Marauder Kronos: Scifi Alien Invasion Romance (Mating Wars) (10 page)

T
he shuttle begins
to vibrate as we hit atmosphere. I still can’t see anything through the view screen; it looks like we’re still just floating through space.

And then, all at once, a snow-white planet appears, filling the entire view screen. I see snowy peaks and white coastlines meeting deep blue water. After a few moments, the view screen flickers and cuts off, denying me the view as we land. We must be within the field now.

I can still feel Jerky there with me, so he hasn’t shut off yet.

The shaking intensifies as we hit harder and faster against the atmosphere. We soon fall through the worst of it, and the pull of gravity is back on us as we glide through the air.

“All right,” Ramses says, “we’re going to be landing on a peninsula, on top of a frozen sea.”

“Why’s that?” Kronos asks.

“Because it’s where I landed last time. And it’s where I made contact with the Atlanteans.”

“How do we make contact?” Ramu asks. “You got some kind of signaling device?”

Ramses suddenly looks tight-lipped. “We’ll worry about that after we land.”

“My suit is still working,” I say. “Is that normal?”

“It should have shut off by now,” Ramses says. “Let me see.”

I hold up my hand and Jerky makes the biomaterial over my hand shimmer.

“That’s lucky for us,” Ramses says. “We’ll have to try to reverse-engineer that –”

“No,” I snap. “You’re not touching it.”

“But –”

“She said no,” Kronos says. “Drop it.”

“Touchdown in two minutes,” Malcolm says.

We all sit tight and wait for landing. Malcolm brings the shuttle down to a gentle landing, and I almost am able to convince myself that we’re landing on somewhere civilized like Mars, or in a floating city on Venus.

“Everyone suit up,” Ramses says. “Minna, your suit still working?”

I make Jerky form a helmet.

“Looks like it,” he says. “Just remember that it’s fucking cold here. Colder than Mars. Kronos, you may want to pack a back-up thermal suit for Minna, just in case the suit fails.”

Kronos nods.

“Everyone’s bag should be packed to the brim,” Ramses says. “We don’t want to get stuck eating spider meat. Trust me.”

I feel queasy, and then the image of all the Marauders and Seraphim chowing down on giant spider’s meat fills my mind and I nearly vomit all over the shuttle.

I open up my bag and throw some of the magazines for the submachine gun onto the floor, and I grab more rations and stuff them into the bag.

Malcolm side-eyes me. “You know, if we don’t have enough ammo, it won’t be us eating the spiders. It will be the spiders eating us.”

“I have a biosuit,” I say. “The food is ammo for me. And I need as much as I can carry.”

“Shit!” Ramses says.

I look up and see him throwing his bioglove to the ground.

“Your bioglove busted?” Kronos asks.

“It worked here before,” Ramses says. “The Atlanteans themselves made it immune to the field.”

“Guess you aren’t such good buddies with them as you thought,” Ramu says, chuckling. “Hope they will still be willing to come out and play with us. Mind if I use the glove?”

“It’s deactivated,” Ramses says.

“So I can use it?”

“No,” Ramses says, staring him down.

“Worth a shot,” Ramu says, grabbing a rifle.

“So I have the only functioning biosuit,” I say. “Guess I’m pretty important.”

Kronos grabs my waist. “You’ve always been important.” He flicks his ears up at me.

“You know how to use that thing?” Ramses asks. “We may end up relying on you.”

“I know what I’m doing,” I say. “But this suit can’t run on antimatter. We’ll need a lot of food, and I am
not
eating spider meat.”

Ramses dumps out his bag and replaces several magazines with extra rations.

“Everyone bundle up,” Ramses says, “I’m opening the hatch.”

He presses it open. I hear the wind begin to howl, but Jerky has fully insulated me against the cold.

“Damn,” Kronos says, “that’s cold.”

We walk down the ramp, and I see tall and beautiful snow-capped mountains on one side and a frozen sea on the other. I spent most of my life on Mars, so I’m used to tall mountains, but never such beautiful purple and white ones...like out of a fairytale.

“It’s beautiful,” I say.

“It’s
cold
,” Delphie says, her teeth chattering as she pulls her big coat tighter against her body.

I feel almost guilty that I don’t feel the cold. Almost.

“So what’s the plan?” Kronos asks.

“Follow me.” Ramses goes down the ramp and steps into the snow. His body sinks into the snow up to his thighs.

