Starliner

by David Drake

  The grin slipped into something feral. "As you've seen, I should have thought."

  "Do let me finish, Tom," Wade said sharply. "Lieutenant Holly, there isn't any clean way of proceeding from here. If you care to wait—"

  "Mr. Wade," Wanda said, "I am in charge here. We will proceed as follows. We'll have to ki—eliminate—the isolated soldiers before we attempt the bridge controls. We'll—we'll trust Ran to take care of engineering control."

  "See, Dickie?" Belgeddes said as he reopened the drawer the pistol came from. He rummaged around until he found a box of cartridges among the hard copy. "All under control."

  "How do you propose to locate the hostiles, Lieutenant?" Wade asked formally. "And if I may suggest . . . ? They appear to be deployed in threes, not as individuals."

  "Yes, that's correct," Wanda said with a sharp dip of her jaw that passed for a nod. "And we'll locate them like this."

  She undipped the communicator from the front harness strap of the body she'd dragged into the cabin. It worked on the same principals as Trident's intra-ship communications rigs, but it was somewhat larger and extended a rigid wand to a structural feature instead of using a transceiver chip and a length of flex.

  She touched the wand to the console's face. "Bridge," she ordered, "on a schematic, locate the points within the Empress that a communicator of this—"she broke squelch "—modulation has been used in the past ten minutes. Over."

  Six labeled decks appeared in blue outline, shrunk to fit on a single console display. The nine red dots were at expected locations—the bridge, engineering control, and public areas including the main lift and drop shaft foyers on four decks. The commando looked surprisingly sparse against the starliner's enormous volume. They must have lost half their strength in their blind ship-to-ship crossing through sponge space.

  Survivably sparse, it might be.

  Wade looked over the 15-mm rifle from Calicheman that leaned against a corner of the cabin. "Interesting," he murmured.

  He turned to Wanda Holly. "Very good, lieutenant," he said. "Now, as for the method of procedure—may I suggest a course?"

  "Go ahead," Wanda said curtly. Every time her mind tried to grapple with what came next, it mired itself in bodies thrashing as she tried to slide them along the deck.

  "Right," Wade said. "First, we'll need a scout That's you, Tom. Signals intelligence is all very well, but we don't want to stumble into a team that didn't bother to report in."

  He looked at Belgeddes.

  The plump man clicked home the reloaded magazine of Wanda's pistol. "You know me, Dickie," he replied without concern. "You lead, I follow. In this case, follow from in front."

  "Right," Wade repeated. He slung the submachine gun and raised the bomb thrower by the handle on top of its receiver. "Then with your agreement, Lieutenant, we will proceed as follows. . . ."

  "And the more fool me," Belgeddes added with a chuckle.

  * * *

  "I heard shots," said Trooper II Weik, waggling the muzzle of her submachine gun down the corridor toward the bow.

  Corridor 7 widened into a foyer and mini-lounge toward the stern of Deck A, where the shafts opened. The ambiance was from the Moghul Empire, with columns decorated in tilework helixes and florid carpeting on the deck. A band of knobbed brass bannisters ran around the top the walls as though there was an upper-floor balcony, and the holographic murals were of minareted palaces with reflecting pools and lush vegetation.

  "That's fine," said Trooper III Buecher, the team leader. He watched the lift and drop shaft openings from over the sights of his submachine gun. "We all heard shots. The people who got nervous and fired them will report to Colonel Steinwagen, who will not be pleased. My team will not be nervous."

  The trouble was, they weren't a team. The planners had allowed for fifty percent casualties as the commando crossed from Attack Transport Vice-Admiral Adler to their target vessel, the Empress of Earth. The planners couldn't determine which soldiers would be lost, however; which would disappear as twists of light into a universe of twisting light, with no boundaries and no hope.

  Rather than the team he had trained with for this operation, Buecher commanded troopers whose teammates, like his own, were running out of air in an alien spacetime. Teammates closer than lovers, closer than blood kin. Teammates who no longer existed when Buecher's magnetic boots suddenly clanged and bit on the hull of a starliner which had been a warp of infolded shadow until the moment Buecher touched it Buecher understood how Weik could be unhinged by the experience. She was a woman, without the strength of will that stiffened Buecher. The will that prevented Buecher from killing these sniveling rabbits, Weik and Magnin, who reached the starliner while Buecher's proper teammates did not. . . .

