Outcast Marines Boxed Set Page 14

  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, 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 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.