by Rick Partlow
“Will it?” she wondered. “The Truthseeker only has one laser turret covering the landing bay and I can take that out with one shot.”
“They won’t have any heavy weapons,” I mused. “I don’t think hostile boarding is something they worry about from the Helta.” Then I realized. “But you’re going to have to come aboard with us. None of the rest of us can pilot the ship.”
“What?” she demanded, sniffing disdainfully. “Did you think I was going to drop you off and leave? Of course, I’m coming aboard with you. There’s space suits in the utility locker, along with a couple of rifles.” To Grunewald, she said, “Whaddya say, Chief? Want to help us take over an alien ship?”
He grunted but said nothing. He was still fucked up over Ripken’s death.
I twisted around to the cargo bay. “Pops,” I called. “We’re gonna go hijack a Tevynian cruiser. You in?”
His eyes were still hooded with grief, but he smiled thinly.
“Do you have to ask, sir?”
“Get the Truthseeker on the horn,” I said to Julie. “If this is going to work, they’re going to have to play bait.”
***
“I don’t know if this is a good idea, Andy,” Joon-Pah said. The picture on the comm screen flickered fitfully, the live connection less stable than the earlier single-burst transmission had been. “There are a dozen of you against a whole ship.”
I tapped a finger against the arm of the acceleration couch impatiently. It had taken four tries to get a message through to the Truthseeker, and then nearly an hour for the ship to get close enough to our position to communicate through the jamming, dodging swarms of Tevynian fighters. We drifted powerless while we waited, trying to minimize our thermal signature to avoid being cornered by more of the pesky little things ourselves. But time was wasting, and every second that cruiser hung in space a hundred miles off our port bow was another second the enemy could be thinning out the Helta defenses.
“We can take them,” I promised him. “But you have to keep the cruisers engaged long enough for us to get on board. Keep them engaged and not get blown up,” I amended.
“That’s the tricky part, isn’t it?” Julie commented drily, as obviously impatient with Joon-Pah as I was. “Look, I’m going to bring the shuttle into the landing bay. You jump to the nearest of the asteroids the Tevynians are trying to push at Hoarfrost and blow the damned thing apart, then we’ll hop out and wait for the bad guys to show up. You keep shooting at the rocks, keep them shooting at you until we get into position to make a run at their landing bay. Then, you just have to fire the impulse gun at their shields at an oblique angle to weaken them long enough for us to get through. Simple.”
“Sometimes,” Joon-Pah said, his ears twitching, “I think that, despite years of attempting to learn your language, I still do not understand its nuances. Because I cannot think of any sense of the word ‘simple’ that applies to this situation.”
“Pardon me, Captain,” Pops said, anchored behind me on the deck of the cockpit, “we’re talking a ship’s crew, not a battalion of soldiers. They might have security forces, but how much of their crew is that going to be? How many Helta crew are on your ship?”
“All right, granted. But at least let me send some crewmembers to help you. It will be difficult to run the ship without a trained crew.”
“After,” I shut him down. “If you send them now, they’ll be more friendly non-combatants we have to look out for. What you can do right now is send me those tutorials you worked up for the Space Force bridge crew when they were training on the Truthseeker. That should tell us everything we need to know.”
“I’ll have it done immediately.” He hesitated. “I know this is the bargain we made, Andy, but I feel as if I have let you down. As if my people have let you down.”
“You’ve done your best for us,” I assured him. “You’ve done everything you could to keep up your end of this deal, Joon-Pah. And if your politicians are ungrateful bastards, intent on fucking you over, well….” I snorted humorlessly. “Welcome to my world.”
“Then come aboard, my friends,” Joon-Pah said, his tone resigned. “And let us see if we can buy those ungrateful bastards some time.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
The asteroid shattered, the surviving chunks hundreds of meters across, tumbling at an angle from the course the Tevynian fighters had been pushing it, no longer any danger to Hoarfrost, though I hoped Helta space traffic was extra vigilant about space debris after this.
