So why, then, was there someone trying to log into the system? The ping came from the fire suppression system, which would be particularly odd under the circumstances had Michelle not known to look out for intrusion.
There was a certain amount of respect for their hackers’ choice. The fire suppression system was as low-security as you were going to get. What was the worst you could do there, after all, douse the crew?
However, Michelle simply smiled.
While she’d done plenty of hacking for profit—never her own, alas—she was mostly the kind of person who preferred mischief at most times. That meant her mind…tilted, a bit, in that direction.
“You shall not pass,” she said as she types a simple, three-word command that instantly booted the intrusion.
“Now, let us see how they like it themselves.”
With that, she tapped a spot on her screen, launching a dozen different scripts back toward the approaching vessel.
Next, she hit the intercom button. “Captain, they are trying to access the boat. I hope to have given them a bit more to handle.”
** ** **
Sergeant Clarise Chatsworth sighed in frustration as she was booted out of the enemy system. In her five years aboard the Ranger, she’d never had this much trouble getting into a system. She thought she’d finally found a way into the network, using the fire suppression system, but she’d been kicked out there.
Her frustration was replaced with surprise when her computer beeped.
A spot on her screen claimed to have an urgent notification for her. Since it looked like a standard notification for the operating system—which happened to be the most common operating system in the universe—so she tapped it.
Do you like sexy mamas with dirty minds? Yes/No.
“What?” she muttered, then pressed the no on the dialog box.
Just as her finger made contact, however, the options switched and her monitor was filled with the vilest forms of adult vids imaginable. Two women—an abomination to any good child of the Church of Eternal Vigilance—was actually the tamest flashing on her screen moment after moment, switching after just long enough for her brain to process what it was seeing.
She looked around for her supervisor, only to notice that her supervisor would be a little busy.
Every monitor was inundated with more and more of the filth.
Doctrine be damned. The men and women of the Ranger’s cyber department were now out of this fight for a while at least.
** ** **
Tommy and Harley were oblivious to Michelle’s shenanigans. They were focused on the cargo bay hatch. For better or worse, they had to make it enough of a choke point to minimize the Armstead presence on board Sabercat. That meant keeping themselves in a bad spot for as long as they could.
He’d felt when the magnetic grapple had snatched them. By now, they should be close.
With that thought, he felt the boat shudder.
“Cargo bay,” he said quietly.
Harley nodded next to him. “Yep.”
“Well, let’s make sure they feel welcome.”
Tommy hit the intercom for Michelle’s shop. “Just let them open the hatch. If we don’t, they’ll blast it, then we’ll have more problems after they’re gone. Got it?”
“Oui,” she replied.
It was all he was going to get from her. He figured she was preoccupied at the moment, so that was fine.
A rumble sounded from outside the cargo hatch. The Marines must be trying to gain access, which is fine. Well, it wasn’t fine so much as inevitable at this point. He could only hope that Regulus would get here quickly, but they should still be at least an hour out.
That meant Harley, Cody, and he would be fighting off two platoons of Marines with only civilian legal weapons available.
Well, he’d had a good run, so what the hell.
As the hatch lowered, Tommy raised his weapon. “Free fire?” he asked.
Out the corner of his eye, he saw Harley nod exactly once. That was all he needed.
The hatch eventually lowered sufficiently where parts of the Marines were visible, which is all Tommy was waiting on.
Tommy Reilly had never intentionally shot at a human being with the intent to cause harm in his life before today. Now, this was his third firefight, but this one was different.
To start with, he was on his home turf and defending his boat. That meant he was more motivated than normal.
Also, unlike the travesty that is his aim with a handgun—aim so poor that it was apparently known throughout human-occupied space—he now had a long gun in his hands. He was very, very good with it.
Squeezing the trigger sent the railgun round spiraling out as its fins deployed, angled to continue that stabilizing spin…right up until it impacted the body armor of the first Marine to show enough of his body.
The armor was solid enough, but this was a forty-two-caliber railgun throwing a projectile at over seven hundred meters per second. While the EDC Marine armor could probably have withstood it, the Armstead Marine Corps lacked that level of protection.
Punching through the Marine, the frangible round tore apart and failed to penetrate the rearmost plate of the Marine’s body armor.
The shot elicited a violent response, though the two friends were in a well-prepared area and could continue to fire.
Harley’s first shot ripped through the unarmored leg of a Marine before smacking into the deck of the docking umbilical. The wounded man screamed at the pain and was soon dragged back toward safety.
Tommy felt his senses shift as his peripheral vision closed in. Harley had warned him about this, an effect of the adrenaline now coursing through his veins like a racecar on a track. He took some deep breaths as he continued to fire, trying to force his vision to expand.
Despite their pretty well-aimed fire, the Marines were making headway. All Tommy could hope was that Cody would be there soon. One more weapon couldn’t make a lot of difference, but it would make him feel a whole lot better.
