by Rick Partlow
Yeah, I was curious about that, too, though my own interest wasn’t as seemingly academic as Olivera’s. The ten remaining cruisers were still maneuvering into a spherical formation, noses outward, as if they expected another sneak attack out of hyperspace. It was a reasonable suspicion.
“They’re not sure yet,” Olivera narrated. “They know from the Chinese that we only have one operational cruiser, but they can’t know the result of the Alliance conference yet. We’ve already shown we have at least one more ship than they thought, and they’re spooked. Gonna take them a minute to decide there’s only two of us.”
As if they were listening, the ships began moving again, aligning in what the infantry soldier in me wanted to call an echelon right formation, all of them lined up on the cruiser to their left.
“All right, now we’re cooking.” Olivera clapped his hands together, rubbing them with anticipation. “Okay, Julie, if they come after us, they’ll probably jump in all at once, but there’s a chance they leave a couple cruisers back at Alpha Three. Lay in a micro-jump to the Lagrangian point. Davis, if there’s any of them left there when we arrive, take the opportunity to put a round through them. Call that plan A.
“The other possibility is that they go after the Truthseeker, and if that happens, we jump in and hit them from behind, give the Helta time to jump out. Comms, get me Captain Joon-Pah.”
Lt. Adams didn’t have the opportunity to make the call, because the Tevynians made theirs, first, all ten ships vanishing in bursts of gamma radiation that the computer displayed as rings of light.
“Shit, they translated!” Davis blurted. I knew the man was a captain, but I hadn’t been aware he’d changed his last name to Obvious.
“Get ready,” Olivera said.
He hadn’t been talking to me, and I felt as useless as I always did during a space battle. What the hell was I even doing on the bridge?
“There!” Davis said. “They went for the Helta!”
I didn’t think he sounded relieved, but I couldn’t be sure. He was right, though. The Tevynian ships had gone for the Truthseeker, though I didn’t follow the logic in it. They could have split up and sent half their forces after each of us, but maybe their commodore or admiral or whoever was in charge of their little fleet thought it more prudent to use his superior numbers to dispose of one threat before moving on to the other.
“All right, Julie, take us in,” Olivera said, still sounding confident.
He looked nowhere near as confident when the red lines began flashing across the main screens. It was something I’d only seen in emergency drills, something I hadn’t expected to ever see in combat, but I knew exactly what it meant and so did everyone else on the bridge.
Julie’s face was stricken when she turned to face Olivera.
“The main drive field is down.”
“Engineering!” Olivera snapped, fixing the representative bridge officer from that department with a glare. “Status report!”
Lt. Cannon was a young man, fresh out of exhaustive training in the systems of our ship, which was why he was on the bridge instead of actually in the engineering department. All the bridge officer did was relay questions like that to the officers and NCO’s who actually knew what was going on.
“I’m not getting anything on the trouble sheet,” the young man said plaintively. “Hold on, sir….”
He punched desperately at the controls on his console and his screen lit up with a view of the engineering compartment. By all rights, Colonel Barnett should have answered the call. He was the chief of engineering and held multiple doctorates in physics of various sorts, though I had been outraged when I found out that the ship’s engineer was neither a chief petty officer nor Scottish.
Instead, an unfamiliar face appeared on the small screen, long and rounded, what my father would have uncharitably called a “horse face.” He leered at the camera with something between disdain and hatred, then raised a handgun toward the video pickup. There was a flash of light, and the feed went dead.
“Oh, fuck me,” Cannon breathed.
“Clanton,” Olivera said, his face white with shock.
“On it,” I told him, turning and sprinting for the hatchway with every ounce of speed the Svalinn had. “Pops!” I called into my throat mic. “Get the whole team to engineering right the fuck now! We have an incursion!”
I didn’t know how, didn’t know when, but there were enemy on board this ship.
Chapter Eighteen
“What are we doing, Julie?” I asked, knowing I should be concentrating on the threat I could deal with, but still needing to have an idea of the estimated length of my life, given the number of enemy ships and our inability to move.
Bulkheads flew by, their details blurring at twenty miles an hour, the occasional crewmember scrambling to get out of the way of my exoskeleton, just a flash of wide eyes and open mouths.
“The general is on the comms with Joon-Pah,” she told me, her voice hushed —she was either trying not to be heard or trying not to distract Olivera. “He’s letting the Helta know we have a problem.” A pause. “He told them they need to get out of the system, go warn Earth.”
I didn’t need her to tell me what Joon-Pah’s response was. I could hear it over the audio pickup of her comm unit.
“To hell with that,” the cuddly little bear-man captain said. “As I have heard you say so many times, Michael Olivera, you do your job and I’ll do mine. Call me when you get your shit together.”
Sometimes I loved that little guy.
“Let me know if we’re about to die,” I told Julie. “Until then, love you.”
“Love you, too. Love you even more if you find a way to get us out of this.”
I was first at the engineering compartment because the bridge was closer than the hangar bay where the Rangers and the Delta team had waited in their shuttles, and probably because I could run faster since there was only one of me weaving through the traffic instead of a dozen. Lucky me, I got to see the dead bodies first.