“That’s two,” Chief Grunewald ticked off, nodding at the cockpit viewscreen. “Wonder how many they’ll let us blow up before they try to stop us.”
I didn’t respond, too keyed up to make small talk. I’d asked everyone if they were buttoned up and set to go three times before the Truthseeker popped out of hyperspace and started blowing up the small asteroids the Tevynians were trying to use as weapons. And since the crew were all professionals, the best in their field or they wouldn’t be here, they’d been ready before I asked the first time and were no less so fifteen minutes later.
Julie and Chief Grunewald were buttoned up in armored pressure suits they’d dragged out of the utility locker, helmets sealed, their Heckler and Koch M27 carbines secured beside them in brackets designed by the Marine pilots who’d been chosen as the first gunners.
“I think the answer to that is ‘two,’ Chief,” Julie said, jabbing a finger at a bright flash on the sensor feed coming from the Truthseeker.
Two Tevynian cruisers emerged from hyperspace only a few hundred miles apart and almost simultaneously, just off the Truthseeker’s port bow, a pair of killer whales breaching. They were careful, I noted, not to arrive lined up with the impulse gun’s emitter, instead maneuvering to try to keep aflank of us.
“Launching now,” Julie declared.
The final syllable was barely out of her mouth before the drives were kicking us in the ass, flame splashing over the launch barrier in the docking bay. That was another new addition suggested by human engineers. Helta shuttles had always used low-power maneuvering jets to nudge themselves free of the bay, but human fighter pilots, particularly Navy pilots, had recommended a mechanism for quicker take-offs, which had been accomplished via the simple expediency of installing a foot-thick metal plate that the flight deck crews could lower into place to absorb the energy of the main drive for a fast launch.
We boosted hard on the way out, the acceleration peeling my lips from my teeth. A gush of air squeezed out of my chest, but Julie cut the drive almost immediately after we cleared the ship. We’d gone from shipboard gravity to around six gees of boost to free-fall in seconds and my stomach had turned to a viscous gel and was trying to crawl right out of my throat. The Svalinn armor was not designed to handle the wearer blowing chunks in zero-g, so I clenched my teeth and my stomach, ignored the bitter taste of bile in my mouth and concentrated on not throwing up.
If any of it bothered Julie, she didn’t show it. Her hands were steady on the control yoke, nudging it gently, the maneuvering rockets spinning us end for end, then correcting to stop our spin.
“We’re holding up here to watch the show,” she said, though whether she was talking to me, Chief Grunewald or the Truthseeker, I wasn’t sure.
The Helta ship swung around with slow, ponderous grace, reminding me of an aircraft carrier turning into the wind during a storm, absorbing two solid strikes from the enemy laser batteries during the turn. I had never seen this sort of battle from the outside and probably wouldn’t have noticed the lasers at all if the computer hadn’t provided a red line connecting the ships. The Truthseeker faltered at the onslaught, as if she were a living thing caught by an attack in mid-step. It was due to the lasers disrupting her drive field by dumping energy into it, but it still seemed unnatural to me after years of studying real physics so I could write an unreal version.
She returned fire and the Tevynian cruiser closest to us took a hit, but all the ships were maneuvering. Truthseeker shot forwa
rd, Joon-Pah unwilling to take any more hits in his bid to reverse course. I had asked once why they couldn’t just reverse without pointing the ship in the opposite direction since it didn’t use a reaction drive, and had gotten an earful of technobabble about how the gravimetic projection pods had to be aligned a certain way to propel the ship. The long and short of it is, I still don’t know.
Whatever the hyperdimensional-physics-based explanation, she headed off at an angle across the course of the enemy ships, portside of the ship to her relative port, which I already know is an unscientific way to refer to relative relationships in space, but damn it, I’m a Marine. Joon-Pah was trying to put one of the enemy ships between his and the other cruiser to reduce the number of starships taking shots at him, which I thought was a damn good idea.
It had the added benefit of forcing the enemy ships to swing around and expose their ass-ends to us, including their hangar bays.
“I’m going to take us closer,” Julie said, and this time I decided she was talking to me. “Hopefully, we won’t get fried before we get a chance to board her.”
