by A. D. Bloom
"Can you repeat that?"
Burr stuck his stupid head in the hole. Over local suit comms, he said, "Hey, I think there's more!"
"I said get the fuck away from there, Burr! Push off! Now!" Asshole. To the bridge, she said: "Somebody cut their way in and patched it with... I don't know what to call it.... Fake hull. It's flimsy... Burr busted through it with his hand by mistake. It imitates the hull like it's made to fool us."
Burr finally pushed off the command tower like Horcheese had told him to, but Burr was an asshole. Just to be an asshole, he grabbed hold of a piece of the strange material before he pushed off the solid part of the command tower for his seven meter flight back to Horcheese and the knuckledragger.
Burr got a good handful before he pushed off. He tore off almost a third of the strange patch, exposing much of the hole. The knuckledragger's lights caught something moving inside, between the hulls. It looked like lengths of hose whipping about.
The piece of fake hull Burr ripped off resisted as it came away and since Burr didn't let go, it spun him around and left him inverted, hanging almost motionless in front of the hole. His suit lights pointed inside, and he must have seen more than Horcheese did because he began to flail as if he was trying to somehow swim away in the vacuum. "Chief!"
"Burr, get the hell out of there!" Horcheese shouted. What drifted through the beam then were unmistakably alien appendages, too many to count. The Squidy they were attached to uncoiled itself from a ball like a knot, and Horcheese felt her stomach churn. Limbs as thin as a garden hose, boneless, and alien waved in the spotlight. Behind it was another, folded over itself and half-entwined with a third.
"Squidies! There's Squidies in the hull! Intruders in the outer hull, command tower, sub-section 2!"
Burr still floated in front of the hole. He put his hands in front of his face like he was trying to block something and cried out like he was pleading, begging. "No...No...Noooooo!" He scrambled and twisted in the vacuum to get away from them. "Horcheeeeese! Help meeeeeee!"
"I'm coming!" She puffed the knuckledragger forward to get him. He craned his neck to look up at her just before his exosuit lit up with glowing, popping discharge like he was getting hit with microwaves. Burr screamed in a way that she'd never imagined a human could scream. In less than a second under the alien maser's beam, he burst into flame and was immolated inside his suit.
She couldn't see the weapon, but a Squidy must have pointed it at the knuckledragger next. The mech-suit sparked and arced around her and Horcheese felt a buzzing under her skin before she caught fire. She screamed exactly the same way her cherry had.
"Chief!" the bridge called to her, "Come in, Chief!"
*****
The redsuits' screams put a shiver through everyone on the bridge who'd heard them. They reminded Lt. Commander Sellis to keep a cold and steely confidence in her voice as she sounded the alarm on all channels: "All hands, all decks, intruder alert. Repeat: Intruder alert. Prepare to repel boarders. This is not a drill. Prepare to repel boarders. There's Squidies on the ship."
Chapter Ten
The alarm had to echo off the bulkheads for a full, five seconds before Ram reacted. He asked Biko if he'd heard Dana right, and Biko's only response was to snatch up a clearzine patch and slap it onto Ram's neck.
All Ram felt was the smack and a scratch like a cat's tongue as the microneedles penetrated and turned into a delivery gel in an instant. He staggered to the hatch as his heart pumped the clearzine through his veins. It would clean his blood, but for the next 15 seconds, it would take its own, quite considerable toll.
Biko dosed himself while Ram spun his hatch's wheel and willed his stomach to climb back down into his belly. The fifteen-second hangover had begun. With the alarm klaxon splitting his face in two, he pulled open the hatch. The fluids of his inner ear swirled, and he sprinted half-serpentine, weaving down the passageway towards the main tube while the three-note alarm shot through his insides and his skull and his body like a painful, second pulse.
A hatch on the right side of the passageway opened, but he saw it too late. Bergano came out running. His big head filled Ram's warped field of view, and Ram's eyes closed out of reflex just before the skull on skull impact and the bright, white flash. Bergano's limbs tangled up in Ram's legs, and as he stumbled and flew forward on his side, Biko tripped over Bergano, too, kneeing him in the temple. Bergano's eyes went dull in an instant.
