He folded around the weights, broken, and coughed up blood. Bruiser let go. The man and the metal tumbled away until they hit another piece of equipment, separated, and the limp body became snared.
Bruiser headed back up the deck towards the mirrors, aware that the third figure was moving in parallel with him. He reached the end of the aisle, cracking the mirror he landed against, and reached down to the metal safety cable. Hand over hand he pulled himself to the far bulkhead, and unclipped the carabiner that secured the cable.
He picked up the nearest kettlebell, and began to swing it around as fast as he could.
The third figure was opposite him, and he could see it was a woman dressed in engineering overalls. She too carried a blade.
He released the kettlebell, and it sailed off towards her. She moved casually out of its way, and began to advance as best she could.
Bruiser had to get closer to her to reach the next kettlebell.
That one too sailed far too slowly to connect, and she had ducked down long before it reached her. She didn’t even stop moving.
Bruiser moved closer still, and picked up the next heaviest kettlebell. The only way this was going to work was if he used it as an over-sized knuckle-duster.
He was fine with that.
• • •
Confusion and horror competed for ground on COMOP’s face, mirroring the overlapping messages that sputtered across the comm system.
“I’m getting reports from all over the ship, Captain. It’s chaos.”
Thande heard a distinct pop-pop-pop from somewhere beyond the closed blast doors. Small arms, most likely removed from one of the emergency lockers containing the spare weapons which lacked remote inhibitors.
When the gunfire had stopped, there was a pause. Then a solid object thudded heavily against the outside of the heavy security hatches, again and again.
“Get me security, now,” Thande barked. “I want this shit under control.”
“You’ll need more than security.” The XO chuckled at her. He stood, pulling against the metal restraints that bound his wrists to a safety rail. “Security is exactly the thing you don’t have.”
“You can fucking stand by, Mister,” Thande snapped.
A metallic clanging sounded somewhere far below them, and the command deck trembled in response.
“What was that?”
“Minor hull breach below decks, Captain. We’re taking fire.”
“The dreadships?”
“No Ma’am. It’s one of ours. O Hallowed Morn is firing on us!”
Commander Yuellen laughed out loud.
“Switch off the IFF recognisers,” Thande said. “Tell the C-MADS turrets to shoot down anything that gets too close. Anything!”
Tactical sent the orders to the defence network, and the clanging was replaced by the familiar thumping of the turrets firing off their interceptors.
“Get me a sit-rep on the Meccrace defence fleet.”
Tactical’s face was ashen. “I’m seeing most of our ships listing, Captain. A handful are firing on each other.”
“Worlds! There must be traitors on every damned one of them.”
“I have the Master-at-Arms on the comm, Captain.”
“Panovar? About fucking time. Tell him his teams are to kill anyone they see lifting a finger against the proper operation of this ship, or against any crew defending it.”
COMOP relayed the order to Panovar.
“He’s asking how he’s meant to know the difference.”
“He’ll just have to do his best,” Thande said. “Can’t ask much more of the man.”
“Ma’am, The Last Days of Dojin is headed right for us. Collision course.”
“Do we have thrust yet?”
“Negative on that. At current speed, impact in a matter of minutes.”
“Tell them to cut their engines, COMOP, or we open fire.”
“They’re not acknowledging, and not slowing either.”
“Tactical; what do we have that will stop them?”
“Nothing short of ship-to-ship missiles will do it, Captain. They’re coming at hard burn. We’ll have to break up the mass.”
“Shit. Shit.”
“It’s them or you,” her XO said. His mouth was curled into a nasty smile.
No, not her XO. Her ex-XO.
“You can fuck right off.” She turned her attention back to Tactical. “There has to be another way.”
“There’s no other way and you know it,” the once-XO said. “It’s them or you.”
Thande looked between the traitor and the battle map. The prow of the Dojin was getting bigger with every passing second. With every passing second, Yuellen’s sneer deepened and his crowing chuckle became more disturbing.
Them or you. Not ‘us’, but you.
Funny, she thought, the odd little things you notice during a crisis.
“Moments to go, Captain,” COMOP was shouting.
“Damn it! Damn it to the darkest fucking Deep! Tactical, fire on the Dojin.”
“Captain, I… I can’t do that—”
“Nuke the damned ship!”
Tactical closed her eyes in the same moment she released the missiles, and ugly laughter filled the command deck.
• • •
Bruiser pulled himself carefully around the corner of the passageway, using the contours of the bulkhead as hand grips. Blood smeared on the white paint everywhere he touched it.
The humans in the gym had been strange; much stranger than they usually were. He was certain that they were not in their right minds, and he could not help but think back to what he had witnessed on Aldava several days before.
Those people who lived in Barrabas Fled had been insane too. Not quite so homicidal, granted, but they had definitely stepped off the same shuttle.
He had recovered his link from his gym bag, but the comm system was — for all practical purposes — strangely silent. Occasionally there was a burst of urgent noise, but nothing recognisable. Nothing his link could lock onto and translate before the sounds ended.
