In the case of the Kreelan ship, either they had nothing mounted in the stern to shoot with, or they hadn’t seen McClaren. Sato couldn’t credit the latter notion, and so he kept his fingers crossed that they didn’t have any weapons that could be trained directly aft. On the other hand, maybe they wanted McClaren to come close so they could fling boarders at her. If they tried, they’d be in for a very unpleasant surprise.
“We’ve got two minutes, sir,” Bogdanova said nervously. They were measuring their closure rate by having one of the Marines, perched in the wreckage at the front of the ship, take range readings to the Kreelan vessel at intervals with a laser rangefinder. Combining the distance readings and information from the ship’s chronometer told them how fast they were approaching, and how long they had left before impact.
“Remember the plan,” he told Ruiz, who only nodded in his armored suit. While the crew originally thought Sato was just going to make a suicide attack, he had a different idea. “We’ve got to hit hard enough to damage her drives so she can’t pursue the boats. That’s the main objective. If we manage to survive that, Ruiz will lead the Marines aboard to take out her weapons or, better yet, destroy her completely. We can’t get away from her while her weapons are still functional, since all we have to fight back with is the aft ventral battery. She’ll blow us to pieces if any of her weapons are intact.” He looked at the others, then said, “Any questions?”
“What if they send boarders at us?” DeFusco asked pointedly.
“That’s why I had all of you draw weapons,” Sato said grimly, conscious of the weight of the assault rifle slung over his shoulder, and the katana hanging at his side. Miraculously, his quarters hadn’t suffered any damage and he had been able to retrieve it. And the newly commissioned warships that had come on this expedition, unlike the Aurora, had well-stocked armories and weapons lockers in several key locations, not just a handful of weapons concentrated in one place. “The Marines have to take the enemy ship. We have to defend our own.”
“Any more questions?” Sato asked. Heads shook all around. “Then let’s do it.”
* * *
Ruiz thought the idea the lieutenant - captain, he reminded himself - had come up with was bug-fuck crazy, but he had to admit the boy had style. And as far as dim-witted stunts that could get you killed went, it appealed to his inner nature. Perched here among the twisted beams and torn plating that was now the “bow” of the ship, watching the Kreelan ship’s drives grow ever larger as the McClaren charged right up her ass, he didn’t doubt that he’d be smashed into paste before he had a chance to shoot one of the aliens. He hoped otherwise, but he’d never been a Pollyanna optimist. He hated people like that.
In the meantime, it was an awesome view. The planet below was a gorgeous blue and brown ball that got bigger as he watched, studded with swirling white clouds in the halo of the atmosphere. The stars shone like a million tiny beacons, and even the Kreelan ship was in its own way beautiful, her flowing lines an elegant contrast to the pragmatic ugliness of her human counterpart. Ruiz hardly thought himself a renaissance man, but seeing a sight like this made him appreciate how someone might be captivated enough to become an artist and put scenes like this on canvas with a brush.
But he’d leave that to others. His art was killing, and his preferred brush was the recoilless heavy assault rifle he clutched in his right hand.
“Stand by,” he told his Marines on the platoon channel as he watched their approach to the enemy ship. They were dispersed in the wreckage of McClaren’s fore end on the side opposite where they hoped to smash into the Kreelan vessel. He had divided them up into eight combat teams of four Marines each, hoping they could reach the hull of the enemy ship quickly after impact, spread out, then plant explosive charges on her gun mounts and anything else that looked vital. And if the enemy wanted to come out and play, the Marines were more than ready to oblige.
Then he switched over to a secondary channel on the induction circuit that linked him back to engineering. “We’re ready, sir,” he reported. “Jesus, we’re getting close.” The Kreelan ship was growing at an alarming rate. Ruiz had spent plenty of time in open space, training both for assaults on other ships and to repel boarders. But this was a lot closer than they’d ever come in training, and the alien ship suddenly seemed a lot bigger than he’d thought it would be.
“Hang on, gunny,” Sato’s voice, tinny-sounding over the induction circuit, said.
