After what seemed to be a couple of centuries, my helmet radio crackled back to life. “This is Squad Leader. We are docking. Prepare to board.”
The boat clanged to a stop as the announcement cut out and the boat grappled to the side of the target. Simultaneous with that, the cocoon retracted, leaving me free to act. There was a rumbling from the docking area where the machinery of the attack boat was burning an entrance into the other ship. I spotted Angel leaving his rack and grabbed him.
Helmet to helmet, to avoid the radio, I shouted, “Angel! Who are we fighting?”
“Who knows? Who cares? Once you get through, just shoot anybody with a different insignia on his suit.”
I was going to thank him for that sage advice, but the machinery cut me off. With a hiss, a section of the troop compartment wall slid back, revealing a tunnel through metal that led into the other ship. A couple of purple beams reached out at us. They vanished in a cascade of return fire as the freebooters stormed through the breach. I think I was the only one not to draw his weapon then. I know I was the last one through the hole.
The passage had an interesting and unexpected twist. The attack boat had oriented the breach so that it was like stepping through a door from the troop compartment. The hole, however, was in the ceiling of a passageway in the target ship. Once we moved past the field of our own boat, and into the target, the other ship’s gravity took over. It was like falling through a trapdoor. I damn near broke my neck. By the time I picked myself up, I had to run to catch up to the squad as the others ran ahead, more to avoid being left on my own than out of eagerness to join the attack. Different people react differently to combat. I read somewhere about a soldier, maybe it was a general, who used to check his pulse when he went into action and was annoyed if it went up. I don’t know about that. Personally, I check my pants first.
We charged down that corridor in a headlong rush more like a crazed mob than a disciplined troop. The few members of the defending crew caught in the corridor were cut down where they stood. Not many tried to run. I remember one vividly, kneeling in the middle of the deck firing at us and dying in a crisscross of purple beams. The few shots the defenders fired were mostly absorbed by our half-armor. Not one of Carvalho’s crew went down.
Then, suddenly, everything changed. Where at first, no one had held out against the rampage, a wall of return fire went up in one section of the passage. Our lead Srihani went down, a hole surrounded by black char in his helmet. The others dove for doorways, or any extension of wall that provided some cover, and fired back. But it wasn’t merely stiffened resistance. This was a trap. From an intersecting corridor we had just passed, stepped three defenders. They opened fire from our rear. Three Srihani fell, drilled from spine to sternum.
I saw the whole ambush unfold in front of me. I had started out behind the others and my tumble through the hatch left me with a sore leg that slowed me down even more. (Okay, I wasn’t trying to be in front.) Angel had stayed with me, although he was trying to urge me to the front. As a result, when the defenders sprung their trap, they moved between us and the rest of the squad. It took just long enough for them to fire that once, for us to realize who they were and that they, intent on their targets, had no idea we were there. Angel and I fired. At that distance, we could hardly miss. Two defenders fell immediately. The third had time to realize the mistake he and his fellows had made before we put him away.
We’d been in just the right place at the right time to foil the trap, but it led to no weakening of the defense ahead. The contest was viciously fought in that confined space. Srihani crouched behind the scant cover of doors, the corners of intersections and bodies on the deck. From these positions, they poured fire into each other at ranges that were too close for any armor to absorb the blast. Slowly, Carvalho’s crew forced their way ahead from doorway to stanchion leaving a trail of bodies to mark the way. It was not all blasters, either. Some of the corpses showed the handles of dushukus.
I brought up the rear of the squad, firing occasionally but mostly trying to avoid the leading edge. Tactically the situation was insane, nothing more than one frontal assault after another with each intersecting corridor we passed a potential source of enfilading fire. It shouldn’t have required any great military experience to see that, hell I could see it, but we kept at it anyway. Since I wasn’t crazy, I started looking for an alternate route.
