Admiral's Challenge (A Spineward Sectors Novel: Book 8)

by Luke Sky Wachter

  There was a momentary pause of stunned silence on the other side of the com.

  “Y-you want me to send the repair auto-bot back into the core,” Hatterson’s voice was filled with disbelief.

  “I can’t very well be on both sides at once now, can I?” Spalding grumped walking over to the hairline breach on the outside of the core’s innermost radiation barrier—and, most importantly, taking himself away from the soon-to-be temporary opening into the deadly bath of radiation on the other side.

  “You mean…you’re not planning to go in there yourself?!” Hatterson asked jubilantly.

  “Of course not! This isn’t a complicated job; just create a seal around the breach and pump in the liquid sealant, then wait for it to harden. Even a monkey like our oversized robot can do that kind of standing around while its bathed in radiation—it can even do it nearly as well as a trained engineer like myself,” Spalding said witheringly. “Really…what kind of simple-minded fool do you take me for that I’d go jump into a fusion core on a dare for a second go-round?”

  “Got it, Commander,” Hatterson said happily, the sudden rise in his suit’s outer radiation levels indicated when the inner door had just opened.

  Applying the convoluted nozzle of his sealant applicator, he stretched the flexible opening all the way from the top of the hairline crack—which he could only see via the suit’s sensors—to the bottom of the blasted, bellyaching thing. Once it was in position, he double-checked the connection between the tool and the canister before starting the preload cycle on the applicator.

  “What’s the hold up over there, Hatterson?” Spalding asked irritably, even though he knew the conditions were less than ideal for such a procedure. The radiation was not only eating up the monkey’s hardened electronics with each passing second; it also made the use of its fine manipulators via sensor feed a chore and a half. Still, the girl really should have been faster on the jump, and for that alone she deserved a little elbow jogging. What’s more, any engineer worth her salt needed the ability to maintain her cool in the face of impatient superiors.

  Why, he could well-remember the many impatient blighters the self-defense force of Capria—acting in its infinite wisdom—had chosen to set over him during his glacial climb up through the ranks. No, he did not relish the thought of climbing down from the lofty perch of Chief Engineer over the entire Engineering department. Far too many impatient buggers, who weren’t on the spot yet, wanted the job done not just soon—but right bleepin’ now. He knew that, at his age it just wasn’t worth the grief. Of course, if it was the only way to get back inside the Clover then he was still game—such should go without saying.

  “Sorry, Sir, you’re cutting out,” Hatterson’s voice came over the link, “but the auto-bot is in position now. We can go whenever you’re ready.”

  “Well, then, what are you still waiting around for girl, an engraved invitation?! Let’s do this,” he said hiding a grin at the ‘convenient’ loss of his last com-transmission. The younger generation might be a bit quick to trust those blasted multi-tools and try out every newfangled invention fresh off the designer’s draft board, but when it came to practical engineering, they learned fairly quickly.

  “Activating the sealant applicator now,” Hatterson said, and Spalding flipped the toggle on the nozzle of his own piece of equipment. Moments later Imperial class barrier sealant was flowing into the hairline crack from both sides.

  Within seconds, the sealant was in and a few minutes later it had hardened enough that, according to the manual, it was time to remove the applicator.

  “Alright, Hatterson, time to get that monkey out of there,” Spalding said.

  Her voice cutting in and out, the engineering rating running the remote-controlled repair suit had to repeat herself twice before she could be understood.

  “Having some trouble with the…control interface, sir,” she said, patches of static overriding her words, “…only one leg working. Not sure…”

  “Well, if you can, just get it out of the core,” he urged, “and leave it in this level. We’ll need to send in a haz-mat team to safely get it out of the generator and ejected from the ship so it won’t contaminate Main Engineering.”

  “I’ll…try,” she said.

  The monkey got as far as opening the door leading into the core before it ground to a halt.

