“Sir,” called Louise from Navigation. “It has just penetrated its wing frag at punch through speed.”
“Confirmed,” said Rosemary.
Well, if two redheads said the same thing, no doubt it was true.
“Punch throughs by the Chapultepec, Fallujah and Chao Lee,” reported Oliver. “No weapons detected. Limited electromag emissions coming from each fragment. Some infrared heat. Team leaders are setting up pressure tubes.”
Jacob looked at the wallscreen. The system graphic showed the twenty-five manta ray ships still lay 30 hours away from their location. Those ships were moving at eleven percent of lightspeed, but no faster, thank the Goddess. The other screen images vanished to be replaced by videos from the four Darts and the Berlin. The LCA image came from the Shinshoni suit of Gunnery Sergeant Jane Diego, who was moving ahead of Richard. Diego was the team leader. Based on Jacob’s time spent visiting with the woman, he had no doubt she had pulled rank on Richard and insisted on being the first to enter the wing fragment.
“Boarding!” she yelled. “Ooh Rah!”
“Ooh Rah!” yells came from Richard, Lance Corporal Jack Simmons and Corporal Atsugi Hideyoshi.
CHAPTER NINE
Richard did not like null gee but he was used to it. It was part of the training every Marine recon person went through if they wanted a berth on a Star Navy spaceship. So before he had boarded the Berlin in the Dart hangar he had not eaten anything fancy. Just plenty of water and some strips of beef jerky. If his energy felt low, there was sugar water available from the drink nipple inside his helmet. Right now he was full of energy, maybe too much. The chance to enter an enemy ship frag and discover just what kind of aliens they were dealing with was better than fighting Nepalese Maoists or the few groups of jihadists who still hit Western targets despite the Mecca Reformation of 2041. The Reformation had renounced the violent jihad sections of the Koran, along with acceptance that Mohammed had been a man inspired by God, but not anything divine. The women in the faith had particularly liked how they had regained full civil rights with the restriction of sharia law to inside local mosques. Now civil law ran all Muslim-majority nations on Earth. As he floated in the transparent boarding tube that connected the LCA to the big triangular section of manta ray wing, Richard dismissed minor thoughts. Time to rock and roll.
“Jerry, power up my weapons.”
“Hey guy, powering up,” called the suit AI that had no self-awareness, unlike the Melody ship AI that acted so weirdly toward the captain.
His suit’s modular backpack clanked as its rocket launcher moved a short-range rocket into launch position. On his right arm the long tube and globular napalm tank of his flamethrower jerked as the fuel pump activated. It showed Ready on the HUD display of his visor. On his left arm a similar jerk told him the 12-gauge shotgun attached to his arm was ready to pump out solid slugs and steel buckshot from a feed line that linked to his backpack. On his belly he felt a buzz as the carbon dioxide laser activated and moved its snout outward from the dome that contained a treasure of solid state microelectronics that could change the laser’s frequency to whatever he needed, whether it be metal punch through or soft body burn. On his right and left hips were a taser handgun and a .45 pistol, both decent for close-up combat. If they were knocked from his gloved hands they went dead so they couldn’t be used against him. He took a deep breath of cool suit air and told himself this was just another recon.
“Plastique ring set!” called out Jane over his helmet comlink. “Move back everyone!”
Richard pushed against the plastic rings of the boarding tube that connected the Berlin’s midbody airlock with the silvery wing fragment. Behind him Jack and Atsugi also moved back until their backpacks were almost touching the closed hatch of the LCA. His rearward float was stopped by the grip of Jack’s hands on the air module above the kidney sections of his Shinshoni. In front of him came Jane, facing him as her white-gloved fingers pulled on the tube liners to move her away from where the magnetic rims of the boarding tube touched the wing metal. Her clear helmet visor showed her brown face frowning as she looked down at the igniter ball that dangled from her belly laser mount. He reached out with his armored hands to catch her shoulders, the internal exoskeleton motors of his hard shell whirring low as they did what his muscles told them to do.
“Got you, Gunny.”
