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Until his second thought had said, ‘There are no rats on Mars.’

  He knew that Kol and Karamov were moving up behind, but he didn’t dare raise his voice to warn them. If there was anyone else down here with them, it was probably a Chosen guard, and they had already seen the glow of their flashlights…

  Which meant there was an ambush, Solomon thought.

  But he could have been wrong. He knew that your senses played tricks on you in the dark. You could see things that weren’t there, or hear things that hadn’t happened…

  What did he know about the underground geologies of this alien planet, after all?

  He strained every sense that he had, trying to make sense out of the darkness even when his stubborn terrestrial biology worked against him.

  Could you get nasal hallucinations down here? he thought, as the gentle currents of cooling air shifted, and he swore that he could smell something like roast meat, coming from up ahead.

  If you could get olfactory hallucinations in the dark, he’d never heard of it…

  Frack.

  Of course, his instincts could be wrong. It could be that there was a vent further up ahead, down the next side passage, and that vent led up to someone’s kitchen. And then again, maybe sound traveled oddly down here. Maybe smells did too. Maybe he had actually heard something that was miles away at the other end of the city…

  But Solomon Cready had always trusted his instincts. Even though he had always practiced over and over again so that every heist and burglary went exactly right, it was always his instincts that were the final judge, and it was instincts that told him now that there was someone up ahead, and perhaps they had just been eating their rations…

  “TZZZZT!” A sound broke the darkness—a muffled sound of a buzzer—a personal data-screen. “ALL AVAILABLE UNITS, WE GOT A SITUATION DOWN AT THE HANGARS… SOMEONE’S SPOTTED THEM…”

  “Damn!” They heard a stifled curse, and that was when all hell broke loose.

  10

  The Arceos Generator

  PHABB-AP-AP!

  Down here, there was no danger of bursting the habitat’s bubble, and both the Outcasts and the Chosen of Mars guards traded bullets as if they were snowballs and this was the surface of Europa.

  They had been sneaking up on us, Solomon growled inwardly as he pressed himself against the wall and concentrated his flashlight at the next opening. Every time he saw a flash of anything—a shadow, a piece of reflective material—he fired. He had no idea how many people they were facing, as the only evidence they had to go on were the quick-reports of bullets and the flashes of muzzle fire as they returned fire.

  They had been sneaking up on us because of that damn sensor, and the flashlights! Solomon thought, snarling silently to himself as he fired at what he thought was a movement.

  The flashlights. Solomon could have hit himself if he had a spare hand. He cursed himself for being an idiot. As if he could ever think for a moment that he had been the clever one!

  He clicked his flashlight off and rolled across the tunnel as Jezzy fired, stopping as soon as he heard her stop. Only he didn’t have the luxury of time to brief his squad on what he was about to do. And by the time that Jezzy had stopped firing, he was only three-quarters of the way across the tunnel. He flattened to the floor.

  If their attacker had heard him move, they could just fire at where they thought he was, and there was nothing that he could do about it.

  If their attacker had night vision goggles and could see them much easier than they could see him, then there was nothing he could do about that, either.

  Luckily, however, Solomon had long ago found out that when there was nothing to be done to help the situation, that at least meant you shouldn’t have to worry about it anymore…

  “Jezzy, Kol, Karamov…” he opened his mouth to say in exaggerated movement, but didn’t actually put any effort behind the words except the shallowest of breath. His earbud communicator should pick up the vibrations of his jaw, right?

  “What!?” It was Karamov, whispering over the earbud.,

  “Vibration only.” Solomon tried to tell them how to use the earbuds so they wouldn’t become targets for their marksman. He hoped they understood. “Just listen. Three burst fires. Three shots and pause, then repeat. On five…four…three...”

  Solomon tensed, hoping that his team knew what he wanted them to do and understood his commands. None of them asked questions, but then again, none of them had time to either.

