New Beginnings v-1

by Jason Halstead

  Kira gasped, drawing looks from the other two. She waved her hand. “It’s nothing, I just hadn’t thought of that is all.”

  The rounded a corner and stopped at a hatch. Captain Sharp unlocked the door with a retinal scan then stepped in and beckoned them to follow. He stopped, causing Eric and Kira to run into him. “Son of a bitch! I’m going to kill him with my bare hands!”

  “ Sir, if he was a FIST, he’s not going to be easy to kill,” Kira pointed out. “Even if he is old and fat.”

  The weapons locker was virtually empty. All that remained were a couple of low grade laser pistols with output ratings low enough to require several seconds for a burn through on an unarmored human target. An alarm rang through the ship, making Eric jump. Sharp turned with a snarl and started back towards the hatch.

  “ Sir, wait!” Kira spotted a display and, near it, a data port. She hurried over and pushed her hand against it, then started commanding the computer to display the source of the alarm. “Our passive sensors picked up an active sensor hit. And there’s another, they’re coming in fast!”

  “ They? How many are there?”

  “ Looks like five, no si- nine of them Sir.”

  “ Nine? Why didn’t you see nine ships out there?”

  “ Sir, they may not be ships. Could be EVA suits. They disable us then send in a boarding party to take control of the ship. After it’s secured, they bring in theirs and tow us off for salvage.” She suggested.

  Kira saw a strange look in Eric’s eyes. “What? It makes sense! That’s what I’d do.”

  “ You have a history of disabling and stealing ships?”

  “ Well no, I just mean when you think about it and break it down…”

  Eric went over and grabbed both of the pistols. He handed one to the Captain and the other to Kira. She looked at it with wide eyes. “I don’t- I’ve never used a gun before!”

  “ Me either, but I’ve got a hunch you’ll be a better shot than I would.” Eric wouldn’t look her in the eyes as he spoke.

  Kira slipped it into the waist of her pants without thinking. She turned to see the Captain watching the two of them. “All right, these things will be useless against an armed and armored boarding party, but maybe if we don’t fire them they won’t know it. You think they’ll override the airlock or blow a hole in the hull?”

  “ If they’ve got inside help they’ll use the air lock. Or if they want to use the ship themselves, they’ll need it pressurized,” Eric theorized. “Doesn’t make me a betting man.”

  Sharp’s laugh was bitter. “You just wagered all our lives.”

  Eric swore. Kira’s eyes widened but she gave him a supportive smile. “If it makes you feel any better I’ll even take off my clothes to show my support.”

  “ Remember when I said to make sure you don’t disrupt my crew or complicate things? That goes double when we’re repelling boarders!”

  Eric chuckled. “Had that talk, did you? Just think of what it might do to the pirates!”

  Kira turned, having heard it first. Her pistol was out of her pants and pointed at the open hatch before Tarn rounded the corner and pulled up short. Sharp swore and pointed his own pistol at the man. “We beat you here, Tarn?” He asked.

  “ Yeah, now put those useless things down. You wasn’t on the bridge so I brought you these,” Tarn grabbed the straps over his shoulder and pulled off two assault plasma rifles. “Anybody ever shoot one of these?”

  Kira felt Eric looking at her from the corner of her eye. She glared at Tarn a minute longer than lowered her pistol. She glanced at her lover and saw him still looking at her. “What? No, I’ve never shot one. I don’t even know what kind of gun it is!”

  “ You handled that pistol pretty well,” Tarn observed.

  “ Beginner’s luck,” she said through clenched teeth.

  “ Give me one,” Sharp said, stepping forward and taking the rifle. He checked the weapon over quickly, then looked at Tarn until the ex-Marine gave him a quick rundown of the weapon. When he was finished the Captain fixed him with a stare. “What happened to the rest of the weapons?”

  Tarn pointed at the two plasma rifles. “Traded ‘em for these. These babies are mil-spec. Not heavy duty like I’m used to, but good enough for pirates. Not what they use these days, that’s how I could get a break on ‘em.”

  “ All my weapons for these?” Sharp persisted.

  Tarn shrugged. “Wait till you see one in action.”

