“Oh. Can you tell which droid she was shooting at?”
“Er…one of the ones you sent right. Kind of hard to figure out the angles with our displays. We’re not a warship, you know.”
“But just one shot?” asked Crawford. “Only the one turret is firing?”
“Only one is moving,” said Sheila. “I think I can see our friend in the gunner’s bubble.”
“Okay, gang,” said Crawford. “Let’s keep this woman’s attention on us.”
“Right, boss!”
“Oops! She’s seen my Ferret,” said Sheila gaily. “Wow, she’s mad, too. Nya, nya! Can’t catch me!”
“She’s trying to fire on your Ferret?”
“Trying, but I’m only thirty meters away and she ain’t near quick enough. Pooh, she’s given up. Watch out, guys, she’s gunning for you now.”
Crawford’s droid was only two hundred meters away from Exeter. The cameras on it could see the laser turret clearly.
“Shit!” The exclamation from close at hand almost made Crawford pull his goggles off to look.
“What happened?”
“The bitch nailed my droid!” snarled Kurtz Renni. “Damn, I was just starting to have fun, too. Can I take another one out, boss?”
“No way, Kurtz!” laughed Fred Kimmal. “You’ve had your shot, now watch how a master—crap!”
Crawford glanced at his display and saw that a second droid was now spinning away in pieces. Hell, this was getting expensive. “Everyone back off. Open up the range. Make yourselves harder to hit.”
There were a few muttered protests, but his people obeyed. Crawford, however, flipped one particular switch on his console and angled the joysticks forward. Almost immediately, a warning light appeared in his goggles telling him he was exceeding safe limits on his velocity. But he had already overridden the interlocks and he pressed on. Exeter grew quickly in his vision and then he engaged the reverse thrust. More warnings flashed, telling him he was about to collide with something.
I know that, you stupid machine. He was shaving things very close, and he was well aware he was going to hit the cruiser. The impact would do no harm to the heavily armored warship, but he was hoping he could slow down enough that his droid would survive. A moment later the view in his goggles jerked around crazily as it hit.
The fact that the cameras were still working was a good sign. He quickly looked over the status readout and was relieved that almost everything was still functioning. One of the thrusters was out, but he could compensate. He used the remaining thrusters to keep the droid close to the ship’s hull. He turned it around and saw that he was about fifty meters from the laser turret which had destroyed his other droids. He didn’t think it could fire at him from this close.
“Okay, Miss Citrone, let’s see how you deal with this,” he said to himself as he deployed the droid’s cutting torch.
* * * * *
Carlina flinched when she heard the faint clang of something hitting Exeter. She swore in rage and despair when she saw that one of the droids was right up against the hull of the cruiser. How had it closed the distance so quickly? She had noticed the one droid trying to sneak in from her right, but she thought she had time to deal with it. Not so, it was here. She swung the laser turret around as far as it would go but cursed again when she could not bring it to bear on the droid. Damn! What would the stinking thing do now? She wiped sweat from her forehead and made the mistake of shaking her hand. Tiny droplets sprayed away in all directions in the zero-G of the gunner’s bubble.
She was breathing heavily and on the verge of panic. This wasn’t supposed to be happening! After she had destroyed the first droid she had hoped Crawford would give up. When nothing more happened for a while, she had gone back to her cutting and had actually gotten into the arms locker. She had the reassuring feel of two laser pistols stuck in her waistband, but it was not nearly reassuring enough. The proximity alarm had sounded again and she scrambled back to her turret only to find a whole swarm of droids heading her way.
She destroyed two of them and the rest appeared to be running, but now this other one was on the hull. A quick glance at her display showed that the others were moving toward her again, too. Damn, damn, damn. Okay, she could not hit the one on the hull, but she could still hit the others. She swung the turret around again. She fired and missed. Her IFF monitor was making angry noises, but she had overridden that. She knew she was hitting the other ships, but the light laser couldn’t do much damage even to an unarmored merchant ship. And she had no choice. She lined up a dodging target and squeezed the triggers. She shouted in triumph as the droid disintegrated.
An instant later she shrieked in alarm as something big loomed into view by her gunner’s station. It was the Maker-cursed droid! From this close it looked incredibly menacing. All of its grappler arms and tools were deployed like some huge, mutant pocket knife. As she watched, frozen in shock, it moved over to the turret and grabbed the projecting laser cannon.
“Go away!” she screamed. “Leave me alone!”
The polarized armorglas of her bubble darkened suddenly as the droid’s cutting torch came to life. In horror, Carlina realized it was cutting right through her laser. She tried to shake the droid off by moving the turret, but it hung on and continued to cut. A dozen warning lights began to flash on her controls.
“Stop it! Stop it, you bastard!” she sobbed.
A moment later all the readouts went to red. The weapon was wrecked. What could she do? The other lasers! There were a dozen more turrets she could use. In a flash she unbuckled herself from her chair, swung through the hatch, and closed it behind her. She stumbled along the accessway toward the next turret.
* * * * *
“Okay gang, see how it’s done?” asked Crawford to his crew.
“Sure, boss! Can we go back in?”
