With only the two ship’s shuttles, the two Marine Albatrosses, and nine rekis, the battalion was not really organized for ship-to-ship warfare. The shuttles had minimal firepower, and the two Marine craft, which were now standing off the seized ship, were not much better. While armed, they were the airborne equivalent of an armored personnel carrier instead of a heavy tank. If the opposing ship were an enemy ship-of-the-line, the Marines’ only possible mission would be to inspect the dead vessel if the Mount Fuji managed to defeat it.
But the SS Calypso Queen was a civilian liner with no offensive weaponry. The Mount Fuji had disabled her engines with one surgically aimed cannon shot, and now it was unable to maneuver. Together with the Mount Fuji two kilometers off, both vessels were still hurtling through space, but the Calypso Queen could not alter course nor speed, hence the not technically accurate term “dead in space.”
The liner might not have offensive weapons, but the 20-30 Dark Tide pirates would be armed, and the ship could be rigged to blow. Esther could be sending two Marine companies to a booby-trapped ship.
“Any signs of an explosive chain?” she asked the sailor on the D-Scan for the fourth time in the last half-hour.
“No, ma’am,” OS2 Halle responded, never taking his eyes off his screens.
Esther knew he’d pass the word if he picked anything up, but she couldn’t help being anxious. There were many ways to scuttle a ship that didn’t require typical explosives, and she wasn’t confident that the Mount Fuji’s sensors could pick some of those methods up before it was too late.
She looked around the CIC, the heart of a ship’s operations. The sailors and most of the Marines were in vac suits, ready for a breach. Esther and Ralph Kutzman were in their EVAs, only lacking the propulsion units before they’d be able to transit to the liner.
Esther didn’t have to actually make the crossing—in fact, she probably shouldn’t. But once the ship was secured, she’d have a better idea of what had to be done if she was on the scene rather than sitting in CIC.
That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it, she told herself.
In reality, Esther couldn’t bear standing in the middle of the Mount Fuji safe and sound while her Marines went into harm’s way. She’d hold back from the breach, but as soon as she felt she could justify it, she was going to cross over.
“F2 is leaving the hangar bay,” the yeoman intoned as if this was just one more training mission.
The breaching party could have simply ridden a reki or EVA’d to the liner, but the shuttles did provide slightly more protection. With breaching tubes aboard, Alpha’s two platoons would emerge from the shuttles on either side of the Calypso Queen, force their breach, and secure them for the waves of EVA Marines from Bravo and Charlie who would actually seize the ship.
“Cheetah One, Two, and Three debarking,” the yeoman said.
Esther looked back to the ship’s monitors. With the shuttles out of the way, the ship’s crew had been positioning the rekis. The first rank of three rekis, had already been ported to the hangar curtain and was now in open space while other Marines boarded their space sleds. The hangar deck, run by Lieutenant Smythe, was working like clockwork. Esther wasn’t worried about that. She was worried about what would happen when the rekis reached the Calypso Queen.
The reki was nothing more than an open sled with a propulsion system. Marines in their vacsuits stood like sardines in old-fashioned cans while the sleds transported them up to 50,000 klicks through open space. There was no life-support and no armor. Until McLamb and his security element secured the breaches, the Marines in the rekis were vulnerable to most weapons, even small arms. The ship’s scanners hadn’t picked out anyone waiting in ambush, but a pirate could be hiding cloaked on the liner’s hull, ready to take a potshot at the Marines in the open sleds.
Still, the rekis were faster than simple EVA-suited Marines, and once McLamb’s Marines breached the ship, Esther wanted the assault element to sweep into the ship with overwhelming aggression.
All three lifts of rekis took off, and the remainder of the force formed up to make the crossing in their EVA suits. Esther watched on the screen as the Charlie Company Marines marched up to the curtain in squad ranks of 13, then gracefully launched themselves into space. In the hangar bay, there had been an up and down; as soon as they reached open space, they started orienting on each other as they moved into formation for the crossing. Each squad maximized their dispersion to preclude the infamous one shot that could take them all out.
Esther was proud at the precision with which the battalion was moving. Still, she felt like she had to get involved. She looked over to Major Kurtzman, but he was on the net talking with someone. She could have listened in, and she was sorely tempted to, but she had to let her Marines do their job without her continually looking over their shoulders. Instead, she kept the battalion command net open.
The two shuttles slowed to a stop some 200 meters from the ship. Within moments, Captain McLamb and his two platoons had debarked and were crossing the remaining distance, each breaching team heading to their position on the Calypso Queen’s hull.
“Order the shuttles to their stand-off station,” Commander Anderson ordered.
A moment later, the shuttles’ avatars started to pull away. Esther didn’t like the fact that the shuttles were pulling back. If things went south, she wanted them to be able to recover the McLamb’s security element. The possibility of things going south, however, was exactly why Steve was pulling his shuttles back. He couldn’t afford to lose them.
And that was why Fred Kingery’s assault element had halted about 500 meters from the ship. If the Calypso Queen were rigged to blow, the debris would act as shrapnel, traveling hundreds or thousands of kilometers outwards. Five hundred meters of vacuum would not diminish the force of any shrapnel, but it would lessen the chance that anyone would be hit. Every 100 meters away decreased the chance of shrapnel hitting someone by better than 99%. McLamb and his security element would be wiped out, but most of the assault element and support elements would have a good chance to survive.
