He pulled Wilkerson from the deck. “I’m all right, Sarge,” the boy said as he knelt to help another get to his feet. Tsu nodded. It looked like they were all reviving from the blink.
“Get ready,” came the word from the bridge. “We’re spinning to give you a tangential boost on launch.”
“All right, form up,” Tsu ordered. “Time to do or die for the fucking politicians.” The lock’s inner door slammed shut three seconds later, cutting off the noise from the corridor. “Systems on,” he shouted as he slammed his own faceplate closed. His ears popped as the lock’s air was evacuated. His suit pressure quickly compen-sated.
His troops had already formed their pods; two grapplers with each torch bearer. They all knew the drill and were lined up, ready for launch. He dreaded what they would face on the other side of that lock.
He took position at the lead, lifted his right arm, and waited for the red light. When the lock hatch opened he saw the stars whipping past as the ship spun on its axis. Christ, how many mps were they going to give the launch?
“Go!” The light came on, his arm fell, gravity disappeared, and fifteen marines were thrown into space, each pod flocking to ensure maximum survival as they approached the projected path of the other ship.
In the distance he saw the other groups flying as well. One was ahead of them and the other delayed by fifteen seconds.
He prayed that the ship had timed their own launch properly.
Fireman Third Class Susan caHenrath could practically hear her heart pounding as she stood before the hatch for her first combat. Her head still ached from the damned blink and there was a sour taste in her mouth. Her stomach felt empty and cold and she had to pee really, really badly. Why was time going so slowly? What was all that shouting in the corridors about? It was as bad as the time she and Phil Crenshaw had tossed the . . . Oh God, she hadn’t thought about Phil for months and now she was . . .
The light blinked red, the hatch flew open, and there were ten million stars racing by and somebody was yelling. She was thrown away from the ship as gravity disappeared and followed her two grapplers into the dizzying whirlpool of stars. Sue clutched her torch tight to her chest as they all flew away from the ship. She prayed that the officers had calculated their jump correctly. If so it would place them above the enemy’s hull just as it passed.
Would she see the approaching ship? Wouldn’t it be moving too fast? What if it changed course and hit them? What if they missed it completely? Would their own ship come back for them? Hell, would those dumb sailors be able to find them? What if the . . .
She glimpsed a huge metal wall as the enemy ship suddenly flashed by, just a few meters away. There was a snap at her back and, suddenly she was accelerating as she was yanked at right angles. She twisted her head and saw her two grapplers busily gathering their skeins that had stuck to the ship’s hull. They were reeling in the lines like fish that had caught a boat.
She released the safety on her torch before her feet hit and looked around for the color tag that Sarge used to mark her spot. There! She checked the seam he’d identified. It looked as if there had been a repair to the armored plating. She tilted her torch, made sure the others were not too close, and fired.
The other two firemen began working on the opposite side of the plate. Their torches threw an actinic light on the entire group. Several of the grapplers were ducking to avoid the gobs of molten metal that flew off the burn. They already had their lines secured to the plate’s center.
“Clear,” Tsu radioed the instant the firemen’s torches completed their circuit of the plate. Sue stood back as the grapplers pulled it free and let it fly away. She quickly began burning through the insulation, deck plates, and miscella-neous cables and pipes that they’d exposed. The entire section exploded as soon as someone made the final cut that weakened the structure. Air rushed out in a cloud of debris, along with an unlucky, writhing crewman.
She had no time to dwell on the dying rebel as he flew past. She brought her torch to cross arms and dropped into the hole. Her grapplers followed, their small arms already swinging around to fire on anyone in sight.
The location on the door said “B-34.” That was pretty close to the bridge. “Follow me,” Sarge said as soon as everyone was inside. She followed close behind him into the corridor.
The amount of control Earth had over its colonies diminished as the colonies be-came more self-sufficient. Soon commercial ties began to grow between the scat-tered worlds and too, the desire of some colonies to control others. A strange sort of war emerged, with capture and control of the ships that traveled between the worlds being the key.
Capturing an enemy ship had two purposes. First, it denied the enemy of its ability to traffic with other worlds, thus striking an economic blow. Second, it kept that ship from being used to capture other ships and often meant taking that world out of the war entirely.
Both could be accomplished by destroying a ship, but every combatant knew the cost that represented. No one wished to waste such a valuable resource. Capture was the only alternative.
But how does one capture a ship that has the ability to jump light years? Detection was still limited by light speed so a quarter-light jump’s destination could not be detected for three months at least.
The strategies that emerged were to either lie in wait near the approach lines to a world or to boldly attack another world in hopes that its ship, or that of its allies, was there.
The battles that emerged were more like seventeenth century naval battles than twenty-second century duels. Ballistic weapons were fired to disable the opposing ship. Boarding crews were sent to take command by whatever means they could.
And men died horrible deaths in the process.
Sergeant Tsu checked the deck panel. “B-34. All right troops. We need to get down one and up thirty to reach the freaking bridge.” His troops immediately began moving up the corridor, arms at the ready. One of the firemen burned through the first blast door quickly and died in a burst of enemy small arms.