I waited until no one was watching me, then inched backward around the curve of the passageway. A door in the bulkhead opened as soon as its plate was touched, leading me into a large storage compartment. It was partly full of large boxes of a smooth, blue material. They were full of something, because I couldn’t even move them, but the only markings were numerical. Since I wasn’t there to take inventory, I let them be and worked around them to reach the opposite wall. To my disgust, there was no door, but I did spot a vent set high on the wall. A conveniently placed box let me reach it.
I climbed onto the box. Would the opening would be large enough to crawl through? Something tugged at my leg and I almost jumped out of my suit. I looked down and saw Angel.
“Jesus Christ, man! What do you want me to do, die of heart failure before I can get shot?”
“Sorry, Danny-boy.” At least, he sounded sheepish. “What are you up to?”
“Well, you tell me,” I said. “Normally, I gather when you board a ship it’s a freestyle melee, like a rumble. Right?”
“Pretty much,” he agreed.
“Right. Except these guys have been in a few fights, maybe, and have figured that by closing off key passages they can stop you. Seems to me, the only way to beat it is to go around it, not try to overrun it.”
Angel nodded vigorously. “I figured you’d know what you were doing.”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” I replied. “I am sure that they don’t know what they’re doing.” I jerked a thumb back in the direction of the firefight. “Come on, give me a hand. I want to shoot the facing off this vent.”
The lattice arrangement that covered the opening ran seamlessly into the wall on both sides. There were no screws, no hinges and no face plate to work with. But the grille was obviously thinner than the wall plates and my handblaster cut through it. Once inside the vent, it was evident that the passage doubled as a workman’s crawl space. We had handholds, a tool locker, even lighting that came on wherever we crawled. Okay. If there was one way into the crawl space, there had to be other ways in—and out.
I need not have worried about the exit. We rounded a corner and there was a hatch set into the side of the passage with “EXIT” emblazoned in standard galactic over it. At my touch on the plate, the hatch door retracted upward, leaving us facing a quiet corridor.
I stepped out with Angel close behind. Elsewhere on the ship, violent hand-to-hand combat was in progress. I had no idea where I was and Angel was simply following me, so I took an arbitrary turn to my right and set off. We walked for maybe ten minutes until we came to a safety door that bisected the corridor. It slid open at my touch, so I knew there was normal air pressure behind it, but once through it we could hear shouts and the unmistakable static crackle of blaster discharges. The corridor immediately ahead of us was empty up to the point where it connected with another broad corridor. The sounds of fighting came from the right side of the corridor, the left was quiet. While I stood guard, Angel crept to the intersection and peered around to the left and right.
“Jesus!” he exclaimed and pulled himself back to a sitting position. “That’s the main entrance to the bridge on our left! We must have outflanked everybody when we went through that vent.”
On one hand, that sounded encouraging. On the other, it implied that we were isolated.
“What’s out there?” I asked him.
“Two guards, either side of the corridor, right in front of the bridge entrance. They have shielded positions but they’re not in them. The corridor to the right branches, I can’t see where the fighting is.”
; A mind is a funny thing and sometimes it can play tricks on you. This was one of those times. Mine, suddenly, wasn’t thinking of me being scared stiff in the midst of mortal combat on a spaceship. Instead, it slipped back into its football mode, looking at weaknesses and acting automatically. I motioned Angel to stand up. Then, I just stepped out into the corridor, blaster ready.
The two guards were anything but ready. They were standing out in the corridor, peering toward the noise. I took them by surprise. My beam drilled one in the solar plexus, burning through his half-armor and dropping him on the deck. The second had his hand on his blaster when I fired. He reacted fast, too. I could see the blaster come up as the first Srihani crumpled. But before he could fire, a beam drew a line from behind me to his throat. Blood sprayed from where his throat had been. His blaster fell, followed by his body.
Beside me, Angel was standing shaking his head. “Danny-boy,” Angel said, “you are one crazy dude.”
I couldn’t answer him then. I was just beginning to realize what I had done.
Finally, I said, “Angel, take one of those alcoves and cover the corridor.”
