by David Drake
I hooked my right foreleg into the hole and unlatched myself from the line. A crewman in metal armor loomed from the darkness within the Fed vessel and fired a shotgun into my chest.
My breastplate survived the shock. The crashing impact blew me back out of the hole. My leg lost its grip, and my flailing arms touched nothing.
Piet Ricimer caught my right wrist in his left hand. He fired his carbine into the hole. The Fed shotgunner was pirouetting from his weapon's recoil. His breastplate sparked as the rifle bullet dimpled it. The Fed continued to spin slowly, but the shotgun drifted out of his hands and a smoky trail of blood froze in the vacuum around him.
I grabbed the rim of the opening and jerked myself aboard the Keys to the Kingdom again. Icicles of refrozen steel broke off in my grip.
The Fed constructors had used light alloys for most of the internal subdivisions. Our fire and the exploding cannon had blown them to tatters, leaving the gun deck open except for throughshafts and a pair of parallel hull-metal bulkheads that supported the upper decks when the vessel was on the ground.
Scores of bodies drifted in light that flickered through the hull openings. Most of the corpses were Molts. Their flexible suits were no protection against plasma or against the fragments of bulkhead, weapons, and bodies which the blasts turned into shrapnel.
Figures moved twenty meters from us, near a companionway shaft. A bolt from Stephen's flashgun sent one corpse toward the far hull, shedding limbs.
That corpse was a Molt. Riflefire winked, puncturing two other Molts whom the laser had lighted. A last Molt and an armored human vanished back into the shaft.
Men sailed toward the companionway from behind me. I headed for the freight elevator near the Keys' vertical axis. My initial jump was too high. I had to dab along the deck's scarred ceiling to redirect myself. There were no points for gracefulness today.
The circular shaft was of hull metal, but the outer doors were alloy. Blasts had bowed them into the shaft, springing the juncture between the leaves wide enough that I could probably have crawled through it as is.
I thrust my bar into the opening to cut outward and down. The blade almost bound, but I jerked it back across to complete the cut, doubling the size of the gap.
It was the first action I'd taken since I'd run from the 17 Abraxis to the Oriflamme.
I didn't know where the elevator cage was. If it was below me, the bulged doors would keep it from rising. If not—I'd take my chances on being able to carve through the cage floor before it crushed me into those same jagged doors.
I was thinking very clearly. I wasn't sane, but that's a different question; and the situation wasn't sane either.
The dim ambience of the elevator shaft helped me when my eyes adapted to it. Actually, the light may not have been that dim. Although my faceshield filtered the quick succession of plasma bolts, they'd leached the visual purple from my retinas.
I rose three decks, using my left gauntlet on one of the elevator cables to control my speed and guide me. The sills and paired shaft doors told me where I was. I was pretty sure that the bridge was a deck or two higher yet, but this was as far as the cargo elevator went.
Holding the upper rim of the shaft opening, I cut an ellipse from the panel's inner sheathing. The pieces drifted away from the bar's last contact, tumbling across the shaft. There was no gravity to make them fall.
I should have brought a light . . . but I didn't have a hand for it, and I couldn't hold it in my teeth with the helmet on. The present illumination was good enough, because I knew what I was looking for.
The shaft doors were locked closed by pins under spring pressure. Electromagnets raised the pins when the cage and safeties were in the proper position. If the power was off—as it seemed to be now—the doors could be unlocked as I did, by pulling the mechanism out from the back.
I could have cut through the doors, but that would have warned the Feds on the other side that I was coming.
I wedged the side of a boot into the door seam, then forced the fingers of my left gauntlet in and levered the valves in opposite directions. Faces looked up in terror as I sailed into what had been a circular lounge giving access to individual suites against the hull.
This deck had atmosphere before it flooded past me and down the elevator shaft. Most of the personnel I saw as the light faded to the flatness of direct illumination wore suits, but their helmets were open. Hands groped to slam faceshields closed instead of swinging weapons toward me.
A team of twenty Molts was hauling a carriage gun across the lounge on four drag ropes. The 10-cm cannon was no less massive for being weightless. It slid on with the certainty of a falling boulder when the crewmen dropped their harness.
