Invasion- Pluto Read online

  Huh. I’ll consider myself lucky if there is going to be an ‘after’ and the worst thing that I have to think about is space junk, she thought.

  Next, she lowered the grabbing pincer-arms to the wheel, latched on, and started to turn.

  For a moment, the outer airlock controls wouldn’t budge an inch, until finally it did, moving in halting, juddering quarter-turns, until—

  FZZZT! The bolt of purple-white light seared across Jezzy’s shoulder, severing one of the grab arms and flinging her backwards.

  “Ach!” She was dangling from the airlock by just one pincer-arm of her harness as the form of a cyborg, its human flesh horribly blackened from the vacuum of space, appeared, climbing towards her from the other side of the Esther.

  Frack!

  Jezzy pushed the directional controller on her harness belt with one hand as her other moved to the trusty Jackhammer at her side. These guns were solid-units apart from the barrels, so that meant they could fire in space, but firing a projectile weapon in a vacuum always had an extra level of complication…

  PHOOM! She pointed the Jackhammer as the vice arm swung her to one side and fired, the recoil of the shot in zero-G moving her backward as much as the bullet pushed forward.

  Thump! She hit the side of the hull and felt a judder run through her shoulders as the last remaining grab-arm snapped from its hinges.

  Which means I’m not attached to the tug anymore… Jezzy realized in a flash of crystal-perfect awareness as she started to peel from the side of the still-turning Esther.

  FZZT! Another line of purple-white light scored in front of her as Jezzy threw her shoulders forward into a roll that would see her return to the surface of the Esther.

  Grab! She reached out to seize one of the ladder rungs, pulling herself tight to the craft and sparing a look above her to see that the cyborg itself was still grimly clinging on, just as she was, on the other side of the airlock. The thing was spreading thick, black gobbets of its machine-oil blood from the wound she had inflicted in the bare part of its chest.

  It was nowhere near enough to stop the thing.

  “Lieutenant! We have multiple enemies approaching through the field! I can fire on them, now!” Faraday’s voice joined her inside her helmet.

  “Not yet! A bit busy here, sir!” Jezzy said. She swung herself to one side as the cyborg once again fired the particle-beam hand across the hull at her, for the purple-white laser shot to spear into the night behind her.

  She was a sitting duck here, unless—

  Jezzy let go of the ladder at the same time that she fired the harness’s positioning rockets, full force, straight out behind her.

  The combat specialist, acting field commander, and temporary first lieutenant was thrown forward like she was one of the cybernetic torpedoes herself, covering the distance between them in a fraction of a second and reaching a hand down to grab onto the wheel of the airlock as her other fired point-blank at the cyborg.

  PHOOM! The recoil from the blast once again threw her back the other direction, but it had the desired effect. The power of the shotgun shell at such close range was enough to peel the cyborg from his grip and send him spiraling end over end through the night.

  Thunk! Jezzy landed back on the hull with a heavy thump, coughing as the force of the shock winded even her.

  “Lieutenant? You still out there?” she could hear the desperate words of the tug driver Joe on the other side of the door.

  “Urgh. Only just.” She pulled herself back to the wheel and now, with no vice-like grabbing arms on her shoulders, she instead had to use both hands to turn the wheel, bracing her legs against the side of the hull for traction.

  Creeeak. The wheel turned another quarter, and then another quarter—

  KER-LUNK! This time, she saw the cyborg that hit the hull of the spinning Esther, bouncing and skidding across the hull until it caught a hold, a little way beyond the prow.

  “Come on, come on, move, you miserable piece of trash!” she shouted as she hauled at the airlock wheel, waiting for the cyborg at the other end of the boat to start firing at her at any moment.

  “Joe, you did depressurize fully in there, right…” she gasped as she heaved at the wheel again, a fraction of a moment before suddenly steam and gases enveloped her as the airlock door burst open—

  She’d managed to break the seal of the airlock, and physics had done the rest.

  And no, the inside of the airlock decompression chamber was clearly not decompressed.