Hoping I looked more like John Wayne than I felt, I walked over to the door and put my hand on the plate. Nothing happened. No surprise, but I figured it was worth a try. A heavy blaster could probably have cut through those doors; my handblaster would not. What about the guards lying in front of the doorway? They might have had access to the bridge.
I grabbed the nearest body by one arm and dragged it over to the door. I pressed its hand up against the plate. Silently, the doors slid apart.
I’d never before been on the bridge of a starship, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. Not a window—I knew that much. The bridge was always sited along the main axis of the ship to give it as much protection as possible. Instruments piped the outside world in, displaying it on a large screen that was actually one entire wall of the room. The screen showed another ship, Carvalho’s obviously, and segmented areas of the screen showed information about the battle. The bridge crew manned rows of panels, alive with screens and lights, that extended from the sidewall a third of the way toward the center of the room. In the middle, directly in front of the main screen and with their own bank of small screens, were three chairs. Only the central one was occupied, presumably by the captain. I had about a second to see all of this and then one of them saw me. He gave a shout and jumped up, whereupon I blasted him down. That set off chaos. The bridge crew tried to rush me. Fortunately, the vestibule that framed the entrance to the bridge gave me some cover. I fired three bolts, which hit no one although they damaged the boards where they struck. They did force the crew down to take cover. One return shot went high past my shoulder and hit the closed door behind me.
“Hold it!” I bellowed, my blaster leveled at the captain. I was gambling that the bridge crew would be unwilling to risk their captain in order to take a potshot at me. For that moment, the dice rolled my way.
The captain had spun his chair around. Now, he came to his feet, but his blaster was still in its holster. I can’t remember at all what he looked like, only that he was tall. (Come on, it was kind of stressful.) I could see his tongue lick quickly across his lips as he stared at my blaster, but his eyes were steady.
“For the ship!” he yelled, and reached for his blaster.
He never had a chance. Fast as he might have been, my blaster was already out and aimed. Just the reflex reaction to his shout was enough to tighten my thumb over the firing stud. The bolt took him in the upper chest. He fell backwards over his chair, spilling onto the deck behind it, his blood gushing over the deck plates. There was a moment of silence.
“Do you accept?” asked one of the other officers, breaking the spell that had held all of us.
He too was standing, hand inches away from the grip of his blaster. I wished I knew what he was asking me to accept. Was it another challenge? There were more armed Srihani on the bridge and, given a moment to gather their wits, they could easily blow me away.
“I accept.” I tried to say it firmly, hoping that I was making a wise choice.
The officer relaxed. “Communications,” he snapped, “yield the ship.”
Across the bridge, another Srihani spoke into a tiny mouthpiece. His words were simultaneously amplified over the speakers.
“Cease fire. Cease fire. Command has yielded the ship. Cease fire, immediately.”
I looked around, my mood going from fear to astonishment, as the crew shut down their boards. When it was done, the officer who had spoken to me said, “At your command.”
The fight was over.
And that is how Danny Troy conquered a starship single-handed. Well, almost.
Chapter 8
In some respects, I was busier after the battle than during it. The Flower of Rianth, the merchanter we had attacked, had been badly damaged during the fight, but not fatally. Credit Carvalho for launching the Strike Force early and your friend, Danny Troy, for reaching the bridge quickly. Credit also the deceased former captain of the Flower, who had recognized that his crew was going to lose the battle. His challenge to me to fight for the ship, one on one, had been for show, a suicidal show at that since he had also known he would not win that duel. By doing it, he allowed his crew to pretend that he, now dead, had surrendered the ship, not they. It saved the ship —and a lot of lives.
The Flower of Rianth was still operational, making the ship itself a valuable prize. Carvalho gave precedence to transferring as much of the Flower’s cargo as possible, but once that was done he pushed both crews to repair the Flower so she could make an interstellar transit.
Yes, I did say both crews. It seemed no sooner had the shooting stopped than Carvalho took on most of the Flower’s crew. The ones who didn’t sign on with Carvalho were mostly the officers, and the reason seemed more that Carvalho didn’t need them than their unwillingness to join us.