  "I didn't hear shots," said Magnin. "It's a big ship. Noise is funny. The Colonel will tell us if there's anything we ought to know."

  Magnin faced the stern with his doorknocker. The planners had allowed for the possibility that the commando would have to fight its way through a series of firedoors lowered across the corridors. The squash-head bombs of the 15-cm assault weapons had shown in tests on Grantholm that they would wreck the locking mechanisms of the firedoors and spall a sleet of fragments into defenders on the opposite side.

  The reasoning was good, but the crew of the Empress of Earth were cowards who used the presence of civilians as an excuse not to oppose the commando. The doorknocker was of limited use in a normal firefight, because the thin-cased missiles had no direct fragmentation effect: only concussion and, perhaps, bits of fittings and furniture flying about as secondary projectiles.

  If opponents attacked from the stern end of the corridor, Magnin's weapon could not give as satisfactory a response as a submachine gun would; but the concern that roiled Buecher's mind was a false one, he realized, because the cowards who would not defend themselves weren't going to attack either.

  They weren't going to give Buecher an opportunity to avenge his teammates.

  There were no civilians in wartime, and no neutrals either. The only immoral act in wartime was to fail, and Grantholm would not fail.

  ". . . Sweet Betsy from Pike," warbled a thin, cracked voice from a cross-corridor joining 7 twenty meters astern of the shaft foyer. "She went to Wyoming with—"

  "Magnin, watch the shafts!" Buecher ordered—

  —though the bombs had a five-meter arming range and wouldn't go off if somebody did pop from a shaft opening while the singer distracted his team—

  —and spun to cover the corridor sternward with his submachine gun.

  "—her husband Ike," the singer caroled as he staggered around the corner, a fat old man with drink stains down the front of his plush jacket

  He stared owlishly at the muzzle of Buecher's submachine gun.

  "I'm so very sorry," the passenger said. He attempted a bow and had to catch himself on the bulkhead to keep from falling. "I mus' be in the wrong room."

  As he spoke, he did topple back around the corner.

  "Bomb!" Weik shouted.

  Buecher flattened, sweeping both ends of the corridor with his peripheral vision. His weapon pointed sternward, because there would be a rush from that side, but a 15-cm projectile sailed on its spluttering rocket motor in a flat arc from the cross-corridor toward the bow.

  The projectile was almost as slow as a lobbed grenade. Because the shooter had been afraid to expose himself, the bomb would hit the wall opposite the shaft openings. The concussion would be heavy but survivable, and when the attackers rushed in behind their bomb—

  Buecher hugged himself to the deck, his trigger finger poised to begin shooting at the instant the bomb went off.

  The fat passenger stepped into Corridor 7. He aimed a pistol in either hand, though only one was firing.

  The muzzle flash of the first shot was all that Buecher's disbelieving eyes saw. The bullet punched through the bridge of his nose. Belgeddes had learned to correct for the pistol's slight tendency to throw left.

 
An instant later, the rocket projectile smacked the wall and ricocheted, a dud because Wade had removed the base fuze. The wet slap of plastic explosive deforming was lost in the snap of Belgeddes's next two shots and the roar of Holly's submachine gun as she entered Corridor 7 from the bow side.

  The bomb skittered a further moment until its motor burned out. The case had burst open. Volatiles from the explosive added their sharpness to the residues of rocket fuel, gunpowder, and the blood mingled with feces that was the smell of violent death.

  "No time to lose," Wade warned crisply as he stepped out behind Holly. He had reloaded his projector with a live bomb, just in case. A submachine gun was slung across his back.

  "Right," Wanda said in a cold, dry voice. "We'll take the Embarkation Hall next."

  "There's always time to reload, Dickie," Belgeddes said with arch disapproval. He thumbed loose rounds into the magazine to replace the three he'd fired.

  The bridge of the nose, the left earhole, and the point where the spine of the flattened woman entered the back of her skull.

