Brothers in Valor (Man of War Book 3)
Page 15
Nodding his thanks Neumann turned to the Krag behind him, who was grappling with Lance Corporal Wong. Man and Krag each had an arm around the other’s waist, trying to throw his or its opponent to the deck, each hoping to pull out a fighting knife and cut the other’s throat. Neumann swung his cutlass at the Krag’s leg, cutting it off just below the knee. As the alien loosed its grip on Wong and fell, Neumann finished it with a quick, powerful stroke to the neck, cutting it almost halfway through, sending the Krag to the deck in a shower of its own blood.
Behind Kraft, one of the Krag who had been using a pistol at the outset of the battle had cast caution to the wind and was firing it at the humans, ignoring the risk of boiling or poisoning or irradiating everyone in the compartment if his shot went awry. In the melee, it was having a hard time hitting anything that was not protected by a helmet or body armor, but the threat was very real. Saccomanni turned toward the sound of the shots, only to be hit by two rounds to his helmet for the trouble. The carbon fiber composite helmet turned the bullets, but the twin impacts left him hearing bells and seeing stars, momentarily taking him out of the fight. Just as the Krag extended its arm to take aim at another human, Marine Private Ostergaard eliminated the problem by slicing off the Krag’s shooting arm at the elbow with a particularly wicked edged weapon known prosaically as the Model 2305 Battle Ax. Maintaining the momentum of his weapon in a great, overhead loop, Ostergaard swept the ax around to take off the Krag’s head just as the severed arm hit the deck.
Looking like an enormous Viking and driven by a battle lust little different from that which sometimes moved his distant Danish ancestors when they were the terrors of Europe, the enormous Scandinavian waded with a deafening but inarticulate roar into the clump of five remaining Krag, who were bunching together to make a last stand. With a few deft strokes, Ostergaard mowed them down.
Kraft surveyed his diminished command. Not counting himself, he had seven effectives remaining, six of whom were covering the blown hatch from various positions of concealment around the compartment. If the Krag showed up, they would have a warm greeting.
The other five men were down, two dead and three injured. All three of the injured were unconscious from shock and blood loss. Because they were several decks away from the hatch leading out of the Krag ship, there was no practical way to evacuate the wounded to the Nicholas Appert. The mission rules specifically covered this situation. The major met the eyes of Private West, the assigned field medic for this mission, who was kneeling near the wounded, and nodded grimly. West pulled a pressure syringe from his kit, loaded an ampule, turned the dial at the syringe’s base to set the dosage, and moved to administer the first injection. Kraft gently took West’s wrist, shook his head, and held out his hand for the syringe.
“This duty falls to me,” Kraft said quietly. West handed the syringe to the major, who pressed it against each of the three men’s necks. Three quick hisses. Three hearts stopped. Gently, reverently, he removed the ID tags from around the necks of each of the five dead men and put them in his pocket, his face a grim mask, while another man took their ammunition, handguns, and some miscellaneous equipment. He then reached into each man’s pockets, pulled out an orange painted round from each, loaded them into the dead men’s rifles, and pulled the triggers. The “Phelps Cartridge” shattered the chamber and lodged a steel plug in the barrel, rendering the weapon useless without some fairly complicated gunsmithing. If the Krag vessel survived, there would be nothing left with these men that the enemy could use.
Kraft stood and made the “prepare to move out” hand signal, a circling motion with his right index finger over his head—no sense yelling orders to be heard out in the corridor. The men came out of their concealed positions and lined themselves up against the bulkhead on either side of the hatch. Kraft popped open his percom and input a short code. The wrist device linked up with the patch he had stuck on the corridor bulkhead earlier—a camouflaged ultrawide-angle visual scanner providing a view of the corridor, about twenty meters in either direction from the hatch.
