Lieutenant (The David Birkenhead Series)

by Phil Geusz

  Apparently, however, as few Imperials as Royalists studied engineering. Suddenly the background roar of the fighting redoubled as our panic-stricken enemies discharged their weapons at nothing and began frantically seeking exits. With any luck, some of them might even start shooting at each other. One group flashed by down at the end of the corridor; had the invasion penetrated so deeply already? The first and second enemy slipped by before I could react, but I nailed the last clean in the center of mass with my salvaged Imperial hand-blaster. Fortunately, the others kept right on running.

  There was no direct route from the airlocks to Tunnel Zero, and hadn’t been for quite some time; we’d long since closed off various key arteries to make the invader’s task more difficult and confusing. Along the way we stopped by the room where we’d stored the corpses there’d not been enough suits for—many of these were dressed in Imperial uniforms. We each grabbed one, and they proved very useful indeed. Wherever we thought an enemy might’ve penetrated, we threw a corpse ahead of us and let it float along in the null-gee. If nothing happened, our route was safe. But if someone challenged the thing or shot at it, we backed off and found another way.

  Our little group was the last to make it back to Tunnel Zero; in fact, I closed the vault-like doors of our last ditch keep behind us with my own hands. Now we were enclosed in an armored and stone box many feet thick in most areas, with enough air to last for weeks. There were only about twenty of us left; the five surviving bunny-marines from the assault on the cruiser, one of the three I’d sent to counter the docking-area invasion, and the few Rabbits like Fremont and Nestor who’d been assigned other essential work that so far had kept them out of combat. Plus Chief Lancrest and one of his crew had made it alive out of Engineering, though both were bleeding from multiple wounds. Lancrest, however, still sat stubbornly at his backup console, intent on damaging as many Imperials with his widgets as he could possibly manage. “He’s figured it out, damn his eyes!” the petty officer muttered as I stepped up behind them. An Imperial marine was floating in the center of their screen, reaching out towards what must’ve been the hidden camera.

  “Energize the cabinet,” Lancrest ordered, and the enlisted man struck a single key. There was a bright flash, the screen went dead…

  …and from another angle I watched in grim satisfaction as the howling Imperial tried to apply a vacuum-tourniquet to his burned-off wrist.

  Suddenly the pair noticed me. “We’re still getting them now and again, sir,” Lancrest reported. “But it’s retail, not wholesale. Ones and twos, is all. They overran us through sheer numbers.”

  I nodded. “It was unavoidable. You did a wonderful, wonderful job.”

  He smiled through his pain. “Not half as good as the one you’ve done, sir. They’ll still be telling tales of how you defended this Station a thousand years from now. You’re going to be a legend.”

  I felt my ears redden and looked away. “Keep at it,” I instructed him. “As long as you’ve got anything left. There’s nothing else more constructive to do anymore.”

  His smile faded. “Aye-aye, sir.” Then he turned back to his screen, seeking out another victim.

  “How long do you think we have, sir?” Fremont asked from his station at the console.

  “I don’t know,” I answered. It was the simple truth. “We have two days worth of hay stockpiled here, plus some water and human food. But I doubt they’ll let us starve to death. They’re much too angry at us for that.”

  “I can see where they might be a bit irritated,” the former suit-repair specialist replied with a faint smile. “Sir…” But words failed him.

  “You’ve done magnificently,” I replied, redirecting the conversation. Yes, he’d broken out weeping at a critical moment. But I’d have loved him less if he hadn’t. Then something occurred to me. “You haven’t had a break in hours, have you? Not even when I told everyone to fill up on hay?”

  “No sir. But I’m fine.”

  I shook my head. “Go take ten. Or even twenty, if you’d like. That’s an order. Brush your ears, exercise a little. And above all, eat! I need you wide awake, my friend. Not half-exhausted. I’ll cover the console myself.”