  The bitter gases poisoning the air made Wanda cough as she swapped magazines. That could have been responsible for the way her eyes were watering also.

  * * *

  Ran Colville hummed "Won't you come home, Bill Bailey?" as he got out of the drop shaft, pushing the food cart before him. He moved at a deliberate pace, like a steward who wanted to avoid a rocket from his superiors but wasn't trying to set any speed records.

  Moving, basically, at the pace of a steward who doesn't expect much of a tip at the end of his journey no matter how quickly he reaches it

  The Engineering Deck was laid out for cargo operations, besides being narrower than all but one of those above it. The single corridor, 15, kinked around bays intended for passengers' hold luggage. There was no point, as there was on the passenger decks, where a three-man team could dominate four hundred meters of straight corridor with their weapons.

  Ran couldn't be sure where he was going to meet Grantholm troops, or even whether he would meet them. It was unlikely that there was no one guarding engineering control, however; and the Empress's Cold Crew would be a special problem for the hijackers.

  "I'll do the cooking, honey," Ran whistled. "I'll pay the rent. . . ."

  The Grantholm team, all three of them male, stood in front of the open corridor hatch giving onto the engineering control room. When Ran appeared a moment behind his off-key whistle, the soldiers tensed as cats do when starting their stalk.

  One man faced sternward, though so far as Ran knew there was nothing but long-term cargo stowage in that direction, and no way to enter those bays except through the hull while docked. Maybe the Grantholmers thought somebody was going to come out of a bulkhead to get them.

  "Halt!" the team leader ordered over the sights of his submachine gun. "What are you doing here?"

  Ran stopped where he was, twenty meters from the soldiers. "It's dinner for a Mr. Schmidt," he called. "Look, don't point that thing at me. This is just a job, okay? I'm just doing my job."

  "I didn't order dinner!" objected the soldier aiming at the blank wall. He twisted to look over his shoulder. Then, when his leader didn't shout at him, he pivoted to face in the same direction as his fellows.

  "Tubby Schmidt?" the third soldier asked. "Only he's with the bridge crew, isn't he?"

  "He would be if he'd made it aboard," the leader said briefly. Then he added, "Cover me," and walked toward Ran and his cart

  "Look," said Ran. "They told me Schmidt at engineering control and look lively. That's all they said, Schmidt."

  "It can't be Lieutenant Schmidt," the third man mused aloud. "He's out on the hull, and they can't come inside so long as we're in sponge space. We are in sponge space, aren't we?"

  "How the hell would I know?" snarled his team leader. He peered at the dishes on the cart. They were sealed with optically-clear covers which were opaque in the infra-red spectrum, so that their contents could be viewed but stayed hot.

  "Honeydew melon, Green Turtle soup," Ran said in a bored voice. "Roast gosling with aubergine in tomato." He pointed as he went along. "And asparagus in Hollandaise sauce."

  Viewed dispassionately, it must have looked delicious. Ran couldn't be dispassionate, because he was trying to imagine how he could handle the situation if two of the Grantholmers stayed that far away from him. He couldn't. He'd have to go back and find somewhere a weapon that wasn't only point-blank like the gas projectors—

  The team leader turned and stared at his men. "One of you wise guys used the ship's commo to order a meal, didn't you?" he demanded.

  "Not me!" Schmidt—Smitt, Shmidt, Smid, or whatever variation of "metalworker" this Grantholm soldier bore—insisted.

  "I'd be in my rights to keep it all for myself," the team leader said. "But I guess there's enough for three."

  He looked appraisingly at the multi-course meal. "They don't half do themself good, do they?"

  Then he added harshly to Ran, "C'mon, you." He jerked his thumb toward engineering control and his two subordinates. "Bring it over."

  The leader stayed behind Ran. The Grantholmer faced down the corridor, toward the shafts, as the Trident officer sauntered obediently forward.

  Ran grounded the cart in front of the two soldiers. "Gentlemen . . ." he said as he whisked the lids off the first pair of dishes, then knelt to stow them on top of the cart's repulsion tray.

  "What's that?" muttered Schmidt.

  "Aubergine," replied the team leader. "Whatever aubergine is when it's at home."

