Warrior-Woman

by Mary Ann Steele

  "Signe, Midori's a natural at flying. She's the only one of my crew that is. From the first moment she lifted, she demonstrated an exemplary grasp of the mathematics coupled with an inborn, intuitive ability to merge mind and body with the machine. I sense that ability to be utterly exceptional. She deserves better instruction than I can give her¾an advanced course, as it were. I'd appreciate your offering her that, busy as I know you are. You won't find too many of our fledgling spacers able to match her."

  "What welcome news, Eric! Of course I'll instruct her¾if indeed my own skill still exceeds hers¾and I'll ask Sean to do the same. He's by far the most spectacularly adept pupil I've taught. Between the two of us, we'll take Midori as far as we can. I appreciate your bringing the matter to my attention."

  Elated, Signe investigated. Seated next to Eric's pupil, watching intently as Midori lifted a boat off a lock on a habitat, she instantly concluded that Eric had not exaggerated in his claim. The petite, black-eyed, golden-skinned woman, serenely self-possessed even for a Gaean, demonstrated an aptitude that put her right alongside Signe and Sean in the Commander's mental ranking of those learning the difficult skill. The warrior-woman hid none of her potent satisfaction at that discovery, either from Midori, or from Eric.

  Pride suffused the Commander. For the way we were forced to learn, we've met a daunting challenge with courage and daring , she exulted. We'll fight the Columbians in their own element--render Gaea free in perpetuity! All we need is time.

  Time! That sobering thought blasted the warrior's enraptured burst of ebullient confidence. Racked early on by her fear that Arlen could be planning some lightflash assault, she had kept her two vessels constantly on the move, docking them randomly at various locations on the five major planetoids of the Group. Reflecting that neither the attack nor the search she dreaded had as yet transpired, she conjectured that Arlen's hold on power might turn out to be transitory.

  Recalling the heavy cost in water fuel of making those transits, the leader sighed. She nevertheless took comfort as she recalled that the expenditure produced a prime benefit in addition to lessening the danger of a Columbian strike and reinforcing the training given the crews. A considerable number of the men and women who once manned the ships affectionately known as rock-hoppers--small interplanetoid vessels of uniquely Gaean design that formerly plied routes within the Group, meeting the needs of families living precarious lives on far-flung stations--surfaced in isolated settlements. Those inconceivably bitter survivors of Norman's systematic purge of their kin--indigenous spacers deprived not only of their livelihood but also of a cherished lifestyle--emerged from hiding to flock to Main World. Fired with patriotic zeal, they not only contributed knowledge and skill to the cause, they clamored to fight.

  The day finally arrived when a superbly trained force of sixty-four people prepared to launch the strike that Signe hoped would gain them the nucleus of a fleet. Jassy commanded one ship, Theo the other. Exhaustive practice in limiting their cross-dialogue to the words on Wong's list perfected the two close friends in the use of the stratagem. Yuri sat the board with Jassy. Malcolm paired with Theo. The two men serving as second officers felt confident, after their own practice sessions, of their ability to coordinate their handling of the two ships while their captains aimed and fired the Earth-built weaponry. Signe, backed by Eric and Sean, led half the force of thirty fighters transported aboard Jassy's vessel. Conor, backed by Morgan and Wong, commanded the other half.

  Harnessed next to Wong and twenty-eight other comrades lying upon Spartan accommodations crammed into the limited space of the remodeled ships, Morgan shot his protégé a grin, well aware of the martial expert's eagerness to prove himself in his first battle. To Wong's vast relief, the two men's close association had blossomed into solid friendship, to the extent that the pair anticipated employing a unique battle-strategy made possible by the variation in their sizes.

  Having endured the cruelly prolonged acceleration that sent the assault force hurtling towards Columbia at a speed enabling them to reduce the time required for the transit from twenty-four hours to sixteen, Morgan harbored profound gratitude to both Wong and Signe, for the training that made the brutal lift barely tolerable. The uneventful interim, spent in alternate periods of exercise, sleep, and conversation, drew slowly to its conclusion. His eye on his watch, the redheaded warrior stoically prepared to withstand an equally brutal deceleration, as did his comrades.

