“Yes, Lady Captain.” Ikuhara looked over the silent room, the staring, stunned crew. “Shall I put us back on course for the wormhole?”
“May as well,” Sula said. A hashish scent filled the air, and Sula repressed the urge to sneeze. She called the other members of her group to meet in the stairwell one deck above them, on the level of the common room. She left Maitland and another petty officer in Command with Ikuhara, then led the rest to the elevator. Everyone tucked their weapons away. Sidney sucked on his pipe.
Two stairwells, Red and Green, with stairs of bare metal strongly braced against accelerations, connected all the levels of the ship, though not all doors would open to everyone. Sula’s collaborators met in the stairwell in a creeping fog of hashish smoke. The three new pistols were passed out. Sula told Vijana to wait six or eight minutes before going for the purser’s store, then led her re-formed group of eight down four levels.
She was glad to be in fresher air and took several deliberate breaths to calm the storm in her nerves. She was going to walk out of the stairwell door with Ming Lin, turn right down a curved corridor, and surprise the pair of Torminel guarding the cargo hold. She and Lin would then shoot them—or, if there were unexpected complications, the other five would join the engagement.
But when she pushed the door open, not two but four black-clad Torminel stood directly in front of her. The two guards on the previous shift had apparently stayed to chat with their comrades.
Sula could think of nothing to do but shoot. She got her weapon clear and fired into the nearest target, but on her right, Lady Alana’s weapon snagged on her pocket, and by the time she got it clear a Torminel knocked it from her hand and went for her throat.
Nerve-paralyzing Torminel squalls rent the air. The recruit Sula had shot didn’t fall but seized her gun hand and yanked her forward, practically off her feet. She tried to turn her pistol toward her target and took a wild shot, and then the Torminel clouted her on the side of her head, and she stumbled. Gunshots hammered the air. Something wrenched at her hand and she lost her pistol. Then she was hit on the head again and fell to the beige carpet with a Torminel landing hard on top of her.
She looked up at the snarling face within inches of her own. The Torminel’s black-and-cream fur stood on end and his head resembled a horrifying puffball with two enormous dark eyes and a snarling scarlet mouth. Panic flared in Sula. She punched at the face as she tried to writhe out from under the recruit’s weight. The Torminel clawed at her face, and then his fangs dived for her throat. She managed to get a forearm between them and tried to lever his head away from her, but his jaws opened and he clamped down on her forearm. Pain galvanized her and she squirmed and kicked and punched with her free hand. Nothing seemed to work. His weight on her made it hard to breathe. The Torminel’s hot breath reeked of carrion.
And then the recruit’s body went limp, and the jaws relaxed on Sula’s arm. Sula blinked up at Alana Haz, who stood astride the Torminel, and who then seized him by his collar and rolled him off Sula.
Sula saw, as Haz pulled the recruit away, that Alana had killed the Torminel by driving one of her high heels into his brain. Wasn’t expecting that, Sula thought.
I’m guessing neither was the Torminel.
She gasped for breath, looked around, and saw that the four Torminel were dead, while Macnamara and Shawna Spence were busy looting them of their weapons. Ming Lin was streaming blood from a broken nose. Engineer Markios sat against the back of the elevator, looking dazed but otherwise unhurt. None of the Terrans seemed beyond repair.
“Come out, please,” said Lady Alana. “We need to get you to safety.” Sula turned her head to see a Lai-own engineer looking out his cabin door.
Of course there would be crew on this level, Sula realized. Those working other shifts might be in their rooms sleeping, or going about their own business.
“Come out, please,” said Alana. “Everyone, please. We’re going to put you in the hold until this is over.”
Sula sat up and felt her head swim. Something warm ran down the side of her face where the Torminel had clawed her. Sula waited for the storm in her head to grow quiet, then rose to her feet and reached in a pocket for a handkerchief. Torn muscles in her forearm ached where the fangs had ripped them.
