Defiance: (The Spiral Wars Book 4)

by Joel Shepherd

  “Sir, I think we need to take the whole bridge off-line. Petty Officer Daro agrees, says those shorting systems are just fucking up everything else. Get it offline, reroute the whole lot here or to Command T-5. Harris is still there but we’re not getting shot at anymore, and defensive guns will only be offline for a few minutes…”

  “Do it,” Erik agreed, and she spun and left as she’d come. No one was talking about Suli. Dufresne had wanted to, Erik could tell, because she, Erik, Suli and Draper were the only starship pilots left on Phoenix these days, and made their own little gang on top of the skills pyramid. But they were all too damn busy, and it would serve nothing. Besides which, if they talked about Suli, then they had to talk about Keshav Karle, whose remains had been mercifully removed from the chair beside Harris, and then Wei Shilu, who’d lost a lot of blood but was apparently going to make it… provided they could find a way to get him into an EVA suit, and through to Medbay, which was not currently accessible from here without one…

  “Okay,” said Kaspowitz, “if Geish can fix our fucking scan some more, that’d be great, because I still can’t see shit. But from what I can see, we’re in the same wide elliptic we were in at time of intercept, obviously. The good news is we’re not going to fall into the singularity on the return leg, though I’d guess we probably will eventually… in maybe a year or two.”

  “I think we can dismiss that as an actual problem,” said Erik past gritted teeth, as the flight computer rejected some of his new code, and gave him another fifty ‘non-functional’ indicators to go with it.

  “We’re in a slow tumble,” Kaspowitz continued, “just like you said — about one-point-seven rpm, with a one-point-two rpm twist for good measure. There’s near wreckage that’s ours, and there’s some far wreckage that’s probably Stassis, not much left. We got off pretty light.”

  Erik’s brain protested that assessment, but he knew it was true. “Well, we have to assume they crippled us on purpose rather than flame us, which means they’ll probably come back to us when they have time.”

  “And of course, all our fucking shuttles are gone with the marines.” Kaspowitz’s lips twisted in a futile smile. “Sure could use some escape pods about now.”

  It was an old Fleet joke, based on the mythical safety features the ship architects were always supposed to be working on. In reality, escape pods for all crew added some horrendous amount of weight to a warship that relied on mobility to survive in combat, and were of dubious utility anyway, given a crippled ship at high-V needed jump engines to decelerate, which small pods lacked. A crew’s best chance in a catastrophic scenario was to stay alive on what was left of their ship as best they could until help arrived. It wasn’t like there was some impending detonation from which they all had to immediately escape — anything on Phoenix that was going to blow had done so already, and there was better lifesupport on even a ruined warship than a tiny pod could muster, crammed to the gills with too many hard-breathing spacers, to say nothing of the complete lack of medical facilities or toilets on what could be a very long wait.

  A spacer interrupted them — Spacer Paxton, a bloody cloth wrapped around his head, and coming straight for Erik. “Captain, back-quarter’s still sealed, the damn security measures have malfunctioned and the system’s refusing to let us through the emergency airlock on E-Bulkhead. It’s asking for Captain’s biometrics, it’s the only way we can get the damn doors open…”

  “Dammit,” said Erik, and began pulling off his headset. Thinking about it further wouldn’t help — Paxton said the system wouldn’t work without Erik in person, so that was that.

  “I’m on it Captain,” said Petty Officer Morales, moving to take the headset himself, and the access screen for software input.

  Erik pushed after Paxton, checking his suit’s helmet on his back, and gloves in thigh pockets, then out into the main trunk hall beyond. The lights were emergency dull red, and the cross-corridor at E-Bulkhead that went to the Major’s quarters, then around to Marine back-quarter, were shut behind heavy emergency doors, wall screens red and flashing with warnings to say there was no air on the far side. Erik pulled on the hand lines up the corridor, past spacers coming the other way in masks, hauling big emergency bags, one with a crude crowbar in hand to pry open jammed doors with the hydraulics down.

