Command Code Read online

  “He’s telling the truth.” Solomon recounted the tale of the strange memory-visions that the Ru’at drone had given him in the ‘judgement’ room. Decades before the Message had arrived through deep space, the Ru’at had already visited the Sol system. They had sent an orb just like the one that Solomon had in his encounter suit pocket—well, without being busted and with its strange wiring half hanging out. Maybe it was even the one that he still had on his pocket.

  And there they had changed that quiet little patch of mid-western Earth somehow… Solomon stopped there, because he didn’t want to go into the details of his own heritage, forgetting that the clone Tavin had already spilled them.

  “That was where you were…born?” Mariad said cautiously.

  Born. Solomon rolled the word around in his mind. “Kind of.” He shrugged.

  Solomon took a deep breath and said, “They told me that I was an experiment. That NeuroTech and AgroMore and whomever else were working with the Confederate Council to study the Ru’at phenomena, and somewhere along the line, they had decided to make clones of the inhabitants of that original town.” He was one of them. Tavin was another.

  Mariad looked at him, her eyes hard and fierce.

  Believe me, lady. I don’t feel any better about it. “Apparently, the Serum 21 in my blood—the same stuff that the Marine Corps dosed the Outcasts with to help create a breed of super-soldiers—all came from me. Or the original me, anyway,” Solomon continued. “The boy who was affected by the Ru’at point of contact.”

  Something strange had passed through the land of that place, through the soil, and infected the humans who had lived there. Changed them.

  What was it the hologram Ru’at had called me? Solomon considered. My child.

  “I think the Ru’at tried to terraform Earth, and to create a new breed of humanity themselves…”

  “Until the mega-corps got wind of it and turned the technology to their own use?” Rhossily nodded. “Just like they did when the Message arrived, and they created the cyborgs.”

  Solomon nodded. “That’s it in one. The Ru’at have been hungry for the Sol system for the last two hundred years, give or take.” Solomon looked further down the path, across the acres and acres of green-blue alien fungus. “And now they’re finally here…”

  “It wasn’t just Earth, though,” Kol continued. “I grew up on Earth, but I had family on Mars. One summer when I was sixteen, my family got enough money together to send me up the space elevator, and on one of the cruise ships here to meet them.” The young man fell silent, clearly remembering happier times. “My uncle brought me here and swore me to silence.” Kol took a deep breath and let it out raggedly. Solomon could see how much it cost him to admit that.

  “My uncle wasn’t the only Martian who knew it was here. Loads of people did. Father Ultor did.” Kol nodded. “There was no colony here then, of course—nothing but a closed-off cave with a pocket of atmosphere in it.” Kol shook his head at his apparent young naivete. “All the Martians who knew about it said that it was proof that Mars could sustain life, that Mars had sustained life in the past. That was the seed that sparked the whole independence movement.”

  You poor suckers, Solomon thought. The Ru’at had played them as much as they had played Earth. “The Ru’at were terraforming Mars, too,” Solomon said. “And they were making their own little tame colony of humans all the time.”

  “But who—what—could even think like that?” Rhossily burst out. “We’re talking a propaganda and covert invasion plan a few hundred years in the developing? How intelligent are these Ru’at? How old?”

  That was the million-dollar question, Solomon had to agree. He wasn’t even sure that they had encountered the Ru’at, the true Ru’at, not their machines or their transmissions or their deep-space drones. Is this what they did? he asked himself. Did they send out drone ‘seeds’ to any life-supporting planet they could detect, hoping to one day colonize?

  It was all too much to even contemplate, he thought. How under the heavens could they ever hope to beat an enemy that arcane and that patient?

  “Pretty,” a new voice broke into their depressing analysis of the situation. It was Ambassador Ochrie, and all eyes turned to see that during their discussion, the Ambassador for Earth had walked a little further down the path and was peering beyond one of the large mounds of alien vegetation.

  “What is it, Ambassador?” Mariad was the first to her side, reaching out to touch the ambassador’s shoulder before suddenly recoiling in horror.

