyone…”

“Right.” Solomon felt oddly touched by the woman’s plight. Even though she hadn’t been particularly nice to him (at all) or to any of them, she was still one older woman putting her life on the line, under a sky that could rupture with flame and fire at any moment. And all because she wanted to see her community free of fanatics.

And for a hundred thousand Confederate credits, Solomon reminded himself. Fela might be a closet altruist, but that doesn’t mean she’s stupid.

“Thank you,” he said, and led the members of his Gold Squad up the ramp.

Armstrong was bright, and Solomon wondered how until he realized that most of the triangular panels of the outer geodesic dome far above them were actually made out of a thin, photo-sensitive membrane that allowed natural light in, like a greenhouse.

It was also as hot as a greenhouse, he thought as he pulled at the heavy poncho he was wearing and was even about to take it off when Kol stopped him by putting his hand on his commander’s arm.

“Huh?”

“Look, Commander…” Kol nodded at the other Martian civilians that hurried and bustled around them, and Solomon saw what he was getting at.

The main avenue in the heart of this part of the habitat—Sena Avenue, as the water surveyor had called it—was wide enough for two double-lanes of hover and electric shuttle traffic to move at a snail’s pace up and down the center, with the avenues lined with boutique shops and what looked to be Mediterranean cafes and bistros. Solomon even saw ceramic pots of bay trees, thyme, and lavender sitting outside the establishments, as the Martian civilians hustled up and down the street.

Not everyone wore their Martian robes, Solomon saw. In fact, only a little over half of the people that he saw actually wore them, but that wasn’t why Kol was insistent that they keep theirs on. It was the fact that the ochre, orange, and reddish robes of varying cuts and styles were so demonstrably worn, and that many citizens had even added the emblem of the hammer over the planet sigil on their backs or their breast.

Still more insignia of the Chosen were daubed in red paint here and there on available blank walls. And everywhere—from the tiny sugar pots of the cafés to hanging from the back antennas of the electric shuttles—there could be seen more generic red flags of Mars.

This was a city in the grip of a war fever, and it looked to Solomon as though the red robes and blatant ‘Martianism’ was the order of the day, if they didn’t want to stand out. As Solomon surreptitiously watched the hurrying people around him, he saw that most Martians wore cheap encounter suits or overalls, indicating their status as some kind of industrial worker or miner, and that these people were also the most likely to be wearing the Chosen insignia.

And everyone is understandably stressed… He saw another bickering argument break out between the owner of a café and one of her waiters. But Mars society had also been growing and developing for the last sixty years or so, and so he could also see the makings of a rudimentary middle class, and even a few ‘elite’ Martians stepping out of stretch shuttles or talking noisily on the data-screens, all the while wearing crisp business suits.

But Mars was overwhelmingly an industrial planet, and one that was obstinate, Solomon came to the conclusion. And from the look of all of the flags, Solomon thought, they might also be becoming more than a little paranoid, too…

“BWAAARRR!” The sudden sound of a klaxon made them all jump, but the rest of the crowd didn’t seem to pay it any mind. Solomon identified the source of the noise as a speaker mounted high on a wall overlooking one part of Sena Avenue.

“ATTENTION, BROTHERS AND SISTERS OF MARS! MARTIAL CURFEW BEGINS IN ONE HOUR. REPEAT: ONE HOUR UNTIL MILITARY CURFEW… ALL CITIZENS MUST BE IN THEIR HOMES AT OH-EIGHT-HUNDRED HOURS… ALL CITIZENS MUST CARRY THEIR IDENTIFICATION PAPERS ON THEM AT ALL TIMES! LONG LIVE THE RED!”

“What time is it now?” Solomon breathed to Kol beside him, who looked around until he saw a clock over one of the buildings. The entirety of Armstrong Habitat appeared to be built on one level, with the rising lines of other red-rock buildings further ahead of them. Solomon could make out the startlingly white building of the imprimatur’s palace between the edges of buildings, as well as tall metal towers, clustered with antennas and dishes.

“Seven.” Kol nodded.

Then they had an hour to find this Marshal and get under cover, Solomon thought. Unless they wanted to have fun explaining to the Martian guards just what their forged identity papers meant…

“Come on…” Solomon started to jog down the avenue with the others behind him, which blended right in with the high level of anxiety amongst the other Martian civilians.

“Hghr!” They had reached the end of Sena Avenue to find a small courtyard with a statue as the central piece of a white-fountain. Absurdly, it was a statue of an over-large Mars rover—one of the earliest ones sent up there in the twenty-first century, Solomon saw, and from its tracked feet flowed clear water.

But that wasn’t what had drawn Solomon’s attention. It was a group of the Martian Outriders, still wearing their insect helmets and their heavy robes even though the interior of Armstrong was breathable and warm, and they were surrounding somebody.

Thwack. Solomon flinched when he heard the dull thwack of a fist against flesh. He hunched his shoulders and kept walking, before a whimper of a voice called out, “Help!”

Solomon slowed his footsteps.

“Chief, what are you doing?” It was Kol, looking alarmed at their leader’s indecision. Karamov and Wen had also slowed to a halt, looking at Solomon with shadowed, uptight eyes.

“It wasn’t me! I’m innocent, I swear!” came a cry from behind the huddle of guards, followed by another resounding slap. The Outrider guards moved, broke ranks as they pushed the crowds out of the way, and there, Solomon could clearly see who they had been tormenting. It was a boy, no older than fifteen or sixteen perhaps, dressed in the shabby red and ochre industrial work clothes of any other Martian youth, but with a red mark on one side of his face, and blood pooling from a cut to his lip.

“This boy was found stealing food rations from the stalls!” one of the insect-headed Martian Outriders called out to the crowd. “What a lack of moral fiber that shows!”

“I don’t like this…” Solomon muttered, feeling his chest tighten. He had always had a short fuse, and it was always triggered by authority figures acting like bullies. He didn’t know why he was like that. Maybe it was the hazy memories that he didn’t really recall of a father back home somewhere in the American Midwestern Confederacy. Or maybe Solomon just had a hard time dealing with authority…

“Sir… Don’t…” Kol warned.

“We’re at war, son!” the Outrider guard turned and screamed at the youth, who just stood there with lower lip quivering and the watchful nervousness on his face of one of the young when faced with a force that was older and much more powerful than they were.

“You think you got more of a right to that ration pack than the stall holders? You think you’re special, do you, son?” the Outrider was roaring, taking a step toward the boy.

Solomon found his hands balling into fists at his side.

“This would never happen if the imprimatur was still here…” the specialist commander overheard one of the watching, aghast Martian citizens mutter to their neighbor.

“It’s these Chosen of Mars—they’ve taken over!” their neighbor agreed.

“Stealing food is a crime, lad…” The Outrider loomed in front of the boy now, and the three other guards were standing in a rough semicircle around the confrontation, holding their rifles across their chests.

“In any other time, we’d fine you, clip you around the ear, and send you home to your parents… But now that we’re at war…” the Outrider’s voice dropped. “Stealing rations is about as close to treason as you can get, lad…”

“Hey, boss!” It was Kol, tugging on Solomon’s upper arm now. “What are you doing?”

The commander looked down, seeing red for a moment before he realized that he had taken a step toward the scene, and his hand had slipped under his poncho to the pistol at his hip.

“Undercover, right?” Kol whispered at him insistently.

“You’ll be lucky if you ever see daylight again, son!” the Outrider was bawling at the youth. “The new Mars hasn’t got any space—or spare oxygen—for thieves and criminals! For unpatriotic people!”

“Get off me,” Solomon snarled at Kol, and over the younger man’s shoulder he saw the grim faces of Jezzy Wen and Karamov. They looked both as hurt, guilty, and furious as he was at this display of cruelty, but they were clearly also caught on what to do.

Solomon breathed quickly, shallowly for just a moment. He wondered what he was going to do. If it was just him here, then he would have charged in to break the bullies’ noses—but with his crew here, his team? With the fate of the war resting on his shoulders?

“Let this be a lesson to the rest of you!” the Outrider hollered, now raising the butt of his rifle over the young boy’s face…

Stuff this. Solomon snapped.

“We’re with you, Commander,” he heard Jezzy mutter. She pulled her gun from its holster and held it low.

Solomon nodded, and moved—

CRACK!

He aimed the shot not up at the sky—which presumably would have only burst a hole in their pressurized environment—or at the guards ahead of them, but instead he shot past the shouting, irate Outrider guard about to hit the youth and managed to take out the Martian rover’s marble antenna.

There was a moment of shocked silence, and then, all hell broke loose.

Screams and shouts filled the air as the crowds started to scatter away from them. Solomon stepped forward, his pistol still held high.

“Weapons down! Weapon down!” the Outrider guards were shouting at him as they raised their rifles.

“Don’t move!” This command came from Jezzy, emerging on the right of Solomon, her pistol leveled at the nearest guard.

“You heard her,” said Karamov, stepping out of the crowds on the left—to be joined by Kol, looking not as eager as the other two but still with his pistol out and aimed at the guards.

Five guards, four of us, Solomon did the quick mental arithmetic. But one of theirs was standing in front of the boy, unsure of what to do. That meant four armed gunmen versus four of the same, Solomon calculated,

“Drop your weapons or we’ll blow you away!” one of the guards was screaming, but Solomon kept his pistol pointed straight up, while Jezzy, Karamov and Kol just stood and glared, waiting for the order.

“Touch that boy again and I’ll blow a hole through the habitat’s window,” Solomon said calmly, even adding a smile at the end of it.

“You wouldn’t dare!” the central guard snapped back. “Causing a loss of pressure for all the people of Armstrong? You’re bluffing.” The guard shook his head. “Take them down…” he said, turning back to the boy.

BANG! Solomon pulled the trigger of his pistol, and the Outrider guards in front of him flinched.

Tsssss…. There rose a very fine, high whistling sound from somewhere far above them.

“Commander?” Karamov muttered in horror beside him, and it wasn’t just his own men who were horrified at what he had done… The Outriders were looking panicked up and down the avenue, at their attackers, at the civilians still screaming and shouting.

BWAAAARRRM! Suddenly, klaxons blared across the habitat as red and yellow lights competed with the street and shop lights for their attention.

“HABITAT BREACH! ALL CITIZENS TO MAKE THEIR WAY INSIDE, IMMEDIATELY! REPEAT, HABITAT BREACH…” the speaker systems started to call out on repeat.

“What did you do!?” the Outrider guard in front of the fountain was saying. He looked half-convinced to order his panicking men to fire, and half-convinced that he wanted to flee indoors, even though he was already wearing one of the insectile encounter masks…

“It’ll take a while for all the oxygen in a habitat the size of Armstrong to bleed out.” Solomon shrugged. “I’m sure you guys have contingencies for that, don’t you? Repair drones? Spray-plastics? You Martians are a resourceful bunch, I’m sure you’ve dealt with this sort of thing before…” Solomon said.

“Us Martians…” the guard echoed Solomon’s words, sounding suspicious.

“Now release that kid, or else I will add another bullet to the hole up there. Which will mean that your repair crews have twice as much work to do, and Armstrong will be losing twice as much oxygen. Hey, maybe I’ll just keep on firing…” Solomon grinned.

“Gah!” The main Outrider guard—who must have been some kind of captain, Solomon thought—snarled at him in indignation and frustration, looking from the thieving boy to the man with the gun pointed at the thin skin of Armstrong Habitat.

“You know I’ll do it…” Solomon said with another wolf-like smile.

“He will. He’s crazy…” Kol added helpfully.

The Outrider guard who could be a captain looked between their attackers and the boy for a long moment, and then, with a shove, pushed the boy towards them. “This won’t solve anything,” the Outrider said. “We’ll find you. We’ll find the kid. The Chosen are unstoppable, and the Red never forgives!” the man snapped at him.

“Walk towards me, go to the nice lady with the gun,” Solomon said, nodding for the boy to hurry to stand behind Jezzy as he started to take a slow step back from the courtyard.

“You Chosen are unstoppable, huh?” Solomon called out as he started to quicken his pace, keeping his gun raised high at the Armstrong skin far above, as Karamov and Kol kept their guns on the four guards opposite them. “Tell that to the Marine fleet about to fall out of the sky on top of you.”

“You Martians,” the Outrider captain sneered. “You’re Confederates, aren’t you? What are you? Deserters? Freebooters?”

“I’d love to stop and chat, but, y’know…” Solomon nodded above them, where the hissing sound had now become a wail and a roar of wind. He wondered if he could even feel it getting cooler. “The atmosphere in this place sucks.”

They backed down the street, waited until they were turning the next avenue, and then ran.

“Dammit, Commander!” Kol was shouting as they sprinted as fast as they could down the avenue. “You fired bullets inside a habitat!”

“I didn’t really have much choice, Specialist!” Solomon countered as the habitat alarms and klaxons sounded behind them

BWAAARRM!

“HABITAT BREACH! ALL CITIZENS TO MAKE THEIR WAY INSIDE, IMMEDIATELY! REPEAT, HABITAT BREACH…”

“But you broke an entire habitat, Commander!” Kol pointed out.

People were scattering from the streets ahead and behind them, rushing into the nearest shops and buildings as fast as they could, no matter if they lived, worked, or were just passing by. Shop owners and residents were hurriedly pulling down the flimsy plastic frames with the rubberized seals over the doors and windows. Each and every building would become its one tiny little airlock, and all of those with air conditioning or air filtration units would at least have enough oxygen to wait out a serious crisis. The rest of the shops that didn’t would have to hope that the authorities fixed the hole in less than whatever time it took for them to use up their available oxygen.

“Hoi! There they are!” they heard shouts from behind them as the Outrider guards gave chase.

“Oh frack,” Jezzy said, skipping and turning in midair to fire a warning shot into the tub that held a bay tree beside the running Outriders. The tub exploded, showering the nearest guard with dirt as the spindly tree fell to the ground. It wasn’t enough to slow them down, but it did make them a little hesitant to be so quick…

“Up here. Follow me!” this came from the boy, already peeling off from the main pack and leading the others up a set of external stone stairs to the roof of one of the nearest buildings. Solomon didn’t hesitate to follow, and the rest of the squad piled after him.

8

Honor Amongst Thieves

There is no rain inside a habitat, and thus no need for a peaked roof, tiles, slates or guttering. There is also a lot of heat, which needs to be carefully conducted away at every point in the system.

Both were reasons why the members of Gold Squad found themselves chasing after a boy across a complicated arrangement of flat-roofed buildings, jumping between the small gaps in the buildings as much as hopping low container walls to the rooftop below, before continuing in a haphazard zigzag across the heights of Armstrong. Armstrong had long since taken lessons from the hot climate architects of the Mediterranean and the Middle East of Earth, who used wide, flat spaces to radiate heat back into the air, as well as allow the building to cool from as large a surface area as possible.

“Unnf!” Solomon jumped a container wall to land on the next rooftop, beside a line of red and ochre robes laying out on the warm stone.

“I think we lost them.” It was the boy, collapsed against the far container wall and panting, his arms over his knees. From below them, Solomon could still hear the worried and angered shouts of both the civilians terrified of them and the Outrider guards hunting for them. As the rest of the undercover—not-so-undercover anymore, Solomon thought—Gold Squad hunched and collapsed by the low retaining wall of the flat roof, they all held their breath as the shouts below moved off, to be replaced by the WAO of the station’s klaxons and the buzz of small robot drones rushing to repair the rips in the habitat fabric.

“Was that an entirely wise move, Commander?” said Kol, looking over at him as he slipped the ridiculous bubble-helmet of their borrowed suits on.

“Good idea, Squad.” Solomon cursed himself for not thinking about it sooner, gesturing for everyone to put on their helmets, just in case the robot repair drones up ahead didn’t get the hole in the habitat fabric fixed in time.

Until he looked over at the boy, hunched and large-eyed with worry sitting crouched across from him.

Nuts. “Here.” He started to throw off his orange robes and unzip the industrial worker’s encounter suit. “You need this more than we do, probably…” he murmured.

“Commander!” Karamov said suddenly in alarm, throwing a look above.

“What? You want this kid who just saved our lives to die because of us?” Solomon returned indignantly. He knew that he was acting waaay out of the official Confederate Marine rulebook, but what choice did he have?

“No, it’s alright…” Surprisingly, his offer of aid was turned down by the very youth who needed it the most. “They’ll get it fixed. They’re already spraying it with adhesives…” The boy shrugged, which Solomon thought was a remarkably resilient gesture for one so young. As a way of explanation, the boy added, “It’s nowhere near the first time that’s happened…”

“What, that someone shot a hole through the habitat?” Solomon left his suit on, but his helmet off. He trusted this kid, for some reason, which made him stop. Why? He was a little thief, wasn’t he? Supposedly stealing food rations from other Martians. Not exactly the actions of a saint…

Because that is precisely what I would have done in his situation. Solomon grinned slightly.

“Well, there’s always a few nutters with guns on Mars.” Another shrug from the youth, looking up to watch the robot drones at work.

The kid was right, Solomon saw. It took four drones to do it, rising on small puffs of positional rockets before they clung to the translucent and milky panels of material—three to apparently ‘hold’ the stretched canvas taut, and the fourth one that stayed in the air, buffeting and swaying in the storm of winds up there, to spray the entire section of the membrane with some thick, viscous liquid. Within seconds, the howling wind had decreased to a low murmur, a whine, and then stopped.

As soon as the gale from the loss of pressure had stopped, Solomon and the others heard the hissing as great jets of steam—what he assumed must be pressurized oxygen—were released around the edges of the ‘walls’ of Armstrong Habitat as it automatically repressurized.

“Of course, now you lot are screwed, right?” the kid said with a sniff.

“I beg your pardon?” Jezzy said from her crouch by the wall, looking over the edge to keep an eye on the locked-down buildings outside.

“Well, damaging a habitat is at least an exile from Mars offense. Off to Titan or the asteroid worlds for the lot of you,” the boy said, breaking into a grin.

“You little…” this came from Kol, apparently the most upset by what they had just taken part in.

“Marine,” Solomon quelled his anger with one word, before turning to the boy. “I wouldn’t worry about that, kid. We’ve already been to Titan, and I don’t think they want us back.”

“Well, the Chosen are talking about bringing back the Long Walk,” the boy said obstinately, as if there were an argument and he was going to prove just how brave he was compared to them.

Teenagers. Solomon rolled his eyes. He couldn’t remember what it had been like being a teenager, but he knew that he must have been just as difficult and sullen as this one. “Long Walk?” Solomon asked genially, not taking the bait. Youths like him—like the one Solomon had been—thrive on conflict and argument. Solomon figured that if he didn’t have the officials of Mars to be mad at them, he’d probably just as happily be mad with them if they let him.

“Yeah. It’s frontier justice out in the townships. But the imprimatur said it was illegal when she was here,” the boy said with a somewhat gleeful sense of macabre humor. “If someone does something really bad, then they kick you out of the habitat with whatever cheap-ass encounter suit you’ve got, and you have to figure it out for yourself. They won’t take you back in, but if you can manage to walk all the way to the next township habitat, then the Chosen reckon that the Red’s forgiven you, and you can start again.”

“How much oxygen do these suits hold?” Solomon wondered aloud.

“Not enough.” The boy shrugged. “But I ain’t worried. They’ll never catch me anyway…”

“Don’t say that,” Solomon said suddenly, and severely. “First rule, son: you always get caught, one day. Everyone gets caught. It’s just the luck of the game.” It was after all, Solomon considered, just why he had left the Midwest of the American Confederacy and traveled to New Kowloon. He was starting to get sloppy. He had to jump-ship to a new territory—the territory where a thief like him could make it big.

“You say that like you mean it,” the boy said defiantly, standing up and yawning.

Ah, the metabolism of youth, Solomon thought ruefully. His limbs still ached, and his side was a dull twinge of pain where it was still healing from getting shot. He envied the days when he could run across an Earth city or fall from a window as he escaped his crime and still get up five minutes later.

“I do mean it.” Solomon stood up as well, nodding for the rest of his squad to do the same. “All of us here had interesting lives before we came to Mars.” Before the Marine Corps, he almost said. “And one thing I know is this, son: if you want to keep on doing what you’re doing—getting away with it, I mean—then you gotta be prepared to face the consequences when it goes wrong. Because there is always going to come a time when even your luck runs out, or just that some other guy is luckier than you.”

“Not me, I’m the best in Armstrong,” the little thief said proudly.

“Yeah, I used to think the same thing too,” Solomon murmured. He liked the kid. He was tough, street-smart, and willing to take his own chances. Even if he was being stupid about it.

“Commander…” this time, the one to berate him was Karamov, looking at him without helmet and nodding to further inside the township. Solomon got his meaning. We don’t have time for this. There’s about to be a war.

And it was probably a war that could easily flatten this habitat, and this boy, Solomon thought grimly. “You know Marshal? He runs an electronics store in a market near here?”

“Old Man Marshal? Yeah. I know him. A real tight-ass,” the kid laughed.

“Ha. What, he caught you stealing from him, did he?” Jezzy said wryly. Even though all the Outcasts were once criminals and would-be convicts, Solomon had always thought that it was Jezebel Wen with her career in the Yakuza who he most acquainted with. Solomon didn’t know what wrongs Karamov and Kol had committed in their pasts to deserve the long stasis-sleep to Titan, and get derailed for Ganymede instead, but Solomon got the impression that their crimes weren’t in the same league as his and Jezzy’s.

“Something like that, lady…” the youth grumbled.

“Whatever. You’ll be safe with us,” Solomon said. “Can you take us to him?”

“What’s it worth?” the boy returned without a shadow of hesitation.

Smart kid, Solomon thought as Kol, still behind his bubble-helmet, burst out indignantly.

“Why you little— We just saved your life!”

“Yeah, that’s gotta count for something, right?” Solomon pointed out.

“Mhm.” The youth apparently would have preferred some sort of more physical sense of moral satisfaction, hopefully in the form of actual credits, but when he realized that he wasn’t going to get any of that, he just shrugged in the nonchalant manner of all youth and nodded. “This way.”

“Look, kid. I don’t even know your name…” Solomon said, meaning to give the boy one last piece of advice as they followed the youth over the side of the building to a set of stars that led back down to the quiet streets below.

“Tomas,” he said, not looking back.

“Just trust me on this, Tomas. I know you probably think that we’re old, and that we’re not as quick or as smart as you, and maybe you’re right…” Solomon wondered why he was even attempting to pass on this guidance to the kid. Would he have listened at the boy’s age?

Oh yeah, this place is going to erupt in fire and death from an orbital bombardment if we don’t stop it, Solomon kept on thinking. That is why I’m helping him. “But just hear this. Those Outrider guards—Chosen of Mars—whoever they are, really… They know your face, and they’ll be coming for you, because you showed them up. You made them feel stupid. It’s what people do, especially bullies. They can’t stand it when they’re beaten.”

“So? I’ve gotten away with it up until now…”

“Up until now, exactly,” Jezzy said harshly, and Solomon was surprised at the schoolmarm attitude he heard from his combat specialist. Maybe they did things differently in the Yakuza, after all?

The group were ghosting through the mostly quiet streets of the city as the warning klaxons continued overhead. It seemed that Armstrong had an automated system, and that the Martian citizens wouldn’t come out of their pressure-sealed houses and shops until the all-clear was sounded.

Which meant that there was probably going to be safety inspections and regulations to fulfill, even out here on the frontier planet of Mars, Solomon recognized. Good. That bought them some time.

“So? What’s the point anyway? The Chosen are only making everyone’s life a misery, and the whole planet is going to be at war any day now, anyway.”

Any hour, more like. Solomon bit his tongue. They passed the plastic-sealed windows and doors of cafes and restaurants, everything looking eerie and strange. The Chosen haven’t told the people that there are two Confederate Marine Corps fleets in high orbit above the planet, he considered. That must be why the boy wasn’t panicking more.

“Like I say, kid. Every thief gets caught one day. You already did. It’s just the natural way of things… But the mark of a really clever one is what happens next. How do they get out of it? What can they offer? Trade? Do?” Solomon said. He couldn’t remember all the times that he had now been ‘caught.’ Not by the Confederate Enforcers of Earth—that had only happened once, and had set him on his path to here, after all—but he had been caught a whole heap of times by private security, or the American Mob, the Mafia, or the Yakuza. What had saved him was that he always had something to trade—a job for a job, information for his freedom…

“Look, you want to continue doing what you’re doing?” Solomon cut to the chase. “You want to be the best thief on Mars? Then start being smarter. There’s a water surveyor down in the hangars called Fela. Go and beg, plead, pray that she’ll take you on, and get yourself moving between the habitats for a living. That will keep you alive,” Solomon said.

If, of course, all of Mars doesn’t become a ball of smoking rock and ruins by next morning. He bit his lip.

“Really? Getting out of Armstrong?” The boy looked up at him with a new expression, and it looked like hope.

“Yeah, sure, why not?” Solomon said. “A smart lad like you should be able to make something work.”

The boy grunted and nodded, and that appeared to be as good a promise as any that Tomas would take his advice that Solomon was going to get. He hoped that he had managed to save the boy’s life, to get him out of the habitat before the war broke out for real…

“We’re here.” The boy stopped beside a large pagoda-like sealed tent that sat beside a dozen or so others, backed onto the stone buildings. They were in a long, cobbled avenue with more of the bay trees and Mediterranean shrubs in pots, and with a line of dimly-glowing LED lights set into the middle of the floor. As Solomon and the others scanned the area, the commander saw the detritus of what would have been a busy market if the entire habitat hadn’t been shut down by his actions: crisp packets and food wrappers beside scattered oddments and even a few credit coins.

“Ace!” Tomas quickly bent to scoop them up, before returning to the tented stall and hitting the plastic with the flat of his hand. “Marshal! Open up! It’s all clear!” the kid shouted, earning a groan from Karamov.

“I guess we’ve given up not drawing attention to ourselves,” he grumbled.

“We did that when the commander decided to shoot a stars-damned hole in the ceiling!” Kol mumbled, but Solomon ignored them both. He knew that he had to let them grumble. He wasn’t going to be one of those commanders who had to only hear positive things said about him all the time.

“Go away!” they all heard banging and shuffling coming from inside the plastic.

“Marshal! Get your lazy butt out here!” Tomas said again, laughing.

“I said go away, Tomas!” The old man wasn’t budging.

Solomon cleared his throat and stepped up to the milky-white plastic and spoke as loud as he dared through the pressure seal. “Marshal? It’s us. We’re friends of Fela,” Solomon growled.

There was another loud bang and a very audible swear word from the other side of the tent, and then a hiss and a zipping sound as the plastic was rolled up by an aging black man in a simple vest top and baggy trousers, with a tool belt and crossed-over bandolier of gadgets and equipment. Marshal had long dreads in a braid down his back that had long since given over to gray, and he had speckles and blotches on his cheekbones under somewhat rheumy eyes.

He doesn’t look like the sort of secret operative to help us infiltrate the hideout of the Chosen of Mars, Solomon thought, but then again—considering what he and his Gold Squad were wearing—looks could certainly be deceptive, couldn’t they?

“Good day, Marshal,” Solomon said with a tight smile. “I think we’ve got some work to do, right?”

The old man looked between the bedraggled, tired, and wary-looking Outcasts in their Martian civilian clothes for a moment, before stepping back and beckoning them inside. “I guess you’d better come in, hadn’t you?”

9

Instincts in the Dark

“You know why we’re here.” Solomon looked at the old man surrounded by his benches of electronic gadgets and spare parts as he hurriedly pulled the plastic seal back down to the floor. It appeared that the tables here were the ‘front’ of Marshal’s store, and a door led into the stone-built building which—presumably—was the man’s workshop and inventory.

“I do,” Marshal said severely, not stopping as he squeezed past them and through the open door. “Come on, the war won’t wait for the likes of us,” he said over his shoulder, and Solomon and the rest shuffled through to find themselves in a small room with a narrow pallet bed on one side, a tiny kitchen stove, and more crates and boxes.

“I take it that was you then?” Marshal nodded up to the ceiling.

“We had, ah…a difference of opinion with your local constabulary,” Solomon hazarded.

“They shot a hole through the habitat, Marshal! These guys are crazy!” Tomas said exuberantly.

Wonderful. If that is the only lesson that he takes from this… Solomon sighed, drawing a hand over his face.

“Huh. Guess it’s all the same one way or another…” Marshal shrugged. There was a general air of malaise around the old man, as if he had already given up hope that he would get out of this alive.

“We’re going to stop this,” Solomon said. “With your help, that is.”

“My help?” The old man laughed abrasively. “You’re going to need a lot more than that, let me tell you…” He bent down to pull aside a dusty but intricately patterned rug to reveal a metal trapdoor. After opening the code lock, he pulled it open to reveal that the house lay over a dark, brick-built tunnel.

“Geothermal vents that heat up the city in the night and cool it down in the day. Pretty ingenious really,” he said.

“They’re pressurized?” Solomon frowned. The trapdoor was no airlock. There were no pressure seals that he could see.

“The entire city is. Even the vents and tunnels underneath it. Easier for workers to go down and clear out any cave-ins or work on the fans,” Marshal said.

“Commander… We really don’t have any time for planetary architecture…” Jezzy murmured beside him, already pulling out her pistol in one hand and a flashlight from her pack in the other.

“Right. What can you tell us?” Solomon asked the old man.

“Head straight, Follow the tunnel to a T-Junction and turn left, then another right, and then right again. That brings you up to the first Chosen checkpoint,” Marshal stated.

“What?” Kol burst out. “Checkpoint? I thought the point was that we could bypass the guards…not walk straight into them!”

The electronic engineer shrugged. “That’s the best I can do. But what I can tell you is…” He turned to one of the plastic crates, pulling it out to move bits of equipment back and forth, this way and that, until he found what he had been looking for.

“Amp converter. But one that I’ve set to receive about sixty percent higher output than the habitat regulations allow,” he stated.

“Right… And how does that help us?” Solomon said.

“Well, beyond that checkpoint is the main generator station for the Arceos District,” Marshal said.

Solomon looked at the man in bemusement.

“I was brought in by the Chosen and paid a very high fee to help install a few subroutines in that generator,” Marshal explained. “And that requires some very careful measurements of amp and wattage being used and produced… And Arceos, which is a pretty normal district just like this one, with shops and warehouses and residentials— Well, it requires about fifty percent more energy than any other similar district…” Marshal stated.

“And just what does that even tell us?” Solomon was confused.

“That Arceos is running some pretty heavy computers down there…” Kol, who was their technical specialist, explained.

“This one’s got it,” the old man said appreciatively. “Arceos is where the Chosen have got all their servers and mainframes, I promise you.”

“How do you know?” Solomon didn’t move. “There could be another reason. A secret project. Something you don’t know about…”

“I’m a trained planetary habitat engineer,” the old man stated. “I helped out on the schematics and electrical overflows and shortages of this entire habitat. I know what’s running where, and I know when there is something pretty suspicious, and what’s going on in Arceos is it,” he said, with a touch of iron in his voice. “And besides, time is running out and I’m the only one who was willing to talk to Fela, so…”

“So, you’re all that we’ve got.” Solomon nodded, looking at Jezzy and the others of his team a little warily. Marshal was right, and the commander knew it. He was their best lead, and they didn’t have time to start scouring the city for another way into the Chosen’s database.

“Fine.” Solomon came to a decision. “Just what are we supposed to do with this converter thing of yours, anyway?”

“Get past the checkpoint and install it on the generator. It’ll cycle through the usual power outage, but it’ll force the generator to take sixty percent more than even it is used to. It’ll blow the batteries, forcing Arceos to go dark,” Marshal stated. “Whatever servers the Chosen are running will go offline, and whatever checkpoints, cameras, security systems or transmitters operating out of Arceos will go dark too…”

“Until they fix it,” Kol stated, looking at the round, tubular contraption with wires and cables splaying out of either end.

“Yep, until they fix it. But by then, you’ll have gone in and done what you need to do, won’t you?” Marshal said severely.

“I guess we’ll have to,” Kol muttered, frowning. Solomon could see that this inelegant solution wasn’t what his finetuned technical brain approved of, but that was Mars for you. Solomon sighed inwardly. It was a rough and ready place, full of cheap austerity fixes and cobbled-together technologies.

No wonder the colony worlds hate us so much, the brief thought flashed through Solomon’s mind. The Confederacy was doing everything it could to keep them poor, while it profited off their riches. Only Proxima—far away enough and large enough, with a fully breathable and sustainable ecosystem—came close to breaking free of Confederate control…

Anyway. Solomon shook his head. “Jezzy, you’re with me. We’re lead contact.” He crouched down to be the first to jump down into the tunnel below. “Kol, you back us up. I want you ready to install that converter thing of his at the first opportunity.”

“Got it, sir.” Kol took the device from Marshal’s hand, turning it over once or twice and looking at it with apparent disdain before slipping it into one of his trouser pockets.

“And, Karamov, rear guard. You know the drill… Protect our backs, jump in if we can’t get the job done, and be ready with your medical kit when we need.”

“Absolutely, Commander.” Karamov even gave a small salute.

“What about me?” came a younger voice. It was Tomas, looking between all of the much older and much larger Marines with a sort of earnest desperation on his face.

“What about you, kid?” Solomon paused. “You already have a job to do, don’t you? See Fela. Do it now.”

“I can help. I’m quick. I’m smart…” Tomas started to argue.

“Tomas, no.” This came from Marshal, settling a wrinkled and much work-scarred hand on the boy’s shoulder. “We’ve done our bit. Now we have to let them do theirs.”

“But I can help. Much better than pretending to be a water surveyor!” Tomas shrugged the old man’s hand off.

“No, Tomas.” Solomon was adamant, looking hard in the boy’s eyes until his face flushed and he was forced to look at the floor. “You know what I said about being smart? That you have to be smarter? This is one of those times. We’re the ones who can get this job done, not you.” And I really don’t want anyone else to die because of me, Solomon thought.

“You need me,” Tomas stated indignantly.

“No, kid, we don’t…” Jezzy shook her head, impatient to get going.

Actually… A thought crossed Solomon’s mind. “Look, you really want to help?” he asked, and then explained what he wanted the kid to do. It was still dangerous—very dangerous, perhaps—but it was still safer than going up against the Chosen in the dark tunnels under the city, or having bombs dropped on his head by the Rapid Response dreadnaught far above.

“You think you can do that?” Solomon asked.

“Easily.” Tomas grinned, and was already making his way out of the room, and back out into Armstrong to get started.

“You reckon you should have done that, Commander?” Karamov asked doubtfully.

Solomon opened and closed his mouth, before saying, “Probably not. But I was just like him once. Still am, maybe. Young and dumb. Wouldn’t listen to anyone. And I would get myself into more trouble on my own than I would if I had a job to do. At least this way…”

“At least this way, he’s helping his fellow Martians free ourselves of that terrible First Martian business,” the old man broke in, his tone serious. “The war is going to come to all of us—young and old, loyal, criminal, or Chosen alike. It’s good that he has a chance to play his part,” Marshal stated, and that was that.

But as Solomon threw a quick salute at the old engineer and dropped down to the stone floor below with a light thud, he couldn’t help but wonder if it really was a good thing that people like Fela and Marshal and Tomas got sucked up into the Confederate-Colony war. They were normal people, like he had once been, after all. When were they ever going to get to lead their own lives and not be pawns of one side or another?

Of course, Specialist Commander Solomon knew that who he was really thinking about was himself, but he knew that there was nothing he could do to get out of his situation yet, anyway.

“Was it first right or first left?” Jezzy breathed into the dimly-lit tunnel. It was broad enough for two to walk side-by-side and hewn out of rough yellowish sandstone blocks with an uneven rock floor. The Outcast Marines could feel a gentle cooling breeze meet them as they moved through the shadows, with just the light of their handheld light for guidance.

“First left, then two rights,” Solomon said.

“Oh yeah, I forgot you were Mr. Quick Thinker…” Jezzy grumbled.

Oh, you’re still mad at me, then? Solomon thought, before he stepped out in one smooth movement with his gun and light raised in crossed-over hand positions. Blind and shoot, his training told him. When you were working in situations like this, the Marine Corps strategy was to act fast and to overwhelm the opponent. No time for second-guessing…

But of course, there was no one waiting there down the tunnel. No light. No sensors. No cameras. Just more leagues of featureless dark.

“Look, Jezzy…” he breathed as he nodded for her to move past him and then followed. “I’m going to sort it out. Your father. I promise.” I just have no idea how to, yet.

“My father’s on Earth. We’re on Mars. Or Ganymede. Just what do you think that you’re going to do?” Jezzy snapped at him, breaking her usual stony concentration when on a mission.

She must really be hurting, Solomon realized. Of course she was. This was her father they were talking about. “Please, Jezzy, just trust me. I’ll…” He still had no idea what he was going to do. Jezzy was right—a few hundred thousand miles separated them, and last time he checked, the ex-convict army of the Outcasts weren’t allowed holidays.

And as soon as I try to enter any of Earth’s space elevators, then the Enforcers will probably jump on me and ship me off to Titan… Solomon cursed. What was worse was that Jezzy had hit the nail on the head. He was supposed to be the smart one. That was why the colonel had forwarded him for the command specialism, and why he was the one to lead their squad and not Jezzy herself, or Arlo Menier, the Outcast bully who had been the first to get the hotseat, until he had blown it in front of the colonel.

But what good is all of my supposed brilliance if I can’t even save my friend’s father? Solomon berated himself. It was probably this that led him to miss the first sign of danger. Jezzy hissed, suddenly grabbing his arm and forcing him back against the wall with a heavy thump.

“Hey!”

“Look!” Jezzy pointed down to the side of the wall, where one of the cracks between the blockwork was a little larger than the others, and as she pointed her light at it, something glinted in the darkness.

“Oh. What is that?” he said, breathing hard. It was roughly at the level of his ankle, and even though Jezzy had forced him back against the wall, he couldn’t be sure that he hadn’t walked in front of it.

“Is it a sensor? An alarm?” Solomon’s tone went deadly serious. There were no klaxons, but that might not prove anything…

“I don’t know. Get Kol up here…” Jezzy said, turning to flash her light on and off a couple of times, to see the wobbling light of their technical specialist rushing up.

“Yo! What you got? We’re not there already, we went left and right, not left-right-right…”

“Glad someone was paying attention,” Jezzy said, glaring at Solomon before turning to shine the light onto the strangely reflective object glinting from the crack in the wall. “What do you think it is? I just saw it out of the corner of my eye…”

“Okay, give me some space…” The younger man immediately crouched down, gesturing for Jezzy to shine her light just above whatever she had found as he fished at his belt for some more personal instrumentation.

“Okay now….” Solomon saw his technical operative set a small eyeglass to his eye and then raise two long, slightly-curved metal rod-like things to the hole. “Oh…”

“What is it?” Solomon breathed.

“Well, it’s not a mine, you can thank your lucky stars for that…” The younger man was doing something at the site, fiddling with whatever was in there. Solomon heard a clink and the scrape of metal on metal.

“But we’re okay now. All deactivated.” Kol sat back and smiled up at them through his bubble-helmet. “It was a motion detector. Simple laser scan. I used the magnets on these to break the circuit. It should be fine to walk past now…” he said.

“Has it been triggered?” Solomon said, still not moving.

“Uh…” Kol frowned, looked into the crack in the wall once again, and shook his head. “No way to tell, boss. But you’re good to go now, I promise.”

“Just so long as you’re sure…” Solomon take a careful, very large step over the place where he assumed the beam of infrared or ultraviolet light or whatever it was cut across the tunnel. Still no klaxons or alarms. Maybe he hadn’t triggered it after all.

“Come on,” Jezzy was the first to hiss under her breath as she and Solomon once again took the lead to the next tunnel turning. “Just pay attention, please!” she hissed at him, and Solomon was about to make some snappy and very withering remarks—whenever he thought of them—when this time, something caught his attention.

“Wait,” he whispered, freezing in place.

Jezebel Wen, trained not only as a combat specialist for the Outcasts but also as a Yakuza executioner did not do the obvious thing such as ask, ‘what is wrong?’ Instead, she froze in place, not moving her flashlight or her pistol from her statue-like stance.

This time, Solomon was certain that he had heard something. A small noise in the darkness that was easily overlooked. His first thought had been it must be a rat.’

Until his second thought had said, ‘There are no rats on Mars.’

He knew that Kol and Karamov were moving up behind, but he didn’t dare raise his voice to warn them. If there was anyone else down here with them, it was probably a Chosen guard, and they had already seen the glow of their flashlights…

Which meant there was an ambush, Solomon thought.

But he could have been wrong. He knew that your senses played tricks on you in the dark. You could see things that weren’t there, or hear things that hadn’t happened…

What did he know about the underground geologies of this alien planet, after all?

He strained every sense that he had, trying to make sense out of the darkness even when his stubborn terrestrial biology worked against him.

Could you get nasal hallucinations down here? he thought, as the gentle currents of cooling air shifted, and he swore that he could smell something like roast meat, coming from up ahead.

If you could get olfactory hallucinations in the dark, he’d never heard of it…

Frack.

Of course, his instincts could be wrong. It could be that there was a vent further up ahead, down the next side passage, and that vent led up to someone’s kitchen. And then again, maybe sound traveled oddly down here. Maybe smells did too. Maybe he had actually heard something that was miles away at the other end of the city…

But Solomon Cready had always trusted his instincts. Even though he had always practiced over and over again so that every heist and burglary went exactly right, it was always his instincts that were the final judge, and it was instincts that told him now that there was someone up ahead, and perhaps they had just been eating their rations…

“TZZZZT!” A sound broke the darkness—a muffled sound of a buzzer—a personal data-screen. “ALL AVAILABLE UNITS, WE GOT A SITUATION DOWN AT THE HANGARS… SOMEONE’S SPOTTED THEM…”

“Damn!” They heard a stifled curse, and that was when all hell broke loose.

10

The Arceos Generator

PHABB-AP-AP!

Down here, there was no danger of bursting the habitat’s bubble, and both the Outcasts and the Chosen of Mars guards traded bullets as if they were snowballs and this was the surface of Europa.

They had been sneaking up on us, Solomon growled inwardly as he pressed himself against the wall and concentrated his flashlight at the next opening. Every time he saw a flash of anything—a shadow, a piece of reflective material—he fired. He had no idea how many people they were facing, as the only evidence they had to go on were the quick-reports of bullets and the flashes of muzzle fire as they returned fire.

They had been sneaking up on us because of that damn sensor, and the flashlights! Solomon thought, snarling silently to himself as he fired at what he thought was a movement.

The flashlights. Solomon could have hit himself if he had a spare hand. He cursed himself for being an idiot. As if he could ever think for a moment that he had been the clever one!

He clicked his flashlight off and rolled across the tunnel as Jezzy fired, stopping as soon as he heard her stop. Only he didn’t have the luxury of time to brief his squad on what he was about to do. And by the time that Jezzy had stopped firing, he was only three-quarters of the way across the tunnel. He flattened to the floor.

If their attacker had heard him move, they could just fire at where they thought he was, and there was nothing that he could do about it.

If their attacker had night vision goggles and could see them much easier than they could see him, then there was nothing he could do about that, either.

Luckily, however, Solomon had long ago found out that when there was nothing to be done to help the situation, that at least meant you shouldn’t have to worry about it anymore…

“Jezzy, Kol, Karamov…” he opened his mouth to say in exaggerated movement, but didn’t actually put any effort behind the words except the shallowest of breath. His earbud communicator should pick up the vibrations of his jaw, right?

“What!?” It was Karamov, whispering over the earbud.,

“Vibration only.” Solomon tried to tell them how to use the earbuds so they wouldn’t become targets for their marksman. He hoped they understood. “Just listen. Three burst fires. Three shots and pause, then repeat. On five…four…three…”

Solomon tensed, hoping that his team knew what he wanted them to do and understood his commands. None of them asked questions, but then again, none of them had time to either.

BLAM-BLAM-BLAM! Solomon’s Marines fired three shots simultaneously at their attacker—or where they thought that they were. What Solomon had been counting on was the fact that three Outcast Marines firing three times—a total of nine shots—was deafening in this small space. He wished that he had indeed put his bubble-helmet on like Kol had, at least that might have afforded him some type of protection as he combat-crawled forward as fast as he could during the deafening roar and the echoes.

Then pause.

His plan had paid off. Gold Squad did indeed pause, and whoever the attacker was at the other end of the corridor was clearly too overwhelmed by all the noise and fury to immediately return fire.

Solomon paused in his crawl, holding his breath—

BLAM-BLAM-BLAM!

Another series of gunshots rang out over Solomon’s head, and he crawled again. He was almost there. The muzzle flare and the lights behind him showed him the edge of the tunnel.

PHABABABAB! The attacker turned fire, and this close, Solomon could clearly see the crouching figure illuminated by the flare of their stubby gun as they leaned out from the entrance to the tunnel ahead.

BANG! Solomon fired up, his arms ached with the recoil of his pistol, and the sound was all-encompassing, but he hit.

“Urk!” Their attacker was thrown back into the tunnel—the exact same one that Solomon and the rest of the squad were supposed to be heading towards.

“CEASE FIRE!” Solomon called, surprising himself with his authoritative sound as he crawled forward, pulling himself around the tunnel edge and turning on his light and raising his pistol at the same time—

To see the checkpoint—a simple metal gate across the tunnel, with a hurricane lamp on the floor at the other side, and there, on the floor just a meter from him, was their shooter—a man in Martian red robes and a much sturdier encounter suit than the one he was wearing. It even had an inbuilt breastplate and arm greaves, and the hammer over the red planet symbol of the Chosen of Mars. He was dead.

“Gold Squad, move up!” Solomon snapped over the communicator, quickly getting to his feet to kick the man’s stubby machine pistol to one side as he covered him with his pistol, breathing hard as Jezzy was the first to round the corner.

“Sir,” she said, moving past him to the body to check the pulse, and then, without skipping a beat, to go through the man’s pockets.

“Jezzy? Now is not the time…” Solomon thought, impressed by Jezzy’s determination, but hardly thinking that now was the time to worry about robbing someone…

“I’m not robbing him, you idiot!” she hissed angrily as she pulled from the man’s pocket a lanyard and a plastic pass-card, turning back to the gate to swipe the card reader and for the door to buzz open automatically.

“Well, technically, you are…” Solomon couldn’t resist from pointing out.

“Oh, for goodness sake… We all almost died, a firefight with next to zero cover, and you go and pull a stunt like that!” Jezzy was saying as Kol and Karamov swung around the tunnel to see the dead guard, the gate, and their arguing specialists.

“Everyone alright here?” Kol said lightly, looking from the body on the ground to the two Outcast Marines.

“I’ll be a heck of a lot more alright when we have this mission behind us and we’re off this planet!” Jezzy said.

“Same,” Solomon agreed, stopping to pick up the man’s communicator—a simple data-screen no bigger than his pass-card. When he held it up to his light, he could see the contents of the last call made, sent as an audio message and translated on the screen.

“We were lucky he forgot to turn his communicator onto silent,” Solomon joked, earning nothing but dark looks from all around him.

“A disturbance at the hangar bays?” Karamov looked over Solomon’s shoulder. “He came through, didn’t he?” he said, talking about Tomas.

“Yeah, I just hope he did precisely what I told him to and got himself hidden in Fela’s secondary airlock as soon as the Chosen came,” Solomon said. He had told Tomas to start a panic at the other end of the city from the Arceos District, that the ones who had attacked the habitat—Solomon in other words—had been spotted in the area, and that ‘they’ were gun-toting madmen.

“Which scrambled the Chosen to apprehend us, hopefully buying us some time…” Solomon nodded ahead, where there was a low murmur of a whirring sound, the sort that came from a fan. Or a motor. Or perhaps even a generator.

“Come on, we have to move.” Solomon broke into a jog towards the noise. He knew that whatever advantage Tomas had garnered for them—which was quite an advantage, it had to be said, as he had alerted them to their ambusher after all—would be fast vanishing as soon as the rest of the Chosen realized that they could no longer reach their checkpoint guard here at Arceos.

They were racing against the clock, and Solomon still hadn’t even begun to think about how he was going to lead his team out of there in one piece.

The Outcasts climbed through the gate to find that the whirring sound had grown louder, and that this corridor was unlike the previous. A glow came from a string of LED lights further down the passageway, and at intervals, there were stations where stacks of rifles, cloaks, and helmets were stored.

“Far more than is necessary for a simple guard complement,” Solomon murmured.

“What are you thinking?” Jezzy was at his side, her eyes darting forward down the tunnel corridor.

“That these Chosen have taken over, or are planning to…” Solomon nodded. “And that they were planning to do it down here, in secret.”

“Even when the Confederacy take Mars back, which of course they will,” Jezzy agreed. “They could have years of routing out the Chosen from their hidden places like this… We should tell the colonel.”

“We should tell the colonel to release the imprimatur, you mean,” Solomon whispered to the woman he was starting to think of as his second. He looked at her in the dim light. “We both know that it might only be the Imprimatur Valance who can keep a lid on Father Ultor’s mob, and that she wasn’t responsible for the attack on Titan.”

“Father Ultor didn’t seem aware of it either,” Jezzy pointed out. “He was in as much danger as the rest of us on Titan.”

Solomon groaned. “Then what is this we are looking at here? Father Ultor’s Chosen have decided to take over Mars without him? That they were the ones behind the attack?” He paused by the next cache of weapons, stooping to examine them.

“And then, of course, there is this…” He pointed out the heavy ruggedized crate that the rifles were stacked against.

CMC BATCH N# BK/3901, it read under the glare of Solomon’s flashlight. “CMC? Confederate Marine Corps, by any chance?” He reached to his belt to take out the small service knife to cut at the thick webbing straps that held the crate together. “What’s the betting that…”

Snip! With a tearing sound, the webbing broke and the lid was easy to pop open, revealing packing foam and the nested shapes of shoulder panels and greaves. Ones that Solomon and Jezzy recognized, because they were precisely the sort that they had seen worn by the full Marines of the Confederacy.

“Power armor.” Jezzy reached with her pistol to move aside the first shoulder pad. It was thick, made of a hardened polysteel outer shell, and then layers of shock-absorbent foam, compressed leathers, and metal-mesh. It was one step up from the light tactical suits that the Outcasts wore, and one step below the full tactical, fully-encasing suit that Malady wore.

And it was only available to the Confederate Marines Corps.

“No unit or number designations,” Solomon breathed. That meant that they weren’t stolen. They must have come direct from whatever manufacturing plant that the Marine Corps used to make them.

“How widespread are the Chosen of Mars,” Jezzy wondered out loud, “if they can get their hands on this…”

“Or a better question might be how many friends do they have?” Solomon considered. “How could they even afford this?” Everyone knew that the Chosen of Mars—the ‘First Martians,’ as they were otherwise known—were little better than a cult, and one whose popularity depended on their demagogic leader Father Ultor. They might have widespread support across the Martian colony, but Solomon had never heard of them ever reaching beyond the confines of the Red Planet.

And besides which, Mars was mostly an industrial world, and one that was under a stranglehold of Confederate taxes. Even a semi-criminal organization like the Chosen of Mars shouldn’t have been able to afford whatever the cost of Power Armor was on the black market. And if there was anyone among them who should know the workings of the black market, it would be Solomon.

“These Chosen must have powerful friends, rich and powerful friends,” Solomon said darkly, nodding towards the source of the noise further ahead.

“Be ready…” Solomon whispered as they neared a well-lit chamber, resonating with the whirring noise that was now a deep, repetitive rhythm.

“Three…two…one… Now!” Solomon was the first to move, turning as he rushed to the side of the doorway, pistol up, sweeping the room for signs of danger, but there were none.

Instead, he was confronted by the sight of a square chamber walled by large metal units where lights flickered behind grills and fans loudly beat their staccato rhythms. It was the generator for the Arceos District, and it was unguarded.

“Jezzy—” Solomon nodded to the only other exit in the room, and the combat specialist moved past him to the other side of the room to take up her stance watching the corridor beyond.

“Kol, get Marshal’s gadget in place,” Solomon said as his young technical specialist was already moving into the room and taking out his belt of tools and the strange tube device with the wires scattering from both sides.

“Wow, that old guy was right. This generator can sure pack a lot of punch…” Kol was muttering as he took out one of the metal grills and started to unhook wires from a similar transistor-type device inside. “There might be enough in here to power half the city!”

“Why would the Chosen need that much power?” Solomon muttered. Moments before he was about to find out.

WRRRR-Thunk! There was an ominous metallic screech from the corridor leading out.

“Oh frack,” Solomon heard Jezzy say.

11

In the Name of Mars

“Talk to me, Specialist. What you got?” Solomon was already moving towards her when a bolt of something shot from the corridor, striking the combat specialist on the shoulder and sending her skidding across the floor.

“Urgh!”

“Jezzy!” Solomon shouted, skidding along the floor to her and looking up as he raised his pistol down the corridor—

But was too shocked to fire at what he saw. What? His mind blanked at the sight, trying to register what on earth had shot one of his squad members.

“What IS that!?” he shouted, before firing.

It was humanoid, that much was certain, but that was where any and all likeness to humanity stopped. If anything, the creature coming towards them looked more like Malady than it ever could Solomon or Jezzy, as it seemed to be partly enclosed in plates of white and gray steel, with servo-assisted joints at the knees, elbows, and even some sort of rudimentary battle harness at its waist and forming the support for the breastplate on its chest.

Like power armor. Confederate Marine power armor, Solomon realized, until he saw the thing’s head. It was a bald human head, but its skin was a pallid gray, and one entire half was made of the same sophisticated steel plates. He was reminded, momentarily, once again of Malady, as the creature had its ‘human’ eye closed as if it were asleep—or dead—but on the robotic side of its head was a gleaming purple diode in place of an eye.

Its articulated left arm ended in a particle weapon, similar to the sort that Malady was able to use. Solomon could see the multiple spinning wheels moving, sparking with static electricity like tiny lightning bolts as it powered up the device to fire again.

But particle weapons are insane, Solomon knew. They were only used in industrial contexts to forge and cut poly metals, or else in place on large pieces of heavy infrastructure like ships and transporters. The only reason that Malady was able to carry one into battle was that he was nearly the size of a tank and had the reserve power ready to use one.

BLAM-BLAM-BLAM! Solomon fired, seeing the bullets ricochet and spark off the thing’s metal hide, one of them spinning it half around as it found a bare, fleshy shoulder.

“Gotcha!” he growled in feral joy as he spared Jezzy a look beside him. She was still alive, breathing shallowly, and her own shoulder held a blackened mark just under her collarbone. Thank the stars that energy weapon cauterized the wound, Solomon saw.

“Commander!?” It was Karamov, moving in front of Solomon and firing his own pistol at the thing. More sounds of metal striking metal and the almost musical tones of the bullets shattering or ricocheting off the creature. The onslaught had forced it to its knees, before finally knocking it to the side of the corridor.

“It’s down!” Karamov said, his voice wavering with astonishment and anxiety. As well it might, Solomon thought. They had never faced anything like that. Was it some new kind of full tactical suit? Like the one that Malady was encased in, but this time not an all-encompassing shell?

“Kol!?” Solomon snarled.

“Almost, Commander! One more minute…” the young specialist breathed as Cready saw him hurriedly reattaching wires to Marshal’s gizmo, now secured into the walls of the Arceos Generator itself.

“Just hurry it up! We need to get Jezzy out of here!” Solomon said.

“Sir… The mission…” Karamov was saying, sparing a worried glance at Wen. “We can’t abandon it when we’re so close…”

Dammit. Solomon gritted his teeth and snarled. Wasn’t it enough to turn off the Arceos District, the headquarters of the Chosen? Wouldn’t that give the Confederacy the advantage they needed?

No. Solomon knew. The Chosen would undo whatever it was that Marshal’s gadget had done, and that would only mean that the war would be inevitable. And now with this thing—

Solomon looked down the corridor, expecting to see the body of the cyborg-type creation—only for there to be nothing but blackened scorch marks on the walls. It was gone.

“What the—” Karamov had followed his commander’s stare to see the same impossibility. “I dropped it, Commander, I swear. I saw at least two bullets hit the thing’s flesh, one in the head…”

“Well, it’s certainly not there now, is it?” Solomon was caught between two evils. His combat specialist was out of action and needed help, but he needed to finish the mission and steal the Chosen’s data.

And I have some killer cyborg thing on the loose. “This must be the Chosen’s secret weapon. Some new type of Power Armor…” Solomon was saying as his mind raced to a decision.

Frack it, he thought.

“Kol, I want you to get Jezzy out of here. Get her back up to the city and make your way out. I don’t care how. Just make sure that her suit is sealed and that you both have helmets. Get yourself out into the Red and I’ll send Malady to pick you up.”

“Aye, sir,” Kol said immediately, already putting his tools away as the wall behind him started to light up with multiple green lights. “And, uh…whatever else is happening, Commander, we’d all better get out of here, because the Arceos batteries are going to blow as Marshal’s gadget overloads the generators.”

“Go back and use the Chosen suits back there for Jezzy,” Solomon ordered. Kol was already moving, and Solomon leaned over his combat specialist.

“We’re going to get you out of this, soldier,” he whispered.

“Just…keep your promise…” The Commander of Gold Squad was surprised to hear her cough and groan as Jezzy’s eyes fluttered open, clouded with pain. For a moment, Solomon thought that she meant the promise to steal the Chosen’s data—until, of course, he realized precisely what she meant.

“My father…” Jezzy coughed, wincing as Kol slid his arms under her shoulders and tried his best to get her to her feet without causing too much pain. He failed.

“I promise, Jezzy. And you’re going to be around to see him again yourself, so just do as Kol says!” Solomon ordered, watching as his technical specialist half-supported, half-carried the limping and slouching combat specialist back the way they had come.

“Sir?” It was Karamov, standing guard over the only other exit where the cyborg had so recently and mysteriously vanished from.

Solomon spared a look at the walls of the Arceos Generator, now a lot brighter with more flickering voltage lights than it had before. And making a heck of a lot more noise. It wouldn’t take long, he knew. “We’d better go. With me, Marine,” Solomon growled as he ran down the corridor, pistol high.

“I don’t get it. What WAS that thing?” Karamov at his side was saying as they raced past where the cyborg had been. Solomon knew that they didn’t have any time to pause, but he forced himself to scan the floor and walls for signs of a hatchway or secret exit. There was nothing.

“I don’t know, Marine,” Solomon muttered, before catching sight of something on the stone floor. Tiny black drops, like blood.

“That’s not blood.” Karamov had spotted the same and knelt, touching the substance lightly with his gloves and examining it. “If I didn’t know any better, then I would have said that it’s…” He looked up at his commander with surprise. “…engine oil?”

This is getting weirder and weirder… Solomon growled, nodding further ahead of them, where the spatters of black oil appeared to be heading. He didn’t want to stop to think about the fact that the creature had taken at least three direct flesh wounds from the combined firepower of both him and Karamov, and yet it was still alive! “Come on.”

The corridor started to turn, leading upwards until they saw flashes of light overhead. Grills in the ceilings. Ventilation vents…

“Marine? I don’t think we want to follow this tunnel to wherever it leads,” Solomon made the decision. “Because that thing is sure to be waiting for us, with whatever friends it has…”

Karamov immediately saw the commander’s plan, reaching up to the nearest vent where he could just touch it with the tip of his pistol. “Hang on,” Karamov said, kneeling so that the commander could climb onto his back before standing up. Solomon splayed his hands to the side of the vent and peered through, to see the gathering gloom of a Martian night, the glow of neon lights, and the edges of corrugated metal buildings.

“Some kind of warehouse-industrial unit,” he said. “We’re outside, so this tunnel must lead straight underneath it.” Solomon held his breath as he strained his ears to hear the sounds from topside. There was the distant whine of motors, which could be trams or transporters or a Martian tank for all he knew. But no voices.

“Okay, no point waiting down here to get shot or blown up…” Solomon started to hit the side of the grate where it latched to its frame, using the butt of his pistol.

WHACK! WHACK!

The whine behind them was getting louder, reaching that worrying, shrieking level of a protesting machine about to give up in explosive style.

CRACK! The latch broke, dropping to the floor beside Karamov, and Solomon pushed up on the stiff grate, feeling all the muscles in his shoulders and back bunch and tighten…

“Ugh!” The grate lifted, flipping open into the Martian night with a scrape, making Solomon hiss in annoyance.

“So much for subterfuge, Commander…” Karamov grunted beneath him.

“Frack subterfuge, Specialist,” Solomon growled, seizing the surface of Armstrong Habitat and hauling himself up. “So far, I’ve blown a hole through an entire habitat, and we’re about to blow up a generator underneath the habitat…” He rolled across the cold cobbles, seeing that he had been right—this was indeed some kind of industrial park in the heart of the Arceos District, with featureless corrugated warehouses sitting in grid-like fashion, side by side.

Moving quickly, Solomon reached back into the hole to seize his specialist’s upraised arm before bracing his feet against the edge of the ventilation grill on the floor and heaving as Karmov jumped.

“Ooof!” They both sprawled onto the floor of the Arceos District after a desperate scrabble, panting and exhausted.

“But…where’s the Chosen’s hideout, sir?” Karamov was saying, looking around from one exactly the same warehouse to the next.

“My guess is that it’s the very one that the tunnel was heading towards,” Solomon said. And where that cyborg must have been going… He nodded at the nearest warehouse directly in front of them, again without signs of insignia or announcement boards to indicate who owned it or anything about what might be contained inside.

Just as floodlights around them exploded into life.

“HALT! In the name of Mars!”

12

All Red Underneath

Jezzy and Kol struggled past the crates of elicit Marine Corps equipment and through the gate, past the body of the Chosen guard that Solomon had killed. Behind them, the whumping sound of the Arceos Generator was getting louder and more insistent, turning into a fast-paced, high-pitched whine.

“So…exactly how long have we got until that thing blows?” Jezzy managed to cough. Her shoulder was on fire, and the pain was spreading down her right side as if someone was pouring molten glass over one half of her. Secondary aches and pains were spreading to her chest and legs, which Jezzy knew was just her body trying to alert her to the serious amount of damage she had sustained.

“Ach… Wait a minute… Stimulants…” she croaked, reaching for her belt to pull the only injector pen she had and jamming it into her wrist. Within a moment, the molten-glass pain receded until the agony was just radiating from her shoulder once again.

Can I even move my arm? She tried to flex her fingers. “Ach!” She could, but it hurt. A lot. Okay. I’ve got movement. I’ll be able to do this… she thought.

“The generator? Well…it’s not in very good health at all…” Kol said distractedly as they paused at the T-Junction where their gunfight had taken place, looking both right and left before picking right.

“This isn’t the way we went before…” Jezzy said blearily, the painkillers not only dulling her pain but also her senses. It was one of the reasons why she didn’t like taking them. Her Yakuza training had left her with an iron resolve and an unflinching belief in her own abilities. Not only had she been schooled in various martial arts and numerous weapons, but a part of her training had been kneeling on the edge of freezing cold lakes through long winter nights, or being hit by bamboo canes repeatedly in the stomach until she collapsed.

I should be able to take this pain. It’s only pain. It’s not real, she thought. She told herself. She tried to make herself believe.

It wasn’t working. Even a feared Yakuza Executioner had to have pain relief sometimes, she admitted.

“Yeah, this way is quicker…” Kol was saying, hauling toward a patch of light at the end of the tunnel.

“How do you know?” Jezzy managed to ask as they shuffled.

“Well, the transistor is making sure that the batteries are receiving, like, a hundred and thirty percent power when they only technically receive a hundred percent conversion, but in actual reality that goes down to something like eighty-five percent when you take into account all the normal buffers and limiters and what have you…” Kol said. “So, that’s what…fifty percent more power than the batteries can handle? They’ll short, send a massive surge of power to all the district fuse systems…”

“I wasn’t talking about the generator, genius,” Jezzy groaned, thinking that hearing just how near to an explosion they still were wasn’t really doing her worries any favors. “I meant how did you know that this was the better tunnel to take?”

“Ah. Didn’t you know?” Kol said as he moved quickly towards the light. It was a grate set in the ceiling, through which a slatted square of neon light from the nighttime of Mars was pouring through.

“Know what?” Jezzy wheezed. At least the conversation took her mind off the pain.

“My uncle was a Martian. One of the first to settle, actually, back in the twenty-first century,” Kol said.

“Ah.” That would explain why Kol had been so annoyed at the commander for shooting a hole through the habitat. She had previously just thought it was his technical mind’s outrage at having a sophisticated instrument so easily tampered with.

But that can’t be true, can it? He’s just turned a generator for an entire city district into a ticking timebomb, she told herself, before realizing that her thoughts were babbling. She wasn’t used to the painkillers, and they were dulling her edges.

“Really?” She tried to focus on the technical specialist’s words as he set her down against the wall and reached up to the grate…

“Damn!” He couldn’t reach it. Jezzy heard him hiss through his teeth, and she couldn’t see his forehead as it was in shadow behind the ridiculous bubble-helmet that he was still wearing, but she was sure that it would be glistening with sweat as they were both very aware of the time that this was taking.

“I’ll help you up…” Jezzy offered, raising her arms to form a step for his boot…until her arm flinched with pain. “Ach!”

“No, you won’t,” Kol said, frowning. “But that’s okay. I got a solve for this…” He fished around in his belt to pull out his technical specialist’s toolbelt, carefully extracting a small, dark block attached to wires.

“What’s that?”

“Battery packs, and…” He unclipped a few rounds from his pistol, carefully winding the wires around and adding small gobbets of something that looked like plasticine.

“Oh… A charge?” Jezzy whispered at the side of the wall as Kol jumped, managing to grab the small rail on the inside of the hatch and hang there a foot or so from the floor, reaching up with the other hand to affix the bullet and batteries to the inside of the latch.

“Oof!” He landed again, turning to hunch over Jezzy. “Close your eyes. It’ll take a minute…”

“Have we got a minute?” Jezzy said, her thoughts returning to the whining generator behind them. Something was bothering her, but she couldn’t remember what it was. Now she wished that she hadn’t taken those painkillers.

FZZZZT! A bright flash and bang as the batteries ignited the tiny amount of charge and the bullet blew, buckling the latch above and filling the tunnel with black smoke that smelled of cordite, but thankfully dissipated quickly.

“Gotcha.” Kol seemed inordinately pleased with himself. “I should be able to jump up and grab the lip now, haul myself up, and…”

Something was still bothering Jezzy though, and she finally remembered what it had to be. Kol had said his uncle was a Martian…but what did that have to do with him knowing which way to go in the underground ventilation tunnels of Armstrong?

“Was he an architect? Worked on Armstrong like Marshal?” Jezzy said.

“Ah,” Kol said, slowing down from where he was busy securing all of his tools on his belt, ready for the leap. “I was hoping that you wouldn’t ask that,” he said, and his voice sounded thick, different somehow.

“Why? You two don’t get on?” Jezzy was pushing herself to her feet, tottering as one side of her body was now starting to feel like warmed-up rubber from the painkillers.

“Not at all. In fact, we get on just famously…” Kol said, jamming the painkiller injector pen that he had been supplied with into Jezzy’s neck.

“Ach!” Jezzy lurched, spinning out with her good fist in a backhanded swipe.

“Urk!” Even when under the influence and in pain, it seemed that not all of her training had been overridden…

“Stars damn it!” Kol wheezed, coughing. Her strike had managed to fracture his bubble-helmet, but he was lucky that he was wearing it at all. If he hadn’t, he’d probably have ended up with a collapsed larynx. “What did you do that for?” Kol hissed.

“Me?” Jezzy was struggling to push herself upright again. Now the rest of her body was starting to feel like warm rubber. “You’re the one who stuck me with that…that…” Blackness was swirling around the edges of her vision. The laser shot in her shoulder and the painkillers coursing through her body was too much for her to bear…

But despite these difficulties, she was still alert enough to hear the click of a pistol. A Marine Corps pistol as Kol leveled his firearm against her.

“Oh, come on…” Jezzy said as she collapsed against the wall, trying to force her stubbornly heavy hands to fumble at the holster on her waist…

“Don’t,” Kol said, low and warningly. “I don’t want to have to shoot you, Jezzy. You’ve always been fair. Tough, but fair…”

“Then don’t shoot me. Let me shoot you first…” Jezzy spat, helpless as his hands—now stronger than hers, thanks to her condition—easily wrestled the Marine Corps pistol from her and threw it down the tunnel.

“There we go. Now the temptation’s gone, isn’t it?” Kol said. He sounded like Kol, Jezzy thought, but the technical specialist who was doing these things to her was far different from the young man she had thought of as carefree, a little reckless, but basically loyal.

“Why?” she said, as her breathing labored. How many of those tranquilizer pens can a human body take? Easily two, right? What if that human body was in shock from a particle beam weapon?

“Like I said, my uncle was a part of the first colonists on Mars. First Martians, get it?” he said, and to Jezzy’s eyes, his form was starting to blur and waver as even her eyes seemed to be succumbing to the painkillers.

“Oh crap…” she managed to murmur.

“Yeah, I guess you’d think that, but it’s not really as bad as you think, Jezzy…” he said. “Well…it will be for you when the Chosen get here, but for what it’s worth, it’s nothing personal. I’m not going to shoot you. That would only lead to more questions, I’m sure.”

Gee, thanks for being so considerate… Jezzy thought. She couldn’t say the words as somehow she was now lying on the floor, and everything was going dark.

“It’s not some big conspiracy, Jezzy. It’s just plain and simple loyalty. My uncle worked all his life up here, became a true Martian, red in blood and sand. And you know what happened to him?”

Oh, please, do tell me… Jezzy thought. It seemed that her near-unconsciousness did not affect her appreciation of sarcasm.

“Nothing. He didn’t get any awards or medals. He never even made enough credits to start his own fabrication ship. He just died as penniless as he always was back on Earth. And all thanks to the Confederacy trade laws. So… When Father Ultor started up the Chosen of Mars, it kind of made sense to me.”

“You…you’re not even…Mar-muhr-Martian!” Jezzy managed to hiss up at him.

“Nah. But we’ve all got the Red running through us, right? It’s not just about Mars. It’s about Proxima and Trappist and the Asteroids. And someday, I’m sure that you’re going to see that. The Confederacy has to fall. And it starts here. Sorry, Jezzy.”

You fracking… she thought as she heard a grunt and a scrape as Kol must have leaped up to the open grill above and hauled himself through. He didn’t even stop to turn around and say good-bye, or offer any last-minute words of advice, but she heard footsteps disappearing into the Martian night, as her vision went darker and darker…

13

The Only Card he had…

“HALT! In the name of Mars!”

Voices screamed at Solomon and Karamov as floodlights illuminated them on the Martian cobbles, hideously exposed and with nowhere to run to.

Oh frack oh frack oh frack… Solomon’s mind was racing. He couldn’t see anything beyond the glare of lights. Could he shoot them out? Make some darkness? Give Karamov time to escape?

Click-click! Whirr-click!

But already he could hear safeties being released and booted feet approaching them from under the light and on all sides. They were everywhere, they had been caught, and there was nothing they could do…

Scrape. Thud. Thud. Scraaaape. Something was eclipsing the light ahead of them, a lumbering silhouette approaching them behind the sound of booted feet.

“We mean you no harm!” Solomon called out, lying through his teeth.

“Really, Commander?” Karamov hissed behind him. The medical specialist had his back to the commander, covering the advancing line of guards with his pistol. Neither of the Outcasts had enough bullets to win.

“Well… Might as well try…” Solomon thought, but unsurprisingly, the Martians weren’t buying it.

“WEAPONS DOWN!” someone barked at them as the scraping got nearer, and the floodlights on the top of every warehouse around them started to catch the tops of the insect-like helmets of the Chosen of Mars/First Martians.

And a killer robot.

“What the—” Solomon was so surprised that he did actually lower his gun as he saw the large rectangular object stalking forward on its servo-assisted legs. It looked like a giant, murderous, maniacal metal table.

And it was precisely the same sort of ‘experimental robot’ thing that the Outcasts had fought in the depths of the Erisian Asteroid Field, trapped in the belly of a deep-field station-ship on route from Proxima.

On route to Mars, Solomon remembered from the colonel’s end of situation report.

“Uh… Commander?” Karamov had now turned to face the new enemy beside the Martian guards, seeing the same thing as before.

“I see it. I can’t really avoid it, can I?” Solomon said despairingly. Last time, they had only managed to defeat the thing because, one, Solomon had dropped a service lift on its head, and two, they had a Malady at their side. Now, Solomon had access to neither.

And besides which, we also appear to be surrounded by about a dozen armed guards.

Specialist Commander Solomon Cready of the Outcasts reluctantly came to a decision.

“Fair enough. You boys seem to be a bit worked up,” he said easily, slowly bending down to set his pistol on the ground in a very showy, and exceedingly slow and non-threatening way.

“Commander?” Karamov said nervously at his side.

“Do as the nice man says, please,” Solomon whispered, beckoning his Marine to set his gun down.

Any minute now, the generator’s going to blow. Any minute now… Solomon was thinking over and over, waiting for the ground beneath them to rupture and spurt flame. It was the only card he had left. One big, monumental distraction that might just give them enough time…

But nothing happened. Nothing at all.

“Seize them!” barked one of the insect-helmeted Martians, and the surrounding guards closed in on them, only too eager to use their fists, boots, and the butts of their weapons against the helpless Outcast Marines…

“Urggggh…” When Solomon awoke some time later, it was to a world of hurt.

His head felt like he had been pulverized by a gang of angered Martians… Oh, wait… He had been, hadn’t he? When he tried to move his limbs, he found that they weren’t moving at all. For a second, he was terrified that the Chosen of Mars had done some terrible, irreversible damage to his body like snap his spinal cord or something, but then he was relieved—a little—to see that he was actually tied to a chair.

“Commander?” a very thick voice said beside him. It sounded a little like Karamov, but only if he was also submerged under water and speaking through a sock. Solomon’s eyes hurt with the glare of bright lights, but when he blinked several painful times, his image resolved to see the shape of Karamov similarly tied to a chair beside him, and with a face that was purple and red with bruises as he presumed his own was.

“Karamov. Thank the stars you’re alive,” he murmured.

“Better than you, from the looks of it,” Karamov slurred—which, considering how his medical specialist currently looked, Solomon thought was no great recommendation. Still, he had to try and look on the bright side. He wasn’t dead.

“And it doesn’t hurt as much as getting shot,” he whispered. He’d only been given a beating as Karamov had, and Solomon had had plenty of beatings in his life before. Living as one of the most audacious and wanted thieves in New Kowloon was just the sort of lifestyle choice that also led to plenty of beatings.

I’ll be okay. I’ll hurt for a week probably, but I’ll be okay, he told himself. Just so long as the First Martians didn’t decide to come back and finish the job.

As it was, it appeared that the First Martians nearest them weren’t even paying attention to the two captured Confederate Marines.

Now that Solomon’s eyes were starting to work again, he saw that they must be in one of those warehouses—perhaps the very same one that they had been trying to break into to steal the Martian battleplans.

It was a long and wide space, separated by two higher floors accessed by ladders and gantries. It was on one of these that they were tied, overlooking the railings to the warehouse floor below.

Which looked to be an entire industrial workshop.

The floor had been excavated pretty extensively, dropped several meters and with multiple metal machines and large metal beds with overhead standing lights so that more Martians could work fitting and soldering metal components.

“What are they doing?” Solomon whispered.

“Dunno, but they’ve been at it for the best part of an hour, I reckon…”” Karamov shrugged.

“How do you know?” was Solomon’s first question, and then, “Have I been unconscious for that long?”

“Look, it’s light outside.” Karamov nodded towards a line of high windows near the roof of the warehouse, just above one of the gantry levels that hugged the walls. They were apparently glass, now flaring with the dim reddish-yellow light of another Martian day.

“We infiltrated Armstrong near dusk, didn’t we? And it must at least be morning, so…” Karamov reasoned. “And yeah, you were out cold for all that time. I think the Martians took a greater delight in beating the frack out of you than they did me…”

“No one likes a pretty face…” Solomon murmured, although he was sure that he wouldn’t have to worry about that for a while yet. His nose felt very broken indeed. But a new thought pushed aside his own vanity.

“The generator didn’t blow, clearly…” he said, as all the lights were still on and the machine production beds were still whirring away ceaselessly. “Unless this place has its own backup generator?”

“Maybe, but I don’t think that even we were that lucky, Commander…” Karamov said. “I haven’t heard any explosions, and there’s been no alarms going off…”

Oh crap. Solomon growled inwardly. Just how much worse could this mission get!?

As it turned out, it was about to get a whole lot worse.

“Gentlemen,” said a voice as a figure stepped in front of them. It was a tall, thin man in his later fifties, perhaps, but who had avoided giving over to the middle-aged spread. Instead, his form was almost austere. He had slicked-back black hair with streaks of silver-gray, glossy and oiled, and he wore a plum and dark blue suit.

He doesn’t look like a Martian, Solomon thought. His skin was too pale—it didn’t have the telltale darker tan of a life spent being irradiated. Even if the Martians always lived behind their helmets and habitat domes, they still had a higher dose of solar radiation, similar to the Mediterranean regions of Earth.

“Who the frack are you?” Solomon said, his words coming out mumbled.

The man wore gold rings on his fingers that he twisted as he scowled at them.

He’s nervous, Commander Solomon realized, which was never actually a good sign. A nervous kidnapper meant that they were unsure of how to proceed. They could decide to kill them or to let them go…or to start cutting bits off.

“Ah, well, I am sure that you would like me to tell you, so perhaps if you survive all of this, then your superiors can send some elite Confederate Marine kill squad after me?” the man said with a scowl.

“The Marines don’t operate kill squads,” Solomon said immediately. This man was worried about getting caught, Solomon realized. That meant that he wasn’t just based on Mars, and he was certainly no Martian… So he must be a regular in Confederate space. Confederate bases. Earth. And, from the looks of him, Solomon was sure that he was a corporate man.

“Oh, don’t they?” The man raised one brow. “How little they tell you, their foot soldiers…” he said idly, shaking his head as he turned to look back down at the production line.

So this is how the Chosen of Mars are getting their money to buy black market Marine weaponry? the commander thought. It made sense. The mega-corporations were the richest players in the Confederate and colonial space. They were richer than some cities, some entire colonies. It was always a push and pull war between them and the Confederate lawmakers as to who really wielded power.

But why would the corps want to start a war between the Confederacy and Mars? he wondered—before, of course, the answer came to him.

War was always good for business. The corps could sell arms and armor to any side, both sides, and they would come out on top—no matter how many thousands of lives were lost. It had always been that way in the history of modern warfare, after all…

“Anyway, you will be pleased to know that I have managed to convince the good men and women of Mars not to string you up, even though you infiltrated their sovereign territory with every attempt, it would seem, to blow up Armstrong Habitat.”

“What!?” Solomon burst out. “What on Mars are you talking about? You will never be able to make that stick…”

“Erm…” In response, the ascetic man in front of them only raised a thumb and forefinger to the ceiling and mimed ‘pulling’ the trigger. “I am right in thinking that it was you who shot a hole through the habitat just earlier, Marine?”

Damn. Solomon glowered at him. “That was only one tiny hole. Nothing personal…”

“As I am sure that the Confederate Marine dreadnaughts circling above are nothing personal, either?” the man pointed out with a heavy sigh, shaking his head as he reached into his pocket to draw out a portable data-screen, tapping its surface a few times until he had in his hands one of the local Martian newswire feeds.

The Martian Chronicles…every hour, every day!

TOP STORY: Rising Tensions between Confederate Aggressors and Mars…

UPDATE: Two Confederate agents were captured last night as they attempted to break into Martian industries and buildings, presumably to continue their acts of industrial sabotage on patriotic Martian businesses.

This level of aggression against sovereign Martian civilians simply cannot continue!

The two Confederate agents are believed to be a part of a much larger taskforce, sent here by the Confederacy of Earth either to disrupt or outright attack Armstrong Habitat. They are believed to be a part of the same force who, earlier yesterday, managed to cause a major incident and shut down central Armstrong when the habitat membrane itself was ruptured, apparently during a firefight between them and the First Martian guards seeking to protect all of us.

BACKGROUND: As you are aware, tensions flared just a few days ago when our spokesperson and leader, the Imprimatur of Mars—along with Father Ultor, the figurehead behind the First Martians/Chosen of Mars—was imprisoned by the Confederacy on spurious charges that they had orchestrated an attack on Titan!

Despite providing no evidence, the Confederacy have continued to hold the two leaders of Mars and put into place a complete embargo on all Martian goods and services, moving so far as to blockade the planet with elements of their Rapid Response and Near-Earth Confederate Marine Fleet.

As yet, the Chosen of Mars have refused to back down, and they demand the return of their leaders. The Confederacy has issued no calls for peace talks.

What will this volatile situation mean for the future of the Red Planet and its citizens? Have YOUR say by contacting our free toll channel, on…

“Nice attack piece,” Solomon muttered, before looking up at the man. “Was it you and your people, though? Who attacked us on Titan?”

The corporate man—probably some kind of junior executive, Solomon had decided—looked taken aback for a second, blinked, and said nothing as he turned off the data-screen and slid it back into his pocket.

“Anyway, gentlemen. We have the Confederacy over a barrel. They cannot justify their blockade anymore…” the man said.

“But we were attacked!” Solomon remembered the grinding crash of the Titan ice mine as it had slid into the pit of its own devising, crashing and crumbling all around him.

“But the Martians are not stupid…” The man ignored him. “They know that they cannot win in an outright confrontation against the Confederate Marine Corps.”

“Damn right they can’t…” Karamov said as the corporate executive continued.

“So, they will be offering you as hostages in return for Father Ultor and Imprimatur Valance. Two for two.” The man continued to twist his gold rings. “That seems a rather nice, balanced number, doesn’t it?” He turned to gesture across the balcony space where the two soldiers sat, above where the Chosen of Mars busily continued to construct the strange, experimental robots that Solomon and his team had seen—and fought—before. There, they could see a much larger data-screen flickering to life.

I’m glad they think that we’re as important as the imprimatur and Father Ultor… Solomon thought. But he was sure that he already knew what the Confederate answer would be, even as he saw the corporate man nod. Their chairs were turned to face the wall, where a small tripod and a camera sat almost directly in front of them, with two of the insect-helmeted Martian guards standing on either side.

From this angle, that small camera won’t be able to pick up the rest of the workshop, Solomon saw. If they were about to be broadcast to the nation or to whomever, then the Chosen of Mars—and their corporate financiers—didn’t want the rest of the universe knowing what they were doing here.

But just what WERE they doing here? They were building more of those experimental robot things, right? Which had come from Proxima. To Mars. And were being financed by the corporations.

“N-something…” Solomon muttered under his breath as a small red light started flashing on the camera. If only he could remember what that corporate logo had been that they had found in the belly of the deep-field ship, along with its own murderous experimental robot.

Novis? Neuro? Solomon couldn’t remember. It wasn’t one that he remembered hearing of, back on Earth, which meant that it couldn’t have been that big a company, right? Most of the largest mega-corporations were so big as to be as popular as major drinks brands.

But Solomon had been sure that it had been the company that made the experimental, murderous robots—it was the only clue they had to go on, after all—which meant that this executive here had to be from the same firm, right?

“Who am I speaking to!?” Both Solomon and Karamov jumped as a very familiar voice suddenly swam into the warehouse space. There was nothing in front of them apart from the camera, but when Solomon turned his head to the display screen over the workhouse, he could see the austere, grim face of none other than Colonel Asquew, sitting at her desk with the many-starred flag of the Confederacy emblazoned on the wall behind her. Her surroundings looked to be rich—some kind of Marine or Confederate audience chamber, with a marble-topped desk with sunk-in modules for data-screens, and pillars on either side of the flag behind her.

I wonder if that is some room up above us in her dreadnaught? Solomon found himself wondering. “Hi, Colonel,” he hazarded.

“Good grief… Is that…” Asquew blinked, looking shocked at the fact that she must be able to see Cready and Karamov through the small camera.

“I see that you know each other, Colonel,” the corporate man said, but staying out of sight. Only the two Martian guards, still and impassive and holding their rifles in their hands, were visible—apart from the wounded Marines, that was.

“Who am I speaking to!?” Asquew demanded once again.

“We are the Chosen of Mars,” voiced the guard at Solomon’s side. “The First Martians. The rightful inheritors of Mars. We are the ones who were born here. Who stayed here. Who are the first truly extra-planetary citizens. And we reject all claims that the Confederacy has to rule over us!” the guard said passionately.

Solomon wondered for how many years that particular guard had been waiting to make that particular speech to some Confederate bigwig like Colonel Asquew.

“Yes, yes, very well.” Asquew brushed aside the Martian’s rhetoric. “I know full well your grievances, Martian. What I want to know is: what do you want!?” Asquew snapped back.

“We REJECT the claim that we have to abide by Confederate laws. We REJECT the fact that we can only trade with Confederate-approved traders, or that Martian citizens who have worked every day of their lives to keep the Red happy have to pay taxes to a different planet many miles away! We REJECT…” The guard was starting to get on a roll, Solomon thought.

“Yes, yes, but how do you think your goods are transported? Protected from the raiders and pirates?” the colonel pointed out. “Does Mars have its own Barr-Hawking jump-ships? Do they know how much their fuel costs? Do you realize that the Confederacy were the ones to colonize Mars in the first place? And it was the Confederacy who built your habitats and wells, your infrastructure and life-support? Mars relies upon the Confederacy for everything!” Asquew spat back.

“Great,” Karamov muttered at Solomon’s side. “The last thing we need is this old argument again…”

“And just who is hanging their dreadnaughts over our skies, huh?” the guard retorted. “If the Confederacy were so interested in the affairs of Martians, then they would already have released our beloved imprimatur and Father Ultor!”

“You’re making no sense…” Asquew muttered darkly.

“No, Colonel, it is you and your Confederacy who are making no sense!” the guard spat back. “So here is our deal: deliver us the imprimatur and Father Ultor back to us, and you may have these two agents of yours, unharmed.”

Solomon kept turning his head from the camera to the screen, hoping to catch a glimpse of what Asquew was thinking behind her eyes.

She’s never going to agree. Why would she?

“As soon as you hurt a hair on their head, then it’s war…” Solomon was surprised when he heard Asquew say out loud.

“I think they’ve already managed to do that, haven’t they?” Solomon murmured, turning so that the camera could see the full extent of his face’s bruises and scrapes.

“The Chosen of Mars understand this. So, deliver us Imprimatur Valance and Father Ultor, and you can have your men back, and then we can talk…” the Martian said, surprising Solomon even more.

No one wants to die. Solomon saw a glimmer of hope. The First Martians or the Chosen or whatever they want to call themselves don’t want to see their beloved home world nuked to a crisp…

“And we want the Confederate fleets to withdraw immediately from Martian space!” the corporate man announced defiantly from out of camera shot.

“Who am I speaking to!?” Asquew peered back and forth on whatever screen she was using.

“Our…consultant,” the Martian guard at Solomon’s side said, just before the corporate executive made even more demands.

“And we want a zero-tariff on all Martian goods!” the corporate executive announced, earning a flinch of surprise from the guard beside Solomon.

“You know that will be a matter of diplomatic discussions with our ambassador…” the colonel started to say.

“And we want a public apology from the Marine Corps!” the executive declared, this time earning a nervous shuffle of the guard’s feet.

What is he playing at? Solomon thought.

“The Marine Corps has acted according to its code of conduct at all times…” Solomon could hear the colonel starting to get annoyed.

“Preposterous! Zero tariffs, a complete removal of all Confederate ships from Martian space, a recognition of Martian autonomy effective immediately, a recognition that the Martian territory extends to its near space…and a public apology from the Marine Corps!”

“This is ridiculous…” Karamov muttered beside Solomon, and, from the way that the two Martian guards were nervously shuffling and looking at each other, entirely unexpected on their part.

Who benefits from a war? Solomon remembered. The corporations. War was always good for business.

“I am not empowered to make those kinds of decisions, whomever I am speaking to, but you should be aware that none of that will be on the table…” Asquew was rising from her seat, her face visibly reddening with anger.

“Then you must be prepared to watch your two operatives die on interstellar broadcast!” the corporate officer crowed with what Solomon thought was glee.

“NeuroTech!” Solomon called out suddenly, remembering the name of the stenciled letters he had seen in the Erisian Asteroid Field, the same one that had been stenciled on the side of the packing container that had once held the murderous robot.

Which was also the creator of Serum 21, the genetically-engineered drug that the Confederate Marine Corps was giving to its outcast Marines.

They are behind this, Solomon thought.

“Shut him up!” the executive snapped.

“What was that? Commander Cready?” Asquew had paused, looking intently at the two agents.

“It’s NeuroTech!” Solomon called again, as the corporate executive lashed out at the camera centered on them, dashing it against the wall, where it shattered into sparks and a number of pieces.

“Tavin!” the guard was hissing behind Solomon. “What on earth do you think you are doing? This was only supposed to be about getting the Father Ultor and the imprimatur back to us! You and your antics have doomed us to a war!”

“There was always going to be a war, you idiot!” NeuroTech Executive ‘Tavin’ shouted back. “And now the Marine Corps knows that my company is behind it! They’ll seize our assets! They’ll freeze our Confederate accounts!”

“If you weren’t prepared for this, Tavin, then maybe you shouldn’t play with the dreams of nations…” the guard shouted, and there was the click of the safety catch from the man’s rifle.

“Don’t be an idiot, Morris!” Tavin barked. “Kill me and Mars won’t receive any more of the armaments you need. Mars will helpless against the Marine Corps…”

“We have the robots. The cyborgs…” ‘Morris’ the Martian stated, now leveling his rifle not at Solomon or Karamov but at Tavin.

“Do you?” Solomon watched as the corporate executive pulled himself up to his full height, even pulling his suit tighter as if making himself presentable for a board meeting. Tavin whistled, and there was a clanking noise from underneath them.

The cyborgs—the part-human, part-encounter-suit soldiers with the dead flesh and the unseeing eyes, marched into the room from underground bay doors.

How many are there? Solomon counted five, ten…twenty…

Then came a terrible metallic whining as one of the objects in the sunken hangar bays pushed itself upright, dominating even the small room. It was one of those experimental killer robots—vaguely table-shaped, but almost as large as a personal rocket ship. Lights flared along its surface, and weapon pods popped open, extending Gatling guns, missile racks, and even one particle weapon.

“They’re all NeuroTech property, you Martian scum. Do you think we would just hand over the control codes to you without having a backdoor?” Tavin sneered. “Now, you will let me go. Because I don’t see that you have any choice…”

There was a moment of silence from the Martian guards, before Morris shouted ‘gah!’ and lowered his rifle.

“Get out. Never step foot on Mars ever again, you snake,” the Martian said.

All the while, Solomon and Karamov were watching this interchange with only one thought: Could they use it to their advantage? To escape? It had been Tavin and NeuroTech who had called for their death, after all…but it was the First Martians whom they had attacked, even killed.

“Oh, don’t worry. I won’t have to, Morris,” Tavin paused at the stairs that ran down to the floor of the warehouse, where his own guard complement of cyborg warriors were awaiting him, as loyal and as patient as bloodhounds. “You see, NeuroTech is just the parent company in a conglomerate. Do you realize what is going to happen after the Marine Corps wipe you lot off of the face of the Red Planet? One of my companies, maybe several of my companies even – will be awarded the contracts to help rebuild, just as we did the first time around.” Tavin grinned evilly.

“I’m going to make a lot of money out of you Reds.” The NeuroTech executive turned and walked away, as the Martians fumed, and the ground started to shake.

KABA-THOOOOM!

The explosion was muted and distant, hitting the ears of the Martians, Outcasts, and the corporate alike at the same time and making them all pause, raising their heads to the distant windows. Did they see the light flicker out there in the Martian skies, just a fraction?

“The bombardment! It’s begun!” Morris was shouting. “Get the weapons! Get the people to the ventilation tunnels!”

Further below them, Tavin redoubled his pace as he, the cyborgs, and his robot broke into a run, leaving the warehouse in a rush.

“Don’t let him get away!” Solomon shouted desperately, not that the Martians were paying any attention to what he was saying.

“Captain? The Confederates?” the other guard said as Morris raced out to begin his defense of Armstrong.

Solomon saw the Chosen of Mars pause on the stairs, looking at them dispassionately.

Oh no.

“Kill them. Who cares about these two, now that we have a war on our hands?” the captain said, turning and leaving as the other guard released the safety on his rifle and lowered it towards Commander Solomon Cready…

14

One Advantage Left

KABA-THOOOOM!

Jezzy Wen was shaken awake, quite literally, as she shuddered and bounced on the rocking floor and dust filled the ventilation tunnel she was in.

What was that? She still felt groggy, but she no longer hurt. If anything, her entire body let like warm elastic.

The painkillers. She remembered Kol and his betrayal. Young Technical Specialist Kol, who had fought alongside them for the last year. Who would have known that he was a secret Martian sympathizer? Him and his uncle. Maybe he didn’t even know how deep his feelings for Martian independence went, until it seemed like the Marine Corps—the very people he’d had the misfortune of being pressganged into—were ordered to go to Mars and put down a rebellion.

Whatever. She shook her head, her vision doubling for a second before settling again.

“Breathe. Concentrate on the breath,” she told herself, trying to recall her Yakuza training. As she centered herself, the other part of her training, her Outcast Marine training, kicked in.

What dangers are there? The woman held herself still and listened. There appeared to be tremors racing through the ground from distant explosions. Had Marshal’s generator-buster gone off in the end? No. Impossible, because Kol himself had been the one to install it. So that meant it was something else.

The commander. It had to be, even though those sorts of explosions were so loud and sounded so far away that they sounded more like an aerial bombardment than anything that even Solomon Cready could come up with.

Aerial bombardment or…orbital.

“Oh frack.” Jezzy realized what was happening. The Marine Corps bombardment of Mars, and of Armstrong in particular, had begun.

“So…dangers happen to be—no squad, I’m on my own, I’ve been shot by some weird robot man, one of my crewmates is a traitor, and the planet is now a battle-zone,” she listed. It didn’t sound any better to her than before, to be honest.

What advantages do I have? The next part of the training kicked in.

“Uh…” For a moment, it was very hard to come up with any at all, but eventually, Jezzy managed to force her stubborn and cynical mind to take their situation seriously.

She was still alive. Just about. That counted as an advantage. Her service pistol was still over there, as was all of her normal equipment minus one painkilling tranquilizer pen. She was also Jezebel-fracking-Wen, she told herself—once one of the most dangerous women in Yakuza employ. Trained since she was sixteen or so, with over a decade of learning how to kill people and survive terrible situations.

Anything else? She pushed herself to her feet, feeling wobbly but thankful that the painkillers at least meant that she could ignore any bad effects from her gun wound. In fact, she could probably ignore ANY effects of physical exhaustion about now.

And there was one other thing, of course, she thought when she saw that the tunnel ahead of her had collapsed. The rubble formed a handy stair up to a hazy sky above her.

“Come in, Malady?” she activated the communicator that was still in her ear, before sliding her bubble-helmet in place and picking up her service pistol. “Malady, come in. This is Specialist Wen. I’m in Armstrong, Arceos District, and I could really do with some superior firepower right about now…”

Jezzy Wen had the advantage of having a Specialist Malady to call on.

15

A World at War

“You don’t have to do this…” Solomon said to the First Martian while it sounded like the whole world outside was going to hell. Explosions were erupting all over the place, it seemed, and sirens and klaxons were blaring outside. The lights started flickering, and yet still, the Martian was sighting down the gun at them, tied to their chairs.

“Look, buddy, shoot him first, will ya?” Solomon pleaded. “I never liked him anyway…”

“Hey!” Karamov said beside him.

“Huh?” The Martian guard took the bait, raising his eye from the gun for a fraction of a moment to chuckle at Solomon’s desperate treachery… And it was all that Solomon needed to move.

Solomon rocked forward as fast and as hard as he dared, feeling the rear legs of the chair rise behind him as his weight moved onto his feet, and he jumped, smashing into the guard’s legs with the back of his chair and rolling…

There was a splintering sound and pain shot up Solomon’s arms, but he found that he was sprawled on the floor, half of the chair dismantled behind him and with the ropes much looser on his left wrist.

But where was the guard that had been about to shoot them both?

He had dropped the rifle and was even now pushing himself up groggily from where he had been smacked by Solomon’s charge to the floor. The Specialist Commander of the Outcasts’ Gold Squad wasted no time. His legs were free, so he kicked the man back down again, giving him time to pull an arm free—

“Hyagh!” The guard was also reaching for the rifle, but Solomon didn’t. Instead, he reached for the man’s knife at his own belt as he threw himself forward, killing the guard with one savage blow.

“Urgh…” Solomon rolled over onto the floor in disgust and exhaustion. There were screams and shouts from below as the sky appeared to erupt into flame. No one had noticed their desperate scuffle. Not yet, anyway.

“Hey, Commander, do me a solid and get me out of here, huh?” Karamov was hissing worriedly, still sitting precisely where he was before. “Unless, that is, you really meant what you said about never liking me…”

“Shut up, you fool.” Solomon smirked, cutting the polycord and grabbing the guard’s rifle as he and Karamov crept to the edge of the balcony to look down.

The first Martians were all abandoning their posts. Most had thrown red cloaks over their shoulders and on top of their armor and were hurriedly racing outside. Distantly, underneath the roars of explosions, Solomon could hear the whine of heavy machinery and engines starting, as he imagined the Chosen of Mars jumping onto their hover-bikes and racing to try and defend Mars.

But defend Mars how? Solomon thought. There were two Marine Corps dreadnaughts up there, and all they had to do was to nuke Armstrong Habitat and that would be it…

“But maybe even the Marine Corps can’t be seen to kill an entire civilian city…” Solomon thought out loud, before nodding to Karamov. “Come on.” Most of the First Martians had left the warehouse now, and they appeared to have other things on their minds anyway, as Solomon and Karamov crept down the steps to the doors and look out at the embattled dome…and to look up.

PHOOOSH! Most of Armstrong’s membrane was made of a thick, translucent material, crisscrossed with triangular rods to hold it in place, and it was through this that Solomon could see the effects of the Marine Corps bombardment. Only it wasn’t an orbital bombardment as he had feared.

He saw up there that the sky was awash with five-party flights of the two-winged, wedge-shaped Marine Corps fighters, screaming across the sky and not firing on Armstrong.

Instead, Solomon watched as small, dark parcels like malicious presents were dropped from the underside of the vessels to impact outside the habitat and explode in great gouts of red and black earth.

“They’re showing off their power. Even Asquew doesn’t want to kill a few hundred thousand people in one go…” Solomon said, feeling an odd moment of pride at that.

Only they weren’t alone in the skies, apparently…

PHOOSH! PHOOSH! The Martians had their own fighter-planes. Although ‘planes’ is a bit of a stretch, Solomon thought. They looked little better than tubes with star-like radials extending from their trunks, each of which had positional booster rockets. In the low Martian gravity, these rockets spun and careened through the sky like fireworks, looking completely out of control yet apparently totally remaining so.

The Martian tube-fighters were insane, faster and more maneuverable than the Marine Corps fighters, but they didn’t pack as much of a punch, Solomon could see. They had only rotating mini-cannons at the front, powerful enough to punch holes through the wings of the Marine Corps fighters, but a direct hit to a Marine Corps hull would only bounce off.

“They’ll never win…” Solomon was thinking.

“You wanna bet?” Karamov was nodding towards where a deeper, juddering sound announced the second wave of the Martian defense.

A Martian saucer—which had always looked like a doughnut to Solomon’s eyes with its wide, banded middle—was appearing over the other side of the Armstrong crater. They were about the size of eight or nine of the Martian attack fighters in one, and they were monumentally, insanely tough, or so Solomon had always heard. He saw plumes of rocket exhaust from its middle as it launched more of the haphazard rocket-ship fighters, and then engaged the enemy with its own missiles.

Meanwhile, Solomon saw white and gray streaks racing up into the skies from the far edge of the Tharsis crater wall around Armstrong, and he realized that the Martians must have some kind of missile defense system out there—or perhaps even ground-based rocket positions. As he watched, he saw two Marine fighters get hit, exploding and spiraling across the sky trailing black smoke.

“You got your encounter helmet?” Solomon asked quickly, knowing that he had lost his at some point during the last night.

“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 caravan 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 them 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.

A part of Jezzy even wondered if what they had been told was a lie. A piece of careful misinformation seeded on the eve of war to help their campaign somehow? Or maybe to inspire loyalty. Their squad so far had already made waves by being the first one to have an actual traitor in their midst. She wouldn’t put it past the Confederacy to lie to their own people. After all, her own training in the Yakuza had led her to realize that power corrupts, and all organizations or individuals did everything they could to hold onto that power.

But the general wasn’t lying, was she? Jezzy thought. She knew that Asquew had been telling the truth, thanks again to her past. She had heard the last-minute confessions, reminiscences, and accusations of more people than she had ever truly wanted to. She knew what stripped-down, bare-naked honesty sounded like. She knew what it looked like in someone else’s eyes.

“Solomon?” she prompted again, pausing for him to get suited up before they joined the queue of others waiting to begin.

“Space sure is big,” Solomon muttered at the floor as he pulled on his boots.

2

The Brigadier General’s Address

“The Confederacy is at war,” Brigadier General Asquew had said, which Solomon thought was rather unsurprising, and also rather an understatement.

You invited my squad to this private debriefing just to tell us THAT? Solomon thought, his battle-tired body making him irritable.

“But not with who you think we are,” Asquew surprised him by saying next.

Not the First Martians, or the ‘Chosen of Mars,’ or whatever it was that band of fanatics were calling themselves? Solomon frowned, before his heart lurched.

Oh no. She must mean Proxima, doesn’t she? Earth’s largest sister-planet in the nearby star system of Alpha Centauri had been vying for complete independence for almost as long as Mars and Luna had. If they decided to throw their chips into the civil war too, they were a large enough and sustainable enough colony that they might even be able to win their freedom, the specialist commander thought…

But the answer was far stranger than another bunch of human settlers.

“This is unlike any conflict that humanity has faced yet,” Asquew intoned. “And as such, we have no way of strategizing our enemy’s weaknesses…

“Unlike other human conflicts, this has mostly been an invisible war without direct battlefield manifestations,” Asquew stated quizzically. “A war of positioning, and of information, against an enemy who appears to be far more technologically advanced than we are…”

What? The Proximians? Solomon thought confusedly. How had Earth’s sister got that far ahead of the Confederacy in such a short time? Everyone knew that the Confederates kept a strangle hold on technological development, and that most of the best available technology went to developing the Confederate Marine Corps itself.

But it wasn’t the Proximians that the general was talking about at all.

“You have been called here because you now have first-hand experience of the enemy, although you did not know who they really were at the time,” Asquew stated.

“You fought the rogue NeuroTech machine in the Erisian Asteroid Field, shortly after it had managed to kill an entire deep-field station-ship of traders on route to Mars. And you fought the cyborg warriors of Mars, also the creation of NeuroTech.”

“Well, to be honest, sir, I am not entirely sure if you could say what we did was fighting,” Solomon heard himself mutter, before shutting his mouth with an audible gulp. I must really be a lot more tired than I had thought! He looked up to see that Warden Coates was glaring at him for speaking out of turn, but Asquew didn’t appear to mind the small breach of conduct.

“I read your report, Specialist Commander,” Asquew responded. “Yourself, Specialists Wen and Karmov loaded that cyborg with bullets, and you managed to drop it. Which is more than any other Marine can say who have faced them yet.”

Only we didn’t drop it for very long, did we? Solomon remembered the strange being they had seen in the ventilation tunnel on Mars. It had shot Jezzy Wen with its hand-mounted particle engine—a weapon that Solomon had never seen in such a miniaturized form before—and Gold Squad in turn had fired everything they had at the creature that looked curiously like a mixture of Malady and a corpse, with part-metal suit and exposed, necrotic flesh.

The thing had dropped, but soon afterwards, it had vanished, leaving a trail of a thick, dark substance that looked like a horrifying mixture of blood and engine oil.

That cyborg had gotten back up and disappeared. Solomon remembered the feeling of horror in his stomach. It had gotten up even after taking six or seven solid Jackhammer shells.

“I’m sorry, sir?” Jezzy spoke up at his side. “You said that other Marines have faced those…things?”

Asquew frowned for a moment before replying, “Yes, only not in a battlefield situation. Here, let me explain…” She nodded at Warden Coates, who stepped forward to the desk to plug in a data-screen and swipe a few holographic buttons. There was a shimmer of light as the center of Asquew’s desk lit up and started projecting a three-dimensional recording, faintly glitchy, from what appeared to be various training programs.

There was a team of full Marines—Solomon could tell from their heavier, more robust style of power armor—making a slow sweep of a diorama set, really nothing more than a breezeblock bunker with bare rooms and corridors inside that were used to train reaction times and threat-response.

The Marines moved in two groups through the bunker, their position made visible by a floating insert map. Suddenly, the leading team encountered a shape in the greenish night-vision cameras, and a red dot appeared on the map.

It was one of those cyborg things, Solomon saw, moving insanely fast and completely ignoring the live-round burst fire it received. This one was bulkier and shinier than the one they had faced in the tunnels, and the body’s chest, shoulders, and half of its bald head were exposed, looking pale, sickly, and ghostlike.

The thing shuddered and was thrown back against the nearest wall as the second team of Marines quickly advanced in a pincer movement through the diorama.

But it kept coming. Solomon watched it raise its hand and fire that strange weapon at the Marines. Internal turbines whirred, and light exploded—not as needle-sharp as the purple bolt of light that had hit Jezzy, but a more diffused spotlight-type of purple beam that still had enough force to throw three of the advancing Marines against the far wall.

BRAP-PRAP-PRAP! The cyborg fired the stocky pistol that it held in its ‘human’ hand at the Confederate Marines—and thankfully, Solomon saw that the cyborg had indeed been given dummy rounds that flashed bright yellow for a moment before hitting the leading Marine, and then the one beside them.

Alarms and grunts of pain sounded as the Marines were thrown back and forced to their knees by either dummy rounds or the thing’s diffused energy weapon, and each Marine who was hit earned a flashing orange light from their suit as they were registered ‘dead’ in the wargame.

The cyborg pretty much did the same to the second strike-force of Marines, and the third.

“What you are looking at here are highly confidential training videos taken three years ago, when NeuroTech approached us with what they said was the future of modern warfare,” Asquew stated.

“Naturally, the Marine Corps was eager to take advantage of any new development that would mean a quicker, more efficient defense of the Confederacy.” Asquew said the words, but Solomon could tell she wasn’t easy with that decision.

“The Marine Corps strategists realized that the NeuroTech cyborgs have two problems, however. One is that they are too good at killing. We had nothing that would stop them short of a full tactical.” Solomon watched her nod at Malady.

“And as for the second problem, they are owned by NeuroTech. Placing the future of the Marine Corps entirely into the hands of one mega-corporation was a risk that we realized we could not take, and it appears that in that, at least, our suspicions were proved correct.”

“So…” Jezzy nodded in understanding. “NeuroTech have been developing these weapons of war, and when the Marine Corps said that they don’t want them, the company decided to sell them to the separatists?”

“Indeed, Specialist Wen.” Asquew cleared her throat. “But were this a matter of a simple bit of illegal arms dealing, then our actions to freeze NeuroTech accounts and seize their assets would suffice. I told you that this is about aliens. About a new kind of conflict,” she said firmly.

“Naturally, we started investigating NeuroTech to see how they had come to develop this weaponry.” Asquew nodded once more at Warden Coates, who swiped another button. The paused training video to vanished and was replaced with a flickering image of an object hurtling through a high, white sky, followed by schematics.

The thing looked a little like on orb, although one side was flattened with the faintest lip on the outer ‘edge.’ The schematics—only of the outside—were much clearer, showing the same shape revolving and rotating in space without any apparent thrusters or rockets.

“This object was intercepted on Confederate Earth some ten years ago, after it crash-landed,” Asquew said. The image resolved to a massive hangar filled with Marine Corps ships, and the strange thing lying on its side in the center.

“Samples were taken, and scans conducted, of course, but nothing we could do would open it. Shortly thereafter…””

The image next showed a place in the desert where a few anonymous warehouse buildings sat. Suddenly, the scene exploded in a gigantic fireball, scattered through with purple sparks.

“The craft malfunctioned, or self-destructed, we really have no way of knowing…” Asquew stated. “But ever since, the Confederacy has been avidly hunting for more evidence of whoever sent it to us.

“Was it a probe? A spy? A challenge? A refugee? The first act of a war?” Asquew shrugged. “We have no idea, but what we later found out when we started looking into NeuroTech was that they had also been investigating these phenomena, and apparently managed to recover the exact same craft on Proxima,” Asquew stated.

“This craft became known as Experiment X to NeuroTech, and from it, they were able to start developing a line of human-machine hybrids we saw earlier as the cyborgs, as well as the murderous robots.

“And then, two years ago, we became aware of something called The Message.”

The Message! Solomon sat up a little straighter in his seat. That was what he had overheard Doctor Palinov and Coates talking about before. That the Outcasts had been created specially to deal with the ‘Message,’ whatever that was.

“Apparently, Proxima received a communication some time ago, at one of their deep-space satellites. It was from a race who called themselves the Ru’at, and they were claiming responsibility for seeding our solar systems with their craft.”

“What did they want?” Solomon couldn’t help himself and burst out.

“What do the Ru’at want? That, Specialist Commander, is the question of the century. Possible even of the millennium,” Asquew said. “We do not know the precise contents of this message other than a few small details: that the aliens called themselves the Ru’at, and that they had been the ones behind the vastly superior, mysterious craft…

“And that they were willing to offer us information,” Asquew said. “Our contacts and spies on Proxima have revealed that the Message contained very little information about the Ru’at as a species, but it did indeed contain a long and detailed data-set, which apparently translated to various new types of energetic particle engines, new types of alloy, stellar mechanics, perhaps even entirely new branches of science and mathematics.”

“And they gave all of that to the Proximians?” Solomon was surprised. He knew that maybe they should forgive their largest colony for utilizing the information, but why didn’t they share it with the Confederacy? With the rest of humanity?

“We do not know if the Ru’at were ever aware of what creed or polity of humanity they were contacting.” Asquew shrugged. “And we do not have access to the entire message, but from the copied and transcribed pieces that we have managed to smuggle out of Proxima, we have realized that this technology presents an existential threat to the Confederacy. It is far in advance of anything that Earth science has managed to generate, and now it is in the hands of NeuroTech, and the colonies.”

Asquew continued, “Our analysts have discovered that all of the Ru’at technology, the very same sort that has somehow found its way into NeuroTech’s experiments, operates from a base line of machine code that we have never even considered before. This technology cannot be hacked. It cannot be mimicked. It seems to operate as a self-replicating virus, one that is able to keep on generating complex algorithms to allow the machine itself to learn and adapt…”

“Artificial intelligence?” Solomon asked.

The general shook her head. “No. Not precisely. Or not as we understand it, anyway. These cyborgs and battle platforms that we have seen—that you have faced—do not have sentience or self-awareness as we do. They do not have feelings. Indeed, they do not appear to have any semblance of personality at all. But they have very deep machine learning. So, you managed to neutralize that cyborg threat on Mars, but the next time, that same cyborg will have memorized and analyzed your fighting styles. The same goes for the Ru’at satellite technology, apparently. Once they are launched, they will continue upgrade and update their own programming until the communication abilities of the colonies far outstrips our own.”

“Uplift…” murmured Solomon, remembering something from a long, long time ago.

“Excuse me, solider?” Asquew said.

“Ah, excuse me, sir. I thought it was just a silly science fiction story…” Solomon smiled uneasily. “It’s an idea common in some stories that communities of aliens make contact with less technologically advanced species and uplift them, or they are given a new evolutionary leap by the far superior aliens.”

“Well, an interesting idea, soldier, but the Marine Corps cannot base its battle strategy on the optimistic dreams of writers,” Asquew said.

“Excuse me, sir, but…” Solomon said a little hesitantly. “But what makes you so sure that the Ru’at have any other intention than a peaceful uplift of the human species? Surely, if they come from an entirely alien civilization to ours, then maybe this is just how they say hello and not an act of war?”

“Cready…” Warden Coates hissed in annoyance. Solomon could see the vein throbbing in the warden’s neck that he had come to recognize as the sign of an impending outburst that usually led to him using the control unit to send torturous electric shocks through their bodies thanks to the implanted control chips that all of the ex-convict Outcasts had as a matter of course. But he’s not going to do that here, and now, is he? Solomon thought. Not in front of the general, at any rate.

“It’s fine, Coates. I appreciate free-thought in my Marines,”

“Adjunct-Marines,” Coates couldn’t help himself from clarifying. Which, Solomon thought, was actually the very same crime that Solomon was supposed to have just committed—that of questioning their superior officer.

Asquew ignored him as she continued, “I understand your hesitancy, Commander Cready. However, our best Marine Corps analysts have spent years deliberating over the exact reasons behind the Message and the motivations of the Ru’at. And the most that any of us can say with any certainty is this: that this technology is dangerous, and it is surely one of the key reasons why the seditionists thought that they could be strong enough to break away from the Confederacy. This message has already managed to do what some fifty thousand years of human history hasn’t achieved: splinter our species into different groups, with NeuroTech happily making a profit on the downfall of our entire kind.”

“And fanning the flames of war.” Solomon nodded, enjoying the way that his casual conversation with the general was infuriating Warden Coates.

“Precisely. So, not only does the Marine Corps have to put an end to these ridiculous attempts at sedition by Mars, Proxima, and Luna, but we also have to get to the bottom of just what the Ru’at want,” Asquew stated. “We cannot afford to let NeuroTech continue, which is why in the next few days, I will be sending Gold Squad on a mission.”

“Aye, sir.” Solomon nodded formally. “Where to?”

“All in good time, Commander Cready.” Asquew gave the young man a tight smile. “I still have to win the war for Mars, yet…”

Which isn’t going to be happening any time soon, Solomon thought as he looked out the viewing port window to see the surface of the Red Planet, scarred and dotted with smoke.

“In short, Specialist Commander Cready…” Asquew surprised him by speaking again. “None of you would be here if it wasn’t for the Message. The Outcasts are the Marine Corps’ response to the Ru’at. As soon as we realized that this alien force could be among us, we needed an answer, and we created one: a new type of Marine that does not have to rely on the technology of their equipment, but instead be biologically and chemically enhanced,” the general said proudly.

“You Outcasts will be our weapon against the Ru’at. You have been commissioned exclusively with that goal in mind,” she continued. “Now, I need you to make yourselves ready, for in the next few days—sooner than I wanted—I fear that you will have to begin.”

3

The Instincts of Solomon Cready

3 Days Later

Push, and…jump!

Solomon lengthened his stride over the frozen rocks and ice plates of the Ganymedean surface. Ahead of him, Jezebel Wen was little more than a blur against the baleful eye of Jupiter, rising over the far horizon. The gas giant gave everything an almost yellow glow.

They were returning from their exercise run, and Solomon could feel his back and brow clammy with sweat. Working out in near zero-G wasn’t as effortless as civilians thought it to be. Solomon grimaced. The problem was that there was only a fraction of the resistance available to his own limbs. When he pushed off a rock into the next leaping run, it felt like he was pushing against nothing much more than blancmange. It made his thigh and back muscles work that much harder, and Solomon’s side where he had been shot was starting to ache.

Solomon was in a good solid position at the back of the pack of runners. Dammit, the man thought. Although it wasn’t a race, the constant evaluation and assessments that the Outcasts were subject to meant that everything was a competition—even just exercising.

Around him loped members of the other squads of the adjunct-Marines, similarly fresh back from Mars as Cready and his Gold Squad was. Solomon recognized members of Red, Blue, and Teal Squads, but he wondered what had happened to ensure that they got an early rotation back here. Had they succeeded very well or failed on Mars? What had been their missions?

And, slightly more despairingly: Where were the other members of their squads?

He was pondering this mystery—anything to take his mind off the dizzying Ru’at situation—when suddenly something drew his eye and slowed down his pace.

Ahead of them, they were approaching the home stretch of the not-race race as it approached the hangar bays of the Ganymede Training Facility, looking like large crouching turtles with metallic shells and a series of closed launch-bay doors. Behind them stretched the long collection of buildings designed into a semicircle that was the facility, and above that was the boxy shape of a Marine transporter.

The transporters were the standard dropship of the Confederate Marine Corps, a pregnant, bulging bug from which sprouted four booster rockets at each corner, and each with independent movement so they could swivel and turn, allowing the large logistics craft to make even the most precise of landings.

None of which was happening right now, though.

All four of the Marine transporter’s rocket thrusters were slanted back and up from the main body, firing the craft down towards the Ganymede surface without any attempt to slow down, reposition, or extend the landing legs.

In fact… Solomon made a quick calculation of the trajectory of the descent. It was heading straight for the Ganymede facility.

“Jezzy!” he screamed over his light tactical suit communicator. Normally on these sorts of simple exercise missions, the specialist commander would turn his communicator just to the emergency station band only. He wasn’t supposed to be acting as a squad leader at the moment after all, and he would still have been reachable by Ganymede if they needed to send urgent information.

Well, what is stars-damned more urgent than a crash landing?! Solomon growled, fumbling with the catch on his harness that opened to reveal his short-range wireless controls.

Wireless Network Communicator…On.

Gold Channel…On.

Broadcast All Frequencies…On.

In response to Solomon’s hurried button pushing, his eyes filled with the green haze of the holographic lettering on the inside of his helmet.

“She’s coming in too hot and fast. She’ll hit the main dome. Everyone find cover!” he said breathlessly, starting to run—not toward the training facility, but instead to the nearest plate of ice and rock sticking out from the Ganymede floor. Around him, the other runners had stumbled and slowed, a couple still moving forward thanks to the low gravity as they, too, comprehended was about to happen.

“Nonsense! We need to get people out of there!” one of the other squad’s members said. Frankinson from Red, Solomon thought. At least the guy had the good sense to turn his own suit communicator on as Solomon had done, he thought for a fraction of a moment.

“Negative on that, Frankinson.” Solomon let his momentum slide towards the plate of ice and rock, ducking as he did so. “You’ll never get there in time. Better to help the survivors…” he was saying as his back hit the wall of ice, stopping his charge and effectively providing him a shield against—

Against the inevitable.

Solomon managed to turn just in time to see that some of the other Outcasts were indeed doing just as he had suggested, diving for cover on the complicated ice and rock plain, striated with rills and ridges where surface water had fused with the rock.

But some had ignored him completely, and they were closing the distance towards the launch lobby, the hangar bay doors where Solomon knew they would be activating their suit identifiers and sending messages to the airlock doors to open.

“Station Command! Do you read me? Station!” Solomon was shouting once again. Why aren’t they doing anything? They have defensive gun placements, don’t they? Why weren’t they trying to stop the craft—

Because it was all happening too quickly, Solomon thought. The transporter was creating a blurring red and white haze of plasma as it burst through Ganymede’s thin gassy atmosphere, shaking and shuddering with the G-force of its descent… One of the booster rockets at a corner was flaring and being torn from its socket thanks to the momentum—

KABABOOOM!

And then there was an almighty flash as the transporter hit the main dome of the Ganymede Training Facility.

Seeing an explosion in near zero-G is almost as surreal an experience as seeing one in the near-vacuum of space.

Unlike the too-quick movements of more earthly tragedies, these terrible acts happen almost in slow motion, given the different gravitational pulls and flows. The transporter buckled and tore, spilling sparkles of light like fireworks at night. The lights glowed oddly in the strange Ganymedean environment, doubling and twinkling and glowing odd colors as they interacted with Ganymede’s unique mixture of scant noble gases.

Waves of fire spread and erupted, growing like clouds in red ink spilled in water—moving languorously and slowly, even gracefully—if it weren’t for the several Outcast Marines who had managed to get to the bay doors just as the flame-clouds enveloped them, picked them up, and consumed their suits in moments.

The ground shook as the pressure of the impact was driven through the training facility’s foundations and into the plates of rock and ice that stood for ‘bedrock’ up here. Solomon heard grinding shrieks that he thought was metal ripping and rending, but when he looked down, he saw that fracture-cracks were racing out in crazy spiderweb fashion along the alien plain where the ice—as strong as it was—was still no match for having a Marine transporter thrown at it.

The explosion looked odd, but it was short-lived owing to the lack of available oxygen in Ganymede’s thin atmosphere. Instead, flumes of fire-ink blossomed here and there in jets as portholes inside the facility burst apart, and the heat of the crash found the center’s oxygen-processing machines.

Then instead of fire came the tearing and crumpling of the facility itself as metal met metal and obscenely joined together. Solomon watched in horrified awe as one of the four thruster rockets of the transporter broke off and sheared through the front audience hall, where he and the others would have stood to recite the Marine Oath every day, or hear daily minutes and briefings given by Warden Coates.

The destruction raced along the facility in odd ways—a rounded dome the color of chrome foil and with spiraling metal girders around it suddenly performed a reverse concertina and collapsed in on itself as correctly as if it had been designed to do that all along.

Decompression, implosion, and explosion, a part of Solomon’s mind remembered from one of his command lessons. As a specialist commander, he was expected to take overview classes that covered all other areas of specialist training so when he gave orders to his team of specialists, he would have some idea of what he was talking about, or was even possible.

What would not be possible, however—his training had taught him—was to be able to use the Ganymede Training Facility for a long time. The transporter had finally stopped its dreadful descent, but now most of it had disappeared, apart from one upturned corner sticking from the center of the facility. Still, portholes burst with slow-moving fire as other areas crumpled in on themselves.

Jezzy… Solomon’s heart froze. She had been at the front of the race. Of course, she would have been. Solomon had never met anyone as athletically accomplished as she was.

Had she got my message to find cover? To stay away? Or, like Frankinson, had she elected stupid bravery over wisely staying alive?

Solomon got up from the shelf of ice and rock that had sheltered him and looked into the ruin that was once his home. There were bodies. There were Outcasts struggling to repair damaged suits, or else put suits on.

People are dying. They need my help.

Solomon broke into a run towards the facility, now that he was sure that the transporter wouldn’t explode.

Broadcast All Channels

“Listen up! Everyone away from the facility! Move out over the plain!” Solomon started shouting at Outcasts as he ran forward, his eyes scanning for signs of Jezzy’s body.

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 lightweight ‘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 counterstrike.

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 into 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 deregulated ‘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 battlegroup 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 thought 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.

Only we don’t have enough air for that, Solomon realized as the tanks blipped red. The evacuation tent was standing, but it was decidedly saggy in places, indicating that all the available air was not enough to generate regular earth pressures.

“Sol?” said one of the Green Squad Outcasts worriedly, and Solomon knew what must be on the woman’s mind. The idea of the evacuation tent was to create an emergency environment that you could seal, blow one of the inner doors, and move the to-be-rescued people into the tent, and then into the more secure area at the other end, which in their case was the buggy.

But we can’t do that here, Solomon saw. They had to use all of the buggy’s internal air tanks just to half-fill the tent, meaning that the buggy interior was now without oxygen.

“So, what we’ll do is get the warden and the others into the tent and dress them in emergency evac suits, which will keep them alive on the surface or in the buggy until…” Solomon said.

Until when, though? he thought. The emergency suits were little more than amorphous, flappy bodysuits with bubble helmets. They had no dedicated air processor units, just filters. They would be able to recycle and extract the person’s available oxygen for a short while only—an hour? Forty-five minutes?

“It’s the best we can do.” Jezzy had joined Solomon as they considered the operation. “Let’s just get them suited up at least…” She was looking speculatively at the half-filled tent. That was the next problem, Solomon knew. The pressure inside the facility was bound to be higher than the one in the tent now, and that meant that the door would be pressurized. Removing it would rip it off its hinges, and the resulting blowout could easily rip the tent from its position or send the bulkhead door searing through the mesh material, defeating the whole object.

“I can do it,” Malady said, climbing—barely—through the buggy to crawl into the evacuation tent and disappear from view.

“I’m in front of the door…” Solomon heard over his suit communicator.

“Can you open it?” the specialist commander asked. “There should be a manual hand-crank…”

“There is. But it’s quicker to…”

Solomon heard a grind of metal and a torturous screeching noise on the other end of the communicator. Is he just ripping the door from its hinges!? Solomon was once again astonished at the man’s brute strength.

“It’ll blow, Malady!” Solomon said urgently.

“I know. I can take the blast,” Malady assured him. “I’ll hold the door until it’s safe—”

KABOOOOM!

Before the man-golem could finish speaking, the entire evacuation tent shook and filled in an instant, and the attached Ganymede buggy at the far end shook and rocked on its bubble wheels as the full tactical man must have no doubt managed to break the door seals.

There was silence for a moment, before everyone realized the same thing. The tent had held.

“Yeaaaah!” a cry went up over Solomon’s suit communicator from the other rescuers, and Solomon found himself grinning. This was working. It was actually going to work.

“Get the warden and the others into a suit!” he called to Malady, who answered in the affirmative as he turned his attention to where Jezzy was already climbing some of the ruined building, looking for either more survivors—or more attackers.

“No sign of trouble, Wen?” he called to her on their private squad frequency.

“Not yet, sir,” she returned, “but there is something you should see up here…” She was crouched by the edge of the transporter wreckage, kicking over bits of concrete and metal.

