Lieutenant (The David Birkenhead Series)

by Phil Geusz

  It took two, maybe three more long minutes to deal with the filter and grating from the back, then I was face to face with a long-dead orderly staring at me through empty eyesockets. Gently I shoved him out of the way, then made room for the humans to come through so they could get into their suits and back to breathing good air before they vomited up their toenails—by the sound of things, that was about all they still had left to lose. While they were recovering I made my way all the way to the back wall of the room, which was also the Station’s outer hull. And there, sure enough, was the emergency airlock the schematics had promised me.

  Working quickly, I undogged the heavy anti-invasion bolts that made entering the Station there even more difficult than cutting through hullmetal and swung the door open. It’d hold either two humans or three Rabbits, I estimated. With meant about seven full cycles at half a minute apiece... “Come on!” I urged my troops. “Now! Now! Now!” Fremont was in the first load. “Take cover the moment you get through,” I ordered him. “Occupy us an area of hull we can hold. I’ll be with the last load.”

  “Yes, sir!” he barked as the hatch slammed shut in his face.

  Next were three more Rabbits, then after an endless time another three. By then the two humans had begun to recover a bit, so I sent them. They were just finishing up when suddenly the lights went out and I felt a wave of sickness flush through me. It was the core-Field down in the engine room, beginning to careen out of balance!

  At first I smiled—I’d estimated we needed about a ten-minute delay before putting the engines to work ruining themselves, and felt rather pleased with myself over the accuracy of my calculations. But… I’d forgotten to account for the reaction of the Imperials! Suddenly the big wheel on the door at the far end of the barracks-hall began to spin, as our foes too began seeking a way out!

  I didn’t know what to do at first—if I fired at them then they’d call for help and smother us by sheer numbers. But Nestor, bless him, moved without orders. With a mighty leap he flew down the hall, then jammed his blaster in the mechanism.

  “Good!” I called out as the lock cycled and the next three Rabbits filed in. One was Snow, who still didn’t look good at all. But there was still no time for him—I slammed the door in his face and began the cycle again. “Stay right there, Nestor! Out of sight, by the edge. If they make it in here...”

  Then I thought things through. He’d stuffed his blaster in the mechanism, which left him pretty much helpless. “You take over here,” I ordered Vollie, one of my reformed slacker-bunnies. “When everyone else is through, join the last load.” Then I leapt after my undersized aide.

  36

  By the time I arrived at the entryway, the Imperials out in the corridor were backed up and clamoring for a way out. This area was well forward of the primary bulkhead and therefore wouldn’t be involved in the engine collapse—that was why the troops were bunked here in the first place. Our enemies were well and truly panicked, however, and perhaps a dozen were piled up pounding on the jammed wheel. My guess was that they hadn’t a clue there were Royalists on the other side—after all it was dark, they’d only ever seen a handful of us since invading, and the air was still full of drifting corpses.

  I looked back at my last few Rabbits—one more load, and Nestor and I would be the only two left. But the door wasn’t armored, and one of the Imperials was unwrapping a demolition charge…

  Finally the last three Rabbits climbed into the lock. “Stay close!” I ordered Nestor, who nodded in reply from behind wide, terrified eyes. Without a moment to lose I drew my weapon, jerked myself back flush against the wall…

  …and yanked Nestor's weapon free, allowing the Imperials to come bursting through in an uncoordinated mass, rotating and flipping head-over-heels six ways from Sunday. A good friend and marine had once advised me to set my blaster to ‘wide-beam, full power’ when entering into zero-gee combat, and if anything the Imperial model I was carrying was even more potent than its Royal equivalent. I didn’t even aim, just waved it at the Imperials and squeezed the trigger one, two, three times. Each discharge seemed a titanic explosion in such confined quarters; I couldn’t miss such a tightly-packed mass. The firefight was bloody, brutal and short. Best of all it was totally one-sided, my side being the winning one.

  I tossed the exhausted weapon away, then ducked low and leapt into the mass of fresh corpses. It was the best thing I could think of to do, with my primary weapon now empty. I still had my Sword, and that was best employed in the closest quarters possible. I was unlucky, however. Somehow, by a miracle one of the Imperials hadn’t been scratched. He raised his gun and I swung my blade, though I knew with sick certainty that I was beaten. Then, out of nowhere, a single laser-bolt slammed home into the Imperial’s faceplate and the enemy marine went limp.

  “Sir!” Nestor called out from just behind me. “I got him, sir! I got him!”

  “You certainly did!” I answered, my heart still racing and my sphincter squeezed extra-tight. We’d never found time to give the ex-cabin boy any more than the most rudimentary of training, yet he’d just saved my life. Perhaps all of our lives. I panted once, twice, three times trying to overcome the terror-reaction that still gripped me. Finally I grabbed a dead marine, this one a decomposing Royal that’d drifted close, and used him as a pushoff point to zoom back to the still-open hatchway. It closed easily enough, and this time I made sure it was firmly locked. Then I looted myself a fresh blaster as well. “Come on,” I urged Nestor once I was done, after taking a few seconds to hug him close in the lapine fashion. “Let’s go find the others before they forget about us.”

