by Rick Partlow
In front of Ari, the pod's combat lock shot out with a bang of explosive bolts, revealing the smoke-filled corridors beyond the docking bay and a cluster of stunned Protectorate officers staring with disbelief at the hole that had suddenly materialized in the wall.
An armor-clad Marine streaked past Shamir with a puff of compressed gas from his zero-gee maneuvering jets, slicing across the Russians with a burst of flechettes from a CAWS supershotgun. A haze of bright-red blood globules floated across Shamir's vision, and when the view cleared a half-dozen Marines had spread out in a hemisphere around the opening.
"We're in, sir," Shamir reported.
"Head for the bridge, Ari," McKay ordered. "We'll meet you there."
A weight pressed the occupants of the courier forward as Vinnie hit braking thrusters, bringing them from docking speed to a dead stop just short of the forward wall of the bay.
"Take small children by the hand and check your seats for personal possessions, ladies and gentlemen," Vinnie announced, securing the yokes of his battle helmet. "And thank you for flying Protectorate spaceliners."
The four men moved quickly and with practiced ease as they pulled weapons from ready-mounts on the hull and moved to the ship's emergency airlock. McKay hit the control to open the outer door to the hard vacuum of the bay, then turned to his team.
"You boys ready?"
"You only live once," Tom grunted, racking a round into the chamber of his CAWS. "Might as well get it over with."
McKay chuckled, then punched the pressure plate to open the inner door.
The atmosphere in the courier's cabin shot them out the door like they'd been launched from a mass driver, straight into the midst of a squad of Protectorate biomechs. Jock squeezed the maneuver control in his left fist and turned himself in a lazy arc, at the same time pressing down on the butterfly trigger of his assault gun. Modified for zero-g, the gun vented its exhaust gasses from rear-angled ports to counter the recoil as he fired, pumping alternating penetrators and frag rounds into the biological robots.
It was a surreal scene, the armored biomechs falling apart under the impact of a hail of slugs in the dead silence of the vacuum. All Jason heard was his own breath rasping inside his helmet as he, Vinnie and Tom joined Jock in pouring fire into the squad of Protectorate troopers, but the effect of the barrage was real enough. Within seconds there was nothing left of the half-dozen biomechs but careening chunks of flesh and metal and baseball-sized globules of floating blood.
A half-dozen spacesuited human workers scurried for cover, but McKay ignored both them and the primary debarkation collar that was extending automatically toward the courier, and moved instead to the maintenance airlock. While Vinnie, Jock and Tom surrounded him in a defensive cordon, Jason pulled a computer module from his belt and affixed it to the airlock control panel. The module read and decoded the door's security system in less than a second and sent the outer door sliding silently open.
Jason pulled the device free and the four of them moved into the lock, shutting the outer door behind them. Through their pressurized helmets, the men could hear the gentle hiss of inrushing air as the lock equalized pressure with the ship. Once the indicator lights went green, Jason attached the lockpick module to the inner door and then moved quickly back from it, bringing up his rifle.
The inner lock slid aside with a rumble of antique motors, moving with painful slowness, and before it was halfway open they were squeezing out through the gap and setting up a perimeter in the corridor. Jason had half-expected a squad of biomechs to be waiting for them, but there was not so much as a cockroach to be seen in the antiseptic-white hallway---just a Cyrillic-lettered sign on one wall with a pictographic symbol for an airlock and the universal symbol for danger.
"The Marines must have 'em distracted," Jock opined hopefully, looking around nervously at the lack of opposition.
"Yeah," McKay grunted, unconvinced. "Well, let's not wait around for them to find out we're here."
With a gust of compressed gas, he led them down the corridor, heading for the bridge.
***
"What in the hell is going on?" Antonov roared, turning on Lieutenant Dubronov, the violence of his outburst sending the officer floating gradually backwards till he caught himself against a safety rail.
"Sir..." the man stuttered, "I think we are under attack!"