Behind her visor she looked up, her brown eyes intense. “Thanks.” Richard let go of the armored shoulder pads of her hard shell. “Flipping,” she said as she raised her white-armored knees, placed her black magboots against his hips and pushed, causing her to rotate feet upward with her helmet down. As soon as he saw her modular backpack come around to him he reached out, touched it to stop her rotation and spoke.
“Gunny, go with the entry. Jerry, darken my visor.”
“Yes boss! Darkening,” called the AI’s bright voice.
“Blowing the plastique!” Jane said, not in the least bothered by being upside down relative to him and the other two Marines.
Yellow flame flashed ten meters ahead as the plastique acted on the igniter’s signal. White and orange gases billowed back toward them, partly filling the airless space within the boarding tube. The gases were pushed by air outgassing from the chamber they had just cut into. His suit HUD showed an air pressure equal to a high mountain. Jane tossed a small square gadget through the opaque gases.
“Drone launched!”
Richard looked down at the small vidscreens that lined the lower rim of his helmet. One held a view of the pilot bubble of the Berlin, where Daisy sat before her control panel, wearing a Mark XIV Shinshoni Hard Shell. He had insisted she learn the suit’s basics if she was going to take him into a live fire zone. The woman had spent three hours under the tutelage of Jane, learning voice control of the suit AI and how to use the tongue pads inside the helmet to activate various suit systems. While he had disconnected her left arm shotgun and right arm flamethrower, and her belly CO2 laser, he’d left alone the taser handgun and .45 semiauto pistol that adorned the suit’s hips. While she had training in firing ship weapons, she had never done range shooting with Shinshoni systems. He didn’t want her to accidentally torch his returning Marines. And the two guns were sufficient protection in case some alien made its way up the tube and past the closed airlock hatch. He glanced at the other screens. Images from the boardings by the teams on Chao Lee, Tarawa II, Fallujah and Chapultepec filled four card-sized screens. Each was doing the same as his team, planting a ring of plastique on an inner wall surface, then moving back to the midbody airlock of their Dart before igniting it. A screen on his far right held an image of the Bridge of the Lepanto, with Jacob seated in his elevated captain’s seat, and Alicia below him. The image came from a ceiling vidcam that showed everyone on the Bridge, including the captain’s friends Lori, Carlos and Quincy from the right front laser node. A small screen in the middle of his helmet flickered to life as yellow light shone out from the body of the drone.
“Boarding!” yelled Jane, grabbing the tube wall rings and pushing herself forward through the thinning gases. “Metal cut through was clean. No jagged edges. Entering.” She flew with both arms aimed forward, ready to fire shotshells and balls of flame from her primary weapons in case an alien showed up from some hidden place. Which seemed unlikely, based on what he saw in the drone’s vidcam transmission.
The room through which the drone now flew resembled a storage room on any human ship. Cartons, boxes, long tubes and balls of stuff were visible, either restrained by netting or filling open topped hampers attached to the walls. The room itself looked to be rectangular in shape. Orange light shone down from ceiling light strips. At one end was a flat metal wall with a door outline. Leastwise, door was what he guessed it might be. The outline resembled a simple Roman arch, curved at the top, straight on either side and horizontal where it met the metal floor. A panel in the middle of the archdoor glowed with swirls of color in a pattern that repeated itself every half minute. Clearl
y there was live power still operating in this section of the wing fragment. But was it emergency power or fully operational power?
“Gravity inside!” yelled Jane over the comlink.
Shit. “Team, watch out on your entry!” Richard called as he pushed his weightless body forward, pulling his knees up to his chest as he sailed through the circle cut through the hull metal. He thrust his boots downward as the null gee vanished. “Ummph,” he muttered as his black magboots slammed the metal of the room floor. Ahead of him was Jane, already moving to the left of the apparent doorway, both arms aimed forward. “Almost full gee guys! Be prepared.”
Behind him came two thumps that he felt through his own boots.
“Inside, moving right,” called Jack.
“Landed, preparing airlock tube,” said Atsugi.