  Oh, frack, Solomon thought. What now!? He made it to the two women and saw just what they were so equally stunned by—albeit one of the women was shocked, and the other entranced.

  Lights were spreading through the Ru’at vegetation, from the Ru’at vegetation. For a moment, to Solomon’s eyes, they almost looked like pollen rising on the wind, until he realized that there was no breeze down here. And since when does pollen glow like that?

  Drifts of tiny yellow-white particles were lifting from the blue-green, swaying in the air before slowly wafting across the cavern floor.

  Straight toward them.

  6

  Not Invincible

  Tsss….

  Jezzy opened her eyes to discover that she was still alive. Which she hoped was an improvement. It was dark, and the only light came from the sparking of a control panel. A control panel that I should have been sitting at, she thought as she realized she was lying on the cockpit floor.

  I’m not dead. I didn’t get my atoms scattered halfway from here to Neptune… The thoughts coalesced groggily.

  TZRK! A brighter explosion of sparks sent beads of molten light scattering across the deck. She couldn’t see the viewing screen, which meant either it had broken or that there wasn’t anything to see.

  In her barely conscious state, Jezebel Wen was suddenly consumed by the fear that the ship hadn’t managed to survive falling out of the Barr-Hawking field. Maybe they were trapped in some nightmarish almost-space between the ripples and folds of lumpy space-time.

  No. Get it together, Jezzy! she berated herself and coughed.

  “Sound off…” she whispered, and then, a little louder, “Marines, sound off!” She hoped that her power suit still worked.

  Suit Telemetries… Active.

  The blip of green and orange lights appeared over the inside of her own helmet, and then came the arriving voices of the survivors.

  “Corporal Malady. Ready for duty,” the voice of the big metal golem-man said.

  “Willoughby here and present, sir,” the lighter, slightly weaker voice of the female Marine said.

  “Corporal Ratko. In a whole heap of pain but still breathing,” the final member of her squad coughed. “And we bleeding well made it!” Ratko added, her voice so full of hysterical joy that Jezzy couldn’t help but join in the chuckling.

  “I do not understand what is so funny,” Malady, ever the stoic, intoned over the giggling voices of Ratko, Jezzy, and Willoughby.

  “I just managed to do what no other pilot in the history of the Confederacy has ever done, that’s what!” Ratko was saying, and now Jezzy could see the dim white glow of her suit environment lights flicking on, underlighting her face behind her helmet’s faceplate. The corporal was still strapped to her command chair—she hadn’t been thrown out, Jezzy noted—and was already hitting dials and buttons, trying to get the Scout to power up.

  “We’re on critical power only,” the acting squad commander heard the technical specialist say. “Life support and little else.”

  “Navigation?” Jezzy wondered aloud, pushing herself from the floor. Her head swam and she felt bruised and shaken. Now that she was up, she could see a fine haze of bluish smoke from the burst wires and control panels hanging in the room, and a thin, watery sort of illumination coming from the physical portholes.

  “Starlight,” Jezzy said, moving toward the nearest one.

  “No navigation. All our sensors are in shutdown mode. If I c
an get to the engine compartment, then I should be able to restart the subsidiary battery packs and get this boat up and running,” Ratko was saying, rising from her chair.

  “Get it done,” Jezzy ordered, turning to look out of the porthole. Please let us be somewhere I recognize, she worried as she wiped her hand over the condensation on the inner side of the porthole. Life support was on the bare minimum, she saw.

  Jezzy looked and saw a sight that was either the best or the worst in the world, depending on your perspective.

  Outside the porthole loomed the rust and orange orb of Mars, and in front of that was the wreckage field of the First Rapid Response Fleet.

  “Oh.” Jezzy swallowed nervously. She knew that the Rapid Response Fleet under General Asquew was split into two halves, with one usually patrolling the outer solar system, ready to jump and respond anywhere needed. The First Rapid Response Fleet, however, had been sent to oversee the pacification of Mars.

  And it was obliterated, but not still.

