Alien Legacy Read online

  Alien Legacy

  Outcast Marines, Book 7

  James David Victor

  Fairfield Publishing

  Copyright © 2019 Fairfield Publishing

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Except for review quotes, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the written consent of the author.

  This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is purely coincidental.

  Contents

  1. Dead Not Dead

  2. Float

  3. Brother of my Brother

  4. Jump Start

  5. Hospitality

  6. Take My Breath Away

  7. Flying for the Enemy

  8. The Last Flight of the Oregon

  9. S.O.L

  10. City of Heaven

  11. The Last Call

  12. Ru’at Hails You

  13. Shadows of the Past

  14. Not a War, an Upgrade

  15. Battle Plan

  16. The Judgement

  17. Reunited

  18. Attacked!

  19. Revelations

  20. The Acting Commander

  21. Lie to This…

  Thank You

  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, Solomon 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-machine 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 cyborg’s 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.” Solomon 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, Tavin,” 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,” Solomon 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 ma
n 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?”

  “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, nose, and mouth—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 tiny 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 of 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 there, 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 of 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 of 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 her 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 had no idea 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 before 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.<
br />
  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 a blackened with soot, and the metal ‘sheaths’ of 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.