He counted down from four, praying that she had understood his meaning, then rolled out again, briefly drawing fire, pulling the attackers to expose themselves, before pushing back towards the bulkhead. Hunt and Yaskova took the shots that brought the attackers down, putting their bullets right through the crates and out the other side. A second later, Stewart began her assault, throwing a flare to attract their attention, before charging forward with a wild cry, her squad taking full advantage of the momentary confusion.
Now, the hatch could open, and Walpis stepped out, a bandage wrapped around his arm, shaking his head as he looked at the mess outside. Cooper quickly counted bodies, almost all of them not-men, though a pair of technicians were lying next to two of his troopers on the floor, Pavlov and Gainsford. Sergeant Gurung was sprawled on the floor, his breathing unsteady, his kukri lodged in a nearby foeman, a shuttle pilot behind him, her dead eyes staring into nothing, her body still.
“Damn,” he said, shaking his head. “Just...damn.” With a sigh, he looked around, and said, “Lance-Corporal Price, head up to the bridge and inform the Captain that we have secured the ship. Weapons check, everyone, then proceed by fire team to Reserve Position Beta.”
“You think there might be a second wave, sir?” Akjes asked.
“I damn well hope not, Private,” he replied. “I damn well hope not.”
Chapter 3
Sub-Lieutenant Pavel Salazar ducked out of Shuttle One's cockpit as the alert sounded, chaos and confusion everywhere. Technicians sprinted to their combat stations, scrambling to respond to the alarm. Over at the monitoring stations, Sub-Lieutenant Bradley was gathering a group of technicians around her, and he scrambled over the deck towards them, listening to the anguished scream of the hull as a missile slammed in, the lights flickering for a second.
“What the hell's going on?” he asked.
“Alamo's under attack,” Bradley replied. “I can't raise the bridge, or anyone outside this deck. Internal communications must have been damaged.” Waving a thumb at the exit, she added, “Elevator system's out as well. I can't even send a runner.”
“Can you get a status report?”
“What do you think I'm doing, playing solitaire?” she snapped. Turning to a balding man standing next to her, she asked, “How are we doing, Kowalski?”
“Looks pretty bad, ma'am,” the grizzled Chief replied. “Damage in five areas, and we've been boarded, down on the engineering levels.” Stabbing a finger at the screen, he said, “Best I can tell, our troopers have reacted, but I can't get anything more recent than thirty seconds ago.”
“A lifetime in a battle,” Salazar said, as Bradley turned pale. “Don't worry, Barbara, Gabe will be fine. This isn't his first boarding action.”
“I know,” she replied. “Can you raise the bridge?”
“Someone's set up a jammer,” Kowalski said, holding a communicator between two fingers as though it had been dipped in something disgusting. “We might as well be sending smoke signals, and if the damage gets much worse, that's what we'll be doing anyway.”
“Hooke,” Salazar said, turning to a thin-faced man skulking at the rear, “can you hack into our external sensors, try and find out what's going on? It would be nice to know whether or not we're winning.” Tapping Kowalski on the shoulder, he continued, “Chief, go over to Shuttle One and finish pre-flight. I was almost done.”
“Pre-flight?” Bradley asked, as another explosion rocked the ship.
Shaking his head, the pilot replied, “If things get much worse, we're going to need it.”
“They're worse,” Hooke said, his face pale, holding up a datapad. “I'm picking up a swarm of missiles heading this way, just launched. Impact in fifty-two seconds, and they're heading right for us.” Shaking his head, he continued, “The bridge isn't doing anything about it. We aren't even reacting!”
Nodding, Bradley said, “The power system. Even with the new overrides, it's going to take three minutes to bring everything back on-line again. Which means that we can't maneuver, and we can't launch our missiles to knock theirs down.”
Glancing at the shuttle, Salazar replied, “The missiles are self-contained. Can we launch them from here?”
Bradley shrugged, and said, “Probably. What's the point? Without primary sensor guidance, they'll just go drifting aimlessly through space. They certainly won't be able to intercept an incoming missile swarm.”