  The last thing I ever saw inside Zombie Station was a roomful of hopeless, floating corpses, this time mostly kitted out in Imperial gear.

  37

  Fremont had done a good job choosing us a secure area; the moment Nestor and I were through he waved us to cover behind a large rock that eons ago had agglomerated itself onto the original asteroid’s stony surface. It provided a nice overhang so that it was only open to assault from one direction, and he’d already posted three flank guards—left, right, and overhead. Even better, one of them was our engineering petty officer—in other words he’d amplified on my instructions and then ordered about a human accordingly. My already high opinion of Fremont rose—apparently he’d been hitting the tactical manuals as well as the technical ones that’d taught him his primary jobs. And his self-confidence must be growing daily. “Sir!” he said over our radio link. “We should wait right here—it’s perfect!”

  It certainly would’ve been, I grudgingly agreed, if Javelin really was going to have all the time she needed for a nice leisurely pickup. “I’ll look things over,” I temporized, taking advantage of a series of handholds to scale the little outcrop.

  My naked eyes were no substitute for the dozens of magnified cameras I’d previously had at my disposal, but that didn’t mean I was totally blind. There were now three clouds of debris where the troop-transports had once hovered, nor could I make out any sign of the enemy cruisers. While it was conceivable that they might be hidden behind the bulk of the Station, which was where Javelin was, there were no bright-red heavy-caliber laser bolts zipping past either. I could only suppose that this was due to lack of living targets. The battlecruiser was queen of the system now. If she were decelerating heavily, that would mean that I’d guessed incorrectly about the Imperial Fleet being in hot pursuit and that she’d have all the time in the world to bring us off. If she wasn’t slowing down, then we were either going to capture a boat or be left to die in her wake.

  How could I know for sure?

  I couldn’t, of course, and that was the ugliest, hardest-to-swallow truth I’d ever faced. Even asking Javelin’s captain such a question might yet somehow endanger her, so that was out too. But in my gut I felt that I’d reasoned things out properly, and that staying here where it seemed safe would be the surest possible route to death. So, I decided, that meant that we had to steal a boat and th
at was that.

  Fremont didn’t want to abandon such a perfect little hidey-hole, especially not once the sick-making core collapse began flaring up more frequently and urgently. There’s a lot to be said for sticking to cover when the birth of a new black hole is both imminent and close at hand, and I couldn’t blame any of my troops for the way they looked at each other in doubt as I led them the wrong way across the outside of the primary bulkhead and into the collapse zone. Yet they followed, and that was enough.

  The Station’s turrets had been built close to the engineering center in order to simplify power-transmission issues—a blaster fires energy, not a physical slug, so in essence the cores served as Zombie’s magazines. The bulk of the Imperial invasion force had landed in that area, so therefore there should still be large numbers of troops to be taken back off before things went kablooie. But… Where could they be taken to? Where would the assembly points be? Who would land where, and how would collisions be avoided? The troop transports were gone, along with the last vestiges of Imperial command and control on the navigational and logistic end of things. Every assault boat commander—usually a petty officer with little training in anything but basic navigation—would be on their own. The result would be—had to be!—chaos in the extreme.

  Sure enough, when I cleared the last rise a dozen assault boats were jockeying for position to land on a patch of hull that could at most accommodate three, while panicked marines darted about the allegedly-cleared area beneath them. Finally one bore in and landed regardless, smashing at least three Imperials beneath its skids while the others circled and dithered. It was like a scene from the Inferno—hundreds of screaming lost souls surging mindlessly about and getting in the way of their would-be rescuers while a few individuals used their jetpacks to put all the distance they could between the dying Station and themselves. These latter would likely survive, I knew. But only if an Imperial fleet really was on the way—otherwise without the air in the boats they’d be goners in hours.

  The wheels in my mind spun yet again—I hadn’t been able to plan this part out ahead of time. Then I looked back at my little force to make sure everyone was keeping up…

  …and was struck with the stark contrast between the orderly discipline they still radiated and the mad, raging mob scene unfolding not so far away. If I were an assault boat captain, I asked myself, where would I rather try to land? Next to an orderly, under-control group of friendly Rabbits, or amidst a mass of rioting, terrified troopers liable to swarm aboard and prevent everyone from getting away?

  The question answered itself, especially since all of we bunnies, even me, were wearing non-combatant slave-suits that carried no military ID chips. I decided to sweeten the deal even further by promising prisoners—surely the Imperial staff officers had assigned captives a high transport-priority so they could be interrogated while what they knew was still useful? Even better, almost all my bunnies were carrying Imperial weapons, just like I was. That was because we’d given the suited corpses priority for the Royal stuff to make them more convincing. “Everyone,” I ordered. “Throw away every bit of king’s military gear you’re carrying—guns and everything. Fremont, you and Nestor are to enable your safeties and keep your weapons pointed at the human’s heads. You two are going to pretend to be POW’s. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir!” the chief replied, sounding surprisingly unruffled.

  I waited until all the weapons had been discarded. “All right,” I ordered. “I want us all to move out into the open in a nice tight group, just as sure and confident as if we owned the place. Then, if a boat comes near, smile and wave like hell!”