“What is it?” He bounded over to the edge of the rubble and scrambled easily up to where his combat specialist stood, Jackhammer pointing out over the destruction.

There, on the other side of the pile of rubble, was the center of the crash site, Solomon saw immediately. The center of the facility had turned into a crater with rings of shattered concrete around the twisted shell of the Marine transporter. Here and there in the rubble, Solomon could make out images of curious commonplace items—a few intact floor tiles still in place that had once led the way to the mess hall; a Marine Corps tee-shirt still hanging on the edge of a bunkbed, as if the Marine had left it there just a few moments ago, while the rest of the bunkbed was covered in soot, rocks, and dust.

“It’ll take months to rebuild,” Solomon agreed with Jezzy’s dismay—only that wasn’t what Jezzy had called him to look at.

“Not that, idiot,” she said distractedly, nodding to the walls of the transporter that still stood.

“What am I looking for?” Solomon saw the thickened external plates of metal, the blackened scorch marks from the insanely hot fire, the torn socket where a thruster rocket must have been…

“No. That.” She pointed to a part of the transporter that was marginally less damaged than the others—a piece of the wall plate about double the size of the Ganymede buggy that was depressed into the rest of the craft, and one that was surprisingly clean.

Oh frack. Solomon realized what it must be. “Is that what I think it is?” he asked, which was a stupid question, because of course it was. Solomon had spent over a year getting on and off those enough to recognize an external module placement when he saw one.

“Landing module.” Jezzy nodded, indicating the pristine bulkhead door slap-bang in the middle of the clean wall of metal. It was through that that the Marines or passengers would be able to access the small landing unit mounted externally to one side of the transporter craft—hence the clean metal underneath it, where it had avoided the burn of reentry—and then detach. The landing module only had space for a couple of squads of Marines at most, but it had its own landing gear, parachutes, and even positional boosters.

“Maybe it was full of loyal Marine Corps staff, who ejected from the transporter before it hit?” Solomon said hopefully.

“Or it could have been full of more murderous cyborgs,” Jezzy drawled.

Solomon growled in frustration. That was all they needed. An unknown complement of NeuroTech cyborgs who had landed at an undisclosed location on their moon, with apparently only one intention in mind—to kill them.

“Specialist Commander Cready!” his suit communicator burst into life with the angered voice of Warden Coates, making Solomon flinch. “We have no time to admire the scenery. You and Specialist Wen are to get back here and lead on point!” The warden had clearly taken over, directing the remaining Outcast Marines to fan out in a wide skirmish formation around the Ganymede buggy as they departed for the hulk.

The only consolation, Solomon thought as both he and Wen shouted, ‘Aye, sir’ and ran back to the buggy, was seeing the warden try to maintain an air of superiority whilst wearing his flappy, dayglow, emergency evac bubble-suit.

8

Not Like Humans at All

“But who was it?” Solomon murmured over his narrow-band Gold Squad channel as he led the survivors out of the wreckage and up onto the ice plains. The rills of pink and gray over white where deposits of minerals had been scoured into the ice were a normal sight, but Solomon couldn’t shake the feeling of dread.

Probably because half of these people could die if we don’t find an oxygen supply, he thought. But it was more than that. The dark ridge of rock that formed a natural enclosure wall for the facility—or had, the man was forced to remind himself—was too good a place for an ambush.

The sensible thing would be to lead the men and the buggy along the side, Solomon knew. That way was smoother and probably quicker, even though it would add almost eight hundred meters or more to their two-klick journey.

Which was nothing, right? A simple spacewalk, he told himself.

But Solomon didn’t want to take any chances. What was it that the general had said? That the cyborgs and all of the Ru’at technology retro-engineered by NeuroTech had machine learning algorithms that they wouldn’t even believe. That meant that any cyborgs that had escaped the destruction of the facility would probably choose to be up there and ambush them.

And any cyborgs that made moonfall in that landing module would have learned from watching our defense…

“Straight up. That gully.” He held up his hand and led the way straight up the ridge. Better to face any potential enemy now than to be picked off and sniper-shot at their enemy’s leisure.

“Commander!? What are you doing?” the warden demanded on the general channel.

“Sir, it’s a shorter journey, and I don’t want our position to be too exposed…” Solomon said, weariness heavy in his voice. All we need right now is some stupid order from the warden.

“Very good, Commander,” he heard the warden murmur, and the surprise that Solomon felt almost stopped him in his tracks. He would have expected the warden to argue with him, his least favorite adjunct-Marine in the Outcasts, at the very least. What was up? Maybe Warden Coates is a nicer guy when facing the very possible prospect of asphyxiation, he considered.

“Good call, Sol,” Jezzy whispered over their Gold channel. One of the benefits of this mess, Solomon realized, was that there was no central transmitter server monitoring all their squad frequencies. The warden had just the same shortwave communicator as they did and not the override-all-channels that he would have enjoyed back in the facility.

“Thanks. But I still have no idea who it was who brought them here…” Solomon said, breathing hard as he was the first to climb the ridge. The questions bothered him. They had come in a Marine transporter. That meant at the very least a hijack of Marine Corps equipment, overpowering trained Marines, and having the resources and skills to be able to do that.

Or it could mean a traitor in the Corps. Like Kol.

“Wait a minute,” Jezzy cautioned him, bounding to his right side as Malady joined his left, with Karamov behind them, holding the rest of the convoy back until his commander gave them the all-clear. Together, Gold Squad were the first to take the ridge of the hill in a triangle formation, fanning out quickly to the jagged spikes of rocks for cover.

“Anyone got anything?” Solomon peered down the sight of his Jackhammer along the ridge to see nothing out of the ordinary. More rocks. More ice. Nothing that glinted like chrome, or looked like pale, dead flesh.

“All clear at your east,” Malady intoned. The big man didn’t crouch, as his armor would probably be protection enough against most enemy attacks. So far, it hadn’t been tested against the particle beams of the cyborgs, however.

“All clear on your west,” Jezzy echoed, sighting along the spur of the ridge that led back towards the ruined facility.

Which just left the south. Solomon adjusted the range finder on the top of his Jackhammer and scanned down the lowering edge of the ridge to where it dropped into another plateau of ice, and then the crater where the practice hulk was stationary.

It looked like the skeleton of some ancient sea creature, Solomon had always thought, if that sea creature had metal bones. The hulk sat where it had been hauled sometime in the distant past, and still even had old stencil markings of arcane military numbers and designations. Solomon knew it well. He had been sent into its empty holds and bare corridors a few times on training exercises, where he would usually be expected to dummy-shoot a rival squad.

And then there was movement. A shape emerging along the top ridge of metal plates and girders, raising an arm!

“Commander Solomon sir!” an enthusiastic voice said over their general communicator. “Distress beacon working. We managed to fire it up not five minutes ago—”

There was a flash in the dark, and that was the last anyone heard from that particular Green Squad Marine.

“Contact!” Solomon was yelling, turning to trace the line of purple-white light that had speared from the darkness of rock and ice to their west.

“I thought you said the west was clear!?” Solomon growled at Jezzy, looking for the source of the attack. A glint of chrome or silver, a shape that was too regular for the organic shapes of the moon’s surface… Anything.

“It is, stars damn-it!” his combat specialist spat back, doing the same as her commander from her own position. “That’s out on the plateau. Not up here on the ridge.”

Frack it. “Sorry, you’re right.” He scanned the lay of the land quickly. The ridge ran east to west between the facility and the crater that held the practice hulk and the hacked distress beacon. On the other side of the ridge, between their position and the crater, was the ice plateau.

“With any luck, they’re still a ways out,” he announced. He was guessing that the cyborgs—please only be one, please only be one out there… he thought—were at the extreme western edge of the ice plateau, where the ridge started. Maybe they had been about to climb up onto the ridge and take position up here to ambush them, Solomon thought, but the convoy’s quick ascent meant that the cyborgs had to move to the plateau instead.

“Dammit!” He realized the situation at once. Both the Outcasts and the cyborgs’ positions were in a case of stalemate—or at least, that was what his strategic training taught him. The Outcasts had the higher ground, which was good, but Solomon also knew that if he tried to bring the convoy and the buggy over the ridge, they would be silhouetted against the ochre glare of Jupiter.

It would be like a day at a shooting range for the cyborgs.

But similarly, if the cyborgs wanted to avoid getting shot then they would have to remain where they were, too. Hence, stalemate.

“And we can’t afford to wait around here, exposed…” Solomon was growling to himself as he searched the dark for the enemy.

It was at that moment that Solomon realized his total error, as the first cyborg stood up from the ice plateau and casually started walking up hill toward them.

Solomon fired.

Jezzy fired.

Malady fired.

All three shots hit the singular chrome and flesh creature, making it judder and spin on its heels, but it slowly turned and kept marching.

This situation would have been a stalemate if they were facing any other normal human enemy. One that was afraid to get shot and die. And one who, once they had gotten shot, usually did die.

But the cyborgs weren’t like humans at all.

9

Strange Allies

“Multiple contacts. West by southwest…” Solomon heard Jezzy say over the general channel. Not that he didn’t already know that, of course. He was crouching just a little way away from her, after all, and facing the same rising line of cyborgs as they started to climb the ridge. But Jezzy was following procedure, calling out the situation report to any other Marines that might be listening on the general channel, and of course Warden Coates behind.

“Eliminate them!” Coates was hissing in Solomon’s ear.

I wish it were that easy, the Gold Squad Commander was thinking as he ejected the previous ammo mag from his Jackhammer and jammed in another, selecting burst fire from the available settings on the side.

“Fire at will!” Solomon called, leaning out and targeting the nearest cyborg he could see.

It was a heavyset one, its human body a slightly bigger build than the others, although that was where any trace of individuality ended, as the thing had the same silvered arm, shoulder, part-face and legs as its colleagues.

Colleagues, Solomon scoffed. As if creatures like this know anything about solidarity.

He pulled the trigger, feeling the reassuring kick of the firearm against his shoulder as he gripped hard on the stock to stop it from jumping too much. BADA-BRAP-BRAP-BRAP! He was rewarded by the flash and flare of muzzle fire, almost simultaneously causing a shower of sparks and ricochets from the rising man-machine.

The cyborg staggered under the onslaught, the commander’s bullets forcing it back down the incline to the west of their position. Through the sights of his gun, Solomon saw the grisly image of the creature’s bullet-pocked body, freeing droplets of black machine oil into the Ganymede air.

The creature toppled back, hitting the frozen rocks hard and skidding back down to the edge of the plateau.

Yes! It felt like a victory, but the commander knew it was a limited one. He might have pushed it back, but with ceaseless determination, he saw the thing push itself back up on silvered metal arms and start to climb the incline once more—albeit slightly wobblier than before.

“This is insane!” he cursed, firing another barrage of Jackhammer shots at the thing, this time aiming for its belt and the legs. The cyborg didn’t make any pretense of dodging or ducking. It just took the bullets as stoically as it had every other time that Solomon had fired.

Suddenly, a shower of sparks hissed into the air from one of the thing’s knee-joints, and it was done, sliding back to the edge of the plateau, clearly with some kind of injury to its right leg.

“Well done, Commander,” Jezzy breathed tensely over the channel.

“Not good enough, though…” Solomon saw that the cyborg was once again moving. This time, it was hauling itself over the rocks by its arms since it could no longer stand up, but it was still coming for them.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” Solomon breathed over the channel communicator as other Outcast Marines took up positions beside him and began firing—other survivors of the facility crash who had been guarding the buggy. They had a total of nine Outcasts up here now, all armed with Jackhammers, and they were facing a similar number of cyborgs.

Six… Seven… Solomon ducked a purple-white particle beam that seared overhead as he counted the approaching enemy. Enough to fill a small landing module, easily, and they had approached from the western ice shelf that lay beyond the facility, meaning that they hadn’t come from the crash site itself.

A scream burst over the shared channel as suddenly one of the rock formations on the brow of the ridge burst apart in a flare of burning light, and the particle beam from below that had super-heated the rocky elements and melted the gluing ice punched its way through to find the adjunct-Marine who had taken up position on the near side.

“Outcast down!” Solomon was calling, scrabbling down the safe side of the ridge to re-ascend it underneath the Outcast’s body. The sight was terrible—a darkened burn hole straight through the man’s chest. Acting on instinct, Solomon grabbed the body and pulled it backwards, away from the possibility of any more mutilation, and picked up the man’s spare ammunition to add them to his own, before re-ascending the ridge…

We can’t stop them, Solomon was thinking, just as there was another scream over the shared channel—this time from their eastern flank instead.

“Malady!” Solomon shouted. The full tactical had been guarding that wing of the battlefront, but he had been joined by other survivors. Looking across, he saw the shape of a body flying and tumbling through the air—a human body, an Outcast Marine who had been seized and thrown by an advancing cyborg as easily as if the man were nothing more than a twig.

“Contact east!” Solomon shouted as he realized what had happened. The cyborgs really did have deep machine learning circuits, didn’t they? Their blatant assault of the western side of the ridge had concentrated the Marines on them, as another small group must have crawled over the ice plateau below and up their eastern flank. They were being surrounded! Solomon brought up his Jackhammer—

—just as a heavy, dark shape barreled into the approaching cyborg. It was Malady, standing up to his full height and making a roaring sound over the shared communicator channel as he knocked the cyborg back the way it had come. Solomon saw the back and side plates of the full tactical flex like bronze-colored muscles, and the small wheels and servo-assisted pistons releasing steam all around him as he charged to the next approaching cyborg.

It was like watching two rhinos attack each other. Solomon felt a moment of terrible awe as the two man-robots battled. Malady was clearly the bigger in every way, but the cyborg had an inbuilt particle-beam weapon. It was quicker than Malady, but not as strong.

“Enemy all around us!” Jezzy was shouting, and Solomon could hear the report of her own gun over the channel as she fought the western assault.

“Position overrun! Fight where you stand!” Solomon shouted the most terrifying words that he had never hoped to utter, but it was now already too late as something half-silver bounded through the light gravity past Malady to land between Solomon and his squad member. More cyborgs launched themselves into the air to similarly break apart the Outcasts line.

BADA-BRAP-BRAP! His weapon was still on burst fire, and Solomon fired straight up at the cyborg’s chest, giving it a full burst that knocked it back.

It’ll be back, Solomon knew, but he had no time to hunt it down, as he was pushing himself back to his feet, turning to see where another cyborg had landed near the center of their group.

This was a sort of fighting that Solomon hadn’t trained for. He was a commander, he was taught to think in positions and logistics and strategies, but this was just a bloodbath. Instead, his more distant, New Kowloon instincts kicked in.

Keep moving. Stay alive. He kicked out, somersaulting over the ridge to the far side as the rocks behind him exploded with purple-white light. He landed badly, half-stumbling before turning and firing a shot at the nearest cyborg to leap again.

Be fast. Take what chances you can. That was how you survived in the chaotic and complicated streets of New Kowloon, Solomon’s body knew, even if his mind didn’t. You had to be agile. Unpredictable.

“Arghhh!” another scream as one of the Outcast survivors that Solomon Cready had rescued was blown off the ridge by a bolt of purple-white light. Solomon turned to find the source of the attack, just as it was smashed to the ice by the leaping, charging Malady.

The specialist commander found himself in one of those surreal lulls in the middle of the violence that he had read about from other Marine’s biographies. All around him, people struggled and fought and died, and everyone was shouting, snarling, and screaming. The ground shook with the thunder of bullet-shot and the impacts of bodies.

The eastern flank is gone, Solomon saw. Only Malady, another Marine, and himself stood on this side of the battle, and there were Outcasts fighting cyborgs in the heart of the ridge as well, who appeared to be trying to push their way to the knot of survivors on the west with Jezzy and Karamov at their center. Solomon had no idea how they were managing to hold out against such an unstoppable enemy, but they were…somehow.

“Rally! Rally, my brothers and sisters!” Solomon held up his Jackhammer and started to bound towards that knot of fighters with Jezzy and Karamov. If they could reform there, then maybe they had a chance…

“Ach!” Something struck him on the side of the shoulder, spinning him around and sending him falling down the side of the ridge, bouncing in the low gravity as his attacker followed him down.

It was one of the cyborgs, who had apparently backhanded him with enough force to send him flying. The cyborg’s metal legs pulverized the rocks and ice as it landed, but Solomon still hadn’t even pushed himself back up again yet, and his Jackhammer was gone! It had slipped from his fingers in the fall and was now slowly floating a few meters away.

The cyborg leveled its weapon-arm at the Gold Squad Commander. Solomon saw the cylinders spin in a blur and discharge threading miniature lightning bolts as it generated the charge necessary to—

“Not today, metal-man!” a voice shouted as something smashed down on the cyborg’s hand, knocking it down so that the light seared into the creature’s own leg, to a hiss of molten metal and steam. It had been a boulder. One of the Outcast survivors—a big one at that—had seized a boulder and thrown it, before reaching to pull up his own gun on the strap around his shoulder and fire point-blank into the thing’s face as they bounded forward.

The cyborg swiveled and flew backward, its leg tattered and showering machine oil and sparks as it flew, and Solomon’s savior reached down to seize the specialist commander by the front of his light tactical and haul him to his feet.

The face inside the Outcast visor-helmet was not the one that Solomon had been expecting, however. It was Arlo Menier, a member of Red Squad and one of the Outcasts who had been determined to make Solomon’s life on Ganymede a living hell.

Adjunct-Marine Menier was a big Frenchman, with the build of a professional wrestler even before adding a light tactical suit on top. He had dark eyes and no hair, but a handlebar moustache that he was very proud of.

Solomon and the rest of Gold Squad had also had one training exercise with him as their commander before their final squad positions were allocated, and Arlo Menier had made every bad decision that a leader could make. Luckily, the visiting Brigadier General Asquew had noticed, ejecting Menier from the squad and giving the command to Solomon instead—which had started almost a year and a half of enmity, near fights, and small acts of cruelty from the large Frenchman towards him.

“Arlo!” he said in shock, unsure of what he should do. This man had tried to kill him out here once. Well, scare me, perhaps, he corrected. But holding a flaming arc-welder just a little away from the vulnerable visor mask of a fellow adjunct-Marine was just as dangerous as trying to kill one, right?

Solomon watched as the larger Menier reached down to snatch up Solomon’s Jackhammer from where it had been starting to settle on the ground. His nemesis held the gun in his spare hand for a moment, as if also wondering whether he was going to shoot his long-time enemy…

“Here,” Arlo grunted, passing the gun to the specialist commander and turning to fire at another approaching cyborg.

“On your left!” Solomon called, as the cyborg with the particle-burnt leg had managed to drag itself into a crouching position, once again raising its laser-generating arm and aiming at Menier.

Solomon reversed his grip and fired, hitting the thing’s ruined face to an eruption of sparks and machine oil. The neck twisted horribly, and the thing collapsed to the ground, unmoving.

Both Solomona and Arlo looked at the dead cyborg for a moment. Between them, they had done it. They had managed to kill one. It had taken two point-blank shots to the head and a self-application of its own particle laser to do it, but they had still done it.

“Thanks,” Arlo murmured gruffly at Solomon.

“Head shots,” Solomon breathed, wondering how they had managed to do the impossible, before realizing that each of the cyborgs that they had seen so far had platework silver-sheaths covering the backs of their heads down their spine to their belts. Even if their chests or shoulders or arms were bare of metal, each cyborg still had that ‘spine sheath.’

“It must have hit the central cortex or spinal column…” Solomon said. “Down their back… That’s where their control cables are—running down the spine!” he shouted excitedly as both men turned back in the direction of the battle to spread their good news, and to fight. Together.

10

Manna from Heaven

“Hold your positions!” Solomon shouted as he fired again, hitting one of the advancing cyborgs on the side of the shoulder. It wasn’t the hit he was looking for, but it was enough to spin it around, and for the Outcast beside him to target its spine. A direct hit! It went down, but their problems were far from over.

The survivors had been pushed back to the northern side of the ridge that overlooked the ice plain and the ruined facility behind them. They had lost a further two Outcasts and one staffer who had taken up a gun and joined them on the front line.

Solomon pulled the trigger for it to click impotently and the warning light to flare along its side. Dammit! He was out. He kicked himself backwards as he ejected the empty ammo case and reached for the next.

There was only one left on his belt.

Damn-damn-damn! He snarled, jamming it home and racking the first round.

The ‘front line’ was now in front of the buggy, parked halfway up the southern incline. The cyborgs had taken the ridge from them, cutting off the two Green Squad members at the practice hulk.

If they even still live, Solomon thought angrily.

BAP! BAP! The sounds of gunshots were loud over his suit communicator channel, whilst only being muted from his external suit mic. He realized that the person next to him was firing a Marine Corps service pistol, and that it was Warden Coates, stalking towards the front line as if his indignation alone could defeat the enemy. Solomon had never seen the small, wiry man fight, and he had automatically assumed that a man as cruel and as authoritarian as Coates would still be hiding in the buggy.

Not the case, however, as he saw his superior officer stride forward and take up arms with two hands, firing expertly in single shots to sever another cyborg’s spine sheath.

They were all down to single shots now, though. There wasn’t enough ammunition to go around and burst-fire from the Jackhammers was too imprecise to guarantee the kills that they needed.

How many are left? Solomon did a quick tally of the soldiers around him. He was relieved to see that all members of his Gold Squad had survived so far, although Karamov appeared to not be getting up from his crouch by a rock. Had his legs been injured? They were down to seven surviving adjunct-Marines versus five cyborgs. Although they had the greater numbers, and Malady, they were still a long way from winning. Solomon didn’t like those odds.

So far, the best tactic had been to gang up on the cyborgs. Two or three Outcasts firing on one, with one or two of the attackers firing shots to drive them to the ground, while the remaining Outcast went for the kill-shot on the thing’s back or neck.

But now that their numbers were pretty evenly matched, Solomon was starting to fear that they wouldn’t make it.

“Warden, sir! Oxygen check!” Solomon called out to Coates when the man slid to the floor and behind the boulder beside him as he reloaded his pistol. The man should have looked ridiculous in his flappy, cloak-like emergency suit, but Solomon was beyond resentments and grievances right now. We’ll have time to resume our usual hatred if we’re both alive at the end of it, he had decided, mostly thanks to the actions of Arlo Menier.

“Marine?” The warden’s voice was brusque, but Solomon heard him grunt in approval and watched him check the small reader on the side of his wrist. “I’m fine. But the rest will be running out in twenty minutes,” the warden said tersely, checking his pistol and standing back up to continue his sharpshooting.

But you put your suit on at the same time as the other staffers, Solomon realized as he watched the man fight. That meant that Coates had only twenty minutes of oxygen left too, and that the warden didn’t care, just so long as he was still able to fight.

The understanding that they were all in this together spread through Solomon, and it was like a breath of fresh air, strangely.

I hated it here, he admitted to himself as he targeted another cyborg, attempting to push forward from the top of the ridge, but instead meeting a barrage of shots from him or the others around him. I hated Ganymede. I didn’t want any part of the Marine Corps.

And the ex-thief had good reason to hate it, perhaps. The training facility had been run on austere, demanding lines. Absolute commitment to regulation, alongside a dangerous genetic—and chemical—program that had seen almost a third of the total Outcast forces die of seizures and toxic shock.

Ganymede had seemed more like a prison camp than a military academy, he thought.

But now, in the baptism of blood and war, Solomon caught a glimpse of something else that had been hidden away here. It was in the way that Warden Coates fought alongside his men—well, attempting to put his men and women to shame with his fearless outrage, perhaps. It was in the way that, when death was a certainty, Arlo Menier had stepped up and saved his life, and then fought alongside him. It was in the way that the different colored squads had been forced to fight, and die, together.

And it didn’t come from Ganymede, or the warden’s commands, Solomon realized. This new thing, this camaraderie, this brotherhood of arms came from each other. From the other Outcasts who were all just like him, ex-convicts, the mad, bad, and dangerous whom Confederate society had sent to the prison moon of Titan for the rest of their natural lives.

Here, together, these outcast men and women had forged something new between them. A reason to stay alive, if only for each other.

Even Warden Coates, Solomon had to grudgingly admit, was a little bit of an outcast here, too. A man with a strangely powerless military title who only had authority over the most hated military brigade in the entire Corps, but who had given this project his all, just the same.

It was in that moment that hope broke over them all like manna from heaven.

Searing phosphorous stars were falling to the moon’s surface in streaks of boiling, burning white light along the ridge that illuminated the battlefield too sharply.

Illumination rounds, Solomon recognized, as the general band of his suit communicator burst into life.

“Attention Outcast Marines. This is the forward dropship the Humbolt, Rapid Response Fleet. Hold your positions.”

Following the illumination lines came a burning light in the skies behind the ridge. Solomon saw a small, dark shape enter the lower atmosphere and fire at the ridge.

“Cover!” Solomon shouted as he and the other survivors dropped to the floor.

The Humbolt had fired missiles at the top of the ridge as it entered Ganymede’s atmosphere, and Solomon tucked his head under his arm as the ground shook and the brightness of the explosions managed to break through even his closed eyes. There was a deep, vibrational rumbling followed by more bursts of light and noise, and then it was over.

Solomon raised his head just in time to see the Humbolt scream overhead on atmospheric rockets, performing a wide turn over the ruins of the training facility. The ridge where the last remaining cyborgs had been holding was now a charred, broken series of craters. The cyborgs may be nigh unstoppable, but the advanced Hellfire system of the twenty-second century was enough to destroy them.

They had done it, Solomon could have laughed, or cried, the relief was so palpable. They had survived the hour it would take for the distress beacon to call for support from Mars. And for them to arrive so quickly must have meant that the general had dispatched the dropship as soon as she could.

“Good job, Commander,” he heard someone saying over the general channel, and when Solomon looked up, he saw that it was Arlo Menier of all people, offering him the meaty power glove to help him to his feet.

“No.” Solomon shook his head, feeling disorientated by this change in the bully. “You saved my life, Marine,” he murmured back.

“I know,” Arlo growled, tightening his grip on Solomon’s gloved hand for a moment in a squeeze that would have popped finger bones had Solomon not been wearing power gauntlets. “Hm,” the Frenchman grunted. “You’re still an idiot, but you can fight,” was all that the big man said before turning to start the grisly task of loading the bodies of the dead.

Behind him, Solomon wavered on his feet, wondering if that meant that he and Arlo were friends now.

“Cready!” Coates barked. “Get those staffers to the Humbolt and hooked up to some real oxygen now!” the warden demanded, just as outraged as ever.

11

CounterStrike, and Welcome

“The cyborgs knew what they were doing.” Solomon nodded in agreement with Asquew’s words as he, his squad, and the other survivors of Ganymede looked up at the form of the woman on the overhead screen.

They sat in a small briefing room on board the Humbolt’s mothership, a battleship by the name of the Oregon, capable of fielding three dropships like the Humbolt, as well as a full company of a hundred Marines—had they even been on board. Instead, the Oregon was staffed with only two platoons of roughly twenty Marines each, as all the others were still engaged with the siege of Mars.

But still… Solomon considered. For the general to send a full battleship to the rescue of Ganymede when it could have been employed in the Martian theater was a sign of how seriously she had taken the situation, he knew.

The Oregon was in orbit around Ganymede as there was nowhere for it to dock or to make landing now that the facility was destroyed. And it really was. Solomon could view the aerial pictures right now, as they scrolled down one side of the overhead screen, along with reports and analyses of that day’s action.

“The Outcast Training Facility is gone.” Asquew appeared able to read Solomon’s mind. “This was no doubt a targeted attack against a key Marine Corps capability.”

What was more, the crashing of the Marine transporter had only been a diversion for the real attack of the cyborgs, hidden in their landing module and making moonfall on Ganymede moments before the transporter had hit.

“But why us?” Solomon heard one of the other survivors ask—one of the Green Squad team he had sent to activate the distress beacon. “And what were those things?”

“Why you?” Asquew’s eyes flicked to Solomon and the other Gold Squad members. Solomon knew what was coming next. She had to tell them the truth of what they faced, and she did so in clipped, efficient sentences. When she was done, and everyone in the room now knew about the Ru’at, NeuroTech, and the cyborgs and killer robots of the colonies, a newer, tense sort of silence settled over them.

“The secret war has gone public,” Asquew muttered as her eyes stared into the middle distance. “The colonies are using alien technology against us. We have already sent a very clear counter-message.”

The scrolling images on one side of the screen suddenly displayed a new image. It was of the Red Planet, but the image was taken from too high for Solomon to see just which of the Martian habitat-cities it was featuring. Before he could try to trace any familiar craters or mountains to get his bearings, there was a tiny pinprick of light on the surface.

Which rapidly grew larger—a perfect circle of light that was growing wider and higher in moments.

Oh frack… Solomon realized what he was looking at, as the bubbles of light started to glow around the edges while they burned up the lower atmosphere.

“We’ve nuked Mars,” he breathed.

“Affirmative, Specialist Commander Cready,” Asquew confirmed. “Two megaton thermonuclear devices were deployed at fifteen forty-eight hours today, on the plains outside of Armstrong and Pavonis Habitats.”

“Outside?” one of the other Outcasts wondered aloud.

“We are not in the business of mass slaughter,” Asquew said. “But the shockwaves of the blast alone will be enough to cause a major setback to the Martian habitats, their economies and futures.”

Solomon could see the reasoning. The supersonic, super-heated shockwaves would be powerful enough to wipe off the face of Mars any of the smaller settlement bubbles on the sand plains between Pavonis and Armstrong, as well as cause major widespread damage to the habitats themselves in the form of ripped bubble-fabric, building collapses, and power outages. Maybe not hundreds of thousands would die, but a thousand certainly might…

“Which will give us the breathing space we need to recalculate our strategy in the light of this present attack,” Asquew intoned.

“General, sir? Permission to speak freely, sir?” The warden stood up from where he had been sitting at one end of the metal table, throwing a perfect salute as he addressed his superior officer.

“As you wish, Warden. This is an informal meeting, given the outstanding acts of bravery you and your people have performed today.” Asquew nodded.

“Thank you. But I must ask… How did the colonists get a hold of a Marine transporter? And when did they have the opportunity to load it full of the NeuroTech cyborgs?” Coates asked, his eyes flaring with righteous indignation as his facility, his baby, had been totally destroyed.

“A good question. Our records show that earlier yesterday, this man boarded the Marine transporter that attacked your base, where it was stationed in orbit around Mars.” Asquew nodded, and the side-show of nuclear terror was replaced with the Marine Corps photographs of Specialist Kol’s identity card.

“Kol!” Jezzy spat, standing up in fury. For once, this lack of protocol wasn’t remarked upon by the warden.

Solomon nodded. It made sense, after all. Kol had been a member of his squad, and he had been their technical specialist, trained in electrical and mechanical engineering. If anyone would know how to fly a Marine Corps transporter, or how to override the door controls, it would have been Kol.

Just like he would also know how to fool the Ganymede satellites when he sent the transporter crashing into his old home… Solomon sighed. Kol had been trained here on Ganymede, after all.

“Report, Specialist Wen.” Coates nodded at her.

“I last saw Kol in the ventilation tunnels under Armstrong.” Jezzy ran through the story that Solomon knew well by now. “He was meant to fit a device that would blow a part of Armstrong’s power grid, making it easier for me and the rest of the Gold Squad to sneak in and destabilize the separatists on Mars,” Jezzy said.

“But he had no intention of blowing the power grid, and instead overpowered me and left me to die, stating that he was joining the Chosen of Mars/First Martian separatists,” Jezzy explained. “Needless to say, the device didn’t work, and our mission failed, forcing the Confederacy to engage in outright warfare with Mars instead of infiltration.”

But it was also there that we discovered the cyborgs, Solomon had to admit. Who were being sold by the mega-corporation NeuroTech.

“Agreed,” the general intoned. “We will continue to search the Ganymede crash site to see if this traitor went down with his ship. In the meantime, I have alerted all officers that this man is wanted for treason…but I am sure that he did not act alone.”

“Sir?” Warden Coates asked.

“Kol managed to get a good-sized force of these cyborgs on board the transporter without raising alarms. There is every likelihood that there are further traitors loyal to Mars inside the Marine Corps,” Asquew said heavily, and a gloomy silence fell across the briefing.

“But the Director of Defense has told me that we have every permission to act fast and decisively,” she said, “against the threat that is NeuroTech. NeuroTech supplied Mars with cyborgs, and NeuroTech must have supplied ex-Outcast Kol with the cyborgs to attack Ganymede.”

“While we have seized their New York, London, and Shanghai offices, they all pale in comparison to its interstellar headquarters…” The side panel beside her face flickered to reveal tall buildings that tapered near the top, made of a fabulous bronze but whose balconies were overflowing with greenery, like a hanging garden.

“The NeuroTech headquarters are on Proxima Centauri, our sister planet,” the general said. “And while Proxima’s role in this conflict has been little more than blockades of Confederate goods coming into their space, as well as a few riots and provocation on the streets of their capital, they have long been voicing the same concerns for greater independence as Mars has. They have not sent active soldiers to face the Confederacy, but we fear that it is only a matter of time.”

Especially now that you’ve nuked a fellow colonial planet, Solomon thought a little despairingly. When faced with such total destruction, any rebellious force really only has two options left: either total capitulation, or the decision that they might die anyway so a total commitment to the war effort instead.

Solomon didn’t like to guess which way it would go.

“Despite repeated demands by our ambassador for the Proximian Imprimatur to exile NeuroTech from their territory, the Proximians haven’t done so,” Asquew stated with a grimace. “Which leads the Secretary of Defense to conclude that the only possible explanation is that Proxima has been working with NeuroTech all this time. Perhaps funding or facilitating the mega-corporation to send these new weapons to Mars, to feed the Martian uprising, in an effort to strengthen their own.”

Solomon saw Warden Coates nod one brittle, hate-filled nod.

“So, this will be your new mission, Outcasts,” General Asquew said. “I will be sending what remains of you to Proxima to infiltrate and destroy the NeuroTech factories where they built the very things that destroyed your home and killed your fellow Marines.”

A loud cheer went up from almost all corners of the room, even from Warden Coates.

Everyone always likes a little payback, Solomon thought, smiling disingenuously and nodding along with others, even as his heart fell. Maybe the rest of the Outcasts here were too upset to think about what the general had just offered them. This wasn’t just a chance at revenge. This was traveling to a potential enemy territory, at the other end of human space. Their odds of a successful mission were tiny. Solomon and Gold Squad had done infiltration work before. They knew what it was like to be surrounded on all sides by the enemy.

They’re desperate, Solomon realized. The Marine Corps top brass are desperate to end this war in any way they know how, and now they are going to bet on a bunch of embittered ex-cons.

And while Brigadier General Asquew was offering them a chance at revenge, it was also clear that she did not expect anyone who went to ever come back alive.

Solomon’s realization that this was a suicide mission fully resolved when he heard the next thing fall from the general’s lips.

“And because of your outstanding acts of bravery in the field this day…” She cleared her throat. “I will be recommending that the Outcast company be given full Marine status within the Rapid Response Fleet and the wider Marine Corps, and those of you who have won specialisms will be carrying them forward into your new rank, as well.”

There was a stunned moment of silence, and then loud cheers broke out from the room.

“Welcome to the Marine Corps, my brothers and sisters.” Asquew smiled grimly.

12

Ceremony

The atmosphere was hushed and still inside one of the holds of the Marine Corps battleship, the Oregon.

Solomon stood in line with the other survivors of Ganymede, looking into the large room that had been cleared of ammunition boxes and crates, and instead held assembled lines of standing full Marines, dressed in full power armor, on either side of them, creating an empty avenue that started in front of Solomon to the far end of the hold where, under the large airlock doors, stood Warden Coates, Doctor Palinov, and Colonel Faraday of the Oregon, an older man with graying hair and a craggy face in ceremonial dress uniform.

Solomon recognized him, having seen him about the Oregon. This was his boat, and he reported directly to the general. In this place at least, Colonel Faraday outranked everyone else.

“Brothers and sisters,” the colonel said in a loud, authoritative voice. “You are called here today to witness the induction not only of brave men and women into our community of Marines, but also to see the creation of a new company in the Rapid Response Fleet.” Faraday held up a hand to signal for a large banner to ripple open from the ceiling of the hold.

It was a skull, Solomon saw with a morbid shiver. A green skull over a red backdrop.

“The green represents new life, coming from the old way of death,” Faraday stated. “And of course, the red is the fire of courage and the color of bloodshed, both signifying where you have all come from and what qualities you will need to succeed as a full Marine.” Faraday nodded. “The Outcast Company is born,” he said in an almost reverential tone, before nodding to his fellow officer beside him.

“Step forward, Adjunct-Marine,” Warden Coates said in a low voice that nonetheless carried well over the silence. Coates had managed to somehow find a matching ceremonial suit for his position—gray with red stripes, with a small peaked cap emblazoned with a gold star.

The room was dark apart from the spotlights on the empty avenue, clearly illuminating Solomon Cready as he stepped forward in a formal ceremonial march—knees up, wide steps, slowing to bring both feet together, then performing once again as he moved slowly towards his superior officers.

“A-TEN-Hut!” the warden barked in perfectly aggressive, clipped tones, and Solomon stopped, stamped his right foot down, and threw a salute at the same time as the warden, and for the Colonel Faraday to acknowledge him with a more relaxed salute.

“Step forward, Specialist Commander Cready.” Faraday nodded, and Solomon took the final two steps that put him in front of the men and women.

This is it, Solomon thought. This is my graduation.

For a moment, time seemed to slow down as Solomon considered his position and his past. He had never even dreamed that he would be standing here, in front of a military leader and being awarded full Marine status. Even after joining the Outcast Marines, he had found it difficult to imagine that he would ever actually make it through basic training and then field training to this point.

But here we are, he thought. He had done it.

The old Solomon that he had been—the one who had scammed the Yakuza and the Triads, and who had stolen from corporations and museums alike—would have scoffed at this ceremony. He would have sneered at such ritual antics.

What’s the point? When are they going to pay me? That’s what I want to know! Solomon could almost hear his previous self saying just that in the back of his mind.

‘But now I am older, I put away childish things…’ the ex-thief remembered a line from somewhere, though he couldn’t remember where. But it was true, and it made sense to him now. The old Solomon that he had been hadn’t seen what this new Solomon had seen. He hadn’t spilled blood and sweat beside his military brothers and sisters, even those he had hated.

Solomon felt like a new man, which was itself an unusual sensation for someone who had always been so certain of his place in the world. The old Solomon had been a loner, a wild card—he had even turned on his oldest friend Matthias Sozer, hadn’t he?

But now I know something different… Solomon had the humility to lower his eyes for a second, to look at his feet on the grillwork of the hold’s floor.

Now, Solomon knew that he was nothing without his team. The Outcasts had been forged in battle, and when Solomon had walked out of it, he felt himself to be unrecognizable. There was no going back to the man that he had been.

“Specialist Commander Cready,” the colonel said in a gravelly voice, sounding very serious indeed. “I have been empowered as the site-commander to induct you into the Marine Corps, but first I have to ask you one question: are you ready for this duty?”

Solomon breathed, allowing himself to savor the moment. It was a duty, of course. He would be expected to take orders for the Confederacy. To kill for the Confederacy. To die for the Confederacy, if need be.

Of course, he had been expected to do all of these things as an adjunct-Marine of Ganymede before as well, but the Outcasts had been pressganged convicts, implanted with control chips that the warden could use to paralyze them at any given opportunity. I never really had a choice to join the Marine Corps before, Solomon knew. The only other option would be to be sent to Titan as a laboring prisoner for the rest of his natural life, which had been sure to be very short, given the harsh conditions and the dangerous nature of ice mining.

I’ve never really been asked before, Solomon thought.

You think you can say no? the argumentative and difficult small part of his mind said—the part that belonged to his old self, and not his new. The old Solomon would have called the new one a fool and that he could still be sent off to Titan at the whim of his superior officers, and that he still had the control chip implanted into his neck anyway, didn’t he?

But this time, it was different, Solomon told himself. He had been asked, at least. He had been seen and recognized, and even respected, by his superior officers.

“I am, Colonel, sir.” Solomon nodded.

The first thing to go was his light tactical suit.

Two Marines stepped forward from either side of him to start working quickly and efficiently to strip the Gold Squad Commander of his shoulder-pads, gauntlets, and battle harness that they had all been instructed to wear. In one of those slightly comical twists, Solomon and the others were already barefoot, as the Marine Corps had long since found out that this ceremony took too long if you also had to disengage metal boots as well.

In just a short while, Solomon stood before Warden Coates and Colonel Faraday in just his undermesh suit, as the two Marine helpers returned with his new dress.

First went on the mesh gloves, black, of course, and much thinner and made of finer materials than any that the adjunct-Marines had worn. They had pressure-sensitive pads on the fingers, and sensors embedded just above the wrist that would communicate his heartrate, blood pressure, moisture retention, and a number of other essential biological readings to his new uniform.

And the backs of the gloves were carefully machine-embroidered with the sword, star, and eagle insignia of the Marine Corps.

Next came the mantle—a flexible padded collar studded with sensors that draped over his shoulders and covered most of his neck. It would offer some more protection from attacks, but its primary purpose was to generate passive energy from the heat of his body and transmit it to the much more powerful power suit he was soon to wear.

“Arms up,” one of the Marines said, and Solomon did so for a wide metal belt studded with connector ports and module holders to be clipped around his waist. In the center was a large metal buckle with the Marine Corps insignia emblazoned for all to see. The belt harness functioned like the old battle harness did, Solomon realized as he carefully watched the procedure. He would have to suit up in the worst conditions ahead, he was sure. Metal-mesh straps were extended from the belt to cinch onto the mantle and cross his thighs, supporting his body and adjusting his posture. It was a surprisingly comfortable design and felt much lighter than it looked.

Next came the shield plates—a breastplate and a back plate made of interlocking sheaths of metal that could move and flex, hooking up to the belt harness for green LED lights to flash that they had achieved connection and the armor was now powering up.

Power armor was mechanistically the same stuff as Solomon’s old shoulder-pads, power gauntlets, and power boots, but it was made of thicker materials, with more cushioning material between alternating plates of metal, metal wire, and mesh materials. Ultra-fine cables that moved water and liquid oxygen around his body in both a coolant and hydration system snaked through the underside of the plates, along with fine threading of connectors that meant that the suit could be ‘powered.’ It could generate its own electricity from light or heat, and its tiny servo mechanisms, pistons, and compressors meant that Solomon would feel only a fraction of the weight of all that metal.

Over the shield plated went the shoulder-pads, magnetically clicking into place, and finally came the plates greaves, the power gauntlets, and the power boots.

By the time they had finished, Solomon Cready now stood five inches taller from the heavy boots, and a good few inches wider as well.

And yet it still feels remarkably agile. Solomon tried swiveling his hips, to hear the tiny hum and whirr of internal motors from his new suit.

“Marine,” one of the helpers murmured, snapping Solomon’s focus back to the moment, where a helmet was being lowered over his head, connecting to the mantle and with an automated hiss, inflating a snug rubber seal with the shield plates.

Solomon was plunged into darkness for the briefest moment, but then a friendly digital-green light washed over his face, and Solomon was looking out of the helmet’s faceplate, with the holographic display of the power armor’s commands and readouts scrolling down one side of his vision.

In front of him stood Colonel Faraday and Warden Coates, and somehow, the bullet-proof crystal lenses of the helmet seemed to make the figures appear clearer than even Solomon’s natural eyesight would have allowed.

POWER ARMOR… Active.

USER ID: 1LT Cready.

COMPANY: Outcasts, Rapid Response Fleet.

SQUAD IDENTIFIER: Gold.

SQUAD TELEMETRIES… Active.

Bio-Signatures: GOOD.

Atmospheric Seals: GOOD.

Chemical, Biological, Radiological Sensors: ACTIVE

Oxygen Tanks: FULL (6hrs).

Oxygen Recycle System: WORKING (1hr).

The power armor had better sensors and better protection than the light tacticals had, Solomon saw. There was even a hazy green wash of color every few seconds, as the suit’s internal scanners registered the assembled lifeforms of the Marines all around him.

It’s like wearing a top-of-the-range battleship, Solomon thought in awe.

“You are clothed anew, Marine,” Faraday’s voice came over the suit’s internal speakers loud and clear. “But there is still something that we have to take away from you…”

Solomon watched as the older man gestured for his old shoulder-pad to be brought toward him and held in the hands of the Marine as Faraday reached down with a small handheld device, and there was a fizz of steam and escaping gas as he plucked something from the top edge.

It was Solomon’s specialist commander star—a tiny golden star that had been magnet-sealed to his old suit.

“You no longer need this, solider.” Faraday gestured for Solomon to open his gauntleted hand, and he dropped the tiny bronze star into his hand with a chink. Solomon felt a moment of sadness at that, but he promised himself that he would keep it. He would never throw away the first symbol he had that others had trusted him.

“But instead, we give you this.” Faraday held up a hand, and one of the Marine helpers placed into it a small black metal box, which flipped open in the man’s hands and revealed a small foam bed, with a slightly larger gold-looking star over a sword. The insignia of a first lieutenant, over the sword of the Marine Corps.

And if I survive long enough, I’ll add another sword under that first one, and then a third, and then… Solomon almost shook his head, inwardly laughing at his own enthusiasm. After the star and four swords came the silver eagle over a star, the insignia of a colonel of the Marine Corps and probably the highest ever practical “field rank” that a man like Solomon knew he could ever hope to achieve.

After that comes the generals, he knew. Officer classes like Colonel Faraday here probably required extensive re-training at some elite Marine Corps academy somewhere…

FZZT! Using the same tool, the colonel sealed Solomon’s new rank onto the upper dome of his new right shoulder-pad.

“Welcome to the Marine Corps, First Lieutenant Cready.” Faraday nodded. “Although you have the same duty as before, to command your Gold Squad in times of battle, you are also now empowered to command squads of full Marines in times of battle, both those of your own named color squad, and those of others.” Faraday raised an empty hand once again.

“Bring forth the flag,” he intoned, and one of the Marine helpers disappeared behind him to return with a folded triangle of what looked to be a very ancient material in red and white.

“Place your hand on the flag, Lieutenant, and repeat after me the Marine Oath…” Faraday said, and Solomon did so.

“Through blood and fire, I will still stand strong.

“I will stand at the borders and the crossroads, I will stand strong.

“Even with the eternal night before me, I will be the flame!”

As the words died in Solomon’s throat, he found himself looking at Colonel Faraday for a short moment, and then across to Warden Coates to see the man give him the tiniest nod of recognition. It was a small act, but Solomon felt as if it was titanic. Does this mean that Warden Coates respects me now? That he won’t work to have me banished and exiled anymore?

With his head still reeling from the ceremony, Solomon was dismissed, walking lightly on a suit that aided and supported every movement of his battle-hardened body back to the line, as the next adjunct was called up to be stripped of their old self and transformed.

By the end of the ceremony, every one of them would be made anew.

13

You won’t be Coming Back

Mission ID: PROXIMA

Strike Group ID: Outcasts Company, Rapid Response Fleet

Parent Fleet ID: Rapid Response 2, Confederate Marine Corps.

Squad Commander: Cready (Gold)

GROUP-WIDE ORDERS:

Select weapons module components

Make planetfall

Await activation order

Isolate target (NeuroTech HQ)

Eliminate target’s ability to produce Ru’at technology

The commands flickered over the inside of Solomon’s helmet as he sat in the webbing seat of the Oregon, in the same hold as he had been inducted into the Marines in, funnily enough.

But the last sixteen hours had seen the hold and the Oregon itself transform from an emergency rescue vehicle to a battle-ready strike command. The banners and crates had been cleared away and replaced by the webbing seats and the racks of weaponry that each Marine would be expected to carry.

Service knife.

Small service pistol.

Solomon ran down his inventory on his internal holo-controls, activated by simple hand gestures on the sensor pads on his mesh gloves inside their gauntlets.

6 meters micro-rope—an ultra-fine coiled cable of metal wires that would be strong enough to hold him and two other Marines, securely wound from its deployment port inside his belt harness. This matched the piton attachments that he could kick out from his heel and toecap of the boot, should he have to do any climbing.

The power armor that they now wore was incredible, Solomon and the other Outcasts had marveled. They were fitted with a variety of equipment, suitable to a wide variety of terrains and challenges that they might face.

A standard medical kit was in place inside its modular compartment on his belt, complete with wound sprays, bandages, surgical kit, and fixatives. No medicines in the module, however, as the suit’s arms and torso had inbuilt injectors that could be triggered to release stimulants, painkillers, or tranquilizers should they be needed. Solomon had already been shot once, and he didn’t want to go back to having to rely on a cocktail of drugs to keep him alive ever again.

Flak system. He noted the small pods on either side of his shoulders that could spray metal-foil fragments into the air around him to confuse weapons’ targeting systems for a brief moment.

But the real fun stuff came up next: the weapons racks. He saw Combat Specialist-turned-full-Marine Sergeant Wen unhitch herself from the webbing to be the first to approach the weapons rack.

“Okay to continue, sir?” Jezzy paused, one hand hovering over a set of short, curving energy blades. She spoke formally, in a more controlled tone than she’d used to before, and Solomon wondered if she felt different by their new status as well.

“Please do, Sergeant.” Solomon nodded. He thought it was unsurprising if Jezzy felt different in her new suit, he certainly did, and not the least because he was now First Lieutenant Cready, in charge of an Outcast squad.

But can I live up to it? Solomon had a moment of doubt. He had grown into commanding three or four friends, after all, as the Gold Squad Commander. But this was different. His squad had swelled to include the survivors of Ganymede, and he had been promoted on top of that. Could he pull it off? Could he make them believe in him, he wondered.

And it’s not like my last command went all that well, with one adjunct dying and another becoming the most wanted traitor in the Confederacy, he thought wryly.

But what was done was done. Solomon looked around at the new and expanded Gold Squad.

Sergeant Jezebel Wen, his suit telemetries read as he turned to regard each of them. A very small readout of her basic vital signs and suit telemetries read everything normal and active.

Corporal Malady. The walking man-golem hadn’t received any new power armor, Solomon saw, which was a blessing in many ways, as the full tactical suit was still probably the most dangerous thing they had.

Corporal Karamov, whose medical specialism had now been upgraded so that he carried a full battlefield surgery module along with a host of more arcane biochemical devices that Solomon had never learned to use.

Lance Corporal Ratko—a small, tough ex-Green Squad woman who was a technical specialist and the woman who had re-engineered the distress beacon to call in the Oregon back on Ganymede.

Lance Corporal Willoughby—another woman, taller than Ratko and also from the ex-Green Squad of the old adjunct-Marines.

And finally, the very last of his new arrivals and the one Marine that Solomon was the most wary of: Lance Corporal Menier, his suit readouts said, whose life-signs were all perfectly normal, for a man currently asleep and snoring slightly behind his own helmet.

The man had been a giant even before the addition of power armor, and now he stood almost as tall as Malady, and almost as impressive. Solomon hoped that their newfound truce would last. Last time, their argument had started when Solomon had been promoted over him. Did that mean that Menier, who hadn’t even been given a specialism yet, would once again be resentful? Would try to undermine him?

Solomon didn’t know. But he hoped not as he looked at the sleeping man. He was the only one of them so relaxed about what they were going to do that he could sleep through the multiple jumps it had taken to get them all the way out to the system of Alpha Centauri.

A squad of seven… Will it be enough? The rest of the Outcasts—those who had still been engaged on Mars and who hadn’t been cycled back to Ganymede just prior to its destruction—had also been upgraded to full Marine status, but it was only his squad who had been selected for this mission. It was an honor, Solomon knew, but then why did he feel so nervous? Perhaps because he suspected this very well might be a one-way trip.

“Squad, select your weapons modules,” Solomon breathed to take his mind off of his nerves. Everything seemed so terribly real now. But the stakes have always been the same, haven’t they? He argued with himself. Don’t die. Don’t let anyone else die.

Jezzy predictably selected the energy blade, a selection of throwing knives, as well as the trusty Jackhammer, slinging its strap over her shoulder before slotting the weapons into their relevant holders about her belt.

“Ah…” Karamov said a little uncomfortably as he was the next up, selecting the rifle as well as a belt of flashbang grenades before returning to his seat.

Ratko and Willoughby approached the weapons stands next, selecting a mixture of firearms and, surprisingly, a sniper rifle for Ratko.

“Someone wake Menier up,” Solomon said in frustration.

“Hgnh? What?” Solomon heard the large Frenchman loud and clear over his suit’s gold channel. “Ah! My favorite part!” Menier saw the stand and understood what he had to do, selecting—of all things—a set of combat claws that retracted into a wristband, as well as a Jackhammer, grenades, and two extra service pistols. “You can never have too many guns!” Arlo announced cheerily to the others as he sat back down, playing with his combat claws by flicking his wrists and sending the sharpened, reinforced steel blades scissoring out over her power gauntlet and back again.

“Lieutenant, sir?” Malady was the next to stand up, gesturing for his commander to join him.

“Choices, choices…” Solomon looked at the array of firearms both large and small, as well a whole host of close-combat weapons, grenades, and thrown weapons. He didn’t want anything complicated, and he wanted the freedom to move and think about what was happening around him. Best to stick to what you know, he thought as he selected the trusty Jackhammer alone and sat back down.

“That’s what I like to see, ladies and gentlemen!” Menier guffawed loudly a few seats down from Solomon. “A man who knows he doesn’t need anything else!”

Solomon frowned, wondering if he should take that as a compliment or one of the big man’s many acerbic criticisms, but when he shot a sharp look over at Menier, he found the man merely grinning as if he hadn’t said anything wrong.

Maybe it’s going to take me a long time to trust him, Solomon considered as Malady chose.

Micro-missile deployment unit, Solomon’s telemetries registered as Malady lifted two metal pods shaped like bubbles with flattened sides, carefully lowering them onto his shoulders where they locked into place. Solomon knew that those pods would burst open to reveal a nest of tiny weapons ports, each bearing an inbuilt micro-missile, targeted by the wearer’s hands. Malady was probably one of the few people here who would be able to wear and fire two of them, and still use the Jackhammer rifle he selected at the same time.

“Well, if we’re all suited, locked, and loaded,” Solomon called out, “then I guess we’d better get this show on the road!” He hit the call button on his belt. “Oregon Command, this is Lieutenant Cready and Gold Squad. We’re good to go.”

“Very well, Lieutenant Cready. Initiating Mission Proxima now,” replied the functionary tones of a Marine clerk somewhere far above them. A few minutes later, the doors down into the hold hissed open and in walked a tall, Nordic-looking woman dressed in white robes whom Solomon had met before.

She was the ‘personal assistant’ of… Solomon thought, just as the flame-haired Ambassador Ochrie, still dressed in white encounter robes and still looking just as irritated by existence as before, stalked in above them.

“Outcasts,” she greeted them—a tad coldly, Solomon thought, “I am Ambassador Ochrie, and you will be making planetfall on Proxima with me, under the pretense of my personal guard as I conduct talks with the Proximian Imprimatur…” She paused, her eyes finding the members of the old Gold Squad in the hold below her, and Solomon wondered if that was a look of disdain that passed over her features.

Well, the last time we were acting as her bodyguards, we almost got her killed and were involved in a major terrorist incident that arguably started the colonial conflict… Solomon reasoned. He knew that he would probably be less than pleased if he were asked to do it all over again, and this time, the stakes were much higher…

“When a window of opportunity arises, I shall activate you and you will have to make your interception of the NeuroTech production facilities,” she stated. “As much as I hate this level of subterfuge that we have to employ, it would quite simply be impossible to dropship you through Proximian-held space and expect you to survive long enough to actually make planetfall.” She sighed, as it was apparently a necessary evil that even she didn’t want to entertain.

All of Gold Squad watched as the ambassador’s mouth fell even more into a serious, straight line. “I am afraid that, once activated, there will be little hiding our true intentions to the Proximian military,” she stammered a little over the words, and Solomon realized that the hard-edged women was afraid. “My mission is to deliver you to Proxima, and then, if any of us survive, to escape.” She paused for a moment, before saying the next awful truth.

“I will be leaving Proxima on my ambassadorial craft and, depending on how your mission goes, it is very likely that I will leave as soon as you make first contact with the enemy. You will have to make your way to one of our agents on Proxima, there to leave the planet’s surface on your own, to rendezvous with a jump-craft that will be dispatched to pick you up…”

All of this sounded very good, Solomon read between the lines, but now at least he knew why the ambassador was so nervous. What she was saying was this: ‘I’m just here to deliver you and get the frack out of there. Once you’re on Proxima, you won’t be coming back.’

“Understood, Ambassador Ochrie, ma’am.” Solomon nodded, once, up at the woman. It wasn’t just him who understood the subtext to her words, however. Each of the Outcasts exchanged frank and gloomy looks between each other before the ambassador spoke again.

“Good. Well then, that’s…good.” It was easy to see how hard these orders were for her as well. “Then we shall disembark. Please command your men to follow me, Lieutenant Cready,” she said, making her way down the metal stairs with her beautiful and deadly personal assistant at her side, towards the airlock doors.

“Aye, Your Excellency.” Solomon stood up. “You heard the lady. Let’s go and get some justice for our comrades lying in the Ganymede ice!”

“Five…four… Brace!” the slim personal assistant was calling over the ambassadorial courier ship’s internal speakers.

It was a much smaller craft than the Oregon, Solomon saw, and designed primarily for fast travel from orbitals to surfaces, a vague wedge of two forward-pointing triangles, with heavy thruster rockets at the fatter end and a large number of communications aerials and dishes that were currently being slotted back into the body of the vehicle. It had been attached, limpet-like, to the side of the Oregon, and once through the airlock, Solomon and the six others of his squad were standing in the main room, holding the overhead handle bars as the ambassador and her personal assistant occupied the front cockpit.

“Three… Disengaging magnet links…”

There was a hissing sound and a wobble as the courier wobbled free of the Oregon, gravity and spin dynamics making to fall away from the larger craft in slow motion.

“Two… Preparing thrusters…”

Another series of clanks and deep, vibrational shakes from the body of the craft.

“One and…fire!”

Solomon and the others were jerked to one side by the sudden burn of the craft’s thruster rockets, sending it peeling away from the Marine Corps battleship above and in an accelerating arc toward the bright orb far below it.

Proxima. Solomon crouched a bit to peer through the nearest porthole. “There she is, boys and girls, take a look,” Solomon said. Because it might be the last time you get to see a sight like this, he didn’t dare add.

The bright orb of Proxima Centauri was an unparalleled jewel in the night sky.

The first fully inhabitable planet that humanity had colonized was a little larger than its sister, and looking down onto it was like seeing the home world for what it might have been, centuries ago. There were vast blue oceans, and green landmasses crisscrossed with the whites of untraveled mountain ranges, and the reddened, hotter, Mediterranean regions of its equatorial belt.

The landmasses weren’t scarred with dead industrial zones or of the urban mega-metropolises that had taken over Earth’s continents. The seas had not yet risen and flooded coastal areas, creating the smoggy, toxic marshes that proliferated back on Solomon’s home.

The atmosphere wasn’t wild with the swirls of storms and hurricanes either, as if the very weather here was heavensent, too.

Proxima had been called Earth’s greatest hope for a future—a planet that would need minimal to no geo-engineering to make it inhabitable, and which would be the stepping off point to homo sapiens becoming a truly interstellar species.

Only it hadn’t gone according to plan, Solomon thought as he saw the sparkling objects that hung in near orbit around the planet.

Satellite-drones. Solomon had heard of the metal cross-shaped structures. They still looked like children’s toys from this distance, but as the ambassadorial craft swept closer, they grew in size until each one was a little larger than the courier itself. They eddied and revolved slowly on their own positional rockets, routinely firing every few minutes to fight the pull of Proxima’s gravity and to keep sending them on a looping orbit around their parent.

Their four-pointed ‘spikes’ were actually a space-based missile system, designed not to keep peace between warring factions and partnerships as on Earth, Solomon knew, but to keep a watchful eye on the darkness of space.

“Proxima is a heaven, but…” Solomon was surprised when the words of the ambassador narrated their view of the planet from the ships’ speakers. “But she has always had a sort of cultural paranoia,” the ambassador stated authoritatively. “Cosmo-psychologists claim that it stems from the fact that they are so far away from Earth, and from any colonial neighbors. They do not have the sense of interplanetary community that our Sol System does…”

“Is she kidding me?” Solomon heard Menier grumble over their squad channel. “Wasn’t much interplanetary community I saw on Mars…”

Solomon wondered if he should rebuke the man, but he didn’t when he realized that he actually agreed with him. Earth might be blessed with neighbors in the form of Luna, Mars, Venus, and other colonies, but it didn’t mean that they got along…

Solomon turned back to look at the isolated, perfect planet out here on the edge of humanity’s reach, and he almost felt a sense of jealousy for them. Wouldn’t it have been easier to emigrate out here? he wondered. To start again somewhere new, and never have to worry about New Kowloon and the Yakuza and the Triads and the loss off his old friend, Matthias Sozer.

Yeah, that still hurts, he was surprised to realize. Matthias Sozer. My friend. Who died…because of me.

“You have a long face, Lieutenant,” intoned Malady on one side of him, switching to a private channel between them.

“Thanks.” Solomon pulled a face. “But yeah, I guess I’m worried about the mission. I’m hoping that I can act bravely, and wisely…”

“All commanders must feel the same,” Malady said, always wiser than anyone else that Solomon had ever met, “before being called to op their duty.” The giant man-golem turned slightly so that his sleepy, half-lit face faced him. “I have faith in you, Solomon,” he stated in his flat, mechanical tones, and apparently that was all the man had to say, because he turned back to regard the planet they were going to pick a fight with, just the same as the rest of the Outcasts here.

But Solomon knew that, as a commander, he couldn’t afford even a moment of nostalgia or melancholy. “Ratko?” he called over their shared channel. “You’re our technical. Can you work on a way to get past that missile system when we’re making our escape?”

“I can, Lieutenant, but…” The small woman was frowning, and Solomon thought he knew what her argument would be.

That escaping the surface seemed a long way away from here… That they had to not get immediately imprisoned by the supposedly still-neutral Proximians first. And then they had to infiltrate the NeuroTech headquarters, on a hostile planet, as their get-out in the form of the ambassador left the system…

And then we have to find this secret Confederate agent who may already be apprehended or dead by now, Solomon thought a little bitterly. All while they were probably being shot at by Proximians or cyborgs, as they stole a ship and made launch, and navigated the war-style missile system…

“Just start working on it, Ratko.” Solomon nodded at her. “I have faith in you,” he echoed Malady and saw the woman straighten up in her suit, throwing a salute.

“Aye, Lieutenant Cready, sir!”

The ambassadorial craft was starting to shake as they entered Proxima’s near-atmospheric radiation field, something every planet had. Solomon looked at the nearest of the star-like drone satellites, but he didn’t see it spinning towards them or missile tubes hissing open.

“I’ve got a message coming in from the surface, patching it over main ship’s comms,” Ambassador Ochrie announced.

“Attention Confederate Vessel! This is the Proximian Port Authority, please verify our scans within one minute…”

Vessel ID: Ambassadorial Craft X31 (Courier-Class)

Vessel Operator: Ambassador Ochrie (Confederacy of Earth)

Bio-Signs: Nine.

“Proximian Port Authority, this is Ambassador Ochrie. Your scans are correct, and I am sending over authentication receipts now.” Everyone heard the ambassador’s response.

“I am allowed, according to your gold-level license, to speak to Imprimatur Mariad Rhossily,” Ochrie said. There was a glitch on the other end as her words must have been relayed through the Proximian chain of command.

“Ambassador Ochrie, a pleasure to have on Proximian soil once again.” This time, it was a woman’s voice who answered them, with a faint lilting accent that Solomon couldn’t place. He knew next to nothing about the Proximians, apart from the exaggerated claims of gossip-sellers back on Earth.

They are a peaceful people.

Life is easy up here.

They have a perfect society.

Solomon didn’t believe a word of it. And he wished that he’d been given more time to study their new hosts.

“I thank you for agreeing to meet with me, Imprimatur. I hope that our meeting will be…peaceful for both of our peoples,” Ochrie said formally.

“As do I, I can assure you, Ambassador. These are dark times that we are living through, and we have to always be aware of what is important at all times,” the imprimatur stated rather cryptically, and Solomon wondered if that was a promise or a threat. It could have been either.

“You are cleared to land at my personal docking port, Proxa, Hex-Grid Reference…” Imprimatur Rhossily gave them a string of numbers and letters, for Ochrie’s personal assistant to input the details and their craft’s auto-pilot to adjust their trajectory and speed, turning the ship before they plunged into the Proximian atmosphere, with flames at their nose, and the craft’s belly full of Marines.

14

Utopian Dreams

Fanfare and dazzling sunlight greeted them as Solomon led the way down the craft’s ramp, his heavy metal power armor suit feeling as light as a feather thanks to the internal servo-assists. Solomon had a moment to wonder at just how comfortable this upgrade was—far better than the light tacticals they had worn for so long—before he turned to take his place standing at the edge of the ramp.

Jezzy and Karamov joined him at his side, while Menier, Ratko, and Willoughby performed a mirroring position in front of them, creating an avenue for the ambassador and her assistant to walk though.

The ways of ambassadorial visits couldn’t have changed much since the times of sailboats and people in funny cloaks, Solomon thought, as the air was split by trumpets and the ambassador sedately made her way down the ship’s ramp. It gave Solomon plenty of time to look around him…and marvel.

The imprimatur’s ‘personal landing site’ looked like a small park, with three large bare patches and adjoining bare paths that joined together, leading to a white palatial building.

In the distance, Solomon could see a brick wall surrounding the landing site, encrusted with ivy and with the heads of curiously Earth-like trees peeking from the far side. The white-walled palace imitated a neo-classical style, Solomon saw, with colonnade terraces and formal gardens. The overall building was quite low—no more than three stories high at the highest levels.

But what was really astonishing was the view that the palace had over the city of Proxa, the capital city of the planet and the largest. The imprimatur’s palace was placed on a ridge of rolling highland that descended into woods and patchwork meadows on one side, but on the sea-ward side displayed a huge bay with waters as blue as sapphire.

The city of Proxa itself was designed on vaguely hexagonal lines—different squares and districts all built according to hexagonal patterns, with more brick walls between them or lines of trees. It could have been something out of a fairy tale, save for the tall chrome buildings of Proxa’s center. Earth’s sister world even had skyscrapers now, it appeared.

The city displayed a cluster of parks and even small lakes, and Solomon scanned the scene for the building that he knew had to be there. That he and his team had come to infiltrate…

There. The gold triangular spire sat in the middle of its own hexagonal precinct, with low, white, L-shaped buildings clustered around it. Despite its gold, terraced walls, the entire site was still a very green, airy space, with each terrace of NeuroTech’s headquarters overflowing with greenery, and the avenues between the low white buildings showing off lines of landscaped trees.

Proxa is a vision of heaven, Solomon had to admit. How could anyone think that there could be any crime, or poverty, or disease here?

Or that the building there is churning out murderous robots to fuel a distant civil war? Solomon’s jaw clenched.

“Ambassador, a pleasure…” he overheard the Imprimatur of Proxima say as she approached, flanked only by two people in silver and white robes. She was a small woman with curly chestnut-gold hair slowly giving over to silver. She wore only a simple silver star at her breast, and no other ostentation or insignia. No honor guard? Solomon wondered. That must mean that either Proxima really is an entirely peaceful colony, with no awareness of what NeuroTech is doing under their noses, or…

Or that she was so supremely confident of her strength that she wasn’t afraid.

He thought that the second explanation was the most likely.

“These are…troublesome times we find ourselves in,” Solomon overheard the two women talking as he walked a few steps behind and to the left of the ambassador. At his side walked Jezzy, and behind them walked the other Outcasts, though without Malady, whom Solomon had ordered to stay in the craft with the ambassador’s personal assistant.

When we need some big guns, I’ll need him, he thought. And it also didn’t hurt having one of his own men with their most obvious escape ship, either.

Maybe I can tell Malady to hold the ship in orbit or come and get us when we’re done instead of… Solomon’s mind was racing as he tried to figure out the plan of attack. It was difficult since he was also trying his best to listen in on the ambassador’s conversation and register their surroundings.

The imprimatur’s palace was every bit as grand at close range as it had appeared at a distance, Solomon realized. White stone walls and marble columns, flagstones veined with quartz, and everything set in beautiful parklands with many plant species brought or seeded from Earth, he saw. Their flagstone path did not head straight up to the palace above them, however, but took time to wind through the sedate garden, turning past banks of lavender and pruned rhododendron bushes.

“I am glad that Proxima understands the gravity of the situation,” the ambassador stated. “Obviously, the Confederacy wishes to extend its continued support to all of its colonial allies…”

The imprimatur stopped walking suddenly, making the rest of the line shuffle awkwardly to a halt to avoid stumbling into each other. “Even Mars?” she stated incredulously.

The ambassador, to her credit, didn’t skip a beat. “The Confederacy believes strongly in the people and the prosperity of Mars, and when they are free of the yoke of their fanatics, we will all be safer.”

“And by the fanatics, you mean the Chosen of Mars? Father Ultor’s group?” the imprimatur said evenly. “I believe I heard that both Father Ultor and Imprimatur Valance of Mars were in Confederate Marine Corps custody, am I right?

The ambassador really did hesitate then, nodding. “Yes, that is correct.”

“And the Confederate Marine Corps have dropped thermonuclear devices on Mars? Am I correct,” Imprimatur Rhossily said, “or is that just space gossip?”

“No, Imprimatur… That is correct. It was believed that a show of resounding force was necessary as a precaution to avoid further conflict. I am sure that you understand,” the ambassador said, with a hint of steel to her voice.

“I understand perfectly, Ambassador,” the Imprimatur of Proxima said, gesturing for them to walk on, taking a set of steps that led up to a white-walled terrace and a set of grand wooden doors into the palace.

And the line of waiting cyborgs.

Solomon heard Jezzy’s sudden intake of break as he was already stepping forward, one hand falling to his side where his Jackhammer was slung.

“Lieutenant!” It was the ambassador, putting a warning hand out and lightly touching Solomon’s arm.

The cyborgs weren’t attacking. They weren’t even raising their weapons or looking in their direction. Instead, Solomon saw that the four man-machine things, each with the same variety of body parts recast in chrome and steel, stood stock still in front of the doors, gazing out over Proxima.

“Ah, yes. I suppose they can look a little alarming to the untrained eye…” the imprimatur was saying with a small smile. “But really, Ambassador, there is no need for your man to worry.”

Your man? Solomon raised an eyebrow behind his helmet. I am a military commander, not a hired servant!

“Yes, most alarming, I have to admit,” the ambassador smoothed over the momentary tension. “I have never seen their like. Is it a new type of tactical suit that Proxima has developed?” she said lightly, and Solomon could hear the heavy layers of subtext there.

Solomon didn’t know if the ambassador knew all about the Message, and the Ru’at, but he thought that it was likely that she did. She would probably, in the very least, know that he and his squad had been sent here to neutralize NeuroTech precisely because it was churning out murderous machines like these.

But so far, the general populous didn’t know that cyborgs were being used on the battlefields, against the Confederate Marine Corps, he realized. Did the Imprimatur of Proxima know?

“No, not a tactical suit, although similar, I suppose…” The imprimatur led the way up the steps and past the silent, watchful cyborgs as the doors opened soundlessly in front of her. “Proxima wouldn’t dream of developing tactical suits when we already have the sworn protection of the good Marine Corps.” The imprimatur managed to nod at Cready in recognition, and he inclined his head back.

“What a load of lies,” he heard Jezzy whisper over their squad channel.

“Probably, but we don’t know yet,” Solomon murmured under his breath.

“Then why not staff your palace with Marines, like I have?” he heard the ambassador say lightly as they walked through a grand hallway with a high, arched ceiling and a checkerboard floor. Distant windows at the other end of the room let in the bright Proxima sunlight from an internal courtyard. Two wide staircases of stone led up and out to the right and left.

“Oh, well… Proxima is very proud of our resourcefulness,” the imprimatur said with an icy smile, leading them to a small wooden table and chairs, where carafes of wine and water, and a small selection of fruits and sweet pastries, sat.

“Please, take a seat, Ambassador, and I will get seats for your honor guard…”

“No need, ma’am,” Solomon murmured respectfully as he stood at the ambassador’s shoulder, with the rest forming a line behind him.

“As you wish.” The imprimatur nodded gracefully.

“You were saying, Rhossily, about Proxima’s resourcefulness?” Ambassador Ochrie looked up to ask. Solomon noted that she didn’t make a move to touch either the wine, water, or food. Wise woman, he thought.

“Oh yes. Well, I mean sustainability, of course. The cost in fuel, time, and effort it would require to bring a complement of Marine guards all the way out here to Proxima and then ship them back and have them replaced all the time seems ridiculous.” The woman smiled.

“Of course, you know that the Confederacy would reimburse Proxima for any bills associated…” the ambassador began.

“But still, it offends my sense of balance. When one of our very own Proximian companies here offered us these warriors, who are built from our own processed metals, with the bodies of our own Proximians, then it seemed a much more…” She drew an imaginary circle in the air between them. “…complete solution.”

“No place is an island, Imprimatur,” the ambassador countered. “Proxima’s self-reliance is admirable, but why make your challenges any more difficult than they already have to be?” Solomon realized that there was something much more important being discussed here, under the surface. Was the Confederate Ambassador warning the imprimatur to show her allegiance to the Confederacy? To not go it alone?

“The Confederacy is like a powerful, well-oiled machine.” The ambassador drew another imaginary circle, copying her opposite number. “And it can lend its strength to all of its members.” She then drew a much larger circle in the air around the first. “You can think of it like cogs in that machine, all working together to make life easier for all of humanity.”

“What a poetic and inspiring take on Confederate policy,” the imprimatur said a little stiffly. “But is it not better for each of those cogs in the machine, as you so eloquently describe it, if they can all at least pull their own weight? No cog wants to be dragged down by any others.”

That is what this place is all about, Solomon realized. That is why Proxima has always been called a sort of heaven… All of the pieces of evidence, from the missile satellites to the parklands and the perfect hex-gridded layout of Proxa, jumped out to Solomon’s mind. They believed in a certain complete wholeness and balance, of everything working in accordance with its parts, and of their planet as a whole being entirely self-sustaining.

Which makes sense for a colony world so far from the home world, Solomon thought. Proxima had to generate its own energy, feed its own people, and it was only sensible too that it could defend itself.

But Solomon also knew that what they were talking about was a sort of treason.

Proxima believes that it can go it alone, and the imprimatur has said as much, he considered. They wanted to be self-reliant, and that meant self-governing.

A free Proxima, independent of the Confederacy.

“Tell me, Ambassador, have you ever heard of a man called Malcom Jekkers?” the imprimatur said, pouring herself a glass of water and sipping it slowly as she stood in front of them.

Malcom Jekkers… Solomon shot a look at Jezzy beside him. They certainly had heard of Malcom Jekkers. In fact, Solomon remembered looking into the old man’s eyes as he had helped him to tunnel out of Titan’s collapsing ice-tunnels.

He had been a prisoner of the Confederacy, sentenced to a life of mining for promoting Proximian independence. And he had been shot by—apparently—Martian dissidents. Although those same Martian dissidents had apparently blown up the ice mine and fired on their own demagogue leader Father Ultor… Solomon knew that there was a mystery there. Someone had started this war, and he was ready to bet that it was NeuroTech, sparking the conflict and then selling its murderous weaponry wherever it could.

“Yes, of course I do,” the ambassador said, sounding a little shaky and finally discombobulated by Imprimatur Rhossily’s even-minded charm. “I was there, at Titan, when…”

“When the Confederacy seized Father Ultor and Imprimatur Valance of Mars,” Rhossily stated heavily.

“Martian separatists were behind the attack,” the ambassador countered.

A few choice moments of silence from Imprimatur Rhossily spoke volumes that words never could, before she cleared her throat and set her glass of water down once again. “Anyway. On that day, a man named Malcom Jekkers, a Confederate prisoner, was killed. As you know, he was imprisoned by the Confederacy for supposedly seditious literature…” Solomon saw Rhossily’s jawline harden a little as her carefully manicured composure cracked just a fraction. “Whatever books that Jekkers might have liked to read, he was in fact an architect. An actual architect. He was the one who helped design the Proxima we see today.”

“I don’t see what this has to do with whether Proxima wants Confederate protection or not,” the ambassador cut to the chase.

A frown from her opposite number. “Jekkers believed in whole systems. His thinking was a thing of beauty and peace. Every system—be it a city or a family household or an entire colony world—has to be able to meet its needs internally to be able to be strong enough to meet others externally, if you see what I mean. It’s a very Buddhist idea, actually.”

The ambassador didn’t answer.

“It is a great loss to all of humanity that Malcom Jekkers died on the frozen surface of Titan,” Rhossily said at last, standing up a bit straighter. “I will have my people show you to your rooms, as well as your guards, where you can be rested. We will meet again this evening over a formal state dinner. I have already invited a host of local thinkers and business leaders from Proxa, who are all dying to meet the Ambassador of Earth.”

The ambassador stood formally, offering a graceful nod to her counterpart as Solomon suddenly had a thought.

“Names,” he said out loud.

“Lieutenant?” Ambassador Ochrie said through the corner of her mouth.

“I will need a list of names of all those expected to attend, for security purposes against possible threats to the ambassador’s life, you understand…” he intoned heavily towards Imprimatur Rhossily. He saw a flash of hatred cross her eyes then, and in that moment, he knew that she had no intention of pledging allegiance to the Confederacy.

“Of course, Lieutenant. Anything for the safety of the ambassador,” Rhossily said, before turning on her white heels and clipping out of the room.

Ochrie waited for the woman to fully disappear into the side rooms before she turned and raised an eyebrow at Solomon. “You and I will need to talk, young man.”

“She has no intention of siding with the Confederacy,” Solomon argued with Ochrie in the ambassador’s large, two-room apartment in the imprimatur’s palace. Although he and the rest of the Outcasts should be next door in their much more basic but still very comfortable suite of rooms, he had followed the ambassador in here along with Lance Corporal Ratko to set up the interference devices.

The room itself was what Solomon might have described in his former life as a golden egg. There were oil paintings on the wood-paneled walls that Solomon thought must be worth millions, and every piece of furniture from the table to the chairs to the small desk under the bay windows had to be antique. The windows led out onto a tiny balcony that overlooked the internal courtyard, but both Solomon and Ambassador Ochrie stood in the center of the room, away from prying eyes.

The only other additions to the golden egg were the tall, thin black metal tripods scattered around the edges of the room, looking like mounts of a camera shoot. These were the interference devices that Ratko carried, turning them on to create a zone of statically-charged particles that would interfere with any listening, viewing, or scanning devices, before Lance Corporal Ratko had returned to their shared room, leaving Solomon and Ochrie to talk.

“Not yet. But when she sees that her dreams of Proximian independence are futile…” Ochrie argued.

“You heard her. It’s too deeply ingrained. This Malcom Jekkers helped to create the dream, and Rhossily reveres him almost like a saint!” Solomon pointed out. “But you’re right in one way, Ambassador…”

“Oh please, do lecture me on statecraft, Lieutenant Cready…” Ochrie said caustically, pacing the room.

“That Rhossily is a dreamer. She’s a utopian,” Solomon said. “She’s not like the Chosen of Mars, who have an axe to grind with the Confederacy. She’s protecting NeuroTech because she thinks they are going to help her Proximian dreams come to fruition. But they won’t.”

“Why do you say that?” the ambassador said.

“NeuroTech is supplying the Chosen of Mars and tried to supply even the Marine Corps with its cyborg weapons. It just wants to make money, and it will turn on Proxima just as soon as it’s offered a better price…” Solomon reasoned.

“How can you be so sure?” Ochrie shook her head. Solomon knew that what he was asking was too much to hope for in their position—to drive a wedge between Imprimatur Rhossily and the company that had offered her protection.

Solomon shrugged. “Because I used to be very good at bargaining with people in much stronger positions than me,” he said, remembering all the years he had traded secrets and stolen artifacts from one group of criminal mobsters to another, and sometimes stealing them back and selling them back again in another direction…

“Rhossily will never outright agree to capitulate to Confederate dominance,” Solomon stated, “but if we can make her see that NeuroTech—our mission here, after all—are going to ruin her dreams of Proximian independence, then she might act for us anyway.”

“Your mission, Lieutenant Cready. You came here to hound NeuroTech for war crimes, I know that. I came here to try and stop the war spreading to Proxima,” Ochrie said, sitting down with a loud groan into one of the very comfortable-looking antique chairs.

“We can do both.” Solomon smiled. He had taken off his helmet to speak to her more privately, and now he reached over to tap his helmet on the side of the temple.

“Rhossily forwarded the list of invited guests to our channel,” Solomon was saying, “and on it is the name of none other than Augustus Tavin, the CEO of NeuroTech.” Solomon grinned. He remembered Tavin well, the thin, acetic sort of a man who had wanted Solomon and Karamov tortured in front of Brigadier General Asquew when they had been captured by the Chosen of Mars at the start of the war.

“Me and my Outcasts will be able to apprehend him tonight, and when we do, we’ll force NeuroTech to hand over all cyborg technology, and Rhossily will have to comply with us when she sees that it’s Tavin that we want, and not Proxima at all.”

It is also a way that I will be able to fulfill my mission and not put my Outcasts in any more danger, Solomon thought proudly. He knew that if it had come to running through the streets and trying to infiltrate NeuroTech’s headquarters, then more good people of his would die—like all those Ganymede surface that he’d seen die.

Like Matty Sozer died, he remembered. And it had been his fault. His doing.

Now that Solomon Cready was a full Marine and a first lieutenant, he intended to bring all of his people out alive from every mission he went into. And he had found a way to do it, without anyone spilling any blood.

Or at least, that was the plan, anyway…

“You’re seriously expecting to waltz up to this Augustus Tavin and simply place him under arrest, and that will be the end of it? The end of the civil war?” Ochrie said wearily, rubbing her temples.

“If it might work, Ambassador, then I am honor-bound to attempt it…” Solomon said seriously.

Ambassador Ochrie, clearly did not feel the same level of confidence that Solomon felt. “Well, it sounds to me, Lieutenant Cready, that you are the one with utopian dreams here…”

15

Command Override

The imprimatur’s dinner was, indeed, formal.

“If I had known it would be this bad, I would have asked the warden for a dress uniform,” Solomon joked to Jezzy, who stood beside him in the entrance foyer.

It was early dusk, which on Proxima meant the high burn of soft pink clouds, racing towards a purpling sunset. The palace had been transformed from an already impressive and spacious Mediterranean villa into what could be best described as a fairy grotto.

Discrete but bright, clear white lights sparkled charmingly from their occulted positions underneath the many trees and scented bushes of the grounds. Strings of more lights raced up the columns and along the balconies—not in a gaudy, festive way, but one that allowed the gathering dark to settle here and there in comfortable, intimate corners where you would imagine small and private talks taking place.

The inside of the palace was awash with a softer sort of light—from actual candles, Solomon saw, hanging in sconces and atop vast crystal candelabra that had been lowered from their places in the ceilings. Every room was bedecked with cut flowers, filling the large hallways, lobbies, dining rooms, and greeting rooms with a light fragrance, and from one alcove, a trio of Proximian musicians played perfectly-tuned and soothing string instruments.

The Outcasts stood in two lines as before, on either side of the lobby door that led into the grand dining room, having been given ‘spaces of honor,’ as the imprimatur had declared—taking up obvious guard positions in place of their own cyborg guards.

It was a gesture of Proximian trust, Solomon considered, but he was also very aware that every door and archway that led out of the palace was staffed by a team of four silent cyborgs, and that the imprimatur had insisted that the Confederate Marines not carry any weapons at any time during the dinner.

“Yeah, she wants to show that she trusts us, but that she’s also able to have us surrounded by actual armed cyborgs at all times…” Solomon muttered over their Gold channel, earning a dark harrumph of disgust from Arlo opposite.

Arlo Menier… Solomon let his eyes slide to the large Frenchman. He wondered how long their truce would last, and whether Menier was indeed the changed man that he now presented himself to be. There had been a time when Arlo Menier had promised to kill him, before the Battle of Ganymede.

Can one man really change so much? Solomon wondered. He hoped so. The heavens knew that he hoped that he had changed.

I am not the same young man responsible for the death of his best friend, he thought. He wished. Matty Sozer had trusted him. Kind of.

He had also betrayed me. Solomon felt an echo of all of that old anger, hurt, and resentment rise in him, and it tasted bitter in the back of his throat. Solomon had thought that maybe he was beyond these feelings of guilt and shame now—that he had become someone else.

But maybe we never change, he considered, his eyes lowering to the floor.

“Lieutenant!” Jezzy hissed, alerting him to the fact that the guests for the dinner had started to arrive.

Solomon stood up a little straighter and concentrated, searching for the man who had tried to have him killed.

“Imprimatur, such a pleasure!” The pleased ripples of conversation were entirely boring to Solomon as he watched couple after couple of trade ministers and finance directors and agricultural overseers and city mayors and who knows what else arrive and greet both Imprimatur Mariad Rhossily on one side, and Confederate Ambassador Ochrie on the other.

“God help me,” Solomon heard Arlo opposite him groan, and, although he maintained his same wide-footed stance of attention, he saw the large man shrug a little as he mimicked falling asleep.

“Menier,” Solomon breathed over the Gold channel, but he didn’t know if his rebuke went down well or was listened to as his concentration was broken by a sudden, gargled hiss of outrage on the other side of Sergeant Wen.

It was Karamov, and he had half-stepped out of line, the power armor suit visibly shaking with pent-up emotion.

“Corporal Karamov!” Solomon hissed over their secure channel, as the commotion had caused a few of the comfortable, smiling Proximian heads to turn. Solomon followed Karamov’s intense posture to see, there at the other end of the lobby and walking leisurely forward flanked by two heavyset cyborg guards, was Augustus Tavin, CEO of NeuroTech Industries.

“Corporal, keep it together! Batten that frack down!” Solomon clicked off his suit’s external microphones to be able to shout a little more forcefully at Karamov, who, grudgingly, was stepping back into line next to Jezzy but who was still visibly shaking with fury.

As well he might, Solomon thought as his own fists clenched. That man there had preened and gloated in front of himself and Karamov as he had threatened to have them tortured and killed on a live transmission to the General Asquew, back on Mars.

And what had been worse, the CEO had had no intention of using them as a bargaining chip like the Chosen of Mars had, Solomon remembered bitterly. The Chosen had wanted to display their ‘captive Confederate infiltrators’ to the Marine Corps in the hope that they would release Father Ultor and Imprimatur Valance in a prisoner exchange.

However, Augustus Tavin had been there to start a fight, both Solomon and Karamov knew. He had demanded impossible things that the General Asquew couldn’t possibly hope to offer, before insulting the Marine Corps and promising to kill Solomon and Karamov.

All because Tavin wanted the war, so he could keep on supplying his arms to the seditionists, and now, the Proximians… Solomon took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“Orders, sir?” murmured Menier opposite him, now no longer goofing about but standing up straighter. “I have weapons on me… Do you want me to seize Tavin when he walks past?”

“What?” Solomon asked. “You have weapons? How did you get them past the imprimatur’s inspection?”

“I’m a big man in an even bigger suit,” Menier said.

“Uh, Lieutenant, sir…” This came from Willoughby over their shared Gold channel. “I’ve got a service pistol down my boot.”

“Well…” This came from Jezzy beside him, in the verbal equivalent of a guilty shrug. “Throwing knives. All over me.”

Solomon groaned. He wasn’t sure whether to be proud or annoyed with his squad who had disobeyed orders to not bring weapons to their unarmed guard duty. Well, at least they were disobeying Proximian orders, and not mine… he considered. “Anyone else? Ratko? Karamov? Am I the only one without any sort of weapon on me?”

“Guilty as charged,” the smaller Ratko standing beside Menier said.

“I’ve got a spare service pistol behind my back plate you can use, Lieutenant,” Karamov said.

Wow. Thanks for making me look like a total idiot! Solomon thought. But anyway, no time for this. Tavin was already turning to enter the lobby to the dining hall, and they were sure to need every weapon they had concealed if they couldn’t overpower those two cyborg guards immediately…

“Uh…” Tavin rocked to a sudden standstill when he saw the Confederate Marine honor guard. Solomon narrowed his eyes and glared at him, knowing that Karamov would be doing the same, and he felt Tavin’s eyes glide across them.

He doesn’t recognize me, Solomon thought, before remembering that he was behind his helmet. Dear old Augustus would have to get a lot closer to be able to see past the anti-glare sheen of his faceplate.

“Is there a problem, Mr. Tavin?” the imprimatur was saying, stepping forward to block Solomon’s view before he could get a chance to make a move.

“Dammit! Stand down!” Solomon hissed to the others, trying not to betray any movement to Tavin, the cyborgs, or the other guests. “We cannot afford to hurt Proxima’s leader!”

“Oh, no problem, Mariad,” Augustus Tavin was saying, although his pale and austere face with its slicked-back dark hair did indeed look like there was a problem, and quite a severe one at that. “I just wasn’t aware that the ambassador had brought a squad of Marines with her…” he murmured. Solomon twitched his fingers inside their mesh gloves, activating the control pads that instructed the various controls of his suit.

External Microphones: 100%

The sounds of the party jumped in volume, and Solomon slowly angled his body a little so that his suit was directed toward the muttered conversation halfway down the lobby…

“Times are dark, and the Confederacy is a little twitchy about security,” he heard Mariad Rhossily say with a sigh. “But have no fear, they are only an honor guard, nothing more—not an invasion fleet!”

“Hm, well…” Tavin gave a thin, snake’s smile as he changed the subject.

He probably would have loved it if we were the start of another war here, Solomon thought. That way he can make all the more money off the backs of dying people!

“Have you seen the new X-line?” Tavin was saying, stepping aside to wave his long-fingered hands at the two heavyset cyborgs that flanked him.

Solomon’s eyes narrowed as he tried to see what made them so special. Their human parts—the upper chest, lower jaws—were just as pallid and cadaverous as before, but the metal of their shoulders, arms, legs, and half-a-head seemed much sleeker and better manufactured than before.

“I am sorry, Mr. Tavin, but I am not free to talk about trade at tonight’s dinner,” the imprimatur stated, touching the man briefly on the arm and gesturing towards the dining hall, past the double lines of Confederate Marines. “Please, take a seat with the others…”

That’s it, walk right past me… Solomon tensed, imagining how it had to go down. He could seize Tavin as the other Outcasts attacked the two cyborgs. Before anyone died, he might be able to put a gun to Tavin’s head and tell him to call off the counter-attack.

But I will have to get that gun from Karamov first, Solomon was thinking, as CEO Augustus Tavin appeared to want to argue.

“But, Imprimatur, this is pleasure, not business!” Tavin simpered. “Our new X-line comes with the particle-beam hand as standard across all models, but we’ve upgraded their strength, toughness, jumping ability, and we now have weapons ports on the left shoulder! These two, for instance, have installed…”

“Mr. Tavin, if you please. It is considered impolite to discuss business at mealtimes,” the imprimatur said more forcefully. “When you have stayed a few more years on Proxima, I hope that you will also come to understand our seemingly quaint traditions…”

Dammit! Solomon had wanted to know just what weapons systems these two super-hardened, super-strong cyborgs were carrying. But at least he had learned something else: that Augustus Tavin wasn’t a Proximian native, and that his relationship with the imprimatur was an uneasy one, meaning that she might be more likely to let him go without conflict when Solomon and his men did what they had come here to do…

“Lieutenant, sir?” Jezzy breathed.

“Wait for my move,” Solomon said over their channel. “If you have to fire, single shot only…” he said quickly as the CEO and two cyborgs started their approach towards them.

“Single shot! We could only smuggle in pistols, sir!” Ratko sniggered, just before Tavin and his two guards started walking down the middle of their two lines.

Solomon waited the three steps it took for Tavin to be firmly in the middle of the lines of three Marines, before stepping out and turning to block Tavin’s exit.

“Augustus Tavin, I am placing you under arrest for the deaths of thirty-nine brave men and women on the moon of Ganymede, Sol System,” Solomon said, raising a gloved and gauntleted hand…

“Gah!” Tavin took a sudden step back, shock and horror written across his face.

“Lieutenant! What are you—” shouted Imprimatur Rhossily, as—

Arlo Menier calmly took a step forward, moving a hand from where it had been held behind his back, and discharged his smuggled Marine service pistol directly into the back of the nearest cyborg’s head.

“FZTTT!” There was a grunt and a shower of sparks as the cyborg went down in a second.

“Woah!” Solomon shouted, as the guests around them started to scream. What was Arlo thinking? Solomon’s mind raced. That bullet could have missed or could have gone clean through the cyborg into Tavin, or me! Luckily, however, Menier’s bullet hadn’t left the dead cyborg’s skull, and it had neatly severed the thing’s brain stem, as well, ing the only certain way to kill it.

But the other was still very much alive, and Tavin was already starting to run.

“Lieutenant! Ambassador!” Rhossily was screaming in fury.

“Ugh!” Karamov hadn’t been as reckless as Menier had been, but he was every bit as decisive as he stepped forward behind the other cyborg, throwing an arm around the thing’s neck and jumping backwards, drawing it away from protecting Tavin—

—who was scrambling to his feet and pushing past Ratko in a frantic attempt to get out of the lobby.

“Wait right there, sir…” Willoughby slammed the butt of her pistol into the man’s face.

“Ach! My nose!” Tavin fell to his knees as blood erupted from his face. Solomon had to admit that, after seeing the terror of the collapsed Ganymede Training Facility, and after seeing the crimson and white rising horror of an atom bomb exploded on Martian soil because of this man, Solomon was quite pleased that he was in pain.

“Ach!” But Karamov was having trouble with the cyborg guard, who was easily stronger than him. The cyborg had backhanded Karamov in a metal-handed blow that had sent him crashing across the room, turning back to the other Marines.

BRAP! BRAP-BRAP! Arlo, Ratko, and Willoughby fired at the thing, hitting the cyborg’s chest and making it stagger backwards, crashing through a giant potted yucca plant. But Tavin’s bodyguard was already pushing itself back up again from the wreckage, his bare chest dripping a mixture of machine oil and blood.

“Call it off or I’ll slit your throat!” Jezzy had stepped forward to place one of her thin-bladed but glitteringly sharp throwing blades under the CEO’s chin.

“Cease! Cease and desist!” Tavin shouted in terror, and the singular cyborg guard slowed his ascent to very calmly and smoothly resume a silently watching, standing position.

“How long will that last?” Solomon snarled at Tavin, reaching into his belt harness for the only thing that he had been able to freely bring, the climbing metal rope, which he started to spool from its deployment module to tie the CEO’s hands and attach the man to his own suit. It beat handcuffs and chains, he had to think.

“It’s keyed to my voice. It’s totally deactivated. It won’t threaten you again, I promise…” Tavin was sobbing in the middle of the circle of Confederate Marines, as all around them, the visiting Proximian dignitaries were demanding to know what was going on.

“Precisely, Ambassador, how dare you bring weapons into an imprimatur’s sovereign territory!” Rhossily was shouting at Ambassador Ochrie, who was already making small, calming gestures as if this were just a schoolyard argument and she some sort of long-suffering teacher.

“Please, ladies and gentlemen, good citizens of Proxima, this does not concern you. That man, the CEO of NeuroTech industries, is wanted for kidnap, murder, attempted murder, torture, and selling illegal armaments in a time of war!”

“Arms to the Martian freedom-fighters, you mean!” someone at the back of the angry, panicked crowd shouted back.

“Yeah! Freedom for Mars, freedom for Proxima!” someone else bellowed.

Great, Solomon thought. What he really didn’t want was to find a bunch of Chosen of Mars sympathizers in this crowd right about now.

“It is not a time of war here on Proxima, Ambassador, and so your Confederate laws do not apply. You are attempting to extradite a Proximian citizen, and I, with the full authority of Proxima, do not allow it!” the imprimatur shouted.

Oh frack, Solomon thought. “Malady?” he whispered into the Gold Channel. “I want you to fire up that ship’s engines. We might need to make a much speedier exit than even I was expecting…”

“Aye, Lieutenant, sir,” he heard Malady intone in his usual metallic drawl.

“Consider your actions very carefully, Imprimatur Rhossily!” The ambassador drew herself up to her full height and spoke in a clear voice to her rival. “I will be leaving this planet with my honor guard and their prisoner over there, and if you or any Proximian force tries to stand in our way, then the Confederacy will have no choice but to do to Proxima what we did to Mars.”

To nuke it? Solomon thought in horror. No-no-no! This is not how this was supposed to go. This was supposed to avoid a war…

“Are you threatening me, Ambassador?” Rhossily spat back.

“No, I am promising you,” the ambassador said evenly. “Which is why I know that you will let us go. I do not want a war between our planets. I know that no good can come of it. And I certainly do not want hundreds of thousands to die in the subsequent conflagration.” The ambassador took a step forward, so that she was face-to-face with the de facto leader of Proxima. “Because you and I are both intelligent women, and we both know precisely that is what will happen as soon as we cross that bridge, one that we cannot come back over,” she said in a low voice as the rest of the lobby and dining room fell quiet.

“Hundreds of thousands will die. Perhaps millions. Is one man’s freedom worth all of that loss to both of our worlds?” The ambassador sounded cold, but infinitely logical. “War may be inevitable between Proxima and the Confederacy, one day, but it doesn’t have to begin here, on this day,”

Solomon heard Ochrie’s voice take on a slightly softer tone, and he realized just how good she was as a diplomat.

“You and a lot of your people have a dream, Mariad Rhossily: a free Proxima. An independent Proxima. I get that—really, I do—but that dream will be buried in ash and destruction if we fight each other now…. Instead, I am asking you to hold onto your dream, Mariad Rhossily and the good people of Proxima, to keep that hope alive and keep working for it in a different manner. Send ambassadors, envoys, and lawyers instead of soldiers and missiles. One day, the universe will be different, and I promise you that Proxima will have its chance again.”

Wow, Solomon thought. Either the ambassador was playing a really long game, or she had just managed to lie through her teeth to get what the Confederacy wanted, because he saw the tears well up in Imprimatur Rhossily’s eyes, for her to shake her head and look away, and then nod.

“Take him and leave Proxima space. I never want to see you in this hall again,” Rhossily said, and Solomon and the other Marines felt an immense sense of relief.

So happy were they, and so caught up in the impassioned arguments of these two women, that no one reacted quickly enough when the deactivated cyborg suddenly reared to life, raised its particle-beam hand, and shot Augustus Tavin dead in front of them.

16

A Metal Sky

BRAP-DAP-DAP!

Screams and gunfire filled the lobby as people reacted to the sudden assassination. Why did it do it? What’s going on? Solomon’s thoughts were already racing as he reached for his pistol—and realized that he didn’t have it on him.

Arlo, Ratko, and Willoughby had stepped up to the challenge, however, responding with all of their almost two years of Marine Corps training and casting a deadly flurry of bullets at the cyborg. Solomon watched as time itself seemed to slow, and the cyborg was hit on the chest and arm—the bullets sparking and ricocheting off toward the ceiling. It staggered back, lifting its particle arm once again as something happened to its shoulder.

It looked as though the thing’s metal shoulder muscle was blossoming like a flower, peeling apart steel petals as a four-barreled tube emerged from the thing’s back.

The weapons module that Tavin had installed! Solomon realized. It was a micro-missile launcher!

Phwack! Jezzy moved fast, lunging forward across the few meters that separated them and skewering her blade up and out, into the thing’s neck.

Crash! With a metallic whine, the thing collapsed as Jezzy’s blade severed the thing’s brain stem and it fell backwards to the floor.

“What’s happening!?” Rhossily was shouting. “Why did it—”

“It must be some kind of automatic backup system,” Solomon said, already moving forward to Ambassador Ochrie’s position. Without the need to take Augustus Tavin in, his next priority was to ensure that the ambassador and his Gold Squad got back to the boat safely.

“Malady… Get that bird ready. We’re leaving,” Solomon hissed over his suit’s communication channel.

“You think Tavin did this to himself? So that he wouldn’t be taken alive?” Jezzy was saying, standing over the body of the cyborg as the people around them quickly moved back from the gunfight, creating a wider and wider circle around them.

“He must have done. I don’t see any other explanation,” Solomon said quickly, looking around them.

“Arlo! Willoughby! You’re on point. I want a clear route back to the ship!” Solomon ordered brusquely. “Ratko, keep an eye on the other guests. Don’t shoot anyone.” He turned back to his remaining squad members. “Jezzy, Karamov, you two are with me. We’re protecting the ambassador and getting her out of here—”

THA-WHUMP!

Before any of the Outcasts could even take up their new positions, the checkerboard marble floor tremored and shook, and the chandeliers rocked from their chains.

“What was that!?” Imprimatur Rhossily of Proxima was already reaching into her white and silver robe for a small communicator bud, putting it into her ear as the crowd started to scream.

“We’re under attack!” Solomon heard one of the Proximian guests say, seconds before the glass of the windows shattered when another shockwave rolled over them.

“Ambassador! If this is some Confederate trick…” Rhossily was demanding answers, while at the same time calling for reinforcements. “Guard detail to the palace. Get me a situation report. Scramble the air fleet! What’s happening out there!?”

“Ambassador.” Solomon looked at her heavily. It wouldn’t be the first time that the Confederacy had decided to use his men as a diversion. Solomon and the rest of Gold Squad had been in Armstrong Habitat on Mars when the Confederate Marine Corps had started their attack, after all.

“I know nothing about any attack, I promise!”

FZZZT! There was a sudden bolt of purple-white light bursting down the hall from the main doors, missing the imprimatur by inches.

Solomon jumped forward, seizing Mariad Rhossily’s shoulder and dragging her back into the lobby. Over her struggling shoulder, Solomon saw two of the cyborg guards that had been placed by the front doors. They had broken down the front door and were marching forward, raising their weapons.

“Down!” Solomon shouted as another bolt of purple-white laser-light shot into the lobby and the dining room behind them. Someone screamed.

“Back! It’s the cyborgs!” Solomon shouted, shoving the Imprimatur of Proxima behind him as he reached for Ambassador Ochrie.

Who was firing a tiny, concealed pistol the size of a child’s toy at the advancing line of cyborgs. BANG!

“Even you came down here armed!?” Solomon shouted as he grabbed her shoulder and pushed her behind him as well.

“Of course! You don’t think I was stupid enough to not carry weapons, do you?” Ochrie said.

Great. It was just me who listened to the regulations then… Solomon thought, before shouting, “Outcasts! Form on me! Contact straight ahead!”

“It’s the cyborgs… They’ve malfunctioned,” the Imprimatur of Proxima was saying with wide eyes. Around Solomon, the Outcasts formed up, firing their pistols at the two advancing cyborgs. Without a weapon, Solomon was useless to do anything other than watch as the hail of bullets hit the two murderous man-robots, spinning them around or making them suddenly stumble.

CRACK! One shot hit something vital in one’s metal knee wheel, and the cyborg slammed to the floor, before starting to crawl towards them.

“Bring them down!” Solomon was shouting as the other cyborg was halfway to the lobby.

THAP! It was Karamov’s shot who ended it, firing from where he still lay on the floor. The rest of the Outcasts poured their bullets onto the remaining, crawling cyborg and eventually, one of them found the place that it needed to, as the metal death machine stopped moving.

“I’ve got reports coming in from all over Proxa. The cyborgs have seized the port, they’re making their way to the barracks…” the imprimatur said as she ordered people to stay away from the windows.

“NeuroTech,” Solomon growled. “It has to be them. This must be some sort of insurance policy that Tavin pre-programmed into the cyborgs…”

A metallic voice broke into their conversation. It was Malady from on board the ambassadorial ship. “I don’t think so, Lieutenant… I’m sending the courier’s live video feed to you…”

Solomon saw a faint line of green light flash over the inside of his helmet as Malady attached the ship’s videos to their Gold Channel.

Incoming Broadcast! Accept?

Source: Ambassadorial Craft X31 (Courier-Class)

A faint, slightly opaque image scrolled down over half of Solomon’s vision, and in it, he could make out the tall trees and parklands of the imprimatur’s estate and gardens, and the large white stone building of the palace itself. Everything was still glittering with grotto-lights, although they shared their radiance with large, dull red glows coming from Proxa itself.

“Bombs? Missiles?” Solomon breathed.

“Look up, Lieutenant…” Malady said, and Solomon did, seeing that the dark sky above the city wasn’t quite so dark as it should be.

Proxa was a wealthy place for a colonial city, and in its hex-mapped heart, there stood a number of shining metal skyscrapers—nowhere near as tall as the mega conurbations that existed back on Earth of course, but they were tall enough to speak of civilization and wealth. Along their sides and at their top were the gentle red illumination lights that guided Proxima’s drone and aerial vehicles. These lights spilled their radiance over the glass windows and metal walls of the towers.

And over the underside of a vast shape above them.

“What is that…” Solomon’s eyes went round inside his helmet.

Solomon Cready was a command specialist. That meant that he had been groomed for his position by studying strategy, tactics, military history, group psychology, and more. A part of his training was to have a functional knowledge of major types of starcraft employed across human space.

He was no expert, perhaps, but what he saw above him was unlike anything that he had ever seen before.

It was big, for a start—a vast metal sky that was only slightly grayer than the nighttime clouds that Solomon could see in the far distance. It hung over the city of Proxa like a shield, almost the size of the city itself.

The reason why Solomon hadn’t seen it at first was mostly because he hadn’t expected to see it, but also because the thing had no underlighting on its machine belly. No landing lights. No guidance lights. Nothing to indicate that it cared at all for how it might make planetfall or what it might disrupt when it did.

And the thing looked mechanical in a way that Solomon didn’t expect from any sort of craft. He couldn’t even see any evidence of engines. No rocket fire or thrusters. How did it stay up there? Solomon had no idea.

He could see landscapes of metal pipes and tubes, each of which must have been as big as the palace they were currently standing in. Solomon could see units like metal boxes on tracks, shunting towards and back from each other. It was like looking at the inside of a vast engine, but one that Solomon had no idea what its ultimate purpose could be.

“Whose is that!?” Solomon was shouting as he took a step back, suddenly unsure. What do I do now? How do I defeat this? I can’t defeat this.

“Lieutenant?” It was Jezzy, helping Karamov to his feet as she looked at him in worry.

“Invasion. Some kind of craft,” Solomon was saying, his mind racing for an answer. Could this be a Proxima ship?

But all thoughts of it being loyal to the city it hung over were dashed as he saw small, dark, spinning objects fall from the engine-like sky, rotating as they did so faster and faster just before they hit the ground.

No! Solomon knew what would happen, and he watched in real time as he and everyone in the palace felt the whumps of explosions out in the city. Solomon watched as expanding purple-and-white light globes gave way to the roar of a more normal, crimson explosion.

That craft was bombarding Proxima.

“Imprimatur?” Solomon demanded, casting a look over his shoulder to see from her terrified expression that she had received the news over her ear communicator just what was happening to her capital city. “It’s not one of ours!” she said. “I’ve got reports of more cyborgs heading our way. Surrounding the palace.”

“Barricades!” Solomon realized what they had to do. “Get those doors sealed!”

“The windows are smashed open, Lieutenant,” one of the guests—perhaps the one who shouted pro-independence propaganda earlier—said dryly behind him.

“In the dining hall, not here in the lobby!” Solomon snapped, ordering that the grand, white-painted double-doors that led into the dining hall were also closed and barricaded. When some of the guests protested, Solomon had little time for them.

“You can either stay out there and be killed by the cyborgs or stay in here with a team of professionally-trained Marines. Your call.”

Each and every one of the guests, rather unsurprisingly, decided to move to the smaller lobby area as Arlo directed them in barricading the double-doors at either end of the room with anything they could find. Solomon watched as they upended antique dressers, tables, chairs, and statues against the doors. Before they had completely sealed the front, Solomon ordered them to halt, leaving a crack open.

“We all know that this is not going to hold them back, right?” he turned and said to Gold Squad.

One by one, Jezzy, Arlo, Willoughby, Ratko, and Karamov nodded at him. They knew what he was saying—when the cyborgs got there, they would be the only defense that these people had. And all they had were knives and service pistols.

Service pistols that are probably not far from running out of ammunition. Solomon grimaced.

“I’m going to our rooms,” Solomon said. “I’ll grab every weapon I can carry and rendezvous back here. But if you get a chance to get out to the courier, take it.”

“Lieutenant, no!” Karamov said. “I’ll go. We need you here.”

“No one needs to go,” Solomon heard a woman’s voice say, and he was surprised to see that it was Imprimatur Rhossily, stepping away from where she had been trying to calm her crowd of Proximian officials and elites.

“Proxima might have a reputation as a heavenly place, but that does not mean that my predecessors were fools and idiots.” Solomon and the rest watched as she walked to the center of the room, kicking at the different tiles until she found one that made a curiously echoing thonk. “I need a knife,” the imprimatur muttered, and Jezzy was at her side, stabbing at the grouting between the tiles until there was an audible click and the entire tile rose on automated pistons, revealing a metal ladder leading downwards.

“Where does it go?” Solomon asked.

“The palace has its own armory—pretty old stock now, but enough to give everyone a weapon, at least.” The imprimatur was already gesturing for the guests to approach. “The tunnels lead out to a feature in the garden. From there, we’re right next to the private launch pads. If we can find any more craft…”

“Enough to get everyone off planet?” Ambassador Ochrie asked, looking up at Solomon as she said in a smaller voice, “There isn’t enough room on the courier for all these people…”

No, there isn’t, Solomon thought dismally. Not for the thirty-odd people here, and clearly not for the tens of thousands of civilians who lived in the city of Proxa beyond.

“Off planet?” said a man’s voice. It was the same one as who had been the most vocal and acerbic just a little while earlier. Solomon saw that he was looking a large, round-bellied man with short brown and gray hair, and heavy black-rimmed glasses.

“Trade Minister Wylie, please… Now is not the time for arguments,” Rhossily said in exasperation. Clearly this man had a history of antagonism long before the Outcasts came.

“I have no intention of going off planet. I have a villa in the mountains. Fully stocked with food, water, and arms,” the man stated proudly.

“I should have known…” the imprimatur hissed under her breath.

“Those that can’t fit into your craft or don’t want to flee Proxima can make for my villa, where we’ll hole up and wait for reinforcements,” the man was saying.

Solomon realized that he was looking at some kind of struggle for power. This trade minister wanted to be the hero of the day, but he just didn’t understand the gravity of the situation.

“Short of an entire Marine Corps fleet, Mr. Wylie, I am not sure that any reinforcements are going to do you any good against the size of the ship that’s hanging over your city right now,” he said gravely.

“Lieutenant, the trade minister does have a point,” Ambassador Ochrie said urgently, as they could hear the distant sounds of laser shot and banging, as if the cyborgs had finally found their way to the palace.

“I cannot get all of these people off-world. The Confederacy cannot, at the moment. But if they can get to safety…” she pointed out.

“Fine,” Solomon growled. All he needed was another crazy mission across a battlefield to a place that may or may not be safe, especially when he had a perfectly good courier vessel waiting to take him and his troops out.

“I’ll go,” Arlo said gruffly, looking at the barricade behind them as it shook.

“What?” Solomon said.

“The situation is obvious. We need to get the Proximians to a place they can hide, and someone needs to get word of what is happening here back to the Confederacy,” Arlo said. “They’ll need protection. I’ll lead the Proximians here to this villa of theirs and await orders.”

You’d do that? Solomon blinked, surprised. For people that you don’t even know? For potential enemies of the Confederacy?

But then again, Solomon realized that the Confederacy and the Proximians’ only real enemy now was whoever—or whatever—was attacking Proxa out there.

THUMP! Some of the stacked chairs skittered from their places in the barricade as the doors shook again.

“Do it.” Solomon nodded, and the group of Proximian officials and ministers, as well as the Ambassador of Earth and a bunch of Outcast Marines from the Confederacy, climbed quickly down into the tunnel below the imprimatur’s palace, and hopefully, towards freedom.

17

The Ru-at

Click. They all heard the noise as the flagstone far above them automatically clicked into place, plunging the group of refugees into almost pitch black.

Environmental Lights Activated.

The cowls Marines’ helmets lit up with soft blue LEDs, banishing the near darkness. Solomon saw that they were in a wide two-person tunnel cut into the bedrock with machine precision, metal pipes and wires spread out along the walls.

I seem to spend a lot of my time underground, Solomon thought distractedly as he checked the vitals of his squad on his readout. All good.

“Malady? Situation report,” he breathed.

SKRRR! A crackle of static over the Gold Channel, but then, with relief, Solomon heard his Marine’s voice.

“I’ve taken the ambassador’s craft outside the palace grounds,” the metal golem responded. “The unknown vessel above us does not seem interested in engaging with any aerial or land-based craft.”

“What, none?” Solomon wondered. “Aren’t the Proximian forces attacking it?”

“There was an artillery barrage from the dock region of the city, Lieutenant, but the craft above ignored it, and shortly, the barrage stopped. I fear that no weapon that Proxima has will be enough to damage it.”

“The vessel is clearly in league with, or at least contact with, the cyborgs on the surface. It must be using them as its field-teams,” Solomon said

As if summoned by their mention, there was the distant sound of crashing and thumping from far above them.

“Have they found the trapdoor?” a worried Proximian minister asked, looking up.

But no light was lancing down from the shaft they had just climbed down. The cyborgs must have broken into the room, but they had no idea where the contained humans had gone.

“Quietly.” Solomon held up a finger of his metal power gauntlets over his helmet, miming shushing them, before pointing at the imprimatur. “Lead the way,” he whispered, and, in pairs, the group of stranded Proximians and their guardians started creeping through the long dark, trying to make as little noise as possible for fear of alerting the man-machines above.

“Could it be NeuroTech?” Solomon whispered to the imprimatur at his side, with Ambassador Ochrie and Jezzy forming the next pair behind him. Solomon’s suit lights revealed a perfectly straight tunnel, with the occasional metal door leading right and left—all of which the imprimatur ignored.

“To be honest, Lieutenant, I really have no idea…” Rhossily shook her head.

“They would need an orbital ship-field to construct a vessel that big,” Solomon was saying, which didn’t fill him with confidence. He knew that the problem with space was that, well, it was big. Very big.

Plenty of space for an off-planet construction platform, Solomon thought. He had seen their like in the newsfeeds back on Earth, of course. Most spacecraft were constructed in orbit these days, and very few were engineered at surface level and then sent upwards. The fuel cost and the associated dangers of sending a newly-minted craft on its maiden test flight into orbit was simply too great.

Instead, the Confederacy and every colony world that had been given license used orbital platforms—giant mechanized stations with teams of hundreds of engineers who spacewalked their vessels together, bolt by bolt.

“But still…” Solomon murmured as he kept walking into the gloom. “A construction station big enough to build something the size of city would get noticed, right?” Was NeuroTech really that rich?

“The question is not only how, Lieutenant, but why,” Ambassador Ochrie pointed out.

“What do you mean?”

“We have been operating under the assumption that NeuroTech has been profiting from the civil wars, seeking to offer every side its cyborg technology,”

“Hngh!” Rhossily made a strangled sound of outrage. “They what?”

“Yes, Imprimatur. It wasn’t just to Proxima that Augustus Tavin promised his company’s technology…” the ambassador said, with a hint of sad irony to her voice. “But the fact remains that the only way that NeuroTech profits is if they stay out of direct conflict themselves…”

Solomon understood what she was driving at immediately.

“What good does it do NeuroTech to attack Proxima? To attack anyone with its own fleet of cyborgs? It doesn’t make any money that way.”

“Unless they sold out to the Confederacy,” Rhossily muttered irritably.

“No.” Solomon shook his head. “I would know. I was sent here to destroy NeuroTech, not make them our allies.”

“So you say…” The Imprimatur of Proxima was clearly suspicious.

Just as she had every right to be, Solomon conceded, just not to be stupid at the same time. “Even if you don’t believe me, Imprimatur, it looks like I failed in both missions. Augustus Tavin is clearly dead on the ground up there, and my squad is now stranded on Proxima unless I can find a way out!”

“It’s not far.” Rhossily seemed a little more subdued as she nodded ahead. The ambassador, however, had one final point to make on the nature of their new shared enemy.

“The cyborgs attacked both Confederate Marines and Proximians, which make them our shared enemy now, so please, Lieutenant, Imprimatur, we must work together—at least for now…” she stated. “I was taught that it is always wisest to understand what your opposite party wants when you enter into a negotiation,” they all heard Ochrie say.

“…but the actions of that vessel and the cyborgs make no sense if it really is NeuroTech behind them both. Even if the company succeeded in conquering Proxima, they would still have to fight the Confederacy straight afterwards, or at the same time. And, what is more, we should be asking ourselves whether one singular mega-corporation—if that is what we are dealing with here—can hope to maintain control over an entire planet? They are not a government. They are not a nation, with hundreds of thousands, even millions of people in their employ. NeuroTech just isn’t equipped to run a planet.”

Solomon was about to point out that none of this was getting them any closer to off-planet, when his suit lights illuminated an end to the tunnel ahead of them.

It was a simple metal door with stenciled letters and numbers across its center.

“This is the reserve armory,” Rhossily said, pulling a key from her pocket and inserting it into the door for it to creak open.

Ping! Tick! Fluorescent lights clicked on as soon as they walked into the cramped space. But it was a very large room, Solomon saw as he walked in cautiously, Karamov’s pistol held up high in front of him. No enemies lying in wait for them.

To be clear, it was a large room that had a lot of stuff in it. Solomon saw aisles of racks and holding boxes and cabinets stapled to the walls. There were crates of tinned goods, sitting beside open boxes stuffed full of encounter suits and boxes of medical kits.

And guns. Solomon’s eyes lit up.

There were stacks of rifles like unlit bonfires, next to trays of pistols and crates and crates of ammo boxes.

Nothing that was as powerful as a Jackhammer, Solomon thought miserably as he scanned the available merchandise. “Outcasts, reprovision,” he ordered, and the other members of his squad pushed their way in to start greedily throwing rifles over their shoulders and stuffing their available belt modules with ammo and pistols, discarding their Marine service ones if they had run out of bullets.

“Ah, now that is more like it!” Solomon heard an appreciative groan and ventured around one of the aisles to discover that Arlo had found racks of short shotguns. Pump-action ones, he saw with a slight sense of dismay. Not the automated release of the Jackhammer, but one where after every second shot, you would have to break open the barrel and reload.

But they pack a punch, he had to admit. Maybe enough to keep a cyborg down.

“Hand them out,” Solomon said quickly, picking one for himself and filling two utility modules on his belt with the stubby, rounded shells.

When the Outcasts were provisioned—Arlo stood proudly with two rifles strapped to his shoulders, and a shotgun in his hand—Solomon gave the signal for the rest of the Proximian ministers and officials to be brought in.

“Pick something you know how to use, and if you’ve never fired anything before, then pick a pistol,” Solomon called out, before turning to Ambassador Ochrie, who hadn’t picked up anything.

“Ambassador, although I am going to try and assure your safety, given the threat, I cannot be certain…” Solomon began.

“I have my pistol.” She showed him the ridiculously small device. What did it fire? .22 rounds? Solomon thought.

“I really don’t think that will cut it, ma’am…” Solomon tried to say. Even the imprimatur had equipped herself with a rifle and stood with her people, describing how to use them.

“I am a diplomat, Lieutenant,” Ochrie sighed. “While I have no qualms with fighting for my life, and my nation, I must always know how my skills are best served. Which is not on the front line but being able to talk about it after the battle.” She nodded, and Solomon felt curiously proud of her for taking such a stance.

No such luxury for him, however, as he slotted two shells into the shotgun and signaled to the imprimatur. “Is it that door for the way out?” He nodded to the only other door at the end of the armory.

“It is.” He watched her pale face nod. “It leads to another straight tunnel, but this time, there are no doors on either side. Eventually, it reaches a pair of stone stairs, which comes up about fifty meters from the palace terrace.

Fifty meters? Solomon grimaced. He didn’t like a number that small. Easy enough to be seen, and seen clearly.

“And from there to the rear of the palace grounds?” Solomon remembered what Malady had told him about where he had to hide the courier craft.

“Just follow the garden path. Another hundred meters or so. Plenty of shrubs and tree cover…” She nodded.

“Okay.” Solomon took a deep breath, and then came up with a plan.

Deactivate Environmental Lights? Affirmative.

External Microphones: 100%

Solomon turned off all his suit lights but turned every piece of sensing equipment that the armor had up to maximum as he crept down the corridor towards the stone steps at their end. The reason he could see was that the steps themselves were illuminated by a silvery sort of light—starlight from outside.

Behind him crept Jezzy, then the ambassador, Karamov, the imprimatur, with Ratko and Willoughby at the back of their small forward group. Arlo Menier was further back, with the Proximians who refused to leave the planet of their birth.

“Ready?” Solomon breathed, to see the graying shadow of Jezzy’s helmet nod, just the once.

Solomon eased himself up the steps, to see that they came out in what could only be described as a picturesque ‘grotto’—a collection of rocks around the tunnel exit, and the whole thing shielded by large, sprawling rhododendron bushes.

“See anything?” Jezzy hissed behind him as Solomon crouched two steps down from the top and peered out across the palace grounds.

It was night and it was dark outside, but at least it wasn’t the pitch black of the tunnel. Instead, the sky was a lighter silvery-grey of overcast clouds—and one giant fracking mechanical spaceship, Solomon thought—as well as the dim glow of the garden LED lights.

Whump! Suddenly, there was a flash of light across the scene and the sound of a distant explosion coming from the direction of the city.

“Bombardments continuing,” Malady’s voice joined them over the suit communicator. “Ship scans seem to be suggesting that they are targeting Proxa’s infrastructure. Barracks, factories…”

“Why aren’t the drone-satellites firing at it?” Solomon wondered aloud.

“Impossible for me to ascertain at this point, Lieutenant,” Malady returned.

“One of these days, Malady, we’re going to work on your appreciation of rhetorical questions…” Solomon mounted the steps, emerging into the palace gardens and crouching under the cover of the spreading bushes.

There was the palace—with large sections of its walls, windows, and doors all seemingly broken apart. He heard the sound of distant screams and felt shame and anger run through him like a line of fire. I should be out there, saving people’s lives, he thought.

“Nothing we can do, Lieutenant.” Jezzy always had an uncanny way of reading his innermost thoughts. She joined him in a crouch under the spreading boughs of vegetation.

“I know, but still…. I don’t like it,” Solomon whispered.

“You already have people’s lives behind you, waiting to be saved,” Jezzy said, and when Solomon looked at her, he saw the hard glint in her eyes. Maybe that was why the ex-Yakuza agent was so good at reading him—she knew what it was like to make difficult choices between life and death.

Just like I made that choice about Matty Sozer, all that time ago, Solomon thought. He could feel the burn of shame over his crime, and the guilt-laden resentment he still felt. That was why he was doing what he did now.

I was the cause of that man’s death—one he shouldn’t have had. Solomon Cready wondered if no matter how many lives he would save in his career as a Confederate Marine, would it ever be enough to cancel out that one life he had failed?

“Lieutenant.” Jezzy nodded towards the palace, where a trio of cyborgs were patrolling. There were no humans with them, no sign of any operating controller dictating their movements.

“Who’s giving them their orders!?” Solomon gritted his teeth in frustration.

They did not speak as they walked, which did not surprise Solomon, as he had never seen the soulless man-machines speak at all. He didn’t know if they had any vestige of consciousness left in their bodies at all.

But they must have some way of relaying information, he thought. Otherwise, how would they know to march in perfect uniformity? Or to stop at the far end of the palace, one standing by the wall as the other stepped out, and then for both remaining to join the exposed one?

“They’re conducting searches,” Solomon said. Although without any apparent consciousness inhabiting them, he wondered if he could really say that ‘they’ did anything.

“You think they’re searching for us?” Jezzy breathed.

Solomon had no idea what inhuman cybernetic machines might want at all, but it made sense to his military training. “It’s what I would do,” he said. “And they seemed to converge on the palace pretty quickly and head for our barricaded lobby. That means that they must recognize the importance of the imprimatur and the ambassador, at least…”

“Aww, and here was me thinking they just wanted to get a better look at my handsome face,” Arlo Menier snickered over their channel.

“I’m sure they’ll get their chance, Menier,” Solomon muttered dourly.

But it was good news for them that they were patrolling, at least. That gave them a repeatable window to move when their patrol was out of sight.

“Groups of four or five. Follow the leader,” Solomon sent the message through the Gold channel, to then be sent down the line of refugees behind them. “Arlo, I want you and Wylie to stay with us until we’re at the ambassador’s ship, and then hopefully we can give the cyborgs a distraction to give your group time to get away from the palace.”

“Appreciated, Lieutenant,” Menier growled.

Solomon waited until the patrol had come back around the building, and then waited a few more tense minutes for them to repeat their patrol. With any luck, he hoped, they would do the same thing all night…

“Now!” he whispered, as he, Jezzy, the ambassador, and the imprimatur made a break out from their cover, across the flagstone path to the grass verge beyond, running ten meters or so until they skidded to a halt in the eaves of the next giant sculpted plant.