  BLAM-BLAM-BLAM! Solomon’s Marines fired three shots simultaneously at their attacker—or where they thought that they were. What Solomon had been counting on was the fact that three Outcast Marines firing three times—a total of nine shots—was deafening in this small space. He wished that he had indeed put his bubble-helmet on like Kol had, at least that might have afforded him some type of protection as he combat-crawled forward as fast as he could during the deafening roar and the echoes.

  Then pause.

  His plan had paid off. Gold Squad did indeed pause, and whoever the attacker was at the other end of the corridor was clearly too overwhelmed by all the noise and fury to immediately return fire.

  Solomon paused in his crawl, holding his breath—

  BLAM-BLAM-BLAM!

  Another series of gunshots rang out over Solomon’s head, and he crawled again. He was almost there. The muzzle flare and the lights behind him showed him the edge of the tunnel.

  PHABABABAB! The attacker turned fire, and this close, Solomon could clearly see the crouching figure illuminated by the flare of their stubby gun as they leaned out from the entrance to the tunnel ahead.

  BANG! Solomon fired up, his arms ached with the recoil of his pistol, and the sound was all-encompassing, but he hit.

  “Urk!” Their attacker was thrown back into the tunnel—the exact same one that Solomon and the rest of the squad were supposed to be heading towards.

  “CEASE FIRE!” Solomon called, surprising himself with his authoritative sound as he crawled forward, pulling himself around the tunnel edge and turning on his light and raising his pistol at the same time—

  To see the checkpoint—a simple metal gate across the tunnel, with a hurricane lamp on the floor at the other side, and there, on the floor just a meter from him, was their shooter—a man in Martian red robes and a much sturdier encounter suit than the one he was wearing. It even had an inbuilt breastplate and arm greaves, and the hammer over the red planet symbol of the Chosen of Mars. He was dead.

  “Gold Squad, move up!” Solomon snapped over the communicator, quickly getting to his feet to kick the man’s stubby machine pistol to one side as he covered him with his pistol, breathing hard as Jezzy was the first to round the corner.

  “Sir,” she said, moving past him to the body to check the pulse, and then, without skipping a beat, to go through the man’s pockets.

  “Jezzy? Now is not the time…” Solomon thought, impressed by Jezzy’s determination, but hardly thinking that now was the time to worry about robbing someone…

  “I’m not robbing him, you idiot!” she hissed angrily as she pulled from the man’s pocket a lanyard and a plastic pass-card, turning back to the gate to swipe the card reader and for the door to buzz open automatically.

  “Well, technically, you are…” Solomon couldn’t resist from pointing out.

  “Oh, for goodness sake… We all almost died, a firefight with next to zero cover, and you go and pull a stunt like that!” Jezzy was saying as Kol and Karamov swung around the tunnel to see the dead guard, the gate, and their arguing specialists.

  “Everyone alright here?” Kol said lightly, looking from the body on the ground to the two Outcast Marines.

  “I’ll be a heck of a lot more alright when we have this mission behind us and we’re off this planet!” Jezzy said.

  “Same,” Solomon agreed, stopping to pick up the man’s communicator—a simple data-screen no bigger than his pass-card. When he held it up to his light, he could see the contents of the l
ast call made, sent as an audio message and translated on the screen.

  “We were lucky he forgot to turn his communicator onto silent,” Solomon joked, earning nothing but dark looks from all around him.

  “A disturbance at the hangar bays?” Karamov looked over Solomon’s shoulder. “He came through, didn’t he?” he said, talking about Tomas.

  “Yeah, I just hope he did precisely what I told him to and got himself hidden in Fela’s secondary airlock as soon as the Chosen came,” Solomon said. He had told Tomas to start a panic at the other end of the city from the Arceos District, that the ones who had attacked the habitat—Solomon in other words—had been spotted in the area, and that ‘they’ were gun-toting madmen.

  “Which scrambled the Chosen to apprehend us, hopefully buying us some time…” Solomon nodded ahead, where there was a low murmur of a whirring sound, the sort that came from a fan. Or a motor. Or perhaps even a generator.