Deafening waves of atmospheric compression from nearby detonations rolled down Ram's body. The shock wave from the explosions filled his mouth and clapped at his ears.
After tripping over Bergano, Ram expected to fall and hit the deck, but he didn't. His stomach lifted and shifted with the rest of his organs, and the impact with the deck never came. Hardway's normal .3 gees of artificial gravity were suddenly gone.
Ram's now-weightless flight down the passageway continued. Biko and a clearly unconscious Bergano tumbled behind him as Ram bounced off the edge of the open hatch and fell out into the sub-tower's tube, spinning across the ninety-meter, vertical shaft. The klaxon rang and voices shouted everywhere asking where the Squidies were. Ram struggled to see up the tube through a haze of nausea from the violent, nano-chemical processes taking place in his bloodstream. Five more seconds... He clung to the thought like a life-preserver. It'll be over in five...
Without anything to grab in the middle of the tube, Ram couldn't stop, but as his head finally cleared, he managed to tuck his legs and spin for a sloppy, feet-first landing on the far side of the tube.
Four decks up, in the spine, smoke poured from the command tower's aft tube. Nearby, a section of topside bulkhead lit up glowing orange and then red. It less than two seconds, it burned white hot. Ram shouted a warning, but before the Staas Guards nearby could get out of the way, it erupted in a bright and blinding streak that sprayed down and washed them away in a deluge of molten metal.
.06 seconds later, the shockwave hit Ram like a fist in the gut. His ears rang so loud he had to squint to see. Behind the high-pitched tone in his head, Dana's voice echoed thin from a nearby speaker: "Enemy breaching charges have been detonated in the spine and command tower, aft tube. All teams, repel boarders. Company marines to the spine and command tower, aft tube."
If the Squidies had blown their way into the command tower's aft tube, Ram thought, then there wasn't much between them and the bridge.
The orange, molten metal ringing the breach in the spine's topside bulkhead was briefly visible before thick, yellowish smoke swelled outwards from it in a quickly expanding, vaguely spherical, zero-gee cloud. Not much got blown out the exterior hull breaches the Squidies made; they must have been too small. Instead, the smoke hung and gave the alien boarders cover as they entered the spine.
Ram drew the Honma & Voss as he crouched against the side of the tube and looked up into the smoke. He picked a landing spot on the far side, one deck below the spine, swallowed, and pushed off.
Halfway across the tube, he could make out the aliens' grotesque silhouettes in the smoke, all thin limbs and ribbon. Fat, MA-48 rounds from Hardway's rifles ripped tunneling holes through the cloud leaving swirling wakes. The ones that hit the Squidies lit up the smoke with a red-orange flash.
The fifty-cal sabot rounds penetrated the aliens' exosuits with ease, but after they wrecked hell on the boneless things inside, they didn't have the energy left to tear their way out the back. The aliens' bodies folded around the flying bullets, and the high-density rounds propelled three of them down the spine. They flew across the mouth of the tube above Ram with all their grotesque, garden hose limbs trailing behind them.
Ram lined the H&V's red, front sight between the green dots of the rear sight and held the perfectly balanced constellation over the closest of the alien shapes floating in the smoke above him. The Squidy flared up bright just under its nub of a neckless, alien helmet. The Itar bored a neat hole clean through.
The Squidy arched and then jerked and spasmed while bill
owing gas and blue liquid shot out the wound and beaded into zero-gee globs. Ram would have drilled it again for good measure, but even at a moderate rate of discharge, the focused x-rays still burned a visible line through the smoke. The alien things above saw the line it drew straight back to Ram.
Five, ropey, alien silhouettes raised their appendages to aim. Their masers looked like fat lengths of pipe fit over the last 50cm of their 'arms'. There were too many of them to shoot one at a time.
Ram cranked the dial on the side of the war relic and demonstrated how it earned its status as an terror weapon on Earth. He didn't aim the Itar in the conventional sense; he aimed it like one aims a reaper. Ram held down the trigger on the Honma & Voss and cut the beam of focused x-rays across the pack of Squidies like he was harvesting wheat.
Where the shaft touched, it ripped atoms apart. It converted matter to plasma that crackled and sheathed the beam like the flame of a terrible sword.
