by Blaze Ward
Snowfall was suddenly rushing past her like a blizzard, air and humidity flash frozen and expelled. It lasted for several seconds, and then fell to nothing.
Another chunk of the ship gutted open, like a fish. Nobody not currently in a suit would be able to get here and get into one, until the outer breach was covered or repaired.
Catch-22. For them.
“Moving,” Trinidad called. “Lead team, close it up.”
Heather hadn’t bothered to draw her pistol before now. She was a good enough marksman, but had known there wouldn’t be anything she needed to shoot at, especially not with this many armed marines around.
She drew it now, more as a symbol of authority than anything. Her job was aft coverage until something came along, with Dedra Janowski and Vlad Faurot, one of the marines, assisting her.
“Stairwell located,” Trinidad called. “It’s locked.”
“Manual override on this one,” Siobhan’s hard voice replied. “Keep integrity at this point.”
“Prybar,” Bok ordered loudly.
Heather stole a glance to see a suited figure telescope out a metal rod and wedge it into a wheel lock at the base of the wall next to the door. In a complete power failure, you could always open a sealed hatch by turning the manual override. The area beyond it would vent, just as the previous ones had, but then they could seal it up again behind them and proceed, eventually remaining in pressure.
Locked hatches were a far sight easier to open if both sides read some level of pressure. But it also meant that the ship’s crew could get at them easier.
Heather shifted herself a little closer to the middle of the column, tapping Vlad and pointing at the airlock behind them so he would be aimed at anyone who had somehow managed to suit up, sneak all the way across the width of the hull, and was trying to come up behind them.
Nobody was that fast right now, but given time, someone might have a clue.
Heather wanted to look at the corridor running parallel to the spine of the ship. It ran forward from here for a considerable distance, before ending in a wall. From her memory on the approach, that would possibly be another airlock, into the humongous ribcage where all the cargo containers were stored. Engineers would need access to them while docked.
“Dedra, assume an airlock at the end of that corridor,” Heather said quietly. “Shoot anything that moves and call for help immediately, so they can’t flank us.”
“Yes, sir,” the engineer replied, shifting her big bulk against a frame in such a way that her head and arm would be all that was visible.
Heather glanced forward. Prybar man was working, but the door was slowly moving.
“Stand by for pressure breach,” Bok called.
Heather found a good place to be out of the way and grabbed on. The stairwell should have sealed horizontally at each deck, so there ought to be only a little air escaping.
Unless some idiot had overridden the locks, and the whole column of air was about to escape. She had seen dumber things in her career.
Those were usually terminal mistakes in space.
Puff of air suddenly riming into frost on the opening, but not that much. Just a single room opening to space.
“Lead team in,” Siobhan ordered. “Prybar with them. Assume the same up a level. Open one more and then we’ll feed in behind you.”
The man next to the prybar reached into the bulkhead and manually locked the door against closing, at least for now. Nobody on the bridge could override, if they were lucky.
She corrected herself in that assumption, realizing that she was used to Aquitaine, and to a much lesser degree, Fribourg. Buran might not follow the standards of naval architecture Heather took for granted.
Nothing moved in her area of coverage, though. Lead team was talking on a different channel from everyone else right now, so they could chatter constantly, but not distract.
Something shuddered under Heather’s feet, the whole hull rippling strangely. It took her a moment to identify the feeling.
The ship had just jumped.
That was the transition to JumpSpace. She wondered if they had triggered a blind jump forward, onto their next expected coordinates, or managed a reciprocal, and put themselves on a course that would return them to Laptev.
Not that something like that would help. They would still be at least another jump down to the friendly coverage of the guns on the station. Possibly two jumps, unless they got extremely lucky.
Still, risks. The clock was very much ticking, one way or the other.
“All hands,” Heather said, just in case anyone had missed it. “The freighter is now in JumpSpace.”
Dedra looked around just enough to grin and nod. The rest remained silent.
Out of their control now.
“Second level breach imminent,” Battenhouse’s voice came over the comm.
So, they had gotten up a level safely, and finished that process. More air and life was about to bleed out of the ship. More people trapped and watching their air reserves dwindle.
“All hands, move up to the stairwell,” Siobhan ordered. “Heather, you’ll have the bottom until we clear the top.”
“Acknowledged, Siobhan,” Heather said.
All the others columned into the stairwell quickly, leaving the room empty but for the three of them. Heather tapped Vlad first, and sent him back, followed by Dedra when Vlad was set.
It was a game of retrograde, armed leapfrog, as the three of them backed into the stairwell. Bok was there with the prybar close by. Probably a second prybar, so that the other engineer could go forward, as soon as this door sealed.
“Last in, Chief,” Heather said.
Bok nodded and grabbed the wheel in the wall with both hands and began to spin it quickly, grunting with the effort of overcoming the weight of the door and any ice that had frozen in the track.
There was nothing Heather and her people could do but point guns out the rapidly-closing hatch, but the Boatswain had it closed much faster than Heather thought possible.
