by Terry Mixon
He directed Gunnarsdotter and her team to head for engineering while he led his people toward the bridge. If they could gain control of the ship, that would make the fight significantly easier.
Right now, they had the advantage of surprise. The enemy knew they were there, but they hadn’t had a chance to get armored up, and they were probably not all armed either.
They ran into a small group of fighters just short of the bridge. They also weren’t armored, so the fight was brutally one-sided and quick.
“When we take the bridge, use your stunners,” he said over the external speakers. “They’ll probably be using flechettes, but we need someone to answer questions. We’ll just have to take the risk.”
The bridge hatch was locked, but the armorer was able to take care of that with an explosive charge that wrecked the mechanism and sent the hatch itself spinning into the bridge.
That sparked some flechette fire but far less than he’d expected. The defenders were disorganized, and that was perfect for the flashbangs he threw in. Smoke followed that, and his people raced in once the opaque cloud had filled the bridge.
Their optics was more than capable of seeing the enemy through the smoke, but the same wasn’t true of the crew. The coughing and wheezing defenders tried to see through teary eyes and hear through deafened ears but failed.
He and the marines quickly stunned anyone who was still moving, and then they stunned the ones who weren’t just on general principles.
With the bridge secure, he put a pair of marines on station to guard them against attacks from the rear while he got the life-support system working, drawing the smoke out and seeing what they’d captured. The fact that these people had been firing at him with flechette pistols meant that they weren’t innocent bystanders. So far as he was concerned, they’d gotten what they’d deserved.
It took less than twenty minutes to fully secure the ship and account for everyone. Because he was thorough, they went through the ship a second time but found no holdouts.
The final tally on his side was five marines injured, one seriously. Two other marines had bounced off the hull, and their conditions were still unknown at this time.
They’d killed nine of the crew in the attack and severely injured seven. Half a dozen had been stunned in engineering or the bridge, and several others had been wounded in the breaching of both of those locations.
The most interesting thing about this was the course that the ship was on. It had definitely been moving to match speed with the training ship. They’d overshot it because no one was managing the ship during the fight, so it would take a while to get back into the general area in one of the small craft.
He gathered up his most combat-effective people, and they boarded the ship’s cutter, detaching quickly and racing toward the distant training vessel. He only prayed that they weren’t too late.
42
With Riggio going through the hatch first, he drew the initial fire. That took him down, but he took down at least one of the attackers as well. It all happened so fast that Andrea barely got her stunner up and onto the second attacker before he fired on her.
Only the attacker’s attention initially being focused on Riggio saved her from a fatal burst of flechettes before she took him down. Once she was sure that both of the attackers were down, she knelt beside Riggio.
He’d taken flechettes to his chest and had already succumbed to his wounds. The man who’d helped save her from the Singularity had saved her life once more, but now he was dead.
The rage that shot through her threatened to overwhelm her. She bent down, retrieved his flechette pistol and spare ammunition, and stalked over to the stunned attacker. She raised the pistol and aimed it at his head.
“Whoa!” Claudio said, pushing her hand to the side. “We don’t shoot prisoners, no matter how much they deserve it.”
She hadn’t even heard him and the rest of the squad arrive. Andrea considered what he’d said. She could kill this guy, but it wasn’t going to bring Riggio back. It wasn’t going to bring JR back.
“I don’t think I agree with you right now, so it’s probably better you take this,” Andrea said as she handed him the flechette pistol. “Scavenge all the weapons you can. We’ve got to go find JR’s squad ASAP. This guy will be stunned for the next several hours, but I still want him tied up. Make it fast.”
They were still doing that when she heard someone racing up the corridor. She raised her stunner and found cover. If their attackers were coming this way, they’d deal with them.
Instead, the rest of JR’s squad came racing around the corner ahead of them. Two of them were carrying the dead recruit.
Andrea pointed at Claudio. “Grab Riggio’s body, the dead attacker, and the prisoner. We’re going back out onto the hull and hope that Diana has gotten the pinnace open. We should be able to get away far enough that any explosion—if they’re stupid enough to actually arm it before they have the ship secure—won’t take us down.”
She didn’t want to look at JR or Riggio as they picked them up, but she forced herself to. They were her responsibility. Their deaths were her responsibility.
Once they had the bodies and the unconscious prisoner ready, they raced to the airlock they’d used to board the ship and cycled out as quickly as they could. The jamming was still in effect, so communication was impossible.
The ramp was down, but she had no idea whether Diana had done it or if the pilots had left the small craft open. In the end, it hardly mattered.
She used hand signals to indicate that she would try to bring the pinnace’s controls to life. They’d be locked down, but the man who’d trained her to fly had been a smuggler. Getting around those types of lockouts was one of the unofficial lessons that he’d taught her when Grace and Fei were looking the other way.
Andrea raced into the control area and found Diana in the copilot’s seat, trying unsuccessfully to get the controls to come to life.