  Sharp scowled and turned to Eric. He handed him the laser pistol. “Kira, patch back to the computer and let Jeff and Kevin know to grab whatever they can for a weapon and lay low.”

  Kira did as she’d been told, a moment later the synthetic voice of the ship’s computer came across broadcasting throughout the ship. While she was there she checked on the progress of the boarding party. “Sir, based on the rate of closure they should reach us in a few more minutes.”

  “ Don’t you want them to be with us?” Eric asked.

  “ You left ‘em on the hull or are they on the ship?”

  “ Shit!”

  “ Yeah, that’s why Kira sent out the message. The computer will have broadcast on the suit’s frequency as well,” Sharp said.

  “ That’s why he’s the Captain,” Kira said.

  Eric shot her a dark look but couldn’t hold it.

  “ Main airlock, let’s go!”

  They filed out, falling in behind Tarn and the Captain. Kira’s eyes went to the Tarn’s rolls, noticing the higher quality pistol at his hip. She also picked out a bulge in his boot that she assumed was a backup gun. A moment later as he stepped over the entry to another hatch she saw his shirt rise enough to display the handle of a high tech combat knife.

  She gasped as Eric grabbed her hand. She glanced at him and he nodded for her to hold back with him. She did, asking him the question with her eyes that she dared not utter aloud. He pulled her after him, turning down a passage to the crew’s bunkroom.

  “ Baby, this isn’t the best time for this,” Kira said. “I’ll admit, I can’t think of another time when we’d have the bunks to ourselves though.”

  Eric snorted. “Open your locker.”

  “ Eric?”

  “ Do it!”

  Kira jerked back at his tone. She nodded and turned to the wall with the crew’s storage lockers in it. It scanned her eye, releasing the lock, and she opened it up before stepping back. “There, you want to go through my underwear now?”

  “ Maybe,” Eric said. He scanned everything quickly, then started pulling open the drawers and rooting around in them.

  “ Eric, seriously, what are you doing?”

  “ I knew it!” He gloated. “This drawer doesn’t track right, hang on.” He fiddled with the drawer for a moment before he pulled it out of the locker and set it on the floor. He reached back in and pulled out a slim box that had been stashed beneath it. “Open this.”

  Kira looked at it and felt herself start to retreat inward again. She shook her head, not at the action, but at the thought of losing herself. With a mewl of frustration, she swallowed past the lump in her throat and reached forward to press both her thumbs against the ID scanners on it. It chirped and clicked, letting her know the locks were released.

  She opened the case and let loose the breath she had not known she was holding. Inside was a folded piece of cloth that shimmered in the light. Eric let out his own gasp, drawing Kira’s gaze. “I thought there’d be something else.”

  Kira reached in with trembling hands and picked it up. It unfolded, hanging loosely in her hands until she stretched it taut as she held it up. “What is that? Lingerie?”

  She shook her head. “It’s a bodysuit designed to diffuse energy weapons. It offers protection against any radiant beam weapon, but not something like a plasma weapon. Those have a highly energized form of matter.”

  “ How do you know that?”

  She looked at him and saw the pale color of his cheeks. “Eric, this is mine. I do
n’t know how, I’ve never seen it before, but it opened to my thumb prints. And I can’t think of a better time to find out.”

  “ Find out what?” His question went unanswered. She stood up and stripped off her clothes, standing nude in front of him in the single least sexual moment she could ever remember being in. She slipped the diffusion suit on, pulling the shimmering material into place and noting how it fit her perfectly.

  “ Wow,” Eric whispered. “Pretty crude of me, but you’re beautiful.”

  Kira smirked. “That is crude, but there’s never a bad time to tell me I’m beautiful. What I need to know is how you knew it was there?”

  Eric fell silent. She saw him struggling internally. His eyes dropped and he gasped. She followed his gaze and saw what had stolen his breath. She dropped to her knees and reached in, pulling out the strange pieces of metal that the bodysuit had hidden. Her hands slid across them, feeling a sense of familiarity even though she had no idea what she was doing. She looked at Eric, meeting his gaze, and then closed her eyes. Her hands worked the items, putting them together in a smooth and practiced manner that left a dryness in her mouth.