  “Agh!” Jezzy was thrown head over heels back as something collided with her, rocketing out of the airlock.

  “Help!” It was Joe, a Plutonian worker in a drab black and tan encounter suit, a ridiculous bubble-helmet at one end, wrapping his gloved hands over her shoulders and clinging on for dear life as they spun through the debris field.

  “Wait, Joe! I need to see!” Jezzy shouted as they tumbled, and her stomach lurched with the G-forces. She managed to tear one of his hands from her shoulder, instead gripping the worker around the wrist with her powerful gauntlets as she kicked out with her legs, trying to right their tumble.

  “Oof!” Joe’s back suddenly hit the discarded plate of metal they had been hurtling towards, and Jezzy hit it a second later.

  Warning! Suit Impact.

  Rear Shield Plate Armor: -13%

  Her suit registered the damage across the interior of her helmet, but Jezzy didn’t need the holographic controls to know that her body was aching and once again out of breath.

  Maybe I should have turned down this command position, Jezzy groaned inwardly as her free hand grabbed the edge of the rusted piece of metal that they had collided with, while in front of them was the Esther, still spinning.

  She was lucky that she had power armor on for that impact, Jezzy thought, before suddenly realizing that Joe, the man she still held by the wrist beside her, hadn’t made a sound or a move yet.

  Joe the Plutonian tug driver did not have power armor on.

  Frack! Jezzy pulled him towards her to find his body floppy and lifeless, his eyes closed inside of his suit. “Please don’t be dead, please don’t be dead…” Jezzy was whispering frantically as she checked her suit controls, then cursed when she remembered that this man wasn’t even in the Marine Corps, let alone in a Marine-friendly encounter suit. Usually, all members of her squad would show up as identifier tags on the inside of her faceplate whenever she saw them, along with a health bar indicating general biological fitness. Power armor suits constantly monitored their wearer’s vital signs.

  Joe wasn’t a Marine, and Joe’s suit wasn’t connected to hers. With this guy, Jezzy knew that she would have to be a bit more inventive to find out if he had died in her hands or not.

  Activate Suit Thermal Imaging.

  Her faceplate screen glitched a scrolling green, to be replaced by the bright white warmth of the body of the man, muted by his suit, and disappearing completely as his bodily warmth could not transmit into the freezing vacuum of space at all.

  His body was still warm, which was a good sign… But then again, it only just happened, didn’t it?

  Jezzy turned the suit imaging back to normal and leaned in until she was almost clanking helmets with the tug operator. She watched his face with eagle eyes, looking for any telltale signs of life…

  Condensation. The inside of his bubble-helmet had a tiny patch of condensation on the inside, and, as she watched, it faded to almost nothing, before coming back a long moment later.

  Condensation that could only come from warm breath in a cold suit, Jezzy thought. Such tricks wouldn’t have worked with her own suit, she knew, which had every available insulation and moisture-capturing technology and air filter.

  But with these old service encounter suits? Jezzy was very pleased that Joe was wearing one for the first time since she had met him.

  “Okay, probably concussion. Just so long as you don’t throw up in there, you’ll be fine…” Jezzy muttered to herself, wedging th
e man’s unconscious body between her and the slowly-revolving bit of metal she was clutching onto, before using her free hand to attach the man’s belt to her own with her poly-filament metal rope.

  “Right. Now let’s see about getting you home,” she said, daring to haul herself up to the edge of the scrap plate of metal—

  FZZZT! A line of purple-white fire shot past her and she ducked back again. It was the cyborgs, they were out amongst the debris field, and at least one of them had spotted her.

  Jezzy banged the back of her helmet against the metal as she waited for the answer to come to her. As the metal slowly rotated and spun—thankfully not colliding with anything else yet—she could see the distant half-silvered forms of more of the cyborgs as they leapfrogged just as she had done from wreckage to wreckage, making their way across the field.

  But why? Who brings troops to a spaceship battle? she thought with frustration. Either way, she had to move, and she had to take the unconscious Joe with her.