  Cursing under his breath, the old engineer grabbed the infernal thing with his suit’s manipulator and dragged it the rest of the way through, and then pounded on the button to close the door.

  Moving away from the irradiated repair auto-bot, he looked at his suit’s radiation levels with growing concern. Even that little exposure could have been deadly to him and, even if it wasn’t, he had no interest in seeing those butchers down in Medical any sooner than he had to.

  He didn’t even care that they’d rebuilt his hips and finished repairing his lower intestinal tract. No gains were worth the price of going back under their care, not if it could be avoided.

  He sighed with relief after seeing that the radiation levels inside his suit, while on the high side, were still in the survivable level without extraordinary treatments.

  “A simple radiation bath and I’ll be good as new,” Spalding said with satisfaction. “See? It went just like I told them. An easy job—and now we’ve got a fully functional gunboat carrier!” All that remained was to finish tearing out her internals and welding boat racks on the outside of the hull. It would take another month at least but when he was done there wouldn’t be an uglier, or tougher, gunboat carrier in the entirety of known space! He’d stake his reputation on that, too.

  Why, it was almost time to go to work on that other hulk. All she needed was her generators restored, as well. Then all that would be left was to look into the hyper drive situation.

  Muttering happily to himself, he pulled out a large piece of lead-lined duralloy II and started welding it around the surface of the hairline crack they’d just patched.

  “Spalding do you read me!” Came a much stronger com signal that he’d had before. It was also accompanied by the sort of irritating voice he could have lived without right about then.

  “Don’t have a good signal; you’re breaking up,” he grumped, turning back to the welding job. He needed to get this right, or else those boys in their radiation haz-suits wouldn’t be able to get in here safely.

  “Don’t you give me that! Just what were you thinking? I almost had a heart attack,” Glenda Baldwin exclaimed angrily, “you could have just told me you weren’t going to head into that core, you know.”

  “This from the woman who threw me to the jackals without word one!” he snapped in a rising voice. “I don’t remember any warning given to me.”

  “So this is revenge?” Baldwin sounded like she wanted to strangle him.

  “Revenge is such a harsh word,” he said sweetly, but with his gravelly voice he sounded more mixed and mangled than anything, “what I will say is that you told me not to go into that core—and I always aim to please a lady.”

  “I also told you to eject that core!” Glenda said sounding at her wits end.

  “And then we’d be out a perfectly good fusion generator,” Spalding placed his tongue between his teeth and continued to use the molecular bonder to finish the first weld line of the duralloy cover plate. “I ain’t aimin’ to please so much that I’ll just go and throw away a perfectly good piece of equipment. There’s pleasing and then there’s foolishness, and that right there was just utter foolishness, plain and simple”.

  Baldwin made an inarticulate sound of feminine rage and cut the channel.

  Spalding eyed the weld lines he still had to do. Considering the situation outside the generator, he figured this job was going to take another good fifteen minutes…at least.

  He’d just have to keep a weather eye on his rad-counter that’s what he’d have to do. Give things time to cool off out there…as well as make sure the job in here was done good and proper of course.<
br />
  Humming happily to himself he turned back to his job. He was never happier than when a plan came together like it had here.

  Chapter Forty-seven: Finishing the Job

  Metal shrieked as I tore a rivet through my enemy’s visor. I instinctively came around with a wild, right-handed uppercut and barely managed to clip the latest Lancer to challenge me. The loss of my right hand didn’t mean that the battle-suit’s gauntlet was any less present—it just meant I couldn’t open and close the hand, or use it to manipulate anything.

  Fortunately, I did manage to connect, however slightly, and the power in this suit meant that the Lancer went spinning to the deck. That was too close! These warriors might have been from a primitive culture, and my suit might have been head and shoulders above theirs performance-wise, but that didn’t make them stupid. The previous challengers had worked out that speed was my main disadvantage, and they had worked hard to damage my reinforced metal joints and slow me down even further. They’d also saved their best for last when it came to my challengers.

