More chuckled softly. "When are the Ajaxians ever up to any good?"
"Not often," replied Mullins.
"Right. There is a difference between us and the Ajaxians, however. It is one of moral behavior. We have to be better than them. We must maintain that difference so that we don't ever become like them. We must not become barbarians to fight barbarians. If the Ajaxians wouldn't respect a hospital vessel, then that is all the more reason why we should."
More turned to Heyward, whose hologram hovered beside him. “I think it’s time that we send in the professionals. I’m hoping the Ajaxians on her won’t be interested in making a last stand, but we can’t be sure.”
Heyward nodded. “I’ll get my people ready.”
“Good, Matt. I’ll send two squads of my own crew as backup. I’ll let them know that they should not get in the way.”
*****
Lieutenant Darius Jenkins sat on the port side of the Steadfast’s assault boat, the restraint harness deployed snugly around the rugged contours of his M74 battle armor. Beside and across from him were the seven other members of his squad of power-armored Republican marines. Each had donned his helmet, with their masks lending them the visages of ferocious war gods. His men would have enjoyed that notion, Jenkins knew. There was something primal about presenting a fearsome aspect to one’s enemies that would have appealed to their warrior souls. There was nothing primitive about his men, however. Each was a trained specialist, and every one of them had an advanced degree in either engineering, linguistics, or medicine. A marine was prepared to be a one-man wrecking crew if necessary, and his suit of armor made this a distinct and terrible possibility, but he was much readier to function as a part of a team. A squad of eight marines was a miniature army, worth many times its number of ordinary soldiers in combat.
“Weapons check,” called out Sergeant Thomas Cone. Each man made a final check of his personal M22 gauss rifle, a weapon that spat metal penetrators or pellets via electromagnetic pulses. The marines were also armed with grenades, small missiles, and vibrating combat knives that could cut through armor as if it were butter. One of their number carried a flamethrower, capable of dousing a corridor or room with a wash of blazing infernium. The role of Halifax’s marines was to crack open an enemy-held site, be it a ship, a bunker, or landing zone, and end the lives of any inside it who dared resist. Long campaigns and footslogging through deserts or jungles was for lesser troops. Jenkins’s marines had talents that were too precious to waste on missions of secondary importance. They were to be deployed only when other soldiers would stand no chance of survival when going into the most hostile environments or confronting the most lethal threats that war could offer. Boarding actions, the highly dangerous method of obtaining entry to a ship under hostile control, was one of the marines’ foremost specialties.
“So the admiral, More, he’s back,” Corporal Jacques Wilkes noted. Wilkes was the demolitions expert of the squad, and could reduce a house to splinters and concrete dust with a few grams of well-placed magnapex explosive. He was not given to small talk, or any kind of talk at all, but the return of their old commanding officer had caused him to speak now.
“That’s old news,” Jenkins said. “We’ve known for at least two hours.”
Wilkes shrugged. “I’m glad he’s back. War gets interesting when he’s around.”
“Chasing Jaxers and the riff-raff of the system was getting kind of dull,” Private Simon Cass agreed. “With More here, maybe we’ll find a time anomaly that shoots us a thousand years into the future, or discover a lost alien civilization. Fun stuff happens when he’s on the job.”
“I’m sure he’ll be happy to hear you say that,” Jenkins said. “Is that what runs through your mind when you get bored?”
“I’m never bored when you’re in command, sir,” Cass insisted. “It’s all about the mission, and the mission only. Still, it would be nice, once in a while, to get to board something more interesting than a scrap metal freighter or a garbage scow.”
“True,” Jenkins said. “But we can’t be picky about what our targets are, please bear that in mind. We don’t get to choose what the Aquitainians or the Jaxers decide to fight their war in.”
"I'm glad to have the old man back too," Private Gordon Brand said. "Matt Heyward is a cool guy and all, but with More here it seems like old times."
"Nostalgia," added Cass. "We have nostalgia for the way things used to be."