I let the impetus of my leap from the shaft take me into the crowd of aliens trying to close their helmets. I swung my cutting bar with no aim but to hit something, anything.
Ripping the Molts' fabric suits was good enough for my purposes. The limbs and gouts of fluid sweeping past me on the last of the deck's atmosphere were a bonus.
A rifle fired, its yellow powderflash huge for expanding in near vacuum. I was through the Molts within my immediate reach. I pushed off from the plasma cannon traveling relentlessly past me.
I couldn't have executed so complex a weightless maneuver if I'd practiced for weeks. Chance or murderer's luck took me on a vector to the Fed trying to lever another shell into his rifle's chamber as my bar jerked and sparked through the neck of his armor.
I spun and pushed myself toward the next large concentration of the enemy, the group fronting the companionway hatches. Some of the humans were screaming behind their faceshields. God knows I gave them reason to scream.
I grabbed a woman with my left gauntlet. She pounded the side of her riflebutt on my helmet, then tried to short-grip the weapon to shoot me. Her mass anchored my sweeping right-hand cut through her fellows.
The stiffeners in Molt suits were under tension. When my blade sheared a ring, the severed ends sprang apart and dragged the rip in the fabric wider. A bad design for combat . . .
I cut the line of a backpack laser and a corona of high-amperage blue sparks shorted through the metal armor of the man holding it. The Fed's body should have been insulated from the outer shell, but his liner had worn or frayed. The suit stiffened as his flesh burned, raising the internal pressure to several times normal.
I was shaking the woman in my left hand, but I didn't have time to finish her until I'd taken care of the laser and by then she was limp within her articulated armor. She'd lost her rifle; a bullet hole starred her faceshield.
Someone aiming at me, someone shooting at random; her own bullet, triggered at the wrong instant. I held her close as I scanned for living targets.
The 10-cm cannon continued its course into the partition bulkhead surrounding the lounge. This deck was given over to suites for powerful passengers and the Keys' command staff. Nonetheless, the hull was pierced with gunports and a few plasma cannon were placed here for emergencies. I'd interrupted a crew shifting an unfired weapon across the lounge to a compartment from which it bore on the Oriflamme.
The cannon's stellite muzzle hit the flimsy bulkhead at a skew angle and ground another meter forward, driven by the inertia of tonnes of metal in the gun and its carriage. The wall split at the point of impact and buckled inward across all four edges.
The door popped open like the cork from an overcharged bottle. The suite had still been under normal air pressure. Two Molts and a female servant spurted into the lounge. The servant tried to scream and she shouldn't have, though it didn't make more than a minute's difference since neither she nor the Molts had breathing apparatus.
The suite's main occupant was a plump woman of fifty, wearing a glittering array of jewelry and light-scattering fabrics cut too tight for her build. A transparent emergency bubble protected her. She stared transfixed at the cloud of lung tissue protruding from her servant's mouth.
Feds edged toward me around the right-h
and curve of the lounge. There were half a dozen armored humans and as many Molts in the group. I flung away the corpse to drive me toward them.
The Feds hadn't identified me in the carnage and tricky illumination, but they noticed the movement. Muzzle flashes and the sparks of ricocheting projectiles brightened the lounge. The corpse spun as several rounds hit her, and the bullet that punched through my left shoulderguard flipped me ass over teacup.
My left shoulder was cold. Some of that would be the sealant oozing from between the armor's laminae to close the hole. I tried to wriggle my fingers. I couldn't tell if they moved.
My figure somersaulted five meters from the Feds. The Molts were less awkward in their flexible pressure suits, but only a few of them carried firearms. The humans aimed for another volley, and I couldn't do a damned thing but spin since I wasn't touching anything I could push off from.
I hurled my cutting bar at the Fed in a parcel-gilt hard suit pointing a rifle at me. A flashgun pulse flickered through his faceshield and ruptured his skull within. The bolt might have reflected harmlessly if it had struck his metal armor.
