Brothers in Valor (Man of War Book 3)

by H. Paul Honsinger

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  CHAPTER 5

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  07:11 Zulu Hours, 12 May 2315

  Kraft’s three teams, to which he had given the prosaic names of Team 1, Team 2, and Team 3, jogged off in three different directions. Team 1, consisting of eight men under the command of Gunnery Sergeant P. P. “Pissed Off” O’Carroll and accompanied by Lieutenant Maynard, had an assignment that was considered both the most important and the least hazardous of the three. They filed out of the staging area in which the Krag main hatch was situated into a corridor. With weapons at the ready, they jogged for about ten meters before they came to a corridor that went off to the left. They took it and came to an access ladder, which they took one man at a time, most of the men waiting just inside the branch corridor, with two men looking around the corners down the main corridor using nearly invisible fiber-optic peep scopes. One Krag spacer came down the long corridor on what appeared from his demeanor to be some routine errand. When he got within three meters of the marines, PFC Stanley “Bug Eye” Barrow calmly stepped into the corridor and shot it twice in the chest and once in the head with a silenced pistol. Barrow was one of the two men in each team equipped with the 10 millimeter Nordic Naval Arms Model 2212 silenced sidearm for just this eventuality.

  Team 1 used the access ladder to descend five decks, where the marines emerged in another subsidiary corridor, which they followed to where it joined the main corridor. They could almost have been on a Union vessel—the same air, corridors, and access ladders of roughly the same dimensions. Even the controls and fixtures, which looked unfamiliar and were labeled in an unreadable language, still looked as though they might have been made for humans. Not even the—to the human eye—odd meadow green and butterscotch yellow color scheme could dispel the certainty that this ship was made for creatures whose ancestors came from Earth and who shared common genetic heritage with humankind. One could almost imagine the planet that spawned them both weeping that her children were killing each other in such great numbers.

  After using the peep scopes to determine that the main corridor was clear of Krag, the marines turned right and jogged for about fifteen meters before coming to a locked hatch about two meters wide consisting of two panels that slid out of the wall and met in the center—the kind that the Krag used for compartments containing bulky equipment. Behind the hatch was the Krag Environmental Systems Control Room. Again Dodger and Bates went to work, popping off the control mechanism’s cover, deftly snipping and ripping and connecting the alien wires with their alien color code of brown, butterscotch, green, tan, and rust instead of the familiar bright red, blue, green, yellow, and orange. After about a minute and a half, Dodger announced, “Almost done. When I attach this clip, the door will open in about six seconds.”

  While the Dodger had been practicing his art, O’Carroll had been arraying his men: three men kneeling, two men prone between them, and one man standing behind the kneelers, his feet in the spaces between the spread legs of the prone shooters. The sergeant had already ordered the men to fix bayonets. Each weapon was now tipped with 171.4 millimeters of razor-sharp, cold steel. O’Carroll stood to the side of the door with two antipersonnel grenades in his left hand, two flash-bang grenades hanging ready from loops on his tunic. His right hand held his silenced sidearm.

  The sergeant verified that his shooters were ready—weapons in firing position, visors in place, bayonets fixed—holstered his sidearm, and nodded to Dodger, who connected the clip, nodded back to O’Carroll, and reached for his weapon. There was no room for Dodger and Bates to fit in and fire through the hatch, so they turned around and faced the corridor, protecting his buddies’ backs, joining Maynard, who had been performing that function with his submachine gun. In 6.22 seconds, the hatch slid silently into the bulkhead, presenting Team 1 with a large compartment full of complex equipment and about a dozen Krag at work, a few of whom turned to see which of their shipmates was entering. With a yell of “FRAG OUT!” O’Carroll tossed in his grenades, while his men opened fire. All but three of the surprised Krag went down in the first five seconds as marines poured in rifle and shotgun fire. Then, with a deafening “OORAH!” the marines charged into the compartment: first the kneelers, then the man who was standing behind them, then those who were prone, and finally those who had been protecting the shooters’ backs.