  38

  It worked like magic. Given a choice between the maelstrom and an easily-justified and safe-looking alternative, well…. Our ride arrived within two minutes, and the airlock slid silently open. The loadmaster’s eyes widened at the sight of Rabbits under arms, but it’d been a strange and stressful day all around, and perhaps he wasn’t processing data so well anymore. I pointed him out to Fremont and, still smiling, made a furtive throat-slitting gesture. Then I worried about that particular Imperial no more as I led the rest of my Rabbits forward towards the cockpit. The pilot thrusted us off the surface without warning, and I picked up a nasty bruise on my right thigh. But otherwise it went off like a charm.

  “Hello, Master!” I declared with vacant eyes as I stepped without slowing through the bright-red “No Admittance” doorway that separated the cockpit from the cargo bay. “Thank you so much for picking us up.” I tried to look proud of myself. “The major told us to get the prisoners aboard a boat, and we did it, we did it, we did it!”

  “Good Rabbit!” the copilot replied reflexively, eyeing my Sword. I’d forgotten all about the thing, and clearly game-time was over. So, still much nearer to the Station than I’d have liked, I drew my blaster and held it to the copilots head. Beside me, the quick-thinking Nestor did the same for the pilot.

  “Don’t move a muscle without being told,” I ordered them. “Keep thrusting us away from the Station. And bring up a tactical readout.”

  “Why, you…” the copilot protested. Then he began to rise out of his seat—

  —and without the slightest hesitation I splattered his brains all over the controls.

  “Holy shit!” the pilot screamed. “Jesus Christ! I mean…”

  Then I leveled my weapon at his head. “Wipe off the screen,” I ordered him, my voice still calm and gentle. “Then bring me up a tactical display.”

  “I’ll see you in… Jesus!” he screamed, the last in agony. For I’d just blown off the toes of his right foot.

  “We don’t have time for this,” I explained. “It’s also quite tiresome. Besides, I think I just might be able to fly this thing myself.”

  “Ooooow!” he moaned, rocking back and forth.

  “Wipe off the screen,” I prompted him. “Now. Or I’ll do the other foot too.”

  “Shit!” he muttered, skin ghost-white. “I have a handkerchief in my pocket.”

  “Dig it out,” I allowed. “Nice and slow.”

  He did so, then used it to wipe the glass clear. Or mostly clear—it was still streaked up something awful. The tactical display wasn’t much like its Royal equivalent, but with just the one large ship left in the system it wasn’t too difficult to interpret. “The Royal vessel,” I asked. “Is it slowing?”

  “No,” he answered. “But not accelerating either. No one understands what’s going on anymore—everything’s gone totally to hell. Christ! This was supposed to be a milk run!”

  I allowed myself a faint smile. “It still can be, relatively speaking. Because my side does take prisoners. At least sometimes, that is. When they’re nice and cooperative. We’ve even been known to grant them refugee status.” I let that sink in a moment. “Do we understand each other?”

  “We do,” he answered after a long, thoughtful moment. “May I please put a dressing on my foot?”

  “Soon,” I promised him. “I’ll get Nestor to do it for you—he’s good at that sort of thing. For now, I want you to put us on a course to intercept Javelin—that’s the Royal battle-cruiser. I don’t care if you run the tanks dry or burn the motors out either one; get us as close as you can.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” he replied, pressing what certainly looked like the proper buttons to me.

  I nodded, satisfied. “Nestor, go ahead and get out your first-aid kit.”

  39

  Javelin might often have been referred to as the fastest thing in the sky, but that wasn’t quite the literal truth. What people meant was that she was the fastest large interstellar warship in the sky, which was another thing entirely. Smaller vessels could be and often were much quicker, in the fashion of speedboats compared to ocean liners, and by virtue of their intended purpose assault boats were sprinters, designed to duck into and out of ‘hot’ landing zones as quickly as possible. No, we'd never catch the battlecruiser unless she chose to shed some of the massive delta-vee she’d built over a
period of who knew how long. But we could come fairly close, if we were willing to totally trash the boat’s engines. For the rest, all we could do was hope.

  Our first order of business was to turn off our Imperial squawker and mount the Royal beacon we’d brought along on the boat's outside hull. I sent Fremont and Snow to attend to that, though the former was perfectly capable of doing it by himself. I didn’t at all like the looks of the big white bunny, and felt he needed something to do. Then I had Nestor yank the dead Imperial out of the copilot’s seat and let the chief ease himself into place there instead. He and I were both engineers, but I didn’t have a tenth of his experience. Our pilot might or might not attempt something funny; if he did there was at least a good chance that one of or the other of us engine-room types would catch him in the act. Not that I thought he would—he seemed like an intelligent, reasonable sort of man for an Imperial, and after what I’d already shown him it’d take a raving lunatic to offer even the slightest resistance. He moaned once or twice while Nestor cut off his boot and bandaged his truncated foot, which was understandable enough. Other than that, however, all we got out of him was an instant “Aye-aye, sir!” to every request, as if the little cockpit were the bridge of his fleet’s flagship and I the most gold-adorned officer in Imperial history.