  Ahead was a big gash in the wall, caused by something small and very fast, residue of the shot that had torn through the bridge. Reactive foam was now rock-hard in the breach, bulging from the wall like an organic thing embedded in the metal. In an opposite room, acceleration slings swayed in the light ship motion, floor-to-ceiling and each filled with a dead body. The corridor air was filled with a lot of floating, random debris — tools, gloves, bits of unidentified panelling, particles of rock-hard foam, globules of water escaped from damaged pipes. Some of those would be blood, but in the red glow of lights it was impossible to tell which.

  Paxton took him left, pulling arm-over-arm along the line, and now bounding off the wall to correct his course. Ahead, around the bend in the upward-curving floor, they found the corridor filled with fire-retardant mist in a thick white cloud. The fan filters weren’t pulling it from the air, and Erik followed Paxton’s lead through it.

  Within the foul-smelling cloud were an emergency team dismantling part of a wall to get at a stubborn electrical fire, with muffled shouts within facemarks, and hammering tools to get the panels off. Past that was the back-quarter airlock — the only way in on this level with decompression on the far side. They had to defend the ship if the deepynines came back, and naturally, all the weapons were on that side of the decompression doors.

  “Captain!” shouted Spacer Shin over the hammering behind. “I’ve got it rigged to this, it should just work if you give fingerprints and an iris scan, let’s see!” And pointed to the slatecomp she’d rigged to the door controls.

  Erik peered at it… and unexpectedly, the screen flickered and vanished, replaced by a vid image of an armoured marine visor at very close range. It was directly on the other side of the door, Erik realised.

  Spacer Shin stared. “Is that… there’s someone there?” Astonished, because obviously there were no marines left on the ship. Or no, Erik recalled as he realised. There was still one.

  “Hey guys,” came the hoarse, raspy voice of Corporal Edward Rael. “Stand by, I think I can access it from this side.”

  Shin and Paxton stared questioningly at Erik, not as up-to-date on the recent doings of Command Squad marines as he was. Erik nearly smiled, and bent closer to Shin’s screen so the microphone could hear. “Corporal, it’s the Captain.”

  “Oh hey, Captain. I was riding out the fight in my suit, safer than Medbay.”

  Of course, thought Erik. Marines were actually the safest on the ship in combat — not only armoured, but already wearing functional EVA suits. “And how’s the throat, Corporal?”

  “Oh, you know,” Rael rasped. “Can’t talk much, that’s the main reason the Major won’t let me back yet. Need to talk to fight, apparently. Here, that’s got it.” Door panel lights flashed, warning of the farside airlock door opening. “It only wants to open this door, I’ll see if the inside panel lets me cycle it the other way, standby. We about to get boarded or something?”

  31

  The underground zones between levels thirty to forty in the trench region were large enough for drones or marines to fly in low gravity, with difficulty. Thruster flares now lit a nearby ceiling amidst huge roof supports and unidentifiable mechanical systems.

  “Left at two-forty!” snapped Sergeant Kono. “At least three marks, looks like high speed!” Trace took a final bounce, then halted with a burst of decelerating thrust beside an access hole that went twenty floors down about a great central crane, as around her, Command Squad took similar cover.

  “More ahead, coming straight!” called Arime from behind, then the hammering of Koshaim fire as he and Kumar opened up. Trace saw a storm of ricocheting chaingun fire behind — a distra
ction, as her main focus was tacnet, now wide-open once more with coms active, and the deepynines either unable to jam it, or unwilling least that jamming kill their own coms. “Dammit, you okay Bird?”

  “Yeah, got clipped by one. I’m okay.”

  “Where’s he at, Irfy?” Kono demanded.

  “They went right, they’re trying to reach the crane!” Arime replied.

  “Pull back to me boys,” their replacement section leader Vijay Khan admonished them. “You’re too far out.”

  “Yo Corporal.”

  The spearhead force of deepynines had gone straight down the geofeature, seeking the fastest route to the command room where Styx, Dale and Lisbeth had gone. There, they’d run into Delta Platoon, reinforced with Alpha Heavy Squad and a platoon-sized force of parren marines. Trace had given the job to Delta because Lieutenant Crozier was the undisputed master at defending fixed spaces with boobytraps, ambush crossfires and the rest, and from what she’d heard, the first deepynine wave had been not so much halted as annihilated.

