His comm panel beeped and he sighed. A captain’s work is never done, for however much longer my tenure as captain lasts. He pressed the control on his desk. “Captain here.”
“Sorry to disturb you, sir.” The sensor officer, Ensign Karen “call me Shel” Sukowski was usually a no-nonsense individual. She was getting stronger with her instruments and he’d learned to listen when she spoke. “We’re getting a strange return on close-in sensors.”
“What kind of return?” he asked, sitting up a bit straighter.
“It’s a very small reading of neutrinos, Captain. I only just picked it up out of the all the background interference a few moments ago. The only reason I even spotted it at all is because Equinox is between Kingston and the star. The destroyer’s hull is providing a degree of shielding from some of the background radiation and that’s when I saw it.”
He blinked in confusion. “So what does that mean?”
There was a pause. “Well, I’m really not sure, sir. It might be nothing.”
“But you think it might be something.” He wasn’t asking. The ensign wasn’t known for flights of fancy or so he’d seen in his admittedly short time in command. She paused again and he let out a breath. “Damn it, Ensign, what do you think it is?”
“As I say, Captain, I really don’t know,” she hedged. “But it’s coming straight at us on a completely straight course. With such an energy signature and with the course it’s on, that can’t be a natural phenomenon.”
“I’ll be on the bridge in a minute,” Robert said, slapping the comm panel and hustling out of the compartment. He was on the cramped bridge less than thirty seconds later. “Report,” he ordered.
“Still showing that signal, Captain,” Shel replied, not looking up from her console. “It’s still closing on our position. At current speed it’ll intercept in forty-six seconds.”
“Comms,” Robert ordered, dropping into his command seat. “Open a channel to all hands; make sure you include any work parties that are out on the hull. Helm, get ready to move us to a new position one thousand kilometers below us.” The helmsman repeated the order and readied his controls.
“Aye, sir.” The comms operator pushed a control, then nodded. “You’re on, Captain.”
“All hands, there is an unknown object moving toward us and we will be making a minor course change to avoid it. Any teams out on the hull: make sure that you are locked down and hold on tight.”
“Time to intercept?”
“Twelve seconds, sir,” Shel reported, her voice getting tense.
Robert opened a display window, showing the ensign’s sensor feed. She had an icon tagged “Unknown neutrino emission” that was moving closer to the other icon in the center of the screen “Kingston”. The distance counter was scrolling down. At five seconds remaining, he gave the order. “Helm, go now.”
“Aye, sir,” the zheen sitting at the helm replied, easing the control levers forward. The ship moved forward at twenty percent power, which was more than enough to move the ship out away from the incoming anomaly.
Kreighton nodded in satisfaction as the anomaly passed right by, continuing along on its original course. “Well, that’s that,” he said, sitting more comfortably in his command seat.
But Shel had her eyes glued to her displays, slowly shaking her head. “What the? No, no, no.”
“What is it?” Kreighton demanded, turning to look at her.
“The… thing, sir, the anomaly,” she said. “It’s turning!”
“It’s turning?” he said, bringing the sensor display back up. Sure enough, the… whatever it was was turning around to chase the corvette. “Comms, get everyone inside the ship, now!”
“Lieutenant! I think we’ve been detected,” the pilot said, sending the message through their implant comms. It was confirmed a moment later when the corvette did a slight course change and acceleration which just forced the shuttle to miss the capture. The pilot barked and steered the shuttle around for another pass.
Yanakov swore. “Kors! Get us within grappling range of that ship. If need be, we’ll do this the hard way.”
“With their engine damage, they can’t possibly outrun us. Well, not if we bring our own engine power up to full.”
Yanakov nodded, snarling. “Do it. No more screwing around; let’s get latched on and aboard. This one is not getting away from us.”
