by Ralph Kern
Like a choreographed dance troupe, the troops swept round the corner. The sergeant’s team swept counterclockwise toward the living spaces while we headed in the other direction toward the bridge.
The corridor was familiar but now tilted ninety degrees to when I was last aboard. Rather than a gentle curve upward, it now arced round to the right. From some of the hatches, which were now on the floor and ceiling, ladders had been extended so people could get up and down while Erebus was under thrust.
“Wait,” I called to the two soldiers ahead. They paused and knelt down, not looking back at me, keeping their focus on where the threat would come from. “There are a lot of these hatches with ladders in them…too many.”
“Go on,” Phillips encouraged me along my train of thought.
“That suggests to me that either the hostages have free reign to wander about, or…”
“Or they’re not hostages.”
It made sense. The shooting up the shaft had obviously come from more than one person.
Suddenly up ahead, figures darted across the passage and behind open hatches, corridor ribs, and whatever cover they could find.
Then they opened fire on us.
CHAPTER 54
EREBUS
“Contact front!” Phillips shouted as she brought her rifle to bear and returned fire with smooth, disciplined single shots. The distinctive blue sparks of incap rounds zipped both ways through the passage.
“Major, Team Two, we are engaging five plus,” I heard Sergeant Jamal call over the com.
I pressed a button, and a hatch in the floor opened. I hunkered down behind it as the zip-thud of rounds hit. “We’re engaging, too.”
“Roger that,” Jamal responded.
I peeked around the cover. The combatants shooting at us had on some kind of armor that, though not as impressive as Phillips’s team’s rigs, looked sufficient to block antipersonnel rounds. Both sides were stuck using incaps; armor-piercing rounds would blow bloody great holes in their ship. Thank God my instincts about Frain not being insane were so far holding true. Both sides being restricted to incaps balanced things a bit, though, because they could do more than just stop people; they could disable battle armor, too.
“Simmons, fire and maneuver. Let’s push them back. Ready?” Phillips said.
“Ready.”
“Go!”
In the same way they had in the shaft, the two of them pushed down the corridor, one providing covering fire while the other advanced on the enemy. This was where we would see whether quality would beat quantity. We just had to hope that quantity, in this case, wasn’t a quality all on its own.
One of our rounds struck an enemy combatant. The armor sparked and the fighter shook as if being electrocuted before falling to the deck. Score one for the good guys. The other combatants answered with a wild torrent of incoming incaps streaking down the corridor. It told me that we weren’t facing disciplined soldiers here; they were trigger-happy as hell. The response may have been undisciplined, but in the slim confines of the corridor, it made life for us even more difficult.
In a short lull, I darted for the next open hatch. Something slammed into my leg, and it went numb. In a stumbling fall, I managed to get behind the next open hatch cover and looked down to see what damage had been caused.
Fortunately, my suit wasn’t one of the powered affairs the soldiers were using, so I wasn’t immobilized from the incap round. Even better, it had protected me from the worst of the round’s effect. Still, it felt like I had one hell of a dead leg.
“Took a hit; still in play,” I growled at Phillips.
“Roger that. Secure their casualty as we push forward.”
I waited until they had pushed a little farther ahead and around the curve of the corridor and, in a limping jog, went to the prone figure on the floor. Kneeling down, I placed my gun aside and turned the body. I lifted the visor and saw the face for the first time.
I didn’t know her name, but I recognized her from when I was last aboard. She was one of the crew of Erebus.
She groaned, her eyes rolling beneath her closed lids. “You’re okay. You’ve been hit with an incap round. You’ll be fine in a couple of hours,” I tried to reassure her, not that she would likely be able to hear. The fact that she had formerly been an enemy had ceded to the fact that now she was a casualty, and I had a duty of care to her.
She moaned in response; the round had struck her helmet. That really would have hurt if my leg was anything to go by. I moved her onto her side, placing her in to the recovery position, and, finding the power pack on the back of her armor, ripped it out. She’d be locked in the suit when she woke up and out of the game.