  But the first wave’s sacrifice had revealed Delta’s deployment, in mutually supporting crossfire about the geofeature, and the next wave had gone into the walls and were now giving Delta a hard time on their flanks.

  The command room wasn’t exactly hard to get to — it was curiously well connected to the rest of the city, not an isolated and defensible position at all. But some ways to reach it, far beneath the city surface, were much faster than others. Some were main transport routes, wide and straight, down which large numbers of deepynines could engage thrusters and move at high speed. Others were narrow, winding corridors and drysine nest-habitats that would take hours. The deepynines, Trace guessed, would be using their knowledge of this sort of engineering to find those fast-transit corridors, now that the main geofeature was proving frustratingly well defended.

  Now came the secondary thrusts, to try and find the best ways down — the old, alternative geofeature holes, all of which had been sealed by multiple heavy doors metres thick. Then there were these large engineering levels, no doubt once filled with heavy machinery or vehicles, now empty and ideal for fast motion. All such regions were now being hit hard, and Trace was having her customary difficulty fulfilling her primary task — monitoring and commanding the entire formation — while her unit was involved in action of its own. In other circumstances, she might have put Command Squad somewhere unimportant where the deepynines would leave it alone, to let her command in peace. But it was obvious to her that this fight was going to be a close-run thing, where the absence of even eight marines could make a difference… and besides, she had no confidence that the deepynines wouldn’t be able to trace communications and find the one small human unit that wasn’t fighting, guess it was the Company Commander, and swarm it, with obvious consequences.

  “They’re coming through now!” Lieutenant Chester Zhi was announcing to her, as she ignored nearby shooting and watched the swarming dots and datafeeds from human and parren units alike. “Looks like at least a hundred, the parren next to us are getting hammered. I think they’re already getting around the right flank, there’s too much space here for us to cover all of it!”

  Zhi had been east of the geofeature, in the big, empty storage-tank region beside several old, sealed geofeatures that would give the deepynines an alternate way down. “Just slow them down, Chester,” Trace told him calmly. “If they try to encircle you, pull into a defensive perimeter and hold — time spent on you is time we buy for Alpha, you copy?”

  “I copy Major… hey Kunoz! Got a squad down one level, we’ve got…” And the transmission cut as Zhi realised his command line was still open.

  Nearby, the drones that had been circling Command Squad made a dash at Kono, only for him and Zale to beat a fast retreat, leaping and firing full thrusters to escape. The pursuing deepynines ran into crossfire from Terez, waiting for exactly that eventuality, one exploding and tumbling, another breaking wide and presenting Zale with a good belly shot, smashing it in half where thorax met abdomen. Two others pulled back without firing, while a fifth dashed further right to get around Zale’s flank… only to discover Trace behind cover at his rear, overlooking the crane-hole that was its target. Trace hit it through the right shoulder with her first shot before it could align weapons, shearing off two legs, and it crashed into the lip of the hole, and fell from sight.

  “Dammit guys,” Trace told her squad, “don’t let the kids bother Mummy while she’s working.”

  “Yeah, maybe if there were thirty of us,” Kono retorted.

  “Leave the third transition!” Crozier yelled, ducking low to reload her Koshaim, slamming the empty mag into the back-mounted reloader as chaingun rounds fragmented walls and floor around her. “The parren have got that further down, hold one and two!”

  A rocket hit nearby, fragments blasting through the nest-like confusion of hacksaw habitat, and she popped back up, rifle seeking new targets. Ahead through the maze was a major vertical transition — a stairwell, if hacksaws had used stairs. It worked more like a multi-rail transport, and while deepynines lacked the attachments, they were grabbing those rails with their many legs and blasting full thrust like a rollercoaster, giving Crozier some concept of how drysines would have used it back in the day. With the geofeature unavailable to them, the deepynines were attempting to outflank and go down, past the humans and parren defending that descent. These rollercoaster transitions were how they were doing it, or trying to.

