by B. V. Larson
Tribune Drusus cleared his throat. Turov glanced at him and nodded.
“Now,” she said, “I’m going to turn planning over to our master tactician, Tribune Drusus.”
She stepped away from the central console and Drusus stepped forward. The officers relaxed visibly. Drusus was far more experienced in this area. I considered it a wise move on her part to relinquish control.
“Thank you, Imperator,” Drusus said. “I’ve been studying this problem since we first learned Minotaur had been overrun. Here’s the ship in detail.”
He brought up a three-dimensional display of the vessel and spun it around with his fingertips so that we were looking at the stern region.
“As best we can tell, the enemy pierced the thick hull surrounding the engine core. This took time, but when they finally made it through, they were able to do enough damage to poison the atmosphere of the ship.”
As we watched, a simulation of poisonous gas flooded the ship. The decks were each displayed in their appropriate color: gold for the command level, green for the central exercise zone and blue for the bio level. These decks were sealed at first, but with the help of the invading aliens, the gas spread from zone to zone until the entire ship was affected.
“This scenario is supposition, of course,” Drusus said. “But we know from models that it could have happened this way, especially given the alien capacity to excrete acids that burn through metal quickly. Taken by surprise, most of our troops would have succumbed to the radiation and poisoned air. The rest were probably killed by the invaders themselves.”
We watched in grim silence as deck by deck, the ship was invaded and all resistance extinguished. I felt a fresh surge of hatred for the Wur, and I had to wonder how many desperate troops had fought to the death on Minotaur. Cut off and dying, I was sure our troops had done their damnedest—but it hadn’t been enough.
“That’s all history,” Drusus said, watching our grim faces. “Here’s the plan to retake the ship. We’ll start here, at Green Deck. The upper dome is shielded with a heavy blast-dome, but we can disable that from the outer hull and get the clamshell dome to open. After that, all we have to do is puncture the inner transparent bubble and enter the ship.”
There were surprised looks all around. Martinez spoke up again.
“But won’t that release the atmosphere, sir? Explosive decompression will result. If there are any survivors...”
“If there are, we doubt we’ll find them on Green Deck. Think about it. These are plants. Where do you think the Wur are most likely to have taken up residence? Moreover, the atmosphere inside the ship has been compromised already. We’ll have to release it all anyway to begin the clean-up process.”
Martinez nodded. She retreated a step and said nothing more. I understood how she felt. The situation was terrible. All this time, down here on the planet’s surface, we’d been too busy to think about how the rest of our legion had fared. But now, we were going to be confronted with the gruesome realities.
There had to be thousands of dead. They’d been left rotting for a week inside our ship. Even if we could retake Minotaur, we were going to have a hell of a time making the ship livable again.
There wasn’t much argument after that. People got their assignments, and they left one by one to brief their teams. Each unit got a specific mission, either to capture a critical zone of the ship or to search and destroy enemy combatants.
“McGill?” Drusus said at last.
“Here sir,” I said. I’d been hanging back in a shadowy region near a curving bulkhead. There were only a few people left in the chamber, so I walked up to the central console.
“There you are. It’s not like you to hide.”
“No sir. What can I do for you?”
Drusus eyed me strangely. “I’ve got a special mission for you. I want you to get to Gold Deck and get to this area.”
He leaned over the table and zoomed in on the map of the ship. A region blinked red. It was part of Gold Deck, way out along the starboard side.
“Storage locker six, sir?” I said, reading the legend that popped up between us.
“That’s it. There should be something useful there or right near that location. A combat vehicle.”
It was about then that I noticed Turov. She was staring at me from her seat in a chair behind Drusus. She looked like a cat eyeing a bird on the wrong side of a plate glass window. That look on that woman’s face made me nervous.
“Uh…a combat vehicle, sir? You mean a dragon?”
“That’s right.”
“I thought we left all the dragons—”
“McGill, are you refusing this mission?” he asked.
“No sir. Not at all. I can see how a dragon might be useful. I accept the mission, sir.”
“I’ll inform Graves.”
That was it. I walked out, headed to my squad in the hold, and sat down with them. Sargon was the first one to notice that I had an odd look on my face.
“What’s up, boss?” he asked, frowning.
“Nothing,” I said. “But we’ve got a special op coming.”
I explained it to him and the rest of the squad. They were left scratching their heads with me.
“Let me get this straight,” Carlos said. “Your girlfriend sent you to Gold Deck to get her shoes, is that it?”
“Shut up, Specialist,” I said.
Kivi perked up at the mention of the word “girlfriend.” She looked from me to Carlos and back again.
“Girlfriend? On Gold Deck? McGill, don’t tell me you’ve been fooling around with Turov again. I thought you’d buried that evil relationship back on Tech World.”
“Think again!” Carlos said unhelpfully. “Actually, I can’t believe you didn’t already know, Kivi. You need to get online more. There are chat-line reports and even a few blurry snaps taken by suit-cameras.”
“What?” I demanded. “Of all the dirty, underhanded—”
“Luckily they aren’t underhanded,” Carlos said, showing me his tapper. “At least you have your clothes on. Turov’s hair looks a little funny, though, as you two come out of her office together in this one. That’s a dead giveaway, McGill. Unprofessional.”