"You think!" Antonov repeated, glaring at the man. "What in the hell do you mean, 'You think?' Dubronov?" He pointed at the image frozen on one of the ship's security scanners, the bodies of a squad of biomechs floating in a sea of blood and metal fragments. "Do you see that, Lieutenant? You damn well better know and you'd better know fast."
"General," he said hastily, "we have received scattered reports of gunfire throughout the ship, and a maintenance crew in the docking bay has radioed that several armored men came out of Colonel Podbyrin's ship and killed the security detail."
"Podbyrin! That goat-fucking moron!" Antonov's fists clenched and he wished for gravity so that he could smash something. "He let himself be captured!" He turned back to Dubronov with unbridled rage in his visage. "You. I want you to take a security team and find these invaders. Do not try to engage them directly, just get behind them and herd them."
"Herd them where, General?" Dubronov asked, shaking his head.
"Why, exactly where they wish to go, Lieutenant." The General's eyes narrowed and Dubranov could see the foxlike cunning that had brought Antonov from a minor division commander to leader of half the world. "Right here. I want you to bring them to me."
***
Johnny Lee shook away the darkness and tried once more to claw his way free of the wreckage of the overturned ATV. Lee wasn't sure what had hit them, but the last thing he remembered was a flash of light and the taste of metal and dirt, and then he'd woke upside-down beneath the roll-cage of the little machine. The front end of the ATV was a twisted mass of smoldering metal, and he didn't know where Raj was.
His helmet kept getting twisted around and bumping against the roll cage, so he impatiently yanked it off and suddenly felt as if he were about to faint. A warm trickle of blood flowed down his forehead and dripped off his nose, and he cursed under his breath---if his brains were leaking out he wouldn't be walking very far.
"Goddammit, Raj," he hissed, pushing at the dirt beneath him. "Where the hell are you when I need you?"
"Just give me a second, you ungrateful asshole," came the unexpected reply.
Lee twisted around and saw Rajiv Vingh leaning into the frame of the wrecked ATV, trying to push it off his friend.
"Just hold still so I don't crush your silly ass," he grunted. "That'd be real funny---you live through an enemy rocket hitting us and then get your neck broke while I'm trying to get you out."
As Lee watched him, he noticed that Vingh's right leg was covered with blood, his fatigue pant ripped at the thigh, but it didn't seem to slow the man down as he strained against the vehicle. The ATV frame began slowly rocking in rhythm, and finally Vingh rammed into it with his shoulder and the little rover toppled over with a high-pitched metallic creak. Lee pulled his legs into a fetal position and let the ATV's roll cage pass over him, the vehicle coming to a rest on its side with a rattling crash.
"Thanks, Raj," Lee moaned, rolling gingerly to his feet. He felt a little dizzy and his head throbbed with every heartbeat, but at least he was alive. "Are you okay?"
"I'll live," Vingh told him---and as he did, Lee finally noticed how quiet it was.
No rattle of gunfire, no explosions, not even the rumble of engine turbines. He looked across the field and saw to his surprise that they were alone. The burning hulks of the hodgepodge of vehicles the strike force had assembled littered the plain like little roadmarks leading to the control center. At their head, toppled apocalyptically, was the remains of one of the Protectorate Hoppers, one of its legs a twisted ruin, its biomech driver hanging limply from the shattered cockpit.
The control center itself loomed only
a hundred meters in front of them, the transmission antennae it guarded now scorched wreckage from multiple missile hits, and around its walls were scattered lumps that could have been bodies. But there was not another living soul to be seen on the field of battle.
"Where is everybody?" Lee blurted, taking a tentative step toward the control center.
"Far as I can tell, " Vingh declared wearily, "they're all dead. Nothing's moved since I came to."
"They can't all be dead," Johnny said, shaking his head. He waved at the entrance to the base. "If anyone made it, they'd be inside."
Without warning, he began striding purposefully toward the entrance, leaving a limping Raj struggling to keep up.
"Did that ding on your head scramble your brain?" Vingh asked, catching up with him. "What if there are more of those biomech things inside?"