The Itar cut clean. In hundredths of a second, the beam burned through alien exosuits and the boneless flesh underneath so that severed appendages writhed in zero-gee like dying snakes. They whipped and spattered blue. The wet atmo that jetted out from the Squidies' suits turned yellow-white and foggy.
In less than a second, the sulfur stink became unbearable. His eyes watered. The atmo the aliens breathed smelled a hundred times worse than their smoke. He held his breath and moved as quickly as he could. The ones he hadn't killed were already looking for him and bringing their weapons to bear.
Ram pushed off to relocate, and after a four-second flight across the tube, he impacted against the opposite bulkhead, just a deck below the top of the sub-tower's tube, almost in the spine.
He tried to get as much cover as he could behind a junction box, but it covered less than half of him. There was nowhere to hide. He looked up at the alien shapes hanging in the noxious cloud above. Any second, he thought. Any second, they'll find me and they'll burn me.
*****
Coming down the tube from the midships Hab (aft of the command tower), Lucy Elan heard the cracking atmospheric shock waves from the MA-48 rounds and they let her know that at least some of her company marines had already made it to the spine with their rifles. The crew would have to draw weapons from the armory, but her squads were always ready.
As she descended, she could see three of her own in the spine. They'd taken cover in the struts outside the mouth of the tube and were firing up the spine, towards the command tower. Lucy stopped at the junction where the tube met the spine. She inverted and peeked out.
Near the command tower, a hundred yards towards the bow, semi-opaque, yellow smoke filled the spine. Lucy couldn't see the breach that had been reported in the command tower's aft tube, but the one in the spine was was clearly visible. A dozen or more, 3.5-meter, alien bundles of hose and carpet hung like alien ghosts in the smoke.
The unmistakable beam of Ram Devlin's reckless x-ray hand cannon ripped an arc across the enemy from the sub-tower tube, slicing limbs and cutting Squidies in half. He must have had that thing turned all the way up. He was lucky it hadn't cut a new gash from the spine clean through to the outer hull. That sidearm of his was illegal for a lot of good reasons.
Lucy didn't like collateral damage. She carried an M990 flechette gun loaded with high-explosive, low mass, micro-projectiles. She drew it and pushed off across the spine, landing behind a strut near the people-mover on the starboard side. First, she put her sights on the pair of smokey, alien silhouettes pointing weapons down the tube into the sub-tower.
The darts that didn't hit the Squidies burst in the air around them, mostly harmless, but the darts that found their targets burrowed through the alien exosuits and detonated inside. The little explosions made the Squidies freakish bodies jump and twitch and spasm. They bent and twisted and practically tied themselves in knots in the air before they drifted limp.
Sgt. Biggs was closest to her. He made himself small and fired from behind a strut across the spine from her. "How many?" he shouted.
"No idea!"
A hundred meters down the spine the cloud of smoke around the alien boarders lit up. Within it, a narrow cone burned bright from a Squidy's weapon discharge. It vaporized the smoke particles in the air and drew a line right at Biggs.
He saw it. He couldn't miss it. He tried to shout something, but a burning wind filled his cheeks and flame jetted out his mouth. It erupted out his ears and his nose and eye sockets.
Biggs burned up, but his MA-48 still functioned. His flaming hands held that rifle and his finger squeezed the trigger until it burned away. In two more seconds, he crumpled, his half-cinder corpse sheathed in flames.
A crewman named Holchek landed under Lucy and fired down the tube. Holchek was one of the ones Lucy had trained. Just ahead of her she counted three marines. She had two more behind her to port. Lucy shouted, "Marines! We're moving up! Holchek, you're with me!"
Holchek was still giving her first nod as Lucy Elan shouted for, "Covering fire!" and launched herself up the spine, ripping rounds downrange as she flew.
*****
After shouting out the warnings over the squack and giving the order to repel boarders, there had been just enough time to get the uppermost of the massive emergency bulkheads in the command tower's aft tube sealed before the Squidies' detonations knocked the rest of them offline along with the carrier's inertial negation and artificial gravity.