  The transfer into low orbit around Columbia complete, Signe and her officers studied the panoramic view of the surface filling the time-delayed multispectral screens. Swiftly achieving consensus, they determined on striking a tempting target.

  Theo remained in orbit, on guard in space. Jassy descended. Water vapor exploding into plasma beneath the heat shield of the ship caused no noise audible to the inhabitants of the military complex formerly under Dexter's command, but now under Arlen's. The vacuum of the void preserved a perfect enshrouding silence.

  The glowing sphere beneath the Gaean vessel's heat shield, decelerating the ship, showed up plainly on the video screens depicting the vault of space, but the four men manning the board in the installation targeted for a strike never glanced at those. Two spacers on duty answered calls, and relayed others to various officers. One man performed routine administrative work. The other kept his eyes glued to the scanning screens.

  Upon those graphic displays, the blips denoting incoming vessels appeared as stylized but detailed images revealing the shape of any approaching ship. Those images, generated from characteristic radar signatures, appeared overlain with constantly changing data pinpointing the ships' positions and trajectories. The man on duty checked that data against that provided by spacers manning the boards of the vessels. Were any vessel to maintain silence, he would instantly assume it to be manned by renegades, but he expected no such occurrence, given that a strike on a major military installation by an outlaw had never been known to occur.

  Ships showed up on the video screens only as moving, dark, tenuous shapes hard to see against the star-sprinkled blackness of the void. Only after the vessels began decelerating were they plainly visible, and then only as a glowing sphere of plasma: a luminous, unimaginably hot, gaseous mass of water atoms stripped of their outer layer of charged particles. That familiar sight did not admit of accurate judgment as to distance above the surface, by an observer depending on fallible human eyesight. The man responsible for monitoring traffic from space to locks customarily depended solely on the data obtained as a complex, high-tech receiving system picked up reflected scanning beams. Banks of computers tracked incoming vessels, and assumed partial control of each when such control became necessary to prevent collisions. That system instantaneously integrated raw data into the graphic displays.

  The Gaeanite microlayer coating Jassy's black ship fully absorbed the scanning beams striking the hull, as the invader coasted towards the planetoid. Deceleration caused the formation of a sphere of plasma, but that phenomenon went unnoticed by the men on the station's board¾as did Jassy's transfer into a high orbit while his lieutenant and his superior reconnoitered, and sorted through the flood of communications emissions. The descent likewise escaped detection.

  The ship settled onto the lock. No alarm, no flashing of signals on the station's board accompanied its initial contact. Listening intently, Jassy determined that the men manning the board continued to carry out routine business unaware of the proximity of a hostile invader. Anxiety melted into satisfaction as he concluded that the short-out gear integral to the vessel's docking module¾equipment of his devising, which nullified such transmissions¾worked perfectly.

  According to the preconceived plan, the raiders docked at a point from which two corridors stretched away at right angles. Their every battle-sense alert, the intruders waited within the inner lock roofed by the docking module from which they had issued, breathing air released into the lofty cylindrical enclosure from tanks integral to their ship. Huge twin fuel pumps, insul
ated against the cold and shielded to withstand the vacuum that would again surround them once the vessel withdrew its air and lifted, stood side by side. Those squat behemoths chilled the air inhaled by the throng of warriors crowding against their massive bulk, and seared with bitter cold any unprotected flesh touching them.

  Bothered on some gut level by the extreme ugliness of his surroundings, Morgan swept an uneasy glance around the premises. Fixtures ringing vertical gray walls shed harsh light of a malignant bluish cast. In the center of the imposing volume of space, the semicircular grillwork allowing access to the ship's docking module cast weirdly distorted shadows on the frigid metal of the deck. Soft respirations alone broke the oppressive silence.

  Upon emerging into the empty expanse of the outer lock, Signe and Wong boldly pressed the switch that caused the pressure-proof door giving onto the corridor to swing silently outwards. At the instant that a pair of guards patrolling the long passageway arrived to investigate the open door, two martial experts sprang out to dispatch the unsuspecting men with bare hands, soundlessly. Thirty raiders separated into two equal complements, and took separate routes towards specific objectives.

