Throne of Stars

by David Weber

  Pahner shook his head as the communications system automatically dumped a feedback squeal. Something had filled the frequency with static. He knew what the sound meant, but that didn’t mean he had to like it.

  “Sergeant Despreaux?” He asked. Silence answered. “Computer, switch: Beckley?”

  “Sir!” The Alpha Team leader was panting. “Despreaux’s down! We’re in bug-out boogie mode, Sir. The Armory is open!”

  “Hold tight, Beckley,” Pahner replied. “You just have to hold on!”

  “I’d like to, Sir, but it’s just me and Kileti functional. Kane bought it, Chio has Clarke, and I have Nimashet. We’re going to try to pull back through the Diasprans and hand over the fight. We don’t have a choice, Sir.”

  “Computer, switch: Fain!”

  Gronningen ducked as a burst of plasma filled the passage with steam. A previous burst had penetrated the inboard bulkhead and cracked a gray-water pipe. Now the blast turned the gray-water to vapor and fecal plasma.

  “Julian!” he called, lifting his own plasma cannon over the security station and blasting away in return. “They’re trying to break out!”

  “All units,” Pahner announced over the general frequency. “General counterattack underway. Hold what you’ve got; the Diasprans are nearly there!”

  “Pocking hell,” the squad leader snarled, sliding on his belly towards the plasma gunner’s position. “Why couldn’t they just wait for our reinforcements?”

  “Because they don’t want to die?” the Asgardian suggested. “You know—”

  The second blast of plasma had been more carefully coordinated, with two plasma cannons and a bead cannon all aimed at the base of the security point. Although the security point was a “hard patch,” a ChromSten plate which was not only secured to the bulkhead but anchored into the next deck, the concentrated blast from multiple sources first weakened the armored patch, then ripped it out of its frame.

  The ChromSten plate, its backing of hardened steel melted in the intense heat, flew down the passage, catching Moseyev unawares and slamming him into the outboard bulkhead.

  And all the coordinated fire the plate was no longer intercepting tore into Gronningen.

  Julian ducked under the last blast of plasma fire, reached the stricken Asgardian, and rolled him over. The final blast had caught him just below the waist, and shredded the heavy body armor with effortless viciousness. Gronningen’s eyes were screwed shut, but he opened them for just a moment, raising a hand to his squad leader. His mouth worked soundlessly, and the hand clamped on the sergeant’s armored shoulder.

  Then it dropped, and Adib Julian let out a scream of pure primal rage.

  “Stay down!” Macek bellowed as he grabbed Julian from behind and fought to wrestle him to the deck, but Julian wasn’t interested in staying down.

  “Dead! They’re all dead!” he yelled, and swatted Macek away like a toy.

  “Sergeant Julian,” Pahner called. “What is your situation?”

  “I’m sending them all to hell, Sir!” the sergeant yelled back, and picked up the plasma gunner’s weapon.

  Julian’s toot, courtesy of Temu Jin, had been reloaded with all the hacking protocols available to military and civilian intelligence, alike. He used them now, diving deep into the central circuits of his own armor, ripping out security protocols until the system was down to bare bones. Although personal armor was designed to be partially mobile in zero-gravity, the jump system had never been designed for full-gravity combat. But by taking all the control systems off of what was, effectively, a small plasma cannon, the sergeant could create a jump capability that was actually worth the name.

  Of course, there were drawbacks.

  “Don’t try this at home, boys and girls,” he hissed, and hit the power circuit.

  His leap carried him over the barricade and into the deckhead, and the howling plasma stream melted the bulkheads behind him.

  Macek let out a yowl as the stream passed across his lower legs, heating the nearly invulnerable armor of his suit and jumping the internal temperature nearly a hundred degrees. The automatic systems dumped the heat nearly as fast as it went up, but for just a moment, the armor made Marduk seem cool.

