Breakout Read online

  Breakout

  Fugitive Marines | Book 1

  David Ryker

  Douglas Scott

  Ryker’s Rogues

  Contents

  Become a reviewer!

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Epilogue

  Become a reviewer!

  Author’s Note - David

  Author’s Note - Doug

  Become a reviewer!

  I’m looking to build up a review team - a crack team of ninjas who can read and review a book within a week or so. In return, you’ll get a free copy of every book I publish - which is a lot (see below!) Reviews make a huge difference to the success of an independently published book, and I have twenty or thirty spots available. It’s first come first served…

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  Currently available for review:

  Invasion - Contact One

  Downfall - Contact Two

  Breakout - Fugitive Marines One

  Wanted - Fugitive Marines Two

  Coming Late September:

  Untitled - Iron Legion One

  Untitled - Fugitive Marines Two

  Prologue

  When N’Yhillit first saw the shimmer in the distance, he thought it was just a trick of the light. An effect of the atmospheric conditions that always accompanied the electrical storms at this time of year.

  By the time he realized what it truly was, of course, their planet’s fate was sealed. But at that moment, it was beautiful.

  He’d been watching the storm gather from his vantage point atop the tallest hill in the colony. He wasn’t alone; at least a dozen others, male and female, had climbed the tower of mud and spit to get a closer look at the spectacle. Here in this particular spot, the late evening sky was a shade of indigo that was particularly vivid, especially given how sensitive the species’ insectile eyes were to the ultraviolet portion of the spectrum. It made his thorax vibrate in a way that was pleasing to him.

  N’Yhillit had come in the hopes of composing something for his mate, who was with their eggs now, exhausted, protecting them from the various predators that still roamed the night around their colony. Life must be protected. It was the most basic instinct of their species and their most sacred law. She couldn’t be here with him, but he could describe it to her, and perhaps make her feel the same things he was feeling.

  He just happened to be heading toward the pipe when the shimmer came. Liquid burbled freely into the clay catch basin, so that anyone who had to work up here—or, as was the case tonight, had climbed up for the view—would have access to life-giving water. So when the air around it spread outward like a ripple for a moment, N’Yhillit thought his eyes were perceiving something that was caused by the unique light refracting in the water. He noted it vaguely as he tilted his head and dipped his beak into the basin.

  Suddenly his mind’s eye was filled with the image of his mate.

  He could see as if through the perspective of her multi-faceted eyes. They were scanning the cell that they called home. He felt his nerve endings spark with excitement as he watched her gaze roam around the cell in the tower, taking in the rough walls and the geometric holes in them that held their supplies.

  How was this possible? Was he truly able to share his thoughts with her somehow? What miracle was this? Could she do the same, and see the approaching storm through his eyes? His mind was filled with possibilities.

  Then her eyes turned to the eggs.

  They glistened in the light of the moons streaming in through the opening in the wall that served as both window and door. Their crimson membranes, so fragile and yet so indescribably important, pulsed with the life that grew inside them. At first, N’Yhillit feared his mate was wary of an attack, that a predator—perhaps one of the long, hairy creatures that burrowed into the foundations of their towers—was approaching.

  Then he watched in horror as her beak—his beak, for he could no longer differentiate—pecked towards the first red orb, tearing it open and clamping down on the tender flesh inside. His thorax buzzed with panic as he tasted the first jet of blood gushing into his throat. He felt the revulsion—and the perverse pleasure, the satisfaction—as he chewed and swallowed. Each egg in turn, until they were all nothing but shredded scarlet goo on the floor of the cell.

  Attenuation achieved.

  It appeared in N’Yhillit’s mind in his own buzzing language as if it were one of his own thoughts, but it wasn’t. It was something else. Something other.

  And it was in his mind!

  Continue setup.

  By now, others who had gathered to watch the storm had noticed N’Yhillit stumbling on his rear legs, scrambling to stay upright, and they approached. Offers of sympathy and assistance registered in his tympanic membranes as the others reached out to him with steadying legs, but his mind was full of these new thoughts.

  These alien thoughts.

  Kill them, the voices buzzed.

  Kill them? The thought made no sense. You killed predators, not friends. Not members of your own colony.

  Then his mind’s eye was once again filled with the image of his eggs, the feeling of satisfaction and triumph as the vulnerable flesh collapsed under the force of his bite. The delicious taste of the fluids as they flowed down his throat and into his belly.

  If he’d had lips, he would have smiled.

  Kill them, the voices repeated.