Jenkins' grimace was completely hidden by his helmet. "So that’s what occupies your thoughts when you ought to be practicing marksmanship? Missing our old captain and a dissatisfaction with our enemies? I'll have you know that the RHN goes to great lengths to ensure that we have only the finest opponents facing us."
The chuckles of the marines echoed in Jenkins' ear, modulated by his suit's audio system.
"And I appreciate every effort that the Navy makes on our behalf," Cass said, bringing his mighty armored shoulders upward in an awkward shrug. "I've always believed I should earn every bit of the exorbitant pay I receive. Still, our most recent ops have not been all that satisfying."
"You might want to remember the ancient proverb," advised Cone. "'Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.'"
"Under most circumstances I'd say those were words to live by," said Cass. "Whoever said that obviously wasn't on patrol in this system for any length of time."
"No, I don't think he was," agreed Jenkins. The war in Aquitaine had been a tedious posting so far. The excitement had accrued only to the ships and the pilots of the Golden Sabers. For the marines it had been sheer drudgework. Every marine wanted to be in the thick of things, and serve in the most dangerous sectors, not in some backwater system fighting against a lesser enemy. They all hated the Jaxers, that was part and parcel of being a Halifaxian marine. They wanted to get at them. They'd run into very few of the enemy’s infantry while they had been operating in-system, and everything else had been so routine. Most of the Ajaxian personnel they’d encountered had been inferior ship crews, not real soldiers. Combat had been rote and by the numbers.
While routine meant that he and his marines were not getting shot at, it also held some latent dangers. When his men got bored, when everything seemed to be one run-of-the-mill op after another, they might become careless. That could lead to errors of judgment. Mistakes. Costly mistakes. The line between a friendly inspection of a merchant freighter and a deadly firefight could be much thinner than anyone realized, especially when nothing out of the ordinary had happened in months. It was human nature to relax one's guard when action became scarce.
"I want you all to stay sharp on this op," Jenkins said. "This is not another milk run. That I can promise you. The Jaxers have control of that ship, even if it is a hospital ship that once belonged to the Aquitainians. They're bound to have done something nasty to it.
"Any more intel about what we might be up against?" asked Waldo Tikhonov, another one of the privates in the squad.
"No change since we boosted from Steadfast," said Jenkins. "They refuse to respond to our hails. Expect the reception to be hot." Jenkins turned to the pilot of the assault boat, Javier Sung, one of his marines who specialized in small craft operation in addition to killing and destroying. “How are our companions from Albacore?”
“They’re in a line behind us. Doing their best to stay out of our way.”
“Did you threaten them?”
“Only a little,” Sung said. “They won’t try to board until we give them the go-ahead. I mentioned the possibility of a weapons malfunction on the boat. Their pilots got the message right away.”
“Good.” Jenkins was uneasy with the backup that Admiral More had insisted on sending along for the boarding. Captain Heyward had been comfortable sending just the squad out to the hospital ship. Eight battlesuited marines were enough firepower to handle everything up to and including a company of ordinary troops, so he didn’t think that Jenkins and his men needed additional support. More had tho
ught differently, and ordered both his own ship and Steadfast to send out two shuttles apiece full of naval armsmen. These were nothing more than sailors with guns, and it would be a nuisance to have to watch out for them when going aboard, but what an admiral wanted, an admiral got, so there they were, in little craft bobbing behind the marines’ assault boat.
“Coming up on the hull, lieutenant,” said Sung. “Five seconds to shield breach.”
Passing through a ship’s shield was unpleasant but not very dangerous, as long as one took precautions. It was a lot like entering water. If you smacked into a body of liquid water at too high a velocity, it would be like hitting a ferrocrete wall, and you would splatter your molecules all over. If you approached slowly, very slowly, you could pass through relatively easily. You’d feel squeezed a bit as the shield compressed around you and tried unsuccessfully to extrude you into hyperspace, but you wouldn’t die. It would feel like someone was sitting on your chest for a few seconds. That’s all. Hyperspatial shielding was most effective against high energy beam weapons, speeding missiles, and nuclear blasts. Oddly, slowpoke boats filled with homicidal marines, the most dangerous military force in the galaxy, could pass with little trouble.