  Julian’s armor smashed into the overhead, taking him partially into the upper deck, throwing him from side to side in an erratic pattern that was impossible for the Saint battle armor to track. Somehow, he managed to turn a bounce into a spin, bringing himself around as the last of the power was expended, and as the jump gear’s last, spiteful bit of plasma bit into the overhead, he caromed from one side of the passage to the other until he landed on his feet behind the Saint defenders.

  The four Saints were still trying to track in on him as his first blast hit them. He swept the weapon from side to side, low, ripping their legs out from under them. As the commandos fell, he continued to sweep the weapon back and forth, ignoring the screaming emergency overload indicator as he melted not only their fallen battle armor, but the deck underneath and the bulkheads to either side. He expended the cannon’s power like a drunkard, but before the capacitor completely discharged, the overloaded control circuits let go.

  The ball of undirected plasma picked the sergeant up and slammed him backwards into the armored command deck hatch. Since the door was made of ChromSten, like the armor, but much thicker, he hit and bounced.

  Hard.

  Krindi Fain shook his head as the human suits fell backward into the intersecting side passage and then rolled around the corner for shelter. The air in the other passage was silver and red with plasma bolts, and the bulkhead on the opposite edge of the corridor disappeared as the fire from the Saints punched through it into one of the innumerable holds before dissipating itself on the cargo.

  His unit—twenty Diasprans, the captain himself, Erkum Pol, and the drummer—was approaching from the ship’s west. The Armory ought to be about twenty meters up the passageway the humans had just tumbled out of. And, obviously, it was heavily defended.

  “Ah, me,” he muttered as he fumbled with the human radio controls. “SNAPU: Situation Normal, All Pocked Up. First Platoon will prepare to engage,” he said, continuing to trot towards the intersection as he finally got the radio to work properly. The fire had slackened off to what the defenders obviously believed was enough to keep the Marines from reentering the passage. “Platoon will face right into the corridor, in column of threes, proceeding to the Armory by volley fire at a march. Platoon, quick time . . . march.”

  “Sergeant, what’s that?”

  Private Kapila Ammann would have been just as happy to crawl back into his bunk. He’d long ago quit trying to figure out why he’d ever joined the commandos. It was days like this that made him count the number of hours until his ETS date, but the way things were going, he wasn’t going to make it for another one hundred and twenty-six days, fourteen hours, and—he glanced at his chrono—twenty-three minutes.

  “What’s what?” Sergeant Gao snapped, then looked up in surprise from the casualty he was treating. “A unit . . . marching?”

  “Holy Pollution,” Ammann whispered as the Diasprans rounded the corner. “They gave scummies plasma guns!”

  In the last few months, the Diasprans had gone through revolutions in weaponry that humans had taken millennia to achieve. They’d started off as untrained conscripts who had been turned into pikemen. Then they’d progressed to musketeers, then to rifle skirmishers, and now they were plasma and bead gunners. But much of their drill from the early days remained. And they used it now.

  The first rank turned the corner, pivoting on the interior Mardukan, leveled their plasma cannon, and opened fire, stepping forward at a walk.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  “Aaaaahh!”

  Kapila hugged the deck as the air literally disappeared around him. The Mardukan fire mostly went over his head, but its intensity first superheated the atmosphere in the corridor, then expanded it to the very fringe of vacuum. He supposed he could return the fir
e, but there didn’t seem to be much point. If he killed one or two of the scummies with a shot, the rest would turn him into drifting atoms for his efforts. Even if they didn’t, a near miss would be sufficient to kill him. Flying fragments could easily punch holes in his standard ship suit, which would permit the intense heat to fry him to a crisp . . . which would at least save him from asphyxiation when his suit depressurized.

  But so far, they seemed to be missing. He liked that, and he had no intention of doing anything to change it.

  He rolled his head to look back up the passage behind him and saw that the entire unit was gone. One or two of them might have gotten back into the Armory, but he saw at least four carbon statues that indicated casualties. Graubart was still alive, though. He might even stay that way, if he got some prompt medical attention. Sergeant Gao, on the other hand, was just a pair of legs, attached to some cooked meat.

