Well, add that to the long list of reasons he had not to like Centrocor. It was pretty low in the ranking just then. Number one was the fact that anyone who spotted them here would try to kill them on sight.
A message came in from Ehta—text only. He glanced down at the display on his wrist.
How do you want this done, boss? Neat and clean, by Navy regs? Or do we do it marine style?
He typed back his reply without having to give it any thought. Quick and dirty, he told her.
This was no time for fair play or nice behavior.
Ehta touched each of her marines on the shoulder, then flashed some quick hand signals at them. She tucked her heavy steadygun under one arm and kicked down the hallway, her people falling into perfect formation behind her. They moved fast, twisting around a corner into a main corridor so deftly Lanoe had to hurry to keep up.
The main corridor was empty—at first. As the marines shot down its length, Lanoe just had time to register a hatch opening to one side. A neddy in a thinsuit came through, looking back over his shoulder. He was laughing, sharing a joke with somebody Lanoe couldn’t see.
Binah was closest. The marine grabbed the neddy’s arm and pulled him into the corridor, then brought up a combat knife and stabbed down into the neddy’s brain. The poor engineer’s helmet tried to flow up around his face to protect him, but Binah knew what he was doing and yanked his hand back before it could be encased in flowglas. He left the knife inside the helmet.
The neddy still had one foot inside the hatch. Binah pulled the corpse free and the hatch slid closed. There was no cry of alarm from inside. Whoever the neddy had been joking with, they had no idea what had just happened.
Good.
Binah pulled a tube of adhesive from his suit and glued the body to the wall, where it wouldn’t float around and make a mess. As soon as that was done he was moving again, following Ehta around another corner.
Then everything went to hell.
Before Lanoe could even get there to see what was happening, he heard shots. The wicked chatter of a machine rifle and then the low, burping roar of Ehta’s steadygun. As he came up beside her he saw little jets puffing from vents on the chunky gun, holding it perfectly still in midair, defying the physics of microgravity. Ehta rested one hand on the trigger, keeping the rest of her body behind the cover of the corner.
Up ahead, Lanoe saw the bodies of three Centrocor marines floating in midair, drops of blood orbiting around them like tiny red moons. Two more were down at the end of the hall, their bodies mostly behind cover, their guns flaring as they returned fire.
Lanoe grabbed his own pistol from the holster at his hip and brought it up to snap off a shot. It went wide, but the Centrocor marine he’d been aiming at didn’t get a chance to fire back. The steadygun belched again and fire burst all around the poor bastard, his arms jerking as an explosive shock wave pulverized his internal organs.
Yi brought up her particle rifle and sprayed down the end of the hall, cutting one Centrocor soldier in half. Neat holes perforated the silver helmet of another and they were clear. There was no one left alive down there. Ehta got her people moving right away. “They’ll have heard that,” she said. “Double time now, marines! Go, go, go now!” She grabbed the steadygun and pulled it out of its static position, then kicked hard down the hall. Lanoe followed, pistol still in hand.
Mestlez—Ehta’s information specialist—checked his wrist display as they shot down the corridor. “They’re moving, responding. Looks like six bad guys headed our way right now, lots more starting to figure out something’s up.”
“One hundred and ten meters to target,” Malcolm said, bracing his feet against a wall and then kicking off, hard. Blood drops shook loose from his sleeve. Not his own.
“We’ve got emergency hatches closing all over the place,” Mestlez said. “Don’t worry, boss, I’m on it.” His fingers danced across his wrist display, even as he kicked down the hall to keep up. “Running a denial of service attack right now.”
“Get it done, or we’re rats in a cage here,” Ehta screamed at him. “People, did I say move? Because it looks like I accidentally said, ‘Let’s stop here for a picnic.’ Damn your damned eyes to hell, you move when I say move!”
Lanoe sensed rather than saw someone coming up behind him. He wheeled around and saw a Centrocor pilot bending over the dead body of the neddy they’d left glued to the wall. Maybe the pilot was armed. Maybe he wasn’t.