  Unlike the majority of the nearly twenty men I’d killed already, this guy was trained. He knew his suit in and out, and exploited its every advantage to the maximum. This was clearly a warrior who had been with me at least since near the beginning.

  Maybe another man would have hesitated, wondering about this and that—why he’d turned against me; why was he doing what he was doing; when, exactly, his loyalties had changed; and what I could do in the future to stop this from happening again—but instead of doing any of those things right at that moment, all I cared about was charging forward and keeping him on the defensive. This was the last challenge of the day, and I really couldn’t have cared less about the political alignment of a dead man.

  It was either me or him, and I was determined it would be him. So while he was down, I wanted to put the boots to him good and hard. Unfortunately, as I’d mentioned previously, this was one of the fully-trained Lancers from our contingent. The moment my foot started to descend, he rolled to the side and I stomped bare deck instead of his head.

  He rolled, and kept rolling, working to gain sufficient distance to regain his feet and thus mount another offensive. I pushed my suit for all it was worth, but the repeated strikes to my leg joints had taken a toll and I just couldn’t seem to catch him.

  I glanced down at the power readout on my built-in ion cannon, but it was still reading too low to fire another shot. Originally it had possessed two capacitors, but along the way one of the batteries had been destroyed and the other was severely damaged. So now, not only did I have half the potential capacity I had before, but the one battery bank I did have was slow-charging.

  Seeing his chance the Lancer jumped to his feet in a single movement, his sword coming up and around to face me as he did so. But that was just a distraction for the plasma rifle he pointed at my head and opened fire with. As I said: he was a skilled suit operator, unlike the majority of the easy meat I’d crushed under the boots of my battle suit. Maybe if they could have come at me in a group they would have made short work of me, but one on one the Devastator was just too formidable.

  Ignoring the flares of light and powerful crashes hitting my reinforced helmet area, I continued to run forward. Running through the area he’d been in before he opened fire, I click-activated my extendable vibro-blade and swung wide.

  The screech of metal on metal told me where my foe was, and I blindly turned to confront him.

  “Sorry, Warlord Montagne,” the warrior said and I heard the high-pitched whine of a short-fuse plasma grenade about to go off.

  I instinctively raised my left arm—the one with the still-present hand—to protect the most fragile part of this suit: the visor that allowed me to see.

  An explosion rocked my head, giving me whiplash and sent me seeing stars. A powerful impact followed before I’d had the chance to see what was happening and, combined with my lack of balance, it was enough to send me stumbling over backwards.

  With a resounding crash, I hit the floor flat on my back, a pair of duralloy-shod feet on either side of my head.

  Still blinking away stars, I regained my sight just in time to see, out of the still working left half of my field of vision—the right side of the hud seemed to be down looking like nothing more than a spiderweb of cracked and broken crystal—the Lancer place another plasma grenade on my right knee joint using the sticky substance. The left knee, I realized, also had a plasma grenade affixed to it—a fact I took in after just an instant.

  I immediately tensed. Lying on my back, I was a sitting duck—I needed to get out of there!

  I started to roll to the side, and one powerful explosion after another rocked the suit.

  I screamed, feeling a sharp pain in my right thigh. Surprisingly, my left leg felt just fine, which I could only attest to the incredible durability of the Devastator class battle-suit.

  “It ends here,” the Lancer declared, jumping on top of me with his sword held in a reversed grip with blade pointed straight down at my left eye.

  I was surprised—shocked, actually. One highly-trained Lancer had just shown exactly how vulnerable this sort of oversized, heavily armored battle-suit was when faced with a nimble opponent who knew its weak points and was willing to ruthlessly exploit them.

  “I’d really hoped it wouldn’t come to this,” I sighed, staring up at the point of the sword.

  The warrior raised the vibro-sword up high in one quick savage motion—

  —and I activated the suit’s last weapons system. I’d hoped to keep this one hidden, just on the off chance I had to deal with an armed insurrection later on.