  Kapila slid his bead rifle carefully to the side and spreadeagled himself on the deck, hoping that the scummies would settle for just capturing him.

  Of course, he’d heard that scummies tortured their prisoners to death. But if it was a question of the possibility of torture, or absolutely buying it from a plasma blast, he’d go for the possibility any day.

  “Cease fire,” Fain ordered as he stepped around a gaping hole in the deck. His troopers’ fire had opened the bulkheads on either side of the passage to the surrounding compartments, and the wrecked corridor sparked with electricity and finely divided steam. The ChromSten reinforced Armory had shrugged off most of the damage, and now most of one of its walls and its support structure—which had taken a beating—could be seen through the gaps in the bulkheads. All in all, they’d done quite a bit of damage, he reflected. But as long as they were in their suits, the environmental conditions were survivable. Actually, things were looking good; the Armory hatch was shut, and the passage was secure.

  “Sergeant Sern, take four men and secure the far end of the hall.” He fumbled with his radio some more until he managed to shift frequencies. “Captain Pahner, we have the corridor outside the Armory. The doors are shut, though.”

  There was a human—presumably one of the “Saint Commandos”—lying face-down on the deck. He didn’t appear to be injured, but he had his fingers interlaced on the back of his helmet, and he wasn’t moving. Fain gestured to Pol, who picked the wretch up by the back of his uniform and dangled him in the air.

  “And it seems that we have a prisoner, too.”

  Roger rounded the corner to the bridge entrance and stopped, shaking his head in awe. The ship was trashed. Indeed, never in his worst nightmares had he ever imagined that a ship could be so trashed and still hang together.

  More or less.

  The deck looked as if it had been carved by a giant kindergartner who had somehow gotten his hands on an absentmindedly mislaid blowtorch. The heavy-duty plastic of the decksole had melted and splashed, leaving jagged splatters, like impressionistic stalagmites, on the bulkheads and huge dripping holes in the deck itself. The bulkheads had sustained major damage of their own, as well. Many of the holes blasted through them were large enough for battle armor to crawl through into the surrounding compartments. One of the larger ones led to what had once been the captain’s day cabin, which was as thoroughly trashed as the passageway itself.

  And the Bridge hatch was, once again, firmly shut.

  Roger sighed as the drifting smoke and steam suddenly moved sideways and disappeared. He didn’t have to look at the red vacuum morning light on his helmet HUD to figure out what had just happened.

  “Memo to self,” he muttered. “Giving Mardukans—or Marines, for that matter—plasma cannon on a ship assault is contraindicated.”

  Honal followed the first entry team into the shuttle bay, then dove sideways as a blast of bead-fire tore the three Vashin apart. Fire seemed to be coming from everywhere in the open bay, but the majority of the human defenders were on the far side, near the bay’s huge outer hatches. It was easy enough to tell where they were, but doing anything about it was another matter, because they’d taken shelter behind a massive raised plate which undoubtedly did something significant when shuttles were parked in the vast, cavernous space.

  Honal favored bead rifles over cannons, since the full-sized rifles—after suitable reshaping by Poertena—made a short, handy carbine for someone the size of a Mardukan. Now he used his to return fire, walking the beads along the top of the plate. Each hit tore a chunk out of the top of the device—whatever it was—but didn’t seem to faze any of the humans crouched behind it.

  The rest of the Vashin entered behind him, but the fire which greeted them was murderous. Besides the Saints by the main airlocks, there were more scattered on catwalks around the bay, and some sheltering by a second set of hatches. The combined crossfire had the Vashin pinned down in the open, without any cover of their own, and the defenders were methodically massacring them.

  “The hell with this!” Honal snarled. He and the human Mansul were partially sheltered by a control panel. It had taken a few hits, but it was still functional, judging by the red and green flashing symbols above the buttons at its center. He contemplated the device for a moment, and then smiled.

  “Mansul, can you work this thing?”

