The Last Strike: Book 5 of The Last War Series

by Peter Bostrom

  “Good idea.” Yim led the way toward the shuttle, rifle scanning the hangar bay as he went.

  Out of nowhere, the four uninjured Marines burst through the front door, rifles ready.

  “Shit!” Blair dove behind a pile of barrels. Yim stopped, backed up carefully, and ducked behind them next to her. Reardon flopped down beside them, Sammy still dangling from his neck.

  Rounds screamed overhead, bouncing off the barrels and ricocheting around the hangar bay, one or two sparking off the hull of the shuttle.

  “What’s going on down there?” shouted their pilot.

  “We’re about to get pinned down, that’s what!” Blair fired her pistol over the rim of the barrel, hammering the trigger. She had to scatter the Marines so she could buy everyone some time. “Get aboard! Now! Yim, go!”

  Yim sprinted up the loading ramp, puffing and wheezing, then crouched by the lip and prepared to cover them.

  Blair fired a few more times. The Marines were probably too disciplined to be suppressed by a handgun for too long, but she had to try. “Reardon, go! Yim! Covering fire!”

  Reardon broke cover and sprinted toward the shuttle impressively fast considering his state of inebriation and the bulky burden bouncing on his back.

  No sounds of covering fire reached Blair’s ringing ears.

  “I’m jammed!” shouted Yim, hammering the rifle. “Blast, it’s jammed!”

  Double triple shit. The Chinese opened up and gunfire screamed all around them, bullets whizzing like angry hornets past Reardon and Sammy. Blair emptied her magazine, firing wildly without hitting anything.

  Miraculously, Sammy and Reardon made it up the ramp. That left only her.

  She ejected her magazine, jamming in a fresh one, then clicked the slide closed. Deep breath, deep breath.

  “Unjammed!” shouted Yim. He fired a few shots to test it. “Go!”

  “Moving!” Blair broke cover, holding her pistol out with one hand, firing wildly as she ran to the loading ramp. The Chinese were relentless as they returned fire. Bullets screamed past her damaged ears. One tore a hole in her shirt. Another bit a chunk out of the heel of her boot, nearly sending her sprawling. She shot. She ran.

  And then she was up the loading ramp and collapsed inside the shuttle, panting and gasping. “Pilot! Take off!”

  “Requesting decompression of the hangar bay,” said their pilot. Outside the ship she could hear the muted ping of rounds bouncing off the hull as the Chinese shot at them. “Stand by. We have to wait until these people clear out… fortunately they’re all rabbiting. They know what’s about to happen.”

  Dammit. She didn’t know anything about spaceships. Blair dragged herself up to her feet, unable to suppress a giddy giggle. “Everyone okay? Nobody’s hit?”

  “I’m good,” said Yim.

  “Yeah,” said Sammy, who was slumped against the wall, exhausted.

  “Fine,” said Reardon, laying on the deck looking dangerously close to vomiting. Running for his life with a stomach full of pink coffee apparently didn’t agree with him. It was vaguely satisfying for Blair to see him looking green around the gills for once, and she could barely repress a faint smile. Even her hiccups were gone.

  “Wait,” said Reardon, holding up his hand, slick with blood. “Someone’s bleeding.”

  “I’m clear,” said Yim, turning around. “See?”

  Sammy stared at her. “Well, it’s not me,” he said, crawling over to his brother, his thin, limp legs dragging behind him. “You’re drunk, you probably don’t feel it.”

  “Or,” said Blair, her eyes drawn to Sammy’s limp legs, to the bloody trail they left. “You don’t feel it.”

  “Oh,” said Sammy, twisting around and regarding the massive hole in his right thigh with a detached, academic curiosity. “That’s not good.”

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Shuttle

  Hangar Bay

  Chrysalis Station

  Kepler-1011 system

  Blair grabbed a medpack and ripped it open, spilling medical supplies all over the shuttle’s deck.

  “That’s definitely not good,” said Sammy, again. He didn’t seem panicked. Shock must be different when you’re paralyzed…

  “Damn fucking right that’s not good!” Reardon shouted, apparently completely sober now, grabbing his brother by the shoulder. “You dumb shit! You fucking idiot!”