With a thump she felt in the soles of her feet, the hatch sealed. Bok rose, grabbed the prybar from the floor, and wedged it into the wheel and set the other end under the first stair.
Nobody was opening that wheel from the other side with it in place. Easier to just blow the entire bulkhead apart with explosives.
“Rear door secured,” Bok called at he turned and attacked the stairs. Those people on the stairs themselves had pressed tight to one side to let the man through.
Heather nodded and waited for things to clear.
From here on in, there wasn’t much she could do.
Hogan’s Alley (June 5, 402)
They were past the point of Lights! Camera! Action! at this point, but Trinidad still felt a subtle change come over things as the sounds of Bok sealing the hatch below echoed up the column of the stairwell. Still, the helmet lights were on, just in case, and the camera was picking everything up so they could do a good after-action review for training.
You got better by studying what you did wrong the last time.
Up until now, every breach had meant people on the other side of a wall had to suddenly scramble for helmets at a dead minimum, on the way to getting into a pressurized suit of some sort so they didn’t freeze and rupture. Now, the playing field would be leveled. Defending crew would be able to shoot at them rather than merely run because they had no air to breathe. And they could hold a defensive posture, assuming firearms.
For the very first time, it dawned on Trinidad that there might not be any guns on this ship. Or maybe, one or two, in case a crewman went nuts and needed to be stunned insensible. The ship had no naval guns. No civilian ship in Buran’s space had weapons.
And here he was, leading an armed insurrection, with five more guns than crew members on his side, when you took into account stunners, spares, and the pistol Nakisha had to go with her grenade launcher.
Still, he kept his opinions to himself. Better to be overarmed and p
erhaps overwhelm unarmed defenders, than to presume a flock of sheep who suddenly turned into wolves. As point man, he would be the first to encounter hostile fire.
“Markus, you ready?” he called over the comm, glancing down three steps to where Nakisha had an assault grenade in one hand, a pistol in the other, and the satchel of rockets with the launcher strung across her back.
“Say the word,” the big engineer replied.
Somewhere below them, Bok would be climbing stairs as fast as those sixty-year-old legs would go in gravity, but they were racing the clock and defenders now. Bok could catch up.
“Go,” Trinidad ordered, aiming his own pistol at the space where the hatch would open from the wall.
The wheel started to turn in Markus’s hands, and then rolled back as soon as he let go.
“Damn it,” the engineer growled. “Someone on the other side fighting me. Hang on.”
Trinidad stepped back as the big man grabbed the prybar and wedged it into the spokes of the shin-level steel wheel. He turned it now by putting his entire weight against the end, until the prybar clanged loudly against the deck.
“Gerry, grab that wheel and hold it in place,” Trinidad ordered.
Gerry was certainly not the brightest marine, but he was among the strongest. He lumbered over and grabbed one of the spokes in both hands, pulling up so hard that it actually turned another half-spin when whoever was on the other side suddenly lost their footing.
Markus jammed the prybar in quickly and turned, setting up a rhythm with Gerry, while Trinidad watched.
As a thought, Trinidad swapped the pulse pistol for the stunner he had in a pouch. Not particularly effective in vacuum, and extremely short ranged, compared to a pulse pistol, but they were in a stairwell that went up a level and ran into another hatch. You had to open it, pivot around a central post one hundred and eighty degrees, and then climb to the next hatch. Best way to seal between levels, and still let people move.
He turned to Nakisha and caught her eye, holding up the stunner and pointing it at the assault grenade in her hand.
“As soon as you can shove it through, okay?” he ordered.
She nodded and grinned. That girl was crazy, even by marine standards. One of these days, he’d have to get her a job as a stuntwoman, when they were all civilians again.
The hatch opened a crack. Not much, and it was moving a millimeter at a time as the people on the other side fought, but they were losing ground steadily to the prybar and the big marine.
Trinidad leaned in and fired the stunner through the gap. Not at anything, and probably couldn’t hurt even if he did, but he wanted them skittish on the other side of the wall.
Sure enough, the wheel suddenly spun faster as someone lost a grip, or fell over, or something. Trinidad was able to get the barrel into the opening enough to get an angle on the next shot. He fired three jolts as quickly as the trigger would cycle.
Nakisha tapped him on the shoulder and Trinidad jumped back as she pushed her deadly egg into the gap. A moment later, the far side erupted in light and shockwave as the grenade went off.
Trinidad looked down and saw Gerry spinning the wheel freely now, all resistance stunned for a bit.
The door opened faster. Trinidad got an arm through enough to fire towards the defenders. There was someone there, holding his head and his ears. Trinidad put a shot dead center and watched the man collapse.
Footsteps sounding on the stairs caught his attention. Someone else was running up another level.
Trinidad bolted.
Marines ran up and down staircases in full gravity with heavy packs regularly, just so they could do something like this. He raced up two steps at a time, trusting his instincts to find the treads as his eyes stayed up to spot movement. From the sound, Nakisha wasn’t far behind him.
He knew they were supposed to stay together. Boarding tactics stressed again and again the importance of not sallying so far ahead of your support that you got cut off. But he had Nakisha with him, and all her grenades and rockets. Siobhan could catch up. He might have the rest of the team out-gunned right now. Hell, maybe the rest of the ship.