“Three hundred meters,” one of his Marines reported from a check of his laser rangefinder. “One-fifty...”
“Oh, Christ!” Ruiz cursed as the McClaren slammed into the other ship with the force of thousands of tons of mass moving at nearly ten meters per second. There was no sound, of course, but he could feel the screeching of the hulls grinding together through his hands and feet as he clung desperately to a pair of girders that had once been part of the ship’s central conduit.
He saw that somehow the navigator, Bogdanova, had yawed McClaren to starboard at the last second so they didn’t run right up the Kreelan ship’s stern, then reversed the yaw to slam into the target. None of his men flew off into space, so he figured they all managed to survive.
“Go, go, go!” Ruiz yelled to his Marines. He could see that a number of protruding girders from what was left of McClaren’s bow had impaled the other ship through its thin armor. But there was no way to tell how long the unholy union would last. They had to get aboard the Kreelan ship fast and do as much damage as they could. Everything else was gravy.
“Heads-up, gunny!” one of his men shouted. “Here they come!”
Dark shapes had begun to emerge from what must have been one of the enemy ship’s airlocks in the shadow of McClaren’s battered hull. Ruiz knew then that the enemy must have seen McClaren coming all along. Knowing she was impotent after losing her forward section, the Kreelans had been waiting for the human ship to get close enough, probably figuring they were trying to ram. Holy Christ, he thought to himself. They could have blown us out of space a hundred times, but pulled this shit, instead.
“Take ‘em!” Ruiz ordered, dropping any attempt to comprehend idiotic alien behavior as he brought up his rifle. The head-up display, or HUD, in his helmet was painting over two dozen targets in red, with his Marines highlighted in blue. He took aim at the nearest Kreelan and fired, watching as the projectile streaked toward its target.
A specialized weapon, the type of rifle the Marines were using had been rushed into production from a hurriedly fabricated prototype. In testing it had turned in an outstanding performance, and Ruiz wasn’t disappointed now. Firing small rocket projectiles to minimize recoil that could send the Marines spinning out of control in space, the weapons packed a much bigger punch than the standard assault rifles carried by the Ground Forces troops. The projectiles didn’t travel as fast as bullets, and so weren’t as accurate over longer ranges against moving targets, but this range, less than a hundred meters, was right in the middle of their sweet spot.
He watched with satisfaction as his round hit his target square in the chest, the semi-armor piercing projectile punching through her suit’s armor before exploding inside. The suit instantly puffed up from the pressure of the small detonation, the faceplate turning red with blood as the Kreelan’s body was blown up from the inside. “Die, motherfucker!” he hissed.
“Ruiz!” Sato’s tinny voice interrupted his concentration as he picked out another target, a Kreelan who had just shot one of his Marines. “You’ve got to get to the ship! She’s starting to pull free!”
With a start, Ruiz snapped his head up to look at where the two ships were joined, and sure enough, the Kreelan was trying to pull away to port. “Fuck,” he cursed to himself. “Yes, sir!” he told Sato. Switching to the platoon channel, he boomed, “Marines! Follow me!”
Coiling his legs beneath him, he leaped toward the upper hull of the struggling enemy ship, firing at any warriors he saw as he flew over them. Most of his Marines jumped after him, bu
t he could see more than a handful of suits bearing the names of his men and women spinning away, lifeless, from the battle.
Without warning, he was surrounded by three or four warriors that in his eyes looked more like giant black spiders than humanoids. They had him by the arms and legs, pulling at him as if they were trying to draw and quarter him. One of them drew a sword, his eyes couldn’t credit the sight, and was about to try and run him through when all four of the aliens suddenly exploded in a cascade of gore as a fusillade of recoilless rifle fire tore through them.
“Christ, gunny!” he heard one of his Marines said as two of them grabbed his arms and propelled him with their micro-thrusters to the Kreelan ship, while two more provided covering fire. “That was too fucking close.”