She found and retrieved her pistol, checked the magazine, put the magazine back in. These actions were simple and automatic, and she felt bits of the world fall into place as she performed the simple, undemanding movements.
“Come out, please,” called Lady Alana once more.
Sula stretched her jaw muscles, managed to form words. “Move the bodies back into the stairwell,” she said. It might reduce the terror of the civilians.
Her hand comm chimed, and Sula answered when she saw it was Ikuhara. “The security desk here has been getting calls about a gunfight,” he said. “We’ve told them to stay quiet and remain in their cabins.”
“If they’re all on this deck, tell them it’s over, and they should come out. The Fleet is going to evacuate them to a safe place.”
“Yes, my lady.”
The Torminel were dragged away, leaving bloody smears on the pale deck. Lady Alana, limping along with one bare foot, took charge of the off-duty crew.
“We’re going to put you in the hold till this is over,” she said to a new group. “You’ll be safe there.”
Maybe it was the Fleet uniform that gave Alana Haz the authority to bring the off-duty crew shuffling toward the hold. Maybe it was the confident baritone voice. Whatever it was, it worked, and Sula was grateful.
The corridors in the passenger section were wood-paneled, or mirrored, or had paintings or photos. Here on the decks inhabited only by crew, the walls were plain beige composite, now somewhat marred by bullet holes and blood spatter.
Farther along the curving corridor was the actual entrance to the hold, a large cargo elevator capable of carrying supplies from the hold to inhabited sections of the ship. Sula called the seven unarmed members of her group, who were standing in reserve, and told them to come down the stairs to their level.
In the meantime, Alana Haz and Shawna Spence shuttled the off-duty crew down to the hold, and by the time the elevator returned, Sula had been joined by her remaining seven Terrans. Along the way they’d passed the four dead Torminel piled in the stairwell, the blood smears on the deck, the bullet wounds in the walls. When they arrived, they found Sula dabbing blood from her face and Ming Lin with her broken nose, and by that point they were grim. Though they’d all served in the Fleet during the war, none of them had trained for the kind of personal close-quarters combat that had just erupted, and they looked as if they were mentally girding themselves for a new kind of war.
Once they’d arrived, Sula called every elevator to her floor, then locked them in place by using their emergency cutoff switches, further disabling them by jamming open their doors with furniture taken from the crew cabins. If the Legion sent reinforcements to this deck, they’d have to go by stairs.
Sula took the new arrivals to the holds. These were fourteen decks deep, most levels completely filled with containers, but the cases and trunks belonging to the passengers were in a separate area, walled off behind a locked grille. One of the crew knew the combination to the gate, and Sula led her party to pull her furniture out of crates and then the hidden weapons out of the furniture.
A fair amount of ingenuity had gone into hiding Sula’s arsenal, but that meant all the guns had been broken down into their constituent parts, so as not to look so much like guns. Which meant they required reassembly. Sula took it upon herself to put together the Sidney Mark One, a small homemade submachine gun that Sidney had designed during the last war. It was a crude weapon and far from perfect, but Sula had retained hers throughout the campaign for Zanshaa City. Sula’s was the first such weapon ever made, and she’d hung it on the wall of her office on Confident, then later in her apartment.
Despite the Sidney’s drawbacks, Sula reminded herself
that it was a far more deadly and impressive weapon than anything the Legion of Diligence was carrying.
She’d just finished threading the tube stock onto her gun when her hand comm chimed. She answered and heard Vijana speaking over a series of gunshot booms.
“We’ve run into trouble,” he said.
“Where are you?”
“In the purser’s office. But we can’t get out, there are Legion all over the place.”
More booms. Sula recognized the sound of a shotgun, a sensible weapon in the close confines of the ship.
“What happened?” she asked.
“Sidney asked the purser for access to his stores, but the purser wouldn’t allow it once he realized Sidney wanted to check his firearms. So I stuck a pistol in his back and told him to open his stores, and he panicked and began to yell for help. I had to knock him out, but half a dozen people heard him and—” There was the sound of a crash, and more booms.
