“Yes, my priestess!” Elai-Tura’an responded instantly as she carried out Tesh-Dar’s orders.
Throughout the ships of the second attack group, hundreds of warriors clad in what were to them primitive vacuum combat suits leaped from airlocks arranged along the ships’ flanks, steering toward the human ships that were even now turning to meet them.
* * *
“Primary kinetics, fire!” Capitaine de vaisseau Pierre Monet, captain of the Alliance heavy cruiser Victorieuse ordered over the orchestrated chaos of the bridge. The ship was rocked down to her keel as a set of twenty rounds of two hundred millimeter armor-piercing shells was fired from the ship’s five main gun turrets. While the current generation of lasers were generally more effective, kinetic weapons, not too far removed from the shells fired by wet navy ships centuries before, were far less expensive and could still be extremely lethal.
Just after the main guns fired, a low humming sound echoed through the ship, one of the smaller close-in defense lasers firing at incoming Kreelan projectiles.
Amiral Lefevre stood silently on the flag bridge, trying to make sense of the chaotic information on the tactical display. The task force to which Victorieuse was attached was involved in the equivalent of a knife fight with the second group of Kreelan ships that had jumped in. While this Kreelan force was only slightly bigger than his own task force, his formation had essentially lost any semblance of tactical integrity. The Alliance datalinks were still up, allowing their ships to coordinate their fire, but the targets were so close that the French ships were now in danger of committing fratricide.
“Triomphante reports she’s being boarded!” one of the tactical officers shouted.
“What?” Lefevre demanded, incredulous. He had heard the report of the Kreelans boarding the Terran survey ship, but had dismissed the notion. It was a ridiculous concept in modern space warfare.
“Boarders, sir!” the officer repeated. “They report aliens in vacuum suits are aboard, attacking the crew.”
“Sir,” Capitaine Monet interrupted, worry lining his face as he looked out from the view screen on the flag bridge, “sensors are showing a cloud of objects directly in front of us, on a direct vector from one of the enemy ships.”
Boarders, Lefevre thought again. What kind of enemy are we fighting who would throw away their people in such a fashion? But he didn’t hesitate. “Fight your ship, captain.”
Monet nodded, then ordered his weapons officer, “Put the forward batteries under manual control. Sweep those damn things from our path.”
* * *
Li’ara-Zhurah floated through space with the dozens of other warriors of the attack group she led, trying to reach one of the many human ships that were maneuvering wildly in the fierce melee taking place around her. She hated the primitive vacuum suit she had to wear, but had fought a series of fierce challenges for the honor of wearing it, and would have done so again without a second thought. Her blood sang with the rapture and pain of her sisters who now fought and died in the battle raging above the human planet. Her hands clenched reflexively in anticipation as her chosen target, one of the larger human cruisers, swept toward her, belching fire at the attacking warships of the Imperial fleet.
Some of the warriors in her attack group suddenly cried out in shock and agony as rapid-fire laser bolts suddenly began to sweep through their formation. The ancient design of the vacuum suits incorporated reflective shielding, but even the comparatively small amount of energy it still allowed to bleed through was enough to severely burn or kill the warrior wearing it.
“Attack!” Li’ara-Zhurah cried as she fired her small maneuvering thrusters in hopes of throwing off the enemy’s aim and getting that much closer to her target. “Move in!”
With a war cry from her surviving sisters, the group surged forward en masse toward the human warship that was now speeding directly toward them.
* * *
“They’re inside minimum range!” the tactical officer exclaimed as the cloud of targets on the Victorieuse’s tactical display passed inside the range rings of the close-in defense weapons. The weapons were primarily designed to stop missile and kinetic weapons, and had fared poorly against the alien attackers. The software that controlled the weapons’ targeting wasn’t expecting such slow moving targets, and while the small laser batteries had killed at least half of the aliens heading for the ship, that still left several dozen alive.