“Yeah, that would be nice,” I agreed. “Let’s not do that.”
“You gonna sit there and kibbutz the whole time, Andy?” she asked, and I thought I heard a smile in her voice.
I was going to make a snarky reply because I hated to disappoint her, but high-gravity acceleration forced the breath I’d saved for it out of my lungs, and I couldn’t help but suspect she’d planned it that way. I stopped trying to talk and concentrated on not blacking out, focusing on the tactical display.
The Truthseeker’s tactical and helm officers might have taught our people how to sail the ship, but they’d also learned something about tactics in the process. Actually, almost everything they knew about tactics, they’d learned from us. The Truthseeker fired again as she slid around the enemy ship, the particle beam from her starboard batteries causing the image of the Tevynian cruiser to shimmer as her drive field lost stability at the point of attack. A flare of melting armor lit up the side of the enemy ship, but the damage was mirrored along the flank of the Truthseeker as the Tevynians got in their own licks during the exchange.
Meanwhile, we were heading straight for the other ship and I couldn’t do anything else, so I sent my fervent hopes out, for all they were worth, that Joon-Pah would notice where we were heading and that the Tevynians wouldn’t notice us at all. This was why I really hated space battles. I thought about Ripken and decided he’d been right about installing a door gun. At least then, I’d have something to shoot at the bad guys.
The shuttle’s drives were pitiful and primitive compared to the cruisers, nothing more complicated than using a very compact nuclear reactor to heat up metallic hydrogen reaction mass and shooting it out the drive bell, but it was decades, maybe even a century beyond anything we could have come up with. The image of the enemy ship in the view screen jumped out at us, suddenly and alarmingly close. The drive pods were teardrop shapes blended into the broad end of the wedge at the back of the cruiser, glowing blue with Cherenkov radiation, twisting the fabric of spacetime in ways I could never hope to understand, in ways not even our best theoretical physicists fully understood.
All it would take was for us to get a few meters too close to the edge of that field and the tidal forces would rip the shuttle apart. I tried not to think about that, about how close we were and how even after our drive cut off, we were still flying at the ship way too fast.
It’s moving forward, too, I reminded myself. Julie knows what she’s doing. She’s the best star pilot in the galaxy.
I snorted a laugh at the classical reference and Julie gave me a look, her curious frown visible through her helmet’s visor. I said nothing. She would accuse me of being a huge nerd, which was true, and it would take too long to explain, which would make it not funny. And of course, she didn’t need to be distracted from trying to position us to get on board the enemy ship. Besides, she’d used the shuttle’s acceleration to keep me from smarting off before, so she would just have to wonder what comedy gem I might be keeping to myself.
“Any time now, Joon-Pah,” she murmured. She sounded nervous, which scared the shit out of me because Julie Nieves was never nervous at the controls of anything she could fly.
As if Joon-Pah had heard her entreaty, the Truthseeker wheeled around the stern of the Tevynian cruiser she’d been exchanging fire with, aiming her nose at the other ship, the one we were coasting toward. The Tevynian ship began to turn, trying to get away from the Truthseeker’s spinal mount, but it was too late. The impulse gun discharged, off-center by just a degree or two, far enough to miss the enemy ship entirely, but close enough to bring her field down entirely for several seconds.
And when her field went down, her forward motion ceased entirely, since propelling the ship via twisting the fabric of spacetime didn’t imbue the ship with any momentum. We’d been trailing her by hundreds of miles while she boosted with her warp field, but with the velocity stolen, we were flying right up her ass, way too fast to be survivable.
“Anything about this plan you want to tell me, Julie?” I asked her.
“Oh, ye of little faith,” she said, but the words came through clenched teeth.
The shuttle spun on a sledgehammer blow—firing of the nose maneuvering thrusters, flipping end for end, leaving us with our butts hanging in the wind, backing into the hangar bay. It wasn’t much of an improvement, and I was about to tell her so, watching the distance to the cruiser shrink, but she’d forgotten more about flying than most pilots would ever know, and she hit the drive at just the right time.