  Sammy glared at him, throwing up his hands. “Hey, what did I do?”

  “You got yourself shot, you dumbass!”

  Blair grabbed a bandage compress and saturated it with a hissing can of biofoam, then turned over Sammy’s leg, looking for the exit wound. Almost immediately, a spurt of blood shot up like a leak from a hose.

  “Oh shit, what was that?” Sammy shrieked and grabbed his thigh, as though suddenly realizing the severity of a gunshot wound. “Oh god! What?”

  His femoral artery had been nicked. No other part of the leg would create such blood pressure. “You’re in trouble,” Blair said, and jammed the bandage-compress against the exit wound. The entry wound continued to spray blood. She could feel it throb under her hand. “I need another compress,” she said, snapping her fingers in the air. “Come on, someone!”

  Reardon, who was now cradling his brother’s head in his lap as he whispered a hurried stream of reassurances stitched together with threats and expletives, paused only long enough to smack Admiral Yim in the kneecap. Yim jumped slightly, then bent over and apologetically tore open another medkit. When he had finished preparing the second bandage, Blair showed him how to hold Sammy’s leg in a bandage-sandwich. The biofoam hissed as it went to work creating a synthetic skin over the wound, stemming the blood.

  But a dark brown stain slowly spread over the metal deck. Sammy’s whole face went ashen, and he slumped unconscious in his brother’s lap.

  Reardon and Blair cursed simultaneously. They weren’t moving. “Pilot.” She squeezed her communicator so hard she thought it might break. “Medical emergency, one of our team is hit. We’ve gotta get back to the Caernarvon. Now.”

  “Can’t,” he said, simply.

  “What do you mean can’t?”

  “The station won’t unlock the hangar bay doors,” he said. “They say there’s some kind of NAP violation and that we can’t leave. That, and there are still those Marines plinking away at the hull. I hope they don’t have anything stronger than those rifles, lady, because this is a transport, not a gunship. I don’t wanna test the integrity of the hull.”

  Surely the ship was hardened against micrometeor strikes. Surely it would be okay…

  Didn’t matter. No time. “Okay, well, you’re telling me there’s no guns aboard? We can’t blast our way out?”

  “What part of transport don’t you understand?”

  Yim shot her a concerned frown. “We’ve gotta get him to a hospital,” he said, adjusting his grip on the compress. “Soon.”

  Blair let out roar of exasperation and squeezed her communicator awkwardly with one hand as she applied more pressure to Sammy with the other. “Blair to Caernarvon.” No response. Nothing but static. “Blair to Caernarvon, respond. Medical emergency on the shuttle.” More nothing. “Dammit.”

  “The Chinese are likely jamming us,” said Yim. “That’s standard procedure on a ground operation.”

  “There’s gotta be a way!” shouted Reardon, his eyes red and glistening. “C’mon. Think. How can we get in contact with Mattis?”

  Yim hesitated, then nodded to himself. “Okay, well, in order to maintain communications with the ground teams, there’s a free, unjammed frequency. Of course, they rotate it to keep it secret, but it’s there.”

  “Great!” Reardon leaned forward. “Can we use that?”

  “It changes randomly,” said Yim, shaking his head vigorously. “We can’t just tune into it. Every one hundred milliseconds the frequency hops. No way we’d be able to get out more than a quick burst.”

  “I don’t feel so good,” said Sammy, bl
inking weakly as he came to.

  “I know, Sammy, I know. Just hang tight.” Blair wracked her brains. “But if the Chinese are jamming, then surely the Caernarvon would know about it, yeah? Like, jamming usually involves just broadcasting lots of noise—a big, high energy signal from the ship that overwhelms local transmissions. So they know something’s afoot.”

  “This is silent jamming,” said Yim bitterly. “Their computers analyze transmissions that come out and intercept them, transmitting the signal wave’s inverse so it gets cancelled out. Like noise cancelling headphones, but on a massive scale.”