  Several came racing down the transition now, and were hit by Koshaim fire, marines deployed into the hacksaw maze that surrounded much of the city around the geofeature. One drone lost legs and crashed into a support at high speed. More cover fire ripped — deepynines on this level were using drones on the transition to draw fire from marines, whom they would then try to eliminate. About this side of the geofeature, the rest of Delta Platoon were doing the same — the opposite side was largely transition-free, and deepynines over that way would have to go a long distance before finding another fast way down. But now some drones were risking fast runs down the geofeature again, and with far fewer guns to hit them, some were getting through… or worse, landing on Crozier’s units’ exposed flank.

  “Watch the rear, watch the rear!” Sergeant Lai yelled on coms, as Crozier saw red dots appear where Lai didn’t want them, then a lot of yelling and firing. She wanted to watch, but thrusters fired ahead and some dark shapes streaked through the structure…

  “Left!” yelled her second, Sergeant Wong, up and firing ten metres from her side. “Multiples, watch it!” As missiles produced fireballs in both directions, and Crozier saw how everyone’s attention had just swung left, leaving a gaping blind spot to the right…

  “It’s a decoy, watch your right!” she yelled, and hit thrust to displace fast, crashing into a wall on purpose to drop to new cover overlooking many irregular holes and accessways ahead, just as missiles tore through them. Suit countermeasures engaged, several went sideways and blew up, one struck near overhead with a thump that shook everything despite the vacuum, and then through the flames came drones, blazing fire.

  Crozier shot the first one, hit thrust again to dodge as return fire tore apart where she’d been, glancing hits off her armour kicking her into a half-spin. She was up in time to see another smashed by a Koshaim through the nose, then the man who’d done it, Private Berg, her Squad number four, got shredded by a burst and lost limbs. Someone else was screaming, and everything by the transition exploding, so Crozier fired missiles from flat on her stomach, the rear launcher streaking carnage into that deepynine mess, and everything else exploded.

  She came up firing to the right to clear that side, Private Rai suddenly behind her and doing that for her, as from the main killzone the multi-legged horrors leaped through flame and smoke and into her lines. She saw marine armour come apart like paper before someone hit that drone point-blank with multiple rounds, and was then hit himself by chainguns that detonated the ammo rig and blew him fl
ying into a wall.

  “LT, we got more!” Private Rai was yelling, turning sideways to send his own missiles, as someone else shouted “The Sarge is down! The Sarge is down!” And Crozier’s plan to charge the deepynine flank ahead disappeared, to find her own flank exposed, and she dropped again as fire came from that direction, and a missile took out supports within metres.

  “Fall back!” she yelled. “Delta First Squad, geofeature! Fall back and jump, we gotta go down!” She did that, Private Rai with her, leaping for cover, then hitting thrust on an exposed stretch to streak up a tight corridor, then cut to skid and bounce across the floor. Tacnet showed her Sergeant Wong was dead, analysing vitals so she didn’t have to — that had been him with the ammunition blast, and with Berg dead, she’d lost half her personal section in seconds, her platoon XO with them. Tacnet showed Corporal Kess was also dead, and now Second Squad was showing casualties.

  The hangar overlooking the geofeature was not wide, and Delta First Squad fell back to it laying down fire in all directions. “Spanky, Benny, First got rushed, three down and we’re displacing down the geofeature!”

  “Copy LT!” came back Sergeant Jakobson of Third Squad. “Parren just laid down holy hell on the third transition across from us! You get beneath us and we can leapfrog it!”

  Lance Corporal Riggs was carrying Private Haim, and now propped the armour against a wall. Crozier hit thrust to get there quick, and found Haim’s armour holed in several places, blood all over her visor from her attempts to breathe — the vitals appeared in closeup when Crozier looked at her, nasty with internal bleeding and other things that suit auto-stabilisation probably couldn’t deal with. Anti-breach had plugged up the holes with hard foam, lifesupport had pumped new air to keep the pressure up, med systems would stick Haim full of needles to pump in stabilising drugs and plasma, and a marine’s ‘natural’ micros would activate to try and repair internal damage and stop the bleeding. Marines dead in minutes outside a suit could live hours inside one. But in a vacuum there was nothing else to be done, and there was no medbay to evac her to anyway… and any shuttle that tried would get shot down as soon as it exposed itself.