by Evan Currie
“Not in this case. It was well within human tolerances. I only mention it because it was just enough to show up on the tox panel, but nowhere near enough to cause any issues.”
“My Marines don’t just lose their shit and empty a mag down the halls their buddies are standing in,” the gunny said flatly. “Something happened.”
“Obviously,” Rame said. “We have multiple accounts confirming the sounds, and no one here doubts that something happened, Gunnery Sergeant. What I’m saying is that it was not medical in nature. Other than the banging he gave himself when he slammed into the bulkhead, Lance Corporal Jan is in perfect health.”
“Then what the hell happened down there?” the gunny grumbled, mostly to himself.
Rame rolled his eyes, but elected to respond anyway. “In my experience, if the people involved aren’t hallucinating, that generally means that they actually saw something, Gunnery Sergeant. Which, I would suggest, means that there is something down there.”
The gunny shot him a dark look, but did not say anything as he turned and stormed out, leaving Rame alone with his patient, finally.
The doctor turned back to the toxicology workup he’d done on the Marine’s blood, noting that the man probably needed to cut down on his caffeine intake.
Right. That’ll happen sometime this century, I’m sure.
► The Odysseus, with the Priminae squadron in tow, continued to close on the Imperial Fleet, trading shots as they could, but both sides were mostly marking time as the distance between them closed. Eric was growing irritated with the stalemate, but still did what he could to encourage it to continue while he had teams trying to fix the damage incurred earlier.
The new problems below decks were doing everything but soothing those nerves.
“Damage control team reports the deck has been sealed,” Heath reported.
Eric shot a glance over at her. “Good. Get them out of there and put the atmosphere back to that deck.”
“Aye sir, they’re pulling out now,” she said as she tapped in commands. “I’m opening the valves to that deck.”
“Slowly now,” Eric reminded, still tense. “Don’t blow out their repairs.”
“I doubt the system can feed that much air at once, sir,” Heath said, “and if it can, well, better to find out now than later.”
Eric supposed she had a point there.
“Raze, we’re close to entering optimal range on these bastards,” Steph warned from the pilot’s pit. “If they choose to turn on us, it’ll get ugly real fast.”
Glancing at the telemetry, Eric stood up and walked around to look at the large main screen. His pilot was right, of course. The best defense the Odysseus had right now was, ironically, the rear gravity warp of the enemy ships. That same warp was the only thing keeping them from hammering the Imperials as well, of course.
Assuming the Priminae held the line—which was an assumption that Eric wasn’t entirely comfortable making despite their actions so far—the best outcome of such a fight was total destruction of the Allied vessels and an effective crippling of the Imperial Fleet.
Not a trade he would prefer to make, if he had a choice.
Sometimes you had to accept a beating, though, just to show the bully that he wouldn’t get away with that sort of crap so easily in the future.
God, I hope it doesn’t come to that.
“Keep pressing closer,” he ordered. “Signal the Priminae ships to follow us in. Stand by all weapons from this point. I want everyone on watch. If they twitch, don’t wait for orders. Burn every last living one of them you can from the black.”
“Aye Skipper.” The response was the same from three stations as he walked over to the pit and knelt down.
“When it happens, if it happens, it’ll happen fast,” he said softly. “Do whatever you can to get our weapons the best shot.”
Steph nodded somberly. “You know if they turn on us, we don’t stand a chance, right?”
“I know,” Eric said. “Keep pressing them anyway. And if they turn, don’t bother trying to evade. Remember the Alamo.”
“Understood, Skipper.”
Eric got back to his feet and returned to the command station, where he slipped into his position and checked the data from Heath’s operations. The air pressure on the affected decks were returning to normal, though still not quite high enough for people to breathe, and so far there was no sign of leaks.
“Everything is holding as expected,” Heath confirmed, noticing his interest. “We can send people to the affected decks in another few minutes.”
“Security teams only,” Eric ordered, “and make sure they have environmental suits on, even if they’re not relying on them. No one goes onto those decks in the open until we have a repair team check that the patches are holding.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
► “Weston is out of his mind,” Pol hissed under his breath, leaning close enough so only the captain could hear him talk.
Druel didn’t comment immediately. What could he say to that? His second in command wasn’t wrong. Pol was arguably understating the situation, but there was little they could do about it.
If they turned and withdrew from the fight, they’d be consigning the Odysseus and likely the Tetanna to quick deaths. Quite possibly the rest of the Terran forces would die in the resulting firefight as well.
Druel ran his hand back through his hair, unobtrusively pushing the sweat that kept forming on his brow back and wiping it away as best he could. This just wasn’t what he had joined the fleet for, and he didn’t know if he could continue like this for much longer.
“We knew he viewed fighting differently than our people,” he said finally. “He threw his ship against the Drasin with worse odds than he is facing here.”
“He used guile and stealth against the Drasin,” Pol corrected.