** ** **
Another shot popped off, then Cody ducked back behind his makeshift barricade. He’d put a couple of them down already, but they were still coming, though slowly.
He peered out and squeezed off another round, which smacked hard into the body armor of the Marine, piercing it. The man cried out for a long, loud few minutes, indicating he wasn’t dead, which was fine. He was out of the fight, at least.
Another lean, another shot, this one going wide and slamming into the bulkhead.
Despite not hitting anyone, it had the benefit of at least reminding them to take care, slowing their advance.
As the bunched up on the fourth deck plate, he smiled.
Taking a slight risk, he carefully laid his weapon down and picked up the two exposed wires on the deck beside him.
“Oh, this is gonna suck for you sookas,” he quipped to himself as he touched the wire.
One of the wires was tied into the boat’s power supply. The other was tied into the explosive seals that currently held that particular deck plate onto the catwalk the Armstead Marines happened to find themselves on.
Now that a power source could send an electric signal to that seal. With the expected results.
The deck plate, no more than a meter wide but five meters in length, held four Marines in a “stack.” Held. Past tense.
Instead of holding Marines, it was falling forty meters into the labyrinth of pipes and conduit that made up much of Sabercat. So were the Marines.
Chapter 16
Commander Walker watched the readouts. Sabercat was still locked up with the Armstead cruiser, now identified as the A.M.S. Ranger. Based on what he knew about the average crew of a Harrison Class transport, there couldn’t be more than five or six people in the crew. He honestly expected the whole thing to be over.
Ranger still wasn’t responding to hails, much less threats, but they still had to do what they could. Walker had already apprised his command of the situat
ion, and although Reilly hadn’t mentioned it, he’d felt obliged to mention that this ship belonged to the son of Senator Maureen Reilly. If nothing else, it would get the higher ups to get off their collective rears and actually do something.
“Any update?”
Cooper shook his head. “Negative, sir. They’re still docked.”
Walker nodded his understanding.
This was the part of space combat he hated. It took forever, and even the most patient man had his limits. Space combat tested all of those.
“Time to weapons range?”
Of course, most weapons had an infinite range in theory. Once launched from their railguns, the penetrator rounds would travel forever until they hit something.
Instead, “weapons range” instead referred to the range when their targeting systems were considered accurate.
In other words, he could take a shot now, but he couldn’t guarantee that the round would hit the Ranger. In fact, the probability of missing the Armstead ship and hitting the transport was far too likely to make it palatable for his career.
His opinions of Reilly, however…well, there was still his career to consider.
“How long until we have a shooting solution?” he asked the weapons panel operator sitting nearby.
“Five minutes, sir,” the technician replied crisply.
Walker nodded. “Let’s just hope those poor bastards have five more minutes.”
** ** **
Michelle was having far too much fun. She’d been booted from the cyber department’s computers a bit sooner than she’d expected, which was fine. All that did was mean she could use her digital judo against them while protecting her boat.
Armstead’s best hackers—white hats, one and all…at least in their own minds—continued to try and infiltrate her system. Her system. They were throwing everything they could think of at her, and she was slinging it around, often redirecting it at another node within their own system.
She had Ranger’s cyber department battling for their own life. If she got in, she would have absolute control. With a keystroke, she could kill everyone on board, and they knew it.
They knew it because they wouldn’t hesitate to do it to her people.
She wormed her way into Ranger’s communications system. This was definitely a high-security system, but it wasn’t the first system with supposedly high security she’d been in, and it wouldn’t be the last.
Curious, she thought as he looked at the communications traffic. The ship was willfully ignoring calls from and EDC ship. While she had little love for the EDC itself, she knew they considered themselves the police of free space.
She listened to one of the more recent messages. It was a threat. Regulus was warning them to back off or risk being fired upon for engaging a North American Alliance flagged vessel in free space.
The EDC had enough ships in the system to make Armstead’s independence vanish in the wink of an eye, obliterating their navy in the process, and nothing she’d seen indicated the average Armstead citizen was oblivious to that fact.
Well, then…let’s see. Upload this file into the shipboard intercom system, and the Marine unit’s coms. What if I did this…
** ** **
Tommy and Harley had been forced back by the influx of Marines. They’d heard more shots coming from behind, meaning Cody was engaged too. At least they now knew why he wasn’t with them.
Another shot put another Marine down, but Tommy was running low on ammo for the Pendleton. No matter how good a shot you are, you’re going to miss a lot in a gunfight. The dynamic situation makes it unavoidable.
He’d dropped twenty or so, he was sure, but there seemed to be so many more.
As he exposed himself to take a shot, he regretted it within a moment. That moment just happened to be when a round tore through his left shoulder.
“ARGH!” he barked as he pulled back behind cover.