Capitaine Monet hit a button on his command console, opening a channel to the crew. “Prepare to repel boarders!” he barked, feeling mildly ridiculous saying those particular words, despite the potential severity of the situation. The Alliance Navy had no protocols for dealing with hostile boarders, and none of the ships carried marines who could mount an effective shipboard defense. In fact, the Alliance had no space marines at all: such a military force had been seen as unnecessary in the modern age. The only thing they had was a small armory containing light weapons that were used during inspection operations that had the potential to turn violent. Doing a quick calculation in his head, Monet ordered, “Every department is to send five men to the armory immediately to draw weapons! Defend the ship!”
Hearing Monet’s orders, Lefevre immediately opened a fleet-wide broadcast. “All ships,” he ordered, “be prepared to repel boarders. Repeat, be prepared to repel boarders.”
Just then there was the sound of an explosion somewhere aft, followed by an alarm that one of the secured compartments was losing air.
“The hull has been breached,” Monet hissed.
* * *
Matching velocity with the human ships that Li’ara-Zhurah and her warriors wanted to attack would have been virtually impossible without the inertial compensator that the builders had discovered far back in the Books of Time. It was on a level of technology comparable to what the humans possessed, so it was allowed by the priestess. Bulky and primitive compared to the energy bubbles used in the current day, the compensator was small enough to be fitted to a suit, and had originally been designed millennia before to allow boarding operations just such as this.
The human ship loomed before Li’ara-Zhurah, approaching faster than she would have thought possible. She could see its forward laser batteries still belching coherent light at her sisters; many had been lost, but many yet remained alive, their fury and bloodlust pounding in her own veins. The dull gray behemoth was nothing but angles and bulky protuberances, the muzzles of its larger weapons flashing with crimson brilliance as they fired. She knew that the ships of her fleet were absorbing a tremendous amount of damage while inflicting comparatively little to give her and her sisters the honor of taking the sword to the enemy. It was greater honor to the Empress to fight eye-to-eye with one’s foe than to smash away at them with the guns of warships. Her Children would hardly shy away from such carnage, but their goal was a battle of being against being, not one fought by technology.
Holding her breath, Li’ara-Zhurah fired a magnetic grapple ahead of her, hoping that the hulls of the human ships were composed of ferrous alloys to which the grapple could adhere. Yes! she thought triumphantly as the grapple clung to the skin of the human ship as it sailed by, automatically triggering the inertial compensator. Suddenly, almost magically, Li’ara-Zhurah was traveling alongside the ship, her velocity relative to the vessel having been equalized by the compensator.
But there was a price to be paid. The device had to do something with the huge amount of energy it had just absorbed in matching her velocity to that of the ship, and it converted it all to heat. Li’ara-Zhurah cried out as her back was suddenly seared by the red-hot compensator just before it automatically separated from her suit and drifted off into space.
Gasping at the pain, she triggered the miniature winch that reeled her to where the grapple had attached itself to the vessel’s metal skin. Once there, she activated the magnetic soles of her boots to anchor her feet to the alien hull. She looked around in wide-eyed wonder at the spectacle around her: ships everywhe
re, blasting away at one another with kinetic rounds and lasers; clouds of warriors maneuvering through space, trying to find their targets; and periodic eye-searing explosions as ships died. And it all took place in total, utter silence.
Bringing her mind back to the task at hand, she unwound a strip of putty-like material and stuck it onto the hull in a rough circle as big around as her arms spread wide. Walking awkwardly across the hull in her magnetic boots, she put some distance between herself and the putty-like material, then triggered it.
Rather than a conventional explosive, the boarding charges the warriors were using was a chemical compound much akin to thermite used by humans. Once ignited, it burned at a ferociously high temperature and could melt through virtually any metal that human technology could produce. Since the warriors would have no way of knowing if the part of the hull they landed on was merely a thin metal skin or armor an arm’s length in thickness, primitive explosives might not be sufficient. But even the thickest metal could be penetrated with enough heat.