Solomon waited, breathing shallowly. No signs of pursuit. No shouting voices or screams. No fizzing of particle beams being fired against them.

“Good.” He looked back to see that Karamov was next, with a gaggle of about five Proximian refugees. It seemed that in his absence, Arlo had already organized his squad into one Marine traveling with groups of five. Maybe Menier really should have been a commander after all, Solomon thought, but it was once again time to move, and they ran across the grass to the next bank of lavender as Karamov’s group moved up to their vacated position behind them.

They leapfrogged like this down the palace gardens, with Ratko and Willoughby bringing up the next teams of five and six respectively into the umbral darks of plants and landscaped lawns.

That left just Arlo, with about another fourteen people to bring up on his own.

“Menier! Where are you? Have you made it into the grounds yet?” Solomon said. He, Jezzy, Ochrie, and Rhossily were at the final patch of cover—a line of pruned trees standing on their own island of raised mounts before the open lawn with its wide dirt patches of landing zones. The exact same place where Solomon had first stepped foot on Proximian soil.

“One team with Wylie has, I’m still with the remaining seven at the grotto,” Menier whispered back.

“Why are you attempting to bring up so many on your own?” Solomon asked.

“Because these fourteen want to stay. On Proxima,” Arlo said, and Solomon realized that Arlo had purposefully put himself last of all the groups.

“You’re a good Marine, Menier,” Solomon said after a pause.

“No, I’m not, Lieutenant. But I should tell you thank you. For believing in me,” Arlo said, just as there was the sound of scraping and a sudden, startled yell over both the channel and the night.

“What was that?” Solomon stood up in a half-crouch, peering into the dark.

“It’s one of Wylie’s lot. They tripped over the flagstones…” the Outcast heard Arlo say, and then saw the large shadow of the Frenchman break from the distant grotto to race, hunched, in front of the garden lights, skidding to grab a shape on the floor, drag it to its feet, and shove it into the waiting bushes—

But by then, it was already too late.

FZZZT! A bolt of purple-white light banished the darkness, clearly illuminating the half-standing Arlo in his power armor, as the bolt sailed past him to bust into burning fragments as it blew apart the upper branches of one of the trees.

Wylie’s group panicked, screaming and jumping up to run toward the next position.

“No! There’s only room for one group at a time!” Solomon was fully standing now, watching the mayhem ensue behind them.

Most of Wylie’s group skidded to the bank of lavender, displacing Willoughby’s group that was already hiding there, while other Proximians decided to just make a break for it entirely, running straight across the lawns to the rear of the palace grounds.

“No, stay down!” Jezzy said in alarm.

FZZZT! Another purple-white line of light found one of the running Proximians, throwing her from her feet and illuminating her like an angel, before she fell to the ground, dead.

“Too late now,” Solomon said, taking aim with his shotgun. “Get the ambassador and imprimatur out of here, Jezzy!”

“I’m not leaving,” Jezzy said.

“That’s an order, dammit!” Solomon fired and saw the bullet spark as it hit one of the patrolling cyborgs, and the force of the heavy shell flung it back against the wall. He had no doubt that it would get back up again in a minute, but he might be able to keep them down—

“YAAAAS!” Arlo Menier, apparently, had pretty much the same idea as Solomon saw him striding out of the dark to shoot his own shotgun at one, and then pump it to shoot again. He was laughing victoriously as he did so.

He’s insane, Solomon thought. But maybe it was the sort of insane they needed right about now.

“Sir!” It was Karamov, sliding to a halt beside him as he managed to keep his small team of five mostly together. But it appeared that he was the only one, as the Proximians were now all breaking cover in their panic and running freely across the open, exposed lawn toward the rear of the grounds.

“All Outcasts, rear-guard action! Covering fire!” Solomon snapped, taking another shot at a further three-man cyborg patrol that rounded the palace walls, before slamming to his side and rolling out of the way as he fumbled at his belt for more shells.

BOOM! BOOM! Karamov’s shotgun took up the slack, as did others of the Outcasts as, one by one, they broke their concealed positions to fire up at the terrace balconies and the cyborgs coming out of them.

“Reload!” Karamov called, throwing himself behind the tree roots as Solomon now knelt up, looking for the next target.

There are too many up there, Solomon saw. Already there were three teams of three—several of them limping or stumbling as various parts of their bodies had been blown away—but they were too far away to perform accurate headshots with these ancient weapons.

“Get the people out of there! Fall back!” Solomon commanded, firing two shots and slumping to the ground. “Reload,” he shouted, knowing that Karmaov would take it as his signal to stand up and fire his two shells. This way, they could keep up a constant barrage of covering fire as the group ran.

Which they were doing. Solomon looked back over the lawn to see the thirty-odd Proximians already racing over the packed-earth of the landing pad. Streaks of purple-white light shot through the night and claimed a further two lives, three…

Is Jezzy alright? Did she make it to the end? Solomon thought desperately. Did the ambassador? Or were they one of the stilled human forms that were now scattered across the imprimatur’s lawn?

“Reload!” Karamov ducked, as Ratko, Willoughby, and Menier continued their assault.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Ratko and Willoughby had managed to make it to the nearest cover to Karamov and himself, Solomon saw, and were performing the same tandem two-Marine barrage he and Karamov were doing.

Then where is Menier? Solomon scanned the dark garden as one of the cyborgs fell over the balcony, apparently dead, but it wasn’t enough.

“Get some!” Solomon heard the dulcet, savage tones of the large Frenchman as he strode out of the bushes casually, firing off one shot towards the balcony and then the next. “Come and get me, tin-cans!” He was laughing.

“He’s drawing their fire, silly fool!” Solomon cursed. “Jezzy? Malady? What’s your status?” he hissed over the squad channel.

“I’ve got them, sir. On board and quickly filling up with Proximians,” Malady intoned. “Engine ready for escape-burn.”

“On my command,” Solomon said. He knew what he had to do. He turned to Karamov beside them, keeping the general Gold channel open so that all of those in the courier ship would be able to hear his final commands as well. “Rear-guard firing with Willoughby and Ratko to get yourself to the ship. Check Wylie is alive, and tell him to leave with his people, now.”

“Now, sir?”

“Yes! As soon as Wylie’s group have made their move, you tell Malady and Jezzy to take off,” Solomon said.

FZZT! BOOM! The battle continued, with purple lines of fire arcing over the heads, answered by shotgun bangs.

“Sir, what about you and Menier?” Karamov looked wide-eyed at him from inside his helmet.

“Just get off-world. Tell the Confederacy what you saw.” Solomon said, breaking from his cover into a run—back towards the Palace.

FZZT! A bolt of purple-white raced past Solomon’s side as he swerved from the upraised cyborg hand ahead of him.

In a surreal moment of slow-motion, he ran past Ratko and Willoughby running the other way, skidding to a halt beside Karamov behind him as they took up his orders, too.

FZZZT! Another shot exploded the shrub beside him as Solomon zigzagged forward. The particle lasers were getting more accurate, and Solomon remembered something that Asquew had mentioned, what seemed like an age ago. ‘The most highly-developed machine-learning circuit’. These cyborgs knew how to adapt while engaged on their murderous mission. It wouldn’t be long before—

FZZZT! It was like being kicked by a horse, Solomon thought, but as he had never actually been kicked by a horse, his twisting body, thrown by the hit to his shoulder-pad by the particle laser, thought that it was probably more like being hit by Malady.

“Ooof!” He landed with a skidding thump, his senses spinning, wondering if he was dead or not.

Nope. Not yet. There was pain in the shoulder that had been hit, but nothing that felt life-threatening.

Warning! Suit Impact!

Location: Right Shoulder.

Analysis: External Armor Plating Reduced Efficiency: 65%

Loading Stimulant Injector… Activated.

Loading Painkiller… Activated.

Solomon saw the small holographic display light up inside his helmet and show a simplified green image of his power armor, with the right shoulder plate and the upper arm sheath pulsing a danger-red, and then two pinpricks of pain near his abdomen as the belt harness deployed the automatic injector pens, reacting to the armor’s medical scans of Solomon’s body.

All of this happened in a fraction of a second, and Solomon was already rolling to one side as he felt the warm wash of the painkillers, followed by the electric excitement of the stimulant flood through his body.

FZZZT! Another purple-white beam burnt the patch of grass he had landed on, and Solomon pushed himself up to his feet, raised his shotgun, and—

Click. It was empty.

Frack!

Luckily, however, Menier’s shotgun wasn’t empty. BOOM! He fired up at the balcony beside Solomon, pumping his shotgun for it to click uselessly as he, too, ran out of shells and then threw the shotgun to the floor in disgust, instead taking the rifles from his shoulder and throwing one to Solomon.

FZZZT! One of the cyborgs had managed to shoot out Arlo’s knee and he spun to the ground, grunting in pain.

“Menier!” Solomon hit the safety button and fired three, quick-fire rounds before running to his squad member. “Can you walk?”

“I’ll be fine,” Menier spat, growling in pain as Solomon seized him by the shoulders and dragged him to the nearest cover of an ornamental rock and tree.

“Look at this mess.” Menier pointed at the blackened and mangled shape that had been his left boot.

“Stay down,” Solomon said, turning to fire several more shots back at the advancing, implacable enemy.

“Frack that!” Menier hissed, pushing himself to a standing position, wincing in pain. “It’s not too bad. Not broken, I think, and the stimulants sure are helping…” POP! POP! He added a few more shots to Solomon’s.

He saved my life, he remembered. Out there on Ganymede. I owe this man the same. But what weapons did he have left that could save either of their lives?

Without the rest of the Outcast Marines there to keep their numbers in check, the palace terrace was now starting to fill up with more of the cyborgs. At least three had clanked and stumbled their way down the steps and were advancing across the gardens towards them.

“We need cover…” Solomon gritted his teeth. He refused to die out here. He refused to let anyone else he was supposed to be responsible for die.

Flak System. Activate.

Solomon took a leap of faith. He didn’t even know if this tactic would work with things like cyborgs, but he did it anyway. It was all that he had left, after all. He took three lunging steps out from the rock, seeing the cyborgs raise their particle-gun hands to track his movements—

And he fired the power armor’s internal flak system.

This time, it was like getting tapped by Corporal Malady, as he felt multiple ruptures from the shoulders of his suit and deafening bangs above his head.

Micro-weapons ports had opened on the shoulders of Solomon’s suit and fired tiny rockets like fireworks into the sky around him, where they exploded with streamers of metal wire, coils of foil, and smoke.

The sound of the multiple booming explosions was disorientating enough, and the smoke released quickly obscured the image of the palace in front of him as flashes of silver filled the sky like metal rain.

FZZZT! One bolt shot through the white cloud and missed Solomon by a wide mark, but another hit one of the falling metal fragments, suddenly creating a real fireworks display as the super-charged particles discharged, forming a spider’s web of lightning bolts that expanded to all of the near fragments of metal flak in the air between Solomon and the advancing cyborgs.

“Run, Menier! Solomon was calling, starting to turn and jog backwards.

Arlo Menier couldn’t run per se, but he managed to hop and collide with Solomon as they ran behind their bank of dispersing cover, across the lawn and towards the brick wall—

PHWOOOSH!

PHWOOOSH!

Something—or two somethings, to be precise—screamed overhead and exploded on the terrace of the imprimatur’s palace, sending cyborg bodies everywhere.

It was Malady and the ambassadorial ship, rising above the wall and moving forward to hover over the two Outcasts as it fired its few weapons at the attacking cyborgs.

“You waited? You idiots!” Solomon snapped up at them.

“We’re throwing you a line. Hold on,” Jezzy returned over the Gold channel as two metal wire lines were extended from the belly of the wedge-shaped craft for Solomona and Arlo to catch a hold of—

“No, sir,” Menier said, and Solomon saw that the man he had just tried to save refused to take the line offered.

“What? Get on board right now, that’s an order, Marine!” Solomon said in alarm. He knew what Arlo was attempting to do.

“I said that I would stay and help Trade Minister Wylie survive. And fight.” The Outcast Marine was already hopping to the edge of the garden wall, following the line of retreating Proximians as they ran down the lanes and parklands beyond the palace. “I promised him, Lieutenant,” Arlo said with a shrug before disappearing.

“Lieutenant. Ship scanners indicate more cyborgs approaching from the city. If we’re going to go, we have to go now…” Jezzy was saying. “We have ten of the Proximians on board, and another ten went with Trade Minister Wylie.”

Solomon swore, casting one lingering look at the gap in the wall where Arlo Menier had so recently hopped through. Is that what this life is all about, this training? he thought. Learning how to keep your promises. Learning how to be an honorable man.

Solomon did not feel very honorable as he seized the wire rope and pulled. The internal winch system took up the slack and pulled him into the air, leaving Proxima behind.

Invasion: Pluto

Outcast Marines, Book 6

Prologue: The Visitor

The ship hung heavy over Earth’s sister planet of Proxima. A roughly ovoid black mark marring the otherwise pristine blues, whites, and greens of the generous planet.

The alien ship didn’t move, it didn’t fire positioning rockets, and it wasn’t dropping any more incendiary devices onto the planet’s capital city of Proxa. It was, however, staying in position, though the Confederacy and the colonists had no idea why.

The vessel had been like this for two Earth-normal solar days after its domination of Proxa, and after it had unexpectedly entered Proxima space without alerting either the space-based missile system or Proxima’s long-range telescopes. The cyborg army developed by the Proximian mega-corp NeuroTech had performed their task well and had pacified the planet in apparent tandem with the arrival of this strange behemoth.

But for now, it was still.

Not everything was motionless in the space around the planet though, as a small dark gray object, two cylinders attached at its middle to a set of four outboard thruster rockets, turned off its engines and continued to coast towards the giant craft. This new arrival was tiny compared to the much larger stain upon Proxima’s atmosphere.

But that was the point.

“Silent running activated,” whispered the stern man in the cockpit of the tiny vessel. His Marine Corps helmet was underlit by the glow of his scout vessel’s dashboard lights. The Intrepid had been tasked with gathering data on this new arrival in human space, and although it was well versed in covert operations, the Intrepid and her two-man crew had never seen anything like this.

Initial Scans Complete: Downloading Data…

Sergeant Joe Edmunds checked the Intrepid’s readouts while he waited for their preliminary scans to complete. The thrusters were off, and there was a shield system in place around the engines. There was little that he could do about the Intrepid’s electrical static, but the craft had been designed with graphite and rubber panels covering its internal structure, only allowing the scout vessel’s scans out in a narrow beam that would be hard to pick up.

Well, hard for any normal human vessel, anyway.

Approximate Diameter: 5.6 Kilometers…

Approximate Height: 500 Meters …

“She’s big,” Edmunds whispered. Even if his voice did not betray any emotion, the way that one of his hands tremored slightly did.

“What electrical readings you getting off of that thing?” murmured the only other occupant of the Intrepid, Edmunds’s long-term service buddy, a woman named Aliyah Rhatnari. They’d worked together for many years now, usually being catapulted to some farflung colony like Proxima, or else ghosting past the deep-field ships as they picked up radio and electrical traffic.

Colonial imprimaturs might claim that they were spies for the Confederacy, and perhaps they wouldn’t have been wrong.

“We got a lot.” Edmunds clicked on the screen beside the flight sticks to show a digital display of the craft ahead of them in faux dayglow colors. Bright white spots like heat were scattered across the black mark, and the ovoid disk itself was colored a ‘noisy’ orange-yellow, with a large ‘cloud’ of red stretching beyond it into space.

“It’s got a huge electrical footprint. It must have some kind of internal reactor system in there. Possibly several…” Edmunds said uneasily as he tried to keep it together. Just gather the data, the young Marine told himself. There is nothing else you have to do. Gather the data for better minds to crunch…

“No observable thruster system,” Rhatnari said. “Although I’m definitely picking up evidence of hydrocarbons and radioactive particles.”

“Did the witnesses say that they saw positioning rockets?” Edmunds breathed. He couldn’t remember much of Brigadier General Asquew’s briefing, which itself was unusual, since Joe Edmunds had been selected for his role partly because of his ability to remember everything.

But it was the panic, he knew. He’d done the battle psychology classes, he knew what was happening. His mind was forgetting key facts, because it was trying to scream at him to turn the boat around and get the hell out of here, out of sight of that alien thing.

But I am not in danger. We’re not in danger. The mission is unthreatened, he reminded himself as he gritted his teeth and held onto the flight sticks a little tighter.

“No data on that,” Rhatnari replied. “No reports on how it got into orbit, or what was powering it.”

Wonderful, Edmunds thought. Without any way of knowing how it moved, or what its propulsion system could be, then they also had no way of knowing just what the craft was capable of.

Well, apart from being perfectly capable of leveling a city, that is, Edmunds remembered.

“It would happen to the Proxies, wouldn’t it…” Edmunds muttered. He didn’t like being out here—especially not as he hung in a tin can outside a devastatingly large unknown spacecraft—and he didn’t like the fact that the Marine Corps was expending so many resources to help out Proxima, of all people.

“Edmunds!” Rhatnari said in a low, scandalized whisper.

“What? I heard that Proxima probably built the thing itself. Maybe this is just some stunt,” Edmunds said, clutching at straws as he once again tried to disbelieve what his eyes were telling him. “This could be Proxima’s way of telling the Confederacy they’ve got some big, bad, technology…”

“And they flattened their own capital city to prove it?” Rhatnari hissed back. “Stop being willfully ignorant. You know what this is, you can see it as much as I can.”

“It’s not aliens, Aliyah. Come on!” Edmunds said a little too forcefully, a little too loudly. But even if his assertion sounded ridiculous to his partner, she could at least understand why he would cling to it.

Humanity had never encountered aliens. Not in a hundred and more years that they had been a spacefaring species. They had developed jump technology and had been able to seed their progeny all the way out here to Alpha Centauri, yet they still had never picked up even distant radio chatter of another species out there.

Humanity—which was to say, the Confederacy—had sent out probes and deep-field drone satellites to search for other forms of intelligent life. They’d constructed at least two more vast, space-based telescopes, one hanging out past Pluto, and another not so far from the edge of the Alpha Centauri System.

But still nothing. No distant lights on far-off worlds. No telltale chemical signatures of processed molecules discerned from radio telescopes.

Nothing.

Until now, that was.

But how did they get here? Do they have jump travel? The questions were maddening for Corporal Rhatnari. Even if they had some strange form of propulsion system that the Confederacy couldn’t detect, the sheer physics of it meant that the telescopes should have been at least able to see a vessel of that size coming for them.

Which only, really, left two conclusions for a clever woman like Rhatnari to come to…

That this vessel is so advanced, it might as well be a freaking act of God, or…

Proxima’s forward alert warning systems has been compromised…

Either way, Rhatnari knew that they were looking at something that could outclass anything the Confederacy had. She examined the pictures of the alien craft that their super-sensitive cameras were taking, all the time.

“Its surface is modular, I think…” The corporal toggled the images’ contrast and re-skinned it in different color modes to get a better look. She could see sections of what appeared to be metal on the outer side like tubes, boxes, chassis, shapes. More complicated, shadowed lines filled the spaces between the shapes. Pipes? Wires?

“Does it even have a solid internal body?” Rhatnari wondered aloud. It was like she was looking at the exposed parts of an engine, a solid structure from a distance, but was actually a modular system of parts placed alongside and on top of each other.

“You done? I think we’ve got enough material….” Edmunds was saying, his hands itching to get out of there. He didn’t want to admit that what he was looking at was an alien spacecraft ahead of him. It was too mechanical, too industrial, and too freaking large!

“Shouldn’t aliens all be light, glowing lights and ethereal music, anyway?” Edmunds muttered, remembering some ancient childhood Confederate film.

“No, that’s ghosts you’re thinking about. Or angels, maybe,” Rhatnari said. “Aliens can be anything the universe can make them to be.”

Which was the maddening thing about when she looked at the thing in front of her. It was obviously a constructed thing. Some machine or what passed for alien hands must have formed those pipes, must have welded that metal together, must have extracted the minerals and ores to get there, must have thought about what the best way to achieve their vision was.

But there doesn’t seem to be any provision for life support at all, Rhatnari thought. Or at least not for any oxygen-breathing, 1:1 Earth-normal gravity sort of life, she conceded.

There was a complicated snarl of shapes, however, like processors and pipes that struck across one-half of the ovoid and ended in an uneven set of metal plates at one end… Outlets? Grills? Exhausts?

“I want to take a closer look at seventeen degrees northeast spin-ward off pole,” Rhatnari called out the Proxima-centric reference point. It was easier, she knew, to always base their directions either on the direction of Earth far, far away from them, or else use the nearest object’s geography, like Proxima.

“I’ll move the cameras.” Edmunds said, reaching for the controls that would swivel their tiny, telescope-like scanning devices.

“No, I meant we need to get closer. Fly due spin-ward, off its northeast bow,” Rhatnari said.

What? Edmunds blinked. “We’re under orders not to engage…”

“I know that, Edmunds, I’m not asking you to fire at the thing, just fly a bit closer, that’s all!” his companion said. “And seeing as you reminded me, let me remind you that our orders were to collect information. I think that structure there could be some kind of propulsion system…”

“I’m not sure about this, Aliyah…” Edmunds started to say.

“Joe, come on. Through blood, fire, and fury, remember?” Rhatnari quoted the Marine Oath at him, and even Joe Edmunds had to admit that she was right. They had been tasked with gathering information because they were the best placed and the best trained for this mission. Who knew, there might even be a commendation in it for them. And wasn’t like the thing had even moved in the past forty-eight hours.

Maybe it’s dead, he told himself.

But it really wasn’t.

1

Inhuman Hands

First Lieutenant Solomon Cready stood at attention behind Ambassador Ochrie’s chair, looking at the black marble table that dominated the center of General Asquew’s audience chamber on board the dreadnaught Indomitable. His thoughts still circulated with what he had seen in Proxa, and before that, on Ganymede.

The sky on fire, metal man-things stalking through the Proximian streets, and the ruins of the Ganymede Training Facility. Of being overrun on Ganymede by the things, and having to order everyone to fight, just fight, wherever they stood and however they could.

The cyborgs did not hesitate. They did not slow down or suffer from exhaustion. One minute, they were statues, and the next, they were coming for you. Even with their limbs blown off, they would still come for you.

On the other side of the table sat the general herself, in deep red and gold battle-plate. The only other occupant at the table was Mariad Rhossily, the Imprimatur of Proxima, whom Solomon and his crew had rescued from her colony-world not seventy-two hours prior.

“Ambassador, Imprimatur.” Asquew nodded sternly at them both, before inclining a slight nod to Cready as well. “Thank you for coming at such short notice,” she said seriously.

It was short notice, Solomon thought. He swore he could still smell Proxa’s smoke in his nostrils, and he still hadn’t managed to find any time to clean and check his power armor yet. With the Ganymede Training Facility gone, the Outcasts had no base, no home, meaning they were bunking where they could in ad hoc rooms in the mega-ships of the Confederate Marine Rapid Response Fleet.

We got promoted to full Marine status, Solomon considered, but the Outcasts are a broken unit. They had, what, a little under a hundred ex-convicts who had somehow survived the insane training or the attack on Ganymede?

Just what difference can a hundred ex-cons make in a war? It was hard for Solomon not to feel disparaged, he had to admit, but the general was still talking, so he straightened his back and tried to pay attention.

“I am sure you must both be busy with the question of Proxima’s refugee crisis.”

“And all of Proxima’s citizens currently trying to get home, or trying to get away from home, or trying to find any word of what has happened to their home world,” Mariad Rhossily stated heavily. “And all the deep-field cargo ships that need to be alerted and diverted from entering Proxima space. The list goes on.”

“You have the full backing of the Confederacy,” Confederate Ambassador Ochrie said. It was her job to liaise with all of humanity’s colony-worlds and keep them happy enough to toe the Confederate line. Given the fact that Proxima had been muttering about independence for decades, and now that Mars had declared itself sovereign territory, Solomon could understand why Rhossily probably felt a little tetchy.

“Then why isn’t the Confederacy reacting faster to this threat to my home world!?” Mariad said with apparent weariness but evident frustration. Solomon figured that it was a complaint she must have already been making to the ambassador, general, and any other Confederate official who would listen over the past two days.

“I take it that the Marine Corps hasn’t been deployed against this aggressor yet?” she continued.

“Actually, that is why I called you here.” The general didn’t raise her voice or appear perturbed by the imprimatur’s angry questioning. “As well as Lieutenant Cready, given his and your close involvement with the invasion.”

“Invasion,” Mariad stated. “Is that what you’re calling it?”

“I don’t see any other name for what is happening, Mariad…” If Ochrie had tried to be comforting, she only came across as patronizing, the Outcast commander saw.

“Can it be an invasion if the company responsible were already living on Proxima?” Rhossily argued. “We all know that NeuroTech built the cyborgs, and we all know that the cyborgs attacked the second that ship appeared in orbit…”

“Excuse me, ma’am, but…” Solomon couldn’t stand for this stupidity any longer. “The cyborgs that also killed their own creator?” He remembered the moment when he had stepped forward to place Augustus Tavin, the CEO of NeuroTech, under arrest for selling the cyborg warriors to the Martian seditionists—only to watch the man gasp in surprise as one of his own creations shot him through the chest.

“I don’t know enough about cybernetics to know what happened, but it seems to me that all we need to do is to respond with the full might of the Marine Corps!” Rhossily banged her fist on the table.

She is upset, Solomon considered. Of course she was. The first time that he had heard about the Message from the alien race known as the Ru’at—a deep-space transmission kept silent for over a generation, containing within it the detailed schematics of cybernetic technology—well, he hadn’t wanted to believe it, either.

It would be so much easier to blame NeuroTech, Solomon almost sympathized. The mega-corporation might be powerful arms dealers, but they were also only human. They had bank accounts and offices and he was sure they liked going on holiday to Venus every year.

But the Ru’at? What on earth do they want? Solomon thought.

“We received this earlier this morning, a transmission from our scout ship, the Intrepid.” General Asquew fluttered her hands through the holographic displays, and a flickering image appeared, projected on the black marble table before them as if it were a data-screen.

It showed the dark edge of the ship with the bright glow of Proxima’s atmosphere in the background. The officials watched as the contrast from the bright surface of the planet flared and then diminished as whoever had taken this footage adjusted their settings.

“You sent a scout ship alone,” Mariad Rhossily said with incredulity, and Solomon could tell she thought the situation warranted a vessel with a lot more guns.

“Please, Imprimatur, just keep watching,” the general stated.

A different object eclipsed the view, before the scout ship swung past it to get closer and closer to the vessel. Solomon recognized the long launch tubes of Proxima’s missile defense system, hanging above the invading vessel and not doing anything about it.

“Why didn’t it fire?” he heard Rhossily murmur.

“Look,” Solomon murmured, noticing something about the Proxima space weapon. “No lights. No movement,” the young man said. “It’s been deactivated.”

“But…how?” the Imprimatur of Proxima stated.

The ship grew larger ahead of them as the Intrepid had drawn closer, and now the image revealed metal buttresses hundreds of meters tall, support girders snaking with oddly-opalescent wires, and holding in place large ‘units’ like the modular components of a computer. It was a machine landscape, Solomon thought. He thought he recognized ceramic pipes—or some sort of material that looked ceramic, anyway—that were so wide, he could very well have flown a Marine transporter down the middle of them!

“It doesn’t have a hull,” Solomon realized.

“Lieutenant?” Asquew asked. “Observations?”

“It doesn’t seem to have any external sort of shell. That means it’s not worried about asteroid impacts.” Solomon gestured to where several of the metal shapes—from the rounded domes to the cylinders—were crisscrossed with scars and scratches from impacts. “And also that it’s not trying to keep a hold of an internal atmosphere…”

Across the table from him, Asquew nodded, as if she had already come to that conclusion but had been waiting for someone else to verify it.

“It’s not a ship. It’s a machine,” Solomon said in astonishment.

The recorded image on the general’s desk flickered with lines of static, but then cleared to reveal that the Intrepid had gotten close, very close indeed.

The giant arms of stanchions, buttresses, and supports dominated their view as the Intrepid must have performed a very close fly-by. Solomon couldn’t see any lights flickering on the ancient metal, scarred and scratched. He also couldn’t see any obvious rivet or bolt joints. It was like every part of the vessel had been molded as a whole unit.

There was movement, however, from the hissing and escaping gases from vents here and there. The Intrepid paused, then drew closer, but their reasoning couldn’t be worked out or ascertained.

And that was when it happened.

Something moved in the innards of the vessel, like an internal organ pulsating.

“What is going on?” Solomon heard Ochrie breath.

“Wait,” Asquew stated, as the shadows and movement inside the strange invader continued. More hissing, and finally—

The giant metal girders were moving on unseen, internal tracks. It was like watching the thing give birth, Solomon thought with a shiver of revulsion.

Something dropped into the night—one of the modular units, roughly cylindrical and made of a dark rustred metal. Around its body were three rings of reflective black obsidian, and they were each moving at different speeds, like a gyroscope.

“What is that thing?” Mariad whispered.

“What are those things,” General Asquew corrected her, as, in the distance, more of these cylinder-craft dropped from the belly of the invading craft.

How many was that? Solomon tried to count. Twenty? Thirty?

“It’s an invasion fleet,” Rhossily stated.

“Only thirty ships…” Solomon murmured. And none of them looked a match for the Marine Corps dreadnaughts, although they might be three times the size of the Intrepid, he guessed.

“Wait for it…” Asquew nodded once again at the picture as something started happening to each and every ship: the black obsidian rings were rotating faster and faster, creating a blur…

A blur like a Barr-Hawking engine, Solomon thought, before the first vehicle suddenly burst with light. White and bluish radiance spilled from the rotating rings around the nearest ship, and it shot forward, blurring as it did so and creating a glowing line of pure white like a comet’s tail, gradually fading from view as the energy, radiation, and radiance dispersed.

“It jumped,” Mariad Rhossily stated.

But it didn’t, did it? Solomon frowned.

“Perhaps. But not as we know the technology. It almost looks like a faster-than-light drive, and not the sort of jump-drive that we have….” Asquew muttered darkly.

As well she might be annoyed, Solomon thought. Faster-than-light was technically and practically impossible. Or at least, it was impossible for the likes of humanity so far. Their Barr-Hawking ships worked by creating a miniature event-horizon of super-charged particles so dense that they folded time and space. The Barr-Hawking jump-ship then just traveled the shorter distance between the two points.

Faster-than-light, or FTL, was merely theorized as a way of breaking the light barrier. Only neutrinos could travel faster than photons, but so far, humanity had never managed to create any sort of field or vessel that could withstand the pressures of even near light speed travel. You could feasibly cross entire solar systems near instantaneously.

“Is it faster than jump travel?” Solomon asked immediately.

“We don’t know. But the speed is not the biggest problem,” Asquew said. “It’s the fact that every one of these ships have that engine.” She nodded as, one by one, each and every ship vanished from the field of view, leaving the Intrepid and the mothership behind.

“Where did they go?” Rhossily asked.

“We just don’t know.” Asquew shook her head. “We received this footage two hours ago, and so far, there has been no sign of them again. But we have run projections on the footage.” She waved her hand, and the image was replaced by a star map of Alpha Centauri and its planets, with lines of light radiating out in a tight cone.

“If they maintained their courses, then this is where those trajectories would meet,” Asquew said in a low voice, as the star map suddenly zoomed out, and out again past the neighboring systems, the vast spaces between the stars, finally encountering the scatter-gram edge of the Oort Cloud, and then the Sol System’s very own outer asteroid belt.

Solomon watched the arrow-straight lines of light spear across humanity’s solar system, ending at one planet.

“Pluto,” Solomon breathed in horror.

“Precisely. These trajectories are too exact,” Asquew nodded. “We believe that, should the ships maintain their course, they will be attempting to establish a bridgehead on Pluto, our furthest planet, and from there, they will be free to attack all of the planets of the inner solar system with ease.”

The Ru’at mean to trap us within our own solar system, the Gold Squad Commander realized. Any movement that we make to rally our fleets or strike back would mean that we have to deal with Pluto first.

“Did the Intrepid get any scan readings on the vessels?” Solomon asked. “Propulsion, speed, weapons?”

“Ah, well…” Asquew gestured to keep watching the footage as the Intrepid moved closer to the underside of the vessel, where the craft had been ‘birthed.’

Solomon saw many, many roughly-hexagonal ports in the underside of the invading craft, from which these strange devices must have dropped. The Intrepid flew closer to the nearest, catching a glimpse of a tunnel leading up into the body of the craft, with not really internal walls to the tunnel, but instead strata of wires and pipes—

Flash! Something speared out from the invading crafts launch tubes: a light, bright and tinged with purple-blue, hitting the Intrepid straight—

The screen glitched and rolled into static.

“What was that? What happened?” Mariad asked quickly.

“More things that we don’t know,” Asquew grumbled. “That was the last transmission from the Intrepid, and no attempt to hail them or track them has led to any success whatsoever.”

“Are they dead?” Ambassador Ochrie looked up sternly, defiantly.

“We fear so, Ambassador.” The general shut down the frozen images on her desk and looked to the assembled. “It is clear in my mind that this is not the work of NeuroTech. No matter how much money they have, I am sure that they could not keep a construction like this secret for so long. This is the work of inhuman hands, and I fear that what we have just witnessed is the start of an inhuman invasion.”

The room fell silent as everyone considered what terrors the future would bring. Could they win against the Ru’at machine, as Solomon was now thinking of it?

While at the same time fighting a war with the Martians?

“Lieutenant Cready, I will be sending you to Earth with Ambassador Ochrie and Imprimatur Rhossily to present all of this evidence to the Confederate Council,” the general stated. “I cannot trust this film to be transmitted in any way other than by hand. At the moment, the word of the invasion hasn’t spread across the Confederacy, but when those ships start arriving, everyone will know. I need you, Lieutenant, to convince the council that we must be prepared when the enemy comes for us.”

Earth. Solomon blinked. I am returning to Earth. But why? Confusion gripped him. Did I do something wrong? Is this a reprimand? Surely it would be better for him to be out there on Pluto, with his unit, defending humanity against the Ru’at?

“Sir? My squad, sir…. Will they be joining me as before, as an honor guard for the ambassador?” Solomon asked.

“Negative, Lieutenant. If our analysis of that footage is correct, then the first of the vessels will arrive at Pluto within the next few hours. The rest of the Outcasts will warp and be there to greet it when it does,” Asquew said.

“But, sir—” Solomon couldn’t believe it. They were going to send the Outcasts—his Outcasts—into battle without him?

2

Acting Field Commander

“Outcasts! At-TEEEEN-Hut!” snarled Warden Coates, storming into the suite of dormitory rooms that had been found for what remained of the Outcast Company. They were on board the general’s dreadnaught, still hanging over the surface of the embattled Mars.

Jezzy shot a measured look at Karamov as they ran to stand in line beside their brothers and sisters, everyone quickly falling into grim silence. Lieutenant Cready hadn’t returned yet from his debrief with the general, and a tense air hung over the Outcasts family.

Some of them were on deployment to Mars when Ganymede was attacked, Jezzy knew. They hadn’t been a part of the general’s battleship ceremony, but they received their own full Marine appointments after their recall when the Ru’at had appeared.

Now there was a flush of nervousness, fear, and celebration that ran through the crowd, Jezebel Wen saw. The Outcast Marines who had been on Mars had never encountered the cyborgs, so they didn’t know why they had received this sudden honor, but each of them knew they wouldn’t get it for free.

“Immediate, full-company deployment to Pluto. I expect all ready to ship out in the hour, understood?” Warden Coates stalked the front line of the Outcasts, sounding and looking as nothing had happened on Ganymede, the sergeant thought. He sounded just as angry, just as perennially disappointed with them, but out there amidst the ruins of his beloved Ganymede Training Facility, Jezzy had been sure that she had seen some new feature of their warden. He had listened to their battlefield recommendations. He had appeared, if not humble, then at least a little more human.

That didn’t last long, did it? Jezzy growled to herself as the warden opened his mouth to continue his tirade.

“The general has taken a personal interest in the operations of you Outcasts, so consider yourselves privileged!” the warden stated. “But don’t let the fact that you’re wearing fancy power armor mean that you can relax! Don’t think for a second that because you’re wearing a full Marine Corps insignia, that means any of each and every one of you is indispensable, by any definition of the word!”

Great pep talk, Warden, Jezzy could have groaned.

“And if I hear of any insubordination whatsoever, if you so much as look odd at your superior officers, if you bring shame in any way to the noble traditions of the Marine Corps—” The warden’s face twitched with suppressed indignation. “—I promise that I will bust you out to Titan no matter what sort of fresh hell the rest of the galaxy is sliding towards! Understood!?”

“Sir! Yes, sir!” the Outcasts roared.

“Good. A few announcements, then. In her great wisdom, the general has allocated us to the Oregon, a Marine Corps battleship, where you will be reporting to Colonel Faraday, and Sergeant Wen will be acting field commander with a temporary field commission to first lieutenant in Lieutenant Cready’s absence.”

What? Jezebel flushed. I don’t even know what that means… she thought, and realized that no one else around her did either, as she was rewarded with a few side-long, suspicious looks.

“Well, what are you waiting for? Get yourselves suited up!” Coates barked at them, and the Outcasts broke into tense, excited, and nervous action as they rushed to their lockers to grab their undermesh suits.

“Warden, sir?” Jezzy waited for the rush of bodies to clear before she approached Coates.

“Wen? What is it?” He half-turned to regard her fiercely.

“Thank you for the honor, sir, but I don’t think I understand…” she started to say, but Coates cut her off immediately.

“You’re one of our best combat specialists, Wen, if not the best. I need you to lead the rest of the Outcasts against the Ru’at. I need you to teach them how to kill cyborgs. Specifically to kill cyborgs.”

“Oh.” Jezzy wavered in place. “But what about Lieutenant Cready and Gold Squad?” she asked. Did this new designation mean that she would no longer be fighting alongside Solomon and the others?

“Lieutenant Cready is being deployed elsewhere, making you the acting field commander. Don’t ask questions, Wen, just trust that there are better minds than ours working all of this out!” he said harshly, before stalking out of the room.

Jezebel Wen felt oddly out of place when she turned around to look at the rest of the bustling room. There was Karamov already shrugging on his undermesh suit, there was Willoughby and Ratko who had fought alongside of her on Proxima. Malady was practicing a few experimental punches in mid-air at the back of the room. It was like watching a walking mountain.

Everything is changing. We’re changing, she thought for a moment. Is this what war means?

And just where was Solomon Cready going?

3

Taranis Industries

Solomon watched the tall, barrel shape of the Oregon swing out from the docking arms of the general’s dreadnaught.

It is leaving without me, he kept thinking, over and over again. His Outcasts were leaving without him, under the acting command of Jezebel Wen.

The dreadnaught itself was a giant of a ship, one of only six such super-massive pyramids of steel that acted as the flagships of the Marine Corps fleets. In comparison, the tub of the battleship Oregon, under Colonel Farady, was the size of a cat to a human.

It was hard for Solomon to think that there must be a few hundred people on board that moving vessel, and half of them were his own battle-brothers and sisters.

Jezzy, Karamov, and Malady… he thought as he watched through one of the dreadnaught’s portholes to see the distant craft turn majestically. One side of the Oregon suddenly lit up in a red-tinged radiance as it caught the reflected glow of the Red Planet below.

The Red Planet that we are currently at war with. Solomon could see the smears and specks of disaster across the surface of Mars even from this high orbit. Black clouds hung heavy over craters and billowed across the fierce Martian deserts.

What have we done? Solomon thought.

They’d nuked Mars.

We’ve nuked Mars, he corrected. He was more deeply a part of the Marine Corps than ever now, and whatever actions his superior officers took, he knew that he would have to be the one dealing with them from now on.

“Strange to think, isn’t it?” murmured a voice behind him, and Solomon was surprised to turn around and see that it was none other than Brigadier General Asquew joining him in the small viewing lounge.

“Strange, sir?” Solomon snapped to attention.

“That in our lifetime, we’ll have nuked another planet and encountered aliens…” She sounded worried, haunted almost, as she narrowed her eyes to look at Mars.

“Any word of the seditionists?” Solomon said.

“The Chosen of Mars are still attacking Confederate ports on Mars, but their attacks are desperate and uncoordinated,” Asquew said. “I am sure that their resistance will be annoying for many years to come, but right now, I do not think there is anything standing in the way of a troop deployment to the surface of Mars to recapture the cities and habitats stolen from us.”

At the same time as we’re expecting the Ru’at at any moment? Solomon thought in alarm.

The general must have sensed a little of what Solomon was worried about, because she turned to look at him seriously. “The Ru’at, and that blasted message of theirs, forms the existential threat to humanity,” she said. “And we can only face it if humanity is unified—meaning that we need to initiate swift and rapid action to take Mars, and then we can move to using Mars’s impressive processing factories in the war effort,” she said, before dropping her voice lower. “There is another reason why I need you to return with the ambassador to Earth, Lieutenant Cready,” she stated.

“There is a mega-corporation on Earth called Taranis Industries. It specializes in biology, chemistry, medical sciences, that kind of thing,” the general said. “We happen to know that Taranis Industries and NeuroTech were very close for a time, sharing research and facilities and what have you. Our analysts now believe that the cyborg technology could not have been possible without the help of Taranis. While we believe that NeuroTech has been destroyed on Proxima, Taranis Industries still has its base on Earth.”

“And you think that this Taranis Industries might be just as bad as NeuroTech? That they might have more of the dormant cyborgs?” Solomon asked.

“They could have.” Asquew nodded. “But there could also be clues as to what the contents of the Ru’at’s original message was. If we understood their technology as well as NeuroTech did, then we might have better chance of defeating them.”

“But, sir… Why me? Can’t you just authorize Earth-local security services?” Solomon asked.

“This is a matter of trust, Solomon,” Asquew said. “You’ve fought the cyborgs. You know what they are capable of. And besides which, we know that NeuroTech or Taranis could not have been acting alone. They managed to supply the Chosen of Mars with Marine Corps equipment, which means some sort of Confederate involvement. We need to find out just how deep and how dangerous this conspiracy is.”

“You think that there might be other traitors on Earth?” Solomon asked. “Those loyal to Mars?”

“Those loyal to money, Lieutenant. Someone with access to Marine Corps equipment attempted to start the war by attacking Titan,” she said. “That points at collusion between some of the mega-corporations and a conspiracy inside the Confederacy itself!”

Solomon remembered. He had been there, attempting to save the ambassador’s life.

“How many traitors are there? Are they merely Martian sympathizers or are they in fact in league with the Ru’at?” The general grimaced. “Believe me, Lieutenant, these are questions and considerations that I would much rather not be having to think about. I would rather be out there, sword in hand and a gun at my hip, fighting the Ru’at beside my fellow Marines.”

From the look on her face, Solomon believed her.

“But this is the nature of high office, Lieutenant Cready,” Asquew said dryly. “We discover that our enemies aren’t just the ones that we fight out on the field of battle, or in the spaces between the stars. Sometimes we find them wearing suits and occupying ever higher and rarefied positions.” Her expression turned sour, and then she sighed.

“It helps that you seem to have made a habit out of not-dying, Lieutenant Cready,” she said as she turned back to look at the disappearing dot of the Oregon.

“Sometimes I think that it’s more of a lifestyle than a habit, ma’am,” Solomon said as he also watched the Oregon start to lock into flight with its jump-ship. Any minute now and he might never see his friends ever again. They would be taken over spacetime by the Barr-Hawking jump-ship to Pluto…and then what?

Was there anything that a mere hundred Marines could do to stop a force like the Ru’at?

“Sir… Is it still possible to get a message to the Oregon?” Solomon frowned.

“Of course,” the general said. “As soon as she jumps, it’ll be the same old long-distance radio transmissions that we all have to put up with.”

Solomon nodded. It was one of the greatest threats to the Confederacy—and to humanity as a whole—that they hadn’t discovered some sort of faster-than-light form of communication.

“I just want to get a message to Sergeant Jezebel Wen. Please tell her to look after the squad for me while I’m gone.”

4

The Future of Earth

Does she know about my real mission? Solomon wondered as he looked over at Ambassador Ochrie, sitting across from him on the shuttle. She sat in perfect, determined repose as she always did, an older woman with hair long since given over to silver-white, and with deep purple and red robes. Beside her sat her Scandinavian personal assistant—a tall, thin blonde in matching robes, whom Solomon had seen fire a pistol like a sharpshooter.

“I don’t know why the general cannot agree to scheduling a personal jump-ship,” muttered Imprimatur Mariad Rhossily on the opposing bank of chairs, leaning forward and picking at her nails in frustration.

Solomon could see where the woman was coming from, at least. The shuttle that they had left the Indomitable in was of the utmost luxury and quality, a small, boxlike shape on thrusters and positional rockets, whose interior was plush and decadent. Several lounge chairs with comfortable upholstery sat next to large portholes displaying views of the Martian surface.

The ruined Martian surface, Solomon had to correct, at least to himself.

“Because that would attract too much attention, Imprimatur,” the ambassador said evenly. “The Confederacy may indeed by wealthy, but we’re not so rich as to use an entire jump-ship on one tiny shuttle!” Ochrie laughed.

Which is a fine excuse, Solomon thought. What was the real reason? That the general didn’t want to alert Taranis that they were coming for them? That she didn’t want to spook the citizens, or alert the traitors inside the Confederacy?

Well, if worrying people was her main concern, she’s failed in that job! Solomon could have sniggered, given the thermonuclear devices and imminent troop dispersals to Mars.

Whatever the reason, however, the shuttle they were on swam through space towards the designated holding zone, where a much larger transport was currently allowing similar such shuttles to dock and attach at its belly like calves to a cow. Out to one side, Solomon could see the stationary Barr-Hawking jump-ship, waiting for them to dock and join all the others.

“Activating docking procedure in three…two…and—”

Clunk! Solomon shook a little where he stood beside the two seated women as their small craft connected with the larger ship and attachment arms slid into place over their wings.

“Jump procedure beginning. Prepare to brace in five…four…”

“It won’t take long, Imprimatur,” Ambassador Ochrie said soothingly. Solomon realized that Mariad Rhossily, growing up on Proxima, must have the belief that jumps took hours, almost days, to get from one useful destination to the next. Here around the near planets, however, it would only take a matter of minutes to get to Earth orbit.

Solomon’s ears popped and he felt a sudden and bewildering vertigo as the jump-ship started to work, throwing out magnet-lock cables to attach to their own parent transport’s hull, and for their craft to be pulled along for the ride, like fleas on the back of a dog.

They jumped.

“Leaving jump… All passengers, brace.”

The automated words of the shuttle computer blared into the room where Solomon was swaying on his feet, fighting off jump-sickness.

One thing’s for sure, faster-than-light travel has got to be smoother than this! Solomon considered.

“Decoupling from jump-ship. Welcome to Near-Earth Space.”

Solomon felt vibrational shudders running through the shuttle floor as the distant magnet clamps were released from their parent craft and they decelerated to enter the space between Earth and the Moon.

“First time to Earth, Imprimatur Rhossily?” the ambassador asked, uncoupling her belt to gesture to the porthole for her opposite number to take a look. Over their shoulders, Solomon could see the bright orb of the Earth, its upper atmosphere a sea of grays and whites. On the other dark side of the planet, they could see the vast neon spiderweb of lit-up mega-cities.

I wonder if I can see New Kowloon from here. Solomon peered a little closer.

“Shuttle Xge-4, you are ready for detach,” the speaker system said, followed by a further series of shakes as their transporter released the lichen-like shuttles that clung to its belly, falling away like metal leaves. Solomon felt his stomach lurch, and then the shuttle fired its own rockets, headed for the New York Space Elevator, clearly visible as it poked up from the dome of their mother planet as a string spiderweb lines leading to a platform-station shaped like a snowflake.

There were only three space elevators in existence on Earth, at New York, Shanghai, and Mexico City, but they had been humanity’s key achievement in getting to the stars. It cost far less energy to attach shuttles to the cables and send them up to the platforms without having to deal with escape velocity. After that, the Confederacy’s conquest of the near planets was all but written in the stars.

“It doesn’t look like Proxima,” Imprimatur Rhossily said doubtfully. “It’s too…busy.” She sounded surprised, although Solomon figured she must have known what Earth was like.

She’s right though, Solomon thought. Earth had made a mess of its planet, and its near-orbit was filled with satellites and stations moving in complicated geometric patterns around each other. The parts of the planet that were visible in the breaks of heavy gray clouds were mostly filled with cities or barren industrial zones. Proxima, on the other hand, still looked like an untouched wilderness.

But Earth’s mine, Solomon thought affectionately anyway. She might be dirty and hectic, but she was the soil that he had grown up on. Somewhere, far below him, he knew that he could find streets that he remembered, and noodle bars where the owners would know just what his favorite dish was. There might even be people who remembered his name…

But not friends, though. Solomon’s thoughts soured as they drew nearer and nearer to the space elevator, its navigational beacons flaring red and green.

No, Solomon didn’t have any friends left on Earth, if he’d ever had any to start with. His childhood in the Midwest of the American Confederacy had been a fraught time of which he could remember little except getting into trouble, and his second life in New Kowloon had seen him cause the death of his only friend, Matty Sozer.

Maybe it’s for the best if no one remembers my name on Earth, Solomon was starting to think, just as a rising bubble of white light engulfed the New York Space Elevator.

5

Attack!

“WAO! WAO! WAO!”

Alarms were going off throughout the shuttle that Solomon, Ambassador Ochrie for Earth, and the Imprimatur of Proxima, Mariad Rhossily, were in as they watched in horror at the scene playing out below them.

“Someone’s blown up the space elevator—” the ambassador was whispering, her face ashen.

“Ambassador! Someone’s blown up New York!” Imprimatur Rhossily pointed.

Holy frack, she’s right, Solomon hung onto the overhead handles of the shuttle, momentarily frozen.

The rising bubble of white light looked like a blister on the surface of the world, but it rose in absolute mathematical precision. For a moment, the sheer magnitude of the blast did not look like an explosion, Solomon thought. It was beautiful, in a way—like watching a star being born. It was majestic.

Until Solomon saw where the lowest edge of the bubble was racing through the atmosphere of Earth, and it burned red.

The upper platform of New York’s space elevator, its docking ports and stationary shuttles and transporters and cruise ships, all vanished into the center of the light that hurt Solomon’s eyes and caused his two companions to look away.

And then the bubble retracted, losing luminosity and color as it collapsed back into itself.

Leaving what remained of the space elevator behind it. It was now no longer an orbital space station, attached by polyfilament cables. It was a blackened and twisted skeleton of metal, slowly turning on one edge and discarding pieces of debris as it lowered still more over the dome of the Earth.

“Dear heavens, it’s… It’s….” The ambassador was almost hyperventilating.

The space platform that was the jumping-off and arrival point for thousands of vessels every day was turning on its axis and sinking lower into the skies of Earth. Its closest edge to the planet started to burn red, a deep, angry, malefic red, as it suffered from reentry for the first time.

“No… Who could have done this?” The ambassador was shaking. “How did the Ru’at get here so quickly…”

But the Ru’at haven’t used nuclear weapons before, have they? Solomon was thinking. The general told me that there were traitors on Earth. Taranis Industries…

“That platform is going to hit the American Confederacy,” the imprimatur breathed. “Tens of thousands will die…”

“Security channel override!” the ambassador shouted at the shuttle’s automated computer system. “Ambassadorial Code X3-Alpha-One. This is the Ambassador Ochrie, and I need a line to the Confederate Council, immediately!”

She was still saying this when the first shockwave hit, and their shuttle lurched to one side.

“Extreme atmospheric turbulence, please take your seats…” the automated shuttle voice said.

You’re not joking, Solomon thought as he threw one arm around the ambassador and held her to stop her from being dashed against the wall. The imprimatur, on the other hand, was already sliding across the floor of the shuttle, her hands scrabbling at the chairs.

“What’s happening!?” Mariad Rhossily screamed.

“Radionic shockwaves,” Solomon gasped, remembering his military study lessons on Ganymede. “They travel faster in lighter atmospheres…”

And their shuttle was still in space, riding the cusp of Earth’s atmosphere where the nuclear shockwaves would be the most violent. The window alternately flashed white and black as the shuttle wheeled end over end, skipping over Earth’s upper atmosphere. Sparks blew from one of the wall units.

“Attention, passengers. Please secure belt harnesses at this time. Navigational systems down. Corrective measures being taken.” If it was possible for a computer to sound worried, Solomon rather thought this one had managed to pull it off.

“Frack this,” Solomon snarled, grabbing the ambassador and shoving her into a chair as he struggled to hang onto the ceiling handles with one hand. “Belt,” he shouted at her dismayed face, before the ambassador nodded and clipped her belt together.

No time for the imprimatur, Solomon was already throwing himself at the small shuttle door that separated their cabin from the automated cockpit.

The door didn’t budge.

“Dammit!” And Solomon didn’t have any of his firearms on him, either…

“Security channel override! Ambassadorial Code X3-Alpha-One! Open the cockpit door, computer!” Ochrie was shouting at the shuttle as she reached down to grab Rhossily’s hand.

“Security override accepted.” The cockpit door hissed open, and Solomon was thrown against one of the two pilot chairs before hauling himself into the seat. In front of him was a bank of data-screen desks, as well as flight sticks and a whole bunch of levers and lights that were currently working on automatic.

“Ochrie, manual override!” Solomon called as he seized the flight sticks and tried to lean the craft into the spin, but the shuttle’s controls remained stubbornly immune to his demands.

The ambassador called the same commands out, ending with an impassioned, “Manual override!”

But nothing happened.

“Automatic navigation is mandatory in near-Earth atmospheric flight…” the computer was perfectly capable of saying.

“Double-dammit!” Solomon swore. He’d forgotten. It was one of the ways that the Confederacy maintained control—a very small but effective security procedure that saw all vessels with a license to operate near Earth have a command override switch placed in their computers. The Confederacy used automated software to direct the orchestra of space traffic that clogged its skies, while at the same time giving it the ability to halt any particular craft it wanted to.

Well, Solomon had once developed some very specific life skills, far below on the streets of New Kowloon.

Where are the controls! Where are the stars-damned controls?! The ex-thief demanded that his brain give up its answers. The younger Solomon had never broken into an orbital shuttle before, of course, but there had been a very particular job that he’d been gaming both the Triads and the Yakuza, and he had realized that if he needed to get out of New Kowloon quickly, then he’d better know at least half a dozen ways how to do it.

And one of those ways was researching standard orbital shuttle manufacture and construction.

CRASH! Solomon’s metal boot finally dented the plate behind the flight control sticks, exposing wires and circuit boards and mechanical devices that clicked and whirred.

Which one was it? His eyes searched as the shuttle shook and started to judder with a low vibrational shake that could only mean that were starting to dip into Earth’s upper atmosphere themselves.

An orbital shuttle can never survive uncontrolled reentry, Solomon knew. They just weren’t built for it. If he didn’t get control of this craft yesterday, they would all burn up in the skies over the dirty Atlantic Ocean.

There! A big, fat green cable ran through the circuit boards like an artery. It had to be the automatic override, so Solomon grabbed it with his power gauntlets and pulled.

FZZZZT! An explosion of sparks and the alarm went dead, and the flight stick started to erratically jerk, matching the craft as it flipped over once again.

“Into the spin, into the spin…” Solomon seized the flight sticks and tried to channel every second of his training on Ganymede into this.

Solomon fought. He wrestled with the flight controls of the shuttle, and it felt more like driving a bumper car or throwing himself through one of the Confederate Midwest Nascar championships. The orbital shuttle wasn’t designed with aerobatics in mind, and its positional rockets just weren’t powerful or responsive enough to be able to respond to every rippling shockwave from the nuclear blast below.

One of the women was screaming in rage and frustration behind him, but he couldn’t tell which one it was.

His stomach churned as they barrel-rolled over and over, before skidding through the magnetic fields of Earth’s inner Van Allen Belt.

FZZT! More sparks flared from the flight board, and Solomon prayed that it wasn’t some vital part of the ship that had just short-circuited. That was the thing with spacecraft, he fretted, just about everything was vitally important. There were a thousand and more ways that you could die if there was any sort of malfunction at all—from sudden depressurization, to the build-up of toxic carbon monoxide, to freezing to death if the life controls packed up, or becoming lost if the radios or navigation systems blew up.

“Come on!” he snarled at the flight desk and the flashing white, black, and red lights visible over the cockpit window.

He’d done high-G training with the Marines. He knew focusing on the horizon, the middle point, would be their salvation.

If I can keep us heading in that direction… Not falling into Earth’s atmosphere below or spiraling out into space.

Solomon’s hands moved and responded with minute gestures to try and steer the craft into any exaggerated spins and out of any swerves that threatened to send them careening down towards the Atlantic Ocean far, far below. What he didn’t realize was that, of all the people inside that shuttle, he had the advantage.

The Serum 21 that Doctor Palinov of the Ganymede Training Facility had administered to the Outcasts had been created to change his genetic structure. To promote his DNA and RNA to build amino-protein bridges between previously unconnected genetic code. It made the Outcasts tougher, faster, more resilient, and in Solomon’s case, smarter.

The mutagenic serum that he had been given made only tiny adjustments to his metabolism, his neurological structure, allowing his brain to pass messages a fraction of a second faster, and to respond a fraction of a second quicker.

But it was enough.

I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die… Solomon gritted his teeth as he worked feverishly in the cockpit as Earth burned below them. He thought about his Gold Squad, now many thousands and thousands of miles away. He thought about Jezebel Wen, the tough ex-Yakuza enforcer who had become his friend. He thought about Karamov, his medical specialist, a little quieter and more reserved but filled with a deep strength. And he thought about Malady, the man who had been permanently incarcerated in a full tactical suit for previous crimes, and how loyal he was.

I don’t want to die because I want to see them again, he thought, and suddenly—

PHWOOOSH! The shuttle leveled out, flying straight across the top of the dome of their mother planet, still shaking and bouncing, but at least they were upright and heading in only one—rather than several—directions at once.

Yes! Solomon would have punched the air in celebration, but he daren’t take his hands off the flight stick. He had done it. They were going to survive…

“Everyone alive back there?” he called out.

“Ugh—” there were various moans and groans from behind him in the shuttle compartment but no screams, so Solomon took that as a good sign.

“EMERGENCY BROADCAST. ALL FREQUENCIES.” The speakers suddenly blared to life again. “All near-Earth traffic to return to holding orbit immediately. If you require medical assistance, head to Luna Station. EMERGENCY BROADCAST. ALL FREQUENCIES. All near-Earth traffic….”

“We could try for the Shanghai elevator?” Solomon called loudly. Even though Shanghai was a part of the Asia-Pacific Partnership, nominally a ‘partner’ to the Confederacy of Earth, Solomon thought that they had a good chance of making it to the Confederate embassy, and from there…

“Luna,” Ambassador Ochrie corrected him, sounding haggard. “It’s the safest location nearby, and the Confederacy has the Near-Earth Marine Fleet stationed there…”

“Yes, ma’am.” Solomon took a breath and directed the positional rockets to change course, half-certain that they would tear from their moorings after the ride he had just put them through…

But luck was on their side, at least a little bit of luck, anyway, as the shuttle shot upward in a curving arc towards Earth’s smaller sibling.

6

Last Stand at the Last Call

“Holy stars…What am I supposed to do with this!?” Jezebel Wen couldn’t hide her frustration as she saw the busy field of craft clustered around Earth’s most distant relative.

“Protect it,” muttered the man beside her. Shorter than Wen and wearing the deep purple and red ceremonial encounter suit of a colonel, Faraday of the battleship Oregon still managed to cut an impressive figure, as he and the Outcast Marine stood at the front viewing deck of the Oregon’s bridge and looked out onto the icy planetoid in front of them.

Pluto was a small world, and so far away as to be almost inconsequential, were it not for two things: one, that it was far enough outside of the inner and outer system to provide an excellent departure point for jump-ships, and two, in recent years, it had become a major tourist attraction.

‘Come and See the Solar System’s Furthest Point!’ a gigantic neon sign on the sides of a slowly-moving cruise ship eclipsed their view of the planet beyond.

The Oregon had jumped into Plutonian space just a half-hour before, and already their Barr-Hawking jump-ship had detached its clamps from their forward hull, retracted them and rose to join its fellows in deep orbit outside of Pluto.

“Don’t these people know that there’s a war on?” Jezzy breathed, watching as the cruise ship glittered with lights. She could even see tiny shuttles leaving one of its main holds in small clouds to take near-flight tours of the small world.

“And what do they hope to see? It’s a rock…” she muttered angrily. Jezzy was not one who was accustomed to feelings of anxiety. She had done most of her growing up within the Asia-Pacific Partnership’s most notorious crime syndicate, and of all of the things that it had taught her, the ability to maintain an icy control over one’s emotions and surroundings was perhaps paramount.

However, Jezzy was not facing down a gang of Triads now. This was not a matter of deciding who was to die, and how best and most efficiently to overcome the enemy.

What Jezzy was looking at was a picture of three large, bulbous Confederate cruise ships almost as large as the Oregon itself, as well as a host of smaller shuttlecraft. Each craft probably held between five and twenty civilians, and there was a host of smaller yachts and crafts clustering around Pluto’s main station—Last Call, as it was known.

That could be what, a couple thousand civilians at risk here? Two thousand? Three thousand? More?

“The Confederate civilians don’t want to be reminded of a war,” Faraday corrected her. “Most Confederate civilians won’t have heard about Proxima yet. But they will have heard about the Martian uprising. And that, instead of making them cautious, makes most people want to experience more, to spend more money, have better holidays…”

We nuked Mars! Jezzy could have pounded on the glass in front of her. Let alone the invasion of Proxima, or the imminent arrival of the strange Ru-at ships at any moment. Surely the news that the Confederate Marines had dropped two thermonuclear devices on their neighboring planet made people a little more circumspect?

But Faraday was right, Jezzy cursed silently. She had seen the same kind of behavior time and again when she had been a Yakuza executioner. Something curious happens to the human spirit when they are faced with overwhelming stress and constant anxieties. She had known informers and debtors, in their last days, to suddenly decide to sell all of their belongings or give them away. Even for the Yakuza operatives like her, the same applied. If they knew that they were heading into a highly-dangerous mission, the hours and days before would be filled with a curious elation—anything was possible, and every pleasure, no matter how small, had to be savored.

“They’re trying to forget the danger,” Jezzy breathed, earning an agreeing sound from the colonel beside her.

“They picked the wrong place to go to forget about it, then,” Faraday muttered. The older man was just as annoyed as she was, Jezzy knew. She wondered if he felt outmatched and outgunned by the Ru’at, like she did.

Why didn’t they send the entire Rapid Response Fleet here to head the Ru’at ships off? Jezzy thought in annoyance, but she already knew the answer of course.

Both of the Rapid Response Fleets are engaged with the Martian Uprising. Which, she knew, left just the two Near-Earth Marine Corps Fleets, both of which were usually kept stationed near the parent world of humanity at all times.

Wonderful. Jezzy looked over at the colonel, seeing Faraday pull at his moustache as he looked long and hard at the cruise ships, Pluto, and the orbiting jump-ships far beyond. His expression was stern, and the man did not look happy at all.

You know this is going to be a last stand sort of fight, don’t you? She didn’t say the words out loud to her superior officer, but she thought them. Brigadier General Asquew had sent them both here to try and stop an alien invasion that clearly outclassed them in every way. That meant that General Asquew did not expect them to win at all, but she expected them to slow down the enemy, probably giving her enough time to rally the fleets.

The old colonel looked over at her suddenly, and his expression was grim. Neither the Yakuza Enforcer nor the career Marine officer said anything to each other, but they nodded.

They both knew perfectly well what they were doing here.

7

Luna 1

“Luna 1, please come in. This is Lieutenant Solomon Cready of the Rapid Response Fleet, and I have with me the Confederate Ambassador and…”

“Don’t.” The ambassador put a sudden hand on Solomon’s shoulder before he could mention the imprimatur’s presence as well. “It’s bad enough broadcasting to everyone that I’m in danger, let alone the leader of Proxima…”

Solomon grimaced for a second, but he accepted the orders. “What, you don’t want to spook people?” he muttered. From where he sat, he knew that he would be able to turn his head to see the still stationary bubble of explosive vortex over Confederate New York. The people of Luna and Earth already had a lot to be worried about.

“Of course. It’s my job as an ambassador to make peace, Lieutenant,” Ochrie said.

“I think we’re past that point, Your Excellency,” Solomon muttered, but he did as he was ordered.

Below their shuttle grew the monochrome craters, plains, crevasses and peaks of Earth’s moon. It still looked like a barren lump of rock in the sky, with large parts left barren, but that was all about to change.

Rising ahead of them was Luna 1—the giant collection of white bubble-habitats that could be seen from Earth on a clear night as a distant spark of reflected light. Up this close, it reminded Solomon of some kind of ice palace: a set of white geometric bubbles, the smaller ones clustered around the larger, with many aerial-turrets rising from the bubble walls and apexes, shining with soft blue radiance.

It could be pretty, if it wasn’t for the circumstance, Solomon thought. He had never been to Luna of course. Even during his most lucrative days as a thief on Earth, he could never have afforded the shuttle ride from the Shanghai Space Elevator up here.

Luna 1 was the first, oldest, and largest of the Luna habitats, with Luna 2, 3, 4 and up to 6 scattered around the near face of the Moon. Like Mars, Luna was primarily an industrial colony, with the smaller habitat bubbles given over to giant processing factories, where everyone who lived there would also work at their local plant.

Even though Luna shared much of the hardworking conditions and general poverty the Martians did, they had not developed the same puritanical frenzy as the Chosen of Mars/First Martian groups on the Red Planet. Perhaps it was due to the Moon’s proximity to Earth and Confederate control, Solomon wondered. What little he knew of this place was that they had plenty of trade unions and trade councils, and that a lot of mega-corporations also located their offices there to avoid vigorous Confederate taxes.

Even Taranis? Solomon wondered sourly. He wondered what was left of his mission now. To find out where Taranis Industries had copied the original Message. To find out who had helped both Taranis and NeuroTech to start a war between the Confederacy and the colonies.

To find out whether they were in league with the Ru’at…

“Attention Orbital Shuttle Xge-4, this is Luna 1 Main Station. You are cleared to land at Port 12.”

“Thanks, Luna,” Solomon said. “Who’s the senior Marine commander you have on base?”

“That would be Major General Hausman, Luna liaison and director of the Near-Earth Fleet, Lieutenant,” the human voice on the other end of the line said.

“Good. We’re going to need to see them. Immediately.”

“I’ll send a priority message, but, Lieutenant, sir…” the voice sounded worried. “You know that Earth, New York, it’s…”

“We know, Luna 1, believe me, we know…” Solomon said grimly, pulling the shuttle into a wobbling, arcing flight towards the smaller bubble with a giant ‘12’ stenciled on its top.

“Ambassador! Lieutenant!” a loud voice greeted them as soon as Solomon, Ochrie, and Rhossily had left the repressurization airlock and were walking down the ramp into Bubble 12.

WAO! WAO! “Alert all citizens! Non-essential travel is prohibited. All people with security experience to present themselves to the nearest Marine Corps office, immediately.”

Blaring alarms and flashing orange lights were everywhere, and Solomon and his companions seemed to have walked into a station preparing itself for war. Solomon saw the port staff running back and forth in their gray service suits as they tried to do several things at once. Others were calling for supervisors or managers to attend to this and that important decision, now!

The important decision that Solomon had to make right now, however, was whether or not to trust the man and his team of Marines in full power armor signaling to them.

“Major General Hausman.” Solomon stopped and threw as perfect a salute as he could manage. It seemed to pass muster, as no one screamed at him for the attempt.

The general of the Near-Earth Fleet was a man in his sixties, Solomon guessed. He was a tall and stocky man, and one who Solomon guessed must have been a giant in his younger days, but now whose physique had apparently been given over to padding rather than muscle. He wore the pristine white and purple uniform of his position, but without any of the armor that the General Asquew routinely wore.

Hausman had short-cropped hair that might have once been blonde but was thinning and giving itself over to gray. He had clear, steel-blue eyes over a square, all-American jawline.

“Lieutenant Cready of the Outcasts, Rapid Response Fleet, sir.” Cready nodded.

“You’re a long way from your post, Lieutenant Cready,” Hausman said. “The Rapid Response Fleet is deployed at Mars…”

“And the Outcast Company is deployed at Pluto, sir,” Solomon said heavily, studying the man’s face for any sign of a reaction. There was none.

He doesn’t know. Solomon’s heart plummeted. He doesn’t know about Proxima, and the Ru’at. And the fact that they were coming here, to Earth system, any hour…

“So…” Hausman looked perturbed.

“Excuse me, General.” Ambassador Ochrie stepped forward, inclining her head to the senior military officer. “But we have critical information that has to be seen by the Confederate Council, right now. Lieutenant Cready is acting on orders from General Asquew to deliver this information, and me, to the right ears,” she said.

Hausman frowned deeply. “I am afraid that is out of the question.”

“Excuse me?” Ochrie looked sternly at the man. Solomon wondered who outranked who in this situation. Hausman was one of only three people who could be said to be in charge of the entire Confederate Marine Corps—Asquew being another one—while the ambassador was a representative of the Confederate Council itself.

“Most of the Confederate Council were in New York,” Hausman said heavily. “Although we are trying to locate the remaining members of the council outside of the American Confederacy, we have no idea of how many survived New York.”

No. Solomon felt a tremor of shock run through his knees and cursed himself for his weakness. A part of him had known, ever since seeing the bubble of light engulf the space elevator, that this was coming. But he guessed that his battle training hadn’t let him consider it fully.

New York was one of Earth’s major cities. A site for a space elevator, a major hub for the nations of the world, and the Confederate Council was made up of world leaders of the various ‘fragments’ of the Confederacy, such as the Premier of the Asia-Pacific Partnership and his top aides, or the President of the Russian Alliance.

The Confederacy was supposed to be a system, of world-wide collaborative government. A way for humanity, as a whole, to ascend to the stars.

In truth, it was a haggling, bickering, intimidating, and bribing network of different powers and old nation-states who managed to pretend to work with each other for the benefits that off-world resources and opportunities afforded them. The fact that all the different parts of the Confederacy had even managed to agree to creating the Marine Corps between them was a miracle.

And now what’s going to happen? Solomon thought in horror.

“Until all partners of the Confederacy have managed to put forward their representatives, the council cannot convene.” Hausman continued, and Solomon nodded to himself. At least that much made sense. Each part of the Confederacy who lost their leader, president, prime minister or chief would have to emergency swearin the next highest-ranking civic official. Until then, the Confederacy itself was rudderless.

“According to Confederate guidelines, Ambassador, during such situations, the authority passes to the most senior ranking military officer, which would be myself.” Hausman nodded severely. “And I have called for immediate martial law to be in place across the Confederacy until we can respond to this…disaster.”

“This attack, General.” Ochrie’s voice wavered. “That was an attack against the Confederate Council. It had to be.”

“My analysts are collecting all the information they can, Madam Ambassador,” Hausman said. “But until we have more intelligence, I cannot let rumors like that be spoken freely.”

“Rumors!?” Ochrie burst out. “We saw it, General. We saw the blast!”

“Madam Ambassador.” Hausman’s tone became clipped and stern, and Solomon saw the two Marines stand up a little straighter beside him. “Now is not the time for histrionics. I have a planetary disaster to see to. Now, you said that you and the lieutenant, and…” He threw a look at Mariad Rhossily, who merely stood demurely behind the ambassador beside Ochrie’s personal assistant. Solomon noted that the Imprimatur of Proxima kept her head down as if she was just another staff member.

“That you were here to deliver critical information. As I am the acting commander-in-chief, you may present that information to me.” Hausman nodded.

Ochrie shared a look with Solomon that spoke volumes. Can we trust him? Will he believe us?

“Not here, General,” she settled for. “It is too sensitive, worse even than rumors.” She added the final part in what Solomon thought was a slight barb, but Hausman ignored it.

“Fine. Marine Offices, Luna 1. Get yourselves there and I will be there as soon as I can.” Hausman nodded to the exit.

The Ru’at are already in Earth’s solar system! Solomon screamed inwardly. “Sir, please, this is of the utmost critical importance, sir!”

“Lieutenant Cready!” Hausman barked suddenly, his face turning from the stern patrician figure to that of a red-tinged, furious bull in an instant. “You are no doubt aware of how I like the chain of command to run here in the Near-Earth Fleet! General Asquew is a noble and courageous leader, but now, while you are here on my soil, you are under my command. Understood, Marine?”

Solomon blinked several times. Hausman was almost as bad as Warden Coates. He hadn’t expected that level of outrage from the man.

“Sir. Understood, sir!” Solomon threw another salute, a better one this time, and Hausman dismissed them both with a nod.

“Oh frack,” Ochrie whispered under her breath as soon as the general and his bodyguards were out of earshot.

“You’re telling me,” Solomon murmured back.

“You think he will listen to us?” Ochrie asked.

Solomon Cready didn’t know.

8

Bridgehead

“They need to be gone, now!” Jezzy watched as Colonel Faraday barked an angry order at the administrator of Pluto’s only station, the Last Call.

Pluto wasn’t technically a colony, it had no flag or colors or insignia of its own, and all of the people who lived there only did so on the back of the transport and the service industry around the tiny planetoid. As far as Jezzy was aware, Pluto had never pressed for independence, and it had no way of sustaining itself anyway—no fertile land, no bio-habitats big enough to support a growing population, no large-scale energy-harvesting technologies.

But still, as Jezebel Wen looked at the woman who in charge of the Last Call on the behalf of the Confederacy, she was sure that she could see that same spark of defiance coming from her eyes as she had seen on Mars, and on Proxima.

Administrator Fatima Ahmadi was a woman in her early fifties, perhaps, thin, with long dark hair that she allowed to fall freely over the sturdy leathers and meshes of her encounter suit. The woman was on the other end of a data-screen—presumably on the station itself, Jezzy reckoned—and looked about ready to turn her end of the connection off.

She didn’t look like a Confederate administrator, as Jezzy saw them. She didn’t have any of the finery or seals of high office that other officials in the Confederacy enjoyed. If anything, she looked like she had just rolled out of a shift at the mechanical bays and had sat down to answer some video-messages.

So no, Pluto wasn’t a colony, but Jezzy was starting to think that this woman here might want it to be one.

“Do you know how much money we’ll lose if we cancel all of those fancy tourist visas?” Ahmadi inspected her nails and proceeded to bite at one of them.

“This is a military matter, Administrator Ahmadi, and as such, I have to ask you to comply now,” Faraday demanded.

Jezzy stood with the other bridge staff on the Oregon, a few steps behind the colonel and wearing her full power armor. She tried to maintain absolute stillness and poise, knowing that it would add to the message.

“Am I going to have to ask about jurisdiction, Colonel?” Ahmadi was infuriating, and, Jezzy thought, absolutely unafraid of anyone. She was starting to like her.

“You can ask, Administrator, but I don’t have to remind you that military orders trump civilian regulations. If you want, I can get General Asquew on the line right now and you can hear my orders from her…”

“And by ‘on the line,’ you mean sending a sub-frequency message which will take hours to get to Mars—where I hear your General is busy bombing people—and then hours to get the answer back here?” Ahmadi raised an eyebrow.

We don’t have time for this… Jezzy thought.

“I’m afraid we don’t have hours, Administrator.” Faraday’s tone was serious. Deadly serious. “You don’t have hours.”

From behind her helmet, Jezzy saw Ahmadi’s eyes narrow as she tried to work out whether that was a threat or an attempt to intimidate her, but the look on Faraday’s face was too severe and too blunt. “Fine,” Ahmadi said. “But I will be raising this with the Confederate Council, and we’ll be sure to bill the Marine Corps for lost earnings to my station, you know.”

“Feel free. And lost earnings is infinitely preferable to lost lives, Administrator.” Faraday nodded gratefully.

“You don’t live out here then, do you?” Ahmadi shot back, but she was already complying, as she said. “I’ll dispatch the order, but it’s going to take time to round all the tour parties up, and to provision the cruise ships and get them jumped out…” she was saying.

No time! No time! Jezzy’s heartrate increased a notch.

“As soon as you can, please,” Faraday said, before the message clicked off. When he turned back to Jezzy, he looked worried. “The Ru’at will be here by then,” he murmured.

“We don’t know that, Colonel,” Jezzy said, wishing that she believed it. She looked up at the two holographic displays over the viewing window—out of sight of the screen which the administrator had recently talked to them on—and saw the projected countdowns to the Ru’at’s arrival.

Even the best Marine Corps scientists didn’t know how long the journey would take, Jezzy thought. All bets were off with faster-than-light travel, but she had been present at the debrief, when he had explained that these two estimates were the best that their scientists could come up with.

One display read: 2 hours: 43 mins: 13 seconds.

The other read: 38 mins: 24 seconds.

Jezzy sure hoped that whoever had come up with the first time was a lot smarter than the one who had figured out the second one.

9

An Officer Abroad

Solomon, Ochrie, and Rhossily made their way through the terrified and panicked Luna Station 1 to find the resident offices of the Marine Corps.

It felt strange to Solomon. Even though he had been to a few off-Earth worlds now as a part of his almost two years with the Marine Corps, he had never spent time in one that wasn’t currently under attack.

Although, that might all change at any moment… Solomon thought miserably.

There was an element of Mars to the sights and sounds that he saw—in the way that everyone in the wide metal corridor walkways seemed to be a notch poorer than the average Earth-based Confederate citizen, and also in the way that most of them wore trade suits, dull ochres, browns, grays or gunmetal blues with insignia patches for various corporations or smelting works.

Luna is an industrial town, Solomon thought, as the main connecting avenue from habitat-bubble twelve to the main, much larger bubble of Luna 1 ended in a set of airlock doors. Solomon and his two companions waited for the lights to cycle to their green ‘okay’ position and for the doors to open.

“This feels wrong…” Rhossily muttered at their side as Solomon led the way.

“What do you mean?” Solomon asked, although he knew that he couldn’t see much that was right with their position at that moment.

Inside the airlock, they emerged into a wide concourse that must have run around the inside of Luna 1’s circumference. In the distance, Solomon could see more airlocks on their side of the wall hissing open, taking in or disgorging people on their hurried way to their next work shift in the smaller outlier bubbles, no doubt.

The opposing wall was given over to narrower corridors that led deeper into the station, as well as lines and lines of boutiques, cafes, and restaurants—all of which were being shutting down or had already been shut down by teams of burly Marines.

“Martial law! Immediate curfew!” Solomon watched as one Marine in a bronze sort of suit barked at a pair of surly, blue-clad Luna workers, with short caps on their heads. The two workers slowly stood up, making a point of draining their coffee mugs slowly, before sauntering off deeper into the station.

“Well, that for a start,” Rhossily answered Solomon darkly.

“We have to get this information to the council,” Ochrie repeated in an urgent whisper. “They will take the appropriate steps to safeguard Earth, and the Confederacy, and of course to retake Proxima.” She inclined her head at Rhossily.

“You believe so, Ambassador?” the Imprimatur of Proxima asked candidly.

Solomon stopped the two Marine guards and before they could bark at him, he asked them where their main offices were.

“Inner Hub, Level 4, Lieutenant, sir.” One of the Marines saluted him, making Solomon pause for a moment. His own squad had saluted him on occasion—he was their commanding officer who had fought alongside them, of course—but usually they were a little sloppy, perhaps a little sarcastic.

It was strange to be afforded the respect of his new officer rank right here and now, in front of other Marines.

“As you were, Marine,” Solomon remembered to say, turning in the direction indicated. “Ladies?” He gestured.

“Lieutenant, what’s your opinion?” Mariad asked pointedly as they walked quickly down one of the wide white corridors, past doors and ladders that went up to the terraces and balconies and residential flats apartment. “Of whether coming to Luna—or even Earth—is a good idea?”

“They are my orders, ma’am,” Solomon said. Taranis Industries. The Confederate conspiracy. General Asquew had asked him to get to the bottom of them. Him. Solomon Cready.

“The Confederate Council is in a shambles, and there is now martial law across Earth,” Rhossily stated, regaining some of her old poise and composure as her voice strengthened. “The Confederate Marines are soon to be fighting a war on two fronts, with the Near-Earth Fleet apparently not getting involved in either.” She continued ticking off reasons for despair as if counting ships at a space dock.

Solomon’s temper broke. “And what would have me do, Imprimatur? What can I do, apart from my duty?” He dropped his voice into a low hiss. “All three of us know what’s coming for us.”

“All I am suggesting, Lieutenant Cready, is that you would be better served by heading out there, back to General Asquew and fighting the Ru’at,” Rhossily stated in her infuriatingly calm Proximian way.

“What are you talking about?! My home just got nuked!” Ochrie whispered back just as fiercely.

“So did Mars,” the imprimatur said. “Look, what I am saying is this. We Proximians have a way of looking at things that tries to teach simplicity, and forthrightness,” she said. “To me, and to my Proximian upbringing, then, any more time that we spend here in Luna 1 or near Earth will be a waste of our energies from the real challenge that we have to face. There is too much confusion here, and too many vested interests.”

Solomon had to hand it to the woman, even after seeing her home world get invaded by an unknown alien force, and all of her people become refugees, she remained levelheaded and even wise in this most dangerous of times.

“We’re not leaving!” Ambassador Ochrie hissed, as they came up to a set of double-doors bearing the stencil ‘Inner Hub’ over the frame. Solomon realized that the main bubble habitat of Luna 1 was made out of concentric smaller ‘bubbles,’ with each presenting a different zone.

The green light hissed open, revealing a white avenue, at the end of which looked to be the central plaza of Luna 1, with terraced levels spreading up the walls.

But the corridor wasn’t empty. There, standing at the doors, were two pairs of Marine guards in power armor.

“Gentlemen.” Lieutenant Cready nodded at them from inside his own power armor suit, stepping forward with the ambassador and the imprimatur behind him.

But something wasn’t right. Solomon saw a minute gesture from one of the Marines on the right, a hand moving a fraction of an inch to their utility belt harness.

System Alert! Suit Telemetries Inactive…

An orange holographic warning scrolled across the inner space of Solomon’s helmet. That was odd, he thought. His suit telemetries—the short-range radio frequencies that every Marine suit used to connect to the rest of their squad and to the current battle mainframe—was blocked.

Not that there is anyone to talk to, the thought flashed through Solomon’s mind. His suit was probably keyed to the Gold Channel of the Outcasts, who were literally at the other end of the solar system right now, or else trying to link up to the main battlefield mainframe of the Rapid Response Fleet, currently invading Mars.

But doesn’t the suit automatically upgrade to the local Marine mainframe? Solomon frowned, just as he saw, out of the corner of his eye, a guard on left give a small, almost imperceptible nod to the guards on their right.

“Marine,” Solomon turned to greet him, pausing for a second. “Is there a problem?”

Lieutenant Cready could see through the man’s faceplate, and he could see the man’s eyes widening for a moment in shock, concern.

This isn’t right, Solomon thought, just as the guard on the right started reaching for the butt of his Jackhammer rifle.

“Back!” Solomon shouted, stepping in front of the two women and pushing them back as the first Marine swung up their Jackhammer.

Solomon swerved to one side as the muzzle went off.

BOOOM!

The flash was incredible, just a foot in front of his face as Solomon turned under the arc of fire, his suit’s noise cancellation suddenly cutting the boom of the weapon.

Solomon bounced up on the balls of his feet, one power gauntlet pushing the man’s Jackhammer aside as his other hand struck out in an upward blow to where the Marine’s neck would have been, were it not for the metal cowl that locked into the helmet.

CLANG! Fighting in power armor was an art, and one that Solomon had to learn quickly. Unlike the light tacticals, where you could feasibly cause damage through the plate and the battle harness, power armor was like an all-enclosing shell of interlocked plates. Although Solomon hit the man as hard as he could, all he left was a scratch on the metal, but the Marine was pushed back, spinning.

“Lieutenant!” he heard the ambassador shout as there was another muted BOOM from behind him. Who had been hit? he thought, spinning around to see that one of the other guards was pointing his Jackhammer at the two women and was taking aim.

Solomon lunged, seizing the man’s gun and forcing it up so that it fired into the ceiling.

Solomon Cready had a fraction of the service time that these Marines did, but he also had an advantage: his blood and his body, his very substance, was full of Serum 21. Deep inside his cells, the serum activated, alerted by the sudden flush of neurotransmitters and cortisol.

The serum activated RNA strands that had been dormant, it rewrote his biological command code, forcing his nervous system to respond more efficiently, and his muscles to take up more protein, more adrenaline.

Solomon kept on moving through his lunge, snatching the Jackhammer from the man in a sudden move, reversing his grip and firing it point-blank into the Marine’s chest.

There was a huge blast of sparks and smoke, and the Marine flew backward to land with a thump against the wall. The front shield plates of his power armor were horribly mangled, blackened and dented, with a tiny wisp of smoke rising from the center. Solomon didn’t think that he had managed to burst a hole through the man’s suit, but he could easily have broken ribs. Either way, this Marine was out, slumping to the floor.

“Solomon!”

Another shout and Solomon turned to see that the ambassador had dragged the imprimatur back, and they were stumbling, falling over themselves through the airlock and into the outer hub. There were still three Marines, one of which was getting back to his feet where Solomon had punched him, the other two raising their Jackhammers to take aim at his two charges.

“No!”

Flak System. Activate.

Solomon snapped his hand to one side as the controls glowed green inside his helmet. He felt a thunk and a vibrational judder as, from the ports on his shoulders, his suit spewed out the pre-loaded flak system designed to disorient attackers, provide cover, and disrupt a weapon’s targeting systems. Smoke burst into the tunnel around him, as well as loud bangs, and tiny missile tubes fired coils of aluminum foil.

“Agh!” He heard a gunshot and a woman scream as the smoke and the flashing foil obliterated his view.

Thermal Imaging. Activated.

Working automatically, his faceplate flushed a neon green and suddenly Solomon could see the hazy, ghostly images of red and white shapes. The two Marines were now pushed to the sides of the tunnel, and two smaller, glowing white heat signatures were on the floor further ahead.

Mariad and Ochrie, Solomon thought, hoping that he hadn’t been too late.

Ker-THUNK!

Warning! Suit Impact Detected: Helmet Rear.

Armor Plating Efficiency: -20%

The Marine he had hit had hit him with something over the back of the head, and strong enough to damage his helmet, but not enough to stop him.

Solomon spun, raising his leg as he did so to roundhouse kick the Marine behind him. The combined strength of the blow and his heavy metal boots was enough to send the man flying.

BOOM!

Someone was firing at him, but because of the smoke, they missed. Solomon still had the other Marine’s Jackhammer in hand and discharged it, from only a few meters away, into the Marine who had fired it at him. Now there was only one left.

“FREEZE!” Solomon demanded, striding forward to clank the muzzle of his stolen firearm against the man’s helmet. “Now, I don’t know if these fancy helmets of ours can withstand a point-blank shot, but I’m willing to bet that whatever the outcome, you’re going to be in a lot of pain!” Solomon hissed at the remaining Marine, as he heard a groan from behind him.

“Nobody move!” Solomon called out before the other Marine he had kicked could decide to try and help his friend. The smoke from the personal flak system was starting to lower to the floor, revealing the shapes of two dead or unconscious Marines and Solomon with his stolen weapon against the head of another.

“Easy there, Lieutenant…” the second Marine standing on the other side of him was saying, taking a slow step forward. The soldier did not have any guns in his hands—he must have dropped it when Solomon kicked him—but that didn’t mean he was harmless, Solomon knew.

“I said nobody move!” Solomon pulled the trigger back a fraction.

“Okay, okay. You’re the boss…” the Marine standing a little way from him muttered.

“Ambassador? Imprimatur? Are you okay?” Solomon called, not taking his eyes from both Marines.

“Ugh. Yes, I think so…” Ochrie’s voice groaned, as Mariad coughed from the smoke.

“You won’t get far, Cready…” the standing Marine said. Already, alarms were bursting into existence around them.

WAO! WAO! WAAOOO!

“Who are you working for!?” Solomon hissed. “Who put you up to this? Hausman? NeuroTech?”

The Marine sneered at him. “You’re on our territory now, Outcast. We own the Moon. We own Earth, now! You and your traitor Asquew are going to pay!”

“Who do you mean ‘we’!?” The ambassador was striding forward, looking about ready to slap the man, even if he was wearing a full power armor helmet. Before she could, however, there was the sound of shouting from the outer concourse, where Solomon and the others had entered Luna 1. It was more Marines. And when they got there, Solomon knew they wouldn’t like what they saw at all.

My traitor Asquew? Solomon wondered, It didn’t make sense, but there was no time for that now, anyway.

“Ladies, please…” Solomon was stepping back, his Jackhammer still raised as Mariad grabbed one of the fallen Marine’s guns and the sound of pounding feet grew louder.

“We’ll see you next time, Outcast,” the standing Marine was laughing at them, as Solomon and the others turned and fled.

10

Commander-in-Chief

“Why did they call the general a traitor!?” Solomon was panting inside his power armor. Although it was designed to be servo-assisted and as light as just a heavy set of clothes, sprinting through a moon-base habitat, up flights of stairs, and across balconies was still an effort.

Currently, Solomon and his two companions were flattened against the wall of a stairwell, looking out across the adjoining balcony terrace and down to the central plaza of Luna 1 below as it slowly started to fill up with Hausman’s Marines.

And they were all searching for them.

“Never mind that, Lieutenant. Just why on Proxima did they start shooting at us!?” Imprimatur Rhossily was similarly gasping for air.

They had lost their pursuers with the back and forth terrace balcony-hopping that they had done, but it was only a matter of time before they were spotted.

We’re not exactly inconspicuous, are we? Solomon could have groaned when he saw his reflection in the silvered floor of the adjacent lift. He was a Marine wearing full power armor. He might be able to pass as one of Hausman’s Marines, but only to the civilians. The other Marines would see his call-sign on their own suit telemetries the moment he stepped into view.

For the first time since he had been awarded the privilege of wearing the expensive Marine Corps power armor suit, Solomon cursed the fact that he had it on.

“General Asquew said…” Solomon breathed, keeping his eye on a trio of Marines moving across the plaza floor. The main and central atrium of Luna 1 would have been a marvel, Solomon realized, were it not for the imminent threat of getting shot. It had as its centerpiece a tall fountain throwing glittering water some twenty feet into the air, which Solomon was grateful for at least, as it meant the noise of the spraying water hid their whispers and movements somewhat.

The different terraces of Luna 1 spread around the fountain in a circle, with their balcony levels displaying offices and restaurants, embassy buildings and more. It was a pleasing, bright, and airy sort of a place, and the sort that Solomon might have liked to spend time in…again, if he wasn’t being shot at.

But he had other things to think about. The conspiracy.

“Asquew said that there had to be a conspiracy at the heart of the Confederacy. Someone who helped NeuroTech and Taranis to supply Mars with weapons. To start the war by attacking both of you, Ambassador and Imprimatur, on Titan.” Solomon filled them in.

“Taranis? Aren’t they a biotech firm?” The ambassador frowned. The imprimatur had never heard of them.

“Yeah, Asquew thinks that Taranis was working with NeuroTech. That they might have some of the Ru’at’s message,” Solomon confirmed, holding up a warning hand as the trio of Hausman’s guards looked in their direction as Solomon and the others ducked back.

Solomon breathed. He counted to three, and then he counted to ten. No shouts and no blaze of gunfire, so they might be alright.

Might be.

“Someone tried to start a war between the colonies and the Confederacy, and two mega-corporations have been using alien technology for years,” the imprimatur whispered. “Got it. Now I’m on the same page…”

But why did that guard call Asquew a traitor!? Solomon couldn’t get the question out of his head. It didn’t make any sense. A traitor to what? The Confederacy? But Asquew was out there fighting for it! And she was doing everything she could to unmask a conspiracy, not start one!

“Psst…” Solomon startled as his suit picked up a whisper. It was coming from neither of the two women with him, but the stairwell above them—

—where there was a young boy’s face looking between the stairwell bannisters at them. He was pale, the sort of pale that you get from living most of your life without Earth-filtered sunlight. The boy couldn’t have been older than twelve or thirteen, with short black hair and wide, almost ghoulish eyes.

“Go away, kid” Solomon whispered back as the trio of Marines started to walk slowly towards their stairwell.

“Pssst!” the boy said again, this time reaching one moonlit-pale hand through the gaps between the bannisters to beckoning them up.

“He wants us to follow him,” the imprimatur said.

“It could be a trap!” Ambassador Ochrie warned.

“Children might play tricks, but they do not lay ambushes,” the imprimatur said, already moving up the stairwell to the next landing and the young man above.

“Rhossily! Come back!” Solomon was hissing at her, but she was already gone. “Dammit!” Solomon nodded for the ambassador to follow him as they moved as silently as they could up the stairwell.

“What does he want?” Solomon whispered as they got to the next landing, to see that the boy had once again run on ahead of them to the landing above, again beckoning them through the railings.

“He wants us to follow him,” the Imprimatur of Proxima said, eagerly taking the challenge as she jogged up the stairs after the boy.

“You don’t say.” Solomon kept his grip on his Jackhammer loose and casual, ready to use on the guards beneath them at the first sign of trouble.

The boy paused at the next landing, and when Solomon and the ambassador joined Rhossily there, they saw the boy look warily though the plate glass, and then hit the release button for the door to open with a near-silent hum, revealing a narrow avenue.

Still not speaking, the boy waved them on behind him as he passed a set of double garage doors on one side, and then a smaller metal door with a tiny awning over the other, and a small brass plaque bearing the legend, Poulanous Bistro! Everyone Welcome!

The boy knocked on the door several times, and it was opened by a large man wearing a cook’s apron, with thick waves of wiry black hair held back in a bun. The scent of cooking meat, coffee, cloves, and cinnamon washed out of the bistro to greet them.

“Alexis! What are you doing? You know it’s curfew!” the man who was clearly the boy’s father was saying, grasping the small boy towards him in a fierce bearhug, before he spotted the three strays that his boy had brought home with him.

One of them wore full power armor, and the other two were clearly women of some standing.

WAO! WAO! WAAOO! The stations alarms were still going off, and distantly, they could hear thumps and bangs as doors were knocked.

“Please, sir…” Mariad Rhossily whispered to the man, as Solomon kept on casting worried looks back the way that they had come.

“You guys had better come in,” the father said in a low, urgent tone, holding the door open for them until all three had vanished inside.

The Poulanous Bistro was a small but welcoming restaurant furnished in a Mediterranean style, even with real wood tables and countertops, Solomon saw. Small curtains hung over porthole windows into the corridor beyond, and vining plants had been encouraged to grow up frames by the side of the empty tables.

“I am sorry, my son is always making friends,” the boy’s father said, having picked up Alexis and depositing him on the side of the counter, from where he looked at the newcomers with his large, rounded eyes.

“Thank you.” The imprimatur crossed the space between them, taking the man’s hand with both of her own and holding it earnestly. “You may have saved our lives.”

“Mariad,” the ambassador said in a shocked undertone, and from the look on her face, Solomon could see that she was still unsure over whether to trust this man.

“Oh, it’s alright,” the man surprised them by saying, shaking the imprimatur’s hand and then turning to offer his hand to the other two. “I am Max Poulanous, and this is my café, and you are all very welcome indeed.” Max paused. “I came to settle on Luna some years ago, and I came here for a better life. But what I have seen out of my door today, it makes me wonder,” he said heavily, before shaking his head and his face cracking into a large grin. “But anyway, enough talk of dark tidings. Coffee?”

The ambassador hesitated, but both the imprimatur and Solomon were eager to accept. “We’d be delighted, Max,” Mariad stated, and the man turned to talk to his son in Greek, sending him off to make the coffees.

“The boy should not hear this talk.” the man gestured for them to take seats.

“Are you going to help us?” The ambassador remained standing stiffly in place, until Max gave her a smile, even if it was a sad and tired smile.

“Of course. That is the Luna way. And the Greek way,” he said. “I recognize you from the news reels, Ambassador, I know who you are. And I have not been yelling at my door for Hausman’s thugs to get up here, have I?” he pointed out.

“Hm.” That, if anything, seemed to reassure the ambassador as Ochrie took a seat beside Solomon and Rhossily.

“Hausman’s thugs?” Solomon asked, uncoupling his helmet and setting it on the table in front of him. It felt good to be out of that thing for a moment, he thought. “You mean the Marines?”

“Ah yes, the Marines…” Max’s eyes flickered as he moved over Solomon’s large power armor.

“I’m not General Hausman,” Solomon said quickly, holding up his hands in a placating gesture before very slowly, and very carefully, setting the Jackhammer he had at his belt on the floor at his feet, and straightening up. “I am with the Rapid Response Fleet, under General Asquew.”

“Lieutenant…” the ambassador whispered warningly.

“Really, Ambassador. We are the guests of this man and at the mercy of his good nature,” Mariad said sternly, earning a glare from the ambassador, but also a brief look of shame as she looked at her hands.

“Ah, Asquew…” Max whistled appraisingly. “Then you have a lot of problems, my friend. General Asquew has barely been off the newswires all day.”

“All day? Even after New York?” Ochrie said.

“Ah…” The restaurateur grimaced, “Especially because of New York, I fear.” He stood up to go turn on the large wall screen, for it suddenly to blare with the insignia of the Near-Earth Marine Corps badge and scroll with updates.

“New York attacked by terrorists! All flights to and from the American Confederacy canceled. Heavy chaos over our skies as flights to Shanghai and Mexico are stopped entirely!”

“The senior officer in command, General Hausman, has stepped forward to aid in the recovery effort. ‘We will hunt down the traitors, wherever we find them!’ He has claimed that a secret cabal of Marine Corps officers, close to General Asquew, have elected to attack Earth…”

“Pfagh!” Max clicked off the sound as he turned back to the shocked faces of his guests. “Traitors. Hausman has been talking about traitors ever since it happened. He says that there is a conspiracy in the heart of the Confederate Marine Corps!”

“He might not be wrong about that part,” Solomon murmured, frowning deeply as he slumped forward and put his head in his hands. I have to try to get to the bottom of this. Why is Hausman saying this about Asquew? Why did his soldiers attack us?

“But to think that Asquew had anything to do with the attack on New York is just ridiculous. She is far too busy attacking Mars,” Solomon said.

“Hausman must have the wrong information,” the ambassador said. “If I can get to speak to him, then we can clear this up…”

“I don’t think that is going to help, Ambassador…” Max said as he pointed to the muted screen, where now the repeating newswire had been replaced by a live-feed picture of Hausman, sitting behind a desk and dressed in a pure white and gold ceremonial uniform. Behind him was the flag of the Confederacy in full color. Max gestured for the sound to come on again immediately.

“People of Earth and Luna, these are dark times indeed for the soul of the Confederacy and the fate of humanity! Whilst one of our planet’s greatest cities has been attacked, and the casualties are high, all is not yet lost!

“This is but one tragedy, and human history, if anything, has taught us that we are a species capable of reaching beyond such tragedies. Of turning their sorrow and hard iron lessons of the soul into the steel that we use to build bigger and better empires! To strike down our enemies, wherever they may be!

“But I do have some very grave news to tell you. It appears that only one of those closest to us could have attempted such a foul and complicated act. Someone who believes that there should be no Confederate Council, and no Confederacy, only herself!”

“No!” Solomon could guess where this diatribe was going, and he already didn’t like it as he half-rose from his seat.

“So, it with great sadness and after much deliberation that I have chosen to share this news with you: the perpetrator behind the bombing of New York, the criminal mastermind who would stop at nothing until she has dismantled all that we hold dear, is none other the Brigadier General Asquew, Commander of the Rapid Response Fleet.”

“Why is he saying that?” the ambassador was saying.

“Can you not tell?” Max, from his stool by the counter muttered grimly.

Solomon rather thought that they all could, but that no one wanted to believe what was about to happen next.

“Asquew’s sin is that of pride, ladies and gentlemen, in believing that she was above her station, and that she could know better than all the rest of us. She believes that SHE will be a better ruler for the Confederacy than any other, and she will use Mars as her base to attack Earth!’

“So, my fellow comrades and friends, I have made a decision. It falls upon me to muster the forces of righteousness and justice against evil. I have placed Earth and Luna under my own protective care, until I have eliminated the threat of General Asquew, whom I now shall strip of all rank and titles, and instead she will henceforth only be known as the traitor Asquew!”

“Oh my god.” The ambassador swept a hand to her mouth.

“Can you see what he is doing?” Max asked as he scowled at the camera. “He’s taking over. He’s just said as much. He’s taking over Earth and the Moon, over the Confederacy.”

“What he’s saying about Asquew isn’t true,” Solomon said fervently. It couldn’t be true, could it?

“Of course not,” Max said with a snort of disgust. “Hausman moved into Luna a few months ago, taking up offices here in the station, and ever since then, we’ve been having problems. I don’t trust him one bit to be telling the truth…”

“Problems?” the ambassador asked.

“People disappearing or getting intimidated by his Marines. Other people I know at Luna docks say that Hausman placed a special ‘securities levy’ on all ships leaving Luna surface.”

“That’s illegal! That’s against Confederacy regulations!” the Ambassador said quickly.

“Well, whether it is legal or not, Hausman did it. He started commandeering storage bubbles here and there all over the Moon, giving the companies that he liked special contracts, and moving his Marines and his equipment in, saying that it was a new positioning of the Near-Earth Fleet,”

“Or it might have been a way to make sure that he had a stranglehold on Earth when the time came…” Solomon said.

Who else had access to thermonuclear devices?

“Tell me, Max… Do you know anything of a company on Luna called Taranis? Taranis Industries?” Solomon suddenly thought.

“Taranis? Ha!” Max laughed and clapped his hands. “That was one of the first companies to be given one of the storage bubbles!”

Solomon shared a dark look with the ambassador. General Asquew had been right. There had been a conspiracy at the heart of the Confederacy, and someone was working with both NeuroTech and Taranis to start a very lucrative war between Earth and the rest of the colonies.

Only it turned out that conspiracy was General Hausman of the Near-Earth fleet himself. “And in the process of making the corporates a whole heap of money, they must have promised Hausman that he would get to rule the Confederacy. He would get to rule Earth,” Solomon said in horror.

11

New Arrivals

1 hour: 13 mins: 28 seconds, the first, more optimistic timer read.

-16 mins: 44 seconds, the despairing one read. At least the second one was quite obviously, glaringly wrong, Sergeant Wen thought.

Jezzy had both timers direct-fed into her power armor telemetries, so that both countdowns flashed slowly just to the right of her eyes as she looked out at the mess that was Pluto.

The Last Call’s administrator had taken her sweet time, as far as Jezzy was concerned, in telling the cruise ships to disembark, and even now she could still see them in the distance, heading out like a pod of gigantic space creatures away from the small planet.

But there was still a lot to do.

“Forward more!” Jezzy called out over her suit radio. She currently hung in space, feeling perfectly warm and comfortable inside her armor, even if she did still feel just a little bit nervous at not having any solid ground beneath her.

In response to her command, the Plutonian tug rather sweetly named the Edith responded by firing its positioning rockets for two small burns, moving it about four hundred meters ahead.

“Haven’t you got enough yet?” said the rather annoyed voice of Fatima Ahmadi over Jezzy’s suit radio. That was another thing that she’d asked to have patched into her suit telemetries—that all communication for this field operation be collated by the Oregon’s mainframe, and then sent out to her suit. Being the acting field commander kind of gave her those sorts of perks.

Ahmadi herself was not on board the Edith, a friend of hers called Joe something-or-other was. Instead, Ahmadi was in the tug that hung above Jezzy and from which she was connected to by the thin lifeline of a polyfilament metal cord.

“Believe me, Ahmadi, when this begins, you’re going to wish that we had more,” Jezzy promised her.

Convincing Ahmadi that she needed to surrender all active duties and hand them over to the Marine Corps had been the easy part, as it happened. It was a marvel what having a colonel in the form of Faraday could do. Jezzy liked him. Faraday was a soldier’s sort of soldier, one who had campaigned for decades, the kind who had signed up as a grunt at the tender age of eighteen and kept plugging away at it until he was at his current high post, hovering somewhere around his early sixties.

In fact, Jezzy thought that Faraday rather reminded her of some of her old Yakuza bosses—the old family, true Japanese ones who had managed to quell a room with a look, and who seemed to exude authority through their very pores. It hadn’t taken long for Faraday to convince Ahmadi that something very big and very terrible was coming their way, but that she could be a part of that glorious struggle.

No, that wasn’t the hard part. What had been the hard part was telling Ahmadi just what it was that they were expecting.

“I still don’t think they’re going to come,” Ahmadi muttered over her suit, as if to prove Jezzy’s reflections. “But, you know, I always had an inkling that one day something like this would come…”

“Really?” Jezzy said distractedly as she made small movements with her hands, ‘swimming’ through the vacuum to turn around and look at what she had managed to create. A field of eight small Plutonian tugs, designed to help the jump-ships in maneuvering the larger ships that came out here, reprovisioning before they jumped further and deeper. Would it be enough? Jezzy thought.

Absolutely not, she had to concede.

“Oh yeah, you know, I started out as skeptical as everyone else. Why would there be aliens after all? Why hadn’t we ever heard from them?” Ahmadi said.

But we did, didn’t we? Jezzy refrained from correcting her. She didn’t have time to disclose the full truth and deal with the emotional fallout. NeuroTech got the Message from the Ru’at first, somehow. They managed to translate it, turn it into useable technology. But still, she knew just what the station administrator meant. No obvious, friendly, deep-space signals like Morse code over the interstellar gulfs.

“But you know, something starts to happen to you after a while of living out here…” the administrator confided. Fatima Ahmadi seemed to be one of those hardworking, mostly-sarcastic workers who didn’t have time for either fools or social niceties. She had clearly long since given up trying to pretend to be proper, or respectful to anyone other than herself.

“I guess it’s living on the edge of the solar system. Every shift, every hour, you get to look out at all of that…space out there, just doing nothing. All of those stars, galaxies, planets… I think that most people on the Last Call think as I do. That it’d be an awful waste of space out there for there to just be us,” Ahmadi said.

Jezzy was about to correct her that Proxima at least would have been a lot better off if the universe had stuck to its principle of cosmic loneliness, but she had to make sure that the eight tugs were in the right position, ready for the next stage of her defense plan.

WHAP!

Jezzy felt it before her human, primate eyes registered what had happened. A wave that rushed up through her body like a sensation of vertigo, spreading from her toes right up through her gut to the top of her head. It was a little like a sensation of nausea, but where had she felt that before?

She remembered what it was in the moment that her eyes registered what had appeared, and for her suit chatter to explode.

Jump Sickness.

“Holy mother of—”

“What is that? What IS that!?”

“Administrator, come in! I got a new arrival! Three klicks dead ahead!”

WHAP! WHAP!

WHAP!

More of the strange Ru’at ‘jump-ships,’ as she was coming to think of them, were appearing, and they did so with a small shimmer of light as they displaced ancient starlight as they traveled.

But it wasn’t like the shimmering fractals and light-illusions created by a Barr-Hawking particle engine, Jezzy could see. These strange cylindrical ships with a pointed prow and with three rotating obsidian rings around their bodies had appeared with the least amount of fuss and light that Jezzy could even imagine.

How many are there? Jezzy remembered to breathe and counted quickly. Ten, twelve, fourteen…

How many had Asquew said there were supposed to be? She couldn’t remember. Her heart had stopped beating.

Thud. Then it kicked back in, and with it, all of Jezzy’s instincts.

“Tug team deploy! Deploy all vessels, and then get the hell out of here!” she shouted over the suit communicator, just as she felt the line attached to her suit pull taut.

“And that’s my cue, lady,” Ahmadi’s voice sounded tight. “Whoever these newcomers are, I don’t think you’re going to like it if I drop a hundred tons of rubble on your head!”

No, Jezzy wouldn’t, she thought as she accelerated to the open airlock, to be hauled into the cone of blackness and thumped to the floor just as the airlock door closed after her, hisses of pressurization steam filling the chamber. Come on, come on! Jezzy was already impatient and standing despite the waves of vertigo and the sudden heaviness in her limbs. She had to get to the bridge of Ahmadi’s tug—the Gingko, strangely—and see if her plan was working.

“The Mary-Lou released!”

The urgent calls of the other Plutonian tug drivers sounded over Jezzy’s helmet as she climbed the short ladder to the cockpit of the Gingko, where Ahmadi was already pulling the levers to release her own lumpen cargo.

Jezzy’s feet shifted as the entire tug shuddered, and she saw the green indicator diagram on Ahmadi’s desk screen—a tiny, stylized depiction of the Gingko itself—start to empty.

Below their feet, the heavy lower hold doors of the Gingko and the other tugs were opening like the lower jaws of some draconian beast. They even spewed high-velocity gases as suddenly the traces of atmosphere inside the haulage holds normalized with that of the vacuum of space.

And with the gases came dark shapes of all sorts of sizes—from as small as the severely-cut nails on Jezzy’s hand, to the size of the cockpit she was standing in.

Pluto was a transport hub, essentially. Despite its growing eminence as a tourist attraction, its main purpose in the scheme of the Confederacy was the refitting, refueling, and repairing of the deep-field ships that stopped here before their long journeys to Proxima, Trappist, Barnard’s Star, and others.

Which meant, in no uncertain terms, that Pluto had a lot of mechanical engineers at the Last Call, and wherever there are mechanics, there had to be engine parts.

Each of the tugs stationed between the Last Call and the arriving Ru’at fleet spewed collections of metal that they had been transporting from one hulk to another, or else picked up from the various ‘holding zones’ where collections of scrap and reusable metal were kept, magnetized to stationary drone satellites. There were nuts and bolts, any of which could cause a catastrophic collapse if they hit the right ship in the perfectly wrong place.

But that wasn’t all. There were also girders that had been shorn from their craft after failed the rigorous safety tests, or entire plate sections of outer hulls, as well as the omnipresent flexible steel and rubberized insulation that the Confederate starship engineers packed into the spaces between outer and inner hulls.

The mass of detritus, powered by the differences in pressure, rolled and rotated outwards from each tug as they slowly rose out of the debris field and started to pull away.

Is it going to work? It was a haphazard and a desperate plan, Jezzy knew. But then again, she also knew—as well as Colonel Faraday knew—that their job here was to launch a first ‘last’ stand. Faraday had seen the footage of the Ru’at jump-ships and the Ru’at mothership. They both knew just what was expected of them: to stand and fight for as long as they were capable, if the Ru’at showed the first sign of attack.

“Fatima! Oh frack, I’ve got a problem… The bay doors won’t open!” Ahmadi’s console lit up with the incoming message. It was Joe, Fatima Ahmadi’s friend piloting the Esther, one of the furthest of the tug ships.

“Oh crapsticks…” Fatima’s hand blurred as she selected the scanners to magnify the picture of her friend’s ship on the desk-screen.

There was the Esther, still exuding gas and bits of scrap metal, but she was slowly starting to spin on her axis as her haulage hold doors had only opened a few meters—not the ten or so meters required for proper deployment. As Jezzy watched, she saw the Esther firing her positioning rockets to keep out of the enlarging debris field that they had created.

All the other tugs had flown safely away from the mess that they had created. That had been the trickiest part of the whole procedure, Jezzy and Fatima knew. She had needed experienced tug pilots to be able to leave the manmade asteroid field as soon as they had created it and before the spiral dynamics of vacuum-objects saw the bits of metal colliding with their own ship!

“Try the manual override!” Ahmadi was saying urgently as the Esther turned back the other way, narrowly avoiding being hit by a large shard of external ship plate.

Behind them, the Ru’at jump-ships were remaining stubbornly inactive, as if they were amused by this palsied effort of humanity to stand in their way.

Ahmadi zoomed in more, and the close-up image of the Esther’s partially-opened hold doors grew on the desk as Fatima fought to keep the cameras trained on the twisting tug ship.

“Joe. You got a blockage. Starboard front corner. Something’s jammed against the door pistons!” Ahmadi was saying, and the image showed a chunk of scrap metal that hadn’t rushed out of the hold as it should have done but had somehow become wedged against the large pistons that opened and closed all hold doors.

“What? I’ve still got a half-full hold. I can’t fly out of here like this— TZZRK!”

Suddenly, the large image was knocked out of view, and Joe’s incoming message snarled into static.

“Joe! Joe, come in! Repeat: Esther, respond to hail!” Ahmadi was shouting down the archaic microphone that these old tugs were equipped with. Jezzy looked out of the cockpit window to see that the Esther had slumped to the side, its front maw still losing debris at a slow rate, but there was now also a plume of gases from the far side, turning the tug over and over.

“Joe!”

“TZZZK” I’m okay, boss… I got hit by some of the debris. I’m losing atmosphere!” Joe’s shouted.

Oh no, Jezzy thought. She had known that this might be a possibility, that the tug drivers themselves would be performing a very tricky and exacting maneuver. Fatima had assured her that her pilots were good enough.

“Do they come equipped with escape pods?” Jezzy asked in horror, one eye still on the motionless ships. This was not how she wanted her first exercise in command to go, with the sudden and senseless death of a civilian.

“Yes, but that would be a bad idea…” Fatima was already pulling levers and firing her own positional rockets to rise high above the debris field, arcing towards the front line. “As soon as Joe’s escape pod fires, it’s bound to hit some of that wreckage. It might survive, but those things don’t have any navigational abilities. They just automatically fly to the nearest safe harbor.”

Which would be the Last Call, Jezzy saw—only now there was an ever-widening debris field between the two.

“He’s going to be safer inside the Esther. These tugs can take a good deal of battering before they give up the ghost.”

KER-THUNK! As if to prove her point, the Ginkgo shuddered as a piece of scrap metal ricocheted over its hull.

“But leaving him out there would mean that he is the first in line when the Ru’at attack.”

“I’ll go. Did I see a harness down there?” Jezzy was already moving back to the ladder, heading back to the long equipment room where a couple of the large, bulky belted backpacks had been hanging up. A harness was basically the same as a battle harness that the Marines wore, but they were external to whatever suit that the worker wore, clipping over their protective gear and strapping over their shoulders. From each backpack there extended tiny positioning rockets, and above the shoulders extended two long, spider-like legs with multiple joints, at the end of which were grabbing vices.

Jezzy had never used one, but she had seen them being used. They couldn’t be that much different from the jump-packs that she had worn on Mars, could they? She knew that these harnesses were used the Confederacy over by starship engineers to perform exacting welds and work that required close, non-automated attention. The vice grabbers on the ends of the shoulders could hold tools or brace the flier against the vessel they were working on, and their positional rockets would make sure that they could travel to and from their mothership with ease.

“Have you ever used one before!?” Ahmadi was shouting after her, even as Jezzy shrugged one over her own power armor. It barely fit, but when it did, at least her armor compensated for it easily.

“No, but I don’t think we have much choice, Ahmadi. I need you in here flying the Gingko and ready to pick me up when I get back with Joe!”

She heard a loud grumbling shout from above her as she secured the final strap.

“But the debris field— Any random piece could take the pair of you out just as easily as the escape pod!” Ahmadi argued.

“It’s our best shot. I’ve got more chance of avoiding the wreckage like this and you know it.” Jezzy turned and hit the airlock decompression button before stepping in. As the door cycled to a close behind her, she stood in the dark and wondered if Ahmadi would okay the door release command at all if she disagreed so mightily, but there was a blink of orange and green lights and the outer door opened.

WHOOSH! The residual atmosphere in the chamber forced Jezzy out at speed—straight towards a rising length of silver cable.

Frack! She grabbed the belt controls and fired the tiny positioning rockets on the underside of the harness backpack, turning and spinning her body so that she swam past the steel cable before it could tangle with her.

“You’re a fool, Lieutenant Wen,” she heard Ahmadi say over the suit telemetries.

She’s probably right, Jezzy thought as she fired the rockets in tandem to swerve and loop around the next spinning piece of tubing, a bulkhead door, an unrecognizable piece of slag metal…

But I can’t let this civilian die. I can’t let that be the hallmark of my command, Jezzy was thinking as she cast a look ahead of her. The Ru’at ships still hadn’t done anything yet and were just hanging there, motionless. She wondered if they were the ones waiting to be attacked.

“Lieutenant Wen! This is Faraday. What’s happening out there?” burst in the angered tone of Colonel Faraday’s voice. Jezzy knew that he should still be standing on the bridge of the Oregon, where it was stationed between the debris field and the Last Call.

“Mission of mercy, Colonel, sir!” Jezzy shouted back as she fired the right rocket to make her swerve past a spinning girder the thickness of her arm.

“Mercy? Lieutenant? This is a time of war! I have mines loaded and ready to fire, but I can’t with you flying through the middle of the battlefield!” he responded, if not with outright anger, at least with obvious annoyance.

“It’s something I have to do, sir,” Jezzy said, “There’s a civilian caught in the field. I can’t let him die without a gun in his hand.” And that, at least, appeared to be something that the colonel understood.

“I have the firing plan that you suggested locked in and will be firing as soon as you’re clear.”

“Affirmative, Colonel, sir!” Jezzy said, flying through the debris field that she herself had orchestrated.

It was far easier to negotiate the revolving bits of metal like this, Jezzy thought. It was like diving, if anything, she thought. She would fire her rockets to make a clean run through a ‘bare’ patch of space before ‘landing’ on the edge of a piece of metal and pushing off, leapfrogging from one piece of spinning wreckage to another.

And still, the Ru’at jump-ships didn’t make a move.

What are they waiting for? Jezzy wondered as she suddenly flew through a shimmering field of washers and bolts.

She heard drumming all over her suit and faceplate as the tiny bits of metal drummed across her body like solid rain. None of them were traveling fast enough to do her power armor any harm, of course, but she still retracted the harness’s positioning rockets all the same until she had broken through to the other side.

Not that I’m not glad that the Ru’at haven’t attacked yet… she thought as she fired up the harness once again to swoop under a large piece of hull plate. She saw the spinning Esther ahead of her.

Which was now spewing gases from several places across the metal rhomboid of its body, and whose hull had clear heavy scratches and dents across it.

“Ahmadi? I’m there. Patch me through to the Esther,” Jezzy said.

“I read you, one, two, connecting and here—” The sergeant heard the glitch and hum of connections before the now-familiar voice of Joe greeted her.

“Here comes the cavalry! Am I glad to see you!” Joe said. He sounded gruff, stressed, and scared.

“Situation report. What’s happening over there, Joe?” Jezzy started to tap the rockets of her harness so that she scooted forward gently towards the shaking, revolving ship ahead of her. “Can you get to an airlock?”

“Fuh-freezing in here, Lieutenant.” Joe’s voice shook and trembled. “The impact must have taken out life support. I’m in my encounter suit, but these things have only got forty-five minutes of oxygen…”

“How much atmosphere you got in the Esther?”

“We’re at…uh…two percent…” Joe didn’t sound very pleased at all. Which wasn’t enough to last more than about twenty minutes, Jezzy quickly calculated. But it was plenty of time for what she had in mind.

“We’ll get you out of there before then, Joe, don’t you worry. I want you to get to the airlock and wait for my signal,” she said, seeing the hexagonal dome of the external bulkhead door swing past her and around again.

“But how am I going to release the door? There won’t be anyone in the cockpit!” Joe said, alarmed.

Oh, fracksticks. Why didn’t these tugs have the same level of sophistication as the Marine Corps ships!? She could have screamed, but she didn’t. Marine Corps ships had multiple redundancies built into them. For all their thuggish utilitarianism, the Marine Corps airlocks could be operated by the suits of those waiting inside or outside.

“Okay, I’ll come to you then. All airlocks have external controls, right?” she said, half-asking the question rather than stating it. She knew that all Confederate airlocks were supposed to have external opening and closing controls for emergencies.

The engineers probably hadn’t imagined this situation, Jezzy thought.

“It’s got external mechanical locks. You’ll have to break the seal and turn the wheel counter-clockwise,” Joe said. “There are pressure converters, but it’ll still open with a punch.”

“Not if you run through the full decompression process on your end, Joe,” Jezzy reminded him. “Get to the airlock now, Joe.”

“Aye-aye, Sergeant.”

Swoop. The airlock hatch swept past Lieutenant Wen’s view once again, before the Esther was shaken by another impact to its front and circled wildly.

The Ru’at ships still weren’t attacking, Jezzy realized, which was a good thing, but also insensible. What were they doing? Just sitting there until General Asquew could send more of the Rapid Response Fleet here to blow them out of the sky?

Jezzy didn’t doubt for a moment that the entire weight of the Rapid Response Fleet could destroy these vessels. There were only fifteen of them, right? And the Rapid Response Fleet alone had six or eight times that number of vessels, of all different classifications from one-Marine fighters all the way up to the giant flagship dreadnaughts.

Only fifteen. Her memory did the mental equivalent of sucker-punching her in the gut.

General Asquew’s footage of the departing Ru’at jump-ships that had been shown to Jezzy on board the Oregon had shown about thirty of the enemy vessels.

Where did the other half go? Jezzy thought in alarm. She was already gesturing for her suit communicator to activate when she saw small flashes of light out of the corner of her eye.

Flashes of light that were not coming from the Esther in front of her, or the scrap wreckage field behind her.

It was coming from the Ru’at fleet—or half of it, anyway.

Tiny explosions of light across the face of the strange cylindrical vessels. Jezzy gasped. “Are they firing at us?” she called out on her command frequency. It had looked like muzzle flashes from a distance, but there was no accompanying hail of projectiles, missiles, or torpedoes lancing into the Esther and her. Instead, the lights flared, diffused, and winked out just as if she was looking at lights, not down the barrels of ship-mounted guns.

Were they trying to send a message to us? she thought, until she saw precisely what the lights had meant. Small dark shapes were flying through the night—straight for the asteroid field.

The Ru’at had indeed decided to send a message, but their message was the flying bodies of cyborgs, metal on one side, and dead, blackened flesh on the other.

And they were coming straight for the Esther, and for Acting First Lieutenant Jezebel Wen.

12

Not Entirely True

“Lieutenant,” Ambassador Ochrie hissed from where she stood in by one of the bistro’s porthole windows. Every line of her body was tight as she peeked out past the curtains.

So far, the wanted Marine, ambassador, and imprimatur had spent the last several hours enjoying the strong coffee of the Greek restaurant as they tried to figure out their next move. Despite their sudden imposition, and the fact that they brought with them the threat of General Hausman’s Marine guards breaking down the door at any moment, Max Poulanous and his son Alexi had appeared to be nothing but generous to them, and currently, the pair sat at one of the dining tables with Rhossily, who was trying to teach Alexi a game of chance.

“Lieutenant!” Ochrie repeated urgently.

“What have you got?” Solomon stepped up to her side, leaning to look through the gap in the curtains to see what troubled the ambassador.

Marines. They were outside, moving down the hallway in their power armor, their Jackhammers slung across their chests. Solomon’s eyes narrowed.

The Marine of Hausman’s force—who Solomon presumed had to be members of the Near-Earth Fleet, just as he was a member of Asquew’s Rapid Response Fleet—wore the same armor that he did, but their colors were gold and red, and their belt harnesses seemed to have less of the battlefield-minded Rapid Response accoutrements, with less rope deployments or medi-kit modules. Instead, these Marines had more lines of flashbang grenades and handcuffs.

“Hausman’s building a private police force,” Solomon murmured, watching as they sauntered down the corridor, past the closed doors of adjacent shops.

“A private police force that will have us executed the first chance he has!” the ambassador said. A Luna-wide curfew had gone up across the station since the New York attack, and there was an eerie quiet outside their walls.

“Hush,” the ambassador said, stepping back from the curtain as Hausman’s Marines stalked past, policing the curfew. At the dining table, the imprimatur and the others caught wind of what they were saying and fell into an uneasy silence until Solomon checked the curtains once more and saw the retreating backs of Hausman’s guards.

“We’re good,” he breathed, hearing the audible sigh of relief from all those around him.

“We need to get off the Moon,” the ambassador whispered to Solomon.

“Aye,” he agreed. I need to let Asquew know just what is going on back here. Solomon knew that it would take hours, at least, for radio news to reach Mars about New York, and Hausman. Hours during which time the Ru’at would have appeared, and Asquew’s offensive of Mars would already be well underway. He thought about what he had seen in Luna 1’s docking stations. “We might be able to steal a ship. It’d have to be civilian maybe, as I don’t think we could get a Marine Corps ship…”

“But then, how would we jump?” the imprimatur pointed out. “All of the ships near Earth have been grounded or are in holding patterns. No one is allowed to enter or leave near-Earth space.”

“That is not entirely true…” Max cleared his throat and spoke up.

“What? Do you know a way to get off the station?” the ambassador asked suddenly.

“Well…” The restaurateur grinned broadly. “That depends on who’s asking.”

“Are you sure about this?” Ambassador Ochrie still managed to look fierce, even behind the heavy gray cowl she wore over her head. The imprimatur was similarly garbed, but, despite Max’s protestations, Solomon had refused to leave his power armor behind. Instead, they had changed their plan to this: that Lieutenant Cready would pretend to be one of Hausman’s guards, escorting subversives…and hope to note run into any of Hausman’s Marines who could see his ID.