A blurry shot of me kissing the Imperator was displayed on Carlos’ arm. I had no idea who’d taken it. Hell, it might have been a buzzer on the wall for all I knew.
“That’s the trouble with pinhead cameras flying around everywhere,” I complained.
Kivi’s face pushed between us, and she got a good look.
“Dammit,” she said. “You’re a fool, that’s all I have to say. You’re not going to get anything out of that relationship other than friction with everyone in the legion.”
“Ha-ha!” burst out Carlos. “Friction! McGill’s all over that.”
“There is no relationship, Kivi,” I said, but that sounded weak, even to me. Still, I had to try. “We’re not seeing each other anymore. It was just a weak moment caught on camera.”
“Hey,” Carlos said, nudging me, “check this out.”
Knowing I shouldn’t, I saw him swipe to a brief vid. This one showed me coming out of the Imperator’s quarters, not her office. Neither of us was entirely dressed, and she had a beverage in her hand.
“Shit,” I said.
“Look at it this way, McGill,” he said, “at least she’s smiling.”
I grabbed his arm and tapped the delete button while he chuckled. A few moments later, he showed me he had it back again.
“What the hell…?” I demanded.
“It’s on a server somewhere. In a cache, floating on a cloud—whatever. Give it up, McGill. You’re famous. The good stuff never dies on the net.”
Knowing he was right, I sat glumly for the rest of the flight. I decided to ignore them. After all, I’d done it, and they couldn’t be expected to let it go. Sometimes there were things that superseded the chain of command. I couldn’t squelch their fun without turning into a raging dick, and they didn’t deserve that.
So, I suffered the ribbing until it died down then turned to business, giving out tactical assignments.
“I don’t have to remind you all that this is do or die,” I told them when I had their full attention again. “We’re sitting in the last lifter. Our legion is over ninety-percent dead. The enemy strength is unknown, but it was enough to kill everyone aboard when they invaded.”
They began to sober up as they listened to my words. The odds were bleak.
Legionnaires, particularly those who had the misfortune to sign up with Legion Varus, aren’t strangers to death. But that didn’t mean we liked dying.
-42-
The opening stages of the boarding action went smoothly enough. Minotaur hung in space, a derelict. Emergency flashers along the hull blinked slowly, showing the ship was in distress.
Even more ominous was the constant pinging tone that hit our headsets every ten seconds. It was on every channel—a powerful signal that rhythmically informed us the ship was in dire trouble. No one aboard had bothered to turn it off, and as we weren’t aboard yet, we couldn’t either. It was the best evidence yet that the entire crew was dead. Who would have let that signal continue, unchecked, for a solid week?
As we got closer to the ship, the tone pinged louder. It set my teeth on edge, and I had my crew lower the volume of their headsets’ general channel and increase the volume on the squad channel. We could still hear the distress call, but it no longer interfered in our conversations.
Our lifter spun around and began braking, setting up to land on the massive dreadnaught’s hull. The lifter was the most vulnerable at this stage of the game. If the enemy had gained control of the anti-ship weaponry—well, we were all as good as dead.
Gritting our teeth and listening to that incessant pinging, we waited until the transport came to rest on Minotaur’s hull. We felt the transport shiver as clamps were applied.
“We’re down, and we’re good!” Graves announced to the unit.
His words were met with a ragged cheer. All around me, troops clutched their morph-rifles and double-checked their suit integrity.
“All right,” Graves said. “We’re pumping all the air out of the lifter now, storing it in tanks for later. Prepare for hard vacuum.”
I could already hear the steady hiss of escaping air. It grew in intensity, and it seemed to me that I could feel cold spots inside my armor. I don’t think a spacesuit has ever been made that didn’t have hot and cold spots in it under extreme conditions. Some of our suits were pretty banged up, and they didn’t always work perfectly. My armor, for example, liked to pool up water in the lower left corner of my visor while in zero G. It was really sweat and steam from my exhalations and not overly dangerous, but it did demonstrate that the dehumidifiers weren’t operating at a hundred percent.
“They tell me from the bridge that the outer clamshell controls have been accessed from an external port,” Graves said, relaying what he was hearing from the brass channel. “We’re working with the AI to convince it to open up. That could be difficult if the transparent dome over Green Deck is compromised. The AI is programed to prevent decompression.”
“No shit,” Carlos said to me. “Next, he’ll tell us the whole plan to break in through the glass is tits-up. Then we’ll have to go in using those acid-holes the plants bored through the hull. You see if I’m—”
“Shut up, Ortiz,” I said.
For once, he did as I asked. No one wanted to hear about all the crap that could go wrong. We weren’t on our first mission in space. We knew it was the most deadly environment any man could have the misfortune to fight in.
A rumble went through the ship. Everyone put their right hand on their buckles and gripped their rifles with the left. Carlos looked at me, and I could see he was scared.
“Remember the first time they pumped the air out of a lifter on us?” I asked him, smiling.
“Oh yeah—how could I forget our first shared death experience? Graves is still a cold-hearted bastard. How can he maintain such a grim life after all these years? I mean, wouldn’t you get tired of it?”
