Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Next in series:
TERMINATION
SHOCK
by
GILLIAN ANDREWS
Interstellar Enforcement Agency
(Book One)
The moral right of Gillian Andrews to be identified as the author of the work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988. All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner, unless they are permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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ISBN: 978-84-09-16378-6
DEPÓSITO LEGAL: DL PM 1486-2019
COPYRIGHT AUTOR Y EDITOR @ GILLIAN ANDREWS 2019
PRIMERA IMPRESION 2019
2..0
Illustration @Tom Edwards
TomEdwardsDesign.com
Chapter 1
Sammy was glowering and Mel was looking down at the decking. Neither of them thought I knew how to lead a squad. They were right, but I wasn’t about to tell them so.
Sammy cleared his throat with a sort of huffing sound. “They’ll send someone else, Rye,” he told me, trying to seem helpful and not denigrating, something he could use some practice at.
I gestured with my M596 long barrel, making a huge effort not to sigh. “Just aim at the Avaraks, Sammy. Let’s get the job done.” I didn’t have to say the same to Bull Cunningham. He was in his element, eyes shining, carelessly notching up accurate shots at the enemy. Despite being a Terran Flatlander, he was one of those souls born to be a marine. He hadn’t got there yet, but I was pretty sure it wouldn’t take him too long. If I hadn’t had two weeks seniority on him he would have been leading this team now. He would probably have done it better.
For a moment I considered handing the job over to him, but the small Tyzaran girl clutching at my uniform made me focus. She hadn’t been in our remit, but having found her huddled shaking in a doorway, I knew I had to try to save her. There was no way she should have been here. All the visiting Tyzaran dignitaries had been hastily evacuated twelve hours earlier. She had just leapfrogged to my top priority.
The sounds of inter-vessel torpedoes hammering old Commorancy continued. The ancient hull plating was shivering with transformed kinetic energy, making it hard to concentrate.
I kicked Wolseley’s legs out of the way. No man left behind, I thought fiercely. Yeah. Like that had worked out well. Our intrepid leader wouldn’t be going anywhere anytime soon. He was missing most of his torso. I couldn’t have taken the remaining bits of him with us, even if I had wanted to.
Major Wolseley hadn’t thought much of my insistent suggestion to fall back and regroup. He was old school. Gung-ho and give your all for the ship; what do you think we train you for, and so on. Rewards in heaven, I supposed. I’m a Spacelander too, but I didn’t believe in all that claptrap. He should be proving or disproving it pretty soon, I calculated. He must be hammering at the pearly gates about now. I hoped he found his misplaced stubborn heroism worth it.
Unfortunately his rigid sticking to the rules had now left those of us remaining in combat with little choice. We could die or we could fight. Half the Avarak intruders had taken advantage of the delay to advance from the port side, trapping us in the corridor between the main engine room and the EM core, and we sure as fitz weren’t going to be retreating anywhere now.
As for Captain Tevis … I didn’t think we would be seeing him anytime soon in this corridor. Not that I knew him. I knew of him. He’d been responsible for the death of one of my uncles. His specialty was keeping his own head down and persuading others not to. The captain would have more pressing work somewhere else on the ship. Somewhere more protected, my subconscious snarked. I tried not to think about it. Like it or not, I was now the de facto head of this decimated squad. I had better things to do than wonder where Commorancy’s just-give-me-my-decoration captain had got to.
Mel’s eyes were sidling towards Sammy. She was wondering whether to mutiny or not.
I cocked the firing mechanism and pointed my gun at her. She rolled her eyes, but at least that brought them back in my direction. She pushed the barrel of her own M487 XRS against her shoulder and squinted down the corridor at the invaders. The sound of her firing was just one more boom amongst the juddering metal which screeched its demise. If we didn’t clear this position soon we were lost. Tears were streaking down her cheeks. I wasn’t sure if they were of rage or fright. It didn’t matter. All she had to do was keep firing. If she didn’t I might shoot her myself.
I turned to cover our rear. Poor old Commorancy was groaning like a collapsing whale. This ship wasn’t going to last much longer.
A computer voice suddenly crackled into life over the ship’s loudspeaker system. “Abandon ship. Abandon ship. This is not a drill. Proceed to your nearest exit port and board the shuttles in an orderly fashion.”
Thanks a lot. Would if we could. I guess the announcement was one step better than ‘we are about to abandon ship leaving the rest of you to die in this old bucket’, which is what our esteemed captain really meant.
Mel wavered. My back was jammed up against hers. I could feel her gun go quiet as she processed the information. A bullet hit Sammy, who collapsed on the floor.
I snarled backwards at her. “Keep firing, damn it! Don’t you even think about taking your finger off that trigger!”