Solomon walked down the long, empty access tunnel with Max behind him, his hands held together with a length of rope that wasn’t actually tied, and behind him came the ambassador, cowled and fake-tied, and then Imprimatur Rhossily, similarly adorned.

“Nothing is ever certain, madam,” Max said, still with his characteristic trace of energy and optimism, but his voice did sound a little strained. “But I have been living in Luna 1 for a long time… Me and some of the other local tradespeople, we have, you could say, developed a few small ways to make sure that goods are easily available…”

“Smugglers, you mean,” the ambassador said dourly.

“Ambassador, I hardly think that any of us have the luxury of choosing our allies.” Imprimatur Rhossily said.

If they WILL even become our allies… Solomon thought as he saw their destination, the distant airlock of Port 13, one of the smaller bubble habitats to the rear of the larger Luna 1 bubble, and apparently just as deserted.

Max had spirited them out of Luna 1 just a short time earlier, waiting for a time when the patrols were at their lightest and leading his charges through a series of service elevators and access tunnels that were the domain of couriers, cleaners, and delivery staff, until they had entered their last hurdle—getting into Port 13.

“It’s a hoods terminal, meaning that you only get workers, porters, haulers coming through here. No tourists or civilians,” Max explained.

“Aren’t you a civilian?” Solomon asked.

“Ah…” He reached up to tap the lanyard on his neck, which had a picture of his smiling face and his ID reference numbers as a tradesperson of Luna 1.

“Luna Trade Guild. All self-owned businesses get to be on it. It gives me the right to use this port,” Max said as they stepped up to the white metal doors, the light above stubbornly stuck on red.

“Not the rest of us, though…” Solomon murmured dismally, standing in front of the small camera by the side of the door, angrily gesturing to the people behind him and pressing the door-release button.

Access Denied. The small LED screen flashed the words. Solomon groaned. He was not a member of the Lunar Trade Guild, quite clearly.

“Listen up, by order of General Hausman!” Solomon raised his voice to shout into the camera. “I have three prisoners here and I need access to this port for further investigations of illegal activity! Open up or I’ll get a demolitions team to burst our way in!” he said, adding some fire and grit into his voice as he did so.

“Sheesh, Lieutenant…” Max sniggered behind him. “I think you’re going to give them a heart attack. You almost gave me one!”

“Ah.” Solomon actually felt a little proud of his performance. Lying was something that he had been very good at, once. “Old skills.”

“You were an actor?” Max asked as they waited for whoever was on the other side to come to the decision that it was best to let the angry Marine in now rather than later.

“I suppose you could say I was a performer, of sorts…” Solomon shrugged, as the small LED screen suddenly flashed the words:

Access Granted.

There was a hiss, and the doors opened ahead of Solomon, revealing a line of rather large, burly men in the gray and blue tradesmen encounter suits, some with utility belts and a variety of small tools and modules attached, looking at them speculatively.

“They don’t look very happy to see us…” the ambassador whispered warily.

Are you really surprised? Solomon thought as he looked at the six or seven men standing in front of him, blocking his access and appraising him with all of the calculated menace of a boxing ring. These guys aren’t just tradesmen, Solomon recognized immediately.

Lieutenant Cready of the Outcasts had just found the smugglers of Luna.

13

The Invasion of Pluto

“Lieutenant Wen, get out of there!” Faraday was roaring over her suit.

Jezzy ignored him. The Ru’at jump-ships had ‘fired’ their cyborgs, apparently from specially-made launch tubes, and with their flesh being kept alive by cybernetic enhancements and controls, they had no need to encase them with protective suits or atmospheric helmets.

Instead, the cyborgs flew forward like living missiles into the wreckage field, and Jezzy was frozen for a moment in shock at this bizarre act of war. Didn’t the Ru’at know that the Marine Corps could just fire at them? Jezzy thought. The Oregon alone, a powerful—if aging—Marine Corps battleship, could probably fill this scrap field with missile fire.

But then Jezzy remembered the battle that she had fought alongside Solomon and a fraction of the Outcasts on Ganymede, back when Ganymede had been their training home and they had been called ‘adjunct-Marines’ not yet even worthy of full Marine status.

They had fought just a handful of the cyborgs on Ganymede’s frozen surface. A handful against almost double those numbers of trained Outcasts. And still the cyborgs had managed to overrun their position, decimating their numbers

And it was all because they didn’t stop. They don’t die when they are supposed to! Jezzy remembered with a snarl of rage. You could pour bullets into them, and those that did manage to get past the cybernetic plates didn’t even slow them down. You had to totally dismantle them or sever their spinal cord to stop them.

No wonder the Ru’at weren’t bothered about sending their cyborgs into battle first. The Ru’at cyborgs could probably walk, stumble, and crawl through a field of exploding missiles and still launch themselves at the ship that had attacked them.

But right now, Jezzy had only one ship to worry about. The Esther.

She had no time to wait for the perfect matching trajectory. She fired the rockets of her harness and shot forward towards the spinning vessel as a cloud of cyborgs approached from the other side.

Woah! She narrowly missed a spinning metal rod, moments before she impacted the side of the Esther with a brutal, heavy THUNK!

“Ach!” Jezzy saw stars for a moment and her hands scrabbled, sliding down the hull of the tug as it turned over and over, before one of her power gauntlets finally caught something—one of the many external grabrails. She was no longer bouncing on the hull but was instead revolving with the Esther, hanging on like a limpet.

Wonderful. Now all I have to do is find the airlock.

Luckily for the acting field commander, the design of the tug was fairly straightforward—the grabrails she clung to led to the ladder, which in turn led to the dome of the airlock. The woman cursed how everything seemed slower in zero-G, as she grabbed the ladder bars and hauled herself up, one hand at a time.

KLUNK! She felt the vibration of an impact vibrate through the outer hull of the ship and froze for just a second. But the Esther kept on spinning on its axis, and there were no sudden explosions of gases or electronics. Whatever piece of junk had hit the ship, it wasn’t THAT bad, clearly… Jezzy thought as she continued her ascent, reaching the hexagonal dark gray dome of the airlock.

“Joe, I’m in place. You ready?” she asked.

“I’m inside,” he said, and her external suit microphones picked up a muted tapping on the inside of the airlock.

Right. Break the rubber coating, turn the wheel clockwise. No, wait, COUNTER-clockwise! Jezzy hooked one hand to the nearest ladder hold and studied the dome. There was a thick rubber seal running around the edge of the control wheel on the very top, but luckily, Jezzy had a tool for that.

Using the controls on her new harness, she moved the grabbing vice arms overhead down to the seal to pinch onto the squashed cake of rubber and press down, exerting more and more pressure.

She felt the pressure suddenly lesson as the vice-like pincers cleaved through the rubber, which burst from between wheel and outer airlock door. She released it, letting the rubber rotate away. She felt a twinge of ridiculous guilt at littering space, before remembering that she’d just poured eight tugboats full of metal into Pluto’s near space. That was going to require some heavy clean-up satellites to get rid of after all this.

Huh. I’ll consider myself lucky if there is going to be an ‘after’ and the worst thing that I have to think about is space junk, she thought.

Next, she lowered the grabbing pincer-arms to the wheel, latched on, and started to turn.

For a moment, the outer airlock controls wouldn’t budge an inch, until finally it did, moving in halting, juddering quarter-turns, until—

FZZZT! The bolt of purple-white light seared across Jezzy’s shoulder, severing one of the grab arms and flinging her backwards.

“Ach!” She was dangling from the airlock by just one pincer-arm of her harness as the form of a cyborg, its human flesh horribly blackened from the vacuum of space, appeared, climbing towards her from the other side of the Esther.

Frack!

Jezzy pushed the directional controller on her harness belt with one hand as her other moved to the trusty Jackhammer at her side. These guns were solid-units apart from the barrels, so that meant they could fire in space, but firing a projectile weapon in a vacuum always had an extra level of complication…

PHOOM! She pointed the Jackhammer as the vice arm swung her to one side and fired, the recoil of the shot in zero-G moving her backward as much as the bullet pushed forward.

Thump! She hit the side of the hull and felt a judder run through her shoulders as the last remaining grab-arm snapped from its hinges.

Which means I’m not attached to the tug anymore… Jezzy realized in a flash of crystal-perfect awareness as she started to peel from the side of the still-turning Esther.

FZZT! Another line of purple-white light scored in front of her as Jezzy threw her shoulders forward into a roll that would see her return to the surface of the Esther.

Grab! She reached out to seize one of the ladder rungs, pulling herself tight to the craft and sparing a look above her to see that the cyborg itself was still grimly clinging on, just as she was, on the other side of the airlock. The thing was spreading thick, black gobbets of its machine-oil blood from the wound she had inflicted in the bare part of its chest.

It was nowhere near enough to stop the thing.

“Lieutenant! We have multiple enemies approaching through the field! I can fire on them, now!” Faraday’s voice joined her inside her helmet.

“Not yet! A bit busy here, sir!” Jezzy said. She swung herself to one side as the cyborg once again fired the particle-beam hand across the hull at her, for the purple-white laser shot to spear into the night behind her.

She was a sitting duck here, unless—

Jezzy let go of the ladder at the same time that she fired the harness’s positioning rockets, full force, straight out behind her.

The combat specialist, acting field commander, and temporary first lieutenant was thrown forward like she was one of the cybernetic torpedoes herself, covering the distance between them in a fraction of a second and reaching a hand down to grab onto the wheel of the airlock as her other fired point-blank at the cyborg.

PHOOM! The recoil from the blast once again threw her back the other direction, but it had the desired effect. The power of the shotgun shell at such close range was enough to peel the cyborg from his grip and send him spiraling end over end through the night.

Thunk! Jezzy landed back on the hull with a heavy thump, coughing as the force of the shock winded even her.

“Lieutenant? You still out there?” she could hear the desperate words of the tug driver Joe on the other side of the door.

“Urgh. Only just.” She pulled herself back to the wheel and now, with no vice-like grabbing arms on her shoulders, she instead had to use both hands to turn the wheel, bracing her legs against the side of the hull for traction.

Creeeak. The wheel turned another quarter, and then another quarter—

KER-LUNK! This time, she saw the cyborg that hit the hull of the spinning Esther, bouncing and skidding across the hull until it caught a hold, a little way beyond the prow.

“Come on, come on, move, you miserable piece of trash!” she shouted as she hauled at the airlock wheel, waiting for the cyborg at the other end of the boat to start firing at her at any moment.

“Joe, you did depressurize fully in there, right…” she gasped as she heaved at the wheel again, a fraction of a moment before suddenly steam and gases enveloped her as the airlock door burst open—

She’d managed to break the seal of the airlock, and physics had done the rest.

And no, the inside of the airlock decompression chamber was clearly not decompressed.

“Agh!” Jezzy was thrown head over heels back as something collided with her, rocketing out of the airlock.

“Help!” It was Joe, a Plutonian worker in a drab black and tan encounter suit, a ridiculous bubble-helmet at one end, wrapping his gloved hands over her shoulders and clinging on for dear life as they spun through the debris field.

“Wait, Joe! I need to see!” Jezzy shouted as they tumbled, and her stomach lurched with the G-forces. She managed to tear one of his hands from her shoulder, instead gripping the worker around the wrist with her powerful gauntlets as she kicked out with her legs, trying to right their tumble.

“Oof!” Joe’s back suddenly hit the discarded plate of metal they had been hurtling towards, and Jezzy hit it a second later.

Warning! Suit Impact.

Rear Shield Plate Armor: -13%

Her suit registered the damage across the interior of her helmet, but Jezzy didn’t need the holographic controls to know that her body was aching and once again out of breath.

Maybe I should have turned down this command position, Jezzy groaned inwardly as her free hand grabbed the edge of the rusted piece of metal that they had collided with, while in front of them was the Esther, still spinning.

She was lucky that she had power armor on for that impact, Jezzy thought, before suddenly realizing that Joe, the man she still held by the wrist beside her, hadn’t made a sound or a move yet.

Joe the Plutonian tug driver did not have power armor on.

Frack! Jezzy pulled him towards her to find his body floppy and lifeless, his eyes closed inside of his suit. “Please don’t be dead, please don’t be dead…” Jezzy was whispering frantically as she checked her suit controls, then cursed when she remembered that this man wasn’t even in the Marine Corps, let alone in a Marine-friendly encounter suit. Usually, all members of her squad would show up as identifier tags on the inside of her faceplate whenever she saw them, along with a health bar indicating general biological fitness. Power armor suits constantly monitored their wearer’s vital signs.

Joe wasn’t a Marine, and Joe’s suit wasn’t connected to hers. With this guy, Jezzy knew that she would have to be a bit more inventive to find out if he had died in her hands or not.

Activate Suit Thermal Imaging.

Her faceplate screen glitched a scrolling green, to be replaced by the bright white warmth of the body of the man, muted by his suit, and disappearing completely as his bodily warmth could not transmit into the freezing vacuum of space at all.

His body was still warm, which was a good sign… But then again, it only just happened, didn’t it?

Jezzy turned the suit imaging back to normal and leaned in until she was almost clanking helmets with the tug operator. She watched his face with eagle eyes, looking for any telltale signs of life…

Condensation. The inside of his bubble-helmet had a tiny patch of condensation on the inside, and, as she watched, it faded to almost nothing, before coming back a long moment later.

Condensation that could only come from warm breath in a cold suit, Jezzy thought. Such tricks wouldn’t have worked with her own suit, she knew, which had every available insulation and moisture-capturing technology and air filter.

But with these old service encounter suits? Jezzy was very pleased that Joe was wearing one for the first time since she had met him.

“Okay, probably concussion. Just so long as you don’t throw up in there, you’ll be fine…” Jezzy muttered to herself, wedging the man’s unconscious body between her and the slowly-revolving bit of metal she was clutching onto, before using her free hand to attach the man’s belt to her own with her polyfilament metal rope.

“Right. Now let’s see about getting you home,” she said, daring to haul herself up to the edge of the scrap plate of metal—

FZZZT! A line of purple-white fire shot past her and she ducked back again. It was the cyborgs, they were out amongst the debris field, and at least one of them had spotted her.

Jezzy banged the back of her helmet against the metal as she waited for the answer to come to her. As the metal slowly rotated and spun—thankfully not colliding with anything else yet—she could see the distant half-silvered forms of more of the cyborgs as they leapfrogged just as she had done from wreckage to wreckage, making their way across the field.

But why? Who brings troops to a spaceship battle? she thought with frustration. Either way, she had to move, and she had to take the unconscious Joe with her.

And it was at that point that she remembered that she still had the positional rockets of Ahmadi’s harness. “Okay, buddy…” she said with a frown to the unconscious face of the tug ship driver. “It’s probably better that you’re not going to see this.”

She turned around so that both her hands were holding onto the ends of the sheet of hull metal, and Joe was pressed between her and the sheet.

Then she fired her positioning rockets, full force, behind her.

The bit of rusted and dented hull took a few moments to get up to speed, but once it conquered its own inertia, it moved at a fair speed, like it was being ‘pushed’ by the outstretched hands of Jezebel Wen.

FZZT! FZT! Sparks exploded from one edge of the hull plating as one of the many cyborgs moving across the field took a shot at her. A fraction of an instant later, another shot narrowly missed her.

“Lieutenant? Where in the name of Jupiter’s moons are you going? I’m forty degrees off your port-ward shoulder.” It was Ahmadi, still flying somewhere beyond the debris field and trying to find a way to get close.

“Wait, I’ll angle the trajectory…” Jezzy swung her legs to one side and the corresponding angle shifted the direction the sheet metal was flying in, as—FZZZT!—it collected more fire from the cyborgs that they passed.

When Jezzy raised her head, she could see the looming undercarriage of the Gingko above her, getting bigger by the moment. She felt once again that curious impression that she was deep underwater and was rising to the hopeful surface that was the Ginkgo.

CRASH! Something hit her sheet of scrap metal and they started spinning wildly. It was all Jezzy could do was to grip onto the metal with all of the augmented might of her power gauntlets.

They must have hit some piece of debris, Jezzy thought. Something that was traveling fast enough to send them into a spin

“Hgnagh? Wha-what is going on?”

She heard Joe cough and splutter as they were thrown through the field of scrap metal, and then he was moving and squirming underneath her.

“Hey! What’s happening?!”

“Don’t move, Joe!” she hissed, just before there was another resounding thump as they rebounded off yet another piece of debris. Jezzy cursed, but she could see that their erratic, out-of-control spin had at least taken them nearer the edge of the debris field.

“Just listen to me! On my command, we jump, got that?” Jezzy said through her clenched jaw.

“What? Are you crazy!? There’s aliens and space and junk out there—” Joe was saying.

Jezzy didn’t have time for the fainthearted. “Jump!” She killed her positioning rockets and kicked out with her boots. Joe reacted a fraction of a moment too late, but he did jump, and then the line that was connecting them yanked him forward and they were both spinning through space as the sheet of scrap crashed into another piece of metal several times its size, buckling and rolling.

That could have been us, Jezzy thought. It could still be us. She hazarded a look over their shoulder as their spiraling flight started to lose momentum. They had cleared the debris field, and the entire battle for Pluto was laid out underneath them like a panorama from a history still.

The field of scrap metal was a slowly expanding bubble between the Oregon, standing alone against the Ru’at jump-ships. Behind the Oregon was the Last Call station, and beyond that the distant glimmers of fleeing civilian vessels.

The Ru’at could easily fly around the debris field of course, but to do that would leave them open to being shot at multiple times by the Oregon as they took the long route. Jezzy didn’t know if that was why the Ru’at jump-ships were still unmoving and passive, but it was the one tiny tactical advantage they had right now.

Moving through the large bubble of dangerous metal leapfrogged the miniscule forms, picked out in brilliance every now and again when distant starlight caught the metal parts of their bodies. The Ru’at cyborgs—that must have, surely, come from Proxima and NeuroTech originally—had made it over halfway across the debris field and were approaching the final hurdle. After that, Jezzy saw, they would simply launch across the gulf between them and the Oregon, and, like locusts, they would cover the large battleship with their bodies, eventually finding a way in.

“Fire, Colonel! Fire!” Jezzy screamed into her communicator.

There were bursts of light from the large, vaguely triangular wedge of a ship with a distended belly that was the Oregon. Gases escaped from weapons ports as lines of fire like comets screamed across the gulf of space between the Oregon and the debris field.

Some of the torpedoes made it quite a way in before hitting a piece of wreckage large enough to detonate it, but many of the torpedoes exploded in the first third of the scatter-salvage field.

It was like watching a battle in slow motion, as she saw bubbles of instantaneous flame and light explode outwards, rending and burning, splintering, fracturing, and sending molten hot shards of salvage spinning off in all directions.

But despite the impressive theater of destruction that the acting field commander could see below her, Jezzy still wondered if it would be enough to even slow down the cyborgs and the Ru’at that still waited for them.

14

Payments

“What did you say your business was here, Lieutenant?” said one of the central figures off the gang that blocked Solomon, Max, the ambassador, and the imprimatur’s escape.

Solomon’s eyes flickered over the group, before settling once again on the man who had spoken. He was larger, burlier than the others, with short brown hair and small eyes. He’s the ringleader…

“Tomas. Tomas, it’s okay. It’s me.” Max stepped forward, holding up his ‘bound’ hands before pulling them apart in a showman’s gesture. “Voila!” He grinned, causing a chuckle of amusement through the gang.

“Max,” the smuggler ‘Tomas’ nodded. “This is no time for business, Max. You should get back to that kid of yours. Keep your head down and your nose clean for a bit!”

“This is precisely the time for business, Tomas,” Max stepped forward to say urgently. “Important business. Business that could mean whether there is hope for any of us left or not!”

“Hope?” Tomas laughed, shaking his head. “There’s a very high price on that these days, my friend.”

But for all his swagger, Tomas gave his team the nod and turned to limp back into the small habitat bubble of Port 13, and Max, Solomon, Ochrie, and Rhossily followed him.

Schnikt! The door locked behind them, and Solomon saw that at least half of the smugglers were staying by the door, manning the small video station to watch who or what might be coming their way, and the rest shuffled behind them, still looking as though they would be ready to shoot them at the first opportunity.

“Max, you’re a good man. You’re loyal,” Solomon overheard the smuggler captain saying to the Luna restauranteur. “But this?” He nodded to the people that Max Poulanous had brought with him. “This is reckless, my friend,” he said as they left the small hallway and into the Port 13 proper.

It was a haze of activity, Solomon saw. There were three super-large airlock double-doors that dominated the warehouse-like bubble. In front of each door were metal ramps where carts full of crates were being wheeled, either left in wait on the ramp to be picked up or moved to garage-style pits in the floor, where they were carefully stowed away.

“A crisis is always good for business?” Solomon muttered, from past experience. He got a dark look from Tomas in front of him.

“People are going to need food. Medicines. Little treats and things.” He nodded to the crates. “Curfews are always good for business.”

“What if people need a way to get off the Moon?” Solomon kept his voice low, but Tomas clearly heard him, because he frowned even deeper. He said nothing until he had led them to the side of the warehouse, where the noise of grinding and chugging air-processing units surrounded their conversation.

“That depends, Marine,” he finally turned and said.

Solomon studied the man. The Gold Squad Commander had met many such operators in his time in New Kowloon. Whereas the criminal underworld always had a shifting sea of faces at the lowest level, like goons and thugs and petty criminals, Solomon knew that it was the mid-level operators like Tomas here and the higher-up syndicate bosses and gang-lords who always stayed the same.

They had to be smart, tough, and uncompromising to get where they were, and to stay alive doing so.

They were also smart enough to know which way a deal would go before they entered into it.

“If it’s credits you want, I can get you money,” Solomon said, knowing that, given the situation, that Asquew would agree to any price. “But more important than that, Tomas, I’m giving you an opportunity.”

“Oh, you are, are ya, Marine boy?” Tomas even dared to grin sarcastically. “As far as I know, you might be one of Hausman’s agents, and you’re just here to try and pick up information.”

“I’m not. I’m with Asquew,” Solomon said.

“Sheesh…” Tomas whistled low and turned back to Max. “Look, I really don’t have the time for politics, Max. You’re a good guy, but whatever you’ve got yourself mixed up in here, take my advice and get out of it now. Politics is never good for business,” Tomas said, looking ready to turn and leave them there.

“Look, Tomas.” Solomon stepped across the smuggler’s path. “I just want you to hear me out, please? You know as well as I do that as soon as Hausman secures his footing here on Luna and on Earth, then he’s going to be the one controlling all trade in and out of Earth space.” Solomon remembered what Max had told him earlier. “He’s already charging extra for Luna imports and exports, right? Backhand money that goes straight to him and his Marines?”

Tomas’s eyes narrowed. “What are you trying to tell me, Marine?”

“That Hausman will crush your business. Or, if he lets you live, then it will only be if he can seize most of your profits. He’s not the guy that you want in power.”

Tomas shook his head. “And just what do you expect me to do about that? Do you see a fleet of Marines here, waiting to fight for me?”

“No,” Solomon said. “Because they’re out on Mars right now. With the Rapid Response Fleet.”

Tomas was quiet as he stared hard at Lieutenant Cready, before making a disparaging noise. “Almost, Marine. But what good will it do me if they’re all the way out there?”

“Get us out there, and there is a lot more chance that when Asquew deals with Hausman, she’ll look favorably on all those who helped her,” Solomon promised.

“Promises. Lies.” Tomas shrugged. But Solomon knew that the smuggler could see the truth: that under Hausman, his operation had no chance of surviving intact, but under Asquew he might do. “I’m going to need some assurances before I decide to help you. And a whole heap of credits.”

Dammit! Solomon thought. It was going to take hours to get a message to Asquew, and more hours to get the response. He couldn’t wait that long. “Look, you’ll just have to take my word that I’m good for the credits. I am First Lieutenant Solomon Cready of the Outcast Company of the Rapid Response Fleet, personally reporting to the General Asquew…”

“Your suit,” Tomas said.

“What?”

“You give me that fancy power armor suit of yours, First Lieutenant Solomon Cready, and I’ll count that as a down payment.”

“But…” Solomon blinked in confusion. But the suit is mine, he thought. But it wasn’t just his, was it? It was a sign of his journey, of who he had fought to become. He hadn’t realized just how attached he was to the power armor—far more so than the light tactical suit he used to wear as a lowly adjunct-Marine.

I wonder if Malady feels the same way about his full tactical suit? Solomon thought. If Corporal Malady is alive at all, that is…

“The power armor for three tickets off the Moon, that’s my price.” Tomas was grinning much more broadly now, knowing that his deal was making Solomon uncomfortable. “I can get a lot of credits for a suit like that on the black market,” he murmured. “Or maybe I’ll just keep it around here, because you never know what sort of places that a Marine can go that a lowly tradesperson can’t…”

But it’s my suit! Solomon thought in alarm.

“Don’t worry, Lieutenant. We got trade suits for you. I won’t leave you naked!” Tomas roared with laughter.

“Lieutenant, I think this might be the best option we have,” Ambassador Ochrie whispered to him.

“Fine,” Solomon grumbled and released the latch on the metal cowl around his neck that would start the unlocking process of the font and back plates. “But I’m telling you, Tomas—I’m going to want to buy it back one day.”

“Oh, I count on it, Lieutenant Cready.” The smuggler grinned.

15

Decompression Event

“They’re clearly insane,” suggested Administrator Fatima Ahmadi from the cockpit of her tug as she powered the vessel towards the rear of the Oregon.

Lines of burning white light shot out from the Oregon, and the torpedoes exploded in sudden flashes of light and escaping gases against the face of the wreckage field. From their distance, Jezzy couldn’t see what was happening to the cyborgs that the Ru’at ships had dispatched against them, but she hoped that they were all blown to smithereens.

The Ru’at jump-ships still hadn’t moved from their original positions, and as soon as Ahmadi had rescued Joe and Jezzy from the cold mercy of space, she had driven her tug in a wide arc around the battlefield before heading back to the rear of the mighty battleship to deliver the Acting First Lieutenant Jezebel Wen to her post.

“I mean, sending troops against a battleship? I don’t think we have much to worry about from these would-be alien overlords,” Ahmadi cackled, clearly getting a thrill from all of the action that had infected her small corner of space.

“You didn’t see them, Fatima…” Joe said from where he was slumped against the side of the cockpit wall. “Their skin looked dead, frozen or baked or something. And half of their bodies were made of metal. They don’t need to breathe air, Administrator.” The tug driver looked haunted.

As well he might be, Jezzy thought. She remembered when she had first fought just one of the cyborgs. It had taken their entire squad to even put a dent in it.

“Well, still…” Fatima grumbled as the Oregon accepted their docking request, and the Gingko joined the other stationary Marine vessels hanging like limpets to the underside of the battleship.

“Thank you, Administrator, for everything.” Jezzy paused before entering the airlock. “Just…get you and as many of your people out of here as you can…” She tried to impress the seriousness of the situation.

“Ah, that’s where you’re wrong, lady. Most of us people left out here, us Plutonians, we haven’t got anywhere else to go.” Fatima shrugged. “The Last Call is all we got, so I figure that me and most of the other staffers here will be staying, if you don’t mind.”

Jezzy wondered whether she should try to convince the administrator of the foolishness of her actions. But Ahmadi doesn’t look to be the woman who would bend. Fatima was tough, and Jezzy admired that.

“The Ru’at seem eager to make displays of power. They might destroy the Last Call as they did the city of Proxa, but after that, I don’t think they will be eager to chase survivors. If we lose, you might be able to move your people to Pluto itself. You have emergency bunkers down there?”

“Of course.” Ahmadi rolled her eyes. “I’ll start organizing the evacuation as soon as I get back to the station, but you Marines should know a good captain always goes down with her ship, right? I’m sure the same goes for administrators and stations.” Fatima threw Jezzy a carefree, courageous wink. “Now get the frack off my ship and go kill some aliens for me, will you?”

“Aye-aye, Captain.” Jezzy threw the woman a formal salute and did as she was told.

“Colonel, I’m on my way up,” Jezzy said as soon she set foot through the Oregon’s airlock and into a bustling launch hall, where Marines and gray-suited staffers were running back and forth, loading the small Marine Corps fighters with armaments and performing the final security checks.

Ready to Launch in 1 minute. Repeat: All Forward Crews to Launch in 1 minute.

The overhead speaker systems announced this as Jezzy dodged carts of missiles and racks of ammunition.

“Glad to have you safe, Lieutenant Wen,” Faraday’s voice was clearly audible over her suit. “I’m preparing to dispatch Forward Crews 1 through 4, who will launch against the Ru’at jump-ships.”

Already? Jezzy thought. She knew that the forward crews were really a catchall designation, hastily applied to any marine squad to indicate their first-in, invasive roles. She’d never seen any of the Outcast units called ‘forward crews’ before—probably because their whole reason was to act as a first-in expeditionary force.

For the Marine company of the Oregon, however, who worked alongside the Outcasts, their forward crews were all fighter pilot teams, as they were based on a battleship.

“Sir… Shouldn’t we deal with the cyborg problem first?” Jezzy was saying as she made it to the service elevators leading up through the center of the boat. It was busy with staffers hauling equipment, so she had to wait.

“I hardly see them as a problem…” Farday said. “They charged straight into my field of fire. I doubt that any could have survived!”

“You haven’t seen them in battle, sir,” Jezzy said. Her words were chillingly accurate a second later when the Oregon’s alarms suddenly blared.

All Personnel Evacuate Floor 3! Repeat: All Personnel Evacuate Floor 3!

“Faraday? What’s happening?” Jezzy froze.

“I don’t know, some kind of decompression event…!” Faraday was saying as, over his own suit transmission, Jezzy could hear the frantic alarms and urgent calls of the bridge officers while they tried to get a handle on the problem.

“It’s the cyborgs, Colonel.” Jezzy knew it in her gut. “This is what they were sent to do. They’re too small for your scanners to pick up, too small for the Oregon’s defenses to target them.”

“That is why we shot a boat-load of torpedoes at them!” Faraday roared.

“Sir, this is what they do. They overwhelm you, taking all the flak you can send their way.” Jezzy cursed. “I’m going.” Jezzy abandoned the elevator and instead slammed through the doors to the stairs, already resounding with red light and alarms.

“We’re locking down Floor 3. It’s almost entirely depressurized, Lieutenant!” Faraday informed her, and the Oregon as a whole juddered and shuddered as its internal pressures fluctuated.

“I’m still in my suit,” Jezzy said.

Open Channel: Outcast Group ID

Jezzy paused only to toggle the controls on her suit telemetries so she could broadcast to every member of the Outcast Company on board the Oregon.

“Outcasts, to arms! Full suit operation on Floor 3. Prepare to repel all boarders!” she said, making it to the first landing where an airlock blocked her way. Jezzy hit the door-release button repeatedly, already slinging her Jackhammer in front of her, impatient to get to the action.

Floor 2; Weapons Locker, Medical Bays, Holds 3-5, the stenciled sign read. There were voices coming from the stairwell above her, coughing and gasping.

“Marine Corps!” Jezzy shouted as she ran up the stairs to find the airlock to level three closed and blocking her path, while on this side of the door was a team of three staffers, coughing and shivering as they slumped against the walls and the floor.

“What happened? How bad is it in there?” Jezzy said.

“We only just managed to get out. Most of the others…” one of the gray-suited staffers said as he looked up owlishly at her. “There was a hull breach. We didn’t know where from. We tried to isolate the loss of pressure, found that there was a hole in one of the external plates, leading to the internal repair tubes.” The young man coughed.

“By the time we closed off the nearest room, another hull breach occurred in one of the holds, and then another.” He shook his head, looking at her with wide eyes. “They were in the repair tubes. They managed to break in through the outer hull and crawled around in there like rats until they found another place to breach the inner hull!”

“The cyborgs,” Jezzy stated as the doors behind her banged open, and the booted feet of more Outcasts could be heard, charging up the stairs to join her.

“Am I glad to see you,” Jezzy said to the first one to reach her landing, Corporal Karamov. Behind him came Ratko, Willoughby, and Malady.

“We followed your suit coordinates, got here as soon as we could,” Karamov wheezed, out of breath.

“They…they don’t die!” the man on the floor said. “I saw them on the internal cameras, and so I sealed the hold they were in and opened the external airlocks, intending to blast them out of there, or at least make them freeze to death…” He shook his head, and Jezzy nodded grimly as he spoke.

“And they didn’t die. They just kept on coming…”

“We’re ready to go in, Lieutenant,” Ratko said, loading her automatic shotgun and standing before the airlock, gun leveled at the point it would open.

“Is there a seal on the other side?” Jezzy asked the three staffers, who nodded. Airlock doors were always designed with an extra empty room on the inner side of them, meant to act as a decompression chamber or a safe ‘bubble’ of air should the main rooms and avenues leading up to them be compromised, like now.

“Okay, well, you three get off this floor and spread the word.” Jezzy waited for the staffers to hobble and jog down to the floor below, and through the door, before turning to what remained of Gold Squad.

I wish Sol was here, she thought painfully. Their commander might be a liability in some ways—he was reckless and prone to making spur-of-the-moment decisions that changed the entire mission parameters—but Jezzy was always impressed with just how calm he was under pressure, and how he always put the lives of his squad first.

And he’s the one who has actually HAD some command training. Jezzy sighed.

“Weapons caches. Oxygen tanks,” Malady intoned in his flat, emotionless electronica voice.

“Huh?” Jezzy wondered what he meant, and then realized. “Oh, Malady, you genius.” She had forgotten that, of all of them, he was actually the one who had been a full Marine before becoming a member of the Outcasts and probably had more combat experience than the rest of them put together.

“Attention all Outcasts!” Jezzy broadcast to her company. “This is First Lieutenant Wen, ready to enter Floor 3 from below. I want you in squad formations. Keep your buddies in sight at all times. You’ve fought these things before, you know what to do—head and spine shots for a kill, nothing else will work,” she said, then proceeded to deliver Malady’s advice.

“I want non-combat specialists of every Outcast squad to create a weapons caches at major airlock junctures, as well as emergency oxygen breathers for those staffers not in power suits.”

“Aye, Lieutenant Wen.”

“Sir! Yes, sir!”

“Already on it.” She heard the various voices of the other squad leaders in the Outcast Company receive and okay her message as she nodded to herself and turned back to Gold Squad.

“Okay, you lot,” she said in a lower murmur. “Ready to go do this thing again? Kick butt for the good of the Confederacy?”

“Always.” Ratko smiled grimly, bracing behind her weapon.

Then I guess we’d better get this show on the road, Jezzy thought as she switched her communicator back to full-company broadcast.

“Blood and fire, Marines! Who’s the baddest, meanest, and toughest of all the Marine Corps!? That’s right, it’s us. It’s the Outcasts of Ganymede. Now let’s show these metal suckers they picked the wrong fight!”

She hit the door-release button and stepped in alongside the remnants of her squad to the small decompression chamber behind, as the airlock to Floor 3 hissed shut behind her, then she hit the decompression button.

Hssssss!

It always felt like a sudden gale as the air was sucked out of the chamber, dropping the temperature and the pressure in moments. The gravity vanished, and she felt her feet start to rise from the floor.

Power Boot Controls: Activate Magnets 20%

Jezzy’s feet suddenly clanked back into place on the floor of the chamber as the powerful localized magnets that every set of power boots contained were activated. But Jezzy didn’t want it to be difficult to move, so she slid the power being exerted right down to 20%, meaning that she could almost glide and that every step was a bound.

Behind her, the rest of the squad did the same, setting their own boot magnets to varying degrees of strength, depending on what they preferred to fight in. So at least we’re not entirely weightless, she thought as the light over the inner door ahead of her went from a warning red to a blinking green.

Release. Jezzy hit the control button, and the inner decompression door slid open to reveal a gloomy world of flickering emergency lights and free-floating equipment.

And cyborgs…

16

General Luna Assistant

“On my signal,” Tomas the Luna smuggler whispered to his three ‘new employees’: the Imprimatur of Proxima, the Ambassador of Earth, and the Squad Commander from the Outcasts.

Only currently, they did not look like their rightful jobs. Instead, they all wore the shabby gray and tan encounter suits of Luna workers, and they were waiting to join the crush of similarly-clad workers hurrying up the ramp to Loading Door 2 of Port 13.

“And you’re sure that this ship of yours is going to make it?” the ambassador muttered darkly at their guide. They had left Max Poulanous just a little while earlier, with great sadness on both parts as he returned to his bistro and his boy.

“Just try to remember us—all the little people under your Confederacy and Marine Corps…” had been Max’s final words to Lieutenant Cready before they solemnly shook hands.

I will never forget, Solomon had promised, and he knew that it was true. It was these ‘little people,’ as Max had called himself, that suffered the worst, Solomon had realized. The staffers on Ganymede, the citizens of Proxa, and even the Martians in Armstrong Habitat.

It doesn’t matter if they’re colonists or Confederates, Solomon agreed silently. We’re all facing an enemy that is far worse than anything we can do to each other.

“This ship of mine will make it, lady,” Tomas growled back. “And you know why? Because I can smuggle anything.”

“You sound pretty certain,” the ambassador said. But Solomon realized that he admired Tomas, despite all his outrageous arrogance in taking Solomon’s power armor! You needed self-belief for this job. The job that was only a few nudges away from what Solomon had used to do, after all.

“The Helga is a transport ship that is scheduled to go and pick up the latest in Martian iron,” Tomas explained once again. “Where it gets brought back here, and then off to all of its buyers who’ve already invested in it,” he said.

Minus a nice cut to you, the smuggler king of Luna, no doubt, Solomon thought.

“But I thought you said that ‘Commander-in-Chief’ Hausman—” Imprimatur Mariad Rhossily said his name with apparent humor, as if she found the title ridiculous. “—had stopped all traffic to and from Earth?”

“He has,” Tomas growled, clearly annoyed. Solomon wondered what that would mean for his operation in the near future. “The Helga is one of the last boats to get clearance, and that is only because there are a lot of very rich corporations both here on the Moon and back on Earth who want their imports.”

“But Hausman has declared the Rapid Response Fleet to be traitors?” Ambassador Ochrie stepped in. “How is the Helga supposed to make their transaction with Mars, which is currently under Asquew’s command?”

“Ah, ye of little faith…” Tomas gave the woman a crooked grin. “The iron has already been brought and loaded onto a Martian cargo ship, which has already jumped from Martian space…before New York,” he said meaningfully. “I have a friend in Hausman’s guard—”

You do? Solomon thought.

“—who said that this was the last shipment that was going to come out of Mars for a long time. And Hausman needs to keep his corporate backers happy, right?”

“Corporate backers like Taranis?” Solomon raised an eyebrow. Was he about to help—albeit in a tiny way—Taranis to build more killer cyborgs?

“I have no idea.” Tomas shrugged. “So, the Martian jump-ship isn’t coming here because of the trade embargo, but it’s going to be arriving near the inner asteroid belt, where the goods will transfer to the Helga, and where you three get on the Martian ship and fly off to your beloved Asquew.” Tomas smiled proudly.

That’s the plan, Solomon knew. It was a complicated plan as far as he was concerned. His old criminal instincts shouted a warning at him that there was already too much that could go wrong. Too many people were involved—from Tomas and his band of smugglers, to the other staffers and whomever the pilot and captain of the Helga was, and finally to this other Martian cargo ship. Would they all be loyal to Asquew? Would any of them? How closely was the new ‘commander-in-chief’ paying attention to this final ship to break the embargo?

Solomon had never liked complicated plans, in all of his years of running some of the biggest scams, heists, and cons in the history of New Kowloon.

A complicated plan always breaks, he told himself. Keep it simple. The best jobs were always the ones where it was just him, his wits, and one destination. The fewer people involved, the better.

Only now I have the Imprimatur of Proxima and the Ambassador of Earth to worry about, Solomon thought irritably. Both would be worth a fortune to Hausman, and either would probably be worth a lot to any number of rival factions, from the First Martian seditionists to the mysterious Taranis Industries.

And I’m the only person they’ve got, this side of Mars. Solomon took a deep breath. He had never thought that this is what his life would become. Protecting people. Saving lives. Loyal to the Confederacy. No, not the Confederacy! he corrected himself immediately. Loyal to the soldiers who had fought alongside him, had died for him. Loyal to the Outcasts.

And the Outcasts were somewhere out there, fighting in the darks between the stars, and he was stuck here. But he had been given a mission by his superior officer, Solomon argued with himself. A mission that he had failed at but had been given to him because Asquew had believed in him. Had trusted him.

And so, if it is the very least that I can do, I will get the pair of you to safety, Solomon silently promised the two women at his side.

“Let’s do this.” Solomon nodded to Tomas.

“Go!” Tomas pushed Solomon’s back, and he moved quickly across the open ramp to where the latest cart of metal boxes had been brought up and was awaiting workers to push and pull it the rest of the way through Loading Door 2 to the waiting Helga beyond.

Solomon was the first to arrive at the cart, moving to the front to grab one of the metal handles as Ochrie and Rhossily moved to the back, reaching up to push it. “Got it?” Solomon whispered to the two women, who nodded at him seriously from the shadows of their cowls.

“Let’s go.” He heaved, hauling the cart that was supposedly full of machine repair parts and spare components for the Helga up the ramp, bouncing over the airlock seals and into the noisy, busy hold of the docked ship.

The Helga was a standard-sized transporter ship, which meant that it had a series of three large holds but with only one door at each end. Each hold looked like a warehouse with a gantry level running around the top with doors up into the mess halls, cabins, and whatever other amenities the Helga afforded its staff.

“Where are we going?” the ambassador hissed at Solomon as he pulled the cart past a line of jogging staffers, and then past wide, empty bays waiting for the shipment of Martian iron.

Solomon scanned his surroundings. There was the large opening to the central hold, Hold 2, and beyond that, Hold 3, but there was also a whole range of smaller bays with carts just like this one lined up under the gantries.

“There,” he said. It was darker down there, and it seemed to be a place for general maintenance equipment. And all we have to do is to pretend we’re busy for the next hour or two, Solomon thought, and then make it across to the Martian transporter at the other end.

If it was a longer jump that they were about to take part in, then Solomon might have been more worried. He might have tried to find them a safer place to buckle up and wait out the nausea and dizziness of Jump Sickness, or he might have been more worried of their true identities being uncovered by the Helga’s staff.

But this is only a micro-jump, Solomon told himself. All we have to do is keep our head down for an hour, hide out somewhere dark.

Currently, they each had on the encounter suits of ‘Luna General Assistants,’ which was a very uninteresting way of saying that they were pretending to be any one of the short-term contract staff who worked the transport network. It was Tomas who had gotten them their suits and told them that no one would bat an eye. He had already ordered three of his guys off the work detail to be replaced by these three.

What if they want to check identity cards? Solomon thought.

Tomas had said they wouldn’t, and Tomas was their only shot at getting to Mars.

“Hey! You three! Stop, you three!” a voice suddenly barked down at them from above, and Solomon froze.

What if the Helga staff know all of Tomas’s workers? What if they’re suspicious?

“Sir?” Solomon said in a thick voice, looking up at the thin man on the gantry above them in similar shabby worker suit grays, a data-screen in his hands. He was obviously some kind of supervisor for the Helga.

“You Luna lot are new, ain’t ya?” the man shouted down over the hiss and gasp of pistons and the bustle of other staffers hurrying here and there.

Solomon’s fist clenched on the handlebar of the cart. Frack.

“Is it that obvious, sir?” he managed to say.

The supervisor paused, looking hard at Solomon for a second, before snorting in disgust. “Less of your lip, son. Those parts are going for Hold 3. Right at the back in the engineering section, you got that? You can follow simple instructions, can’t you?”

Breathe. Solomon felt his chest start to fill with anger as his temper rose. Follow simple instruction, he thought. I’ve been ordering men and women to their deaths! And before that, I masterminded one of the biggest heists against the Asia-Pacific Partnership Yakuza there has ever been!

But, unlike the Solomon he had been—the one who would tell the overseer just what he could do with his ‘simple instruction’—the newer Lieutenant Solomon took a deep breath and brought himself under control.

I have a mission and a duty. To these two women at my side. To Asquew. To the honor of my Outcast brothers and sisters.

“Yes, sir. I can follow simple instructions, sir.” He nodded and proceeded to haul the cart away from the safe, dark place he had been meaning to stash both it and their party, and instead rumbled it over the airlock seal to Hold 2 as the imprimatur and the ambassador pushed at the other end.

“That was too close,” the ambassador whispered as they trundled through the exact same warehouse layout as before, but the crowds of other staffers were growing thin, Solomon was glad to see.

Departure imminent! Please ensure your cargo is stowed and your duties completed to ensure a speedy departure.

The ship’s alert system announced this as there was a hiss from Hold 1’s doors as the airlock seal started to slide shut.

“Lieutenant!” the ambassador hissed at him again.

“Trust me, just wait…” Solomon was dawdling, pausing the cart by a stand of small forklift loaders and bending down as if he were adjusting one of the thing’s wheels. They were mostly out of sight of Hold 1 and the supervisor, Solomon reckoned. All we have to do is act natural.

The ship’s alert system sounded again, now to be joined by a low, warning beep that signaled their liftoff.

“C’mon.” Solomon stood up, rattling the cargo crate into Hold 3, which had lost the brilliance of the service lights and instead just had the dull glow of the ship’s background lighting.

Hold 3 was deserted, but it wasn’t empty, Solomon saw.

Departure imminent! Please ensure…

Half of Hold 3 was already given over to large crates of ruggedized plastic, each one several feet long and a few feet tall.

Where have I seen something like that before? Solomon wondered as he slid their cart next to the others, locked the wheels, and tied the webbing around it.

Hsssss! The outer doors had finally closed, and now the doors between the holds were also beginning to hiss shut, too.

“Solomon!” the ambassador squeaked in alarm.

“It’s alright, Ochrie. This is the plan,” Solomon insisted, drawing them closer into the shadows of the crates. “The boat’s busy. We’ll just be forgotten about in here, and then in an hour, forty minutes, whatever, we’ll sneak out and onto the Martian transporter.”

That was Solomon’s plan, anyway. As it turned out, Tomas’s was far more successful than his.

“Hey! What in the name of Earth are you three still doing down here?” shouted a voice from above them. It was the supervisor, having entered their gantry level by some hidden door above, obviously inspecting the holds before final takeoff.

Departure imminent! Please ensure…

“Get up here and get to the jump-seats now!” the supervisor snapped, waiting until Solomon, the ambassador, and the imprimatur hurried up the stairs to the gantry level, where he directed them through the nearest bulkhead door.

“You’re lucky. If I lost people from my safety inspection…” The supervisor was clearly annoyed as he hurried them along the narrow service corridor to what looked like a long hallway with rows of seats backed against the wall.

It looked a little like a Marine transporter, Solomon thought, as the supervisor directed them to take up three seats at the end, which they did.

“Buckle up!” the supervisor said, sitting in his seat at the front, and then the Helga was shuddering and shaking as it rose from the surface of the moon on four plumes of flame.

Solomon groaned under his breath. They were precisely where he didn’t want them to be. Now they had to lie through their teeth for an hour-long jump, pretending to be people that they weren’t with the other Helga workers, and hoping that no one recognized them.

Frack.

17

Blood in the Stars

“Ratko! Covering fire!” Jezzy shouted as she made to leap across the space to the next doorway.

“Get some!” the smaller Marine yelled, leaning forward with her automatic shotgun and releasing a burst of heavy shells into the space.

The depressurized Floor 3 was a mixture of laboratories and storage bays, with corridors and small plaza-areas connecting them. Currently, they were filled with floating detritus from every room. Jezzy could see slowly-revolving beakers, shattered glass, stainless steel instruments, chairs—

—and blood, the real stuff as well as the darker gobbets of machine-oil blood that powered the cyborgs.

Not that they appeared to be any closer to dying, Jezzy thought as she saw the cyborg that filled the corridor space knocked back by Ratko’s shells, flying and spinning through the weightless environment.

Now! Jezzy jumped, soaring across the corridor as more flashes of muzzle fire bloomed in the dark.

“Oof!” She sailed through the doorway and hit the floor to find herself in a small laboratory with white floor-to-ceiling cabinets in every room.

“Lieutenant!” There were two more Outcasts in here, not from Gold Squad but others of the company who had been sent to Pluto along with Jezebel.

Outcast ID: Sergeant Ijuo (Combat)

Health: GOOD.

Outcast ID: Lance Corporal Francis

Health: COMPROMISED.

The readouts on the inside of Jezzy’s helmet filled her in on the general state of the two Outcasts in the room, the ones that she had come to try and save after they had been pinned down.

Sergeant Ijuo knelt by the door, Jackhammer raised and already sighting for the next nearest cyborg, while behind him, slumped against the wall, was Lance Corporal Francis, with one arm hideously blackened and burnt from a direct hit by one of the cyborg’s particle weapons.

“Are we glad to see you!” Ijuo exclaimed before firing.

“Francis, can you move?” Jezzy asked, receiving a hazy thumbs-up from the Outcast Marine. He must be high as a kite on suit adrenaline injectors, Jezzy thought, having been there herself when she was shot by one of these things on Mars.

“Ratko, how are we looking?” she called over her communicator.

The Outcasts were spread out across the entirety of Floor 3 in small groups, having entered the floor from various airlocks, seeking to push through to join up in the middle and hopefully forcing the cyborgs back as they did.

That had been the plan, anyway. Only now it looked as though every knot of Outcasts were pinned down and trapped by the seemingly unstoppable cyborgs.

Only they aren’t unstoppable, are they? Jezzy thought.

“I can’t push them back, sir!” Ratko shouted back.

“Oh hell,” Jezzy growled. This was exactly what she didn’t want to happen. To get pinned down herself, as particle-beam laser shot burnt the edge of the laboratory door and the walls of the corridor beyond.

Think, Jezzy, think! She had Ijuo and the wounded Francis here, and she had Ratko and Willoughby across the hall in the door to another room. Karamov and Malady… Where were they? Still stuck the next corridor over, fighting three or four cyborgs.

“Lieutenant! Situation report! I need that hull breach closed off before it can cause any structural damage to the Oregon!” Faraday said.

“Sir! Yes, sir. Heavy fighting. The cyborgs are proving tougher than we thought, but I’m working on it!” Jezzy said, before cursing under her breath.

“I heard that, Lieutenant.”

“Sorry, sir.” Jezzy leaned out and fired a hail of shells at the nearest cyborg, aiming for the thing’s head and neck, but she only managed to hit its chest and shoulder. It was thrown back against the wall, but its fellow machine-man took its place to fire at Jezzy.

FZZZT!

“Frack!” Jezzy was suddenly pulled back by Ijuo, who had grabbed the back of her suit as the purple-white line of fire shot across her head to destroy one of the cabinets behind her.

“Thanks,” Jezzy breathed, as Ratko and Willoughby opened fire.

Everything is just repeating itself… Jezzy growled. It was almost as if it didn’t matter what they did, they could only fight to a stalemate the way they were fighting right now.

What would Solomon do? she thought. What would a real commander with real command training do in this situation? Almost as if she had summoned his ghost by thinking about him, the words rose in her mind. You have to change the situation.

Which is a very easy thing to say, Jezzy growled internally, but not so easy in practice.

How did we fight them off on Proxima? Jezzy thought, remembering the cyborgs that had attacked them at the imprimatur’s palace. Well, they hadn’t really fought them off, not really. Not in a firefight kind of way. But when they had first attacked, Jezzy and Gold Squad had successfully killed at least a few, and they had done that by…

Close-quarter fighting, Jezzy realized, feeling a shiver of horror. The cyborg’s only vulnerability was their spinal cord, which seemed to house all their essential wiring. The problem was that it was sheathed in metal down the back and up to the base of each cyborg’s skull. On Proxima, the Outcasts had been fighting in the middle of the cyborgs, with one or two Marines engaged in trying to distract it while another Marine got in a shot or a strike at the thing’s neck.

Close quarters. Close combat.

“Ijuo, how good are you with that thing?” Jezzy hissed at the Outcast crouching beside her, gesturing to the thick gladius-style blade he had sheathed at his belt harness. Jezzy herself had one longer but thinner blade, subtly curving and razor sharp, strapped across her back.

“I’m good, Lieutenant,” Ijuo said with a feral grin.

“Then be prepared to follow me.” Jezzy nodded, then hailed Ratko and Willoughby. “Change of plan. You’re going to let the cyborgs advance. If you can, lure them towards your location,” she commanded.

“Lure them?” Ratko grumbled. “With what? I don’t think I packed any sweets or breadcrumbs this time, Lieutenant.”

Jezzy ignored Ratko’s insolence. It was a battle, and that was the sort of woman Corporal Ratko was. The heavens knew that Jezzy felt the same way.

“I don’t know how, but I have ultimate faith in you, Marine,” Jezzy said, drawing her blade as Sergeant Ijuo beside her did the same.

Suddenly, Ratko opened fire.

I thought I told her to let the cyborgs advance!? Jezzy hazarded a glance to see that was precisely what she was doing. Willoughby had launched herself down the corridor as Ratko stepped out to cover her, before she jumped backwards.

The shots hit the two cyborgs, but they turned and swiveled in the air, lunging forward to get at the two Outcast Marines.

FZZZT! FZZZT! Two more lines of purple-white fire shot through the corridor.

Jezzy heard a scream. One of her Marines had been hit.

Outcast ID: Corporal Ratko (Technical Specialist)

Health: COMPROMISED.

“No-no-no!” Jezzy was shouting, but her plan was working. As Ratko and Willoughby met the end of the corridor and ducked out of harm’s way, they were chased by the two charging cyborgs, flying forwards, past Jezzy and Ijuo’s open doorway.

“Haii!” Jezzy stepped out, throwing her arm and the glittering silver blade that it carried in a deadly arc.

TZZRK! She felt pressure and a sensation of weight, and then the force of her blow was pulling her forward into a spin as the head of the first cyborg floated free from its body.

Ijuo had slightly less luck than Jezzy did as he rolled forward under Jezzy’s leap and struck upwards with his gladius. It caught the cyborg across the side and shoulder, missing the spine but sending it crashing against the rear wall.

The cyborg was already raising its particle arm as Jezzy continued in her spin, sweeping her blade in a deadly arc over Ijuo’s head to plunge it into the cyborg’s neck—

FZZZT! But not before it fired.

“Hgargh! A grunt of pain, and Ijuo was thrown backwards, back into the room he had rolled out of.

Outcast ID: Sergeant Ijuo (Combat Specialist)

Health: DECEASED.

“No!” Jezzy howled in frustration and despair. She had been meaning to save them. To save all the members of the company she had been asked to protect.

Because I’m just supposed to keep them alive until Solomon gets here, her thoughts continued as she stared at the ruins of the Outcast Marine sergeant whom she had known for only a brief few moments.

I’m supposed to look after them…

“Lieutenant, I’ve got your suit coordinates on my screen. You’re the closest to the hull breach. Starboard-forward to Storage Bay 4,” the colonel informed her.

Jezzy clenched her teeth in frustration. Her impulse was to follow Willoughby and Ratko, to see what help Ratko needed, and then there was the wounded Lance Corporal Francis behind her. Both of these were her men, and they needed her to get them out of there, didn’t they?

But I have orders from the colonel, Jezzy knew. And she also knew that if she didn’t fulfill them, then it wouldn’t just be her Outcasts who would be in danger, it would be the whole Oregon.

And there was no point saving lives on a ship that was about to break apart. Jezzy turned in mid-air, kicking out at the walls to swim her way forward through the empty corridor to where it ended in the larger storage bay.

Environmental Warning!

Her suit flashed an orange and red warning light moments before Jezzy felt the shockwave hit her body.

One of the walls of the storage bay suddenly crumpled inwards, tearing itself from the ceiling and the wall as the metal fatigue, hastened by the sucking, pressure-less vacuum, took hold.

And Jezzy could now see clearly past the wall to the layers of metal girders of the inner hull, and finally, the thick plates of the outer hull that had been scored and pulled open like a tin can.

And beyond that, stars.

“Colonel, the rip is too big!” Jezzy took a snapshot of the image and wirelessly transmitted it to the bridge. This wouldn’t be the simple case of a spot-weld in a few places, or even a team to cover the holes with the spare metal plates that every starship carried. This would require a major outfit and repair, at a station very much like the Last Call behind them.

“Colonel?” Jezzy hailed him again.

There was silence from the other end of the line.

The hole in front of Jezzy was large, almost the height of herself and about as wide again. The inner and outer hull made up a four-meter length of twisted and shattered girders, crumpled past a narrow crawlspace that must have been the service shoot the cyborgs had broken into and used to worm their way through the hull of the Oregon like termites.

“Colonel? I need orders, now!” Jezzy said.

“Lieutenant Wen. Get you and your company out of there, now. I’m sending people to the escape pods,” Faraday said as a deep shudder went through the battleship. It was the sort of bone-deep, vibrational shake that made Jezzy’s teeth ache just feeling it move up through her feet and into her knees. It was the sort of structural groan that preceded some terrible collapse.

“Sir!?” Jezzy said.

“We’ve got decompression events on Floors 4 and 2, and more cyborgs pouring in. We’re compromised, Lieutenant Wen. We need to retreat and regroup.”

“Retreat and regroup!?” Wen burst out in shock. “How?”

“Get to the escape pods. There are several on your level, if they haven’t been damaged by the decompression,” she heard him say in a tight voice. “I’ve automated them to make planetfall on Pluto. You’ll have basic survival gear, and from there, you can regroup with the Plutonians and await rescue.”

“Sir?”

“The battle is lost, Lieutenant. We held the Ru’at here for a short while. We can only pray that it was long enough for General Asquew to pacify Mars and free up the rest of the fleet. Now, move it, Marine! That is a direct order!” The colonel clicked off their connection, and Jezzy was left hanging in space, in front of the stars, wondering just how it could have come to this.

“Jezzy!” It was Karamov on one end of the communicator. “We’re pinned down. Can’t make it past the entrance hall!”

“I’m coming,” Jezzy said, turning and launching back the way she had come as an emergency broadcast broke in over her suit communicators:

Group-Level Broadcast: Oregon Marine Detachment, Outcast Marines.

Sender ID: Brig. Comm. Faraday (Commanding Officer)

Message: Attention all personnel. Immediate evacuation order. Make your way to your nearest escape pods immediately. Repeat: Immediate evacuation order.

“Jezzy!? What was that?” Karamov sounded spooked, as well Jezzy thought that he might be, given the circumstances. She sure was spooked.

“Orders, Karamov. We all heard the man. I’m on my way.” Jezzy flew through the weightless corridor the T-junction at the far end, just as a line of purple-white fire clipped her boot.

FZZT!

Warning! Suit Impact Detected: Right Power Boot

Armor Plating Efficiency: -70%

“Ach!” Jezzy felt the flush of transferred heat and the pain of constricting metal as she was spun against the wall.

Adrenaline Injector System Activated.

Before Jezzy even had a chance to rebound off the wall, she felt a slight pinch of pain and then the enlivening, electrifying flood of adrenaline as her suit automatically compensated for her injury. All pain was gone, and she felt like she could do impossible things.

Which, right now, meant Jezzy kicking out with her damaged foot to force her body into a tight corkscrew spin, crossing the distance between the wall and her cyborg attacker as she lashed out with her strengthened-steel blade.

CLANG! She hit the thing’s metal arm, and the cascade of sparks and screaming metal indicated that she had nearly severed the limb from the creature that owned it.

But Jezzy wasn’t done there. She punched out with her free power gauntlet—her Jackhammer still strapped to her back, where she had put it when she had taken to the sword—to grab the cyborg’s face with her own metal grip.

The power gauntlets of the Outcasts were only one step down from the full tactical suits like the one that Malady wore. That meant articulated, servo-assisted joints that could pile on pounds more pressure than her already-strong body could normally allow.

She seized the cyborg’s face, feeling vaguely disgusted by this close contact with the almost-dead human flesh, wrenching the cyborg’s head up and back so that she could slam her blade into the thing’s exposed neck.

FZRK! More sparks and gobbets of machine blood, and the body was falling away, revealing the final corridor before the entrance hallway to Level 3, which was filled with three more cyborgs, already turning to confront her.

“Where’s Ratko and Willoughby!?” Jezzy managed to shout, the panic at having three of these monstrous things to deal with on her own finally overcoming her mania-inducing adrenaline rush.

She was going to die. No one had ever fought three cyborgs on their own before. Well, no one had done that and survived, anyway.

“Ratko and Willoughby made it through to us. But we can’t—” she heard Karamov respond, before there was another flash of purple-white light from around the end of the corridor.

Jezzy raised her blade at the nearest cyborg in traditional samurai style, just as her Yakuza mentors had taught her, and she leaped.

18

Contraband

Don’t say anything… Don’t say anything… Solomon prayed as he overheard one of the nearest general assistants on the Helga try to ask the imprimatur a question.

So far, the jump had been going on for approximately twenty or thirty minutes. They couldn’t be that far off from arrival, and Solomon was sure everyone was awash with jump sickness.

But Solomon had heard that there were those who actually enjoyed the paroxysms of anxiety and nausea, of sweaty and aching limbs and clenching jaws. He wasn’t sure if any of the general assistants around him fit that category, but they certainly were a lot more able to withstand the pressures of a Barr-Hawking field.

“So, how long you been at the Luna Station, huh?” one of the assistants behind her leaned forward in his webbing, clearly taking an interest in the aristocratic-looking Mariad Rhossily.

“Oh, just a few days,” the imprimatur said, which was almost truthful. Solomon had to complement her resourcefulness.

“Really? I haven’t seen you in the mess hall. What bubble they got you in?” the man asked.

Shut the conversation down! Solomon was inwardly screaming. He didn’t want to come so far only for it all go wrong here and now.

“Ah, well…” Rhossily wavered. Solomon could tell that she didn’t know enough about the Luna Station, its layout or internal procedures to be able to lie effectively. Should he step in?

“Anyway, I heard that we’re going to get paid BIG for this cargo. What are you going to do with your cut, lady?” the man went on.

“Hssst!” The assistant next to him suddenly elbowed the talkative worker in the side. “No mentioning that, you hear!?”

But it was too late. Solomon had already overheard it. Hadn’t Tomas the Luna Station smuggler said that the Helga was on a pickup mission, not a delivery? That it needed an empty hold so that it could fill with Martian iron for Hausman’s corporate backers?

Solomon considered the possibility that Tomas had lied to them, which was of course, a very real possibility. And not one that he could do much about.

But I don’t think he did. Solomon frowned. Call it a hunch. And there had been those large, cubicle-style boxes that he had seen down in Hold 3 of the Helga. Cubicle-style boxes that he had seen somewhere else before, if only he could remember where…

Eris. Solomon’s nausea-addled mind suddenly worked.

The Erisian Asteroid Field, when he and the rest of the Outcasts had been sent to find out what had happened to one of the Confederacy’s deep-field ship-stations—giant cruiser-type civilian ships that traveled slowly but incredibly far on their own Barr-Hawking drives, with an intergenerational crew who quite as often lived, married, and died on their long-distance ships. The ships were major carriers of the Confederacy’s import and export goods, traveling from one farflung colony world to another.

But this one had a secret in its heart. It had only been transporting one thing: a war robot manufactured by NeuroTech on Proxima and sent to Mars. It had ‘woken up’ just as the cyborgs on Proxa had mysteriously ‘woken up,’ and then it had proceeded to cause a catastrophic life support system failure on the ship, killing all of the crew, and then mimicking their distress calls to lure the Outcasts to their doom.

And there had been crates like those down below our feet alongside it. The memories all came rushing back to Solomon. Those crates had been empty on the deep-field station-ship, but the exact same ones that Solomon had seen in the First Chosen of Mars hideout hadn’t.

They had been filled with the slumbering bodies of the cyborgs, newly fashioned from NeuroTech offices, Solomon realized.

“Oh frack!” He shot upright on his chair.

19

Battle-sister

“Hai!” Jezzy spun, her blade flashing silver through the weightless corridor. It was hard to exert any great force in her strike, but the magnetized weights at the end of her boots helped, giving her leverage to push her highly-toned muscles against.

Muscles that had not only been trained by the Marine Corps Outcast Training Program on Ganymede, but also by the Yakuza, and augmented by doses of Serum 21, the biological ‘medicine’ that all of the Outcasts had been given.

TZRK! There was a spray of sparks as her blade came down on the raised metal arm of the first cyborg to strike at the cyborg’s face. It wasn’t enough. In any normal encounter—say, with an actual stars-damned human, Jezzy thought—it would have been enough of a severe injury to make the wearer fall to the floor, howling in agony.

As it was, her opponent just swung his heavy metal fist around, heedless of the half of his face that was hanging off.

Jezzy tried to duck, but the weightlessness made it difficult. All she could do was swim, leap, and glide—

Thump! The blow hit her on the side of the helmet, spinning her in mid-air to the opposite wall of the corridor she was trying to fight her way through and bouncing her head off the inside of her own armor.

Warning! Suit Impact Detected: Helmet, Left Side

Armor Plating Efficiency: -40%

“Eurgh…” Jezzy’s vision swam as she started to bob and float in the air. It was hard to see anything but stars. Even the warning notifications of her own suit appeared to be doubling.

Move. Move! MOVE! A desperate and angry part of her demanded her attention, and she opened her eyes just in time to see the half-faced cyborg raising his weapon arm to fire once again, straight at her chest.

Power Boot Controls: Activate Magnets 60%

Jezzy’s fingers twitched and in response, the tiny data-pads sewn into her inner mesh gloves indicated to her suit what commands she wanted to deliver to it. Power was shunted through the magnets at the soles and balls of her boot, surging them into life and slamming the acting field commander to the floor.

FZZZT! The purple-white bolt of fire shot inches from her helmet to buckle and burn the metal wall behind her.

Move! Attack!

Jezzy was already heeding her own advice, lashing out with her blade to hit the cyborg’s knee joint. There was a clang and a hiss of escaping steam as she must have ruptured some sort of hydraulic system, and the cyborg twisted on its hips, falling to the floor in front of her.

Power Boot Controls: Activate Magnets 10%

Jezzy was already kicking off the floor as she readjusted the magnets in her boots with whisper-quick finger movements. The combined effort of her legs and the sudden lighter weight of her body helped her to somersault over the falling cyborg in front of her as it shot into the wall space she had occupied.

“Urgh!” She kicked out at the second cyborg that was waiting for her, and one more behind that.

Her kick sent the second cyborg careening back into the third, buying her a heartbeat of time.

“Ach!” Pain ripped up her leg.

Warning! Suit Impact Detected: Right Power Boot

Armor Plating Efficiency: -100% COMPROMISED

The cyborg with half a face, instead of firing up at her as she had thought it would do, had instead swung around to grab her wounded ankle that had earlier been hit by one of the particle beams.

At the time, she had been lucky that the laser shot hadn’t melted a hole straight through her suit, but her luck ran out this time.

Hsssss!

Environmental Warning! Suit Pressure Compromised!

Pressure Loss: 2%

Oxygen Loss: 8%

It wasn’t just the loss of oxygen and the asphyxiation that Jezzy Wen was terrified of, it was the sudden freezing cold that penetrated her foot and felt like someone was attacking her with icicles.

I’ll get frostbite in minutes.

I’ll starve of oxygen in minutes.

My foot will freeze and shatter.

These dark thoughts raced through Jezzy’s head in the time it took for her to lunge down with the blade still in her hand at the almost-prone cyborg.

It was a reaction, and an angry one at that. She couldn’t afford to take her eyes off the cyborgs behind her, but what choice did she have? It was a direct blow, under the cyborg’s chin and straight through the neck to its spine.

TZRK! The cyborg juddered and went still, his hand slowly releasing her ankle as—

“LIEUTENANT!” boomed a voice over her suit communicator, and Jezzy had the sense to leap to one side as she spun in the air.

It was Karamov, holding one of his arms awkwardly and cradling a Jackhammer against his hip in the other. He looked injured, but he had managed to fight his way out of the entrance hall to come and rescue her.

Only it looked as though he might be the one who needed rescuing.

PHOOM! He fired the Jackhammer straight into the second cyborg, who had picked itself up and was trying to get a line of fire on Jezzy. The shell, of course, didn’t kill it, but it did separate panels of metal and send the cyborg spinning as it fired.

FZZZZZZZT! The purple-white light scored the walls and ceiling as the cyborg went down, and Jezzy was already lunging, ‘catching’ the falling cyborg with the tip of her blade and severing its spinal cord as they both crashed to the floor of the corridor and bounced.

Which just left the third cyborg, already turning to backhand Karamov with great ease and send him slumping against the wall.

Outcast ID: Corporal Karamov (Medical Specialist)

Health: DECEASED.

“NO!” Jezzy screamed as the warning indicator on her suit helmet flashed orange and red, before fading again to just a grayed-out nametag.

No. How could it be? How? It felt like she had been kicked in the gut. And the head. And everywhere else, repeatedly.

“Karamov…” Jezzy let herself float, unable to even send commands to her arms and legs to move, to duck, to do anything. Her entire right leg now felt like a block of ice, but in that moment, Jezzy couldn’t even care.

She had joined the Outcasts alongside Karamov. They had fought together, trained together, slept in the same room, been on the same missions. He had been the one assigned to the original Gold Squad just by pure luck of the draw, like Kol had as well. Through the last year and a half of training and missions, Jezzy had come to regard him as a friend, and even more so after the treachery of Kol, when she realized that Karamov’s quiet and sometimes taciturn demeanor actually hid a reservoir of kindness.

Which was why he made an excellent medical specialist, Jezzy knew. Karamov might not have been the most reckless of the Outcasts, and he might not have been the largest, or the quickest, or the toughest…

But he had been like an anchor in their group. A group that had been fractured and broken and set upon by forces and enemies and situations that were unbelievably stronger than they were.

Or so Jezzy might have thought, if she had looked at the cyborg warriors or the killer robots or the exploding ice mines and everything else that they had come up against.

The crazy thing was, that through all of that and as people had died all around us, Jezzy thought, Karamov had remained. He had survived. He had earned the right to wear the power armor of a full Marine.

“What have I done?” Jezzy let herself lower to the floor as the cyborg who had killed her friend turned to raise its particle-firing weapon arm straight at the Acting First Lieutenant Wen.

“Do it. I deserve it,” Jezzy spat the words into her helmet miserably. She had failed Gold Squad. She had failed Solomon.

“No. You DON’T!” a voice boomed, and even though Jezzy could hear the burn of particles that were volatile enough to burn through plate metal, she didn’t feel any different.

Am I dead? Is this what dying feels like? Which was odd, because one side of her body still hurt like all hell as it froze from the break in her boot. She looked up—

—to see Corporal Malady, the Marine who had been biochemically sealed inside his own full tactical suit and looked like a giant, rounded, walking man-tank. He had arrived, standing over Karamov’s body, and with one great metal arm had seized the cyborg’s firing arm and wrenched it up to the ceiling.

FZZZZZZZZT! The corridor was starting to fill with smoke and steam from the burning weapon.

Environmental Warning! Toxic Smoke!

The parts of her suit that still worked started to apply their air filtration units, as tiny fans woke up to drive the metal gases from the melting ceiling away from her and any chance of getting into her suit.

“What. Did. You. Do,” Malady was roaring in his almost-electronica modulated tones. Jezzy had never seen the big man angry, but now he was. His sleepy eyes were wide awake, still a myopic glassy-white but obviously glaring at the cyborg in front of him.

“To. My. Friend!” Malady held the cyborg’s firing arm up as it continued to burn the purple-white laser into the ceiling. He rammed his other giant metal fist into the cyborg’s head and, rather disgustingly, through it as well.

The line of laser light winked out in an instant, leaving just the ghostly, flickering shapes of Malady and the other bodies in the corridor, amidst the smoke of molten metal already congealing on Jezzy’s suit and the floor, the walls, anything it floated next to.

“Lieutenant Wen,” Malady intoned, as heavy and as serious as a dreadnaught. “Come quickly. The escape pod is waiting, and the Oregon hasn’t got long.”

“Karamov…” Jezzy was shaking her head as she rose, and gobbets of molten metal rained down around her from the ceiling. “His body. We’re taking it with us,” she said, seeing Malady nod and pick up the absurdly limp form of the Outcast Marine that Jezzy had called her friend and—

KERAAASH! The ceiling crumbled and fell in between them as the compromised inner bulkhead gave way and the floor above them suddenly depressurized…

20

Dead Men Walking

“Comman— Solomon?” the ambassador almost called him by his title, before blushing heavily. “What is it?” she hissed in alarm at Solomon’s sudden outburst.

“It’s nothing, uh…” Solomon was saying as the Helga general assistant sitting behind them—the one that had been so interested in talking to the imprimatur—turned his head at the lieutenant’s sudden outburst.

“You okay, buddy?” the man growled, eyes flickering between the imprimatur and him.

“Fine. All good,” Solomon was saying, leaning forward in his seat and wondering what they were going to do. What he was going to do.

We are on board a ship smuggling more of those cyborgs to Mars. Solomon knew that the very same companies who must have pressured Commander-in-Chief Hausman to accept the Martian iron shipment must also have used this trade as a smokescreen to supply very dangerous weapons to the Martian separatists.

But why? Does this mean that Hausman is on the same side as the First Martians? Solomon put his head in his hands and tried to think.

No. Hausman probably didn’t care at all about the Martians, whichever side of the independence debate they might be on.

But Hausman seemed to care about money, and he seemed to care about being the leader of humanity.

Either Taranis were going behind Hausman’s back to prolong the war—it’s good for business!—or Hausman himself knew that he was supplying very dangerous weapons to the Martians. And that meant that it was Hausman who was backing the war between the colonies and the Confederacy, because that meant that it kept his rival, General Asquew of the Rapid Response Fleet, plenty busy while Hausman secured his stranglehold over Earth.

Solomon looked across to Ambassador Ochrie, who was still regarding him with alarm, but he had no way of telling her what he had worked out here in public.

“Ah… Supervisor, sir?” Solomon raised a hand and leaned out to grab their data-screen-wielding supervisor at the far end of the line of seats.

“Yeah? What do you want?”

“Jump sickness, sir. Can I use the bathroom?” Solomon said, putting on his best sick and sickening voice, thinking that if at least he could get down there, maybe he would be able to see just what was in those crates. And if they were dormant cyborgs, he might be able to find some way of deactivating them…

Without any weapons? His own mind berated him.

Solomon gritted his teeth in frustration. How he wished that he had his power armor and the rest of his normal Outcast equipment with him right now. But he knew that he was a resourceful man, he would be able to find something down there in the hold to use as a weapon on dormant machine-things, surely.

If they stay dormant, that is… Solomon thought. On Proxa, they had mysteriously and suddenly been awakened to murderous action, without any apparent warning. Asquew was sure that it was the Ru’at directly, somehow coordinating the attacks of the cyborg mobs throughout Proxima with the Ru’at mothership as it appeared, just as suddenly and as mysteriously.

Which meant that they were all in danger, so long as those crates remained on board.

“Sir, I really gotta go…” Solomon said.

“I don’t believe it. Last time I short-hire from Luna 1 again!” the supervisor grumbled. “There’s sick-bags under your seat. Use them. We’re coming out of jump any minute, anyway…”

Grrrr! Solomon fought the urge to call their supervisor a name, but instead slumped back into his seat instead. He didn’t know how he was going to get down to Hold 3 now, or whether there was already a metal fist, punching out of the ruggedized plastic below—

WHAP!

Another wave of nausea and vertigo, and Solomon realized that they had arrived…somewhere. For a couple of seconds, him along with everyone else in the staff seats were blinking and trying to regain a sense of proportion. Their primate bodies were not used to bending time and space around them to hurtle through that dimensional ripple to the other side. It was a curious feature of jump sickness that it didn’t matter how far you went, or where you went. Even though there was no physical anomaly or radiation that could be detected on those traveling inside the fields, there was plenty of personal evidence every time you jumped that this was what you would get.

Psychosomatic, Solomon thought. That was what they said about jump sickness, and yet he was also looking at a room of groaning, moaning people as they undid their webbing belts and slowly started to stretch and crack their muscles and joints.

I have to move. Now. Solomon clicked open his webbing belt and was already standing up as Ochrie and Rhossily beside him made to join.

“There is something I have to do, and it could be dangerous, ma’am,” Solomon whispered to her under a pretense of adjusting his uniform.

“This whole trip has been dangerous, Lieutenant. Don’t forget what we saw happen to New York!” the ambassador whispered back.

How could I forget? Solomon rocked a little on his feet. He had seen a city burn. Or at least, a part of a city burn. Someone—Hausman, Solomon sneered inwardly— was willing to go to extreme lengths to get his way. He was willing to kill, and to kill in large numbers.

And after seeing New York burn, Solomon figured that the ambassador had a point. He nodded. “C’mon, we’re going.” The lieutenant, the ambassador, and the imprimatur turned and jogged for the nearest door back to the holds, as other assistants behind them were groaning and standing up, masking the noise of their running feet.

“What is this all about?” The ambassador was panting before they got to the end of the service corridor that led down to the three major holds of the Helga.

“Those crates down there. This whole shipment. It isn’t just about iron,” Solomon quickly explained as he skidded to a halt.

Ship-wide Announcement: Jump completed. All personnel to their stations and prepare for the transfer.

The ship’s speaker system blared with its automated voice, and Solomon growled his frustration. They were ahead of the others, but it would only be by a few minutes. How much damage could he cause in that time?

“What are you talking about, Lieutenant?” Ochrie pressed.

Solomon skidded to a halt at the door that led to the ladder down, his hand on the release lever. “This shipment. It’s the cyborgs. And it must mean that Taranis Industries is still manufacturing them. They’re going to send them to Mars, to fight Asquew, because Hausman is the one funding the colonial war.”

“But if those cyborgs get activated…” The Imprimatur of Proxima paled. She had seen what hell they had caused to her entire city.

“Precisely. The Ru’at will take them over, I’m sure of it,” Solomon said, throwing open the door and jumping down the ladder to the gantry below to see—

—a whole load of burst-open crates, and a line of cyborgs standing in front of their empty plastic wombs, gleaming under the Helga’s ship lights and standing stock still, as if they had been there all the time…

“Ah, Lieutenant Cready, please do come down and join us,” a voice surprised the lieutenant, and it was coming from a man standing at the entrance to the Hold 2 as the containment doors hissed and slid into the floor.

The man was thin, and what some might call ascetic. He wore a formal midnight blue and black business suit, over a white shirt and black tie. Old-fashioned, but impeccable. At his side stood four more cyborgs, two on each side.

And the man was dead.

“Ambassador Ochrie, my pleasure.” The dead man nodded with a wide but thin-lipped smile. “And Imprimatur Rhossily, lately of Proxima! What a pleasure it is to see you all here. I do have to say that your timing is impeccable!”

“You’re…you’re dead.” Solomon couldn’t get over the fact that he had seen this man die, shot through the heart by one of his own creations.

The man in the blue suit looked puzzled for a moment, making an elaborate show of patting the breast panels of his suit and checking for injuries.

“No, I am very much alive, Lieutenant Cready. Surprised to see me?” asked Augustus Tavin—the CEO of NeuroTech…who had died on Proxima.

Alien Legacy

Outcasts of Earth, Book 7

1

Dead Not Dead

“Surprised to see me?” the thin man said. He wore an old-fashioned but impeccable blue and black tailored suit, white shirt, and black tie. And why aren’t you dead? Solomon was indeed surprised to note.

“Tavin,” Solomon growled from where he stood on the upper gantry next to Ambassador Ochrie of Earth and Mariad Rhossily, the Imprimatur of Proxima. All three wore the same service suits of a ‘General Luna Assistant’—although their camouflage hadn’t helped when the dead man below had seen through their disguises instantly.

Dead. The man should be dead. Solomon’s thoughts raced. He had seen Augustus Tavin, the CEO of the multi-planetary corporation called NeuroTech, die.

One of your own cyborgs shot its particle beam weapon straight through your heart! Solomon remembered. That had been the starting shot of the Ru’at invasion of Proxima, and human space entirely. The cyborgs had ‘woken up’ and overthrown their previous programming as they seemingly fought for the alien menace.

“I’ll take that as a yes.” The dead man smiled, showing a flash of white teeth as he gestured for them to come down to the floor of the hold. But Solomon wasn’t moving an inch, as on either side of the walking dead man stood a line of the cyborg warriors, freshly delivered on the very same transport that Solomon and his companions had stowed away on.

I have been such a fool. Solomon gritted his teeth. He didn’t have his Jackhammer with him—like his Marine power suit, it had been taken from him by the smugglers of Luna because it would have given him away instantly.

But I can’t let Tavin win… Solomon cleared his throat. “I’ll come down, but my friends are staying right here.” Away from you, Solomon thought.

“Lieutenant, no!” Ochrie narrowed her eyes.

“Do you trust me, Ambassador?” Solomon muttered under his breath.

The ambassador nodded.

“Imprimatur?” Solomon looked at Rhossily, who nodded.

“You got us off of Proxima in one piece,” the colony leader said.

Only just, and there’s no guarantees that I can do the same again this time. Solomon took a deep breath before descending the ladder to face the dead man.

“How very noble of you, Lieutenant Cready,” Tavin said. “Of course, you know that I can order my cyborgs to shoot your two companions any time I choose?”

Solomon said nothing as he crossed the empty space of Hold 3 toward the bulkhead entrance to Hold 2. His eyes scanned the large metal boxes for anything he could use as a weapon.

But there was nothing.

Oh, fracksticks. He had learned a lot in his short career as an Outcast Marine on Jupiter’s moon of Ganymede, but when push came to shove, his instincts always returned to his much longer training on the streets of New Kowloon.

I’ve been in plenty of scrapes and tight corners, he reminded himself. I haven’t died yet. And if there was one thing he’d learned, it was that the best weapon you have is your mind.

“What do you want from me, Tavin?” Solomon asked as he walked slowly forward. Maybe I can get near enough to get a chokehold on him, he thought. Or if Tavin has a weapon, I could snatch it and hold him hostage.

The Outcast commander wondered whether the cyborgs would pause before they killed him if he had their supposed creator by the neck.

“You could shoot them, Tavin, but I’m guessing that’s all going to depend on whether they’ll obey your orders.” Solomon kept on walking forward. “You know what happened the last time we met.”

“That’s quite far enough.” All humor dropped from the CEO’s voice as he raised a hand. The cyborgs on either side of him did precisely the same movement. “We don’t want you getting it into your head to try something heroic now, do we?”

“Heaven forbid…” Solomon muttered. He was still about five meters away. Too far for a quick attack. And the cyborgs are going to be quicker than me, Solomon knew. He had seen them in action. Although the cybernetic half-human/half-machines might be slow to start, performing simple, straightforward attacks, their machine learning was, quite literally, out of this world. What might start as a simple attack would quickly escalate into a devastating blister of moves as the cyborgs’ internal logic analyzed their opponent’s fighting styles and reaction times.

No taking on six cyborgs on my own, without weapons, then.

Solomon had to come up with a different plan. “So, you survived, Tavin. Good for you.” He always had been a good talker. It was probably the only skill he had that was better than his skill at stealing things. “But you must see that there’s no need to get the ambassador and the imprimatur involved in this. Let them go, and we can talk about what happens next.”

“What happens next? Oh, my dear fellow. How very quaint of you to think that you can start negotiating with me. But you know the old adage: you always have to negotiate from a position of strength,” Tavin said.

“But you don’t need them,” Solomon growled. I was tasked with keeping them alive. They are my responsibility. “And what are you going to do with them when you have them? Killing the ambassador will only make the Confederacy come for you with everything they’ve got. They’ll forget about the Martian separatists. They’ll just come for you,” he promised, although he had absolutely no idea if any of it was true or not.

“And what of the imprimatur?” The dead man smiled bloodlessly.

“She’s not important to you. Whether you’re in league with the Ru’at or the Martians or neither or both, Imprimatur Rhossily is the leader of a conquered world. She has no leverage worth speaking of,” Solomon said evenly, wincing inwardly even as he said it. “And killing her won’t further any of your aims.”

“And how do you claim to know WHAT my aims are?” Tavin’s eyes flared in anger.

Bingo. Solomon kept his face still. I now know that he has a temper. The Marine wondered if he could make him act rashly—do something stupid—and give them an opportunity to escape.

“It must have really hurt when your own robots turned against you, Tavin. What was it? Faulty wiring?” Solomon eyed the distance between them. It wasn’t growing any shorter.

The man’s jaw clenched, and Solomon saw his hands twitch. Signs of frustration. He thought he was starting to get to the man, until Augustus Tavin opened his mouth next.

“While I do appreciate your concern, Lieutenant Cready, it really is starting to annoy me,” the dead man said.

Solomon blinked in confusion.

“I did not get shot on Proxima,” the dead man said somewhat paradoxically.

“I don’t understand…” Solomon started to say.

“Lieutenant!” It was Ochrie, suddenly calling out from above them. “I don’t see how there can be any use in negotiating with a murderer. What do you want with us, Tavin?” The ambassador leaned forward on the gantry railings.

“Don’t you think that the lieutenant has a right to know?” The man who was and was not Augustus Tavin started to smile.

“Right to know what, exactly?” said Solomon.

“State your business, Tavin! None of us have any more time for games,” Ochrie said acerbically.

“But it hasn’t been me playing those games, has it, Ambassador?” the CEO who might have died on Proxima purred. “It’s probably time that you told the good officer here what the Confederacy has been playing at, don’t you think?”

“Lieutenant, come away from there. Now,” Ochrie said.

What? Solomon looked up at the bureaucrat. There was something that she didn’t want him to know. Something that Tavin clearly did know.

“I don’t think I can, ma’am.” Solomon looked at the six cyborgs, still with their weapon hands raised and pointing out at them.

“He was always supposed to be a clever one, wasn’t he?” Tavin said as there was the sound of hissing from behind him.

We’ve already docked with the Martian transporter, Solomon realized. That was how this Tavin-who-was-not-Tavin had come on board, right?

Wrong, Solomon realized as the external airlock doors to Hold 1 started to open to the stocked belly of the Martian transporter.

Clank. Clank. Clank. And a new line of cyborgs.

Each one had their faces almost entirely contained by the silver chrome of their kind. But their essential human features—their eyes, noses, and mouths—were all still biological.

And all looked exactly like Solomon Cready.

2

Float

Jezzy floated, and her body grew cold.

Jezebel Wen, Acting Field Commander of the Outcast Marines and trained combat specialist, did not know how long she had hung in the vacuum of space, but it couldn’t have been long.

If it had, she would have frozen to death and/or asphyxiated from the miniscule loss of pressure in her boot. The cyborg that she had killed had been strong, and the crushing grip of its servo-assisted metal hand had been enough to cause a tiny metal fracture in her combat boot. Her foot had already been hit by a glancing shot from one of the dead cyborg’s particle-beam weapons, and it was this damage that had allowed the fracture to spread.

“Suit, respond!” the second lieutenant hissed, although her lips didn’t want to move.

The automatic internal display of her power suit—the sort which should scroll holographic information over the inside of her helmet—was silent. It was like being inside a metal coffin, she thought.

My suit’s inactive. The realization acted faster on Jezzy’s pained and flagging consciousness than even the suit’s auto-stimulants would have. But her suit couldn’t deliver their life-saving payload anymore. Her power suit was dark.

But outside of Jezzy wasn’t.

There was a flash of electric-blue light, and Jezzy saw sparks erupt across the half-collapsed corridor that she, Karamov, and Malady had been fighting in.

Karamov. Jezzy felt the savage kick of grief to her chest. Karamov is dead.

Karamov—the somewhat taciturn, quiet, and serious Outcast member of Gold Squad who had become a medical specialist. He had been with them since the beginning—since they had all first arrived on the Marine Corps training facility on Ganymede. Even though he hadn’t chosen to be in Gold Squad, he had been assigned to the squad that seemed to get into all the worst fights, and Karamov had never complained. Not ever, Jezzy thought. Not once.

And now he is dead. And it is all my fault.

It was then, at her darkest moment, that Jezzy considered the unthinkable. Maybe she should just float here, watching the glitching sparks of the open panels in the corridor. Flash! Another escape of brilliance into the small space, before being plunged into darkness again.

It was kind of peaceful here, Jezzy thought. Perhaps it was fitting that the acting field commander, with a duty to protect her squad and her company, went down with the ship that she served on. Perhaps, she thought, it would be fitting that someone like her—an ex-Yakuza killer—should die here in the dark, if all of her skills and training couldn’t even have saved her friend.

But who will be the one to tell Solomon the news? Jezzy thought. She was a creature of honor, after all. Even with all the killing she had taken part in, the Yakuza still prided themselves on being honorable, even if it was a twisted sense of honor.

Solomon has the right to hear about Karamov’s death—and my failure—from my own lips, Jezzy realized.

The Oregon, a Marine Corps battleship, had been attacked by a wave of cyborgs, dispatched by the waiting Ru’at jump-ships. Jezzy had seen the cyborgs—who had no need for oxygen or water or any sort of life support that she knew of—flying through the debris field outside Pluto to latch onto the Oregon like locusts.

Once there, they must have used their particle-beam hands to burn holes straight into the Oregon, thus causing the massive decompression event that had occurred over several floors. Which was why the corridor she was currently in was weightless.

How much of the Oregon’s crew survived? Jezzy thought in her misery. Had Corporal Malady gone, too?

The Outcast Marine who wore the monumental full tactical carapace had been trying to help her, Jezzy remembered. He had joined her in her fight—too late to save poor Karamov, of course—but he had killed one of the cyborgs before the ceiling had crumpled.

Was Malady still there? Jezzy looked at the tangled mess of metal and wire that flashed into brilliance with the sparks. Nothing could survive that, surely? But Malady was big. Very big. He might have got trapped on the other side…

It was around about this very time that Jezzy realized she hadn’t died yet. She always knew that she wasn’t dead, of course, but what was different was that she hadn’t been expecting to last this long.

The hole in my combat boot should have sucked all the oxygen out of my suit by now, Jezzy knew. She had done basic astro-medical training as a part of her Outcast training. Nowhere near as advanced as poor Karamov had gotten, of course, but enough.

And the loss of pressure between the vacuum of this corridor and the internals of her suit would have expelled all the moisture in her body as she froze to death.

But it hadn’t.

Why am I still alive? Jezzy puzzled, before changing it to: How am I still alive?

She breathed in small sips and tried to remain calm. The air smelled and tasted stale, but she didn’t have any compulsion to cough or retch or struggle for more air.

Check 1. I have some oxygen, at least, she told herself. She had to be running on the spare oxygen tubes that cycled their way through her power armor. Even if the armor itself had shorted out, the suit’s reserve tank valves should still be open and feeding into the main oxygen supply. What would that give her? An hour? Two?

Again, Jezzy cursed the fact that she had succumbed to unconsciousness when the corridor had crumpled. Whatever section of wall or ceiling or floor had hit her must have been powerful enough to knock out some vital connection in her suit. And she didn’t know how long she had been in here, alone. Jezebel Wen had no idea if her oxygen would last another sixty minutes, or just another two.

Check 2. My foot…

That was the other puzzler. Why hadn’t she frozen to death, if she had a hole in her boot? Jezzy leaned the top half of her body forward, allowing herself to flip forward slowly. Mustn’t raise the heartrate, she told herself. The anxiety of being trapped in a slowly fragmenting battleship with an alien menace the likes of which they had never seen before was enough to raise it far enough.

But a higher heartrate means quicker respiration, she knew. Which meant less oxygen.

Something banged against her outstretched hands, and she moved the fingers of her power gauntlets fitfully. It was a smooth surface. It clanked when she touched it, so it was probably a wall or the ceiling—if those terms even meant anything anymore to the crumbling hulk of the Oregon.

She waited, tried to breathe deep.

Flash! Then it happened. The sparks that she had been waiting for erupted once again from the broken-open bit of wall panel, illuminating the space where she was and the ruin of her combat boot.

The corridor had become a tiny oval with jagged messes of metal at either end, tapered and squeezed around the nearest bulkheads. She had been saved by the impact-resistant design of the Oregon, as it had created a small pocket of safe corridor between the two crumple-zones.

And her eyes flashed to her foot in front of her to see—

One entire side of her boot was blackened with soot, and the metal ‘sheaths’ had crumpled and collapsed against each other where the dying cyborg had tried to tear her foot off. But some of the crushed plates must have formed a seal with her own blood and the slagged beads of rubber insulation, melted by the cyborg’s particle-beam hand. Together, they must have formed a plug that had sealed the fracture.

But for how long?

The sparks winked out, and Jezzy was plunged into darkness once more. But this time, she knew that she wasn’t going to freeze to death or depressurize any time soon.

Well, unless of course the blood dries or the rubber cracks… Jezzy thought, balletically spinning herself head over heels until she was approximately at the place where she thought the sparks were coming from.

Come on, come on, come on… She scrabbled around on the wall until she found it. The sharpened jag of metal and, on the other side of it, a torturous mass of cables, wires, and strange, bulbous units or crystalline tubes…

If there are sparks coming from this thing, Jezzy knew, then it means that the Oregon has power.

Her hands moved over the board, desperately trying to remember any scrap of her classes on Ganymede. They had covered a whole variety of things in their lessons—from military history to basic starship design and layout. She was sure that they had covered astro-mechanics.

If those blocky units are transistors, then that must mean that a power board can’t be too far away… Jezzy rummaged around in the guts of the battleship until she hit something firm, but with a slight give and covered in fine nodules.

Bingo!

Now, all she had to do was to find the damaged circuit. In the dark. Without any suit scanners to read heat, electromagnetics, or anything else.

Flash!

Sparks cascaded over Jezzy’s shoulder, blinding her momentarily with their brilliance. But she moved quickly, bringing up her damaged foot and allowing it to catch the falling sparks along the site of the damage.

It didn’t hurt at first, as the sparks harmlessly discharged themselves over the external framework of Jezzy’s suit. But then one of the pieces of molten light hit exactly where Jezzy had wanted it to—the rubber, blood, and metal spot of ruin, melting the softer layers and creating a more secure seal.

FZZZZT! It also happened to feel like stabbing her foot with a glowing hot poker.

She screamed into the dark.

3

Brother of my Brother

The cyborgs wore Solomon Cready’s face. All twenty of them, and they were all marching straight into the hold of the Helga.

“Hold it right there!” Solomon could hear a voice shouting from one of the other gantries that hung inside the other holds of the Helga. The Outcast commander recognized it as the shouting, bullying voice of the overseer of the general workers. The very same work team that he, the ambassador, and Rhossily were pretending to be a part of.

The cyborgs did not halt until they were standing well inside of Hold 1.

“I said hold it!” The overseer was either used to seeing cyborgs, Solomon thought, or he was just way too angry to care what had just seized control of his ship. Just the fact that someone had dared to do so without his permission.

“Who are you? Where’s that Martian iron that we’re supposed to pick up?” Solomon could hear the overseer was shouting down at them.

“Here is your Martian iron, Overseer,” said a voice that Solomon recognized, as, over the shoulders of the not-Tavin and his cyborgs, there stepped the obvious ringleader of the new arrivals.

Specialist Kol, lately of the Outcast Confederate Marines.

“Kol!” Solomon couldn’t help himself from bursting out as soon as he saw the young man.

Kol had been in Gold Squad from the very beginning. Back when they had still been lowly adjunct-Marines, and a part of the most hated squad in all the Outcast Company.

Solomon remembered him as eager, earnest, and a little too slight to be a Marine, but then again, all the Outcasts had started out as criminals, hadn’t they? He had been sharp, quick-witted, and friendly.

And he had betrayed them all to the Chosen of Mars—the separatists who had attempted to seize the Red Planet from the Confederacy.

“Kol, you son of a—” Solomon pushed forward and almost made it all the way to Tavin before the dead-not-dead man’s cyborgs closed ranks on him.

“Hey! Get off!” Solomon saw the flash of their silver arms and felt hands gripping him as strong as vices, pressing through the thin material of his cheap service suit and exerting more and more pressure… So much so that he swore he could feel them impacting the muscle beneath. Just when he was sure that the bones in his upper arms were about to snap under the cyborg’s ministrations, he cried out—

“Okay! Okay, I get the idea. Call your dogs off!” Solomon gasped at the man he knew as Tavin.

“That’s far enough.” The man nodded and although the cyborgs didn’t let go their various holds on the lieutenant, they did stop exerting any more pressure. Solomon was still in agony, though.

I really wish that I had my power suit on about now, he thought, and not for the first time. Not only would its strengthened steel plates and armor provide much more protection against the cyborg’s strength, but it would also, automatically, shoot him full of painkillers or stimulants whenever he needed.

Like now.

“Lieutenant?” said Kol at the other end of the hold.

“Just what is the meaning of this? You know this man, Assistant?” the overseer was shouting loudly in alarm. “And what are you doing to one of my staff, whoever the hell you are, anyway?!” The overseer had spotted what was going on in Hold 3, clearly, with Solomon seized by a gaggle of cyborgs and pushed to his knees in front of the man who wasn’t dead.

“Kol? Do you want to do the honors?” Tavin said.

“Absolutely,” the ex-Outcast said loudly, stepping forward.

“I see that you ditched your uniform, Kol. Feel better, do you?” Solomon hissed through gritted teeth.

“Explain yourselves, now, or I’m calling the general!” the overseer started to say.

“Your Martian iron is here, in the form of these cyborgs, Overseer,” Kol called out. “Your shipment will go ahead as planned. You are to return these to the Luna Station and General Hausman.”

That had been the plan all along… Solomon realized what he had just heard. General Hausman, Protector of Earth, must have been in league with the mega-corporations!

Solomon cursed himself for being so stupid. Someone had been supplying the Martian separatists with Marine Corps hardware, hadn’t they?

Hausman must have started the war so that he could seize control while Asquew and the Rapid Response Fleet were out of the way!

“These three are coming with us,” said Tavin, gesturing to Solomon, the ambassador, and the imprimatur.

“Over my dead body.” Solomon hissed.

The man who wore Augustus Tavin’s face burst out laughing. “Well, haven’t you worked it out yet, Lieutenant?” He took a step closer to the knot of cyborgs restraining the Marine. “There’s plenty more where you came from.” He nodded to Kol’s shipment of twenty cyborgs that all bore Solomon’s face.

“Serum 21,” Solomon growled. All those medical experiments that the Outcasts had been subjected to by Doctor Palinov on Ganymede. They must have…cloned him? Was that what the Outcast program was really all about? Creating a clone army? Were Doctor Palinov and Warden Coates working with Hausman and the mega-corporations too? How deep did this conspiracy go?

“Maybe there was a defect in this one’s upbringing,” the Tavin who was not Tavin said speculatively as he eyed the growling Lieutenant Cready. “And here I was told that he was the smartest of the lot. Look for yourself …” He nodded to the empty packing crates that had been on board the Helga. Seven of them. Six for the cyborgs, and one for…

“You?” Solomon blinked.

“Ah, comprehension dawns,” Tavin said as Kol’s shipment of cyborgs clanked into the hold and lined up by the back wall in perfect unison.

“I am like you, Lieutenant Cready. More like you than you would care to admit. We two are brothers, of a kind…”

“Tavin!” Ambassador Ochrie called out in alarm.

“I think the man deserves to know, don’t you, Ambassador?” Tavin nodded, and two of the cyborgs broke free from holding Solomon down to point their particle-beam arms up at the two women. “It is time for you to come down now. Either that or die.”

“Solomon!” Imprimatur Rhossily gasped in fear, but it was no use. They couldn’t run, and they couldn’t hide. After a few muttered words, Ochrie and Rhossily started the slow climb down the ladder to join the lieutenant and the others.

They had been beaten. They had been captured.

“Lieutenant Solomon Cready,” Tavin rolled the name off his tongue. “It’s a good name. But it wasn’t the one that either you or I were given at birth. I was given a number. Just like you were.”

“What do you know about my life?” Solomon growled. “I don’t know what’s happening here, or why those cyborgs are wearing my face, but I am nothing like you!”

“Really?” Tavin chuckled to himself. “Tell me, Solomon Cready… What do you know of your life, really? Do you remember your childhood? Do you know why the Confederate government had been tracking you ever since you were a child?” Tavin’s voice dropped low.

“Do you know why you killed your best friend, Matthias Sozer?”

4

Jump Start

“Fracking hell!” Jezzy gasped at the pain radiating from her boot. The entire righthand side of her body no longer felt freezing cold, but that was little consolation given the fact that it now pulsed with the agony of scorched flesh. Jezzy wondered if she had managed to melt her boot to her foot.

At least… Even her thoughts gasped. …it’s a seal. She wouldn’t lose any more oxygen or die from depressurization any time soon.

But she still hung in the dark of the dead spaceship and waited for the next illumination of sparks from the power board she had found.

FZZZTT! When it next came, Jezzy was prepared, shielding her visor so that the she could see the control board quickly—follow the frayed wires to their connectors and scan the board for the thick black coil, striped with red.

Gotcha!

It was the main power input to this piece of electronics. She seized it as the corridor went dark again, and pulled. For a moment, it stayed stubbornly in place, and then—

FZZT! She was showered with more sparks, harmlessly dissipating across the surface of her suit. But she had the black length of cable in hand as she fumbled at her utility belt. The metal fingers of her glove barely transmitted the pressures to her internal mesh gloves, but she found the access port she was looking for.

To the power suit’s energy hookup.

“I hope this is going to work…”

Jezzy twisted in the zero-G environment to get into a better position and wished that she had paid much more attention in her technical study lessons.

Don’t you need a positive and a negative? She hesitated. Wasn’t that how you jump-started an engine?

But power suits weren’t exactly engines, were they? She just had to hope that fighting with the cyborgs had only knocked a connection loose, or that her suit’s power had run down in the time that she had been floating here, unconscious.

She jammed the live electrical cable into the access port and screamed.

FZZZZT!

Soothing, soft green and orange lights flared in the darkness, illuminating the still, unconscious form of Jezebel Wen.

Emergency Reboot System Initializing…

The glowing green words flashed, and a percentage bar shot up from empty to full.

POWER ARMOR… Active.

USER ID: 2LT Wen

COMPANY: Outcast, Rapid Response Fleet.

SQUAD IDENTIFIER: Gold.

SQUAD TELEMETRIES… Active.

Bio-Signatures: COMPROMISED

Atmospheric Seals: COMPROMISED

Chemical, Biological, Radiological Sensors: ACTIVE

Oxygen Tanks: MINIMAL (1:33:18)

Oxygen Recycle System: COMPROMISED

The lights blipped and scrolled over Jezzy’s sleeping face as the power suit, jump-started by the Oregon, tried to correct the vast amounts of damage that both it and its occupier had sustained.

Emergency Stimulant Injector Deployed…

0.3micro grams Anti-inflammatory Deployed…

Painkiller Injector Deployed…

Dotted around her body, nestled against the undermesh, were the suit’s various injector modules. Working in tandem, they started firing in sequence, selecting the appropriate medicines stored inside the armor’s carapace and delivering them in quick jabs.

Environmental Suit Controls: ACTIVE

The underlit lights of her helmet’s cowl flared to life, at the same time as Jezzy’s heart started pumping furiously and her brain chemicals surged.

Jezzy gasped and coughed, feeling at once very, very exhausted and filled with an electric sort of energy. She could no longer feel the pain emanating from her foot, nor the various scrapes and knocks that she had sustained during her fight. The last of her suit’s medicines had seen to that.

“It worked!” She was astonished, but also very grateful. She had managed to jump-start her suit, and now she watched as its holographic readouts and controls flowed over the inside of her helmet.

“The oxygen recycler isn’t working…” she muttered. That meant that her suit could not attempt to recapture and convert her breath, nor any spare molecules from the surrounding space to siphon for oxygen.

Meaning that I only have what is left in the tanks… An hour and a half. Not enough to get to Pluto from here, she knew, but enough to get out of this corridor.

Now that she could see, Jezzy performed a proper study of the space she was trapped in. Crumbled, twisted, and burnt metal at both ends of the corridor. I might be able to twist that out of the way, with help from the power armor, she thought. These suits weren’t as impressive as full tacticals, but they still had a wide range of useful features—such as the servo-assisted gloves, arms, and back plates that meant she was now many times stronger than she had been as a biological human.

There were the chrome body parts of at least one of the cyborgs, twisting out of the wreckage. Jezzy smiled grimly at her own handiwork, before—

“Aha! Now we’re talking!” It was her Jackhammer rifle, snagged on one of the bits of twisted girder.

Jezzy swam over to snatch the rifle up quickly.

Jackhammer Personal Rifle…

Weapon: OPERATIONAL

Ammo: 7 Bullets

“Damnit!” She read the available ammo left in the rifle, updated on her suit commands as soon as she picked it up. Seven bullets wouldn’t be enough if she had to fight her way past any more of those cyborg things. But it’s better than a kick in the teeth, she had to agree with herself.

But first, before she did anything else, Jezzy opened her suit telemetries and gestured for a broadcast.

COMPANY-WIDE BROADCAST;

SENDER: Second Lieutenant Jezebel Wen, Acting Field Commander, Outcast, Rapid Response Fleet

“Hello? Call in! This is Second Lieutenant Wen… I am still on board the Marine Corps battleship Oregon and seeking a way out. I do not know how much of the Oregon is operational, or even still intact—or how many of my company remain alive. Respond with full situation report if you receive this, over and out.”

The silence that met her broadcast was deafening.

5

Hospitality

“Lieutenant? Solomon?” said Mariad Rhossily, looking at the man with fear in her large, brown eyes.

She has a right to be afraid, Solomon thought. I know what I did.

“Come on now, this isn’t one of your reception parties, Imprimatur,” the Tavin-clone was saying as he led the three humans, flanked with his six cyborgs, through the hold of the Helga and into the waiting dock of the Martian transport ship.

The crew of the Helga, including the overseer, watched in stunned silence as the changeover was made. Six cyborgs delivered with the clone-Tavin for twenty Martian-built ones, destined for Luna Station and Commander-in-Chief Hausman’s service.

The Martian transporter was much smaller than the Marine Corps ones that Solomon was used to. Its hold was a fraction of the size, and he could clearly see the flight deck on the level above them, separated by a glass wall.

“Over there, Lieutenant,” sneered Kol, directing them to the side of the hold where the cyborgs pushed them into chairs to be strapped in forcefully.

“It must be strange taking orders from me, huh?” said the man who had been the youngest of the Gold Squad Marines.

Solomon didn’t say anything. His mind was on other things. Like Matty Sozer.

“C’mon, Lieutenant, you haven’t got anything to say? Cat got your tongue?” Kol teased as the bulkhead doors connecting them to the Helga hissed shut and the ships prepared to separate.

“Leave him alone,” Rhossily snapped, earning a mocking chuckle from the ex-Marine.

“Oh, trust me, lady, he’ll be alright. It is, after all, what he was designed to be. Ain’t that right, Lieutenant? Always end up on top, right? Always get back on your feet?”

“Kol.” The word of rebuke came, surprisingly, not from Solomon or any of the Confederates at all, but instead from the lips of the clone-Tavin. “We haven’t got time for revenge or games. Whatever argument you have with the lieutenant is immaterial now.” The clone turned to look up at the flight deck.

“The Shield of Aries is ready to disembark! Please move to your designated areas,” the internal ship’s systems said.

But Solomon, through the fog of his confusion, got the sense that Tavin wasn’t referring to just the fact that they were about to move toward the Red Planet. The clone-Tavin, in fact, had sounded awed.

Or maybe that is what being asleep inside a box will do to you, Solomon snarled internally. He wondered if he had ever done the same—or not him exactly, but his body, this flesh that was at the same time his and not-his.

Am I a clone, as this new Tavin states?

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the clone-Tavin announced. “We will shortly be traveling to the Red Planet.”

“The Red Planet is besieged by the Rapid Response Fleet. You won’t even make it through to the surface!” Ochrie spat angrily.

“Oh well.” Tavin shrugged. “By now, Brigadier General Asquew should be either dead or flown.” He tapped his own forehead, as if he had access to all the secrets and information of the universe locked in there.

“And you lucky people are going to be the first Confederates to see what has become of Mars!” The clone-Tavin once again took on the awed, grandiose timbre. “You will be fortunate enough to witness the birth of a new colony on Mars. A Ru’at colony!”

The Shield of Aries jumped, and Solomon and the rest felt the familiar lurch of nausea and vertigo that came with every use of the Barr-Hawking field.

But while the other hostages thought that the jump-sickness only added to their misery, for Solomon the feeling was quite the reverse at that moment. He relished the waves of sick headaches that pounded at him. He welcomed the primal certainty that he shouldn’t be here and shouldn’t be doing this.

Jump-sickness was one of the unintended side effects of using a Barr-Hawking field. The field itself created a small bow-wave in spacetime in front of the craft, folding impossibly long stretches of space together so that you could travel enormous distances, whilst stretching the same spacetime out behind you. It was one of the peculiarities of human biology that it created a sense of cosmic wrongness.

This wrongness was a feeling that Solomon threw himself into, because it reminded him that he had to be, indeed, at some level, human.

No matter what the clone-Tavin said… Solomon glared at the floor of the Shield. A few paces in front of him was the form of Kol, standing with his gun leveled at them. But the side effect of the jump-sickness gave Solomon minute glitches of perception. His brain simultaneously tried to tell him that Kol was very far, far away, and yet still just a few paces ahead of him.

Jumping, the trained Marine Corps soldier knew, was a nightmare for operational logistics. Your computers and ship and navigation might all be working perfectly, but your crew would all be bleary-eyed and sick, and trying to work out just where they should be and what was real or not.

Which was why Solomon chose that moment to look over to the impossibly-close and must-be-far-away Ambassador Ochrie beside him and asked, “Is it true?”

Ochrie raised her head—which seemed to take forever in the strange perceptions of the Barr-Hawking field—and the look on her face told Solomon everything that he needed to know.

It was. He wasn’t him. He was a clone.

BWAARRRRM!

“Proximity warning! Proximity warning!”

The Shield dropped from the top of the fold in spacetime and immediately all the alarms in the ship went off.

“What is it? What’s going on!?” Kol was nervous, already moving to the ladder up the flight deck.

“Stay here with our guests,” clone-Tavin snapped, taking his place on the ladder and walking through the automatic doors.

Solomon could see through the glass wall that separated the flight deck from them, and he could tell that something was up. A crew of four Martians looked worried, jumping up to race to different command units, hitting controls and shouting at each other.

Unknown to the hostages inside the ship, the view outside the Shield was horrendous. The small Martian transporter—with its own Barr-Hawking generator wheel—had blazed into existence inside its own corona of light. just as it should have done—

—and straight into a warzone.

“We’re too early!” Kol had run to one of the portholes to peer outside. “This stage was supposed to be completed by now!”

“What stage?” Solomon heard Ochrie demand.

Kol didn’t take his eyes from whatever was happening outside, but his voice carried clearly. “The arrival of the Ru’at.”

Outside the Shield of Aries, there was a minefield of ship parts and fast-thrown debris, set against the backdrop of the mighty Red Planet. Mars was once again true to its reputation as it spilled blood on the surface and in space. Again.

The Shield was little more than a disk-shaped craft, with the wheel of its Barr-Hawking particle drive still spinning like mad at the fatter end. In front of it, debris—some bits as large as the transporter itself—spun and careened through space.

The debris quite clearly belonged to what was left of the Rapid Response Fleet, under General Asquew. She had been attempting to blockade the Red Planet, leading to a land invasion of key infrastructure points and habitat-domes. That meant that the near-orbit around Mars was filled with Confederate Marine Corps battleships, frigates, destroyers, and smaller attack craft.

Or it should have been, anyway. All that was left between the Shield and Mars was a handful of the heavy-bellied, proud-prowed battleships still firing their missiles and torpedoes into the darkness at the Ru’at jump-ships.

The Ru’at jump-ships were fat cylinders just a little bigger than the Shield itself, with three concentric rotating rings around their tubular bodies, which spun in a blur of light. These rotating rings looked a little like the rings of the Barr-Hawking ships, but any human looking at them would see they had something to do with the general propulsion, and not just the ability to cross the lightspeed barrier.

But the Ru’at jump-ships were attacking the remaining knot of Martian defenders. They flickered through the vacuum of space, blurring so that they looked to be traveling at near lightspeed already, before stopping stock still and firing a singular purple-blue beam from their nosecones at the Confederate vessels.

These particle beams were unlike anything that the Confederate ships had faced, and everywhere they hit scored a line across a Marine Corps ship, whole floors depressurizing and rupturing, spilling fire, plasma, bodies, and equipment into the cold grave of space.

The Rapid Response Fleet was getting wiped out, but the remaining ships were not retreating.

“BWAAARM! Brace for impact!” the Shield’s automated voice declared, a moment before the ship suddenly juddered and violently turned on its side, throwing Kol against the wall.

“Urgh!” The traitor flopped, clutching his forehead that was now blossoming with blood as sparks showered from one of the wall units.

“We’re being targeted!” Solomon and the other hostages could hear the desperate calls from the flight deck. Someone must have left the open channel running in the panic.

“What is it? Who’s attacking us?” Kol was shouting, struggling to his feet as he attempted to make it to the ladder, but Solomon could see that the knock on his head was bad. Not bad enough to kill him—more’s the pity, the Gold Squad Commander thought—but bad enough to make him woozy.

“You can’t fly this thing, Kol,” Solomon snapped. “You know it. And it looks like your Martian pilots aren’t worth the sand they came from.” The lieutenant had a plan, but the chances of it working were next to nothing. “Let me out. I’ll fly this bird to safety.”

“Hngh-ah…what?” Kol had slouched onto his knees, holding his head as he tried to stem the bleeding.

Bet you wished you’d made it to full Marine and your power suit now, huh? Solomon couldn’t resist the rather uncharitable thought.

“Tavin!” Solomon shouted, hoping that if the flight deck had left their open channel on, then they would also have left their receiver open. It worked, as the glass doors above them hissed open and there, clutching at the frames, was the clone-Tavin, looking paler than usual.

“Evasive Action!” the speakers shouted, and clone-Tavin was thrown to one side as the Shield lurched once more—but not fast enough.

FZZZARRK! There was a sudden explosion from the rear of the Shield of Aries, and the rear half of the hold—just a few meters from where the hostages and cyborgs sat—crumpled inwards, spilling sparks and wires.

“Tavin! Another one of whatever those were, and we’ll be looking straight into space,” Solomon shouted. “You know I was trained by the best Marine program. Let me fly!”

But clone-Tavin did not respond from above them. Solomon wondered if the Shield’s sudden swerve and attempt to get away from whatever had hit them had injured the man.

Hopefully, Solomon thought.

“BWAARRM! Aft Hull compromised! Power lost to rear-rockets 3 and 4!” the computer voice said once again, and the ship lurched and swung as it tried to compensate.

“I can fly. I was trained for combat missions, and I don’t want to die up here!” Solomon shouted at the open flight deck doors as the hostages were shaken in their seats.

“You’re a pilot?” a new voice said over Kol’s groaning. It was one of the Martian pilots, looking small and scared in her rustred encounter suit as she clutched the open doorframe. She had a simple command visor pushed back over her brow and had soot and dust down one side of her face.

There was smoke coming from the open doorway above the woman’s head, the lieutenant saw. Then it’s a lot worse than even I thought. Whatever had struck the Shield must have also shorted some of the ship’s command circuits, he thought. That was one of the only ways that you’d get a fire on a flight deck, short of a direct hit.

“I can fly,” Solomon said. He wasn’t technically a pilot. That would have been, back in the Marine Corps anyway, the role of the technical specialists, trained in all aspects of military machines from their upkeep to their use.

Which is what Kol was before he defected. Solomon looked again at the injured man, now scrabbling at the wall-mounted medical module for help. Nope. Kol would have made the better pilot, but from the look on the face of the Martian woman above them, even she could see that her reserve pilot was in a bad way.

“I’m releasing him!” the pilot shouted back into the flight deck as she turned to scrabble at one of the wall consoles, hands hitting buttons and flicking through holographic controls. If there was any argument from the crew of the Shield, then Solomon couldn’t make it out over the sounds of the alarms.

“Lieutenant! You cannot help these people. They’re trying to bring down the Confederacy!” Ochrie was saying—slightly hysterically, in Solomon’s opinion.

“The Confederacy is already brought down, lady!” Solomon returned. His nerves were frayed with the recent revelation, and his temper was up. But even in the middle of his confusion and anger at being lied to his whole life, there was an icy center to his thoughts. “Trust me, Ambassador. I’m going to get us out of here.”

“And fight off the Ru’at all on your own?” Ochrie said imperiously.

“If I have to,” he replied, seconds before there was click and the harness that had been holding his arms and waist snapped open, released by the Martian woman above.

“Get that traitor’s gun!” Ochrie hissed as soon as Solomon was free, but the lieutenant had barely jumped out of his chair before a silver-chrome hand had grabbed his shoulder and clamped down in a vice-like grip.

“Ach! Really!?” Solomon snarled up at the flight deck as the cyborg that had moved quickly to seize him continued to stare impassively forward.

“You can fly. But don’t think for a minute that I trust you,” said the rising form of clone-Tavin, shaking his head and staggering. “You’re going to have a gun to your head the whole time, and if I suspect for a second that you’re trying to escape, I’ll tell the cyborgs to blow a hole through your friends down there!” he said angrily, batting at the Martian woman to return to her seat.

The Shield tossed and turned as it tried to avoid the debris of destroyed battleships, as well as the attacks by whomever was trying to take them out.

“BWAAAARM! Coolant system overheating! Mandatory venting procedure activated!” the computer said, and the ship lights flickered, the temperature dropping noticeably.

But that temperature is going to rise soon, Solomon knew as the cyborg marched him to the ladder. One of the many misnomers about spacecraft was that, without all these environmental controls, they would be freezing cargo boxes.

Which is only partly true, Solomon thought as he climbed quickly up to the level of the flight deck. The cyborg clanked behind him.

In truth, a spacecraft had to endure conditions similar to that of the harshest deserts on Earth. If you were traveling through a vacuum, far enough from the sun for it to just be another twinkling blip in the sky, then the spacecraft had to be kept heated. But as soon as you flew as near to a star as any of the inner planets of the solar system, then the unshielded radiation could fry flesh in minutes.

Which is why every ship needs a transvector coolant system, Solomon knew. It kept the inner hull panels cool, reducing heat transmission to the inside of the craft, or it could be turned into a heating system, warming up the inner hull panels by a few degrees.

And if that system was broken…it meant that the tin box they were flying in was at the mercy of solar winds and reflected radiation from the Red Planet below.

“What’s the sit-rep?” Solomon barked as soon as he entered the flight deck, seeing that it was already a mess.

The Martian transporter should have had three console-panels and three staff members sitting at each one. A classic configuration, the lieutenant thought, with the consoles given over to pilot and navigation, comms, scanners and ship technical, and finally, the captain’s seat. The flight deck of the Shield was also laid out in the classic design: a semicircle of floor space before the wide viewing porthole above, and drop-down screens—two of them, cracked and dark.

Only the piloting and navigation console seats appeared operational, as both the captain’s seat and the comms console were smoking wrecks.

“What the crap happened here?” Solomon said in alarm as he took the piloting chair and buckled himself in.

“Massive system overload. Negative feedback energy surge,” the Martian lady with the sooty face said, hovering around the ruined comms desk and trying to see if any of its smoking, cracked screens were still operation.

It was then that Solomon noticed the red-suited bodies—two more of the Martian flight crew, the last two. They must have been the pilot and the captain of the Shield, who had been thrown to the floor, dead.

Click. A sound by the side of his head made Solomon turn to see the snarling face of clone-Tavin, pointing a heavy pistol at him from one side of his chair while behind him loomed the silent, ominous form of the cyborg.

“Do you really need to do that?” Solomon said as he gritted his teeth and took the controls. He was pleased that there was nothing out of place here, at least—two flight sticks, one on either side of the chair, linked to the console board in front of him.

“As I said, Lieutenant Cready—any suspicion that you are attempting to escape, and I will not waste my time with you any longer!” Tavin repeated his former warning.

Gee, thanks, the man thought as he concentrated on the board in front of him, throwing glances up to the viewing port ahead to get a visual cue.

“BWAAARM! Proximity alert!” The Shield of Aries computer was clearly still active as it blurted out a warning that was entirely unnecessary.

Unnecessary, because Solomon could see the giant bit of Marine Corps battleship spinning through space and coming straight toward them. On one of its torn faces, Solomon could clearly see the words CMC Strident—the Confederate Marine Corps battleship known as the Strident, or what remained of it anyway.

6

Take My Breath Away

“Come in, Outcast Company! Come in, Gold Squad! Anyone?” Jezzy said over her suit communicator. Even the usually calm and collected Yakuza killer starting to fray at the edges.

“Where are you all?” Jezzy whispered to herself. Colonel Faraday of the Oregon had given the evacuation alarm just a few minutes before the decompression event.

How many Marines managed to get to the escape modules and out? Jezzy thought. Surely some of them would have survived, wouldn’t they?

FZZT! “Comm… Oregon… Repeat: confirm your status…” Her suit communicator suddenly glitched, and a crackle of static met the woman’s ears, but Jezzy couldn’t make the words out.

It must be this damn ship, Jezzy thought. All the damage to the hull and the infrastructure was getting in the way of her suit transmitter. Normally, any Marine Corps power suit would piggyback on the local server-transmitter of the battle group, thus Jezzy’s suit telemetries should be using the Oregon’s own signal boosters, as her suit’s personal range was tiny in comparison to the banks of satellite dishes and pulsed radio waves that the ship could send.

But the ship’s communicators must be down, so I’m only on suit power… Jezzy reasoned. The small wireless and radio transmitters installed in her power armor wouldn’t be able to broadcast through the thick metals of the Oregon.

But someone had heard her. Someone was on the other end of the line.

“Hello? This is Lieutenant Wen, of the Outcasts I’m on board the Oregon, Deck 3… I think…” Jezzy repeated, and then forced herself to repeat the same words again, but much slower still.

“Hello? Can anyone read me?”

For a moment, there was nothing, and then—

FZZT! “Lieutenant Wen! This is Faraday… FZZZT!”

“Colonel?” Jezzy blinked in surprised. Of all the people that she might have expected to hear on the other end of the line—Malady perhaps, Willoughby or Ratko—she had never even dreamed it would be the colonel who would answer.

“What are you doing still on Level 3? I tho— FZZZZT! —of there!?” she heard the man’s patchy voice exclaim.

“Colonel, line is bad. Repeat: Line bad. I’m trapped. Bulkhead…” She scanned the walls for the stencil marks she had seen earlier. “…forty-four, bulkhead forty-four.”

There was a sudden explosion of some very caustic swearing on the other end before Faraday, the man in charge of the Oregon and their entire battlegroup, returned to civility. “FZZT! …there. Repeat: Wait there… I’m coming to… FZZT!”

Well, Jezzy thought, there probably wasn’t much chance of her going anywhere anyway.

Jezzy hung suspended in the corridor of Floor 3, by bulkhead 44, and awaited rescue. Which was not an easy thing for a woman like Jezebel Wen to do. She was much more used to being in charge of her own life, and she didn’t like being at the mercy of others.

“What if he doesn’t make it through to me?” She started to fret, frustrated by her impotence. What if there were more cyborgs roaming the empty halls of the Oregon? What if the Oregon decided to finally break apart at that precise moment? What if the colonel couldn’t do anything to free her from her metal prison?

To keep her mind occupied with at least the illusion of control, she ran through her suit diagnostics again.

Medical Injector Systems…OPERATIONAL

Suit Environmental Controls…COMPROMISED

Suit Hull Integrity…COMPROMISED

Air Seals…GOOD

Magnet Seals…GOOD

Oxygen Tanks: 0:26:13

“Less than half an hour of oxygen left,” she thought in alarm. She had already spent over an hour sealing her foot, electrocuting herself, and rebooting her suit. “And a half an hour is time that I don’t have,” she whispered into the bluish-tinged light of her suits. She knew that if the elevators weren’t working—as nothing much else appeared to be working on the Oregon—and if the colonel had to contend with more crumbled entire floors, then it could easily take him half an hour just to get to her. And that was besides the weight of the metals that stood between her and freedom.

Magnet seals! Jezzy’s mind picked up on that small detail. It would give her a tiny advantage, but she was very glad of any advantage about now…

She activated the magnet seals in the bottom of her combat boots, setting them to a strong 60% force as her body suddenly clanked to the ‘ground’ of the corridor. All power suits came with that extra feature that the light tacticals did not—the ability to run power through three large magnets in the soles of the metal boot, which would stick her to the floor in low-gravity situations. By adjusting the amount of power that swept through them, a Marine like Jezzy could alter her ability to leap, run, float, fly, or remain stock still, even without any natural gravity.

And what I really want right now is to provide as much resistance as won’t kill me… She bumped up the power to 75% force and felt her legs growing heavy and solid as tree trunks. She wasn’t going anywhere.

But that wasn’t the point.

Jezzy reached up to clamp the metal fingers of her combat gauntlets on the nearest twist of metal blocking her path and heaved.

SKREEEAARRR!

The sound of screeching metal met her suit’s microphones, and she could feel the plates of her suit’s back interlocking and tightening as she asked it to do the impossible.

There were some benefits to doing dull manual work in low gravity that Jezzy was thankful for. The main one was that weight wasn’t as important as mass, and mass was only an issue when it was related to direction or velocity.