  When Kira opened her eyes she held a rifle in her hand that was light weight and possessed a deadly beauty. Her eyes went to a magazine that was loaded full of ellipsoid shapes, with each narrow end coming to a point. She slipped it into the rifle and cycled a round into the chamber.

  “ Damn…”

  “ Yeah,” Kira said softly. She looked up abruptly. “Shit! The others! We’ve got to help them.”

  “ You really know how to use that?” Eric stood up and asked.

  Kira rose as well. “No, but I’ve got a hunch I’ll figure it out. Come on! And Eric, you’re going to tell me how you knew about this later. I don’t even want to think about it right now, but as soon as this is over I’m going to seriously freak out and either I’m going to need you there to hold me or I’m going to need you there so I can slap you silly.”

  Eric grinned. “So long as you need me.” He followed her out of the bunkroom and back towards the main airlock where their shipmates were presumably waiting for them.

  Chapter 9

  They paused at the top of the stair well that led down to the passage with the airlock. Sharp shouted something that was drowned out by the sound of a scream. Eric looked at Kira, his eyes impossibly wide. She held up her hand to him, acting without thinking, and used her long legs to fly down the stairs in two steps.

  She knew Eric was following but she didn’t wait. It was exciting and terrifying, but she somehow knew what she had to do. She burst through the open hatchway into the passage and threw herself into the far wall. She felt the heat of a passing shot and it brought the reality of the situation to her. She’d already seen several of the invaders through the open door to the airlock. One on the inner side of the door, two on the outer side, and a third kneeling further back in the middle. She had also seen the twitching leg of a fifth on the ground.

  Tarn was kneeling behind an open panel that he’d removed from the wall. He was also sporting multiple scorch marks on his clothes. The panel glowed in a few places from strikes from the raiders energy weapons. Captain Sharp stood in another hatch, trying to angle for a shot but she knew he was being driven back each time he attempted it.

  Kira threw herself forward, springing off the wall and crashing on the floor in the middle of the passage. Her rifle was held ready for the moment she stopped moving. She pulled the trigger mechanically and jammed her right hand and right knee into the floor.

  When next she came to rest she was kneeling with her left was on the deck and her right knee spread wide for balance. She sensed more than felt the beams from the pirates’ lasers that missed her spinning form. She held her breath long enough to send another high density sliver at supersonic speeds through the faceplate and head of the pirate that stood on the right side of the hatch, then she dove forward into a roll. She felt the heat along her buttock and thigh from a highly focused light beam that grazed her. The suit fragmented and disbursed the energy, causing discomfort but not injury.

  A cry behind her proved far more distracting. She risked a glance back, her only thought one of fear that Eric had been hurt. She saw him clutching his forearm and scrambling backwards. Another shot hit her, this time squarely in the side beneath her left arm. The body suit prevented it from burning through, but the heat blistered her skin beneath the second skin.

  With teeth clenched, Kira fired a round blindly then let her mind go enough to drop supine to the deck. Her rifle hummed as the magnetic rails in the barrel sent forth a round into the crouching invader on the left side of the air lock door. It hit him high on the left side of the chest, near the shoulder, but the spray that coated the wall of the airlock behind him and the way he spun away from the impact gave proof that he was out of the fight.

  With only one visible attacker left Kira knew what her next move should be. She gathered her legs in preparation to spring then noticed the spherical ball that was only now slowing its roll toward her. It had just passed Tarn, leaving it half a dozen feet behind Captain Sharp. With less than ten feet until it reached her, she drove her hands into the deck.

  The concussive blast from the grenade swept over her, knocking her off balance and leaving her disoriented. It was a LF grenade, or Low Frequency, which let loose a powerful subsonic blast that was great for disorienting people and even damaging delicate electronics. She tried to make sense of how the floor and the ceiling seemed interchangeable, fighting back a wave of nausea at the same time.