I felt, rather than heard, the gasp of outrage, but my words were effective. She started to return fire again. I squashed the Tyzaran girl between me and Bull. She was half our size. At least we could act as human shields for her. She was cringing at the sounds and the flashes of gunfire, her crest sticking out rigidly from her scalp in panic.
I tugged at Sammy’s shoulder lapels, dragging and pushing him slightly to one side, where a small doorway gave him a little better cover. I couldn’t spare the time to look at him. I just kept returning their fire. The shuttles in the stern cargo hold might as well have been ten kilometers away. We were not going to get there in time. I was pretty sure our part in this newly born war was just about over. I was pretty sure our part in life was just about over.
Still. There were a couple of things worth trying first. I unpinned my last two dunker grenades with my teeth without stopping firing and threw both of them together at the Avaraks blocking our retreat. I was careful to count to three first, to cook the grenade. Didn’t particularly want to give the Avaraks time to toss them back at us. Better to be too close to the flashpoint than on top of it. That had been drilled into us earlier in this three-week space defense course. Dunker grenades were about all the live ammunition we had been allowed to play with, and I was lucky to have a couple still hanging off my belt. They created a combination of a dazzling flash, electronic whiteout and heavy
smoke. We had thought we would never need to use any of it. The Avaraks had decided differently just as we were about to take our final day exam.
“… Four … Five.” I grabbed Mel’s head and pushed it downwards. Bull protected the little girl’s eyes.
There was a small explosion down the corridor, followed by a tremendous flash. Smoke billowed down towards our position. I grabbed Sammy again and tugged at Mel’s arm. Bull picked up the Tyzaran child and followed us.
The very first thing a true Spacelander does on a new ship is explore the network of crawl tubing hidden behind the bulkheads. That’s where you see what sort of a ship you’re on. Now I was glad I had. I knew that there was a service hatch about ten feet towards the blast center. It was certainly our only chance of escape.
We galloped along in tandem like a lame pantomime horse, Sammy’s legs bouncing on the decking as Mel and I manhandled him along between us. There was just this small window of opportunity before the smoke cleared and the Avaraks got us back in their sights. Thankfully they were not dumb enough to shoot through smoke when their own units were on the other side of the supposed enemy position.
I tore the hatch open. Mel jumped through and dragged Sammy inside. I stood aside as Bull and the girl dove through. As they did I ducked and slipped behind them, pulling the hatch shut behind me. I locked it fast, knowing that the feeble lock wouldn’t hold the Avaraks for long if they wanted to follow. I was pretty sure they wouldn’t be able to. Avaraks are substantially larger than us. I didn’t think they would fit in the narrow passageways. Female Avaraks would, but I hadn’t seen any on Commorancy.
It wasn’t much, but it was a chance. Bull and I now slung Sammy between us and ran for it, Mel racing ahead of us, pushing the girl before her.
I was trying to recall the schematics of this end of the ship. If I was correct we could turn into the right main service tunnel and then slip down through the emergency lift bypass – a drop shaft that would finally lead into the secondary shuttle bay, in the bows of the ship. That was all of twenty decks down. But who was counting? We would either make it or die. Good motivation.
We went down those ladders like the very devil was after us. Sammy was gasping with pain and trying to hang on to our necks as we half fell, half shimmied down the iron rungs. Mel was still crying. I wondered where she had all that liquid. I was about as dehydrated as a man can get and still function, but then, she was a woman.
I shouldn’t have had that thought. Fate must have been listening. I snagged my arm on one of the rungs. That skewed my fall, throwing me roughly against the other side of the ladder and crashing me sideways into one of the jutting supports. My shoulder blade slammed into the metal and cracked. I felt the fracture. I found I did have some liquid behind my eyes. Who knew? I couldn’t help a tense smile at the irony. ‘Never ask for whom the bell tolls’, and so on. Two bawling Spacelander recruits. Maybe it was lucky Captain Tevis was somewhere else. I’d rather die than have this witnessed. I turned my head away so that Bull wouldn’t notice. Fine leader I was.
It was even harder with only one arm to climb down the ladder. The liquid behind my eyes dried up but the pain sure stayed. It wasn’t only the shoulder blade: the whole of that side of my torso was burning. I was cursing the lot of them by then. All the brilliant Avarak strategists who had somehow put old Commorancy, a teaching ship, at the epicenter of a battle. Even though I had no idea what this Avarak incursion was all about it was odds on to a tadpole that somebody further up the line of command would. And somebody on board had just put a neat red line through Commorancy’s name as an acceptable loss. I started my imprecations at Major Wolseley and worked my way up past Captain Tevis.
I had run out of people to cuss by the time we had traveled past twelve decks. Sweat was proving again just how much water a body holds even when you think it is dry.
“Rye?” I caught a hint of Mel’s sympathy. I hated it.
“Shut the hell up! I’m fine!”