She pushed it hard, eight gees of braking boost, enough to really, really hurt, and not just us. That hangar bay didn’t have the armored blast shield to protect it from the drive. It was hard to stay conscious, much less pay attention to the view from the rear cameras, but I caught a glimpse of the hangar crew trying to run and not quite making it, figures in pressure suits turning into torches, another shuttle coming apart, the wings ripping off and blowing into the rear bulkhead.
And then we were down, slamming into the deck, the landing gear bottoming out into its hydraulic housings before springing back up. The shuttle was still bouncing up and down, absorbing the impact, when I yanked lose my restraints and rolled, springing off my plant foot and jumping down the steps to the cargo bay. This was familiar, like so many hot landings back in the Corps, hundreds of times in training, dozens in actual combat. Speed was everything, getting out and attacking before the enemy could react, staying inside their OODA loop.
Back in Venezuela, the platoon sergeant and I would both have been yelling at the men to un-ass the V-22 or the chopper, whichever we’d ridden in, and I would have been feeling that urgency, the itch between my shoulder blades. That wasn’t a problem with the Delta team. No one had to say a word, no one had to shove anyone else out of their way. They stacked silently and smoothly, not a single wasted motion, with Baker up front and Rodent beside him, his plasma gun angled toward the overhead while they waited for the ramp to lower.
I risked a glance behind me to check on Julie and Grunewald, saw them clambering behind us with all the awkward urgency of your average POG (Person Other than a Grunt) when someone sticks a rifle in their hand and tells them to get on the line. I checked their muzzle discipline and was satisfied that neither of them would accidentally shoot me in the back, which, I suppose, was the best I could hope for from a Navy zoomie and a Space Force button-pusher. Then the ramp was down and the line was moving and I had to turn my attention to the front.
Being in the back of the line was frustrating, like being a short kid behind a line of tall adults when the parade went by, but I, at least, could tie into Dog’s helmet camera. His point of view was a tiny window at the corner of my HUD and I had to be careful not to let the psychological distance of watching the action on a TV screen get me complacent.
Dog—Master Sgt. Douglas Calhoun—was as good a point man as I’d ever seen, and
he ducked under hatchway as soon as the ramp was open far enough to let his suit through, then leapt off the end behind the cover of a wrecked shuttle wing. Even from where I was, about midway through the cargo bay, I could feel the heat pouring in from the hangar, radiating off every metal surface, some of them still glowing red. It was like stepping into a convection oven. Anyone who ventured into it without a suit would have passed out immediately.
Which might have been why there was no opposition waiting for us. I knew there were emergency blast doors between the hangar bay and the main body of the ship because the design was the same on the Truthseeker, and we’d been prepared to hack our way into their security system to get it open if need be. It wasn’t necessary, not because the Tevynians hadn’t tried to lower the blast barrier, but because most of the cockpit of a shuttle was jammed into the hatchway, keeping the doors from closing. For now. Even as I stepped onto the ramp, the barrier moved from its recess in the overhead, crushing the fuselage of the shuttle a few inches more.
“Move!” I said, because this was a command decision and they wouldn’t have done it without an order. “Get through the hatch while we still can!”
Now that itch between my shoulder blades came on with a vengeance. The team was through in seconds, squeezing between the half-crushed shuttle t and the rounded edge of the hatchway with maybe a half an inch to spare, but I had to wait until last, making sure Julie and Grunewald passed through before I went. The door was massive, a foot thick and solid metal, and it crushed a few more inches each second, forcing even Julie, who was five-four in shoes, to duck to get through.
That left me, and I had to both scrunch down and try to make six hundred pounds of bulky powered armor somehow slender enough to fit through the tiny opening, getting more slender with every inch the cockpit was pushed down, flattening it out. The crumpling, rending metal squealed in protest as the door tortured and my own nerves screamed in sympathy. My chest armor scraped the jagged metal around the cockpit and my backpack scraped and hung up briefly on the blast door track on my other side and I really, really, really did not want to get stuck in the damn doorway.