“Anyway,” he concluded. “We’re trapped in here. But we have good cover and better weapons than they do, so they’re not coming in.”
“Where are the Torminel?” She tried to build a picture of the purser’s office and the common area in her mind.
“We’ve killed a couple,” Vijana said. “Some of the live ones are in the common area, behind the furniture. Some in the gift shop across the way. Some in the stairway on my right, and others in the corridor on the left somewhere—I can’t be sure without getting my head blown off.”
Sula closed her eyes, built a picture, and thought she understood what was happening. “We’ll be there as soon as we can get organized. But right now I need to call Ikuhara.”
When she got Ikuhara, she told him to get the security station to see what was going on in the common room and purser’s stores. Ikuhara ordered Maitland at the security station to locate the proper video feeds, but he also had another issue.
“The ship’s captain is outside Command,” he told her. “He’s demanding to be let in.”
“Does the camera work? Does it show he’s alone?”
“He seems to be.”
“Then let him in. He can do less damage as a hostage than free and wandering around giving the Legion advice.”
“I’ll do that, but now Maitland’s got the video up from the common room.” Sula heard Ikuhara’s sudden intake of breath. “It’s a mess there! What went wrong?”
“Can you tell me where the Legion is?”
“There are about a dozen on Stairwell Red, looking through the door into the common room. Another eight or ten have passed through Stairwell Green and into a corridor that leads to the common room from there. It looks like both are keeping Vijana’s group pinned down in the purser’s area. There are ten or so in the common area, but there may be more because the cameras don’t cover all of it.”
“Right,” Sula said. “Fairly soon now I’m going to ask you to cut the engines, so we’ll go weightless. Then I’m going to ask you to start the engines again under high acceleration. Understand?”
“How high?”
“Let’s say three gravities for ten seconds, then two until I tell you to stop.”
“Very good, Lady Captain.” He hesitated a few seconds, then spoke. “Should I ring the warning for zero gee, and then for acceleration? We could have a lot of injuries among the passengers if we do this without warning.”
“No,” Sula said. “We can’t let the Legion know what we’re doing.”
“Yes, my lady.”
The passengers will have to take their chances, Sula thought. She glanced up to see Lady Alana Haz looking at her.
“My wife,” she said. “My children. They have no experience of zero gee, and they won’t have warning of high acceleration.” She pressed her lips together in apprehension.
“They’re in their cabin, aren’t they?”
“Yes, of course.”
“They won’t have far to fall,” Sula said.
“Can I send them a warning?”
Sula wondered whether the Legion had any way to intercept her communication and decided that with Ikuhara established in Command, they didn’t.
“Be quick,” she said.
She looked over her group of twelve. Macnamara and Alana Haz were armed with semiautomatic carbines, and Spence with another Sidney Mark One. The others at least had pistols.
In addition, Spence and Ming Lin were carrying explosives and grenades. Sula’s group was still outnumbered over two to one, but Sula was beginning to feel a trickle of optimism.
Storming an enemy-held position, like Zanshaa High City or Striver’s common room, was turning out to be Sula’s specialty.
Sula led her group back to the crew levels, then up Stairwell Green to the passenger entrance deck. She peered through the port in the stairwell door and saw the black-clad backs of at least ten Torminel, all crouched on the corridor’s thick umber-colored carpet with weapons in their hands, the lead officer peering around the corner into the common room and the entrance to the purser’s quarters. No one was shooting. The battle seemed to have died down.
“Macnamara,” Sula said, “contact Vijana on your comm. Tell him that in a minute or so we’re going to need them to start firing. And tell them shortly after that I’m cutting the engines, and they need to be in a place where they won’t drift up into the line of fire. And after that, heavy gravities.”
“Yes, my lady.”
While Macnamara was making his call, Sula called Ikuhara and told him to prepare for zero gravity.
“I had to call Engine Control and tell them to strap in,” Ikuhara said. “They asked what was up, and I told them there was no time.”