The pilot grinned over his shoulder to where the lieutenant was seated in the front of the troop compartment then looked back and increased the shuttle’s velocity. It took an additional twenty minutes of the shuttle moving to get into range and the corvette just managing to evade. Finally, in a fit of supreme irritation, the pilot jinked a turn at the last minute and both grapples launched, clanging on the metal of the small warship.
“Got it!” he crowed in satisfaction.
“Bring us in,” the lieutenant ordered, then turned to the troops. “Thirty seconds!” he commed. It wasn’t as visceral as a bellow across the battle field but it did allow for ease of communication. He received rapid-fire response messages from the twenty soldiers aboard. Everyone was ready. Fighting aboard the cramped confines of a corvette, especially a damaged one would be interesting, but they were trained for this. It wouldn’t be the first time any of them had done this before. Up until Seylonique, the General’s troops had captured three vessels of that class from local space defense forces.
“Sir, we’re showing a ship docking with us at airlock 4,” Shel cried, pointing at her display.
Kreighton’s throat went completely dry and his heart dropped all the way down to his stomach. His mind, filled with fear and confusion, was convinced that heard his heart plop in the pool of acid in his stomach. Thankfully, his sense of responsibility overrode his fear and he spoke.
“Alert status one!” he barked, slapping a control on his chair. Cherry red lights began flashing and the general quarters alarm started screaming throughout the ship. “All hands, prepare to repel boarders. Arm yourselves.” It was an order no one in the Seylonique Navy had ever uttered in the history of its existence.
This is insane. Where the hell was the pirate ship? Doing a quick double check, Kreighton looked over the sensor feed and confirmed it. Aside from Kingston and the Equinox the only other vessels in the system were freighters, not counting the alien ship. The freighters, is that where the invaders came from? Then he shook his head. Investigate later. If we don’t save this ship, it won’t matter where they originated.
“Hail the Equinox. You!” he demanded, looking first to the comms officer to a specialist at the auxiliary damage control station and stabbing a finger at him.
“Sir?” the young man, still a boy, really, squeaked.
“Seal the bridge. Do it now!” Robert snapped when the boy didn’t move. The young man, eighteen years old and just weeks out of Basic training leapt out of his seat and was at the hatch and in two strides. With a few keystrokes, the bridge door sealed, heavy bolts locking into place.
“No response from the Equinox, Captain,” the comms specialist called, sounding worried.
Robert bit his lips, thinking. Then he turned to the sensors. “Shel, you said that the anomalous signature was detected only once the Equinox was between us and the star, correct?”
She nodded. “Yes, sir. That’s right.”
“And it was moving straight at us once the destroyer was positioned nearby,” he continued, his voice serious.
Shel turned back to her station as realization struck. “They came from the destroyer,” she stated, double checking the sensor feeds and the captain’s hypothesis. “Yes, sir. The neutrino signature came at us on a vector straight from the destroyer. Not around it, but right from it.”
“Macklin to the bridge!” a frantic comm signal interrupted her report.
Kreighton passed a control. “Go ahead, Master-at-Arms.”
“We’ve got over a dozen armed boarders in armored skinsuits that forced their way in from airlock 4! Three crewmen down!
” The sounds of weapons fire could be heard over the comm channel. “I need immediate backup!”
“Help is coming, Chief,” Kreighton promised, though he wasn’t sure where that help was really going to come from or how his crew was going to fight off the heavily armed boarders. Internal cameras confirmed the master-at-arms’ report: black clad figures with heavy assault weapons moving in from the airlock. They were both broad and wiry, and very distinctly shaped.
“Are those lupusan?” he asked, squinting. Then he shook his head. “See if you can shift people from the forward section to help out aft.” Looking at the assault rifles and grenades the boarders carried, he knew the crew of the Kingston was in serious trouble. Kingston had a small armory which included three gauss rifles (miniature rail guns capable of magnetically accelerating metal slugs with a high rate of fire, similar in performance to the assault rifles carried by the invaders), a dozen needler pistols, and ten stunner pistols. His entire armed force was outclassed by sheer weight of enemy fire, not counting the stunners, which might not even affect the armored boarders. The armory was more suited to customs, inspection and patrol work than standing off against a heavily armed foe. But they had to try.