“Get them launched,” he replied. “I've got a plan. Hooke, you're with me.”
“Why?” the hacker asked.
“Because, Spaceman, I need someone to crack into our missiles so that we can guide them to their target. We're going to steer them in ourselves.”
“That's crazy!” he protested. “We can't launch a shuttle in that mess out there!”
“Forty-eight seconds,” Bradley said.
“We're dead either way, Hooke, so why not die a hero?” Salazar sprinted to the shuttle, Hooke pausing for a second before following him.
“I don't want to die at all,” he plaintively replied.
“Relax, Spaceman,” Kowalski said, clapping the hacker on the back as Hooke slid into the co-pilot's seat. “No point being all tensed up when the missiles smash into you. Good luck.” Just as the hatch closed, the wise Supply Chief ducked back out onto the deck, barking orders to the launch crews outside.
The hatch slammed shut, and Salazar engaged the emergency override on the elevator airlock, sending the shuttle crashing down to the lower hatch with a rattle, then opening to the lower hatch before the air had all been evacuated, a control sequence that washed his screen with protesting red text, before the blast tossed the shuttle clear of the hull, sending it lazily spinning away.
“Snatch those damn missiles, Hooke,” he said, engaging the engine to take them on a course towards the approaching missiles. The hacker, his face pale, nodded as he started to rattle instructions into the electronic warfare suit, entering the control systems through the backdoor and bringing them under manual control. The shuttle engine roared to full power, throwing them onto a trajectory that all the systems suggested would lead to their certain death in a matter of seconds. Salazar thought differently, but a glance at his co-pilot's face indicated that his view was far from unanimous.
He switched the view on the main screen from the familiar, comfortable starfield to a sensor display, showing the rapidly receding Alamo behind him, the enemy battlecruiser ahead, coming up on closest approach, and the twelve missiles, six from each side, diving towards each other. Hooke's eyes were focused on his controls, and Salazar glanced across to see the beads of sweat building up on his forehead as the hacker frantically worked to save both the ship and himself.
A frown crept onto Salazar's face as he saw the approaching missile salvo change course, moving across to the right, the enemy gunner wise to his plan. He threw the shuttle into a sideways drift, slamming down the port thrusters to send him diving towards them, trying to keep the missiles launched from Alamo in their control radius. Despite all of his efforts, two of them drifted free, ranging away and out of the battle, and he uttered silent curses under his breath as the seconds counted down.
“What are we going to do now?” Hooke asked, glancing up from his work for the first time.
“Send our remaining missiles forward. I've got a plan.”
Snapping a control, Hooke ramped the missile engines to maximum acceleration, sending them racing ahead of the shuttle, slamming into their enemy counterparts ahead. The sensor screen cleared, only three more tracks for him to worry about. His shuttle, and two enemy missiles ahead. He glanced back at Alamo, shaking his head, the once-pristine hull burned and blackened, bursts of gas flying out in all directions, a trail of ice particles from the rear section as the lumbering beast struggled to maneuver.
Up ahead, the enemy ship seemed in little better condition, listing to the right as her th
rusters fired in series, the helmsman struggling to bring her under control. Those two missiles could make the difference, and Alamo wasn't going to be in a position to do anything about it.
“Can you do anything, Hooke?” he asked.
“No,” he replied, bluntly.
“Then start slamming out the physical countermeasures, and hang on.”
Shaking his head, the hacker turned to the side, tapping a sequence of controls, launching drones and chaff to the side, attempting to confuse the incoming missiles, now only seconds away from their target. Salazar pivoted the shuttle around, ranging in as close as he could, within a matter of meters of the enemy warheads, and the sensor display was a fog of ghost images, confused reflections and twisted patterns. He was gambling that the missiles were on autonomous control now, and his bet paid off as their engines ceased for a moment, before turning around, shedding their velocity as they homed in on their newest target. The shuttle.
“Great, sir,” Hooke said. “Just great. Where do I get off?”