I waited for a second, but he didn’t answer his own question.
“I expect it gets into a man’s blood,” I told him. “After a few decades, it’s all he knows.”
Carlos looked down at the deck. Debris floated around us. Discarded ammo. Dangling straps and wires. What looked like perfectly secured environment on the ground was rarely clean in space, once everything started to drift in the air.
“You think we’ll end up like Graves?” he asked. “Not caring if we live or die?”
Frowning, I strained to come up with an answer for a few seconds, when luck would have it that I didn’t need to.
Yellow flashers began rotating. The ramp was going down.
“Legionnaires,” Graves said in our headsets. “We’re going to move out in an organized fashion. Double-check your magnetics. If I see a man floating off with one of my last full sets of equipment into deep space, I’ll shoot him in the ass.”
The ramp lowered into the silence of space. The atmosphere was gone, so while we could feel the motors with our butts, we couldn’t hear them with our ears.
The harsh starlight of L374 shone in like a beacon as the crack grew. When the ramp was fully deployed, we slapped the central button on our safety belts, and they fell away.
We got up en masse, but at first, we could hardly move. There were lots of troops ahead of my squad this time. As close as I could figure it, we were going to get off the lifter in the very last wave.
Up ahead, troops exited in a steady stream, scrambling into the glare of the local star. The reflections from their helmets were dazzling.
“Is that clamshell open?” Sargon asked. “I never heard Graves say—does anyone know?”
“It’s clear,” Kivi said. “The embedded techs are talking. Lots of techs have buzzers out now. Should I deploy one, Veteran?”
I glanced at her. I knew she had twenty of them, but sending one out early was technically a waste. In open space, they couldn’t use their wings. The tiny drones had to expend puffs of fuel to fly, and they had a very limited supply of that.
Opening my mouth to deny her request, I had a second thought. For purposes of morale, it would be good to see what we were going up against.
“Fly one,” I said. “Just one, mind you, and pipe the feed to everyone in the squad.”
She hurried to obey. A few seconds later my tapper displayed an over the shoulder view of the lines of troops. The image slewed and moved rapidly.
With sickening speed, it zoomed past the helmets of a hundred troops and out into the open. I watched my tapper in fascination.
Open space. There wasn’t anything around other than Minotaur and the colorful disk of Death World itself below us.
I could see the clamshell, drawn back and displaying the inner layer of hardened polymer that kept the cold void outside the ship. Along the rim of the dome, a growing throng of soldiers spread out. They were walking oddly, using their magnetic boots to keep them anchored to the metal hull.
As we watched, a weaponeer in the lead squad fired his gun at the polymer sheet the troops were encircling. The effect was immediate and alarming. The ruptured surface fired out like a massive sheet of glass in slow motion. I could see air and water vapor escaping into space like a geyser. The mix frosted into a trillion ice crystals and began to coat the onlookers who stood too close to the edge.
Up until that moment, everything had gone exactly according to plan. We’d flown up from Death World to Minotaur, docked, opened the clamshell and punctured the dome. Honestly, I’d begun to hope that despite everything we’d recapture the ship without a loss. Minotaur looked to be devoid of any life at all. What if the radiation had killed the Wur as surely as it had killed the legion and the crew? That would be a best-case scenario, and up until now, it had seemed possible.
But then, as the air vented and the troops fell back from the fury of the blasting ga
sses, I felt a rumble beneath my feet.
Through Kivi’s drone, I could now see what it was. The two halves of the clamshell dome—the blast shields that normally covered Green Deck—were beginning to close again.
For about a second, no one reacted. The two metal half-domes rolled up, looking slow from the point of view of the drone, but to people out there on the hull, it was moving pretty fast.
Two figures were lifted up and tossed into space. They tumbled, ejected by the force of the moving dome. A few other figures were even less lucky. They were entangled in debris, and as the metal crescents rose, they were crushed to pulp.
“Emergency!” shouted Graves. “Everyone out of the lifter! Get into the ship now—anyway you can. That’s an order!”
We surged forward. The organized, shuffling mass of troops turned into a wild flood. I glanced one last time at my tapper to glimpse the view Kivi was relaying from her drone. Troops were throwing themselves into the geyser of escaping gas, fighting against the pressure to get inside. The geyser was visibly weaker now, but with nothing for the invading troops to push against, they were having a hard time overcoming that gushing current.
Meanwhile, the clamshells were still moving, shutting themselves at a steady rate. I could tell from the look of the choked up group ahead of us that we weren’t even going to make it to the exit before Minotaur closed up again.
“Squad!” I shouted. “Everyone release your magnetics and jump up! Climb on the ceiling, hand-over-hand!”
They hesitated until they saw me do as I’d ordered. Then they followed my lead.
Moving as fast as I could, I dragged myself over the ceiling, which was webbed with storage nets and like. Employing this tactic, we at least made it to the ramp. Behind me, I could see others adopting my approach. The ceiling of the lifter was thronged with troops who were moving like spiders.
“What do we do when we get out into the open?” Carlos demanded from behind me. “Just throw ourselves out into space?”