  One of the colony members leaned close to his head. His name—H’Aggilith—came to N’Yhillit as he spoke, asking if he needed help, if they could take him to the queen for healing. N’Yhillit ignored the offer, instead reaching behind him and clutching a large lump of clay that had been baked hard at this altitude by the constant heat of the binary star overhead. He swung it in an arc with all the force he could muster, and it connected with H’Aggilith’s chitinous skull, cracking it in two and spraying opaque liquid across his companions.

  It felt marvelous. Deep in his thorax, his nerve endings vibrated with the approval of the new thoughts in his mind. This was right. This was good.

  The others reeled in horror as N’Yhillit rose from the ground and stalked toward them, his other arms reaching out to grab more chunks of clay. The idea of fighting back wouldn’t even enter their minds; he wasn’t a predator. Life must be protected. It was their prime directive.

  And it made it so much easier for N’Yhillit to kill them all. In the end, the fact that they didn’t fight back made it all the more satisfying to him. When he reached the last one
, a female named K’Rrhee, he felt a pang of regret at knowing there were no more to slay.

  Stop. Attenuation achieved.

  He tilted his head as if doing so could help him hear his thoughts better. But it soon became clear when K’Rrhee staggered to her feet and plucked her own chunk of hard clay from the ground.

  He had a partner now. Someone who understood, as he did. The two of them turned in unison toward the colony below, cast in a purple halo under the storming skies. There would be much noise tonight, and much thunder.

  And it would be glorious.

  1

  They didn’t hear it when the meteorite struck the surface, but the shockwave hit them with enough force to make up for that and then some. Gravity on Oberon was only a third that of Earth, and the men went sailing backward as a wall of dust and debris pelted them from the direction of the impact.

  “Captain!” A voice bellowed through the comms link in Quinn’s suit helmet. It had been two years since he had been busted down to sergeant, but at times like this, his men still forgot. “What the hell was that?”

  Good question. They were still sailing through the air—well, technically it wasn’t air, since the moon had no atmosphere to speak of—and Quinn was still trying to gather his wits. A few seconds later he came to rest in a puff of dust as he managed to stop his momentum and regain his feet. His men, as he still thought of them even though they were no longer in the Marines, had managed to do the same. Their gleaming silver spacesuits had lost some of their shine now that they were covered in a thin layer of Oberon’s surface, but otherwise they looked none the worse for wear.

  “Hold position,” Quinn clipped as he began to jog-jump toward them, slowly covering several feet at a time in the reduced gravity. Giving orders was second nature to him, and it was second nature to his companions to follow them.

  The others—Geordie Bishop, Percival Maggott and Dev Schuster—had landed within several meters of each other because they’d been close together and weighed down with equipment boxes when the meteorite had struck. Quinn had been closer to the jump ship and wasn’t carrying a load, which meant he’d flown farther.

  “Kergan, come in.” Quinn closed in on his companions as he waited for a response from the guard. Nothing. The debris kicked up by the impact obscured everything on their western horizon, including the ship, and it was quickly headed their way.

  “Great,” Geordie groaned. “We’re going to have to go into that cloud of shit, aren’t we?”

  “There’s going to be comms interference,” said Dev, focusing, as always, on the tech. “We may lose contact once we get in. Do we risk it?”

  “Fucker wouldn’t risk it for us,” Maggott grumbled in his thick Manchester drawl. “Just sayin’.”

  Quinn slapped a gloved hand on Maggott’s shoulder—he had to reach above his head to do it since the man was about two-and-a-half meters square and needed a specially made suit—as he joined the other three.

  “At ease, big guy,” said Quinn, knowing that anyone who called the man Percy risked losing some teeth. “We can wait until the cloud clears—”

  “Get back here!” Kergan’s voice screamed into their headsets. “Now!”

  The other three spared a glance at Quinn, who nodded and took off double-time toward the encroaching cloud. They followed him as they always did, trusting in his lead, knowing he would always be the man in front of them and he would never steer them wrong.

  Then again, they’d followed him to prison, so that kind of blew that particular theory out of the water.

  Particles that ranged in size from sand grains to golf-ball-sized gravel pelted them as they entered the field of debris and they were forced to wipe at their clear polycarbonate faceplates to be able to see. Suddenly Quinn’s sense of direction was challenged, and it wasn’t made any easier by the fact that their jumping style of movement didn’t make for a particularly straight line of advancement to begin with.

  A blast of static came through the speaker next to Quinn’s ear, startling him.

  “There’s that interference I was talking about,” said Dev, bringing up the group’s six. “The transmitter is in the Raft, and the Raft is on the other side of that cloud.”