Cameras showed a firefight in the spine, but Dana had no idea what was going on in the command tower's aft tube. Those cameras were already out. The one emergency bulkhead she'd gotten closed had a two-meter hatch set in the center with small, diamond-pane portholes, but that view was too narrow to see anything but yellow smoke and flashes of orange and ruby light.
The cameras in the spine caught shots of the aliens' queer limbs and torsos. The beam of Ram's sidearm lit up the whole cloud when it slashed up the tube through the smoke. A stuttering line, dotted and dashed in red-hot metal appeared across one half of the emergency bulkhead, presumably where the sweeping beam of that antique terror-weapon missed the enemy and damaged the ship instead. She briefly glimpsed pieces of Squidies floating in the smoke looking like dying snakes and hoses and shredded bath-towels before the camera went offline.
Moments later, the porthole on the other side of the emergency bulkhead filled with an alien helmet. She couldn't really see any eyes inside the tinted, cycloptic visor on its neckless nub of a helmet, but she could feel the malice in its gaze. The way it eyeballed her made her want to kill it.
It watched her, but she could see it was doing something down below the porthole, out of sight. Maybe it kept looking at her because it wanted to see the surprise on her human face when the meter-wide spot on the emergency hatch began to glow red and then white and then melted away completely, sparking and burning as the tip of an alien, plasma-based cutting tool emerged from the molten metal.
"Two minutes," Dana told to the rest of the bridge crew. "Two minutes, maybe less and they'll be through that emergency bulkhead. The bridge hatch should take them even less time."
Li handed her one of the MA-48s from the bridge's small weapons locker and passed out the rest of the double-barrel, over/under weapons.
Katz pointed to the bottom barrel. He said, "If we're fighting them on the bridge without gees, then I recommend using the pulse laser. Unlike the railgun, there's no recoil and if we miss, we won't have ricochets in here."
Biko's voice came over comms. "Bridge what is your status? Please respond."
Dana lunged for the button. "Biko! We've got the top emergency bulkhead of the aft tube sealed, but they're cutting their way through! They've got something like a plasma cutter. A minute and a half more and they'll be cutting their way in the bridge."
"We're coming." That's all he said.
Li stared out the hatch's porthole and from all the orange light on his face Dana could tell the cutting was going quickly for the Squidies. He looked at Katz first, and then at he
r. "The laser, then?"
She said, "Railgun, pulse laser... either one will work. Just remember to disengage the safety." Dana held up her MA-48 for Li so he could see her thumb flipping the assault rifle's fire selector switch out of the 'SAFE' position.
*****
When they saw the crewmen and marines retaking the spine, Ram and Biko launched themselves through the smoke. Drifting, severed limbs and gangly, alien corpses reached out trying to entangle them like jungle vines.
The aliens were still thick in the command tower's aft tube. Marines and crew sent rounds up into the smoke and the Squidies threw cones of microwaves back at them making the smoke ignite in four-story, tapered columns. The Squidies' masers used a kind of explosive shell to help generate the enormous microwave pulse and this was the first time Ram had ever heard one fired inside a pressurized atmo. It made a loud, but dull, whumping noise like a sledgehammer on hard dirt.
Lucy Elan was assembling squads to re-take the command tower's tube. Biko shouted to her, "They're cutting through the bulkhead up there and trying to get to the bridge! We've got to go now!"
"Mr. Devlin," Lucy shouted. "Here!" Lucy launched an MA-48 sailing across the mouth of the tube to Ram. "I don't want you and your toy cutting through any bulkheads either."
49 armed crewmen and marines sheltered to the sides of the tube going up into the command tower. That was enough. Ram almost asked Lucy what the hell she was waiting for until he realized she was waiting for him to give the order.
Ram looked from one face to another. "The topmost emergency bulkhead is shut. The enemy is trapped and exposed. We will ascend that tube hard and fast. We will lay down heavy fire ahead of us and we will shoot them until they are dead. We go on my Bingo."
He braced himself against the deck and fired sabot into the smoke. After he'd loosed three rounds and the space all around him to the left and the right had filled with shooters, too, he aimed himself up the tube, shouted, "Bingo! Bingo! Launch! Launch!" and pushed off. Together, with rifles firing, the 49 flew up the path of the beams and bullets that swirled the smoke in front of them.