“Shit, they’re armed!” One of the grapplers shouted before he too went down in a splatter of blood and guts.
Tsu’s remaining men immediately dropped into file formation; the front two providing covering fire while the second two bracketed individuals over their heads. Another of his marines went down. He saw one of the rebel squad swing his rifle toward him. Is this it? he wondered even as he started to duck.
Wham! A chunk of the rebel’s helmet blew off and, with it, a rush of snow as the moist air inside the man’s suit evacuated. Tsu hoped nobody had a patch handy. That would be one less rebel they had to contend with. “Good shot.”
“Thanks, Sarge,” Wilderson said as a shot blew away a patch of wall next to his rifle.
Despite her training, despite the endless drills and simulations, despite everything she’d been told to expect, Sue caHenrath was still scared. None of it had prepared her for the sight of someone she knew being cut in half by enemy fire. It could easily have been her. What was she supposed to be doing now? Oh lord, everybody was shooting and Sarge was shouting and she couldn’t think and her hands were shaking and she thought she might have peed.
Images of her little dog, her friend Phil, her mother, and a thousand other minutiae of her short life before joining the marines flashed unbidden through her mind. The marine in front of her fell forward with most of his back gone.
A surge of intense anger overcame her. She wouldn’t let these bastards kill her. And there was no way she was going to let them kill her buddies! She screamed and hit the torch’s trigger before she even realized what she was doing. Immediately the corridor burst into flame. The firestorm incinerated the bodies on the deck, scorched the paint off the walls, and did gods-knew-what to the enemy squad.
Oh God, what had she done?
Tsu saw his faceplate blistering from the intense radiation before he realized the source. He threw an arm out and pushed the fireman aside, ready to chew her out for f
iring a torch in close quarters, when he realized that her action had saved all their lives. “Drop the damn torch and use your Goddamn rifle,” he ordered as he slapped caHenrath’s helmet.
The firestorm had cost them. Four of his marines had flame-damaged suits, one was wounded from the firefight, and the three who’d been shot first were now cinders on the deck. That left him with twelve effectives. Christ, one of them could have been him! “Weapons?” he commanded.
“One torch, nine rifles, one side arm,” Schilling called out. The other arms were molten lumps. Tsu kicked a smoking rifle aside as he pushed forward over the seven blackened stumps that used to be men.
“Coming about,” Helm cried as Pride’s steering jets fired and the big inertial gyros twisted the ship on her axis. The stars wheeled around on the screens as the ship turned toward Invincible.
“Sixteen minutes,” Intelligence warned. That was the estimated time remaining until Invincible’s drives had enough charge built up to blink away. “I think we hit the dorsal steering jets,” Guns reported.
“Captain, we’ve got a hull breach amidships,” Chief reported. “Damage control in action. Small arms, we think.”
That meant a boarding party, for sure. “Any damage from shot?”
The Chief checked. “Some hull impacts. No penetrations.” That was good news. Invincible’s cannon could easily destroy his small ship.
Captain Faradaddie ran a quick calculation to see how much time it might take for his own marines to reach their objectives. They would probably take five to eight minutes to breach the hull, another twelve or fifteen minutes to fight their way through the corridors and compartments to the bridge, engineering, or life support objectives. That gave them only five minutes to render her ineffective before she could blink to safety. That is, if they weren’t all killed before then. There was damn little slack in that schedule.
“Fire main engines as soon as we’re lined up for another pass,” he ordered. Velocity was what he needed. Momentum. Every extra meter per second he could add to the ballistic cannon’s shot counted.
“On screen,” Visuals called. Faradaddie looked up to see that Invincible had changed direction and was heading away on an oblique angle. “Son of a bitch. Alter course to intercept.”
“Right thirty, up twenty,” Helm acknowledged. As the mains fired the image of the other ship drifted off the center of the screen.
“Correct that damned precession,” Faradaddie ordered and felt the thrum of the steering jets firing through the soles of his feet.
Tsu was down one more rifle, a grappler this time, lost to a shattered faceplate. Some rebel smart-ass had evacuated all the air in the corridors as a defensive measure. Probably expected them to be stupid enough to open their suits.
CaHenrath was still lugging that damned torch along like it was her fucking baby. He hoped there was no charge left in it. Gods, she could kill them all if she fired it in these confined spaces.
He checked their location. B-3. Good, that meant they had to go down one and just a little bit forward to reach the bridge. Piece of cake, that is, once they got the damned troops guarding this passage taken care of. He checked the time. Chief had said he had twenty minutes, plus or minus three, to reach the bridge and he had already wasted eighteen.
They were on borrowed time.
On board Invincible Captain Zaggat fumed. The smaller Fleet ship was being clever, turning to track their new tack so quickly. “How much time left?” he asked. “Two minutes,” Navigation replied.
“Spinning up,” Engines reported.