“Are we being painted by anything?” Jenkins asked Sung.
“No,” replied Sung. “Our scanners are sweeping the hull of the ship. They haven’t spotted anything pointed at us that looks like a weapon, either.”
“Doesn’t make sense that the Jaxers would go to all this trouble to take over an Aquitainian ship and not remake it to their liking,” Cone observed. “Could they have decided to have used it as a hospital ship for themselves?”
“Anything’s possible,” said Jenkins, pondering the curving outline of their target. “Doesn’t sound like something they would do. They tend their wounded, when they tend them at all, on their warships. They don’t like to waste a hull and its expensive DP drive on ferrying around injured soldiers. They had something else planned for this.”
The assault boat alighted on the exterior of the medical ship. Gravitic clamps deployed, forming a tight bond with the alloy hull. The bottom of the boat opened to reveal the upper hull of the larger vessel. A small forcefield glowed greenish-white, keeping the atmosphere of the boat sealed in between it and the target.
“Atmospheric pressure nominal, lieutenant,” Sung declared. “We’re good to go.”
“No point in wasting anymore time then,” Jenkins said. He stood, and the other marines rose beside him. “We will probably be entering a cargo bay. It will be a drop to the floor, assuming that artificial gravity is still operating. Look sharp! We don’t know who will be greeting us. It will probably be Jaxers, you can drop them all you want, but the old Aquitainian crew might also still be on board. We’re here to help them, not splatter them across the insides of their ship.”
“You got that marines!” barked Sergeant Cone. “We don’t kill friends or allies!”
“We get you, sergeant!” came the unified response of the other men. There was some light laughter.
Jenkins nodded. “Now that’s clear, time to go and explore this ship.”
The assault boat mounted a boarding drill on the undersurface. It was not actually a drill at all, but an industrial strength laser saw. It was meant for short-ranged mining work on dense asteroids. It also worked at a top-quality shipbreaker in orbital facilities, speeding the process of dismembering an old spacecraft when it had outlived its usefulness. Marines had discovered that it also worked very well on all kinds of ships, particularly those that didn’t want to be boarded. . .
The laser saw deployed, emitting a blazing white beam of focused light on the hospital ship’s hull. It rotated a full three-hundred-sixty-degrees in four seconds, leaving behind an orange-red line where the metallic hull had been cut. Freed from its connection to the rest of the hull, the circular piece, a little over a meter in diameter, fell away, clanging to the deck floor some five meters below.
Jenkins dropped a small probe in the hole. It hovered about a meter below, turning on its axis, supplying him with a full view of the interior.
“Cargo bay,” he said. “Nobody’s there, yet. Sung, stay here and guard the fort. Let’s move!”
The seven other marines jumped, one after another, following the lieutenant down through the hole. Jenkins landed with a loud thump, the built-in shock absorbers in the legs of his battlearmor cushioning the impact so that it felt like he had leaped from a height of just a few centimeters. He raised his M22 rifle and scanned around the bay, which was filled with cargo crates almost all the way to the ceiling. He picked up no targets. Behind him, Sergeant Cone and the others landed, and formed a perimeter, with each man picking one of the informal corridors between the crates to keep watch over.
“Life signs?” Jenkins asked. “I’m not picking up any inside the bay.” According to the Jenkins’ suit’s scanner, no one else was in the cavernous bay except him and his marines.
“If there’s anyone on here, they are as well-shielded from detection as we are,” Cone said. “I’m picking up a lot of interference. Range on my scanner is only twenty percent max.”
“Same with me,” Wilkes said. Agreement came from the rest of the marines in short order. “Something in the cargo?”
“Maybe.” Jenkins strode over to one of the crates. He hauled the plasteel box off its loading pallet, lifting it as easily as an unaugmented man might lift a bunch of grapes. He laid it on the deck. Removing a vibroknife from its sheath, he sliced through the steel locks securing the crate shut. He opened the lid.