  And it was at that point that she remembered that she still had the positional rockets of Ahmadi’s harness. “Okay, buddy…” she said with a frown to the unconscious face of the tug ship driver. “It’s probably better that you’re not going to see this.”

  She turned around so that both her hands were holding onto the ends of the sheet of hull metal, and Joe was pressed between her and the sheet.

  Then she fired her positioning rockets, full force, behind her.

  The bit of rusted and dented hull took a few moments to get up to speed, but once it conquered its own inertia, it moved at a fair speed, like it was being ‘pushed’ by the outstretched hands of Jezebel Wen.

  FZZT! FZT! Sparks exploded from one edge of the hull plating as one of the many cyborgs moving across the field took a shot at her. A fraction of an instant later, another shot narrowly missed her.

  “Lieutenant? Where in the name of Jupiter’s moons are you going? I’m forty degrees off your port-ward shoulder.” It was Ahmadi, still flying somewhere beyond the debris field and trying to find a way to get close.

  “Wait, I’ll angle the trajectory…” Jezzy swung her legs to one side and the corresponding angle shifted the direction the sheet metal was flying in, as—FZZZT!—it collected more fire from the cyborgs that they passed.

  When Jezzy raised her head, she could see the looming undercarriage of the Gingko above her, getting bigger by the moment. She felt once again that curious impression that she was deep underwater and was rising to the hopeful surface that was the Ginkgo.

  CRASH! Something hit her sheet of scrap metal and they started spinning wildly. It was all Jezzy could do was to grip onto the metal with all of the augmented might of her power gauntlets.

  They must have hit some piece of debris, Jezzy thought. Something that was traveling fast enough to send them into a spin

  “Hgnagh? Wha-what is going on?”

  She heard Joe cough and splutter as they were thrown through the field of scrap metal, and then he was moving and squirming underneath her.

  “Hey! What’s happening?!”

  “Don’t move, Joe!” she hissed, just before there was another resounding thump as they rebounded off yet another piece of debris. Jezzy cursed, but she could see that their erratic, out-of-control spin had at least taken them nearer the edge of the debris field.

  “Just listen to me! On my command, we jump, got that?” Jezzy said through her clenched jaw.

  “What? Are you crazy!? There’s aliens and space and junk out there—” Joe was saying.

  Jezzy didn’t have time for the fainthearted. “Jump!” She killed her positioning rockets and kicked out with her boots. Joe reacted a fraction of a moment too late, but he did jump, and then the line that was connecting them yanked him forward and they were both spinning through space as the sheet of scrap crashed into another piece of metal several times its size, buckling and rolling.

  That could have been us, Jezzy thought. It could still be us. She hazarded a look over their shoulder as their spiraling flight started to lose momentum. They had cleared the debris field, and the entire battle for Pluto was laid out underneath them like a panorama from a history still.

  The field of scrap metal was a slowly expanding bubble between the Oregon, standing alone against the Ru’at jump-ships. Behind the Oregon was the Last Call station, and beyond that the distant glimmers of fleeing civilian vessels.

  The Ru’at could easily fly around the debris field of course, but to do that would leave them open to being shot at multiple times by the Oregon as they took the long route. Jezzy didn’t know if that was why the Ru’at jump-ships were still unmoving and passive, but it was the one tiny tactical advantage they had right now.

  Moving through the large bubble of dangerous metal leap-frogged the miniscule forms, picked out in brilliance every now and again when distant starlight caught the metal parts of their bodies. The Ru’at cyborgs—that must have, surely, come from Proxima and NeuroTech originally—had made it over halfway across the debris field and were approaching the final hurdle. After that, Jezzy saw, they would simply launch across the gulf between them and the Oregon, and, like locusts, they would cover the large battleship with their bodies, eventually finding a way in.

  “Fire, Colonel! Fire!” Jezzy screamed into her communicator.