We all follow behind him, hauling our huge bags.

“There’s a cave dug into the mountains,” Ramses says. “We’ll make camp there.”

“We’re
camping
in a mountain cave?” Delphie asks, throwing her arms out. “How are we supposed to get warm?”

“I’ll make a fire,” Ramses says. “Come on.”

We trot through the snow for 10 minutes or so, and suddenly Ramu spins around and raises his rifle.

“You see that?” he asks.

We all stop.

“I didn’t see anything,” Kronos says. “The snow is blinding me.”

My vision is worse than all of theirs. Marauders and Seraphim can see much better than humans. I definitely don’t see a thing, and I’m also blinded by the snow.

“Get down,” Kronos shouts.

He pulls me down with him, and we all land on our stomachs.

“I saw something, too,” Kronos hisses.

“Spider?” Malcolm asks.

“No,” Kronos and Ramu say in unison.

“Shit,” Malcolm says. “Must be Darkstar.”

“I’m checking it out,” Kronos says.

We’re all lying flat on a path that Ramses has carved out from walking through the snow, and Kronos crawls up the ridge, holding his submachine gun.

He reaches the ridge, then holds his gun up.

There’s a loud popping sound in the distance, and moments later I hear bullets whizzing over our heads.

Kronos pulls his gun back down. “Guess they weren’t just rumors. Nice intel, Ramses.”

I throw up a shield and jump out into the snow, before Kronos can stop me.

“Minna!” he shouts.

I make the shield transparent, and bullets start to hit it. After shielding the plasma beam, the bullets are nothing.

I yell back down to the others, “There are only three of them.”

The shooters are firing at me from behind rocks in the foothills, about 200 meters away. I shoot out a tendril for each of them, and as soon as they see the bright orange tendrils snaking toward them, they start to run.

I grab hold of one of them by the ankle, and he turns his gun toward the tendril. I divert one of the other tendrils to rip the gun from his hand, and then I start to drag him down the foothills and into the snow.

The other two open fire on me again, but the shield makes their bullets useless.

“I’m pulling us in a hostage,” I shout. “Get ready!”

I jump back down into the snowy trench and let the shield pull back into my biosuit. Moments later the tendril rips the hostage in with us.

Kronos punches him in the face and knocks him out cold. It’s a Marauder, a few decades older than Ramu – grey and wizened.

Ramses, Ramu, and Kronos pop back up, their guns raised.

“Looks like you scared them off, Minna,” Kronos says.

“Let’s head back to the shuttle,” Ramses says. “We can use the tents.”

“The tents?” Delphie says. “The
tents?
Why the hell were we trudging through the snow to go live in a cave if you have tents?”

“It’s a gut feeling I had,” Ramses says. “If you show the Atlanteans that you can live off the land, they respect you more.”

Everyone starts to groan, except Malcolm. He looks like he wants to groan, but he doesn’t want to be openly defiant toward his superior.

“Well,” I say, “at least we got a hostage out of it. We can ask this guy what Darkstar is doing here.”

“Is he a friend of yours, Malcolm?” Ramu asks.

Malcolm looks down. “I know him. His name’s Bala. He should be...willing to negotiate with us.”

“What’s his story?” Ramses asks.

We’re walking back down the path we came on. Ramses has hoisted Bala over his shoulder and his carrying him, while Kronos and Ramu have their guns pointed at the foothills as we retreat.

“He was part of High Command a few coups back,” Malcolm says. “One of the Marauders that just wanted to get the hell out of the solar system and leave humanity alone. Then there was a coup, and then there was
another
coup, and Bala and all the Marauders like him decided to break off and do their own thing. I heard rumblings that they may head to Atlantis, so I guess they actually did it.”

“So these guys didn’t really want anything to do with Darkstar?” I ask.

“He’s former High Command!” Delphie says. “He used to be a head honcho on Darkstar, so you can’t really say he ‘doesn’t want anything to do with Darkstar,’ can you?”

“He’s old,” Malcolm says. “He’s tired. He probably just wanted to see the sun again, even if it’s cold as balls here, at least you can see the sun. On Darkstar, the sun is barely brighter than any of the other stars. It really gets to you.”

I fall back and walk with Kronos once we are out of range of the foothills. “So 10 million rubles. You want to keep being a pirate if you have that much money?”