  Signe's force encountered opposition. Gelett, Galt's senior captain, emerged with seven of his men from the recess housing the elevator leading to the military complex, and strode out into the wide passageway. That battle-seasoned warrior, entrusted by Arlen's archrival with one of Second Corps' two remaining Earth-armed ships, beheld fifteen Gaean raiders bearing down on him. Shock failed to deprive the quick-witted spacer-fighter of his ability to react swiftly. Barking an order, he sent a man sprinting towards the stairs, even as he unsheathed his sword.

  Prepared for such an eventuality, Signe acted. With astonishing swiftness, she drew a slim knife crafted of Gaeanite from a sheath at her belt. Stopping in mid-advance, she threw the weapon, the movement of hand, wrist, and arm so swift as to seem blurred to any beholder. Moments later, the wicked black sliver sank with lethal effect into the back of the man fleeing to give warning.

  One by one, the seven remaining Columbians, now engaged hilt-to-hilt in desperate swordplay, fell. Sean's blade found Gelett's vitals. Teeny cut down the dying Columbian Captain's second officer. Within minutes, the raiders gained the lock over the sprawled dead bodies of eight foes. Stooping, Signe retrieved her throwing knife before becoming the last Gaean to enter the outer lock.

  Borne upwards through the docking module as they stood on the elevator, six tense raiders waited while Sean pressed the switch that would open the hatch of Gelett's vessel. Signe and Sean rose, charged through, and hurled themselves across the bridge to drop the two startled spacers manning the board, thereby preventing them from broadcasting a warning. Two other Second Corpsmen, emerging from cabins, fell victim to Eric's sword, and Teeny's.

  Conor's force met no enemies in the corridor. Quickly and efficiently, his spacer-fighters eliminated the two Columbians guarding the outer lock below Lambert's ship. Morgan swarmed up the ladder of the inner lock, followed by Wong, Jess, Madelyn, and three other members of the assault force. Leaping nimbly upwards, the diminutive martial expert clung to the redhead's broad back, rode his comrade through the hatch ahead of the others, and jumped down milliseconds before Morgan engaged the blade of the astounded Columbian Captain.

  Even as five of Lambert's spacers raced out of cabins to cross swords with Jess, Madelyn, and three Gaean men, Wong slipped through the melee to target the crewman who succeeded in initiating a garbled warning before dying from a single lethal blow to the throat. A statuesque blonde female combatant flipped off the screen, chagrined by her awareness that she acted too late to prevent news of the assault from being broadcast.

  Lambert crumpled to the deck, both hands clutching at the wound reddening his chest. Moments later, the former First Corpsman died on the blood-smeared plates of his bridge.

  The prize having been gained, Morgan called down to the comrades on watch below. Conor, Jess and a swordsman named Ryan acted as the rear guard. Those premier warriors beheld Yukio charge out of the stairwell at the head of his full crew. Blocking the entry to the inner lock, the three Gaeans fought with savage effectiveness within the diminishing space, as the heavy door ponderously, inexorably, automatically closed. Leaping for the ladder, the trio mounted to the bridge. Conor slammed the hatch-cover shut moments before Wong initiated the lift sequence. Hurling their bodies supine on the deck, the rear guard stoically endured the ensuing trauma unprotected by harnesses.

  Yukio, unhurt, spread the alarm. Carey and Brant, in space, responded. Carey, closest to Bessemer, where the attack had occurred, picked up on his video screens the ship stolen from Lambert. Boldly, the former Fifth Corpsman, now a member of Arlen's Special Force, issued a demand that the vessel return to descend at the lock he specified in Columbia, or be annihilated. His fair warning unheeded, the Captain snapped an order to his second officer to blast the still-fleeing ship.

  Brant also spied Carey's ship and Lambert's on his screens, from a greater distance. He saw no other. Carey's command issued from Brant's transceiver. Thirty seconds later, the brilliant visible light marking the passage through the void of the deadly pulse from an Earth-built weapon lanced from a point in space nowhere near the fleeing ship , to annihilate Carey's vessel. As the highly trained observer watched through dilated eyes, the disembodied heat-glow signifying acceleration of a ship paralleled the course taken by the stolen vessel.

