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  The Kepler Rescue

  Outcast Marines, Book 2

  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. Break and Enter

  2. Break or Be Broken

  3. A Job For You

  4. Old Habits Die Hard

  5. No Possible Recompense

  6. Serum 21

  7. Decisions

  8. Joachim

  9. Kepler

  10. Raid!

  11. Ghost Hulk

  12. Mayday

  Epilogue: Experimental Industry

  Thank You

  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 gruelling 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 flin
g 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, leap-frogging 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 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.