by Ian Douglas
2228 hours GMT
The explosion was clearly visible to the men aboard the American military station, even without the telescope, a silent flare of white light against the peaceful blue backdrop of Earth. “Got the bastard!” Dahlgren cried.
Moments later, six projectiles the size of ball bearings smashed through Shepard’s thin hull like bullets fired through cardboard.
Marine Orbital Strike Force
International Space Station
2235 hours GMT
Fuentes was not outside when the Japanese Lightnings were destroyed. The SCRAMjet transport McCutcheon had arrived on schedule, and half of the Marines standing watch over the ISS had gone aboard. A rotation schedule had been set up, allowing the Marines of the MOSF to spend six hours at a stretch inside a pressurized environment where they could take off their armor and enjoy some downtime. Fuentes had stayed outside for as long as her life support could take it, then gone inside with the last rotation.
The initial battle had been savage but mercifully brief, a necessary result of the sheer deadliness of combat in vacuum. Five Marines had been killed. Three more had missed the station in their headlong charge across space or been knocked away by careless bursts from their ATARs, but all of them either had managed to reverse course and make it back to the ISS or, in the case of Private Bagley, had been picked up by the Thornton on Search and Rescue and brought back to the McCutcheon.
The exact number of UN combatants at the ISS was unknown. Three bodies had been recovered, but it was believed that at least two others had been killed as well. The fighting, Fuentes thought, had been eerily like something out of eighteenth-century naval warfare and the very beginnings of the Marine Corps’s history, with troops clinging to the rigging and spars of the station to blaze away at one another, sometimes at almost point-blank range.
With the enemy withdrawn inside the station, the battle had reverted to something out of an even earlier time, the siege of a medieval castle. The attackers couldn’t get in without destroying what they wanted to capture; the defenders couldn’t get out without risking being overwhelmed. Intelligence reports relayed to the Marines from Cheyenne Mountain indicated that a European SCRAMjet orbital transport was apparently being readied at their primary CSG launch site at Kourou in French Guiana.
That transport would have reinforcements—probably too many for the MOSF to handle. Only the presence of the High-Energy Laser aboard Shepard Station was discouraging them from launching. Cheyenne thought that the Japanese fighter attack had been intended to knock Shepard and its laser out, clearing the way for the arrival of UN reinforcements.
And there was one piece of extremely disturbing news. While the rest of the Marines aboard McCutcheon were still cheering the news of the destruction of the Japanese fighters, Captain Fitzgerald, McCutcheon’s commander, had taken her aside and quietly told her that Shepard Station’s radio was off the air—knocked out, apparently, by the impact of several projectiles fired by one of the Japanese space fighters during the attack. That could mean simply that their communications had been knocked off-line. It could also mean, however, that Colonel Dahlgren and Major Lance were dead, the station’s HEL smashed, and the Marine Orbital Strike Force’s one ace in the hole permanently out of the game. There was no way to tell just by looking at the station; it continued to trail the ISS by about twenty kilometers.
But all radio messages from Dahlgren had ceased abruptly at the moment projectiles from the detonated Japanese warhead had swept past the station.
The biggest danger now was that the UN would pick up on the fact that Shepard had fallen silent. According to Fitzgerald, even moving the Thornton over to the Shepard’s vicinity to check out the damage might call unwanted attention to the fact that the laser seemed to be off-line. If the UN decided that it was safe to proceed with the SCRAMjet launch from Kourou, it would only be another hour or so before local space was swarming with enemy troops…or possibly some more fighters similar to those downed by Shepard. The Marines would have no alternative then but to pack up and head back to Earth.
Fuentes had all of this in mind as she suited up once more and passed through the McCutcheon’s airlock into space. Seven Marines were on station outside the ISS at all times now, and care was taken to change the guard at staggered intervals, to avoid providing an attractive target for the UN troops penned up inside.
“Okay, Carlotto,” she said, jetting gently across the intervening emptiness toward the station. “Time for you to go take a load off.”
