One pirate stood on guard, holding a rifle listlessly and looking bored. His helmet was lying on the floor next to him. Most of the others must either be inside the control room or chasing after Trenchard, thought Sivia. Although the pirate was for the moment looking the other way, if Sivia dropped out of the shaft to the ground, despite the low gravity in this part of the ship, the guard would undoubtedly hear him and bring his rifle to bear. Sivia wouldn’t stand a chance. How to get into the scanner room, Sivia thought? How do I get past a space pirate who is looking out for Space Navy crewmembers?
Three minutes later Sivia crawled out of another snipe tube, one compartment down from the scanner control room. This was an area by an exterior inspection hatch that led out of the ship towards the front, allowing the technical crew to affect repairs on the forward scanner arrays and torpedo tubes. Just as in main engineering, there were four E.V.A. suits lined up ready to use. They looked similar to the pirate’s suits but they were too new, too clean. Sivia desperately searched around the room, through the cupboards full of tools, sealing tape and reels of wire. Then he chanced upon something that might work; a pot of sickly yellow grease that the engineers referred to as “baby shit” due to its yellow colour and terrible smell. Sivia grinned from ear-to-ear and set to work on the nearest suit.
‘He’s done what?’ Captain Smiler shouted angrily.
Inside the control room Smiler’s X.O. stood in front of him with her helmet under her arm, looking rather sheepish.
‘We think he’s taken the circuit breakers with him outside the ship. He just entered one of the asteroids. Our men have followed him in but it’s going to be hard to find him in there.’
Smiler scowled for a long moment before replying. ‘Tell them that if they don’t recover those circuit breakers, they won’t get back aboard this ship! That should motivate them a little.’
There was a moment of uncomfortable silence before the Executive Officer replied.
‘What about Commander Trenchard?’
Smiler snarled. ‘I don’t care about him, just the circuit breakers.’
Then Smiler grabbed his own helmet from a nearby console and moved towards the exit ladder.
‘I’m going back to the Onibaba,’ he said with a frustrated tone in his voice. ‘I can’t make head nor tail of the command systems here so I’m going back to use ours and contact Harlequin.’
Then he stopped and turned back towards his X.O.
‘Try not to fuck up any more while I’m away, would you?’
Trenchard was playing a deadly game of hide and seek with the pirates. He had worked his way deeper inside the loose pile of gently floating lumps of rock and iron and had turned off his suit’s lights and propulsion jets. He was waiting, crouched in a natural alcove that had been splintered from one of the larger rocks. All he could hear inside his suit was his own tense, heavy breathing, coming in short, nervous gasps. The scar on his neck was itching terribly now and he was desperate for the toilet. Suddenly, he spotted movement and all was forgotten.
The pirates must have split up to search for him more quickly. He could see one of them, a fearsome skull painted across his helmet. The pirate was feeling his way along the solid iron walls of this part of the asteroid. The pirate’s spotlight played along the rough walls of the inner space, illuminating minerals and ores that danced and glittered in the bright beam. Trenchard couldn’t see any of the other pirates; they must have explored down different openings. He waited for the pirate to pass in front of him, about ten feet ahead. Then he braced his feet onto the rock behind him and launched himself towards the back of the pirate.
He hasn’t seen me, thought Trenchard as he floated forwards. Don’t look round, don’t look round. As Trenchard neared the man’s back, he pulled a combat knife out from its sheath on his belt. As he reached within arms distance, he grabbed the air hose that connected the pirate’s backpack to his helmet and sliced through it with one deft swipe. The terrified man grasped desperately behind him at his unseen attacker but Trenchard had already moved, spinning past him and brought the knife up in a diagonal thrust into the man’s ribcage. The pirate spun away erratically, his struggling becoming gradually less and less frantic. He left a trail of perfectly spherical blood droplets in his wake, frozen solid like ruby marbles. Trenchard could see the man’s lips moving. Even though he couldn’t hear the words, he knew that the man was warning his comrades. One down, five to go, thought Trenchard grimly.
PING!
A bullet zipped past Trenchard’s visor and impacted into the wall sending splinters flying. Shrapnel hit his visor making a sharp pinging sound, rattling like hail on a tin roof. As he turned, he could see another pirate gaining on him at full speed and there was nowhere to hide.
