“Nagatha?” I asked. “What do you think?”
“I must concur with Skippy, both on his recommendation, and his caution that the network is reluctant to allow outside control.”
“How long until the ship is ready for action?”
Nagatha responded. “Unknown at this time, the bots are still assessing the damage. My best guess is the ship will be out of operation for another three days.”
“Hmm,” I grunted. “Nagatha, is that a real three days, or are you padding your estimate like Scotty did on Star Trek?”
“Oh, Colonel Bishop,” she was scandalized, but there was a hint of amusement also. “I would never do that.”
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
The ship was ready to fly again in twenty-nine hours, not three days. Skippy privately told me the damage wasn’t as bad as he had originally feared, but I still figured Nagatha had padded her estimate. Also, I gave the order to renew the operation with some repairs still unfinished. The forward sensor array was being repaired as best we could, Skippy judged that if we got into a situation where we needed the special long-range capability of that sensor array, we could just jump away.
You know the saying ‘It never rains but it pours’? Yeah, it was like that for us. While Nagatha and Skippy had their bots scurrying all over the ship to fix the critical damage, two more Maxolhx ships approached the far end of the wormhole, before we were able to take advantage of the situation. Again, the Universe just loved screwing with Joe Bishop. The good news was, after testing his ability three times, Skippy was now confident that he could cut off the wormhole’s data feed before the event horizon emerged. We were as ready as we could be.
I settled my lazy butt into the command chair again. My laptop was with me, I planned to work on the official mission report while I waited.
Smythe called before I could pull up the report file. “Colonel Bishop, we are ready down here. Let’s do this again, shall we?”
“Hopefully, this time the result is different,” I replied with a glare at Skippy’s avatar. His avatar was standing on an electrical access box next to the main display on the bridge. I insisted his avatar manifest where I could see him, so I could shake my fist at it if he screwed up again. “This could take some time, so-”
“Bingo, Joe!” Skippy shouted. “We hit the jackpot this time. There is an Extinction-class Maxolhx battlecruiser knocking on the other side of the wormhole, and it is alone! Ok, I have shut down the data feed. Wow, this is a primo opportunity, Joe. Battlecruisers do not usually travel without escorts.”
“Pilot, get us moving,” I ordered, and felt the ship shudder slightly as we began to accelerate as hard as the Dutchman’s battered structure could take. “Smythe,” I said softly, forcing myself to speak in a calm and confident manner. Inside, I was shaking and praying ‘Please God, don’t let me screw up and get everyone killed’. “You heard that?”
“Affirmative. Standing by for Skippy’s ‘Go’ signal.”
The battlecruiser came through the wormhole at a normal, safe and slow speed, since it had not detected the Flying Dutchman. The word ‘slow’ has a different meaning in space combat, because the target ship was moving at a quarter meter per second relative to the event horizon. By the time the enemy ship’s nose appeared, the Dutchman was moving in the same direction at about two-thirds that speed, paralleling the course of our target. On the display, I saw the nose, then middle section of the battlecruiser emerge through the event horizon. Before my mouth could open to scream for Skippy to do his thing, he activated the bagel slicer. The event horizon slammed closed, shrinking from maximum diameter to nanoscale in the blink of an eye. The forward three-quarters of the battlecruiser was tumbling through empty space in front of us, while the aft section of that ship was a hundred and seventy lightyears away. The enemy ship was cut in two pieces as neatly as if a laser scalpel had done the work. The Dutchman shuddered again as the ready dropships launched, and my part of the operation was over. The bagel slicer had done its job, now it was up to the assault team to exploit our brief opportunity, or die trying.
United States Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeant Margaret Adams had braced herself when she heard Skippy’s announcement of a juicy target coming through the wormhole. ‘Brace’ was not the correct term, because what she actually did was relax most of her muscles, resting her helmet back against the Falcon’s seat. The muscles she did tense were those of her stomach and thighs, to prevent blood pooling in her lower legs from hard acceleration. Unlike the Kristang Dragon type of dropships, the advanced Thuranin Falcons had a limited ability to protect the occupants from the effect of acceleration. The lead teams were aboard Falcons, with the reserve force following in slower-moving Dragons.