In that sense, then, anybody with the right encounter suit would be able to move seemingly impossible obstacles just by the application of their own mass to the object. Without gravity, the object’s weight wasn’t the thing to overcome—but the object still had mass, or size, density of materials, rigidity, substance. A single human in an encounter suit couldn’t shove a spaceship out of the way, because the spaceship has a much higher mass, Jezzy knew.

But… If the spaceship was stationary, and that human was braced to an unmovable object, then all that mattered would be if the human could generate enough force. The resistance of friction, weight, and gravity could all be overcome with the right application of mass.

Jezzy heaved, and her suit’s microphones picked up the squeal of metal from in front of her. By magnet-locking her boots to the floor, she was giving herself the mass of the entire bulkhead, making herself an extension of that larger substance.

But the wrecked wall, too, was connected to the rest of bulkhead forty-four. Jezzy just had to hope that the metal she was pulling wasn’t still connected to the actual wall.

Her power suit readjusted its loads and ratios to aid in her task. Servo-assisted motors in her gloves, her elbow-pads, and pauldrons compensated for any lack of strength, and the interlocking back plates that stretched down her spine to the harness-belt worked in tandem to provide the most support and the most force up and down her body.

SKREEEAAAR! Thunk!

Jezzy was suddenly bending backwards at the knee—while her feet stubbornly stayed in the same position—as a large fragment of twisted wall, a few inches thick and almost as wide as she was tall, broke free from the jumble.

“Yes!” Jezzy was breathing hard as she let the metal section float free behind her. For all the weightlessness and her power suit’s abilities, it was still a monumental task.

Oxygen Tanks: 0:20:13

But it had taken too long. Jezzy bit her lip in consternation. She studied what was left of the jumble of metal ahead of her. Girders and stanchion supports were twisted like spaghetti next to battered wall plates. Wires and cabling that had once been inside the walls now hung like ivy ahead of her.

But there was a gap! A small gap, admittedly, barely big enough to fit her arm through, but it was there. As Jezzy leaned forward, the environmental lights on her suit revealed a dark space flaring with flickering lights. The other bulkhead after this one, she reasoned.

Oxygen Tanks: 0:19:52

No time to dawdle… She needed to get to some oxygen, and quickly… She seized the nearest twisted girder and heaved, just as she had done before. With her boots magnetized and braced on the floor, this time the effort was easier—but still taxing.

I must have loosened the wreckage with the first piece, she thought as the girder twisted out of the wreckage, bringing with it a cloud of metal fragments as the collapsed wall started to change shape.

The hole was getting bigger. She might be able to fit her arm and head through.

FZZZT! More sparks scattered over her arms as she seized the next girder, pushing and pulling to try and bend the debris out of the way.

Oxygen Tanks: 0:15:08

It’s taking too long! Jezzy started to sweat. Her suit registered her accelerated heartrate and offered warning advice. The combat specialist ignored it as she gripped the next piece of metal and threw her upper body back as much as she was able.

Oxygen Tanks: 0:12:33

KER-THONK! Something gave in the wall, and the metal she was holding sprang out of the blockade, bringing with it a spinning girder as thick as her arm

Thwack!

“Ach!”

Warning! Suit Impact Detected!

Front BreastPlate Armor Efficiency -28%

As if her suit didn’t already have enough problems…

Oxygen Tanks: 0:08:41

But the hole was big enough to crawl through now, at least. She powered down her boots and immediately started to lift from the floor, before kicking off to fly through the hole and the corridor on the other side.

Am I going to see Malady’s body here? Karamov? Ratko? Willoughby? She couldn’t help thinking. Her Gold Squad had been trying to stem the tide of the invading cyborgs when this level had crumpled. Had anyone gotten out?

“Lieutenant Wen… FZZT! Floor 4 access port… I think we’ve got company—FZZT!”

Faraday’s words did not fill her with comfort. She flew down the corridors as fast as she could, but it was hard to get her bearings now. This entire level had suffered a catastrophic collapse, like crushing a tin can. Several of the corridors that branched off this one were little more than smashed walls and floors. Others had the wall plates strangely mangled, punching out grotesque shapes into the corridor.

And what was worse was that she could see the evidence of the recent battle that she had supposed to be leading. She saw the silver-chrome limbs of cyborgs half in and out of wreckage, as well as scraps of the gold and slate-blue uniforms of the Oregon’s Marine complement.

She couldn’t see any scraps of black and red uniforms, though, she felt guiltily glad to note. Black and red were the colors of the Outcast regiment. Her company. Her responsibility…

Oxygen Tanks: 0:04:21

“Four minutes!” Jezzy cursed. How was she going to find her way out of this maze in four minutes? Where was the colonel?

“And when he said he had company, did that mean that I shouldn’t go to the Floor 4 access port, or that I should?”

Jezzy shook her head and growled in frustration. Either way, she was just going to have to take the very first available escape that she could find, even if that meant—

She swung around a corner, to see that all the bits of debris in this corridor were slowly spinning toward the far wall.

Or what had been the far wall, anyway. Instead, the inner hull of the Oregon gave way to the outer, as if a massive explosion had gone off in here. And the outer hull was petaled open, with strips of torn metal pointing out into the starry darkness.

“Oh frack, oh frack, oh frack…”

Oxygen Tanks: 0:02:11

There was no time to go back into the warren of collapsed corridors. This is a shortcut, Jezzy told herself, hoping that she wasn’t committing suicide as she kicked against one of the walls and shot forward through the hole in the Oregon’s side.

Jezzy saw the walls of the Oregon flashing past her as she scissor-kicked her legs, turning her body and throwing out an arm to—

Scraaape!

—catch one of the jagged ends of the metal and slide along it, the metal of her gloves and the metal of the battleship creating sparks.

“Urgh!” At last, her grip held just before she careened off into space, and she was swinging herself around.

Magnet Seals…25%. She braced her legs as she toggled her boot controls, slamming her feet onto the ruined hull outside the tear.

“Phew.” She had a second to breathe.

Breathe. As in…oxygen, her brain warned her.

Oxygen Tanks: 0:01:55

“Okay…think, Jezzy…” She was standing on the side of the Orgon, which now looked as though it had been deflated in mismatched places. As she turned to scan for the nearest porthole access, she saw the edge of the Oregon’s hold. Its double folding doors were wide open and twisted as jumbles of machinery, carts, and equipment slowly spilled out.

Above her, she could see where several other floors had also been affected by the decompression event. Those were the floors that had crinkled together, losing all form as the metal had rumpled like a blanket.

I’m outside Floor 3, the epicenter of the tragedy, Jezzy thought. That meant Floor 4 was above her, which was also where the colonel might be. Or might be warning her to stay away from.

The floor above this one did not look to be the same rumpled and fractured metal as this one. It was still intact.

And that meant it might still have a viable atmosphere! Jezzy had to hope.

After all, her very life depended on it.

Oxygen Tanks: 0:01:03

Adjusting her magnet boots, she grabbed the side of the Oregon’s hull and propelled herself upward. Her legs started to lift and back away from her, risking turning her graceful glide into a tumble.

“There it is!” There, up ahead, was a line of viewing portholes, as well as the built-up hexagonal module of an emergency escape hatch. These things were dotted throughout the Oregon, and indeed throughout every starship, Jezzy knew. All she had to do was get to it.

Oxygen Tanks: 0:00:42

The small form of the combat specialist and acting field commander skittered up along the battleship’s hull, with the entire vault of heaven over her shoulder. She was a tiny figure moving against a slowly rotating spaceship like a skipped stone.

The emergency escape hatch was coming up to her fast. Too fast?

Jezzy lowered her hands just in time to grab the steel rungs in place around the outside, her momentum turning her over and slamming her against the hull.

CLANG!

Oxygen Tanks: 0:00:31

Thirty seconds? “Plenty of time,” Jezzy muttered. She’d had entire—successful—duels that had lasted less time than that.

That was what she told herself, anyway, as she flipped herself over—one arm holding onto one of the hatch railings while the other flipped the external command cover.

“The seals are set to green. That’s good,” she murmured, checking the small diagnostic panel revealed within. If the atmospheric seals were holding, then there was atmosphere inside. All she had to was to get in.

The command panel had two large buttons, one red and one orange. She hit the orange one first and felt a vibration through the doorway as the airlock on the other side was flushed of air, and the internal airlock door to Level Four was closed.

Oxygen Tanks: 0:00:26

She had to wait for the red button to light up and indicate that it was safe to enter. Safe!? Jezzy could have laughed if she wasn’t stiff with concentration. The Oregon is a hulk! Just where was safe anymore?

Blip! The button lit up red, and Jezzy punched it.

Oxygen Tanks: 0:00:21

Only for nothing to happen. The hatch started to rise a few inches, releasing the remaining gases around her, but then it stalled.

“What?” Jezzy almost let go of the railing in alarm. It was stuck. “The stars-damned hatch is stuck!” she shouted at no one. Maybe it was an effect of the Oregon’s massive structural damage, placing undue pressures on all parts of the hull, or maybe the escape hatch to Level Four hadn’t been properly maintained, oiled, and cleaned.

Whatever the reason was, Jezzy was going to be imminently screwed unless she got it open.

Oxygen Tanks: 0:00:16

Jezzy hit the button again, and the hatch repeated the same abortive gesture—rising a few inches and locking. With a growl, Jezzy raised her Jackhammer with her free hand and started hitting the edge of the hatch, hoping to dislodge the jam or knock the metal apart.

Oxygen Tanks: 0:00:10

Ker-THUNK! Hiss…

Suddenly, the hatch shifted a little on its seat, and a final gasp of gas and steam burst from the edge. The hatch rose to reveal the narrow, human-sized tube on the inside.

Not wasting any time, Jezzy folded herself in, grabbed the hatch’s internal handles, and slammed the cover shut. A sense of foreboding flooded through her as she now realized that she was in a tiny metal tube inside a dying spaceship. She might have just crawled inside her own coffin if the airlock system was broken.

Oxygen Tanks: 0:00:06

Hsssss!

Steam erupted from the walls on all sides, obscuring her vision as the airlock repressurized hopefully to normal human levels. But it was taking too long. The airlock process depended on how much available oxygen and inert gases that the Oregon still had within its reserve tanks…

Oxygen Tanks: 0:00:03

Oxygen Tanks: 0:00:02

Oxygen Tanks: 0:00:01

The acting field commander gulped a deep breath instinctively. How long could she hold her mouth shut and not breathe?

Warning! Oxygen Tank Empty! Warning!

Jezzy’s chest started to burn with the need to exhale and breathe in again. She could feel the need like a wave, taking over all thought.

Blip! The steam stopped and a green light flickered on over Jezzy’s head as the internal airlock hatch popped open.

Jezzy hit her cowl’s helmet release mechanism, and the helmet slid back over her head as she flopped onto the deck of Floor 4, gasping and panting at good, clean air.

It took her another fraction of a second to realize that she wasn’t alone in the corridor. There, turning to register the new arrival and raising its weapon arm, was one of the chrome-cast cyborgs.

Frack!

7

Flying for the Enemy

“Evasive action! All crew, brace!” Solomon was shouting as he pulled down hard on one of the flight sticks while pushing on the other one. In response, the Shield of Aries turned on one side as it fired its positional rockets.

The giant piece of the CMC Strident spun toward them, end over end.

It’s going to miss us! It’s going to miss! Solomon was leaning down hard on the flight control sticks, but then the Shield started to misbehave.

Where they should have barrel-rolled out of the way, the Martian transporter performed half a turn, and then juddered as its back end started to rise and roll toward the wreckage.

“What!?” Solomon burst out.

“It’s the rear booster rocket. It got damaged in the attack—” the Martian comms officer managed to say, a second before impact.

“BRACE!” Solomon shouted as the wreckage hit.

The giant iceberg of metal hit the forward prow of the Shield and scraped along it, driving the transporter beneath it as sparks and fire blew from the line of destruction.

“BWAAARM! Collision alert!” the automated computer screamed at them.

“You’re not kidding…” Solomon growled.

“Forward hull compromised! Losing pressure to crew cabins! Auxiliary power banks 1-4 compromised! Water recycling unit compromised!”

The computer kept on blurting out the list of systems that the wreckage had destroyed as it swung over the top of them and the Shield swooped out and away, trailing bits of metal.

“How bad?” Solomon shouted at the comms.

“Our forward hull integrity is about forty percent, Capt— I mean…” The Martian woman stopped herself from giving the hostage the dignity of his position. “We can’t take another hit like that, let alone those Confederates.”

Those Confederates who are my battle-brothers and sisters, and who have no idea that I’m flying this thing! Solomon gritted his teeth and concentrated on the screen in front of him. There were more pieces of wreckage coming their way. The engine housing of a Confederate ship. Masses of hull debris.

Solomon flew. He wished that he was in a Marine Corps vessel, not only because that would mean that he wasn’t a prisoner, but because it would have much more advanced readouts of this ship’s capabilities.

But Solomon had always been a quick thinker. It was the one gift that had allowed him to be taken on as an Outcast Marine rather than being sent to a penal colony, after all.

The Shield’s computers weren’t clever enough to compensate for the damaged booster rocket behind them. That meant that Solomon had to do it by hand.

Breathe, Cready… he told himself, performing one of the basic Marine centering and concentrating techniques. He tried to feel what the ship wanted to do through the way that the flight sticks jerked and pulled, attempting to disobey his every command.

It was the right one that felt the worst. There was a resistance there, and every time he pulled or pushed on it to fire the positional rockets down that side of the Shield of Aries, the rear of the transporter started to kick out. The damage must have been extensive on the rear right side, he thought.

Instead, he concentrated on keeping the righthand rockets as still as possible as he fired the left-hand ones in tiny movements. The Shield started to pirouette and swoop around and over the wreckage coming their way.

And straight into the path of one of the remaining CMC craft.

“Lieutenant!” The voice of the clone-Tavin was loud in his ear, and Cready felt the nudge of the cold muzzle of the man’s pistol against his temple. “No surprises, please,” he whispered.

“Surprises? Just what do you expect me to do?” Solomon shouted, pulling on the left-hand stick to veer them away from the CMC battleship bearing down on them. Behind it was the disparate line of other CMC fighting craft, engaged in battle with the Ru’at jump-ships.

“Just get us to the surface of Mars. In one piece!” Tavin snapped.

I think keeping us alive is my first priority… Solomon kicked down on the pedals at the base of his chair, but the Shield only sputtered forward marginally faster than it had been flying before.

The battleship was gaining on them. It looked like a rough hexagon of metal, with stubby wings on either side and a prow extending from the front that curved slightly downward, giving the ship a vaguely bird-like appearance.

But luckily for Solomon and the rest of the crew of the Shield, it was also damaged. Solomon looked up at the overhead screen as he flew, seeing the ugly black marks seared along its body and the small clouds of metal fragments like plumes of smoke that fell from it as it chased them.

“BWAARM! Targeting controls detected!” the computer panicked—unhelpfully, in Solomon’s opinion.

“She’s still got torpedoes. We haven’t got a chance!” the comms officer was shouting.

“We always have a chance,” Solomon growled. That was one of the things he had learned on the streets of New Kowloon. Surviving and winning wasn’t about being the best thief, or the best fighter, or the fastest escape artist—although Solomon had been good at all of those.

It’s about taking advantage of opportunities.

“BWAARM! Weapons lock detected!”

“She’s firing!” the comms officer said as plumes of gas and steam erupted under the curving nosecone of the vengeful battleship, and their rear scanners displayed the small silver darts burst from the weapons ports and rocket toward them.

Take advantage of opportunities… Solomon counted tensely: “Three…two…”

And then he pulled on the righthand control stick as hard as he could, knowing that the results would be unpredictable. There was a grinding, heavy sensation as the Shield attempted to swerve—

And then rolled end-over-nose, spinning in a barrel-roll through space as the torpedoes shot past the erratic movements of the craft.

“BWAAARM! Forward anti-shock stabilizers compromised!” the computer helpfully told him as Solomon fought to retain control of the ship.

“Yes!” the Martian communications officer shouted at her desk.

“We’re not out of the woods yet,” Solomon growled. Ahead of them rose the giant orb of Mars. At this close range, it looked more orange than it did red, scudded with yellows and browns. “It’s going to take us twenty minutes or more to get into Martian atmosphere,” Solomon called out, knowing that the Marine Corps battleships weren’t designed to enter planetary atmospheres—their mass and size meant that they would break apart if they even dared.

But this Martian transporter could.

“Northern hemisphere, quadrant eleven,” clone-Tavin said. “That is where we’ll be—”

“BWAARM! Targeting detected!” the not-so-helpful computer bleeped at them.

“Why couldn’t the damned automated voice network go offline instead?” Solomon growled.

The CMC craft might have been damaged, but it was bigger than they were. It had bigger engines, and thruster rockets that actually worked, rather than the wrecked and haphazard state that the Shield’s main propulsion systems were currently in.

It was gaining on them.

“Do that thing again!” the Martian officer implored Solomon.

“There’s no guarantee the ship will take it!” Solomon said. He didn’t have the engine readouts on his console, but he could feel through the way the Shield was being pushed to its limits. Another top-over-end maneuver like that might just break it apart.

“You have to do something!” she snapped.

Take advantage of opportunities… Solomon had an idea.

“Can you send me the engine controls? Booster fuel-loads? Liquid mixtures?” Solomon said as he pulled at the flight sticks, forcing the Shield of Aries to swerve and slice through the vacuum in an effort to shake off the eventual torpedo lock.

“Forwarding command overrides,” the comms woman shouted, hitting what remained of the controls on her desk before crossing quickly to the captain’s desk seat and finishing the operation.

Command Override Granted!

Solomon’s desk bleeped, and a holographic list of green and orange specifications scrolled over his board. Solomon saw what he wanted immediately.

Ship Schematics > Engineering > Rocketry and Propulsion > Command Override Controls

The lieutenant could see the list of blinking red rocketry parts that had been knocked offline, or completely destroyed, in the collision. Half of his positional thrusters—tiny rocket systems that could be fired independently to change course and position—were down.

But that wasn’t even the worst news that met his eyes. His bank of main thruster rockets was severely compromised. They were firing on two out of three, and one of those remaining was firing sporadically.

“No wonder I can’t control this bucket,” Solomon growled as his hands blurred.

“BWAAARM! Target lock detected!”

The automated computer still wasn’t doing anything for Solomon’s nerves, but he did his best to ignore it.

He navigated back to the engineering commands, quickly running a different algorithm for the fuel mixture that the rockets combined and fired.

“Whatever you’re going to do, Cready, I suggest that you do it now!” Tavin was saying in alarm.

“I’m doing it!” Solomon moved into the rocketry and propulsion commands, selected all the main thrusters, even the malfunctioning ones, and hit the burn activation.

Outside the Shield, the CMC battleship the Dauntless was bearing down on the escaping Martian craft. The Dauntless was an old-time battleship, with an old-time sort of commander.

The slightly vulture-like ship was already heavily damaged, but that didn’t stop it from pursuing the ship that was clearly a part of the resistance.

Under its downward-arching prow, weapons ports opened to gusts of steam once more, followed by flashes of light and gouts of gases as tiny silver shapes burst from their seats and arced away.

The four torpedoes from the Dauntless were some of the last in the ship’s forward battery, but its commander was past the time for caution. Colonel Austin, already an aging man who had served General Asquew for more than thirty years, knew that they had lost the battle for Mars.

But his superior officer had left him with one command: To protect the Confederacy from the forces aligned against her.

In short, Colonel Austin of the Dauntless just wanted revenge against anyone and anything that had a part in the Fleet’s downfall.

The torpedoes charged forward on the super-bright blue jets of their own rocket propulsion systems, curving in the vacuum as their internal computers adjusted to their sensors. They were targeted and locked on the massive engine signal ahead of them. There was no way that they would miss it now.

Half a klick… They sped closer to the struggling, juddering Shield.

Forty meters…

Thirty…

Suddenly, something happened at the back of the Shield. Instead of the constant burn of one of the main thruster rockets and the off-and-on burn of the second, all three suddenly flared a crimson red, turning an ugly purple as a massive cloud of fire and plasma erupted from the back of the ship.

Unknown to the commander of the Dauntless, the Gold Squad Commander had injected a highly volatile and dangerous mix of propellants into the available rocketry systems and had opened all the injectors.

The sustained, super-charged burn of the Shield’s thrusters threw her forward like nitrous oxide in a conventional combustion engine.

But that wasn’t all. The quickly expanding and evaporating plume of fire from the back of the Shield acted like a vast heatwave, diverting the torpedoes’ target lock. As soon as the four darts entered the heat-field, they believed that they had reached the engine itself and detonated.

The result was a massive flash of fire and light, extinguished in moments but impressive nonetheless. The Shield of Aries shot forward ahead of the fireball and straight into the upper atmosphere of Mars, where the Dauntless couldn’t follow it. In moments, they would be racing over the surface, and the CMC ship couldn’t afford to waste valuable resources on just one ship. Not when there was still an alien fleet attacking their brothers and sisters.

The Shield of Aries had escaped.

“What was that?” the Martian comms officer shouted with joy.

As relieved as Solomon was about the whole not-dying business, he couldn’t spare time for the congratulations. The Shield was shaking and rocking as it hit reentry, and already all of the forward portholes and viewing windows were flaring orange-red with the burn.

“Head in the game, soldier!” Solomon snarled at her, doing his best to try and pick up the nose of the Shield before it hit a terminal velocity and plunged into the Martian sands.

“We’ve lost most of our propellant system. The positional rockets are just about useless. We’re going to have to old-time physics this one!” Solomon was shouting.

Which meant gliding and allowing the ordinary laws of aerodynamics to reduce their speed. Solomon would usually have tried to use the forward positional rockets to counter their velocity, as well as diminishing the burn rate to the rear thrusters to slow them down.

No such luck now, though, he growled to himself as he fought the damaged flight control system.

“If I can raise the nose, then we’ll be skating over the thermals. They’ll help to slow us down,” Solomon said through gritted teeth. He heard an affirmative from the comms officer at his side and was glad that she hadn’t actually asked about the landing procedure yet.

The best we’ll be able to do is to glide into the deserts. His mind raced. Perhaps they would survive it, but the Shield was already pretty badly beaten up. There were no guarantees that it wouldn’t break apart on impact.

The nose started to rise in response to Solomon’s frantic use of the controls. They juddered and shook a fraction less, and the burnt horizon of the planet appeared at the top of their screen.

“We’re still coming in too hot and too fast!” the comms officer called.

“You think I don’t know!?” Solomon countered.

It was at that point that something appeared over the Martian sands, and it was moving toward them.

It was a black cylinder, and around its body were three quickly-rotating wheels, flashing an eldritch blue and purple color.

It was one of the Ru’at jump-ships. It seemed clearly capable of operating inside a planet’s atmosphere as well as deep space as it lashed forward toward them. Solomon’s heart skipped a beat. Did it know that they were its allies? Who knew what the Ru’at believed or valued…

The ship grew larger as it was about to intersect their path, and then—

From its nosecone, they were so close that Solomon could see a tiny port opening, and the flare of a blue-purple light. The Ru’at jump-ship, the enemy of humanity, had fired its devastating particle-beam weapon straight at them.

8

The Last Flight of the Oregon

FZZT! Jezzy rolled as the bolt of blue and purple light shot past her to hit the closed airlock door. There was a resounding whumpf as the metal buckled inward and scorched to black, but it held.

Thank the stars, Jezzy thought.

The combat specialist could barely think as she combat-rolled to one side of the corridor, raising her Jackhammer to fire a return salvo.

PHOOM! She didn’t even have time to aim, so she only managed a winging shot that ricocheted off the cyborg’s shiny shoulder. In any ordinary battle, the trained fighter knew that merely firing the Marine weapon would probably have been enough to send her adversaries ducking for cover—or at least flinching.

The cyborg, however, didn’t even blink as it swung its arm back toward its target.

Frack! Jezzy’s body was filled with the warm jitter of adrenaline and her suit stimulants. She didn’t feel all the aches and pains that she had sustained over the last twenty-four hours, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t suffering their effects. She tried to kick off from the wall, but her body wasn’t reacting fast enough. Maybe it was the fact that she was tired, or anxious, or maybe she just hadn’t adjusted to the pressurized atmosphere and the near Earth-normal gravity yet.

Whatever the answer, time appeared to slow as she watched the cyborg raise its firing arm much faster than she was moving. In times like this, Jezzy could feel her senses sharpening. Her eyes picked up even the smallest detail of the shiny metal form and the necrotic flesh.

Jezzy saw the metal cords of the thing’s arm—what might have once been its tendons—flex as it fired. She saw the wheels that housed the particle mechanism turning, clicking faster.

Pha-BOOM! The cyborg was thrown sideways in an explosion of viscera and sparks.

What?

“Lieutenant Wen!” It was Colonel Faraday, lurching from the intersecting corridor and holding his own smoking Jackhammer, which he had just fired almost point-blank at the thing’s head. “You’re alive. Good. I don’t know how many more of those things are on my boat. On me!” He raised his gun again and turned to sight back down the corridor he had come from.

“Sir. Yes, sir. Where is everybody?” Jezzy said as she scrambled to her feet and ran to his side, taking up position about a meter away from his left side, her own gun raised as she peered down the sights.

“Textbook move and clear,” Faraday barked, setting off with wide and quick paces, moving his rifle from side to side as he continuously scanned every doorway, bulkhead, or intersecting corridor mouth.

“Sir. Yes, sir.” Jezzy moved in tandem, keeping to his left, and half-turned on her hip so she could sweep her Jackhammer rifle behind them.

Even moving like this, Jezzy was surprised at how much ground they covered in a short time. Faraday set a punishing pace even in his advanced years, and Jezzy had to wonder how many stimulants and chemical augments he was running on.

“Clear,” he said when they passed a medical bay.

Jezzy cast a second eye in to confirm, to see that the white-tiled room was smashed and ruined, with several ugly black marks on the walls.

“The cyborgs wormed their way through my entire ship before we had a chance to contain them!” Faraday snarled, pausing before a corridor, breathing out sharply and then swinging out to sweep the empty space.

“Clear.”

“I know, sir,” Jezzy managed to stutter in response. That was my fault. The colonel had asked me to contain the boarding party.

Although ‘boarding party’ was a bit of an optimistic term. In truth, the cyborgs had simply flung themselves through the void of space at the Oregon. They had no need to breathe. and the strange cybernetic adjustments meant that they didn’t freeze or pop in the vacuum of space. Upon grappling with the large battleship, they had cut their way in with their particle-beam weapons, causing multiple hull breaches and floor-wide decompression events, before burning and clawing their way through the hull to infect every part of the battleship.

A few floors had managed to survive, it seemed. The cyborgs must have tired of cutting their way through the thick outer and inner layers of the ship’s hull in favor of using the more conventional doorways and lifts.

“Here. There’s an escape pod on the inside of the viewing atrium.” Faraday nodded to where the corridor ended in a semi-circular room, with thick plate glass forming a viewing window. In a weirdly surreal scene, Jezzy saw the plush leather benches under the window where the off-duty Marines would have sat and watched the stars. On one wall-mounted side table, there even sat a cup, half-brimming with coffee where it had clearly been abandoned.

What made the diorama all the more sickening was that the current view through the window displayed the battle outside.

Large pieces of wreckage rotated, mixing with the smaller glints of industrial metal. It looked like an asteroid field in front of them as pieces collided, broke apart, and combined. Jezzy knew what she was looking at. because she herself had planned that field.

But it didn’t do any good, did it? she thought miserably. The Ru’at jump-ships had appeared on the edge of Plutonian space, not far from the last Confederate refueling station for lightyears, The Last Call.

Jezzy and her team of Plutonian engineers and hauliers had had just enough time to spill their loads of junk metal, trash, and industrial supplies across the star-way in an expanding cloud of fragments, hoping to at least slow the advance of the alien ships.

And we failed.

Instead, the Ru’at jump-ships had acted in true Ru’at fashion, which meant that they did the completely unexpected. They had ‘fired’ their cyborg boarding crew into the field of debris, some of them dying in impacts with bits of ship metal, but most leapfrogging and propelling themselves over the obstacles to their eventual target of the Oregon.

Outside, it looked like what had been Jezzy’s best line of defense had instead turned into their graveyard. Jezzy flinched when she saw the distant tubular shapes of the Ru’at jump-ships, still hanging motionless on the far side of the wreckage, just as if nothing had happened at all.

The sight of such commonplace activities against such a tragic backdrop seemed to bring the colonel up short as well, as Jezzy saw the older man pause and rock slightly in place.

“A lot got out, before…” he confirmed quietly.

“Sir?” Jezzy dared to ask. “My squad? The rest of the Outcasts?”

Faraday shook himself inside his power suit, looking across at her with his slate-gray eyes. “Some of them were on Level Three, fighting the cyborgs,” he said carefully.

“I know. I was there,” Jezzy said.

“But it’s good that you think of your men first.” Faraday gave her a ghost of a smile. “You will make a good official commander one day, Lieutenant Wen.” He nodded to the two side-by-side doorways that looked suspiciously like coffins.

“I just hope that we get to be alive to see it, Colonel-sir,” Jezzy said ruefully, performing a final sweep behind them with her Jackhammer as she hit the escape pod release button. The door slid upward, revealing something that looked very similar to a cryo-bed.

The escape pod was padded with stiff leather and barely bigger than a cupboard. No portholes on the walls, and as soon as Jezzy stepped in and turned around to lean against the back, manacle-straps fired and locked into place across her waist, chest, and ankles.

I’m going to make it out, she thought, feeling strangely nauseous at the prospect. Why do I get to live when so many died?

“These are pre-programmed to get you to the nearest rally point set up by whoever the senior officer out there is,” the colonel said as the door started to hiss closed in front of Jezzy’s face. He threw her a salute.

“Through blood and fire, Marine,” he intoned loudly.

“Through blood and fire…” she repeated, before realizing that he wasn’t stepping into the adjacent escape pod beside her. He was stepping back out into the atrium to watch her depart.

“Faraday!” she shouted, knowing that he would still be able to hear her over their suit comms. “What are you doing? Get out of there!”

Clunk! The door hissed closed, and Jezzy could see that she did have a strip of a viewing window on the inner door of her escape capsule, before, with a grinding shudder, the entire pod suddenly jerked back into the hull and started to tilt, ready for launch.

“I have one mission left to do, Lieutenant,” Colonel Faraday said, still with his saluting hand motionless by the side of his temple. “You know the Marine Corps Regulations. No Marine technology is to fall into the hands of the enemy.”

“You mean a captain goes down with his ship?” she said in alarm as the tilting stopped, and she could only see the distant commander of the Oregon if she peered down the length of her body.

Faraday said nothing.

He means to blow up the Oregon to stop it being salvaged by the Ru’at, Jezzy thought in alarm as three orange lights blinked over her head. In a heartbeat, one turned green, and then the second one, and then—

But we don’t even know if the Ru’at care at all about stealing Marine Corps tech, she could have screamed, but her words were plucked from her along with her breath as the final green light blinked on.

WHOOOSH! The escape pod she lay in rocketed away from the viewing atrium and the remaining colonel. Jezzy saw flashes of light and metal archways blurring through her viewing window as she accelerated.

With a violent shudder, the escape pod burst out of the side of the twisting and dismantling Oregon. Suddenly, the shaking stopped, and Jezzy was looking up at stars.

And wreckage.

It was an oddly serene moment, as the combat specialist was powerless to do anything other than lie back and watch, before the escape pod’s rockets fired, and the coffin-shaped pill quickly turned under the debris field and swooped away from the scene of their defeat.

But Jezzy could still see the leviathan-like shape of the Oregon as it shook, parts of its hull crumbled or collapsed. As the battleship grew smaller and smaller in her field of vision, she saw it start to turn, spurting gobbets of rocket flame and plasma as the battleship attempted to right itself.

“What are you doing, you crazy old fool?” Jezzy watched in horror as the Oregon managed to almost right itself and ended up pointing in the direction of the wreckage barrier, and the distant Ru’at ships beyond.

As Jezzy watched, the Oregon fired every working rocket and thruster it appeared to have left. It moved slowly forward at first, gaining momentum and speed with every passing second.

It was growing smaller and smaller in her viewing window as the two craft moved away from each other, but Jezzy could see everything in the crystal clarity of space.

Small explosions erupted along its forward bulk as it started to flow through the metal trash field. It was getting faster and faster, shaking and tilting as it charged forward on a desperate kamikaze flight.

There was a slight flicker of light from the engines that was almost beautiful, like a reflection of bright Christmas lights, as tiny explosive charges were detonated by the colonel around the engine’s main casing.

Flash! With a sudden, widening halo of light, the Oregon blew up.

“Faraday… Sir…” Jezzy breathed. Her suit had filtered out the hard glare of the massive self-destruct sequence, but her vision was still obscured by tears. She didn’t know whether she had just witnessed the bravest or the stupidest action she had ever seen.

“Through blood and fire, sir,” she murmured into the dark as her escape pod flew on.

9

S.O.L

“What was that!?” Colonel Austin of the Dauntless saw the plume of fire and eddies of smoke as his target disappeared into the thin atmosphere of Mars.

The old warrior knew that his ship wouldn’t be able to follow them to the surface, as much as he might have wanted to finish the job. The Dauntless was built in the vacuum of space and designed to stay there. The gravitational pull of a planet the size of Mars would break it apart with ease.

Not only that, but the torpedo and missile batteries wouldn’t be able to target the tiny craft against all the background planetary radiation. Not with any accuracy, anyway. One of the many problems with interstellar conflict was that it had to remain interstellar, if it was to be of any use.

But what was at the forefront of the colonel’s mind was the stunt that the seditionist Martian transporter had just pulled off—a massive blowout of plasma and fuel, creating a momentary firestorm that had fooled his torpedoes.

“That is some seriously quick thinking…” he muttered. It was the sort of thing that you needed serious Marine Corps training to pull off.

“Colonel, sir! More of the Ru’at ships are rounding on the Indomitable, sir!” his tactical specialist announced.

“Turn us around!” Austin barked. “Navigation, I want a course plotted to the nearest Ru’at threat. Weapons, I want every weapon module loaded by the time we get there. Engineering, try and get some more power out of the old girl!”

Colonel Austin knew just as well as everyone else on board that what they were doing was fighting a losing battle.

We’re going to go down with this ship, Austin thought gravely. But they would do so while in the service of the Confederacy.

It said something about the type of man Colonel Austin was that the thought left him feeling optimistic, not depressed.

“Colonel, sir?” called out his engineering specialist. The concerned tone alerted him to the fact that something was quite wrong indeed.

“Marine? Report!” Austin said as he took to his chair once again.

“I ran a scan on the fireball that the Martian ship gave off, just in case it might have been a threat to us.” The Marine sounded worried. “But I’ve been getting some very strange readings from it,” he said, looking over at the colonel.

“So? It’s done. They escaped. Our battle-brothers and sisters are in danger! To your duties, Corporal!” Colonel Austin was not one who had what you might call a curious mind.

“Sir… I am sorry, but this really is unique. There are organo-compound signatures in that blast, dissipated now of course, but they are…” The man shook his head. “It’s almost as if they’re spelling out a message.”

Colonel Austin might not be a curious sort of man—he had learned a long time ago that a curious soldier was usually a dead soldier—but he was no fool, either.

“Unusual? How unusual?” Another thing about Colonel Austin was that he trusted all of his crew. If a specialist thought that something was important enough to tell him, then he would hear the man out, at least.

“Highly unusual sir. I’m sending the details to your desk and copying to comms,” the man said, flicking his fingers through the holographic controls.

“Comms? You really are sure that this was a message, then?” Austin looked at the data. All he could see at first were burn and expansion rates, chemical makeups, and direction of force.

And then he saw it. The chemical analysis indicated that there were complex chemical compounds inside the outer wave of that explosion. They had been destroyed and dissipated within microseconds, of course, but the highly advanced scans of the Dauntless had picked them up in that fraction of time all the same.

“Complex compounds that shouldn’t be anywhere near fuel propellant,” the engineering specialist said.

“An accident? Dangerous?” the colonel asked.

“No, sir, not dangerous at all, but they must have been injected on purpose into the fuel tanks,” the engineer said.

“Wait, Colonel!” This was from the tactical/comms desk as the man there analyzed the results. “These compounds are all repeated strings of molecules…”

“Go on,” the colonel said.

“Simple molecules that can be found anywhere in the ships, but they were drawn from the oxygen filtration system. Trace elements of selenium, oxygen, and lytase. Or Se, Ox, Ly.”

“I thought you said that this was a message. Seoxly?” The colonel started to shake his head. Maybe the battle and the arrival of an alien war fleet was too much for them. Should he relieve them of their duty?

“S.O.L.,” the comms specialist said. “It’s too unique to be random. Those elements shouldn’t have been combined in that way either”

“And they were injected on purpose into the propellant, don’t forget!” the engineering specialist said. “It’s a message. It has to be. A message for a craft able to scan that explosion, sir.”

“A message for us, you mean,” the colonel said seriously. “Okay. I’m listening. S.O.L. The name of our system? Our sun? What does it mean? Theories?” the colonel asked, but none of the bridge crew could get to the bottom of it.

“Sol… Sol….” Colonel Austin shook his head. “Forward the details to General Asquew. Let her figure it out. We have a war to fight!”

10

City of Heaven

“Brace!” Solomon shouted, attempting to throw the Shield of Aries into a spin to get away from the Ru’at ship’s attack.

But the Shield had already suffered too much damage from the collision, and the available propellant in the rocketry systems was already running low after the blowout that Solomon had engineered.

It couldn’t move fast enough. The particle beam hit…and nothing happened.

We’re not dying. Solomon froze in his seat. Why aren’t we dying?

The forward viewing window was glaring bright with blue-purple light, and there were no alarms from the automated computer system. No warnings of the hull being burnt through, or of an atmospheric breach.

“What’s going on?” Solomon whispered.

“You have so much to learn about our friends, Lieutenant,” clone-Tavin stated, and even though Solomon wasn’t looking at him, he could hear the man’s smirk.

Their perilous descent to the surface of the Red Planet had seemingly halted. And still no alarms were going off. In fact, past the glow of the particle beams, Solomon could see through the windows that the Shield hung some two hundred meters over the desert surface, completely motionless.

“Is that…” Solomon couldn’t believe his eyes—or what was happening. “Is that a stars-be-damned traction engine?” he breathed in awe. “But those things are impossible. It’s just a silly science fiction story!”

“‘There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio…’” clone-Tavin murmured the quote. “People thought that cybernetic technology, even jump technology, was a fairy tale once upon a time. And now here we are, with the Ru’at cyborgs across all colonies of human space, and with the Ru’at jump-ships able to travel faster than light.” Tavin lowered his pistol from Solomon’s temple, satisfied that any threat of escape from the man was now gone.

“You should read what was in the Ru’at Message, Lieutenant Cready. Technologies the likes of which even those silly science fiction stories could not make up!”

Really? Solomon’s eyes narrowed. “Are you going to show me the Message then, Tavin?” he said, giving up on the pretext of attempting to find out the clone’s ‘real’ name. The cloned CEO of NeuroTech Industries didn’t seem to mind, this time.

“I think we will leave that decision to our saviors, don’t you?” Tavin nodded to the screen, where the horizon was starting to shift as the Shield of Aries was pulled by the cylindrical Ru’at jump-ship.

The Martian transporter picked up speed in the glow of the Ru’at’s strange technology, and Solomon could see the surface of Mars beneath them start to blur as they sped forward faster and faster. In the distance, the lines of Martian craters and mountains appeared.

We’re heading north by northeast. Solomon recognized the terrain. He didn’t know Mars well, but his earlier incursion into the Armstrong Habitat in the Tharsis Thocla Crater had seen him study, along with the rest of Gold Squad, the broad geographic areas of Mars.

The map of secessionist activity didn’t have much up here, Solomon thought. “There aren’t any habitats this far northeast,” he said.

“Not that the Confederacy is aware of.” Tavin’s voice once again sounded like a smirk.

“Have you…seen them?” Solomon heard the Martian communications officer say in worried awe.

“The Ru’at do not believe in the same importance of physical meetings as humans do,” clone-Tavin said in a considering tone.

That’s a no, then, Solomon thought.

“But the Ru’at will certainly make their presence felt to you, when they feel that they need to,” the clone beside him said. “You’ll see in due course, I’m sure.”

With that rather unsettling prediction, Solomon started to wonder if there was any way he could escape from his current situation. He had sent the organo-compound signature to his friends in the CMC. If they picked up on that message, then they’ll know that I’m here. That they have a man on the inside.

But Solomon knew that the chances of them coming to get him, the ambassador, and the imprimatur were slim. Even if his message did manage to get through to General Asquew, there was no guarantee that the last remaining General of the Confederate Fleet would be able to do anything about it.

Solomon knew that he and his two companion hostages were now in the eye of the storm. They were on their own.

At that dreadful point, the colony of the Ru’at on Mars appeared on the horizon, and its metal surfaces shone in silver and bright, bright light. It was like looking at some heavenly citadel.

It looks too beautiful for an alien race that are so good at killing people, the lieutenant thought.

Just how on earth—or Mars—am I going to get myself, the ambassador, and the imprimatur to escape from that!?

11

The Last Call

“Get those doors sealed!” the small, dark-haired administrator of Pluto’s The Last Call station was shouting. Fatima Ahmadi moved across the large, now-empty space of the station’s holds.

Usually, this place would be filled with commuters and workers, each and every one busy and hurrying from either the deep-field station-ships or the cruise ships, or else working logistics for the station. The Last Call might be Confederate Earth’s most farflung station before the colony worlds of Trappist, Barnard’s Star, and Proxima, but it was also a very busy one.

Or would have been, once, Fatima growled to herself. It felt unnatural, to be walking through the halls and corridors of her home where she had lived for the past twelve years, taking constant injections of calcium and magnesium and attending the gym twice a day every day to ensure that she kept a proper bone density ratio.

She was used to The Last Call being filled with noise—the chime of bells as the cruise ships announced their departure cut across by the speaker announcements from some work team or another, asking for mechanics or fabricators or hauliers to move to this airlock or that one.

But now, the station echoed. All the pedestrians—as Fatima liked to call them—were gone, having fled, bewildered, almost thirty-six hours ago under her orders. There were no alerts from the work teams, as there were no corporate or Marine Corps ships left to restock, refuel, and resupply.

Fatima hated it.

“Door 1, you done?” she barked at where the skeleton crew of hauliers who were left were stepping back from their task. The large airlock door, wide enough for a tide of people to stream into The Last Call four-abreast, was now closed and had a glowing red line joining its door panels.

“She’ll hold, ma’am!” cried out Ted, one of the older and most experienced hauliers at the station.

“I doubt that very much,” Fatima muttered as she sighed. But it would have to do. She’d been told by the colonel—the late colonel, from all accounts—that if she wanted to survive, she had to go to ground. Failing that, all she could do was barricade herself somewhere secure and hope that the cyborgs—or the Ru’at—weren’t interested.

For Ahmadi, that all translated as: rally to The Last Call, her responsibility and her home for over a decade, and order every bulkhead door that wasn’t essential to be welded shut.

“You sure you don’t want to try for Pluto?” Ted said, his voice no longer muffled as he slid up the welding mask over his still-sooty face and took a deep breath. He smelled like solder and char. “The Marines are down there. We might even be safer with them.”

“Ted, go if you want. You heard my speech along with everyone else. I only want people remaining here who actually want to be here,” Fatima said seriously. “We still got the life yachts, enough for everyone, left?”

“What, and leave you here alone? No way, Fatima.” Ted shook his head violently. He might be a perfect example of a grumpy industrial worker at times, but he was loyal to a fault.

“Then we’d better get moving,” Fatima said. She had decided to stay at The Last Call instead of taking one of the small life yachts down to the planet’s surface. Although there was a network of both emergency and tourist bunkers down there on Earth’s farthest sibling, Fatima knew that they wouldn’t be able to hold out there for long.

The Marine Corps had elected to use Pluto as their rally point, apparently, as Fatima had seen the many escape pods leave the Oregon like seed pods bursting from their mother plant. Each one had taken a graceful, curving arc past The Last Call toward Pluto—presumably on some automated flight plan.

So, it was a considerable surprise indeed when there was an almighty kerr-rash from the other side of Airlock 1, and Fatima’s small data-screen on her hip bleeped the register codes of the last Oregon Marine Corps escape pod.

“What the—” Ted spun on his heel, his welding torch spurting into life as he flinched at the sound. The other teams of hauliers working to barricade and seal the other airlocks also paused in their work and looked hesitantly at the glowing red line of Airlock One.

Fatima could see their consternation written clearly on their faces. Is that them? The cyborgs? The Ru’at? Have they come for us?

But it wasn’t, was it? Fatima rechecked her data-screen one more time, just to be sure. “Back to work, fellas! It’s not who you think!” she shouted.

“Who is it?” Ted did not look convinced that it was a friendly face.

“It’s Marine Corps. It has to be the colonel of theirs.” Fatima was already taking the welding torch from the man’s hands. “Come on, give me the fuel pack. We need to get that door open now!”

Fatima Ahmadi threw the soldering pack over a shoulder, grunting with the effort as she ran to the still-glowing line of the door and started working. A flick of her wrist and the welding torch sprang into life, at first burning an incandescent yellow before she adjusted the propane mixture to turn it into a blisteringly hot blue flame.

“Here, wait up…” Ted shrugged off his welding helmet and placed it over his administrator’s face as she knelt to get to work, before taking up one of the titanium rods on the floor.

The glowing red bead of solder brightened under Fatima’s attention, going from red to orange in a matter of heartbeats, and then to yellow, and then started bubbling and running down the door seal.

“Okay.” She sweated behind her mask. Even with her industrial-class encounter suit and the welding mask, she could feel the waves of radiating heat coming from the door as she was forced to step back while Ted stabbed the titanium rod at the melted solder. Quick jabs, because even though the hardened titanium had a much higher melting point, Ted didn’t want it to fuse into the door seal.

Thock! Thock!

More liquid gobbets of metal fell to the floor, hissing and cooling into solid silver puddles before their heavy work boots. Fatima moved in to work at the seal again, this time with more of the recently added metal pouring away, before Ted jammed the rod into the seal and heaved.

Creeeak!

With a gasp of steam from the closed environment behind, the door separated, and the automatic opening mechanism pulled the doors stutteringly back to reveal Jezebel Wen, sitting on her escape pod and looking at them with clear puzzlement.

“What the heck are you doing here?” Fatima flipped the welding mask up.

“Wow. Nice to see you, too,” the Marine said, standing up and looking back at the pod. “Colonel Faraday must have pre-programmed the pod,” she muttered.

“Well, I’m sure glad to have a Marine on board, but you gotta know that all the rest of your lot are on the surface of Pluto, not up here.” Fatima was already gesturing for her to get inside. “Come on, quick. I don’t know how much time we have before…”

Clunk.

It wasn’t a particularly loud noise that interrupted their conversation, but the administrator of the service station knew in her heart what it was. She had heard similar noises to it every day of her life up here.

And it was coming from the external airlock doors.

“That’s the sound of a ship docking…” Fatima breathed, stumbling back from the unsealed and now-open airlock.

“A friendly?” Jezzy was saying, already swinging her Jackhammer up and aiming at the outer airlock door. Even though it was a fairly bulky weapon, it looked pathetically small compared to what must be coming through the other side.

Fatima spared a look at the data-screen hanging from her hip. “Well, the station hasn’t received any telemetry signals. Whoever it is, it’s operating dark.”

“Or it doesn’t even use Confederate radio codes.” Jezzy started to back-step, still pointing the gun at the outer door. Just like the Ru’at wouldn’t, she thought.

But if it was one of the vacuum-resistant cyborgs, somehow surviving the destruction of the Oregon and flinging itself here to The Last Call, then why was it initiating a docking procedure? How?

“They would just cut their way in, like they did on the Oregon,” Jezzy muttered to herself.

“What?” Fatima said in a tight voice.

“Tell everyone to get out of here. Everyone.” Jezzy had reached the inner airlock door.

“You heard her, ladies—get your butts into gear! Back up to engineering!” Fatima was already calling, and the few work teams, hauliers, and mechanics who had elected to stay behind as Ahmadi had quickly dropped their tools and ran for the service elevators.

Jezzy paused by the inner airlock door as people scattered behind her.

“Come on!” Ted was shouting, already reaching the side of one of the elevators. He wasn’t speaking to Jezzy, of course, but to Fatima, his oldest friend here on the station, who was still standing next to Jezzy.

“Go without me!” Fatima said, hitting the big red button to make the inner airlock start to hiss and rattle closed in front of her. The door, thanks to the quickly solidifying solder that Ted had just added to it—and then Fatima had tried to take away—impeded the door’s travel. It froze, shook, and then traveled forward a few more inches.

Tsssss! Steam erupted from the far end of the airlock, where someone—or something—had managed to activate the outer lock’s opening mechanism.

“That means they’ve got a pressurized environment,” Jezzy said, her heart hammering in her chest as she focused her gun at the center of the door.

“What?” Fatima was hitting the door-close button again, but the door would only shake and judder in place.

“That’s gas escaping from their side. It means they’ve got an airlock seal on their side of the door, just the same as we would use,” Jezzy said. “It means that they breathe oxygen.” That they’re biological, even. The combat specialist’s mind started to race.

“What good does that do!?” Fatima had now given up on trying to close the door and was instead tugging on Jezzy’s shoulder to try and pull her back toward the elevators.

“Because if it breathes, we can choke it!” Jezzy was looking around the hold. “There has to be something around here…” The combat specialist could see the turbines and pipes of the air filtration system that pushed oxygen around the inside of The Last Call.

No. It would take too long to depressurize this space.

Tsssss! The steam had now stopped, and the three airlock lights over the outer door were blinking. The first had already gone from a warning-orange to an okay-green, and even as Jezzy watched, she saw the middle light flicker green, and then…

“Come on! We have to go!” Fatima shouted.

“There. That pipe,” Jezzy followed a nest of the stations pipes—some metal, some ceramic, and one of the largest looked to be reinforced chrome-aluminum.

My Jackhammer will be able to get through that, she thought, raising her rifle to point at it.

“What are you doing?” Fatima was pulling at the Marine’s shoulders.

“What’s in that pipe? It’s not connected to the fans.”

“That’s pure carbon dioxide! It’s all the filtered dioxide from the station, going to be vented out into space. If you burst that, you’ll kill both of us!” Fatima was saying.

“But not quickly.” Jezzy pulled the trigger.

PHOOOM!

“You idiot!” Fatima was shouting as the shiny pipe burst, and then silvered fragments ripped up and away from the hole Jezzy’s gun had made.

The room quickly started to smell heavily of exhaust. It stuck to the back of her throat and made Fatima’s eyes water. The administrator raced to one of the side walls, pulling at the handle on the emergency panel to draw out a basic breathing system, which was little more than a facemask attached to a pipe and a bottle of compressed air.

Environmental Warning! Air Filters Offline!

Jezzy’s suit chirruped at her. “Get to the elevator. Now!” Jezzy turned and grabbed the station administrator by the shoulder, hauling her back as the final warning light on the outer airlock door clicked to green. The atmospheric pressures on the other side must have equalized. It was now safe for those on the other side to enter—or so they thought.

The outer door started to open as the two women stumbled for the elevator.

And the whole room was caught in the glare of a brilliant white light.

12

Ru’at Hails You

The Ru’at had built their new city in no time at all, Solomon realized as he looked down over the star-like shape that spread before them, everything built in gleaming chrome.

It was too bright to be out here, amidst the ochres and rusted tones of Mars. It looked brighter and cleaner than anything that the Martians or the Confederates could build, Solomon thought.

And it also looked surprisingly…industrial.

The Ru’at jump-ship was pulling them over its home for Solomon, the clone-Tavin, and the Martian communications officer to look down through the viewing window at a shape that was almost reminiscent of a snowflake. Long ‘arms’ of gleaming silver metal branched out from a tall spire in the center—fatter at the base and pointed at the top like a steel pyramid.

And from these splayed arms that hugged the Martian deserts sprang several more, smaller ‘fractals’ of the same shape and color as their parents. In effect, Solomon realized that he was looking at lots of different modules, halls, habitats, or laboratories joined onto five major arteries, with the Ru’at spire at its heart.

“But when did they get here? How did they have time to build this?” Solomon said, frowning at the display below them as the Ru’at ship started to guide them lower and lower toward the outermost edge of one of the arms. It is intending to dock.

“The Ru’at arrived not a few hours ago,” Tavin murmured.

“Then they couldn’t have had time to build all of this.” Solomon estimated that their new city must be almost a mile in diameter. Could they, though? He questioned himself. Who knew what this advanced alien race were capable of?

Unless… Solomon looked over at Tavin. At the clone of Augustus Tavin, he corrected himself

In just the same way that he thinks that I am a clone, too…

Augustus Tavin—the real one, if there even was a ‘real’ biological human at the start—had been the CEO of the interstellar mega-corporation called NeuroTech. The company specialized in military technology and had bases everywhere, although its main headquarters had been on Proxima.

NeuroTech and Taranis Industries were the ones behind the cyborgs, building them from schematics stolen from the Ru’at Message, Solomon remembered. They were both companies that had been around a long time.

“Long enough to build a secret base on Mars?” he murmured, and he saw that the clone-Tavin beside him was watching him with a ferocious intensity.

“You guessed right, Lieutenant Cready,” the man said as they lowered to the surface of the Red Planet, iron-rich sands billowing up around them. “The cyborgs built this place for their arrival.”

“You mean you built this place,” Solomon muttered as their ship was set down with perfect precision next to one of the radial arms. There was a distant series of thunks and tremors from the body of the damaged Martian transporter as, Solomon presumed, the airlocks were extended to match up with their own.

The Ru’at jump-ship was now no longer in view, and the blue light had clicked off around them.

“What happens now, Tavin?” Solomon growled, half-rising from the pilot’s chair, only for a metal hand to descend on his shoulder from behind. It was the cyborg that was acting as Tavin’s bodyguard. Solomon had forgotten it was there, and when he tried to squirm out of the way, the implacable grip only increased until he couldn’t move at all for fear of breaking his own collarbone.

“Now, Lieutenant? Now you will be judged,” Tavin said.

“Solomon!” The shocked and frantic voice of the Imprimatur of Mars, Mariad Rhossily, rose to greet the lieutenant as soon as he left the flight deck of the Martian transporter.

The imprimatur and the ambassador were now both standing in the main body of the hold, their wrists tied together.

“Is that really necessary?” Solomon sneered at the only other full human in the room—the treacherous Kol, holding a dressing to his head injured from the battle with one hand, while the other pointed a pistol at the hostages.

“Can’t have anyone getting funny ideas now, can we?” Kol sneered back, just as vehemently.

“Funny ideas, right in front of those monsters?” Solomon nodded to the line of the NeuroTech cyborgs that had arrived with the clone-Tavin, standing stock still as if they were statues.

They don’t even breathe. Or blink. Or speak. Solomon shuddered, before the metal hand clamped onto his shoulder shoved him forward.

“Where are you taking us? I demand to see a superior officer!” Ambassador Ochrie was saying, attempting to use the full force of her ambassadorial authority. It didn’t help that the woman also looked as white as a sheet.

I wonder what the official Confederate policy is for alien contact. Solomon heaved a sigh. Whatever was going to happen now, he knew that they were a long way from Confederate regulations.

We’re going to have to work this one out on our own, Solomon thought as he was pushed to join the others, and Kol hit the door release.

The party stepped into a white corridor with a tapered roof. Everything was pristine and shining metal, from the floor panels to the walls.

And the habitat—or colony/city—was already inhabited. Which is odd, Solomon thought. He hadn’t expected to see living, flesh-and-blood people here.

“These people are Martians!” Ambassador Ochrie correctly diagnosed the sight ahead of them. Rivers of people in all sorts of uniform and dress, and they were humans. They wore encounter suits and shawls, dresses and robes, and all of them had that slightly industrial, ragged appearance.

As if they’ve spent most of their lives working in the factories and machine plants that Mars has.

“You are incorrect, Ambassador,” clone-Tavin stated. “These people might appear to the untrained eye to be Martians. And indeed, they have lived most of their natural lives here on Mars, but they are not Martians,” he said, somewhat absurdly as they stepped out into the busying crowd, joining the flow of people as they walked up the corridor. Some peeled off before they reached the end, moving through automatic doors and into the smaller, ‘fractal’ rooms that branched from the main. None of the humans in here paid any attention whatsoever to the new arrivals, or the freakish half-silver, half-human cyborgs that escorted them.

“What?” the ambassador asked in confusion.

“They are now Ru’at,” the clone-Tavin said in a low murmur, but the timbre and solemnity that he managed to give to even these few words made it feel almost reverential.

“What!?” The ambassador scoffed. “That is a load of ridiculous codswallop, as well you know.” She shook her head. “A subjugated people never willingly adopt a new culture.”

“And just what makes you think that they are subjugated, Ambassador?” clone-Tavin kept his voice low amidst the tramp of feet and the rustle of clothing. “Do you hear anyone crying? Wailing? Gnashing their teeth?”

Solomon, as well as the ambassador and anyone else with ears in that room, could not hear sounds of distress at all.

“These people were what we used to call the First Martians, or Chosen of Mars,” clone-Tavin said, and Solomon’s eyes slid to Kol walking a few paces in front of him. Just like you, Kol? He gritted his teeth but said nothing. The technical specialist for Gold Squad had Martian relatives, who had apparently passed on their fanatical belief in an independent and free Red Planet to Kol. When the time had come, and push had turned into shove, the specialist had elected to betray all his squad-mates and leave them to die in the service tunnels under the Martian Armstrong Habitat. He had defected to the seditionists.

“All of these people were already dissatisfied with the Confederacy, and so when another alternative was offered to them—”

“The Ru’at, you mean?” the ambassador said darkly.

“—they volunteered to move and work here,” clone-Tavin said. “They were given hope. A new start. A new life. Which of us doesn’t want those things?”

“I don’t know, do you?” the ambassador returned archly.

“What do you mean? Because I am a clone? Just like the good lieutenant here?” Clone-Tavin spared the ambassador a thin-lipped smile.

“Stop saying that!” Cready hissed at him, and either the hurt and confusion in his voice or the put-down of Tavin made the ambassador stop her taunting of the clone.

“What’s wrong with them all?” the imprimatur whispered to Solomon at her side as they walked sedately in silence. They were heading not for any of the smaller doorways that led to the right or left, but instead, the hostages were being led straight to the far end.

And the spire? Solomon thought grimly. “Wrong?”

“No one’s talking to each other. At all,” Rhossily whispered, and then Solomon realized that was entirely true. He hadn’t registered it at first, given the shock of seeing humanity here in this supposedly alien base.

But there was…nothing. He shuddered as the hairs on the back of his neck started to stand up. No muttered conversations. No exclamations, proclamations. No arguments or lovers’ words. All the ex-Chosen of Mars walked calmly to their respective destinations.

“Are they drugged? Did you drug them?” Solomon hissed angrily at Tavin in front of them.

“Me? I haven’t done anything!” the clone said, apparently finding Solomon’s outrage very amusing. “Here, why don’t you see for yourselves?” Tavin stepped from their course to directly cross paths with another ex-Martian coming the other way. It was a young man with blond hair and an orange shawl.

“Excuse me, citizen. Ru’at hails you,” the clone said.

Solomon watched as the man blinked several times, as if surprised, and then reached up to touch two fingers to his forehead. “Ru’at hails you, brother,” the man responded seriously.

“Tell me, friend. Are you happy today?” Tavin continued.

The colonist stalled in front of him, frowning just slightly.

So, they do feel annoyance, Solomon was kind of grateful to see.

“Of course I am happy, friend,” the colonist responded. “The blessings of Ru’at go with us,” he said with a more perfunctory nod than before and sidled out of Tavin’s path to rejoin his own.

“You see? Perfectly happy!” Tavin stated.

“Perfectly brainwashed, you mean,” the ambassador muttered.

Solomon rather thought that the woman was right. They neared the end of the hallway and swept through a large open arch into a long, curving thoroughfare.

We must be almost under the spire. This appeared to be some kind of canteen space, Solomon thought, as he saw that on the inner wall of the curving room were many, many booth-like cubicles. The citizens of the quiet colony were making their way to various cubicles to wait in line, and through the doors, Solomon saw figures in the darkness—Ru’at!?—handing or offering things to the Martians.

“What’s that? Who’s behind those booths?” the imprimatur asked, clearly completely disturbed by this whole experience.

“Why don’t we go and find out?” Tavin gestured for them to move forward, cutting across the passive crowds of ex-Martians moving back and forth from one booth to another, before moving back into the thoroughfare and off to their own respective, personal missions.

“What do they do here?” Solomon murmured out loud, baffled. “How come the Confederacy doesn’t know about this?”

“Don’t they?” Tavin murmured, but before Solomon or the others could ask the clone to elaborate, he continued. “This is a colony, Lieutenant. Same as any other. The Ru’at citizens here work as every other colonist does, although the Ru’at technology does make a lot of the more menial tasks irrelevant.”

“Making cyborgs,” Solomon guessed, and when he saw Tavin’s jaw twitch, he knew that he had hit the nail on the head. “This is where the Martian separatists are getting their armaments from, isn’t it? The cyborgs? The war robots?”

“Your genetic programming does you a good service, Lieutenant.” Tavin inclined his head, leading the way not to the nearest booth, but cutting across to a line of three that were separated from the rest. Each had a lip built out around the booth, as if those inside would want privacy for whatever business they had to conduct there.

Business…or punishment? Solomon slowed his steps, but before he could signal his intentions to the two women at his side, the silence of the thoroughfare was split by a shrill keening.

Skreeeeeeeee.

“By the stars, what sort of cacophony is that?” The ambassador stumbled, hands sweeping to her ears as the imprimatur did the same.

Solomon, strangely, found that the noise didn’t affect him at all. And neither did it appear to affect Tavin at his side.

But every other human, from the imprimatur and the ambassador to the ex-Martian colonists, appeared to flinch. Almost as one, all the citizens dropped to their knees where they stood. Slowly, with greater resistance, the ambassador and the imprimatur hunkered down too, although Solomon rather thought it was from the pain the high-pitched screeching was causing in them.

In a moment, it was just Tavin, Solomon, and the complement of cyborg guards who stood upright and alone in the thoroughfare.

Tavin half-turned to nod slowly at Solomon. “Believe me now when I tell you that you and I are like brothers?” And then, the clone slowly and gracefully also lowered himself to his knees, gesturing for Solomon to do the same.

The best thief in New Kowloon was very tempted to remain standing, just to spite this strange man. I am NOT a clone! he shouted angrily inside his own head. No matter if he had seen almost two dozen cyborgs wearing his own face, he still couldn’t believe it.

Maybe I am the original, normal human one, he thought angrily as he joined the others on the floor, kneeling with head bowed.

SkreeeeeeEEEEEE! The screeching whine increased in pitch and volume until it appeared that every ‘normal’ human there was in agony. The worst affected, of course, were the ambassador and imprimatur, who cried out in anguish from their huddled falls. But the lieutenant could also see all the other ex-Martians starting to shudder where they knelt, their shoulders and backs shaking and sweat beading on their brows.

And still Solomon and Tavin, as well as the cyborgs, were completely unaffected. Even Kol was kneeling on the floor beside the others, gritting his teeth.

“What the hell are you doing to them?” Solomon hissed to Tavin.

“Me? But I am not doing anything at all, Lieutenant. It’s the Ru’at, see?” Tavin murmured, just as a bright purple light burst into the thoroughfare.

The imprimatur gasped out in pain.

The light appeared to have a similar effect on all the natural humans here. Low murmurs rippled across the throng in pained murmurs. It was the first time that Solomon had heard these strange colonists appear to express human needs.

The light grew more and more intense, until it was so bright that Solomon’s eyes, even turned away, burned with psychedelic after-images.

This is the Ru’at? They’re here? His mind was racing, wishing that he had a pistol on him. A weapon. Anything.

The light grew closer. Solomon could tell by the intensity of the glare and the wave of groaning discomfort from the people around him.

But the thoroughfare was too packed with human bodies… Where was the light coming from, Solomon wondered, until he realized that it was floating. The Ru’at, or whatever this thing was, was floating over the humans’ heads. And it was glowing with a brilliance that made Solomon think of neutrino stars and pulsars.

The floating light moved over their kneeling people’s heads, accompanied by that strange, high-pitched whine.

“By the stars, what the…?” he heard Mariad Rhossily whisper beside him. He raised his head to look at her, but the ethereal brilliance turned everything into high contrast. Her skin looked so pale as to be almost translucent, and her eyes were dark.

“What is it? What’s happening?” Solomon hissed at her. The imprimatur had her head not lowered, but raised, and then he saw that everyone else did, too.

“What is going on with them all?” he turned to hiss at Tavin, but then the light hit his eyes, and all thoughts of the Ru’at, the clone-Tavin, and even the Confederacy and Mars itself disappeared from Solomon Cready’s mind…

13

Shadows of the Past

Solomon Cready sat in his tiny box-room hotel apartment, looking at the object on the table. The neon lights of New Kowloon’s never-sleeping business district glared through the blinds. He hadn’t bothered to turn the room’s LED lights on. Really, what was the point when you had a six-meter advertising screen outside your window?

In a short while, everything would change forever for him. Not that the young man knew that at the time. His best friend Matty Sozer would arrive, with the news of his contact in the Neon Lounge who would be able to help him decipher the riddle of the device that sat on the table in front of him.

But maybe the younger Solomon Cready did have some premonition or awareness of what might happen, as his eyes slid away from the strange metal device he had found hidden in this very room.

It was some sort of transmitter, clearly, the man noted. A silver metal tube, thinner and smaller than his little finger, with two wires coming out of the end, with tiny wire pads at the end.

“Someone smuggled this in here to keep tabs on me,” Solomon muttered to himself. But who?

On the other side of the obscure tracking device was a heavy pistol, awaiting its clip of fat nine-millimeter bullets. Solomon had taken the pistol out of its lockbox under the cheap rented bed just a little while ago.

Solomon hated guns. It was generally a sign that everything about the mission that you wanted to go right had failed. Guns were an easy way to solve problems, and always the messiest.

But still, what he was looking at here he knew to be serious business. It was clearly a very sophisticated device, and someone had gone to a lot of effort to hide it in his room.

His room. Solomon Cready’s. It was a sign that ‘they’ were onto him—whoever ‘they’ were…

The Yakuza? Could be. Although this looked far too advanced for their usual methods. If the Yakuza wanted to keep tabs on him, the young thief knew, then all they would have to do was to drive up to his hotel and drag him into one of their Black Maria cars. The largest crime syndicate in New Kowloon had never been shy about getting to the point.

The Triads? Could be…but Solomon knew that they had even less chance of being able to afford some high-tech surveillance equipment like this.

That left only two players. One was the mega-corps that came to the deregulated zone of New Kowloon in order to perform all their most suspicious of trades. They could afford technology like this, but really, Solomon had stolen, swindled, and cheated enough of the world’s biggest companies that it could be ANYONE.

And then, of course, there were the Confederate Enforcers. The stars knew that Solomon had done plenty to annoy the police force of the Earth Confederacy.

Did this mean that they were onto him? And that a raid was imminent?

Whoever it was who was trying to keep tabs on Solomon, one thing was for certain: they had a lot of money, and they could get pretty much anywhere.

KNOCK-KNOCK-tap! The door suddenly shook with two loud knocks, followed by a much lighter finger tap.

‘Thank the stars,’ Solomon breathed as he stood up and moved to open the door. It was the secret knock that he and Matty had shared since they were teenagers, back out West in the American Confederacy.

Now that his best—and only—friend Matthias Sozer was here, everything would be alright. Matty knew people. Matty was smart. Matty had his back…

Many more years back still, Solomon stood in a deserted laboratory, not knowing that his entire life was about to change.

He was barely into his teenage years, and already he had managed to get expelled from the Confederate-state school. Not that he minded. The younger Solomon had hated how slow everything had been in that place—from the lessons to the teachers and other students.

Why couldn’t they see the answers to the problems as he apparently could so easily? Why couldn’t they catch up?

Solomon had been a gangly sort of youth, with sharp features and wide, clear eyes. And he was also very, very smart, which was why he now found himself here, in the heart of AgroMore’s laboratory, not intending to DO anything per se, more just to alleviate his boredom.

Or so he thought.

AgroMore was the biggest corporation in the small Mid-Western town that Solomon had grown up in. This laboratory and twenty or so others just like it were near the top of the company’s giant tower-like harvesters that slowly moved around the endless fields of golden wheat. It had taken Solomon an hour to climb the outer scaffolding, and only a further five minutes to pick the lock that let him in here.

The youth could feel the entire tower moving under his feet, as well as the distant vibration-chug of the hoppers and sorting machines in the levels below.

But up here? This was where the strains of wheat were put together, wasn’t it? Where the crop was analyzed, and the best genes were selected for next year’s growing season.

Around the youth stood rows and rows of metal tables, with long semi-circular hydroponic units on top. Different units were filled with glaring blue-white light, others had a deep red, and still more had a brilliant white. When Solomon edged closer to look inside, he could see the different stages of the young wheat plants—from seeds germinating on a mesh bed to sprouting shoots in thin trays of vermiculite.

But, apart from the wonders of genetic modification, there wasn’t much else for Solomon to see. His curiosity was starting to wane, and that was always bad. It meant that he would get bored, and that he would try to push himself further and do something truly reckless next time.

“Pssst!” A voice disturbed his investigation, and Solomon froze. There was something at the window behind him.

“Hey, you! The guards are coming! Get out of there!” The silhouetted figure was waving at him to come out.

“Guards?” Solomon turned around slowly to see a youth roughly his age—a few years older, perhaps, but not much—with dark hair and dark eyes. He was crouched on the windowsill that Solomon had himself unlocked and opened to the fresh night air outside.

“Who are you? Why are you helping me?” Solomon didn’t move as he strained his ears. Could he distantly make out something—the sound of a drone copter, perhaps, rhythmically humming in the distance?

“I’m Matthias. Matty. I saw you climb the tower—it was pretty cool—but you were too slow.” The youth shrugged, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to want to climb the harvesting towers in the middle of the night. “You know that the guards patrol every twenty minutes, right?” The kid shook his head.

Solomon paused for a heartbeat before breaking into a grin. “Thanks, Matty. You know the best way down?”

Matthias Sozer nodded. “Of course. Follow me. I got your back.”

And from that day on, Solomon and Matthias Sozer had become friends, and eventually, accomplices.

“What did you do!?” Solomon looked down at the upturned face of his best friend—the man who had been his collaborator on a hundred scams, heists, and missions.

The man who had saved his life more times than Solomon had saved his.

In Solomon’s hand was the same heavy pistol that he had been wary of picking up just a few hours before. But he had picked it up—even though Matty had said his contact would be kosher, that there wasn’t going to be any trouble.

“But there was trouble, wasn’t there, Matty?” Solomon hissed in anger. They stood in the garage basement of one of the many tower block tenements in New Kowloon. The ghettoized district of Hong Kong was now a walled miniature city-state all its own—a deregulated zone that was hard to get into, and much harder to leave.

The rules were looser in New Kowloon. The enforcers conducted little more than lightning raids through the rat-warren streets and housing blocks exactly like this one. New Kowloon was where the criminals went to become masters of their craft, and where the politicians went when they wanted to buy the things that normal society wouldn’t allow.

New Kowloon was where Solomon Cready had ended up, and where he had excelled, rising to become one of the best conmen and cat-burglars in a city that was full of them. He had cheated the Yakuza and the Triads alike. He had leeched hundreds of thousands of Confederate credits from the mega-corporations. He had even once had his hands on a Picasso.

And now he had been brought low by the only person in Kowloon who could have outsmarted him.

“Those gunmen were waiting for us. They were waiting for me,” Solomon spat. The pistol felt heavy in his hand. Heavier than he remembered it being. Solomon knew that it was just a trick of his imagination, but it felt to him as if his hand was holding all the weight of the sin he was about to commit.

There was only one man in New Kowloon who had known about the meeting with their informant. Just as there was only one man who had access to Solomon’s rooms for long enough to plant that device.

There was only one man in New Kowloon that Solomon trusted.

Had trusted.

And that was Matty Sozer, looking up at Solomon with the eyes of a youth, staring at him from a harvester window.

Solomon lowered the pistol as his chest started to swell with fury. How could Matty have done this to him? Why? How long had his best friend been working against him?

“I’ll ask you one more time, Matty: why?”

14

Not a War, an Upgrade

Back on the metal floor of the strange Ru’at city, Solomon was gasping for air as he felt his heart race.

“Matty!” he whispered, shaking his head to cast aside the strange memories or visions or whatever those experiences had been.

“Proxima…” he heard the imprimatur beside him mutter, and when he looked over to her, he saw that she too appeared disoriented and confused, just as he was. “I was… It was like… It was like I was in a dream…” Mariad Rhossily rubbed her eyes and looked at her shaking hands, as if to prove that this really was real.

The other citizens of the colony were groaning and wobbling back to their feet—all apart from the cyborgs, of course, who had stayed exactly where they were. As Solomon did the same, offering his hand to help the older Ambassador Ochrie to her feet, he saw that it looked as though every human here had had some sort of deeply moving experience. It was startling to see so much emotion from the people who, just moments before, had been as silent as the cyborgs themselves. Solomon could see tears and a few weary, tragic smiles, as well as quite a few more deeply troubled frowns.

“Ambassador?” the imprimatur breathed in a low voice. “Did you…”

Ochrie was the one in their little group who appeared the least emotional. Instead of tears or laughter, her mouth was a flat line. “Did I what? Have some recurring dream about my dead daughter? The answer would be yes. And it doesn’t mean anything.”

“You have a daughter?” Solomon said in surprise. Somehow, he had imagined that the austere woman would have been married to her job. “Had, I mean… I’m sorry…” he stammered as he saw Ochrie’s eyes widen for a fraction of a moment, and then her frown deepened instead.

“Her death was a long time ago, and I fail to see what relevance it has to our predicament here,” she snapped.

“Of course it has relevance,” Tavin broke into their muttered conversation. “You have been given a gift of knowledge by the Ru’at. Just as we all have.”

“And what could you possibly have experienced, Mr. Tavin? Seeing that you were grown in a test-tube?” The ambassador had her hackles up, Solomon realized.

“Oh, I had a life. Or this body had a life.” Tavin flickered his eyes to Solomon. “What about you, Lieutenant Cready? Care to share with the group?”

“No,” Solomon said tersely, and instead changed the subject. “What was that? A drug pumped through the air?”

“That, Lieutenant, was the Ru’at,” Tavin said mysteriously. “That is why so many of the Chosen of Mars converted to following their new masters.”

“You’re not making any sense, Tavin!” the ambassador hissed. The crowds around them had thinned somewhat, and by now, the vestiges of the emotional experience were starting to drain from their expressions, as the human citizens once again went about their daily business. The sudden return of the silence felt as comforting as a hospital bed.

“The Ru’at are a strange species,” Tavin declared. “And when us poor humans come into contact with them, they can trigger…memories in us. You see, you Confederates are thinking of this encounter with the Ru’at in entirely the wrong terms. You use terms like invasion or war when really, you should be seeing the Ru’at as our allies, as these people here do. What we are talking about is an upgrade.”

“Allies!? Upgrade!?” Rhossily turned on the man, stalking forward, and Solomon thought that she would probably hit him straight across his smirking face if one of the cyborgs hadn’t stepped forward to extend an arm and halt the irate woman.

“The Ru’at didn’t look like our allies when they bombarded Proxima!” the woman said vehemently to the taller man.

“I never said that they were peaceful, Imprimatur,” Tavin said. “But the Ru’at did send us the Message, which allowed us to create all of this amazing technology, and that promises to unlock the secret of faster-than-light travel as well!” The clone looked pleased. “The Ru’at have been studying humanity for a long, long time, and they have sent their gifts to us as an offer to help us evolve. To become more like them!”

“It sounds like you’ve drunk the Kool-Aid, Tavin,” Solomon growled, using a long-dead expression.

“Ask these people around us!” Tavin spread out his long-fingered hands. “Do any of them look unhappy? Are their lives still ones of crushing misery and long hours of dangerous work? Can you really not tell me, Lieutenant Cready, that the Ru’at haven’t made their lives better?”

Solomon forced himself to consider the question as he looked around them. The thoroughfare was once again filling with the converted citizens of the colony. These new arrivals also walked in silence, calmly, but Solomon wasn’t sure that he would have described them as happy. He watched as those nearest to him went to wait their turn at the cubicles on the inner side of the wall, before stepping inside and being handed something by the shrouded figure.

“Food. Water. Medicine. Duties. Advice. Tools,” Tavin announced, indicating the booths around them. “Everything that a human might need or want, they can have it for free.”

“How very utopian,” Solomon sneered.

“I ask you again, Lieutenant: do these people look unhappy to you? Would life not be better if we let the Ru’at guide humanity? They are already an interstellar race. Think of the knowledge and the opportunities that they can offer us!” Tavin ended gloriously.

“What do I think?” Solomon squinted. “I think that a lot of people died on Proxima, and just a few miles above our heads, fighting these Ru’at.”

“If the Marine Corps wasn’t so stubborn…” Tavin began, before Solomon cut him off.

“And it also seems to me, Tavin,” Solomon said in a louder voice, hoping that some of these new ‘Ru’at citizens’ had the wits left to listen to him, “that giving away free food and triggering painful memories is a great way to brainwash and control a civilization you want to conquer!”

15

Battle Plan

“Stand down! Stand down!” Dark silhouettes were piling through the open airlock, and they were bulky, humanoid but taller than the average human, and much, much wider.

And they’re shouting in English, Jezzy registered as she and The Last Call’s station administrator barely reached the opening to the service elevator.

“What?”

“Lieutenant Wen!” a voice was shouting, and Jezzy turned to see the first dark shape walk out of the glare of their assembled suit lights.

It was General Asquew.

“General!” Jezzy felt her knees go weak as relief flushed through her. The Second Rapid Response Fleet is here. They might have a fighting chance.

The General of the Rapid Response Fleet was a tall and imposing woman even before she put her power armor on, and with the added metal-sheathed combat boots, the battle-harness, and the metal cowl and sculpted helmet, she looked more like a Valkyrie or some sort of living warrior goddess than she did a human. The impression was further aided by the broadsword that she had strapped to her hip, and the heavy machine pistol she held in one hand.

“Lieutenant Wen. We detected the destruction of the Oregon as soon as we jumped in. What happened? Where’s Colonel Faraday?” Asquew asked as lines and lines of Marines swept into the hold around her.

“Ugh. Excuse me,” Fatima said in muffled tones from behind her breathing mask, “but if you’re not the Ru’at or the cyborgs, can we stop my station becoming a poisonous deathtrap now?” She nodded up to where the silvered pipe that Jezzy had shot was still spewing carbon dioxide.

“Frack. Sorry. I didn’t realize who it was. You said yourself that the station didn’t recognize their ship ID,” Jezzy said, looking around for a way to stem the poisonous clouds.

“It’s Hausman,” Asquew spat, her voice loud and clear through her suit’s speakers. “He’s revoked all of our command codes. The entire Rapid Response Fleet are now considered to be enemy combatants!”

“What!?” Jezzy shook her head. This was all too much for her. It was like Asquew was speaking a foreign language. “General Hausman of the Near-Earth Fleet?” she repeated. There were only two generals in the entirety of the Marine Corps, and between them, they coordinated all the Marine units, including her Outcasts as well as every ship from one end of the Confederacy to the other. But seeing as humanity was in danger of spreading itself pretty thin between all of the various colonies, stations, and deep-field station-ships, it was decided that one military commander would be responsible for the protection of Earth, the Moon, and the near stations—Hausman—and the other would be responsible for everything else—Asquew.

“Earth has been nuked,” Asquew said.

“What!?” Jezzy burst out.

Behind her, the station administrator had apparently given up on the idea of getting the woman responsible to fix her station, so instead, she was already at a unit on the base of the pipe, heaving on a large metal wheel and slowing the flow of dangerous gases to a standstill.

“Is that going to be a problem, Administrator Ahmadi?” Asquew asked the woman, not missing anything in her usual eagle-like command style.

“No, General. I’ve rerouted the gases into the secondary system. Just so long as we can vent this room and repair the pipe, we’ll be able to keep The Last Call habitable.” Fatima threw a very dark look at Jezzy.

“I’m sorry…” the combat specialist murmured. She was sorry for a lot of things. She was sorry that she couldn’t have saved Colonel Faraday. Just like she was sorry that she couldn’t save the steady-hearted Karamov.

“You did what you thought you had to do, Marine. No one will judge you for that,” Asquew said, already turning back to Fatima. “Don’t vent the room. My Marines can fight in this environment. And we never know what advantage that might give us against our enemy.” Her attention turned to the back of the hold. “Those elevators will become a secondary airlock system. Just so long as the bulkhead doors are closed, we’ll be able to bring people in here in survival masks and not risk the rest of the station.” She nodded and turned to the Marines, who were busy dragging heavy cargo boxes into the hold. Each of them wore their own suits of power armor, whose air filters would deal perfectly with the poisonous gases in the room.

As Jezzy watched, the Marines set up lines of cargo boxes before flipping the top ones open to reveal weapons, armor, and more weapons. She saw a team of two Marines pulling out a heavy repeater cannon, carrying it between them as a third Marine fired heavy bolts through the thing’s base and into the floor. When they were finished, it was pointing straight at the airlock door they had come through.

“I want one in front of every airlock,” Asquew said. “And I want medical teams to the survivors. We’re taking them out of here.”

“General, sir?” Fatima was saying, wiping the sweat from her brow from her own work diverting the carbon dioxide. “I don’t think that my people will want to go. I gave them the same choice, and those that stayed, well, this is their home.”

Jezzy saw that General Asquew about to say something, but then she just nodded perfunctorily as she turned back to her quartermaster. “Then see that the survivors are suitably armed.”

“Excuse me, Marine?” One of the general’s Marines approached Wen, a data-screen in one hand. As the military personnel around them rushed and hurried, Jezzy was taken to one side to be offered a new suit of power armor.

“Seeing as this one is, uh…” The young Marine frowned at the state of Jezzy’s suit.

“I had to jump-start it,” Jezzy said distractedly, her mind repeating the phrase, Earth has been nuked. Earth has been nuked.

It was a complicated procedure getting out of her suit—particularly because she had effectively welded a part of it to her own foot—and the dangerous atmosphere inside the hold made it all the more difficult.

“Holy frack…” the young Marine said when she saw the state of Jezzy’s foot. “The stimulants must be the only thing that’s keeping you standing up!” A quick calculating look, and the Marine was calling out to Asquew.

“Sir! General, sir! Request to set up immediate field hospital at first safe breathable location to our current!”

Asquew nodded. “Granted. Keep it far enough back so that when the fighting spills over, we’re not having to spend time rescuing your patients.”

“Sir! Yes, sir!” The Marine nodded to her team of medical specialists, and they started for the nearest elevator.

“There’s a works canteen a floor below us. It’s big, has water, and is away from the main station avenues.” Fatima sighed dramatically. “I’ll take you there.”

“Sounds perfect. Medical Team Blue? With me!” the specialist called out, and they were moving.

As Jezzy hopped and hobbled with the group of field medics, her mind was still racing. They nuked Earth. Solomon was heading for Earth.

And then, the worst thought of all: Solomon must be dead.

“Hausman did it? But…why?” Jezzy looked up at the form of her general standing over her. Jezzy was in what the medical specialist referred to as an ‘FTB’ or Field Treatment Bay, more colloquially as ‘Anywhere There Aren’t Bullets Flying at You.’

In short, it was one of the metal canteen tables with a sheet laid over it and a cluster of medical equipment. The medical team had already commandeered the room and set up several such FTBs, empty at the moment but awaiting the imminent arrival of the injured.

“One of the generals nuked New York,” Jezzy heard Fatima repeating Asquew’s words from the other side of her treatment bay. Jezzy herself was hooked up to monitors and extra injectors while the medics worked on her foot, which meant anaesthetizing it to the point that she couldn’t even remember she had a foot, and then prying away the metal from her burnt and frost-bitten flesh before using dermal patches of quick-growing cellular tissue—loaded with stem cells—to rebuild it.

“Will she walk?” Asquew asked the medic at Jezzy’s side.

Wow. Great bedside manner, sir, Jezzy thought.

“Oh, sure. She’ll be stiff and might have lost some movement, but there’s nothing structurally wrong down here,” the woman said, and Jezzy couldn’t work out if that was a reassuringly pragmatic attitude or deeply depressing.

“How long?” Asquew asked, looking behind the screen at the surgical operation the medic was currently performing. Jezzy watched the older woman’s face for any signs of a reaction. There was none.

“Well, I’d advise twenty-one days at least until full movement is attempted…” the medic started to say.

“Unacceptable. I need Lieutenant Wen ready to fly,” Asquew said.

You do? Again, Jezzy felt that curious doubling of feelings as she was at once flattered by the general’s faith in her, and traumatized that things were clearly that bad.

Solomon’s gone… she couldn’t stop herself from thinking.

Fly where?

“Well, seeing as we’re probably all going to die out here anyway…” The medic was a woman who apparently didn’t care who she was talking to. Jezzy thought it must be one of the few benefits of having seen all your fellow soldiers, Marines, and superior officers in varying states of agony. “Just so long as Lieutenant Wen stays dosed up on her stimulants and painkillers. Her new suit will have a complete restock and I’ll add something extra into the mix; then she won’t feel the pain.”

“But can I fight?” Jezzy said. Solomon might be dead, but that doesn’t mean I want to lie down and let his death be for nothing!

She earned a small nod of appreciation from the general, and that was all.

“Well, I wouldn’t go around doing leaping roundhouse kicks at those metal meatheads, but yes, you’ll be able to fight,” the medic said, before leaning around the screen to catch Jezzy’s eye. “But, as a medical professional, I am obligated to tell you that if you don’t take as much weight off this foot as possible, then your healing time will probably double or even triple to forty-two, sixty-three days…”

“If we’re still alive in sixty-three days, I won’t care if there’s still a foot attached to the end of my leg at all!” Jezzy said and meant it.

“Good,” the general said. “As soon as the medic is finished, you and your Outcasts are going back to Mars.”

What!? Jezzy thought.

16

The Judgement

“Step forward, Ambassador Ochrie,” Tavin said seriously.

They stood in front of the large booth-cubicles in the rear wall of the thoroughfare, with the line of Tavin’s cyborgs behind them.

There was something different about these cubicles, however, Solomon saw. These three stood apart from the others and had higher, peaked archway openings with small container walls built out around them to provide a more private opening.

I haven’t seen any of the Martians here using these ones, Solomon thought. His mind checked the surroundings for any modes of escape.

The cyborgs had particle-beam weapons for their hands.

The only person who actually had a gun was Tavin.

“No,” the ambassador said firmly. “Not until you tell me what you are expecting to happen.”

“You will be judged, of course—by the Ru’at,” Tavin said. “Everyone who converts is brought here, where the Ru’at will read your soul and make a decision about whether you are capable of accepting the new evolution of humanity.”

“I’m not,” Ochrie said flatly. “So, if that means that you are going to kill me, then you might as well get it over and done with now, because I will never bend a knee to one of those things again!” She spat vehemence. “I am an officer of the Confederate Government. I demand an audience on equal footing with the aggressors!”

Tavin was quiet for a moment before his voice returned, full of menace. “It is not up to you to decide if you can be useful to the Ru’at, Ambassador. Would you dare question a god?”

“I would,” Solomon said, surprising himself even as he said it.

“Lieutenant,” Ochrie looked at him sternly, “this is not your place. I am the civilian representative. It is my duty to parlay with them.”

“Now you’re starting to sound like our host,” Solomon murmured, earning a dark look from Ochrie. The two locked eyes and held each other’s gaze for a long moment.

“I won’t back down, Lieutenant. We might be in a strange environment, but the rules of Confederate-Marine relations still apply,” Ochrie insisted. “I am the ranking officer here. Stand down, Cready!”

Solomon gritted his teeth. “I’m trying to save your life!” he hissed at the woman who he had been protecting for the last several days. “Both of your lives!” He nodded to include the Imprimatur of Proxima.

“I fear that we have moved beyond that point, Solomon,” Mariad Rhossily said in a ghostly whisper.

At that, the ambassador turned and walked into the booth.

Solomon could still clearly see the woman’s back, still wearing the assistant encounter suit that she had donned to try and escape the Hausman-controlled Lunar base. But in front of her was shadowed darkness, and the suggestion of a veil.

A low humming sound started as soon as she entered to stand before the veil. The lieutenant thought it might be the low-static hum of some big, electrical unit.

“And again, Ambassador, through the veil, if you please,” Tavin stated.

Solomon hissed in frustration. He wouldn’t be able to see what was happening on the other side if she did that. He wouldn’t be able to help her if—

There was a sigh of fabric and a suggestion of movement from the other side of the veil in front of Ochrie. Was that a person? A shape?

The humming grew louder, becoming a heavy, buzzing drone.

“Ambassador, wait!” Solomon stepped forward.

As Ochrie did too, and vanished into the darkness on the other side of the veil.

The droning sound immediately clicked off, and there was silence from in front of them.

“Ochrie!” Solomon was calling, stepping forward again so that his boots were almost crossing the threshold.

Clamp! One of the cyborgs, moving as fast as a well-oiled machine, grabbed Solomon’s shoulder with its vice-like grip and wouldn’t let go.

“What is going on in there?” Solomon asked. “What are you doing to her!?”

Suddenly, the station lights flickered around them, as if a vast surge of energy had moved through the station, before the lights sprang back to normal brilliance.

And then there was the ambassador, stepping back through the veil with a curiously blank look on her face.

“Ambassador?” Mariad was the first to move to her side, reaching up to touch the woman’s shoulder. Even though the two women had never shown any particular friendship to each other—in fact, Solomon had heard them arguing more times than not—Ochrie did not flinch or resist the gesture.

If anything, the ambassador appeared to not even register that the other woman was there.

“Ma’am?” Solomon asked, struggling against the cyborg’s grip.

Ochrie looked up at Solomon and met his eyes. She looked like the same woman that the lieutenant had seen walking into the booth just a few moments before, but there was something awfully, terribly different about her.

All trace of the sharp, gray-blue stare was seemingly gone. Her perennial frown lines that had turned her every demeanor into one of quiet, calculating authority were gone. Instead, the woman was looking up at him with wide, clear eyes.

She looked innocent. Remade. Carefree.

“Ochrie?” Solomon said cautiously.

“Ru’at hails you,” the ambassador responded with the ghost of a smile on her wan face.

“What have you done to her!?” Solomon turned (as much as he was able) to round on clone-Tavin.

“Done? Nothing!” Tavin declared. “She has seen the light. Haven’t you, Ambassador?”

All eyes turned back to the usually fierce older woman, who stood for the first time seemingly relaxed and at ease. “I know what I have to do now,” she said evenly.

“And just what precisely is that, Ambassador?” Solomon was saying through a tight jaw. The Ru’at have done something to her, he thought. They’ve brainwashed her or something…

“Please, do not be alarmed, Lieutenant Cready,” Ochrie said with a nod. “I am still me. I am still the Confederate Ambassador. I need to return to Earth to negotiate with General Hausman about the arrival of the Ru’at.”

“Negotiate?” Solomon asked seriously. “What is there to negotiate, exactly, Ambassador?”

“Why, the integration of the Confederacy into the Ru’at, of course, Lieutenant!” Ochrie looked puzzled, as if that was the most natural answer in the world.

“You’ve turned her into a stars-damned sleeper agent!” Solomon spat at Tavin.

“Sleeper agent? Really, you are being far too melodramatic, Lieutenant Cready. This is the way forward. For all of us,” Tavin said. “We are just a young species, starting out on our journey of cosmic discovery. The Ru’at have millennia of experience and technology that they wish to share with us.”

“And is that what the Proximians thought when the Ru’at bombed them from low orbit?” Solomon pointed out. “What about the Martians here, too?”

“We’ve been over this, Lieutenant. There are always growing pains. And as you can see, the Martians here are happy with their new arrangement.”

“Are they really?” Solomon muttered under his breath.

And then he caught sight of Kol, the treacherous ex-Marine, out of the corner of his eye. He had betrayed the Marine Corps for his ‘side’—the First Chosen of Mars, the Red Planet’s independence fighters.

Kol looked perturbed as he looked around at his fellow Martians.

And Kol has a gun. Solomon saw the traitor’s stolen Jackhammer at his belt.

He had an idea.

“And just how free is Mars going to be under the Ru’at instead of the Confederacy, do you think?” he asked Tavin, but he saw Kol flinch as his words hit home.

“Freer than they were before.” Tavin’s tone started to turn sour. “Now, this is getting tiresome. Imprimatur Rhossily? Please step forward to be judged.”

Solomon saw Mariad blanch paler than she had been before. She didn’t move. She can see as well as I can what is going to happen to her as soon as she steps through that veil, Solomon thought.

“Tavin, there’s no need for this. You’ve proved your point, I’m sure,” Solomon started to try and barter for the sanity of the Imprimatur of Proxima.

“The Ru’at demand judgement!” Tavin said as two of the cyborgs stepped forward, raising their humanoid hands to Mariad’s shoulders.

“Solomon?” The imprimatur’s widened as terror captured her. She hissed the words quickly at him. “Tell my people, tell Proxima, that I fought for them!”

“Wait!” Solomon said, looking not at Tavin or Mariad, but at Kol.

Kol with his Jackhammer rifle.

“This is wrong. The Ru’at won’t give you freedom. They’ve sparked a war and then are moving in to take over the dregs. They don’t care about your independence! Just look at Ochrie!” he pleaded with the man.

But Kol was a traitor, Solomon should have remembered. Even though his eyes were shadowed and his brow furrowed—he clearly hadn’t drunk the Kool-Aid yet, Solomon realized in that moment—he gave Solomon one final, harrowed look of guilt and shook his head. He wasn’t going to get involved this time.

“Kol!” Solomon snapped at him as Imprimatur Mariad Rhossily was pushed forward past the lieutenant.

“Solomon!” Mariad gasped. Her foot crossed the threshold.

“Take me!” Solomon attempted instead. “At least, please, at least let me go first.” Solomon breathed hard.

If this is the only thing that I can do to prolong their freedom, then I’ll do it, he thought. Solomon knew that he had run out of options. That all he had left was his body, his life, and his mind. There were no scams or tricks or stunts that he could pull now to stop the inevitable takeover of Earth by this alien menace.

But I guess I can stand up to it, face-to-face, he thought. That was what he had learned from the Outcast Marines. That honor wasn’t about following orders, or even doing well—it was about what you did when all the chips were down. When the odds were stacked against you, and you were tired and hurt and there didn’t look to be any way out.

“I’ll go next,” Solomon said, and there was no denying the resolution in his voice.

17

Reunited

“We received this message.” General Asquew was walking briskly down one of the corridors of The Last Call, on route to the main hold and, outside of that, the ships that would take Second Lieutenant Jezebel Wen and her Outcasts back to Mars.

The general wasn’t really slowing down for the injured Marine that limped behind her.

Jezzy had only just come from the treatment bay in The Last Call’s works canteen, and although she could barely feel anything below her right knee, her marching was still awkward.

Am I even going to be of any use out there? Jezzy thought in frustration as her power armor picked up the packet of information that Asquew had sent to it.

Incoming Message!

SENDER: BGen. Asquew.

Pattern Signature Recognition: Selenium, Oxygen, Lytase…

“What am I looking at, sir?” Jezzy lurched.

“It was a compound signature given off by a rogue Martian transporter entering Martian space,” Asquew stated. She had already told Jezzy about the arrival of the Ru’at jump-ships in Martian space, and the battle against what was left of the first Rapid Response Fleet.

“Colonel Austin was a good commander,” Asquew stated. “He died in honor.”

“Did no one make it out alive?” Jezzy breathed in horror. She had yet to see the Ru’at ships in battle.

“As you know, all telemetries are delayed by the time it takes to send the radio signal, so we don’t know exactly. But this was the last coded message to reach my position while I was already on route here.” Asquew’s voice faltered over their suit speakers.

She had been caught out, racing from one battlefield to another, and meanwhile, Hausman dropped the bomb on New York and the Ru’at decimated half her fleet, Jezzy saw. It was a classic pincer move—effectively exiling the only woman in the Confederacy who had the competency to do anything about the invasion.

“Se. Ox. Ly,” Asquew stated. “S.O.L.”

Jezzy stumbled, putting her hand out to steady herself against the wall. “Sol? Solomon?” Waves of relief flooded through her. Her commander, her friend, was alive.

Maybe.

“I believe so. The Outcast commander was, as you know, escorting Ambassador Ochrie and the Imprimatur of Proxima to brief the Confederate Council on the events of Proxima.” Asquew paused, turning to wait for Jezzy to regain her composure. “As the Confederate Council meets in New York, I had automatically assumed that Hausman had taken them out in his move for Terran domination. But it appears that I was wrong.”

“And there’s no way this could be a random pairing of molecules?” Jezzy had to ask. The hope would be too painful if it was wrong.

“I trust my officers, Wen. If Austin’s team thinks this is important, then I do too. I cannot see any other explanation than it being a message from Lieutenant Cready, letting us know that he is alive after all. If, indeed, he and the others had managed to get out of New York, then they might well have made for Mars to rendezvous with the Rapid Response Fleet.”

“But why did they make planetfall instead?” Jezzy was confused.

“Your guess is as good as mine, Marine. Which is why I am sending you to find out. The Ru’at jump-ships have, I presume, routed the ships I had stationed there. Perhaps the Ru’at are planning to do to Mars what they did to Proxima? Perhaps Solomon was attempting to stow away to the surface to help the survivors there? Or perhaps this is a clue—that he wanted us to know that something big is happening on Mars.” Asquew nodded to herself and continued marching as Wen joined her.

“Either way, we have the last known coordinates of where the Martian transporter was heading, and you will be traveling, with a small team of personnel, to find out what is going on.”

“Sir. Yes, sir.” Jezzy nodded, but she had one more thing to add. “I am more than relieved to find my commander alive, sir, but don’t you need all troops here? To fight off the Ru’at?”

“What Ru’at, Marine?” Asquew stopped at the alcove where the corridor turned, where a large ovoid porthole looked out into space. This had clearly been the general’s intention as Jezzy stepped forward and looked.

The Ru’at jump-ships had gone. “But…where?” Jezzy breathed.

“Your guess is as good as mine. We believe they activated their faster-than-light drives shortly after the Oregon self-destructed.”

Then Colonel Faraday died in vain… Jezzy felt her heart sink just a little bit lower, if that was even possible.

“Which means that the major concentration of Ru’at forces, as last observed, is Mars,” Asquew said.

“But, General…” Jezzy could see a gaping flaw in her plan. “If the Ru’at are all at Mars, and what’s left of the Rapid Response Fleet are here…”

“Are you questioning my orders, Marine?” Asquew said severely, before softening her tone. “The Outcasts were always meant to be an expeditionary unit. Infiltration, extraction, incision. That is where your skills lie. I need forward scouts to get eyes on Mars before I commit my resources, and the Outcasts are the perfect match.”

“Of course, General, sir,” Jezzy said.

“And, after all, it’s not exactly like you will be going there alone, is it?” Asquew said with a wry smile as one of the bulkhead doors hummed open, and a gaggle of figures appeared. Jezzy recognized each and every one of them.

“Malady!” she greeted the golem-like form first. Corporal Malady was the only remaining core member of the Gold Squad left—apart from me and Solomon, now, Jezzy thought as she stepped forward to rap her knuckles on his hard exoskeleton.

Corporal Malady wore his usual full tactical suit, and was, in short, a walking tank. Jezzy looked up at the strangely silent face of the man behind his faceplate. He permanently looked half-asleep, as he had been biochemically sealed into the full tactical suit for attacking a commander in his previous unit. Jezzy still didn’t know precisely what had happened and had never dreamed to ask.

He is an Outcast now, like me, she thought. That was all that mattered anymore.

“Lieutenant Wen,” the electric-sounding tones of the man-mountain said. And even though he appeared incapable of emotion, Jezzy was sure that she could hear gratitude in his voice.

“Karamov…” Jezzy breathed.

“He was given a military funeral, Lieutenant Wen,” Malady intoned. Jezzy knew what that meant—that he would have been buried in the icy rocks of Mars still inside his power armor, clutching his Jackhammer across his chest.

“Good.” Jezzy nodded quietly. “He didn’t deserve to die. He was a good man.”

“They all are, Marine,” Asquew said behind her, her tone serious. “There will be time for grief afterwards. For now, the memory of our fallen comrades has to spur us onward to greater victories.”

“Sir. Yes, sir.” Jezzy nodded, and her response was echoed by Malady and the other two remaining members of the Gold Squad.

“Corporal Ratko,” Jezzy greeted the smaller Outcast Marine. Ratko wore her power suit, like Jezzy, but hers looked pretty banged and bashed, scratched and scorched in places. She was a smaller woman than Jezzy, and a technical specialist—meaning that she was proficient in almost every aspect of piloting and engineering.

“Good to be back, sir.” Ratko threw a very lazy sort of salute.

The Outcast Marine Willoughby beside her was the next newer addition to Gold Squad. When the Outcast Marine base on Ganymede had been attacked—by none other than Kol, as it happened—the Marine Corps had lost a lot of personnel, and the Outcast ‘adjuncts’ had been upgraded to full Marine status. Ratko, Willoughby, and Arlo Menier had been added to Gold Squad, as the entire unit had to be redesigned.

Ratko and Willoughby weren’t original members of the Gold Squad, but they had proved themselves loyal, all the same.

“Willoughby, glad to have you on board,” Jezzy said warmly.

“Glad to be here, sir,” the taller, fairer woman said from behind her own faceplate. Willoughby hadn’t made it to specialist grade yet, but Jezzy could see a sort of panther’s grace in the way she stood and held her back straight, and Jezebel Wen would have guessed that Willoughby would make it to combat specialist like her.

If any of us survive this, she added inwardly.

“Gold Squad, here are your orders: attempt to track down the whereabouts of Lieutenant Solomon and deliver him from danger. Also, you are to act as forward scouts on any and all Ru’at activity around or on Mars—”

And it was precisely at that point that all of The Last Call shook underfoot, and the air was split by the sound of multiple alarms.

18

Attacked!

BWAARM! BWAAAM! BWAAAR!

The lights in The Last Call flashed a warning red. Straight past the intermediary orange, Jezzy noted. That must have meant that something really bad was happening.

“Obs Team! Report!” Asquew was calling over the suit communicator, talking to whichever Marines she had assigned to the observation teams tasked with scanning for all signs of danger.

“I thought the Ru’at had gone?” Ratko was saying, already slinging her Jackhammer from her shoulder.

“They have.” Asquew was already moving, marching quickly in the direction of the hold. With a nod to her squad, Jezzy and the others fell in behind her.

“But the cyborgs…” Jezzy said. She had been hoping that the destruction of the Oregon had taken out the cyborg menace, but she must have been wrong. Maybe they had sought to flee the Oregon when they had seen it heading for their jump-ships. Maybe they had spent the last hour or so leapfrogging from bits of space-blown debris, just as they had before, and now they were here.

“Decompression breaches!” Jezzy said quickly as they turned the corner.

“Explain.” Asquew’s voice was machine-like, taut and precise.

“The cyborgs crippled the Oregon by cutting through its outer hull, leading to floor-wide decompression events. The internal structure of the Oregon couldn’t handle the change in internal atmospheres.”

“Okay. Solutions,” Asquew demanded.

“We blow out all the outer rooms,” Ratko, the technical specialist, said.

“What?” Willoughby looked aghast at the idea.

“It’s standard procedure in spaceship fires, sir,” Ratko explained as they ran in the baleful red glow, and the alarms of The Last Call sounded loud in their suit microphones. “You flush out the fire and any toxins in the affected levels, while maintaining internal seals in the innermost rooms,” she explained. “Think of every space vehicle as an egg.”

“An egg…” Jezzy muttered, thinking: fragile. Easily broken.

“What went wrong on the Oregon was that the decompressed levels went right through the center of the craft—like scrambling an egg—but if you can keep the yolk intact and only get rid of the white…”

“The internal pressure remains a constant. I see what you’re driving at.” Asquew nodded before calling across the open-band network.

“Urgent message for Station Administrator Ahmadi. I’m connecting you with Corporal Ratko. She’s going to talk you through what you need to do. Out.”

The group ran up the corridor toward the last ‘airlock’ service elevator, where there was already a team of other Rapid Response Marines waiting to fill the unit.

“Sir! General, sir!” they chorused at the sight of Asquew.

“You want me to what? Are you as insane as that other one!?” Jezzy heard Ahmadi’s furious voice on the other end of the open channel.

“Administrator, please. This will stop The Last Call breaking apart, as well you know—” Jezzy could hear her saying before she muted their channel to concentrate on what was in front of them.

“General, sir? Do you still want us to get off-station?” she asked abruptly. The woman in front of her had drawn her sword—a strengthened steel broadsword that was so large and heavy-bladed that only a person wearing the augmented strength of a power suit could wield one. In her other hand, she had her heavy machine pistol, and she took center space in the elevator with the rest of the Marines filing in around her.

They were all combat specialists. Jezzy saw the tiny, stylized gold sword under their main squad and regimental insignias. This was Asquew’s strike team.

“What are you waiting for? Get in, Marines!” Asquew snapped at them. It was a tight fit to get Malady in there as well, but they managed it, and the elevator hummed upward to the hold.

“Full environmental protection. Expect low gravity. Wait for my command,” Asquew announced to all of them. And then, more privately to the surviving four members of the Gold Squad, “You’re my eyes and ears out there—on Mars, I mean. I need to know how far the Ru’at have spread, and if there is any hope for Earth. We’ll clear a space. You will make your way to airlock three, where—if it is still operational, and hasn’t been attacked—there will be a Marine scout ship waiting to take you to the jump-ship,” she said.

There was no arguing with the woman, as Jezzy and the rest of Gold Squad announced, “Sir! Yes, sir!”

Thrum-click! The elevator juddered into its final position, and the doors started to slide open—

FZZZT! A bolt of purple-white fire shot through the opening door, and through the helmet of one of the strike team standing at the general’s side.

“Fire at will!” The general raised her pistol as they leapt into the hold.

“Protect the general!” Jezzy shouted to her squad as she somersaulted through the air. The hold had been transformed into an eerily silent battleground, save for the amplified noises from her suit’s pickups.

It was weightless in here, owing largely to the fact that the main outer doors of airlock 1—the very same one that Jezzy herself had come through in her escape pod—were wide open.

Ammo casings spiraled through the gravity-less atmosphere, along with droplets of red and the machine-oil ichor of the attacking cyborgs. But there were also bodies and weapons slowly somersaulting through the air, caught in the eddies of velocity and motion.

FZZZT! Lines of purple-white fire burned through the hold, coming from the horde of cyborgs that were attacking through the open airlock.

“They’ve already breached!” Jezzy called to her own squad, even though she knew they could probably see that fact already. But she wanted to do everything perfectly this time, and it wasn’t just the fact that she was fighting beside the general herself, the victor of over a dozen conflicts.

It’s because I have to get back out there. To Solomon. To Mars.

The cyborgs were jumping and spinning through the open airlock, but they had a hard time taking the main hold. Jezzy saw the situation instantly—the Marines who had been there had been surprised, and there was still a gaggle of the original technicians and obs team attempting to hold their ground, sheltering behind one or other of the available bulkheads.

We have the smallest window of opportunity to bottleneck the enemy. The cyborgs’ only option was to flood the hold with bodies and particle beams. But if they could push them back and force them to fight in a confined space—

FZZT! A purple-white line of fire burst just past Jezzy’s shoulder as she jackknifed through the air, raising her Jackhammer.

PHOOM! PHOOM! Two good shots at one of the flying cyborgs. It threw it off his murderous trajectory, spinning it over, but the thing was still moving…

“Back of the neck and spine is a kill-shot!” Jezzy announced, firing another volley at the next nearest cyborg. She wasn’t attempting the precision kill-shot that she had called for. Her plan was just to push them back.

“Blood and fire!” Asquew, apparently, had much the same idea as she landed in the center of the hold, sweeping her broadsword around in a wide arc that smacked a cyborg and almost cut him in half. He silently sprayed machine parts and ichor as he was thrown against the nearest bulkhead, and Asquew fired into the face of the next one.

But she was too exposed! She was in the center of the line of attack from the enemy.

“Malady!” Jezzy shouted as she pushed out from the bulkhead she had landed against, arching through the air back toward the middle of the room.

Clank! The arrival of the full tactical Marine, magnetizing his boots so that he could stand his ground, was like the sudden appearance of a bull in a china shop. He hit the hold floor a few meters away from Asquew before seizing one of the cyborgs out of the air as if it were a thrown rag and flinging it back the way it had come.

“Gold Squad! On me!” Jezzy shouted as she skidded across the floor on the other side of Asquew. Her right foot still felt oddly numb, thanks to all the drugs the medic had pumped into her system. She ducked as the general’s broadsword sailed overhead to strike sparks from another cyborg.

PHOOM! Jezzy fired into the face of one of the silver menaces before it had a chance to land on her, and then used her Jackhammer as a bat to sweep out the legs of the next nearest one.

There was no gravity in here, so the cyborg didn’t fall, but it did start to cartwheel in the air, swinging its particle-beam weapon around to fire at the Outcast Marine.

Thwack! Jezzy hit it with the butt of her Jackhammer in the softer, unprotected and still-fleshy part of the throat. It was a clear design flaw in the cyborgs, as the augmented strength of her suit and the accuracy of her martial arts training severed the thing’s spinal column. It twitched and spun slowly backwards, dead.

“Nice strike, Marine!” she heard Asquew hiss as she gasped for breath beside her. Jezzy looked up to see that Malady had moved forward, with at least three of the cyborgs hanging off his carapace. Even as she watched, she saw one of them raise its particle weapon, about to fire at point-blank range directly into Malady’s helmet.

“Get off him!” someone screamed as the smaller shape of Ratko launched through the air, colliding with the about-to-fire cyborg and spinning through the vacuum as she ripped it off Malady.

“Ooof!” Jezzy heard Ratko’s grunt of pain as the pair slammed against the bulkhead wall, and then Willoughby was there, forcing her Jackhammer into the gap between the struggling Ratko and the cyborg, and firing directly into the thing’s face.

PHOOM! Another dead killer robot.

But there was still a whole lot more coming their way. Jezzy gritted her teeth and raised her gun, ready to fight to the death.

19

Revelations

Solomon Cready stepped into the booth—or rather was pushed into it by the metal arm of the cyborg behind him.

“Hey!” He found himself in an alcove barely bigger than he was, arched at the top, and facing a heavy red veil just a few paces in front of him. The space made Solomon think of a coffin.

It was dark in here, too dark for what was in effect an open box, and when Solomon turned his head, he saw that the thoroughfare behind him looked muted and washed-out, as if seen through a foggy window.

“What the—” It wasn’t just his eyes that this place was playing hell with, either. He could no longer hear the sounds from the colony behind him. Not that the brainwashed Martians made much sound anyway, but this was different.

Dampeners? He had heard of high-end military hardware that could create noise-cancellation and interference, like a jamming system that cut out radionic and electromagnetic frequencies to ensure that you weren’t detected.

But this was technology being deployed in what was by all accounts an open booth. He had never heard of damping technology like this.

“I guess another thing that we’ll have the Ru’at to thank for…” Solomon muttered through gritted teeth. His hands twitched at his hip, wishing that they could curl around the trigger of his trusty rifle. Instead, they only found dead air.

There was a sigh of movement in front of him, as if a wind had blown at the edges of the veil. Solomon thought he saw a figure. Was this the Ru’at? Or one of their representatives?

“Who’s there? My name is Lieutenant Solomon Cready of the Outcast Marines,” Solomon started to say as the veil twitched again, and a deep, mellifluous voice intoned.

“Enter.”

Was this how it had been for Ambassador Ochrie? Solomon already thought that he had been in here longer than the ambassador had. Did that mean that the aliens had something special designed for him?

Heaven knows that I’ve tried to make their life as difficult as I can, Solomon thought. What with destroying their initial cyborgs and walking robot platforms, and leading the refugees of Proxima off-planet.

“Enter,” the voice repeated, and Solomon took a deep breath.

“Let’s have it, you starfrackers…” he said, pushing aside the heavy veils and stepping forward.

Into light.

Bright, dazzling blue-white light that filled Solomon’s vision until he couldn’t see anything. Even when he raised his hands to shield his eyes, all he could detect was a faint, graying shadow that must be his own limbs.

“I said my name is Solomon Cready, Commander of the Outcast Marines, and I want answers,” he burst out.

“You want answers, Solomon Cready?” the rich voice returned, and with it, the harsh glare started to fade away. Solomon didn’t know whether his eyes were adjusting to what he could see in front of him, or it was some controls being manipulated.

But he found himself looking at a tall—well, human.

“What?” Solomon blinked in confusion.

Both the speaker and Solomon were standing in a pristine white room, circular, with the walls and the ceiling emitting a constant white light, making it hard to tell where the floor ended and the walls began.

The person who stood in front of him was tall, wearing a silver encounter suit that contrasted strongly with his dark, umber and chocolate-colored skin.

And he’s old, Solomon saw. The short, tight curls of his hair had long since given up their black and instead turned into a frosting of platinum silver, matching his suit. His eyes were deeply lined, but bright and clear, and he held his hands in front of him.

“Who are you?” Solomon demanded. “Where is the Ru’at?”

“Where? A better question would be what, Solomon Cready,” the man said, separating his hands and slowly raising one long finger toward Solomon’s face. It was such a graceful, slow movement that Solomon didn’t even think to pull back as the finger moved up past his nose and lightly touched him on the forehead.

FZZZT!

Solomon was standing on the edge of a golden field. Tall heads of wheat swayed in front of him, and the sky held the deep pink-indigo of approaching dusk.

“This is…” Solomon recognized this place. It was home. The American Confederacy—more specifically, the central belt of the Mid-West.

Solomon Cready knew where he was. He was at the top entrance to the AgroMore farm lot number 21, one of many such giant parcels of land that the tower-like harvesters slowly trundled through, harvesting and analyzing and experimenting.

The ground at his feet was bare earth, a wide entrance track that swept down to the bowl of land that lot 21 occupied. On his right and left were the low, rolling hills that he had played on as a kid.

Although Solomon couldn’t remember exactly what games he had played.

There was the first twinkling of stars across the dusk ahead of him. It was peaceful and quiet.

No bird sound marred the evening. No sound of the distant corporate harvesters. Not even the wheat heads in front of him made a noise as they swayed.

“Is this…a hologram?” Solomon asked himself.

One of the stars in front of his view grew stronger, brighter, and it wasn’t due to lack of clouds. As Solomon watched, it grew to the size of a quarter, and then to the size of a golf ball.

That was no star.

The burning light in the sky reached the size of a baseball, and now Solomon could see its trajectory as it shot across the darkening sky, not making a noise, lowering its trajectory more and more as it passed behind the low hills.

Solomon expected to see an explosion. A plume of smoke, or at least a shockwave of air. That thing had been moving so fast! What had it been—a meteorite? A satellite?

But there was no sound of the impact, and as Solomon looked back to the space in the sky where it had seemingly come from, there was a sudden flash that was dazzlingly bright.

FZZZT!

When the light died down, Solomon realized that he was no longer standing on the edge of lot 21, but rather, he was inside it. A good way inside it, in fact.

He stood surrounded by the tall tops of wheat, following one of the many small avenues between the planted rows. The sky was darker now above him, but a strange radiance was up ahead, shining through the plants like a floodlight.

Moving as if in a dream, Solomon started to trudge forward.

The light grew brighter the closer that he got to it. Solomon could see that there was an opening up ahead in the wheat. It had been flattened in a wide circle, and he could see the exact way that all the stalks had been pushed and bent to the floor in a mat, like there had been an explosion, except it was one without heat or furious energy.

And there in the dead center of the crop circle, hanging just a little higher than his head, was a blue-white orb.

“What the frack!?” Solomon burst out.

This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be happening, could it? He was still standing inside that strange room in the center of the Ru’at colony. This was some sort of a recording, or a full-immersion hologram, or hypnosis…

This sort of thing didn’t happen, Solomon knew. Yes, aliens existed—he now knew—but this? This was the stuff of science fiction B-movies!

“Move up!” a voice called from behind him, and Solomon turned to see that there was someone on the path he had recently just trod, the dark silhouette of a figure with some sort of hat, holding up the bright beam of a flashlight as they crab-stepped forward.

“Who are you?” Solomon asked the man, but the man ignored him. He got the impression that the man couldn’t hear him at all.

The figure slowed as they got to the lip of the clearing, and the light of the hanging orb revealed his form: a man in dark combat fatigues, with a helmet and radio antenna strapped to the side. He held a flashlight in one hand and, with wrists crossed, some sort of heavy pistol, pointing straight through Solomon and at the orb behind him.

“Can you… Can you see me?” Solomon breathed, but the soldier made no response at all, just held his ground as other pinpricks of light appeared around the circumference of the circle and still more dark-clad soldiers stepped forward to the edge of the clearing. Each of them had a torch and a pistol pointed at the orb.

And then Solomon realized something: Their uniforms were out-of-date. Like, really out-of-date. He couldn’t be sure, but Solomon thought that he was looking at the military soldiers of sometime in the twentieth or early twenty-first century. Before Earth had settled Proxima and the Moon. Before the nations of the Earth had amalgamated into the international, world-wide global coalition called ‘the Confederacy.’

Solomon was replaying events of the past.

“We got it,” the man in front of Solomon said, as he appeared intent on the orb hanging over Solomon’s shoulder.

FZZZT!

This time, Solomon was no longer in the wheat field, surrounded by soldiers. When the glare of light slowly dulled to a point that he could see again, he was standing in the booth of what appeared to be some kind of laboratory.

A glass screen separated his vision from what lay on the other side: a bare white room, where the glowing, white-blue orb hung in its precise center. But this time, Solomon could see that the glow from the orb actually came from a line that broke across its middle, and it was far less radiant than it had been in the field. Solomon could make out the curve of a smooth, shiny, chrome-like surface.

“Prepare the particle beam,” intoned a voice, and Solomon turned to see that others had joined him in the room. Scientists, apparently, since they wore pristine white lab-coats. They walked in and sat down at the various banks of computers that were on this side of the glass, before starting to switch dials and buttons.

A low thrumming started in the containment room, passing its vibrations through the floor and the walls so that Solomon could feel them coming up through the soles of his feet.

The Outcast commander turned to look at what was happening to the orb, just as the line of bright light around its circumference broke, spilling light and noise—

SCREEEEEEEE!

“Ach!” Solomon stumbled backward, hands sweeping up to his ears, even though the sound had vanished. He was once again standing in the pristine white room in front of the man in the silver suit.

“What? Who? I don’t understand!” Solomon said.

“No, you don’t,” the man intoned. “You are just a small part of a very long story, Solomon Cready—or perhaps I should say, Test Subject H21?”

“What!?”

FZZZT!

Solomon found himself now standing in a different sort of laboratory. There were long banks of metal tables, with raised boxes, glowing with a soft light on every one of them.

The harvester, Solomon thought. This was the harvester that he had climbed out of curiosity when he had been kicked out of school. There had always been rumors that the biotechnology firm was up to no good up here on the top floor. That there was government involvement somehow. That they weren’t just trying to create super strains of wheat to feed the ever-expanding number of Earth colonies.

At least he was securely back in the future, the lieutenant realized. He could tell from the data-screens that hung over the sprouting bays and the small glitches of holographic information coming from them—all numbers and statistics.

“But this is the same place where that…whatever it was landed.” Solomon frowned. Or hovered, to be more precise. Almost a century before the AgroMore harvesters had come to town, this field had been the site of an alien arrival.

“A Ru’at encounter…” Solomon’s brain started to piece together the clues.

His hometown. His dreary, middle of the road and middle of nowhere hometown had been the site of one of the most important discoveries in the history of human civilization itself!

Which made Solomon suspicious. If this was all true, then why would they turn this place into just another farm?

Solomon stepped forward to the nearest tank, fully expecting to see small leaves of green poking from vermiculite and growing medium.

But what he saw instead were rows and rows of healthy, pudgy, pink human babies.

“Dear god!” Solomon stumbled back.

“That is what they never told you, Solomon Cready of the Outcast Marines,” the man declared. “The Ru’at Message was never a radio wave. It was a probe. It arrived a hundred years earlier than your Marine Corps would have you believe. And it has shaped human evolution ever since.”

“I— I don’t understand…” Solomon struggled to remember what General Asquew had told him. “The Marine Corps created the Outcasts as a response to the Message. They engineered Serum 21 to create a breed of super warriors capable of fighting off the threat.”

Serum 21. H21. Was that what this man had called him?

“You see now, don’t you?” the man said, once again holding up his hand.

FZZZT!

Solomon was standing in a living room. A fairly normal, typical living room, and one that he would recognize instantly in any of the one-floor, wooden houses that dotted AgroMore’s farming community.

It wasn’t his home, that much Solomon could see. He didn’t remember the baby piano in the corner, or the low coffee table, or the marigold yellow sofa.

But then again, when Solomon tried to remember the living room of his own childhood, he came up blank. He didn’t know why he had never considered that before.

On the marigold sofa sat a man in a deep blue-gray suit, very finely tailored but still out-of-date. And the face that he wore was none other than Augustus Tavin, the CEO of NeuroTech and now, the clone.

“Excuse me, sir, but what is this all about?” said a voice from the open doorway behind Solomon, and he turned to see—

Mother.

A woman with hair as blonde as the wheat fields a few blocks away, and just as disheveled as she hastily tied it back in a bun. She wore fairly simple clothes—a pair of jeans and a white and blue blouse, and there was something about her face that tickled Solomon’s memories.

“Is that… It can’t be…” he thought. He couldn’t remember his own mother, of course. Her face had long since been scrubbed from his memory by time.

…or maybe you never had a real mother, Pinocchio…a snide thought in the back of his mind said.

But there was something incredibly familiar about her, all the same.

“Our office has been in touch before, Mrs. Cready,” Augustus Tavin said.

It was her. It really was her. Solomon staggered where he stood. Then why couldn’t he remember her? Why couldn’t he remember this room?

“You said that there wouldn’t be any more tests. You said that the last lot would be the end of it,” his mother who was not his mother said worriedly.

“Mom!” a voice called from behind her in the kitchen.

“Go back inside, Solomon!” she said.

Solomon had no memory of this event happening. Not to him, anyway.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Cready, but our recent studies on the soil have shown that there could, in fact, be a developmental risk to all the children in…”

“Mom?” A small form appeared around his mother’s legs. It was a boy barely older than ten or eleven, with a bowl cut of mousy blonde-brown hair.

And Solomon recognized himself. Or the child that he would have been, even if he could not remember this event ever happening in real life.

“Just one more blood test. It really is just to make sure that the boy is safe,” Augustus Tavin said, drawing from the side of the sofa a black briefcase, before setting it on his lap to unlock it and reveal a foam inner, with vials and a syringe securely in place.

“Do I have to, Mom? It hurts!” the younger boy who wore Solomon’s face said, clutching tighter at his mother.

“It’s going to be alright, sweetie. It’s so AgroMore can make you better.”

AgroMore, Solomon thought. The farming mega-corp that had run the crop harvesters and fed the world. Only that wasn’t all they were doing, was it? And it seemed that before Augustus Tavin had moved on to military and biotechnology with NeuroTech, and relocated to Proxima, he had been some sort of chief officer here in the agriculture business…

In the very place where the Ru’at drone had first made contact.

The deed was mercifully quick, but even so, Solomon still winced to see himself grow pale with fright and shock when a vial full of his own deep red blood was taken from him.

“There. All better, little Solomon,” his mother said, drawing him away as the CEO reseated the contents in his briefcase and secured it, stepping up to brush imaginary lint from his trousers.

“We’ll have the results back to you in just a short while, Mrs. Cready, although I am not expecting there to be anything to worry about.”

“But I thought you said there was a possibility of contamination!” His mother frowned at the man. She might have been worried and clearly out of her depth, but Solomon admired her fight. “Just what exactly have AgroMore done out there? They should never have come here!”

“Please, have faith in the process, Mrs. Cready.” But Augustus Tavin was already turning with his bloody prize and moving for the front door. “With samples like this, our scientists are going to make the world a better place. We’re going to make the future a better place.” He nodded with his thin-lipped, shark-like smile as Mrs. Cready’s look of confusion only deepened.

“It was a test site.” Solomon blinked as the light faded from his eyes. “My home. It was all a big experiment…”

“No, Solomon Cready,” the man intoned. “It was the start of something big. It was the start of the future.”

Solomon started to feel his temper rise in his chest as he balled his fists. “I think you’d better do some explaining right now, or…”

FZZZT! This time, the flash came from all around Solomon as he felt like he was kicked by Malady in his full tactical suit.

“Ach!” Solomon slammed against one of the white walls, crumpling to the floor and gasping for air as he held his chest, half-expecting to see a smoking hole where his heart should be, but he was apparently unharmed.

“Manners, H21,” the man said in his rich, calm voice, as if they were just having a difference of opinion. “That was not you that you saw, H21. That was the boy that we cloned you from.”