“Helm, shift course, take us toward the hyper limit heading back home. Don’t push the engine too hard, but get away from all the other ships.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” the zheen pilot replied, slewing the corvette around setting a course and lumbering off for the hyper limit. It would be days at this rate of speed and acceleration to get there, but soon the Kingston would be going fast enough that the freighters would not be able to catch them before she escaped over the hyper limit. The problem was the Equinox. The destroyer’s engines were powerful enough to easily overtake the corvette, especially since Kingston’s propulsion units were trashed. If she indeed had been taken, there was nothing Kreighton could do. He could try and evade, but it would be only a short matter of hours before the destroyer overtook the corvette and managed to capture her or simply blasted her to component atoms. They’d have to make the necessary repairs and rebuilds to the hyperdrive once these boarders were dealt with, but the parts and supplies were already aboard. It wasn’t a great plan, as far as plans went, but Robert was determined he wouldn’t be an officer who froze up. Indecision in battle killed just as often, if not more, than rash decisions. But better he do something than just sit back and let the end come.
“Any sign of pursuit?” he asked after a minute.
“Nothing so far, sir,” Shel replied, her voice steady. Robert was sure she was scared, but that was no surprise; they all were.
They were working one problem, but it would all be for naught if they couldn’t deal with the boarding operation.
Master-at-Arms Marshal Macklin fired another trio of needle shots down the corridor, then ducked back as one of the invaders leveled his assault rifle and cut loose. Needle spikes crashed into the corner of the bulkhead he was hiding behind and the fusillade just went on and on. After half a minute, and the shooting stopped for a moment, he risked a peek back around, crouching down low. How did I get so lucky? He asked himself. Eighteen years in the Navy, and now I get to hold off armed boarders? Transfer to a corvette seemed like such a cushy job. Why the hell did I take a transfer over to this heap anyway? The boarder was slapping a new magazine into his weapon while he and the others behind him continued to advance. He raised his weapon to resume firing, aiming right at Macklin’s exposed head. Aiming quickly, the Master-at-Arms fired right at the lead boarder’s legs. His shot was true, hitting the soldier in the ankle.
The kinetic energy of the shots knocked the attacker’s leg out from under him. He stumbled and fell. His weapon went off and the sustained fire sprayed the corridor, needles slashing into the various bulkheads. Two quick shots from Macklin’s pistol hit the invader’s faceplate and punched through. The faceplate sprouted a series of spiderweb cracks, punctured by two small holes. The figure writhed for an instant and then lay still.
There was a roar from the rest in this group and they charged Macklin’s position, rifles leveled, and they peppered the area, the bulkhead, everything with a spray of fire. With an exclamation, Macklin pulled back just in time waving the other two crewmen standing just behind to move back as well. They sprinted the other way down the corridor, but it was the only way to go and the three pushed inside Environmental and crouched in the hatchway. All three leveled their pistols.
One of the invaders recklessly turned the corner and ran straight into the combined fire of all three of Kingston’s crewmen waiting there. Needles from all three hammered into the armored invader which made him stagger and twitch as though he was mortally injured. After fifteen seconds of sustained fire, a trio of shots finally pierced the tight weave of the armor enough to cause damage to the throat. It seemed as though the one chink in the armor caused others as half a dozen others punctured his chest all in the same area. The brute flailed for an instant and crashed to the deck.
But by then it was too late. Four of the armored thugs raced ahead, leaped over the corpse of their comrade and were on top of Macklin and his small team.
“Surrender!” a harsh voice intoned.
With great reluctance, Macklin lowered his weapon; the business end of an assault rifle in his face. The other two terrified crewmen dropped their weapons to the deckplates with a pair of clunks. The barrel of the rifle twitched, moving away from Macklin’s face.