  There were bursts of light from the large, vaguely triangular wedge of a ship with a distended belly that was the Oregon. Gases escaped from weapons ports as lines of fire like comets screamed across the gulf of space between the Oregon and the debris field.

  Some of the torpedoes made it quite a way in before hitting a piece of wreckage large enough to detonate it, but many of the torpedoes exploded in the first third of the scatter-salvage field.

  It was like watching a battle in slow motion, as she saw bubbles of instantaneous flame and light explode outwards, rending and burning, splintering, fracturing, and sending molten hot shards of salvage spinning off in all directions.

  But despite the impressive theater of destruction that the acting field commander could see below her, Jezzy still wondered if it would be enough to even slow down the cyborgs and the Ru’at that still waited for them.

  14

  Payments

  “What did you say your business was here, Lieutenant?” said one of the central figures off the gang that blocked Solomon, Max, the ambassador, and the imprimatur’s escape.

  Solomon’s eyes flickered over the group, before settling once again on the man who had spoken. He was larger, burlier than the others, with short brown hair and small eyes. He’s the ringleader…

  “Tomas. Tomas, it’s okay. It’s me.” Max stepped forward, holding up his ‘bound’ hands before pulling them apart in a showman’s gesture. “Voila!” He grinned, causing a chuckle of amusement through the gang.

  “Max,” the smuggler ‘Tomas’ nodded. “This is no time for business, Max. You should get back to that kid of yours. Keep your head down and your nose clean for a bit!”

  “This is precisely the time for business, Tomas,” Max stepped forward to say urgently. “Important business. Business that could mean whether there is hope for any of us left or not!”

  “Hope?” Tomas laughed, shaking his head. “There’s a very high price on that these days, my friend.”

  But for all his swagger, Tomas gave his team the nod and turned to limp back into the small habitat bubble of Port 13, and Max, Solomon, Ochrie, and Rhossily followed him.

  Schnikt! The door locked behind them, and Solomon saw that at least half of the smugglers were staying by the door, manning the small video station to watch who or what might be coming their way, and the rest shuffled behind them, still looking as though they would be ready to shoot them at the first opportunity.

  “Max, you’re a good man. You’re loyal,” Solomon overheard the smuggler captain saying to the Luna restauranteur. “But this?” He nodded to the people that Max Poulanous had brought with him. “This is reckless, my friend,” he said as they left
the small hallway and into the Port 13 proper.

  It was a haze of activity, Solomon saw. There were three super-large airlock double-doors that dominated the warehouse-like bubble. In front of each door were metal ramps where carts full of crates were being wheeled, either left in wait on the ramp to be picked up or moved to garage-style pits in the floor, where they were carefully stowed away.

  “A crisis is always good for business?” Solomon muttered, from past experience. He got a dark look from Tomas in front of him.

  “People are going to need food. Medicines. Little treats and things.” He nodded to the crates. “Curfews are always good for business.”

  “What if people need a way to get off the Moon?” Solomon kept his voice low, but Tomas clearly heard him, because he frowned even deeper. He said nothing until he had led them to the side of the warehouse, where the noise of grinding and chugging air-processing units surrounded their conversation.

  “That depends, Marine,” he finally turned and said.

  Solomon studied the man. The Gold Squad Commander had met many such operators in his time in New Kowloon. Whereas the criminal underworld always had a shifting sea of faces at the lowest level, like goons and thugs and petty criminals, Solomon knew that it was the mid-level operators like Tomas here and the higher-up syndicate bosses and gang-lords who always stayed the same.

  They had to be smart, tough, and uncompromising to get where they were, and to stay alive doing so.

  They were also smart enough to know which way a deal would go before they entered into it.

  “If it’s credits you want, I can get you money,” Solomon said, knowing that, given the situation, that Asquew would agree to any price. “But more important than that, Tomas, I’m giving you an opportunity.”

  “Oh, you are, are ya, Marine boy?” Tomas even dared to grin sarcastically. “As far as I know, you might be one of Hausman’s agents, and you’re just here to try and pick up information.”