Shaking free of his Marines as he settled close to the hull, annoyed with himself for letting the Kreelans surprise him more than anything else, Ruiz said, “Get those damn charges planted! We don’t have time to fuck around!”
“Check,” the team leader said, and they took off toward the stern of the ship, skimming over its surface like bloated dark gray birds.
Other Marines tried to break contact with the Kreelans and get to the enemy ship. Some made it, some didn’t. Others were simply fighting for their lives as more Kreelans poured out of the ship’s airlocks. Ruiz’s targeting system was painting at least four dozen enemy targets swarming his people who were still pinned down in the wreckage of McClaren’s bow.
“Oh, shit!” one of his female Marines cried out. “Gunny, the ship-”
Her signal broke off as the McClaren sheered away, stripping away a fifty meter long piece of hull plating from the Kreelan ship and venting the enemy vessel’s guts to vacuum. Atmosphere exploded in icy clouds into space, carrying along several dozen of the ship’s crew, none of them wearing vacuum suits, and other debris.
“Ground!” he ordered as he used his micro-thrusters to slam his suit down on the already-shifting hull of the enemy ship. “Latch on or you’ll get left behind!” He activated the magnetic grips in the palms of his armored gloves and the soles of his boots, praying that the ship’s skin had enough ferrous metal to hold onto. Luckily, it did.
The good news, such as it was, was that he had good communications with his men and women again. It was a small consolation as he watched the ship pull away from the McClaren, most of his Marines left tumbling in her wake. The few Marines left defending McClaren went down fighting under a swarm of enemy warriors. Ruiz wondered if Sato’s luck had just run out.
“Gunny,” one of the team leaders said after Ruiz had taken a head count of the dozen Marines who had made it across, “we don’t have enough charges left to take out half the weapon mounts on this bitch. What are we gonna do?”
“Get in close and fuck with ‘em,” he said. Then he led them over the side of the hull and into the ship through the section ripped open by McClaren as she had pulled away.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Admiral Tiernan watched the tactical display with quiet admiration as the McClaren took down the three Kreelan warships that had gone after the carriers, then drove off and pursued the fourth. Morrison, he thought about the ship’s captain, whom he’d had the displeasure of knowing from a previous command, as much of an asshole as you are, I’ll pin the Medal of Honor on you myself for pulling off that stunt.
They hadn’t even realized McClaren was still with them until the Ticonderoga’s sensors picked up her drive signature not long after the destroyer had quietly sailed behind the Kreelan fleet. Tiernan had wanted to contact her, but had decided not to risk drawing any more attention to her than necessary after it became clear that she was headed after the Kreelans pursuing the incoming carriers. That would have been what Tiernan ordered Morrison to do, anyway. The admiral only hoped that the destroyer would be able to keep the last Kreelan ship from doing too much harm to the carriers or the boats that were now rising from the surface with whatever was left of the ground forces.
“Engagement range in two minutes, admiral,” his flag captain reported quietly.
On the tactical display, the two opposing fleets raced toward one another and what Tiernan knew would be a final orgy of destruction that would decide the outcome of the battle for Keran. He knew he was taking a huge risk: he was under direct orders not to lose his fleet as a fighting force, but was counting on more than a little luck to favor him in this engagement. He knew that he might very well lose everything in the next few minutes. But as the old saying went, “who dares, wins.” An entire planet and millions of people were at stake. Neither he nor Amiral Lefevre were about to abandon them.
His only real concern was the ammunition stocks of the Alliance ships. They didn’t have much left, and they hadn’t been able to take the time to jump out to rearm. So, once again, the Terran ships were in the lead, with Ticonderoga in the center of the third wedge that was arrowing for the enemy formation’s heart.
“Nothing fancy,” he had told the flag staff officers as he had quickly sketched out the maneuvering orders after the Kreelan fleet had begun to come down from high orbit to attack. “We sail through their formation doing as much damage as we can. All ships are to fire at will as soon as the enemy’s in range. Then we’ll see where we stand.” And how many of our ships are left.