Lanoe didn’t care. He lifted his pistol and fired three rounds into the bastard’s chest. The pilot reared back, then splattered, as the explosive rounds detonated inside his body cavity. Blood and gore fountained from the collar ring of his suit.
Lanoe turned back around and saw Binah watching him.
“She said move, damn you,” he told the marine.
“Something’s wrong,” Bullam said. She’d heard a noise, a rumbling sound like a distant explosion. Her chair vibrated, just for a moment. “Something—”
Red lights flared all over the IO’s position. A warning chime sounded, pulsing fast. Shulkin didn’t move, didn’t so much as look up, but every other person on the bridge tensed and looked around, desperate to find out what was going on.
“Security is reporting a … a …” The IO shook his head. “It’s not clear, sir, but there are reports of explosions, of weapons fire—”
“Lock us down,” Shulkin said. As if he was ordering breakfast.
The navigator turned around to stare at him. “Sir—there’s only one exit from this room, protocol suggests … I mean, perhaps we should consider evacuating—”
“This is the safest compartment on the ship,” the pilot interjected. “If we seal the hatch, we can—”
“Lock us down,” Shulkin said again. He was not in the habit of repeating his orders, and did not look pleased to have to do so now.
Bullam twisted around and saw thick armor plating slide over the hatch behind her. Bolts clunked into place, clamping the armor down. The air recirculators hissed and died and new displays popped up all around the IO until he was surrounded by them, walled in by light. Data streams spooled across those displays far too fast for any human eye to make sense of them.
“They’re running an electronic attack on our systems,” the IO said. “Trying to force open the safety hatches—”
“Who?” Bullam demanded. “Who’s running the attack? Who’s here?”
“Presumably someone who wants to kill us,” Shulkin said.
Bullam looked for Maggs, found him. His mouth was pursed. He lifted his shoulders, then let them drop again.
She mouthed the words “protect me” at him, and he nodded.
“What are we seeing?” the navigator demanded. “Is this sabotage? Did they have spies on board, are we—”
“Biometrics are … confusing,” the IO said, his face hidden behind three new displays that had just popped up. “We have casualties, lots of them, but I’m also seeing unknown IDs, people I can’t account for, we …”
He swiped a number of displays away from himself, as if he were climbing out of his well of light.
“Captain,” he said, “we’ve been boarded.”
An explosion went off right next to Lanoe’s head. No, that couldn’t be … couldn’t be right, if it had been that close he would be—he would be dead—
His ears rang and his eyes swam. Something was moving toward him through smoke, through flickering light. Half of a particle rifle, the stock blown off, spinning right toward his face. He batted it away with his free hand.
He raised his pistol and fired into the smoke, one shot, two, three. He had ten rounds left, and two clips in pouches on his suit. Ehta’s steadygun burped and his head reeled as another explosion rocked the corridor.
He couldn’t see anything useful—stabs of light, reefs of smoke that stank of burning insulation. He realized his helmet was down. He reached up and fumbled for the key that would bring it back up. Why had he lowered it? He couldn’t re
member.
One of the marines screamed and his arm came off, spinning fast as it bounced off the walls, leaving spots of blood everywhere it touched. Lanoe grabbed him and pushed him up against a wall, then grabbed an adhesive patch from his pocket and slammed it over the spurting wound, the raw meat of the marine’s shoulder. He brought the marine’s helmet down and saw the man had gone into shock already, his eyes rolling back in his head. His suit would pump him full of painkillers and stabilizers. There was nothing else Lanoe could do for him.
“Give me that,” Ehta said, scooping up the rifle. The poor beggar didn’t need it anymore. “He’ll live,” she told Lanoe. “Let him go. Leave him! Malcolm’s dead. I’ve got Binah talking to their computers, but he’s not trained for that and it’s not working. Doesn’t matter. Yi’s got a dismantler. We’re almost there, boss. Stay with me!”
