Bravo Company had landed closer together, but one of their platoons was still aboard Defiance. If Company Commander Hunter had pulled three of his platoons together, he was doing better than Alpha was.
Unacceptable, really. Pierre was going to have to talk to his First Sword, Company Commander Mikko Comtois, later.
“Alpha-Five, Alpha-Four, converge on Alpha-Three,” he ordered, assessing those two as closest to the bridge. “They’re going to defend the bridge hardest. Alpha-Two, join Alpha-One; we’re en route to the cargo section and the crew seems determined to protect that region.”
A chorus of acknowledgments echoed in his com, and Pierre turned his attention back to the situation around him. He’d kept up with the command platoon half-unconsciously, and his map showed they were approaching the main cargo compartment.
He had no idea what the ship might be carrying, but he also had no idea what the hell the damn thing was doing out there. They were a long way from anywhere of importance.
“Contact! Multiple contacts—power armor closing!”
Pierre hadn’t truly registered that his Alpha-Three Platoon commander had mentioned power armor. No civilian ship had any such thing. Power armor was licensed and restricted. Even planetary and ducal militias had problems getting enough.
There shouldn’t be any of it aboard a random civilian ship on the edge of nowhere. If he’d taken the time to think about it, he would have guessed that Alpha-Three had encountered something rigged up from civilian heavy work suits or something similar.
Fortunately, Pierre and his people were professionals, and even as he was arguing with himself over whether the strange ship’s crew could have proper power armor, he was giving the correct orders.
“Danger close! Set guns for minimum range, minimum dispersion. Pull Third Squad back!”
He probably should have left the orders to Company Commander Comtois or Speaker Olimpia Newport, but given that he was in the middle of the firefight himself, he couldn’t not be involved.
It took him a moment to consciously recognize the reason why he’d given the orders he had, too. Third Squad had moved out in a careful column of pairs, scouting the doors as they passed them.
What had allowed them to safely progress when they assumed they were facing lower-tier opposition left them extended and vulnerable facing enemies with similar gear. The scan data suggested that the power-armored troopers were closing on them through the walls, with a cavalier disregard for their own ship’s infrastructure.
Pierre didn’t need to give more orders, though. Newport was already in motion, organizing the two squads into a receiving formation with an equal disdain for minor obstacles like walls and doors.
There was a gap for Third Squad to fall back into and a series of interlocked lanes of fire that took advantage of the fact that a plasma beam intended to take down power armor wasn’t even going to be slowed by standard steel walls.
“Targets clear,” Newport’s voice said calmly. “They’re adjusting to intercept Third Squad. On my mark, Marines…Third Squad…drop.”
The armor wasn’t really designed for the men and women in it to hit the ground, but the ten Marines in Third did the best they could. Their profile was cut at least in half, clearing the lines of fire to the soldiers closing in around and behind them.
No one waited for a second order from the officers. Their sensors could pick up the power armor through the walls, and their comrades were out of the line of fire. Pierre picked his own target and opened fire with the rest of the platoon, the maximum-focus, maximum-power burst hitting in the center of his target’s torso.
Not every species known to the Imperium was humanoid, and not even every humanoid species kept vital organs where humans expected them to be—but very few beings still functioned if you vaporized the core bits keeping their limbs attached to each other.
His target certainly didn’t. Icons flashed on his heads-up display, and the power signature the platoon’s sensors were tracking went dark. There’d been sixteen power-armored soldiers closing on them, presumably trying to take Third Squad out without dealing with the rest of the platoon.
They’d underestimated the sensor capabilities of Imperial power armor, and that was the end of their short-lived attempt at tactical brilliance. Eighteen plasma rifles fired at sixteen targets. Two stayed up long enough to attempt to return fire, but they clearly didn’t have sensors that could target through the ship’s walls.
“Bien, so they have merde power armor,” Pierre observed aloud. “I’m still concerned that they have power armor at all. En avant, Speaker Newport. I am now very curious as to what these people are carrying.”