  Realization of the import of what he just saw flashed with stunning force into the supremely competent Captain's mind. "Carey's bought it!" he grated to the men on Arlen's board. "Annihilated by a vessel totally invisible to me, except for the glow of its exhaust! I can no longer detect even that! I'm fighting blind, but I'm following the stolen ship!"

  Arlen himself replied. "Drop back, Brant," he commanded, his voice betraying no hint of the cold fury gripping him. "That ship will be totally undetectable, if they're in free flight. You could be blasted before you knew you were under attack. Where does Lambert's vessel seem headed?"

  "Towards Gaea--and the exhaust, which is all I can see of the other, indicates that the enemy ship's flying a trajectory identical to the one captured."

  "Let both go. Drop back out of range, and return to your base."

  Signe heard that command. Certain now that no other vessel pursued, she ordered Malcolm to lift off Theo's ship in a black lifeboat. At her command, a raider undocked one of Jassy's boats, and flew a parallel course with the ship stolen from Galt's senior captain, so as to free a lock. Having entered the Gaeanite-coated small craft that Malcolm then docked on that mooring, the Commander flew back with Theo's second officer to dock the invisible craft on the eerily disembodied lock visible as an isolated entity standing out against the all-encompassing blackness which, the spacer approaching knew, shrouded the undetectable main bulk of Theo's black ship.

  Signe next commanded the crews manning the prizes to return by devious dissimilar trajectories back to Gaea. After rearranging two crews of the black ships by lifeboat transfers, she headed at a formidable velocity back to Columbia.

  So far, so good , the war-leader reflected. Taut with adrenaline-induced excitement, she listened as Arlen commanded the personnel of the mine on Penn's Rock in the Gaean Group to evacuate the premises in the four second-class military ships he kept stationed there for that purpose. Her breath hissed between her teeth as she heard her archfoe order Amin and Evan to escort the vessels back to Columbia. "You can't pick up Signe's Earth-armed ship on your screens," he warned his captains. "She somehow rendered it undetectable, except for the glow of its exhaust when it's accelerating. Don't try to engage either of the ships she snatched, should you encounter them. Your orders are to escort the miners back."

  Penn's Rock just reverted to its rightful owners! the Gaean Commander silently exulted.

  Boldly, Signe sent her two black ships into a high orbit around the Ice World. Eyes intent on her screens, she studied the two facilities located on
that forbidding body, while listening to the cross talk among the spacers manning the enemy vessels.

  Those communications revealed what the raider most wished to know: a first-class military ship lay moored at each installation. She also learned that a third such vessel circled the planetoid in a low orbit. On the surface, crewmen of the cargo ship docked next to the Earth-armed ship coveted by the unseen watcher loaded a priceless quantity of water ice into the two holds.

  Ten minutes spent eavesdropping on the military band informed Signe that the circling ship would shortly transfer out of orbit to escort the cargo vessel back to Columbia. Sardonic amusement attended her hearing her foes state their erroneous assumption that the expenditure of fuel needed for the operation her undetectable ship had just completed prohibited her doing other than returning to Gaea.

  Surprise, you'll get shortly , she promised grimly.

  Determining on an audacious attempt, the Gaean leader relayed her orders via the voice-coder. Jassy's vessel she left guarding the orbiting foe oblivious to the presence of a hostile ship. Timing her maneuver so that she descended unseen by the crew of the vessel circling the Ice World at low altitude, she settled onto the lock next to the military ship, which in turn rested next to the fully loaded cargo vessel. Leaving ten raiders on guard in the lock below her black ship, she, Conor and Morgan led a force totaling twenty men and women down the two hundred meters separating the two moored vessels.

  Accompanied by seven of his spacer-fighters, Marcel stood in the outer lock below the cargo vessel. The former First Corpsman recruited by Arlen into the Special Force acted in his capacity of guarding the Ice World and the shipments leaving that outpost.