She watched as the boarding charge burst into brilliant flame, instantly melting the metal of the hull, which bubbled off into space. The flames sank into the ship’s metal skin, eating it away with heat.
A moment later, the entire circle of the hull - plating, electrical conduits, piping - exploded outward from the air pressure in the compartment beneath as the boarding charge breached the interior wall. Two human figures, not wearing space suits, flew past her, ejected by explosive decompression. The flow of air stopped after a few moments.
Ignoring the pain from the burns on her back, Li’ara-Zhurah jumped through the breach, her sword held at the ready.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
One of the enlisted sailors from engineering, Second-maître Emmanuelle Sabourin, led four other crewmen toward the nearest compartment that had been breached. They had been among the first to reach the armory, and had drawn two automatic shotguns and three sidearms, plus a pair of grenades. Sabourin had wanted all of her team to be armed with shotguns or rifles, but the armorer simply nodded over his shoulder at what he had available: three more shotguns, half a dozen assault rifles, and maybe a dozen pistols, plus a dozen grenades. That was it.
Disgusted, she’d taken the weapons the armorer had offered, along with a generous quantity of armor-piercing ammunition. That, at least, was not in short supply. She was actually surprised that the armorer was handing out armor-piercing rounds, as they could wreak havoc if they penetrated the inner walls of the ship and destroyed any of the underlying electrical systems or conduits. But he had told her it was on the captain’s direct orders: he believed they would need it to fight the boarders. Unsettled by that bit of information, she led her team aft as another group arrived to pick over the meager weapons supply.
Unlike the other teams, Sabourin’s team members were all wearing vacuum suits. While the ship had a plentiful supply of emergency “beach balls” that crewmen could quickly jump into in case of a loss of air pressure, there were only a small number of vacuum suits, which normally were used only for external repair work and the various odd jobs for which an EVA (Extra-Vehicular Activity) was required. There were only half a dozen or so, and they were all kept in engineering. When the chief engineer chose her, his senior enlisted rating, to lead the team from engineering to help repel the boarders, she and her companions grabbed the suits and put them on. The only problem was that they weren’t designed for combat: she could puncture one with a screwdriver, and they only had basic communications gear. But it was more than the other teams had.
“This way,” she said, turning right and pounding down an auxiliary stairway. The captain had locked all of the ship’s elevators. Halfway down, the ship rocked to the side, throwing her off-balance. Losing her grip on the handrail, she chose to jump down the rest of the way rather than tumbling down the remaining steps. She landed on her feet and rolled, only to come face-to-face with an apparition the likes of which she had never seen before.
The Kreelan warrior bared her fangs and lunged forward, thrusting her sword at Sabourin’s mid-section.
Caught totally off-guard, Sabourin instinctively swung her shotgun to deflect the alien’s attack, the sword’s tip barely missing her suit. But the movement put Sabourin off-balance, and she fell backward to the deck as the Kreelan raised her sword, preparing to bring it down in a savage double-handed strike.
But the alien warrior never got the chance. With a deafening blast, the other member of Sabourin’s team with a shotgun blew the Kreelan back against the bulkhead. The alien slammed into the wall with a grunt of pain, but then got right back up again: her glossy black chest armor looked like someone had hit it with a fist hard enough to make a deep indentation, scraping the black coating off to reveal the gleaming raw metal beneath. But the shotgun’s armor-piercing round hadn’t gone through. The warrior was no doubt badly bruised, and may even have suffered some broken ribs, but otherwise was quite alive.
At least she was until Sabourin blew her unarmored head off with the shotgun. “Salope,” she spat. Bitch.
“How did she get in here without a suit?” one of her teammates asked as he helped Sabourin get back on her feet, something that wasn’t easy to do in the ship’s artificial gravity while wearing the bulky suits. “There are no airlocks in this part of the ship.”
“She made one,” one of the others called from the nearby hatchway in the direction Sabourin had been leading them. “Look.”