She knew the ‘Go’ order had been given even before she heard the words, because her legs, forearms and neck tingled. Nanomachines floating in her blood had just constricted her blood vessels, further helping to prevent blood from being trapped away from her vital organs and brain. She barely heard ‘Go’ in her helmet speakers before the Falcon rocketed away from the docking bay. There were two Falcons in each bay, facing toward the target so the assault dropships did not need to waste time maneuvering other than racing toward the enemy ship, then slowing to match course and speed.
Even with the compensating field generated by her seat, she felt a force seven times that of Earth’s gravity as the Falcon’s main engines surged at full military thrust, augmented by the seldom-used and noisy booster motors. Blood pounded in her ears, muffling the grunts of the pilots over the common channel.
“Shit,” one of the pilots gasped. “Target is spinning.” She paused to take a breath. “This will get rough.”
That had been one of the chief concerns in planning the mission; that the bagel slicer would leave the target ship spinning unpredictably. There was a limit to the amount of spin the Falcons could adjust for in their attempt to latch onto the battlecruiser. Above the limit, the pilots would have to wait for the spin to stabilize, then approach the axis at the center. The worst situation would be for the target to be tumbling around more than one axis. Skippy thought the automated emergency systems of a Maxolhx warship would reduce the amount of spinning and tumbling that the assault force would need to deal with. The beer can admitted his guesswork was all theory, until they went into action.
Adams clamped her teeth together as the Falcon went ever so briefly into zero gravity, then the acceleration came back on even harder after the craft flipped around. Her stomach was fairly empty as she had eaten a quick-digesting, low-residue meal, so if she did ralph she wouldn’t foul the inside of her helmet faceplate. Tasting bile and wondering how the hell her stomach had the strength to send anything up to her mouth, she renewed her determination not to puke, not to be the only one who lost her breakfast on the mission.
That determination was severely tested as the Falcon flipped on its side, then slewed sickeningly to the left.
In that Falcon’s cockpit, Fireball Reed struggled to breathe evenly. The outer edges of her vision were already tinged with red as the heavy gees starved her optic nerves of oxygen. From practice, she knew to focus on the vital cluster of instruments directly in front of her, instruments placed there in a dense display so she could still maintain situational awareness if she suffered tunnel vision. With the red filling an ever-increasing part of her visual field, tunnel-vision was becoming more likely.
As the lead pilot of the Merry Band of Pirates, Major Reed had expected Bishop to insist she remain aboard the Flying Dutchman during the assault operation. Instead, he wanted her flying the lead bird, the one carrying Smythe, Adams and two of their five functional combots. If the assault failed, he explained, the Dutchman could jump away with the press of a button, something even Bishop could handle. The crucial role in the assault was the actions of the dropships, and that is where he needed Reed. Bishop had also insisted that Desai temporarily relinquish her role as XO so she could fly one of the other Falcons, a decision the Indian Air Fo
rce Lieutenant Colonel had agreed with.
Sami Reed had been prepared to argue with the Pirate commander, so she was thrilled when he acted like assigning her to a Falcon was his idea. Maybe it had been his idea. Whatever. All she knew at that moment was that the target ship was spinning near the limit of her Falcon’s ability to compensate, and she had only ten, possibly twelve seconds to latch on, before she would need to veer away so the ship behind her could try its luck.
Some small part of her mind reprimanded her for signing up to be a Pirate, the same part of her mind that had tried to warn her before she acquired her unfortunate callsign. From that day, she could not smell cinnamon without feeling faintly queasy.
