Conquest of Earth Read online

  I don’t care if it hits or not, just so long as—

  In response to her desperate movements from the piloting chair, the ESR opened ports and fired positional rockets, swerving away from the Ru’at vessel to head deeper into the debris field.

  “Come on, come on, my pretty…” Jezzy was surprised at how much she was enjoying this, especially given the fact that she was about to die.

  Maybe it’s because it’s just them and me, Jezzy thought. Out here among the stars. We’ll see who’s best. That was the Yakuza training in her talking, she knew.

  Unfortunately for Jezebel Wen, the answer to who was the best was undeniably the Ru’at.

  She swerved in a wide arc away from the now pursuing Ru’at vessel, only to find a gleam of starlight and a confusing warping effect ahead of her.

  The second Ru’at patrol ship had arrived, using its rotating FTL rings to skip just ahead of her position in less time than it took for a heart to beat.

  “Dammit!” Jezzy threw the flight controls toward the floor. “Mainframe! Give me maximum thrusters!” she shouted.

  ESR Mainframe: Maximum Propellant Load to Main Thrusters.

  Jezzy felt a jolt as she was once again thrown back in her seat as the tiny ESR vehicle was thrown forward. Pieces of ruined Confederate craft swept past her hull in a flash of serrated metal, and—

  CRAAASH!

  ESR Mainframe: Proximity Warning!

  ESR Mainframe: Craft Compromised. Hull Damage at Side Plate o7…

  The ESR tactical computer wasn’t as fast as what Jezzy was used to. “I know!” she shouted as the octoid orb careened from the impact, sending itself on an erratic course across the debris.

  Strangely enough, this misfortune was what saved the craft, and Jezzy within, as a thick line of blue-white fire obliterated the section of metal that she had bounced off. The Ru’at were on the chase, and it looked as though only pure chance was keeping Jezzy alive.

  ESR Mainframe: Unknown Craft on Intercept Course!

  “Oh, what now!?” Jezzy growled as she swerved to avoid a piece of fuselage. The baleful Red Planet was growing ever larger in front of her. She knew that if she wasn’t careful, she would soon end up approaching atmosphere—and she had no idea how the damaged ESR vehicle could withstand it.

  The ‘what now’ had appeared just on the horizon of Mars and was approaching at a blistering speed, its outer rings starting to speed up. It was another Ru’at jump-ship, and it had brought friends.

  ESR Mainframe: Unknown Craft on Intercept Course!

  ESR Mainframe: Unknown Craft—

  The slow ESR tactical computer glitched as it overloaded on the warnings. It was attempting to tell Jezzy that there were in fact three more Ru’at ships arriving, to add to the two already following her.

  “Five? How many had first been dispatched from the Ru’at mothership?” she wondered out loud as she randomly threw the ESR into a tailspin. “It hadn’t been a lot! Ten? Twelve!?”

  She couldn’t remember. But either way, five ships out of the entire Ru’at fleet was no small achievement.

  If she could pull off her game-plan, that was.

  Using a variety of random maneuvers, she managed to pull the ESR back into a path toward the center of the wreckage field, where the remnants of the Rapid Response Fleet were the densest and where the hulk of the Invincible could clearly be seen in the background.

  The gold and gun-metal pyramid had been pointed down toward the Red Planet, which Jezzy assumed was because of the planetary bombardment it had started. Now, however, it was listing to one side, its emergency power still holding it in a sort of orbit with Mars, but she rather figured that it probably wouldn’t take long before its orbit deteriorated.

  Maybe I’m doing Mars a favor, she thought as she raised one hand from the stick and flexed her fingers.

  Timer App Downloaded.

  Controls: Countdown

  Set timer: 5 minutes; 1 minute; 30 seconds; 10 seconds

  Lieutenant Wen had a whole heap of controls to choose for when to detonate their jury-rigged nuclear device.

  “Ratko, did I ever tell you that you are a genius?” she murmured to the empty cockpit. She concentrated, keeping one eye on the hulk of the Invincible as the Ru’at craft flickered and almost instantaneously shot toward her.