She strapped herself into the pilot’s seat, reached under the controls, and opened one of the access panels. Inside were a number of wires and control modules. She plucked out two control modules and ripped one specific wire free to wedge into a new location. Once she’d done so, the controls sprang to life.
“Who’s your mama?” she asked in a purring tone as she started bringing the pinnace’s systems online.
“You can hotwire a pinnace?” Diana asked, a hint of awe in her voice.
“I’m multitalented. Strap in. This might get rough.”
She brought up the vid cameras scattered around the exterior hull and watched as the last of the recruits came out of the airlock, bearing the bodies. The vacuum had immediately begun to vaporize the leaking blood. The poor bastards were going to be covered with what was left of their comrades.
At the ramp’s base, Claudio was urging them to move faster. She was astonished that no one accidentally broke their magnetic connection to the hull with everything that was going on.
As soon as the last of the recruits was inside, Claudio hit the com by the ramp as it was rising and opened a channel to the bridge. “Everyone is in. Let’s get the hell out of Dodge.”
Andrea didn’t know where Dodge was or why it was important that people left it in a hurry, but she was all in favor of getting away from their attackers, particularly since they’d probably set the fusion plant to blow, and they were almost certainly racing back to the pinnace themselves.
Her training in flying a pinnace was not as thorough as she would’ve liked, but she could handle the basic maneuvers. She’d even brought a pinnace down from orbit while under supervision.
Technically, she could do it all. Realistically, she’d always had someone with far more experience standing by to give her pointers. Now she was doing it on her own, and one mistake could kill them all.
Andrea killed the magnetic lock that held the pinnace to the training ship and goosed the thrusters to lift them away. Then the caution and warning system lit up with indicators t
hat they were taking fire from somewhere.
A glance back at the vid cameras showed that the pilots had come out onto the hull and were firing flechette pistols at them. The odds of the flechettes causing damage to the pinnace were minimal but not zero. She needed to get away from them even faster than she had been, particularly if that ship’s fusion plant was rigged to blow.
She activated the main engines and increased the thrust to maximum. A couple of minutes of this, and they’d be clear of any possible explosive radius around the training ship.
Andrea was starting to relax just a little when the proximity and collision alarms went off. She yanked her attention back to the scanners and saw a ship almost directly in front of them. She couldn’t tell what course it was on, but it was far too close to them.
She pushed the control yoke down so that the pinnace dove beneath the other vessel. Scanners had tagged it as a civilian vessel: Exigent Circumstances.
That brought them closer to New Dallas. In fact, that brought them down to the edges of the atmosphere, and she felt a little drag on the pinnace’s hull.
That other ship might not have been part of the attack, but there shouldn’t have been any civilian ships inside the Fleet-controlled area. She needed to get her people entirely outside the reach of these bastards.
She tried bringing the communication system online to call someone—anyone—but there was still no connection. It had to be some kind of jamming to be this widespread. If they were being jammed, there had to be ships out there taking advantage of this, and she needed to act decisively.
Taking a deep breath, she put the pinnace into a deorbit flight pattern and tried to dredge up every single thing she could remember about what had to be done to safely get into the atmosphere. At this point, they were committed, and she needed to make sure they reached the ground alive.
“What are we doing?” Diana asked, staring at the planet growing larger beneath them.
“We’re heading down to the surface. I don’t suppose you know how to fly a pinnace.”
Her friend shook her head, her eyes growing even wider. “Do you?”
“Pretty much. I really wish this jamming would go away so I could call somebody.”
“Jamming? You mean this wasn’t just some way they could cut off our communications on the ship?”
“I still can’t connect with anybody,” Andrea said. “It’s got to be more widespread than we’d imagined. Find out how Claudio is doing back there.”
“Claudio is fine,” the boy said from the hatch behind them. “Everybody is strapped down. What’s this I hear about landing? I didn’t know you could fly a pinnace, particularly coming down from orbit.”
She turned to smile at him cheerily. “I’ve done it a couple of times. Under supervision.”
The young man pulled out one of the emergency seats that the flight engineers used when necessary and strapped himself in. “That doesn’t sound very reassuring. How confident are you that you can get us down in one piece?”
“Mostly? I spotted another ship that looked like it might be part of the attack. If we’d stayed up there, we’d have gotten shot at or gotten more visitors. Someone is jamming the entire area. We’ve got to get out of here.”
“If you can get us down in one piece, I’ll withdraw all my objections to you being a marine. You’d have earned it.”
“I’ve already earned it, jackass,” she answered with a snort. “Still, I’ll hold you to that.”
Thankfully, she still had the recordings of the last couple of flights practicing atmospheric entry in her implant storage, and she was able to skim through them and get the data that she needed for the appropriate angle and speed references.
One of the keys to flexibility in flying that Kayden had taught her was not to lock up. There had to be some fluidity to your reactions and what the vehicle was doing, or you’d make the wrong call. Supposedly, the entry path was more forgiving than one might expect.
