Invasion- Proxima Read online

  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 space-walked 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 equipp
ed 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 step
ped 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.