The guard stationed by the scanner room was bored. He’d had no company, no food or drink since being posted here three hours ago. Man, he could murder a bacon sandwich, he thought to himself. Dreaming of white bread, crispy streaky bacon and brown sauce, the pirate almost didn’t notice his comrade approaching down the passageway. Along the corridor came another pirate dressed head to toe in his E.V.A. suit with his helmet still in place. They must have just come over from the Onibaba, thought the guard idly. I wonder if they’ve brought lunch? The guard smiled broadly at the new arrival as he got nearer.
‘Hey shipmate, you can take off the hard top now you know,’ he called out.
The new arrival came to a stop in front of him. It was only now that the figure was this close that the guard noticed something unusual about their E.V.A. suit. The skull painted across the new arrival’s visor looked a little… greasy?
‘Mate, what the heck is that bloody awful smell?’ the guard asked, wrinkling his nose up. ‘Have you just dropped one?’
The new arrival reached up with their left hand and popped his visor up. The face beneath beamed a broad smile.
‘No, but you have mate!’ Sivia said as he brought the large spanner that he was hiding behind his back, up sharply, smashing it across the side of the guard’s face.
The surprised guard dropped like a stone with a satisfying crunch as his jaw crumbled. Sivia bent and dragged his unconscious body inside the scanner room, closed and locked the hatch behind him and thrust the spanner into the mechanism to prevent anyone else from opening the hatch. He pulled a handful of plastic cable-ties out from his inside pocket and bound the unconscious pirate’s arms and legs. Then Sivia stood up and turned towards the scanner machinery.
‘Right then,’ he said out loud. ‘Let’s see if anyone’s listening out there, shall we?’
McGagh gave a grunt as he heaved on the end of his rifle. The barrel of the rifle was wedged in to a minute crack that the troopers had managed to open up between the hatch and the frame. A group of the strongest troopers were hauling as hard as they could on the hatch, using any hand hold that they could find purchase upon with their fingertips. The pneumatics that held the hatch closed were whining and complaining but they still held fast. With a bellow of anger from McGagh, the rifle slipped out of the crack in the hatch again and the hatch slammed shut with a resounding clang. McGagh finally lost his temper and began clubbing the stubborn hatch with the butt of his rifle, taking his frustration out on the solid metal.
‘Stupid, fecking…’
‘Hey, McGagh!’ Stofan shouted. ‘That’s not going to do us any good, you daft sod.’
McGagh stopped swinging and turned towards Stofan, panting and glaring. ‘No. But it makes me feel a hell of a lot better,’ he growled.
‘Is this what you lot do for fun?’ called a new voice from somewhere above their heads.
The whole platoon snapped their eyes up to where the voice had come from. Several rifles were aimed at the figure who was sticking half way out of a snipe tube, high up on the bulkhead. It was a young engineer and she was beaming down at their surprised faces with obvious glee.
‘How did you get up there?’ called out an amazed Stofan.
‘Snipe tube,�
� shouted the young woman, jerking her thumb back towards the tunnel behind her. ‘Come on. Pirates have boarded the boat. The Captain’s dead. I can lead you nearly all the way to the control room through here.’
After a short silence while the troopers mulled over the news of Captain Bird’s death, McGagh piped up, ‘Where’s Commander Trenchard?’
‘In an E.V.A. suit, outside in the asteroid belt with the boat’s main circuit breakers,’ the young snipe called. He’s trying to stop them from getting underway. He left orders to attempt to re-take the control room.’
Stofan’s gaze moved from the figure in the tunnel down to the deck. It was a drop of some twenty feet.
‘We need to build some stairs. Move it!’ she shouted.
Instantly the troopers began lugging heavy crates and ammunition boxes over towards the wall, stacking them on top of one another to form a surmountable pile.
‘Better load up,’ said Stofan to McGagh.
McGagh nodded and ripped the cover off a nearby ammo crate. He clicked a cartridge home into his own rifle and then began handing the other live rounds out to the busying troopers.
