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  And then Solomon realized something: Their uniforms were out-of-date. Like, really out-of-date.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 sight 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 of 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 of 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 mothers’ 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 pot-shots 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 shot
s 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 the 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.