“Yup, keep her busy.” He paused for a moment and glanced at Sheila. She still had her image goggles on and did not notice that he had taken his off. He toggled a switch on the com panel. “Kurtz? You wanted another shot, didn’t you? You can take over my droid for a while. I need to… take a break.”
“Sure thing, boss! Thanks!” Crawford transferred control to Renni’s panel and then got out of his chair and headed for the hatch. He was just slipping through when he heard Shelia shouting at him.
“Chuck! Just where do you think you’re going?”
* * * * *
Carlina cursed in frustration as her laser was wrecked—again. This was the third one she’d lost, but she had managed to nail another of the droids. She was just heading for another turret when the alarm sounded again. She pulled out her hand-comp and looked.
“No!”
She came to a stop and slumped against the bulkhead, gasping. She had tied her small computer into the bridge sensor station. It now showed her that a bogey was only a few dozen meters away from the other side of the ship. It was bigger than any of the droids.
Much bigger.
She pulled out one of her pistols and sprinted for the bridge.
Chapter Four
Charles Crawford stared at the light gray wall that was the hull of the heavy cruiser Exeter and tried to decide if he was feeling excited or just plain scared. Scared, yeah, he was definitely scared. Annoyed, too. He glanced over to where Ensign Frichette was seated in the co-pilot’s chair. He had managed to slip away from Sheila’s apron-strings and get down to the shuttle—only to find Frichette already there. The lad had blushed slightly but merely said that he had promised he would not join the boarding party—he’d said nothing about coming along on the shuttle transporting the boarding party. Crawford, himself caught playing hooky, could hardly protest, so here they both were.
“There’s one, sir,” said the shuttle’s pilot. He and Frichette looked where the man was pointing and saw the clearly painted outline of an emergency airlock. He was fairly certain that none of the ship’s defense lasers could bear on them here. Fairly certain.
“All
right, latch us on,” said Frichette. Crawford had nearly given the order at the same time but caught himself. The ensign was in command, he reminded himself. Doing a good job of it, too, it seemed. The boy was certainly nervous, but he concealed it quite well.
“Yes, sir, extending docking collar now. Moving in to attach.”
The shuttle slowly edged closer to the side of the cruiser while the pilot carefully aligned his vessel so the collar extending from their own airlock would exactly line up with the warship’s lock. As he watched the operation, he noticed Frichette stifling a yawn and rubbing at his eyes. The regulations called for a full day of rest after revival before doing any serious activity. He glanced at the pilot; he had been revived even more recently. How was he feeling?
Well enough, apparently, because it took only a minute or so before the magnetic clamps on the docking collar grabbed hold of the cruiser’s hull and locked them down tight.
“Hard dock complete, sir. I’m reading a good seal.”
“Nicely done.” Frichette and he unstrapped from their seats and moved back into the passenger compartment. A dozen people waited for him there. Ten were reliable crewmen and one petty officer Chief Duncan had picked out for the operation. Two were workmen that Crawford had provided—Greg VanVean and Pawli Samms.
Crawford went over to the airlock and opened the inner door. The lock itself was barely large enough for two men, but with the docking collar pressurized, they could leave the inner door open and still open the outer door. Even so, they were all wearing vac suits, just in case. He entered the lock and pressed a button. The outer door hissed open, revealing the two-meter long docking collar and the emergency airlock leading to Exeter. There was a small control panel next to the lock door. He floated over to it and pressed the entry button.
Nothing happened.
He tried again and still nothing happened. This was not unexpected, simply annoying. On a civilian ship there would have been a manual hand-crank, but military ships were a bit touchier about security and that feature was missing. He pushed himself back into the shuttle. “All right, the door won’t open, we are going to have to cut. Greg, that’s your department.”
“Right, boss,” said the big man. “Pawli, let’s get to work.” The two workers unstrapped and began collecting their gear. While they were doing that, Crawford went back to the shuttle’s cockpit and reported his situation back to his people on Neshaminy. They informed him that Citrone was no longer manning the laser turrets, so that indicated she was aware of what they were doing. Sheila chewed him out for a few minutes for his ‘school boy stunt’ until he told her he had to go.
To avoid fidgeting uselessly in front of the others, he stayed in the cockpit and stared out at the Rift Fleet. It was a different perspective from here than aboard Neshaminy. He was closer to the outside edge of the cluster and only a few cruisers and destroyers were visible against the unremitting blankness of hyperspace. He was no stranger to hyperspace, most of his jobs were gate construction and usually one end of the gate was in some system without a gate there already. That meant the only way to get there was by starship. But he’d never been on a trip like this before. When they dropped back into normal space, the stars of home would be three thousand light years away…
“Boss?” VanVean was calling to him, startling him out of his musings. “We’ve got the controls uncovered. You might want to see what we’re doing.”
Crawford moved back into the passenger compartment and then into the lock, Frichette following him like a puppy. There was a considerable cloud of smoke from all the cutting, roiling oddly in the zero-G. The shuttle’s air recyclers weren’t designed for this sort of load and he was glad he was breathing his suit’s air. He pushed himself up to look past VanVean’s broad shoulder and saw that a rather neat hole had been cut around the airlock’s control panel and that the whole unit was now loose, still connected by some trailing wires.