  SCREREEAA—

  ESR Mainframe: Craft Compromised. Hull Damage at Forward Plate o3…

  She was taking heavy flak now, but not from the Ru’at. It was from the many pieces of CMC ships that the Ru’at had destroyed and left lying around.

  Timer App:

  10 Seconds?

  “No,” Jezzy said. There wasn’t any time. She slid Ratko’s app slider all the way to the start of the app visible on her heads-up display.

  Timer App:

  3 Seconds?

  Initiate: Y/N?

  Y.

  “Let’s see how advanced you are now, Ru’at suckers!” Jezzy said as the counter clicked, and she threw the ESR into a tight turn—

  2…

  1…

  The expanding globe of white light that started near the nose ‘tip’ of the Invincible was incandescent, exponential, and unstoppable.

  4

  Naked Opportunity

  BWAAAARM!

  Solomon’s eyes twitched awake with the sudden imposition of an alarm. It was one of the Ru’at alarms, he knew. The Outcast Company lieutenant had heard the likes of it before when he had attempted to flee this place with Kol and the others.

  “What— Where— How…” he murmured. He was still alive. Somehow.

  And he wasn’t in agony anymore. In fact, the young man was surprised to realize that he felt pretty good.

  BWAAAARM!

  The bright light in his eyes flickered, shutting off for the briefest of moments and plunging Solomon into darkness before re-igniting, but at a much more subdued level.

  Solomon raised his head to see that he was in a perfectly round room with steel walls and what would have been a glowing white ceiling. Just like the judgment chamber, he thought. He attempted to push himself up but realized he couldn’t.

  “What?” His wrists and ankles were still restrained. He was able to look down the length of his body to see that he was lying with his back on a stainless steel ‘plate,’ and that each of his limbs were locked to the cold metal by magnet bracelets.

  He was also naked, which was slightly disconcerting to see, as he was sure that he had come into this room clothed.

  And also bleeding and about to die, of course, but still, Solomon didn’t like the idea of waking up naked in an alien environment. “What did you do to me?” he murmured, raising his head as much as he was able to see his chiseled and defined chest, his long and lithe arms. Was it his eyes, or could he see marks on his body?

  He could. There was a very faint network of reddish lines zigzagging across his body like he was one huge, crazy, biological jigsaw. The lines were very faint, like scratches, and just slightly shiny, like scars.

  Eurgh, no! Solomon thought suddenly. Was he looking at the evidence of the Ru’ats surgeries? Wasn’t that precisely what the hologram had told him—that the Ru’at were planning to ‘make him anew’?

  “What did you do to me…” Solomon said in horror, and then louder, “What did you do to me!?”

  BWAAAARM!

  The colony’s alarm blared once more from hidden speakers, and in its wake was a dull hum as a door opened, and in walked the form of the ‘human friendly’ hologram of an aging man with white hair and a silver-white encounter suit.

  He doesn’t look like a hologram, Solomon thought. But then again, maybe this was all a part of the Ru’at’s attempt to calm him down.

  “The procedure hasn’t taken. There has been a complication,” the man said. For the first time ever, Solomon thought he saw the man frown. He gestured with his hands, and over his shoulder swept into the room a floating device that made Solomon’s heart jump. It was one of the Ru’at orbs, wha
t appeared to be a floating drone sphere of steel with no visible system of propulsion, with a line inscribing its circumference that shone a brilliant blue-white.

  Solomon gulped. He had one of these orbs in his old clothes. It was smashed and broken, and he’d hoped to deliver it to General Asquew for her team to analyze. They were also capable of the most unbelievable of things. Not only could they float seemingly without thrusters, rotors, turbines, wings, or rockets—gravitonic technology? Magnetics? Solomon’s intelligence-gathering mind wondered—but they could also create waves of invisible force strong enough to pick you up and throw you around. Solomon knew this only too well, as the broken orb had done just that to him on more than one occasion already.

