A Greater Interest: Samair in Argos: Book 4

by Michael Kotcher

  “I have one of those too,” Kiki responded, pulling a similar weapon from under her own loose vest. “Sidearm too and one of those foamy grenades.”

  “Shotgun,” Kayla replied. “Two handguns, two flash bangs.”

  “Sidearm, and about twenty booms,” Calvin said. “About half are noisy and bright, got five frags, two slimers, and three that’ll clear a room.”

  “Take it easy with those,” Tamara said, finding her voice again.

  He blinked amusement at her. “Trust me, Ma’am. I’ve used them all before. I’ve got this.”

  She scowled at him and was about to say something but then Beau brandished his pistol and slid a blade a few inches from the sheath on his back and gave a loud bark, as though he was clearing his throat. Tamara backed off, trying to keep her breathing level and calm. Again, she tried to link in with the ship’s systems but again she was thrown out. The systems were a bit esoteric to begin with but it wasn’t an issue of strong firewalls. It was that the ship’s core systems were designed against wireless intrusion. The software firewalls on the systems themselves were average, though Eretria Sterling and Apogee had done a pass over them to try and increase security. But the systems did not have much wireless access, and certainly not for the critical systems. She couldn’t get in and take a peek at what was happening. Tamara shook her head in frustration.

  Kayla leaned back out into the corridor and grabbed a young zheen running down the corridor by the arm. He hissed at her but she didn’t release him. “Let me go!” the yeoman demanded. “I have to get to my duty station. We’re at general quarters.”

  “In a minute,” the she-wolf told him. She shook him slightly and his mouth parts writhed. “Oh, stop it, I’m not hurting you. Now, what’s all this about?”

  “We’re under attack, uh, Ma’am,” the yeoman said, trying to pull his arm loose. He wasn’t having much luck in shaking the iron-gripped lupusan off of him.

  “What? What are you talking about, we’re under attack?” the bodyguard demanded. “Someone is attacking this ship?”

  “We’ve been boarded, Ma’am,” he said, pulling now, using the blunt fingers of his free hand to try and pry himself loose. “You need to let me go! I have to get to my station.”

  “Let him go,” Tamara demanded.

  “Wait,” Viktoriya interrupted. “You. You said we’ve been boarded? By whom?”

  “I don’t know!” the zheen almost shouted. “Let me go! They didn’t say, up on the bridge. Only that we’ve been boarded. A bunch of people came in on the starboard side somehow, got through the shields and the hull and are moving through the ship. That’s all I know!” He squirmed, almost thrashing around in his desire to get free.

  Kayla let him go and in his struggles he stumbled backward, landing hard against the corridor’s bulkhead. With a hiss and a snarl, he rushed off, his feet clumping on the deckplates as he went. She turned and looked back at the others. “Boarded?”

  “Then we’re definitely not staying here,” Viktoriya ordered. “Ma’am, I’m sorry, but you’re not staying aboard this ship. We need to get you to safety and this place is no longer it.”

  Tamara sighed, then nodded. “Understood, Serzhant. Where to?”

  “Well, since all the fun is taking place on the starboard side of the ship, I think we need to make it over to one of the portside airlocks amidships and then signal your ship to come and get us,” Viktoriya said. “Everyone ready?” The others nodded. Calvin’s grin was back and the sisters had affected grins of their own. The serzhant nodded again. “Ma’am?”

  Tamara took a very deep breath and then let it out, drawing one of her own small pistol from the small of her back. The lupusan scowled for a moment, but then looked away. “I’m ready, Ms. Eristov. Is there a problem?”

  She nodded to the gun. “You sure you know how to use that, Ma’am?”

  Tamara grimaced. “I’ll be fine, Serzhant. Now let’s move.”

  Viktoriya’s frown only deeped. “Fine, Ma’am. Just don’t shoot any of us with it. All right. We’re going to make for airlock 22 on the port side. We’re going to move quickly, but for now, we’re not going to run, not unless we find any of those boarders. Nice and easy. Let’s go.”