  Twin holes one on each shoulder of the suit popped open, and a mix of plasma and sonic grenades shot into the air. In addition to the built-in ion cannon for disabling enemy suits, this suit also had an area-suppression weapons system.

  In an internal compartment on either side of the suit’s back was a cache of grenades. One was for plasma, and in this case, the other was filled with sonic, with each compartment capable of holding ten grenades each.

  It wasn’t enough ordnance to fight and win a sustained battle with—at least, probably not. But it was more than enough for any soldier to punch a hole in the enemy line with a blitz attack. That was the proposed hope anyway.

  In practice this was the first time I’d used the system, and with multiple CRASH—BANG—BOOMS, I was rocked by the dangerously close explosions.

  Red lights, ear shrieking warnings, and critical system failure alerts cascaded across my left field of vision. My leg motivators were catastrophically compromised, as was the suit’s left shoulder. My right arm was down to half effectiveness and, lacking a hand, meant using it as my sole source of controlled movement made things more than a little clumsy.

  Lifting my head, I looked over to see the Lancer—who had been thrown more than a dozen feet by the force of the blasts stagger to his feet. His armor scorched and blackened, he raised a glove missing three fingers and took a single step towards me. He then stopped, raised his sword defiantly, and then collapsed to the floor motionless.

  “Triumphant Napoleon,” I rasped from my suddenly dry throat. It had taken every trick up my sleeve—both of them, as it were—as well as every advantage Spalding had managed to build into my previously new, but now effectively destroyed power armor…but I’d done it.

  Gants and Hierophant came over to look at me while one of my detractors without the courage—or maybe it had been desire—to challenge me stopped over by my last opponent, looked down, and then shook his head.

  Seeing me looking back at him, Gants hurried over the last few feet between us. “Are you okay, Sir?” he asked worriedly.

  “Get me out of here,” I growled. The suit was entered through the back and with my current inability to flip myself over that meant that even if the emergency release mechanism was working that I was still going nowhere until someone flipped me over—or propped me onto my side at least.

  G
ants jumped, as if stung.

  “Right away, Sir,” he said quickly. He reached down and grabbed me, “Help me, Hierophant.”

  Between the two of them, they levered me over and pried me out of my suit.

  Coming out of the suit, I staggered and would have fallen if they hadn’t grabbed me by the elbows on either side. My left thigh still hurt like you wouldn’t believe, which I somehow irrationally thought would no longer be the case once I was free of the restrictive confines of the Devastator.

  Looking down at the source of the pain, I was irritated to see that the leg was still there; if it was gone I could have explained away the pain, but there it was—with a three inch shard of duralloy sticking out of it.

  Three inches and this much pain? I thought with bitter disappointment. Now that was just insulting. I’d thought I was tougher than that.

  Angry with such a small piece of metal being such an irritant, I promptly reached down and pulled it out.

  A belated, “Wait!” from the Armory medic came too late. But with the shard now fully out of my body, I could see that it was at least six inches in total size.

  “Well…six inches is better,” I grumbled.

  “If that had been in an artery you could have bled out,” scolded the medic.

  “I’m fine,” I said examining the injury critically. It didn’t look like it would kill me anytime soon. We could deal with it after I left.

  “Hold still, Sir,” Gants said as I shifted away from the medic.

  I shook my head. “No time, Mr. Gants; a fleet doesn’t run itself,” I started hobbling toward the door, “and we’ve spent far too much time on this particular matter as it is.” Dumbfounded, Gants and Heirophant followed me as I limped across the room.

  “I’m going to need a new, gym,” I decided after a cursory look at the war zone that just an hour earlier had been a relatively pristine exercise facility, “make sure you get a repair crew in here right away.”

  At a loss, and with growing looks of respect, the Tracto-an Lancers who moments before had been passionately hoping for my death stood aside as I continued to discuss Fleet business while calmly exiting the floor.