CHAPTER 10 “ALPHA MIKE FOXTROT”
Trenchard brought his rifle up and around in an arc, strafing the area where the pirate was floating towards him. The volley just about cut the pirate in half, his lunch spilling out from his ripped open guts and floating away into the cold vacuum, becoming instant frozen dinner. With the sudden decrease in pressure the man’s lungs expanded and ruptured. Salmon pink foam began to spew from lips that were beginning to turn an icy blue. Two down, four left. Trenchard had no more time to appreciate the pirate’s gradual death from exposure to the freezing vacuum as two more of his shipmates rounded a corner and raised their weapons.
Trenchard pushed off from the nearest floating boulder and sailed out of their range. The next few minutes were a limb-wrenching race for life through the asteroid’s interior. Each time the pirates came close, Trenchard hit a wall of floating rock and pushed off in a different direction, spinning and rolling to avoid random bursts of rifle fire. Then, just as he thought his limbs would pop from the exertion, Trenchard saw his chance. As he floated past a deeply creviced rock, he pulled a fragmentation grenade from his belt and shoved it deep inside the crack, pressing the activation button as he went. Slamming his back into an opposing rock wall took the wind out of his chest, but Trenchard hit the steering jets hard, counting in his head, nine, eight, seven…
This was what he had been saving his fuel for. He raced away from the primed grenade at breakneck speed. Just as the pirates rounded the corner and raised their rifles, the grenade exploded. Trenchard didn’t look back. For a second, the dark interior of the asteroid was silently lit up like a summer day. The reflection from the sparkling minerals in the walls was almost blinding. Then the impact of the shrapnel and expanding gas of the explosion hit him, throwing him forwards with extreme velocity and shredding his suit. The fabric of his space-suit immediately began to self-heal, but there was no way to avoid the large boulder in front of him. He slammed into it and his right arm was instantly crushed. He could hear the bone break inside his suit with a loud snap and he dropped his rifle which spun away into the darkness.
The whole asteroid heaved outwards like the chest of a giant taking a deep breath. Then slowly the rocks began to collapse back inwards, dragged back by gravity. Boulders and lumps of iron began to smash randomly into each other. The interior of the asteroid became a whirling barrage of spinning splintered rock. Must get out, thought Trenchard through the pain of his broken arm, must get free.
Trenchard saw an opening and hit the jets again, shooting out from the asteroid like a cork from a bottle of champagne. He checked the mirror on his left hand. Two of the pirates were still following him. One of them had a rifle. The pirate slowly raised his weapon. There was nothing that Trenchard could do. He was a sitting duck. He was dead.
WHUMP!
With a blinding flash, the empty space near to the Might of Fortitude was suddenly filled by a massive, decelerating spacecraft. The gravity wave of the decelerating ship sent out a ripple that made the Might, the Onibaba and every nearby asteroid, bob like ducks on a pond. Trenchard looked up, his heart singing. It was the Breath of Vengeance, the ship that had dropped them off in the asteroid belt. Sivia’s message must have got through. A large ship like the Breath of Vengeance shouldn’t jump into the asteroid belt like that, certainly not so close to a smaller ship, but if they had come in further away, then they would have lost the element of surprise. It was a dangerous manoeuvre. Even now, the Breath was taking heavy damage from asteroid collisions as it veered towards the Might of Fortitude and the pirate ship Onibaba.
Inside the Might of Fortitude’s control room, Captain Smiler’s Executive Officer saw the Breath of Vengeance arrive on a monitor screen and swore quietly to herself.
‘We’re leaving. NOW!’ she shouted, donning her helmet and racing up the exit ladder, closely followed by her quietly panicking comrades.
The top of the ladder opened out into a broad passageway that led to other areas of the vessel. The Exec and her fellow pirates stopped short, just outside the hatch, causing those behind to pile into their backs in their hurry to escape. The Exec stared in disbelief and raised her hands in resignation of surrender. The entire corridor was filled with the troopers of the Might of Fortitude, each one with a Vicar rifle levelled at a pirate’s chest or face. At their head, a stern looking Stofan and a grinning McGagh met the Exec’s gaze levelly.
‘Drop your weapons. Don’t move!’ Stofan shouted threateningly.
‘I would listen to the lady if I were you,’ McGagh sneered. ‘We’ve all had a particular pisser of a bad day!’