  “Well,” he answered. “If it’s an order…” His hips cracked audibly when he got up—Fremont was getting on and was probably a bit arthritic—and I knew that I’d done the right thing. Besides, I needed a little time to think, and in all truth manning the console had become more a formality than anything else. A parody of navy watchkeeping-normality, in other words, totally inappropriate to our new circumstances. Idly I switched from one interior camera to another—our enemy was in full roar now, enraged at their unexpected losses and the cruel games we’d played with their minds. They were like rampaging animals as they swarmed from deck to deck, working themselves ever deeper into Zombie. Some were even driven to base, instinctual behaviors like blindly smashing everything in sight and beshitting the mess decks. I gulped at the sight of such primal rage and again vowed not to be taken prisoner. Soon they’d find their way all the way down to where the last great armored-steel doors stood closed in their faces, and they’d know what lay just beyond. Then they’d send for torches and jackhammers or perhaps a diamond-tipped drill and exotic explosives…

  …and we’d be dead, no more than five minutes after the tools completed their work. If we were lucky, that was.

  I closed my eyes and lowered my head onto the control board; suddenly I was exhausted beyond all measure. A few more hours, I reminded myself. At most a few more hours, and then you can rest forever and ever and ever. It was overwhelming, the fatigue was, as if I’d been carrying all the millions of tons of Zombie Station on my shoulders for an eternity, and now the burden was at last exacting its toll. I might even have been asleep, as unmilitary as that was, when Fremont returned and shook my shoulder. “Sir?” he asked. “Are you all right?”

  I sat up with a start. “Sorry,” I muttered as I blinked away my fatigue. “I’m afraid that—“

  “Sir!” Fremont interrupted, pointing at the tactical display, which I only now realized was beeping insistently. “That’s a new pip! A big one! And… It’s in red!”

  I blinked again—everything was still a blur. “But… But… That’s impossible! There can’t be any friendlies all the way out here!”

  Fremont reached around me and hit a button, something that no real navy man would ever have dared do to an officer. “She’s HMS Javelin, according to the squawk,” he replied. “Ever heard of her?”

  My jaw dropped so far that it was a long moment before I could speak. “She’s a brand-new deep-penetration raider,” I eventually explained. “A new class of battlecruiser, all guns and speed. Specifically designed to penetrate multiple Jumps behind enemy lines and raise havoc among the Imperial merchant marine.” I turned and looked my fellow bunny in the eye. “Especially in places where traffic is already all backed up and congested. Like, say…

  …here.”

  33

  The battlecruiser’s unexpected appearance changed everything. My fingers flew as I typed out a message to her. “Zombie Station to Javelin—Midshipman David Birkenhead in command. Be advised that I am under active invasion. Resistance on verge of collapse—enemy controls all vital sectors. Can offer you no fire-support or other assistance at this time.”

  There was a long pause as first one powerful salvo reached across the Zombie cluster, then a second. Javelin had opened fire at very long range indeed, but there was no point that I could see in holding back. The bolts missed their intended target, one of the troop transports. However, they sizzled near enough by her hull to force her to take evasive action. This in turn created total chaos among the orderly little trains of assault boats shuttling back and forth to support their men on Zombie. Two salvoes, I realized, and already the invasion was being disrupted. Why, if it were but offered a little nudge…

  “We’ll be making a sortie soon,” I informed everyone. “All of us, just as soon as the ti
me is right. Get ready.” I checked my internal monitors—there was a little group of Imperials gathered just outside the armored doors on the engineering side of Tunnel Zero, but the other end of our refuge was still clear. I turned to Snow. “Take the marines and go open the dock-end hatches. Occupy a bit of the corridor beyond so that we have our choice of exits. That way we won’t be trapped so easily when the time comes.”

  “But... But…” Snow stuttered, his eyes once more wide in terror. “But…”

  For an instant I nearly screamed “Do it!” in his face. And perhaps I should’ve done exactly that. After what he’d already been through, however, and given his necessarily poor training and preparation for such an ordeal I didn’t have the heart. So turned to Fremont instead. “You!” I snapped. “Go!”