  The Raft was the nickname for the short-distance ship that ferried prisoners from the Oberon One station in orbit to the surface of the fourth moon of Uranus. They’d arrived in it less than an hour earlier with Butch Kergan, a high-ranking guard at the prison, and Kevin Sloane, one of the civilian techs who oversaw the maintenance of the station. It was supposed to be an easy mission to use a sonic drill to drop a few holes and test for palladium deposits, and it was easy—until the meteorite hit.

  The four men moved as one, each keeping a roughly defined quadrant, with Quinn in the lead, Maggott and Bishop flanking and Schuster in the rear. They were so used to it after almost eight years together that it was second nature. Whether it was on the battlefields of Earth or in the mess hall on Oberon One, they were a unit and they had each other’s backs, always.

  “Getting anything on telemetrics, Geordie?” Quinn asked. “Any idea how far out we are?”

  “Transmission isn’t great,” Bishop said from his left, scanning the device on his forearm. “But if it’s correct, we’re about a hundred meters from the Raft.”

  “Pick it up, Marines!” Quinn barked, and the men put more spring in their steps. Whether it actually moved them forward any faster no one could say, because the debris field prevented them from seeing their surroundings.

  After what seemed like an eon, Quinn finally saw the gray silhouette of the ship through the dust.

  “Dead ahead! Kergan, what’s your status?”

  But Quinn could see the guard’s status as soon as he emerged from the cloud: he was on his belly, staring into the abyss of a brand-new crater. Now that the dust had settled, he also realized that the Raft was on the edge of that crater, and was starting to teeter.

  “Sloane is down there!” Kergan cried, pointing at an outcropping just inside the edge of the crater, about ten meters below him. “We need to get him out before the ship drops on him!”

  The Raft was a leftover ferry cruiser from the early days of the war that had ended two years earlier. The conflict had been called a lot of things—the Trade Wars, World War III, the Triad Conflict—but what it had really been was a cash register for war profiteers, and some of them made a fortune selling old cast-offs to one or more of the three factions. The Raft was one of those, an unwieldy rust bucket that was top heavy and could barely keep its balance at the best of times. Even at one-third gravity, its twenty-ton bulk would crush Sloane. Even if it didn’t, the weight would drive him into the soft surface dust, burying him somewhere far beyond their ability to rescue him.

  The other men came to rest around Quinn. Schuster glanced from the ship to the crater and back to the ship.

  “I’d say we’ve got a couple minutes at best before that thing drops, Captain.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you I’m not a captain?” he said distractedly. “It’s Quinn now. Or Lee. Or Gunny, if you have to use rank. Just don’t call me Napoleon; only my mother did that. I’m going inside to get the winch.”

  “Like hell you are!” said Bishop, his eyes wide under his faceplate. “You’ll go down with it and we’ll lose both of you!”

  “You don’t give the orders.”

  Bishop gave him a steely look. “You just told Dev to stop calling you Captain, so neither do you.”

  “We don’t have time for this!” Quinn snapped. He grabbed Bishop’s arm and pulled him toward the Raft. “You stay outside the hatch. I’ll throw you the winch and attach the cable to my suit, then you can hold onto me even if the ship drops.”

  “Roger that,” Bishop muttered. He’d been Quinn’s SIC long enough to know when he was beat.

  Quinn turned to the others. “You two drop and flank Kergan. Await orders.”

  They nodded and did as they were told while Quinn and Bishop made t
heir way to the access ramp in the Raft’s rear, which was still stuck open on its hydraulics. Quinn stepped through gingerly into the cargo hold, which was, thankfully, on the right side of the ship’s airlock. About ten meters in, he saw what he was looking for: a metal box about eight inches square. He lifted it off the wall and flipped a flat toggle switch on the side that released a thin cable with a metal clip on the end. He pressed the spring-loaded clip with his thumb and hooked it into a loop on the sternum of his space suit.

  “Move it!” Bishop prodded from outside the cargo hold just as Quinn felt the floor shift beneath his feet. “This thing’s on the edge!”

  “You’ll be all right.” Quinn heard Kergan’s rough voice in his ear and for a moment thought the guard captain was talking to him, before realizing it was Sloane on the receiving end. “We’ll get you up here, don’t worry.”

  “The winch is coming, Kergan!” he called as he reached the base of the ramp that led down to the surface and Bishop. “Thirty seconds out!”

  “Officer Kergan!” the guard snapped. “How many times do I have to tell you?”

  As many times as I can get a rise out of you with it, Quinn thought as he caught sight of Bishop. He cocked his arm back to pitch the winch and took a breath.