by James Evans
“This is my skillset, Captain. Leave it with me. I’ll retrieve Fletcher; you proceed as planned.”
Warden was about to say something else but he stopped himself. She was right. Comparatively, she was expendable, and in any case, she did have more exo-suit experience than he.
“Don’t put yourself at risk, Corn. We still need you to get us off this thing and Fletcher won’t thank you for dying whilst trying to retrieve her dead clone.”
“Understood,” Corn replied. As Warden worked to adjust his angle of approach back toward the group, Corn turned on the spot and manoeuvred to neatly intercept Fletcher.
“I’m on the ship and beginning to crack the door panel, sir,” said Goodwin.
Warden looked back as he zipped past Fletcher, who was at least a hundred metres off course, and passed Corn going the other way. The Royal Navy officer waved at him as she passed, completely relaxed about the risks she was taking.
Warden shook his head in bemusement.
It takes all sorts, he thought.
Royal Navy personnel were often seen as people who liked the luxury of conducting war through a viewscreen, but that didn’t mean they lacked bravery, and using exo-suit thrusters to pursue a potentially dead colleague adrift in space was about as brave an action as Warden could think of. If it went wrong, Corn had little chance of being rescued. She would likely have to resort to the method Ten had demonstrated earlier.
“Captain, are you slowing down at all or shall we just order you some painkillers from your med-suite now?” Milton asked.
Warden blinked back to life from his reverie and stared at the fast-approaching ship.
“I’ll be slowing down, Colour, just trying to get this over with quickly,” he lied, adjusting his velocity with a short burst of his thrusters.
“As long as you’re not trying to pull a sickie by breaking your arms, it’s fine by me,” Milton replied.
“Hang on, you mean to tell me if I’d broken my arms, I wouldn’t have had to do this?”
“Pretty much.”
“Well, bugger. That makes me peevish, you know.”
“Yup. I suggest taking it out on the Deathless. It’s all their fault, remember?”
Seconds later, Warden’s feet touched down on the surface of the target and he pulled himself around to grip the ship. It was strangely comforting to have something to hold onto.
“Can I open her up now, Captain?”
“One moment, Goodwin,” he said, turning back toward space.
“How goes it, Corn?”
“I’ve got her Captain. It looks like her suit was holed by a micro-meteorite or some other piece of junk floating out here. She seems to be unconscious; I’ll be catching up with you soon. You should get inside and kill everything you find. If I need to give her medical attention it’d be helpful not to have any Deathless bothering me.”
“Roger that, we’re going in,” Warden said, signalling for Goodwin to do the honours. The airlock door slid open silently, and they stepped inside.
Warden pulled the trigger and stepped forward into the room, putting a hand on the chest of Deathless crew member who’d tried to shoot him. His gauntlet slapped into wet flesh as he pushed the corpse aside.
There it was. The airlock that led back to Ascendant. He strode forward to the controls, dropping the technician with a double tap to the head. He peered at the controls as his HUD provided translation. Then he tapped away, locking the docking tube so it couldn’t be disengaged.
Goodwin busied herself at the actual tube, setting up a simple booby trap in case anyone forced their way through the doors and tried to regain access to Target One manually.
Fletcher had recovered quickly once Corn had rescued her. Her ogre clone was tough, but when her suit began to lose pressure, it shut off non-essential functions like communications to preserve power, focussing instead on heating the area around the hole to prevent freezing.
As it was, Fletcher had a wound she wouldn’t be able to ignore if she weren’t drugged to the eyeballs on combat sims and painkillers, but Corn had patched the massive power armour she wore, and her vital signs were good.
Warden began walking from the room, checking the HUD to see the targets Goodwin’s drones had identified.
30
“What do you reckon, Ten? This way?” asked Fletcher, gesturing towards a pair of blast doors to the right.
“Why not through here?” Ten said, pointing at a set of double height, double width airlock doors to the left. “It’s a more direct path to the auxiliary generator. According to Agent O’s information about starships of this class, anyway.”
“I dunno. There’s just something about it that puts me off. Perhaps it’s the oversized doors, or the huge yellow and black warning lines on them, or that angry red triangle with the big exclamation point in it. Perhaps it’s the HUD translating the warning signs restricting it to authorised personnel that’s putting me off.”
“Bah. No sense of adventure. Look, we’re on the capital ship of the admiral of the fleet. What could possibly be in here that you’d have to worry about, dressed like that?” he said, gesturing at her current clone and the bulky power armour. The ogre towered over Ten’s RMSC clone. It was massive, hence the nickname, and the power armour the Deathless used turned it into a true behemoth.
“Fine. But you go first. And if this turns out to be the spaceship equivalent of a shark pit in a volcano base, you’re the one getting eaten by mutated crocodiles bred for war,” said Fletcher, slapping a blood-splattered access card she’d picked up earlier on the access panel.