  Dark shapes swam through the wreckage, cylindrical and with slowly-turning gyres of their obsidian body-rings.

  The Ru’at jump-ships patrolled their kills and were in between Jezzy and the Red Planet.

  “Ah.”

  “Belay that order!” Jezzy hissed urgently to Ratko, audibly clanging and thumping things around behind them all at the rear of the craft.

  “Which one?” Corporal Ratko called back, her voice sounding muted thanks to the fact that the diminutive marine was currently half inside one of the computer panels, with bits of wires and tubes and devices splaying around her.

  “Restarting the engine! I don’t want any extra power running in this boat at all!” Jezzy said.

  “What?” Ratko reemerged from the hole in the wall. “We need the navigation systems to find out where we are… We need weapons systems online—”

  “Six torpedoes won’t give us a rat’s chance against what’s already out there.” Jezzy nodded to the portholes. “Take a look.”

  There was a grumbling and shuffling noise as the three remaining members of Gold Squad made it to the portholes to see what their commander had so recently seen.

  “Ah,” Willoughby said. “Is that…”

  “At least two Ru’at jump-ships, as far as I can see,” Jezzy confirmed. “And they look like they’re patrolling the wreckage. As soon as we light up our engines, they’ll be onto us.” How are we going to get to the surface of Mars now? She could have cried.

  “Ah… Lieutenant?” Ratko called up from the lower, rear part of the small Scout given over to the engines and maintenance. “There’s something else you should know…”

  “What now?” Jezzy’s eyes were fixed on the giant, rotating walls of ruined Marine Corps craft outside, as well as the lazy shark-swimming of the Ru’at.

  “Oxygen tanks are low. Real low.” Ratko nodded back to the hole in the ship that she had just emerged from.

  “How bad is it? How much air have we got?” Jezzy said.

  “About forty-five minutes tops, probably,” Ratko shrugged. “And after that…”

  “We’ll be onto suit oxygen tanks.” Jezebel Wen nodded. They could survive. No one would die, just so long as they remained inside their suits, but she knew that getting air had now become a top priority for them. If they did manage to make it to the surface of Mars, there was no guarantee they would be able to steal or get access to another supply of oxygen, given that the entire surface was a warzone…

  “Solutions?” she asked her crew. Because right now, I am all out! she thought grimly.

  “Full engine burn,” Ratko said. “As soon as we power up the battery packs, we commit to a full propellant burn of whatever is left on the tanks. We’ll shoot toward the planet using the element of surprise.”

  “They’ll still be faster.” Jezzy winced. “And where will we get the oxygen from when we get to the surface?”

  “We’ll have to infiltrate one of the Martian habitats,” Ratko considered. “Just like I heard you did before?”

  “Armstrong Habitat.” Jezzy nodded. She remembered it too well. The Marine Corps had to drop them off miles away from the insurgent-controlled habitat, for them to rendezvous with a local Confederate sympathizer, to then be smuggled into Armstrong. And for Kol to leave me for dead under the surface of the city! Jezzy growled a little.

  “If we can’t outrun them, and we can’t fight them, then we have to distract them,” Willoughby murmured.

  Better. Jezzy nodded. “Okay. How are we going to distract them in a way that won’t bring every available Ru’at ship right down on top of us?”

  Willoughby opened and closed her mouth several times before shrugging. “We need something out there to draw their attention, something out in the wreckage field.”

  That was it. Jezzy clapped her hands together. “You’re a genius, Willoughby.”

  “I am?” the tall woman said, looking confusedly at her superior officer.

  Jezzy turned to stab at the window beside her in the direction of the largest piece of wreckage. It was what remained of the badly named Invincible, one of the two Rapid Response Fleet’s super-massive dreadnaughts.

  “On her,” Jezzy said. “That is where we find our distraction, and our oxygen.”

  7

  Seed-spore

  “Cover your mouths!” Solomon said urgently as the group of humans ran as fast as they could down the snaking dirt path through the alien cavern. Fleshy green foliage brushed and swayed at his calves and feet, and he could only hope that they weren’t poisonous.