“I would say he is using plenty of guile here as well,” Druel said tiredly. “He is giving them a decision. Face us and likely lose far more of their forces than it would be worth to eliminate us, as they would almost certainly be left without sufficient power to do anything but withdraw to their own territory, or withdraw now and save their ships for another battle. It is not a decision I would offer them, but then I do not believe I would have survived what Weston has already proven himself against. It is the best option available to us at this time and, short of miraculous reinforcements arriving from Earth or the Central worlds, I see no other palatable options. Please, correct me if you do.”
Silence from Pol was all the answer he needed.
“So then,” Druel said after a long moment, “insane or not, we will follow his lead in this. If the universe chooses against Weston this time, he has all but secured at least the safety of this system even in defeat. Do you not see it, Pol? In the worst case, Weston has arranged things such that we fulfill our duty to the planet and the colonists. In best, we even get to enjoy the victory. That’s not such a bad thing.”
Pol stared at his captain for a long time, his expression also clearly showing doubt about the sanity of the man sitting in the big seat, but he kept his peace this time.
It wasn’t for him to question, though, and for that, Pol was grateful.
Druel didn’t blame him in the least.
Perhaps the only thing worse than dying at the weapons of the Imperials was having the fate of so many others resting on his shoulders.
► Eric was trying his best to keep his focus on the enemy, but the questions he had whirling in his brain about what was going on in his own damn ship plagued him.
The doc says there’s nothing wrong with the air, but that many people seeing things just doesn’t happen, right?
He’d heard rumors, more than anything, of shared delusions, but didn’t know enough about the phenomenon to know if it actually happened in the real world.
One of his Marines had freaked out enough to accidentally discharge his weapon, not to mention batter himself unconscious against a bulkhead. That was beyond
the pale, and without a medical reason for his actions, Eric didn’t much like the Marine’s chances for promotion anytime in the near future. He’d personally be looking over the man’s record and deciding if he was going to stay on the Odysseus, though Eric would hold off on any thought of disciplinary action until they figured out what the hell the man had seen down there.
In the meantime, however, there was work to finish and more pressing matters to deal with. The enemy outside simply had to be given his attention. The enemy within would have to wait.
CHAPTER 19
► The hole burned through the ceramic bulkhead was big enough to drive a Marine fighting vehicle through, and Rider was trying really hard not to imagine just how much power it would have taken to burn that hole.
Ceramic, as a compound, had several advantages over the steel construction that Terran shipbuilders still preferred. The primary reward was that ceramic had extremely high heat resistance and incredibly low heat transferal. Burning through ceramic plate the way the enemy had took a lot of power, far more than it would take to go through the metal decks of one of the Rogues.
Rider found himself peering down the hole and looking around him best he could to see if the enemy had left a rear guard.
“Looks clear,” Kensey said.
“Alright, let’s go.”
Rider jumped first, dropping through the hole and freefalling for a few meters as the slight twist of gravity caught him and swung him into the cambered deck below. He landed in a crouch, catching himself with his free left hand as his right kept his rifle under control.
His team slammed into the deck on either side of him, two with more grace than he managed, and one with distinctly less.
“You okay?” he asked, sparing Kensey a glance as the man picked his face off the deck.
“Fine. That twist was a pain,” the Marine grumped, retrieving his rifle from where he’d let it clatter to the deck.
“Suck it up,” Rider ordered, getting to his feet and gesturing to the next target. “There’s the next hole. Let’s move. And Kensey?”
“Yeah?”
“Remember the ‘silent’ part of the motto next time.”
“Screw you, Rider.”
The four-man recon team, chuckling softly as they ran, paused only to clear the hole as best they could before dropping through it to the next deck. They led with their rifles, or their boots, depending on which seemed more suitable at the time, and didn’t slow any more than they absolutely had to as they pursued the enemy from deck to deck in an attempt to catch up.
“They can’t be far ahead now,” Rider said firmly. “Cutting through these decks has to be slowing them down.”
“We better hope so, Rider,” Ramirez said. “I don’t want to think of the kind of power they have in those lasers just to cut through decks in the first place, let alone what it would take to let them move without slowing.”
“Not sure it makes much difference,” Dow said as they ran. “Our armor ain’t ceramic. We’d be cooked either way.”
“Point,” Ramirez acceded grumpily.
Rider slowed his pace, his left hand coming up in a fist. They fell silent and slowed as he came to a corner.
“What’s up, Rider?” Kensey asked.
“Heat spike up ahead,” he answered as they walked to the next hole burned through the deck and paused.
There was no sign of the enemy, but his HUD was scanning a lot of heat through the hole.
“They’re close. Tighten up on me,” he ordered. “We’re running a wounded tiger to ground here, and when we catch it, it will turn on us. Stay frosty, follow my lead.”
“Oorah!”
Rider readied his rifle and stepped out into the air, letting the gravity of the ship’s core pull him down through the hole to the next deck.
► “Captain, we have a problem.”
Drey resisted the urge to sarcastically reply to the Terran colonel. He was well aware they had trouble. His ship was drifting in space with enemy soldiers running around her decks while the enemy ships closed on them. “Problem” was a very understated way to describe the current situation, but it would be somewhat impolite—not to mention impolitic—to point that out.