The cargo compartment had been reinforced with heavier armor than the rest of the ship’s interior. That was probably a good thing, Pierre reflected as he touched the scar marks from his people’s plasma fire.
They hadn’t exactly been checking their backstops when they opened fire, and bolts that went through power armor kept going a long way when they missed.
“Casing is intact; we didn’t damage anything,” Newport told him. “Standard schematics of the class show the entrance here, though.”
“Which it clearly is not,” Pierre confirmed. “Split into squads, Commander. One goes up and sweeps the floor above us to port. One sweeps to port here. Alpha-Two will be here momentarily and they will sweep to starboard.
“One squad remains with myself and Company Commander Comtois,” he concluded. “We will relocate when we have located the entrance.”
He studied the casing. It wasn’t quite up to the same standard as his Marines’ armor, which suggested other possibilities.
“While the other squads search for the proper entrance, the squad that remains here will work on an entrance of our own,” he told Newport and Comtois, adding the Company Commander to the channel as an afterthought.
“The suits’ blades can get through this,” Comtois agreed. Like Pierre, Comtois was from France. Unlike Pierre, Comtois didn’t properly value his heritage and had acquired the same more-American-than-anything-else, near-accentless English as most humans in Imperial service.
“It’ll take us a few minutes; finding a door would be faster, but we can do it,” he concluded.
“Exactly the plan,” Pierre confirmed. “One squad remains here and makes a door; the others sweep for the original entrance. I refuse to be locked out by these crétins.”
Chapter Four
The panel of armored hull hit the far wall with a resounding clatter. At some point while they’d been hacking the wall apart, the freighter’s artificial gravity had failed. Given the mess the battle for the ship had created, Pierre wasn’t even surprised.
“Move in!” Comtois barked. Four Marines were through the hole before he’d even finished shouting.
“Clear!” one of them reported after a moment. “Looks like we cut into a bloody museum. The fuck is this?”
Pierre forced himself to wait until at least a full squad had gone through the hole before following his Marines in. Leading from the front was all well and good for motivating people, but the Imperial Marines were also clear that leading from the very front was damn stupid for an officer.
The Marine’s comment on the space they’d entered wasn’t wrong. Shelves and benches were spread around the space they’d entered, each covered in bits of stonework and metal. Each piece had a tag, presumably including an electronic component Pierre couldn’t read yet, but they looked like random debris to him.
So long as none of his people touched anything, it would all stay where it was. Anything that was touched was going to go flying in the zero gee, though.
“Record everything,” Pierre ordered. “We’re probably going to hand this over to actual scientists to study, but if something happens, I want every piece of data we can get.”
There was no logical reason for there to be a ship this far out with a cargo hold full of archeological artifacts. It made no sense at all.
Pierre crossed to one of the she
lves as his people checked on the exterior of the compartment, they were in. It was too small to be the entire hold, which meant someone had parked a container in the main hold and they’d cut into that instead of the main space without knowing.
Some of the pieces looked familiar to him, but the coding wasn’t. He scanned a tag into his system and inhaled sharply.
“Baise-moi,” he snarled. “These are Imperial initial catalog tags. They didn’t rob a museum. They robbed a dig site.”
“There are no dig sites out here, sir,” Comtois told him. “That makes no sense.”
“Check what your system reads of the tags,” Pierre retorted. “They’re ours, which means all of this”—he gestured at the stacks of cataloged debris around them—“is from an official Imperial archeology site. So, either there’s one around here that you and I don’t know about, or this got hauled a long way for a covert handoff.”
“Covert handoff would explain why they’re out here and why they tried to run and then fight,” his Company Commander noted. “What did we stumble into, sir?”
“J’sais pas,” Pierre replied. “But I think we’re going to find out. Crack this container, Comtois. I want to know everything that’s in the cargo bay and everything that’s on the damn ship ASAP.”