“And miss all the fun?,” Salazar replied, slowing the shuttle, hitting the forward thrusters to give the missiles ample opportunity to range towards him, making sure that they didn't reacquire Alamo. He glanced to the side, taking a deep breath, the enemy battlecruiser looming ahead, and then brought the engines back up to full power, collision alarms ringing through the cabin. The missiles had executed a perfect curve, squandering their fuel to change their trajectory, close enough that they would be smashing into him in a matter of seconds.
“Whatever that plan of yours is, sir, could you hurry up with it?”
“Patience, Hooke, patience.”
Carefully, with well-placed thruster pulses, he guided the shuttle around, ranging in towards the target, the enemy battlecruiser. The screen lit up again as six more missiles raced from her launch tubes, heading right for him, and a smile crossed his face. Another attack wave that wouldn't be targeted on Alamo, and with any luck, by the time they'd prepared to fire again, Alamo would be in a condition to do something about it.
More alarms sounded, warning once again of a collision with the enemy battlecruiser, the shuttle spinning on its axis as it dived towards the larger vessel. The force of acceleration pressed him back into his couch as the missiles closed from the rear. The velocity differential was large enough now that he flew through the cloud of approaching warheads, their computers having no time to change course, sending them flying out of the battlespace. Launching them had been an act of desperation, but so was this maneuver.
Hooke's eyes were locked on the sensor readout as the distance ticked down, the enemy pilot doing everything he could with a crippled ship to change course, to get out of the way of the madman bearing down upon him, as Salazar rested his hand on the lateral thrusters, ramping the power to maximum as he prepared to unleash them at the critical second, the missiles scheduled to slam into him just as he crashed into the battlecruiser.
The enemy commander knew. He must have done, but there was nothing he could do to stop him, and at the final second, Salazar slammed on the thruster, sending the shuttle flying over the battlecruiser close enough that he could count the rivets in the hull, the two missiles catching the aft section of the ship, sending a cloud of debris flying into space, twisted metal alloys powered by jets of air as breaches sliced through the hull.
A loud crash sent the two of them lurching forward, Hooke's forehead smacking into his console, knocking the hacker cold, a trickle of blood running from his broken nose. Salazar quickly called up a status report as the blast wave caught them, the debris pitting the hull, alerts warning of outer hull breaches in a couple of dozen places, the main engine dying as the power links shattered, most of the computers rebooting as they struggled to cope with the power drain.
The shuttle pivoted forward, rocking clear, and Salazar shook his head. Somehow, he hadn't expected to survive that maneuver, and a cursory glance at his control panel suggested that he was not finished yet. The communications system was smashed, well beyond hope of repair, and as the viewscreen flickered back on, he saw the icy ball of the planet filling the display, more alarms warning him that he'd managed to drop below orbital velocity during that last, desperate dive, a spiraling course that would only have one, cataclysmic end, unless he could do something to stop him.
He heard a low groan from Hooke, and reached down for the medical kit under his couch, pulling out a sedative and quickly injecting it into his side, sending the hacker slumping back. With a quick tug, he tightened the restraints, locking him into position, and made sure all was secure before turning back to the helm. The main engine was out, but he still had the maneuvering thrusters, a separate system that had somehow made it through the blast wave undamaged, and at least some of his sensor suite. Enough for him to tell that the planet ahead had an atmosphere thick enough to give him a chance of managing re-entry, slowing himself down to a survivable landing.
The structural diagnostics were confused, figures running back and forth, and there was no time to get a full readout of the density of the atmosphere ahead, the computer struggling to program a safe descent path as he dragged the shuttle onto the right trajectory. The sensor lit up with an image highlighting something called 'Target Three', a heat and electromagnetic source from the surface, and while it almost certainly meant falling into enemy hands, he slewed his course around to place him as close to the base as possible. The odds were that he was going to urgently need help as soon as he landed.
He looked back at the spacesuits, hanging on the wall, then across at Hooke, shaking his head. There was no way he could manage to get the unconscious hacker into a suit, and if he placed him in a rescue ball, the concussion of the impact would kill him anyway. If his co-pilot couldn't wear a suit, then he certainly wasn't going to wear one, either. That just meant that he needed to bring the shuttle down to a safe landing, nothing more. An extra force urging him to do the best job he could.