I had a close look at the changeover because Carvalho posted me to the gang overseeing the repair work, a perk for my performance. It brought me into close contact with Ruoni, the officer who’d asked me to accept the Flower’s surrender. He was a slim, intense, young Srihani who, in spite of his youth, had served on two other merchant ships previously and had survived an earlier encounter with freebooters.
Ruoni wasn’t going to join us, as Carvalho had his own fire control and executive officers, but that didn’t stop him from managing the Flower’s repairs in expert fashion. He ignored the unsightly but purely cosmetic residue of buckled deck plates, blown out interior walls and shattered safety doors. Damage to the reactor lines and places where the ship had been opened to vacuum, those were the critical areas he concentrated on. For two days, Ruoni had his surviving engineers, plus some of Carvalho’s, laboring to patch the drive together. The merchanter personnel obviously had a far better grasp of how the thing was built than Carvalho’s people did. It took the full two days, without sleep, but I’m not sure it could have been done at all without the merchanters. They succeeded or, at least the ship was spaceworthy, although neither Ruoni nor the engineers believed that it would be good for more than a few transits.
I was supposed to watch Ruoni and make certain there was no sabotage. It was a futile assignment. I could no more have told whether the repairs were done properly than a Neanderthal watching an automobile being fixed. Perhaps foolishly, I admitted as much to Ruoni.
“It doesn’t matter.” He shrugged. “It is custom for there to be a supervisor. However, I would hardly sabotage a ship that I have to fly. There would be nothing gained by it.”
I had to agree with the logic, so I changed the subject and asked him what he planned to do after the ship docked at a station.
He shrugged again. “I have no idea. There will be another ship that needs a Fire Controller, or someone will buy this one and need to crew it. Or maybe neither, and I will rot away on a station.”
Under other circumstances, I could have become friendly with Ruoni. He was a bit dour, but
his side, after all, had just lost the battle. He obviously knew how to coax maximum performance from others. An innate talent is necessary to be really good at that and Ruoni had it. He answered my questions politely, even though some of them must have sounded truly foolish, and he told me far more about the ship than he had to. It was his willingness to talk about the ship that led me to ask other questions. For instance, why had the crew changed sides so easily after their captain had died to save their lives?
“There is nothing unusual about it,” Ruoni answered, with a look that compelled me to tell him that I had not grown up in the empire. “As I said, it is not unusual. The kvenningari do it all the time. Parole and retirement, or change insignia. All sides are sworn to serve the empire, so changing sides does not violate one’s oath. It is not so different here, except that it’s not necessary to retire if your option is not to change sides.”
“How can it not be different with a freebooter?”
“Freebooters maintain that they have Imperial charters and operate under Imperial regulations,” he pointed out.
The words brought back the farcical investigation after Kolgorinn’s death. Was this the reason for the elaborate pretense? But still, “And you change sides just like that, even after fighting so hard against one another?”
Ruoni looked at me as though I was daft. “Would you sign them on if they did not fight hard?”
The question was rhetorical and the argument futile. The Imperials had come up with a convenient theory to explain away what they did. The reality was irrelevant.
“Ruoni,” I said, “the more I see of your empire, the more I am coming to believe that the idiots running my world actually know what they are doing. And that is a truly scary thought.”
It took five days of work in all, four for the repairs and one for testing, before the Flower was ready to fly again. When it was done, Carvalho called a holiday on the Flower, both for us and the Flower’s old crew, battened down anything fragile, and let the booze flow for a full day. By the time that was over the remaining differences between the two crews were submerged by the bond of a mutual hangover. There was one fight to the death between two of the Flower’s crew, which Carvalho dealt with the next day by doctoring the record the same way he’d done after my fight. When that was done, everyone was buddy-buddy and it was time to go back to work.
My Life: An Ex-Quarterback's Adventures in the Galactic Empire Page 9