She had no breath to spare for talking and her copilot knew that Sami had command of the spacecraft. Without speaking, the Japanese man seated to her right was expertly pinpointing a point where they could latch on, a location chosen by Skippy even before the Falcon had shot out of the docking bay like a shell from a cannon. Sami knew her copilot had to be suffering from the same vision-restricting effects of deceleration, yet he had not lost focus.
The cockpit display was becoming fuzzy, so her flightsuit automatically switched to the head-up projection on the inside of her helmet, showing her only the information she needed. The ship’s automated systems had taken over all systems other than guidance. The Falcon had launched with landing skids extended, one less thing she needed to worry about.
She had an impression of some kind of turret whizzing past on the right, before she leaned the control stick over and activated thrusters to line up with a relatively smooth area of the battlecruiser’s hull. In her visor, the area was outlined in yellow as the prime target for boarding, because it was adjacent to a large airlock. There was a sharp, shuddering bang as the skids hit, lost contact as they bounced over something with a screeching sound, and latched on then broke away. As the craft slid across the hull of the alien battlecruiser, there was a hard thump and it rolled to the left as the righthand skid lost its grip.
There was a sudden eerie silence, with only the faint whine of the righthand skid’s clamping mechanism engaging. “We’re down!” She spat in a weak voice. “Smythe-”
“Moving,” the STAR leader grunted as the straps released him.
Margaret Adams was second to last out the rear ramp of the Falcon. Technically, she was the last person, because the last being to leave the Falcon was a Thuranin combot under her control.
“Ready, Gunny?” Petty Officer Second Class Pete Gonzalez asked, without looking back. He focused his attention on the busted-open airlock in front of him, and not on the starfield that dizzingly swept past as the target’s hull spun end over end again and again and again-
He forced himself not to think about the spinning. The sliced-open hull was not only spinning nose over cut-off tail, it was also wobbling side to side and intermittently jerked in one direction or another as power relays blew or thrusters tried to fire or simply because air was venting from shattered compartments. An especially violent movement occurred just as Gonzalez stepped off the Falcon’s back ramp on to the enemy hull, making him glad for the training that had made him secure one boot to a hard surface before lifting the other foot. If not for the grip of that one boot, he would have gone flying off into space and needed his armored suit’s limited flying ability to bring him back into the fight.
“Behind you,” Adams replied tersely. “Take lead,” she added without needing to, because having the petty officer in the lead was the plan. They needed to move and move fast, to cripple the enemy’s ability to fight back, ability to regain control over the ship, ability to even understand the situation and who had dared to attack a senior-species warship. To prevent the enemy from taking control of the ship, the assault teams needed to cut data connections in any fifteen of nineteen precisely-defined locations around the interior, plus jack Skippy’s remote presence into any five of fourteen possible access points. There were more than fourteen possible access points, but the mission planning had determined that the designated fourteen points were the only ones the teams could get to before the enemy reacted and crushed the attackers.
Adams and Gonzalez had a combot with them for two reasons. Their assigned targets inside the hull were deeper inside the ship and therefore more difficult and time-consuming to approach. The enemy would have more time to determine what was happening and set up defenses, therefore the two of them were more likely to encounter organized and determined opposition. That explained why a precious, heavily-armed-and-armored combot was assigned to that objective. Margaret Adams had been assigned to operate a combot because she had extensive experience with the deadly machines.
The other reason she had been assigned a combot was because before the operation, Colonel Joseph Bishop had a tense argument with the STAR team commander. No, Adams was not to get special treatment. Yes, she was a professional and knew the risks. She was getting a hulking armored alien killing machine, and a Navy SEALS operator to watch her back, because those were the Goddamned orders from the mission commander and if Lieutenant Colonel Smythe did not like that, he could sit this one out.
Thus, Gunnery Sergeant Adams had a SEALS petty officer scouting the way, and a combot with software upgraded and monitored by an asshole AI. Because, even if the mission commander was unable to admit it, Skippy the freakin’ Magnificent had no problem stating that Margaret Adams was special.