Good thing he checked. There were ten or so Krag crouched behind a portable blast screen, with flash visors down, so that if the humans tried to soften them up with flash-bangs or fragmentation grenades, the only effect would be to warn the ambushing aliens that the humans were about to come out. He snapped his percom closed and turned to his men. Kraft made the standard hand signal for “Krag,” wiggling his fingers in front of his upper lip to indicate whiskers and then gestured toward where they were located with an extended hand and forearm in a slow chopping motion. He then pumped his fist twice, each pump representing five Krag—they tended to do just about everything in multiples of five.
He then pointed to Able Spacer Third Class Hannum and patted the back of his left hand with the palm of his right. Hannum nodded sharply in response to the standard hand signal, handed his rifle to the man standing next to him, unshouldered his pack, and pulled out a tube, about half a meter long and about ten centimeters in diameter, closed at one end and open at the other, with the opening surrounded by a ring obviously designed to make a gastight seal with some flat surface. Reaching back into the pack, he pulled out two handles that he slipped into opposite sides of the tube and a cylinder just a few millimeters shorter than the tube that resembled nothing more than a grayish summer sausage, one end of which was squared off while the other had a small nozzle, a ring-shaped dial, and a locking pin.
After donning a set of aluminized gloves and hood that made him look like a half-dressed firefighter, Hannum turned the dial at the base of the sausage, setting it for his estimate of the thickness of the bulkhead in front of him, six centimeters, pulled out the locking pin, and dropped the device into the larger cylinder. Then, grasping it by the handles, he held the cylinder over his head with the opening toward the wall. He pushed the opening as tightly as he could against the wall, his legs straining to make as tight a seal between the tube and the wall as possible.
Since removing the safety pin, Hannum had been counting at a deliberate pace: “One, I’m navy, two, I’m navy, three, I’m navy . . .” Upon reaching “ten, I’m navy,” he whispered hoarsely, “FIRE IN THE HOLE!”
Just when Hannum would have reached “twelve, I’m navy,” things started happening inside the innocuous-looking little summer sausage. First, a shaped breaching charge blew a neat hole clean through the bulkhead into the corridor right over the heads of the crouching Krag. Three-hundredths of a second later, a small solid rocket motor at the rear of the sausage ignited for less than a tenth of a second—really more of a slow explosive than a conventional rocket—just long enough to push it out of the tube, through the still-smoking hole in the bulkhead, and into the corridor, where a small explosive charge inside the device detonated.
The charge itself wasn’t powerful enough to harm anyone, and its purpose was not to do so. Rather, the small but precisely engineered explosive liquefied the grayish, gelatinous material that constituted the bulk of the sausage and shattered the hard plastic shell that enclosed it, turning the gelatin to a thick mist of tiny droplets, which, when dispersed, formed a fuel–air mixture filling the corridor for about eight meters in both directions. Just another two-hundredths of a second later, when mist and air were mixed in the proper proportions, a tiny detonator gave off an even tinier spark.
What ensued, however, was anything but tiny. A sixteen-meter section of the corridor exploded like a bomb, its force magnified by virtue of being confined in two directions by the corridor’s bulkheads. The Krag in the corridor—quite literally inside the explosion—were dead before they hit the deck, the force of the blast reducing their internal organs to lukewarm, purplish-red soup.
These Krag were among the first to encounter another new Union weapons system, the Mist Ordnance Explosive Air Munition, or MOEAM, an acronym which, in the few weeks since the weapon was issued, the men had come to pronounce as “mom.” In this case, at least, it appeared that MOEAM had cleaned house.
As his men were carrying out his order, Kraft flipped open his percom and pressed a soft key. The sound of small-arms fire came over the unit’s miniature transducer. “McMillan, report.”
“McMillan’s dead, Major. Krag grenade dropped down an access tube.”
Kraft recognized the voice of the group’s second-in-command, Master Sergeant Oldsen Urquhart. “What’s your status, Urquhart?”
“An enemy force, estimated to be between squad and platoon strength, is between us and the objective. Another group that appears to outnumber us about two to one has cut off our escape. We . . .” A nearby explosion, likely a Krag grenade, interrupted him. “Mission success unlikely. We’ll take a lot of rat-faces with us, but I expect this unit to be a total loss.”
