Merkiaari Wars Series: Books 1-3

by Mark E. Cooper

  Negative.

  What the hell? Oh right, the search was negative. He hadn’t been crew on one of these tubs before. He knew that. Didn’t matter in the least. His sensor map was getting nicely detailed and his database had the basic layout of the Dasher class for him to use. With luck, the enemy hadn’t bothered to modify their ship any further than beefing up its weapons and ammo carrying capacity. That was the usual pattern. Raiders didn’t usually spend money on interior layout changes. The bridge was the bridge, environmental was environmental, and engineering was engineering. That sort of thing. Where changes might occur would be in areas such as crew berthing, cargo areas, and other places that wouldn’t influence the actual function of the ship. Additional magazines for missiles for example could be created in any empty section, but unless he needed to move through such an area to reach another, he couldn’t see how it had any effect on him.

  He mapped a safe route through the ship using the service ways and ventilation tunnels. Safe, as long as the alarm wasn’t raised. Ships, no matter the class—military or civilian it didn’t matter—had things in common. Things like keeping the air in! In cases of emergency they all had blast doors that would seal off sections of the ship. The section seals everyone saw daily when walking the decks of any ship or station, were lifesavers, but few realised the complexity required of such systems. Section seals and blast doors in personnel areas were relatively simple things, but imagine having to seal every maintenance tunnel, every ventilation shaft, every possible way for air to escape while maintaining a ship’s systems to all areas through the myriad of pipes, wires, and god knows what. It made Eric’s head hurt. Ship design was not in his future that was for sure. The point here was that a single alarm could seal every deck and service tunnel to the bridge. He had to reach it absolutely undetected.

  That was going to be hard. Very hard indeed.

  Eric kicked his way out of his confinement. He couldn’t just lift the lid. It was buried under all the other cargo the raiders had piled atop it. His boots thudded into the side of his box with the power of pneumatic jacks. Thirty seconds and repeated blows later he was out and stripping off his environmental suit. It was a relief to be out of the smelly thing, but not because of the stink. It just made movement and combat easier.

  He drew his pistol in a lightning fast move, his enhanced muscles performing the task smoothly as always. He holstered it and adjusted his belt. He drew again. Yes, that was perfect. He holstered the pistol again and checked his rifle. All was as it should be. Calling up his much-annotated map, he orientated himself and headed deeper into the cargo hold to find his initial access into the guts of the ship.

  It was a maintenance hatch like any other. There were hundreds like it on the ship, needed for engineers and their remotes to service the ship and make repairs. Anything that moved or could fail in any way at all needed an access point like this to repair or replace it. Some of the service ways were too narrow for even the smallest engineer to navigate, and those were used exclusively by droids and remotes. That fact had made his choice of route harder because there simply wasn’t a way to reach the bridge without emerging into the ship proper. He had made allowances, trying to minimise those emergences and making them in rarely used parts of the ship. He used his combat knife to pry open the cover over the controls and used them to open the hatch.

  The first leg of his journey to the bridge was a simple matter of following the service way to the first vertical junction. He was careful to close the hatch behind him, but he didn’t need to take any further precautions. He was well insulated deep in the guts of the ship that few people, if any, ever saw. No one would hear him clambering about. He encountered only a single repair mech on the way, and it had stowed itself in its charging bay. Not that it would have mattered if it had been active. It was the autonomous kind, not the type requiring a tele-operator to function.

  The service way was large enough for him to walk if he doubled over. He chose to do that at first, but soon resorted to a crawl. It was easier and frankly he preferred to keep his head up and looking ahead rather than down. Despite keeping his sensors sweeping ahead, he was still Human enough to prefer seeing where he was going with his own eyes. Crawling slowed him, but he had time. No one knew he was aboard. He could take the entire day if it meant reaching the bridge undetected.

