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  But now, the station echoed. All the pedestrians—as Fatima liked to call them—were gone, having fled, bewildered, almost thirty-six hours ago under her orders. There were no alerts from the work teams, as there were no corporate or Marine Corps ships left to restock, refuel, and resupply.

  Fatima hated it.

  “Door 1, you done?” she barked at where the skeleton crew of hauliers who were left were stepping back from their task. The large airlock door, wide enough for a tide of people to stream into The Last Call four-abreast, was now closed and had a glowing red line joining its door panels.

  “She’ll hold, ma’am!” cried out Ted, one of the older and most experienced hauliers at the station.

  “I doubt that very much,” Fatima muttered as she sighed. But it would have to do. She’d been told by the colonel—the late colonel, from all accounts—that if she wanted to survive, she had to go to ground. Failing that, all she could do was to barricade herself somewhere secure and hope that the cyborgs—or the Ru’at—weren’t interested.

  For Ahmadi, that all translated as: rally to The Last Call, her responsibility and her home for over a decade, and order every bulkhead door that wasn’t essential to be welded shut.

  “You sure you don’t want to try for Pluto?” Ted said, his voice no longer muffled as he slid up the welding mask over his still-sooty face and took a deep breath. He smelled like solder and char. “The Marines are down there. We might even be safer with them.”

  “Ted, go if you want. You heard my speech along with everyone else. I only want the people remaining here who actually want to be here,” Fatima said seriously. “We still got the life yachts, enough for everyone, left?”

  “What, and leave you here alone? No way, Fatima.” Ted shook his head violently. He might be a perfect example of a grumpy industrial worker at times, but he was loyal to a fault.

  “Then we’d better get moving,” Fatima said. She had decided to stay at The Last Call instead of taking one of the small life yachts down to the planet’s surface. Although there was a network of both emergency and tourist bunkers down there on Earth’s farthest sibling, Fatima knew that they wouldn’t be able to hold out there for long.

  The Marine Corps had elected to use Pluto as their rally point, apparently, as Fatima had seen the many escape pods leave the Oregon like seed pods bursting from their mother plant. Each one had taken a graceful, curving arc past The Last Call toward Pluto—presumably on some automated flight plan.

  So, it was to considerable surprise indeed when there was an almighty kerr-rash from the other side of Airlock 1, and Fatima’s small data-screen on her hip bleeped the register codes of the last Oregon Marine Corps escape pod.

  “What the—” Ted spun on his heel, his welding torch spurting into life as he flinched at the sound. The other teams of hauliers working to barricade and seal the other airlocks also paused in their work and looked hesitantly at the glowing red line of Airlock One.

  Fatima could see their consternation written clearly on their faces. Is that them? The cyborgs? The Ru’at? Have they come for us?

  But it wasn’t, was it? Fatima rechecked her data-screen one more time, just to be sure. “Back to work, fellas! It’s not who you think!” she shouted.

  “Who is it?” Ted did not look convinced that it was a friendly face.

  “It’s Marine Corps. It has to be the colonel of theirs.” Fatima was already taking the welding torch from the man’s hands. “Come on, give me the fuel pack. We need to get that door open now!”

  Fatima Ahmadi threw the soldering pack over a shoulder, grunting with the effort as she ran to the still-glowing line of the door and started working. A flick of her wrist and the welding torch sprang into life, at first burning an incandescent yellow, before she adjusted the propane mixture to turn it into a blisteringly hot blue flame.

  “Here, wait up…” Ted shrugged off his welding helmet and placed it over his administrator’s face as she knelt to get to work, before taking up one of the titanium rods on the floor.

  The glowing red bead of solder brightened under Fatima’s attention, going from red to orange in a matter of heartbeats, and then to yellow, and then to start bubbling and running down the door seal.