  The remaining pirate held his position while five others rushed past him and down the passage. Tarn was slumped against the wall, the steel panel resting on him. Captain Sharp was rolling on the ground, trying to find his feet much the same as Kira. She rolled onto her back, clamping down on her lips to prevent her stomach from emptying. She tasted the bile and screwed her eyes shut. When she opened them she saw one of the men pointing their laser rifles at her.

  They had been modified, she noticed instantly. Without knowing how, she understood the bulky modifications amplified the power considerably. As a trade off she estimated the guns had to cool longer between shots or, if ignored, would shut down to prevent damage. That or the pirates went through a lot of weapons.

  Tarn and Sharp were both being covered as well, though Tarn was only beginning to show signs of coming out of the grenade induced stupor. The fourth boarder walked up to Kira and chuckled when he saw her rifle laying in the passage. “Well well, what have we here?” He said. He had opened up the external speakers on his suit to allow his voice to be heard.

  The man guarding her turned to look at the other pirate as he bent down to pick up her rifle. Kira realized that if any life lay ahead of her would be short at best, or long and filled with pain and suffering. Her body wanted to act now that the dizziness was fading. She was terrified of blacking out again, but living through what was about to happen scared her more.

  “ One last time,” She thought to herself, surprised at the thought and the fact that she was not sure it had even come from her. Kira let out her breath and fell back within herself.

  She watched, almost as though she was staring at a display screen, as her body spun on the floor so her legs were between the man’s standing above her. She scissored her legs open, hitting his at the ankles and sending them flying. With barely a yelp he fell, pulling muscles in his groin and slamming into the deck roughly.

  Kira, or her body at least, sat upright and grabbed the laser rifle from his hands. She lay back down and planted both feet on him, then propelled herself across the floor even as she sent him rolling into the pirate that was straightening with her own dropped weapon. As she slid she oriented the laser and fired, burning through the soft portion of the pirate’s suit at his neck and making him lurch backwards. Being off balance, he crashed to the floor.

  Kira felt another wave of nausea hit her as her body flipped up into the air, driven by a powerful convul
sion of her back and legs. Then she was on her feet and running forward. Distantly she smelt scorched hair and she knew her head had been narrowly missed. Another beam struck her in the chest, burning her badly and charring her bodysuit with the direct hit, but not penetrating.

  She fired her laser with one hand, puncturing the suit of the pirate that stood near Tarn but doing no damage. He pulled himself back into a crouch, an instinctive reaction that Kira suspected whoever was controlling her body had expected. Her free hand grabbed her own magnetic accelerator rifle from the wounded pirate, which she then used to fire point blank into his chest.

  Space suits were designed to be radiation and energy resistant. Against a sharpened ballistic projectile travelling close to three thousand feet per second they were no better than papier-ma c he. He collapsed onto the deck, gasping for breath and clawing at the hole in his suit over the hole in his chest.

  Another beam staggered Kira, this one warming her thigh. It had come from the pirate in the air lock that had remained to cover the others, much the same as the blast that had taken care of any split ends in her hair. She gestured at him with the laser rifle, making him duck behind the wall. The beauty of beam weapons was that they fired at the speed of light and the beams themselves were invisible to the human eye. Calling her bluff would have been a very dangerous gamble.

  Even with that threat momentarily averted Kira had no idea how she was going to survive. The man near Tarn, who remained senseless, was a heartbeat from firing at her. The man who had slipped through the hatch to cover Captain Sharp had also stuck just enough of his body out to fire at her. She winced internally, preparing to be consumed in a painful fiery death.

  “ The wall! ” The voice inside her said. “ Jump to it, spring off it, and put a bullet through the man ahead of you, then use the laser to deal with the man in the hatch. ”

  Kira stumbled, suddenly realizing her body was her own again. Her stumble saved her, based upon the curse she heard from the pirate in the hatch. She lurched forward, knowing she had only a few feet to go. She felt her rifle throb in her hand, a feedback control in the grip notifying her that the capacitors had recharged. She leapt to the side, dodging the beam from the man ahead of her, then planted her foot on the side of the passage as instructed and boosted herself higher into the air so that she had a better angle at him over Tarn’s slumped figure. She fired and felt a jolt of exhilaration flare through her as he fell back to the floor and fed a growing pool of red liquid.