“Not if I can help it,” Kraft said. “Create a defensive perimeter and hold your position, Urquhart. Help is on the way. Kraft out.” Kraft hit a few keys on his percom, one of which caused it to ping the master sergeant’s percom, triggering it to respond by transmitting the precise location of Urquhart’s unit to be displayed on Kraft’s device. He stepped back from the bulkhead and looked at his men. “Marines, our brothers in the third team are cut off from their objective and from escape. We’re going to fight our way through to them and jointly complete the mission. Follow me.” The marines strode out the hatch, turned right, and jogged down the corridor. Flanked by Zamora and Ulmer and with his sidearm in hand, Kraft led the marines at a trot by the shortest route to their comrades. Despite the danger, it never occurred to Kraft that he should be anywhere but in the forefront of his men.
In the Union Space Marine Corps, leaders lead.
Kraft, who had done his homework on the layout of Krag ships, led his men with no wrong turns. They encountered very few Krag, which they promptly shot, but heard a great variety of alarms and occasionally encountered flickering ceiling lights, varying artificial gravity, and in a few instances, even heard distant, muffled explosions—the Gremlins’ work was really starting to tell. Having descended to the lowest deck, they heard shooting and an occasional explosion ahead of them as they pushed aft. Finally, they came to a dogleg in the corridor: two ninety-degree turns, one to the right and one to the left, one of many breaking up most of the longer corridors in the Krag ship, designed to prevent an enemy from being able to rake the entire passageway with weapons fire.
Kraft consulted his percom to compare the position of his group with the position being reported by the transponder in Urquhart’s percom. He turned to his men and made a vertical chopping motion in the direction of the end of the corridor around the second turn, meaning, “The enemy is there.” He then met the eyes of PFC Bradford “Pockets” Pickett, so named because he had customized his marine boarding and surface combat uniform to feature, as Zamora liked to say, “slightly more than three hundred pockets.” The major made a gesture that looked like he was pantomiming an insect crawling up his forearm. Pickett nodded his understanding, reached into a pocket located just above his navel, and produced an object about as long as his thumb and resembling a large ant except that its color exactly matched the ceiling of the Krag corridor. He withdrew a slender locking pin in the ant’s tail and pressed a few keys on his percom. The ant went through a series of test movements and blinked a tiny green light. After another glance at his percom to check that the ant was transmitting, Pickett turned the insect-like device so that its legs were facing up and tossed it to the ceiling, where it clung hanging upside down.
Obeying its simple but effective programming, the ant began to crawl along the ceiling down the corridor toward the enemy. While two men kept their “heads on a swivel” looking out for any approaching Krag, the others popped open their percoms, watching the image transmitted by the tiny “recon ant.” In less than three minutes, the insect-like drone had made its way past the end of the corridor, through the open hatch two meters into the hangar deck, and was on its way back to the largest concentration of Krag, where it would stop and provide continuous imagery.
Those images made clear what had happened. Urquhart’s men had blown the hatch to the hangar deck to find their way blocked by a dozen or so members of the Hegemonic Naval Combat Corps—essentially Krag marines. Unable to take the hangar deck immediately and concerned about being attacked from behind, they had detached one of the armored bulkheads that had formed one side of the corridor and set it up on its side as a barricade, preventing any Krag attacking them from the rear from having a straight shot at them down the corridor. A group of thirty-four armed Krag spacers had then attempted to relieve the Combat Corps troops in the hangar deck and had been held off by Urquhart’s marines. Knowing a good idea when they saw it, the Krag had protected their own rear by an expedient identical to that adopted by the marines, except that they had pulled down two bulkheads. Accordingly, around the second corner of the dogleg, Kraft and his men faced several meters of corridor, a line of two armored bulkheads, thirty-four armed Krag spacers, another armored bulkhead, Urquhart’s marines, an open hatch, and roughly twelve hardened Krag Combat Corps troops on the other side of that hatch, defending the hangar deck.