I didn’t know any of the three. Not the way I knew the Delta team or even the Rangers, who I’d trained and could pick out of a lineup. I might have seen these people in the ship’s mess, though I couldn’t have sworn to it, and the only way I could have put a name to any of them would have been to check the tape on the chest of their combat utility fatigues. Except I couldn’t read them through all the blood. There were two men and a woman, all of them young, no older than their mid-twenties judging by their ranks, and all of them shot multiple times in the chest.
They hadn’t been shot here in the corridor. I was no forensic scientist, but I could tell from the lack of blood spatter on the deck or the bulkheads that they’d been shot inside engineering then dumped out the hatchway. Engineering had an emergency blast shield, a sheet of solid lead four inches thick that lowered out of the overhead to seal it off in case of a radiation leak. There’d been no leak, I was pretty sure of that. That was one drill everyone paid attention to and participated in no matter what department they were in, and there were too many redundant systems for even the most determined saboteur to disable.
But somehow, they’d gotten the blast doors shut and left us the three bodies on the outside as an advertisement of their intent.
“Bridge,” I called via my comm unit, “I have three KIA outside engineering and the blast shield has been secured. What’s our situation?”
I expected Julie to answer, or maybe Lt. Cannon if he’d managed to pull himself together. Instead, General Olivera’s voice buzzed in my ear, less irate than I would have expected and more laden down with concern. Which worried the hell out of me.
“The power feeds have been shut down,” he told me, “but sensors show they’re intact, which makes sense since it would take high explosives or a team of engineers with the proper tools to physically damage the power trunks. If you can get inside, you can turn the power feeds from the reactor to the drive fields on and we’ll be back in business. But for God�
�s sake, you’d better hurry. Joon-Pah is taking on all ten ships by himself and he’s not micro-jumping because he doesn’t want to leave us to their tender mercies. He has minutes before they turn him into radioactive dust.”
Great. No pressure.
I could hear the Delta team pounding around the bend in the corridor before I could see them. I could see from the IFF transponder feed that Pops was in the lead…and that there was a whole squad of Rangers in tow as well, led by Colonel Brooks herself. I hadn’t asked for them, but I suppose like chicken soup, they couldn’t hurt.
“Shit,” Pops said when he saw the bodies.
The rest of the team filtered up and down the corridor, taking a knee and setting up in defensive positions even though we had no intelligence there was anything out here to defend against. The Rangers came to a stop in the middle of the corridor, some of them scanning back and forth like they were wondering if they should be imitating Delta. Brooks pushed through the gaggle and motioned toward engineering.
“We have any sort of eyes and ears inside?”
She’d been looking at me, but I knew from the communications display in the corner of my helmet HUD that she’d included the bridge on the question, and again, Olivera answered it. I wondered if he considered this important enough to handle it himself or if he didn’t want to watch the Helta sacrificing themselves to save his ass.
“Not currently,” he told her, “but this is what we have from just before they shot the cameras out.”
The footage was raw and unedited, starting abruptly with the micro-jump away from Alpha Three. There were ten people in the engineering crew and they were all strapped into their jump seats—acceleration couches that folded down from the bulkhead for emergencies, which this was surely one. I saw their bodies jerk with involuntary muscle contractions from the micro-jump. The only one I recognized was Colonel Barnett, the chief engineer. He was lolling in his seat, hit harder than most by the whiplash of the multiple jumps so close together.
No, I take that back. I recognized three of the others, too, the ones who recovered first, who unstrapped from their seats to try to take their stations. They were the ones lying at my feet in a pool of blood. The two men who entered the compartment only two or three seconds after the three Engineering crewmembers stood up were moving swiftly, with a purpose, and I didn’t even have to see the guns in their hands to know they were armed. Armed men move a certain way, particularly when they mean to use those weapons.
They were facing away from the cameras when they shot the crew members. I flinched with each impact of the bullets, as if I was just now finding out they’d died rather than seeing their lifeless bodies first. I’d seen so many people die, people I knew, people I cared about, but this hit me just as hard. One of the two men hauled the bodies out while the other kept the crew covered, kept them strapped into their seats. Both of the intruders were tall, broad-shouldered, and the one who dragged the bodies out didn’t seem to have any problems with the weight. He was the one who turned back and shot the camera, the one I’d seen on the bridge.
“Do we know who they are?” Olivera asked, each question another drumbeat. “How they got on board? If there are more of them?”
I wanted to snap something snarky about who he thought I was, ship’s security or something, but it wouldn’t have been appropriate. Anyway, part of the answer had popped up on the display from the ship’s personnel roster ten seconds ago and was waiting on a tiny portion of my Heads-Up Display.
“I only have facial recognition data on one of them,” I said. “But he’s not in the ship’s personnel database. The system picked him out on the security feed recordings and the first time it spotted him was in the hangar bay just before we left Earth orbit.”
“Then they’re not Tevynians,” he said, deflating with the realization.
“They didn’t come in at the conference,” I corrected him. “I’m not jumping to any conclusions, but yeah, I’m thinking this is the Russians.”
“FSB?”