Every pirate threw their weapons to the floor and surrendered. Then suddenly the corridor lurched unsteadily, making the troopers stagger and grab for any nearby hand hold.
‘What the hell is that?’ said Stofan glancing up.
‘Gravity wave from another ship arriving,’ said McGagh. ‘A big one too!’
The Might and the Onibaba were rocking dangerously, docked together as they were in a deadly embrace, pneumatic clamps straining with the effort. A couple of attack gun-ships that had been launched from the nearest hangar bay of the Breath of Vengeance were already speeding towards the scene, dodging and weaving between the random lumps of hurtling rock. The docking clamps of the Onibaba groaned like an angry bear and quickly disengaged from the airlock of the Might. The Onibaba hit full thrust, scraped along the Might’s hull in a shower of sparks and then powered away from the area as fast as it could manage. The gun-ships were too small to take her on and the Breath of Vengeance was too slow and massive, but they both did a good job of chasing her off with a few rounds of plasma fire.
One of the gun-ships rounded towards Trenchard. He quickly hit the distress alarm on his suit’s chest unit and began to wave frantically, warning lights attached to his wrists blinking furiously. The last thing that he wanted now was to be shot by his own navy. He could just see the pilot of the nearest gun-ship give him a grin and a thumbs-up through the cockpit window as they sped past. Then he heard the pilot contacting the command ship over the radio as his suit’s communicator came within radio range and locked into the naval frequency.
‘Gun-ship kilo bravo zulu, niner fiver wun. Target acquired. Alpha mike foxtrot.’
Alpha mike foxtrot was ancient radio jargon in the phonetic alphabet. It was a way of saying a fond farewell to an enemy target; adios mother-fucker.
A second later the gunner leased off a couple of rounds from the mini-guns that were mounted on the side of the gun-ship and turned the two remaining pirates that were chasing Trenchard into a thin red mist. Trenchard sagged inside his E.V.A. suit as the second gun-ship pulled carefully alongside him, finally feeling the searing pain from his broken arm as the adrenaline of the chase subsided.
CHAPTER 11 “DEBRIEFING”
The next day, Trenchard had showered, ea
ten and drunk well. He had also slept like a log in a temporary bunk that had been allocated to him aboard the Breath of Vengeance. His arm had been bone-welded and set in a carbon fibre splint. The drugs the medics had given him had assured him of a good night’s sleep. Now he was sitting and waiting nervously outside Admiral Fife’s office. Fife was the Admiral who oversaw the Wolverine prototype project. He was therefore Captain Bird’s immediate boss for the mission. Trenchard could only wonder how Fife would react after having the prototype nearly stolen and Captain Bird murdered.
Trenchard was roused from his inner thoughts as another brightly clad Admiral swept abruptly along the corridor followed by a group of office flunkies. You could always spot Admirals very easily, dressed as they were in bright red uniforms. They always reminded him of a cooked lobster. Trenchard vaguely recognised the middle-aged woman as Admiral Turner, the officer who Bird had been ordered to report to after the Mars uprising. She had instructed Bird and Trenchard to forget about what they had seen in the insurgent’s headquarters, but Trenchard would never forget the sight of the bodies, slain by the sword of the black-clad assassin.
Trenchard stood a little awkwardly with his arm in a sling and attempted a cursory salute. Turner completely ignored Trenchard as she passed and then she and her flunkies disappeared into a meeting room a little further along the corridor. What was she doing here, Trenchard thought with interest? There were rather a lot of Admirals aboard such a relatively unimportant ship like the Breath of Vengeance. Something big must be going on.
Further thought on the matter was curtailed by another figure with very shapely hips who marched quickly down the corridor towards him. It was a young woman in her mid-twenties. She was astonishingly beautiful; long dark hair tied back into a pony-tail, with black eye make-up and fingernail varnish. She was obviously a civilian, dressed in plain black combats, but she had the air of someone who’d had previous military training. As the woman drew nearer, Trenchard put on his best pulling smile and looked straight at her, making a conscious effort to look her in the face and not stare at her breasts.
The Space Navy Series Books One & Two: Including the Kindle novellas Josiah Trenchard and the Might of Fortitude & Josiah Trenchard and the Morgenstern Page 10