  The vertical shaft allowed him to stand, but it presented another difficulty. Mechs had anti-grav. He did not. He looked for a way to climb, but the designers had decided not to include a ladder or rungs. Probably expected the engineers to use remotes for manual inspections and any maintenance would be handled by droids and mechs equipped with anti-grav.

  Eric slung his rifle on his back out of the way and tested the cable trunking and pipe work lining the shaft. It creaked as he pulled but held. He gave it a little more and one section pulled free with a bong sound ringing through the walls. He scowled and tried one of the other control runs. Surely they weren’t all held in place by spit and bailing wire? He tugged and this time the pipe held. Good enough. He began climbing, his legs kicking free beneath him.

  The Dasher class ships were small freighters when compared to their multi-million ton brethren. They were the minnows in a sea swarming with leviathans, but for all of that the climb was still something like four stories. Eric made it to the right junction and into a cross tunnel that he followed for only a short distance. He had reached the first of his exits. The service way continued on and if he followed it, he would have eventually run out of room far from his destination. The hatch he contemplated would allow him to exit on Deck3E. The E stood for engineering, and ordinarily he would be delighted, but this wasn’t a normal infiltration. He could cause mayhem in engineering, but he needed the ship intact, so no fun and games breaking delicate things today. His visit would be purely that and just a waypoint on his way further forward.

  The hatch unsealed smoothly and Eric emerged. Sensors reported crew working nearby, but not within visual of him. He resealed the hatch and crossed the compartment quickly and out the door into the corridor. He ran. The burst of speed had him at the right door in seconds. He ducked inside just as a woman appeared around a corner, but she either didn’t register him or thought he was crew. She walked by his door and didn’t raise the alarm. Lucky for her, because she would have been dead the second she tried.

  Sensors reported all clear. He was in the auxiliary control room used for monitoring the fusion plants. It wasn’t manned. Usually someone would only be stationed at the controls during jumps to and from foldspace to monitor the draw of extra power needed at those times. He had gambled the raiders would be occupied elsewhere and wouldn’t be performing maintenance. It had worked out.

  There were no service ways leading from this compartment to anywhere he wanted to go, but all areas of the ship needed air. He found the grill covering the environmental duct and used it to enter the airways. He didn’t need to go far. A blessing because the air ducts were confining. He had to lay prone and pull himself the few hundred yards he needed to reach his next waypoint. He reached it quickly but sensors alerted him to a problem. The compartment he needed wasn’t empty.

  Two red icons glared balefully at him. He eased forward until he could see through the gaps in the grill and scowled. A man and a woman were performing an intimate inspection of each other instead of the ship they were meant to be working on. Their clothes and tools were scattered all over the compartment, and it seemed unlikely they would finish any time soon. Eric watched the woman energetically riding her friend where he lay upon the deck exploring her breasts with roaming hands. The show didn’t move him at all except in how he needed to deal with the situation.

  Sensors reported only these two near enough to hear a commotion. Not that he planned to allow one, but he wouldn’t take chances. He drew his knife and gently pried open the grill. He allowed it to fall and burst into the compartment, his legs thrusting hard. His dive sent him across the room and he executed a roll back to h
is feet that brought him up behind the woman. She cried out, reaching her climax just as the knife entered the back of her neck just below her skull. The sound instantly died with her, the knife severing her spinal cord. Her partner’s eyes had been closed, but he must have felt her go limp. He looked up in time to see the knife plunging for him. He didn’t have time to scream.

  Eric wiped the blood from the knife on his thigh staring at the couple. The girl was still astride her partner, slumped forward with her head on his chest. The pale curve of her back was beautiful in the light; her expression... was it wonder? Pleasure? Eric’s face remained a mask, but his hand shook as he sheathed the knife. Already the scene was burned into his viper memory, ready to haunt him in the years to come. He didn’t look away, but made himself remember the feel of the knife entering the girl’s neck between her C1 and C2 vertebrae as his training dictated. Made himself hear her cry of pleasure again and again just as he ended her life. At least this way his nightmares would be true remembrances... and deserved.