  Harvard Mansul had been in a few tight situations in his life. He’d dealt with bandits on more than one occasion, and even done a small piece on them at one point. Then there’d been the pirates. He’d been on a ship once when it was boarded by pirates, but the head of the group had been an IAS reader and let him go. In fact, he’d been sent on his way with an autographed photo of the suitably masked pirate leader. He’d been shot at by inner city gangs, stabbed doing a shoot in Imperial City, and nearly died that time his team got lost in the desert. Then there’d been being picked up by the Krath and imprisoned by a batch of ritualistic cannibals. That had been unpleasant.

  But being pinned down by a Saint Special Operations team raised “unpleasant” to a new high. Nothing else on the list of his previous life experiences even came close. So sticking his head up to look at the control panel was not high on his list of priorities.

  But he took a quick peek, anyway.

  “Hatches, grav, cargo handling, environmental!” he shouted, pointing to the appropriate sections of the panel in turn. “What are you going to do?”

  “Play a practical joke.”

  “Here goes nothing,” Honal muttered to himself, and hit a green button.

  Nothing happened. He waited a heartbeat or two to be certain of that, then grimaced. Time for Phase Two, he thought, and lifted the clear, protective plastic box over the red button beside the green.

  He depressed it.

  The blast of wind from the half-melted hatch behind him shoved him into the control panel hard, but that was about all. The Saints on the far side of the bay, with their backs to the opening shuttle bay doors, were less fortunate. More than half of them were picked up and sucked out the opening portal before they could react. The rest, unfortunately, managed to find handholds and hung on until the extremely brief blast of pressure change stopped. Then they opened fire again.

  “Well, that didn’t work,” Honal grumbled irritably. The brief delight he’d felt when the first humans vanished out the opening only made his irritation when the others didn’t even more intense, and he contemplated the controls again. Mansul’s description of their functions was considerably less than bare bones, he reflected. And he, after all, was only an ignorant Vashin civan-rider. It was unreasonable to expect him to actually understand what any of them did, so perhaps he should simply do what came naturally.

  He started hitting buttons at random.

  Lights went on and off. Panels appeared out of the deck and rose, and other panels disappeared, while cranes and pulleys and less readily identifiable pieces of equipment dashed back and forth on overhead rails. Honal had no idea what any of the fascinating, confusing movements and energy were supposed to achieve under normal conditio
ns. But he didn’t much care, either, when one of the buttons lowered the platform the Saints had been sheltering behind into the deck. And then, finally, the gravity itself disappeared.

  Honal watched an astonished Saint commando spin over in mid-air—well, mid-vacuum, the Vashin noble corrected himself—when he fired his bead rifle just as someone snatched the shuttle bay’s gravity away from him. The Saint sailed helplessly out into the open, propelled by the unexpected reaction engine his rifle had just become, and then exploded in a grisly profusion of crimson blood beads as a burst of someone’s fire tore him almost in half.

  “Now this is more like it!” Honal said with a huge, human-style grin as he drew his sword and gripped the top of the control center with his false-hands as if it were a vaulting horse. “Vashin! Up and at ’em! Cold steel!”

  “Roger, what’s your position?” Pahner asked.

  For a wonder, it looked as if things might be stabilizing. Georgiadas had managed to kill enough of the Saints counter-attacking his position to hold on until the Diasprans arrived. Now he had Engineering intact, and while there might (or might not) still be a few of the enemy inside the Armory, Krindi Fain’s troops had it isolated and fully contained. The counterattack by Emerald Dawn’s bridge personnel had also been stopped, and the Vashin were running rampant. Pahner’s own area was still pressurized, but two-thirds of the ship had lost pressure, and large portions of the internal gravity net had been shut down. The Northern cavalry had developed a positive liking for zero-g combat. Which was just . . . sick.

  He didn’t want to think about the hideous price his people and their Mardukan allies had paid, but the Saints were clearly on the defensive and well on the way to completely losing their ship. Now if they could only talk Emerald Dawn’s surviving officers out of the Bridge before they did irreparable harm.