“Understood.”
Pierre grimaced and switched channels.
“Hunter, report,” he ordered.
“Engineering and Life Support are secure,” his other Company Commander reported. “We’ve secured the entirety of the rear third of the ship. Base ship class schematics were useful, but this ship’s been modified beyond belief. Missile launchers, boarding shuttles…this is a pirate, sir.”
“I’d got that,” Pierre ground out. “Are we in control of those systems?”
“Her weapons are wrecked or unpowered, sir. It looks like there might be one or two with local capacitors, and I have squads on their way right now. I shut down all power to see if we could keep the computers intact.”
“That’s why we don’t have gravity, is it?”
“Doesn’t hurt us. If they’re half-competent, it won’t bother them either, but it seemed useful.”
“Keep it down for now,” Pierre ordered. Hunter wasn’t wrong, even if Pierre hadn’t thought of it himself. “Keep sweeping forward; let’s get this ship locked down. Have you secured a location to put prisoners yet?”
There was a long pause.
“We haven’t managed to take any yet, sir,” Hunter said slowly. “I don’t know who the fuck these people are, but they’re all armed and none of them are surrendering. They’re all Imperial—I’ve seen humans, Pibo, Yin, and Ivida so far—but I’m not used to seeing even pirates fight like this.”
“Understood,” Pierre said. “Let’s try to take some prisoners, Company Commander. We’ve neutralized most resistance outside the bridge. Have your people deploy suit stunners when it’s safe to.”
The power-armor suits had two built-in weapon systems: the extendable force-blades they’d used to open up the walls, and a set of stunners that were definitely able to non-lethally take down any Imperial member race.
Strange new aliens would be far riskier, but if everyone aboard the pirate ship was from the Imperium, the suits would auto-adjust and take them down safely. Whether the crétins wanted to be taken prisoner or not.
“Bridge status?”
“Hold one,” Speaker Tahira Qadir replied. Pierre bit back a hot retort as the audio channel recorded the sound of multiple plasma bolts being fired.
“Sorry, sir. Bridge is still in hostile hands,” the woman said grimly. “We hit the final interior defense and they have heavy positional weapons. It’s like they expected to be facing some kind of onboard mutiny at some point.”
She paused.
“Bastards even have a portable anti-grenade system. Lost two Marines trying that. We’re down over two squads, sir, though most are only wounded. Three dead.”
“Understood,” Pierre said grimly. “You’re up to three platoons?”
“It’s not helping as much as I’d like,” Qadir told him. “The hull here has been reinforced; even cutting through isn’t opening up options.” She sighed. “They’ve got to be nearly out of crew to resist at this point, but they’re defended against grenades and stun fields, and I don’t see any secondary approaches.
“Permission to assault, sir.”
Pierre muted his microphone for a moment to curse in French. A frontal assault would be the fastest way to resolve this, but even with power armor, charging into fixed heavy weapons was suicide. They could easily lose an entire platoon taking the bridge.
Qadir could launch it without his permission, but she hated the idea as much as he did.
“Denied,” he finally decided. “Let me get Hunter and Comtois on this channel.” He linked the two Company Commanders in.
“Qadir, brief them,” he snapped. “Let me think.”
“Sirs, we have three platoons investing the bridge, but even the base interior walls around here have been heavily reinforced,” she laid out. “The bridge itself has warship-grade compressed-matter armor. There is only one direct approach, and that’s protected by built-in heavy weapons with localized power supply.”
There were several seconds of silence before either of the commanders spoke.
“This isn’t a pirate, sir,” Hunter said into the quiet. “This is a fucking slaver. Ex-slaver, I hope, but…the ship’s too clearly built for it.”
“I concur,” Comtois added. “We’re in the rest of the cargo compartment, and it is definitely set up for prisoner transport. Some of it’s been repurposed for more of the crap they pulled from the dig site, but scans suggest at least one section has prisoners, sir.”