The wound—his wound, he reminded himself—burned from the friction of the round tearing through the atmo, but it did nothing to stop the bleeding. Or the pain.
“I’m going to want some of the good stuff when this is over,” he quipped to his first officer.
Harley nodded, grim faced.
“We’re not going to pull this off, are we?” Tommy asked.
The other man looked at him, as if searching for the courage to admit the truth, if only to himself.
Finally, the other man replied, “Probably not. Not before Regulus gets here if they’re more than two minutes out.”
As if that where his cue, Cody dove into the passageway that formed a T-intersection. Marines were down two of the wings, with only the computer shop and the bridge still protected by them.
“Well,” the engineer said, having far too much fun considering the situation, “this is a fine mess we’ve gotten into. Sir.”
Tommy nodded as he grimaced in pain.
Cody looked at Harley. “He going to be okay?”
The first officer shrugged.
“Real talkative, isn’t he?” the engineer joked.
Tommy shrugged, eliciting a jab of agony. “It’s been a rough day.”
Down the passageways, an eerie silence descended upon the invading Marines.
** ** **
“Sir,” the weapons console operator called out, “We’ve got it!”
Walked didn’t need to ask. They were all waiting for one thing, and that was the word.
“Gonzo,” Walker said, “put this through to those sookas.”
“Roger that, sir,” Gonzales said as his hands had already begun to follow the orders. “Alright, sir, you’re live.”
“Attention A.M.S. Ranger, this is the E.D.S. Regulus. You are currently engaged in hostilities with a North American flagged vessel in free space. You have failed to answer repeated hails asking to clarify your intentions, and have boarded said vessel.
“Make no mistake, my destroyer can lay absolute waste to your cruiser, and we both know it. More to the point, the battleship Sampson and cruisers Defiant and Vigilant are also on route to our location.
“That leaves you in the position to determine your fate. You can either disengage from Sabercat, or I can rip your cruiser a new one. We already have a shooting solution, and I’m more than eager to punch a round through your ship the long way. You have five minutes to pull your people out and disengage.”
He didn’t want to give them that long, but he knew it could take a bit. Five minutes was as generous as he felt like being with these people. Armstead’s independence, in and of itself, wasn’t an issue. He figured colonies probably should be free, after all, but something never sat well with him about why this colony was independent while none of the others were.
Part of him hoped they didn’t break contact and sail away.
** ** **
Within the bowels of Sabercat, Tommy and company heard the Marines disengage, pulling back and doing it in a hurry.
“Walker,” he said softly. “He’s here.”
Harley nodded in agreement. “Sounds like.”
** ** **
Jaxon had gotten the order, but he wasn’t military. Not any more, at least. That meant he was an independent actor in this, and his orders were simple. Cause the return of sensitive materials his employer wanted back.
That meant that when the Marines had pushed toward the resistance, he’d been free to seek out any leverage he could find.
On his dust-off trip, he’d studied the plans for Harrison freighters and knew where he was heading. While Reilly and his crew were defending the core of the ship’s operation—they’d apparently rigged the engineering section to blow if anyone forced entry—he made his way toward the passenger spaces.
The first cabin had a woman in the uniform of an Armstead Port Authority officer.
“I’m not going back,” she said, taking an object off the nightstand beside the bed—he thought it was a vase—and pulled back to swing.
Jaxon simply leveled his pistol at h
er and squeezed the trigger, flattening her as she gasped in pain.
She was a recent pickup, and therefore poor leverage. It was unlikely she would be of much use for what he needed, and now he’d carried out his duty as a loyal son of the church. No one leaves without permission.
The next cabin, he found his preferred target. Identified as Dianne Caldwell, she was of some importance to Reilly. She was young, attractive, and from what he’d gathered, pretty damn wealthy. Taking her might let him make a bit more. Get the data, then ransom her off to her daddy.
To her credit, the woman simply sat there and stared at him definitely.
“Miss Caldwell,” Jaxon said, hoping using her name would unnerve her, “you’re coming with me.”
“Not willingly, I’m not.”
The corners of Jaxon’s mouth turned up. He so loved a challenge.
“I’ve already shot one person in this part of the ship. I’m not from Earth or an Earth-controlled colony. I don’t actually care about earning your father’s wrath for shooting you, so you had best get on your feet before I go with that plan.”
A buzz in his com diverts his attention slightly, but not enough for the woman to get an edge. He was too good at his work.
“All personnel, pull out. I say again, pull out immediately,” the voice on the other end of the com said.
Cowards.
Jaxon reached out and snatched the Caldwell woman up, then wrapped his arm around her so she was in front of him. “Let’s go find your boyfriend, shall we?”
** ** **
Tommy and his crew carefully pursued the Marines out. Neither side fired, but maintained a wary eye on the other.
Step by agonizing step, they retraced the steps of their earlier fight. Blood now covered the deck in several places…including one spot Tommy knew to be his.
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