  “Aye, aye sir!” he replied, snapping off a pretty fair salute. Then he was off like a shot.

  Finally Javelin sent us a reply. “Midshipman Birkenhead,” it read. “Your friend James says hello. He wants to know what your favorite flavor of ice cream is?”

  “I can’t stand any of them,” I typed furiously. “Hello, James! You definitely drew a better berth than I did! Can’t wait to tell you about it!”

  There was another pause, shorter this time, as more salvos rang out across space. All of them Royal, of course; the Imperial cruisers couldn’t yet hope to match the range. There was an intense debate raging in navy circles regarding what a group of cruisers should do when confronted with a vessel like Javelin. Some officers believed that the battlecruiser’s advantage in range was so decisive that the only sane option was to retreat as quickly as possible. Others felt that the smaller vessels should charge into action, get up close, and smother the larger vessel with their faster-firing weapons. But none of the proposed scenarios, so far as I knew, took into account the presence of slow, highly vulnerable troopships actively engaged in supporting an invasion. It was no wonder that the enemy commander—who hadn’t even been in overall charge until two or three hours before—hadn’t reacted yet. His mental wheels must be spinning at a gazillion revolutions per minute but getting nowhere. It wasn’t his fault—the confusion was perfectly understandable.

  “How many of you are there?” Javelin asked me. ”Do you have suits and a working beacon?”

  “About twenty,” I typed back, embarrassed that I’d neglected to take an actual headcount. Some kind of commander I was! “Mostly Rabbits, who are fighting hard and well. And, yes.”

  Just then one of Javelin’s shots struck home on the troopship, which crumpled as if it were made of tissue paper. Every major pressurized compartment on the vessel must’ve depressurized at the blow. After a second or two’s delay her munitions hold went up as well. There could’ve been no survivors. Remorselessly the turrets swung and the battlecruiser began firing again, this time at one of the warships.

  “Find your way to the surface immediately,” Javelin ordered. “Remain in one group. Will attempt pickup if practical.”

  If practical. That didn’t sound nearly as definite as I’d have liked. But it was the only game in town. “Roger,” I replied. “Zombie signing off.”

  34

  Most of us needed a little time to prepare for the bug-out, but because I’d just returned from meeting Snow after his attack I was pretty much ready to go. All I had to do was snatch up the datachip I’d been using as an improvised Station log and then top off my blaster’s magazine. After that I had time to kill while waiting for the others.

  So I spent it watching the unfolding battle as Javelin took on the Imperial cruisers, which belatedly chose to charge. They might well have gotten away with it in a node-cluster as tight as Zombie, save that Javelin shot extremely well. This made perfect sense, when I thought about it. The battle-cruiser was built to sail in harm’s way with no protection other than her firepower and speed—her armor wasn’t much thicker than that of a destroyer. So it was in the navy’s clear interest to assign her the best, most talented gunners and engineers in the fleet. One thing, however, deeply puzzled me. Instead of decelerating for all she was worth and holding her enemies at arm’s length for as long as possible, the Royal raider played directly into the Imperial strengths by charging right back at them! Though she got away with it—the cruisers went up one-two-three once the range grew short enough—it was an inexplicable tactic. Why in the world would any battlecruiser captain with so many as two functional neural synapses do a stupid thing like that?

  I thought about the wording of the message I’d received—we’d be picked up if practical. Then at long last two and two added up properly in my mind and I realized there’d be no long, slow counterattack to hold Zombie Station and wipe out the Imperial landing force after all. Because there was only one scenario under which Javelin’s tactics made sense…

  …and that was if at least a fair-sized chunk of the Imperial Main Battle fleet were hard on her heels, just on the other side of the node!

  Bare minutes ago, the sudden appearance of a friendly vessel in the system had changed everything for us. And now everything was changing again. This time it was the wheels in my own head that were spinning out of control and getting nowhere. Of course they hadn’t been able to tell us, not with the faintest possibility the Imperials might be listening in. Had our enemies known, they’d have tried to cut off the battlecruiser’s escape instead of throwing their ships away in a futile headlong attack. But the information was crucial—time was far more precious than I’d imagined.