“Pretty standard design,” said VanVean without preamble. “What do you think, Pawli? Can you jimmy it?”
“Think so, boss,” said the other worker. “The only thing wrong here is that there’s no power. Probably cut off further inside. I just need to tie in a portable power unit directly to the motor that runs the door and it should open up. I can see the leads right over there…I think.”
“Well, let’s find out.”
“Right.” The man produced a portable power unit, uncoiled its leads, and then stuck his head into the hole they had made. He began to let off a barely audible stream of cursing which apparently was just the way he worked rather than any comment on what was happening. In surprisingly short time he moved away from the ship’s hull. “Okay, let’s see how this does.” He activated the power feed, and to Crawford’s satisfaction, the airlock door slid open. Belatedly, he realized that someone might be waiting in ambush and he fumbled out his stunner, but fortunately, the compartment which was revealed was empty.
He led the way into the airlock. He noted in relief that the control panel by the inner door had some glowing lights on it. The exterior one had seemed completely dead. “All right, everyone, on your toes.” He hit the entry button and the door slid open at once. He cautiously poked his head through, stunner ready, and looked around. The corridor on the other side was deserted. He let out his breath and keyed his communicator.
“Crawford to Neshaminy. We’re in.”
* * * * *
Another alarm on the control panels made Carlina look up from what she was doing. The main status board showed that emergency airlock twelve had just been opened. She cursed. They were aboard. This was sooner than she had hoped. Things were moving too damn fast, but she was nearly done here. Once she was finished she could…what? Her breath was coming in gasps and it was terribly hard to keep her concentration focused. She had one last thing to do, one last thing before the end.
The end was coming, she was quite sure of that. Crawford and his people were coming for her and there was no way for her to stop them. Everything had begun to go wrong from the instant he had found her in the cold-sleep compartment on Neshaminy. Looking back, she could see a dozen different things she might have done to prevent this disaster, but it was all too late now. In a few minutes or a few hours they were going to catch her. She’d fight them, but she would lose in the end. There were just too many of them. Even if she managed to kill or drive off this first boarding party there would be more. And she could not stay awake forever. She could barely stay awake now. How long had it been since she slept? She couldn’t remember.
She typed the last command into her terminal and sighed in relief. For hours she had been cursing the fact that she did not have the access codes to do the things she had wanted. She couldn’t use the automatic weapons systems, hell, she could not even shut the emergency bulkheads to keep the invaders out. But this was her com panel and she did have the codes to make it do what she wanted! The bastards might beat her today, but she was quite sure she would win in the end. Yes. She checked her instructions one last time and then locked down the terminal and blanked the screen.
She stood up and began struggling into her gear.
* * * * *
Charles Crawford cautiously peered around the corner and nervously looked for any sign of their quarry. His people clustered eagerly behind him. They seemed to consider this a big adventure and were chattering away in some sort of pseudo military-speak which they probably picked up from watching the vids. He, unlike any of them, had some real idea of what a boarding action could be like. Many years before he’d been on a gate construction job when a warship had escorted in a merchant ship and the pirate it had caught trying to take the merchant. There had been a lot of casualties and the construction site’s medical facilities had been pressed into service. Crawford had seen the dead and wounded being brought off those ships and looked around a bit afterward. The sights he’d seen were still fresh in his memory. The pirates had fought with a savage desperation and had neither given nor expected quarter.
Who the hell was she? He’d been asking himself that question nearly from the moment this whole nightmare began. The obvious answer was someone who didn’t want the Protectorate of Andera to succeed in establishing a foothold on the far side of the Rift. Unfortunately, there were far too many someones who fit that description. It probably wasn’t the Petrunans. They had gotten across first, but the Hebyrnans, out of fear, pride, or just spite, had quickly followed and browbeat them into accepting a relatively tiny slice of territory in the new arm, while they laid claim to the rest. The Petrunans were on friendly terms with the Protectorate and if they were going to be sabotaging anyone it would be the Hebyrnans.
He supposed it could be the Hebyrnans; they had made themselves pompously obnoxious about their claims to the Perseus Arm and had warned other nations to stay clear. But the Rift Fleet was heading for a spot a long, long way from Hebyrnan territory and Andera had beaten up on them sufficiently during the last war that Crawford doubted they wanted to start another one so soon.
“All clear, sir?” Frichette’s question from right behind him made him jump slightly. He still couldn’t believe he’d let the ensign talk him into coming along. Every argument he’d raised about Frichette being too valuable to risk was instantly countered by one that he, himself, as head of gate construction, was also too valuable to risk. When it became clear that the spacers, who made up the bulk of the boarding party, were far more comfortable taking orders from Frichette, he had relented. The boy seemed nervous, but determined. He was carrying an antique, but still very deadly, force-dagger in addition to a hand stunner. They all had stunners, as Neshaminy’s arms locker not being able to provide anything more lethal.
“Looks clear. But we’re getting close to the bridge. Stay alert.” He eased out around the corner and moved down the corridor to the next intersection, stunner at the ready. His team followed, making far too much noise.
Across the Great Rift Page 6