"Whadda you wanna do, Raj?" Johnny shot back, eyes fixed on the entrance to the control center. "Walk back to Cleveland?" He laughed sharply, regretting it as his head throbbed. "It's all over today, man. If we don't win here, if they don't do their job up there...well, we're all dead anyway."
"That's what I like about you, Johnny," Vingh chuckled, falling in step with his friend. "You're always so damned upbeat."
Chapter Twenty-Three
"War is the unfolding of miscalculations."---Barabara Tuchman.
"Shit! Cut right, cut right!"
Jason pushed his carbine out one-handed against the chest harness that secured it and poured a long burst of fire into the oncoming squad of biomechs, his other hand jerking his maneuver control to the right. Vinnie, Jock and Tom followed on his heels, laying down suppressive fire as they turned sharply into the connecting corridor with a hiss of compressed gas.
Flechette loads and low-velocity slugs chased them into the passage, spanging off the metal bulkhead, one round cracking painfully against the hard armor plate covering Tom's calf. Grunting through clenched teeth, Crossman spun around and triggered a barrage of rocket-assisted rounds back at the pursuing biomechs, tearing through the armor of the lead troopers and sending them spinning uncontrollably in the zero gravity. As Crossman rounded the corner, he caught a fleeting glimpse of a human officer behind the biomech troopers and held up long enough to try to put a bullet in the man. The shot slammed into the wall instead, and then he was out of sight.
"How far off course are we?" Vinnie panted breathlessly, coming up on McKay's right shoulder.
"That's the screwy thing," Jason replied, shaking his head. "We're not. This isn't the route we had planned, but it still leads straight to the bridge."
"Kinda makes you nervous, don't it?"
Vinnie's eyes scanned ahead of them as they jetted forward, but they were alone.
***
"Well, where the hell is everybody?" Lieutenant Shamir muttered, glancing back at Lance Corporal Kurita, the NCO for his fire team.
"You got me, sir," the woman muttered distractedly, attention concentrated on the corridor that stretched ahead of them.
They had penetrated the hull nearly ten minutes ago, and after a brief but fierce confrontation with a biomech security team, they'd encountered only token resistance at a few intersections. They still seemed to be heading for the bridge, and had taken no casualties, but something nagged at him that this was just too easy.
"Hold up," he ordered, braking himself with his maneuvering jets.
Shamir twisted his left wrist up to his visor, bringing up the controls for his helmet computer, and tapped out a command. Immediately, a digital map came up on his helmet's heads-up display, showing him the layout of the Protectorate flagship that the intelligence types had wrung out of Podbyrin back on Pallas.
The ship was surprisingly large, considering it had begun life before the collapse as a vehicle for a manned Mars mission---but, according to Podbyrin, the Defender had undergone extensive expansion since the arrival of the Russians at Novaya Rodina. Now, the former exploration ship was a full-fledged warship, with the redundancy of people and equipment that entailed. As a side-effect of this piecemeal construction, the Defender was a confusing maze of interconnected corridors and compartmentalized sections, all surrounded by a thick layer of nickel-iron armor scavenged from asteroids.
An indirect result of this was that there were many possible routes between parts of the ship. The original plan had been for Shamir's team to take a route to the bridge which led them on a path beneath the central habitation drum, while McKay and company went above it, and the third team headed for the auxiliary control room to ensure the backup weapon system overrides were shut down. But Shamir's route had been forcibly modified by contact with the enemy so that now, while still headed for the bridge, they were now being squeezed into a path that took them directly through the center corridor that traversed the hub of the rotating habitation module.
And that looked too much like a trap.
"Wazzup, boss?" Kurita asked him.
"I'm about to disobey a direct order," Shamir muttered, activating his helmet radio.
They'd been specifically instructed to stay off the radio to avoid being zeroed in on by the Gomers, but the Marines had always put a high value on initiative. "Gunny, this is Shamir, come in."
He waited for a long stretch of heartbeats, praying to a God he hadn't believed in for years that Lambert and his team were still alive.
"Lambert here. Go ahead, LT."
Shamir let out the breath he'd been holding.