  Three Krag had survived the initial shock attack. Two, stunned and disoriented by the grenades, tried to stagger their way to safety. O’Carroll took care of one with his sidearm, two quick, neat shots through the back. Able Spacer First Class Minh was just as quick but not nearly as neat when he brought down the other Krag with a well-aimed shotgun blast to the side of the head, sending the alien’s brains in a red, gelatinous spray that coated four environmental systems status displays.

  No one noticed the third Krag. As the humans were storming the compartment, it had crawled to a floor-mounted weapons locker, drew a submachine gun, chambered a round, and leaped to its feet. Popping up unexpectedly from behind the console with a high-rate-of-fire 8.1759 millimeter submachine gun, the Krag technician expected to catch the humans by surprise and, with a clear field of fire covering almost the entire compartment, cut them down like grain under a scythe, thereby earning a warrior’s name for himself.

  It didn’t happen that way.

  Lt. O. N. Maynard, shot and moderately disabled by a Krag pulling a similar trick two years before, had resolved that nothing of the kind would happen again on his watch. To that end he was standing on a Krag toolbox, weapon on his hip, covering the consoles near the rear of the compartment behind which the marines had not yet cleared. When the Krag stood up to shoot, Maynard beat it to the punch with a tightly grouped ten-round burst to the chest. The ratlike alien fell to the deck like a sack of potatoes, landing behind the same console that had concealed it only seconds before.

  The echo of Maynard’s shots had hardly died before Dodger announced that he had closed and secured the hatch. The marines responsible for searching the compartment’s perimeter and possible hiding places announced that the room was clear. This finding was punctuated by a few pistol shots—coups de grace for wounded Krag.

  Now the men got to the work that they were there to accomplish. Four men went around the room pulling the covers off of consoles and equipment boxes. Having exposed the equipment’s Kragish innards, these same men donned heavy gloves and hoods, pulled large squeeze bottles out of their backpacks, and squirted the contents of the bottles into and over the exposed equipment.

  “Damn,” Dodger said, “that shit smells terrible. I’ve never been briefed on that stuff.”

  “Damn straight, it smells bad,” answered McGinty from under his hood. “But what it does to the Krag is worse than it smells. It flows into all the nooks and crannies, and what it doesn’t short out, it corrodes. Then it turns into rock-hard plastic that catches fire or explodes if you try to chip it out. Turns all this equipment into junk. The Krag will have to unhook it and toss it all out the air lock.”

  Dodger picked up one of the empty containers and read the label out loud: “Electronics Operability Impairment and Materièl Denial Compound 27. Don’t tell me that’s what you actually call the stuff.”

  “’Course not,” McGinty answered. “We call it goop.”

  While the Krag destroyer’s environmental equipment was being subjected to a coordinated goop attack, the rest of the ship was about to be subjected to an attack that was, arguably, even more diabolical. Two of the remaining men were pulling cylindrical packages out of their packs, opening them, removing their contents, and setting them on the deck. When they were done, they had what looked vaguely like thirty-six dull black twenty-five-centimeter-long centipedes, their bodies articulated into ten segments, each spouting two tiny legs. The units carried an array of small but wicked-looking tools lying flat along their “backs” and at their “tails.” When they were all laid out on the deck, Lance Corporal Bondarenko popped open his percom and entered a few keys
trokes. A tiny yellow light flashed on each centipede. A few more keystrokes. Each executed a test sequence by standing, extending each pair of legs in order from front to back, retracting its legs and rolling into a ball, and then returning to its original position. One could almost imagine them saluting.

  “Gunney,” Bondarenko said to O’Carroll, “all thirty-six units are ready for deployment.”

  “Then what are you waiting for, dumbass,” O’Carroll replied, his enormous smile in contrast to his voice and his language, “a medal? Get the little fuckers deployed already. This is naval/marine boarding action, not some kind of half-assed kindergarten field trip!”

  “Aye, Gunney.”