Red lights pulsed on the overhead, and a two-tone alarm sounded general quarters. The passageways were dim, and eerily empty. A scream came from somewhere off to his left, followed by a thud and another, shorter scream.
He reached an elevator that traversed the main decks, and pressed the call panel. It stayed dark. Above the entrance to the elevator shaft, a heavy hatch was recessed into the overhead. Less than a square metre; there was no way he was going to fit through that.
The emergency lighting faded out, bathing the passageway in the pulsing, blood-red light of the general alert. Several decks away he heard hull impacts, tearing metal, and what could have been an explosion.
As he considered where to go from there, a crew member floated swiftly around the nearest corner. She saw him, screamed in terror, and scrabbled at the bulkhead to kill her forward momentum.
“Wait—” Bruiser said, reaching out towards her. Even as he spoke, he saw she was not wearing her link. His words would have seemed threatening and utterly alien to her even if they had been standing together in a sunlit meadow.
She screamed again, pulled hard on a guide rail, and sailed back around the corner like a darting fish.
“Great. She sees a monster.”
He had his link try to connect to anyone he knew who might be listening. Chun was silent, as were Daxon and Bro. Only Norskine replied.
“What’s happening?” Bruiser asked.
“Mutiny,” Norskine shouted. “It’s a fucking mutiny, Bruiser! Don’t trust anyone!”
A crashing sound in the background noise drowned her out, and he had to pull the link away from his earhole for a second.
“Are you well? Norskine?”
“Just about. Hold on,” she said. Another crash. “Nearly got ourselves pinned down just then. Head for the command deck.”
“I’m stuck on seven. Main lifts are out.”
“Use the access hatches?”
/>
“Too big. Too big by far.”
“Guess you’re stuck then.”
“I know.”
“Hold on… the upper engineering level is on seven. Daxon says you should go there. Pummel anything that doesn’t look right.”
“Copy on that,” he grinned.
• • •
Silence reigned on the command deck. Thande found she had no words to share with her officers in this moment; no platitude or rousing speech that could possibly help them get past what they had just done.
What she had just done.
On the tactical holo, the pathetic fragments which remained of The Last Days of Dojin tumbled away from each other, carried by a shell of fading plasma. Some of them would reach Disputer soon enough, but not one of them could threaten her. Not now.
Even the XO had finally stopped laughing.
The XO!
Thande pulled against a hand-hold, turning her body towards him, her eyes narrow and dark, her fists clenched tight.
“Who in the many worlds are you, and what are you doing on my bridge?”
“I’m your executive officer, Captain,” he said. “See how I dance for you.”
“Are you fuck my XO. Commander Yuellen is a good man. An honest, loyal man. Whoever or whatever you are, you’re sure as hell not him.”
“I can assure you, I am.”
He smiled. That same smile had looked warm and sincere on Yuellen when he cared to wear it, but now it seemed nothing more than an empty taunt.
“What’s going on in my ship?”
“Mutiny. Insurrection. Rebellion. Whatever you are most happy to call it. The old order falls away, you see.”
“Under whose orders?”
“Orders? Oh, I don’t particularly use those. They tend to get in the way.”
“Don’t fuck with me. Who’s in charge?”
“Why, me of course. I am.”
There was something in the way he said it that unsettled Thande. It was as if he were answering a different question. Or the same question, but answered by—
“Captain, I have Master Panovar back on the comm. He’s reporting multiple hostiles throughout the ship, concentrated on the command and engineering decks.”
She pulled herself away from not-Yuellen, and turned her attention to COMOP. Whatever the traitor had to say was apparently gibberish not worth hearing, and she had more important things to deal with.
“Have him concentrate his efforts on engineering; he can help restore functions from there. We’ll be fine. Nobody is getting through those blast doors in a hurry.”
As if to undermine her reasoning, the booming great thuds reverberating through the security hatches began to get louder.
“Of course, he might not be quite the Panovar you are used to dealing with,” said not-Yuellen, with obvious satisfaction.
“What do you mean?” Thande asked.
“Until about five minutes ago you seemed fairly convinced I was your XO, and now you are positively certain that I’m not.”
“Captain,” said COMOP, “he’s just trying to unnerve you.”
“And it’s working,” she said. “He has a point. Can we really trust anyone outside those blast doors?”
“Ma’am, why would he risk outing one of his own?” Tactical said. “He’s trying to make you think the Master-at-Arms is a mutineer because that’s the best way to get you to harm your own interests.”
“Can I take that chance?” Thande asked.
“You definitely should,” not-Yuellen said. “Absolutely under no circumstances should you attempt to interfere with Master Panovar.”
Thande closed her eyes briefly.
“Okay, Tactical. I take your point.”
She drew her side-arm, and shot the still smiling not-Yuellen in the heart.
• • •
Bruiser could be stealthy when he needed to be, which was — given his lack of armaments — a fortuitous skill indeed.
He peered over the safety rail, into the deep well of the central engineering chamber. Six decks down, at least two people were moving about slowly on deck twelve. They pushed themselves over the bodies of engineers without giving them a second glance.
Intruders, he thought. Humans don’t usually ignore their dead and wounded.