  Behind them, the drifts of glowing pollen moved lazily, settling back down or eddying in the vault-like space.

  “How do we know it’s even toxic to humans?” Rhossily gasped as they tried to outrun the pollen.

  “Look around you. Do you want to risk it?” Solomon exclaimed, his voice muffled as he spoke through his sleeve. There was nothing about the Ru’at that would surprise him. And nothing that he trusted, either.

  Behind them, the glowing spore-like pollen appeared to be settling again, losing its fierce brilliance in the overhead strip lights and becoming specks and glints, like stars seen in the surface of a dark sea.

  “I think… I think we outran it,” Kol wheezed as they slowed to a jog. They were now deep inside the middle of the alien farm, with tall mounds of vegetation rising to either side like grown-over anthills, and with some now taller than Solomon.

  “How do we get out of here?” Lieutenant Cready hissed. “You brought us down here! Why?”

  “I was saving our lives!” Kol snapped back. “And I told you, I was brought here before. When I was sixteen. There should be an airlocked tunnel on the far side of the cavern that leads out to the desert.”

  “What use is that going to do us?” Solomon gestured to the fine mesh encounter suit he wore, gray and dirty and with Luna General Assistant stenciled over the right-hand breast pocket. None of them—not even Kol—had suits with accompanying oxygen masks.

  “This place was like a pilgrimage for the Chosen of Mars, once,” Kol said seriously, and Solomon saw the young man’s eyes spark in indignation at daring to be questioned.

  He can’t still really believe all that nonsense about the Chosen of Mars, can he? Solomon shook his head. After everything we learned today?

  “It means that there’s a depot not far from the cave entrance,” Kol said. “Or there used to be. Stocked with emergency survival kits.”

  Solomon nodded, knowing what he meant. One of the many examples of Martian self-sufficiency had been their efforts to create caches of life-saving equipment and supplies across the surface of Mars. As the Red Planet was such a harsh environment—with no surface water and sandstorms that could scour skin from bones—the Martians had taken it on themselves to create safe ‘bolt holes’ for any haphazard surface travelers caught between habitats, a lot like the early mountaineers had done in the remote and inaccessible mountain ranges of old Earth.

  “And when we’re eq
uipped, we can hike across the desert to the next nearest habitat, steal a shuttle-ship,” Kol suggested, earning a begrudging nod from Rhossily and Solomon alike.

  “Okay. Well. I suppose that’s a better option than going back up there,” Solomon had to agree glumly.

  But first, they had to cross the alien landscape and get to this distant depot. The lieutenant sighed, gesturing for Kol to lead the way as he had before, and for Solomon to take up the rear of the procession.

  They picked their way carefully between the mounds of vegetation that had now grown taller on all sides. It was a little like walking through a maze, but whose walls were made of living green material.

  The sound became muted as the pillars of leaves and lichen closed in all around them. Even the fierce light from the overhead strip lights had dulled and seemed to forsake them.

  “I don’t like it,” Ochrie murmured to anyone who would hear. Solomon was actually glad to hear the ambassador register dislike for their current situation, and for anything that remotely connected back to the Ru’at. Might that mean there is a way to break her conditioning? Solomon asked himself. Maybe. If she could look at Ru’at technology and be repulsed by it, then there had to be something of the old ambassador left inside there, didn’t there?

  “I don’t like it either, ma’am,” Solomon breathed as he stepped carefully behind her.

  Hsttt…

  “What was that?” Ochrie suddenly stopped, looking around.

  Solomon had heard it too. Something like a rustle of vegetation. “Was that one of you?” he whisper-called out to Mariad and Kol ahead of them.

  “Huh?” Kol turned to ask. “What was that you said?”

  “We thought we heard a noise. A movement in the undergrowth.” Solomon had stooped to a crouch, and he watched as Kol was the first to do the same, and then Mariad, with Ochrie standing in place.

  “Could the cyborgs have come down here after us?” Solomon breathed the words, exaggerating his mouth movements so Kol might be able to read his lips.