“Yessir,” Private Carlotto replied. “Man, it stinks inside this armor, y’know?”
“It’s getting about that bad on the McCutcheon,” she said. “Just think about hot showers when we get back to Earth.”
“What’re you tryin’ to do, L-T?” Gunnery Sergeant Walsh told her. “Ruin morale? I’ve been doing nothing for the past three hours but float here thinking of hot showers.”
“That’s what we’re fighting for, Gunny,” she replied. “Hot showers and all the soap we want.”
Walsh rose on silent pulses of his MMU jets, his armor changing swiftly from ink black to mottled silver and blue as he cleared the station’s shadow and began picking up some of the light reflecting off the Earth and the lit portions of the station. With Walsh at her side, Fuentes let herself drift slowly along the length of the ISS, her boots less than two meters from the uneven white surface. The central part of the ISS was a jumble of lab modules, some showing various flags of participating countries, including Japan, France, and Russia. The largest structures were converted Shuttle II external tanks, most of which were currently being used for storage of either consumables or rocket fuel or water hauled up from Earth. The end facing Earth included the ISS bridge, a turretlike structure with several windows set just above the main docking collar, where a European Hermes remained docked to the station. The lights inside had been shut down, and there was little to be seen through the windows.
Fuentes continued drifting along the station’s length, past the vast, black expanse of the solar panels, where Marines had successfully cut the power cables and robbed the ISS of its main source of energy. The far end of the ISS, away from the Earth, was the original Alfa module. There were five separate airlocks on the station besides the one currently occupied by the European shuttle, each of them guarded by at least one Marine. Three of those five locks were located on the Alfa complex, however, and if UN troops were going to attempt a sortie, that was a good spot to try it from. The big trouble in attacking either into or out of the ISS was the bottlenecks imposed by the airlocks. If only a couple of troops at a time could pass through them, it would be simple for the other side to pick them off one at a time.
She was floating above the Alfa complex when something struck the side of her armor.
At first, she couldn’t see what was happening. Then she realized with a start that part of the Alfa assembly was drifting away from the rest.
No, it wasn’t a part of Alfa, not quite. A lifeboat, one of the original winged pods intended as escape capsules in case of orbital disaster, had been nestled against the last module in line. Now, however, the lifeboat was drifting clear; the fragment that had struck Fuentes’s armor was a bit of metal or paint thrown clear by the silent detonation of a small explosive charge of some kind. And in the next instant, she knew what was happening.
“Heads up, Marines!” she called over the general frequency. “The bad guys are coming out, Alfa-end!”
“Minsky! Ortega!” Walsh added. “Everybody! Get your asses down here! They’ve blown the lifeboat clear and are using the whole damned Alfa complex as a giant lock!”
As he spoke, the first blue-helmeted troopers drifted into view, rising out of the widening gap between Alfa and the escape pod. Hell, they must have depressurized half of Alfa, crowded as many troops inside as they could, then blown emergency release charges on the lifeboat to open up. There could be a lot of soldiers coming out in one big mob.
Fuentes brac
ed her ATAR, acquired a target, and fired. She missed, and a slight imprecision in her aim set her tumbling to the left. Reaching out, she managed to snag a guy wire bracing part of the keel structure, arrest her tumble, and anchor herself against a keel strut. With her legs gripping the strut, she was able to raise the ATAR in both hands without worrying about balance, drag the crosshairs on her HUD’s video inset across an oncoming armored figure, and squeeze the trigger.
The effect was satisfactorily gory, with the UN trooper’s helmet torn open and a pink haze of freezing blood and air spilling into nearby space, as the man’s body spun in the opposite direction. A second UN soldier came in behind the first, firing as he moved and doing a pretty good job of keeping the weapon’s butt plate squarely on his center of mass. Fuentes felt the shock as bullets struck the strut she was clinging to, but she acquired target and returned fire without flinching; there was no place to duck in this alien battleground, no foxholes, no protective cover.
Walsh floated in and anchored himself nearby. “Think they’ll add a verse to the Marine Corps Hymn?” he asked, squeezing off a short burst.