Richard walked past some solid metal crates, then stood behind Jane, his white-armored arms aimed at the archdoor. He watched as the Japanese-American from San Francisco walked up to the archdoor, pulling on one end of the flexible tube, stepped inside the person-high tube, planted its metal ring with magnetic clamps against the center of the archdoor, then stepped back. The young corporal looked through the tube plastic to Jane.
“Gunnery Sergeant, wanna try your tech panel?” Atsugi called over his helmet comlink.
“Yes.” The deadly woman lowered her left arm, turned to face the color blinking panel in the middle of the archdoor, and tapped her tech panel. “It’s cycling.”
Richard watched as the lockpicker box transmitted a diverse group of radio transmissions at the colorful panel. Clearly Jane was hoping that anything that showed electronic behavior, like the panel with its repeating color patterns, might accept a digital radio override. It was a long shot, since they had no idea how the aliens communicated with each other or with their tech.
“Chief, no joy,” she said.
Well, time to do what every Marine loved. Blow up something. “Atsugi, apply the plastique. Then get the hell to the far end of that tube!”
“Acting!” called Atsugi as he pulled free a rope of C4 plastique from where it hung around his waist. In seconds he replicated what Jane had done to give them access through the hull. He stepped back four meters until blocked by the two meter high metal hatch plate that gave access to the tube. Then he knelt on one knee, darkened his visor and aimed both arms at the archdoor and plastique ring. His left hand held the igniter ball. “Ready.”
“All troops! Darken your visors. Jerry, do mine, but monitor that archdoor. If anything comes through it after the blast, shoot a laser bolt through it without waiting for my okay.”
“Darkening. Ready to fire,” the AI said softly.
His view of the orange-lighted wall and archdoor went dark, but he still saw the basics of the transparent airlock tube, Atsugi at its far end, and the C4 on the archdoor metal.
“Corporal, blow it.”
“Blowing!” he yelled.
Yellow flame gushed out in a ring of flame and gas, partly filling the airlock tube. But half the gases went through the person-high hole cut through the archdoor.
Nothing came through that hole.
As the gases thinned out, Richard could see silvery metal showing beyond the door hole. The space was orange-lighted, like the storage room they stood in.
“Gunny?”
“Sending through the drone,” Jane said.
The black square of plastic and metal whirred its four rotor blades, lifted from the floor of airlock tube and flew through the blast hole, under the control of Jane and her eye-blink controls.
His helmet vidscreen that had shown the interior of the storage room now showed what lay beyond the archdoor.
An orange-lighted hallway ran to either side of the archdoor.
It was empty.
And nothing unusual showed, other than the red-glowing metal plate that had been the bulk of the archdoor. That plate was lying against the silvery metal wall of the hallway.
“Team! Into the airlock access tube!” yelled Jane before Richard could order the obvious.
In seconds Atsugi moved forward to the hole cut through the door, then through the hole in a fast jump. The drone image showed him dropping to his knee and aiming both arms down one hallway direction. Jack twisted the bar on the outside of the airlock rim, pulled the hatch out, then entered the tube. Jane followed him. Richard followed her, pulling closed the entry hatch and twisting the inside bar to lock it and keep the hallway air from escaping into the room they had entered. The storage room air was mostly in the room, only a little having escaped into the boarding tube that connected the LCA with the wing hull.
“Hallway covered!” yelled Jane after jumping through the archdoor hole.
Richard followed Jack through the circular hole cut through the archdoor metal by the plastique. Standing with his back against the remnant of the archdoor, he scanned right and left down the hallway. The place was barely six feet high, which forced him and Jack to lean forward to avoid helmet bashing the ceiling. Which was curved like the archdoor. The four of them occupied a hallway that was three meters wide at floor level, two meters high and smooth as a baby’s butt. No pipes or tubes or external blocks were visible. He scanned his HUD sensor readouts.
“Captain!” he called to Jacob. “All teams. We’ve got oxy-nitro air in this place. Twenty-three percent oxy, seventy nitro, the rest inert gases. Fifty percent moisture level. Hallway temp is 280 kelvins. Air pressure is 14 pounds per square inch. Gravity field is ninety percent of a gee. Light is orange bright, but not as harsh as the wasp light in their tubeways. Tarawa, everyone, any opposition to your boardings?”