The hatch, which automatically closed any time general quarters was sounded, stood open. In the compartment beyond, which Sabourin knew had been breached, the Kreelan had attached some sort of thin membrane to the bulkhead around the hatch coaming that had been large enough for her to stand in. The membrane, however it was attached to the bulkhead (chemically bonded, Sabourin guessed), had formed a makeshift airlock, and the Kreelan must then have simply cut through the bulkhead to short out the hatch controls. With a quick blast of air that filled the bubble that now sealed her away from the vacuum in the compartment behind her, the alien could have then just stepped into the pressurized passageway, where she discarded her vacuum armor. Simple and effective.
Looking closer, Sabourin could see that the membrane was actually two membranes, with each one having a barely visible seam down the middle. Suddenly she understood: the outer membrane, which now was loosely draped against the bubble of the pressurized inner one, formed the first part of a double-airlock.
“Merde,” she muttered.
“What is wrong?” one of the others asked.
“If more aliens enter that compartment,” she nodded toward the hatchway and the improvised airlock, “through the hole that the first alien made in the hull, they can enter the bubble through the outer membrane, seal it, then enter the ship through the inner membrane without risking explosive decompression of the passageway on this side.” She turned to look at her teammates, her angular face and dark brown eyes grim. “Anywhere they make one of these, they can easily gain access to the pressurized portions of the ship.”
“But why?” one of the others asked. “If they just blow holes in the hull, they would eventually kill most of us. Would that not be easier?”
“Yes, it would,” she said. The question bothered her, but she had no answer. She had to inform the captain. “Bridge,” she called over her suit’s comms system.
“Bridge,” a communications technician answered immediately.
“This is Second-maître Sabourin on deck six at frame seventy-three,” she reported. “We killed one of the boarders. But alert the other teams that the armor-piercing rounds from our shotguns will not penetrate their chest armor. Head shots only. Please also inform the captain that the boarders can create their own double airlocks. Wherever one of them makes a penetration, more aliens will be able to enter from the vacuum side without further decompression of the adjoining compartment.”
There was a moment of silence, then she heard the captain’s voice. “Sabourin,” Capitaine Monet asked, �
�are you sure about the airlocks? We had assumed that one of the enemy’s primary objectives would be to secure at least one of the ship’s airlocks to allow them to get more warriors aboard faster. That is where we were going to concentrate our ship defense teams.”
“Oui, mon capitaine,” she told him grimly as she and the rest of her team began to back away from the hatch while bringing up their weapons, “I am sure these airlocks work. In fact, more aliens are trying to come through this one now...”
* * *
On the other side of the ship, Li’ara-Zhurah had finished fastening the airlock membrane to the bulkhead of the compartment she had entered. Aside from the two humans who had been blown out when she cut through the hull, the compartment had been empty. Behind her, four other warriors had managed to scramble through the hole and now stood by as she prepared the airlock. She waited for a moment more for the chemical matrix around the edges of the membrane to fuse with the metal of the bulkhead, and then, taking a wild guess, she hit the large green button of what she assumed was the control panel for the hatch. She was right: the hatch slid open, and after a small implosion of air that filled the inner bubble, she stepped through the hatch into the passageway beyond.
She could see in the strange yellow-tinged light that there were no humans about, and she signaled to the warriors behind her to follow. One by one, they entered the outer bubble, then the inner one. Some air was lost as they did so, but it was trivial for a ship this size.
As a second warrior joined her, Li’ara-Zhurah gratefully rid herself of the cumbersome vacuum suit, hissing with the pain as the suit snagged on her backplate and pressed it against her burned flesh. With a growl of anger, she tore the rest of the suit from her body, slashing at it with her black talons. At last free of the encumbrance, she felt like a warrior once again, and not like a piece of meat encased in a tin.
Once the other warriors of her group were through the airlock, they set off in search of the crew.
In Her Name: The Last War Page 22