I unhooked the spare bar from my waist. Feds turned, flailing and throwing equipment in order to get behind the central shaft again.
Piet floated in the companionway hatch. His knees clasped the coaming to steady him against his carbine's recoil. He stripped a fresh clip into the magazine. Stephen's reloaded flashgun exploded a Molt who came on with a cutting bar when his human officers fled.
I tried to brake myself against the ceiling with my left hand. The arm moved, but not properly. My field of view spread into a line of infinite length and no height or width.
Consuming fire shrank to no more than normal pain. Stephen caught my elbow and pulled me to his side. He'd wedged a boot into the plumbing beneath an ornamental wall fountain.
Piet had backed within the companionway. I heard him on the intercom, calling, "Oriflammes to Deck Eight! Oriflammes to Deck Eight! We hold the stairhead, but they'll regroup in a moment!"
Each deck of the Keys to the Kingdom was a Faraday cage. The metal construction acted as a barrier impenetrable to radio propagation. If any Venerians happened to be in the companionway shaft—also a metal enclosure—they could hear Piet's summons. Perhaps they'd even be able to answer it; though not, I thought, in time to make a difference.
"Christ's blood, Jeremy," Stephen said in a tone of laughing wonder. "Did you do all this yourself?"
My vision had wobbled in and out of focus since I tried to use my left arm. Until Stephen spoke, I hadn't really looked at anything. The lounge was—
The lounge was very like what I'd passed through in the Oriflamme's midships compartment a lifetime ago. The bodies floating here were whole, or nearly whole. The head, arm, and torso-with-legs of a Molt had floated back together in a monstrous juxtaposition.
There may have been twenty corpses. It was impossible to be sure. I didn't remember killing that many.
"I suppose," I said.
There was so much blood. I dragged the back of my right gauntlet across my visor. Again, I suppose. I didn't remember doing that before either, though I must have. The ceramic dragged fresh furrows across the brown-red haze that dimmed my sight. I needed a wiping rag.
"Well, it's time to do some more," Stephen said. He aimed his flashgun toward a barricade of mattresses floating around the right-hand curve of the central column.
"That's mine," I said and launched myself toward the Feds.
They were coming from both directions this time. Three Molts wearing breastplates and carrying rifles swept out from the left. The flashgun lit the walls behind me as I slid blade-first toward the bedding from nearby suites.
Out of the corner of my eye I caught Piet's figure diving across the lounge. To get an angle from which to shoot, I supposed, but I had enough to occupy me.
The Feds had stacked three mattresses like a layer cake on end. The spun-cellulose filling wouldn't stop a bullet, but we couldn't see through it and it would absorb the bolt of a monopulse laser like Stephen's without any fuss or bother.
I ripped the mattresses and the pair of Molts pushing them with a deliberately shallow stroke. The bedding didn't affect my cutting blade, but it would've bound my arm if I'd let it.
The Molts sprang away. One of them was trying to hold the segments of his plastron together; the other didn't have arms below the second joint.
Two human officers in hard suits, and a gunner wearing quilted asbestos with an air helmet, followed the Molts. They'd been poised for attack over or around their barricade. I came through the middle of it with a backhand stroke and a cloud of severed fiber.
The gunner shot at me and missed, though the muzzle blast punched the side of my helmet. I stabbed him where his collarbone met the breastbone, then cut toward the officer on my right. She got her rifle up to block me. My edge showered sparks from where the barrel mated with the receiver.
The second officer put the muzzle of his rifle to my head. Everything was white light because Piet fired the carriage gun wedged into the bulkhead nearby.
This deck was sealed except for the shafts in the center. If the 10-cm cannon had been fired perpendicularly into the hull at this range, it would have blown a hole in the plating; but the Keys' hull was thick, and the gun's muzzle was caught at an acute angle to the curve.
The slug of ions glanced around the inner surface of the hull: expanding, dissipating, and vaporizing everything in its immediate path into a dense, silvery shock wave. None of the internal bulkheads survived. Those closest to the muzzle became a gaseous secondary projectile which flattened partitions farther away.