  “Okay.” She sweated behind her mask. Even with her industrial-class encounter suit and the welding mask, she could feel the waves of radiating heat coming from the door as she was forced to step back while Ted stabbed the titanium rod at the melted solder. Quick jabs, because even though the hardened titanium had a much higher melting point, Ted didn’t want it to fuse into the door seal.

  Thock! Thock!

  More liquid gobbets of metal fell to the floor, hissing and cooling into solid silver puddles before their heavy work boots. Fatima moved in to work at the seal again, this time with more of the recently-added metal pouring away, before Ted jammed the rod into the seal and heaved.

  Creeeak!

  With a gasp of steam from the closed environment behind, the door separated, and the automatic opening mechanism pulled the doors stutteringly back to reveal Jezebel Wen, sitting on her escape pod and looking at them with clear puzzlement.

  “What the heck are you doing here?” Fatima flipped the welding mask up.

  “Wow. Nice to see you, too,” the Marine said, standing up and looking back at the pod. “Colonel Faraday must have pre-programmed the pod,” she muttered.

  “Well, I’m sure glad to have a Marine on board, but you gotta know that all the rest of your lot are on the surface of Pluto, not up here.” Fatima was already gesturing for her to get inside. “Come on, quick. I don’t know how much time we have before…”

  Clunk.

  It wasn’t a particularly loud noise that interrupted their conversation, but the administrator of the service station knew in her heart what it was. She had heard similar noises to it every day of her life up here.

  And it was coming from the external airlock doors.

  “That’s the sound of a ship docking…” Fatima breathed, stumbling back from the unsealed and now-open airlock.

  “A friendly?” Jezzy was saying, already swinging her Jackhammer up and aiming at the outer airlock door. Even though it was a fairly bulky weapon, it looked pathetically small compared to what must be coming through the other side.

  Fatima spared a look at the data-screen hanging from her hip. “Well, the station hasn’t received any telemetry signals. Whoever it is, it’s operating dark.”

  “Or it doesn’t even use Confederate radio codes.” Jezzy started to back-step, still pointing the gun at the outer door. Just like the Ru’at wouldn’t, she thought.

  But if it was one of the vacuum-resistant cyborgs, somehow surviving the destruction of the Oregon and flinging itself here to The Last Call, then why was it initiating a docking procedure? How?

  “They would just cut their way in, like they did on the Oregon,” Jezzy muttered to herself.

  “What?” Fatima said in a tight voice.

  “Tell everyone to get out of here. Everyone.” Jezzy had reached the inner airlock door.

  “You heard her, ladies—get your butts into gear! Back up to engineering!” Fatima was already calling, and the few work teams, hauliers, and mechanics who had elected to stay behind as Ahmadi had quickly dropped their tools and ran for the service elevators.

  Jezzy paused by the inner airlock door as people scattered behind her.

  “Come on!” Ted was shouting, already reaching the side of one of the elevators. He wasn’t speaking to Jezzy of course, but to Fatima, his oldest friend here on the station, who was still standing next to Jezzy.

  “Go without me!” Fatima said, hitting the big red button to make the inner airlock start to hiss and rattle closed in front of her. The door, thanks to the quickly solidifying solder that Ted had just added to it—and then Fatima had tried to take away—impeded the door’s travel. It froze, shook, then traveled forward a few more inches.

  Tsssss! Steam erupted from the far end of the airlo
ck, where someone—or something—had managed to activate the outer lock’s opening mechanism.

  “That means they’ve got a pressurized environment,” Jezzy said, her heart hammering in her chest as she focused her gun at the center of the door.

  “What?” Fatima was hitting the door-close button again, but the door would only shake and judder in place.

  “That’s gas escaping from their side. It means they’ve got an airlock seal on their side of the door just the same as we would use,” Jezzy said. “It means that they breathe oxygen.” That they’re biological, even. The combat specialist’s mind started to race.

  “What good does that do!?” Fatima had now given up on trying to close the door and was instead tugging on Jezzy’s shoulder to try and pull her back toward the elevators.