“No.” Solomon shook his head. “It’s not true…”

“You have spent a long time in the wilds, H21. When you started to display…criminal tendencies, we believed that it was correct to allow you to continue to develop. Your handlers gave you space, and time, to allow your remarkable genetics to evolve in their own way,” the man said.

His handlers. The government-military transmitter that had been planted in his room in New Kowloon. He had been followed and tracked since he had been a child.

And that meant that Matty Sozer really had sold him out, but not as Solomon had thought—to some mega-corporation. Matty Sozer had been the only one capable of planting the device, and indeed, he had been the first friend to help Solomon along his eventual path.

“And when I… I mean, when Matty died… You no longer had eyes and ears on me, so you busted me to the Outcasts?” Solomon growled.

“Not entirely our doing, but you were returned to the fold of the program, yes.” The man nodded. “The arrival of the Message changed everything. It changed the future of humanity, and it wasn’t just the fact that the Confederacy now decided to spread their hegemony across the stars,” the man explained.

“The Message, that drone, it did something to the earth,” Solomon concluded, thinking about what he had seen. “It had changed things there…”

“Indeed. Think of it like a gardener planting seeds. That small town where you believed that you were born became the first site of a new species. A new type of humanity.” The man sounded pleased.

But Solomon was still shaking his head, struggling to see why.

“You’re telling me that the Marine Corps knew all along that I was a clone? And that the Outcasts are, what…another part of the Ru’at’s plan?”

The man dressed in silver was silent for a long pause before he spoke again.

“What I am saying, Solomon Cready, is that you and the others like you are the children of the Ru’at. The Ru’at are an ancient species who favored Earth a long time ago. The Ru’at wish to make humanity better. And you, and the others like you, will be the leaders and the guides for that evolution.” The man smiled.

Suddenly, Solomon saw it. Maybe it was being in this strange place, talking to this strange man, that allowed him to see the bigger picture. Or maybe it was his supposedly-enhanced genetic code.

The Serum 21 that had been given to the Outcasts was actually synthesized from him. And he was only special because he had been grown in a lab, where the influence of the Ru’at’s ‘Message’ had warped his physiology, his capabilities, his potentials.

“All this time, we’ve been scrabbling over the scraps…” Solomon breathed in a sort of horrified awe. The colonial war between Mars and the Confederacy was all just an excuse to get humanity to divide. To fight itself and become weaker in preparation for the Ru’at invasion.

All the machinations of Warden Coates, the Marine Corps, and even the mega-corporations NeuroTech, Taranis, and AgroMore… They had all been like children stealing money from mother’s purse. Playing with the technology that the Ru’at had given to Earth so long ago.

But it was a poisoned chalice, wasn’t it? Solomon growled as he got back on his feet. Everything that he had been shown only proved it to him. The Ru’at had somehow spotted Earth from whatever galactic never-never-land they called a home, and they had spent the last hundred years slowly trying to transform the human species and civilization to something that would suit their needs.

“You see the truth now, don’t you?” The man still sounded pleased, although Solomon didn’t think that he knew just what the Outcast commander had been thinking.

“I do see,” Solomon said, and attacked.

20

The Acting Commander

“Hold! Hold the line!” Asquew ordered over the shared suit channel, but Second Lieutenant Jezebel Wen didn’t know whether the woman was being willfully ignorant or just incensed with battle lust.

The problem wasn’t that they couldn’t fight well. The problem was that the cyborgs just kept on coming.

Jezzy fired another shot at one flying through the air above their heads, spinning it over, but even in that moment, she knew she hadn’t killed it. And the fighting was so intense that she had to concentrate on the next cyborg that filled its place, and the next, and the next.

FZZZZZT!

Purple-white lines of particle-beam fire shot through the hold, hitting the walls, burning holes through power armor, and buckling plate. Just a glancing blow from any one of those weapons that the cyborgs could seemingly use endlessly—never having to reload—meant death for a Marine. If the strike itself didn’t demolish flesh and internal organs, then the Marine would have the problem of losing air and pressure and having to scramble for one of the elevators out of there to avoid freezing to death.

And all the while, they had to fight ten times as hard to land many more strikes and shots on even one of their enemy to disable it. It didn’t seem fair.

But war never was, was it? Jezzy thought as she spun around to fire at the charging back of a cyborg that had managed to get past her. With flares of sparks and gobbets of machine oil, the thing went down. She had managed to shoot through its spinal column.

But they were all being pushed back to the bulkheads. Marines were taking shelter where they could and taking potshots at the approaching, silent enemy.

FZZT! FZZZT! They concentrated their barrage of fire against one of the elevators just as the doors started to slide open.

“Argh!”

“Aiii!”

There was no hope for the new detachment of Marines who had come to reinforce the general’s position.

PHOOOM! PHOOOM!

Shots burst across the room, but they weren’t coming from any of the Marines. Jezzy heard a ‘clang’ as something hit the far wall and realized that she hadn’t heard projectile shots at all. Those were the heavy deadbolts that secured the doors to airlock 3.

“We got company!” Jezzy screamed as the door seal started to glow, brighter and brighter, before the metal on this side bubbled and burst.

FZZT!

The cyborgs had burned their way in through the other closed airlock. That meant that two waves of the enemy were now attacking their position from two directions, a perfect ninety-degree angle.

A kill-zone, Jezzy’s military training taught her.

“Where are the repeaters? Why aren’t they firing?!” she heard Asquew roar, and Jezzy saw the answer immediately. Of the three large, cannon-like repeater guns that the general had requested set up in front of each and every airlock, only one still had its Marine in the seat behind it, pulling on the double firing triggers to release bolt after bolt of heavy caliber ordnance. The other two stood still and silenced, still with magazines of shells as large as Jezzy’s hand spooling into them. They had lost their ‘drivers’ in the fight, and with it, the Marines had lost their heaviest artillery.

No one’s ever won against the cyborgs, Jezzy thought. Even on Proxima, they had been beaten to a retreat. Even on the Oregon, all they could do was minimize the damage and retreat.

Did the general really think that they could win this battle now?

The moment of indecision lasted all of a heartbeat as Jezzy remembered Colonel Faraday, and Corporal Karamov—both having died to get her here. To get them all to this point.

“I got it!” Jezzy slid under the swinging arm of the nearest cyborg before kicking out with her boots—one foot still feeling heavy and unmanageable—to roll through the air, landing on the next empty repeater cannon. In front of her was the burning, melting mess of airlock 3 and a line of purple-white fire scoring out of the metal as the cyborgs on the other side fought to gain access.

“How do you fire this thing!?” she snarled as she shoved herself into the seat, quickly pulling the gun harness over her shoulder and seizing the firing mechanism.

“Point and shoot, Lieutenant!” This out-of-breath gasp came from Ratko, still engaged in her own battle as she and Willoughby sought to distract and then disable their own attacking cyborg.

“Point and shoot. Point and shoot…” Jezzy muttered, lifting the firing handles for the gun to respond in perfect servo-assisted motion

Thunk! The door to airlock 3 fell into the room, slowly spiraling over Jezzy’s head—she involuntarily ducked, all the same—and revealing a horde of cyborgs, and behind them, the inky vastness of space.

“Get some!” Jezzy found herself yelling as she squeezed the triggers.

Thud-Thud-Thud!

The long barrel burst with muzzle flash before it slid backwards and locked into its forward position again for every shot, taking up another of those massive shells as it did so.

Even with all their suspension and shock absorbers, the recoil on the thing was insane, Jezzy thought, bouncing in her chair as the gun shook. She was glad that she had thought to put the harness on, at least, as the shaking of the gun probably would have thrown her back into the air.

Thud-Thud-Thud!

With every shot, Jezzy blew apart one of the cyborgs. But unless she hit center mass or directly to the head, the creature would still be grotesquely alive, only with fewer limbs. Jezzy kept on firing, but she watched in horror as one of the creatures with only the top half of its body seized onto one of the wall’s bulkheads to continue to crawl forwards.

But the airlock ahead was starting to clear. The powerful shots of the gun were forcing the cyborgs back out of the open airlock at the far end, to revolve and spin in the vacuum of space.

“Move forward!” Jezzy heard Asquew shout as the Marines exploited the gap created by Jezzy and the repeater cannon. There were still cyborgs to shoot at in airlock 3, but they were in a pitiful and half-demolished state, making them easy prey for Ratko and Willoughby, who landed amongst them, fighting them off with expert shots.

Jezzy swung the gun around to start firing at the remaining horde in airlock 1. With every pound of the repeater cannon, they were punching holes through the enemy’s charge.

“Okay, Wen! Let Harunabi take over. Get your Gold Squad out of here!” Asquew was at her side, already shoving one of her own strike force Marines to take Jezzy’s place on the guns.

“Sir! Yes, sir!” Jezzy was panting and her arms hurt from the exertion of using the gun, but as soon as Harunabi got in the seat, the gun moved with a balletic grace that Jezzy hadn’t dreamed of.

“Holy frack… That’s how to do it…” Jezzy murmured as she fell back with the general, enjoying the momentary lull in the battle to regain their breath.

“We got this, Marine. I’ve signaled the Marine scout to home in on your suit identifiers,” the general was saying quickly, sparing looks over her shoulder at the fight raging behind them. “Just get out of that airlock, and it’ll come and pick you up and take you to my personal jump-ship.” Asquew nodded and turned to go.

“General!” Jezzy said quickly. “How will I let you know what I find on Mars?”

Asquew froze for a moment as she regarded Jezzy, then nodded to herself, clearly deciding something. “I was hoping that I wouldn’t have to do this. But here.” One massive metal gloved hand took out what looked like a small sliver of silver.

“A data-stick?” Jezzy frowned in confusion as the general slid it into Jezzy’s suit ports.

“It’s a safety precaution, Jezzy,” Asquew said, her voice was slightly softer than before. “It has the details of a secure Marine Corps base—one that not even Hausman knows about—where we will rendezvous, if we all survive.”

“But, General, sir… What are we supposed to do then, in this base?”

“No more questions, Wen!” Asquew said tersely. “We’ve already wasted enough time! We don’t know how many cyborgs are out there still. Just get your man Cready, get your intel, and get to that base. If I don’t make it, that data-stick will also unlock the access codes for all Marine Corps-wide higher command functions.”

“What, sir!?” Jezzy said in surprise, but Asquew was already turning away and charging back into the battle.

The higher command functions… Jezzy stood for a moment in shock at what Asquew had just told her. Had just given her.

She knew what the higher command functions were, of course. They were the reason Jezzy couldn’t commandeer a battleship, why there had only been certain departments and rooms that she could enter back in the old Ganymede Training Facility.

General Asquew had just given her all the access codes for the rank of a general. With these, Jezzy could take over entire battleships. Entire destroyers. Entire dreadnoughts. She’d be able to order orbital bombardments. She’d be able to fire nukes.

And what’s more, Jezzy thought as she shouted for her squad of four to follow her through the breached airlock. What’s more was that this little data-stick meant that if Asquew fell, then the general was asking her to continue the campaign against the Ru’at and Hausman alike.

Have I just been promoted? she thought as she flew through airlock 3, followed by Ratko, Willoughby, and Malady.

Jezebel Wen felt that instinctual moment of vertigo and nausea that any human did when leaving the perceived safety of a space station or a spaceship. That sudden awareness that there was an infinite amount of down underneath her, just as there was also an infinite amount of up, left, right, forward, and back.

The four surviving members of the Outcast Gold Squad left the embattled Plutonian station, flying away from the vast debris field behind them and the littered remains of bits of cyborg and Oregon alike.

There was a flash in the distance as the long, arrow-shaped craft soared through the dark. The Marine scout was a small vehicle, with only two cylindrical compartments and a narrow prow, as well as a double set of fat triangular wings, meaning that it could fly both in atmosphere and space.

“Am I glad to see you!” Jezzy heard Ratko saying as the ship slowed to intercept pace, and the Marines fired their small grappling lines from their belts to magnet-clamp onto the vessel.

“She should be programmed to take us to the general’s personal jump-ship!” Jezzy announced over their gold channel, activating the belt-mounted winch system to pull her into the vessel.

There were whoops of celebration and relief from the women behind her, but Jezzy couldn’t join in with their relief to be getting out of that hellish battle. As she clanked to the side of the ship along with the others, to disengage their grapples and clamber toward the small, rudimentary airlock, Jezzy paused, waiting for the slow-moving Malady to catch up with her.

“Lieutenant?” Malady said when he saw her waiting for him. The two women had already entered the airlock and had shut the door behind them. Right now, they were cycling through the decompression procedure. “You did not need to wait for me, Lieutenant. I am completely capable of making a successful intercept with a slow-moving spacecraft,” Malady intoned in his vaguely electronic robotic tones.

“I know you are, Corporal. It’s not that…” Jezzy reached a glove up to halt him. “There is something that I want you to take care of for me. But it is very, very important. Do you understand, Corporal Malady?” she said seriously.

“Is this an order, Lieutenant Wen?” the giant metal golem of a man asked.

Jezzy considered for a moment. “No. It’s not. It’s a request, from a friend. But you should know that what I am going to ask you to carry is probably the most dangerous information in all of Confederate space right now.”

“Does the general know of this?” Malady didn’t move.

“It was General Asquew who gave it to me,” the combat specialist said.

“Then it is because she trusts you to look after it, not me,” Malady said with undeniable logic.

He was always such a stickler for the regulations, Jezzy thought. “Asquew trusts me to make the right decision, Corporal Malady. Which is why I am asking you—because you must be wearing half a ton more of the best combat-grade armor that the entire Confederacy has,” Jezzy said.

“You have a point,” Malady agreed.

“Good. Then just keep this safe for me, until…” Jezzy frowned.

“Until you ask for it back?” Malady suggested.

No. “Until there’s no hope left, and we have to use what is on that data-stick,” Jezzy said seriously.

21

Lie to This…

Solomon threw himself forward at the strange man who appeared to be able to inspire memories and visions and command the very powers of the Ru’at themselves.

Flash!

And even though his fist was arcing toward the man’s face and impossible to dodge, the man disappeared with a flash of light, and Solomon was stumbling forward.

“That was…unwise, H21.” The voice reappeared behind him, and Solomon, trained by the very best in the Confederate Marine Corps and with all of his enhanced genetic code, didn’t waste any time attacking again.

“Hai!” He used his own momentum as he spun on the ball of one foot, lashing out with his lead leg in a devastating roundhouse kick.

Flash!

But the man wasn’t there, and Solomon fell forward into a combat roll.

“I see. I am afraid that I will be forced to…” The voice had reappeared behind him, and Solomon backflipped to his feet once again, turning to see that the man in the silver suit was patiently standing behind him.

FZZT!

This time, the force that hit him knocked him clear across the room, slamming him against the opposing white wall and making him cry out in pain.

“It is not unusual for our children fostered by the alien races to have certain behavioral…problems, shall we say.” The man took a step forward.

“Your children!? Alien races!?” Solomon gasped. Just before—

FZZT! This time, it was like getting hit by an entire starship. Solomon was flung into the air and slammed into the ground by the invisible force. His vision went black, and then full of stars, and then slowly grew brighter and brighter to the brilliance of the room once again.

His children? Solomon was still thinking. Fostered by alien races!? What was this man talking about?

FZZT! The next energy wave was nowhere near as strong as the preceding two, but it did slam his head into the floor and make him spit blood.

His children. He means people like me. Those cloned from the poor victims of AgroMore. And from the site where the Message was first delivered.

Solomon realized that he hadn’t been talking to some creepy old man at all, all this time. He was talking to one of the Ru’at, masquerading as a human.

“What did you do to my head!?” Solomon was saying, his voice thick with blood and swollen lips. He wasn’t talking about the injuries, of course; he was talking about the visions. This man—this Ru’at thing—was either a hologram, or something else. A mind game? A hypnotism device? There was no man really here at all.

“Show yourself!” Solomon cried out. “Is any of what you told me true?”

“It was all true, H21. Why would one such as I need to lie to you?” There was another flash of brilliant white light from the walls, and there, in place of where the holographic man had been, hung the silver orb with a line of white fire scoring across its middle.

“Are you… Are you the Ru’at?” Solomon spat out more blood.

“I am a seed. I told you, H21. Why would I lie to you?” The thing bobbed as it said this in exactly the same voice it had used before.

“Lie to this!”

PHOOM!

There was a movement from one side of the room and an explosion of muzzle fire. The metal orb sparked and was flung against the far wall. before falling to the floor.

Solomon looked up…to see that it was none other than Kol.

“Lieutenant, get up! Get up! We have to go!” The traitor’s face was tight with fear and anxiety, but in his hands, he held the smoking Jackhammer.

“Kol? But— I don’t understand…”

“I just saved your life! That is all you have to understand. Now get your ass up and get moving!” Kol kept his Jackhammer lowered at the shaking Ru’at orb on the ground as he seized Cready’s hand and hauled him back the way they had come. One of the pristine white walls glitched and vanished, revealing itself to be a hologram just like the man had been, and on the other side were the heavy veils.

Kol dragged the man he had betrayed through, and they started to run for their lives.

Command Code

Outcasts of Earth, Book 8

1

The Price of Trust

“Run!” Kol, the ex-Outcast Marine, yelled as he hauled Lieutenant Cready to his feet.

Outcast squad commander, Solomon Cready, hurt everywhere. He had forgotten what being beaten up while not in his Marine power armor was like. But he remembered how he had always dealt with the knocks and scrapes of a criminal life in New Kowloon: Grin and bear it. Then hit them back harder.

“Kol!? What are you doing?” he grunted through gritted teeth. The muzzle of his ex-colleague’s Jackhammer was still smoking blue-gray, and the—Alien? Seed? Device?—that had been attacking him still shook and sparked from the other side of the pristine white judgment room.

They were in one of the inner sanctums of the strange Ru’at colony on Mars. The Ru’at—with the help of their cyborg armies and the Martian separatists—had built this place in a fraction of the time it would normally take to build such a massive structure, and it was unlike any place that the lieutenant had been throughout Confederate Space. The walls and halls and modular rooms all obeyed the same austere, functional machine logic that animated the cyborgs.

And the humans here…

Solomon had seen what this very room had done to Ambassador Ochrie. She had walked into the ‘booth’ that led here and walked out a brainwashed believer of their new ‘saviors’—the alien species known as the Ru’at.

But the strange memory-visions that the Ru’at orb had instilled in her hadn’t managed to do the same to Solomon. Either the strange metal sphere that could seemingly project holograms as real as if you were talking to a living, breathing person hadn’t got to the sanity-reprogramming bit with him yet, or…

Or I am immune, he thought. Because of my heritage.

“Well, I can leave if you want, Lieutenant, but I don’t think you want to be left in here with that thing, right?” Kol said, breathing hard as he leaned against the heavy veil that was all that separated them from the main thoroughfare outside—and the waiting cyborgs of clone-Tavin.

“No, I meant I thought you were one of the Chosen of Mars. I thought you had given your allegiance to that…thing,” Solomon said. His head was still pounding, and he wished that he had his suit on with its built-in pain-relieving injectors and its several inches of armor plate and shock-absorbers. He spat out blood and hoped that he hadn’t lost any teeth in the Ru’at’s attack. The thing had thrown him about the room with the same kind of tractor-beam technology that they had apparently developed. It had been like trying to fight a giant.

“It’s like you said outside, sir—the Ru’at won’t give us our independence, just another sort of slavery…” Kol said.

BRZZZZ! The orb on the other side of the room shook and sparked once more, shakily rising from the floor on its own arcane power…

“Come on. That thing will bring down all the cyborgs on us, and then we’ll be in for it.”

You have to hit them harder than they hit you. Solomon growled with bloody teeth and ruined lips. “Hang on. Give me your gun.”

“Lieutenant?” Kol hesitated. Solomon wasn’t surprised. He had once promised to make Kol pay for his treachery. For remote-operating an entire Marine transporter to crash land into the Ganymede Training Facility. How many deaths is Kol responsible for? Solomon remembered. He had left Jezzy—his sergeant and the person he trusted most in the entire program—for dead.

“We gotta go.” Kol took a step away from the bloody, fierce-looking squad commander.

Yeah, you probably should be nervous around me, traitor. Solomon felt the heat rising in his chest like it always did. A miniature mushroom cloud, a chain reaction about to go supernova…

Solomon had always been tetchy. It was one of the hallmarks of having such a high IQ, or so people had told him over the years. He was in a constant state of frustration and annoyance at how slow everyone else appeared to think. Added to that now was the fact that he—and Kol, as it happened—had been dosed with the genetically-altering Serum 21, a serum derived from Solomon’s own, original body, which allowed him to think quicker, move faster, endure more damage…

“Give me the stars-damned gun, Marine,” Solomon growled.

Kol wasn’t a Marine anymore. He was a rebel. A traitor. A seditionist.

But something in the lieutenant’s tone of voice, and in his eyes, made Kol hand the Jackhammer over without a word.

He can still take orders, then. Solomon wasted no more time, lunging forward and bringing the butt of the Jackhammer down on the rising Ru’at orb.

CLANG! The thing sparked and shot across the room as if Solomon had scored a homerun. When it had finished bouncing on the floor, it shook and wobbled, but didn’t levitate anymore.

Thwack! Solomon gave the orb another blow for good measure, pleased that the thing didn’t appear as omnipotent as it had first seemed. There was a spray of more sparks, and the orb split along its middle. It was still in one piece, if barely. Solomon could see masses of silver wires, fine and threadlike insides, and no more sparks.

Have I killed it? Solomon hoped he had, but that hadn’t been his intention. He scooped the thing up and shoved it in his pocket before turning back to Kol.

“We can go.” He nodded at the door. “But one thing…”

Lieutenant Solomon Cready handed the Jackhammer back to his old Gold Squad member. “It starts with belief,” he said seriously, repeating one of the first lessons that he had received in his command training program on Ganymede.

“Sir? I mean, Sol?” Kol took the gun gingerly, his eyes wide.

“Tactical efficiency starts with belief,” Solomon quoted the full passage. He remembered at the time learning all these aphorisms and their attendant regulations and thinking they were bunkum. His finely-tuned mind knew them all by heart, and funnily enough, it had taken the devastation of Ganymede for him to work out what they actually meant.

“The belief that your unit has your back, and you have theirs. From belief comes trust, and from trust comes bravery.” He nodded to the veil, indicating that Kol should take the lead.

Kol paused, looking at the man he had betrayed, still holding the gun in both his hands like it was a sleeping snake. Solomon could see the wheels turning behind the young man’s eyes. Was Solomon trying to get into his head? Trying to change his allegiance? Trying to win one over on him?

You bet. Solomon didn’t say anything. But more important than that, he needed to know that he could trust this young man with his life. With their lives—the lives of himself, the brainwashed Ambassador Ochrie, and the elected spokeswoman of Proxima, Imprimatur Mariad Rhossily.

And I need him to know that I trust him, or this isn’t going to work.

If you had asked Solomon Cready a year and a half ago whether he believed in the Marine Corps, or whether he trusted the Marine Corps, then the ex-criminal probably would have laughed in your face—and then stolen your credits and your ID card. But now Solomon had fought and laughed beside the other Outcasts. He had seen friends die, and he had seen enemies turn into comrades.

War was like that. It was a funny, terrible, and enlightening experience.

Solomon still didn’t trust the Marine Corps per se, the bureaucrats, and the highest levels of Confederate command—he had seen General Hausman seize control of Confederate Earth, after all, but he trusted the men and women of the Corps itself. He trusted the Marines, soldiers, pilots, and staffers. They were all he had, at the end of the day—all any of them had.

“We do this quickly,” Solomon said in an authoritative voice he didn’t know he had. “You’re right, Kol. We can’t fight our way out. So that means we have to bluff. You can do that, right?”

Kol nodded.

Of course you can. You bluffed your way through Outcast training, all while being a Martian sympathizer! Solomon stamped down on the moment of rage.

“Okay, uh…” Kol swallowed nervously. “Try to look, uh, brainwashed…” he said as he swept back the heavy veil and led the way out into the cubicle and the thoroughfare beyond.

“Lieutenant Cready! So happy to see you again,” the clone wearing the face of Augustus Tavin—the CEO of the mega-corporation that had helped build the cyborgs—greeted them as soon as they stepped out of the booth.

They hadn’t heard the gunshots, or the fight, Solomon realized, remembering to plaster a look of docile openness on his bloody features. It was the dampening field, he remembered. As soon as he had stepped into that booth, all sound of the colony outside had faded to nothing. Another strange piece of Ru’at technology that the Confederacy would probably give an eye and leg to control.

“Ru’at hails you,” Solomon said, trying to smile although his mouth hurt.

“Lieutenant!” Mariad gasped as soon as she saw his bloody face. Her large brown eyes searched his, and Solomon tried his best to keep his face impassive.

“Ru’at hails you,” Solomon said in response, once again attempting a grin.

“I see that you and the Ru’at had a bit of a…disagreement about your loyalties,” the clone of the NeuroTech CEO said with a smirk.

Solomon hesitated. Outside their little group, the rest of the thoroughfare moved sedately and calmly as they always did—emptier than it had been when Solomon had come in—but he knew that it was just a matter of time before the colony became aware of what they had done. He fixed another mooncalf expression on his face.

“The Ru’at helped me to understand,” he said, smiling even though his lips stung with the abuse they had suffered.

Tavin’s eyes sparked with amusement and malice. “I am sure that they did,” he said, before his eyes darted to Kol. “I do not understand why you had to go in there with him, though, soldier?”

Technical Specialist Kol—he had never graduated to become a full Marine, as it turned out—had always been a good liar. “Are you questioning the Ru’at!?” he said suddenly, fierce and loud enough to make a few heads turn.

“No, of course not. I wouldn’t dream of it.” Tavin said hurriedly. Behind him were the four stationary cyborg guards that Tavin had brought with him from Luna Station. They remained impassive and judgmental, their chrome flesh shining brightly in contrast to their human skin.

“Ochrie, Rhossily, you are coming with me.” Kol nodded toward the nearest exit.

“What? But the imprimatur hasn’t been judged yet.” Tavin’s eyes narrowed.

“Something came up in Lieutenant Cready’s interrogation. The Ru’at wish to question them all further,” Kol said, gesturing with his gun for the un-brainwashed Mariad Rhossily to go first, as Ambassador Ochrie stepped meekly into line behind Solomon. With all the complete assurance of someone who knew what they were doing, Kol nudged Mariad in the small of the back with his gun, and they started to move.

“Surely the Ru’at can find the answers to its questions itself, in the judgement chamber,” Tavin was muttering, but Kol ignored him as they started walking.

The boy’s smart, Solomon thought begrudgingly. Kol knew how to play Tavin, and it was a play that the younger Solomon himself would have been proud of.

Devoted employees are the easiest to scam, Solomon remembered. That was why no one had suspected Kol’s betrayal, after all. When Solomon had been doing such things, it was the guards and the corporate executives and the floor staff and receptionists who really believed in their job who always fell first for whatever lie he had been peddling.

You just use their own loyalty against them, Solomon remembered. Tell them that this isn’t unusual. They just need to follow orders and, nine times out of ten, they will.

“Where are you taking me?” Mariad, however, was under no such compulsion. The Imprimatur of Proxima—the woman who had seen her home planet and capital city torn apart by the Ru’at mothership and the cyborgs—was starting to get anxious.

“Where the Ru’at commands!” Kol announced enthusiastically, poking the woman in the back again with the muzzle of his gun. A little too enthusiastically for Solomon’s liking. We don’t want to make everyone else suspicious, after all…

“They won’t win in the end, you know.” Rhossily hung her head as she stumbled forward.

“You are wrong,” Kol stated. They were about halfway across the thoroughfare, and the exit was only a few meters away. Solomon had no idea where Kol was taking them, but he had to hope that the traitor actually knew this colony well enough to take them somewhere they could escape.

“No, you are wrong, traitor,” Mariad’s voice came back, thick and heavy with disgust and scorn. Solomon saw Kol’s jaw twitch with strong emotion.

“You’re a traitor. A traitor to your unit, to your species, to all of humanity!” Mariad’s voice rose a notch. It earned a few more wary glances from the other Martian Ru’at devotees around them.

Shut up, Rhossily! Solomon prayed.

“You see…” Mariad abruptly turned around, halting their advance and forcing Kol to fumble the Jackhammer into the middle of her chest. “Humanity will always win in the end. And you know why? Because we adapt. We survive. And we’re as mad as all hell.”

“Forward! The Ru’at commands it!” Solomon said out loud, trying to glare at Mariad, but she ignored him.

“Have you heard of the Toba event?” The imprimatur, ever a learned woman, rounded on Kol.

“The Ru’at commands you move forward!” Kol said, his voice cracking a little in anxiety. The Imprimatur of Proxima didn’t register it.

“It was a super volcano about seventy thousand years ago that almost wiped out all humans on Earth. A global winter that lasted a decade. Earthquakes. Herd animals dying in the millions,” Rhossily berated the treacherous soldier. “Homo Sapiens was just about an endangered species, but we survived. We persevered. We struggled on. Now, thanks to Toba, all mitochondrial DNA traces back to only about ten women, or something like that,” Mariad said. “Or the Mini Ice Age of twenty thousand years ago that wiped out most human civilization? We got through that, too…,” she said. “Spanish Flu. The trenches of World War One. Humanity may have a habit of making some stupid choices—like trusting you, Kol—but we get up again. We survive. We never give up…”

“I know,” Solomon whispered from where he stood behind Kol’s shoulder.

“Solomon?” Mariad’s breath caught as her eyes scanned his face and found the man’s eyes. His eyes that were full of soul, not Ru’at programming.

“Shhh,” Solomon muttered under his breath. “Just get out. We’re trying to get out,” he said, and Mariad blinked as she looked back at Kol, then at Solomon again. Solomon could see comprehension dawning inside her mind.

“Oh…”

“Move forward!” Kol shouted suddenly, a little too passionately, Solomon thought. “The Ru’at commands it!”

Mariad bowed her head and did so, but the damage was already done. Someone else had noticed their tense, emotional conversation.

“You there, Kol! Halt in the name of the Ru’at!” cried out Tavin behind them.

“Crap,” Kol murmured. “Run!”

2

Intercept!

The Marine scout vessel swam through the Barr-Hawking field, attached to its jump-ship by long metal cables.

To anyone watching from the portholes of The Last Call station—the last Confederate outpost in orbit around Pluto—it would have looked as though the two vessels hung stationary for a second. In a moment, both the jump-ship and its passengers started to dwindle, becoming smaller and opaque as the light holding their image fractured and diffused. There was a final flash as the last of the photons captured in the field of disturbed spacetime gave out…and then it was gone. The nearby stars lost their hazy, gaussian effect and once again appeared hard and bright.

“Coordinates updated to jump server…” the voice of one of the distant jump-ship pilots said, transmitted to those strapped into the chairs of the scout.

“Where are you taking us?” whispered Corporal Ratko, a small woman made larger by her power armor, who was sitting next to the commanding officer for the mission, Second Lieutenant Jezebel Wen. On the other side of Wen sat Lance Corporal Willoughby, silent as always, and on the other side of her hulked the massive form of Corporal Malady in his full tactical suit.

The last surviving members of the Outcast Gold Squad faced forward in the tiny vessel, and each one had plenty of thoughts to occupy their minds. They had only just managed to fight their way clear of The Last Call, fending off the insane attacks by the Ru’at cyborgs.

Brigadier General Asquew fought a way clear for us to disembark, Jezzy reflected. Unconsciously, she turned her head inside her helmet and craned to peer out of the nearest porthole—not that she could see the distant orb of Pluto anymore. Instead, all she saw outside the ship were swathes of strange lights as the gravity field created by the jump-ship stretched and warped the photons and neutrinos around them. The jump-ships worked like that: a ring of heavy particle generators on the small haulier ship created a bow-wave through spacetime, folding the stuff of the cosmos in front of it and lengthening it like the ripples atop a lake behind. An easy solution to crossing vast interstellar distances in no time at all.

It wasn’t as good as the Ru’at FTL drives, Jezzy thought irritably. But it was all that they had. All that humanity had.

“Commander?” Ratko cleared her throat, prodding Wen to respond.

Should I tell her? General Asquew had given her a top-secret mission. However, that same woman had also given her a data-stick containing high-level command codes for the Marine Corps, and she had given it to Jezzy.

In case Asquew didn’t make it, Jezzy thought, and felt the pit of nervousness and despair threaten to open inside her once more. They had already lost so much: Petchel, Karamov… The Ru’at had overrun the Sol system, and their cyborgs, difficult to kill and unafraid to die, were formidable.

We lost Proxima, Jezzy reflected. And the other general—an old-timer by the name of Hausman—had apparently declared himself as the leader of Earth in the aftermath of New York being nuked. A nuclear device he himself had probably set off.

All that was left of humanity was whoever was living under their new Commander-in-Chief Hausman, and the rebel Rapid Response Fleet under Asquew.

If we survive as a species through all of this, I’ll be amazed.

But Asquew had given Jezzy and her squad a mission. A desperate, hopeless mission. And Jezzy knew that her squad-mate had the right to know.

“Mars. We’re going to Mars,” Jezzy said. “We’re going to rescue Solomon.”

“Isn’t Mars occupied by the separatists?” Ratko asked. The initial jubilation on hearing that their original commander was alive and well—at least, they assumed—had died down. Now it came time for the harsh reality.

“And the Ru’at.” Jezzy nodded seriously. “The First Rapid Response Fleet was stationed there, attacking the Martians when the Ru’at jump-ships appeared and attacked.”

“What was Solomon doing there?” Willoughby broke her silence by asking.

“Maybe trying to join the Rapid Response, maybe trying to find General Asquew.” Jezzy didn’t know. Asquew had been there, after all, overseeing the ‘pacification’ of the insurgent group that called itself the First Martians or the Chosen of Mars. It was a long and depressing story, and one that Jezzy thought paled in significance to the arrival of the Ru’at. The human mining colonies on the Red Planet had always lived up to their planet’s fierce reputation. They had always made noises about independence and ‘Confederate hegemony.’

And finally, the Chosen of Mars had their chance, as their cause was funded and supported by a treacherous mega-corporation called NeuroTech, who was sending them the humanoid cyborgs the company had built according to Ru’at designs. The Confederacy now had Imprimatur Valance, once the spokesperson for the Martian colonies, and Father Ultor, the demagogue of the freedom fighters, securely locked away somewhere.

Unless Hausman has released them, that is, Jezzy thought dismally.

But a ship bearing Solomon’s signature had been observed falling into Martian atmosphere, before it was intercepted and apparently carried away by a Ru’at jump-ship. It was as much evidence as anyone needed that the strange alien species of the Ru’at had claimed the Red Planet as their own, just as they had done to Proxima.

“Okay then, troops.” Jezzy cleared her throat, switching her suit telemetries to a squad-only broadcast. It was probably about time to start acting like a commander, if that was what Asquew wanted her to become.

“We’re tasked to be a forward observation and expeditionary unit,” she said in as confident and firm a voice as possible. She tried to ignore the cynical voice in her mind saying that her unit only had four people left: Ratko, Willoughby, Malady, and herself.

But we’ll get Lieutenant Cready back, she tried to tell herself. And Malady has to count as at least two Marines rolled into one, right?

But still, the idea that four people alone could make a difference to the outcome of an interstellar war was laughable. Jezzy herself would have scoffed at such an idea, were it not for the fact that they had survived so far, through battles, infiltration events, planetary casualties, and overwhelming numbers stacked against them.

General Asquew seemed to think we could get this done, after all. And Asquew was no fool.

“We’re going to get eyes on the Ru’at, and we will try to harvest as much data as we can. Where are they based? What is their power source? How many ships do they have? Where can we best target our attacks?” she said. Not that they had enough ships left to actually launch an offensive against the aliens, she tried to not say.

“And we save the commander,” intoned the heavy-metal, electronic voice of Malady. He sounded like what a cement brick would sound like if it could talk. Jezzy looked over to the man-golem, the only one left here of the original Gold Squad, seeing his half-comatose face locked into biochemical symbiosis with his power suit, and nodded slowly.

“Yes. We save the commander,” Jezzy said. She knew, in that moment, that that was what she was really doing this for. Of course she would obey her orders, and she respected General Asquew, but all other aims and goals appeared futile right now. All apart from one: loyalty to her friend and commander.

“This jump-ship will drop us a ways out from our target, and then we’ll be using the Marine scout’s silent running features to get closer to the planet,” Jezzy said. “Corporal Ratko? You’re going to be taking lead on this.” Ratko was their only technical specialist, which meant that she had a high level of expertise and training in all areas of Marine Corps technology and, in particular, communications and vehicles.

“You think you can operate this thing?” Jezzy nodded to their own, empty Marine scout cockpit.

“Sure thing, sir.” Ratko was grinning. She was the sort of woman who liked a challenge. “Once you’ve flown before, you never forget,” she added, although Jezzy didn’t know if that was a joke or an actual piece of Marine Corps advice.

“Good. Then that only leaves—”

PHA-BOOOM!

Whatever it was that Jezzy was about to say, the words were plucked from her mouth by a violent shudder that tore through the ship.

“What in the frack’s name was that?” she exclaimed, already reaching up to hit the release button for her harness.

Thuddudududuhr!

A deep, vibrational juddering jostled them, making Jezzy’s hands shake before she finally hit the release and sprawled forward onto the small middle deck as the other Gold Squad members fought to do the same.

“Computer! Report!” she shouted as she flung herself toward the cockpit.

THUDUDUDUHR!

The shaking was growing more violent, so bad that Jezzy could feel an ache in her teeth, but no ship alarms were going off. There was no sound of fire or smell of smoke…

Jezzy reached the cockpit at just the same time as the scout’s automated computer voice bleeped. She didn’t even hear it, as she was too busy looking in horror at the scene unfolding through the cockpit viewing window.

“Attention all crew. Brace for impact. Repeat: Brace for impact…”

“Dear mother of—” Ratko slammed into the back of one of the command chairs as she followed her commanding officer, looking up to swear at what was coming for them.

Both women knew that they should only be able to see one of two things: either the flashing, strange light of the Barr-Hawking field arcing around them as they skipped through spacetime, or the hard, still lights of stars if they had reached their destination.

What they saw instead wasn’t even supposed to happen. The jump-ship was still there, still far ahead of them and surrounded by the corona of the Barr-Hawking field, but the corona of bent photons was narrow and small and growing indistinct by the moment, and around the Marine ship were the pulsing flashes of stars.

“We’re dropping out of jump?” Ratko breathed, as confused as Jezzy was before the answer became clear. Two of the magnet-lock cables that should have been attached to the nose of their ship from the jump-ship were flailing and spinning through the vacuum on their own.

“How is that possible?” Jezzy breathed, before she saw the reason.

There was a splash of light as a shape screamed overheard. A black cylinder larger than they were, with a pointed nosecone and three fast-rotating rings as black and shiny as obsidian around its body.

It was the Ru’at jump-ship, and as the two women watched, it fired a tight beam of its purple-white light, spearing their distant jump-ship and sending it end over end, tearing the cables from the nose of Jezzy’s craft.

The Marine Corps scout fell out of jump. Somehow, the Ru’at had found a way to attack other ships while they were in jump.

THUDUDUDUHR!

3

Running and Revelations

“Seize them!” The words of the clone-Tavin followed the group as they ran under the bulkhead and out of the main thoroughfare of the Ru’at colony. The brainwashed Martian humans moved slowly, forcing Kol and Solomon to shove them out of the way as the Imprimatur of Proxima seized Ambassador Ochrie’s hand and dragged her with them.

FZZZT! A line of blue, purple, and white fire exploded on the metal walls beside Solomon’s head. Tavin had dispatched his cyborgs after them.

And we only have one gun, Solomon remembered.

“Where are we going? What is happening?” Ambassador Ochrie called out, her face a pale mask of confusion.

“Never mind that! Just hurry up!” Mariad hissed as Kol led them, sliding around a corner in the complex and setting off again in a new direction.

All the hallways and corridors here looked the same. Solomon’s heart hammered. He had no idea which one led back to the Martian transport. But what are we going to do when we get there!? He panicked. This place was a Ru’at colony! It had taken a Ru’at jump-ship, using some kind of advanced tractor-beam technology, to bring the transporter in.

Even if we manage to get our damaged ship off the ground, we’d still never outrun, outclass, or out-fight one of those ships! Solomon felt hopelessness rise in his chest. There were plenty of times that he had been beaten and broken, but he had very, very rarely felt beaten. Maybe it was a quirk of his own mysterious genetics that had always made him think of a way out. Or maybe it was just that the younger Solomon had been dumber than he was now.

“This way…” Kol took another branching turn once again, and this time, the metal corridors had a lot less Martians inside. There were plain doors on either side of them, their only insignia a collection of lines and dots.

Was this part of the colony off-limits to most of the humans? Solomon wondered as Kol finally skidded to a halt at the next junction, panting and turning this way and that.

“Where are we? Where are we going?” Solomon unwittingly echoed the ambassador’s querying voice at the back of their group. There were still the sounds of distant clattering feet coming from somewhere behind them.

Clattering metal feet, Solomon thought gravely. “Can we hide in this place? Do the Ru’at use surveillance cameras?” he said, panting alongside Kol.

“I don’t know. I’ve only been here a couple of times.” Kol was checking the walls and the ceiling, looking for something. “Yeah, I think this is it…” He looked down at the center of the crossroads before kneeling to start digging at the edges of one of the tiles with a small tool from his utility belt.

“What is it? A hatchway? A trapdoor?” Solomon copied his example, using fingers in place of any tools, and in a moment, there was the hiss of releasing pressure from the floor tile, and Solomon could see where the edges of a large square had been disturbed.

“Help me get that up… Quickly!” Kol knelt to pry at the floor panel, revealing that it was in fact an access hatch, hinged at one end and with a steel ladder descending into the darkness below.

“What’s down there?” The imprimatur peered.

“Who cares! Do you want to be burnt toast?” The treacherous ex-Marine was already lowering himself over the edge and down the ladder.

“You next.” Solomon nodded to the Imprimatur.

“What? No. You’re more important…” Mariad shook her head. The sound of clattering metal feet had turned into thundering metal feet, heading their way.

“No, I’m not. You’re still the Imprimatur of Proxima. There are still Proximian refugees who need you,” Solomon said, wasting no time helping Rhossily over the edge as Ochrie stood motionless beside him, looking on in docile passivity.

As soon as the top of Mariad’s head was below the floor, Solomon turned and grabbed Ochrie’s hand. “You have to go down there, the Ru’at commands it,” he said in as heavy and as formal a voice as he dared.

“Yes, but…” Ochrie looked behind them. “That man back there. He said that we should stop.”

“It’s a test,” Solomon said quickly. “A test of loyalty to the Ru’at. Please, Ambassador, get down that hole!” Solomon said, and the older woman reluctantly obliged, moving terribly slowly as she did so. The cyborgs came closer and closer.

“Lieutenant, come on!” the muted voice of Rhossily came up to greet him as Ochrie was halfway down the ladder. The chasing cyborgs sounded so loud that they had to be in the next corridor. They would be here in a heartbeat…

Solomon pushed himself over the edge, one hand letting go of the access hatch as he fell down the shaft, and the hatchway door clanged above him and plunged the falling body into darkness.

“Ooof!” Solomon hit a floor that was altogether uncompromising and unyielding. He was tipped forward onto his hands and knees as pain scraped up his shins and his hands slapped cold, solid…stone?

“Arg,” he groaned and hissed through his teeth. The drop had to be at least fifteen feet. If he had twisted mid-fall, then he could have easily broken a limb or smashed his head like an egg.

“Shhh!” This came from Kol, emerging in front of him in the dim bluish glow of a tiny penlight. The ex-technical specialist put his finger to his lips and pointed above them.

Clank, clank, clank… The sound of the marching feet above them echoed down the tunnel. In the dim light of Kol’s penlight, Solomon could make out drifts of dust coming from above, in time to the marching feet. They didn’t stop, they didn’t hesitate, and thankfully, they didn’t pause, either.

Solomon looked at the rounded eyes of Kol in front of him and nodded. He had done well. So far.

They appeared to be in a tunnel cut into the stony fabric of the Red Planet itself. The rocks were shot through with competing lines of quartz-glitter and dark rust. Iron ore, Solomon thought. It was what this planet was famous for, after all. The whole of Mars was shot through with base metals, thanks to its geological past.

“But we can breathe…” Solomon looked around. Just one tunnel, seven or eight feet high and rectangular, and running mostly in the direction that the corridors above had carried on in.

If we can breathe, then that means this tunnel is airlocked somewhere, Solomon realized. And that a human-friendly atmosphere must have been pumped down here especially.

Which meant that the Ru’at had wanted humans to come down here—wherever ‘here’ was. “Where does it go?” he murmured to the ex-Marine.

“You’ll see. You won’t believe me if I told you.” Kol turned and started trudging down the tunnel, and with nothing better to do than to follow, Solomon, Rhossily, and Ochrie followed him.

They hadn’t gone too far when Solomon realized there was another glow coming to meet them. His instincts screamed from his basal brain cortex: How could you trust this man? He’s a traitor! It’s a trap!

But what choice did any of them have now, anyway? In his pocket, Solomon could still feel the unsettling weight of the Ru’at orb. They had managed to overpower one of the emissaries of the aliens, and now they had a piece of its technology. If he could get it back to General Asquew, then maybe they could work out what weaknesses their enemies had.

If they have any at all…

But the glow ahead of them was stationary. It was them who were moving toward it. None of the humans said anything as they kept walking, following the Marine who had betrayed an entire moon and killed probably hundreds of his fellow Marines.

I should ask him about Ganymede, Solomon thought. How could he have done that? Was he brainwashed? What could have caused him to kill so many? Didn’t he care about his brothers and sisters who had shed their blood with his?

The glow up ahead was strange. Not a clean white light, but also not the more usual purple of either LEDs or the Ru’at. This had an orangish tinge, and the shadows on the walls were a deeper blue. It reminded Solomon of those neon-eye pictures that made you try to see two different things at once.

“More Ru’at trickery,” Solomon grumbled.

“Not quite, this time,” Kol breathed as they walked forward into the glow. It wasn’t bright enough to blind them, so Solomon could clearly see that the tunnel had come to an end, at the edge of a much larger cavern.

“It’s straight-up phosphorescent and florescent lighting,” Kol explained as they stood on the lip of the tunnel’s edge. At their feet were wide stone steps cut into the rock, leading down into—

“A farm?” Rhossily gasped.

She was right, Cready saw, but it wasn’t a farm with normal human crops and a picket fence, and with the sorts of agriculture that Solomon had grown up around. Been bred around, he corrected himself sourly.

Instead, below him he could see that this vast space was given over to different types of chaotic vegetation, the majority of it rising no higher than a few feet from the cavern floor.

“But that’s impossible.” Solomon stated. “Martian soil cannot support complex organisms. Everyone knows that…”

“Just like faster-than-light travel is impossible?” Kol murmured. “This is what the Ru’at are doing. This is why they built their colony here.” He pointed down at the nearest patch of vegetation. Solomon could see a very fine layer of green-blue material covering every available surface, sprouting into gray and silver-flecked brackets the more concentrated it got.

“That stuff is lichen. Or algae. Something like that.” Kol gestured. On the cavern ceiling far above them hung great banks of strip lights on chains, which Solomon saw was the source of the orange, yellow, and bluish light. Kol must have seen his ex-commander looking and nodded upward in their direction.

“It turns out that good old chemical lights provide the best wavelengths for what the Ru’at want to grow. Blue shift for germination and younger sprouts, red shift for foliage growth…”

“But what is it the Ru’at is growing?” Mariad peered below her. “I grew up on an alien world, remember, and not even on Proxima have I seen anything like this…”

“I don’t know. But it’s doing something to the planet. It’s turning its dust and sand into soil.” Kol moved to the edge of the wall and tapped on the rock. “Look…”

The humans followed him and saw that there were strange blemishes on the rock, like chemical stains—only they were concentrating on the seams of iron ore deposit and following them. As the humans watched, Kol scratched the surface of the whitened blemishes with his penlight, and they crumbled and flaked to the ground, releasing a mushroom, yeasty sort of a smell.

Like dirt. Earth, Solomon thought as he turned his attention back to the farming cavern. The algae, or lichen or fungus or whatever it was, made up the overwhelming majority of the plant material, but out in the center, and dotted here and there, rose mounds of denser foliage. Giant, waxy green sorts of leaves with curious tendril-like climbers.

“What’s that stuff?” Solomon pointed.

Kol shrugged. “I have no idea. I only came down here once, and it freaked me out, so I never went down again. I think I only just realized what it was the Ru’at have been doing.”

Solomon was about to ask him what it was, but then the realization struck him too. He had always been a fast learner, after all.

The lichen, spreading along Mars’s vast iron ore seams. Eating the iron oxide up, converting it into nutrients…

“They’re terraforming Mars,” Solomon said in horror. This is why the Ru’at probe first made landfall where I lived, out in the farmlands of the American Midwest. This was why the place turned into the bio-agricultural epicenter of America. Why AgroMore set up their giant harvesters there…

The Ru’at were trying to transform this entire star system into a habitat for themselves.

4

FallOut

“Ratko, what are the chances of us not being scattered all across Confederate space!?” Jezzy was saying as she swung herself over the back of the command chair and pulled up its firing triggers. They were like two handlebars that slid and locked into place in front of her, with triggers and buttons under the finger grips.

“Slim at best, sir!” Ratko thumped into place in the pilot’s chair, quickly buckling herself in and pulling the flight stick.

“Wonderful,” Jezzy growled. What sort of weapons do these scouts have, anyway? She checked the screens on her armrests. “Computer, full tactical command to my chair! Authorization: Second Lieutenant Jezebel Wen, Acting Squad Commander.”

Jezzy hoped to the stars that General Asquew had seen fit to update the ship’s security protocols.

Access Granted.

She did, Jezzy thought with a modicum of relief.

Loading Tactical and Strategic Display…

The screens flickered, and then, scrolling down one side of the forward viewing screen, rolled a three-dimensional hologram of the space around them, with a small, perfect replica of the Marine scout picked out in green lines, along with all its available armament packages.

Marine Scout Class: Viking.

Forward Guns x2.

Nosecone Weapons Module: 6 x Propulsion Reaver Torpedoes.

“Is that it!?” Jezzy burst out. Six torpedoes. Six. She’d have as much chance of hitting the Ru’at jump-ship if she leaned out a window with a slingshot.

“But at least they’re signal-tracking.” She swiped her hands into the controls, setting the torpedoes to detect heat, electromagnetic, and for good measure, radio signals. Surely the Ru’at ships would emit at least one of those energy types. Just one would be enough for a torpedo to get a lock on it, but the Ru’at’s engines were far more maneuverable than the torpedoes.

Especially if it can move off at lightspeed…

“Where is it?” Jezzy shouted, scanning the hologram for the warning orange blip of the Ru’at ship. But it was nowhere to be seen.

“I’m kinda busy trying not to have us separated into our constituent atoms right about now, Lieutenant!” Ratko snapped. She wasn’t one to care about the niceties in the middle of a combat zone, Jezzy knew.

Up ahead, the corona of light around the Marine jump-ship was starting to diminish, and the shaking and shuddering of their own ship was only getting worse.

Warning! Structural integrity under threat.

Analysis: Hull plating has T-minus 4 minutes of efficiency at current stressors.

The words of the computer blared through their interlinked suit telemetries, as well as being projected in large orange letters at the top of the forward viewing screen.

“What in the frack does that mean?”

“It means that we’re falling out of jump without the Barr-Hawking field to hold us!” Ratko said as she moved to hit buttons and pull levers.

“What!?” Jezzy couldn’t speak engineering.

“Normal ships aren’t designed to go this fast!” Ratko settled for explaining as she hit the thruster controls again.

Controlled Main Thruster Burn: maximum propellant injection.

The commands appeared, hovering in the air on the screen for a moment as the scout was thrown forward, and the corona of light around the ship they were chasing grew just a little larger.

And rather counterintuitively, the scout stopped shuddering.

“I’m trying to match relative speeds with the jump-ship to keep us inside the Barr-Hawking field. If we slow, we’ll hit the back end of the field and be—”

THUDUDUDUDHR! The ship shook.

“Dammit!” Ratko screeched, firing the positional rockets at the same time. Jezzy felt the kick of the propulsion system, and the shaking subsided to a low, rocking tremor, as if the ship itself was a living, terrified creature.

“How long can we keep this up?” Jezzy said, not looking up as she ran another scanner sweep of the nearby space. But it was no use. The scanners would only pick up what was relative to their ship inside the energy bubble they were falling out of. Outside was a hazy blur.

That Ru’at ship intercepted us while we were midway through our jump. Jezzy was quite frankly amazed. How could it even scan for the arrival of a Marine jump-ship? How could it move so fast as to intercept them?

“Oh crap…” Jezzy heard Ratko say, a moment before the shaking started again, and this time, orange warning lights blared all around them. “We haven’t got enough juice!” she shouted.

“Then we’ll have to get the jump-ship to slow down, won’t we?” Jezzy opened a communications channel to the distant ship ahead, shining in the flare of bright white and yellow light. It would have almost looked beautiful, like a comet or an angel, Jezzy thought. That is, if the only reason we were looking at it had nothing to do with the fact that we’re going to break apart.

“Scout to Marine Corps jump-ship! Do you copy? This is Lieutenant Wen of the Outcast Marines, come in! We need you to SLOW DOWN. Repeat: slow down!” Jezzy shouted, and a moment later, the speakers glitched into life.

“Lieutenant Wen, this is— GZZZRK!” the speakers attempted to say, before crumbing into static.

“It’s the ion field generated by the Barr-Hawking generators. It’s just too strong. There’s no way—”

Warning! Incoming Vessel. Unknown Signature.

The computer warned them a moment before a small, bright spark of light grew larger and brighter in their viewing window. The shuddering of the scout had stopped, but Jezzy had no idea if that was because of Ratko’s skill as a pilot or because the distant Marine jump-ship had heard their distress call and was slowing down. Wen had more immediate concerns, anyway.

“Weapons, target that incoming craft,” Jezzy said.

Targeting… Targeting… The words flashed up above their heads, before—

Unable to Maintain Weapons Lock.

“No!” Jezzy could have screamed. The Ru’at were either moving too fast, or they might have had their own jamming technology. Jezzy didn’t know. Either way, they were sitting ducks.

The baleful star of the enemy vessel was growing larger and closer as it tore its own way through the fabric of spacetime, toward them. Jezzy was starting to see the glint of metal on its carapace, the shining blur of the obsidian rings that constantly rotated around it…

“We’re slowing!” Ratko shouted. “They must have heard your message, Lieutenant!”

But it was already too late for them all. Jezzy sat, helpless to do anything other than witness the tragedy unfolding before them. The Ru’at ship grew larger, until it had progressed from the size of a fingernail to that of a tennis ball, on course to intercept them.

“That thing must be going fast. It’s catching up with a ship in a jump-field!” Ratko sounded awed and panicked at the same time.

And then it fired. A thin beam of purple-white light erupted from its nosecone, shooting straight out and forward—

—and cutting across the bow of the Marine scout, hitting the giant rear wheel of the jump-ship, with the four nodules of massive energy wave generators at the cardinal points.

The vacuum of space wasn’t supposed to make noise, but even in the quiet, Jezzy’s mind filled in the blanks. She imagined deafening explosions and screams as the line of fire flared brighter for a fraction of a second, describing a taut line of fire between the Marine and the Ru’at ships.

And then the giant wheel on the back of the jump-ship was breaking apart, and the crazy yellow-white corona of burning photons was stretching and diffusing.

THUDUDUDUDUDHR!

The imminent loss of speed contracted the Barr-Hawking field in a heartbeat, and the scout shook as it was thrown about. Jezzy and Ratko bounced in their command chair harnesses, and it felt to the Wen as if a petulant god were trying to shake their skeletons out of their bodies like coins caught in a money-box.

Ratko screamed.

This is it. We’re all going to die. I’ve failed everyone. Again… Jezzy’s eyes blurred with tears, but she could still see the Ru’at ship like a hard pinprick of light, growing fainter and fainter as it slowed.

“Everyone, hold on!” Jezzy shouted, just as their ship was kicked out of the jump-field, shaking and juddering, screens bursting and exploding with sparks.

And with a squeal of alarms, everything went black.

5

Growing Medium

“Is it okay to even touch this stuff? Mariad Rhossily asked as she picked her way carefully behind Kol.

The group had made their way down the cut stone steps to the cavern floor, and it was only from down here, surrounded by the high walls of ruddy rock and with his line of sight obscured by mounds of rising vegetation, did Solomon fully understand just how large this place was.

“When did you say you first came here, Kol?” Solomon said. It was still a temptation to call him ‘Specialist’ or ‘Marine,’ even ‘buddy,’ but Solomon resisted the urge. Kol had automated that transporter to crash-land smack on top of the Ganymede Training Facility, after all…

It still bugged Solomon. Of course it did. He wouldn’t have made it to squad commander if it didn’t.

It’s not that I can’t trust him, Solomon thought as he brought up the rear of their little expedition. Kol was on point, then Mariad, and then Ochrie. Solomon hadn’t wanted to leave the only two non-military personnel at the back of the group, especially seeing as one believed the Ru’at to be near-godlike…

Solomon knew a lot about trust. His old career had all been about abusing other people’s trust, after all. He had seen enough of life in all its desperate, hopeless, back-stabbing, cheating or innocent glory to know that trust wasn’t a finite resource. Some people you can trust in some ways, but not in others, he recalled. Once you got a Yakuza member’s word on something, they would rather die than break it. But that didn’t mean that they wouldn’t just as quickly break you if they were ordered to.

And then there were people like Matty… It still stung to even think about his closest, his only, friend.

Matthias Sozer had been his handler, Solomon now recognized. Who would do that to a kid? Solomon thought. Matty had only been a few years older than Solomon, and they had met in their later teen years.

He was barely a child himself, Solomon now considered. What did anyone know in their early twenties? Admittedly, Solomon Cready had known how to break into safes and hotwire cars and pick locks… But not run a high-level intelligence gathering campaign on the behalf of some shadowy mega-corp and Confederate government alike.

Which was what Matty had done, he realized. His friend and accomplice had been guiding him on a journey throughout his entire life, or so the Ru’at had made him believe.

The Ru’at drone was even now sitting in Solomon’s pocket, and he felt the heft and the weight of it. He had an incredible urge to throw it as far and wide as he could, just as if he were playing dodgeball with Matty back in the mid-west.

No. The ex-thief, now squad commander, resisted the urge. He was still on a mission, of sorts. Even if that mission had once been to deliver Ochrie and Rhossily to the Confederate Council, who, presumably, were all now piles of irradiated dust. Now, Solomon regarded his mission as regrouping with General Asquew. Tell her everything he had seen, everything he had found out about the Ru’at—which wasn’t a lot, admittedly—and of course, to deliver this Ru’at drone to better minds than his.

But where does Kol fit into that? Solomon’s thoughts cycled back to their starting place. Kol had betrayed the Marine Corps. He had killed a heck of a lot of Outcast Marines.

They’ll never accept him back into the fold, if that is even what the young guy wants. Solomon pulled a face at his own musings.

I could trust Matty with my life, so long as I was playing the game according to his plan, he now believed. He wondered if it was the same with Kol. Maybe he could trust the Martian insurgent only so long as Kol thought that he would get his ‘free and brave Mars.’

Which meant, as far as Solomon could see, that at some point or another, he would have to tell Kol that wasn’t going to happen. Not with him, anyway. It wasn’t that Lieutenant Cready cared one way or another if Mars declared itself a sovereign planet. All the more luck to them, he thought as he carefully stepped around the latest trench of thick, glossy green and alien leaves.

But right now, the only way to defeat the Ru’at would be to wipe this place off the face of the Red Planet, Solomon thought grimly. A lot of First Martians were going to die. A lot were going to take up arms against the Rapid Response Fleet.

And Kol would have to choose which brothers he wanted to fight, and possibly die, alongside. Either the Marines, who would kill his fellow freedom fighters, or the Martians, who were brainwashed to serve the Ru’at.

“Lieutenant, watch it!” Solomon stumbled, pulling up short under Kol’s bark of alarm.

Solomon looked around in confusion. He had been so deep in thought that he hadn’t realized he’d stepped off the slight dirt path—real dirt! Rich and brown and black like the soil back home—and had walked several meters into the underbrush.

“Oh, frag…” Solomon looked down. Luckily, the vegetation around this area was still the lowlying blue-green lichen, encrusted with silvery brackets like tree moss. It clustered a little over the top of his boots, and when he retraced his steps, it felt springy and soft.

Almost good enough to take a nap in, Solomon thought, before shaking his head. That was an insane thought! Why did he think that? He had no idea what properties this alien stuff had. Had the Ru’at brought it with them from another star? Or had they created it? In the same way that AgroMore/NeuroTech/Taranis Industries had created him?

“You asked when I first came here?” Kol said, his eyes piercing into Solomon’s.

Sol nodded and saw Kol look away, ashamed.

Aha! So the boy could feel guilty, after all…

“I was sixteen,” Kol said.

“Wait. What?” Rhossily turned back around sharply from where she had been looking out over the alien landscape. “The Ru’at only arrived this year.”

“That’s, uh…not technically true,” Kol said, again managing to look suitably embarrassed.

“What!?” the Imprimatur of Proxima stated.

“He’s telling the truth.” Solomon recounted the tale of the strange memory-visions that the Ru’at drone had given him in the ‘judgement’ room. Decades before the Message had arrived through deep space, the Ru’at had already visited the Sol system. They had sent an orb just like the one that Solomon had in his encounter suit pocket—well, without being busted and with its strange wiring half hanging out. Maybe it was even the one that he still had on his pocket.

And there they had changed that quiet little patch of mid-western Earth somehow… Solomon stopped there, because he didn’t want to go into the details of his own heritage, forgetting that the clone Tavin had already spilled them.

“That was where you were…born?” Mariad said cautiously.

Born. Solomon rolled the word around in his mind. “Kind of.” He shrugged.

Solomon took a deep breath and said, “They told me that I was an experiment. That NeuroTech and AgroMore and whomever else were working with the Confederate Council to study the Ru’at phenomena, and somewhere along the line, they had decided to make clones of the inhabitants of that original town.” He was one of them. Tavin was another.

Mariad looked at him, her eyes hard and fierce.

Believe me, lady. I don’t feel any better about it. “Apparently, the Serum 21 in my blood—the same stuff that the Marine Corps dosed the Outcasts with to help create a breed of super-soldiers—all came from me. Or the original me, anyway,” Solomon continued. “The boy who was affected by the Ru’at point of contact.”

Something strange had passed through the land of that place, through the soil, and infected the humans who had lived there. Changed them.

What was it the hologram Ru’at had called me? Solomon considered. My child.

“I think the Ru’at tried to terraform Earth, and to create a new breed of humanity themselves…”

“Until the mega-corps got wind of it and turned the technology to their own use?” Rhossily nodded. “Just like they did when the Message arrived, and they created the cyborgs.”

Solomon nodded. “That’s it in one. The Ru’at have been hungry for the Sol system for the last two hundred years, give or take.” Solomon looked further down the path, across the acres and acres of green-blue alien fungus. “And now they’re finally here…”

“It wasn’t just Earth, though,” Kol continued. “I grew up on Earth, but I had family on Mars. One summer when I was sixteen, my family got enough money together to send me up the space elevator, and on one of the cruise ships here to meet them.” The young man fell silent, clearly remembering happier times. “My uncle brought me here and swore me to silence.” Kol took a deep breath and let it out raggedly. Solomon could see how much it cost him to admit that.

“My uncle wasn’t the only Martian who knew it was here. Loads of people did. Father Ultor did.” Kol nodded. “There was no colony here then, of course—nothing but a closed-off cave with a pocket of atmosphere in it.” Kol shook his head at his apparent young naivete. “All the Martians who knew about it said that it was proof that Mars could sustain life, that Mars had sustained life in the past. That was the seed that sparked the whole independence movement.”

You poor suckers, Solomon thought. The Ru’at had played them as much as they had played Earth. “The Ru’at were terraforming Mars, too,” Solomon said. “And they were making their own little tame colony of humans all the time.”

“But who—what—could even think like that?” Rhossily burst out. “We’re talking a propaganda and covert invasion plan a few hundred years in the developing? How intelligent are these Ru’at? How old?”

That was the million-dollar question, Solomon had to agree. He wasn’t even sure that they had encountered the Ru’at, the true Ru’at, not their machines or their transmissions or their deep-space drones. Is this what they did? he asked himself. Did they send out drone ‘seeds’ to any life-supporting planet they could detect, hoping to one day colonize?

It was all too much to even contemplate, he thought. How under the heavens could they ever hope to beat an enemy that arcane and that patient?

“Pretty,” a new voice broke into their depressing analysis of the situation. It was Ambassador Ochrie, and all eyes turned to see that during their discussion, the Ambassador for Earth had walked a little further down the path and was peering beyond one of the large mounds of alien vegetation.

“What is it, Ambassador?” Mariad was the first to her side, reaching out to touch the ambassador’s shoulder before suddenly recoiling in horror.

Oh, frack, Solomon thought. What now!? He made it to the two women and saw just what they were so equally stunned by—albeit one of the women was shocked, and the other entranced.

Lights were spreading through the Ru’at vegetation, from the Ru’at vegetation. For a moment, to Solomon’s eyes, they almost looked like pollen rising on the wind, until he realized that there was no breeze down here. And since when does pollen glow like that?

Drifts of tiny yellow-white particles were lifting from the blue-green, swaying in the air before slowly wafting across the cavern floor.

Straight toward them.

6

Not Invincible

Tsss….

Jezzy opened her eyes to discover that she was still alive. Which she hoped was an improvement. It was dark, and the only light came from the sparking of a control panel. A control panel that I should have been sitting at, she thought as she realized she was lying on the cockpit floor.

I’m not dead. I didn’t get my atoms scattered halfway from here to Neptune… The thoughts coalesced groggily.

TZRK! A brighter explosion of sparks sent beads of molten light scattering across the deck. She couldn’t see the viewing screen, which meant either it had broken or that there wasn’t anything to see.

In her barely conscious state, Jezebel Wen was suddenly consumed by the fear that the ship hadn’t managed to survive falling out of the Barr-Hawking field. Maybe they were trapped in some nightmarish almost-space between the ripples and folds of lumpy spacetime.

No. Get it together, Jezzy! she berated herself and coughed.

“Sound off…” she whispered, and then, a little louder, “Marines, sound off!” She hoped that her power suit still worked.

Suit Telemetries… Active.

The blip of green and orange lights appeared over the inside of her own helmet, and then came the arriving voices of the survivors.

“Corporal Malady. Ready for duty,” the voice of the big metal golem-man said.

“Willoughby here and present, sir,” the lighter, slightly weaker voice of the female Marine said.

“Corporal Ratko. In a whole heap of pain but still breathing,” the final member of her squad coughed. “And we bleeding well made it!” Ratko added, her voice so full of hysterical joy that Jezzy couldn’t help but join in the chuckling.

“I do not understand what is so funny,” Malady, ever the stoic, intoned over the giggling voices of Ratko, Jezzy, and Willoughby.

“I just managed to do what no other pilot in the history of the Confederacy has ever done, that’s what!” Ratko was saying, and now Jezzy could see the dim white glow of her suit environment lights flicking on, underlighting her face behind her helmet’s faceplate. The corporal was still strapped to her command chair—she hadn’t been thrown out, Jezzy noted—and was already hitting dials and buttons, trying to get the Scout to power up.

“We’re on critical power only,” the acting squad commander heard the technical specialist say. “Life support and little else.”

“Navigation?” Jezzy wondered aloud, pushing herself from the floor. Her head swam and she felt bruised and shaken. Now that she was up, she could see a fine haze of bluish smoke from the burst wires and control panels hanging in the room, and a thin, watery sort of illumination coming from the physical portholes.

“Starlight,” Jezzy said, moving toward the nearest one.

“No navigation. All our sensors are in shutdown mode. If I can get to the engine compartment, then I should be able to restart the subsidiary battery packs and get this boat up and running,” Ratko was saying, rising from her chair.

“Get it done,” Jezzy ordered, turning to look out of the porthole. Please let us be somewhere I recognize, she worried as she wiped her hand over the condensation on the inner side of the porthole. Life support was on the bare minimum, she saw.

Jezzy looked and saw a sight that was either the best or the worst in the world, depending on your perspective.

Outside the porthole loomed the rust and orange orb of Mars, and in front of that was the wreckage field of the First Rapid Response Fleet.

“Oh.” Jezzy swallowed nervously. She knew that the Rapid Response Fleet under General Asquew was split into two halves, with one usually patrolling the outer solar system, ready to jump and respond anywhere needed. The First Rapid Response Fleet, however, had been sent to oversee the pacification of Mars.

And it was obliterated, but not still.

Dark shapes swam through the wreckage, cylindrical and with slowly-turning gyres of their obsidian body-rings.

The Ru’at jump-ships patrolled their kills and were in between Jezzy and the Red Planet.

“Ah.”

“Belay that order!” Jezzy hissed urgently to Ratko, audibly clanging and thumping things around behind them all at the rear of the craft.

“Which one?” Corporal Ratko called back, her voice sounding muted thanks to the fact that the diminutive marine was currently half inside one of the computer panels, with bits of wires and tubes and devices splaying around her.

“Restarting the engine! I don’t want any extra power running in this boat at all!” Jezzy said.

“What?” Ratko reemerged from the hole in the wall. “We need the navigation systems to find out where we are… We need weapons systems online—”

“Six torpedoes won’t give us a rat’s chance against what’s already out there.” Jezzy nodded to the portholes. “Take a look.”

There was a grumbling and shuffling noise as the three remaining members of Gold Squad made it to the portholes to see what their commander had so recently seen.

“Ah,” Willoughby said. “Is that…”

“At least two Ru’at jump-ships, as far as I can see,” Jezzy confirmed. “And they look like they’re patrolling the wreckage. As soon as we light up our engines, they’ll be onto us.” How are we going to get to the surface of Mars now? She could have cried.

“Ah… Lieutenant?” Ratko called up from the lower, rear part of the small Scout given over to the engines and maintenance. “There’s something else you should know…”

“What now?” Jezzy’s eyes were fixed on the giant, rotating walls of ruined Marine Corps craft outside, as well as the lazy shark-swimming of the Ru’at.

“Oxygen tanks are low. Real low.” Ratko nodded back to the hole in the ship that she had just emerged from.

“How bad is it? How much air have we got?” Jezzy said.

“About forty-five minutes tops, probably,” Ratko shrugged. “And after that…”

“We’ll be onto suit oxygen tanks.” Jezebel Wen nodded. They could survive. No one would die, just so long as they remained inside their suits, but she knew that getting air had now become a top priority for them. If they did manage to make it to the surface of Mars, there was no guarantee they would be able to steal or get access to another supply of oxygen, given that the entire surface was a warzone…

“Solutions?” she asked her crew. Because right now, I am all out! she thought grimly.

“Full engine burn,” Ratko said. “As soon as we power up the battery packs, we commit to a full propellant burn of whatever is left on the tanks. We’ll shoot toward the planet using the element of surprise.”

“They’ll still be faster.” Jezzy winced. “And where will we get the oxygen from when we get to the surface?”

“We’ll have to infiltrate one of the Martian habitats,” Ratko considered. “Just like I heard you did before?”

“Armstrong Habitat.” Jezzy nodded. She remembered it too well. The Marine Corps had to drop them off miles away from the insurgent-controlled habitat, for them to rendezvous with a local Confederate sympathizer, to then be smuggled into Armstrong. And for Kol to leave me for dead under the surface of the city! Jezzy growled a little.

“If we can’t outrun them, and we can’t fight them, then we have to distract them,” Willoughby murmured.

Better. Jezzy nodded. “Okay. How are we going to distract them in a way that won’t bring every available Ru’at ship right down on top of us?”

Willoughby opened and closed her mouth several times before shrugging. “We need something out there to draw their attention, something out in the wreckage field.”

That was it. Jezzy clapped her hands together. “You’re a genius, Willoughby.”

“I am?” the tall woman said, looking confusedly at her superior officer.

Jezzy turned to stab at the window beside her in the direction of the largest piece of wreckage. It was what remained of the badly named Invincible, one of the two Rapid Response Fleet’s super-massive dreadnaughts.

“On her,” Jezzy said. “That is where we find our distraction, and our oxygen.”

7

Seed-spore

“Cover your mouths!” Solomon said urgently as the group of humans ran as fast as they could down the snaking dirt path through the alien cavern. Fleshy green foliage brushed and swayed at his calves and feet, and he could only hope that they weren’t poisonous.

Behind them, the drifts of glowing pollen moved lazily, settling back down or eddying in the vault-like space.

“How do we know it’s even toxic to humans?” Rhossily gasped as they tried to outrun the pollen.

“Look around you. Do you want to risk it?” Solomon exclaimed, his voice muffled as he spoke through his sleeve. There was nothing about the Ru’at that would surprise him. And nothing that he trusted, either.

Behind them, the glowing spore-like pollen appeared to be settling again, losing its fierce brilliance in the overhead strip lights and becoming specks and glints, like stars seen in the surface of a dark sea.

“I think… I think we outran it,” Kol wheezed as they slowed to a jog. They were now deep inside the middle of the alien farm, with tall mounds of vegetation rising to either side like grown-over anthills, and with some now taller than Solomon.

“How do we get out of here?” Lieutenant Cready hissed. “You brought us down here! Why?”

“I was saving our lives!” Kol snapped back. “And I told you, I was brought here before. When I was sixteen. There should be an airlocked tunnel on the far side of the cavern that leads out to the desert.”

“What use is that going to do us?” Solomon gestured to the fine mesh encounter suit he wore, gray and dirty and with Luna General Assistant stenciled over the righthand breast pocket. None of them—not even Kol—had suits with accompanying oxygen masks.

“This place was like a pilgrimage for the Chosen of Mars, once,” Kol said seriously, and Solomon saw the young man’s eyes spark in indignation at daring to be questioned.

He can’t still really believe all that nonsense about the Chosen of Mars, can he? Solomon shook his head. After everything we learned today?

“It means that there’s a depot not far from the cave entrance,” Kol said. “Or there used to be. Stocked with emergency survival kits.”

Solomon nodded, knowing what he meant. One of the many examples of Martian self-sufficiency had been their efforts to create caches of life-saving equipment and supplies across the surface of Mars. As the Red Planet was such a harsh environment—with no surface water and sandstorms that could scour skin from bones—the Martians had taken it on themselves to create safe ‘bolt holes’ for any haphazard surface travelers caught between habitats, a lot like the early mountaineers had done in the remote and inaccessible mountain ranges of old Earth.

“And when we’re equipped, we can hike across the desert to the next nearest habitat, steal a shuttle-ship,” Kol suggested, earning a begrudging nod from Rhossily and Solomon alike.

“Okay. Well. I suppose that’s a better option than going back up there,” Solomon had to agree glumly.

But first, they had to cross the alien landscape and get to this distant depot. The lieutenant sighed, gesturing for Kol to lead the way as he had before, and for Solomon to take up the rear of the procession.

They picked their way carefully between the mounds of vegetation that had now grown taller on all sides. It was a little like walking through a maze, but whose walls were made of living green material.

The sound became muted as the pillars of leaves and lichen closed in all around them. Even the fierce light from the overhead strip lights had dulled and seemed to forsake them.

“I don’t like it,” Ochrie murmured to anyone who would hear. Solomon was actually glad to hear the ambassador register dislike for their current situation, and for anything that remotely connected back to the Ru’at. Might that mean there is a way to break her conditioning? Solomon asked himself. Maybe. If she could look at Ru’at technology and be repulsed by it, then there had to be something of the old ambassador left inside there, didn’t there?

“I don’t like it either, ma’am,” Solomon breathed as he stepped carefully behind her.

Hsttt…

“What was that?” Ochrie suddenly stopped, looking around.

Solomon had heard it too. Something like a rustle of vegetation. “Was that one of you?” he whisper-called out to Mariad and Kol ahead of them.

“Huh?” Kol turned to ask. “What was that you said?”

“We thought we heard a noise. A movement in the undergrowth.” Solomon had stooped to a crouch, and he watched as Kol was the first to do the same, and then Mariad, with Ochrie standing in place.

“Could the cyborgs have come down here after us?” Solomon breathed the words, exaggerating his mouth movements so Kol might be able to read his lips.

There was a shrug from the top end of the line.

“Pretty!” Ochrie sighed next to him, her voice so sudden that Solomon flinched, and looked up—

—to see a singular speck of one of the glowing pieces of alien pollen drift through the air where he had been standing and land on the side of one of the nearest mounds of moss and leaves.

“Oh.” Solomon felt suddenly foolish. Was that it? Was that what he was so worried about? It felt like being worried about the rain or snow. A natural phenomenon that didn’t mean him any harm, and there was nothing that he could do about it anyway…

Hsssttt!

The sound, again. Solomon turned abruptly, his hands itching for the gun that would have accompanied him everywhere as an Outcast Marine. But where did it come from? The squad commander’s eyes scanned the solid pillars of vegetation that stood all around them. Nothing was moving, apart from the delicate fronds and tendrils of the strange alien plants.

“I heard it too, this time,” Mariad whispered, and Solomon could see that her eyes were wide with fear.

“Come on, whatever it is, we should be going,” Kol muttered as he stood up.

“Pretty,” Ochrie said, and Solomon followed her with his eyes as she took a step toward the nearest pillar of vegetation.

“Ambassador, wait!” Solomon said urgently, instinctively. I don’t like this. There’s something out there. Something alien.

It was then that Solomon saw just what the ambassador was talking about. The pillar of vegetation they were walking past, the very same one that they had seen the speck of glowing spore hit, was starting to glow itself.

“Uh…people?” Solomon cleared his throat nervously.

The glow was unlike the pollen-spore glow in some ways. It was the same soft yellow-white, soothing to look at, but it was not made up of a rising cloud of small flecks. Instead, it was coming from inside the heart of the vegetation pillar itself.

“What the…” Kol said, stepping closer, and his confusion was echoed on the face of the Imprimatur of Proxima and, Solomon was sure, his own.

Not Ambassador Ochrie, however. She was staring raptly at the column of grasses, mosses, and leaves, as if seeing an active stellar nebula for the very first time.

The glow started to brighten, growing stronger from inside the column itself before diminishing again. When the cycle had completed, the pillar was once again just a static rise of vegetable matter. It did not look as though anything strange or ethereal had happened.

But then it glowed again, and again Solomon and the others saw the glow become brighter, brighter still, and then fade.

It’s like a heartbeat, Solomon had the sudden, incontrovertible belief. “I don’t like this at all,” he was saying, reaching out to lay a restraining hand on Ochrie’s shoulder. “We have to go, Ambassador,” he murmured to the entranced woman. “We should leave whatever this is alone.” He was about to add an obligatory ‘the Ru’at commands it’ to the end of that sentence, but Mariad’s voice interrupted him.

“What is that?” she said, with far more alarm than before.

“What is what-?” Solomon said, looking at the glowing pillar to see, just as it reached its crescendo of brightness, that there was a…shadow inside the glow.

What? Impossible! Solomon involuntarily took a step back, his heart hammering. For some reason, it reminded him of test tubes. Test tubes and laboratories, with things floating in solutions.

The glow seemed to be generated from the heart of the plant matter and was shining through the leaves, brackets, and frills in the same way that bright sun turns normal Earth trees into an almost translucent, viridian glow. But inside that glow was a silhouette, a shape that was curiously elongated and twisting, like a giant tadpole or a creature of some kind.

“I-I don’t understand,” Mariad said. “How is that even possible?”

“It’s the Ru’at.” Solomon cleared his throat nervously. This time when he set his hand on the ambassador’s shoulder, he firmly cajoled her away from the glowing thing in front of her.

“Well, you’re not going to like this,” he heard the ex-Outcast Marine Kol say, and the alarm in his voice was such that Solomon turned immediately to see what had caused it.

All the pillars of vegetation around them were glowing now, at different times and at different levels of brightness, but they were surrounded by the ethereal radiance.

And inside every one, visible when their glows had reached its crescendo, was the same large, squiggling shadow.

“You know what, everyone?” Solomon’s voice sounded small in his ears. “I think we’ve tarried here too long…”

8

Manual Unassisted Propulsion

What if this doesn’t work? What if the Invincible was too badly damaged to have anything salvageable? Jezebel Wen’s mind was full of questions as she pushed off from the airlock of the Marine Scout.

Behind her in the airlock waited Corporals Ratko and Malady—Ratko because she promised she could find something out of that hulk, and Malady not so much for any particular engineering proficiencies, but because just having the sight of the large man-tank in his full tactical suit made Jezzy feel a whole heap better about life.

“Checking suit controls,” Jezzy said over the suit’s gold channel, directly linked to just her squad and set to close, narrow-band broadcast. Inside the Scout remained Willoughby, who had enough basic training to fly simple maneuvers if she had to. Jezzy prayed that she didn’t.

But as soon as we’re more than a few meters away, we’ll lose telemetries on her, Jezzy reminded herself. It wasn’t something that she liked to do at all, leaving one of her squad members in the dark without a way to contact her, but she told herself that it was necessary.

We have no idea what the Ru’at jump-ships are capable of, she reflected. Even though Ratko had assured her that a ship the size of the Ru’at’s would probably not even register three slow-moving bodies through the debris field, Jezzy was still taking no chances. Their communications were set to as quiet as possible, and they weren’t even using thruster packs to propel themselves toward the distant Invincible.

POWER ARMOR: Active.

USER ID: 2LT Wen (Ac. Sq. Comm.)

COMPANY: Outcast, Rapid Response Fleet.

SQUAD IDENTIFIER: Gold.

SQUAD TELEMETRIES: Active.

Bio-Signatures: GOOD.

Atmospheric Seals: GOOD.

Chemical, Biological, Radiological Sensors: ACTIVE.

Oxygen Tanks: FULL (6hrs).

Oxygen Recycle System: WORKING (1hr).

“Good, all set,” Jezzy murmured, as much to calm her own nerves as to her three-man team. There was something deeply troubling about deciding to fly off into the vacuum of space, where the only weapons you had were your Jackhammer rifles against alien ships that could punch holes through dreadnaught-class Marine battleships.

This was why Jezzy wanted to do this one by the book. Full suit operational. She needed her team to know precisely what they were going to do, when, and where.

MISSION ID: Lifeline.

MISSION PARAMETERS:

Traverse wreckage field to the CMC Invincible…

Locate salvageable oxygen tanks and return to Marine scout…

Locate additional salvageable material as needed (lead: Ratko)…

Locate CMC Invincible heavy munitions locker…

Jezzy had planned their mission herself, running her command codes through her suit to update the squad with what she expected them all to do.

“Everyone locked and loaded?” she breathed, watching the holographic overlay of controls and analysis that played across the inside of her helmet.

“Aye, Commander,” both Ratko and Malady intoned.

Outcast ID: Corp. Ratko (Tech. Sp.)

Health: GOOD.

Outcast ID: Corp. Malady (Full Tac.)

Health: GOOD.

Jezzy hung onto the edge of the airlock hatch on the back of the scout, waiting for any sign of danger or change of course from the distant Ru’at jump-ships. If they had spotted their movement or overheard their communications, they did nothing about it.

Maybe we really are too insignificant for them to worry about, Jezzy hoped.

She leaned over the edge, looking down into the small airlock, and gave a thumbs-up to the two faces behind their faceplates below. First, Ratko pushed off, grabbing onto Jezzy’s outstretched hand as she cleared the airlock, for her commanding officer to swing her around next to her, grabbing the rails that were built on the external hull of any Marine Corps ship.

Next climbed Malady, twisting his prodigious bulk over the lip of the airlock as gracefully as a gymnast, to hold onto the rails on Jezzy’s other side.

“Okay, good. Link up and take a deep breath, people. And look sharp. I want to know the instant one of those Ru’at jump-ships changes course,” she said as she spooled out the polyfilament wire from her suit’s utility belt, clipping the end onto Ratko’s belt, with Ratko passing her own climbing wire to clip onto Malady. None of them would fly alone out here, and Jezzy hoped that their combined momentum would help them move faster to their target.

MISSION ANALYSIS: Lifeline.

ETA to the Invincible… 4 mins 36 seconds.

ETA to objective 1 (oxygen tanks)… 10 minutes.

ETA to objective 2 (munitions locker)… 16 minutes.

Deployment and return to ship… 25 minutes.

Acting Squad Commander Jezzy had to guess just how long it would take to reach every mission objective, but she had purposefully given them a tight schedule. The chances of something going wrong or of them being discovered would increase the longer that they spent out there, and spending half an hour out of the relative safety of the ship already sounded too long.

“Let’s do this,” she said, nodding to Malady.

The largest member of their squad had a greater mass than the other two combined, so Jezzy had asked him to push out from the ship first, followed by Ratko and then Jezzy a split-second after.

It was called a ‘Manual Unassisted Propulsion’ maneuver in the training guides, and Jezzy had only ever practiced it in zero-G simulators before. That had been way back on Ganymede—when Jupiter’s moon still had a Marine Corps training facility on it, and not just a blackened heap of metal.

But even then, Jezzy had only ever practiced it a couple of times, as it required a lot of space to perfect. But she knew that both Ratko and Malady must have also practiced the maneuver, and Malady—who had once been a full Marine before getting busted down to the lowly Outcasts—must have more experience than anyone.

Malady’s greater mass helped pull the two women behind him, attached by the thin cable that stretched between them. As his trajectory slowed, first Ratko passed him by, the cable going slack and then starting to tighten once more as centrifugal force pushed them apart.

At the maximum stretch of the cable, Ratko and Malady started to circle around each other according to Newtonian principles—just as now Jezzy passed Ratko, and the cycle began again. The maximum stretch of Jezzy’s cable pulled down the line, which converted to a ‘push’ for the much larger Malady at the far end.

And then they were off, a trifecta of cartwheeling bodies, using each other’s momentum to cross the vacuum. The beauty of the ‘Manual Unassisted Propulsion’ maneuver was that it kept energy within their three-body system. It didn’t allow any one of them to completely lose their momentum and come to a halt, but every pull converted into a push for someone else.

The downside, though, was that it resulted in spinning and twirling over and over, where even the most hardened Marine with hours of low-gravity training would start to feel nauseated.

Suit Injector System Activated: Anti-Nausea Application…

One of little alert lights on the inside of Jezzy’s helmet lit up indicating that the suit had detected abnormal signals from her metabolism, had diagnosed the cause, and had remedied it all in the space of a heartbeat. Jezzy felt a small pinch of pain around her abdomen as the power armor’s array of medical injectors delivered their payload straight into her bloodstream. Within a few moments, her stomach had settled, and her mind felt clearer.

“Report! Anyone got eyes on the Ru’at?” Jezzy asked.

ETA to the Invincible… 2 mins 16 seconds.

Jezzy could see the spinning bodies of her fellow Gold Squad members in front of her, and behind them, the whirl of stars. Her view was suddenly blacked out every now and again as they passed a piece of wreckage from the First Rapid Response Fleet.

Malady had run the equations on their flight, and all reason and sense had told him that as long as nothing changed too drastically in the debris field, this flight would take them straight to the Invincible.

They swung past pieces of hull plating and engine carriages that could still be identified, as well as much more obscure pieces of wreckage that could not. Jezzy had the sudden memory of the debris field that she herself had created near Pluto, meaning to slow the Ru’at jump-ships’ attack. It hadn’t particularly worked, as the Ru’at had just seeded the wreckage with their own cyborgs, who had used it as cover before performing a hostile boarding procedure against the Marine Corps battleship known as the Oregon.

Is this what all of space is going to look like now? Jezzy found herself thinking a little dramatically. Everywhere the Ru’at were found, would there be this kind of picture beside them?

As Jezzy spun, her darkest fears turned what she and the others were flying through from the scene of a particular battle to a symbol of what was awaiting all of humanity in the future.

If we let the Ru’at get away with it, she admitted.

Jezzy imagined all near-Earth space—the busiest space lanes in the entire Confederacy—being nothing more than a metal and ceramic asteroid field, made up of the dead and broken bits of human civilization.

Was that what all of Sol, all of the Milky Way, the entire galaxy was going to look like in a few years’ time?

“I got one!” Ratko said enthusiastically as she spun past Jezzy. Jezzy saw her mime a direction further away as her shaking, revolving voice sounded in her ear.

“Three o’clock. Wait, no, twelve… Ten…” Ratko said as they cartwheeled through the air. “Not changing course,” Jezzy was finally relieved to hear as they spun closer and closer to their target.

The CMC Invincible was the flagship of the First Rapid Response Fleet, and the usual home for Brigadier General Asquew—before she had gone to lead the defense of Pluto. Every CMC fleet had a flagship, and they were always dreadnaughts—vast golden and steel pyramids, like entire cities floating in space.

If anyone had asked Jezzy a year ago if she thought whether a CMC dreadnaught could ever be disabled, let alone damaged so badly that the crew had to abandon their ship, then the ex-Yakuza enforcer would have laughed in their faces.

The dreadnaughts were big. Pyramids of metal that were the largest achievement of the Confederate Marine Corps, though not the largest vessel in Confederacy, which would be the super-massive deep-field station-ships. But the dreadnaught class weren’t much smaller and functioned as entire stations and habitats, as well as devastating arsenals of power. As far as Jezzy was aware, the Martian insurgency was the first time that the dreadnaughts had been used in front-line battle, and each one was capable of decimating several major cities at once.

We should have won this battle, Jezzy thought as she was in her ‘slow’ part of the cycle, waiting for Malady at the extreme end of the cartwheel to complete his arc. She looked at the shattered Invincible and wondered just what could have happened to it.

It no longer looked like a giant gold and steel pyramid anymore. The last time that Jezzy had seen it, the general’s flagship had been pointing its peak at the planet below them, as flights of CMC fighters had been launching from the holds at the far, larger square base of the craft.

Now it appeared a little like a crumpled hat. The cone at the peak was still intact, and there was still a baleful red light glowing from its very tip—a sign that she still had power, at least—but the rest of it was a mess. A great, ragged hole was torn from its side, ruining its equilateral shape. Jezzy could see entire levels up and down the structure that had burst apart or crumpled.

The same thing that happened to the Oregon, Jezzy realized. Decompression events that had been mostly contained by the superstructure of the dreadnaught itself. This meant that it was like looking at a ladder with some of the rungs missing. Entire lines of hull had disappeared or crumpled, revealing the intricate spiderweb architecture of the outer hull framework and the inner hull.

On the Oregon, that had been caused by the cyborgs burning their way in, Jezzy reminded herself. Entire floors and levels had lost their atmospheric pressures, and the resulting strain on the Oregon had caused parts of it to crumple inwards or explode out.

Cyborgs, Jezzy’s mind prodded her again, just as her line suddenly went unexpectedly taut—

“Huh?” She looked, to see that Malady was completing his return arc, and the silver line was starting to slacken as it transferred its momentum to Corporal Ratko.

But Ratko’s rear line, which should have stretched from her belt to Jezzy’s, was languidly swimming loose in space.

What?

Jezzy felt the momentum of the recent snag take her, rolling her over and over—away from the others and away from the Invincible. The culprit was a small, fast-moving piece of highly polished metal, barely as big as Jezzy’s gauntlet, that had amazingly managed to catch her cable at just the right moment of extreme tension.

The cable that should have connected Lieutenant Wen to Corporal Ratko had been torn in two. Jezzy was floating free in the vacuum of space, without any propulsion mechanism at all.

Frack!

9

Children of the Ru’at

Hsssst. Thud!

The glowing pillars of vegetation grew in radiance and darkened again, and every time they reached their crescendo, Solomon could see the dark, squiggling shapes of something alive inside of them.

Hssst. THUD!

As Solomon and others started backing away from this strange forest, he heard the unmistakable sound of a thud coming from inside one of them.

Like whatever was inside was trying to get out.

Like it’s about to hatch, Solomon thought. He remembered the lines of baby tanks that the Ru’at hologram had shown him in the judgement chamber. That laboratory had been back on Earth, masterminded by the mega-corporation called AgroMore. It had been a nursery for test-tube babies. For clones just like Solomon, who had their genetics rewritten by whatever strange processes the Ru’at contact had seeded into American soil.

Rows and rows of babies in glowing tanks. Solomon’s heart started to hammer.

“This isn’t a fracking Ru’at farm…” he hissed. “This is a Ru’at laboratory.” A Ru’at nursery, he added silently.

“What?” Mariad Rhossily asked. The Imprimatur of Proxima looked at the lieutenant in alarm, then back to the alien forest around them, seeing the glow and the shapes, and hearing the chorus of thumps and thuds from inside each one.

“Oh.” Her face blanched in the strange light all around them, making her look sick.

THUD-THUD-Screeargh-kk!

And then it happened. One of the largest of the pillars of vegetation shook, and instead of a thumping noise, there then came a horrible tearing sound.

“They might be… Might be…” Kol was saying, stumbling back with the only gun that their party had raised before him. “They might be…pets?”

“Would you call that a pet!?” Rhossily screeched as the tearing pillar of vegetation dissolved into a heap of moss and lichen, losing all internal structure and releasing clouds of dust and pollen-like particles…and a shape.

It was indistinct at first, surrounded by the glowing pollen of its former shell, but quickly its movements and eventual shape became apparent.

Solomon had never seen anything like it. He didn’t think that any human had ever seen anything like it, in fact.

The creature had dark mottled skin, brown and russet patches over a deep gray and black surface. It was undeniably organic, undeniably skin. It wasn’t made of the metal that the Ru’at-controlled cyborgs were, but neither was it entirely normal according to any Earth standards of biology.

As the thing wobbled and shook itself to its feet, Solomon saw that it had elongated back legs—much longer than its front legs, and backward-jointed like a dog or a cat. At the end of these back legs were large paws with three black, shining talons as big as Solomon’s entire fist.

Its body was narrow in the middle, rounding out into a barrel of a chest with the same mottled viscera, and the humps and nodules of strange skeletal structures underneath. Its front two arms weren’t backward jointed, however, and in fact…

They look almost human, Solomon’s mind registered in alarm. Almost, because they still had the strange skin tone and color, as well as the obscene bumps and nodules rippling along their surface. Where these forward legs met the ground, however, were two large ‘hands’ with five clearly visible digits, each one ending in another of the large, shining black talons.

But none of this was even the worst feature of the creature, as it raised itself up on its hind legs, with its smaller ‘top’ arms—still longer than the average human’s, it had to be said—flaring out on either side.

No, the worst feature was its neck and head.

The neck was somewhat sinuous, a hand’s length longer than a regular human, but its head…

The thing had no face to speak of. That was because the entirety of the creature’s head was a pulsating maw, fringed with smaller tentacles that waved and flared in the pollen-light around them.

“Holy frack!” Solomon heard Kol say, and then—

PHOOOM! The treacherous ex-Outcast Marine shot it with his Jackhammer. Kol reacted instinctively; he didn’t pause to put on burst or repeater fire. Instead, he had given the creature both barrels of the heavy Marine Corps weapon, and with a reassuringly pained shriek, the creature was thrown back into the first of glowing pillars.

Thud-thud-thud-teeeear! More pillars started to collapse as they tore open in their own clouds of glowing pollen.

“Get moving! All of you! Now!” Solomon said, seizing Ambassador Ochrie’s hand and running down the track.

“Kol! Where’s this depot? The way out!?” Solomon shouted, and Kol spared a quick glance back, pointing to the furthest wall.

“Under that sticking-out bit of rock. There’s a crawlspace—”

“Kol! Twelve o’clock!” Solomon saw one of the strange creatures behind Kol’s anxious face, leaping out of the pollen-light straight at him.

PHABOOM! The Martian sympathizer turned and fired at the thing in mid-leap, just in the nick of time. With a grunt and a grotesque, pig-like squeal, the attacking Ru’at monster was thrown out across the ‘farm.’

But more shapes were already struggling and rising on wobbling legs in front of them.

Did the Ru’at plan this? Is this some sort of a trap, or are we just exceptionally unlucky? Solomon stumbled, pushing Ochrie ahead of him with Mariad ahead of her. “There! That rock!” Solomon guessed. It was the nearest wall, and the only large rustred boulder that stuck out anywhere nearby.

Pig-like growls and yips came from behind them as the group of humans ran for their lives.

Solomon and Kol, who had both been trained on Ganymede and had both also been dosed with the gene-enhancing Serum 21, easily outpaced the two women, but Solomon kept his speed in check so he was always behind them, and even Kol pulled back, spinning on his heel to fire another shot at the next closest Ru’at creature.

PHABOOM!

It seemed, at least, they were easy to kill. It was only that there were so many of them. And while the majority of the creatures were sticking to the path behind the humans they hunted, a few had separated off to bound past the pillars and through the vegetation on either side.

“Oh frack, oh frack, oh frack…” Solomon could hear Kol panting, as he was only a pace or two behind them.

A feral growl came from the undergrowth on their right and one of the creatures burst out, leaping straight for Ochrie.

“No!” Solomon jumped, slamming into the ambassador’s back and sending her flying forward a second before the creature hit him on the shoulder.

“Argh!” Pain tore through his shoulder as the thing’s claws swiped him on the way down, spinning him about and sending him sprawling into the undergrowth.

“Lieutenant!” the frantic voice of Rhossily ahead of them, and then—

“Keep on running!” Kol shouted in panic.

Solomon backflipped onto his feet to realize that the others had raced past him already. Kol hadn’t waited, was Solomon’s first, very cynical, thought.

No. Kol had to make sure the others got to safety, he corrected himself as he heard a growl and spun into a crouch.

The thing had leaped and was already mid-air as Solomon rolled forward.

The creature sailed over his head to crash into the ground on the other side of the path, snorting and shaking its head-mouth as it turned again.

Thwack! Solomon jump-kicked the thing across the face, earning a squeal as it was knocked to one side, but it was already turning to pounce back.

PHOOM! The Ru’at monster suddenly shot to one side as one of Kol’s shots hit it in the side. Solomon looked up to see that Kol had the Jackhammer leveled at him.

“Kol, wait!” Solomon managed to breathe.

“Down, sir!” Kol shouted, and Solomon dropped to his knees.

PHABOOM! PHOOM!

Two more shots sailed past Solomon’s head, and he heard two answering yelps of piggy-like pain from just a few meters behind him.

“Now, RUN!” Kol was turning again and racing ahead, as Solomon launched himself into a sprint.

Maybe it was Solomon’s enhanced genetic code. Or maybe it was the fact that he was a clone. Or maybe, more simply, it was just the fact that he was terrified, which lent speed and vigor to the Outcast commander’s limbs.

Solomon Cready’s focus narrowed to a tiny window of crystal clarity as the sounds of growling and thrashing and snarling behind him, as well as the screams and shouts of the humans ahead of him, faded to a muted blur.

Solomon’s world became forcing his legs to stretch further, his knees to pick up higher, and his back to tighten and arms to pump as he ran for his life. In front of him he saw the Imprimatur of Proxima hit the dirt, sending up plumes of reddish dust as she slid underneath the large outcrop of rock that loomed into the cavern.

Solomon’s adrenaline-enhanced sight could make out all the pinpoint details of her hair, and even her fierce expression of pain, concentration, and panic as she disappeared. There, underneath the lowest bulge of rock, was a low aperture like a letter box—large enough for a human to slide down.

“Get!” Kol did not waste time on niceties before shoving the ambassador after the imprimatur, and then hesitated for a heart’s beat as he fired another shot over Solomon’s shoulder.

The Outcast squad commander didn’t even flinch this time, knowing that the line between dying out here and living was so miniscule that anything might disturb it. He couldn’t afford to waste a second by ducking or dodging or flinging himself one way or another.

“Skraa!” His pinpoint determination was rewarded by the sound of a pained yelp from nearby, behind him. Very nearby behind him. The outcrop of rock was only eight or nine meters away now.

Ahead of him, Kol slid himself through the tunnel, leaving the way clear for Solomon.

The growls were getting louder, the crash of pounding claws closer. Solomon could swear that he could feel the hot breath of the things behind him, beating on his back.

“Please, by the stars!” Solomon threw himself forward into a slide, hitting the dirt and sending up dust and Martian gravel. Pain seared across his chest and arms as suddenly everything went dark.

“Ooof!” And he was rolling to a sudden stop as he hit something soft.

“Lieutenant!” It was Rhossily, grabbing him by his now-bloody arms and heaving him forward as something else hit the letterbox opening of the tunnel.

It was dark, but the filtered light of the Ru’at laboratory-nursery outside cut through in thin beams from the tunnel opening a few meters away. The letterbox mouth opened to a small cave that dropped away suddenly, leaving the strange monstrous claws at the tunnel entrance, scrabbling and digging.

PHA-BOOOOM! This time, when Kol reached up to discharge the Jackhammer point-blank into the thing, the sound of the gunshot was deafening in the confined space. Solomon felt his ears pop and instantly turn into a high-pitched whine.

“Ow!” Solomon said, but couldn’t hear himself speak.

At the mouth of the cave was a commotion of shadows and light, more scrabbling, as well as a spreading dark line of ichor from where Kol must have at least injured another of the things.

“Will they be able to dig past that?” Solomon said, his voice sounding distant and muffled, as if heard through a door. He knew that the shock-based ringing would subside in a few moments, but he didn’t have the time.

Kol was looking at him, shrugging, and when Solomon looked back up to the tunnel mouth, he could now see thin rivulets of gravel and dust falling as the Ru’at creatures dug.

“I don’t know if that will hold!” Solomon tried shouting, which was marginally better.

Kol was nodding that he understood, pointing further into the cave. “AIRLOCK!” He said the words loudly, and the rest nodded that they had received the message. Solomon took the lead this time, accepting Kol’s penlight to illuminate the way ahead.

They had survived the new menace, but only just, and for how long?

10

Manual Unassisted Propulsion, Part 2

“Lieutenant!” came the voice of Ratko over their suit’s telemetry band. Jezzy could see the pair clearly, but they were moving fast now—probably thanks to the sudden severing of their third and final member.

“You’ll be out of suit range in a bit. Retain your mission objectives!” Jezzy shouted after them.

“Lieutenant Wen, I might be able to—” Malady was saying, before his voice grew quieter and fuzzier in seconds, then finally clicked off altogether.

Suit Communications Error! Gold Channel Network Offline!

Jezzy’s power armor suit blipped the alert at her, and she wondered if she had been monumentally stupid by setting their squad channel to the narrowest, most restricted band she could find.

Never mind. You’ve got bigger problems… Jezzy was spinning head over heels thanks to the severed cable. In itself, the spinning and twirling wasn’t the worst part of the experience. Any Confederate Marine had to become proficient in zero-G maneuvers and operations early in their career if they were to make it to where Jezzy was now.

But what was problematic was that her spin made it hard to see the wreckage field in any detail. She flinched, after the fact, as a metal pipe the color of tarnished silver rolled past her, just a hand or so away from hitting her head.

“Think, Jezzy!” she berated herself. “Power suits are strong. They can withstand most impacts.” She tried to sound convincing, even as she remembered that the same logic hadn’t helped the cable at all.

“The cable!” It was still waving in front of her, connected to the blocky, built-up utility belt attached to her suit harness. Already the pair of spinning Outcast Marines seemed little more than children’s toys ahead of her, sparkling before the giant hulk of the Invincible.

“Newtonian physics,” Jezzy remembered. When set free, the outward force will carry the centrifugal object perpendicular to the original motion… She recalled the study lessons that they all had to complete in basic training.

Simple astrophysics, she had joked at the time. What was so simple about astrophysics?

Quite a lot, as it turned out. The rules of physics in space were unreliable, of course, when it came to black holes and gravitational objects and the ripples of spacetime itself, but when talking about basic movement properties, Jezzy remembered that it was actually far simpler than it was on the surface of a planet.

For one thing, you don’t have an entire planet’s gravitational effect pulling everything off course, she remembered in a heartbeat. And in space, you also had such miniscule resistance as to be statistically irrelevant. Which meant that Newton was a god out here. If you push something, it will keep on traveling in that trajectory until it loses momentum, which is itself related to its mass and velocity.

But with negligible resistance, that meant that the velocity and momentum of the object were virtually unchecked.

Which, Jezzy knew, was a very fancy way of saying that unless she did something to change course, she was going to be flying at right angles to her battle brother and sister for a long time yet.

“What do I have?” She had her Jackhammer. She had the cable. She had half a dozen small tools in her belt, and reserve oxygen.

I could discharge some of the suit’s reserve oxygen, Jezzy thought. Which would act as propulsion, but would the Ru’at detect the sudden movement?

“Well, they hadn’t detected three cartwheeling Marines—one of them almost as big as a car—so…” Jezzy thought, using the touchpad sensors on the inner mesh of her gloves to click open the suit’s controls. In a moment, green and orange holographic commands and functions scrolled down the inside of her faceplate.

Atmospheric Seals: GOOD.

Chemical, Biological, Radiological Sensors: ACTIVE.

Oxygen Tanks: FULL (5.5hrs).

Oxygen Recycle System: WORKING (1hr).

Underneath the main command notices, Jezzy swiped through to a schematic of her suit. It was made up of different line colors. Gray for armor and mechanical systems, red for medical, blue for water cycling and filtration systems, and finally, green for oxygen.

“I swear to the heavens that if I have to hack my suit one more time after this, I’m putting in a request for a technical specialism,” Jezzy growled as she cartwheeled. Being sarcastic was her way of not thinking about the possibility of imminent death.

There. She spotted the command for Clear Tank 1, 2… Of course, she knew that her power suit did not actually have ‘tanks’ per se. There were no large cannisters of pressurized oxygen sitting around her body somewhere, waiting for a stray shell to rupture it. Instead, the Marine Corps and most modern encounter suits used a liquid oxygen system—converting it to breathable air when it hit the helmet cowl through a process that Jezzy did not care to understand. All that she needed to know was:

“Where the frack does it vent from?”

Answer: Small of her back. Perfect.

She checked her distances. Now the two spinning Marines were nothing but shining blips against the bulk of the Invincible. She had moved quite a way out into the wreckage field. And I have no way of calculating the propulsion I’ll get, Jezzy thought. Spraying liquid air from behind her would give her forward thrust of a sort, of course, but she didn’t know if it would turn back into air. Would it create a jet, or immediately crystalize in its liquid state?

Dammit.

There was only one other measure she could take. She quickly unslung her Jackhammer and made a loose knot through its trigger with the end of her frayed cable.

Now I have a grappling hook!

Clear Oxygen Tank 1? Y/N

Y

It was like getting suddenly kicked in the back. Jezzy was thrown forward on an extending plume of freezing particles, at first going straight back the way that she had come, and then her trajectory altered as she started to spin.

But she was moving too fast. The wreckage around her swept over her head and under her legs, and the Invincible grew larger to fill her vision in a matter of seconds.

“Malady. Ratko. Where are you?” She scanned the broken buttresses and exposed supports as she was flung toward the vessel.

No, not toward—past!

She had cleared the tanks too late or too early. She hadn’t paid enough attention to astrophysics in study lounge. Jezzy was going to overshoot the Invincible by a matter of meters, and then—

On the other side of the Invincible was the bright, stellar panorama of space. A hard ball of light shone in the far distance that Jezzy took to either be Earth or Venus.

If I miss the Invincible… She realized that the only way to rescue her would be for Willoughby to fire up the Marine scout’s engines and come find her. A simple enough task, and Jezzy knew she would be okay with that outcome, but there was no guarantee that the ship even could use its engines anymore, after what it had been through.

And wouldn’t a sudden burn of propellant and plasma attract the attention of the Ru’at jump-ships? She would have doomed Willoughby, and possibly her entire squad, to die.

And Jezzy knew that she couldn’t do that.

Thock! She was jolted as suddenly her DIY propulsion system emptied and atmospheric seals were restored.

Oxygen Tank 1 Empty.

Oxygen Tanks: WORKING (2.2hrs).

“Which means I have to do this one myself.” Jezzy grabbed the butt of her Jackhammer, scanned for the nearest available target, and threw it with all her might.

Everything looked so slow in space. The woman cursed as she saw the Marine Corps weapon revolving through the vacuum on its spooling-out length of cable—the metal cable that shouldn’t have been able to be sheared, as far as she knew—and prayed.

The external carapace of the Invincible was starting to roll past her. Jezzy saw the vast slabs of bronze-lacquered armor plates, the giant stenciled words of the CMC, the constant myriad pockmarks and scratches of all the asteroids and space dust that the behemoth had sailed through.

Suddenly, the poly-wire cable in her gauntleted hands went taut. The Jackhammer had caught! She had thrown it as best she was able into one of the burst-open levels of the Invincible. Jezzy didn’t know which deck it was, but she was glad when she felt the sudden jolt as her forward trajectory was halted.

And, according to the laws of Newtonian physics, all her potential energy was transferred into centrifugal momentum. She swung on the taut cable toward the Invincible, a heck of a lot faster than she had expected.

Frack!

Jezzy managed to hit the cable release control, only for her body to suddenly spin like a yoyo unwinding on a string. But at least she was also losing speed at the same time, and so, when she thumped into the side of the ship, she didn’t break any limbs.

“Urgh.” She started to bounce off the Invincible, and for a terrible moment, Jezzy had nightmare visions of going through all of this all over again—only this time without any cable or her Jackhammer.

My weapon! Jezzy scrabbled at the hull like a hamster in a ball until she caught hold of one of the many metal handles that dotted the surface of every Confederate Marine Corps ship.

Phew. She had done it. She was here. But now she had lost her gun somewhere in the belly of that beast, as the cable had followed the Jackhammer inside the ruptured darkness, and Jezzy knew that she didn’t have time to search for it.

Whatever. She growled at her own stupidity. But this isn’t a combat mission. I might not need it.

Even in her own mind, that sounded like wishful thinking. No, a lie.

“But I’m hanging on the outside of one of the Marine Corps’ largest ever battleships,” she scolded herself. “If I can’t find a gun inside there, then why in the blue blazes do I call myself a Marine?!”

“You shouldn’t talk to yourself, ma’am,” said a voice, and Jezzy grinned with relief.

It was Ratko, sliding along the hull, moving only in small pushes so that she could catch onto the next set of handlebars as she made her way toward her.

“How long you been listening?” Jezzy breathed, surprised at how relieved she was to see the diminutive, generally angry woman.

“You came back into suit range when you hit the hull,” Ratko said, with a smirk clearly visible through the faceplate. Her face was lit up by the green and orange commands from her own internal readouts.

“You okay? Nothing broken?” Ratko asked.

“One oxygen tank down, but a few hours is still plenty of time,” Jezzy said. Four times the amount of time that she had estimated to get this mission done. “But why are you here, Ratko? I thought I told you both to continue with the mission objectives.” Jezzy tried to regain her composure. “In fact, Corporal, I remember ordering you both to.”

“You can file a disciplinary whenever you like, sir,” Ratko shot back. She wasn’t the sort of Outcast to ever be chastened or ashamed, Jezzy saw.

And yeah, the likelihood of us ever having a command center and a military court and tribunal service ever again is pretty low, right? Jezzy found herself grinning even wider. Of course she wasn’t going to report Ratko and Malady, and the pair probably knew it.

“Well, that’s settled, then. There’s only one thing that I’ve been wondering.” Ratko sounded worried as she helped her commander climb back up the way she had come. “You’ve lost your cable. How are we planning to get you back to the ship?”

Oh frack.

“We’ll think of something. We always do,” Jezzy said, wishing that her voice didn’t sound quite so uncertain.

11

Running the Gauntlet

The cavern was narrow and started to gradually rise in front of Solomon. Through the bluish glow of the penlight he could see the deep red oxide in the walls, and the drifts of sand heavy on the floor.

Everyone’s hearing had finally returned by the time the light revealed their destination: a large, gray metal bulkhead reinforced by girders driven into the floor and surrounding a singular, elongated octagon of a door.

“There she is,” Kol said, still sounding worried as he peered behind them. Solomon wasn’t surprised, as he too was half-expecting to hear the pig-like grunts and roars of the Ru’at monsters at any moment.

“She’s old,” Rhossily said, gesturing to the ancient-looking push-button commands on the side of the door.

“Command code?” Solomon looked at Kol, who opened and closed his mouth a few times.

No way. Not after all this. Solomon could have cried. “Come on, think, Kol! You said you were brought here as a kid. This bulkhead looks old enough to be the same one. You must have seen your uncle input the code. Didn’t he tell you? Show you?”

Was it a trick of my imagination, or did I just hear distant scrabbling?

“Wait, give me some space… Let me think!” Kol’s face glistened with sweat. It was clear to Solomon that the young man had forgotten this part of the escape plan.

“We might be able to rupture the door pistons.” Solomon looked at the heavy cylinders in place. “That’ll release the door…”

“But we won’t be able to repressurize,” Rhossily pointed out. Airlocks worked by creating or subtracting a bubble of atmosphere from a hermetically-sealed room, Solomon thought quickly. If, like most of the times he had used them, it was to go out into a no-atmosphere situation, you walked in, got suited up, and then the air and the pressure was pumped out of the space, allowing you to open the external bulkhead door without any blowouts. If you were entering an atmosphere like moving from the vacuum of space to a secure ship environment, the opposite was true.

And that means if we break the inner door pistons and get inside, there would be no way to depressurize the outer room, Solomon realized.

There would be a catastrophic blowout of atmosphere from this cave as soon as they had managed to get the external door open. And from that entire cavern back there… Solomon thought.

“A catastrophic blowout,” he murmured, looking back the way they had come. He couldn’t see it of course, but in his minds’ eye, he saw the Ru’at monsters, and the fields of strange alien agriculture, and the floating pollen.

“Maybe we don’t want to repressurize this damn place,” Solomon said seriously.

Mariad Rhossily held his gaze for a long moment, turning her head to one side as she weighed the merits of destroying the Ru’at nursery.

“The cavern is huge. All of that atmosphere, forcing through here in seconds?” Rhossily looked anguished. “You are fully aware of what that would mean, aren’t you? We haven’t got a hope of surviving that. It’ll be like a shockwave and a tornado all rolled into one.”

“Maybe surviving isn’t the most important thing,” Solomon murmured.

“Spoken like a Confederate,” Kol growled at them both, walking forward to peer through the small thick-plate window at what lay beyond the airlock.

Solomon hoped that what the ex-Outcast was looking at was freedom.

It wasn’t.

“Oh,” Solomon heard Kol say.

On the far side of the airlock door was another small antechamber just like this one, Solomon and the others saw as they crowded around the small porthole window. At the far end was another bulkhead door with its own porthole window—through which shone the bright, slightly orange light of a Martian day.

But scattered all over the floor was a mess of debris—ripped bits of fabric and mangled bits of metal—and when Solomon looked, he could see that they must have spilled out of the two large metal locker-boxes set in the walls. The locker doors were twisted and open, and their contents appeared mangled and useless.

“Are you going to tell me that pile of trash is the spare encounter suits you were talking about?” Solomon said.

“The survival depot. Yeah,” Kol said, his voice cracking as the sudden despair of their situation hit home. “They try to set the depots up in a chain, leading to the nearest habitat. The next one should be…” Solomon saw the young man that he used to command grit his teeth. “…about three klicks away.”

Three klicks on an alien planet, without oxygen, radiation seals, or proper environmental suit protection, Solomon considered. Yeah, they would be dead in under ten seconds.

“So…now what?” Rhossily asked, looking nervously over her shoulders. Solomon wondered if he could hear something back there again. A scrabbling? A yipping? Had the Ru’at creatures managed to break through into the tunnel?

“I guess we have no choice,” Solomon said, feeling a tide of frustration rising in him. It wasn’t that he wanted to make this choice, after all, but he didn’t like being forced into it.

Solomon had always been the one to find the way out. To find a solution to the problems that affected him, and to somehow come out on top. But now?

“We blow the doors,” Solomon said. “We use the Jackhammer shells to rupture the door pistons and blow this whole Ru’at farm or laboratory or whatever it is,” he said grimly.

At least if any good can come of our deaths, then… he thought. The resulting pressure wave would probably dash them against the walls or shoot them flying out of the external airlock many hundreds of meters onto the hostile Martian surface. Where, he knew, if they hadn’t already been crushed and pulverized by the storm of released oxygen, they would just as quickly asphyxiate or cook to death under the Martian skies.

Yay.

“But at least we’ll have set back the Ru’at’s plans,” Solomon continued his unspoken conversation out loud. Would it be enough to permanently impede the alien invasion?

Probably not, Solomon thought grimly, and it appeared that Kol felt the same as his face deepened into a scowl.

“I’m not going to die for no reason,” he snarled, turning back to the airlock porthole and scanning the room out there quickly. “I’d rather fight those things out there than throw my life away.”

“Well, it’s not like we have much choice,” Rhossily murmured. Her voice shook.

“We always have a choice,” Kol said, throwing a sharp glance at Solomon. “You told me that, sir,” he snapped, hefting the Jackhammer back to his chest. “And anyway. No one is going to take this off me. Not to blow any doors and throw our lives away!”

Coward. Solomon straightened up slowly, feeling his anger start to rise in his chest. “If I have to put you down to get that Jackhammer, you know I will, Kol,” the Gold Squad Commander murmured, his voice dropping to a dangerous growl.

“Try me,” Kol said, stepping back, and this time lowering the Jackhammer at Solomon.

“Gentlemen, stop this!” Rhossily breathed in alarm.

“You tried to do that once before, and you failed,” Solomon snarled back just as fiercely as he took a step forward.

“Don’t move, Lieutenant. You know I’m capable of it. I’ll blow a hole straight through your chest,” Kol said, backing another step.

“Gentlemen! We haven’t got time for this! We need to fight them, not each other!” Rhossily hissed in urgent panic at the sight unfolding before her.

“And then what? You’ll hand our bodies over to those Ru’at friends of yours? Ask for everything to be forgiven?” Solomon took another step toward the traitor. Maybe this was always how it had to go in the end. He felt a knot of rage and despair tighten in his gut.

Solomon had hoped that Kol had changed. He knew that he had, in many respects. The squad commander hoped that the young man had seen just what sorts of horrors he had participated in. Realized what he had missed the day he programmed that Marine transporter to crash into the training facility.

“I thought you were different, Commander,” Kol growled. “You seemed to have your head on your shoulders when I first met you. You knew back then that you could never trust the Confederacy. They’re all the same—policemen, judges, officers. They’re all people trying to tell folks like us how to live our lives.”

“You’re a blind fool, Kol, and you’ve been played all along by the mega-corps and the Ru’at,” Solomon returned.

“Lieutenant! Kol!” Rhossily was begging them.

Kol had stopped stepping backwards, and it wasn’t because he had reached the wall. Solomon could see the resolve harden in the young man’s face. You can always tell when a man is about to kill someone, Solomon thought. Unless it was manslaughter or an accident, of course, but this wouldn’t be. A look of glassy indifference had settled on Kol’s features as Solomon knew he was mentally preparing himself to shoot the man he had once called a friend.

“It must be easier when you’re just remote-piloting something,” Solomon taunted him. “It’s much more difficult when you have to look them in the face.” He knew from experience.

Matty Sozer. The memory threatened to unman him, but Solomon rammed it down again into the darker recesses of his heart. He didn’t want his last thoughts to be regrets.

“Stop this at once!” Rhossily said.

“I think I can manage it,” Kol snapped, his gloved hands twitching toward the trigger—

“THEY’RE GONE!” Rhossily suddenly screamed at them both, earning a worried look from Ochrie.

What? Solomon had no idea what she was talking about.

“Huh?” Kol muttered, obviously sharing Solomon’s confusion.

“The Ru’at. Or their dog-things. Listen, you pair of idiots!” Rhossily stamped straight across Kol’s line of fire to the entrance to the tunnel that led back toward the nursery.

“You’re wrong,” Kol started to say angrily.

“Am I? How long have we been down here, arguing? Why haven’t they broken through and attacked us yet, hmm? Have you thought to ask yourselves that?!” Rhossily reprimanded them both.

“I thought I heard something a little while ago,” Solomon murmured.

“Well, do you hear anything now?” Rhossily arched one eyebrow.

Solomon blinked, tilting his head. No, I don’t. He shook his head. “But that doesn’t mean that they’re not still out there…” he started to say.

“Or it means that they’ve been called off to whatever they were supposed to be doing anyway!” Rhossily said. “Think about it. That place back there is some kind of nursery ground. The Ru’at have created those things—hey, for all I know, they could even be the Ru’at—and for what? To just keep them down there for all time?” Rhossily rounded on Kol next.

“You said you came here as a kid. And that this place was here. That means the Ru’at have been planning this for a long time. A long time. They wouldn’t create a new race of dog alien things just for the fun of it, would they?” she said.

She has a point, Solomon had to agree. But how did any of that help them?

“Look. I am going back out there, and I am going to see if there is another way out of this place—one which actually might give us a decent chance of surviving and beating the Ru’at, you got that?” Rhossily berated them both.

“If you two idiots want to stay down here and kill each other, then be my guest, but I used to be an imprimatur of a colony world. I saw Proxima get trashed. I saw my people die—the people that I was supposed to be protecting. And all that means is that I am not content with being killed down here and having them win, nor am I content with not stopping the Ru’at,” Rhossily said, turning on her heel and stalking back the way that they had come without even a light to guide her.

Solomon stood for a moment, breathing hard as adrenaline and shame ran through his system. He looked across at Kol to see that the younger man’s eyes were wide with similar emotions.

“She kinda has a point,” Solomon begrudgingly said.

“She’s a colonial.” Kol nodded, his voice full of pride. “Just like the Martians. We’re survivors,” he said, following Rhossily back into the tunnel.

Solomon stood still for a moment, feeling like he had been slapped in the face and not sure why. I was trying to find a solution, he thought, outraged. And it had seemed like the only solution had been to try and blow the airlocks.

But maybe that hadn’t been the whole reason, Solomon had to question himself. He still carried the shame of causing Matty Sozer’s death. He still carried the shame of failing the entire Outcast regiment.

Why am I so eager to throw my own life away? Solomon was forced to ask himself. There was a time, on the streets of New Kowloon, that he would never have dreamed of such a decision.

“There’s always a choice,” he murmured to himself. It had been his mantra, after all. There was always a way to get out from under an obstacle. Always a way to play the odds and win. That was what a lifetime of criminality had taught him.

I have to be cleverer than everyone else, he remembered the final part of the self-taught mantra.

“Quiet,” said an appreciative voice behind him, and Solomon flinched. He had forgotten that the brainwashed Ambassador Ochrie was even still there. When he turned, he saw that she was half-smiling, seeming to enjoy the relative stillness of the cave without Solomon and Kol and Rhossily shouting at each other.

And without the distant snarls and scrapes of those creatures, either, Solomon admitted.

“Come on, Ambassador,” he sighed wearily as he reached to guide her elbow. “Let’s try to get you somewhere safe, shall we?”

Although just where that could be in all of Confederate space was a mystery to Solomon just then.

12

Hulk

“We’ve got residual power,” Ratko breathed, standing outside of a very different airlock. One that led from a gutted viewing lounge into the belly of the Invincible itself.

“Do it,” Jezzy said from one side of the corporal as her eyes slid past the bulk of Malady to the rest of the ruined room. The viewing lounge would have contained one large window on the external hull, but the glass had broken during the Ru’at assault.

Now, Jezzy saw the eerie normality of the lounge—the low chairs and tables that were fixed into the floors, still with their faux-leather coverings in place. Cups still drifted through the lounge, and the drinks dispenser machine still sat against the wall, its lights cheerily announcing all the different sorts of beverages it could make.

Jezzy and the others had magnetized their boots and could walk freely amidst the floating detritus. It was a little like being underwater, Jezzy thought.

Blip! A blinking orange light initiated over the narrow airlock door, flashing slowly at first, and then glowing brighter and brighter and turning green as the airlock room flushed out the atmosphere on the other side.

“Good to go,” Ratko said, disengaging the wires that she had attached to the door panel and packing them away into her power suit’s utility belt.

The door hissed open, and the remaining members of Gold Squad stepped into a small oval antechamber, the airlock hissing shut behind them.

Initiating Airlock Pressure… The words flashed over the interior door as jets of steam rushed into the room around their feet.

The only problem they had to face now, of course, was captured by Corporal Ratko when she said, “The Invincible is big. Any clues where we might find the oxygen and the munitions lockers?” She turned to look at her acting squad commander.

I don’t know, Jezzy had to admit to herself. But she knew a way to find out. “Malady? Have you still got that thing I gave you?”

She was referring, of course, to the data-stick that General Asquew had given her at the Plutonian station of The Last Call. It was the general’s last act before sending Gold Squad on their way, and it contained all the high-level command functions and codes for the entire Marine Corps—or as much of it as the general was responsible for, anyway.

“What’s that?” Ratko asked as Malady ejected the small data-stick from the side of his wrist and handed it delicately to Jezzy.

“Dangerous,” Wen replied. She was still shocked by the very existence of this thing in her hands. She could understand why the general had handed it over, but that still did not make it normal for a woman like her—an ex-Yakuza enforcer, at that—to be holding the keys to the castle.