“I’m—I’m fine,” Lanoe told her, wondering if he really was. Wondering if she’d seen something in his face, if he’d just lost his reputation for having icewater for blood. “Where’s the hatch? Where’s the hatch for the bridge?”
“There,” Ehta said, stabbing a finger down the hall. “We’re holding it, we’re in position, but they keep throwing more people at us. Come on, get up to where Yi is, we can use somebody who knows how to aim a gun.”
Lanoe nodded and pushed past her, careening through the smoke to reach a wide hatch where her three remaining intact marines were pressed up against the wall. The steadygun hovered in midair in front of them in turret mode, twisting now this way, now that as it launched its heavy explosive rounds. Gutierrez was injured, but it wasn’t slowing her down. Binah and Yi looked unhurt.
Yi had a wet-looking red ball in one hand. Even as Lanoe arrived, she slapped it against the hatch. It was a dismantler, and Lanoe knew to stay well clear of it. Yi tore off her glove and threw it away from her, even as the red ball started to smoke.
The dismantler flattened against the metal surface, red veins growing outward from its central mass, veins that branched and twisted across the full length of the hatch. They steamed and hissed wherever they touched metal, and intense heat radiated from the hatch as it started to melt. Lanoe pushed away into the corridor and fired off two shots at a vague shadow he saw approaching their position. Gutierrez shoved him aside as the steadygun lobbed an explosive round down that way.
Particle rifle fire streaked across Lanoe’s vision, dazzling him. He turned his face away, just in time to see Binah scream as perfectly straight lines of blood welled up across his cheek. He looked more embarrassed than truly hurt, and he scowled as he leaned out into the smoke and shot back, his own particle beams like needles of fire diving through the murk. Down there someone howled, a sound that was cut off almost instantly by an explosion.
“Boss!” Ehta said. “Grenade!”
In the absence of gravity, the grenade came speeding toward Lanoe in a straight line, shiny sensor plates on its forward end winking as they caught flashes of light. There was no time to think. Lanoe threw himself at it in a forward flip, one boot shooting out to intercept the grenade. He smacked it with his toes and sent it flying farther down the corridor. It exploded far enough away that the burst merely showered him with blood and torn shreds of carbon fiber.
The dismantler hissed and spat big fat sparks of molten metal, and suddenly the hatch sagged in its frame, sagged and bent outward as chunks of it came free. Before the dismantler could even cool down, Binah got his shoulder against a red-hot part of the hatch and shoved, hard. The hatch shattered, broken shards of metal flashing out into the hallway, right in their faces. Lanoe knocked one of the shards away with his wrist and felt the skin there sear and crisp, even through layer on layer of carbon fiber and suit armor. It didn’t matter.
It was done. The bridge was open.
Behind them, down the hall, came the shouts of a whole new squad of Centrocor marines advancing on their position.
Bullam was the first to see the glowing cracks spread through the hatch. “They’re coming in!” she shouted.
“Hellfire,” the navigator shrieked. “None of us are armed—they’ll slaughter us!”
The pilot kicked away from her seat, as if there was somewhere to run. Shulkin barked at her to return to her position, a snarl of noise that barely sounded like words. The pilot pushed herself up against a wall as if she could squeeze through it, her eyes fixed on the glowing hatch.
No, Bullam thought. No. I will not die here just because Aleister Lanoe is a clever bastard, not because Shulkin is a maniac who doesn’t know when to quit, not because—
The hatch shattered before she could finish that thought, triangular sections of it spinning wildly as they flew into the bridge. A man in a heavy Navy suit with campaign flags painted on the sleeves kicked inside, an enormous pistol in his hand. He waved it over his head, shouting a command she couldn’t hear over the sound of her own heart thundering in her chest.
Behind him, marines crowded the hatch, shoving their way inside. Particle rifle fire shot through the room, and some of the IO’s displays blinked out as his console erupted in sparks.
It happened slowly, time turning fluid. It felt like they were all underwater, all sounds distorted, every motion exaggerated into a long, painful arc. The Navy man—it had to be Lanoe, it had to be—moved on a perfectly flat trajectory, headed straight toward Shulkin’s back, toward the chair where the mad captain sat still craning forward, staring at a display.