“I haven’t given it a lot of thought,” he says. “What do you think?”

“I like the part where you have heart,” I say, “but I’m not totally sold on piracy.”

He nods. “I guess it’s a means to an end, huh? Take on shady and not so legal jobs to make ends meet. It’s probably not necessary if I’m already rich.”

I smile at him. “No, it’s really not, is it?”

“But I like being captain,” he says. “And I like taking care of my crew.”

“You could, uh, take on legit jobs? They pay less, but you can feel good about them.”

“Legit jobs?” he asks.

“Like, I could have hired you to escort me from Mars to Venus, and when I got attacked, you could have defended me. Instead of running away like those assholes did.”

Kronos laughs. “I never told you the full story there, did I?”

“What full story?”

“The guy in charge of that escort mission was about to retire, so we paid him off. We were going to pretend to attack, and his job was to just dump the cargo and run away. He made a show of trying to fight back for a bit, just enough that he wouldn’t lose his pension.”

I punch Kronos in the arm.

He laughs. “Hey! At least we didn’t intend to ever hurt you! I didn’t want to fire for real on some civilian ship, and I sure as hell didn’t expect him to dump a
person
in the cargo hold. For a legit escort company, that guy has less heart than a pirate.”

“You asshole. But you could do escort jobs like that. Or you could transport stuff...there’s lots of legitimate work someone like you could do, and you’d quickly get a reputation as someone who takes his work seriously. Someone who
won’t
take bribes from pirates.”

“Hmmm,” Kronos says. “That’s something to consider. I’m not really the type of guy to just retire early and sit on my ass. You’d stay on my crew though, right?”

“Why do you think I’m trying to convince you to go legit? I don’t want to be a pirate, Kronos.”

He raises his eyebrows at me. “So...you’ll stay on board with me?”

“Of course I will.”

“Good,” he says, “because we need your biosuit!”

I punch him again, putting some biosuit power behind it this time.

“Ouch!” he shouts. “Damn, that was a real punch!” He rubs his arm. “That’s going to leave a bruise.”

I scowl at him.

“I’m joking, you know? I don’t care about the biosuit, I just want you close by my side...if you know what I mean.”

I grin. “I know what you mean.” I lean closer to him and whisper, “Do you think we’ll get our own tent?”

When we get near the shuttle, we see several figures gathered around it.

“Shit,” Ramses says. He throws Bala down and kicks his ribs.

Bala groans. Ramses kicks him again. “Wake up!”

“Hmmm?” Bala says.

Ramses pulls him up and points the gun at him. “What are you doing here?”

“I dunno’,” Bala says. “Someone snagged me and dragged me over here, so why don’t you ask them what I’m doing here?”

“Don’t be dense!” Kronos shouts. “What are you doing on Atlantis?”

The Marauders near our shuttle spot us and raise their guns at us, but they don’t fire.

Bala points at them. “They’re not going to shoot you. Not with me here. If you kill me though, then you’re toast.”

“Are you their leader?” Ramu asks.

“You’re kidding?” He says, “Out of all of us, you grabbed
me
, and you
didn’t
know I was the leader?”

“I guess we got lucky,” Ramses says. “Now talk. What are you doing here?”

“We’re just trying to survive. We got tired of all the coups and arguing and darkness on Darkstar. We’re all old and all tired. We just wanted to go somewhere simpler, somewhere no one would come looking for us. And now here you are.”

He glares at Malcolm. “I told you not to tell anyone!”

“I gave you a chance to come with me,” Malcolm says. “You refused.”

Bala sighs. “I’m tired of fighting. I’m done with it. Let me go and I’ll get my boys to leave you all alone. If you’ll leave us alone.”

“Have the Atlanteans made contact with you?” Ramses asks.

“Atlanteans?” Bala asks. “There’s no such thing! We’ve been here for over a year. There’s nothing here but giant spiders and regular-sized rodents and bugs. And snow, lots of snow. You get used to eating the rats; they almost taste good to me now.”

“You’re sure you didn’t just hallucinate your meeting with the Atlanteans?” Kronos asks. “I didn’t see your bioglove working like you claimed it did.”

“We stole a few biosuits when we left Darkstar,” Bala says. “None of them worked here. Looks like your human’s suit works just fine. How’d you swing that?”

“We’re the one asking questions,” Ramses says. “Come on. We’ll take you down to your friends, and you’ll get them to stand down.”