  The marines had chosen to break into that particular compartment because it had an access port for the ship’s main ventilation duct and for the primary maintenance access crawlway. Dodger had cracked the security locks on both and had them standing open. Bondarenko grabbed one armload of the just-activated units and unceremoniously dumped them in one opening, then grabbed another armload and in similar fashion dumped those units in the other. He hit a single key on his percom, and the distinctly shudder-inducing devices scurried away on their tiny sound-silencing polymer legs. Suddenly Bondarenko laughed out loud. Payback’s a bitch.

  In this case payback was going to be a six-ton, barnacle-covered, cast-iron bitch. Stacked up against what Bondarenko had just loosed on the Krag, the biblical plagues visited upon the Egyptians would look like trifling inconveniences. Today the Krag would make the first acquaintance of the Articulated Ambulatory Autonomous Warship Sabotage Drone, Model 2314, Mark I, better known as the “Gremlin.” Gremlins were every spacer’s nightmare brought to metallic, undulating life: elusive, semi-intelligent robots that dispersed themselves throughout an enemy warship by crawling or slithering through air ducts, access crawlways, cable conduits, pipe routes, ceiling spaces, and in a pinch, walking upside down over the enemy’s head along the ceilings. Once spread out, they cut wires, bored holes in pipes and tanks (preferably ones containing toxic, flammable, or explosive materials), tripped circuit breakers, closed or opened valves and then welded them there, opened air locks, and even cut off bits of metal from hatch coamings and fixtures and then insinuated the sharp slivers into delicate gearboxes, bearings, and other critical mechanisms. They cross-wired control circuits, sawed through actuator rods, drained lubricant reservoirs, welded nozzles shut, and set off emergency alarms. The first thing that they were programmed to destroy was the ship’s internal sensors, depriving the enemy of the ability to track them. Equipped with a power supply that would keep it running for nearly a month, each Gremlin would continue its mischief and destruction until it was caught or ran out of power (in which case it would explode with enough force to blow a Krag’s head clean off). A batch of Gremlins could turn a warship into a useless hulk in hours. In this case the bucketful of Gremlins raising their unique brand of maintenance mayhem would hamstring the Krag warship, making it possible for the much less formidable Cumberland to defeat it in battle.

  His team’s job done, Gunnery Sergeant O’Carroll gathered his men, had Dodger open the hatch, and led the team back to the Cumberland.

  As the gunney and his men were unleashing the Gremlins to prey upon the vulnerable interstices of the Krag destroyer, Major Kraft was leading a group of a dozen to do a different kind of mischief. Naval planners had theorized that a full-strength Krag warship crew that didn’t have too many other crises might be able to detect and defeat, or at least contain, a Gremlin infestation in its early stages. Kraft and his men were on board to ensure that the Krag crew did not long remain at full strength or without too many crises. Their target was the Krag crew members who would be best able to fight the Gremlins: the engineers.

  Accordingly, they made their way to the Main Engineering Equipment Room. The men jogged down a corridor, turning into an alcove for an access ladder. Finding it clear, they began to climb down three decks, posting a man in the alcove on each deck as the group climbed past it. One Krag had the misfortune to turn into the alcove on the second deck and was dispatched with a knife to the throat. The Krag’s death was silent but bloody, the knife severing the carotid and unleashing a fountain of blood the color and smell of which could not be distinguished from that of a human.

  Upon reaching the third deck, the men jogged down a corridor for about five meters, took a right turn, jogged another twelve meters, and then took a left. Suddenly a repeating and highly discordant screech assaulted their ears. “Krag alarm,” Kraft announced. “Sounds like an owl going after its dinner. One of the Gremlins must have wrecked something important.” A few meters after the left turn, they came to a large hatch similar to the one leading to the environmental control compartment that was at that moment hosting O’Carroll and his men. Although Kraft had with him a man possessing skills similar to, but of a lesser order than, Dodger’s, there was no point in subtlety now. He turned to another man whose vocabulary didn’t even contain the word “subtle.”

  “Sockem! Charges!”