Turning to the vidcom, Tiernan said, “Good luck, admiral.” They didn’t expect the laser links to be stable in the upcoming storm of ships and weapons.
“You, as well, my friend,” Lefevre told him. “It has been an honor.”
“Indeed, it has, sir,” Tiernan said as the leading waves of the two fleets collided in fire and rending steel.
* * *
Thousands of kilometers away, Ichiro Sato and the surviving crew of the McClaren were fighting an altogether different kind of battle, although one every bit as deadly. The Kreelan warship had managed to free herself from the McClaren’s embrace and was still closing on the helpless shuttles that were now rising in a loose formation to loop around Keran to rendezvous with the carriers. Sato could only hope that Ruiz and his Marines would be able to stop her.
Like a returning nightmare, there were once more Kreelan warriors aboard Sato’s ship. The Marines in what was left of the forward section fought tenaciously, but in the end were simply overwhelmed by superior numbers. None of the crew had actually seen one of the enemy before, and had never really expected to up close. Fear was written on their faces as they ran in teams to defend the key passageways leading aft. They didn’t have to worry about defending the main airlocks, as those had been carried away with the forward section when it broke away from the ship. The only airlock left was the auxiliary located aft of engineering.
“How’ll they get in, sir?” one of the women in Sato’s team asked as he led them forward to defend the ship. He had left DeFusco in charge of maneuvering McClaren, with very simple orders: try to catch up with the Kreelan warship, and slam what was left of McClaren into her drives.
“I don’t know,” he told her truthfully. The Kreelan ships were nothing like the massive vessels the Aurora had encountered, and he had no idea what other surprises might be in store. “But they’ll find a way. Listen,” he said, turning to the dozen men and women on his team, “the enemy is tough and extremely well-trained. But they can be killed. We just have to try and-”
He was interrupted by an explosion as the hatch at the end of the passageway disintegrated into white-hot fragments that blew inward toward them. There was a sudden, brief, gust of air down the passageway, and Sato’s ears popped with the change in pressure. Two similar explosions sounded from elsewhere in the forward part of the ship.
“Get ready!” he ordered, and the men and women with him took up positions on the floor and behind the hatch coaming, trying to make themselves into the smallest possible targets as they aimed their rifles at the still-smoking hatchway.
As the smoke cleared, Sato saw a pair of Kreelans worming their way into what looked like a set of transparent membranes, clear
ly some sort of airlock, at the end of the passageway.
“Hold your fire,” he said, a tingle of fear creeping down his spine. He had assumed the Kreelans would use the same advanced technology they had when they boarded the Aurora. But this was nothing more than a simple, if effective, set of membranes that could certainly be pierced or torn by the human weapons.
“Sir?” one of the sailors asked, his finger tensing on the trigger of his assault rifle.
“If we fire and damage that thing they’re coming through, we’re dead,” Sato told him as he got to his feet. “None of us have vacuum suits.”
As if to punctuate his warning, they could hear the staccato firing of several assault rifles, followed by a hollow whoomp as a grenade went off in one of the other passageways. That was followed by the shriek of air venting into space, one of the sounds that spacefaring sailors feared as much as fire. The screams of the crewmen as they were blown out of the ship were muted by the intervening compartments, but tore through his heart nonetheless.
“Get back,” he told the others as he turned and quickly led them back down the passageway as the Kreelans stripped out of their vacuum suits. Their eyes were fixed on the humans, but otherwise they were not yet prepared to attack. They know the score, too, Sato thought. “Let them come,” he said. “Once they’re out of their suits, we’re on even ground.”
“If you say so, sir,” one of the enlisted men said dubiously as he followed Sato through the hatch, closing it behind him as more alien warriors made their way through the airlock.
* * *
Gunny Ruiz grimaced in pain as he blasted yet another Kreelan out of his path. He had been hit with one of the flying weapons the enemy used: one of the blades was embedded in the thick pectoral muscles of his chest. His suit was leaking air, but he figured he’d have enough to finish the job before he asphyxiated.
In Her Name: The Last War Page 43