Warning buzzes sounded as soon as he did so. He shut the lid out of trained habit, though in his suit he was in no danger.
“Radioactives,” Cone said, standing beside him. “That’s what the bastards are transporting. Nuclear waste, probably.”
“Admiral More and the captain are going to be very angry with the Jaxers for this,” Wilkes said. “The enemy is playing dirty.”
Brand peered inside the open crate. “Why would they be transporting all this nuke material?”
“This was their Plan B,” Wilkes said. “I’ll wager good money there were soldiers on the freighters than ran. If they couldn’t take Arles outright, they were going to turn it into a radioactive junkpile with this stuff.”
“This is beyond the pale, even for the Jaxers,” Cone hissed.
“Expect a house of horrors,” Jenkins said. “Whoever is left on the ship was and still is playing for keeps.”
It didn’t take long for the Jaxers to show themselves. It was impossible for the marines to disguise their entry point. That they were not immediately attacked when they came in, Jenkins realized, could only have been due to their insertion into a bay filled with spent nuke fuel and other radiological waste. The Jaxers had no wish to irradiate themselves, and waited for the marines to make their way into the central access corridor that led from the upper bay toward the bridge.
Jenkins was greeted by a hail of slugs as he made his way to the ship’s reactor and drives. The enemy was using caseless ammo assault rifles. Their fire was accurate, in that it was hard for them to miss the hulking marines in a confined space when they fired on full auto. The laminated composite armor of the M74 battlearmor shrugged off the hits, and compensated for the kinetic energy that the slugs imparted as they squashed against it. There was little chance of a penetration, since the armor was so tough and resilient, but a long burst could potentially knock him or one of his marines down due to the sheer power of the impacts. The M74 reacted automatically to blows, without need of a wearer’s direct input. Stabilizers kicked in to prevent the marine from being knocked off his feet. However, there were times when holding a suit in place could be detrimental, when giving a bit would help to deflect a strike, rather than absorb the entire brunt of it. Milliseconds of give would be followed by milliseconds of power to restore the suit to equilibrium in balance. This would be the best blend to sustain a marine in combat.
Jenkins was gratefu
l that the M74’s designers had put so much thought into how his suit should react when under assault. A hailstorm of gunfire was never pleasant no matter how well the armor defeated it. There was something disconcerting in being on the other side of a wall, in this case, his armored suit, and having the equivalent of a jackhammer banging against it five times every second. Each blow sounded a bit like the bongs of a clock counting down the last moments of one’s life.
Once he had made it to the end of the corridor, Jenkins found the space open up into another cargo bay, criss-crossed with gantries and walkways. This is where the Jaxers had set up their firing positions. Jenkins raised his M22 and aimed at the firers ahead of him. Ten were neatly picked out as infrared images. He opened up with a stream of hypersonic pellets that shredded the Jaxers into pulp, spraying their flesh and bone across the gantries above his head.
Jenkins pushed on, taking down a pair of light bay doors that opened onto a long corridor with a well-placed kick.
“Medical,” he announced as his squad followed him through. They rushed past a series of operating rooms filled with surgical equipment. This was not unexpected. Hospital ships housed such facilities in abundance. He was more surprised to find that the Jaxers had failed to loot the valuable equipment inside them. Medical equipment was sophisticated and costly, and not something they were likely to overlook. They must have mounted this latest operation in great haste, or were so confident that they would succeed that they did not envision the possibility of having the ship taken from them.
Two Jaxer soldiers opened up on the marines as they advanced. The Jaxers were inside a recessed surgical ward, one sublevel up a low ramp at the end of the corridor, and were difficult to see. They could shoot at Jenkins’ men, but were almost impossible to target in return, with the ward, set off to one side, hidden by the rooms in between. Gaus pellets splattered the ceiling and sides of the corridor, sending the marines diving for cover inside the operating rooms to either side.
The Ajax Incursion Page 9