Asquew thought that she might die, Jezebel remembered. In fact, her superior officer might already be dead for all she knew, along with Administrator Ahmadi and a few hundred remaining Marines. They had been attempting to drive the cyborgs and the Ru’at ships back from their invasion of human space—too late now, of course, Jezzy thought dully when she considered just where they were—and there was no guarantee that Asquew would have made it out of there in one piece.

So, she gave me the command codes knowing that I was leaving the battlefield and might be able to put it to use, Jezzy remembered. The general had told her that there was a secret military outpost she could get to. A last stand of loyal forces, if it came to it.

But Jezzy wasn’t interested in that—not yet, anyway. She was fairly sure that any data-stick with that much power would also have the schematics of the Invincible in it, or would be able to pull them from the Invincible’s computers.

Jezzy inserted the data-stick into the small reader on her own belt and waited as the auto-play program loaded.

Loading External Data….

Warning! Ultra-Black Code Access Required!

“Dammit!” Jezzy hissed in alarm. Had General Asquew forgotten to give her the codewords necessary to open this thing? She panicked before an instant later…

Ultra-Black Code Access Granted. Special Administrator Privileges Loading…

Contents:

Fleet | Personnel | Munitions | Bases | Operational Parameters

Jezzy breathed for a moment. This was it. The keys to the kingdom. As tempted as she was to check into the Operations and Bases tabs, Jezzy refused to do so. Not until she had to. For now, she clicked on the ‘Fleet’ tab to find:

Near-Earth Fleet: Composition | Orders | Analysis

Rapid Response Fleet 1: …

Rapid Response Fleet 2: …

Each one of the group types had the same rundown of ship and vehicle types under the ‘composition’ tabs, as well as a long list of specific orders and function commands available for every type of vehicle, and finally an analysis section that appeared to be a log of design and use notes, if anything, Jezzy saw.

She could see discussions about the use of a flight of CMC fighters in terrestrial and near-orbit missions, or the predicted efficacy of a battleship in various scenarios. Along with this came the technical schematics as well as the standard equipment loads for each vehicle.

“Aha.” Jezzy grinned as she read down the controls on the inside of her helmet.

Rapid Response Fleet 1: Cruisers, Command Vessels, and Battle-Carriers: CMC Invincible.

There she was. The very ship they were standing on. A selection of images appeared in front of Jezzy’s eyes, picked out in faint green lines. “I got the schematic,” she said, ignoring Ratko’s confused expression as she found the three-dimensional line image and zeroed in on where they were.

“We’re at Floor 23, just about the crew and recreation areas,” she announced as the steam stopped hissing and the lights above the internal bulkhead door blinked and flickered from their warning-orange to okay-green.

“Straight ahead, Ratko, first right. With any luck, there will still be power to the elevators,” Jezzy said, following the three-dimensional image in the file as the door hissed open.

And they walked straight into a waiting cyborg.

“Frack!” Corporal Ratko, who was the Marine on point, managed to spin her Jackhammer up to slam it into the cyborg’s bulky arm just as it fired its strange particle-beam weapon.

FZZZT! The purple, white, and blue beam of energy seared over their heads thanks to Ratko’s quick reflexes and discharged itself on the far wall, creating a black scorch mark and a mess of bubbling, melting metal.

Thank frack that didn’t go through the airlock! Jezzy thought as she dropped to one knee, pulling her hardened steel blade from its holster by her boot. She really wished that she had her Jackhammer about now, but she also knew that this knife might be just as effective.

PHOOOM!

Ratko had reversed her grip on her own Jackhammer and fired it, point blank, into the thing’s chest. With a shower of sparks and black ichor like machine oil, the thing was shoved backwards into the waiting corridor, the fleshy part of its chest now in tatters, revealing that its innards were a hideous mixture of metal and pipework, all rolled into one.

Had the thing been waiting for us? The paranoid thought crossed Jezzy’s mind. It had just been…standing there. As if it had expected them.

Or it had been put on guard, Jezzy thought. She was already moving, crouching under Ratko’s wild swing with her Jackhammer as the cyborg regained its balance.

Pha-BOOM! Another shot from Ratko, but the cyborg was too fast, pushing the Jackhammer to one side just as the corporal had done a moment before. Jezzy tried to close in with the thing, but the swinging arms of both her corporal and the cyborg were keeping her at bay.

Ratko was locked into a hand-to-hand struggle with the much larger cyborg, and Ratko was no combat specialist. Thwack! The thing backhanded her easily against the side of the helmet, earning a resounding clanging noise as she was thrown against the far wall by the force of the thing’s metal tendons.

But that only meant that Jezzy had a clearer line of attack now.

The second lieutenant stepped in as the cyborg was turning to engage with her next, and easily ducked under the creature’s punch.

Close in. Get inside their guard. Jezebel Wen remembered her training, both Yakuza and military, as she straightened up inside the reach of the cyborg’s arms—

Thock!

She slammed the knife up under the creature’s chin. It was the only sure-fire way to disable one of these walking robot creations, she knew. The only weakness they seemingly had was that all their command circuitry or central nervous system, or whatever it was that they really had, was located along the spine and the cortical base where the spine met the head. That was why every cyborg had metal ‘sheathed’ plates running over its spine at the back, but most of them also had a small window of bare flesh at the front of the neck—presumably so the thing could still turn its head, she thought as her blade slid home.

Tzrk! The creature opened its mouth to let out a strange sort of guttural, electronic moan before its body shuddered and it fell to the floor, still shaking but also clearly dying.

“Ratko!” Now able to move forward, Malady had already crossed the space to the corporal’s body to start initiating her external medical systems.

“How badly is she hurt!?” Jezebel cursed herself for not taking the lead. She had the map, after all. What was she even thinking?

Outcast ID: Corporal Ratko (Tech. Sp.)

Health: COMPROMISED (Stable).

“Thank the stars for that,” Jezzy breathed as she saw Ratko’s suit identifiers come up inside her own helmet.

“Administering cortizoidal, 0.4%” Malady intoned as his giant fingers delicately manipulated the small controls on Ratko’s suit.

A cortical system stimulant, Jezzy nodded. It was actually a naturally occurring enzyme in any human nervous system, but the Confederacy had long since discovered how to synthesize it, and it had been added to the power armor of the Marine Corps ever since.

“Hgnh… What the hell!?” Corporal Ratko suddenly sat bolt upright, her teeth bared in a rictus grin as the tiny amount of nervous system stimulant was carried through her bloodstream.

“Corporal. Focus. Do you know where you are?” Jezzy asked as her sharp eyes scanned the woman’s armor. There was a hairline crack across her faceplate where the cyborg had backhanded her, but Jezzy didn’t think it had broken the air seal of her suit…yet.

Nothing looks broken. Not even a graze on her forehead, Jezzy was relieved to see, and even more relieved when Ratko responded in her much more normal Ratko sort of way.

“Of course I know where I am, sir. I am on a suicide mission, picking apart the bones of the best ship the CMC has, while a sea of alien monsters is trying to kill me,” she said, not very impressed at all. “Now let me get up before I fall asleep!”

Maybe giving the already highly-strung Corporal Ratko cortical stimulants wasn’t such a great idea, Jezzy had to wonder as she picked up the woman’s gun and handed it to her. “You fit to move?”

“That’s what I said, wasn’t it?” Ratko hissed through gritted teeth, already hauling herself to her feet.

“I’m not going to argue with you. Behind me,” Jezzy ordered. “Malady, you’re rear-guard.”

“Aye, sir,” the metal man intoned.

“I don’t see why I have to be in the middle…” Ratko muttered, which Jezzy thought was probably exactly why she had to be the one in the middle.

Motion Sensor Alert!

Jezzy’s suit commands blinked at her, and, in the top right corner of her vision, her power armor’s basic scans showed a ninety-degree fan arc in front of her, with three red blips moving toward their position.

Jezzy looked out through her faceplate. The corridor was long, meeting a T-junction at the far end, but there was another corridor joining this on their right before that.

“You guys picking up company?” Jezzy asked, breaking into a run as she led her team down the first righthand turn.

“Loud and clear. Twenty meters,” Malady stated.

“They were waiting for us! It was a trap!” Ratko stated emphatically. Jezzy wondered how long it would take for the cortizoidal to wear off, so her corporal could return to her normal cantankerous personality rather than this super-heated one.

“I don’t think so.” Jezzy scanned the next corridor. Another T-junction at the far end, and on the left, the service elevator that she had been looking for. “I think the same thing happened to the Invincible that happened to the Oregon. I think the cyborgs swarmed it at the same time as the Ru’at jump-ships attacked it, and the cyborgs broke in and…” And what, deactivated?

“They act like drones.” Jezzy hit the wall by the side of the elevator, nodding at Ratko to get the door working. This part of the Invincible had residual power, which meant that the overhead lights were a dull warning orange, and most of the non-critical systems would be offline.

“At least I can be useful,” Ratko grumbled, attaching the wires from one of her technical modules at her belt and flicking through the commands on the data-screen by the side of the elevator.

“Isolating power controls to this level. Lights. Doors…” Ratko said.

“Incoming nine o’clock,” Malady stated calmly as Jezzy raised her head. Two cyborg forms turned around the end of the corridor they had just run down, raising their particle-beam hands.

Phada-phada-phada-BOOM! Malady had already discharged his Jackhammer on burst fire, filling the corridor with round after round of the heavy shells in the direction of the approaching cyborgs. Many of Malady’s shots missed, but the scatter-shot approach meant that some hit, spinning them on the hips or driving one of them back.

FZZZT! The lines of burning blue-white particles seared the air, but the impacts of Malady’s munitions meant that they missed, burning holes into the walls and causing the lights to explode in a shower of sparks.

“Isolate elevators!” Ratko shouted, flinching with every sound of particle-beam nearby as the silver doors to the elevator hissed open.

“In!” Malady shoved Ratko inside, and then followed her as more lines of burnt energy sought them out.

FZZT! The doors were closing interminably slowly as one laser shot slammed through the gap, rupturing the metal wall of the elevator just a few inches from Jezzy’s head.

“Down!” Jezzy commanded mostly for Ratko’s benefit, as it didn’t really seem as though Malady could crouch or duck in his full tactical suit. Jezzy lunged forward, dragging her finger down the internal data-screen all the way to the bottom as the doors closed, and the elevator started to hum as it moved.

Phew. Jezzy slumped back against the wall. “That was close. Too close.”

“We could have taken them.” Ratko was wrapping her wires back into her belt module and picking up her gun.

“Maybe. Probably. But we haven’t got the time to waste, remember.” Jezzy checked her mission clock.

MISSION ANALYSIS: Lifeline.

ETA to the Invincible… 4 mins 36 seconds. COMPLETE

ETA to objective 1 (oxygen tanks)… 8 minutes.

ETA to objective 2 (munition locker)… 10 minutes.

Deployment and return to scout… 44 minutes.

Forty-four minutes? Jezzy saw in alarm. She’d managed to add almost fifteen minutes to her estimated schedule. That left Willoughby almost an hour out there alone, with a diminishing air supply.

“And we don’t know whether or how these cyborgs can communicate with the jump-ships, either.” Jezzy regained her breath. “Many more encounters like that, and we might get one of those Ru’at ships coming over to check out what all the fuss is about.”

“They’re welcome.” Ratko was grinning savagely, clearly not having come down from her powerful stimulants yet.

“No, Ratko. They’re really not…” Jezzy said, just as the roof of the elevator exploded with noise.

FZZT! A line of burning purple burned through the ceiling right in front of Ratko, who screamed.

“Frack! They broke into the elevator shaft!” Jezzy cried out as her hand once again went to the empty holster at her side. Dammit!

Fzzzzzzt! The line of fire cut through the metal roof like a welding torch, its glowing edges peeled back by chrome fingers. They were opening it up like a tin can!

Pha-BOOM! BOOM! Jezzy felt worse than useless, as she had to wait while Malady and Ratko opened fire at the ceiling.

No, not useless. She threw herself to the elevator’s data-screen, looking at the small green circle sweep down and down, past the different levels of the Invincible.

Emergency stop? She hit the controls just as they crossed the next door. The elevator compartment was filling with the smell of cordite smoke and the roar of Malady and Ratko’s barrage. Their shots seemed to be keeping the cyborgs above them at bay, but another line of laser fire scored through the roof and buried itself in the wall.

Kerthunk! The elevator shook and jumped as the brakes were applied by Jezzy’s command.

“Oof!” Ratko was thrown against Malady, who of course remained as solid as ever. But what Jezzy was pleased to hear was the chorus of clanks and thuds as the cyborgs were thrown off balance overhead. They wouldn’t have a heartbeat of time, she knew.

“Out! Out!” Jezzy hit the door release button, then leaned into the opening silver doors to force them open just that little bit faster as Ratko stumbled, and Malady backed out.

FZZT! Fzzz! More burning particle-beams speared through the floor from above, as Jezzy hit the ground floor sigil on the data-screen and rolled between the closing doors to collapse at Malady’s broad metal feet.

Jezzy groaned. She could hear distant clanking and the sound of muffled particle-beams from the other side of the elevator door, but it was growing quieter and quieter.

“I sent them down to the ground floor…the lowest level of the Invincible,” Jezzy panted. “Unless they know how to work lifts, it’ll take them hours to find their way back up here.”

“And where is here, exactly?” Ratko looked around.

The elevator door was one of several that opened out into a broad balcony, overlooking an even wider workshop.

“Mid-Level Engineering and Repairs,” Jezzy said, checking her map. “It’s not where I wanted to go, but it’ll do. It’ll have what we need.” She pointed out across the hall below them that was as long as a standard football pitch.

On the opposite wall was a selection of three giant external bulkhead doors, which Jezzy could tell from the map led to their own airlocks, from and to which the smaller CMC craft could be brought for customary maintenance. The Invincible was such a large vessel that it didn’t have to concentrate all its different departments in one place, but instead had several engineering decks, as well as several medical bays, crew quarters, and the like.

Mid-Level Engineering was tiny in comparison to Jezzy’s real target: Main Engineering Holds 1-5 located at the ‘bottom’ of the Invincible, along with the main propulsion system. But having a smaller workshop deck halfway up the pyramid meant that they could continue the normal maintenance and repair work that an operational battleship needed.

“Good thinking, sir,” Ratko said, scanning the floor. There was a collection of engineering pits and bays, some only as large as Malady, with others many times that size. Gantries and cranes were stacked against the walls, able to be brought out to attend to every square inch of any spacecraft brought here.

“And there I see some of the gorgeous stuff!” Ratko pointed to one corner. Entire metal cages of oxygen bottles were stacked there, with large ceramic pumping stations behind them.

“Go get them, Corporal. Malady, how much can you carry?” Jezzy said.

Malady turned to look at the six-foot stacks of liquid oxygen containers. “One,” he said.

“One?”

“One stack.” Malady nodded.

“Do it. We have no idea when we’ll get the chance to refuel again,” Jezzy ordered. “We’ll make exit through the main port doors there. So, get the job done, people, and get ready to get out of here.”

Ratko, high on stimulants, was already jogging to the steps down to the workshop floor, but Malady remained behind for a pause.

“But, Lieutenant. The second mission objective,” he intoned.

The munitions locker. The distraction? Jezzy nodded. “I know all that, Corporal, no need to remind me,” she said. “I already have a plan. I’m taking lead on that. You go pick up a few tons of the air we need, alright, big guy?”

“Sir. It is my duty to inform you that we still have to determine a way to get off this hulk, as well as initiate some sort of distraction to allow our ship to escape.”

Jezzy thought of General Asquew’s data-stick and precisely what it contained.

Rapid Response Fleet 1: Cruisers, Command Vessels, and Battle-Carriers:

CMC Invincible… Composition | Orders | Analysis

“Don’t worry, Corporal Malady. I’ve already got it covered.” Jezzy nodded. If I can find a working console.

“As you wish, Lieutenant,” Malady said and turned to follow the hyper corporal. If it was possible for the man-golem Malady to sound skeptical—as every one of his bodily functions, including his voice, was augmented and modulated through machine circuits—then he had managed to sound so now.

Which is all just as well, Jezzy had to agree, because she didn’t particularly feel very confident in what she was about to do either.

Her eyes kept darting back to that line of data still glowing down the inside of her helmet, already open to the only branching line of information that Jezzy needed.

CMC Invincible… Composition. |

Structure…

Superstructure…

Propulsion…

Mainframe and Electrical…

Life Support…

Munitions>>>Priority 1 Weapons>>>Thermonuclear Warheads…

13

Evolution

“I can’t hear anything,” Mariad Rhossily murmured. The Imprimatur of Proxima was already a few meters down the path, with Kol and Ochrie moving to join her as Solomon scrabbled out from under the outcrop of rock and back into the Ru’at nursery.

“What the frack is that!?” Solomon heard Kol saying, lowering the Jackhammer at a dark shape by the side of the path.

“Wait. Stand back,” Solomon was saying, but Kol had already stepped forward to prod the dark shape half-hidden in the moss and vegetation with his boot.

“It’s alright. The thing is dead.” Kol turned the carcass over. It was one of the Ru’at dog-things.

Only it wasn’t a carcass, Solomon saw. “That thing isn’t dead,” he said, taking a closer step. “It’s a skin.”

The four-limbed body looked curiously deflated, as if its insides had been scooped out, leaving nothing but the outer covering.

“I don’t understand.” Kol kept the gun lowered against the thing, although it was clearly as dangerous as a wet dishcloth.

“It’s hide,” Mariad Rhossily was saying. “Like a snake.”

“It doesn’t look much like a snake to me,” the Martian sympathizer muttered.

“Snakes shed their skin.” Solomon grasped what the imprimatur was saying. “When they grow into their next stage. When they grow larger.”

“Sskkrkr…” There was a low, hissing sort of rattle that echoed across the Ru’at nursery grounds. If it was indeed the same Ru’at creatures that they had faced just before, Solomon thought—and he had no reason to assume otherwise—then they had lost their earlier, piggy-sounding sort of noise. Instead, the new form of the Ru’at sounded deeper, more menacing, and yes, larger.

“Look!” Solomon spotted another shape further up the path, again lying prone.

“Another hide?” Mariad asked, moving quickly along with Solomon to it.

“No, this one…” Solomon grimaced as he saw the scraps of torn flesh that was all that was left of the thing. “Our gun didn’t do that.” And my kick to the thing’s head certainly didn’t do that either, he was forced to admit. “It looks like it’s been eaten,” he said with a trace of horror.

They were only born a little while ago, Solomon’s mind considered. Like reptiles, what would these creatures need as soon as they were born?

Nutrients.

“They were born. They needed food, and then…” Solomon breathed.

“We were just in the way,” the imprimatur said. “Those things were meant to feed off each other to achieve their next stage of evolution…”

“Skrkrkrk!” The sound was louder now, but it still didn’t sound very close. It sounded as though it was further out, in the middle of the nursery area.

“Maybe we should go back to that airlock,” Kol admitted, his eyes wide with fear.

“No,” the imprimatur said with fierce determination. “We’re here now. And I, for one, want to know what the Ru’at has planned for that thing!”

“Wonderful,” Kol muttered. “I guess I’m going to take the lead, then.” He begrudgingly stalked forward in a crouch, the gun held high and locked against his shoulder.

The party crept their way back into the same place that they had so recently run from, heading toward the large mounds of vegetation that had been split apart to release the Ru’at dog-things.

But most of the vegetation pods were now just burst-open heaps of compost against the moss and lichen. The nursery ground had performed its function, apparently, and there appeared to be no more reason for them to grow.

Gone too were the drifts of glowing pollen and the wavering tendrils rising from the lichen. Whatever strange mutagenic process they had walked into had clearly run its course.

Ochrie had been right, Solomon found himself thinking as they stepped carefully through the center of the farm, heading back the way they had come to the distant steps and tunnels to the colony above. It’s quiet now. It would almost count as peaceful, were it not for the fact they were walking through a strange alien environment, where every bit of vegetation apparently was designed to eradicate humanity.

“And it’s too quiet,” Solomon breathed. The sound of the evolved Ru’at monster had stopped, and that made Solomon even more nervous.

Ker-THUNK! They all jumped as a loud, industrial-sounding noise started above them.

“What was that?” Mariad said, worried as she looked up to scan the distant cavern ceiling. Solomon did the same. It was hard to make out what was happening up there beyond the glare of the blue and yellow grow lights that hung from long chains, but Solomon could see shapes moving.

“It looks like…some kind of machine,” he whispered, watching the silhouettes and shadows take on a blocky, mechanical appearance just as they slid into view.

What appeared to be some kind of lift was descending from the shadows of the caverns’ roof, but it wasn’t any normal human lift, Solomon could see. It was made of a lowering hexagonal platform with a silver grillwork floor on which sat ragged and red humps of what appeared to be meat.

“It’s feeding time,” Kol murmured.

The platform appeared open apart from the cables that supported it, but what was different was that descending outside the lift came metal columns encrusted with modules and sensors. Solomon could make out protruding forms like antennae or needles, as well as rotating units and flashing lights.

“Like some kind of drone testing station,” Solomon murmured. He had once watched a Discover! Channel documentary on how the Confederacy assessed a potential new planet for colonial habitats. They lowered drone sensing stations—large pod-units encrusted with antennae and sensors and refractors and a hundred and one other instruments—into the new planet’s atmosphere, where they collected data and extracted molecules or even drilled through ice and rock.

“Are they weighing the babies for their health records?” Kol muttered. From his tone of voice, he had been attempting to make a joke, but from the anguished look on his face, even he didn’t find it very funny.

Solomon thought the man was right when he said it was feeding time. The central lift lowered out over the middle of the Ru’at farm-nursery, and the humans had to change their positions to get a clear glimpse of what was happening. They watched as it lowered itself by steady increments, before finally halting just a few feet from the mossy floor.

And waited.

“Maybe it’s not hungry,” Solomon said. “It did just eat all of its brothers and sisters, after all.”

“SCKRKREARGH!” A sudden, deafening roar split the cavern, and even Solomon couldn’t help but flinch as they twisted in its direction.

A shape was rising from the higher mounds of undergrowth. It stalked. It lumbered.

“Holy frack…” Solomon breathed.

The Ru’at creature was now fully bipedal, still with its backward-jointed legs like a cat or a dog, as well as long arms that gave it a sort of hunched appearance.

The creature had changed color, still mottled but now a lot darker—looking more like a rock formation than normal skin, and shot through with lines of rusty red, making Solomon think that it had imbibed some of the iron oxide from the surface of the Red Planet itself. The Outcast Commander could still see the way that the thing’s skin moved strangely across nodules and muscle groups that he could not name. It was alien in every respect.

It was also tall now. From Solomon’s estimates, it must have easily reached seven or eight feet and was proportionately wide. It’s taller than even Corporal Malady, Solomon could have sworn.

For a second, even surrounded by alien biology and in these circumstances, the man’s heart swept to the memory of his squad. What had happened to them? Were they even still alive? Had the Ru’at taken over everywhere apart from Earth?

But the creature roared again, loping forward on its strangely articulated legs. Solomon watched as it raised its head—now not just an open maw but more human-like, with a smaller, bony forehead and brow over a wide grin of a mouth filled with rows upon rows of small teeth.

“That thing grew up,” Kol whispered, and the moment that he opened his mouth, the creature froze and turned its head in their direction.

“Oh frack,” Kol whispered, and Solomon saw the man’s hands start to subconsciously lower the Jackhammer as his body realized that there had to be little they could do to stop such a behemoth.

The thing’s questing hiss traveled over the blue-green vegetation toward them.

The would-be escapees froze, no one moving or making a sound as the humans all held their breath. Even the brainwashed Ambassador Ochrie appeared horrified by what she was seeing.

“Sskrargh!” The thing shook its head with a grunt of annoyance, clearly having given up on finding whatever had disturbed its hunt for food, and slowly turned back toward the platform.

Solomon and the others let out a slow sigh of relief but didn’t even dare move until they had seen the creature close in on the platform and circle it suspiciously.

Kerthunk! Suddenly, the platform rose a few feet into the air, meaning that even the monster, with all its height, couldn’t simply reach in and grab the meat.

The thing will have to climb onto the platform to get the food, Solomon saw.

Which, after carefully sniffing the metal and the wires in front of it, the thing now did, not using its ‘arms’ at all but hopping up onto the platform with its long legs in one easy, smooth movement.

Where it leaned down like a cat over its kill and started to shovel the hunks of red meat into its mouth.

“Uh… We should go.” The imprimatur broke their self-imposed silence. Off on the platform, the creature was too busy gorging itself to apparently pay them any heed, and so Solomon nodded, starting to back away at a crouch, gesturing to Ochrie beside him to do the same.

“Where are the others?” Solomon whispered when he had moved back to Rhossily’s position. They could still clearly see the platform-lift with the creature in place on it. “The other hatched, or grown, or whatever they did, monsters?”

“I think it ate them.” Kol grimaced.

“It’s the last one left,” Mariad agreed. “All the others were just food for whichever one remained”

Solomon shuddered once more. Who would design such a system? If the Ru’at were indeed playing a centuries-long game of domination, what did they hope to achieve by creating some new breed of super-monster?

Not just a monster, a predator, Solomon thought, pausing in his escape.

“Lieutenant?” Mariad whispered in alarm. “What is it?”

Solomon shook his head, trying to put into words what his subconscious was trying to tell him. It had always been like this for the thief. His brain just worked quicker than most people’s, but it often worked quicker under the surface, delivering dazzling realizations and escape plans at the last possible moment.

It must be my genetics, Solomon thought grimly. My genetics that were lab-grown, based on the Ru’at’s perversion of Earth biology.

It was just like what was happening here, he started to put the clues together. This is what the Ru’at did. But the realization went deeper than that. There was something about the way that his own training mirrored that creature’s somehow. He had been grown in a lab, and then guided—or directed—by Matty Sozer on a life of learning the sorts of skills that he would need out here.

Like I’m a predator in a laboratory…

Solomon had been betrayed and charged with his many crimes, about to be delivered to the penal colony on Titan, when Warden Coates had instead redirected him into the newly-formed Outcast Marines.

Which was where I was always destined to be…

There was a sort of symmetry with the life of the apex predator behind them. A creature bred and tested in a controlled environment, until it came time to—

“SKRARGH!” The thing’s roar was deafening, and full of pain.

“Holy—” Kol had turned, raising the Jackhammer in alarm, but there appeared to be no need to worry about their safety—any more than was to be expected, given their current situation. The creature was not going anywhere.

“What are they doing to it?” the imprimatur asked. “Why are they doing that?”

The massive creature was now standing tall, still with hunks of red meat at its feet and with rivers of gore running from its wide mouth, but it was no longer eating. It was screaming.

The thing’s arms were stretched out to either side, making it look like some macabre, obscene religious icon. From the first elbow joint—the thing appeared to have two to each arm—there extended a silver cable, pulling taut to the outside sensing columns. As the humans watched, the thing’s arms were winched that little bit wider.

“What? I don’t understand,” Kol muttered. “Why go to all the trouble of creating some new species, only to torture it?”

“Just like they played games with humanity? Sending the probe, changing the Earth, fooling us into believing that they were trying to gift us with their advanced technology?” Solomon whispered back.

“Look! Something’s happening,” Mariad indicated.

The two columns were slowly moving closer to the monster, and from their sides started to extend what could only be called utensils. Solomon saw the gleam of sharp bits of metal, and others with attachments that whirred and rotated.

“I can’t watch.” Rhossily buried her face in her hands. Not out of any sympathy for the creature, Solomon was sure, but just the sheer grossness of the situation in front of them.

With sudden speed, the utensils darted forward and back from the creature’s body, and the columns themselves started to move, rotating around the lift platform slowly at first, but getting faster and faster as the devices plunged in and out of the creature ahead of them.

“SKRARGH!” The thing roared in clearly apparent agony, but it didn’t die. And now the columns were slowing a little, but still sweeping around the creature in measured rotations. It retracted the torturous implements, and other devices started to extend from the machinery. Solomon saw shapes like molded forms of metal, as well as vice grips holding smaller items.

Hang on a minute… Solomon’s subconscious finally started to make sense of what they were watching.

Up and down the columns were extending more strangely twisted shapes of metal. Some of them long, some of them wide, others just curious scoops. Like mechanical parts.

“Like cyborg parts,” Solomon whispered.

“What!?” Mariad said.

“Look.” Solomon saw the utensils move forward again, still lightning fast, punching their nodules and modules, their devices and strange metallic organs, into the incisions already made on the creature’s body.

“We’re not looking at the thing getting tortured. We’re watching it being operated upon,” Solomon breathed. “This is the final stage of its evolution…”

The creature shook and trembled underneath the onslaught of metal, but it no longer roared in agony, making the Outcast commander think that at least one of those implants must have been some kind of pain reliever.

Instead, with every second that passed, more of the creatures’ body was left a gleaming silver or a dull bronze. After only a few moments, the thing’s legs were now entirely inlaid with lines of metal, to then be covered by sheath-like plates.

Solomon watched in a sort of sick fascination as the creature’s flesh became a canvas for its new skin, a metal skin, one that didn’t cover its alien flesh completely. Just like the NeuroTech cyborgs, it had exposed areas of skin surrounded by metal plate.

It didn’t even flinch when into the thing’s hips were driven what looked like metal rods to form the support for an external harness very much like the sort that created the superstructure of any power armor or full tactical suit. By the time the columns had finished their ghastly work, the creature had assisted joints with external rods and pistons that would probably turn the already impressive creature into something with superhuman capabilities.

Its shoulders were built up, both with layers of metal as well as a tough exoskeleton, capped by more armor. The thing lost its neck, and instead its comparatively small head ended up sitting inside a cowl of metal, the same way that Malady’s faceplate was in the center of a mound of metal that stretched from shoulder-tip all the way around his head.

“They’re taking clues from us,” Solomon thought. Wasn’t that what Tavin had originally said about the cyborgs? That even if they were functionally stupid, their machine-learning and strategy-awareness circuits were unlike anything that anyone had ever seen. The human cyborgs, controlled by the Ru’at, could learn. They could study and analyze the battle moves and defenses of their opponents, the better to outmatch them the next time.

What Solomon thought he was looking at here was the pinnacle of all the experience that the Ru’at must have had from fighting the Confederate Marines. No, fighting MY marines, he corrected. The Outcasts. My company. They were the only group of marines who had consistently and repeatedly engaged with the Ru’at forces in any and all of their diverse forms.

There were elements to the creature’s construction that reminded Solomon of power armor—the way that the harness was built around the hips and lower back, forming an external support cage for the layers of armor.

But unlike power or light tactical armor, this stuff was bonded and implanted directly to the thing’s body. A bit like the biochemical bonding that Malady has in his full tactical. As if the Ru’at had taken all the best bits of Marine Corps technology and was about to use it against them.

And then, finally, came the last adjustment.

The creature was now standing inside its own heavy, articulated suit of silver and bronze, looking like something out of a myth, or a nightmare. Solomon could see the thing’s metal chest plate rising and falling as it panted. And still, it no longer roared in pain. Solomon wondered if the thing could even feel pain anymore, or maybe the mysterious Ru’at had taken that ability from it.

The two columns drew back, slowing in their cycle to a complete standstill as if admiring their handiwork.

Kerthunk! There was another heavy industrial sound from the dark of the cavern ceiling far above, and the sound of turning gears.

Out of the darkness, and into the glare of the strip lights, came a final column of metal instrumentation, this one gleaming white and touched with the brightness of stars. In the column’s center glowed a very pure, bright blue light, the same sort of radiance that had come from the ruined Ru’at orb that Solomon still had in the pocket of his General Luna Assistant service suit.

This final application descended straight down toward the creature, over the middle of the platform lift itself. Solomon watched as it stopped just a hand’s-breadth above the thing’s bony, silver cranium and got to work.

Tools and vice grips and what appeared to be glowing laser scalpels emerged and descended to the top of the thing’s head.

This time, it really did howl.

“SsskraARGHH!” It shook, and its entire body trembled as it was operated upon, and the tools withdrew once more—

—to be replaced by the blue light emanating from the metal orb that slowly lowered itself into the void created by the machines.

It was an orb that looked exactly like the Ru’at ‘seed-spore’ drone that had interrogated Solomon in the judgement chamber somewhere above them, and whose ruins he now held in his hand.

Another flurry of alien medical equipment and all trace of the thing’s blood and gore from its head was gone, replaced by a sleek silver module like a third eye that glowed a startling cerulean blue from the light emitted by the Ru’at drone inside.

And the creature’s screaming, howling, and shaking suddenly stilled.

One by one, the cables holding the thing’s joints restrained broke off with tiny puffs of gas, and the creature stood tall and defiant, looking as though it had always worn that strange metal, cybernetic carapace suit.

“You know what?” Solomon murmured, as much to himself as anyone else. “I think we’ve just seen the birth not just of some clone, or a monster…” he said in horror.

The Ru’at had made this place. They had been developing and growing this spore culture for perhaps hundreds of years. They had waited for a time when the humans could get here, could colonize Mars, and then it had seeded humanity with its next stage: cybernetic evolution.

And now, finally, all the bio-genetic development and cybernetic technology is ready, Solomon thought as he looked at the steady, unblinking blue eye in the middle of the creature’s forehead. Like the way you can’t get an ancient computer to run modern applications. The Ru’at had needed to wait until humanity had caught up. The aliens had needed to nudge and push humanity into the technical evolution it wanted.

“I think we just watched the rebirth of the Ru’at themselves,” Solomon breathed.

14

Tactical Distraction

“How’s it coming with that oxygen?” Jezzy stood back with a groan from the control panel she had been working at. The lights overhead flickered intermittently as the reserve power on board the Invincible glitched.

How much power you got left in you, girl? Jezzy thought, looking at the computer controls she had—barely—managed to hack into. It was all thanks to General Asquew’s command codes, of course. Jezzy knew full well that she wouldn’t have had a hope of doing any of this, if it was left to her own skills.

I’m not like Ratko, or Kol before her, Jezzy thought glumly. She had never particularly minded before that she was not a technical specialist. But with every passing encounter, it seemed that the problems and challenges they faced required ever more complicated, convoluted technical answers.

What good is being able to simultaneously attack three opponents at once?

But despite her lack of skills, she had done it. She thought. She hoped.

Munitions>>>Priority 1 Weapons>>>Thermonuclear Warheads…

Ultra-Black Command Code Accepted.

Authorizing signature…

Timer Allocated…

Auto-destruct Sequence Activated…

ERROR!

“Damn it!” What now? Jezzy groaned. She felt as if she had already navigated through a sea of complicated code-trees and directories just to find the right functions to enable or deactivate.

But clearly, she must have done something wrong.

“I think we’re almost there,” Jezzy heard Ratko say over the squad channel.

“Huh?” Jezzy said, before remembering. “Oh yeah. The oxygen.” She turned around where she had found the prime engineering command console—which had access to the rest of the ship’s mainframe—to survey the work of her colleagues.

The Mid-Level Engineering room was a mess of parts and workshop bays, still with stacks of equipment and spare parts dotted everywhere. But Corporals Malady and Ratko could clearly be seen, now standing in front of one of the large airlock doors with what looked to be a large mound of oxygen cylinders attached by cables. Each cylinder was almost half of Jezzy’s height and filled with precious liquid oxygen concentrate, which she knew she would only be able to heft thanks to the augmented support of the power suit she wore.

No such limitations for the man-golem Malady, however, as she watched him carrying another stack of oxygen cylinders—the entire seven-or eight-story stacks enclosed in its own metal trolley—up to the airlock ramp.

“Once I’ve checked all the lines and seals to make sure we won’t be in danger of a leak, then we’re good to go,” Ratko said proudly.

Not quite, Jezzy thought, reflecting on the large, blinking ERROR message in front of her. “Wait for my command,” she settled for telling them, then turned back to the console.

At Jezzy’s feet were a stack of tools that she had picked up along her search for this command console. There was a standard Marine Corps service rifle, capable of burst and multi-shot as well as single shot, but it was half the width and size of the Jackhammers, and she was worried that it would only be like a bee-sting to an unstoppable, unfeeling cyborg.

Added to her salvage was a heavy iron crowbar a shade longer than her forearm—her Yakuza training had always taught her the simplest weapons were often the best—as well as a small, handheld arc welder.

Better than nothing, she thought, sighing heavily as she found a way to pull up more information on this latest error code.

ERROR! Auto-Destruct of a Primary Weapon is Disabled While Primary Weapon is Awaiting Deployment.

“What does THAT even mean?” Jezzy grumbled. Awaiting deployment. That has to be a saccharine way of saying ‘fired at an unsuspecting planet,’ right?

Jezzy reflected that she was really not cut out for command. The language and the bureaucracy alone were enough to drive her mad.

“So…the nuke is still locked inside its loading bay, and I can’t set off the auto-destruct timer because…” she thought through what the console was trying to tell her.

“Because no one wants a nuke to go off whilst it’s still in the belly of the Invincible?” Ratko said over her shoulder.

“Sheesh!” Jezzy jumped. “When were you able to move so quietly?” she berated the corporal, who had apparently sauntered over as Jezzy was engrossed in trying to decipher the weapons controls of the singularly most devastating weapon in human history.

“Well, I was going to ask you to hold one end of the daisy-chain of cylinders for me, but I see that what you are up to is far more interesting!” She nodded at the console screen in front of her. “You’re trying to arm and set off one of the Invincible nukes?” She whistled appreciatively. “Isn’t that, like, a little self-defeating? Y’know, considering that we’re still inside the Invincible and everything.”

“Smart-ass,” Jezzy muttered before kicking the base of the console. “Well, if you’ve got a better idea how we can simultaneously distract and hopefully take out the Ru’at jump-ships out there, be my guest!”

“You need to do a manual override on the auto-safety measures.” Ratko nodded sagely.

“Huh?” Jezzy frowned. “I have no idea what you just said to me.”

“Augh,” her corporal despaired vocally. “The nukes have automatic safety cutouts, in case some idiot decides to try and set them off while they’re still sitting around inside their launch tubes, right?” Ratko said.

Does she even know that I count as her superior officer right now? Jezzy wondered. Probably. But Ratko doesn’t seem to care all the same.

“So, if you want to set off the timer—which I see you already isolated, well done you…”

“Gee, thanks for the vote of confidence…”

“Hey, it took me four years at technical engineering college to get where I am today,” Ratko pointed out, before grimacing to herself. “That was, of course, until there was the whole business about them thinking I stole their department’s funds, and so they shipped me off to Titan…”

“When you were chosen for the Outcast program anyway,” Jezzy countered. “And did you? Steal the money, that is?”

“Yeah, of course. But anyway,” Ratko continued. “If you want to get the nukes to go boom, then you need to manually break the safety overrides on them. They automatically decouple when the missile is launched anyway, thus making sure that any explosion at least happens outside the ship that fired it, not inside,” she explained.

“Oh,” Jezzy said dourly. Well, there goes that idea, then…

“And the nuke tubes are…” Ratko leaned over to run her hands over the holo controls of the command console. “Forward Tactical Section. Right up the top of the old bird.” She had brought up the design schematic of the Invincible and had managed to create a glowing red dot right near the apex of the pyramid, where the launch tubes had to be.

“Alright then. Shall we get going?” Ratko nodded up to the ceiling of the Mid-Level Engineering Hold. “If we’re not using the elevators again, then we’re talking service shoots, and it’ll be quite a climb.”

“What? No.” Jezzy shook her head. “You’re not coming. I need to be the one to do this,” Jezzy said seriously. “It’s way too dangerous out there anyway, with the place crawling with cyborgs.” And you’re not a combat specialist, Jezzy thought.

“And you know your auto-safety cutoffs from your main power relays, do you?” Ratko looked at her obstinately.

Damn.

15

Through Blood and Fire

“I don’t know about you lot, but I’m not sticking around,” Kol hissed urgently as he started to move. For a man who had supposedly thrown away all trappings of his Marine Corps life, Solomon thought he was doing an excellent impression of one as he backwards crab-crawled past the mounds of Ru’at vegetation.

But he’s right. Solomon spared a look back at the new cyborg creature, still flexing its new limbs and snuffling at the air. It made him shudder as he looked at the thing’s strange skin and animal-like joints.

“Ambassador?” Solomon murmured to the woman at his side, who was still gazing at the creature they had seen created with apparent horror.

Something had changed in her, Solomon could sense. Her face still held some of the brainwashed blankness that the Ru’at had given her, but now, instead of a fixed state of placidity and acceptance, she seemed to be consumed with worry.

Maybe now is the time, Solomon thought, reaching up to touch her shoulder.

Ochrie jumped, almost screeched, but caught her breath just in time.

“You’re going to be okay. We’re going to get out of this,” Solomon promised her. He felt as though their recent roles had been reversed. Where once it had been the ambassador who was in charge, imperiously or cynically dispatching orders, now she was like a child, infantilized by the Ru’at.

“This is the Ru’at,” Solomon said slowly and carefully, nodding at the creature ahead of them. “That is the Ru’at. It is what they are. What they do.”

“But— But…” Ochrie was shaking her head in confusion. “I thought they were our saviors. They said that they were going to make humanity better, to include us in the community of stars.” She repeated the same lies that the alien had given every brainwashed human.

Solomon didn’t even know what to say to that. The evidence in front of them that the Ru’at were monsters—were predators—was astonishing. And I have no idea how to break someone out of hypnotism. He wondered if what he was doing would actually make the ambassador worse rather than better.

“Trust me, Ambassador,” Solomon said.

“And me,” he heard the Imprimatur of Proxima murmur beside him, as the frizzy-haired woman who had been through so much—watching her colony world attacked and destroyed—reached out to take Ochrie’s hand.

The ambassador looked at it for a moment, and then a very small frown furrowed her brows. “Aren’t you… Weren’t you…” she started to say, looking at the woman’s hand that held her own. Solomon wondered if some part of the old Ochrie was trying to resurface. Perhaps the reality of having one of her opponents—the imprimatur that the Confederacy believed had been sponsoring sedition—was enough to prod Ochrie’s sense of outrage.

A low, menacing hiss rolled over the alien landscape, coming from the creature. The singular blue drone light on its forehead flared and flashed, as if it were a scanner light, sweeping the area.

“Kol’s right. We’re not hanging around,” Solomon murmured, turning to start crawling in the same direction that Kol had disappeared in.

They made their way past the middle of the cavern, with the broken-open ‘pods’ of vegetation to their right and left. Solomon saw a break in this strange forest up ahead, with acres of the alien moss in front, and there on the far side were the steps that led back up to the service tunnel that Kol had first found.

Back up to the colony, Solomon thought with an overlay of anxiety. But he felt better about being up there, surrounded by familiar metal and familiar humanoid forms—even if they were all brainwashed—than he did about being out here.

“Uh… Lieutenant?” Solomon was just about to move out into the moss-field when he heard a voice, Kol’s voice, and it was coming from off to one side, where the path they were intending to take branched back around the high heaps of vegetation.

“Kol, what is it?” Solomon asked as he froze and turned—

—to see that Kol was standing there, not even bothering to hide, and that he wasn’t alone.

On either side of him stood more of the Ru’at-Martian cyborgs, and they had their weapon arms already raised and pointed at him.

Ah.

“Once a traitor, always a traitor, right, Kol?” Solomon snarled from his crouch.

What weapons do I have? None.

What weapons can I get? Through the young man’s peripheral vision, he could see lumps of Martian red rock. He might be able to pick one up and throw it if he combat-rolled forward.

But it wouldn’t even be a good enough distraction. Solomon gritted his teeth. It wouldn’t buy Mariad and Ochrie enough time to do, well, anything.

“It wasn’t me, Sol, honest!” Kol was saying, and he held up his empty hands to reveal that the cyborgs had already taken his Jackhammer.

But they haven’t shot him yet, a small, wary and cynical part of Solomon’s mind still noted. This was it. He had lost, he was forced to consider. He had been outmaneuvered and outclassed by the Ru’at. What sort of Outcast Marine was he?

Maybe I’m not a very good one, but I am still a Marine. Solomon felt a cold fire coalesce in his belly. He thought about everything that he had been through. He thought about all the punishing hours of training and watching the Marine transporter crash to a deafening fireball on top of the Ganymede Training Base. He thought about fighting in the dark recesses of space, inside abandoned station-ships as well as under the surface of Mars.

Solomon thought about New Kowloon, and all the people he had cheated…killed.

No. Even he, the ex-criminal, was surprised at the clarity of his conviction. I’m not going out like this, he thought as he slowly rose from his crouch to face the enemy. There were six of them, all told. He wasn’t counting Kol, because the look of abject misery and panic on the young man’s face told him that he was telling the truth: he really didn’t have a part to play in their capture. Three of the cyborgs stood to the right of Kol, and another three stood to the left.

“Lieutenant?” Mariad whispered in alarm as she and Ochrie emerged from the vegetation and froze at the sight before them.

They are going to die, too, Solomon knew, and that realization only added to his fury.

Enough. Solomon was done with skulking around. He was done with trying to find the last-chance, crazy opportunity out of the situations he had been in. He straightened up until he was facing the cyborgs directly.

“What are you doing?” Mariad whispered, her hands rising into the air to indicate that she offered no resistance.

Well, frack that, Solomon thought. “Through Blood and Fire, Kol,” the Outcast Commander said with a savage, almost manic sort of grin. He quoted the Marine Corps oath—the very same one that he had scoffed at when he’d first been forced to repeat it, over a year and a half ago, on Ganymede.

‘Through blood and fire, I will still stand strong.

‘I will stand at the borders and at the crossroads, I will stand strong.

‘Even with the eternal night before me, I will be the flame!’

“Sol! Don’t!” Kol begged him, but Solomon was past caring. As soon as he said the last syllable, he sprang forward, fists rising.

FZZT! The first glare of purple-white laser-light from the nearest cyborg was easy to dodge. It was as if, in his fury, all of Solomon’s enhanced genetics had suddenly activated. Maybe some part of his body knew that this was his swansong.

Time seemed to slow around him as his alien-altered RNA activated maximum adrenaline and cortical steroid functions. It was easy to dodge the first shot as Solomon closed in, leaping to one side and punching out with one hand to force the next cyborg’s firing arm up—

“Solomon!” Rhossily shouted behind him, but Solomon was entranced by his battle-frenzy.

He spun on one heel, striking out with his other hand to force another cyborg’s hands away. He was in the middle of this knot of enemies now. The other three wouldn’t be able to get a clear shot on him.

But that did also mean that he was surrounded by three very strong, very fast, and highly tactical cyborgs.

Keep moving!

Solomon ducked as a metal fist sailed past his ear, and he pivoted once again to this time push with both hands at the third cyborg’s firing hand. In intricate slowness, he could see the wheels of the particle-beam weapon on the thing’s wrist spinning as it activated.

FZZZT! Solomon felt the shudder race up through his hands as the thing fired, spearing through the air to hit one of the other cyborgs in the chest and send it flying.

I can do this! Solomon found himself thinking. Maybe it was his augmented body, flooded with endorphins, that gave him that burst of super-confidence. He was already side-stepping around the cyborg that he had forced to fire on its colleague, using it as cover as the remaining cyborg on this side raised its firing hand—

“Solomon! Watch out!” Rhossily’s voice rose to a shriek.

Thwack! Just for a metal hand to descend on his unprotected head like a thunderbolt, and everything went black.

16

Priority 1

“Right, remember you’ll have to fire as you approach, but only when the Ru’at ships are out of sight.” Jezzy went through the controls one more time to Malady.

The man-golem managed to look unimpressed with Jezzy’s anxiety, even despite the fact that his face always looked permanently semi-conscious.

“I was a full combat Marine long before you were, Lieutenant Wen. I know how to use a piston-operated grappling hook.”

“Piston-operated magnet hook, if you don’t mind,” Ratko said scathingly. It was clearly one of her pet peeves when all her hard work went apparently nowhere, Jezzy thought, and the very pieces of equipment that she had designed and created out of scrap metals wasn’t even called by its right name!

“Okay, sure, right.” Jezzy shook her head. Her nerves were already frayed to the point of breaking. A thousand things could go wrong with their plan, and what was worse than that was that she had a lot of people relying on her.

If I don’t get down to the surface, then Solomon will almost certainly die. She couldn’t help but catalogue the risks. She blamed the Yakuza, who had forced her to go through mindfulness exercises before every mission.

If I don’t get the air to Willoughby and the ship, then Willoughby will die. She had already refilled her own suit with air for the reserve tank she had spent getting to the Invincible, but she was painfully aware that Outcast Marine Willoughby was still out there—presumably—waiting for her much-needed oxygen.

Mission ID: LifeLine

Mission Duration:

Deployment and return to scout… 68 minutes.

She checked her suit’s internal readouts and cursed when she saw that this mission was running longer and longer. How much oxygen did Willoughby have left? All of this meant there was no time to waste.

The plan wasn’t the simplest one that Jezzy had ever had. And it had required Ratko to search the available workshop bays around the Mid-Level Engineering Hold for the tools to create her magnet-grapple device.

Corporal Malady would be disembarking from the hold through one of the massive airlocks, which Ratko had managed to get enough residual power to so it worked. He would be towing the cloud of daisy-chained oxygen cylinders, and his massive strength, as well as the weightlessness of space, would mean that Corporal Malady would be able to haul them all the way to the ship.

If he can remain undiscovered. Jezzy looked once again at Ratko’s device in Malady’s giant hands. It was a simple spool of metal cable, attached at one end to a small gas-canister launcher, and at the far end, Ratko had welded a pretty large magnet, salvaged from one of the workshop areas.

“It’s a one-shot wonder,” Ratko explained once again, holding up a satchel clanking with more of the small, handheld gas canisters to sling over Malady’s shoulder. “You point and fire the cannister, the magnet and line will shoot off to the nearest debris, and then you have to pull yourself in again, get rid of the old canister, and reattach the next one, got it?”

“I believe I made my comprehension clear to Lieutenant Wen,” Malady intoned. “I have operated planetary assault teams, ejecting from orbit. I think that I have the skills to operate a gas-powered magnet.”

The benefit of sending Malady out there instead of the others was his greater mass. Depending on his initial jump, Jezzy knew that he should be able to generate the most momentum out of any of them. Enough to take him into the heart of the surrounding wreckage, and when his momentum ran out, he would be able to use the magnet-launcher to attach himself to nearby bits of wreckage, and leapfrog from piece to piece until he had rendezvoused with the ship.

And, Jezzy hoped, because he won’t be using any propellants, heat or electrical devices, the Ru’at jump-ships shouldn’t be able to track him!

Or at least that was the plan, anyway.

And meanwhile, me and Ratko will be worming our way through the hulk to get to the Priority 1 weapons, she considered. The nukes.

“Activating doors!” Ratko called out, and there was a grating, clanking noise as Malady walked forward into the giant-sized airlock, dragging about thirty oxygen canisters behind him on their chain. He almost looked like a clown at a kids’ party, but whose masses of balloons had all been deflated and were now dragging on the floor.

“Initiating airlock!” Ratko called from the command console, hitting the appropriate buttons to send the door sliding downward again, obscuring the full tactical from view and crunching to a halt in the floor. “Depressurizing in process… Leaving twenty-percent atmosphere to help propulsion,” Ratko stated, meaning that Malady would be thrown out of the airlock when it opened with the escaping atmospheric gases.

“Malady, can you read me?” Jezzy called over the squad channel.

“Loud and clear, sir. I predict that I will be out of range for suit communication in T-minus two minutes,” his voice came back over her helmet speakers.

“Understood. Just get the cannisters to the ship, and…” Jezzy paused, unsure of how to say this.

“I will continue the mission, Lieutenant, have no fear,” Malady said. Jezzy had returned Asquew’s data-stick to him, as Ratko said that the final actions to take on arming the nukes were all manual and did not require the high-level codes.

“Find Solomon first,” Jezzy breathed, but if the giant metal man responded, she didn’t hear it over the sudden glitch in the airwaves as the external door opened and there was a rushing sound over the suit communicators. Malady was gone.

But he will survive, Jezzy told herself. Nothing could kill Malady.

“Come on, Marine,” Jezzy called out to Ratko, already powering down the station and picking up her tools and weapons. “Where’s this access chute of yours?”

“This way.” Ratko nodded to where the giant pipework of the engineering hold buried itself in the wall, along with half a dozen other grates, grills, and fans.

“You sure this is the right way?” Jezzy breathed in the dark. It was hot in here, the service chute was barely bigger than the wide carapace shoulders of her suit, and she felt like she had been climbing for hours.

Mission Duration:

Deployment and return to scout… 88 minutes.

“This is taking too long,” Jezzy said. They had been climbing up the access chute ladder until their arms, legs, and backs hurt. Jezzy was surprised at the fortitude of the corporal, who was at least managing to keep up with her furious pace.

“We should be at…” Jezzy heard Ratko mumble over the suit. “Level 4. Only three more to go!”

Jezzy grumbled and said something that would have scalded the air if it wasn’t already boiling inside of her suit and outside.

“Just remember the procedure,” Ratko breathed, and Jezzy could hear her panting over the gold channel.

“Open the arms lock, follow the yellow wires to the relays…” Jezzy announced.

Thunk-thock. As they climbed, they could hear strange bangs and reverberations from the ship. Jezzy wondered if the entire place was going to collapse around them. If anything, she was sure that it was getting hotter, and she hoped that was nothing to do with the Invincible’s crippled state.

Creeeeaaaak! A shudder swept through the ladder under Jezzy’s gloves, and for a moment she paused, breathing hard.

“Ratko… You’re the engineer. How structurally sound would you say this is?” Jezzy said.

There was a moment of silence behind her, and then Ratko’s voice returned over her channel. “The Invincible has had multiple decompression events, plus it’s been peppered with wreckage. The fact that it hasn’t broken apart yet is a miracle,”

Great, Jezzy thought as she reached up for the next rung of the ladder—just as there was a louder shuddering crash from above.

Creaakkkk! THOCK!

Everything went dark for a moment as the access chute shook, and a billow of dust flew down. When it had finally cleared, Jezzy saw that the chute up ahead of them had collapsed.

“Frack it!” Jezzy growled. “Why can’t anything just go easy for once?”

“Because we’re Marines,” Ratko murmured with equal despair. “Come on. We passed an access hatch a few meters back. With any luck, we’ll come out right about Level 2.”

With much grumbling, swearing, and complicated moving in the dark, they managed to find their way down to the latest access hatch, which was a simple twist-wheel system. It resisted her attempts at first, but with the addition of Jezzy, they managed to get it to groan open, revealing a dark room on the far side with large metal pipes for walls.

“This must be the Forward Weapons Locker,” Ratko breathed. Jezzy didn’t even think that she was looking at a schematic inside her helmet, as she must have memorized the layout of the Invincible.

“What does that mean?” Jezzy said as she waited for Ratko to ease herself inside the locker before following. The place looked like a basement, with giant metal pipes everywhere next to chugging, still-operational machines.

“It means that the Priority Weapons are just up ahead.” Ratko grinned, pointing further into the labyrinth of pipes. The two women crawled forward over the pipes and the machines. It was still stiflingly hot, but they pressed on until they came to a square grill in the floor, from which there was a dull orange glow.

“Emergency lighting,” Ratko insisted as they crowded around the grate.

Below them appeared to be a gallery of different rooms, each one like a cubicle, but big enough to park a car in.

And in each of the cubicles, sitting on its wide metal loading bay, was a missile many times taller than Jezzy.

The Priority 1 Weapons. The nukes. We’ve found them.

17

Grudge Match

“Urgh.” Solomon opened his eyes to a universe of pain radiating down from his scalp. He also opened his eyes to Kol’s rather worried stare as he hovered over him.

“He’s alive,” the man said, not enthusiastically enough for Solomon’s liking.

Solomon groaned, tried to sit up, and found that he couldn’t. What?

He was tied down. Or rather, he had sleek white magnet clamps on his ankles and wrists, but instead of magnetizing to each other, they were immovable on a cold metal sheet under his back. “What’s happening? Where am I?”

“You’d be better off dead,” Kol said in a low voice, which once again did not fill the man with hope. “They got us, sir. They got us, and they’re…planning something.”

“They?” Solomon coughed. Did he mean the cyborgs? Or the brainwashed Martians?

“Yeah, them.” Solomon saw his ex-technical specialist nodding off to one side, and Solomon was relieved that he could at least move his head as he craned his neck to see—

They were on the floor of a circular metal room, similar in style but much larger than the judgement chamber. “We’re in the colony then, I take it?” Solomon breathed.

The walls were the same white metal that matched the glowing white of the ceiling. He couldn’t see any obvious doors or hatches, but Solomon remembered that the judgement chamber had used advanced holographic technology to give the appearance of privacy.

“Where are the others?” Solomon whispered, and he saw the traitor turn his head one way and then the other, scanning the walls.

“I think they were behind there.” Kol nodded to one particular section, proving Solomon’s hypothesis. “They’re alive,” he insisted. “But I don’t know for how much longer.”

Solomon struggled, trying to move, but he couldn’t. He knew that he wouldn’t be able to anyway, but he couldn’t lie there and do nothing. “Then why are you here?” Solomon said. Wherever ‘here’ really was in the Ru’at colony.

“I argued that I had to check on you, in case you swallowed your own tongue or something,” Kol muttered, looking warily around the room at the acres of pristine walls. Or holograms of walls, anyway.

“Well, I guess I should thank you,” Solomon muttered.

“Don’t mention it. I figured if we’re all going to die anyway, then I might as well do something useful,” Kol said, leaning back on his haunches. “Here.” He lifted a simple water bottle to Solomon’s lips. “It’s not going to get any better though, Sol…” he said, showing what he held in his other hand. A fistful of injector pens.

“They said that I had to inject you with these as soon as you woke up, but I reckon that seeing as there’s no one with a gun to the back of my head, I might as well offer you the choice.” Kol waved the injectors. “They said it was painkillers and stimulants.”

“Frack that,” Solomon chuckled, which was also painful. He didn’t know that laughing—even cynical laughing—could be painful. “I trust the Ru’at about as much as I understand them.”

“Heh. Not at all, then,” Kol agreed, putting the injector pens back into his pocket and tipping another dribble of water into Solomon’s mouth.

“He is conscious?” a voice that Solomon recognized called out from the apparently featureless walls. It was Tavin. Or the clone of Tavin, to be precise. “No cognitive deficits?”

“How would I know?” Kol murmured with a shake of his head, before calling out louder, “he always was an idiot, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Gee thanks, Kol,” Solomon said.

“Then step back to behind the line, Kol!” the mysterious voice of Tavin announced.

“Sorry, sir.” The traitor held his old commander’s gaze for a breath. “Looks like this is it. It was a pleasure working with you again, sir,” he muttered, standing up and moving out of Solomon’s view.

“Tavin, you disagreeable piece of space junk!” Solomon shouted with as much strength as he had, which wasn’t a lot. “Tell me what you’re playing at now!”

“You’re in no position to be making demands, Lieutenant,” Tavin’s voice came back. “And anyway, the choice isn’t mine to make. We’re all in the hands of higher powers now.”

“Don’t give me that ‘Ru’at are higher beings’ rubbish,” Solomon said, feeling a sudden shake as all of the magnet clamps de-energized and fell off his ankles and wrists. Groaning, he flopped over to one side and pushed himself up.

“Energy-field activated,” Tavin’s voice said, and suddenly a burning blue and white line, as thick as Solomon’s arm, cut across his vision just a few inches from his nose.

Fzt! Fzt! Fzt! Fzt! The line leapt around the room, where metal rods had risen silently from the floor. Solomon turned and tried to get his legs to move, but he stumbled as the thick line connected all the poles in a many-sided octahedron around the inner circumference of the room.

There was another hiss and sizzle of burning ozone as another ‘rung’ was added to the energy fence, and another, until a fence of particle beams completely ringed Solomon, with him on the inside and Kol crouched against the wall on the far side. Solomon had turned a full circle until he was looking back at where Kol slumped, in the two-or three-meter ‘avenue’ created between wall and fence.

“What the—” Solomon began.

“The injectors, sir?” Kol had drawn them out. “I can throw them over the fence to you—”

“No.” Solomon shook his head. He had meant it when he had said that he was through playing games with these creatures. “If you’re going to try and hypnotize or brainwash me again, then you might as well get it over and done with,” Solomon called out.

“Oh no, Lieutenant. Our masters have declared that they want something very different for you,” Tavin said.

There was a dull blip from the walls themselves, and a long section disappeared to reveal a gallery of sorts. On the top row stood a thick line of Martian-Ru’at cyborgs, and Solomon counted at least nine or ten up there.

On the bottom of the gallery, however, there were just three people—Tavin, Mariad, and Ochrie—and the clone-Tavin was the only one who was standing unaided. The two women were backed onto a metal sheet similar to the one that Solomon had been attached to, only theirs was standing up.

“Ambassador! Imprimatur?” Solomon rushed to that side of the fence, to see that the two women’s eyes were wide and staring straight back at him, but the rest of their bodies, even their heads, were immobile.

“Muscle spasmodics,” Tavin said beside them, even daring to give Solomon a cheery wave.

“If you hurt one hair on their heads, Tavin, I swear to the stars that I will—” Solomon began, feeling the anger rise in his chest again, like a black storm always threatening to capsize his sanity.

“If you survive what comes next, Lieutenant Cready. Or should I call you H21?” Tavin purred back at him.

“That’s not my name,” Solomon hissed.

“Neither is Solomon Cready. The real Solomon Cready died almost a hundred years ago, or haven’t you figured that out yet?” Tavin took a step forward and spoke in a low voice, as if eager to cast the last accusations and insults he could while he still had the chance. “He was the child that the real Augustus Tavin of AgroMore was observing. He died, very unfortunately, of a full-system collapse…”

“You b—” Solomon started to say.

“And you really should have taken those injectors, Solomon—if that is what you like to call yourself. It has the final iteration of Serum 21 in it, developed by my company and the Ru’at right here on Mars. It is the final dose to be administered to the human-Ru’at hybrids.”

“There is nothing in me that is Ru’at,” Solomon said seriously.

Tavin just smiled as he said, “Well, now is your time to find out.”

There was another blip from the opposite side of the room, and this time when Solomon turned, he saw there, high above the fence and the height of his head, a screen. Solomon didn’t know if it was a real, physical screen or a hologram projected like the walls, but it showed the unmistakable jewel of Earth in its center like a blue-green marble, and with it the smaller, bright glow of the Moon. It was still far away in the screen, but Solomon knew this must mean that the Ru’at or their allies had their eyes on his home planet.

“I thought you made a deal with Hausman?” Solomon grumbled, referring to the Commander of the Near-Earth Fleet who had taken control of the Confederacy, called General Asquew a traitor, and announced himself to be Earth’s ‘Commander-in-Chief.’

“In their wisdom, our saviors have decided to initiate the final stage of the plan to elevate the people of Earth,” Tavin said with apparent fervor and glee. “Earth is the home world. The cradle. It is only fitting that it, too, should have the opportunity that the colonies have.”

Solomon’s eyes were drawn to the screen once again as a dark shape eclipsed the Earth in the view of whatever drone or satellite was broadcasting the image.

It was the Ru’at mothership—the very same one that had attacked Proxima, and which Solomon had thought was still stationed on the edges of Confederate space.

Clearly, it wasn’t. The thing was an oval shape of complicated machinery. Solomon saw, for the second time, the strange modular sections of the ship as if it wasn’t one thing at all, but instead was something more like an engine—a collection of rotating, churning, hydraulic, and wired units that moved together as one. It appeared to have no external hull or shields whatsoever, and instead as it slid by, Solomon could see the many scrapes and impact craters where it had swum through asteroids, comets, and space dust.

I have to get a warning out. Solomon was catalyzed by the sight. But how? It meant that he had to survive. He had to get out of here. He looked at the energy fence that surrounded him, and the line of cyborgs standing, waiting, in the gallery. He couldn’t take them all.

“And now, Solomon Cready, as you seem so insistent to be called, the Ru’at have demanded a very particular fate for you,” Tavin called out. There was a burst of steam from the metal floor a little way off, and, rising on a column of metal into the arena, a stand bearing what looked to be a spear.

“What!?” Solomon looked at it in confusion. The weapon was about half the height that he was, with wide, leaf-like blades at either end so that it resembled a sort of paddle—a murderous one. Along the haft of its center were molded grips so that it could be used in either a two-handed or a singular fashion.

“What do you expect me to do with that?” Solomon frowned at the weapon.

“Personally, H21, I expect you to die, but our saviors want to see just how advanced you have become. How advanced their program of human adjustment has become,” Tavin said smugly as there was another hiss from the floor. This time, at the other end of the arena, a much larger panel broke free from the floor, sliding back as a creature rose on an internal lift.

As the creature crested the floor, Solomon saw the sudden glare of bright blue light from the Ru’at orb in its forehead. The creature rose higher and higher until it towered at some seven and a half feet high. Its skin was a deep, mottled black, brown, ochre, and gray, like the lichen some part of its anatomy had been grown from. Its long, orangutan-like arms reached past its hips and gleamed with metal. Down the line of its back and on the scaffolding around its hips was the strengthened exoskeleton that Solomon and the others had seen driven into the thing’s body.

Solomon saw its backward jointed legs, similarly clad in silver and assisted with external supports, just as he saw the thing’s face—a wide, protruding lower jaw that was brimming with rows of small shark teeth.

It was the Ru’at cyborg, and Solomon realized that they wanted him to fight it.

18

Sacrifice and Thermo-Dynamics

“Not that wire!”

Jezzy froze with the small set of wire cutters that Corporal Ratko had given her. She was leaning over the open panel into the guts of the ISPBM—the InterStellar Planetary Ballistic Missile—and about to cut one of the light green wires.

“What? I thought you said that this was the safety cutout,” she said, already confused.

The pair were in the nearest bay to the hatch that they had jumped through in the forward area of the Invincible. It looked a little like a long cubicle, with the nuke on its metal bed, waiting to be loaded into the firing tube in the wall in front of them. Ratko was at the singular command desk a few meters away, checking the launch dynamics, when she had suddenly called out.

“The yellow wire, sir, the yellow!” Ratko bustled to her position to easily trace the vines of wires that snaked through the innards of this part of the missile, indicating where a yellow wire met a relay attached to the missile’s wall.

“The safety control system. This connection is pulled apart at launch, usually, but seeing as you don’t want to launch it…” Ratko leaned into the deadly device, rummaged around until she had access, and snipped the wire expertly. “Now, you’re almost ready to blow us all to kingdom come!”

“That wasn’t exactly the point, Corporal,” Jezzy murmured, and then her brain registered what the woman had said. “Almost?”

“We need to arm it.” Ratko pointed at the nosecone.

“What? I thought it was already primed,” Jezzy said.

“Primed means it has active propulsion systems in place. It can be fired,” Ratko explained, already bustling to the front end of the missile, and with a handheld motorized screwdriver, started to unfix the panels. “Arming it is something different again. You really don’t know that much about technology, do you?” Ratko shook her head as she got the cone panel to flip up. It exposed what appeared to be a set of solid-looking pipes and metal boxes.

“I know it goes bang,” Jezzy murmured. Somehow, this diminutive woman had managed to make her feel like a luddite.

“Yeah, well, you’re not wrong there.” Ratko sighed. “All thermo-nukes rely on the thermo part, right?”

“Heat, I know that,” Jezzy said.

“Not a total loss, then,” Ratko teased. “Thermos are two-part incendiary devices. The radioactive material is further down there.” She waved her motorized screwdriver back down the body of the missile, disturbingly close to where Jezzy already stood. She instinctively backed away a step.

“It’s incredibly dense and incredibly tough. ISPBMs hark right back to the original Alameda tests. There has to be a powerful chemical heat to trigger a cascade in the fissile material,” Ratko explained. “The heat comes from a chemical chain reaction at this end. Small ignition charges ignite highly-explosive compounds, but their energy is forced to further explosive compounds, until it’s hot enough to spark the actual bomb.”

“So, all we have to do is light up that end?” Jezzy nodded to where Ratko stood.

“Yes and no,” Ratko sighed. “This end, as you so eloquently put it, is only connected after launch to the fissile material. Another safety measure to make sure that some crazy Outcast Commander can’t do exactly what it is we’re doing right now.” Ratko tapped the missile with her screwdriver. “We have to manually connect it, which is called arming, got it?”

“Not really, but just so long as you can make it go bang, on a timer, then I’m happy…” Jezzy said.

“Oh, the timer part is easy.” She reached back to the command console to pull her satchel bag of stolen tools, clanking and rummaging until she found a small timer device “How long do you want?”

“Long enough to get out of this hulk and back to Willoughby and Malady,” Jezzy said, thinking: Somehow.

“Twenty minutes, then?” She watched as Ratko set the timer and started to wire and solder the device in place. “I’m going to add an immediate detonation command connector as well,” she said, introducing new elements to the timer—a tiny wireless transmitter with its own crystal shard for an aerial. After that, Ratko moved to Jezzy’s suit to plug in with her engineering console into one of the many data-ports that every suit of power armor had around its cowl.

Data Transmission!

Sender: Sp. Ratko, Outcast Marines, Rapid Response Fleet 2.

Accept? Y/N

Y

Timer App Downloaded.

Controls: Set 5 minutes… 1 minute… 30 seconds… 10 seconds…

“Just press the ‘okay’ and it will override the external timer and count down from there,” Ratko explained, turning back to the cone. “Now, we need to connect up the chemical explosives.”

Clank!

Behind them came the sound of feet as, deeper inside the Priority 1 Weapons Locker, something moved. Both Ratko and Jezzy froze. It could only be one thing: cyborgs.

“How long?” Jezzy hissed.

“A couple minutes,” Ratko breathed.

Clank-clank! The sound of the heavy metal feet was coming closer.

“Get it done, then get out of here. You got one of those magnet grapple hook thingies?” Jezzy asked, knowing that Ratko did. She had made three of the grapples and pullcords, one for each of them.

“Right here, sir,” Ratko breathed as the sounds of the metal feet drew closer.

We’ve been discovered. The cyborgs must have come to check out the noise…

“Arm the ISPBM, get to the nearest airlock, and get out. No waiting around for me, and that’s an order, got it?” Jezzy whispered sternly.

“But, Lieutenant, what are you—”

“I said that’s an order, Marine!” Jezzy said. “Here.” She swapped her own Marine service rifle for Ratko’s Jackhammer. Ahh. It feels good to be holding one of these again. “I’m going to buy you some time, and then I’ll follow you out. Understood?”

Ratko looked at her with wide, serious eyes before nodding. She understood perfectly what Jezzy was doing. “If you don’t make it out, sir, I’m installing the auto-destruct app on my suit as well.” Jezzy saw the woman jam the data-connector into one of her own suit’s ports as Jezzy nodded.

“Good. If she hasn’t blown by the time you get back to the ship, then activate it anyway—with or without me, you hear?” Lieutenant Wen said.

To her credit, the ever-cantankerous Corporal Ratko for once didn’t argue or tease. She just nodded. “Aye-aye, sir,” she said.

Clank-thud-clank! The sound of the advancing cyborgs was much closer now. They could only be around the next knotwork of pipes. Jezzy took a deep breath and ran to confront them.

And if I have to blow that thing while I’m still in here, I will, she knew as she raised the Jackhammer to her shoulder and went to confront the enemy.

19

The Champion’s Reward

The Ru’at cyborg looked different, and it wasn’t just the metal that now covered its body or the fact it was holding the exact same weapon that awaited Solomon. The double-bladed spear looked almost like a toothpick in the thing’s metal claws.

It’s intelligent, Solomon realized. It was still making a low, guttural growling sound, and Solomon could see its tiny, flap-like nostrils flaring as it scented the air, but it had lost all that animal, reactionary energy. It stood relatively contained and focused on the task at hand.

Which was killing Solomon, apparently.

The thing is sentient now, Solomon thought, or the Ru’at orb controlling it is. Solomon’s mind, spurred on by the spikes of adrenaline and panic, started to accelerate. Unknown to him, the Serum 21 that was pregnant throughout his body clicked into gear, and complex chains of amino acids and enzymes were released to activate the Ru’at RNA he had unwittingly been born with.

The pain and weariness in Solomon’s limbs started to subside as the serum in his blood took over. He felt that roiling ball of anger in his gut start to rise once more as a black cloud of energy that would make his heart beat faster and would focus all his attention to a single pinpoint.

“Behold, Ambassador, Imprimatur,” Tavin called out, “the final product development. Which one will win? The cybernetically-enhanced Ru’at? Or the genetically-enhanced one? Two technologies masterminded by our saviors. But which one will determine the fate of the galaxy? Evolution, my friends. It is now ours to control!”

Solomon saw the Ru’at twitch its head toward the shouted words of the clone, and in that movement, he moved. The serum in his body made Solomon react out of instinct, faster than conscious thought, as he leaped forward to seize the blade waiting for him.

“Kol!” Solomon shouted as he saw the Ru’at cyborg start to move in the periphery of his vision. “Give me those damn injectors!”

The thing did not roar as a cornered animal might. It did not charge either, but merely hissed, its entire metal chest vibrating as it stepped from its place and started to stalk its prey.

Warily, Solomon started to back around the circle, aware of the burning heat of the energy fence just behind him. He kept his eyes dead on the Ru’at cyborg, seeing that it was doing the same, moving closer but slowly circling him as he attempted to circle it.

“No chance of calling it a draw, I take it,” Solomon murmured as his limbs flooded with the rubbery, nervous excitement that always came before a fight.

The Ru’at cyborg just continued to hiss. Solomon could see its small, beady black eyes boring into him, watching his every move as a forked tongue flicked from between its teeth and lapped at the air.

“Lieutenant!” Kol threw the first injector high over the fence, arcing through the arena air until—

Got it! Solomon caught it with one hand, reversing his grip and plunging the silver injector pen straight into his neck.

“Ach!”

“Sss-crargh!” The Ru’at cyborg lunged forward in that moment of distraction, keeping its spear low in one hand until the last possible moment, when it flicked it up between them in a strike that would surely disembowel the Outcast.

Clang! Solomon managed to drop the injector pen and seize his own short spear with two hands just moments before the impact, driving his own weapon down to dash the thing’s to one side as they both leaped back again.

First blows, and no one has drawn blood. Solomon was panting, feeling an odd giddiness. Was he hyperventilating? What was causing this new sensation?

He couldn’t tell if the new and improved H21 serum that the Ru’at had loaded the pen with was starting to work or not. He had no idea just what the pure H21 serum would do to his body. Back on Ganymede, he hadn’t known it at the time, but he and the other Outcasts were continuously involved in performance tests. At least a portion of every day was spent in the gym or out on the surface of Jupiter’s moon, with Dr. Palinov taking daily blood samples to assess the impact of their own Serum 21.

I guess this has to be tested in the field, Solomon thought. All sensation of pain and exhaustion was gone, and if anything, his anger only amplified. It felt to Solomon like the storm cloud of his own negative emotions—what he had tried to force down and ignore ever since that fateful night in New Kowloon—was filling his entire body.

The Ru’at cyborg lunged forward once again, and Solomon’s eyes were filled with the glare of blue light.

Clang! Another parry sent shockwaves reverberating up Solomon’s arms. The creature was strong! Far stronger than Solomon.

Instead of pulling the short spear back and swinging again, the creature merely used the first parry to counterstrike with the other end of the blade. Solomon saw the line of razor-sharp steel descending in a line straight for his face.

“Ach!” He pivoted on one heel, allowing the Ru’at’s blade to sail inches past his nose as he lunged forward with the tip of his blade.

“Scrarghl!” He was rewarded with a roar of anger as he felt the blade scrape across the thing’s chest, hitting metal and dark flesh.

As soon as the hit was scored, Solomon jumped away again, hoping to see the thing spurt blood behind him, but it didn’t. Instead, only a thin trickle of blackish ichor appeared and ran down the creature’s chest as it spun around to roar at its attacker.

“First blood to the H21!” Solomon heard clone-Tavin call out, apparently just as pleased to have the human variant of the Ru’at’s creations win as the Ru’at itself.

Solomon panted, backing away from the beast as it closed in once again. He saw the metal pistons on the thing’s legs start to turn and churn as it sprang forward in a bounding step, spear held high.

Solomon ducked into a roll just as the Ru’at cyborg did something unexpected, leaping into the air and jackknifing its body so that it spiraled as it spun, landing expertly behind Solomon.

No! The Marine was already committed to his roll and had too much momentum going forward. Solomon tried to twist his back, but he felt a sudden line of fire spread down his body from shoulder to hip.

“Sir!” he heard Kol yell as Solomon continued to roll out of the way, blood spreading down the back of his thin encounter suit. It wasn’t a fair fight, obviously, given that no one had offered Solomon metal plates like the Ru’at cyborg had.

“Behind you!” Solomon ended his roll as Kol shouted, and he heard the heavy thump of alien, clawed feet as the thing jumped after him.

It’ll bring the blade down to stab me, Solomon guessed, turning where he crouched on the floor, already raising the short spear in a two-handled grip.

KERASH! The Ru’at cyborg had indeed thrown a simple, but very powerful, overhead strike, and Solomon met it with the handle of his own spear, forcing the blow to one side—but not before it had snapped the haft of the two-bladed short spear in half, leaving Solomon with two smaller leaf-blades, one in each hand.

Oh frack. Solomon had a moment of sheer terror as he realized that the monster had just cut through metal with its own two-handed blow. If that strike had hit him, it would have easily cleaved him in two.

But the Ru’at serum—the purest dose of the H21 strain—was now flooding through his system, and Solomon felt sharper, more alert, stronger.

The servos… Solomon’s thoughts raced, seeing the monster raise one giant leg in a stamp that would surely crush his ribcage. He saw the pistons firing and the external exoskeleton flexing.

That is its weakness. Solomon threw himself forward under the thing’s raised leg in a slide, spinning around to drive one of the blades up and into the thing’s hip, between where the metal rods hit the servo mechanisms.

“Scrargh!” The creature roared in pain as black ichor spurted from between the plates and rods, accompanied by the whine of metal. Solomon didn’t stop but rolled again before bouncing to his feet and spinning around, this time with only one blade left.

The thing lunged toward him, but the leg that Solomon had struck was clearly injured. There was a screeching sound as the pistons locked up, and the creature was now half-limping on one foot.

Solomon closed in.

“Through blood and fire,” the Outcast Marine said through clenched teeth as he darted in, blade low.

“SCRARGH!” The monster flung its weapon up in a lightning-fast move. Even with its injured leg, it was still quick.

“Agh!” Pain seared Solomon’s upper arm as he tried to swivel out of the way. The strike that he was going to throw went wide and lost power, harmlessly skittering across the thing’s metal shoulders.

Time slowed around Solomon. Perhaps it was the serum, or perhaps it was his mind’s way of telling him that he was near death. His back was aflame with the previous injury, and now his arm was too. In awful slow motion, he saw the monster reverse its grip and drive its blade toward him.

Solomon jumped. He leaned all his weight toward the beast as he grabbed the thing’s exoskeleton and pivoted, somersaulting over the creature’s head as its blow swept past his legs.

But even with all the adrenaline and increased strength of the H21 serum, Solomon couldn’t catapult over the creature like a gymnast. He turned in mid-air, landing on the thing’s back and grappling with one hand at its exoskeleton.

“SKRARGH!” The thing roared and spun, trying to dislodge the Marine.

But now, Solomon was not fighting like the Marine Corps had taught him. He was fighting the way he used to fight on the streets of New Kowloon. Street-fighting was different from Marine fighting. It was dirty, and it was ferocious. Solomon clung onto the creature for all his life was worth, aware that he was losing it through blood loss with every heartbeat.

Solomon jammed his own remaining blade down on the head of the Ru’at cyborg, hoping to find any bit of uncovered skin that he could.

FZZZT! There was an explosion of light and noise as his blade hit the sunken Ru’at orb in the center of the creature’s forehead, and Solomon felt white fire travel up his arm and fling him across the room.

The energy fence, he managed to think as he hit the floor and skidded, throwing his arms and legs wide to slow his skid.

“Arggggh!” He skidded to a halt just inches from the lowest line of burning fire, panting and shivering with the electrical shock. To Kol, Ochrie, and Rhossily watching, they saw tiny lines of static electricity playing up and down Solomon’s body before winking out as his muscles shook.

I’m going to die, Solomon thought. This was it. He had nothing left. He was bleeding from two severe gashes, and his muscles felt like they had been cooked.

“SSsss…” And the Ru’at cyborg, amazingly, still wasn’t dead. Solomon managed to flop heavily over onto his back to see the Ru’at rising on its injured hip and stumbling to one side as it tried to shake its head.

Which still had Solomon’s blade sticking from its forehead. The Ru’at light had gone out, and in its stead sparked blue-white fire. Black ichor ran down the thing’s face, dripping into its own maw as it roared in agony and confusion.

Solomon had no weapons left at all. The thing was raising long arms to scrabble at its head where the blade still stuck, but its claws wouldn’t close on the object. Its arms and metal talons were shaking. Solomon had managed to maim it seriously, but it still wasn’t enough to put it down.

“Ssss-SCRARGH!” The thing bellowed in pain, a primal sound that made every human in the room flinch. It was the sound of an enraged predator. It was the sound of a frenzied bloodlust as it lunged forward, charging at its prey.

I’m going to die. Solomon saw the thing grow bigger in his vision in moments. It wouldn’t have to do much to kill him, after all. All it had to do was step on him in his current state and the bodily shock would be enough to finish him off.

But it was running blind. It had no Ru’at orb to give it super intelligence anymore.

It’s just another animal now, Solomon realized, and he rolled, just as the cyborg Ru’at pounced.

The creature landed on the spot where Solomon had been.

He lashed out with one leg, hitting the thing’s bad hip.

FZZZZZ-TT!

The creature, blind with fury and already overbalanced, toppled forward—straight into the waiting blue-white lines of burning fire.

There was no time for the creature to scream or even sigh. The particle-beams of the Ru’at were too powerful for that, able to punch through the thickened, meter-wide external hulls of Marine Corps battleships.

Those blue lasers that made the air smell like ozone as they burnt the oxygen was more than a match for one creature, even as powerful as the Ru’at cyborg was. There was a gasp from Tavin and the sound of heavy thumps as the creature’s head and parts of its torso fell to the far side of the energy fence, completely severed by the Ru’at’s own energies.

“He did it. He bleeding well did it!”

Solomon lay there, his eyesight starting to fuzz and go black as he heard Kol shouting jubilantly.

Of course, all they need to do is shoot me now and have it over and done with, Solomon managed to think. Either the H21 serum strain had worn off, or his injuries were so severe that their angered voices cut through the serum’s pain suppressant properties. Solomon could barely keep two thoughts together. He felt weak, and he felt near death.

But he wasn’t unconscious, and he could still hear what Tavin said next. The clone’s voice was tremulous with either fear or awe.

“We have a winner,” Tavin said. “The Ru’at have judged, and the Ru’at have decided. The new general of their invasion fleet, and the commander of their cyborg forces, will be H21 Solomon Cready!”

Conquest of Earth

Outcasts of Earth, Book 9

1

Emergency Survival

FZZT!

Second Lieutenant Jezebel Wen of the Outcast Marines ducked as another line of blue-white plasma fire speared across the munitions locker. The tall woman in her full power armor could see multiple spouts of steam bursting into the cramped corridors from where the cyborgs’ weapons had struck the pipes and units in this part of the Invincible.

The Invincible that is in danger of breaking apart, Jezzy realized, slamming her back against the pipes and waiting for her moment to return fire.

Gold Channel Message Alert!

Sender: Corporal Ratko (Tech. Sp.)

The inside of her visor lit up with a line of green information as the suit telemetries for her squad channel burst to life. And on the other end was Corporal Ratko—the small, angry Gold Squad member who had accompanied Jezzy on her infiltration into this hulk.

“I read you, Ratko, but make it quick!” Jezzy breathed as she tried to sneak a look around the corner, seeing that the two cyborgs at the far end of the narrow corridor were already advancing.

That was the thing with the Ru’at and mega-corp cyborgs… They didn’t tire. They didn’t know fear. They didn’t pause.

Frack!

“I’m clear, ma’am. Almost halfway across the wreckage field to rendezvous with the ship, Corporal Malady, and Willoughby.” The Outcast Marine’s voice sounded breathy and tense, and Jezzy wasn’t surprised. She had sent Ratko ahead of her on a solo, unassisted spacewalk while she fought a rear-guard action, protecting the armed and primed nuke that they had found inside the Invincible, ready to use it against the Ru’at jump-ships that patrolled the Martian orbit.

“Good to hear, Ratko. You know my orders. Two minutes and you blow.” Jezzy ducked as she leaned her Jackhammer around two large ceramic pipes and fired.

Phada-BOOM! Phada-BOOM! Burst fire. She had no time to perform targeted kills on these beings. The metal man-things, with half of their human bodies encased in steel, were almost unstoppable anyway. Only a strike against their spinal cords would sever their essential circuits.

FZZT! Her heavy shells struck, sending the first cyborg into a spin as a line of blue-white plasma erupted from the miniaturized particle-beam generator that was its hand and burned a line across the ceiling.

Tsk! Lines of sparks erupted from the grillwork up there, as well as gobbets of molten metal as the creature’s fire clicked off. There was another deep, rumbling shake that moved through Jezzy’s feet.

The Invincible had been General Asquew’s flagship in the Second Rapid Response Fleet, a vast pyramid of bronze and gunmetal colors able to decimate a planet, should it so wish.

But now she’s ready to be scrap, Jezzy managed to find the time to morosely consider. Just like most of the Marine Corps ships that had faced the Ru’at directly.

It was those particle-beam weapons, Jezzy knew. The ones on the bulky hand-units of the cyborgs were only child’s toys compared to the ones that the Ru’at ships held in their nosecones. Those weapons were able to burn holes straight through the double-reinforced, meter-thick hulls of even the toughest ships of the fleet!

Jezzy knew it was all owing to the Ru’at’s more advanced technology. They were the ones who had sent ‘the Message’ to Earth, packed full of details on how to develop cybernetic and more bizarre technologies. The alien race was so far ahead of Confederate Earth that Jezzy thought, in cosmic terms, this must be like a colony of ants attempting to stop a human from trampling their nest.

Impossible.

The Ru’at Message had been a fake, though—or not a fake, but a sophisticated Trojan horse, and certainly not the olive branch that they had thought. When NeuroTech and the other human mega-corporations had developed the Ru’at technologies, believing them to be a gift and a way to communicate with the first alien species that humanity had ever found existence of, all it had done was build a back door to an alien invasion.

Not that any of it mattered now, Jezzy thought. The Marine Corps Fleets were scattered, destroyed, and betrayed. The Near-Earth Fleet was under the direct control of the other Marine General, Hausman, who had just declared himself ‘Commander-in-Chief’ of Earth, and that left Asquew attempting to stave off the alien menace. And failing, badly.

“Just get out of there!” Ratko was saying urgently. “My suit’s going to pass transmission range any second. I need to know that you’re out!”

BOOM! Another shot from Jezzy’s Jackhammer was enough to send the already-stumbling cyborg backwards into its fellow. Luckily for Jezzy, this area was narrow enough so that only one cyborg could try to murder her at a time.

Jezzy opened her mouth to respond, but then stopped. It would be better if she thinks I’m dead. Then she’ll blow the nuke with or without me.

FZZZT! A line of blue-white fire shot past the edge of her helmet, so close that Jezzy swore she could smell the ozone burn. She couldn’t, of course—her power armor had a completely filtered air circulation system—but she, of anyone, knew just how the mind could play tricks on you when it thought it was going to die.

Jezebel Wen used to be a Yakuza agent, trained to tidy up loose ends and enact the Yakuza’s justice in the Asian-Pacific Partnership region of Confederate Earth. Maybe it was this volatile and uncompromising early start that had given Jezzy her cool head during times of such imminent terror.

What are my mission parameters? she thought as she traded more rounds with the two cyborgs who had cornered her. They both had ugly blast holes about their bodies or were buckled and scorched places in their metal parts, but they still came. Jezzy was only managing to hold them at bay by using her Jackhammer to knock them down or push them back.

But they always—always—got up again.

One. Keep the nuke armed.

Two. Distract the Ru’at.

Three. Get off the ship.

When she thought about it that way, there didn’t seem to be much chance that Second Lieutenant Jezebel Wen was going to be able to get off this boat.

Would these cyborgs be able to neutralize the nuke? Jezzy had no idea if their programming stretched that far.

Would the cyborgs be able to send a message of warning to the Ru’at jump-ships outside? Maybe. Again, her knowledge of their capabilities was severely lacking. But she knew that they were capable of deep machine learning, analyzing their targets to best capitalize on their weaknesses, which showed a kind of evolution.

“Sir! This is Ratko. I’ve got— SCRRRRR!” Jezzy’s internal speakers pulsed with Ratko’s voice, somewhere outside the Invincible, but she was cut off almost instantaneously by static.

She must have moved out of range, Jezzy knew as she fired again, and again. Suit-to-suit protocols for their squad-level communication was a narrow band at best, and she herself had further restricted it to make sure that the alien menace outside couldn’t easily pick up on what they were doing. Or attempting to do, anyway, she thought.

Again, Jezzy thought that it was probably better for her squad member to think that she was already dead in here. That way, when the timer was up, the corporal would activate the nuke and their plan would be secure.

But half a heartbeat later, it seemed that Ratko had managed to get her message through.

Gold Channel Message Alert!

Sender: Corporal Ratko (Tech. Sp.)

Data Packet Received: Trusted. Verified.

On her visor appeared a line-drawing schematic of the forward munitions locker of the Invincible, sent by Ratko. It had a glowing green dot to indicate where Jezzy currently was, as well as another flashing green dot just a few corridors away.

Emergency Survival Raft: Designation 23, the tiny hologram display read.

“What?” Why hadn’t she thought of that? She had automatically assumed that when the Marines, staffers, and soldiers of the Rapid Response Fleet had to abandon the Invincible, all of the escape pods and survival rafts would have been ejected.

But clearly not. Jezzy frowned.

FZZT! FZZZZT! There was a shower of sparks and a loud crack as the ceramic pipe by her shoulder exploded in a million fragments. The cyborgs were getting close!

Jezzy fired as many times as she dared, aiming a burst shot at the one in front’s legs. It fell to the floor under the heavy barrage, but that only meant the one behind it had a clearer shot.

Frack! Jezzy threw herself back as she ducked under the onslaught. She was only a few corridors away from both the nuke and the emergency raft. What should she do?

The emergency survival rafts, Jezzy knew from her training, were a slightly more advanced version of an escape pod, which were little better than metal tubes on thrusters that automatically flew to a pre-programmed location when fired.

The ESR of the Marine Corps, however, were entire little ship ‘units’ with their own directional thrusters and positioning rockets, and sometimes, they even had their own minor armaments. It made sense that there was one for this section of the ship, Jezzy thought. She was currently near the ‘top’ of the Invincible, and the place where the primary-one weapons were held, at that. If there was any sort of malfunction or problem up here, then the staff would want a secure way to get out—and fast!

FZZT! Another line of burning light shook Jezzy out of her hasty thoughts. Whatever she ended up doing, she had to get out of this corridor first, and quickly, before the cyborgs rounded the corner.

But Jezebel Wen had started off as a ruthless Yakuza, and then her talents had been honed by some of the best military training that the Marine Corps could devise in the Outcast Training Program.

Even as the sound of metal feet clanked closer, Jezzy rolled, propped her Jackhammer against her shoulder, and fired.

Upward.

PHADA-BOOM! She fired in single shot as the ammo indicator light on her gun started to flash. Single shot meant that she could more effectively target the part of the ceiling she wanted to hit: the place where congealed gobbets of metal had frozen even as they had fallen, and a line cut across the gridded metal bars to the ceiling.

Clang! Clang! Cla—

Sparks flew, and the Jackhammer’s shells ricocheted down like deadly rain, but with a sudden, much greater explosion of neon sparks, she achieved her aim. There was a resounding crash as the already-damaged ceiling panel buckled and collapsed, dislodging dust and thick clouds of dark smoke.

Warning! Environmental Hazard Detected!

Suit Air Filtration Systems: ACTIVATED

Time until Air-Filter Clog: 4.6 minutes

Her shots had ruptured some sensitive internal organ of the Invincible, and black smoke plumed into the corridor. But Jezzy, inside the carapace of her power armor, was fully protected. For now, anyway.

But her plan had worked much better than she had anticipated, as now there were not only bits of ceiling in the way, there were also billowing clouds of black smoke for the cyborgs to contend with.

Which buys me some time, she thought. But how much? Jezzy was already scrambling to her feet and stumbling down the narrow corridor. She was sure that the cyborgs would follow her, after all. There was no reason to turn and look inside the loading bay of the nuclear missile, was there?

Not if she made some noise.

“Hey! You glorified drone-dolls! Don’t you want a piece of me?” she shouted, clanging on the pipework walls as she turned away from the loading bay and its terrible denizens and toward where Ratko’s map led her. It was an obvious escape bay—a small alcove at the end of the corridor with a bulkhead door and nothing else. ESR 23 was stenciled in bold type over the door, and Jezzy went straight for it.

FZT! FZZZ—

Behind her came the sounds of the cyborgs cutting their way out of the collapsed tunnel and coming after her.

How much time? She flicked her fingers inside their metal power gauntlets, where lay the thin mesh gloves and touch-sensitive pads on the fingertips, which she used to navigate her suit’s holo-controls.

Timer App Downloaded.

Controls: Countdown

Set for: 5 minutes; 1 minute; 30 seconds; 10 seconds

It was the automatic detonation override that Ratko had coded and designed for her in moments, linked to the nuclear warhead, downloaded into her suit’s mainframe controls. All Jezzy had to do was to set the time and away it would go, but the clock was already running down on the device, cresting a little over a few minutes.

Grabbing the door release lever, she yanked as hard as she could. She could feel the metal wanting to resist her, but the assisted strength given to her by her suit’s servos and interior hydraulics made short work of that.

Jezzy pulled the door open and jumped inside, finding that there was just a small platform step and then another, already open door—straight into the ESR. She made sure to shut and lock the bulkhead door behind her all the same, knowing that the cyborgs could burn their way through it, but it was another obstacle between her and death, wasn’t it?

The ESR was an octoid sphere whose door hatch hissed shut behind her as soon as she stepped in, and the console unit in front of the piloting chair glared into life.

It was designed to register life signs and automate the escape procedure as soon as it’s entered. Jezzy was at least thankful for that. This way, she wouldn’t have to waste precious time working out how to use the damn thing.

A series of deep, vibrational shakes shuddered through the ESR as it completed whatever mechanical unlocking procedure it needed to. Jezzy sat in the pilot’s chair directly in front of the console. There were three smaller bucket chairs on either side of her set against the ESR’s walls, meaning that each survival raft was capable of comfortably holding seven survivors.

Lights started racing ahead of her on the other side of the viewing window, four lines of light in each of the corners of her vision, narrowing to a point before flashing once, twice…

Motion Sensor Alert!

Jezzy’s suit pinged her with the alarm as the small overlay map revealed two blinking orange vectors approaching, at speed, behind her. The cyborgs had made their way out of the collapsed tunnel. They had taken the bait. They could probably also see or hear or sense with whatever scanning measures they had installed the noise coming from the other side of th e bulkhead door.

Initiating ESR Main Thrusters…

This message appeared not in Jezzy’s suit, but instead on the lit-up console in front of her. The shaking and shuddering increased as Jezzy’s own motion sensors started to blink more and more rapidly.

Prepare for Launch…

She searched the consoles to find the command she wanted: 360-degree camera control. She switched it on with a wave of her hand just in time to see the bulkhead door that she had so recently jumped through being pulled off of its pistons. Its metal pistons, soldered and bolted to the metal superstructure of the Invincible itself.

No wonder the cyborgs were almost unstoppable—

The first cyborg stood there, one arm dangling uselessly at its side from the strain of ripping the door, as well as having a myriad of Jackhammer holes across its chest and legs. Behind it in the darkness, Jezzy caught a glimpse of the second cyborg as it raised its weapon-hand. In that awful moment that comes with high adrenaline, Jezzy could make out every detail on the ESR’s screen of the things myriad revolving wheels lighting up as it prepared to fire.

Any shot of that thing will go straight through the thin shell of this craft, Jezzy knew. She wouldn’t be dead, because she would be in her power suit, but she would be equally as screwed.

Launch!

Suddenly, the image in her cameras was obscured by glaring white, and then a furious avalanche of orange, yellow, and red flames as the main thruster fired. The flames engulfed the cyborgs. For a hideous moment, the ESR sat perfectly still as it fed the thruster with propellant and sought escape velocity.

Jezzy could see the blackened outline of the first cyborg in the flames as its once-human flesh was boiled away, and its most tender pieces of metal started to boil.

FZZT!

Jezzy was punched back into her chair as the ESR rocketed forward, and multiple alarm sirens went off inside the craft.

ESR Mainframe: Craft Compromised. Hull damage at Rear Plate 13…

But in less time than it took to blink an eye, Jezzy and the octoid sphere that she sat in were hurtling forward. The four lines of lights flashed into a blur, and suddenly the sensation of force and propulsion was gone. She was shooting out of the side of the Invincible and into the wreckage field that had once been the Rapid Response Fleet.

ESR Mainframe: Proximity Warning! Undertaking Automatic Evasive Measures!

The console screen in front of her bleeped as the Marine saw the rising edge of a piece of Confederate Marine Corps battleship coming straight for them. With a gut-wrenching lurch, the ESR fired its left-hand positional rockets perfectly, spinning her view around as they shot past it, only to fire the rockets on the other side to avoid the next collision.

Jezzy was in the wreckage of an entire battlegroup of ships, set against the backdrop of the embattled Red Planet.

The Martian separatists—the ‘Chosen of Mars’ or the ‘First Martians,’ as they called themselves—had successfully fought off the Marine Corps’ attempts to return control of the Red Planet to the Confederacy, with the help of the Ru’at. But its surface was still scarred and smeared by ugly black clouds where the CMC (Confederate Marine Corps) had fired ‘demonstration’ nukes to force a capitulation.

It hadn’t worked, and when the actual Ru’at jump-ships had appeared in Martian space, they had made short work of the Confederate ships.

ESR Mainframe: Unknown Craft on Intercept Course!

The control console blared at her, and it was as if Jezzy’s worst nightmares had all come true at once. There, rising out of the wreckage, was one of the Ru’at jump-ships, and it was heading straight for her.

2

The Future of Humanity

“We have a winner!” Solomon Cready, First Lieutenant of the Outcast Marines, replayed the clone’s words in his head, over and over.

What? It was still as confusing now as it had been when he had first heard it, almost an hour ago on the arena floor.

Despite his current state of near-collapse, the exhaustion that shook his limbs, the glaring white light that filled his eyes, and the terrible wound that ran down one side of his back, Solomon found that his thoughts felt enervated and electric. They jumped and buzzed over his memories, recalling every word, every movement, every detail of the terrible deathmatch that he had just been a part of.

I wonder if this is what happens when you’re about to have a full-system collapse, he thought a little wryly. A last parting gift from his body’s enhanced genetics before he passed irrevocably into shock.

The lieutenant currently lay on his back on a cold slab of steel, trying to not look directly into the blinding white lights above. He didn’t know how he had gotten here, but he remembered the clone’s final words after Solomon had won the fight against the cyborg Ru’at.

“The Ru’at have judged, and the Ru’at have decided. The new general of their invasion fleet, and the commander of their cyborg forces, will be H21 Solomon Cready!” the clone had announced with apparent glee, and perhaps even a little pride, Solomon had to wonder.

He was still in the Ru’at colony on Mars, stuffed full of cyborgs, clones, and apparently brainwashed Martians. The only ‘true’ alien that they had encountered had been Solomon’s challenger—a creature that he, along with the renegade Outcast Marine Kol, Ambassador Ochrie of Earth, and Mariad Rhossily, the Imprimatur of Mars, had seen ‘born’ from the strange bio-nursery under their very feet.

That creature was a monster, Solomon thought. A wide and pronounced predator’s jaw, mottled ochre and black skin, backwards-jointed legs, and double-elbowed arms. But that was only the start of the thing’s strangeness. Their Ru’at captors—who had so far only revealed themselves in the form of a floating drone sphere—had then encased the creature in steel and silver, turning it into an alien cyborg the likes of which neither Solomon nor any other Marine Corps officer had ever encountered.

And I beat it, the young man thought. Although any human physician would probably say that it had killed him in the process, given his current condition.

“Patient is secure,” a voice purred into Solomon’s awareness, and it was a voice that he recognized.

“You…” he managed to croak, flopping his head to one side to see the familiar form of the older human man with frosted white hair, dark skin, and a perfectly white-silver encounter suit.

“You’re not real,” Solomon murmured as he thought of the first time that he had met the man. It had been when he and the other human captives were first brought to the colony. Each of them was meant to enter the Ru’at ‘judgement chamber,’ where they would be brainwashed into serving their new alien masters in every possible respect.

That was what had happened to Ochrie, after all. Solomon attempted to struggle, but his ankles, wrists, and midriff wouldn’t budge.

This man had been a ‘human-friendly’ hologram generated by one of the Ru’at orbs, who had explained to the lieutenant how he wasn’t ‘Solomon Cready’ at all. He was in fact ‘H21’—an experimental bio-program who had been cloned from the original Solomon Cready back on Earth.

“Begin the procedure,” the human-friendly hologram said with a hint of a smile. He appeared in every respect to be considerate, kindly, even empathetic as he regarded the clone-Solomon on the table.

“Frack you,” Solomon coughed. It was starting to hurt when he breathed. The wound on his back was like a line of molten lava igniting into life every time he tried to fill his lungs. “What procedure?”

“H21, First Lieutenant Cready,” the man finally addressed him directly.

“Solomon. My name is Solomon…”

“The Ru’at are pleased with your performance. There have always been two camps within the Ru’at—those favoring machine and cybernetic solutions, and another that posits that no machine can be as complex or as adaptable as bio-genetics,” the man said in a grandfatherly, lecturing sort of way. “You are the proof that the latter camp is, in fact, correct.”

“Let me go! Why should I care at all what weird politics you monsters have?” Solomon hissed.

“You don’t have to, of course,” the man purred in his rich, warm voice. Solomon wondered if the Ru’at had projected him here just to make him more accepting.

“But it doesn’t particularly matter what you care for or not, Solomon.” The holographic man nodded when he used his real name. “This is who you are. What you are. What you were always meant to become.”

“Frack you,” Solomon managed. He knew it was a petty revenge, and that insults were always the least intelligent way to make a point, but he sure did feel a whole lot better for it, all the same.

“You will understand soon, H21. You have come home. To your real family.”

Suddenly, pain lanced into Solomon’s body. He thought it was originating somewhere around his legs, but he couldn’t be sure, given the omnipresent waves he was experiencing.

“Ach!”

“You must let go, H21. Let go of the human that you think you are.”

Solomon’s mind fluttered toward consciousness, heavy with the words of the hologram.

He opened his mouth to speak, meaning to say something like ‘What are you talking about?’ but instead all that came out was a wordless sigh.

(What have you done to me!?)

“The genetic structure that is written into your DNA is only partly the product of Earth,” the voice continued. Solomon couldn’t see anything but white light. He wasn’t even sure if his eyes were open, or if all of this was somehow being transmitted straight into his brain.

But the pain had gone. In fact, all sensation had gone.

“The Message that we sent to Earth a hundred Sol-cycles ago carried with it the technology to alter rhizomatic and bacterial development,” the voice continued.

Rhizomes… The part of Solomon’s mind that was still Solomon tried to remember his scant astrobiology lessons. Rhizomes were a sort of fungus, weren’t they? Microscopic life inside Earth soil that allowed plants to talk to each other, wasn’t it? Solomon distantly remembered the Oracle—the study computer of the Ganymede Training Facility—opening a lesson with the words ‘rhizomes were the basis of all life.’

“When the Ru’at first began their salvation of the galaxy, they soon encountered a problem—”

Good! Solomon didn’t say.

“That of distance. Consider this. Sol’s tenth planet, Eris, lies some fifteen BILLION Confederate-standard kilometers from Earth. A few hours’ hop in one of your jump-vehicles, perhaps, but still all communication you have available to you takes hours to reach the home world.”

So?

“Of course, the Ru’at’s faster-than-light drive—what might translate into human English as a photon wave generator—makes short work of Sol distances, but they are nonetheless staggering.”

Solomon knew what the hologram must be getting at. And the Sol system was only average, a small to medium system floating in the sea of space. The distances to the nearest star of Alpha Centauri and the Confederacy’s most distant colony of Proxima would be many, many times that fifteen billion kilometers.

And as yet, Solomon realized, they hadn’t even begun to discuss how far the Ru’at home world was. It could conceivably be only a little further along in their own spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy, and still it would be impossible, given those sorts of distances, to ever communicate with them.

Well, to communicate, and for a message to reach them at anything under a hundred years or so, Solomon knew. Which he guessed was why the Ru’at had started their invasion process a hundred years ago, with the physical orb-like probe known as ‘The Message.’

“In their superior wisdom, the Ru’at realized that it was impossible to spread their offer of civilization to the rest of the galaxy through the clumsy, and painstakingly slow, habit of negotiation and debate,” the voice said.

“But what they realized was that there was another way.”

Solomon wondered if he really wanted to hear this. Unsurprisingly, it turned out that he didn’t have much choice.

“The idea of sending a representative, or an ambassador, over lifetimes of space just to engage in a futile and shocking negotiation is unproductive,” the voice continued, “especially if we consider the fact that there are many other forms of communication, and data. Biology is communication. So is code. The Ru’at realized that they could send their message of hope to the furthest reaches of the galaxy by encoding it inside one of two types of information: machine language or genetic coding.”

So, that was what this was all about? Solomon thought. Their sending an alien probe to his home world, to alter the very biology of Earth, was the Ru’at version of a hello!?

“I can tell from your facial expressions that you are resistant to this idea. But you will understand its significance shortly. You must stop seeing yourself as an individual homo sapiens, but as a part of a wonderful and rare force. Biology. Life.”

The hologram went on, much to Solomon’s annoyance.

“Life is rarer than you think in the universe. The Ru’at should know. They have done this many times. The Ru’at seek to preserve life itself, and to encourage it. To help it to adapt and grow into the type of organism that can withstand this dangerous cosmic cradle we find ourselves in.”

It was all very well and good. Solomon could have growled if he had any control over his face, but this was all pretty, flowery language and poetry for what was essentially an alien invasion, wasn’t it?

Why didn’t the Ru’at allow humanity to develop on their own? Become their own sort of interstellar organism? What gave the Ru’at the right to act as gods with Earth’s essential genetics?

“As I indicated before, the Ru’at have long debated the merits of using machine code as a form of information, which worked spectacularly well here in Sol, given the uptake in cybernetic technology thanks to the Message. But you—yes, you, H21—are the proof that it is biology itself which will prove the Ru’at’s crowning accomplishment.”

Solomon didn’t want to be anyone’s crowning anything.

“You have marked an epochal shift in Ru’at direction, and quite possibly the future of intelligent civilization throughout this galaxy, at least!”

Yay me, Solomon thought.

“We are remaking your body, H21. The Ru’at are activating your still-as-yet dormant RNA and DNA, as well as eliminating all of the non-essential junk-gene fragments inside of you. You will become a new man, a new being. You will become everything that homo sapiens and the Ru’at were meant to achieve—together!”

What Solomon tried to say but couldn’t, given the alien technology employed against him, was something that would have scorched the air.

“And now, H21, prepare to let go of your previous life and become all that you were meant to be. All that you were designed to be!”

And that was when the pain really began for the genetic experiment known as Solomon Cready.

3

On the Uses of Thermonuclear Devices

The Ru’at jump-ship was heading straight for Jezzy.

She felt her skin inside her power armor clearly drop a degree or two, and all the hairs on her arms and neck stood up. She was more agitated now than she had been when woman-handling a megaton thermonuclear device.

Because if I get this wrong now, then everything that I have tried to do will be for nothing, Jezzy thought. This entire mission that she had coordinated—‘Lifeline,’ as she had optimistically called it—had been about getting much-needed oxygen to their borrowed ship and causing a distraction so they could infiltrate the Martian atmosphere.

And save First Lieutenant Cready, Jezzy knew. Who was still down there, as a captive and hostage of the Ru’at.

“I see you, sucker…” She glared at the object, her earlier agitation transforming perfectly into rage. How dare these things come here, to our solar system, just to frack everything up! What did they want? Resources? Oil? Gold? Food? None of these things made sense when compared with the vast interstellar distances that their ships had to travel, and the advanced technologies they had to employ in order to get here.

Jezzy knew from her astrophysics lessons—just enough to get by, unfortunately—that there had to have been at least a hundred thousand different worlds with those resources before they got to Earth and the Sol System.

So what made Earth different? What made Earth so attractive a target that they would put into place a hundred-year plan to invade it?

Life, obviously.

It was all tied up with the Ru’at cyborgs, wasn’t it? The thoughts flashed through Jezzy’s brain as she searched for the ESR’s weapons.

ESR Mainframe: Offensive Capabilities…

>>> Front-loaded 25mm Heavy Vacuum Rifles x2

“Ridiculous,” she assessed. Although a 25mm shell could be devastating on Earth, in space, it was rare to find any sort of ship with a hull less than 60 or 75mm thick, meaning that the shell had to be going phenomenally fast if you wanted to be able to do some damage.

Either that or have a very lucky shot, because to say that the targeting system in the ESR was basic would be like saying that the Invincible had been a little on the big side.

No, Jezzy knew that the vacuum rifles were mainly installed as a sense of completion for the CMC designers, as well as being able to obliterate smaller amounts of space junk or fire warning shots, not to actually engage in a ship-to-ship battle with a highly advanced alien species.

The ship in question was ominous in its almost featureless hull. Well, devoid of any human-looking features, anyway. Each Ru’at jump-ship appeared exactly the same: a cylinder of dark ochre and black metal with a pointed nosecone and some strange, indented areas along their main hull.

The only features that did stand out, of course, were the three rotating rings around the belly of the craft, made instead of a shinier, obsidian sort of material. Jezzy watched as they rotated slowly with no apparent timing or rhythm between the rings, but she knew that they would rotate quicker and quicker until they blurred into a blackened halo as the strange craft moved faster. They eventually achieved what no human craft ever had: faster than light travel. All human vehicles used a Barr-Hawking jump-drive, and as yet they had been unable to create any material or energy field that could travel as fast as a photon or a neutrino.

These smaller Ru’at jump-ships looked surprisingly different from the mothership that Jezzy had seen in orbit around Proxima. That had been a vast disk, seemingly made of sympathetic machine parts with no external hull or superstructure to speak of. Jezzy remembered being overwhelmed by the apparent miles of churning cogs, pistons, pipes, industrial parts, and crystal cabling as thick as her ESR. If she didn’t know better, she would have said that the mothership bore all the hallmarks of a drone, but these much smaller Ru’at ‘attack’ ships, or ‘jump-ships,’ had solid outer shells that hid whatever machine internals they might have.

However, the rotating rings were at least functionally similar to the particle generators of the Confederacy’s jump-ships. These were small-bodied craft with gigantic rings attached around them, from which fired the four super-massive Barr-Hawking particle generators, thus creating the field. Nearly ninety percent of all Confederate ships did not have their own inbuilt jump drives. Instead, they ‘hitched’ a ride with one of the smaller jump-ships and were pulled along to skip over the surface of spacetime itself.

“But I’ve got something that even you won’t be happy about, I’m sure.” Jezebel Wen, second lieutenant and former Yakuza agent, had a plan. She fired the forward vacuum rifles, already pulling down hard on the right side of the flight controls as she raised the left.

I don’t care if it hits or not, just so long as—

In response to her desperate movements from the piloting chair, the ESR opened ports and fired positional rockets, swerving away from the Ru’at vessel to head deeper into the debris field.

“Come on, come on, my pretty…” Jezzy was surprised at how much she was enjoying this, especially given the fact that she was about to die.

Maybe it’s because it’s just them and me, Jezzy thought. Out here among the stars. We’ll see who’s best. That was the Yakuza training in her talking, she knew.

Unfortunately for Jezebel Wen, the answer to who was the best was undeniably the Ru’at.

She swerved in a wide arc away from the now pursuing Ru’at vessel, only to find a gleam of starlight and a confusing warping effect ahead of her.

The second Ru’at patrol ship had arrived, using its rotating FTL rings to skip just ahead of her position in less time than it took for a heart to beat.

“Dammit!” Jezzy threw the flight controls toward the floor. “Mainframe! Give me maximum thrusters!” she shouted.

ESR Mainframe: Maximum Propellant Load to Main Thrusters.

Jezzy felt a jolt as she was once again thrown back in her seat as the tiny ESR vehicle was thrown forward. Pieces of ruined Confederate craft swept past her hull in a flash of serrated metal, and—

CRAAASH!

ESR Mainframe: Proximity Warning!

ESR Mainframe: Craft Compromised. Hull Damage at Side Plate o7…

The ESR tactical computer wasn’t as fast as what Jezzy was used to. “I know!” she shouted as the octoid orb careened from the impact, sending itself on an erratic course across the debris.

Strangely enough, this misfortune was what saved the craft, and Jezzy within, as a thick line of blue-white fire obliterated the section of metal that she had bounced off. The Ru’at were on the chase, and it looked as though only pure chance was keeping Jezzy alive.

ESR Mainframe: Unknown Craft on Intercept Course!

“Oh, what now!?” Jezzy growled as she swerved to avoid a piece of fuselage. The baleful Red Planet was growing ever larger in front of her. She knew that if she wasn’t careful, she would soon end up approaching atmosphere—and she had no idea how the damaged ESR vehicle could withstand it.

The ‘what now’ had appeared just on the horizon of Mars and was approaching at a blistering speed, its outer rings starting to speed up. It was another Ru’at jump-ship, and it had brought friends.

ESR Mainframe: Unknown Craft on Intercept Course!

ESR Mainframe: Unknown Craft—

The slow ESR tactical computer glitched as it overloaded on the warnings. It was attempting to tell Jezzy that there were in fact three more Ru’at ships arriving, to add to the two already following her.

“Five? How many had first been dispatched from the Ru’at mothership?” she wondered out loud as she randomly threw the ESR into a tailspin. “It hadn’t been a lot! Ten? Twelve!?”

She couldn’t remember. But either way, five ships out of the entire Ru’at fleet was no small achievement.

If she could pull off her game-plan, that was.

Using a variety of random maneuvers, she managed to pull the ESR back into a path toward the center of the wreckage field, where the remnants of the Rapid Response Fleet were the densest and where the hulk of the Invincible could clearly be seen in the background.

The gold and gunmetal pyramid had been pointed down toward the Red Planet, which Jezzy assumed was because of the planetary bombardment it had started. Now, however, it was listing to one side, its emergency power still holding it in a sort of orbit with Mars, but she rather figured that it probably wouldn’t take long before its orbit deteriorated.

Maybe I’m doing Mars a favor, she thought as she raised one hand from the stick and flexed her fingers.

Timer App Downloaded.

Controls: Countdown

Set timer: 5 minutes; 1 minute; 30 seconds; 10 seconds

Lieutenant Wen had a whole heap of controls to choose for when to detonate their jury-rigged nuclear device.

“Ratko, did I ever tell you that you are a genius?” she murmured to the empty cockpit. She concentrated, keeping one eye on the hulk of the Invincible as the Ru’at craft flickered and almost instantaneously shot toward her.

SCREREEAA—

ESR Mainframe: Craft Compromised. Hull Damage at Forward Plate o3…

She was taking heavy flak now, but not from the Ru’at. It was from the many pieces of CMC ships that the Ru’at had destroyed and left lying around.

Timer App:

10 Seconds?

“No,” Jezzy said. There wasn’t any time. She slid Ratko’s app slider all the way to the start of the app visible on her heads-up display.

Timer App:

3 Seconds?

Initiate: Y/N?

Y.

“Let’s see how advanced you are now, Ru’at suckers!” Jezzy said as the counter clicked, and she threw the ESR into a tight turn—

2…

1…

The expanding globe of white light that started near the nose ‘tip’ of the Invincible was incandescent, exponential, and unstoppable.

4

Naked Opportunity

BWAAAARM!

Solomon’s eyes twitched awake with the sudden imposition of an alarm. It was one of the Ru’at alarms, he knew. The Outcast Company lieutenant had heard the likes of it before when he had attempted to flee this place with Kol and the others.

“What— Where— How…” he murmured. He was still alive. Somehow.

And he wasn’t in agony anymore. In fact, the young man was surprised to realize that he felt pretty good.

BWAAAARM!

The bright light in his eyes flickered, shutting off for the briefest of moments and plunging Solomon into darkness before re-igniting, but at a much more subdued level.

Solomon raised his head to see that he was in a perfectly round room with steel walls and what would have been a glowing white ceiling. Just like the judgment chamber, he thought. He attempted to push himself up but realized he couldn’t.

“What?” His wrists and ankles were still restrained. He was able to look down the length of his body to see that he was lying with his back on a stainless steel ‘plate,’ and that each of his limbs were locked to the cold metal by magnet bracelets.

He was also naked, which was slightly disconcerting to see, as he was sure that he had come into this room clothed.

And also bleeding and about to die, of course, but still, Solomon didn’t like the idea of waking up naked in an alien environment. “What did you do to me?” he murmured, raising his head as much as he was able to see his chiseled and defined chest, his long and lithe arms. Was it his eyes, or could he see marks on his body?

He could. There was a very faint network of reddish lines zigzagging across his body like he was one huge, crazy, biological jigsaw. The lines were very faint, like scratches, and just slightly shiny, like scars.

Eurgh, no! Solomon thought suddenly. Was he looking at the evidence of the Ru’ats surgeries? Wasn’t that precisely what the hologram had told him—that the Ru’at were planning to ‘make him anew’?

“What did you do to me…” Solomon said in horror, and then louder, “What did you do to me!?”

BWAAAARM!

The colony’s alarm blared once more from hidden speakers, and in its wake was a dull hum as a door opened, and in walked the form of the ‘human friendly’ hologram of an aging man with white hair and a silver-white encounter suit.

He doesn’t look like a hologram, Solomon thought. But then again, maybe this was all a part of the Ru’at’s attempt to calm him down.

“The procedure hasn’t taken. There has been a complication,” the man said. For the first time ever, Solomon thought he saw the man frown. He gestured with his hands, and over his shoulder swept into the room a floating device that made Solomon’s heart jump. It was one of the Ru’at orbs, what appeared to be a floating drone sphere of steel with no visible system of propulsion, with a line inscribing its circumference that shone a brilliant blue-white.

Solomon gulped. He had one of these orbs in his old clothes. It was smashed and broken, and he’d hoped to deliver it to General Asquew for her team to analyze. They were also capable of the most unbelievable of things. Not only could they float seemingly without thrusters, rotors, turbines, wings, or rockets—gravitonic technology? Magnetics? Solomon’s intelligence-gathering mind wondered—but they could also create waves of invisible force strong enough to pick you up and throw you around. Solomon knew this only too well, as the broken orb had done just that to him on more than one occasion already.

“Yes.” Solomon saw the ‘human friendly’ man nod as if to the orb itself and answer an unheard question. “Subject H21 still has his human culture personality accretions. We will need to repeat the process,” the man said, his eyes scanning Solomon’s body as if studying it for signs of infection.

But it was what the small Ru’at orb did that really freaked First Lieutenant Cready out. It bobbed forward through the air until it was hovering almost directly over his head and started to lower itself, revolving slightly so that its line of blue-white fire was brilliant and all-encompassing in Solomon’s eyes.

“No! Wait! What are you doing? Get that thing away from me!” Solomon shouted, and tried to thrash and move his limbs. It was useless. The magnets were too powerful even for his enhanced genetics.

“You still have your Confederate personality substrate in place, H21. The Ru’at will remove it for you,” the man said seriously as the blue-white glare almost blinded Solomon.

And the Outcast Marine started to feel a pain, entering right into the middle of his forehead.

“Can I trust you?” a much younger Solomon Cready asked his accomplice.

“Of course, Sol. Why would you even ask that?” the figure laughed, turning around for the moon and star light to illuminate his youthful face.

It was Matthias Sozer, of course.

Matthias—or Matty to his friends—was a few years older than the teenaged Solomon—or Sol—but the pair seemed to have hit it off. The night air around them was still, save for the bark of a fox somewhere on the edge of AgroMore’s farmlands. Behind them, the lane swept down to the giant wheat fields, illuminated by nighttime floodlights. And in their center was one of the tall harvester ‘towers,’ stationary and unmoving.

The AgroMore harvesters moved slowly during the day, gathering up the ripened wheat and separating it into wheat and chaff in one of its many tiered levels.

But Sol had only had a passing interest in the industrial quirks of the device. He had dared himself to climb right to the very top, all the way up to where it was said that the agricultural company had its secret laboratories.

It did, in fact, have laboratories up there, but the young Solomon, many, many years before ever hearing about the Ru’at or the Message, didn’t think that what he had seen had been that secretive.

It had just been large beds of hydroponically-sprouted crop trials, all contained in their own growing units and held at various stages of growth under red, yellow, or blue lights.

As far as risky adventures had gone, the climb up several stories had been exhilarating, but the final reveal had been disappointing. At least to his young eyes, anyway. It would be almost a decade before Solomon would think again about those beds of sprouting crops and start to wonder.

But what Solomon had been surprised to find was the one thing that he had never had: a friend.

“Yeah, well, I saw you climbing it, and then I heard on the scanner that the Enforcers would be doing a patrol of the area soon.” Sozer shrugged as he trudged a meter or so ahead of Solomon. He paused and looked back at his younger friend. “I was impressed. Not many kids would dare a climb that high.”

“Did you?” Solomon asked, still a little intimidated by the older, tougher, and much cooler boy.

“Did I what—climb it?” Matty chuckled and shook his head. “Yeah. Summer before last.” The youth looked speculatively at Solomon. “I was probably about your age.”

There wasn’t much to do in the small Midwestern company town in the American Confederacy. The summers were long, and the days were filled with the hum and whine of AgroMore’s machinery, plowing their way across the horizon. It was natural for two misfits like Matty and Sol to fall in with each other.

BWAAR! BWAAAAR! The flashing blue lights and the sirens were getting closer. The younger Solomon froze. The Confederate Enforcers were heading down the access road that linked up to the interstate on the other side of AgroMore’s land. It was the very same road that their lane met up with.

Had they been spotted? Solomon’s eyes darted to the scruffy hedges and the occasional, shrubby sort of tree. It was still night, but the sky was a pale, silvery blue from the stars and the gibbous moon above. It wouldn’t take a lot for them to be spotted.

What’s the penalty for trespass, again? Solomon asked himself.

“They’ve spotted us,” Solomon said as he watched the approaching lights, getting brighter and brighter in his eyes. He was certain of it.

BWAR! BWAAAR!

“No way. Two small blips on the side of the harvester? No way they spotted us,” Matty said with a laugh.

“But AgroMore might have had internal security cameras,” the younger Solomon pointed out, earning a sharp look from Matty.

“True, I guess. Look. I know how to deal with the Enforcers. We’ll stay out of the way, but if they get close to us, let me do the talking, alright?” said the youth who would become Solomon’s lifelong friend, ally, and criminal accomplice—as well as the one person who would eventually betray him the worst.

“Can I trust you?” Solomon asked again. This time, he couldn’t see Matty’s shaded face as the older boy turned to look at him.

“Yeah, I told you, Solomon. You’ll always be able to trust me.” Matty’s voice was low and insistent.

BWAAR—

BWAAAARM!

“—get away from me!” Solomon attempted to kick as the Ru’at orb lowered to an inch or so above his forehead.

Solomon couldn’t have been more surprised when the lights flickered again, and the colony sirens went off in a constant barrage. The Ru’at orb abruptly dropped from its position to smack him in the center of the forehead and bounce off the table, its blue-white light off.

Huh?

BWAAARM!

“I don’t understand…” the human-friendly man said, a look of incomprehension on his face. Solomon saw him tug at his sleeve and raise a hand to the side of his head. There, Solomon saw, was a sleek black implant, like a round piece of black glass.

“A magnetic disturbance?” Solomon overheard the man say, and, “An EMP attack? Reserve systems, immediately!”

BWAARM!

Without explanation, the man turned and ran through the open door, leaving Solomon and the orb in the room and the door open. Solomon realized two things in that very instant: that the man’s boots made a noise on the gunmetal of the floor—meaning that he almost certainly wasn’t a hologram—and that the locks holding his limbs in place had de-magnetized.

An EMP, Solomon thought. An electromagnetic pulse. Clouds of chain-reaction particles that destabilized electronic systems in the blast radius. The lieutenant knew this because he had read the specs on several such weapons that the Confederate Marine Corps had at its disposal, ranging from ‘briefcase bombs’ that could be infiltrated into an installation and detonated to kill all security measures, to the sorts of low-orbit fission devices that not only created vast amounts of heat and light, but could also ruin a satellite network.

“Someone’s knocked out the Ru’at colony.” Solomon’s mood shifted from bleak to hilarity in seconds. It had to be General Asquew, it just had to be! Solomon knew that the First Rapid Response Fleet above them was on the run—he had flown through the battle—but Asquew herself must have arrived to liberate Mars!

“We’re going to be free!” he said, pulling the weak magnetic force apart as he stumbled off the metal bed and slapped cold feet on the floor.