The armor was pristine, no scratches or dings on the smooth grey finish. It had probably just come out of the onboard nano-factory along with their weapons. Frain hadn’t just been making ship-to-ship hardware; he’d been busy fortifying Erebus.
“Shit, Simmons is hit,” Phillips’s voice cut across the com.
I grabbed my gun and hobbled round the corridor past another couple of bodies, pulling power packs as I went. One of them hadn’t been so fortunate. He had had his visor open and a round had struck him straight in the eye, blasting a gory pit into his face. I checked for a pulse, but it had hit in one of the few places where an incap round was lethal. Unlucky bastard.
A hot anger surged through me. This incomprehensible quest of Frain had cost so many lives, but in the space of a few minutes, I had seen it take two people—two people with mothers and fathers, maybe wives, husbands, or children, who would never see them again. Two people I knew and had worked with, people like Dev. This had to stop. I shook my head, refocusing. I took a deep breath and let the anger wash out of me. If I wanted to help stop this, I had to get back into the game. I stood and hobbled down the corridor.
“Coming up from behind,” I called to Phillips so she wasn’t taken by surprise as I approached her. She was on one knee, firing shots down the corridor while return fire flashed back at us.
“They managed to focus fire on Simmons. He’s down,” she said. “His vitals are showing alive but out cold. I’ll need you to provide cover fire for my advance.”
“Okay…” I took a deep breath I looked down the hallway: only a couple left, firing back from the cover of the curve in the passage. Erebus only had twenty-two crew, although we didn’t know how many they had picked up from Iwa. The missing landers suggested they had offloaded some, but how many and where?
“Ready…now!”
Darting my head around my cover, my HUD tactical software sighted down the corridor, seeking a threat. A combatant peered out from behind the open hatch, and I squeezed the trigger, just missing.
“Just keep firing; keep them down. Moving.” Phillips sprang up and ran a short distance down the corridor to the hatch. She hunkered behind it for a beat and then reached over, wrenched the combatant over the cover, and threw their body toward me as if it weighed nothing.
The armored person slammed into the deck next to me. I dragged our assailant round the bend, keeping my gun trained on the face plate. I didn’t want this person to be getting any ideas.
“Got a conscious one,” I told her.
“I’ve taken out the other,” Phillips called back. “We’re clear.”
I gave a sigh of relief.
Flicking up the visor on the prisoner’s helmet, I kept my gun trained on the scared-looking man’s face within. “I think we have some things to talk about.”
“Team Two, status?” Phillips called.
There was no response but the crackling of static over my com.
CHAPTER 55
EREBUS
“Get out of him what you can, then knock him out,” Phillips said coldly over the private channel. “We can’t be far off turnaround, and those firewalls will be smashed through soon.”
“How many combatants are there?” I didn’t recognize the scared-looking man. He looked older than most of the crew of Erebus, more w
ithered, like he’d spent a long time in a low gravity environment. I guessed he was from the Iwa facility.
“From the kicking you’ve just given us, I can tell you there’s only one you need to worry about,” he said as his eyes darted to Phillips’s imposing figure looming over him. “Darren went down hard. Is he okay?”
I figured he meant the poor fellow back down the hallway. “No, I’m afraid he’s not.”
“Goddamn it.” I watched as a slight wobble came over his bottom lip. It would have been almost comedic if a dead man hadn’t been involved.
“You’re from Iwa, the alien research outpost?”
“Yes. Why the hell did you have to kill him?”
“We’re very sorry about that.” And I was. This whole affair had been a horrific waste of life. “But the man and woman who have taken this ship are mass murderers. Now, why are you here in this system? It wasn’t just for you to get away.”
“Still no response from Team Two,” Phillips whispered over the private link. I nodded in response.
“No, it wasn’t,” the man said.
“Then why?”