For once, she did as she was told. I turned my attention back to the Tyzaran girl, who, because of her size, was struggling with the spaces between rungs. She was barely managing, her crest perpendicular to her scalp and her face tight with concentration.
I had time as we dropped through deck after deck. Decks are numbered up from the lowest to the highest. From zero to twenty-five on the Commorancy, stacked one on top of the other. The cargo bay, where we were going, took up three deck heights, so the numbers skipped from zero to four.
“We need a shuttle,” I snapped to Mel. “When we get down, clear any opposition and secure the nearest and biggest thing that flies.”
She nodded. “Do my best. Err … are you fit to pilot?”
I gave her what I hoped was a supercilious look. “Naturally. And even if I weren’t, Bull here could. He was fast-tracked.” I didn’t tell her that, not being a Spacelander, the sum total of his experience was twenty hours on a simulator. She hadn’t been in the same group and she didn’t need to know. The first thing they teach you on this course is need to know. It helps to ensure people follow orders everybody else knows will kill them. Good policy, if you want to avoid being shot by your subordinates.
Bull grinned. He just didn’t care. He had been waiting all his short life for this. I could almost feel lines of worry popping out on my forehead, but his face was shining with exhilaration. The Tyzaran girl was staring at him with mistrust. Tyzarans are highly intelligent beings who are fascinated by progress and technology. They resort to violence if necessary but don’t relish it. All her instincts were telling her to run, but her intellect knew there was nowhere to run to.
We finally clattered into the cargo bay, our boots sounding like castanets on the deck plating. Subtle we were not. We dropped Sammy onto the decking, none too gently, and brought our weapons up.
“No Avaraks!” Mel reported after a moment.
Bull was checking our six. “Clear!”
I pursed my lips. They were right, but there were people here. They were hiding from us, but they were here. I could sense them. Spacelanders spend so much time alone that we can tell when we are surrounded by living, breathing organisms.
Well, if they were hiding they weren’t Avaraks. Avaraks had no artifice. Their huge body mass and dominance had taught them to walk straight up and confront you. They weren’t ones to shiver behind cover. Not subtle at all.
I took a step forward. “All right. Come out! We won’t hurt you!”
Mel gave me a surprised look. Her finger tightened on her gun. I reached across with my good hand and pushed the barrel down. She frowned.
A rustle told me they were obeying me. At first one, then five, and then more children appeared.
I dropped my rifle butt and blew out air. The powers that be hadn’t even evacuated this school class. From what I could see, there must be a couple of dozen kids filing out from amongst the oil drums.
“Why haven’t you abandoned the ship?” I demanded, singling out a young Terran male instructor who was stepping in front of his charges with no attempt at a welcoming smile. This group must be one of the sub-teen Terran familiarity groups that visited the training ship every few days. It was an attempt to introduce future spacefaring rookies to their destiny. Or vice versa. No one was sure.
“Abandon ship? Why would we do that?” His nose was up and his tone was supercilious despite his obvious fear. It made my own hackles rise. The Tyzaran girl looked over to me, picking up on the man’s antagonism and my involuntary response to it.
I stared. “Are you deaf? They have been broadcasting the order for the last half-hour.”
“Not down here. I was told to bring all the children down here and wait for instructions. The sound system must be down.” The man breathed in and out a couple of times. Self-preservation must be telling him not to alienate people he would no
rmally class as backward illiterates, telling him that he might have found some fool to get his nuggets out of the soup pot. His eyes flickered to Bull and lingered on the Flatlander’s rifle. He made some attempt to smile, to appear likeable. I could have told him it wasn’t working. So could the Tyzaran child. She was growing on me.
I nodded to Mel, who slipped away in the direction of the parked shuttles at the far end of the bay.
The false smile slipped. “You have to do something. Don’t just stand around! Help us!” The instructor had straightened his shoulders and assumed an air of bravado in order to attempt to boss me about. I had never seen him before, but Commorancy was very compartmentalized, and I hadn’t been on board that long. I was used to my own ship, Faraday. I had never taken these three-week courses seriously. They had always been more about meeting others like me, rather than actual, useful training. Bull and Sammy and I had dedicated most of our down time on this one thinking up how to meet some of the girls and how to obtain at least a decent measure of alcohol.
“How many of you are there?” We all ducked automatically as a particularly huge tremor tore at the ship’s metal sheathing.
He waited until the sound abated slightly before answering. “Thirty children. Thirty-one altogether, including myself. You can’t just leave us here. It is your duty to help us.”
“We’ll see.” He wasn’t a Spacelander. I should make allowances. There is a reason we know them as Flatlanders. They live in a really limited environment. I tried to make my voice gentle but the adrenalin was still pumping through my body, my arm was killing me and he wasn’t my idea of a hapless civilian. “I’ll do my best.” I looked around the shuttle bay. The noise of failing metal was strident. “This old lady won’t last much longer.”
Termination Shock Page 1