By the time the pinnace had fully penetrated the upper atmosphere and began slowing to something remotely normal, she was drenched in sweat. That didn’t stop her from bringing up the map of the planet and locating the marine base. They were a couple of thousand kilometers away from it but could close the distance with just an extra ten or fifteen minutes at this speed.
In for a penny, in for a pound.
She was just beginning to see the base ahead of them when the jamming finally dropped, and someone on the base contacted them.
“Unknown pinnace, this is marine control three. Abort your approach.”
“Negative, Control,” Andrea said, forcing her voice to remain calm. “This is a flight full of recruits, and we are declaring an emergency. Clear the landing area and have crash rescue standing by.”
With that, she killed the com. “I’m probably going to get into trouble for that, but I’d much rather be on the ground now than wonder who’s going to shoot at us next.”
The landing area came up much, much faster than she’d expected, so she applied even more deceleration. There was a relatively clear area off to the right-hand side as they were coming in, and she immediately selected it as their landing area. It was open ground rather than plascrete, so perhaps it would be a bit more forgiving if she blew the landing.
She overcorrected, and the nose of the pinnace rose into the air, causing her to juggle the flight controls at the last second, but she managed to get the landing struts down and locked into place just a couple of seconds before the pinnace stalled and dropped the last meter to the ground.
The impact was heavy and set off some alerts, but pinnaces were tough. That landing wouldn’t have been the roughest it had ever seen.
She powered the major systems down and then hit the com controls to open a channel to the entire pinnace.
“This is your captain speaking. I’d like to thank you for flying Marine Recruit Spaceways and welcome you to your destination. We hope you’ll consider us for your future spaceflight needs. Now, somebody drop the ramp so that the rescue personnel can get in.”
She killed the com and almost collapsed in her seat. She’d made the landing, even if it had been sloppy. Now it was time for the consequences. There was going to be hell to pay no matter how this turned out, and she only hoped that her explanations would be good enough to see them through.
A hand clapped roughly on her shoulder.
“Good landing, marine,” Claudio said as he rose. “I’ll head back and get things moving. I think you should join us as soon as you can because they’re going to want to get everybody off this pinnace ASAP. Diana, get her squared away. She can’t afford to look shaken at a time like this.”
With that, the tall boy headed back to the rear of the pinnace.
Outside, rescue vehicles were racing in from every direction, and armed marines were beginning to spread out around the grounded pinnace as well.
She’d better get back there and make sure that nobody got shot. And that they took possession of the prisoner. Probably arrested her too.
Diana put her hand on Andrea’s shoulder far more gently than Claudio had. “You did it. You got us out of there. We didn’t escape unscathed, and I know that you’re already thinking about consequences, but you did everything you could.”
Andrea sighed and started unbuckling herself. “I sure hope they think so.”
“Stop. Look at me.”
She blinked up at the girl. “What?”
“Breathe. You look panicked. Don’t let the platoon or the rescuers see you like this. Get it together, marine.”
Andrea took a deep breath and then another. The tension was still there, but she felt less like hyperventilating. It would have to do.
“Thanks. Let’s do this.”
With that, she rose to her feet, squared her shoulders, and marched back into the chaos already engulfing the rear compartment of the pinnace. It was time to face the music.
43
Fei stared at the vid feeds showing two separate rooms
holding their prisoners at the Imperial Intelligence headquarters. One of them showed Dayton, who was handcuffed to a chair at an empty table. The other showed Lucinda Drake, who was in a medical bed, recovering from the abrupt amputation of her legs when the marine drill instructors had breached the hatch leading to the bridge.
Honestly, she wasn’t certain who she wanted to speak to first. With Dayton, she could rub in her failure and the fact that Andrea would live and almost certainly become a marine.
With Drake, she could get into the details of what had been planned to happen with Andrea. She still didn’t understand why the attack had taken place in orbit rather than somewhere on the planet. That just didn’t make sense.
Still Water was on the marine base, interfacing with Major Martelle about Andrea. At this point, her girl knew far too much was going on, and there had to be some kind of explanation for her and the other recruits. Since Fei still didn’t want to reveal her presence, he was the perfect choice and had graciously agreed to do so.
Technically, none of the questioning was official, but she’d promised to record everything with Dayton so that any interesting tidbits could be passed along to Imperial Intelligence, legally admissible or not.
She doubted that Dayton would tell her anything of note, so she might as well start with her. She was the one that Still Water was most interested in, after all. He’d keep her and turn Drake over to the local authorities to deal with.
With a sigh, Fei activated her implant recorders and went into the room holding Dayton. The woman smiled smugly at her, even though she had to be suffering from a massive headache from the stunner bolt.
“You failed, you know,” Fei started off, sitting in the chair on the other side of the table. “Andrea is still alive, and she’s going to stay that way.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Lady Na. I was simply here on vacation. I’m uncertain why you and those other thugs attacked me, but rest assured that there are going to be consequences.”