"Gunny, have you run into any Gomers?"
"Aye, sir, but nothing organized---it's like they're busy someplace else. We have possession of the target."
"Roger, Gunny," Shamir acknowledged. "Hold until further notice. Out."
"What are we going to do, sir?" Clarke, his autogunner wondered.
Shamir took one last, long look at his map before answering.
"We're rats in a maze, Clarke," Shamir mused. He smiled tightly. "Time to climb the wall."
***
"Come into my parlor..." McKay murmured to himself, staring down the elongated corridor at the heavy blast door that was the entrance to the bridge.
It sat there plump and juicy, like a prize plum hanging in front of them, with no enemy in sight.
"They gotta be waiting for us in there," Vinnie surmised with a sigh.
"What was your first clue?" Crossman cracked, chuckling mirthlessly. "So, we just gonna stroll on in and demand they surrender?"
Jason gave the question a second's consideration. This was obviously a trap---but how obvious a trap? Did the Gomers expect them to just walk in, or was the snare more elaborate? Would the Russians use heavy weapons and risk decompressing their own ship? How desperate were they?
"Jock," Jason finally said, his voice sounding tinny in the echo of his helmet intercom. "Do we have anything that'll take out that door?"
"Aye, sir," the big man said, swinging the tube of a missile launcher off his back. He took a moment to program the warhead for maximum penetration, the onboard computer automatically adjusting the configuration of the explosives.
"Vinnie," Jason instructed, "the second that door's down, put a spread of grenades through it. Tom, you and I go in once the smoke clears. I'll take the left, you take the right, and remember, we're in a zero-g environment, so think three-dimensional. Jock, once we get in, you cover from the door. If they pin us down, we'll head low, you shoot high."
“Sounds like a plan,” Crossman said, his helmet hiding his sneer.
“Everyone get behind me,” Jock told them, centering himself on the blast door.
The big Australian let his assault gun hang off its articulated harness while he concentrated on aiming the missile launcher---and fervently hoped that the bulk of the gun and his body armor would combine to stop any fragments the explosion kicked back toward them. Vinnie positioned himself directly beneath his friend, bracing his drum-fed mini-grenade launcher on his hip and anchoring himself to the floor with the electromagnet in the heel of his right boot.
J
ason and Tom had barely had time to move behind the two when Jock fired. The missile kicked out of the tube on a gust of compressed coldgas before the rocket motor ignited, slamming the warhead into the blast door with a concussion that would have thrown the four of them backwards had they not countered it with their attitude jets. A wreath of smoke shrouded the far end of the corridor, but Vinnie didn’t wait for it to clear---he immediately pumped a half-dozen 25mm grenades into the bridge, aiming high, hoping ricochets off the ceiling would help spread the fragments.
Things sounded funny on a spaceship, Jason thought out of nowhere---the thinner atmosphere and the different mixture of oxygen and helium made the bang of the grenades sound tinny, like a snare drum, and his helmet filters baffled the sound even more. Jason felt Crossman start to move into the bridge but grabbed his shoulder to stop him---in the zero-g, the fragments from the grenades would ricochet around the room for several seconds unless something soft stopped them.
Jason mentally counted to three, then let loose of Crossman and grasped the control for his maneuver pack, giving it a hard squeeze. The jet of compressed gas kicked him in the pants and sent him flying headlong into the bridge, with Crossman close behind. Jason cut the boost and flipped end for end just as he entered the ruined doorway, coming into the bridge feet first and giving himself a microsecond’s sideways burst that put him in a slow spin.
The bridge slowly spun around him as he covered all directions with the assault rifle cradled across his chest, finger half-pressure on the trigger...and saw nothing. The bridge was deserted.
Outdated flatscreen displays flickered with activity, and here and there an indicator light flickered red or green in eerie silence. Other consoles, shattered either by the missile or the grenades, sparked wildly in a cloud of shattered glass and plastic. A haze of pale smoke floated through the room, playing tricks with Jason’s eyes, but his helmet’s infrared filters assured him that there was not a soul in the room but he and Crossman.