  “Because if it breathes, we can choke it!” Jezzy was looking around the hold. “There has to be something around here…” The combat specialist could see the turbines and pipes of the air filtration system that pushed oxygen around the inside of The Last Call.

  No. It would take too long to depressurize this space.

  Tsssss! The steam had now stopped, and the three airlock lights over the outer door were blinking. The first had already gone from a warning-orange to an okay-green, and even as Jezzy watched, she saw the middle light flicker green, and then…

  “Come on! We have to go!” Fatima shouted.

  “There. That pipe,” Jezzy followed a nest of the stations pipes—some metal, some ceramic, and one of the largest looked to be a reinforced chrome-aluminum.

  My Jackhammer will be able to get through that, she thought, raising her rifle to point at it.

  “What are you doing!?” Fatima was pulling at the Marine’s shoulders.

  “What’s in that pipe? It’s not connected to the fans.”

  “That’s pure carbon dioxide! It’s all the filtered dioxide from the station, going to be vented out into space. If you burst that, you’ll kill both of us!” Fatima was saying.

  “But not quickly.” Jezzy pulled the trigger.

  PHOOOM!

  “You idiot!” Fatima was shouting as the shiny pipe burst and then, silvered fragments ripped up and away from the hole Jezzy’s gun had made.

  The room quickly started to smell heavily of exhaust. It stuck to the back of her throat and made Fatima’s eyes water. The administrator raced to one of the side walls, pulling at the handle on the emergency panel to draw out a basic breathing system, which was little more than a facemask attached to a pipe and a bottle of compressed air.

  Environmental Warning! Air Filters Offline!

  Jezzy’s suit chirruped at her. “Get to the elevator. Now!” Jezzy turned and grabbed the station administrator by the shoulder, hauling her back as the final warning light on the outer airlock door clicked to green. The atmospheric pressures on the other side must have equalized. It was now safe for those on the other side to enter—or so they thought.

  The outer door started to open as the two women stumbled for the elevator.

  And the whole room was caught in the glare of a brilliant white light.

  12

  Ru’at Hails You

  The Ru’at had built their new city in no time at all, Solomon realized as he looked down over the star-like shape that spread before them, everything built in gleaming chrome.

  It was too bright to be out here, amidst the ochres and rusted tones of Mars. It looked brighter and cleaner than anything that the Martians or the Confederates could build, Solomon thought.

  And it also looked surprisingly…industrial.

  The Ru’at jump-ship was pulling them over its home, for Solomon, the clone-Tavin, and the Martian communications officer to look down through the viewing window at a shape that was almost reminiscent of a snowflake. Long ‘arms’ of gleaming silver metal branched out from a tall spire in the center—fatter at the base and pointed at the top like a steel pyramid.

  And from these splayed arms that hugged the Martian deserts sprang several more, smaller ‘fractals’ of the same shape and color as their parents. In effect, Solomon realized that he was looking at lots of different modules, halls, habitats, or laboratories joined onto five major arteries, with the Ru’at spire at its heart.

  “But when did they get here? How did they have time to build this?” Solomon said, frowning at the display below them as the Ru’at ship started to guide them lower and lower toward the outermost edge of one of the arms. It is intending to dock.

  “The Ru’at arrived not a few hours ago,” Tavin murmured.

  “Then they couldn’t have had time to build all of this.” Solomon estimated that their new city must be almost a mile in diameter. Could they, though? He questioned himself. Who knew what this advanced alien race were capable of?

  Unless… Solomon looked over at Tavin. At the clone of Augustus Tavin, he corrected himself

  In just the same way that he thinks that I am a clone, too…

  Augustus Tavin—the real one, if there even was a ‘real’ biological human at the start—had been the CEO of the interstellar mega-corporation called NeuroTech. The company specialized in military technology and had bases everywhere, although its main headquarters had been on Proxima.

  NeuroTech and Taranis Industries were the ones behind the cyborgs, building them from schematics stolen from the Ru’at message, Solomon remembered. They were both companies that had been around a long time.