  Able Spacer Third Class Claudio “Sockem” Saccomanni, who discovered his true calling as a demolition man after becoming one of Kraft’s honorary marines, was more than happy to oblige. He placed four small breaching charges, one at each corner of the hatch, and laid six lines of high-explosive det cord: four lines making a square with the charges at the corners and two crossing the square with an X. To Kraft the arrangement looked oddly like a hand-marked election ballot. He smiled at the observation, knowing that the marines were about to vote this particular hatch out of office.

  Kraft holstered his sidearm and drew his boarding cutlass, a signal for the other men to do the same. Main Engineering is not a good place for bullets—not unless you want to puncture something that is best left unpunctured, releasing toxins or radioactive materials or blowing up the ship with Union personnel still on board. Meanwhile, Sockem armed the charges’ integral detonators, flipped open his percom, and touched the screen a few times. The percom found the coded transmissions from the detonators, locked onto their frequencies, configured itself to blow them simultaneously, and asked Saccomanni to press a key confirming that was what he wanted to do. He keyed the confirmation, causing the unit to display a PRESS HERE TO DETONATE key. “Charges set and ready to blow, Major,” he said zestfully.

  “Ready, men,” Kraft said to the men who were already flattening themselves along the near bulkhead. While they were positioning themselves, he withdrew a small rectangular patch, about four centimeters on a side, ripped off an adhesive backing, and stuck it to the bulkhead near the door. The same color as the bulkhead, the patch was nearly invisible. When Kraft saw that the men were in position, he nodded sharply. “Okay, Sockem, blow it.”

  “FIRE IN THE HOLE!” Saccomanni yelled and hit the key. With a sharp BLANG, the explosives turned the hatch into so much shrapnel. The four men nearest the hatch each threw in two flash-bang grenades. As soon as the grenades blew, the marines poured into the compartment with a deafening “OORAH!”

  They were met by fifteen Krag engineers armed and ready to receive them. Not surprised by the attack in the least, they had taken cover behind a row of systems status consoles that ran across the compartment about a third of the way between the hatch and the back bulkhead. The consoles had provided substantial protection from the flash-bangs; accordingly, the defenders were only mildly stunned and not blinded at all. The marines had scarcely stepped into the room before the Krag had popped up from behind the consoles and began a spirited defense, firing handguns and service rifles.

  Because the marines were near the hatch, an area deliberately kept free of explosive or radioactive materials, the Krag were—for now—free to use firearms, while the humans were not. In war the playing field was almost never level.

  Fortunately for the marines, the Krag weapons fire was not particularly effective because the flash-bangs shook up the engineering specialists—not particularly good shots in the first place—just enough to
make it difficult to aim their weapons. The marines’ body armor protected them from most shots lucky enough to find a target. Most, but not all. Krag gunfire killed two marines instantly, one with a shot through the face and another with a “magic bullet” that entered his body through his right armpit, was deflected by the head of his humerus, and arced through his chest cavity, the hydrostatic shock of the bullet’s passage through the tissue making a ruin of his heart and right lung. A few of the Krag remembered their training about Union body armor and shot to incapacitate rather than kill, bringing three other marines down with hits to the legs.

  Heedless of these casualties, the marines came on, half of them once again taking up the “OORAH!” yell, and the other half making fierce barking sounds to give voice to the nearly four-hundred-year-old nickname “devil dogs.” In an instant they covered the distance between the hatch and the row of meter-and-a-half-tall consoles that had provided cover for the Krag engineers, climbed to the barrier’s top, and jumped down into the thick of their enemy like Tommys, Doughboys, or Poilus leaping into the Jerries’ trenches in World War I.

  Kraft claimed the first kill. Holding his cutlass in two hands as he jumped down, he used his combined inertia and upper-body strength to split open a Krag skull. A slice consisting of just over 40 percent of the Krag’s head fell to the deck at Kraft’s feet, while the rest of the Krag’s body fell backward, away from the human who ended its life. That Krag’s fall left open a path to one standing just to its left, who was using its rifle to block and parry the cutlass thrusts of Neumann, an ordinary spacer first class from Alphacen. Kraft unceremoniously plunged his cutlass into the middle of its back, straight into the aorta.