  He turned away.

  Sensors reported no hostiles near as he ran through the ship as if alone on a derelict. Been there, done that, he thought. This feeling was similar, but not the same. The ship was alive with mechanical sounds and well lit. Air moved through the ducts, sounds from behind closed hatches, and even distant crashes came to him as vibrations through the structure of the ship as crew unloaded cargo. None of that had been present last time. The ship had been utterly dead, as had everyone aboard except him. Bumbling around in the dark, he hadn’t enjoyed the experience. He’d been lucky to find an operational escape pod that time.

  Lucky. Right.

  Some would call him a Jonah for how many times he had been present and the only survivor when missions went wrong. Then again, all the veterans were guilty of being survivors when circumstances had whittled the regiment down to a nub.

  He entered environmental and went straight for the service way he needed. It was the last one. Sensors reported the vats and equipment unattended as he had hoped. The gardens aboard ship looked after themselves mostly. He hadn’t expected to encounter anyone, but then, he hadn’t expected to find two people having sex in the auxiliary control room either. He climbed into the service way and locked the hatch behind him.

  He followed his map taking the turns fast as he came to them, and climbing when he had to. He was approaching the bridge now, and sensors showed a lot of activity. The bridge was fully manned just as engineering had been. Not really a surprise anymore. He had already guessed the crew was over-sized. They probably doubled as boarding parties for jacking ships and stations. He paused at the final hatch and watched things using sensors. The hatch he crouched beside was in a bad location for his purposes. Dasher class ships used the U-shaped bridge that military ships used. It was a logical layout. The captain’s command station was positioned centrally so that he could oversee operations, and the elevators leading to the rest of the ship were behind him between the legs of the U. All that was fine, but it meant the hatch he was about to use was in full view of everyone on the bridge, directly beneath the main view-screen. There was nothing to be done about it, and he prepared himself for a fight.

  He lay his rifle aside and drew his pistol. The pistol was a little faster to aim in extremis, and he expected this fight to be extreme. There were six hostiles to neutralise, and he needed to do it before they raised the alarm. Also, he needed the bridge intact. He couldn’t emerge spraying fire in all directions. He would have to rely upon Snapshot for targeting.

  Vipers were programmed with perfect recall in an effort to make them better killers by making target acquisition at a glance instant and perfect. The routines in his programming were complicated and numerous. Together they were called Snapshot and could not be turned off. The moment he emerged, he should be able to acquire all six targets, but he couldn’t kill them all with one shot. There would be time for them to respond. They might try to run, or hide, or fight back, and he wasn’t wearing armour. The risk of return fire was part of the job and he didn’t let it concern him. The one thing he feared was the alarm being raised, and if he was seriously unlucky, they might lock him out of the controls.

  Computer: Melee mode.

  The world seemed to slow as the hatch slid aside. It didn’t of course. He had sped up. He pushed himself out of the hatch already turning toward the comm shack. He had chosen it as his first priority to prevent word of his attack leaving the ship. His pistol swung toward the crewman even as he straightened to full height. His targeting reticule found the man’s head and spun. It only had time to pulse once before his finger twitched. A three-round burst splashed blood and brains over the bulkhead but did no damage to the ship. He had set his pistol to 50% power, more than enough even at much higher ranges than this.

  He glared around the bridge acquiring targets as cries of shock erupted. Men and women dove for cover or went for their weapons. His reticule picked them all out storing their positions, and he began servicing targets. He fired at the captain, or the officer currently in charge of the deck. He was sitting in the captain’s chair at least. Before the man completed rising Eric’s three rounds took him in the upper chest blasting him back into the couch.

  Impact!

  Eric staggered as damage assessments flickered onto his display. Right side over the ribs. He re-prioritised his targeting to take out the gunner. It was the damage control officer, and he had a pistol out. Before Eric could take him out, another round punched into him. Left shoulder this time, minimal damage but plenty of blood soaked his uniform and trickled down his arm. He dove aside, rolled to his feet, and killed his attacker with two trigger pulls. The helmsman reached for a control. Eric killed him, but the hand landed and alarms wailed.