The doors opened with a whoosh. “Umm. That was a very vivid image, Fletcher. Perhaps we should talk about you staying up late reading comics and eating cheese, hmm?” Ten suggested as he headed into the cavernous space. He received a two-finger salute for his trouble, and it wasn’t the polite sign for victory.
Fletcher ducked into the room. With her current height, even the larger doors on the Deathless ships still felt a little low. She found herself on a wide metal gantry overlooking a room that was three or four stories tall. It was hard to see the floor through the jungle below.
“What the fuck is this?”
Ten shrugged. “Maybe you weren’t wrong about the crocodile monsters?”
“Let’s just try and get across here as quickly as possible, eh? Gooders, you still got a drone near us?” she asked over comms.
“A micro-drone, set to keep pace with you. We’re in the middle of a firefight, so be quick. What’s up?”
“We’ve just hit a huge room and need to know if there’s a quick way to cross it. It’s our most direct route to the auxiliary power systems. Any chance you can map the room for us?” Fletcher asked as she peered over the edge of the railing that was all that stood between them and a fall into the steamy darkness below.
&n
bsp; The room was amazing. It reminded her of a huge tropical hothouse she’d visited with her school to see the pretty butterflies and unusual plants and parrots. Only that one wasn’t on a spaceship dozens of jumps from Sol space. She couldn’t see the far wall, and could only see one of the adjacent walls. A biome area mixing hydroponics and oxygen-generating plants wasn’t uncommon among capital class ships, but they were usually more like formal gardens than forest, let alone jungle.
“No problem. Give me a second,” Goodwin replied. There was gunfire in the background and Fletcher could see Ten getting fidgety. His fingers twitching to the beat of the weapons in frustrated sympathy. A micro-drone appeared in front of Fletcher, did a loop and flew out into the room. “Done. It’ll map the layout, then return to follow mode.”
“Thanks, Goodwin. Fletcher out.”
Fletcher watched her tactical map as the drone’s scanning filled it in, the gangways appeared, and it looked like they could cross the whole room on them.
“See? What did I tell you,” Ten said as he set off after her.
“I’m not going to the ground floor.”
“Fletcher, they don’t have crocodiles in here.”
“Says you,” Fletcher said as they jogged through the jungle canopy.
“Yeah, they probably have something else in here. Like giant robo-snakes!”
“Not just space monkeys then?”
“Hey, I wasn’t lying about the space monkeys, was I?”
Fletcher had to admit that he hadn’t been, preposterous though it had sounded at first. No-one had believed him until they had seen the monkeys on Child of Starlight. If anything weird or spectacular was going on, Ten always seemed to be at the heart of it.
“No, you weren’t. Is that what this place is? A space monkey habitat?” she asked.
“Probably. Might just be a hot, sweaty, pungent rest and relaxation garden. Admiral’s prerogative, maybe?” Ten replied as they passed the halfway line to the other side of the immense chamber.
“Maybe it’s worth it to keep them happy. I heard they work for the Deathless, right?”
“Yeah, all sorts of jobs.”
“How many are on this ship, do you think?”
Ten pulled up short. “Fletcher, I don’t know, okay? I’m not a bloody expert on space monkeys.”
She stopped as well. “Okay, no need to get touchy. I’m just making conversation, right? A big ship, with a jungle only for the space monkeys, my mind naturally wonders how many there might be on board.” Fletcher held up her enormous hands. “But if you don’t want to talk about it, let’s just go and find that auxiliary power thing and blow it up, eh?”
“Yeah. Right. Yeah,” said Ten hesitating.
Fletcher put her hands on her hips.
“What’s up now, Ten? We’re short of time!”
“You’re right, Fletcher,” said Ten, waving his hand around the room. “There must be dozens, maybe hundreds of them on this ship, and we’ve come to kill them.”
“Them and the Deathless. Nothing they wouldn’t do to us.”
“Yeah, but the mandrills don’t even know about the war. They don’t know what’s going on Fletcher. They’re innocent in all this,” said Ten.
“Shit. You want to save them, don’t you?”
Ten shrugged again. “I’ve got to try and find them, and at least give them a fighting chance. But you get on, Fletcher. You complete the mission, I’ll catch up with you. Trust me, you don’t want to get court-martialled and end up like me.”
“Ten, I don’t think I’ll ever meet anyone like you again. Promise me you’ll catch up? Don’t bugger about.”
“Don’t worry. If I can’t find them soon, I’ll be out of this place faster than a scalded cat. Go Fletcher, and give ’em hell.”
Fletcher found herself in a large, long room, flanked on either side by auxiliary power systems, just as Agent O had described. The generators and converters towered above her, stretching towards the distant ceiling and making even her ogre clone seem small.