  “Come on, we have to move.” Solomon broke into a jog towards the noise. He knew that whatever advantage Tomas had garnered for them—which was quite an advantage, it had to be said, as he had alerted them to their ambusher after all—would be fast vanishing as soon as the rest of the Chosen realized that they could no longer reach their checkpoint guard here at Arceos.

  They were racing against the clock, and Solomon still hadn’t even begun to think about how he was going to lead his team out of there in one piece.

  The Outcasts climbed through the gate to find that the whirring sound had grown louder, and that this corridor was unlike the previous. A glow came from a string of LED lights further down the passageway, and at intervals, there were stations where stacks of rifles, cloaks, and helmets were stored.

  “Far more than is necessary for a simple guard complement,” Solomon murmured.

  “What are you thinking?” Jezzy was at his side, her eyes darting forward down the tunnel corridor.

  “That these Chosen have taken over, or are planning to…” Solomon nodded. “And that they were planning to do it down here, in secret.”

  “Even when the Confederacy take Mars back, which of course they will,” Jezzy agreed. “They could have years of routing out the Chosen from their hidden places like this… We should tell the colonel.”

  “We should tell the colonel to release the imprimatur, you mean,” Solomon whispered to the woman he was starting to think of as his second. He looked at her in the dim light. “We both know that it might only be the Imprimatur Valance who can keep a lid on Father Ultor’s mob, and that she wasn’t responsible for the attack on Titan.”

  “Father Ultor didn’t seem aware of it either,” Jezzy pointed out. “He was in as much danger as the rest of us on Titan.”

  Solomon groaned. “Then what is this we are looking at here? Father Ultor’s Chosen have decided to take over Mars without him? That they were the ones behind the attack?” He paused by the next cache of weapons, stooping to examine them.

  “And then, of course, there is this…” He pointed out the heavy ruggedized crate that the rifles were stacked against.

  CMC BATCH N# BK/3901, it read under the glare of Solomon’s flashlight. “CMC? Confederate Marine Corps, by any chance?” He reached to his belt to take out the small service knife to cut at the thick webbing straps that held the crate together. “What’s the betting that…”

  Snip! With a tearing sound, the webbing broke and the lid was easy to pop open, revealing packing foam and the nested shapes of shoulder panels and greaves. Ones that Solomon and Jezzy recognized, because they were precisely the sort that they had seen worn by the full Marines of the Confederacy.

  “Power armor.” Jezzy reached with her pistol to move aside the first shoulder pad. It was thick, made of a hardened polysteel outer shell, and then layers of shock-absorbent foam, compressed leathers, and metal-mesh. It was one step up from the light tactical suits that the Outcasts wore, and one step below the full tactical, fully-encasing suit that Malady wore.

  And it was only available to the Confederate Marines Corps.

  “No unit or number designations,” Solomon breathed. That meant that they weren’t stolen. They must have come direct from whatever manufacturing plant that the Marine Corps used to make them.

  “How widespread are the Chosen of Mars,” Jezzy wondered out loud, “if they can get their hands on this…”

  “Or a better question might be how many friends do they have?” Solomon considered. “How could they even afford this?” Everyone knew that the Chosen of Mars—the ‘First Martians,’ as they were otherwise known—were little better than a cult, and one whose popularity depended on their demagogic leader Father Ultor. They might have widespread support across the Martian colony, but Solomon had never heard of them ever reaching beyond the confines of the Red Planet.

  And besides which, Mars was mostly an industrial world, and one that was under a stranglehold of Confederate taxes. Even a semi-criminal organization like the Chosen of Mars shouldn’t have been able to afford whatever the cost of Power Armor was on the black market. And if there was anyone among them who should know the workings of the black market, it would be Solomon.

  “These Chosen must have powerful friends, rich and powerful friends,” Solomon said darkly, nodding towards the source of the noise further ahead.

  “Be ready…” Solomon whispered as they neared a well-lit chamber, resonating with the whirring noise that was now a deep, repetitive rhythm.