  "And there ought to be extra flatware down—"Ran murmured. "Yes!"

  He straightened with a napkin-wrapped tube in either hand. He smiled obsequiously and fired the gas projectors into the faces of the Grantholm soldiers.

  Ran had been worried about getting the double, but the cones of droplets sprayed perfectly across the faces of the two subordinates. They lurched backward with blank expressions. Their eyeballs rolled upward so that only the whites showed.

  The team leader caught the dose in the throat, which should have been fine. Either he was resistant to the tranquilizer or his reflexes operated at a more basic level than those of his crew. His finger clamped his submachine gun's trigger and held it back as he toppled onto his face.

  The stream of bullets shattered the cart, the dishes on it, and one of the Grantholm soldiers from waist to ankles. Blood and the pale gray stars of bullet cores splattered the bulkhead behind the pair of men.

  Ran thought the other soldier, Schmidt, had escaped until he noticed an ooze of blood and brains spreading beneath the Grantholmer's head. A ricochet had bounced through the back of his skull.

  Echoing muzzle blasts and the whiz of ricocheting bullets went on for what seemed to be minutes.

  Ran swore softly. He unfastened the sling of Schmidt's weapon. With the submachine gun in his right hand, he grabbed the team leader by the collar with his left.

  He dragged the staring-eyed man to the cargo bay directly across from engineering control. The practical way to deal with the fellow was to kill him, using a bullet or the fighting knife hanging from the Grantholmer's harness.

  Ran hoped he never returned to being that practical.

  He used his ID chip to unlock the bay's personnel access hatch. This bay was the garage, holding passengers' private vehicles. There was no way to open it from within, so it would serve to hold the Grantholm soldier until this business was over. Ran's next task was to find the Cold Crew and—

  The hatch withdrew into its jamb. Swede lunged out with his hands open for a choke hold. The rest of the Cold Crew, all three watches, was behind him.

  "Hold it," the watch chief bellowed. "It's Mr. Colville! What are you doing in that shit suit, sir?"

  Cold Crewmen shoved out past Swede. As they did so, Ran noticed one of the engineering officers, Crosse, huddled well to the rear of the compartment. It can't have been a lot of fun to find yourself locked up with angry Cold Crewmen.

 
; "I'm pretending to be a steward to get the Empress away from these Grantholm hijackers," Ran said. He spoke loudly to be heard over the scrape of boots. "It's dangerous, and it's likely to mean killing. Are you in?"

  "Hell, yes," said Swede. "What do you want us to do?"

  Lewis looked critically at the Grantholm team leader on the deck beside him. "Did a piss poor job on this one, Mr. Colville," he said.

  He stamped his boot down on the back of the Grantholmer's neck, hard enough to snap the spine. Then he stamped again.

  "We're going out on the hull to take the engines back," Ran said, speaking dispassionately. "After that, we'll worry about the troops inside."

  He didn't look down at the fresh corpse at his feet. He'd worked the hull long enough to know it was Cold Crew etiquette always to kick a man when he was down. That's when it was easiest to do, after all. . . .

  * * *

  Ran felt the Empress of Earth thud slightly—once, again, and onward repeatedly in a set rhythm.

  "Whazzat?" a Cold Crewman demanded, spinning on his toes to find a source of the noise. The sound was unfamiliar, and the Cold Crew worked too close to the edge of survival to like changes.

  "They're shutting the firedoors," Ran explained. "Our new masters, I suppose, since the bridge crew didn't during the attack. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that our Grantholm friends've got fewer troops now than they did when they boarded."

  "No friends of mine," Swede said. "No masters, neither."

  The Grantholm commander must have noticed that some of his teams weren't reporting in. Dropping the firedoors wouldn't prevent Wanda and her companions from moving between sections since the Second Officer's ID chip gave her local control of the barriers.

  Grantholmers on the bridge might think they could follow their opponents' progress by seeing which firedoors opened. Wanda knew the Empress's complex layout perfectly. All the Grantholm commander would get from this ploy was a series of false scents that drew his teams into killing grounds.

  Swede picked up his suit, dumped on the floor of the engineering control room with the others when the commando herded the duty watch into the starliner's interior.