“None. In a store room,” called Tim from the Tarawa II. “There’s gravity and lights here. Preparing to blast a hole through their weird version of a door.”
“Same here,” called Auggie from Chapultepec. “This frag looked pretty chewed up on the outside. No gravity inside. There are lights and heat though. We came into a low hallway. Preparing to move out.”
“Moving out,” called Martha from the Chao Lee. “No opposition. Lights are flickering. Suit says the hallway is polar cold. Gravity is out. Deploying drones front and back.”
“Same for us,” called José from the Fallujah. “It’s a chewed up frag. But we got heat, light and fluctuating gravity. Moving out.”
“Proceed as planned,” replied Jacob over Richard’s helmet comlink. “Pilots stay alert to missiles or repair robots launched by anyone inside your frag.”
“Watching,” called Daisy, followed by the other pilots.
As Jacob went silent Richard gestured to Jane. “Gunny, go right. Lead with your drone. Atsugi, you’re tail end. Put out your drone to cover our rear. Move it, troops!”
The white suit of Jane moved right along the hallway, then hugged the left side with both her arms aimed forward. He followed her, moving to hug the right side. Behind him, boot vibrations told him Jack had moved left with Atsugi moving right. It was standard squad deployment formation for an urban environment. Nobody walked down the middle of the hallway. Tho the drone flew down the middle, but elevated close to the ceiling. Any alien that fired a weapon at them would likely miss that first shot. The belly lasers and flamethrowers of him and Jane would prevent a second shot. He ignored the small vidscreens in his helmet as the other Dart teams made similar advances. In a live fire combat zone you paid attention to your partner, your buddies and your near space zone. And you cheated every way possible, which was why they were using drones front and back. The flying black squares flew ten meters ahead of them, giving advance warning of any enemy and serving as a distracting target to an armed enemy.
Ahead Jane stopped. The hallway had joined a cross hallway. It was a dead-end ahead, with options to move right or left along the cross hallway. Or through the outline of an archdoor that filled the middle of the dead-end wall.
“Deploying a magnetic bomb,” she called out.
Richard dropped to one knee. The two Marines behind him did the sa
me. He did not have to look back to know that Atsugi was looking back the way they had come, monitoring both his drone and keeping watch for any enemy coming up behind them.
“Blowing it!”
♦ ♦ ♦
Jacob looked down at Alicia. “Science, what do we know about the invader aliens based on what our teams have found inside?”
The vacsuited woman looked up. Her amber eyes blinked. “A few things. The orange light suggests the aliens come from a K-type main sequence star. The nine-tenths gee says their home world is a rocky planet similar to Earth. The air mix says the same. The high moisture content of the air suggests the aliens like a humid environment. And the low hallway ceiling suggests whatever shape they are, they are not as tall as some humans.” She looked down and tapped an armrest control patch. “The atmospheric pressure is nearly equal to sea level on Earth. The earlier low pressure in the storage room was likely due to losing air to the boarding tube. So they are lowland dwellers versus mountain types.”
“Antonova,” he called back to where Lori sat in a rear observer seat. “Can you add anything?”
“No sir. Commander Branstead has nailed it based on the early data.”
“So we wait and watch,” he said, looking aside to the system graphic holo. The invader fleet was now 26 hours out from their position just inside the system’s Kuiper belt.
They had time to recover bodies, get tech samples and explore the manta ray ship frags. But soon they would have to follow Thirteen’s ship out to the edge of the star’s magnetosphere and make tracks for this Food Enough colony star. Wherever it might be. He looked back to the front wallscreen, which carried the suit vidcam image from Richard’s hard shell in the middle of the screen. To the right was an image from the Tarawa II boarding team. It came from Sergeant Tim Harrison’s hard shell. On the left side of the wallscreen was an image feed from First Sergeant Auggie Naranjo of the Chapultepec. Other images from other Dart teams would appear if something unusual developed. For the moment his ship, the three other fleet ships, and hundreds of fellow humans were safe and secure. Leastwise as safe as one could be in a combat zone in airless deep space.
StarFight 3: Battlecry Page 12