The next turn of the stairs were there, and Trinidad saw a hatch slowly closing, faster than he could get there.
Damn it.
“Nakisha, hit them now,” he yelled in desperation, watching whoever it was escape as the walls came together.
First rule of the new toy Markus had dreamt up for them: Rocket fuel is a pretty good smoke screen, as long as it doesn’t set you on fire going by.
Had Trinidad not been in a combat suit, he might be on fire right now. Anybody but Nakisha taking that shot would have gotten an ass-chewing and possibly been disrated on all weapons until they requalified under a picky rangemaster. The kind who owed Trinidad favors and could repay by making a marine’s existence a living hell for a few weeks.
But this was First-Rate-Spacer Onks. And he had asked for it.
She hadn’t missed his head by more than about six centimeters, but that was as good as a light year under these circumstances.
The angle of the shot was bad, going up the stairwell and hitting the ceiling of the space beyond through the gap, but the ensuing explosion was impressive. Smoke billowed back into the stairwell as something caught fire.
Second rule of rocket-propelled grenades in confined spaces: Splash damage is a bitch.
“What was that?” Trinidad asked as he took the last three steps at once and threw himself at the manual override wheel. The opening was only about ten centimeters right now.
“Fragmentation,” she said. “Figured if I needed this one in a hurry, that would be the default, because using an assault or a wall-buster would have meant a slow situation.”
Nobody was trying to finish closing the door. Trinidad held it in place for now with the override wheel, trying to see anything through the smoke.
“Two assault into the room, and then we’ll go in,” he ordered, wired like a squirrel with a double cappuccino.
She flipped the launcher over her shoulder again and pulled two gray-black eggs from pouches on the front of her suit.
“Fire in the hole,” she yelled, shoving them through and drawing her pistol.
Twin hammerblows of light and sound a second later.
“Stunners only,” Trinidad yelled over the roaring as she started to fire through the gap.
She paused and looked at him like he had lost his mind, but her training held. She drew the stunner with her left hand and stuck her whole arm through the opening, firing from left to right completely blind.
Trinidad focused on spinning the wheel. Gerry was suddenly there, hip-checking Trinidad politely out of the way and increasing the spin. Trinidad rose and drew his own stunner.
Nakisha peeked into the room and lobbed another assault grenade, nodding at her boss with an evil grin.
They had trained too much together, but that wasn’t a bad thing. He knew she was going to tumble herself out into the room headed left, so he would need to cover the right side.
The next grenade went off.
Nakisha started her roll. Trinidad surged right after her.
Gravity failed, and the lights sputtered, dropping everything to nearly darkness, but for emergency lights.
Nakisha’s graceful acrobatic spin ended up with her flailing in the air until she managed to grab a desk as she went by, watching her pistol fly out of her holster and then bounce off the far wall and head back. Trinidad tried to do the same, but missed grabbing the door as he went by and floated loosely in the direction of the far ceiling. He did retain his stunner.
And he was more or less upside down, looking at the room from above.
Smoke.
Well, a soft haze. Something electrical on fire.
Several somethings on fire, actually. The fire suppression system had apparently taken the first hit, and was spewing foam into the air, but not onto the three consoles that had apparently taken direct hits from something else
.
Something moved behind a desk. A pulse of light blew past him just below his head with enough force and heat that he felt it.
Trinidad shot back on instinct, twisting like a worm on a hook. Marines trained to storm ships in the dark with strobes, to mimic the worst situations. You got your boarding cert when you could do it automatically.
“We surrender,” a voice yelled moments later, over the sounds of fire, foam, and Nakisha’s cursing as she tried to cover everything with a pulse pistol while tracking her other pistol so nobody else grabbed it.
Hands were in the air. Fearful eyes peeked over counters as Trinidad managed to get a boot magnet to lock himself to the roof, and then the second. Hopefully, they wouldn’t suddenly turn the gravity back on, or he’d have to test if marines always landed on their feet.
There was no way in hell he would have the time to react.
“Come out,” he answered in Mongolian, just so they heard and understood.
Five people in the room, floating. It looked like a bridge. Felt like one, anyway. One that had suffered a plague of angry pirates. They were holding on with their feet.
A sixth had been stunned and was hanging in a fetal curl not far from Trinidad.
A seventh had apparently been too close to the first grenade that had come into the room. He had been opened up like a knife slash, with fresh blood pooling on various surfaces before the gravity failed, now sticking instead. At least he had been dead when power failed. Trinidad had seen how much fun it could be to clean up a bubble of fresh blood floating in zero-g.
None of the crew members had life suits. Trinidad and his maniacs could have just blown locks open until they vented everyone to space without any risk.
But that wasn’t the reputation he wanted to have. Nor Siobhan.
Speaking of which.
“Siobhan, this is Trinidad,” he called. Three seconds had passed since Nakisha entered the room. “Bridge appears secure.”
“On my way,” she replied.
On an outside line, he continued talking.