“Good,” Sula said. “Stand by.” She turned to her group. “Macnamara, Haz, I want you in the doorway with your weapons. I need everyone to anchor themselves against zero gravity. And when the engines ignite again, we’ll be at three gravities, so make sure you don’t float too high, or over anything too sharp.”
The stairs were bare metal, with open air between each stairstep, and there were strong guardrails braced against high accelerations, so there would be little problem finding something to hang on to or brace against during a period of zero gravity. The problem would come later, under high acceleration, when the alloy edges of the stairsteps would cut into flesh and bone.
It would only be for a few seconds, Sula thought. People would survive.
A bigger problem would be anchoring Macnamara and Alana Haz in the doorway. Sula put them prone on the landing just behind the door, with Spence and Markios braced against the guardrail to either side, each with one hand clasped firmly around their belts.
“Choose your targets,” Sula said. “No wild shooting, we don’t have that much ammunition.” And then, to Macnamara, “Tell Ikuhara to stand by.” And then, into her hand comm, “Vijana, you can start the shooting.”
There followed the great boom of a shotgun, heard clearly through the door, followed by rifle shots, followed by a massive answer of pistol shots, presumably from the Legion. Sula looked through the port on the door to see the Torminel tensing in the corridor, as their leader leaned around the corner to aim in the direction of the purser’s station.
Moving as lightly as possible, Sula pulled open the corridor door—Haz wedged it open with an elbow—and then Sula linked arms with Spence and called to Ikuhara to cut the engines.
Even though she knew it was coming, weightlessness still seemed a surprise. Sula’s inner ear swam as she began to drift away from the landing. The metal stair creaked and snapped as weight came off it. And the Torminel began to drift away from the floor as they frantically scrambled for handholds. There weren’t many for them to grab, though, only a few door handles leading to storerooms or offices.
“Fire,” Sula said, and Macnamara and Haz began what was, in effect, an execution.
The Fleet trained their personnel in zero gravity.
Apparently the Legion of Diligence did not.
The Legion recruits’ movements grew
more frantic as they realized they were being fired on, and that they were helpless to save themselves. They clutched at each other, shrieked, squalled, raved. A few fired wild shots, but recoil sent them into a slow, helpless tumble. Furred bodies bounced off the walls, the deck, the ceiling. Blood trailed through the air, forming perfect spheres.
Sula waited until Macnamara and Haz ran out of bullets and reloaded. She could see movement among the floating Torminel, but she couldn’t tell if they were moving on their own or drifting with the breeze. She waited for Macnamara to take a few careful shots, then called for resumed gravity.
The metal landing came up very fast and hit Sula with three times her own body weight. Stars flashed behind her eyes. Metal stairs and railings groaned. Her mouth tasted of copper. She blinked the growing darkness from her vision and turned her head—she couldn’t quite lift it—to look toward the Torminel, who had come crashing down on the deck in a rain of their own blood.
She gasped air for the time the heavy gees lasted. Then her weight returned to normal, and she rose to a kneeling position. Only one of the Torminel tried to rise, and Macnamara took deliberate aim and shot him.
Macnamara, star of the Fleet combat course. To think, before joining the Fleet, he had been a shepherd.
The scent of blood eddied toward her, and Sula felt her stomach clench. She’d lived through violence, but nothing this close-up and intimate, not on this scale. Not shooting helpless people hanging in midair and landing in a lake of spattering scarlet. She felt nightmares swarming nearby, circling her, trying to break into her mind, and she turned away from the sight in the corridor. She clenched her fist on the metal guardrail and gave her orders.
Sula assigned Haz, Ming Lin, and two others to advance down the corridor. “Don’t engage the Legion unless they attack you,” she told them, “or if they try to rush the purser’s office. Wait for me to come at them from the other side, and bear in mind that we’re going to lose gravity again in a few minutes.”
Haz and her party advanced down the corridor, examining the Torminel carefully to make sure they were as dead as they looked. Each pistol was collected and stuffed into pockets and belts.
The Accidental War Page 35