  Where is Corajen when I need her? Tamara thought desperately. These guards had been handpicked by the Chief of Security, and she did trust them, but she’d never seen them work. It was actually something she’d hoped to never have to test. Better to just throw the money for their salaries at them, pretend like she was satisfied with their performance and then secretly grimace to herself about the waste of money. But now?

  “Should I signal for Mike to come pick us up?” she asked, instead.

  Viktoriya shook her head. “Not yet. We’re going to get to an airlock first. He can move around outside the ship a lot quicker than we can within it. When we’re closer to the portside airlocks, we’ll call him.” She moved up next to her principle. “Ma’am, you stay right behind me. Keep one hand on my back until I tell you otherwise, do you understand?”

  Tamara nodded, trying very hard not to let her breathing get out of control. When the short, stocky wolf stepped in front of her, the others spread out around her, with Beau taking up the rear. Without another word, they went out into the corridor and began to move.

  Getting through the ship was proving easier than Arn had expected and that he and the General had planned for. His platoon had actually encountered four of their Army soldiers, pathetic creatures, really. They’d been caught completely by surprise, and were armed with low-velocity ammunition designed to damage flesh and bone but to avoid puncturing the hull of the ship. His own soldiers had no compunction about any collateral damage. Their own weapons hurled needles and the locals went down. As they moved forward, his platoon along with one other, were making their way along the spine of the ship, planting explosive charges as they went. Arn’s platoon required the greatest amount of traversing the ship, so he took command of that group.

  “Colonel, we’ve got a group of their soldiers entrenched up ahead,” one of the wolves stated. “They’ve set up crude barricades.”

  “You know what to do, Sergeant,” the colonel replied. He turned to a young private. “Fortis, you’re with me and the combat engineers, Sergeant, take care of them.” He waved a hand in the direction of the soldiers obstructing the way forward.

  “Aye, sir! Move!” the armor-clad wolf said and then yelled to the rest of the platoon. Coming to the intersection, he nodded to one of the privates, who pulled out a smoke grenade, pulled the pin and tossed it around the corner. In seconds, the area was flooded with thick clouds and four of the wolves stepped into the intersection, raised their weapons and fired. Four plasma grenades arced down the corridor to the makeshift barricades, going over the obstructions and exploded, shredding the defenders. Screams came down the corridor, but it was muffled by the echo of the explosion. “We’re clear, colonel.”

  He yipped a reply and the platoon continued forward, stopping only long enough for Sigma and one of her fellows to plant a pair of charges on another section of the hull and to a convenient cross brace. “A quarter of the way done, let’s move, people. We’ve got a lot more to do.”

  They were just about to carry on when a squad of Army soldiers attacked. Flechette guns coughed, sending a hail of needles in the direction of the wolves, one of which pierced the faceplate of one unlucky private. He howled in pain and another two shots took him down. The wolves snarled in anger and turned, returning fire. Needles perforated one of the soldiers’ chests, another got hit in the throat, a third tore apart one of the leg of a third. The survivors fired again and one lobbed a flash bang at the wolves. It went off in their midst, though their armor dulled most of the effects. In the split second of distraction, the soldiers cut loose with everything they had and another two wolves fell, hurt, but not dead. The wolves fell upon them with furious anger and slaughtered them.

  Now that the fighting had begun in earnest, Gants no
ticed that the invaders had refrained from shooting out the security cameras. He didn’t know why, exactly, perhaps they were conserving ammunition, or more likely, they couldn’t spare the attention it took to do so. Casualties in the firefights were appalling, at least on the Seylonique side. So far, from what Gants could tell, the interlopers had lost perhaps seven to ten of their numbers while the Army contingent had lost more than a score of men.

  Gants put a hand to his forehead in consternation. What the hell are they doing? The invaders had split into what appeared to be three distinct groups. The first was moving along the keel of the ship. They would move forward, stop for a moment, and then continue their advance. Closed hatches or emergency bulkheads didn’t stop them, they merely slowed the advance. They seemed to be carrying some sort of decryption and access device that they plugged into each hatch control which magically unlocked the hatches, allowing access. And as far as the emergency bulkheads were concerned, they had breaching charges capable of blasting through, and it appeared that they brought a small mountain of them.