  “Three…two…one… Now!” Solomon was the first to move, turning as he rushed to the side of the doorway, pistol up, sweeping the room for signs of danger, but there were none.

  Instead, he was confronted by the sight of a square chamber walled by large metal units where lights flickered behind grills and fans loudly beat their staccato rhythms. It was the generator for the Arceos District, and it was unguarded.

  “Jezzy—” Solomon nodded to the only other exit in the room, and the combat specialist moved past him to the other side of the room to take up her stance watching the corridor beyond.

  “Kol, get Marshal’s gadget in place,” Solomon said as his young technical specialist was already moving into the room and taking out his belt of tools and the strange tube device with the wires scattering from both sides.

  “Wow, that old guy was right. This generator can sure pack a lot of punch…” Kol was muttering as he took out one of the metal grills and started to unhook wires from a similar transistor-type device inside. “There might be enough in here to power half the city!”

  “Why would the Chosen need that much power?” Solomon muttered. Moments before he was about to find out.

  WRRRR-Thunk! There was an ominous metallic screech from the corridor leading out.

  “Oh frack,” Solomon heard Jezzy say.

  11

  In the Name of Mars

  “Talk to me, Specialist. What you got?” Solomon was already moving towards her when a bolt of something shot from the corridor, striking the combat specialist on the shoulder and sending her skidding across the floor.

  “Urgh!”

  “Jezzy!” Solomon shouted, skidding along the floor to her and looking up as he raised his pistol down the corridor—

  But was too shocked to fire at what he saw. What? His mind blanked at the sight, trying to register what on earth had shot one of his squad members.

  “What IS that!?” he shouted, before firing.

  It was humanoid, that much was certain, but that was where any and all likeness to humanity stopped. If anything, the creature coming towards them looked more like Malady than it ever could Solomon or Jezzy, as it seemed to be partly enclosed in plates of white and gray steel, with servo-assisted joints at the knees, elbows, and even some sort of rudimentary battle harness at its waist and forming the support for the breastplate on its chest.

  Like power armor. Confederate Marine power armor, Solomon realized, until he saw the thing’s head. It was a bald human head, but its skin was a pallid gray, and one entire half was m
ade of the same sophisticated steel plates. He was reminded, momentarily, once again of Malady, as the creature had its ‘human’ eye closed as if it were asleep—or dead—but on the robotic side of its head was a gleaming purple diode in place of an eye.

  Its articulated left arm ended in a particle weapon, similar to the sort that Malady was able to use. Solomon could see the multiple spinning wheels moving, sparking with static electricity like tiny lightning bolts as it powered up the device to fire again.

  But particle weapons are insane, Solomon knew. They were only used in industrial contexts to forge and cut poly metals, or else in place on large pieces of heavy infrastructure like ships and transporters. The only reason that Malady was able to carry one into battle was that he was nearly the size of a tank and had the reserve power ready to use one.

  BLAM-BLAM-BLAM! Solomon fired, seeing the bullets ricochet and spark off the thing’s metal hide, one of them spinning it half around as it found a bare, fleshy shoulder.

  “Gotcha!” he growled in feral joy as he spared Jezzy a look beside him. She was still alive, breathing shallowly, and her own shoulder held a blackened mark just under her collarbone. Thank the stars that energy weapon cauterized the wound, Solomon saw.

  “Commander!?” It was Karamov, moving in front of Solomon and firing his own pistol at the thing. More sounds of metal striking metal and the almost musical tones of the bullets shattering or ricocheting off the creature. The onslaught had forced it to its knees, before finally knocking it to the side of the corridor.

  “It’s down!” Karamov said, his voice wavering with astonishment and anxiety. As well it might, Solomon thought. They had never faced anything like that. Was it some new kind of full tactical suit? Like the one that Malady was encased in, but this time not an all-encompassing shell?

  “Kol!?” Solomon snarled.

  “Almost, Commander! One more minute…” the young specialist breathed as Cready saw him hurriedly reattaching wires to Marshal’s gizmo, now secured into the walls of the Arceos Generator itself.