“No. FSB can be ruthless bastards, but they’re generally not suicidal. These guys gotta know there’s no way out of this for them. I’m thinking Chernobog. They’re mercenaries by name, but they’re all of them fanatical Russian nationalists.”
He didn’t say anything for a moment, and when he did, it was to change the subject, maybe because he found the current one too depressing to contemplate.
“They’ve engaged the emergency locks. We can override from here, but that door opens slow. Really slow according to Barnett.”
“Sir,” Barnett broke in, and I wasn’t sure which sir he was talking to, but I paid attention, just in case, “there’s another way in.”
I patched the feed from my comm unit into the same network as Delta and the Ranger squad.
“Go ahead, Barnett,” I urged. “I’ve got you on with everyone. You said there’s another way in?”
“Umm…yes, sir.” Barnett seemed cowed by the idea of talking to all the STRAC-Jack Delta and Rangers, though he hadn’t been bothered by talking to me, the only genuine Space Marine in history. “There’s an emergency access crawlway that allows access to the reactor in case there’s a radiation leak that seals off engineering. You can get to it down past the engineering compartment and it’ll take you through a radiation lock on the opposite bulkhead from the blast shield.”
I was moving as he talked, jogging down to the other side of the compartment, scanning the bulkhead until I found it. The hatch was alarmingly small, about a yard and a half on each side, the latch secured with some sort of coded lock and a big-ass skull-and-crossbones danger sticker warning me that the reactor access tunnel should only be used by qualified personnel in thermal protection suits with an internal air supply.
“This looks a lot like they don’t want us to be in here, Barnett.”
“It’d be fatal for anyone without protection from the heat,” he confirmed. “But you guys got that armor, right?”
I rolled my eyes, then turned and looked back at Pops. We both had our visors up and I could see his skepticism.
“That’s gonna be an awful tight fit,” he said. “I mean maybe, if I left the rifle and vest and ammo and shit behind and stripped off some of the shoulder armor…”
“You aren’t going,” I told him. He started to open his mouth to argue and I held up a hand. “I’m not either.” The words were hard to say. I was used to leading from the front, but the truth was, I had to be somewhere I could run this operation, not the point man inside a tunnel, blind. “Much as I want to, this is something both of us have ranked out of.” I sighed and turned to the Ranger squad. “Quinn, you claustrophobic?” Because I sure as hell was.
The kid pushed up his visor and I could see his eyes widening slightly at the thought of going into the hole.
“No, sir,” he said, and I knew he would have said the same thing even if he was, because he was a Ranger. He handed his rifle off to one of his squad and detached the quick-releases on the sling, then began shrugging out of his load-bearing harness while another of the Rangers disassembled the gimbal hook-up that supported his rifle.
Without the weapon and the ammo for it, he seemed to have shrunk by several inches, but he was still too broad across the shoulders. I stepped in because I’d helped design the damned armor and knew it better than any of them, stripping off the shoulder pauldrons and elbow pads, then turning him around to remove the grenade launcher from his backpack. Pops took it from me and I spun the kid around one more time to make sure there was nothing else we could remove before turning him to face me.
“If you get stuck,” I told him, “don’t try to push forward. Use the suit’s muscle to scoot back to the last position where you weren’t stuck and try again from another angle. Clear?”
“Yes, sir,” he said, sounding as if he was trying to make himself believe it. He gestured at the corporal who’d taken his harness. Grabbing the SIG 9mm out of the chest holster and checking its load, he pointed the barrel down w
ith a practiced motion. He nodded to me. “I’m ready.”
Shit. I’m not.
As the head of security, I had a skeleton-key access code that could open anything on the ship, which seemed like way too much responsibility and power to give a semi-successful science fiction writer, even one with the Medal of Honor. I tapped it into the keypad and the light went from red to green, signaling that the magnetic lock had disengaged. I wedged the thick fingers of my suit’s gloves under the latch and yanked it open.
Heat poured out even this far away from the reactor and I swore, brushing my visor down so I could breathe.
“Switch to internal air supply,” I warned Quinn, “or your visor will fog up.”
“Yes, sir.”
He eeled into the opening, or as close to eeling as a grown man in a suit of powered armor could manage. I was sure he was going to get stuck before he even made it into the tunnel, but somehow, he managed to squeeze through and his legs disappeared inside.
“You all right?” I asked him, bending down to check if he might be stuck right inside the entrance, but he was still edging forward.
“I can make it,” he insisted.
“Let me know when you’re in position,” I radioed. “I’m going to try to distract them.”
Pops was staring at me when I straightened and moved to the communications panel mounted in the bulkhead beside the blast shield. It was designed for emergencies, though I doubt they’d imagined one like this.
“Distract them how?” he wondered.
I opened my visor and touched the call button.
“I’m obviously not going to dazzle them with brilliance,” I told him, “so I’ll just have to baffle them with bullshit.”
Chapter Nineteen
I didn’t think they would answer, but I kept pressing the call button, knowing every time I did it, a loud buzzer would sound inside the compartment. I figured enough of that would wear down anyone, Tevynian or Russian, and as it turned out, I was right.