  Damn. She was just an investigator, not a military specialist. She could feel Sammy’s warm blood soaking through the bandage, the pressure defeating the biofoam’s ability to make a tight seal. The kid was in a lot of trouble. “What if…”

  “What if you just,” said Sammy, weakly, “send out a big pulse on every frequency? Almost all of them will get squelched, of course, but… not on the frequency that is left open.”

  “That’ll just piss off the Chinese, won’t it?” Reardon said.

  “Yeah,” said Sammy, gasping slightly. “But the… the Caernarvon will hear it too. They might assume something’s gone wrong and send help.”

  Blair looked at Reardon. “Get to the cockpit. Talk to the pilot. Can you make that happen?”

  “Yeah. I think so.” Reardon wiped his eyes and nodded emphatically. “Just to be clear: as loud as possible? All frequencies, right?”

  Sammy could only nod.

  “I’m on it,” said Reardon, gingerly lowering Sammy’s head and leaping over him toward the cockpit. He shouted over his shoulder, “As fast as I can!”

  “You better,” said Blair. “Or your brother is going to die.”

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Bridge

  HMS Caernarvon

  Space, near Chrysalis

  Mattis stared intently at the slowly spinning asteroid, idly tapping his foot, lost in his thoughts.

  The last time he had seen this place, the Midway had burned up like a firework in its orbit, bought down by the same man who would later kill his son. Mattis had been betrayed here, and a piece of him had been cut out and left to bleed in the void of space.

  Even he admitted that the only thing keeping him alive was duty. Duty to the oath he had sworn to protect the United States and her colonies, a duty to protect the innocent people of Earth from a menace very few of them truly understood, a duty to…

  To humanity. To his very species.

  “Haven’t heard anything from them yet, Ma’am,” said Blackwood, with the slightest edge of detectible worry. An away team was supposed to regularly check in, but so far they had heard nothing. In fact, sensors all over the ship had gone silent, but Spears had ordered a diagnostic and found nothing wrong. Mattis suspected that the Chrysalis inhabitants, paranoid as they were, had decided to shut everything down.

  Either way, he would not be satisfied until the away team returned with a lead on how to locate Yim. He had a lot to say to his old enemy-turned-comrade.

  Spears leaned forward in her chair, her discomfort obvious. “It’s been too long and it’s too quiet,” she said.

  “Agreed, Ma’am,” said Mattis. “It’s possible their radios went out, but at the same time everything else goes out?” He couldn’t believe that this was a coincidence. “It just smells off.”

  “It smells off,” echoed Spears, giving a slow, vague nod. “Exactly my thoughts, Admiral. You are squared away. I trust your instincts.”

  “And I yours,” he said.

  Spears debated in silence for a moment, then tapped her fingers on the armrests of her chair. “Open all channels,” she said. “And put them all through to the bridge.”

  Mattis raised his eyebrows. “All of them? It’ll just sound like… noise.”

  “It should sound like noise,” said Spears. “But technology has marched on in the few months you’ve been out of the game, Mattis.” She pointed a hand to a monitor that showed the Chinese fleet, floating ominously in space. “We might be witnessing silent jamming. Fortunately, the Royal Navy has a countermeasure, which is to listen on every frequency at once.”

  He nodded. The march of progress was always bound to leave tired old men in the dust. “Very well, Ma’am. Let’s do it. We should turn off noise and volume filtering, and use our analog radios, just to make sure we can pick up the weakest signals.”

  “Agreed,” said Spears, turning to Blackwood. “Do it.”

  Blackwood repeated her order, and with a few taps of her wrist-mounted computer, a faint crackle filled the bridge. It was so soft that it was almost imperceptible.

  “Increase volume four hundred percent,” said Spears.

  The crackle became a murmur. Voices—human voices—mixed in with occasional beeps and static. It was everything. Every network signal, every broadcasted voice, all overlapped and interwoven, forming a flat, eerie murmur.

  “Increase volume a further eight hundred percent,” said Spears. “Try to filter out the distortion.”

  The volume picked up. Despite the racket, Mattis swore he could pick out individual snatches of conversation in the communications. Shouts of confusion, anger, frustration.

  … the hell is wrong with the radios?