  Gants thought he saw an opportunity. He pressed a comm control.

  “Telford here,” the Army major replied tersely. He wasn’t projecting his image, the transmission was audio only. “I’m a little busy right now.”

  “This is Colonel Gants, Major.”

  “I know who this is,” the officer snapped. “What do you want, Colonel?”

  “One of the groups of boarders is moving along the keel of the ship. There are a series of bulkheads we’ve dropped to slow them down.”

  “I know that,” the man’s voice cracked like a whip. “But they just blast through them. Containment seems impossible. You called me to waste my time with this?”

  “I wasn’t thinking containment, Major,” Gants answered back, his voice as cold as frozen helium. “I was thinking you could set up a blocking force behind frame ninety and ambush them as they blast through.”

  “A good idea, Colonel,” Telford said grudgingly. “I’ll take it under advisement. If there’s nothing else?” Telford didn’t wait for a response, he just cut the connection. Gants didn’t get irritated, the man was under a great deal of strain and he didn’t have any time to waste talking with the commanding officer once the meat of the conversation was finished. He let it go.

  Gants turned back to his displays looking for the other groups of invading soldiers. One was on deck twenty, moving toward the interior and further aft, there was no indication where they were going, but unlike the first group, they weren’t stopping for anything except a few pitched battles. “Battles” was an overenthusiastic word for the slaughter that was occurring. However, since the invaders were equipped with much heavier weapons and armor, to say nothing of the mechanized units, they were just ripping through anyone who tried to stand against them. Half a dozen Seylonique troops were cut to pieces by one of the mech’s heavy cannon. The bastards were tossing grenades around his ship like confetti, incinerating everything in sight, immolating the defenders with no hesitation. The major’s troops were completely outclassed and outgunned, but they weren’t running and they weren’t giving up.

  The third group was on deck nine and moving aft as well, but again, Malachai Gants was completely at a loss for what they were doing. While there were critical systems in the aft section of the ship, the invaders were staying clear of anything that would make any kind of sense. In fact, unless he was mistaken, it looked as though they were moving toward auxiliary damage control, but that was absolutely ridiculous. The only thing there that would give the invaders any sort of advantage towards taking the ship was the decompression safeties which would allow them to vent the ship and murder them all, but those safeties could be overridden from the bridge, from Engineering, from Environmental. Let’s not waste time. He barked an order to the engineering watch stander who flipped a couple of switches and shut those safeties down.

  Obviously, they were up to something, Gants knew this. With the firepower advantage the boarders enjoyed, even with their smaller numerical force, they could do a huge amount of damage and inflict massive casualties before they could be stopped. That assumed, of course, that the Leytonstone’s Army contingent could stop them.

  The mechanized armor was powerful and easily withstood the low velocity rounds from the defenders’ weapons. A group of eight Army troopers, incensed at the uselessness of their weapons fixed thirteen inch bayonets to the ends of their rifles and rushed out from cover, screaming war cries and rage, hoping to bring the battle in close.

  It didn’t go as well as they had hoped. The mech’s tribarrel cannon opened up, spewing hate at them and six of them were mowed down before they could get within ten meters of their target. The other two managed to sidestep or duck the incoming fire and reached the CA800. One of the soldiers, a zheen, stabbed his bayonet-tipped rifle as hard as he could into the servo at the base of the tribarrel. Miraculously, he managed to pierce the armor at exactly the right point, damaging the mechanism and slicing through circuitry, before he was shot down by one of the lupusan soldiers behind the 800. The other one, a human, unloaded his weapon right into the forward right leg servo at point blank range. Shotgun blasts deafened him, echoed down the corridor. The sixth blast cracked the servo and the leg wavered, the seventh blast split it in half. The man was showered with tiny bits of shrapnel, slicing into his skin on his hands and face and he shrieked in agony. He fired again and the 800’s leg seemed to go limp. The mech stumbled but it didn’t fall.