She looked for the weakness that Agent O had identified, not that having access to the internal systems of a ship was really much of a weakness. If you couldn’t destroy a ship from the inside, you were a pretty piss-poor commando. Every ship was vulnerable to sabotage, especially if the crew kindly allowed you to wander around unimpeded.
Then she saw it – a confluence of pipes and vents in the rafters of the room. Fletcher had been told the room would have multiple power generation, storage and recovery facilities. It was like a central clearing house for power on the ship. In normal practice, the fusion reactors would power everything on board the ship, from lighting, to wormhole generators and life support.
The Deathless had redundancies for everything and they used much more efficient ship designs than the Royal Navy. It was in their nature, as descendants of an Ark ship culture where everything – air, water, even people – was recycled to keep the ship going. Shutting down the main generators wouldn’t even slow them down.
Captain Cohen had suggested they blow the fusion generators, but Sub Lieutenant Mantle had advised that the resulting detonation would destroy Ascendant, Palmerston and any chance of escaping the battle. Instead, they had planted charges to cut the power coming from the fusion generators, and now they were going to cut backups as well, since Agent O had supplied a way to do it from the inside.
There wasn’t time to do a circuit of the room and climb several flights of stairs to reach her goal. Instead, Fletcher sprinted along the gantry, planted her foot on the railing at the end, and jumped into space, thirty metres above the artificial gravity systems in the floor of the room.
Her hand snaked out as she fell, pointing towards the cluster of pipes that met in a central column that fell from the ceiling. Her magnetic grapnel sailed across the space and clamped onto the top of the column. Then the motor began to wind in the tether, pulling her up towards the ceiling of the vast chamber. The power armour took the brunt of it, taking the strain so that her arm wasn’t wrenched from its socket.
She heard shouting from below. Someone had seen her. She looked down and saw that weapons were being raised. Nothing that could penetrate her armour, as far as she could see, but the tether was another matter. A third of the way to go, and now she was swinging back to the middle of her arc. Soon she would be going directly upward and then she’d been an easy target.
Fletcher reached into her webbing and began dropping things from it. Then she pulled out her massive hand cannon, the brutal automatic pistol the ogre clones were equipped with, the version for their power armour.
The grenades detonated, drowning out the bangs and zings of the gunfire in the roar and flash of explosions. She holstered the pistol as she completed her arc, stretched out her arm and caught the lip of the gantry. Then she pulled herself up and squatted down, trying to make herself a smaller target.
Below, a barrage of smoke and dust billowed. She threw in a flashbang for good measure then turned to the job at hand. Nobody down there would be bothering her for a few seconds.
Fletcher looked at her target, an air intake not much more than two metres across. Ten had suggested a missile launcher from the armoury, but even a bullseye would have been risky. Her armoured fingers gripped the maintenance hatch and she tore it from its hinges. She threw in a pack she had prepped in the armoury, slapped a relay device on the side of the tube to ensure the detonation signal could be received, then turned to leave.
But coming along the gantry her were two ogre clones, both in power armour. Bugger. At times like this, it was helpful to have Ten nearby. The Deathless ogres had their helmets off, and were both grinning at her, joking and laughing with each other as they advanced.
They were friendly with each other, but they weren’t going to give her a warm welcome, despite the fact she was wearing one of their clones. If swinging over them on a grapnel line hadn’t made it obvious she wasn’t a friendly, responding with grenades to their gunfire would have done the t
rick.
Backing up, Fletcher moved to the end of the gantry. The two Deathless troopers drew their swords and the massive vibro-blades hummed to life with a bright orange glow. They waved them about in a threatening manner, demonstrating their skill with the weapons.
Bloody poseurs, thought Fletcher.
She drew her pistol as they began to advance, and they laughed, taunting her. She stuck two fingers up at them and fired at the gantry’s support bolts. Fletcher blew them a kiss, then she stamped down hard on the end of the gantry. The Deathless saw what she was doing and began sprinting toward her, yelling.
She grabbed part of the railing on the central section of the gantry and slammed her foot down again and again as the Deathless ogres charged ever closer.
Then, with an awful screech of tortured metal, the bolts sheared. The gantry slipped, bouncing crazily as it swung from its supporting cables. Fletcher emptied the magazine into the ceiling where the cables were anchored and then, with the Deathless ogres mere metres away, the gantry failed.
Fletcher waved as the Deathless ogres fell screaming to their deaths.
Fletcher looked around. Ten hadn’t caught up yet.
31
Milton ducked back into cover as a burst of fire rattled down the corridor.
“Fletcher, glad you could join us,” she said as Fletcher caught up with the rest of the Marines. “Thought we’d lost you for a moment.”
“Happy to be here, Colour. Need a hand?”
“Yes, we’re a bit pinned down here. I don’t suppose you found a route to flank them, did you?”
“Don’t think so, Colour,” Fletcher replied, firing off a shot with her enormous pistol.