“Only I really could do with some clothes about now…” Solomon remembered that he was still naked and covered with the thin red lines where the Ru’at had done…whatever it was that they had done to him.

“Breathe. Center yourself.” Solomon’s nudity was not a thing that bothered him at the moment. It was probably the fact that he was still very much a hostage of an alien super power, but also slightly because of the fact that, back in his old life in New Kowloon, Earth, there had been many times when he had to come up with quick solutions in uncompromising situations.

What do I have? Solomon catalogued.

“Well, certainly not my pride,” he muttered, until his eyes fell on the motionless, silent, dark Ru’at orb. He snatched it up and padded silently to the door.

Outside was a short corridor that ended at a T-junction. The entire colony appeared to be made of the same gray metal, meaning that the walls and floors were freezing now that the power had been turned off. The usually glowing white ceiling that provided the light was now a dull, weakened haze.

“Get to the air filters!” he heard someone shout as a white-suited woman ran past the end of the corridor. They didn’t even spare a look in his direction. It had to be one of the brainwashed Chosen of Mars, who had come here thinking that the Ru’at would give the Red Planet its independence.

But their loyalty had just turned into a new sort of slavery, this time to a different, alien god.

Solomon saw what he needed to do. He moved down the short corridor, seeing that there were viewing plates in the steel walls looking into other rooms.

Inside were people rising from low steel benches, their shackles having fallen off, shaking their heads in wonder.

“Kol! Mariad, Ochrie!” Solomon hissed into the viewing plates at the people that he had come here with. Rather disturbingly, he noticed that his friends were also all clothed.

Wow. Thanks, Ru’at, he thought dismally as he tapped on the plate and indicated that the door had to be open. “No power!” He mouthed the words, hoping that the ex-Outcast Marine on the other side would understand. Kol took one look at him and nodded, running to the door to start pushing and pressing against it until, with a creak of resistant metal, the door started to slide up.

“Morning, Lieutenant. You always sleep in the buff?” Kol said as soon as he had scrabbled under the door.

“Occupational hazard,” Solomon said in a disgruntled fashion as he indicated that they had to get the doors open to the next two rooms, where the ambassador and the imprimatur were currently banging on the metal.

Kol immediately set to work, heaving and sliding the doors up as Solomon ghosted to the end of the corridor and awaited the sound of approaching feet—

“Lieutenant?” he heard Maraid say with great puzzlement in her voice.

“New Ru’at breeding program,” Kol snickered beside her.

“No, not that! I mean, what are all those marks all over his body?” Solomon tried his best to ignore them as he was rewarded by the heavy stamp of feet. He stepped out just in front of the running, brainwashed Martian, lifting his hands.

“Hi. I am a fully naked man,” Solomon said.

The Martian’s sudden confusion hit him like a cold fish to the face.

Thwack! Solomon’s arm snapped out, viper-quick, to crack the Martian around the side of the head with the powered-down Ru’at orb. The Martian went down with a small sigh, and Solomon busily got to work undressing him.

“Good job, sir. No one wants to see that,” Kol said, earning a withering stare from the lieutenant.

Solomon searched the man’s pockets and utility belt at the same time as stealing his encounter suit. The white and silver jumpsuit was too large for him, but with some heavy cinching at the waist and cuffs, he managed to make himself look slightly less like a balloon. Added to this new look were an oversized pair of boots and a belt with a collection of small tools—everything from wire snips to amp-meters.

And one small handheld device that, if Solomon didn’t know any better, looked suspiciously like a gun.

“Now we’re talking!” Solomon said, raising the thing to sight down its barrel.

The weapon was a little smaller than a Marine service pistol, with a handle and a button for a trigger. It didn’t apparently have any ammo clips, but instead had two tiny coils of a crystal lattice behind transparent plates on the body of the weapon. When Solomon examined the barrel, he saw that it was bulkier than any projectile weapon and was made up of small obsidian rings, ending around a tiny silver orb.

“Huh?”

“Sir, that looks a little like—” Kol started to say as Solomon fired.

FZZT! A pencil-thin beam of white-blue light shot out the end and exploded into sparks on the opposite wall. It left a blackened soot mark where it had hit, a smell of burning ozone in everyone’s nostrils, and a tiny. running line of molten metal at the heart of the strike.

“A Ru’at particle-beam weapon.” Solomon started to grin very widely indeed. “Let’s see if we can find a few more for the rest of you, shall we?” Solomon nodded in the direction that the man had run from, and the four set off at speed. Above their heads, the lights flickered and the colony sirens continued to blare.

BWAAAARM!

5

Distractive Technologies

ESR Mainframe: Proximity Warning!

ESR Mainframe: Craft Compromised. Hull Damage at…

The bubble of metal that Second Lieutenant Wen was currently trapped inside shook and bounced. Its console screens glitched and its speakers blurted out multiple warnings, speaking over each other as the system tried to come to terms with what was happening to it.

Emergency Service Rafts were built to withstand the hazards of space travel—everything from being hit by space debris, to the heat of reentry, to a planet’s atmosphere.

But Jezzy was seriously worried whether the thing could withstand a nuclear shockwave.

The shell of white exploded from just under the tip of the pyramid that was the Invincible. In awful detail, Jezzy saw the metal skin ripple up the length of the once-proud craft as the invisible line of force swept ahead of the expanding white globe.

Jezzy saw all the near fragments of the debris field wobble and shake as the invisible field swept over them, and then it hit her speeding craft. It was like some angry god had used the ESR as a soccer ball and kicked it with all their might.

Jezzy spun. She shook. She tried to use the ESR’s stabilizers and positional rockets, but the craft was swinging around so fast that it was impossible to know which direction to fire them in. All she could do was hold on and hope that she wasn’t slammed into the side of some bit of dead CMC ship large enough to crack the ESR like an egg.

Incoming Transmission: Gold Channel

SENDER: Corporal Malady

“Lieutenant, this is Corporal Malady on board the Marine scout. Lieutenant, come in,” the full tactical man-golem managed to sound at least a little perturbed by the situation. Which was a seismic change compared to his usually austere and soporific tones.

“I’m here, Malady. Course heading twenty degrees off Mars elliptic… No, wait, forty-five degrees… Now heading poleward, ah…” Jezzy tried to read out her positioning, but the way that the compromised ESR was performing made it incredibly difficult. “Malady, have you got Ratko? Did you get the oxygen?”

“All present and correct, sir—apart from you,” Malady informed her. “We have you on scanners. We’re coming for you.”

“No! Don’t get any closer to the blast!” Jezzy said.

“We are far enough out not to— SCHZZZZKT!” The message suddenly glitched out, and Jezzy just had to pray that it was because the signal had been disrupted by the nuke’s EMP. All nuclear devices also created an EMP effect, she knew. Back in the bad old days before the unified Confederate Earth, Jezzy knew that the nations of the world had spent inordinate amounts of time researching the effects of firing nuclear bombs in the upper atmosphere of their very own planet, just so they could measure the effects of the subsequent EMP blast on towns below and satellites above.

The ESR swung and shook once again, and a resounding CRASH turned the craft around completely so that she was facing backwards from the Invincible’s blast.

The shockwave had disrupted the wreckage field around the Red Planet, and Jezzy could see the tiny flares like fireworks as pieces were dragged into the pull of planetfall. Luckily, most of them would burn up before they got anywhere near the surface of Mars and the Martian Habitat bubbles below. She hoped.

But what was even more terribly entrancing was the expanding ball of white that was growing above Mars. It hurt her eyes to even look at it, but Jezzy couldn’t look away. She wondered if this was what looking into the face of God was like.

How big was that bomb? she wondered as the white ball kept on growing larger and larger, wider and wider. It looked too big to be a ‘simple’ nuke—not that nukes were ever that simple.

Are nuclear explosions bigger in space? Was it something about the vacuum that accelerated their growth and destructive potential?

The Ru’at, she thought. They had been gaining on her, following her as she had sought to swerve them toward the Invincible. Had she managed it? Were they now caught up in that ball of white light out there?

Jezzy hoped so. If there was anything that she would like to have as her epitaph, managing to destroy half the fleet of an advanced alien super civilization would be quite a fitting one.

“Well, I guess it sure was a distraction, all right…” Jezzy murmured to herself as the ESR shook and wobbled.

“You’re telling me! Hell, even I’m distracted!” came the voice of the very cantankerous but apparently very elated Corporal Ratko.

“Corporal! Report! How come I can hear you? Didn’t the nuke’s EMP knock out our shortwave communications?” Jezzy was surprised.

“It did, but long story short, I’m a damned genius. I bounced the ship’s signal off the largest reflective bits of wreckage to get to you. Your receivers aren’t picking up a band of information; they’re getting a pinpoint strike of radio waves!” Ratko said.

“I have no idea what you just said, Ratko, but I am very glad that you did whatever it was you just did,” Jezzy breathed.

“We’re coming in on your planetward side. We’ll get you out of there in no time, sir,” Ratko said, and Jezzy thought that was going to be the end of the conversation, until she heard her diminutive corporal take a breath.

“Sir, there’s something else that you should probably know as well,” she said.

Oh no. Jezzy sighed. “Go ahead, Ratko. Hit me.”

“Well, it’s about that pretty ball of light that you’re looking at.” Ratko sounded a little embarrassed.

“Do I really want to know this, Corporal?” Jezzy said.

“Probably not. But my analysis shows that it’s got far more combustive force than any normal, singular warhead should have.”

“I was beginning to think the same, actually. What’s causing it?”

“Well, maybe we should have moved the armed and primed device before we set it off,” Ratko said.

“Why? I don’t see— Oh.” Jezzy remembered where they had found the ISBM—or InterStellar Ballistic Missile—in the forward munitions locker, where all the other Priority One weapons were kept.

“All those nukes,” Jezzy whispered in horror. The locker hadn’t been large, not as large as the Invincible’s forward guns would have been. Jezzy tried to remember how many missile cubicles or silos she had run past on her way out. Three? Four? Six?

Even at its lowest estimate, that would still be four times the distraction she had been hoping for.

“And so, Lieutenant,” Ratko went on, “the upshot of that is that we’ve probably killed all of the facing hemisphere of Mars’s electronics. An EMP that big might even knock out an entire planetary communication grid.”

But Jezzy wasn’t unhappy or shocked by this news at all. In fact, that was the very best thing she had heard all day.

“You know what, Corporal Ratko? I think you’ve just delivered the distraction we were looking for.” Jezzy grinned as the thin envelope of metal she was inside shook.

6

Escape Velocity

“Kol, you know this place,” Solomon whispered. “Which way is out?”

The Outcast lieutenant was currently pressed against one of the metal walls, a few inches away from the junction that connected to a much wider avenue inside the Ru’at colony. The lights were still flickering and dim, but at least someone had managed to turn off the siren. Other white and silver suited Martians were running back and forth, and First Lieutenant Cready could hear them shouting.

“Get reserve power to the air filters!”

“Make sure the airlocks are on automatic shutdown!”

“Bring that emergency battery pack up here!”

And each and every command or suggestion was met by the singular, repeated phrase that was really starting to get on Solomon’s nerves.

“Ru’at hails you.”

It was like a benediction as well as a greeting, as well as the colony equivalent of ‘aye-aye, sir,’ as if the humans here thought that their Ru’at masters were gods for their little world. Solomon found himself surprised to see that despite that these Chosen of Mars were entirely brainwashed, or hypnotized, it didn’t stop them from acting fast in an emergency.

He cursed. He was kind of hoping they would be at least a little dopey, which would give them the advantage.

“Straight across will take you to an airlock.” Kol nodded across the avenue where the embattled Martians raced and ran. “But down there…” He nodded down the length of the avenue to where it met a much larger bulkhead. “Down there is the garage. There’s rovers and transport craft we could use.”

Solomon growled slightly under his breath. He was the only one who was wearing one of the Martian encounter suits, with its blow-up bubble mask in the collar and a pretty basic air filter. He might be able to survive out there on the Martian atmosphere, but the rest of them wouldn’t.

And it would be risky getting three more encounter suits. Solomon’s command training kicked in.

Identify the risks…

Identify the capabilities…

He knew that stealing three Martian encounter suits would probably be less risky than hijacking an entire rover, but once they were out of the shell of the colony, they would have a long walk to the nearest habitat.

“A rover would get there faster,” he thought, looking down the avenue to the distant bulkhead. But that would mean walking past however many fanatically loyal Martians along the way.

Which was a risk that they couldn’t avoid, anyway. He nodded to himself, turning quickly to the others. “Rhossily, you’re in front, then Kol, then the ambassador, and then me. I want you all to keep your wrists together and down in front of you, like they are magnetized. Shuffle. Don’t walk. You’re going to be my prisoners from here on out.” Solomon was the only one wearing a Martian encounter suit, and as soon as he pulled the release valve at the collar, his face was kinda obscured by the thick memory-plastic that rolled over his head.

Solomon lowered the Martian laser pistol in his hands and gestured. “Move it, schlubs,” he said grimly.

“You don’t have to sound like you’re enjoying it this much…” he heard Kol mutter as Mariad was the first to step out into the avenue and the running bodies of the Ru’at colony.

Who paid her no apparent mind, as they were panicking to keep the colony’s essential systems online after the EMP.

“Keep on walking,” Solomon hissed as the Imprimatur of Proxima stumbled, keeping her head low as she avoided all eye contact. The Martian bodies ran past her, brushing her shoulder with their own.

“Out the way! Out the way!” someone was shouting as a trio of white-suited colonists ran down the avenue, pushing a large trolley with what looked to be stacks of reserve battery-servers.

“Get back! You heard them!” Solomon wasted no time snarling at them all as they scattered to one side.

“Ru’at hails you!” someone else was shouting amidst the confusion. A black-haired Martian woman in a white and silver encounter suit was pointing a finger at them from across the corridor.

Oh frack! Solomon’s finger hovered over the trigger button. He didn’t know enough about the colony culture to determine if this woman held a higher rank than him or not, or even if any of the humans even had ranks.

“Ru’at hails you?” he hazarded the response.

A small nod in response from his opposite number. “Where are you taking those prisoners? We don’t have time to concern ourselves with them. The power surge overloaded main servers two, three, and four!” she said imperiously.

Solomon might not know anything about this woman, but he recognized the air of assumed importance. It was the same sort of small-minded self-importance that Warden Coates had exhibited all the time.

“These are high-level prisoners, ma’am,” Solomon said with a deferential bob of his head. “The Ru’at commands they be kept safe.”

At the mention of their shared alien masters, the woman blinked a little, and then nodded. “As the Ru’at wills,” she said, and Solomon echoed her closing remark.

“Okay, that was too close,” Solomon hissed to his charges, and then in a louder, more confident voice, “Pick up the pace, NOW!”

It seemed that even fewer Martians paid attention to them when Solomon was treating his prisoners like dirt, so Solomon wasted no time in barking and cajoling them with threats as they walked stridently down the avenue.

The larger bulkhead joined a crossroads of corridors with yet more people and trolleys running back and forth. Someone had managed to return power to at least this section of the colony. The lights here were bright and white, but they still flickered a little, if Solomon looked.

“Left.” Kol stumbled into Mariad in front of him, and she led their group across the busy intersection to a wide, fat corridor with a door on either side.

“Right door,” Kol hissed again as they stepped toward it to see that it was wide enough for two people to comfortably walk in. Through the door plate, Solomon could make out a collection of both large and small Martian rovers on their long spindle-axles and six ‘bubble’ wheels designed for navigating the many rocks and craters of the Red Planet’s hostile terrain.

Except the door was locked.

“Dammit!” Solomon whispered in alarm. There was a keypad beside the door, but that wouldn’t work now that the power was down, would it?

The power is down. Of course. Solomon raised his pistol and fired point-blank into the keypad. There was a loud boom and a shower of sparks as the keypad burst open, spilling its wires like guts, and the door opened a few inches.

“Solomon!” Rhossily hissed. His extreme actions had brought shocked expressions from the nearby Martians, but it appeared that no one stepped out of their way to reprimand him.

“These are extreme times,” Solomon grunted, nodding at Kol and Mariad. “Right! Hold that door open—now!” His insistent bark of disdain at his ‘prisoners’ earned him the nonchalance of the Martians around him, as Kol and Mariad rushed to heave at the door and force it to creak back into the walls.

Clank-clank-clank.

A new sound met Solomon’s ears. It was different from the thuds and patters of the Martians’ boots. This was the uniform, regimented slaps of metal feet on metal floors. Solomon knew precisely what it was as he turned to look back the way they had come.

There, over the jostling heads and shoulders of the frantic Martians, was a small contingent of Ru’at-human cyborgs. It seemed that they were still functional, Solomon thought dismally. And in their midst, right in the middle of their murderous company, marched the clone of Augustus Tavin.

They were still tens of meters away, but the two clones locked eyes over the seething mass of panicked people.

“Move it, now!” Solomon said, raising his pistol.

“STOP THEM!” Tavin’s fine features twisted in rage as he bellowed down the corridor, raising not a gun but a finger to point at Solomon and the others.

FZT! Solomon fired. He had been a fairly decent shot even before his Outcast training on Ganymede, and now he had both military expertise and an enhanced genetic code.

Solomon’s rear leg swept back as he turned his shoulder, holding the pistol in both hands as he sighted down the ridiculously small barrel and fired.

The shot burned past the racing Martians, exploiting a fraction of a gap between them.

But Augustus Tavin was also one of the Ru’at clones. He also had an enhanced genetic structure. In split-second timing, Solomon saw the man starting to duck, and the shot that should have burned a hole right between his eyes instead only glanced along his temple and ear.

“Ach!” With a gasp of pain and a spurt of blood, Tavin was thrown sideways to the floor. Solomon had no idea whether he had killed him, and if he had any thought that the cyborgs would stop operating without Tavin or would pause to tend to their group leader, then he had been wrong.

The cyborgs were already raising their own particle-beam weapon-hands, and, unlike Solomon, they fired indiscriminately at anything between them and their target.

Martians screamed and hit the deck, either that or were thrown into the air, their fragile bodies blown apart by the cyborg’s weapons.

“Don’t hang around, boss!” Kol shouted, grabbing the lieutenant by the front of his encounter suit and dragging him into the garage as blue-white bolts of fire shot past Solomon’s shoulder.

“Why on earth did you fire on him! You idiot!” Rhossily was shouting as soon as the two men stumbled into the room.

The garage for the Ru’at colony was, for all intents and purposes, a hangar, Solomon saw, but one whose main body was given over to terrestrial vehicles. They stumbled down a set of metal stairs to where the different sizes of Martian rovers—tall, boxy cab-units suspended over six wheels with independent axle control—were kept. Solomon noted that all of them had the sword and red orb that was the insignia of the Red Planet, indicating that they must have been stolen from whatever Martian Habitat they had come from.

The entire far wall was a large airlock-gate, and it was here that Kol had already sprinted to, trying to get the door working.

“There’s no power, remember?” Solomon yelled. “We’ll have to blast our way out…” His words faltered as his gaze took in the far side of the room, where the wall was made of one entirely clear viewing plate.

And on the other side were rows and rows of Ru’at ships, and each one was lying on its side.

Huh?

“I can get the hydraulics to release, but the outer airlock won’t automatically depressurize. Once we’re in and close this door behind us…” Kol was saying. He had managed to get one of the wall units to open, exposing pipes and pistons and large, red-handled levers. He pulled this down with a heavy thunk, and the large airlock-gate started to rise on its mechanical, rather than electronic, pistons.

FZZT! FZT! Solomon flinched as lines of cyborg fire hit the door, and the sounds of shrieking outside intensified. The lieutenant was already moving toward the nearest rover—can’t be picky in times of alien invasion—but his mind was still pulling at what he had seen in the Ru’at hangar next door.

The ships were lying on their side like discarded coffee cups, Solomon thought as he jumped the short ladder to the cab above. Why? It didn’t make sense to dock them like that, so there must have been another explanation. They had looked as if they had fallen, or were lifeless—

Just like the Ru’at drone in my pocket, he thought as his hands closed around the metal orb there.

The door to the cab, thankfully, operated similarly to the mechanical hydraulics and pistons of the airlock-gate. Solomon knew from his time on Ganymede—which was a mere scattering of mechanical and engineering training compared to Kol, who had once been their technical specialist—that most vehicles on hostile-environment planets had both electrical and mechanical fail-safes. Which meant that their essential doors and ports could be operated by cranking handles and levers. Within heartbeats, he had the door open and was helping Ochrie and Mariad inside before joining them in the cramped space.

The Martian rover was designed just as a transport and courier vehicle, although Solomon rather thought that they must be like the Ford pickups of old Earth—able to be modified and retrofitted to almost any use. Solomon found himself sitting in one of two high piloting chairs, until the imprimatur gave a loud snort of disgust from behind him.

“Do you even know how to drive one of these things?” Rhossily asked.

“Do you?” Solomon retorted. Up ahead, the door had finally raised enough for them to drive in, and Kol was already racing to the inside of the airlock to prepare to close it behind them. No one wanted a massive blowout that would send them flying over the Martian landscape…

“Actually, yes! Now move over, Lieutenant.” Mariad was already rising from the bench of seats at the back she had shared with the ambassador to clamber into the driver’s seat. Solomon climbed into the back to lean out of the cab and point his gun back at the garage door.

With a heavy bounce and a jostle that almost set Solomon on his backside, Mariad Rhossily had the rover moving forward, its large wheels managing to screech as she threw it into a tight turn and into the airlock.

FZZT! A cyborg appeared at the door to the garage, its weapon-arm already raised.

But Solomon fired first. He had been anticipating this and despite the bouncing rover, he managed to score a hit. He had been aiming for the head and neck, but the crazy suspension of the rover jostled his arm, and instead the line of blue fire slammed into the thing’s midriff.

CRUNCH! It flung against the opposite wall, its chest now a smoking ruin.

“Holy frack!” Solomon looked at the little pistol. Was that the answer to the unstoppable cyborgs? Use their own weaponry against them?

BANG! The rover shuddered and skidded to one side, even as it crossed into the airlock, when one of its six tires blew. What? It was another cyborg at the garage door, already tracking its weapon toward them.

FZT! FZT! Solomon fired the Ru’at pistol, feathering the firing button so that it produced multiple shots like darts of glowing white plasma rather than one continuous line of light.

Most of the laser shots hit the doorjamb and the wall, leaving scorch marks and bubbling metal, but at least two hit the thing’s legs, sending it crashing to the ground.

“Kol, get in!” Solomon shouted.

“Someone needs to operate the manual de-pressure procedure!” Kol shouted back. Already the airlock gate behind the rover was sliding down under Kol’s direction. As the heavy metal eclipsed his view, Sol saw another shape emerge in the garage door. It was the stumbling, half-crouched form of none other than Augustus Tavin, one hand held to the side of his face as he screamed.

“There they are! They’re getting away!”

Solomon took aim…just as the airlock-gate slid to a halt in front of them.

“Dammit!” Solomon cursed. He didn’t know whether it would have made any difference in killing Tavin, as he was a clone and surely the Ru’at would just build another one, but the ex-thief knew that he would have felt mighty good about doing it. “Kol! Get your behind in here, now!” he shouted.

“De-pressure, sir!” Kol reminded him.

“Fool,” Solomon hissed as he swung himself out from the cab and jumped to the airlock floor to run to where Kol was. “I’m the one wearing the encounter suit. You get in there now!” he ordered, and was surprised when Kol obeyed him.

“These levers and that wheel, sir!” Kol pointed to the exposed mechanical controls as he ran for the rover. Solomon quickly got to work, slamming the wide-handled levers down to hear the ground and walls shudder as exit valves were opened and the air started to flood out of the airlock.

Next came the wheel, a blue-gray industrial shape that looked as though no one had touched it for years. Usually, Solomon knew that airlocks were run on an automated basis—they detected the suit signals entering or leaving, and then they proceeded to perform whatever task was necessary, pumping the atmosphere out of the space or in. But, as with the Martian rover and other terrestrial vehicles in hostile environment worlds, airlocks usually had a manual option. By turning the wheel, he would crank open the filters and valves between the inside of this room and the Martian climate outside.

“Rargh!” Solomon heaved at the wheel, and it started to slowly move a centimeter, and then a little more. What the man didn’t know was only his enhanced genetics had allowed him to even get this far. His Ru’at DNA activated and sent adrenaline through his system, as well as a much more efficient synthesis of nutrients and proteins.

Thud-thud-thud. The inner door started to shake with muffled explosions, and Solomon guessed it had to be the cyborgs on the far side trying to get at them. Even as he watched, he saw several small patches of the inner airlock gate start to lighten in color, turning from dark blue-gray to a lighter blue, then silver, and then warm to a super-heated red.

“They’re burning through!” Solomon shouted, forgetting that he didn’t have the others on his more familiar Gold Channel. He hoped that they could hear him anyway as he threw himself at the wheel and pulled. He could feel all the muscles in his back tightening and stretching, before suddenly the airlock filled with steam and condensation as Solomon broke the seal and the outer airlock door started to rise.

Got it! The lieutenant couldn’t see how close the cyborgs were to burning their way through the airlock, but they would be in for a surprise when they did, as they would effectively perforate the Ru’at colony! Solomon ran for the cab as the rear engines roared and the cab bounced, starting to roll forward.

“Get in, get in!” he heard the dim, muffled shout of Kol, leaning out of the cab and holding out a hand as Solomon vaulted up, to be grabbed by the traitor to the Outcast marines and dragged inside, the cab door slamming and auto-locking behind them.

“Buckle up if you can, ladies and gentlemen. This isn’t going to be scenic,” the Imprimatur of Proxima growled as she kicked down on the foot pedals and the Mars rover surged forward, scraping the roof of its cab across the bottom of the rising door as it bounced into the burnt landscape of the Red Planet outside.

We did it. We escaped. We survived. Solomon braced himself against the door and one of the pilot’s chairs as Kol took his seat beside Mariad up front. He had once been a technical specialist, so Solomon didn’t begrudge having all the expertise up front.

But how far can we run? Solomon’s command-strategy mind was already calculating. And how long can we survive?

7

Master Command Function

“Where am I heading?” Mariad shouted over the chug and whine of the rover.

These things are about as comfortable as if we had chosen a catapult for a mode of transport, Solomon groaned inwardly. No, in fact, a catapult would have been more comfortable. He had no comprehension how Kol could look so calm in his seat, gazing out of the viewing windows in front and to the side as he jostled and jumped, narrowly missing banging his head on the metal ceiling.

Bleeding Martians, First Lieutenant Cready was inclined to say, but he didn’t. He rather thought that they would all need some of that Martian grit before they were free.

“Wait up, wait up, let me see…” Kol was looking out the windows. “We came down in the northern hemisphere, just past Syrtis Planitia…”

Meanwhile, Solomon craned his neck to look through the viewing porthole. Outside, the landscape of Mars wasn’t red, but it was hellish. It was a mixture of ochre oranges, yellows, and browns with black rocks scattered everywhere.

And craters… Solomon was suddenly thrown into the air as Mariad forced the rover across the edge of a not very large one, but with only five of its six ‘legged’ wheels available, it bounced.

“Ach!” Solomon hit the floor heavily, smacking his knees.

“Sorry! No time for safe driving!” Rhossily called out from the front, earning another disgruntled growl from the lieutenant behind. The imprimatur had to turn the vehicle to avoid the next crater, and as she did, the sight of the Ru’at colony came into view.

It was a gleaming silver edifice that rose higher and higher to a silver-steel spike right in its heart. It spread out across the Martian surface like some sort of sea creature, with long, shining steel arms punctured by the dark shapes of airlocks.

It may have looked beautiful, but for Solomon, it made him sick. But he had no time for such worries as his mind churned over what he had seen. The fallen Ru’at jump-ships. Like they were discarded, useless, broken.

Solomon drew out the Ru’at orb from his pocket, finding it just as lifeless as the ships.

“It lost power when the EMP struck,” Solomon muttered. “But this thing wasn’t plugged into any power source…” He had thought that they must run on their own internal power source—and maybe they did—but somehow, the wave of electrons fired from the EMP—and whoever fired it, he thought—had caused it to lose all function.

I wonder… Solomon frowned deeply. “Kol? You’re the technical expert. When you cut off the signal to a wireless-controlled drone, it goes dead, right?” he asked.

“What? Yes, of course. What sort of question is that?” Kol said as he pointed out features to Rhossily in order to try and get a better bearing.

“But what if the wireless drone had an internal power unit?” Solomon asked.

“Then it would work, wouldn’t it?” the treacherous Outcast Marine snapped. “Unless, of course, the wireless signal has a master command function.”

“Who-what-now?”

“Master command. Superior override. The wireless channel is given the priority over every other executive function, meaning that the drone has to get the operational green light from the wireless signal before it activates its internal batteries,” Kol said condescendingly, as if this was a thing that even children should know.

Maybe it is, Solomon thought. He knew how to hotwire a spaceship and break electronic locks, and that was about the extent of his engineering proficiency. But what Kol had said had proved his theory, all the same.

“That EMP knocked out the Ru’at,” he said aloud.

“You don’t say.” Kol wasn’t impressed.

“No! You don’t understand,” Solomon said excitedly. “It’s not just that the EMP disrupted their communications or whatever, it’s…”

‘When the Ru’at first began their salvation of the galaxy, they soon encountered a problem: that of distance.’ Wasn’t that what the hologram-not-hologram human had said? Solomon connected the dots.

“—it’s the fact that the Ru’at aren’t even here!” he exclaimed.

“What?” Mariad shook her head.

“Uh, boss, have you seen everything that we’ve seen these last few days?” Kol didn’t sound convinced.

Solomon almost tripped over his words, he was so excited. “When I was being operated on, they lectured me, telling me that the Ru’at send these little seed-drone things—” he shook the silent orb in his hand, “—out across space, transmitting their Message, and hoping that some intelligent civilization like the Confederacy was dumb enough to take the bait!”

It all made so much sense to Cready now, as he explained it to the others.

“The Ru’at aren’t here. They get the to-be-conquered civilization to do all the legwork for them, to change their societies and cultures and develop cyborg technology and goodness knows what else, so that the actual Ru’at themselves don’t even have to arrive!”

“You’re forgetting, Lieutenant,” the Imprimatur of Proxima said, “that the Ru’at mothership firebombed my planet!”

“Yes, they did, but I don’t think there was even any living and breathing Ru’at on board.” Solomon remembered what the ship in question had looked like—its complicated arrays of mechanical parts, juddering and turning and moving ceaselessly. It had been grotesque in a way, making the lieutenant think that this was what it must be like if you stripped all the skin from a creature and could still see its organs moving.

“And it apparently had no hull, no life support, no need for internal atmospheres or graviton-production… No biological life!” Solomon said.

“And…what’s your point, Lieutenant?” Rhossily asked. The Outcast could tell from her tone that she didn’t care if there were actual little green men inside those ships pressing the firing buttons, or a computer program. The result was still the same: death and mayhem.

“It means that what we’re facing is a robot fleet, a drone fleet, and that they must have some kind of wireless master function or whatever that thing was that Kol said, something that knits all of the ships and the orbs together, and something an EMP can disrupt!”

“So?” Mariad snapped as she turned the wheel angrily.

“Ha!” But Kol got the idea perfectly. “That means all we need to do is to find the central transmitter, the one that sends the original message, and knock it out, and all the Ru’at get shut down.” He howled in glee. “Oorah, sir!” Kol congratulated his old officer.

“Exactly!” Solomon joined in. “And you know what? I bet that master transmitter is on the mothership.”

“But wait! What you are saying is impossible. It takes our wireless signals hours, days, weeks to travel from one end of the system to another,” the imprimatur countered. “Are you telling me that the Ru’at—wherever they really are—are so far advanced that they can defy the laws of spacetime and make a wireless signal travel instantaneously across space? Across distances that we can’t even imagine?”

It was Kol who answered her. “They’ve got FTL, which is just about as near to magic as anyone can figure. Who knows what a civilization as old as theirs can do?” he mused. “But even back on good old Earth, the science academies are starting to ask whether they could use subspace to encrypt and encode messages.”

“Subspace?” Solomon didn’t know what that was.

“Oh, it just means a few iterations up from quanta,” Kol said, still baffling First Lieutenant Cready. “Electrons come in pairs and can transfer data between themselves no matter the distance, right? Well, subspace communication is the idea that because everything was once compressed to a point before the Big Bang, then everything is kinda connected to everything else. You just gotta find the right atomic particles, although electrons are still the best candidate.”

Solomon kinda got it. “You could transmit information across the galaxy using this ‘interconnected particles’ thing?”

“You got it, chief,” Kol laughed. “Although it took you a long while to get there.”

They were in the middle of this warm glow of success, of finally having a battle plan that might actually work, so Solomon almost didn’t feel the orb in his hand start to wobble.

“Hey, I’m sure that’s Elysium Mons, and that must be Hecates Tharsis!” Kol said, pointing to a rising mountain on the horizon, and a smaller mound next to it. “There’s a habitat out there, one with a space port. We can steal a shuttle and get the good news out there—”

The Ru’at orb once again shook in Solomon’s hand, but amidst all of the bouncing, shaking, and jostling that the Martian rover itself was doing, Solomon thought no more of it.

That was until, of course, light flooded the interior of the cab as the orb started to rise from Solomon’s outstretched hand.

8

Runaway Rover

The brilliant blue-white light filled the tiny cab as it hovered in the open air.

“What the crap is that?” Rhossily shouted, risking a look over her shoulder at the alien intruder in the vehicle. “Get that thing out of here now!”

“You brought one with you?” Kol shouted, obviously distressed. “What on earth possessed you?”

Well, we’re not on Earth, for starters… The thought flashed through Solomon’s mind. It must be the Ru’at Serum 21 that they had given him in the colony, sharpening his wits and giving him an insane level of self-belief.

“It’s the subspace network! They’ve got it up and running again!” Solomon shouted as he darted his arm forward—an arm that could now move as fast as a striking viper, muscles and tendons locking into perfect synchronicity a moment before.

FZZTHAP! The Outcast Marine had intended to strike the thing with an open palm, to grab it out of the air or at least bat it against the metal walls.

“Argh!” But instead, all that Solomon got was an almighty shock that pounded him back against the wall of the rover’s cab. There was a line of blue-white light spilling from the circumference of the Ru’at orb, and, if anything, Solomon was certain that it was getting brighter.

Like it was powering up for something.

Do these things have weapons?? What will it do when—

FZTHWAP! Another flash of light spread through the orb, and this time the entire rover was kicked to one side, coming off two of its side wheel-legs before slamming down again, sending up great gouts of Martian dust.

“Get that thing out before it kills us all!” Mariad shouted from the driver’s seat as Kol was already leaning over the back of his chair, armed with the unlikely low-tech addition of a long tire iron.

FZAP! The orb pulsed once more, and it somehow directed the pulse of invisible power at the new threat. Kol was thrown against the side door with a pained grunt.

But he had dropped the tire iron, and Solomon still had the Ru’at pistol in his belt. His hand moved to the handle just as the orb darted forward to hover a foot or so away from his face. It was clear that in silent Ru’at orb speak, it was saying the equivalent of I wouldn’t even dream of it…

Solomon froze, his chest rising and falling as he panted in tense concentration. “Alright, what do you want? How do I make you go away?” Solomon snarled.

From somewhere in the driver’s section, there was a dull bing of electronics, and Mariad started swearing profusely. Across from her chair, the insensate form of Kol was crumpled in the footwell. Solomon hoped that the thing broken his neck.

“It looks like that little darling nugget of evil has been calling its friends,” the imprimatur broke from her torrent of verbal abuse to share with the others. “We’ve got two of the Ru’at jump-ships appearing on the horizon.”

The orb bobbed and shook occasionally as it floated in front of Solonom. “It’s injured,” the man said. “I don’t think it’s at full operational capacity yet…”

“It doesn’t seem that ill to me!” Mariad was incensed as she threw the rover into another swerve, this time throwing them down the side of a steep crater. The human members inside the cab were all thrown forward, but the Ru’at orb just continued to bob and weave a little unsteadily.

“The ships are gaining fast,” Solomon could hear Rhossily say through clenched teeth. “But they’re not running their FTLs.”

“They probably can’t inside atmosphere,” Solomon murmured, keeping his eyes on the floating thing in the wagon. Now that it had managed to call its bigger, much more dangerous brothers in the form of the Ru’at jump-ships, it seemed that it was content to not zap anyone any more.

It probably spends too much power doing that, Solomon thought. And, he realized, it was a drone, wasn’t it? It ran on machine logic. Why should it expend energy when it could just get two much faster, larger, and better equipped jump-ships to do its dirty work for it?

If I can get it to run low on power, I might be able to disable it, Solomon thought, seeing the tire iron just a few inches from his outstretched hand. Of course, that would still leave the problem of two very large and angry alien spaceships coming for them, but Solomon had always been a one-problem-at-a-time sort of person. It was all he knew how to be.

It’s going to shock me. It might even break some bones, but I need to get it to use up a lot of its internal power… Solomon started to take a deep breath.

Just as Ambassador Ochrie’s outstretched hand folded around the orb.

“Huh,” she said nonchalantly. “Did you want this, Lieutenant?” she said in her low, slightly drowsy voice.

She was brainwashed by the Ru’at, Solomon realized.

“What is she doing? What is she doing with that thing?!” Rhossily was once again shouting as she threw the rover into a tight turn around the canyon wall that connected this crater with the next.

“Maybe that means it doesn’t see her as a threat,” Solomon murmured. The blue-white light was still spilling from between the ambassador’s hands, but it seemed to have dimmed somewhat from its fiercer glow a heartbeat before.

“Well, I certainly see it as a threat!” Mariad—rather unhelpfully, in Solomon’s view—clarified.

“Ambassador?” Solomon closed his hand around the tire iron and started to edge his way forward. “I want you to do something for me.”

“Of course, Lieutenant.” Her voice was slightly slurred, but there was still a spark of that same, cantankerous woman in there somewhere. Solomon wondered briefly at the fact that the Chosen of Mars back at the Ru’at colony hadn’t appeared to have it as bad as she did. Maybe, given the fact that Ochrie was the Ambassador of Earth, the Ru’at had decided to imprint their message of servility deeper into her consciousness.

“When I say now, I want you to throw the orb into the air. Not hard, and not fast, just as if you were tossing an apple.” Solomon slid to a crouch, readying the tire iron over his right shoulder. “Can you do that for me, Ambassador?”

“I should think so, but…why?”

“Now!” Solomon didn’t want to give the befuddled woman a moment for her conditioning to kick in. He assumed that it was only his authoritarian bark of command that made the brainwashed ambassador do as he ordered.

Ochrie opened and bobbed her hand upwards, releasing the Ru’at orb.

Solomon swung—

Inside his clone body, his Ru’at genetics read his high cortisol levels and fierce concentration. They activated, chemicals and tailor-made enzymes surging through his body. Solomon could feel every muscle across his back unlock and stretch, producing a rippling line of force that surged through his shoulder and down his arms.

The Ru’at chemicals made it seem to Solomon as if time itself was slowing down, but they weren’t that magical. It was the cocktail of enhanced neurochemicals that made him aware of his unfolding arm in the very moment that the orb rose into the air and started to turn on its axis toward him.

But he was too quick. His wrist and hand were already pivoting with all the momentum of his arm and shoulders and back, and, at just below full stretch, the tire iron made a humming noise as it sliced through the air.

FZZZ! The orb had time to suddenly grow brighter, a moment before the iron connected with its metal skin.

Solomon roared in rage and effort—and pain. The thing’s final parting shot electrified his metal weapon as it connected, and—

THWAP! Both the Ru’at orb and the lieutenant were thrown backwards, with the orb smacking millimeters above the driver’s window before bouncing on the dashboard and into the footwell.

Rhossily screamed, but it sounded more like from shock to Solomon’s ringing ears as he fell against the cab door, his body twitching and shivering.

“Lieutenant?” Ochrie was saying with apparent worry as she moved—not altogether quickly—to his side.

“Is it dead? Is it dead!?” Mariad shouted in the confined space as Solomon groaned and pushed himself up from the floor. He scrabbled forward, hand burning and arm tingling, to see that yes, the orb was lying in the footwell of the rover, and its blue-white light was snuffed. It was broken open along the middle circumference line, displaying the strange silver and crystal lattice of wires that Solomon had seen before.

Still, even given the fact that it just looked like some sort of technological bauble that Kol or Ratko might have dreamed up, Solomon was loath to touch the thing. But he knew that he had to, so he seized it and stuffed it into his pocket.

“Urgh…” Solomon slumped back. He never wanted to have to do that again, but he also didn’t want to throw the orb away. It was a piece of Ru’at technology. It wasn’t something that had been hybridized or hacked by human corporate engineers like the cyborgs were—at least, as far as Solomon was aware. That meant that it might yet have useful information inside it on how to best combat the Ru’at menace.

“Hold on!” Mariad shouted, a moment before the entire rover shook and jumped. The door windows lit up with blue-white light, and Solomon heard the thunder of rocky debris hitting their roof.

“The Ru’at ships are firing on us,” Mariad said, kicking out with one foot against a lever at the same time as she leaned down hard on the steering wheel.

In response, the rover swerved just as there was another flash on their other side.

“They’re less maneuverable in atmosphere!” Solomon called, pushing himself up to crane his head along the side of the window. His Ru’at pistol was in his hand, but he doubted that even the Ru’at weapon would do anything against a much larger ship.

Mariad threw them halfway up one of the crater walls only to spin them down again, sending up a great spray of red dust and gravel high into the air. The fast turn and downward charge gave them speed, but both Solomon and the woman in the driver’s seat knew they couldn’t keep this up for long. The Ru’at would get a lucky shot eventually. Either that or the imprimatur would start to tire.

FZZT! There was an almighty blast from up ahead as the jump-ships did not fire directly at them, but at the crater walls ahead of them, where erosion had caused a large outcrop of rock.

“Frack!” the imprimatur swore once again, throwing the rover into a spin as tons of rock and dust smashed into the ground ahead of them.

The rover lifted on the side where it only had two wheel-legs, and all the occupants were thrown around inside the cab as it came perilously close to tipping over. Solomon had dreadful images of them hitting the red dirt with their legs in the air, as helpless as a bug.

A loud roar split the skies as the two Ru’at jump-ships screamed overhead, turning as they came back for an attack vector.

I thought they wanted me as their general! Solomon thought in fury before he was thrown into the air once again as the rover smacked into the ground, thankfully upright.

“Hit it!” Solomon shouted, and the Imprimatur of Proxima did just that, slamming her foot down as the rover surged forward.

FZT! This time, Solomon saw the twin lines of blue-white laser fire burst from the approaching Ru’at ships, slamming into the ground and sending up sprays of pulverized rocks before the beams raced across the crater floor toward them.

Mariad forced the rover in the only direction they had left—straight up the nearest crater wall, as the Ru’at laser fire raced behind.

“We’re not going to make it!” Rhossily gasped.

“We will! Go for it! We will!” Solomon shouted, wishing that there was something he could do.

There was a judder, and suddenly the Martian rover was lifting from the edge of the crater wall, launching into the air and rising in an uncontrolled arc. The viewing screen ahead of them showed only the dirty orange skies of the Red Planet.

Everyone inside the cab screamed, even Ambassador Ochrie, which Solomon might have taken as a good sign that she was coming out of her hypnotized state were it not for the fact that his ill-spent life was currently flashing before his eyes.

FTHWAP! Something hit them at the peak of their arc—a bright flash of light and a wave of force that spun them around, making even the enhanced genetics of First Lieutenant Solomon Cready feel nauseous and sick, before…

They crashed.

9

Ansible

The rover hit the orange dirt, sending up plumes of dust and sand as it rolled, end over end, across the Martian landscape, bouncing in the slightly lighter gravity of the Red Planet.

Solomon forgot which way was up, or down, or anywhere else for that matter. He felt like he was a bug trapped in a jar, being viciously shaken by a cruel child. Pain erupted into his consciousness from every outer part of his body—his knees and feet, his elbows and hands, and his forehead as other various parts of his anatomy smacked into various parts of the metal interior of the cab.

We’ve been hit. We’ve been hit… Even in his distress, his command training kicked in and a small, removed part of his brain assessed the damage.

We have stopped moving, and we’ve been hit. He was sure of that. What had that flash of light been? That sudden air blast that had dashed them against the rocks?

But a strike from one of the Ru’at ships would have sheared through the shell of the rover… He blinked, trying to open his eyes, but it was dark. He could smell burning rubber and the ozone smell that usually came with sparking electrics. Or Ru’at laser fire.

Then why aren’t I dead? For one thing, he could still breathe. He knew that he could, because he could smell. He had to have working lungs to push the air through his nose, right? But the Ru’at laser shot would have exposed them to the deadly low oxygen, high methane, and high carbon dioxide mix of the Martian atmosphere…

You’re in an encounter suit, you idiot, he told himself. That would be a good reason why he was still able to breathe. Maybe they were buried under a ton of rock. Maybe it was everyone else inside the cab here that had died…

“What the frack…” He was thankfully proved wrong by the sound of a groan coming from just a few feet away from him. It was a man’s voice, and it sounded an awful lot like Kol.

“Kol? Are you okay?” Solomon coughed.

“Do I look like I’m okay, chief?” Kol hacked, and there came the sound of moving debris as Solomon presumed the once-technical specialist sought to fight his own way out of the tonnage of red rocks.

“I can’t see you. I can’t see anything.”

“Fair enough. But who in the name of the sweet holies let the imprimatur drive this thing!?” Kol did not sound impressed, and for a moment Solomon was transported back, almost an entire year ago, to when it had just been him and Jezzy and Malady and Kol and Karamov. He had missed Kol’s caustic humor and boundless optimism, the lieutenant realized at that point.

They had been Gold Squad. The perilous and embattled Gold Squad of the Outcast Marines—the Outcast adjunct-Marines, he remembered, as that had been before General Asquew had lifted their entire regiment to full Marine status.

But remembering that they had been promoted also reminded Solomon of why they had been promoted.

The Outcast adjunct-Marines had been given their first full-battle experience in the ‘pacification’ of Mars, split off into their respective squads to perform various infiltration, expeditionary, and reconnaissance operations.

And it was during Gold Squad’s infiltration of the Martian Armstrong Habitat that Kol had betrayed them.

Not many of the adjuncts had made it out of their first true battlefield experience. Maybe it was poor planning, or maybe their skills were better suited to more discrete missions, but from almost a few hundred, they had been cycled back to Ganymede as less than a hundred and fifty.

And then, this technical specialist, who was cursing and groaning about how he couldn’t see anything and how everything hurt, had hacked into a Marine transporter and sent it crashing into the Ganymede Training Facility, killing more of his battle brothers and sisters. At the same time, Kol must have helped land a unit of the Martian-Ru’at cyborgs to clean up what was left, and Solomon, Gold Squad, and even the thug Arlo Menier—currently somewhere on Proxima, fighting a guerrilla war—had to fight for their very existence.

Not even a hundred Outcasts had survived the assault and the destruction of the training facility, and it was owing to their heroic, desperate actions on the surface of Jupiter’s largest moon that General Asquew had decided to award those who were left with full Marine status.

In a very sick and twisted sort of way, Solomon realized that all the Outcast Marines who were still alive had their current gold pips thanks to the actions of Kol.

But it wasn’t like Solomon was going to thank him. The lieutenant felt conflicted and jittery as he shook his head and freed his arms from something heavy that had been constraining them.

“The imprimatur saved our lives, Kol,” Solomon murmured. He could now hear a hissing sound, and the light had turned from black to a slightly lighter gray, giving him some hope that they weren’t completely covered in Martian rock. “You got eyes on the ambassador? Rhossily?” he grumbled as he started to feel through the dark and complicated shapes around him, until his gloved hands closed on something soft. Fabric.

“Ambassador?”

“Urgh?” It was Ochrie’s voice, and it sounded weak. She was a mature woman already, and Solomon was afraid. What would being thrown around in a rover, and possibly being struck by a Ru’at beam device, have done to her?

She was also our last link to the ‘old’ Confederacy, Solomon thought as he started to paw at the rubble, looking for a head, a face, fearing that his hands would come away wet and slick with the ambassador’s blood. The Confederate Council had been blown apart by General Hausman, and all that was left of the original apparatus of human-Earth was this groaning woman next to him, and General Asquew…wherever she was.

“Ambassador, can you hear me? It’s First Lieutenant Cready. Can you talk? Where does it hurt?”

He heard some tortured breathing return to his ears, until, “It hurts everywhere! Where did you think it was going to hurt, soldier?”

Relief flooded through Solomon. Not only was the ambassador talking, but she was also able to be annoyed—all good signs, considering what they had just gone through. But more than that, it was the fact that her voice had lost its slightly misty, confused cadence. She now sounded full-bore Ambassador Ochrie again: complaining, imperious, and annoyed.

“It’s you! You’re back!” Solomon said gratefully. His hands found her hand, which grasped his tightly as he pulled her from bits of seat foam and metal wall panel.

“Of course it’s me. Who were you expecting—the Queen of Sheba?” Ochrie was hacking and coughing. “Where are we? I thought we were in the Ru’at colony. What happened? Is the war over?”

She doesn’t remember anything of her time under the Ru’at’s control, Solomon realized. But that might be a blessing, he thought.

“Looks like all we had to do was to chuck her from a great height.” Solomon heard Kol chuckle nearby, presumably still clambering about the footwell.

“Kol, check on the imprimatur. She should be right beside you,” Solomon said sternly, to hear the young ex-adjunct Marine grumble under his breath, and the sound of more dirt shifting one way or another.

“Got her, Sol,” the technical specialist’s voice came back. “She’s hurt. There’s blood…”

Oh, frack. If his number one priority—as a serving officer of the Confederate Marine Corps—was to the Confederate ambassador, then somewhere high underneath that would have been the welfare of the Imprimatur of Proxima. Proxima was—had been—Earth’s largest and most successful colony world, and the furthest away from the mother planet. Although there had been a lot of tension between the various colonies and Confederate Earth, the imprimatur was still technically a high-ranking Confederate official.

And her home world was the first to be attacked by the Ru’at, Solomon thought. They all owed her what their negligence had allowed the Ru’at to take.

“But she’s breathing!” Kol said with apparent relief. He wasn’t completely psychopathic, apparently.

“Good.” Solomon’s command training analyzed the situation.

We’re stuck. Trapped.

We could be fired upon by the Ru’at again, one final time, more than likely…

Outside is a hostile environment where I am the only one who can breathe.

“Right, Kol, you’re our technical guy. Can you make some air filters and bubble masks out of a wrecked Martian rover?” Solomon said. “We’ll need three—one for you, one for Rhossily, and one for Ochrie.”

“Well, thank you for not deciding to leave me to die in here,” Ochrie grumbled.

Back in top form, I see, Solomon deigned not to comment.

“Why can’t we radio in for assistance? Where’s the Rapid Response Fleet?” Ochrie said.

She really doesn’t remember. “Ma’am…” Solomon hazarded. “The First Rapid Response was destroyed by the Ru’at. We flew through their remains to get to Mars.”

“But we were supposed to rendezvous with General Asquew,” Ochrie said.

“She wasn’t there, Your Excellency,” Solomon said as he continued to work, shifting metal and the cab’s dislodged equipment boxes out of the way.

Equipment boxes! Solomon wrenched one of the metal lids open. He could hardly see anything inside, but he grabbed handfuls of anything he could to pull up to the gray-orange light.

“Bingo!” Solomon said. “We got emergency encounter suits. And, uh…a medical kit, I think…” He heaved the mass forward, hitting the back of a chair that was hideously bent backward and almost went over him before forcing it forward. “Kol, see if you can get these to work. Get inside, try not to tear them.”

“Sir. Yes, sir,” the technical specialist said with a drawl of sarcasm.

The encounter suits, he knew, would be the over-large, mostly shapeless bag-type things that made their wearer look like an anime bubble-creature. But they had air filters, environmental protection, a reserve air supply, and hopefully even basic short-range radio transmitters.

I last saw them used on Ganymede after the crash, Solomon thought. There was an odd sort of sadistic circularity to the fact that Kol, the man responsible for that, would also be the man to wear them and make sure that others survived by wearing them.

“If you can get me to a deep-space transmitter, then I know of somewhere we might be able to get help,” Ochrie said, and although he couldn’t see her face, he could hear the fierce snarl inside her voice.

“A deep-space transmitter? You’re having a laugh, aren’t you, lady?” Kol said in the darkness amidst the sounds of stretching polymer plastic. “The nearest one would be in Elysium Habitat, which, as you know, is held by us Martians—”

‘Us’ Martians? Solomon winced.

“And besides which, all the Red’s broadcast satellites were knocked out by the Marine Corps when they decided to nuke the planet!” Kol said, his voice rising to an almost-bark of pain and rage.

“Easy there, soldier,” Solomon growled. “We don’t know who’s above us.”

“They were demonstration shots. No habitats were fired upon—” the ambassador countered.

“A demonstration megaton nuclear explosion that still irradiated tens of kilometers of Martian soil—never to be used again!” Kol returned.

“Look, it’s done. Just get me to a deep-space transmitter, and I promise you that it doesn’t matter whether there are any satellites in the sky or not,” Ochrie sighed, sounding like a schoolteacher reacting to the petulant antics of a naughty child.

Solomon heard Kol’s strangled cough of anger, but he cut him off quickly before this descended into an out-and-out fight. “What do you mean, Ambassador? Without satellites, then there’s no way to get the message out to General Asquew, and any message sent might take hours to get to her, wherever she is.” If she’s even still alive, Solomon didn’t add.

“Super-black satellites,” Ochrie said.

“What?” Solomon frowned.

“Oh, I see…” Kol groaned.

“Would you like to tell me?” Solomon was starting to lose his temper with the young traitor. He had thought that they were coming to some sort of understanding. That Kol had seen the error of his ways. Maybe I was very wrong about my ex-specialist.

“There’s always been talk of how the Marine Corps seeded the system with super-black satellites—drone transmitters in stationary or geosynchronous orbits that have so many levels of electronic dampening and interference that they don’t show on any known scanners. They just sit there, completely motionless but hoovering up data and information, until activated by some higher-up.”

“Sounds like just the sort of thing we need right about now,” Solomon said.

“It’s the Big Brother state!” Kol, who was apparently ever the revolutionary, pointed out.

“I don’t care what it is, if it can get us out of this mess,” Solomon said, turning to the dim shadow of Ochrie. “Ambassador, the message will still take hours to get where it needs to go and back. We’ll have to find a way to hide out on the Martian surface.”

“Not necessarily hours. You haven’t waited to hear the other part of my plan,” Ochrie said harshly. Apparently being rolled over in a Martian rover wasn’t just responsible for snapping her out of her hypnotism, but also gave her a pretty mean streak, as well.

“Oh, here we go,” Kol grumbled, but both of the Confederate officials ignored him this time.

“I said that I knew a place that could help us. Help me to activate the super-black satellites, and I will be able to get us to the experimental command hub.”

“The experimental command hub,” Solomon said the words slowly. Didn’t anyone think to tell him about this a year ago?

“It’s the space equivalent of a command-one bunker. A secret space station where we were to evacuate all of the Confederate Council and coordinate disaster relief efforts in the case of a planet-killing event, like an asteroid…”

“Or the Ru’at,” Solomon said.

“Indeed, or the Ru’at. The ECH not only has access to the super-black satellite network, but also a range of technologies currently in development.”

“I knew it! The Confederacy has been withholding scientific advances from the colonies for years!” Kol said egregiously.

“Shut up, Kol. Now is not the time to talk politics,” Solomon shot back.

“He’s right, we have. But now we need to use it.” The ambassador sounded nonplussed at the accusation. “If it’s operational, and if the Ru’at haven’t already found the ECH, then it has on board a prototype ansible that we have been working on…”

“An ansible?” Kol didn’t sound outraged this time, he sounded amazed.

“What the frack is an ansible?” Solomon, a man more used to cheating art dealers and Triads out of their credits, was clearly out of his depth.

“You remember what we were saying about the faster-than-light drives? Subspace?” Kol said quickly. “An ansible works on the same interconnected subspace principle. It could feasibly send information across millions or billions of miles in the blink of an eye. But I thought it was just science fiction!”

“Most things start out as science fiction, before Confederate scientists turn them into fact.” Ochrie even managed to sound smug.

Solomon took a deep breath. “Okay then,” he said. “It looks like we’ve got a new mission. Get Ochrie to Elysium and a deep-space transmitter, and get this ansible thing to work on some super-secret, black-ops space station,” he said. It felt good to have a direction to go, a path toward hope.

But the lieutenant was very much aware that he had to do all of this with three people in the flimsiest of encounter suits, with a sky filled with alien spaceships, and with one of their number currently unconscious.

They never promised an easy life in the Marine Corps, did they?

10

Friends in High Places

“Did it work!?” Jezzy said, attempting to crane her head from the seat that she was strapped in, an X-harness across her chest. She could have gone for the more usual ‘belt’ option, but Ratko—currently piloting the Marine scout—had demanded that everyone inside go for maximum operational safety.

Which was understandable, given that Corporal Ratko was more or less using the craft to hydroplane across the noxious atmosphere of the Red Planet. What would that be called? Jezzy had a distractible moment to wonder. Aeroplaning?

The result, according to Ratko, was that it would use far less of the ship’s propellant resources but gave them a tremendous amount of momentum. Far more than the scout could utilize in low orbit alone, where it would constantly be fighting the giant gravitational pull of Earth’s brother.

But then, of course, there was the problem of the constantly sucking gravity as well, wasn’t there? Second Lieutenant Wen had heard the corporal’s explanation: that if they kept a low, minimal burn and the nose up, then they would essentially be combating freefall all the time. ‘The same principle that makes satellites stay in geosynchronous orbit,’ she had explained. ‘They’re trying to fall into the planet’s gravity well, but the momentum keeps them falling away.’

Whatever. Jezzy shook her head. She just wanted to know if it would make them go really, really fast.

It did.

“Did it work? Where are they?” Jezzy asked again, looking this way and that out of the portholes of the small craft. In front of her in the pilot’s seat sat Corporal Ratko, with Willoughby in the comms and navigational chair. That left only Corporal Malady still in the main body of the vehicle and strapped into his own X-harness seat.

Just a few minutes before, the bio-sensors had registered a curious and unique identifier.

Cready is alive, Jezzy knew. All Outcasts had a control device implanted at the base of their necks—a tiny series of electrodes and wireless transmitters that Warden Coates had used to give them paralyzing electric shocks if they dared to question his tyrannical rule.

And the bio-sensors had pinged off Solomon’s device, where it had been accelerating at speed across the Elysium Planitia—the Martian terminology for the Elysium Plateau. Jezzy and Ratko had only moments to come up with their plan to rescue Sol, but in order to do it, they had to distract the two Ru’at ships that were heading on an attack vector toward them.

An air burst. Jezzy hoped that it had been powerful enough to distract the Ru’at. They had used two of their remaining Hellfire missiles to fire down into the Martian atmosphere—missiles that were designed for space combat, not atmospheric combat.

We couldn’t use them to target the Ru’at themselves with any efficiency, Jezzy knew. Space-based weapons were terrible when introduced to the gases, vapors, and gravity magnetics of a planet, but they might be able to auto-destruct them close enough to give the Ru’at pause. Which was precisely what they had done.

Jezzy couldn’t see anything out of the portholes but the white and orange burn of near-entry. How long can the hull, already damaged, take this much punishment? she wondered.

“You tell me if it worked or not. Look!” Ratko said through clenched teeth as above them on the main viewing screen was a tactical display map of their sector. The globe of Mars appeared in green isomorphic lines, and Jezzy could see the almost opaque orange cones of their firing arcs keeping pace ahead and to the sides of them.

And there were two angry, red triangle vectors rising from the surface toward them.

Warning! Unknown Vessel on Attack Vector!

The computer bleeped at them, and Willoughby moved quickly to pull up an enlarged image from the sensors. As a scout vessel, it was equipped with some pretty high-end, top-of-the-range sensor equipment, used by the Confederate Marine Corps to provide enemy tactical data.

Which meant that the cameras locked onto the two vessels and held them steady in their camera view, overlaying thermal, radio, magnetic, and bio scans over the same image.

Two Ru’at jump-ships, accelerating fast toward them.

“Ah,” Jezzy said, feeling a shiver of panic or anticipation, she couldn’t be sure which. She could make out the blur of their obsidian rings, growing faster and faster as they accelerated, but they still weren’t traveling as fast as the Marine scout.

“Come on, my pretties, come to Momma…” Ratko crowed at the screen, which Jezzy thought was probably a highly unprofessional Marine Corps observation, but one that she echoed nonetheless.

It was all part of the plan, a plan that Corporal Ratko said could work, and Jezzy had told her had to work.

“They’re falling behind,” Willoughby said from her navigation seat.

“I knew it. The Ru’at ships aren’t adapted to atmospheric travel. They can’t use their FTL drives down there,” Ratko said. “Matching speed and velocity.”

Jezzy’s gauntleted hands tightened on the armrests of her chair. Every part of her instincts screamed: Is that really wise!? Shouldn’t they be accelerating away from the murderous alien ships? These were the very same ships that had taken out the dreadnaught Invincible, after all, right?

“If we match speed, won’t they be able to target us better?” Jezzy said through clenched teeth. The G-force they were experiencing was at the constant, gnawing level of juddering bones.

“Yup,” Ratko said.

“Well, isn’t that a bad thing?” Jezzy went on.

“Yup, but not as bad as if we let them breach atmosphere,” Ratko said. This was starting to look like the corporal’s style in any cockpit, Jezzy realized. She might be the one sitting in the captain’s chair, but really it was Ratko who called the shots.

“As you wish, sir,” Jezzy muttered, only slightly humorously. “Ready guns…”

“Armed and ready, sir,” Willoughby said. “On your order.”

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 nanosecond.

“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 reentry!?” 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 electromagnetic 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 reentry 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.

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 telltale 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 shortwave 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.

“Acting Commander-in-Chief, Corporal Malady,” Ochrie corrected. “Until we can get a free and fair democratic election, that is.”

“With the Ru’at everywhere, and Earth under the control of a renegade general, it doesn’t particularly look like that is going to happen any time soon,” Jezzy muttered, but Solomon was relieved to see that she relaxed her hold on the Jackhammer and let it drop to her side.

“And you, Kol—” Solomon turned immediately to the traitor behind him.

“I’m not a Marine anymore, Sol.” The young man sounded petulant.

“Take it as a friendly warning, then,” Solomon said, and Kol did so, sliding the Ru’at weapon back inside his encounter suit.

“Ratko?” Jezzy called to the bridge. “Get us as far away from Mars as possible. Somewhere we can lie low and send a message to Pluto and Asquew…if she’s still alive,” Jezzy said irritably.

“Belay that order,” Ochrie countered, raising her voice instead. “This ship has all the transmission equipment I need to activate the super-black satellites and get us to the ECH.”

“The what, sir?” Jezzy still managed to sound annoyed.

“Experimental command hub,” Solomon filled her in, taking a deep breath. “We’ve found a place where we might be able to lead the fight back against the Ru’at.”

“It must be the same place that Asquew wanted me to get to,” Jezzy said, “Malady?” She extended her hand to the large man-golem, and Solomon saw him draw from his side a tiny data-stick. “It’s the higher command codes for the CMC Fleet. Or what’s left of it.”

“Excellent.” Ochrie smiled. “You keep hold of it, Corporal Malady. I can think of no better protection.”

“And once we’re there,” Solomon continued, “we can use an ansible to contact what’s left of the Fleet and tell them how we’re going to stop the Ru’at.”

“I know that they don’t like EMPs,” Jezzy said.

“Exactly.” Solomon grinned.

14

Not What We Expected

The tiny star of the Marine vessel burst from the upper atmosphere of Mars and soared into space. It was almost unnoticeable against the vast backdrop of the Red Planet below and the flashes of wreckage of the First Rapid Response Fleet as it slowly burned up in Martian atmosphere.

“A lot of Martians are going to die.” Kol mourned the effect of all that metal falling on his home.

There was nothing that Solomon or any of the others could say to counter this. It was disastrously true, and the Red Planet had already suffered a lot of planetary bombardments recently.

I don’t even know how the Confederacy is going to rebuild itself after this, Solomon thought. Even if they managed to stop the Ru’at and liberate both Mars and Proxima, there was still Hausman to try and convince to give up his hold over Earth.

Maybe she’ll have to let the colony worlds go. Solomon looked at Ochrie, who was looking out through one of the portholes at the Red Planet beneath them.

All this trouble started with the colony-Confederate war, he reminded himself. Which he thought might have even been orchestrated a century or more ago by the Ru’at ‘Message.’

“Is this what they do? Wait for a civilization to become spacefaring, and then undermine them from the inside, just to take them over with their drone fleet?” Solomon murmured to himself. The scale of such a battle plan—and the cruelty of it—was staggering.

“What’s that, sir?” Jezzy looked over to him from where she was busy trying to sort the ship’s battle equipment. It was clear to Solomon that the surviving members of his squad had been through one hell of a journey, and it had taken the best part of an hour for Jezzy and Malady to fill him in on everything. He listened to their retelling of the Oregon and the Last Call, the battle for Pluto, the attack in jump-space, and the creation—and detonation—of quite possibly humankind’s largest ever nuclear explosion aboard the Invincible.

Jezzy’s feelings toward Kol had cooled somewhat, Solomon saw. She still wouldn’t talk to him and refused to work alongside him or even go anywhere near him. Which is understandable, the man thought. He had no idea what would happen to Kol in the end, either. The young ex-Marine had done brave, heroic things to get them out of the Ru’at colony.

But he had also caused the deaths of many people, Solomon thought. He would have to face a court martial, if they survived, and that was only on the guarantee that the Confederacy and the Marine Corps even looked like what they did now when all of this was said and done.

“Nothing.” Solomon shook his head. “Just thinking out loud.”

“It feels good to even have the time to think at the moment,” Jezzy groaned, slumping against one of the bulkheads. She had managed to find a range of medical equipment with which they treated the imprimatur, who was not on her rover-seat stretcher anymore but on the tiny medical berth of the scout, hooked up to machines that blipped and scanned her periodically.

“Do you think she’ll make it?” Solomon breathed as their eyes slid to their wounded ally.

“Will any of us?” Jezzy shrugged.

As Ratko and Willoughby—stalwart Marines, Solomon acknowledged—piloted the ship further and further away from the Red Planet and out past its moons, the very next obstacle had been how to get to the ECH.

Luckily, however, Acting Commander-in-Chief Ochrie already had a solution.

“Open a broadcast channel, Marine.” Ochrie had taken herself to the bridge, where she stood near Willoughby’s desk. “Frequency 481.2 megahertz.”

“Aye-aye, sir.” Willoughby did so, only for the scout’s speakers to be filled with the background static hiss of empty space. “There’s no answering station there, sir…” Willoughby started to say.

“None that your sensors can pick up,” Ochrie said. “Broadcast my voice.”

Willoughby hit some dials and nodded. “You’re live, sir.”

“Input Code: Hermes-Alpha,” they heard Ochrie said.

“Hermes?” Jezzy whispered at Solomon’s side.

“The messenger of the Greek gods,” Solomon pointed out.

“Input Code: AA23AA,” they heard her say, to be followed by a final command. “Input Order: Activate.”

The static continued for a moment, and Solomon had a terrible, foreboding feeling that it wouldn’t work, until it did. The static stopped, and an automated voice announced itself from the speakers.

“Voice Authentication: Ambassador Ochrie, Tier 2. Input accepted,” it said.

Solomon shared a spooked look with Jezzy beside him. This was the voice of the super-black satellite program, the deeply secret network of spy satellites and drones that the Confederate Marines had seeded the system with.

“Input Order: Update mainframe, given data of current chain of command,” Ochrie said.

“Updating… Updating… Task Completed. Voice Authentication: Acting Commander-in-Chief Ochrie, Tier 1.”

It didn’t recognize Brigadier General Hausman, Solomon thought. That meant that the spy satellites must have such a wide reach that the network was able to scan for any surviving Tier 1 members and come to the conclusion that Special Regulation 201 was correct. Ochrie was now in charge of the human race.

Solomon thought that Ochrie sounded just a little bit pleased with herself as she went on to say, “Input Order: Activate ECH Test Fleet and rendezvous on my position.”

“Command Accepted.”

“Test Fleet?” This time it was Solomon’s turn to sound puzzled, and the silence in the cramped space was enough that his words carried clearly to the leader of humanity.

“There have always been more than three CMC Fleets, First Lieutenant Cready,” Ochrie said. “But the existence of the Test Fleet has been a super-black secret for decades.”

“Did Asquew know about it?” Jezzy asked.

“Of course.” Ochrie nodded. “As does Hausman, I am certain of it. The ECH Test Fleet is undoubtedly the reason why the general was trying to send you to the ECH, and why she gave you the higher command functions, so that you would be able to activate it,” Ochrie explained.

“But it is not an ordinary CMC Fleet by any stretch of the imagination. It is, as the name suggests, a test. It is made of a fraction of the number of craft that the Near-Earth or Rapid Response Fleets had, and mostly they were experimental ship designs,” Ochrie went on. “New craft mechanics, new weapons systems, propulsion, communication—”

“The ansible,” Solomon said.

“Precisely. The ECH Test Fleet is historically where CMC ships start out, and where they are field tested, before being put into general production. There is no guarantee that these vessels will even be able to counter the Ru’at at all. There have been many, many fatal accidents in the Test Fleet.”

“Outstanding,” Kol muttered miserably from his porthole. Everyone ignored him.

“However, one of the prototypes that have worked are the automated jump-ships. No need for human pilots. They are essentially drone systems that will jump to your location, and—well, see for yourself!”

Warning! Proximity Alert!

The scout’s mainframe crackled into life as there was a sudden flash of light and a hazy ripple of stars in front of them. It was the unmistakable effect of a Barr-Hawking field, and a moment later, the shadowy form of a jump-ship materialized in front of them, looking as solid and as real as if it had been sitting there the whole time.

The automated jump-ship looked almost like any other Confederate Marine Corps jump-ship that Solomon had ever seen. It still held the small, forward-pointing cockpit as the main body, jutting inside a much larger ring of metal, not with the four bulbous particle generators at each cardinal point, but instead three.

“Improved Barr-Hawking engines,” Ochrie said, a note of pride in her voice.

Indeed, it looked a lot like any other CMC jump-ship—apart from the fact that it was gunmetal black, and there were certain discrete differences here and there about its body. It was less angular and blocky compared to the regular jump-ships in standard operational use. All the Marine Corps vessels appeared to have been churned out by a factory, even the super-massive dreadnaughts. They were bulky, and their ports, weapons modules, vents, and grills were all austere and functional. This ship, however, looked…

“Sleek.” Corporal Ratko nodded appreciatively. Solomon’s eyes slid to the treacherous Kol—a technical specialist, like Ratko—to see that he was nodding in agreement, before quickly clearing his throat to cover the fact that he agreed.

And it has no portholes or windows anywhere, Solomon thought, which he found a little creepy.

“Willoughby, open a channel to the jump-ship and tell it to take us to the ECH,” Ochrie said.

Willoughby looked at the silent ship in front of them, and First Lieutenant Cready saw her shrug slightly and tap the navigation and comms console in front of her.

“CMC jump-ship, this is the Special Operations CMC Marine Scout, requesting a lift to ECH, over and out.”

There was no reply from the other end of the channel, but the creepy ship apparently received the message. It fired positional rockets to turn around, and Solomon saw the puffs of gases as it fired magnet locks from its hull. The thin, glittering lines of cables lanced through the air to slap onto the nose and hull of the scout with audible bangs before the automated ship completed its turn and started to move.

All eyes of the crew were fixed on the strange ship ahead, but it appeared to function just the same as any other CMC jump-ship.

“Right, take your harnesses please, people,” Willoughby said as she buckled herself in.

Oh yeah. Solomon had forgotten what jumping was like. How long have I been on Mars? Days? Weeks? He didn’t know, but he moved quickly to check on Mariad in her medical berth to make sure she was secure before taking his seat and pulling the X of poly-mesh fibers across his chest to buckle himself in.

“Jumping in three…two…and they’re—I mean it’s—initiating,” he heard Willoughby’s voice loud and clear over the speakers as everyone else looked forward through the bridge viewing window.

First came the sparks of light from the three particle generators as the ring started to turn, blurring faster and faster and creating a circle of strange light. Solomon could feel the forward momentum on his body as the scout was pulled along faster than it ever could hope to travel on its own. The light ring expanded to become a fuzzy halo, a corona of energy as the Barr-Hawking field was generated.

Spacetime became malleable, and the very energetic structure of the universe was displaced.

Solomon saw the hazy, washy lights of the stars start to wobble and diffuse as their photons failed to reach his retina. His eyes registered odd, strange colors that his brain had no name for.

And then his stomach lurched, and he felt his body cover itself with a fine film of sweat. His teeth ached, and his head started to pound with a pressure headache, moments before vertigo and nausea took him. This was what happened when humans endured jumps. Even though there was no technical or physical reason for it, there was still a primal knowledge that this was something that no human body, designed for terrestrial gravity and Earth-regular spacetime, should experience.

And just like always, as soon as the sensation started to get too intense, it suddenly stopped, and Solomon was sitting in his harness, blinking and taking deep breaths to calm his ragged heartbeat.

“We’re here,” he heard Ochrie say, and Solomon and the others were already rising from their seats to take a look at precisely where ‘here’ was.

“Oh, frack!” Ratko gasped, moments before she hit the thrusters and threw the ship into a spin, just as the ship’s tactical computers blurted out alarms.

Warning! Enemy Vessel Targeting Protocol Detected!

Warning! Target Lock Detected!

15

Ech

Solomon was thrown from his standing position as the ship rolled. He didn’t see, but in front of them, the cables from the automated jump-ship stretched taut, and two of them ripped from the nose as Ratko maneuvered.

In the space ahead of them, the jump-ship suddenly jerked as it was pulled by the scout, before it finally released the last few magnet locks—

And an instant later exploded in a ball of blue and white energy as the enemy vessel’s missiles found it.

“Who’s attacking us?” Solomon shouted, pushing himself up from the opposite end of the craft.

Out of the portholes, the stars were pinwheeling and rolling as Ratko threw evasive move after evasive move. She’s trying to throw off the targeting locks, Solomon knew.

“Keep Ochrie safe!” Solomon clicked into command mode as he stumbled and climbed toward the bridge, Jezzy right behind him.

“How?” he heard Kol say in alarm. Which was a fair comment, as the ex-Marine must have known that there wasn’t much he could do if a missile or a Ru’at laser beam found them.

“I don’t know! Just do it!” Solomon shouted over his shoulder as he entered the bridge, seeing the tactical map overlays above the viewing screen and the vectors of too many ships to make him feel comfortable.

Half of them were stationary orange triangles, indicating Unknown Vessel, which Solomon knew was bad, as that was how the Ru’at ships came up on their scanners.

But the others were the ones that made the lieutenant slam to a halt. They were CMC identifiers, each and every one, and they were all on attack vectors, either with the stationary unknown ships…

Or their own scout.

“Hausman,” Solomon hissed at once.

The CMC ships arrayed against them were what Solomon would have called a forward strike force—certainly not a full battle group, which traditionally had a range of Confederate Marine fighter craft, as well as at least one battleship that would act as the operational command and a number of logistical ships such as Marine transporters, jump-ships, scouts or shuttles. It was also—thankfully—not a full fleet either, which would have had one of the super-massive dreadnaughts at its heart.

Instead, what Solomon and the others were looking at was between eight and ten CMC fighter craft—narrow wedges with four overlapping wing shapes and heavy fuselages, indicating that they could operate in the vacuum of space as well as in atmosphere.

The only problem was that the eight craft were still far too many for one lighter and smaller Marine scout.

“Evasive maneuvers!” Ratko called as she pulled on the flight stick once again and kicked her propulsion pedals. In response, a line of smaller positional rockets along the edge of the tubular scout fired, sending it into a tumbling corkscrew that, were First Lieutenant Cready’s boots not magnetized, would have sent him crashing into the ceiling.

The viewing screen showed whirling stars as well as appearing and disappearing ships, giving the impression that it was the outside space that was cycling and not them. But every few moments, Solomon would see the appearing shape of their target.

The experimental command hub was similar to a platform rather than a station in that it had no large, transparent domes of habitats, and instead looked like a disk around a central collection of spires and antennae, reaching both up and down. The external ring swam around the inner at a steady pace, indicating that it could generate its own gravity as well as hold its position.

Just like the automated jump-ship, it was a gunmetal black and sleek. Solomon caught sight of bulkhead ports and vents, all of which seemed made to a much higher standard than the usual Marine Corps equipment.

But it was under attack, Solomon realized, as he saw sudden bursts of flames flash and evaporate around its outer ring.

“We can’t let Hausman destroy it!” Ochrie shouted from the rear of the bridge, where she had also accompanied Solomon and Jezzy.

But the ECH was only suffering a modicum of the force’s attention. Most of their missile and vacuum-rifle fire was saved for the groups of stationary, sleek black craft of all different shapes and sizes that clustered near the ECH.

It has to be the Test Fleet, Solomon realized. He saw some parts of ships that he recognized from the more standard Rapid Response Fleet, and some that he had no clue what they were for.

Over there, he saw the larger brick-like shapes with their four positional thruster arms similar to a standard CMC bomber, and elsewhere he saw smaller four-winged craft that could be the experimental version of a new type of fighter craft. They were smaller than the regular fighter craft, but with a sharper, meaner nose and a fatter wedge of thrusters at the back.

Then came the more quixotic craft—ships with two sets of outer rings and a long inner body that looked a little like someone had jammed two jump-ships together. Or a couple that appeared to be haphazard collections of spheres attached by thin access tubes, and no apparent propulsion system at all.

Flash! Even as the sight of the mysterious fleet swam before his eyes, Solomon saw one of the sleek experimental fighters suddenly erupt in a gout of flame and plasma as one of the CMC fighters fired a payload of Hellfire missiles at it, which sent it turning end over end into the stationary experimental fighter beside it.

“It’s like shooting fish. Why aren’t they responding?” Jezzy breathed.

“Because they haven’t been activated, dammit!” Ochrie said. “The Test Fleet is comprised of craft, and hardly any personnel at all. There aren’t pilots to fly them!”

Warning! Target Lock Detected!

Ratko growled in frustration. On the tactical screens above them, Solomon could see the small, fast blip of a Hellfire missile closing in on their position.

“Plasma vent!” Solomon called out, remembering just what he had done aboard a transporter earlier to avoid a very similar position.

Ratko didn’t say anything but nodded grimly, understanding immediately what the lieutenant meant. “Opening propellant injectors 1 through 3,” she said as there was a judder from the scout.

Outside their ship, the CMC attack craft would have seen three sudden and small plumes of purple, blue, red, and yellow gases spume out of the back of the scout. The propellant ignited as soon as it got near the burn of the thrusters, expanding and creating a shifting cloak of burning plasma for a brief moment.

But a brief moment was all they needed.

Hellfire missiles rely primarily on thermal scanning, Solomon knew. They locked onto the large heat signatures of a craft’s thrusters and engine block and followed it to detonation.

But now the missile had a new, and much nearer heat signature that burned hotter than the thruster flame for the briefest of moments before evaporation.

Flash! It self-detonated as soon as it entered the plasma field, and the scout was zooming forward, saved.

“Genius,” Ratko complimented him.

“Not quite…” Solomon saw the ship’s warning flicker onto the overhead screen.

Warning! Propellant Mixture -35%!

“We can’t do that too many times,” Solomon said. Well, we can’t do that too many times if we also want to be able to ignite the thrusters and positional rockets.

“Frack,” Ratko said.

But Solomon had an idea. “Ochrie—Chief, I mean—are the ships automated? Remote-controlled, like the experimental jump-ship?” The one that had just been blown from the sky, he thought.

“Of course!” Chief Ochrie said, nodding at Willoughby to open a broadcast channel. “Input Order: Voice Activation Commander-in-Chief Ochrie!” she called desperately.

If they were waiting for a response from the vessel, they got none, but they all knew they didn’t have time to knock and wait politely.

“Activate Fleet!” Ochrie said.

“Send us the remote access!” Solomon hissed, running to the side of the bridge where a line of spare consoles was sitting, doing nothing but processing data. These, he knew, could be used by the crew of the craft to dedicate certain roles to certain officers—gunnery, tactical operations, science analysis, and so on…

“Sir?” Jezzy said in a confused voice. The captain’s command chair was still empty.

“She’s your boat, Jezzy, take the helm!” Solomon said as he heard Ochrie ordering the automated fleet to send their remote access protocols to the scout.

Flash! Another of the experimental fighters exploded, and one of the heavy bombers was listing to one side, two of its four ‘thruster arms’ horribly broken and melted.

Access Granted.

On Solomon’s console, which had no accompanying command chair, flight or firing sticks, were the hologram controls above the black screen as well as a series of overlay tactical images on the viewing screens above.

ECH TEST FLEET COMMAND PROTOCOL

Complement:

Nightjar Fighter Craft Group 1 (5 vessels) ACTIVATED

Nightjar Fighter Craft Group 2 COMPROMISED (4 vessels) ACTIVATED

Nightjar Fighter Craft Group 3 COMPROMISED (2 vessels) ACTIVATED

Vulture Heavy Bomber Group COMPROMISED (2 vessels) ACTIVATED

Retribution Tactical Fighter Group (2 vessels) ACTIVATED

Ouroboros Jump-craft (2 vessels) ACTIVATED

Ragnarök Spheres (2 vessels) ACTIVATED

“What am I looking at here?” Solomon said, half to himself and half to Ochrie. But he knew he didn’t have time for an answer, either. I’ll have to leave all the ships that I have no idea what they do, like the Ouroboros and the spheres…

But when it came to the names of the other ships, Solomon thought he had a much better sense of what they might be capable of. Already, several of the attack groups were compromised, which he thought meant that they had already lost ships from their number or had been damaged by Hausman’s attacks. He had to move fast.

“Jezzy? I’m sending you the controls for Nightjar Group 2 and the Vulture Heavy Bomber Group, you think you got that?”

“Aye-aye, sir,” Jezzy said from her command chair, even though her tone sounded deeply confused.

No time to be confused, Solomon thought as under his fingertips, the available ECH craft appeared in small groups like a computer game, with a catchall list of commands.

>Full Offense

>Full Defense

>Search and Destroy

>Protect

“I guess they automate after you set their operational style,” Solomon said, selecting Nightjar Group 1 and 3 and putting them into full offensive mode, while selecting the Retribution Heavy Tactical Fighters and setting them to Search and Destroy.

Instantly, the ECH craft on the tactical displays started to peel off in their groups, with Solomon in charge of seven Nightjars and two Retributions. He realized that by using his hands, he could direct the different groups en masse, while each craft in their groups would also perform their own maneuvers to attack and evade in combat.

This is just like playing a computer game, Solomon thought, and although he didn’t have much experience playing them—he’d always had too little time while planning or executing real-world heists and scams—he did remember many happy hours as a young teen playing Battle Stars or Frontier Assault.

The eight CMC craft of Hausman’s group were all operating in skirmish mode, Solomon saw—a classic full offensive that encouraged each of the CMC fighter pilots to select individual targets at will, so long as they fitted the remit of the mission.

Which is presumably to destroy as much of the Test Fleet as possible, Solomon thought.

He moved the largest of the Nightjar groups into a direct attack vector against the largest knot of CMC fighters—five against four, as it happened—while the two ‘spare’ craft, he put on a wider arc around the same group.

“I’m going to drive them out from the ECH,” Solomon called. “They’ll probably scatter—”

Which they did. The four CMC fighters—all good pilots, it had to be said—separated into a wider cloud of escaping craft.

The Nightjars opened fire, and on the viewing screen above, Solomon saw the sparkle of fire from the opening and closing weapons ports.

Hit! Target Down.

Hit! Target Compromised.

His main body of Nightjars managed to secure two solid strikes, with only one of the swerving CMC fighters exploding and the other jerking to one side but still operational.

On the viewing screen, the CMC fighters moved with the speed and skill of sparrows in quick, sudden movements. They deployed chaff behind them in glittering plumes of aluminum, chrome, and gas.

But Solomon’s command instincts were already paying off. Two of the fleeing CMC fighters encountered his reserve two Nightjars, and as Solomon’s reserve craft opened fire, one of the escaping CMC fighters flew straight into it.

Hit! Target Down.

But as Solomon had recognized, the CMC fighters were good. One of the two fighters fired its full complement of Hellfire missiles in response, and Solomon’s reserve Nightjars had already been compromised from the first attack.

Warning! Multiple Target Locks Nightjar Group 3, Vessels 1 and 2.

Nightjar Group 3:

Vessel 1 COMPOMISED. DESTROYED.

Vessel 2 COMPROMISED. NON-OPERATIONAL.

As Solomon watched in frustration, curves of flame hit his two reserve craft, one of which promptly exploded into spiraling fragments while the other pinwheeled end over end, its rear thrusters destroyed.

“But it’s still four against two,” Solomon growled fiercely to himself, setting the remaining Nightjar Group 1 to Search and Destroy on the final two CMC fighters of this attack vector. The Nightjars appeared to be faster than the CMC ships, but perhaps not as maneuverable—or rather, they couldn’t perform the slightly erratic, quick-fire turns that their CMC sister-craft could.

But they could close on their enemy all the quicker, and they appeared to be able to target with more accuracy. Solomon left the Nightjar group to their task as he turned his attention to the rest of the battle.

“Jezzy? How are you doing over there?” he called out, his hand already moving to the two heavy tactical craft that he had sent on a wide arc around the ECH.

Solomon could see that Jezzy’s remote command had been going well, considering the craft she had been given. She had control of Nightjar Group 2, with four vessels in it, and the experimental Vulture bombers with two craft inside, while she fought three CMC fighters.

“Good, I think,” he heard her reply. On the overhead tactical displays, Solomon could see that Jezzy had sent the two bombers on a charge, with the four Nightjars spiraling around them in Protect mode.

The three remaining CMC fighters could easily outpace the slower-moving bombers, but the four accompanying Nightjars sent a near-constant barrage of fire against them. Added to this were the heavier guns of the bombers. Jezzy hadn’t fired any of the bombers’ largest payloads yet, not against such small craft.

As Solomon watched, one of the four protecting Nightjars was blown backward by a lucky CMC Hellfire missile, but two of the three CMC fighters were destroyed in circles of light and fire by the charging attack group that Jezzy had created.

Solomon checked his own battle.

Mission Accomplished. All Targets Destroyed.

62% Hit Ratio.

2 Nightjar Vessels Destroyed.

2 Nightjar Vessels Rendered Non-operational. Begin Auto-repair?

Solomon didn’t even know they could do that, but he swiped his hand into the affirmative hologram logo all the same. A tiny circle started to fill up very slowly with green ‘health.’

“They have on-board drones,” Ochrie explained, watching the overhead tactical displays like a hawk. “If they can’t fix the ship, they’ll communicate to get it transported back to the ECH garages.”

“Sweet system,” Solomon murmured. He had lost two vessels out of the seven under his command, and a further two had been critically damaged. Against five CMC fighters, that wasn’t the sort of ratio he had been looking for, but considering that this was his first experience as a remote commander, he considered it a success.

This must be what it’s like for Asquew all the time, Solomon thought. And Hausman.

There was only one CMC fighter craft left.

“I got it!” Jezzy said, and her hands started to move through her tactical commands.

“Belay that order!” Solomon shouted quickly. “Hold back and follow it. Let it think it’s accelerating,” Solomon said.

Jezzy looked puzzled and annoyed, but Solomon quickly explained his reasoning as he settled his hand on the wide sweep of the Retribution Heavy Fighters.

“These fighter craft didn’t get here under their own steam,” he said. “Especially as there’s only a handful of people in the whole Confederacy who knows where here is. Hausman’s got to have a jump-ship around here somewhere.”

Jezzy nodded. Solomon set the heavy fighters on a deep parallel course, still holding back but matching the vector that the singular CMC fighter was taking.

“Deep-field scan initiated,” Willoughby called out from the comms and navigation desk, and all of the tactical maps overhead coalesced into one much smaller map as the view suddenly expanded.

Blip!

Vessels Found:

CMC Marine Transporter 45GE-2

CMC Jump-ship #34

“Bingo,” Solomon said. He instantly set the Retributions on a Search and Destroy mission straight to the thirty-fourth jump-ship of the Confederacy.

“All this technology we’re throwing away,” Solomon heard Chief Ochrie say.

“Better throw it away than have it nuke us, ma’am,” Ratko called out with glee as she turned the scout in the same direction to follow way behind Jezzy’s bombers.

The CMC fighter got there first, but Hausman’s ships were in disarray. The jump-ship was already starting to reposition itself, its engines starting to churn as threw its magnet locks onto the boxlike Marine transporter.

That was how the eight CMC fighters got here, Solomon could see. Each Marine transporter was a huge block of metal, capable of holding a couple of regiments at once, as well as having loading arms that could dock a variety of smaller craft—anything as large as a heavy bomber or above had to secure its own jump-ship. The eight fighters must have clung on, limpet-like, to the belly of the transporter before they were skipped across the fabric of spacetime to attack the ECH.

But apparently the transporter wasn’t deigning to wait for its tiny passenger as it fired positional rockets to get perfectly in line behind the jump-ship.

“It hasn’t even deployed its loading arms!” Solomon heard Willoughby say at the apparent scandal.

“Well, we can do something about that.” Jezzy detached her own Nightjars, which shot away from the Vultures to scream towards the jump-ship and Marine transporter.

Solomon looked at the jump-ship, then at the transporter, and lastly at the CMC fighter desperately screaming forward to try and reach the transporter before the ECH Test Fleet caught up with it.

Inside every one of those vessels is a CMC officer or Marine, he thought. They wouldn’t have been conscripted like he and the other Outcasts had been, Solomon was willing to bet.

But that also doesn’t mean that they don’t have their own extenuating circumstances for joining the Marine Corps. His fingers moved toward the hologram controls and froze. “And they certainly didn’t ask to be put into the middle of a civil war,” he muttered.

“Lieutenant?” Jezzy said, hearing her superior officer mutter and pausing her attack commands.

“Wait.” Solomon shook his head, sliding the Retributions back to Protect and directing their target as their ward and the ECH itself.

“Why? What’s wrong, sir?” Ratko asked.

“Leave them. Weapons down. That’s an order,” he said sternly.

“Sir. Yes, sir,” Jezzy said, pulling her own Nightjars back to the Vultures and slowing their speed accordingly.

“Lieutenant?” Chief Ochrie raised an eyebrow at the man. Solomon knew that she could countermand his order, she had all the authority to override his control of the automated fleet, but she didn’t.

That was one thing that he had learned about the ambassador—the commander-in-chief, he corrected himself—during their long, arduous journey together. She might be fierce and cantankerous, and she might be more than eager to pick a fight when she saw the need for one, but she was a woman who was also willing to hear the analysis and opinions of the people around her.

“We don’t need to kill any more of Earth’s children today,” Solomon said severely. “And we’ve sent the message to Hausman now. He knows that we have the ECH, and the ansible, and the Test Fleet.”

“But he knows where the ECH is now, of course,” Chief Ochrie countered. “Do you not think that he will try again? And the next time, he might bring his dreadnaught with him, and the rest of the Near-Earth Fleet?”

“No,” Solomon said in a matter-of-fact manner.

“Explain.” Ochrie nodded her assent.

“When we were held prisoner in the Ru’at colony, the Ru’at drone showed me an image of the Ru’at mothership approaching Earth space. It might already be in orbit by now, for all I know. They might be working with Hausman, but I doubt it.”

“Reasons?”

“Past experience,” Solomon said, just as he had been taught to do. Stick to the facts. Make a case. “We saw what the Ru’at did to the Chosen of Mars on their colony. And you, of all people, Chief, should know how the Ru’at treat their humans.” She may not have remembered the experience, but they had filled her in. “They brainwash them. Hypnotize them. Even when they’re supposed to be allies. So, for that reason alone, I don’t think that the mothership will take long to start treating Hausman and the rest of the citizens of Confederate Earth the same.”

Ochrie nodded, her eyes going far into the distance for a moment. “So, you are telling me that we need every human fighter alive in order to use them against the Ru’at? Even if those fighters are loyal to Hausman?”

“I am telling you that the real battle is against the Ru’at. And that we’re all in this together. Hausman and the Near-Earth Fleet just haven’t realized it yet.” Solomon powered down his console and took a step back. “I won’t be ordering any of my ships to attack those CMC ships out there,” he said unequivocally.

“Neither will I,” Jezzy said, copying the motion.

Solomon dared the new commander-in-chief to speak against him, but she didn’t. In fact, she cocked her head to one side and gave them both a small smile. “Very good. You know, at first, I wondered at the necessity of creating a new regiment out of criminals, murderers, and thieves, but now I see how lucky I must have been to fall in with the Outcast Marines,” she said, before formally agreeing. “Let them go.”

The air of tension settled and all eyes on the bridge turned to the viewing screen to see the final CMC fighter craft eventually catch up with the Marine transporter, and for the transporter—not so desperate to get away now that its pursuers were so far behind—to extend one of the loading arms for the CMC fighter to dock awkwardly.

And then, just a few instants later, the Barr-Hawking ring of the jump-ship was glowing and blurring, creating a corona of light that extended over all three ships. It shimmered and glittered into nothingness, as if it had been a dream.

“And heaven knows that if it’s heading back for Earth, then it’s going to have the shock of its life,” Solomon murmured as he looked at the wavering stars finally settling back into their hard and bright brilliance.

“True,” Ochrie sighed, before gesturing toward the viewing screen. “No time to lose, then. Take us to the ECH, and let’s find a way to take down that Ru’at mothership, now!”

“Sir! Yes, sir!” the crew members and Outcast Marines chorused loudly. Not one of them could agree more with the sentiment, and their new commander’s determination.

16

Major Surprise

“ECH Mainframe? Activate voice controls,” Chief Ochrie breathed into the dark.

The errant team of Outcast (and ex-Outcast) Marines had docked with the experimental command hub, Ratko synchronizing the scout with the rotating outer disk and docking on one of the portholes with practiced ease.

The doors had opened with a slight hiss of atmosphere to reveal a dark room with a clear glass airlock at the far end, and cabinets of encounter suits and a biohazard sign etched onto the wall.

“This place has always operated under maximum security protocols,” Ochrie explained. “There’s all sorts of sensitive and experimental equipment in here, everything from jump drives to new chemical compounds.”

Solomon shared a look of wary alarm with Jezzy beside him as Ochrie walked up to the clear door and looked through to the other side.

“Not that I suppose it matters anymore. Door open!” she said, and the glass broke its seal with another hiss of atmosphere, revealing a wide corridor that occupied the middle of the outer disk, and a narrower one heading straight forward, which Solomon assumed went to the heart of the hub. It was down this corridor that Ochrie stalked.

“Lights,” she said. “Activate full emergency protocols.” At the sound of the acting commander-in-chief’s voice, white lights flickered on around them, advancing along the ceiling and revealing more doors on either side of the corridor.

Ochrie didn’t pause, but as Solomon and the others hurried past, they caught glimpses through the clear glass of rooms and laboratories and workshops stuffed full of strange equipment. There were banks of screens with wires snaking to orbs that looked like they were made of mercury or aluminum. There was a room devoted to stands of a new type of power armor, as well as laboratories with rows upon rows of empty grow boxes, making Solomon flinch as he thought of his own beginnings.

“How much have they been keeping back?” Kol whispered behind Solomon, but if he had been hoping to be surreptitious, he failed in the empty, echoing space.

“Everything, Mr. Kol,” Ochrie said severely. “Quite simply, the ECH is designed to create, innovate, research, and test the future. At this level of the Confederacy, scientists are brought in from across civilian, colonial, corporate, and military walks of life to help determine the best technologies to deploy for the betterment of humanity.”

“Mars doesn’t seem to have been bettered recently,” Kol muttered.

“And neither has Proxima.” Ochrie spared a look at the still-unconscious Mariad, lying on her gurney and being pushed by Malady ahead of him. “And neither have large swathes of Earth, or the Marine Corps. That is because until Tier 1 is absolutely certain that the technology won’t cause havoc with our delicate Confederate ecosystem, then they will not release it.”

Grow boxes. Agricultural experiments. The Message. Solomon’s mind leaped between the dots, adding them together in a flash of insight. “How much of his comes from the Ru’at Message? The one that changed the Midwest?”

He saw Ochrie’s eyes flicker as she was caught off-guard by his question. But she nodded and said nothing.

“You’re backwards-engineering Ru’at technology, and you’ve been doing so for years, am I right?” Solomon said, unable to keep the growl from his voice. He heard a gasp from Ratko and Willoughby behind him.

Solomon remembered the memory-vision that the Ru’at had given him on their colony—that of the original, non-clone Augustus Tavin taking blood from the original, non-clone Solomon Cready, aged about ten.

That was the Solomon Cready whose genetics had been unknowingly altered by the arrival of the Ru’at drone-seed, looking functionally similar to the very one that he still had in his pocket, although the one he carried was in danger of falling apart. The original Solomon had been the progenitor of Serum-21.

“Which is why it has always been so very important to withhold the technology, and to test and re-test it until we are sure it is safe for humanity,” Ochrie said.

“It wasn’t,” Solomon said in a low, stern voice. How much of their current problems owed itself to this platform? He had blamed the greed of the mega-corporations before, that of AgroMore and NeuroTech and Taranis, but maybe they were only doing the cybernetic and genetic research that Tier 1 of the Confederacy had always wanted them to do. When NeuroTech was churning out cyborgs on Proxima, were they doing it at the behest of Confederate command? Was the entire colonial war just a field-test of Confederate weaponry?

“But you never realized that the Message was a dupe,” Solomon growled. “The Ru’at were using the Message to gain control of human technology. To change the biology of Earth itself!” he said, outrage plain on his face.

“Whosever fault it was, we have an alien mothership about to take over Earth!” It was Jezzy who broke the glares of Solomon and Ochrie.

She’s right. Solomon nodded gravely.

“Yes, we do.” Ochrie echoed his nod. “Here, let’s get the imprimatur to a medical bay and get the rest of you to the ansible.”

The medical bays of the ECH were some of the best that Solomon had ever seen. In fact, they were the best, with hologram-bays that swept colored light and created internal diagrams of what was wrong with the imprimatur.

“Concussion, a bleed on the brain,” Ochrie said as she examined the images. Her hands swept through the holo controls, and in response, the automated drone arms craned over the imprimatur’s form and started to work. Lines of sparkling light lanced into the imprimatur’s head.

“It’s a simple procedure. The ECH’s medical computers will cauterize the bleed and evaporate any displaced blood. She’ll have a headache for days, but she should be fine,” Ochrie said. Solomon refused to leave the side of the woman who had saved their lives escaping the Ru’at colony until the computers had given a green ‘all-clear’ prognosis, and then he nodded for their urgent work to continue.

“I’ll take you to the ansible,” Ochrie said, leading the way to the central command chamber of the hub.

All the ECH’s main controls were in a large circular room with a raised, bridge-like area in the middle. Around the outside circle were many different consoles and data-screens, each with shimmering holographic graphs, readouts, and gauges as the ECH constantly monitored information from the super-black satellite network.

“Activate ansible,” Ochrie called out, and suddenly Solomon’s attention was taken from the devices around the room as something started to happen over the central dais.

There was a discreet hum and whirr of machinery as a dark shape started to descend from the dome roof. The in-set floor lights illuminated something unfolding in an almost organic way—a curl of jointed metal pieces that locked into place until it stopped, stationary, a little over chest height above the dais.

It looked a little like a telescope, Solomon thought, but a curved one. He saw rods, pistons, and servos that allowed it to fold, but its body was made of gleaming bronze and silver tubing, with a latticework of crystal-like wires, ending at a small, octagonal black screen that was no bigger than a man’s face.

Crystal tubules, Solomon thought, drawing out the Ru’at seed-drone from his pocket. The two halves had almost completely broken apart now, revealing strange gold-colored units and modules for which Solomon had no name, with everything connected by fine crystal-like hairs.

“Er…” Solomon started to wonder, holding up the Ru’at orb. “Are we sure that this ansible hasn’t been hacked by the Ru’at—just like the cyborgs?”

“What is that!?” Corporal Ratko was the first to exclaim, and Solomon explained that these ‘seed-drones’ appeared to be the command modules for Ru’at technology. They could produce holograms as well as force-fields, and apparently communicate using subspace.

“Let me see… If I can figure out how the thing works, we might be able to isolate the frequency that the Ru’at are using to control everything,” Ratko said as Solomon handed the orb over. The lieutenant had to agree that he was finally pleased to be rid of it, to be honest.

“We don’t know if the ansible has been compromised, is the short answer to your question, Lieutenant,” Ochrie said. “But now that we also have the Ru’at orb, we still might have a chance to destroy their communication network. We have to take the chance.”

Fair point, Solomon thought, even though it filled him with dread.

“It must use the same principles as Ru’at subspace channels.” Kol had already stepped up to the dais to examine the large, curving apparatus in the center of the room. “It generates a tiny quantum field and must either isolate or transmit a paired electron, many thousands of lightyears away.”

“I’m afraid I am no quantum physicist, but I believe I read a security report to something of that effect,” Ochrie said as she, Solomon, and Jezzy joined him on the platform, where Ochrie stepped forward to the black mirror and started to speak.

“Ansible? Identify the following CMC Officer: Brigadier General Asquew, of the Rapid Response Fleet,” Solomon watched Ochrie say into her reflection.

It’s creepy, Solomon thought as he watched the black mirror of the data-screen pulse with some internal energy, like a ripple spreading across its surface.

“Is it working?” Jezzy whispered in a haunted kind of voice, before suddenly the ansible jerked into motion. Solomon, Ochrie, Jezzy, and Kol sprang back as the entire structure swiveled just like a deep-space telescope, first turning one way on its axis and then the other, until it finally pointed some seventy degrees from where it had originally been.

“Don’t tell me it’s just going to point and say over there,” Solomon muttered to Jezzy.

But the black mirror of the device’s screen was still rippling in rhythmic circles, pulsing faster and faster.

“It might take a while. It is still an experimental object,” Ochrie said as they waited.

And while they waited, Solomon felt Jezzy move a little closer to him and whisper. “Sir… Sol. Back on board the scout, you did something…” she said, though their eyes were locked on the pulsing mirror in front of them.

“Was it bad?” Solomon said. It probably was. I don’t think I’ve had the best of luck so far at keeping friends.

“You let me take the command chair, and then you called me commander,” Jezzy said, and this time, Solomon looked at her to see how puzzled she was.

She’s still my squad member, Solomon thought. Still fiery and determined, but also the most incredibly hardworking person that he had ever met.

“Yes.” Solomon nodded. “I think you deserve it. General Asquew promoted me to First Lieutenant of the Outcasts. You have kept Gold Squad alive for the last however-long, and I think that—if any of us survive this and if there is enough of the Marine Corps left to even be a Marine Corps—you should be given squad command.”

It wasn’t something that Solomon had been thinking about especially, but it was something that had occurred to him in those moments on board the Marine scout as they fought Hausman’s fighters. He had seen the way Jezzy had worked with Ratko, Willoughby, and Malady, and even though he never wanted to lose them as his partners, he now knew how important it was to have trust between service men and women.

“You’ve earned their trust,” Solomon whispered. “They’ll die for you.”

“And so have you,” Jezzy breathed. “The rest of the squad threw themselves into battle without question at your command. You led us out of Proxima, remember?”

Solomon inclined his head. She was right at that, but right then and there, he realized why he had relinquished the boat to Jezzy. And why he didn’t think that he should command Gold Squad anymore.

“H21,” Solomon said heavily, and he saw Ochrie flinch as she overheard his name. “I know what I am, Jezzy, and I know what I am good at. Very good at, in fact,” he said. When he was younger, before he realized that he was a clone, he had always praised himself for his quick wits and his ability to think on his feet. For a while, he had even thought that those qualities had made him a good squad commander.

Maybe it did, he thought. But he also knew that the secrets lying in his blood were more important than just him. “The Ru’at have changed Earth. They—with the unwitting help of the mega-corps and the Confederacy—have changed human biology.”

Solomon took a deep breath. “If we’re still alive after all this, then there’s going to be a lot of work to do. Not just rebuilding and resettling, but also understanding just what the Ru’at have done. I think that it will be better if Gold Squad has its own, dedicated leader, and then I will be able to offer my services where I can.”

It hurt Solomon to admit this, but he had seen too much in the Ru’at colony to not say it. He had seen the caverns of Mars transformed into a living, alien landscape. He had seen whole groups of people brainwashed and enslaved.

“Your request is granted, Colonel Cready,” Ochrie broke into their conversation.

“Huh?” Solomon blinked as the commander-in-chief continued.

“As you say, it will have to depend upon whether or not the Marine Corps and the Confederacy survives, and we will also have to consult with General Asquew for her approval. But I will be forwarding you for command of the Outcasts and the rank of lieutenant colonel, as I intend to expand the Outcast expeditionary forces into a full battalion,” Ochrie said.

Solomon nodded. He felt flushed with pride, but it was also tinged with regret. I guess this means I won’t fight alongside my squad again.

Chief Ochrie must have sensed some of Solomon’s reservations, because he saw the older woman’s wry, wrinkly smile as she said, “Oh, and I wouldn’t worry about abandoning your friends, Colonel Cready. In the Marine Corps, even field officers have tactical battle groups and are able to deploy on missions. I am sure that General Asquew will want your wits and your abilities out there in the field anyway—with your battle group made up of hand-picked Marines.”

Which will, of course, be Gold Squad. Solomon turned to grin at Jezzy, who nodded.

Blip! There was a small flash of light from the black mirror of the ansible as the ripples coalesced into a single blue dot. Shimmering into view just above the surface of the obsidian-looking screen was a simple holographic set of words.

‘CMC Brigadier General Asquew Located: Contact?’

17

Interlude: The Conquest of Earth

In the darkness beyond the light of the sun, a small red light flared. It illuminated a rocky landscape pitted with craters and a singular antenna attached to a large dish. It was the dark side of the Moon, and one of the many near-listening posts.

Signals flickered and passed down the antenna array as the constant stream of sonar waves pinged off a shape. A very large shape. And it was approaching Earth at a stately pace, entering the Moon’s shadow, where it blocked most of Earth’s own electromagnetic sensors.

Which was why the near-listening posts had been set in place, of course.

Ship Designation: UNKNOWN

Propulsion System: UNKNOWN

The simple computer on the Confederate listening device couldn’t recognize what the craft was, only its dimensions—almost two full kilometers across and almost two-thirds of a kilometer thick.

Other devices and equipment whirled into place. Miniaturized radio telescopes, deep-space cameras.

They bombarded the shape with sonar waves, guided magnetic waves, low-frequency sound-bursts…and the shape that came back was that of a giant disk.

It was the Ru’at mothership. And it had come to Earth to pay its respects.

“Incoming!” Alerts sounded up and down the main Moon base of Luna, under the other commander-in-chief’s control, or Brigadier General Hausman, as he was known.

In the main Luna command and control room, which Hausman had turned into his operational HQ, a low-grade panic was starting to spread. In front of computers and data-screens, the Marines of the Near-Earth Fleet struggled to understand what precisely it was they were looking at. They knew of the Ru’at, of course, and they knew of the takeover of Proxima, but they had never seen the actual mothership.

Hausman sat in his raised command chair and surveyed the rising chaos. He was a portly sort of man who liked to be on view before his subordinates. He wore a very-recently fabricated dress uniform that gleamed white and gold, with all his old general insignia and awards, plus a dozen new ones that he himself had a hand in designing.

Around the walls of the command and control room stood the motionless figures of the cyborgs created for him by Taranis Industries—a distant corporate sister of NeuroTech and AgroMore. Their part-metal, part-flesh faces were completely impassive, and the particle-beam hands at their sides were totally impassive. Just as they always were.

“Steady, boys…” Hausman muttered to his crew. He knew the deal, or what Taranis and the Chosen of Mars had said was the deal: The Ru’at would take the colonies, and he would have Earth. He had already made the final move of his operation: to nuke the Confederate Council in New York and declare General Asquew the culprit.

The Ru’at had seen to the end of Asquew’s First Rapid Response Fleet, Hausman knew, which only left Rapid Response Fleet 2.

But Hausman hadn’t been overly worried about RR2, as reports from Neptune had indicated that Pluto had been a disaster for Asquew. She had lost one of her best battleships, and the rest of the RR2 had been engaged in a skirmish-conflict with the Ru’at jump-ships.

And if just eight of the Ru’at jump-ships could destroy the Invincible, then Hausman rather hoped that the rest would have made short work of RR2.

But then, why has the mothership come here, to Earth?

“We got visuals, General,” called one of his soldiers at her station.

“Overhead,” Hausman said gruffly, maintaining his stern demeanor at all times.

On the central view screen at one end of the command and control room, there appeared the overlaid images of the near-listening posts. The picture fuzzed and glitched before settling into an enhanced-color image of the gigantic Ru’at mothership as it powered around the Moon without thrusters or plumes of plasma.

Its size was vast, and Hausman could see the complicated, moving internal machineries, although he couldn’t make out what their purpose really was.

“Near-Earth Fleet set to ready, sir,” called one of his tactical officers.

“Maintain their positions, officer!” Hausman barked. He didn’t want to start an interstellar war with his allies just yet.

“The ship is cresting the Moon’s shadow in T-minus ten seconds, sir,” his navigation officer called. “She’ll be registered by Earth’s defense satellite network.”

Hausman knew what his officer was saying. That the sphere of missile-loaded defense satellites would ping the mothership for identification, and after it received none, it would wait until the mothership had breached the customary no-fly zone and fire automatically.

“Cancel defense satellite auto-fire!” Hausman called. Maybe they had come to parlay. Maybe they had come to meet the new leader of the human race, as equals.

The Ru’at had come to do no such thing, however.

Bzzt! Under Hausman’s large hands, the control pad on his armrests buzzed an urgent call. Private channel.

Sender: Jump-ship #34.

Channel: Alpha-Gold 01.

Hausman accepted the message, patching it through to his wireless earbud. Jump-ship #34 was part of the strike group he had sent to seize the ECH and destroy the Test Fleet. Rather annoyingly, he didn’t have the Tier 1 higher command codes in order to activate the Test Fleet himself, so he had known the correct tactical decision had been to remove it from enemy hands.

There was no way he was going to let Asquew get her wizened hands on it, anyway. And once the automated fleet was down, he would have all the time in the world to crack the ECH’s command codes.

Just as soon as he found out what the Ru’at wanted, that was.

“Speak,” he said out loud, and the message from Jump-ship #34 began.

“Urgent Priority 1 message for Commander-in-Chief Hausman. Operation Salt has failed—”

“What!?” Hausman jerked upright in his chair, earning a few more worried glances from the people around him.

“Someone activated the ECH Test Fleet against us. Request immediate dreadnaught deployment to secure the area. There’s only one CMC fighter remaining of the strike group, as well as the Marine transport, and of course ourselves…”

“Off.” Hausman banged his hand on the armrest, not even bothering to give stand-down orders or recognition of their efforts. He was not the sort of man who rewarded, or even recognized, failure.

Asquew must have reached the ECH. Somehow, she managed to find the codes or hack the Test Fleet, Hausman knew. How much of a problem would that be?

“A major one,” the man murmured to himself. It wasn’t that the Test Fleet was particularly much of a threat to his control—it was a small number of ships, all told—but now Asquew would be able to coordinate strike raids with the help of the super-black surveillance network, which would cause him no end of trouble in the months and years to come.

“Why didn’t they do their job!” Hausman glared at the Ru’at mothership. It was supposed to take out Asquew for him. This was meant to be a partnership!

But the Ru’at didn’t recognize allies. Especially not from biological humans with none of their own DNA inside them.

All around the room, the cyborgs suddenly raised their particle-beam hands, and Hausman heard the whine as they cycled up.

“What is going on? Stand down! I command it!” Hausman managed to shout imperiously, just before they fired.

Outside the glowing curve of the Moon, the Ru’at mothership emerged from the darkness like a predatory shark as it crested into view above the cradle of humanity.

Earth.

From its underside emerged many small shapes, ejected from opening ports into the complicated body of the disk itself….

Ru’at jump-ships, dropping from the belly of their mother like a cloud of locusts. They had to number in the tens, twenties.

Perhaps even hundreds.

18

Endgame

With the many flashes and glares of erupting light, General Asquew and the last of her fleet rippled into the space around the ECH.

From the command chamber inside, Solomon watched the arriving stragglers, and his heart plummeted. They were a fraction of what they once had been. He could make out only two of the large, fat-bellied battleships, where once there would have been ten or more. He could see one—one!—Marine transporter loaded with CMC fighters on its docking arms. Perhaps eight or ten one-person fighter craft.

After that came a smattering of other sorts of craft, none of them enough to make their own battle groups—a few heavy bombers, a handfuls of scouts, and that was about it.

What did surprise him, though, was the fact that there was also quite a collection of tugs and hauliers that had arrived with them. These were civilian boats and completely unfit for combat.

“Administrator Ahmadi!” Jezzy said with a laugh.

“Huh?” Solomon had no idea who that was.

“She’s the Administrator of the Last Call, the Plutonian filling station. I helped her defend the Call from the Ru’at,” Jezzy said, indicating that all of the tugs were hers, as were the good-sized number of civilian jump-ships that Asquew had used to transport her straggling fleet.

“At least she’s still got the Resolute.” Solomon nodded at the giant pyramid of the Second Rapid Response Fleet’s flagship. It was a dreadnaught, just like the Invincible had been, and it gleamed bronze and gunmetal gray.

The dreadnaughts were almost as large as deep-field station-ships, because they were space stations and workhouses and garages and transporters all rolled into one. It was about four times the size of the entire ECH, but it already looked significantly damaged, with blackened lines indicating where entire floor levels had been breached.

“We came under fire in jump,” Asquew explained as her image flickered onto one of the overhead holo-screens.

“Inside jump?” Solomon gasped. “That’s impossible, isn’t it?”

“No.” Jezzy reminded him of how the Marine scout had been chased and caught up to by one of the faster-than-light Ru’at ships.

“Crikey… Right…” Solomon’s heart plunged just a little bit more. Was there no end to what the Ru’at could do?

“Commander Ochrie.” Asquew saw the form of the once-ambassador standing before the ansible. They watched as the general took to one knee and bowed her head. “Through blood and fire…” she recited the Marine Oath, and Solomon found himself murmuring the words alongside her.

‘Through blood and fire, I will still stand strong.

‘I will stand at the borders and the crossroads, I will stand strong.

‘Even with the eternal night before me, I will be the flame!’

“Arise, Brigadier General.” Ochrie bowed her head. “And thank you. Although I think that I may only hold this position until a suitable replacement is found. Right now, we are going to need a bit of that blood and fire.”

Tier 1 Alert!

Several of the ECH’s command screens flared into warning red signals.

“What is it?” Ochrie said, and it was Kol who raced to read the messages.

“It says here, ma’am…that the Ru’at are attacking Earth!” he said, his voice thin with panic.

So this is it. Solomon shared a dark look with Jezzy. It’s begun.

“What’s the ETA on that orb, Ratko?” Solomon called out, not wasting time. People were dying. Right now.

Corporal Ratko was working at one of the console benches with her set of tools, wires snaking out of the orb and into the consoles and computers around her. When her voice came back, it sounded uncertain. “I think…”

“I need facts, Corporal,” Jezzy said, and Solomon could tell he had made a good call in promoting her.

“I’ve isolated the subspace signal that the Ru’at are using to coordinate all of their craft, but it’s a modulated signal,” she said.

“What does that mean?” Solomon frowned.

It was Kol who replied. “A modulated signal means that it keeps on skipping and changing along a set bandwidth, but always within that bandwidth range. It means that it’s incredibly hard to isolate the signal alone.”

“Incredibly hard isn’t impossible,” Solomon said. “Kol, help Ratko on it.”

“Aye-aye.” Kol, amazingly, didn’t hesitate to race to the other technical specialist’s side. “We might be able to block off the bandwidth outer frequencies.”

“Yes!” Ratko said. “We can apply quantum interference, and thereby shorten the bandwidth down, forcing them into one frequency!”

“But that will mean…” Kol said, looking up in alarm at Solomon, Ochrie, and the holo-projection of Asquew. “The Ru’at will know as soon as we start doing it.”

“Do it,” Asquew and Solomon said at once, before sharing a nod between them. There were people dying, after all.

“Initiating procedure,” Ratko said, starting to tease at the crystal wires with some sort of sensor as Kol’s hands blurred through holo-controls in front of them.

“Right.” Asquew cleared her throat, which was a weird thing to see a hologram do. “We know that the Ru’at have FTL drives, and it won’t take them long to trace what we’re doing.”

The command team raced into action. The Resolute was set above the ECH, where it could rain down fire against any attackers as the flights of CMC fighters and ECH Nightjars were arranged in loose battle groups in front of the hub.

Next came the assortment of Retribution and Vulture craft, along with the sporadic Rapid Response craft.

“Behind,” Solomon indicated on the command holo-map on board the ECH. “The Nightjars are automated—no life lost—so they have to be the first line of defense.”

“And our heavy cavalry—” Jezzy meant the larger fighters and bombers. “—can offer gunnery support when they—”

FZZZT! Out in the darkness, there was a flash of blue and white light as the Ru’at jump-ships rippled into space, already firing their weapons.

“Activate Nightjars!” Solomon shouted as he ran to the nearest command console and, just as before, the holo commands of the different battle groups jumped up under his fingers.

As the two technical specialists worked to narrow down the subspace band that the drone Ru’at were using, the battle outside only intensified.

Lines of blue-white fire lanced through space from the advancing wave of Ru’at drone fighters. There are so many, Lieutenant Colonel Solomon thought as he worked, sliding first one Nightjar group forward, and then the next around in a sweeping movement.

The ECH controls were far better than the tactical commands that the scout had. They matched Solomon’s already-Serum 21-enhanced reflexes, and many kilometers away from him, the Nightjars could react at the same speed too.

>Full Offensive

His hand flickered through the attack mode, until he realized just what he was trying to do.

Ahead of him flew a vast cloud of the Ru’at jump-ships, their obsidian rings blurring as they operated at much higher speeds than his Nightjars could.

Group 1 Vessel 2 COMPROMISED

Group 1 Vessel 4 COMPROMISED

And compromised, Solomon could see, meant destroyed. This approach wasn’t working. Not against the faster and deadlier Ru’at jump-ships, and certainly not against the gigantic shape that had appeared behind it: the mothership.

The idea of holding off the Ru’at with the automated ECH Test Fleet had been short-lived. The Ru’at jump-ships had swamped their position almost immediately, and now they were trading fire with the heavy fighters and bombers of both the ECH Test Fleet and the Second Rapid Response Fleet.

And the Resolute. Solomon saw lancing missiles fire in salvos down into the Ru’at forces. There were so many of them that all the Resolute had to do was auto-detonate when they were in range—

FZZZ!

But then came a bolt of blue-white energy as the mothership fired—not against the ECH, but against the much larger Resolute hanging above them. It was the same sort of particle-beam weapon that all the Ru’at used, but it was much larger.

On the viewing screens, Solomon saw the entire pyramid shudder as one of its corners was blown, and the entire thing started turn slowly to one side.

And accelerate forward.

“What is she doing!?” Jezzy shouted from where she worked beside Solomon, commanding the rest of the ECH Test Fleet. But Jezzy answered her own question. “She’s doing what the Oregon did…”

Solomon was still struggling to keep his own Nightjars alive as he asked in a panicked voice, “What did the Oregon do!?”

“It flew straight for the Ru’at in a suicide charge,” Jezzy said.

“Oh, crap.” Solomon knew that Asquew was trying to buy them more time. The Resolute could probably soak up the most damage of all their ships.

“Ratko! Kol! How we doing on that interference?” Solomon shouted as he directed the Nightjars forward.

“We’re in a .5 frequency band! We’re almost there!” Kol shouted back.

But will it be fast enough to save Asquew’s life, and countless hundreds of others?

Solomon slid his hands to every ECH battlegroup he had at his disposal.

>Protect

He changed their attack mode and threw them forward around the Resolute in a glittering whirl of anger. Solomon’s enhanced synapses kicked in as he controlled the ships minutely and individually as best he could.

Target Acquired!

Fire.

Solomon’s Nightjars opened fire on the jump-ships that sought to cut into the Resolute as it charged behind them. Rings blew apart under artillery shells, but many of the beams still got through, puncturing holes into the last dreadnaught they had.

FZZZZZ!

The mothership fired again, straight into the heart of the Resolute, where it shuddered and started to turn over, end over end, as its top cone began to separate. It spilled metal guts and squirming bodies out into the vacuum.

“Got it!” Ratko shouted.

“Initiate!” Solomon shouted desperately, and—

—there was a flare of light from the ECH’s top antennae.

As suddenly as it had begun, the war ended.

Epilogue: A New Era

Without their subspace frequency controlling them, the Ru’at ships—even the mothership—fell silent. Their strange propulsion systems refused to operate. Their murderous beam weapons refused to fire.

But what was even stranger was the fact that the ships themselves started to fall apart, as if they had been held together by nothing more than—

“Electromagnetism,” Kol said in awe.

“Quantum-entangled electromagnetism,” Corporal Ratko corrected him.

That had been why the EMP was so effective, of course, Solomon and the rest now saw.

More than a million miles away across the vastness of space, the cyborgs that had been attacking Luna fell to the ground, their metal and mechanical parts finally giving way to the wishes of their dead hosts.

Further still on the Red Planet, the hundreds of meters of silver-steel of the Ru’at colony once again stopped working. The brainwashed Chosen of Mars stopped receiving their subliminal messages from the Ru’at orbs that fell lifelessly from their posts, and the humans started to shake their heads, looking around and wondering where they were and what had happened. Of course, they were immediately thrown into a fight for their very lives as they struggled to restart their air filters and atmospheric generators.

But the largest piece of auto-destruction came from the Ru’at mothership itself. As Solomon and the others watched, it started to break apart, revealing that it really was made of nothing more that strange, modular machine parts and billions of crystal-tube fragments.

It was these latter components that appeared almost surreal to the eyes of Solomon and the others aboard the ECH, as a fast-expanding cloud of glittering silver blew out from the mothership and the smaller Ru’at jump-ships like a fragile spider’s web, tattering and winking out as they grew more and more disparate.

“I don’t like the look of that one bit,” General Asquew admitted from her glitching holo-form standing next to Chief Ochrie.

Asquew had survived, somehow, even though almost half her crew aboard the Resolute had lost their lives. The command crew aboard the top of the dreadnaught had performed last-minute airlock procedures in order to keep fighting to the very last man, woman, and computer.

“What comes next?” Solomon asked in a sort of awe as he watched the first and most devastating enemy of humanity fall to pieces.

“We rebuild,” Jezzy said beside him, her face grim. Solomon knew that the task ahead was great, and that fractured humankind, more than ever, would have a lot of obstacles if it was ever to approach its former glory once again.

And what was even worse was that Lieutenant Colonel Solomon Cready knew that even though they had halted the Ru’at in Confederate space completely, so they no longer would be able to FTL their drone fleets to attack them, the Ru’at were still out there somewhere, a hundred thousand systems away. The real Ru’at. The ones who had built these machines and seeded the galaxy with their orbs.

To Solomon, this felt like a new era in more ways than one. Humanity now had all the pieces of Ru’at technology to salvage and reverse-engineer, which was what the Confederacy had been doing for the last hundred years anyway, right?

But now they had access to the secret of subspace communication. Quantum-entangled electromagnetism. Cybernetics. Particle-beams. Tractor beams. And of course, faster-than-light travel.

And we’re going to need all of that if we’re ever to face the Ru’at—or any other alien super race—again.

“Colonel Cready?” Solomon turned to see General Asquew and Commander-in-Chief Ochrie regarding him strangely.

“Yes, sir?” Solomon saluted them. He felt like a new man somehow, after everything he had been through.

“Considering your efforts and achievements over your short military career,” the general began, “I would normally offer you some R and R for a job well done, but…” The hologram nodded to the wreckage ahead of them. “There’s work to be done. Assemble your battle group, please. We need a trained military commander, one who’s good at thinking on their feet, to lead a rescue expedition to the people of Earth.”

Earth. Solomon considered. The cradle of humanity. Our home. The place he had once been told he’d never get to return to. “It would be an honor, sir.” He saluted again, turning to Jezzy, Malady, Ratko, Willoughby, and even Kol.

“Ready for another mission, schlubs?” he asked.

“If it’s alright with you, sir,” Kol said, his eyes downcast, “I would like to stay here, on the ECH. Work on rebuilding everything that I helped destroy.”

“Request granted, Corporal Kol.” Solomon nodded. It was probably for the best, anyway. He looked again at the remaining members of Gold Squad. “Anyone else want to beg off?” he asked, a trace of humor in his voice.

“We’ll be ready to ship out within the hour, Colonel,” Jezzy said.

Of course you will, Solomon thought. He knew they would give him a hundred percent.

Because that’s what Marines did.

THANK YOU

Thank you so much for reading the Outcast Marines Boxed Set which contained the entire Outcast Marines series.

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