“Hell, they’d better,” Fuentes replied, adding her fire to his. “I don’t like the unsung hero bit.”
“Me neither.” He fired again. “Everyone who can make it is on the way. If we can hold ’em—”
But there were blue helmets everywhere she looked, and they were closing in. There were only three or four Marines on this end of the ISS, counting the two of them, and they were badly outnumbered.
Which, of course, would have been the UN commander’s plan. Storm out all at once, overwhelm the few Marines you find around your exit point, then disperse and gun down the rest as they approach. A simple, almost elegant solution to what must have seemed like an insoluble tactical problem.
But Fuentes was determined to screw up their plan somehow.
With the strut as an anchoring point, she could be a lot freer with her gunfire, while the approaching blue-tops had to be careful with their bursts lest they set themselves spinning or tumbling out of control. Several of them were already out of the fight, at least for the moment, because of an incautious burst from their rifles. Fuentes ignored them, concentrating on the armored figures who seemed to be handling themselves well in microgravity. One emerged from beyond the end of Alfa carrying what could only have been a bulky, backpack-powered laser rifle; she drew careful aim on that one before he could bring the weapon into play, sending a long, savage burst ripping through his torso armor and helmet and nearly tearing him in half.
Then the rest of the Marines were arriving, drifting in on high-pressure nitrogen jets as fast as tiny fighter planes, giving no thought to slowing, to hiding, to anything except breaking that enemy formation. Two more UN blue-helmets tumbled out of the battle like string-cut puppets…followed by a third. Several more were taking cover amid the struts and crossbeams of the ISS keel, trying to anchor themselves to return fire on the advancing Marines, but enough of them had been hit or panicked that their fire was scattered and inaccurate.
When she turned, Fuentes saw the McCutcheon bearing down on them, a huge black-and-white, flattened dart casting a black shadow across half of the ISS as it edged forward, spilling additional Marines from its airlock as it came. Fitzgerald had recognized the danger, and the Marines on board were suiting up as fast as they could, entering the battle as Fitzgerald brought them closer despite the wild gunfire from the UN defenders.
Gunny Walsh turned to face Fuentes. She could see his grin through his dark helmet visor. “Well, Lieutenant,” he said. “I think we—”
His helmet visor starred, a white, frosted slash appearing across the dark plastic like a shocking splash of paint; a UN round had passed between them, just grazing his visor. Somehow, miraculously, the thin, tinted plastic didn’t crack…yet. But tiny flakes were spilling from the frosted surface, and she could see Walsh’s eyes wide with shock and fear beyond.
“My helmet!” he screamed in her headset. “Christ, my helmet! It’s going to—”
“Quiet, Marine!” she shouted back. “Don’t panic! Don’t move!” Almost without thinking, she grabbed him by the arm, pivoting them both in space until he was in front of her, then triggering her MMU jets and setting them both in motion. A round hit her suit—she felt a violent blow above her left hip that kicked her to one side, but she still had air and she ignored it, steering the two of them toward the open end of the ISS.
It was, she reasoned, the closest airlock, and the most accessible. There might be another twenty UN troops inside, waiting for some Marine to pull just such a dumb stunt as this, but she wasn’t going to float helplessly by and watch Gunny Walsh’s helmet explode.
She didn’t decelerate. Holding tight to Walsh’s MMU, she stretched out with both feet and snagged the lip of the Alfa module with her boots, pivoting sharply, swinging heads over until they were facing the gaping, cave-like entryway that had been occupied moments before by the lifeboat.
Her toehold broke free and the two of them drifted past the end of the station, falling into a gentle tumble. Somehow, she managed to jockey her MMU jets until the tumble was arrested and they were moving forward once more, this time into the deeply shadowed interior of Alfa.
Both doors of the docking module lock were open, and Alfa’s interior was open to space. The first compartment, eerily empty, dark, and still, was unoccupied; a closed hatch at the far end beckoned, just visible beneath a small, orange emergency light.