  Four of the enemy soldiers caught the man in a crossfire and riddled him with needles and he dropped to the deck. Gants slammed a fist on the arm of his chair after seeing those soldiers die.

  Lieutenant Yanakov looked down at the two who had make it through the blistering hail of fire to come in close and even damage the 800. It was an impressive feat, though it would change nothing in the end. The 800 pilot was compensating for the damaged leg, though the powered armor would lost a good portion of its speed until that leg could be repaired. And even without the functional tribarrel cannon, he was far from defenseless. That bayonet strike right to the servo mechanism was a one in a million hit. It shouldn’t have been possible and yet the bug had succeeded. Yanakov found himself in the position of actually admiring the combat prowess of a lesser species. It was a complete fluke, of course, blind luck, but even still, he could not deny the bravery of such an act, nor the fact that it had succeeded against all reason. He nodded in brief salute to the fallen warrior and then ordered his troops forward.

  His group of soldiers was moving toward a point in the ship in the after third of the vessel, only eight decks down from the top. Compartment 163, otherwise known to the crew as inertial dampener control. It was a compartment that was monitored regularly, but aside from the tech who did the actual monitoring, no one else in the battlecruiser’s crew gave it any thought, unless there was some sort of problem. But that’s what made this part of the general’s plan so brilliant. The typical targets for boarding and capture would be heavily and easily fortified, but who would be thinking about the corridors down the keel, the inertial dampeners and auxiliary damage control?

  He hadn’t planned on such serious damage to one of the 800’s in his platoon, but he had another and so far resistance had been light. In fact, his troops had rounded up and killed more regular crewmembers than actual security or these pathetic soldiers. He didn’t go out of the way to kill them, but when they got in the way, or attempted to try and stand against his troops, Yanakov had no compunction about eliminating them.

  Yanakov was exhilarated that the fight and his part of the mission was going so well, though he was willing to admit that the armor he and the rest of his wolves were equipped with as well as the overwhelming and superior firepower was what allowed them to carry the day. Without the armor and with similar low-vel ammo, the fight would be much different. Casualties would be much higher on the side of the wolves, but in the end the outcome would be the same. It was inevitable, actually, that th
e Dog Soldiers would emerge victorious once again, but the cost would be much higher. And it wasn’t as though he was going to give up all those advantages just so that he could say that the playing field was level. To hell with that. Victory was the only thing that matters.

  “Forward!” Yanakov ordered, unable to stop himself from grinning. No one could see, of course, because his face was covered by the armor and faceplate. “Two more compartments and we’re there.”

  “Sir, I’ve been analyzing the thrust of the enemy attack and I think I figured out where group two is going,” the sensor watch stander said, sounding both puzzled and yet confident.

  “Spit it out, Specialist,” Gants snapped. These bastards were cutting through his security force with ease and just slaughtering his crew in what looked like job lots. Any that couldn’t get away were just killed. The bulk of the crew had already been evacuated to the forward half of the ship, giving these pirates a wide berth and trying to stay out of the Army’s way. Still, too many died already and would more would inevitably die before this was all over.

  And to think, I actually wanted to tangle with the pirates. To show that the Seylonique Navy could actually take the bastards on. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be! he raged.

  Seeing the stormclouds, the specialist stiffened. “Aye, sir. I think they’re going for the inertial dampeners.”

  Gants blinked in surprise. “What? That’s insane. Why would they hit there? They’d kill themselves if we accelerated too quickly. They’d kill themselves and us. And they’re not fighting like they want to commit suicide.” He turned to the helm. “Helm, cut acceleration. If she’s right, I don’t want to have any accidents.”

  Chief Kolgus, a young but very bright female lupusan flattened her ears to her head. She nodded. “Aye, aye, Colonel. Cutting acceleration to zero now.” She whirled around and stabbed at the controls and an instant later, Gants’ display showed the main engines offline. Leytonstone was coasting along on her own momentum now. There was nothing anywhere close to them that they would all have to worry about slamming into, thankfully. The colonel breathed a bit easier, but he knew things were far from over.