  What should I do? And how?

  The first thing I decided was that sitting down in Tunnel Zero wasn’t getting any of us anywhere. “Set the cores to collapse,” I ordered the chief. “On a ten-minute delay.”

  “But sir!” he protested. “That’s not how—“

  “I know,” I interrupted him. “Do it anyway.” The reason no one had ever collapsed the engines before was that doing so would consume most of the asteroid that was the Station’s core, and there weren’t any others nearby to start fresh on. So it was standard procedure to set booby-traps instead, such well-thought-out ones that they weren’t worth messing with when resistance ended. Without the rock’s protective bulk there could be no effective battlestation here. Since the Station interdicted only Imperial trade routes our side was the only one with something to lose if the place were never rebuilt. But there’d been enough death and suffering here for the rest of time, I decided. Besides, the collapse was bound to kill who knew how many Imperial marines. And as a final sweetener, the destruct sequence would serve as just about the most potent distraction possible.

  I watched as the chief began keying in the destruct codes, then activated the radio in my suit. “Fremont?”

  “Yes, sir?” He sounded terribly frightened, which was perfectly understandable.

  “I don’t see anything on the cameras anywhere near you,” I explained, my voice as soft and calm as I could make it. “And I have reason to believe the Imperials are about to retreat, if they haven’t begun already. So most likely you’re not going to run into any trouble.”

  The relief was obvious in his voice. “Yes, sir.”

  “I want you to go to the air duct in Tunnel One where it meets Radial A. Make sure no one’s around that we might’ve missed on the cameras, then have someone cover you while you take off the grille and remove the filter. Got it?”

  “Sir… I mean ‘Yes, sir’. But why?”

  I held my temper. Sure, a disciplined human trooper would never have wasted my time with a question. But on the other hand, the more Fremont knew the better job he’d make of things. Most likely I should’ve explained in more detail to begin with. “We’re going to crawl out through the ductwork,” I explained. “All the way to the surface. Then we’re going to capture a landing craft, so that Javelin won’t have to slow down for us. The easier we make the pickup for her, the more likely we are to get out of this mess alive.”

  35

  Sure enough, the Imperials were in full retreat by the time I led my little
force out of Tunnel Zero and back into the working parts of the Station. My last check of the cameras showed them pulling back almost everywhere except in a few isolated pockets where, I was willing to bet, they’d simply failed to get the word.

  The air-ducts were plenty big enough for even a suited bunny, but our two humans had to strip down in order to fit. Even then it was tight, and we Rabbits had to continually hold up and wait for them. I could only hope we wouldn’t hit vacuum only partway out to the skin—the route I’d chosen was under full pressure when we left, but in combat that could change mighty quickly. While I’d delegated two bunnies to drag along the empty suits, they weren’t something that could be donned in an instant.

  It was eerie, moving invisibly in such close proximity to the Imperials. We could clearly hear their barked orders in all directions as we silently floated through deck after deck. Or at least near-silently; the humans banged and bumped sometimes, unable to help themselves. When that happened, all I could do was grit my teeth and hope the Imperials were too preoccupied with everything else in their universe-gone-insane environment to take much notice of a few isolated thumps.

  And so we made it all the way outboard to the Station’s marine billets without anyone detecting us. The barracks-area had been one of our lowest-priority areas during the cleanup, and we’d never quite gotten around to them. We knew from the cameras that there were eight or ten bodies floating in there. My guess was that the Imperials hadn’t given the area much thought either. Even if they had, most likely they’d opened the hatch, taken one whiff, and redogged the thing just as quickly as they could. In either event it was a good bet that we could exit the ductwork there without encountering the enemy. I took a moment to lift my visor and warn my unsuited comrades about what was coming their way, then hit the manual override button on the baffle that was sealing off the airway ahead of us. Visibly speaking, the air didn’t change any. But almost instantly both humans began retching and I knew that my navigation had been spot-on.