“It’s no good, Lieutenant.” Walsh’s voice was harsh, close to cracking. “I’m losing pressure. The inside of my helmet is frosting over. You’d better leave me.”
“Fuck, no!” she shouted, her voice sounding loud and hollow inside the confines of her helmet. She still remembered Captain Warhurst on the embassy roof, still had nightmares about him going down as her Peregrine lifted into the sky.
She wasn’t about to leave one of her people.
That frost inside his visor was a bad sign, though. As air expanded, it cooled. The air in Walsh’s helmet must be expanding fast as it leaked through the myriad crazes and cracks in his visor and into space. He had only seconds now….
She didn’t know if anyone was waiting for them on the other side of that hatch, and at the moment, she didn’t care. The hatch opened the old-fashioned way, with a locking wheel. She released Walsh long enough to throw herself against the wheel, bracing her feet on a deck grating for leverage. If there was pressure on the other side…
There wasn’t. The hatch swung open gently. Grabbing Walsh, who by this time was completely blinded by frost and might be close to blacking out, she shoved him through the open hatch and dove through after him.
The next chamber was a small airlock with four hatches, a kind of joiner module that connected three other modules to a fourth. With the hatch dogged down behind her, she turned about desperately, looking for a pressurization control, unable to find one—
She turned Walsh, intending to move him aside in the cramped quarters, and saw with horror that a piece of his visor the size of her hand had shattered, the pieces of tinted plastic and ice scattering in a glittering, tumbling cloud. His eyes stared at her, bugging from his face in terror, his mouth wide-open, the lips bright blue as he tried to draw breath. Too late! Too late!…
And then she realized that there was something strange. He was breathing. With difficulty, yes, but he was breathing, his mouth gasping like a fish on land as he gulped down lungfuls of air. Only then did her armor’s external mikes pick up the faint but growing hiss of air pouring in through a duct close by their heads. She hadn’t found the control; someone inside must have seen them coming in and triggered it for her.
Her suit’s visor advised her moments later that there was breathable atmosphere outside, standard temperature and pressure. With a creak and a bang, the hatchway opposite the one they’d come through swung open.
Fuentes still had her ATAR, attached to her suit by its lanyard, but she hesitated i
n bringing it up. She didn’t know at the moment whether it would be better to storm through firing or go ahead and surrender; the whole purpose of this exercise, after all, had been to get Gunny Walsh into atmosphere, and this she had done. It grated, though, to simply turn over her weapon and give up….
A young, tanned, blond, male face peered through the open hatch at her, just visible by the wan light of an emergency lantern. “Come on aboard, Marine,” the man said. “We’ve been expecting you.”
She wiggled through the narrow hatch. There were three men on the other side, one holding an automatic pistol. A fourth man floated in a corner, blood smeared across his face.
“I’m Colonel Gresham,” the man with the pistol said. “US Aerospace Force.”
“Colonel Gresham?”
“Commander of this station,” he said. “Welcome aboard…and I mean that, very sincerely!”
She unfastened her helmet. It was steamy hot inside the station, a testimony to the effectiveness of the Marine siege and the cutting of power. There were no lights on at all save for small emergency lights at key points. “What’s the tacsit?”
“Nearly all of them went out that way a few minutes ago,” Gresham replied. “There are only two or three UNers left aboard, I think.” He jerked a thumb at the body in the corner. “He was on guard here and was going to leave you in the lock, but we persuaded him otherwise.”
“Thanks,” she said. She was floating next to Walsh, checking his breathing. The gunnery sergeant was conscious, still breathing hard but able to nod at her when she touched his face. “For both of us.”
“It sounded like their attack was a last effort,” Gresham said. “I think they knew they weren’t going to get any help from Earth, and decided on a last do-or-die charge.”
“It almost worked,” she said. She pointed at a radio on the bulkhead. “You have power enough for that?”
“Sure do.”
“Okay. Use Channel 15. Talk to the Marines outside, and have them start coming in through here.”