  “Yes.” Solomon saw the ‘human friendly’ man nod as if to the orb itself and answer an unheard question. “Subject H21 still has his human culture personality accretions. We will need to repeat the process,” the man said, his eyes scanning Solomon’s body as if studying it for signs of infection.

  But it was what the small Ru’at orb did that really freaked First Lieutenant Cready out. It bobbed forward through the air until it was hovering almost directly over his head and started to lower itself, revolving slightly so that its line of blue-white fire was brilliant and all-encompassing in Solomon’s eyes.

  “No! Wait! What are you doing? Get that thing away from me!” Solomon shouted, and tried to thrash and move his limbs. It was useless. The magnets were too powerful even for his enhanced genetics.

  “You still have your Confederate personality substrate in place, H21. The Ru’at will remove it for you,” the man said seriously as the blue-white glare almost blinded Solomon.

  And the Outcast Marine started to feel a pain, entering right into the middle of his forehead.

  “Can I trust you?” a much younger Solomon Cready asked his accomplice.

  “Of course, Sol. Why would you even ask that?” the figure laughed, turning around for the moon and star light to illuminate his youthful face.

  It was Matthias Sozer, of course.

  Matthias—or Matty to his friends—was a few years older than the teenaged Solomon—or Sol—but the pair seemed to have hit it off. The night air around them was still, save for the bark of a fox somewhere on the edge of AgroMore’s farmlands. Behind them, the lane swept down to the giant wheat fields, illuminated by nighttime floodlights. And in their center was one of the tall harvester ‘towers,’ stationary and unmoving.

  The AgroMore harvesters moved slowly during the day, gathering up the ripened wheat and separating it into wheat and chaff in one of its many tiered levels.

  But Sol had only had a passing interest in the industrial quirks of the device. He had dared himself to climb right to the very top, all the way up to where it was said that the agricultural company had its secret laboratories.

  It did, in fact, have laboratories up there, but the young Solomon, many, many years before ever hearing about the Ru’at or the Message, didn’t think that what he had seen had been that secretive.

  It had just been large beds of hydroponically-sprouted crop trials, all contained in their own growing units and held at various stages of growth under red, yellow, or blue lights.

  As far as risky adventures had gone, the climb up several stories had been exhilarating, but the final reveal had been disappointing. At least to his young eyes, anyway. It would be almost a decade before Solomon would think again about those beds of sprouting crops and start to wonder.

  But what Solomon had been surprised to find was the one thing that he had never had: a friend.

  “Yeah, well, I saw you climbing it, and then I heard on the scanner that the Enforcers would be doing a patrol of the area soon.” Sozer shrugged as he trudged a meter or so ahead of Solomon. He paused and looked back at his younger friend. “I was impressed. Not many kids would dare a climb that high.”

  “Did you?” Solomon asked, still a little intimidated by the older, tougher, and much cooler boy.

  “Did I what—climb it?” Matty chuckled and shook his head. “Yeah. Summer before last.” The youth looked speculatively at Solomon. “I was probably about your age.”

  There wasn’t much to do in the small Midwestern company town in the American Confederacy. The summers were long, and the days were filled with the hum and whine of AgroMore’s machinery, plowing their way across the horizon. It was natural for two misfits like Matty and Sol to fall in with each other.

  BWAAR! BWAAAAR! The flashing blue lights and the sirens were getting closer. The younger Solomon froze. The Confederate Enforcers were heading down the access road that linked up to the interstate on the other side of AgroMore’s land. It was the very same road that their lane met up with.

  Had they been spotted? Solomon’s eyes darted to the scruffy hedges and the occasional, shrubby sort of tree. It was still night, but the sky was a pale, silvery blue from the stars and the gibbous moon above. It wouldn’t take a lot for them to be spotted.

  What’s the penalty for trespass, again? Solomon asked himself.

  “They’ve spotted us,” Solomon said as he watched the approaching lights, getting brighter and brighter in his eyes. He was certain of it.

  BWAR! BWAAAR!