  … need you to get down to deck J and check…

  … stupid thing is on the fritz again …

  Mattis strained his ears, trying to pick out more. Trying to find a familiar voice, or some snippet of information that—

  And then a familiar voice did come in. thundering so loud and raw that it shook his chest. “HEY!” Everyone clapped their hands over their ears. “THIS IS HARRY REAR—”

  And then it cut out.

  “Did you mute it?” asked Blackwood, her eyes snapping onto the communications officer.

  “What?” he asked, blinking in surprise. “Say again?”

  Spears grimaced, rubbing her ears tenderly. “I think it just cut out,” she said, glancing at her instruments. “What the devil?”

  Blackwood tapped with one hand on her wrist, the other on her left ear. “Unclear, Captain. But I think we can conclude something strange is going on on that asteroid.”

  “Something very strange,” said Spears, her voice slightly louder than usual. Everyone’s was. “Okay. We need to get our people out of there. Blackwood, can you trace where that… extremely loud transmission came from?”

  “Analyzing,” said Blackwood, glancing at her console. “It looks like it originated from the hangar bay. It’s currently closed and pressurized, Ma’am.”

  Well, now, that complicated things. “They might be trapped in there,” Mattis said. “But we don’t know that, and we don’t know the status of that airlock—or who’s inside.”

  “Deliberately decompressing a civilian airlock with people inside would be murder,” said Blackwood, nodding. She was right.

  “Risking flushing civilians out into space on a hunch is not something I’m recommending, don’t worry.” He considered carefully but could see no immediate solution. “Dammit.”

  “Ma’am,” said Blackwood eagerly. “The Chinese ships. They’re moving.”

  “Moving?” asked Spears, curiously. “Where?”

  “To the station,” Blackwood said, her words slipping out in a faint hiss. “To the hangar bay. Looks like they’ve noticed what we noticed.”

  Well that wasn’t good.

  “We have to decide now,” said Mattis, watching the Chinese fleet move toward the closed metal door on the side of the astroid. “Or we lose our chance to find Yim.”

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Shuttle

  Hangar Bay

  Chrysalis Station

  Kepler-1011 system

  Blair could feel Sammy’s pulse weakening through the bandage, see the color drain out of his face, and see the growing rust-red stain below him on the shuttle’s deck.

  They had to do something. There was no time left.

  “Help
me,” she pled with Yim. “I’ve never been off-world before. I don’t know how to fix this.”

  Yim seemed lost in thought. Then his eyes lit up. “Hand me your communicator,” he said.

  She passed it over. It was flecked with splotches of blood. Yim cracked it open.

  “Pilot,” he said, speaking slowly and carefully into the intercom. “Listen to me very carefully. We have a shot and dying child back here, in need of critical medical care. Are the People’s Republic Marines still in the hangar bay?”

  “No,” he said. “They pulled back. I think they got some kind of signal—they all got up together. Or maybe they just ran out of ammo.”

  That was good, right?

  “And there’s nobody else?” asked Yim.

  He snorted. “With all the gunfire that’s been rattling around in there, I’m pretty sure anyone in there rabbited a long time ago.”

  “How sure?” Him demanded.

  The pilot hesitated. “Pretty sure?” There was a pause on the line. “Why?”

  “Because,” said Yim, “I want you to turn the ship around so that its rear is pointed toward the hangar bay doors. I want you to enable the magnetic locks on the landing skids, and I want you to burn the engines until the door melts. Then when it’s all pretty and red and soft… smash through it.”

  “Smash through it?” The pilot balked. “I already told the lady. I said this is a trans-por-t.”

  “It can do it,” said Blair, with a confidence that surprised everyone—especially her. “Transports have got to be tough. Not against missiles and shit, sure, but… space is dangerous. They have to be tough enough to survive reentry, and they’ve gotta survive the occasional micrometeor strike, surely.”

  “You are correct,” said Yim. “Theoretically.”

  “Theoretically,” stressed the pilot. “And what if there’s someone hiding in here?”

  “Pretty sure it’ll be obvious as hell what we’re doing, and pretty sure they’re going to want to get the hell out of here before the door melts,” Blair countered.