“Major, Trent.” Frain’s face appeared in my HUD, interrupting us. His head was poking out of the collar of his combat armor, hair matted with sweat. A glint of chrome from his subdermal combat chassis was visible beneath a bloody graze on his forehead. He looked like he had been in the wars. “I have your troops here.”
I glanced up at Phillips from where I knelt awkwardly, favoring my numb leg.
“Mr. Frain, would you be so kind as to oblige me with their status?” Phillips said, not letting any tension slip into her voice.
The view swept round. It was from someone’s HUD rather than the ship’s cameras. I saw Sergeant Jamal, looking to be in an even worse state than Frain, but at least conscious. He was on his knees, hands clasped behind his head. The view swept to another who was lying on the floor but otherwise seemed okay, probably incapacitated. The third, though, his armor had been cut open. I could see one of the armored figures working on him, giving him first aid. The man stopped, turned, and with his visor open, shook his head.
“One is alive and conscious, one is incapacitated. The other, as you can see…well, I’m sorry.” He gestured at the wound on his forehead. “He offered no choice. By my count, that means the two of you are alone now. I have superior numbers and now hostages. Gagarin’s firewalls are nearly breached. Surrender and no one else has to be harmed.”
“Confirm status of the firewalls,” I whispered into my com.
“Minutes,” Captain Vasily’s voice crackled over our coms, bouncing through the Hawk’s laser link. “We’ve put everything into keeping the helm and propulsion intact, but the intrusion is damn good. We can only slow it, not stop it.”
“Cut the com with Frain,” I said firmly, standing up. Phillips turned, flicking her visor open and looked at me, the question clear in her piercing blue eyes. “Now!” She gave the slightest of nods. My HUD showed Phillips had switched us to a private channel.
“He’s delaying us. Whatever he’s up to is coming to a head soon,” I said.
“He has my men,” she growled, a dangerous look on her face.
“I know, Ava.” I took a deep breath; I was going out on another limb here. “But if we open coms, he may threaten them if we don’t cede to his demands. I don’t think he’ll kill them indiscriminately, but if he feels he has to make us comply, he will. If we remove the option to communicate, there will be no point. It removes the threat to them.”
“If you’re wrong…”
“I’m not,” I interrupted in my firmest voice, showing a confidence that I wasn’t sure I felt.
“Let me finish, Trent. If you’re wrong, I’ll throw you out the airlock myself.”
“Yeah, well, I best not be, then.”
“Frain,” Phillips flicked the general com’s channel back on. “We’re not negotiating. We’re closing down coms, and don’t bother using the ship’s PA system; we’ll ignore you. Out.” I looked at her, and she gave the slightest of nods. “Let’s get to the bridge before he does.”
Pushing my visor down, I drew my gun and fired an incap round into the man from Iwa. Phillips was already striding down the corridor. I limped painfully after her.
CHAPTER 56
EREBUS
It was a race, and we knew it. Fortunately we were a hell of a lot closer to the bridge than Frain was. My leg had gone from numb to having the worst pins and needles I could imagine. It was so painful that if I could have hacked it off, I would have given serious consideration to it. I thought back with sympathy to the woman who had been shot to the helmet; she would be in agony for days. I concentrated on putting one foot in front of the spasming other. Left, right, left, right.
“We’re here.” Phillips held her left hand up, stopping me in my painful tracks. I looked up at the bridge access hatch, a ladder extending from under it, and sighed. This was it. If we took the bridge, we took Erebus.
“Ready?”
“Yeah, sure,” I lied. Phillips raced up the ladder like a monkey and pulled the manual release on the hatch. It sprang open, and in a split second, she was through. I pushed myself hard to keep up with her, ignoring the shin splints knifing through my leg. Through the hatch, I could see her aim her rifle at someone out of sight. “Get your hands up.”
I heard running as I pulled myself up and rolled onto the bridge. I slammed the hatch shut and looked frantically for some kind of lock. Erebus wasn’t a warship; she was an explorer. The bridge didn’t have a single antiboarding security measure in place. I climbed to my feet, sighting my handgun at the hatch, and looked around.