The weapons fire of the two forces on either side of the open hatch created a kill zone on each side, beginning with the hatch and spreading in an ever-widening angle representing the respective shooters’ line of sight. Any marine who entered the Krag field of fire died, as evidenced by the mute but eloquent testimony of Lance Corporal “Jumping” Tsang Jinping, who was lying squarely in the center of the deadly zone in a slowly spreading pool of his own blood, his open but unseeing eyes aimed directly at the recon ant’s tiny lens, silently reproaching his brothers for coming too late to save him. The kill zone created by the humans was equally deadly—two Krag lay dead on the far side of the hatch, carried away on the silent wings of the Night Owl, their culture’s answer to the Angel of Death.
The Krag had taken refuge in the two triangular dead zones, one either side of the hatch, where the marines’ bullets could not reach. The defenders made sure that they were far enough back that, shielded by makeshift barricades made of toolboxes and spare parts crates, they were protected from the occasional grenade that the marines lobbed in just to keep things interesting. The marines had also divided into two groups, on either side of the kill zone, flattened against the bulkhead opposite the hatch.
Kraft quickly determined what he and his men had to do. First, they had to eliminate the numerically superior force of Krag spacers, whose rear was protected by a two-meter-tall armored barricade with a Krag on each wing watching his comrades’ backs, separating his force from Urquhart’s marines. Then, once united, the marines needed to take the Krag hangar deck from a squad of what appeared to be battle-hardened Krag marines. MOEAM was no help with either because, in the case of the spacers in the corridor, the barricades stopped nearly a meter short of the ceiling, meaning that the weapon’s shock wave would severely injure, if not kill, everyone in the corridor, Krag and human alike. And in the case of the Krag on the hangar deck, the blast might rupture the fuel tanks in that compartment, starting a fire capable of destroying the reason for taking the hangar deck in the first place and perhaps even threatening the entire ship before Kraft and his men could make their escape.
Kraft gave a brief, rueful shake of the head, wanting to take back all those times as a young man that he had wished for more challenges in his life. He glanced back at the image being transmitted by the recon ant and smiled coldly. The Krag spacers behind the barricade, likely a scratch force of technicians and maintenance personnel judging from the color of the metallic yarn woven into their tunics, had posted both their sentinels tog
ether near the center of the barrier, where they could see any attackers coming at them down the corridor but out of sight of their comrades. They should have placed one spacer where he could see down the corridor, and the other near one wing of the barricade, where he could see the first spacer and where the other spacers could see him, a placement that would have prevented what Kraft was about to do.
With a quick series of hand signals, Kraft communicated his plan to his men. While they made their preparations, Kraft handed his Model 2212 silenced pistol to Corporal Sergey Ivonovich Kozak. “The Cossak,” as he was known, was the best handgun marksman in the group, meaning that he was an exceptional shot, indeed. The Cossak checked to ensure a round was in the chamber, dropped the magazine into his hand, moved the first cartridge in the stack back and forth slightly with this thumb to be sure that it would feed easily—something that all of his handgun instructors had told him was unnecessary but that he always did anyway—and slid the mag back in place.
He nodded to Kraft. Kraft nodded in return.
What happened next was almost bland. Forgoing the leap, roll, and come-up-shooting-type gymnastics one sees in trid vids, the Cossack simply raised his weapon, stepped into the corridor, and—before the Krag guards could react—shot them both cleanly through the head. The muffled cough of the silenced shots and the thump of the bodies hitting the deck were inaudible to the Krag on the other side of the barricade over the sound of the skirmish around the hangar deck door.
The instant the Cossack fired the second shot, his comrades were in the corridor crossing the sixteen meters to the barrier in quick but silent steps. Upon reaching the barricade, four of the marines pulled the pins on the grenades they had been holding in their hands and tossed them over. Five seconds and a cacophony of terrified squeaks and chitters later, the grenades detonated in near unison, and the Krag fell silent. The marines rushed around the barricade and verified that the Krag were really most sincerely dead.