Silently, he pulled on the rail and lifted his body over it. His aim and speed were going to have to be absolutely correct for this to work. Looking down — which might as well have been up, but which the parts of his brain to do with his continued survival told him it definitely was not — it occurred to him that this would be a terrible moment for the gravity to be turned back on.
He pushed himself out slowly and carefully until he was clear of the edge of deck seven, directly over the well that housed the primary engineering systems. Momentum carried him up towards the overhead.
His feet bumped against the plasteel surface, and he steeled himself. This was it. In a few seconds, if he took no action, he would have rebounded so far away from the overhead that he would not be able to kick off from it.
He launched himself downwards with a good, solid jump.
The man he landed on made a horrible crunching sound, and stopped moving straight away. Almost three-hundred kilos of Rodori, accelerated towards a human body, evidently occasioned total debilitation. Bruiser almost felt sorry for him.
Understandably, the other man was taken by surprise, and he turned around to face Bruiser far too slowly. A giant fist smashed up under his jaw, and sharp fragments of his teeth popped out through his lips. His eyes rolled up into his skull and trembled. Aside from sailing towards the bulkhead and collapsing against it gracelessly, he too stopped moving.
Bruiser took a look around. There seemed to be no-one else about, but he was not going to take chances. Not without some firepower to fall back on.
He noticed a large amount of red displayed on the holos dotted around engineering. For humans, red meant danger, wrong, and limit.
“Stay where you are.” The command was barked from behind him. “Raise your hands.”
He did as he was told, but also turned slowly, trying as best he could to appear non-threatening.
“Who are you?” The man was holding a rifle, pointing it right at Bruiser’s face. Behind him, one to each side, stood two other armed officers.
“Private Bruiser. Bravo Company, 951st.”
“What have you been up to in here, eh Bruiser?”
“These are nothing to do with me,” Bruiser said, nodding towards the bodies that were strewn across the deck. “Well… two of them are.”
“You did this?”
“They did it,” Bruiser said. “Whoever these crazy ones are. Two of them in engineering. I landed on one and smashed the other’s face in.”
“Back away,” said the leader. He nodded to one of his companions. “Check them, would you?”
Bruiser moved away compliantly, letting his momentum carry him to a bulkhead away from the bodies. He watched as the subordinate officer pulled herself across the deck, hand over hand, examining the dead with practiced efficiency.
“Most of them were shot or stabbed,” she said at last. “But like he said; this one’s spine is broken in a couple of places, and that one there… his jaw has been smashed into little bits. Neck’s broken too.”
“Works for me,” said the leader. “Name’s Panovar. You probably know what I do in this shiny bucket.”
“Master-at-Arms?” Bruiser asked.
“You actually read the passengers’ brief,” Panovar said. “You nerd.”
Bruiser truly did not know how to respond to that. Sometimes his knowledge of human behaviour was simply not deep enough.
“Anyway, these creeps are all over the ship. Captain says engineering is a security priority, so let’s see if we can’t get it fucking secured, eh?”
• • •
The tense minutes seemed to crawl by on the command deck, but eventually they dragged into an hour. Thande sat in her chair and wai
ted for word. Word from anyone.
Occasionally, the C-MADS turrets fired off a burst at the debris and ordnance sailing towards the hull. Outside, in the black surrounding Meccrace Prime, most of the ships of the defence fleet appeared to be coming under control. Slowly, so painfully slowly, they stopped firing at each other and regrouped.
Others were not so fortunate.
As well as the Dojin, Thande had seen other Imperial ships dying in the silent vacuum. The O Hallowed Morn had lashed out at many other ships besides Disputer, and eventually those still under full or partial control had joined forces to punch her full of holes. No distress beacon had been sent from the Morn; she drifted alone until her atmosphere bled out into the cold. Thande had then been forced to watch helplessly as The Line is Narrow rammed his own sister ship, When the Walls Fell, obliterating them both.
It was a terrible day for the Eighth Fleet. A terrible, black day for the Imperial Navy. Her heart ached.
Tactical’s strained voice brought Thande back to the harsh reality of the command deck.
“Ma’am, change in condition of the unknown ships.”
“Report.”
“While we’ve been, uh, fighting, they’ve formed a cordon around Meccrace Prime. Some of them are going atmospheric.”
“Show me.”
Tactical brought up the planet on the main battle holo, and Thande peered intently at the moving ships it represented for her.
“What are they doing?” She said. “Zoom in on that one, there.”
Tactical obliged.
The dreadship expanded to fill the available holographic volume. An overlay picked out features of interest, marking the functional parts the holo thought it recognised. A helical coil of rear-facing engines around the main body of the ship fired against gravity, lowering the massive craft into the atmosphere with a grace that seemed directly at odds with the vast, monstrous bulk of the vessel. Its stern reached greedily down towards the surface with sharp, black fingers.
“What in the many worlds are they doing?” Thande asked again.
“Panovar reports engineering is secure, Captain. Compromised systems are coming back online, and command protocols are being routed to here only; we’ll have full control back shortly.”
Books One to Three Omnibus (Armada Wars) Page 56