Drayton stood next to Captain Tasker with her hands up, but it was the view on the holotank that made me gasp. We were a hell of a lot closer to the black hole. Space around us had taken on the golden glow of the accretion disk. We were within it now, still racing forward. I saw a graphics box highlighting a dark spec; that world was our destination.
“Layton,” Drayton said with a desperate pleading in her eyes, “you have to let us finish what we came here for. Please, just stand down.”
“Keep your hands up,” Phillips barked at Tasker.
“Get off my fucking bridge,” she snarled, slowly moving away from Drayton. I glanced at the furious captain as I trained my gun on the hatch.
“That is not going to hap—” That was all I got out before the hatch slammed open. A figure erupted through it with armor crackling and sparking, brutally damaged. I fired. The shot ricocheted off the figure’s thigh guard and sizzled into a seat.
Frain moved at incredible speed, slamming into Phillips as a wild shot sprang from her rifle, sparking off the wall. The two figures pirouetted almost gracefully, and Phillips crashed into the wall, denting it. I fired off another round. A spark glanced off Frain’s plated shoulder, and he glared at me. That’s all he got before Phillips was on him again.
Both were deceptively agile in their battle armor: two highly trained fighters colliding with thunderous force. Phillips pulled off a crisp roundhouse kick to Frain’s head. He blocked it, and without pausing, she dropped, a spinning sweep taking Frain’s legs from under him. He crashed to the deck. He rolled onto his feet and punched her in the chest. She reeled back, and he got in a spinning kick to her head. Phillips tumbled from the blow, smashing into the wall.
I sighted him again, the tactical mode in my HUD barely able to keep up. I saw a blue spark zip by me. I turned and reflexively fired a round. Tasker took the round her in the chest. Her gun dropped, and she spasmed, falling to the floor as the incap round took effect.
I spun back around to get a bead on Frain. He and Phillips were locked in melee, punches and kicks flashing between them. Frain grabbed Phillips’s arm, pulled her over his shoulder, and slammed her halfway through a bridge console. Without pause, she kneed him straight in the face, staggering him.
“Stop!” I heard someone shout. Only then did I realize I’d lost track of Drayton.
She stood there, her red hair frazzled, her eyes desperate, and her arms waving to get attention. “Please stop!” But the two battling figures just ignored her, the detritus of the console around them as they locked together, falling to the floor. Both tried to pin each other like professional cage fighters.
I aimed again and fired just as Frain got on top of her. He grunted but ignored it. He didn’t even have to shake it off. Drayton ran toward another console.
I trained my gun on her. “Don’t fucking move.”
“Turnaround,” she gasped.
I wasn’t falling for that one. “I said stop!”
“No, you asshole, we’re nearly at turnaround!”
Somehow Phillips had got back on top of Frain and was raining punches down on him. He was blocking most, but some slipped through. With what must have been superhuman effort, he jerked his hips upward, sending her flying off him.
“Trent, the goddamn firewall’s nearly breached. Can you stop it?” Vasily’s voice cut through the confusion, distorted by the low-bandwidth communications we were using.
I bounded over to Drayton and grabbed her by the scruff of her collar, hauling her away from the console.
“It’s now or never, Trent!” Vasily shouted.
I wrenched Drayton’s head around roughly so she had to look at me. “Stop the incursion!”
She shook her head with a jerk. She was scared. I wasn’t getting through. From the other side of the bridge, the sound of the fighting combatants became even more intense.
“Vasily, how?” I shouted, finally giving up with Drayton.
“Air-gap the master coms panel. It should force it into autodiagnostic mode.”
My eyes darted around the room. On one wall, I could see a number of panels, each titled something—COM, PROP, POW—that kind of thing. “Air-gap?”
“Shoot the damn thing if you have to,” Vasily shouted over the com.
That I could do. I moved my gun away from Drayton, aimed it at the panel, and fired at the one labeled COM. A wisp of smoke raised from it.