One final, futile attempt with the communications system failed, and as Alamo receded below the horizon, he thought he saw a laser pulse connecting the two ships, sending a smile back across his face. No matter what happened next, at least he had the satisfaction of knowing that his ship was back in the fight, and that he had given them a chance of survival, even victory.
A red light winked on, the shuttle slamming into the upper limits of the atmosphere, and an altimeter sprang into life in the middle of his heads-up display, his hands playing the thrusters to fine-tune their descent path. He looked back at his status panel again, shaking his head. The heat shield had been damaged, no doubt about that, but it had been designed by conservative engineers who had built in plenty of redundancy. In a moment, he'd find out whether they had built in enough.
The tips of the shuttle's wings began to glow red with a burning heat that swept across the underside of the hull in a matter of seconds. He flicked a switch to silence the warning alarms, and for the first time since takeoff, silence reigned throughout the cabin, broken only by a low rumbling noise that caused a brief second of panic before he realized that Hooke was snoring. At least someone was having a relaxing time.
As the shuttle fell through the atmosphere, leaving a trail of fire in its wake, he struggled with the thrusters, trying to guide the craft through the narrow corridor of survival that would bring him down in one piece. A loud crack came from the underside, a portion of damaged heat shield flying free, and the ship lurched out of control, almost spilling away before he wrestled it back onto the proper flight path.
The flames were beginning to clear, and he got his first good look at the surface of the world beneath, a mixture of white, gleaming ice and black mountains rising over the terrain, an intricate series of shattered cracks gouged into the landscape, the pristine ice sheet shattered by some long-ago catastrophe. Shadows from clouds ranged over the landscape, and the viewscreen briefly darkened as he flew through one, shaking his head. Anyone
on the surface was getting an amazing show.
His target was just ahead, a few hundred miles away, and although he was slowing fast, he thought he had enough speed and height to get him to his destination, though a controlled landing would be another story. The main engine resolutely refused to fire, and one by one, the systems started to wink out as he spent the remnants of his stored power on the landing.
Up ahead, the shuttle dived towards a jagged mountain range, a thousand daggers thrust up from the ground to rip at his ship, and he used one final starboard pulse from his thrusters to send him through a narrow pass, an avalanche of snow and rocks raining down underneath him. Now he could see his target, a complex of domed buildings nestled around a huge landing pad, shuttles scattered around it at random, a dozen different designs of all shapes and sizes, some of them large enough to rival the smaller starships. On the perimeter, tiny black figures ran around, and a small explosion raced to the sky, close to the shuttles sending a column of smoke rising into the air.
The last of his power was gone, and he was reliant on his battered wings to catch the air as he attempted to glide in, rejecting the hard spaceport ahead of him as too risky. What he needed was a soft landing, and he looked around until he spotted a long reach of snow, curving around the base of a hill, a few miles outside town. He glanced back at his readouts, and nodded. If he was going to come down anywhere, this was the spot.
His speed and altitude decreasing far too rapidly, he swung around to try and catch warm currents of air from the base beneath, waste heat coming to his salvation as it buoyed him for the landing, lining up for the approach. Underneath, he could see vehicles racing out, heading towards his probable landing point, help of at least some kind on the way.
The ground rushed up towards him, far too quickly for his liking, the surface a blur of white and gray as he fired a single pulse from the lateral thrusters, kicking the shuttle up just high enough to carry him to the snow bank, before the shuttle finally made contact with the ground, skipping up into the air once more before skidding around, melting a trail in the snow from the still red-hot heat shield, steam rising into the sky all around as he mercifully brought it to rest, his hands shaking as he threw switches to complete an abbreviated post-flight. He sat back on his couch, marveling that the hull had held through the descent and the landing, then unbuckled his restraints, making his way to the armory in the rear compartment. If he had visitors coming, he'd need to give them an appropriate welcome.
Battlecruiser Alamo: Forbidden Seas Page 3