“Target set,” Navigation said. “Quarter light.”
That should be enough to get out of this damned pickle, Zaggat thought. It was a bad piece of luck, running into the enemy just as they were departing. He hardly had enough weigh to turn to meet them and get Guns to shoot before the bastard went whipping by. Well, Invincible was ready now and God help him when he tried that passing maneuver again.
“Target acquired,” Guns said quietly. “Full load.”
“Automatic fire,” Zaggat ordered. “Set a two-second bracket. Three loads.” There was no way they could avoid running into that much armament. “Steering jets and engine,” he ordered. He wanted her knocked out of the battle, not destroyed.
“On screen,” Visuals said. The other ship was racing toward them, its image expanding as he watched.
“Twelve thousand meters,” Navigation reported and, a few seconds later. “Ten, now.”
Zaggat smiled as he looked at the track projections. Their closing speed was close to five hundred meters per second.
No fucking way they could miss.
The two ships approached to within one-fifty kilometers. “Are our drives spun up yet?”
“Aye, Sir. Set for one-quarter light. Blink on your command.”
“Stand by.” With less than a minute to go he had to assume that none of his marines had reached their targets. “She changed course awfully fast. Guns, are you sure you hit those steering jets?”
“Confirmed, Captain,” Guns replied. “She can’t turn to one side.”
Faradaddie wondered which side that was. They’d noted Invincible rotating as they passed. If so, in which direction was she vulnerable now? He peered at the screen, hoping to get some visual indication.
“Go beneath her,” he said.
“Aye,” Helm replied and adjusted their track with a microburst of the steering jets.
Navigation counted off the seconds. “Thirty seconds. Twenty-nine. Twentyeight . . .”
They were still too far apart. What if Invincible blinked away before the shots at her reaction engines impacted? Crap, if only there had been more time. “Fifteen. Fourteen. Thirteen.” Three bright flashes from Invincible. “She’s fired on us. Blink!” he ordered.
The universe contracted to a pinpoint and immediately expanded again into light so bright it made him wince. The headache hit immediately this time. It was a throbbing, pounding agony that originated behind his forehead and extended along both temples and down into his shoulders.
“Condition?” he shouted and listened as Guns, Helm, Navigation, Visuals, nd all the other bridge members reported in. Good, there were no losses to blink syndrome. “Check Engines, Chief,” he said. “Make certain they can still think straight.”
They had jumped a quarter of a light year, although the headache made it feel as if it had been further. Had Invincible blinked as well or had it remained long enough for his shots to do some damage? Well, they’d have to wait for their own drives to charge back up before they could go back to find out.
One of the crewmen handed him meds and a drink to wash them down. Hydration and pain relief were the only sure remedies for blink syndrome. He wished the drink were something stronger than distilled water, but he’d drink anything he could to rid himself of this headache.
“Stand easy until we can spin up again,” he said.
Captain Zaggat on Invincible was also nursing a headache, although this one was in the form of four marines who were too close to the bridge. “What’s the situation,” he asked the Chief.
“We captured the ones headed for the drives,” Chief Sanchez reported. “Our men are still holding off the group at life support. We’re sending a contingent to circle behind them. It won’t be long now before they’re neutralized.”
Which left the pesky foursome outside the bridge. They were in a secure position, backed up to the blast hatch, which they’d managed to render inoperable. That meant nobody could get behind them. It also meant that nobody could get off the bridge, either.
“They have a torch,” the Chief remarked grimly. “If push comes to shove . . . ” He left the rest unsaid. Zaggat knew that, if the situation got desperate enough, the four just might torch the corridor, fry the defensive forces, and melt the relatively thin bridge hatch. If they did that, it would kill everyone on the bridge with a fiery hell. That tactic wouldn’t do the four enemy marines any good either. In those narrow confines t
hey’d be just as incinerated as everyone else.
“Should we parlay?” Sanchez asked. “What can we offer them, besides their lives?”
“I’m not sure they’d accept. They’ve just seen their comrades killed. Probably ex-pect the other squads to have done no better. They know their own command will be able to locate this ship even if they manage to render us inoperable. If they’re suicidal they could fire that torch.” He couldn’t risk them being sensible enough not to suicide.
“Spin up to one light,” he ordered Engines without further thought. “Blink when ready and without my command.”
It was a hard decision, but the right one. A blink that far would knock out many of Invincible’s crew, possibly kill a couple, and drive a few others out of their minds. But those four marines in the passage had to be tired and worn down by what they had gone through. A one-light blink wouldn’t be easy on them. If he was lucky, it might even kill one or two.
Even if the blink didn’t disable the four, they couldn’t avoid noticing the blink. They couldn’t help but realize that much displacement would put Invincible beyond recovery.
The Chief looked puzzled. “A one-light blink, Captain?” Zaggat nodded. “Yes sir. I’ll warn the crew.” He reached for the intercom.
“No, they might intercept. I want the blink to hit them by surprise.” He just hoped the marine with the torch wasn’t one of those who went insane.
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