The chief exploded forward. Swinging his gun back up, he fired a round into the invader’s groin, eliciting a grunt of surprise and pain, though the armor absorbed most of the impact. With his free hand he grabbed a hold of the rifle barrel and yanked down. Taken completely by surprise at this counterattack, the trooper’s grip wasn’t tight enough and the gun came loose.
But Macklin didn’t use that weapon; he raised up his own pistol and pumped two more blasts into the interloper’s faceplate. The armorglass shattered from the close up impact. The chief saw the lupusan face, covered in blood and his eyes widened in pain and shock. He didn’t hesitate. He wasn’t in his prime, not after eighteen years in the Navy, but years of bar fights and more recently a disciplined training regimen kept him in fighting trim. It certainly wouldn’t do for raw recruits to be tougher than the Master-at-Arms.
He snatched a grenade off the dead lupusan’s belt as the body fell, pulled the pin and popped the spoon. He tossed it over the heads of the other attackers and dove into the Environmental compartment, tackling the two other crewmen and driving them all to the deck in a heap.
The plasma grenade ignited, filling the corridor with fire. Two of the grenadiers were engulfed in the flames and barbecued. They writhed and screamed for a long moment before they collapsed to the deck. Their polyweave carbon nanofiber armored suits could handle impacts from bullets, needles, shrapnel, could even with stand the harshness of vacuum and the pressure of several dozen meters of water. It didn’t do so well under the direct heat of an ignited plasma explosion. It provided more protection than a standard skinsuit but not much; the two wolves still died horribly. One of the CA800’s armored bodies would have shrugged off the blast of one of the plasma grenades, but this was an entirely different piece of equipment.
Unfortunately, Macklin and the two crewmen weren’t spared the fire either. The chief was burned all down his back, his legs and on the back of his skull; even his hair was gone. He was shrieking and writhing with agony. The two crewmen crushed beneath him were shielded from the worst of the blast, though one of the men had a badly seared right leg and his right hand was just as badly burned. The flesh on his hand was blackened and cracking and yet sloughing off the bone. He screamed and thrashed.
A wolf, his armor and weapon scorched from the blast emerged from the corridor. “These ones have spirit! Much more of a challenge than those weakling cowards on the destroyer.” Leaning down, he produced a hypo injector and shot it into the base of the chief’s neck. In five seconds, his screaming and struggles ceased. “I want to
keep this one as a pet.”
The capture of the Kingston continued as the boarding party moved inexorably through the ship. Another small party of sailors managed to pin down a group of three wolves and ambush them, gunfire wounding one in the leg and managing to trip up two more, though they were unhurt. A grenade tossed over the sailors’ heads quickly ended that threat. In under an hour, Lieutenant Yanakov trotted forward to where two of the boarding team were guarding the sealed hatch to the bridge. He looked to the two.
“Any change?” he asked over the internal comms. The boarding had been a resounding success, though there were three of the grenadiers dead, one wounded. The weapons these cretins were using were no better than spud cannons against the boarders’ armored skinsuits.
“No, sir, not a peep,” one of them replied. The Grenadiers didn’t control the entire ship yet, but Yanakov’s squads held Engineering, the Armory and Environmental. The bridge was the last holdout, but that would be rectified shortly.
“Do we have comms with the bridge?”
One of the soldiers pointed to the panel on the left side of the bridge hatch and the officer walked over to it. Thoughtclicking an icon on his HUD, his faceplate popped open and he took a breath of ship’s air. It had a very faint tang of metal; clearly this ship was brand new, despite the fact that it had been ridden hard. Not a problem there, he thought. The General will definitely work this young ship hard once we get it back to Esselon Moor. He pressed the control that accessed the comms to the bridge. “Open up,” he said bluntly.
“Who the hell are you people?” a male voice answered from within the command compartment of the ship.
A Greater Interest: Samair in Argos: Book 4 Page 56