  Goddamnit!

  The last man dove into the elevator but died before the doors closed. Eric turned examining the bodies. A groan from one man, another trigger pull, and it was over. The alarm continued wailing.

  Computer: combat mode.

  The world sped up to normal and data flooded his display, some flashing for attention. Priorities. IMS, absent his input, swung into action and began making repairs. He ignored it all reaching to drag the dead helmsman off the controls. He shut off the alarm, and headed for the elevator. He needed to block it. He didn’t want to permanently disable or damage it.

  The simplest answer occurred to him and he dragged the body halfway back onto the bridge so that the doors couldn’t close. That done he headed for the comm shack to call Gina in.

  * * *

  21 ~ Call to Arms

  Alpha site, Landing, Kushiel

  “Gina,” Eric said giving her a start. “I’ve taken the bridge. I’m using the ship’s comm shack so don’t try to respond. You haven’t got the range. I need you to saddle up and help with the assault. There were a lot more raiders than I thought. I’m estimating forty plus and at least half of them are outside. I need you to take care of business out there while I deal with those in the ship. Coordinates follow...”

  She started in surprise. Coordinates meant the ship was grounded. She hurriedly collected the ammo she had brought to the OP with her, and headed back to tell Liz of the change in plans.

  “...Penleigh out.”

  Gina didn’t bother entering the coordinates into her wristcomp. Her processor had the data, and with a coded thought she added the location to the map of Kushiel they had been gradually compiling. The location surprised her, though she didn’t know why it should when she thought about it. The raiders were here to steal. Why shouldn’t they do that in the capital? The ship was on the ground within the city itself. She was going to visit Haverington again it seemed.

  She headed for the shuttle and called Liz via helmet comm. “Liz, we have a change in plans. Eric needs my help.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “Seemed to be. He says there are more raiders than he thought. He needs me to go to him.”

  “Go. We’ll be fine.”

  She bit
her lip. “I’m sorry to leave you uncovered this way.”

  “Just be careful. Eric wouldn’t ask for help if he didn’t badly need it. I know him. He must be greatly outnumbered.”

  Liz was right. Gina didn’t know him as well or as long as Liz, but she knew him well enough to know he didn’t panic. That he had taken the bridge and called her before clearing the rest of the ship spoke volumes.

  “I’ll be careful. Keep everyone out of sight and listen on comm for me. I’ll be as quick as I can. Fuentez out.”

  Gina quickly boarded the shuttle and went through her preflight checks already thinking ahead to the fight. She didn’t know what she would find in Haverington. She knew the raiders had armed shuttles and their ship on the ground. Worst case scenario would have those shuttles in the air patrolling the area. That would be bad. Not only would she have to land and hike into the city from a long way out, but she would have to deal with possible air attack. Ideally the shuttles would be on the ground and the raiders too busy with their pilfering to launch quickly. She suspected the truth would be somewhere in between. Either way, she needed to choose her landing site carefully.

  She flew the shuttle to Haverington with her eyes glued to her shuttle’s sensors. She didn’t fear being detected by the raiders on the ground, and with Eric in control of their ship’s bridge, she was safe from that too, but the shuttles were another matter. They would have the same or similar range to her cargo shuttle, but being smaller they would be faster and more manoeuvrable. She had no intention of fighting in the air and hugged the terrain to minimise detection.

  She landed in the outskirts of the city.

  She would have loved to use her APC not only to drive closer, but also in battle. The twin-barrelled pulser on the roof could have done serious damage to any target especially those shuttles, but she couldn’t drive and fire the weapon. APCs typically carried a minimum of three crew—driver, gunner, and navigator/comm specialist—plus the platoon of vipers it carried as cargo. On her own, all she would succeed in doing was provide the enemy with a nice mobile target to practice on.