Before Lanoe could reach him, however, Shulkin moved, far faster than Bullam would have thought possible if she hadn’t seen it herself. In one simple, economic motion he twisted around, his seat turning on its pivot, and brought up his own weapon. An enormous silver pistol of the old style, like something you would use in a duel. Its round barrel was full of bullets the size of Bullam’s thumbs, bullets made of lead. She’d seen it before. She’d seen him use it before.
The arm holding that ancient pistol swung up as if it were being pulled on wires, even as Lanoe covered the last meter to Shulkin’s position. The muzzle of the pistol clinked against Lanoe’s helmet, stopping him in midair.
If time had slowed before, now it froze. The marines in the hatch lifted their rifles, rifles that hummed and buzzed—particle weapons, more than capable of cutting Shulkin into slices. They didn’t fire. The pilot turned her face against the wall. The navigator whimpered. The IO swiped displays away from himself so he could see.
And Maggs—Maggs was there, right behind Shulkin. When had he moved over there? Bullam hadn’t been aware of him at all. He shouldn’t be there, she thought. He should be at her side, protecting her—
“Commander Lanoe,” Shulkin said. His pistol’s barrel was centimeters from Lanoe’s nose. “A pleasure to meet you.”
The helmet had been polarized before, an opaque black. Now it changed, becoming transparent. As if Lanoe wanted Shulkin to see his face. He tossed away his own pistol, throwing it back toward the marines in the hatch. One of them caught it.
“I don’t know you,” Lanoe said. “Ex-Navy?”
A veritable rictus of a grin spread across Shulkin’s face, creasing the flesh around his eyes. “That’s right. They forced me to retire. But I’ve got a little fight left in me.”
No one on the bridge so much as breathed.
“I would suggest you tell your people to hold their fire,” Shulkin said. “They have no way of killing me before I pull this trigger.”
Maggs looked in Bullam’s direction. His mouth was a straight line beneath his mustache. His right hand touched the pouch at his waist, the one she knew contained some kind of weapon. He reached inside and pulled out what looked like a dagger.
Still the marines in the hatch didn’t shoot. No one moved any more than they absolutely had to.
“We need him alive,” Bullam said, but it came out as a whisper. She forced herself to raise her voice. “Lanoe’s the only one who can get us home.”
“I don’t care,” Shulkin said.
She ha
dn’t been speaking to the captain. She’d been speaking to Maggs. Who moved his arm just a little, changed his grip on his dagger just a hair. Could he do it? The back of Shulkin’s neck was exposed. Maybe Maggs could kill him with one very fast blow—before the maniac could pull the trigger.
Of course, the marines might shoot Maggs first, if they saw the dagger. And there was no guarantee that Maggs was that good with a knife.
“Time for you to stand down,” Lanoe said.
“Or …?” Shulkin asked.
“By the authority of the Council of Sector Wardens, and the Naval Expeditionary Force, I’m commandeering this vehicle. Under section fourteen of the Los Angeles Convention, no poly is allowed to own a Naval spacecraft, either decommissioned, disarmed, or otherwise. You will cede command to me, now. It’s not a request.”
He’s just as mad as Shulkin, Bullam thought. Quoting archaic law, with a gun pointed in his face? What did he hope to achieve?
And yet—there was some kind of effect. Some subtle change in Shulkin’s face. His grin didn’t falter, but a dry gray tongue extruded from one corner of his mouth and he licked his lips.
Behind him Maggs lifted the dagger another few centimeters, closer to the back of Shulkin’s head.
“I …” Shulkin blinked. “I …”
Lanoe said nothing. He was clearly waiting for an answer.
Now, Bullam thought. Maggs, do it now, or we’re both damned—Shulkin will shoot, because that’s all he has left, it’s suicide of course, but he doesn’t have the imagination for anything else, he’s going to shoot, he’s going to—
Maggs lifted the dagger a bit higher. Then he frowned.
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