“What sort of problem, Colonel?” he asked, looking at Conner’s face in the small screen he’d appropriated in engineering to run his ship.
“The enemy is withdrawing from the ship,” she said. “They’ve been burning through decks and seem to be heading for the flight decks.”
“While I would rather they didn’t cut more holes in my vessel, Colonel,” he said with feeling, “frankly, I am just as happy to see them go. There are larger problems than a few enemy soldiers at the moment, and I’m staring at most of them.”
He looked up at the scanner plot that showed the rapidly approaching enemy vessels as well as the Allied squadrons chasing determinedly after them. He didn’t want to think about what the Imperial vessels could do to his ship, even in passing, before the others could catch up. The fate of a few Imperial soldiers was just not a priority.
“I’m sure that’s true, Captain,” the colonel said tensely. “However, they acquired information from your core that we would prefer they not escape with. Can you track them from there?”
Drey looked up, snapping his fingers in the direction where some of his command staff were working shoulder to shoulder in cramped space with the engineering teams, trying to get everything operational again.
“Sir?”
“Can we track the Imperials on board?” he asked his second.
“One moment, Captain,” the man said, turning to where the scanner tech was working. They exchanged quiet words back and forth before his second turned back.
“Not directly, Captain. We know where they’ve been. There are heat spikes on our environmental control systems, which almost certainly indicate where they’ve been firing their weapons, but the security systems have been taken down on most decks.”
Drey nodded, turning back to the colonel. “Did you hear that?”
“Yes. We think they’re heading for one of your primary flight decks. Do you at least know which one they docked with?”
“That I can tell you,” Drey answered. “The Imperial ship overpowered security on deck eight when they arrived. The likelihood is that is still where their ship has docked, since we’ve received no indications of any move since then.”
“Alright, we’re heading that way now. Can you spare any security forces?”
Drey nodded. “I’ll have everyone I can join up with you, Colonel.”
“Thank you, Captain.”
“Good luck, Colonel.”
► Conner glowered as she closed the comm connection to the captain of the Tetanna. Asking for help from ship security was potentially a double-edged blade. The Priminae soldiers, no matter how enthusiastic, were in no way up to the level of her Marines.
Numbers were a real concern, however, and they would only have one shot at this. If they failed, then the enemy would acquire whatever intel they’d managed to download from the Tetanna’s core. That was not an acceptable outcome, so she was going to risk bringing in the Priminae troops and do her best to keep them from vaping her Marines in the process.
“Sergeant,” she ordered. “Double-time, if you will.”
“As you say, ma’am.” The sergeant turned to the rest of the Marines who were lugging everything they could through the halls of the alien warship. “Marines! Double-step! Move it!”
Conner picked up her own feet, keeping up as she split her focus on the tactical relays she was reading on her HUD. “The captain of the Tetanna will be sending troops to reinforce our position, Sergeant. Please don’t shoot them when they arrive.”
“No ma’am,” the Sergeant agreed good-naturedly. “Would be unneighborly, ma’am.”
“It would at that, Sergeant.”
Getting to the flight deck would have been simplicity itself if the ship had been undamaged. However, with the lifts mostly down
and her squad being forced to detour around sealed decks due to battle damage, Conner was sweating who would arrive first. Enemy troops were taking a far more direct route, but they had to stop on each deck to cut their way through. Her Marines had a longer route, no question, but they were making steady progress, and with the captain and engineering crew of the ship providing override access to bulkhead locks, she thought that they might just make it.
If not, she still had one trump card in play.
Recon, oorah Marines.
► “I’ve got motion,” Rider said as he dropped to one knee and put his left fist up to call the others to a halt in case they weren’t listening to him.
The Marines arrayed themselves behind him as he covered behind junk that looked like it had broken free where the Imperials had cut through the deck. Rider pulled an extendable scanner from the forearm of his armor and pushed it out around the cover, observing the scene through his HUD.
“Computer counts fifteen men in sight,” he said. “Not sure where the rest are. Must be a rear guard.”
“Four against fifteen,” Dow pointed out. “Hardly seems fair. Want to offer them a chance to surrender?”
The Marines chuckled, though an undercurrent of nerves was unmistakable to each of them. None would admit that on pain of death, of course, but the four took comfort in the concerns of their comrades all the same. No experienced fighting man wanted the man at his side to be fearless, not most of the time, at least. Insanity had its place, but that place was rarely standing in the line with the sane. Like panic, it was too infectious for comfort.
“Grenades and smokers,” Rider said softly, letting his rifle hang on its sling as he slipped a pair of canisters from his armor’s straps.
The other three Marines followed his example, each taking an antilaser and a fragmentation grenade from their armor.
Rider thumbed the activator on both, keeping his hand closed around the two weapons to keep the countdown from starting. He nodded to his team as they did the same, then lifted his thumb and felt the devices rumble softly through his armor. The warning wasn’t needed this time; he knew they were live and had no intention of hanging on to them.