The cannon wasn't clamped into deck mountings. It recoiled freely against the thrust of ions accelerated to light speed, tumbling muzzle over cascabel to meet the shock wave plasma-driven in the opposite direction.
The barrel finally came to rest not far from where Piet had fired the gun. Bits of the carriage still tumbled in complex trajectories. Dents from the tonnes of stellite pocked the hull plating.
Stephen had dodged back into the armored companionway. He'd lost his flashgun and the satchels of spare batteries he'd worn, but otherwise he was uninjured.
Piet survived because he was as far as possible from the ricocheting course of the plasma slug. The shock wave tumbled him, but the Oriflamme's gunners had taken a worse battering and survived—most of them—when a similar bolt pierced our hull.
And I survived. I was out of the direct line of the plasma and swathed in mattresses besides. Everything went white; then I was drifting free on a deck from which all the internal lighting had been scoured. A Venerian focused a miniflood on me. Piet Ricimer caught me by the ankle and pulled me with him back to the companionway. I hadn't even lost my cutting bar.
I can't imagine the Lord wanted me to survive after what I'd done, but I survived.
Maybe some Feds in full hard suits were still alive. Bulkheads, furniture, weapons, and bodies—all the matter that had existed on Deck Eight was still there in the form of tumbled debris that could conceal a regiment. If there were any survivors, they were too stunned to call attention to themselves.
There were six of us now. Stephen led the way up the helical stairs, holding a cutting bar of Federation manufacture. Strip lights in the shaft still functioned. The sharp shadows they threw without a scattering atmosphere acted as disruptive camouflage.
A fireball burped into the shaft from a lower deck, then vanished as suddenly. Fighting was still going on below.
The companionway opened into a circular room on the bridge deck. There were four shafts in all. A bullet ricocheted up one, hit the domed ceiling, and fell back down another as a shimmer of silver.
Two inward-opening hatches on opposite sides of the antechamber gave onto the bridge proper. Against the bulkhead were lockers and, at the cardinal points between the hatches, communications consoles with meter-square displays.
A sailor pulled open a locker. Emergency stores spilled ou
t: first-aid kits, emergency bubbles, flares.
Dole tried a hatch. It was locked from the other side. The left half of the bosun's armor was dull black, as though the surfaces had been sprayed with soot.
"Jeremy, can you get us through—" Stephen said, bobbing his helmet toward the hatch.
"Yes," I said, kneeling. The bulkhead was of hull metal, not duraluminum, but it couldn't be solid and still contain the necessary conduits.
"Wait," said Piet. He stepped to a console and toggled it live. The screen brightened with a two-level panorama of the circular bridge. Inside—
Four heavily-armed figures sexless in plated armor; five human sailors without weapons, armor, or breathing apparatus; three Molts, also unprotected and seated at navigation consoles; and a startlingly beautiful blond woman in a sweep of fabric patterned like snakeskin, with jeweled combs in her hair.
Piet pressed his faceplate to the console's input microphone. "Commodore Prothero!" he said, shouting to be heard through the jury-rigged vocal pathway. "We're sealing this deck. Put down your weapons and surrender. There's no need for more people to die."
With time I could have linked the console to our intercom channel. There wasn't time; and besides, I couldn't see very well. I tried to wipe my visor again, but neither of my hands moved.
Dole and two other spacers were closing the companionway shafts. The hatches were supposed to rotate out of the deck, but long disuse had warped them into their housings. The bosun cursed and hammered the lip of a panel with his bootheel to free it.
Prothero would be the squat figure in gilded armor. Impervious to laser flux, but Stephen didn't have his flashgun any more. Prothero and his three henchmen spoke among themselves.
They must have been using external speakers instead of radio. We couldn't hear them through the bulkhead, but the blonde screamed and one of the unprotected spacers launched himself at Prothero when he heard the plan.
Prothero clubbed the man aside with a steel forearm. "Get us through!" Piet shouted.
I drew the tip of my bar down the bulkhead, cutting a centimeter deep. The sparkling metal roostertail was heated yellow but unable to oxidize in a vacuum.