  “No way. Two small blips on the side of the harvester? No way they spotted us,” Matty said with a laugh.

  “But AgroMore might have had internal security cameras,” the younger Solomon pointed out, earning a sharp look from Matty.

  “True, I guess. Look. I know how to deal with the Enforcers. We’ll stay out of the way, but if they get close to us, let me do the talking, alright?” said the youth who would become Solomon’s lifelong friend, ally, and criminal accomplice—as well as the one person who would eventually betray him the worst.

  “Can I trust you?” Solomon asked again. This time, he couldn’t see Matty’s shaded face as the older boy turned to look at him.

  “Yeah, I told you, Solomon. You’ll always be able to trust me.” Matty’s voice was low and insistent.

  BWAAR—

  BWAAAARM!

  “—get away from me!” Solomon attempted to kick as the Ru’at orb lowered to an inch or so above his forehead.

  Solomon couldn’t have been more surprised when the lights flickered again, and the colony sirens went off in a constant barrage. The Ru’at orb abruptly dropped from its position to smack him in the center of the forehead and bounce off the table, its blue-white light off.

  Huh?

  BWAAARM!

  “I don’t understand…” the human-friendly man said, a look of incomprehension on his face. Solomon saw him tug at his sleeve and raise a hand to the side of his head. There, Solomon saw, was a sleek black implant, like a round piece of black glass.

  “A magnetic disturbance?” Solomon overheard the man say, and, “An EMP attack? Reserve systems, immediately!”

  BWAARM!

  Without explanation, the man turned and ran through the open door, leaving Solomon and the orb in the room and the door open. Solomon realized two things in that very instant: that the man’s boots made a noise on the gun-metal of the floor—meaning that he almost certainly wasn’t a hologram—and that the locks holding his limbs in place had de-magnetized.

  An EMP, Solomon thought. An electro-magnetic pulse. Clouds of chain-reaction particles that destabilized electronic systems in the blast radius. The lieutenant knew this because he had read the specs on several such weapons that the Confederate Marine Corps had at its disposal, ranging from ‘briefcase bombs’ that could be infiltrated into an installation and detonated to kill all security measures, to the sorts of low-orbit fission devices that not only created vast amounts of heat and light, but could also ruin a satellite network.

  “Someone’s knocked out the Ru’at colony.” Solomon’s mood shifted from bleak to hilarity in seconds. It had to be General Asquew, it just had to be! Solomon knew that the First Rapid Response Fleet above them was on the run—he had flown through the battle—but Asquew herself must have
arrived to liberate Mars!

  “We’re going to be free!” he said, pulling the weak magnetic force apart as he stumbled off the metal bed and slapped cold feet on the floor.

  “Only I really could do with some clothes about now…” Solomon remembered that he was still naked and covered with the thin red lines where the Ru’at had done…whatever it was that they had done to him.

  “Breathe. Center yourself.” Solomon’s nudity was not a thing that bothered him at the moment. It was probably the fact that he was still very much a hostage of an alien super power, but also slightly because of the fact that, back in his old life in New Kowloon, Earth, there had been many times when he had to come up with quick solutions in uncompromising situations.

  What do I have? Solomon catalogued.

  “Well, certainly not my pride,” he muttered, until his eyes fell on the motionless, silent, dark Ru’at orb. He snatched it up and padded silently to the door.

  Outside was a short corridor that ended at a T-junction. The entire colony appeared to be made of the same gray metal, meaning that the walls and floors were freezing now that the power had been turned off. The usually glowing white ceiling that provided the light was now a dull, weakened haze.

  “Get to the air filters!” he heard someone shout as a white-suited woman ran past the end of the corridor. They didn’t even spare a look in his direction. It had to be one of the brainwashed Chosen of Mars, who had come here thinking that the Ru’at would give the Red Planet its independence.

  But their loyalty had just turned into a new sort of slavery, this time to a different, alien god.

  Solomon saw what he needed to do. He moved down the short corridor, seeing that there were viewing plates in the steel walls looking into other rooms.