  “Long enough to build a secret base on Mars?” he murmured, and he saw that the clone-Tavin beside him was watching him with a ferocious intensity.

  “You guessed right, Lieutenant Cready,” the man said as they lowered to the surface of the Red Planet, iron-rich sands billowing up around them. “The cyborgs built this place for their arrival.”

  “You mean you built this place,” Solomon muttered as their ship was set down with perfect precision next to one of the radial arms. There was a distant series of thunks and tremors from the body of the damaged Martian transporter as, Solomon presumed, the airlocks were extended to match up with their own.

  The Ru’at jump-ship was now no longer in view, and the blue light had clicked off around them.

  “What happens now, Tavin?” Solomon growled, half-rising from the pilot’s chair, for a metal hand to descend on his shoulder from behind. It was the cyborg that was acting as Tavin’s bodyguard. Solomon had forgotten it was there, and when he tried to squirm out of the way, the implacable grip only increased until he couldn’t move at all for fear of breaking his own collarbone.

  “Now, Lieutenant? Now you will be judged,” Tavin said.

  “Solomon!” The shocked and frantic voice of the Imprimatur of Mars, Mariad Rhossily, rose to greet the lieutenant as soon as he left the flight deck of the Martian transporter.

  The imprimatur and the ambassador were now both standing in the main body of the hold, their wrists tied together.

  “Is that really necessary?” Solomon sneered at the only other full human in the room—the treacherous Kol, holding a dressing to his head from the battle with one hand, while the other pointed a pistol at the hostages.

  “Can’t have anyone getting funny ideas now, can we?” Kol sneered back, just as vehemently.

  “Funny ideas right in front of those monsters?” Solomon nodded to the line of the NeuroTech cyborgs that had arrived with the clone-Tavin, standing stock still as if they were statues.

  They don’t even breathe. Or blink. Or speak. Solomon shuddered, before the metal hand clamped onto his shoulder shoved him forward.

  “Where are you taking us? I demand to see a superior officer!” Ambassador Ochrie was saying, attempting to use the full force of her ambassadorial authority. It didn’t help that the woman also looked as white as a sheet.

  I wonder what the official Confederate policy is for alien contact. Solomon heaved a sigh. Whatever was going to happen now, he knew that they were a long ways away from Confederate regulations.

  We’re going to have to work this
one out on our own, Solomon thought as he was pushed to join the others and Kol hit the door release.

  The party stepped into a white corridor with a tapered roof. Everything was pristine and shining metal, from the floor panels to the walls.

  And the habitat—or colony/city—was already inhabited. Which is odd, Solomon thought. He hadn’t expected to see living, flesh-and-blood people here.

  “These people are Martians!” Ambassador Ochrie correctly diagnosed the sight ahead of them. Rivers of people in all sorts of uniform and dress, and they were humans. They wore encounter suits and shawls, dresses and robes, and all of them had that slightly industrial, ragged appearance.

  As if they’ve spent most of their lives working in the factories and machine plants that Mars has.

  “You are incorrect, Ambassador,” clone-Tavin stated. “These people might appear to the untrained eye to be Martians. And indeed, they have lived most of their natural lives here on Mars, but they are not Martians,” he said, somewhat absurdly as they stepped out into the busying crowd, joining the flow of people as they walked up the corridor. Some peeled off before they reached the end, moving through automatic doors and into the smaller, ‘fractal’ rooms that branched from the main. None of the humans in here paid any attention whatsoever to the new arrivals, or the freakish half-silver, half-human cyborgs that escorted them.

  “What?” the ambassador asked in confusion.

  “They are now Ru’at,” the clone-Tavin said in a low murmur, but the timbre and solemnity that he managed to give to even these few words made it feel almost reverential.

  “What!?” The ambassador scoffed. “That is a load of ridiculous codswallop, as well you know.” She shook her head. “A subjugated people never willingly adopt a new culture.”