With Gonzalez in the lead, Adams guided the combot into the darkened ship. With her suit’s computer controlling the grip of her boots, kneepads, elbows and gloves, she moved swiftly along in the zero-gravity environment, guided by the synthetic vision of her visor. The path to the objective was outlined clearly, even if the actual scene in front of her was a chaos of flash-frozen atmosphere, shattered objects drifting in the corridors and occasional reflected light of explosions. She had four comms channels open. The private channel for herself and Gonzalez, who was moving smoothly and quickly in front of her, expertly scouting intersections and signaling it was clear to proceed. The assault team command channel so Smythe, Giraud and Kapoor could issue orders. The channel to the Flying Dutchman, which would only be used in an emergency so dire that the mission was an utter failure. And a channel that was a feed from Skippy, who monitored the overall battle for the three assault team leaders. From that last channel, Adams knew not all was well with the assault. Giraud’s team had run into trouble almost immediately and were on the defensive, unable to reach their objectives. They were now focused on keeping the enemy from interfering with the teams of Smythe and Kapoor, while they approached their individual objectives. Giraud had already suffered two dead, and two others were no longer combat-effective. Yet, a small part of Adams’s mind was proud that no one had panicked, no one had broken discipline. She had not heard anyone call for reinforcements or covering fire, and the background layer of her visor display showed that nine of the required fifteen data connections had been cut, plus Skippy’s remote presence was already jacked into two access points. That was all good news. The bad news was that with Giraud’s team unable to make progress, the remaining objectives were almost all mandatory, or the entire mission would be a failure.
Another small part of her mind, a part she was able to ignore because of self-discipline and training, reminded her that she was aboard a senior-species warship, fighting an impossibly advanced enemy on their own turf. If she had panicked, she would certainly have a damned good reason to, for lowly humans had no business attacking the apex predators in the galaxy.
She did not listen to that panicked part of her mind. Another part of her mind told her that she had several advantages. Surprise, for the Maxolhx had been caught totally off-guard. The enemy would be equipped with environment suits that deployed automatically, but not combat armor. Battlecruisers typically did not carry a complement of ground-assault troops, and the armory where heavy combat suits and weapons were stored, was in the aft part of the ship that was over a hundred lightyears away. Most of the
enemy would not have time or opportunity to acquire light weapons from lockers scattered around the ship. Many of the enemy were dead, injured or in shock from the sudden attack. They had no way to communicate beyond line of sight, so the opposition was individuals or small, isolated groups. And the enemy’s access to their ship AI had been abruptly cut off. The Maxolhx who were still capable of fighting had no idea who had attacked their ship, so their imaginations must be running wild. Only someone with advanced technology would dare assault a senior-species capital ship, so the surviving crew must be facing an enemy with capabilities far beyond their own. The Pirates, who were in Kristang armor, hoped that fear of the unknown would cause the Maxolhx to make bad decisions.
Unfortunately, the Pirates had little realtime intel about the enemy. Skippy was still struggling to prevent the ship’s AI from restoring control, so he had no access to internal sensors other than those of the armor suits worn by the assault team. The Pirates therefore had no idea what was around the next bend in a corridor, until they got there.
They also had no idea what was behind them.
“Contact!” Gonzalez whispered. Keeping his voice low was a habit from SEALS training but it was not necessary in that situation. He was encased in a hardshell armored suit with excellent sound insulation. The corridor was exposed to hard vacuum. And he shot off a rocket and a burst of armor-piercing rounds at the same time he spoke. In space, no one can hear you whisper, and they can’t hear bullets either.
But they sure as hell could see the fireballs of explosions and feel the deck shudder beneath their boots. It took less than a second to let fly a rocket and send two three-round bursts at the vague outline of the target, the second burst was squeezed off while he was dodging violently to the right to clear the field of fire. With his peripheral vision, he had a brief glance of something coming at him from the front, then the bulkhead beside him erupted and flung him backwards.
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