Pierre’s people had shot a lot of holes through the ship. Atmosphere was only slightly more reliable than gravity—and they’d turned the gravity off.
“Please tell me it’s locally sealed,” Pierre said.
“All six prisoner compartments are sealed with local atmosphere,” Comtois confirmed. “At least one is populated, and one other might be. We’re checking, but it looks like they might be set up to be gassed or even have the air evacuated individually.”
Slaver, all right.
“That gives me an idea,” Pierre said softly. “The bridge has lost control of the ship, yes?”
“The ship has no power until I turn the auxiliary generators back on,” Hunter replied. “But the moment I do that, the bridge has as much control as ever.”
“Then cut them off,” Pierre ordered. “Seal them up in their little armored box. No life support, no gravity, no control of the ship. Cut off everything.
“Even if they’re in full enviro suits, that only gives them a few days. We are a long way from anywhere, mes amis. If the bridge crew can’t break out, then they’re not a threat worth spending lives to break into. Vous comprenez?”
“Yes, sir,” Qadir said gratefully. “I’ll get the platoons here busy cutting. What about the main access?”
“You’ve got barrier foam grenades, oui?” Pierre asked. The tools were designed to create a plasma fire–resistant chest-high barricade, since power armor didn’t lend itself to prone firing positions.
“We do.”
“Set them to maximum height and then use them all,” he ordered. “Seal them in until someone finds a radio and asks for us to let them out.”
That got him surprised chuckles from his people.
“Once that’s done and the bridge is neutralized, we’ll sweep the rest of the ship and bring power back up. Comtois, have some of your people bring portable airlocks up from the shuttles. We need to talk to the prisoners and free them, but let’s not risk losing atmosphere in the prison containers.”
Hopefully, the prisoners could even tell him what the hell the pirates had stolen or who they were.
“Report, Battalion Commander.”
Morgan Casimir’s accent had always set Pierre’s hackles up. A woman who had spent as m
uch time around the world as Defiance’s Captain shouldn’t, to his mind, sound like a moderately educated American.
Even the verbally beige accent most Imperial officers affected would be better to his ears.
“We have mostly secured the vessel and are in the process of neutralizing the bridge to finalize that status,” Pierre said calmly. “The vessel had significant internal fortifications, and the crew has fought like maniacs.
“We have secured the cargo bay, which appears to have been rigged for the slave trade. That minimizes my guilt over the defenders’ casualties,” he admitted, “especially as there appear to be at least thirty or forty prisoners in the bay, along with a large quantity of properly cataloged archeological artifacts.”
“Archeological artifacts, Commander?” Casimir asked with an odd tone to her voice.
“Yes, Captain. I’m uncertain of the source, but I’m hoping some of the prisoners will be able to assist me in locating it,” he told her. “The tagging system and details are definitely Imperial Archeology Institute Standard. I’m sending you a sample.”
And he wasn’t going to admit to Casimir that he’d needed his computer to recognize that.
Her pause stretched longer than he was expecting and ended in a grim-sounding sigh.
“Understood, Battalion Commander,” she said in harsh formal tones. “Inform all your people that the existence of the cargo is classified. It is not to be discussed with the rest of Defiance’s crew.”
“Sir?” Pierre asked, stunned.
“That is an order, Battalion Commander,” Casimir told him. “None of your people are cleared for this. I’m probably going to have to change that, but it depends on who the prisoners are. How quickly will we be in touch with them?”
What the merde was that debris?
“I understand, Captain Casimir,” he replied slowly. “I suggest, however, that at least I have need to know now.”
“That’s my decision, not yours, Battalion Commander,” she said harshly, then sighed. “You’re probably right, but I might even need to kick it upstairs. Secure that ship, Vichy. We don’t have much else to go on.”
Relics of Eternity (Duchy of Terra Book 7) Page 3