Esther looked over to the schematic of the Calypso Queen displayed on a 3D screen on the bulkhead. The scans couldn’t differentiate between passengers and pirates, but it wasn’t difficult to surmise that the three larger masses were where the passengers were huddled, and the several smaller groupings represented the pirates. At the moment, none of them were near the two selected breach points.
“Ready to breach,” Wes McLamb passed on the command net.
Major Kurtzman looked over to Esther expectantly.
There were two primary methods to force entry into a ship: breach tubes or the airlocks. Marines tended to avoid doors on the ground and airlocks in space. They were too easy to booby trap, and the enemy tended to defend them. McLamb had two of the Mount Fuji’s engineers with him to break through the locks, and the ship’s owners would undoubtedly prefer that course of action. Esther didn’t give a rat’s ass about the cost of repairs, should it come to that. Her main concern was for the security of her Marines.
There really wasn’t a choice, in her mind.
“Breach,” she told the major.
She shifted her combat PA to a split screen and pulled up the feeds of Sergeants Visquez and Ben-David, the two team commanders. She watched the duel feeds as the four Marines of each breaching team began to move forward, like pallbearers carrying a coffin. The breaching tube was a very primitive, but effective method of getting into a ship. It was essentially an airlock with a plasma gate on one end, a cutting blade on the other. The tube was placed against the skin of a ship and locked into place. An ion vibration blade would then begin to cut into the skin. Only the most hardened ships could withstand the blade for more than a few moments. For most ships, and the Calypso Queen would fit in this class, the breach could be cut in less than ten seconds. For sturdier warships, the blade could be exchanged for a molecular dissolution projector or even shaped charges.
Th
e back end was initially closed off, but once the air pressure between the tube and the breached ship stabilized, the cover would be removed so the plasma gate would allow passage while keeping atmospheric integrity.
Ben David’s team made contact with the Calypso Queen first, and breaching tube locked into place. Esther pulled up the tube’s readouts as the ion generator blade began to rev up the blade. A moment later, Visquez’ team reached their position on the other side of the ship.
“We’ve got movement inside the target ship,” one of the CIC sailors shouted out.
Esther looked up from her PA to the ship’s schematic. She could see that the pirates were rushing to the two breach sites. She’d hoped that the Marines could breach and be inside before the pirates could react, but that evidently wasn’t going to happen.
Marines could and have conducted ship breaching in the face of heavy fire, but the cost in Marine casualties could be quite high. The SOP was to breach where the enemy wasn’t, then secure the breach until there were enough Marines inside the ship to prosecute the assault.
For a ship like the Calypso Queen, the breach itself could take as few as ten or fifteen seconds. But with the rest of the security team standing off out of concern for boobytraps, a more realistic time to get Marines inside was closer to 45 seconds, and it was obvious that the Dark Tide pirates would get to the sites before the Marines could seize them.
Intel gave a probability that the pirates would blow the ship at 46%. For all their propaganda about seeking independence and religious freedom, in reality, they were little more than a criminal gang seeking financial rewards. A destroyed ship might set the stage for negotiations during future ship hijackings, but it would give them nothing for this seizure.
Still, 46% was too much to ignore.
Make a decision, Lysander!
With the blades already cutting into the Calypso Queen’s skin, and the fact that the pirates were rushing to defend those two sites, Esther didn’t think they were going to blow the ship, at least not at the moment.
“Dozer-One and Dozer-Two, slow down your breach. Do not enter the ship. Dozer-Three and Dozer-Four, advance and conduct breaching operations at the alternate positions. Security element, abandon your stand-off positions. I want you on Dozer-Three and Four’s asses. You’ve got 30 seconds to get in that ship.”
Thirty seconds wasn’t doable. It would take Dozer-Three and Four that long to get to the ship’s skin, even longer to get their tubes into position and begin cutting. The key timeline, however, was from the moment each back-up breaching tube touched the ship until Marines were inside the ship.
No military plan survives contact with the enemy, and this was no different. Dozer-Three and Four were just the back-ups in case either One or Two had mechanical issues. The alternate positions had been selected simply because it was SOP. With the full schematics of the Calypso Queen, the two breach sites selected were the two best sites from both a technical and military point of view. With Esther’s conviction that the pirates were going to try and defend the ship and not blow it, at least yet, and their quick reaction, Esther had changed the plan on the fly. The point of main effort shifted to Sergeants Trotter and Julian and their back-up breaching teams, and along with the rest of the security element, they immediately closed in on the ship.
Esther had been nervous during combat before—well, not so much during as before it commenced. At the moment, however, she was almost beside herself. It was extremely difficult for her to stand back and let her Marines go into harm’s way. She’d have given almost anything to be out there, to be with the teams as they cut their way into the ship.
She performed a quick check with Visquez and Ben-David. Dozer-One was 21% through the hull, while Dozer-Two was at 30%. According to the schematic, twelve pirates were waiting just on the other side of Dozer-Two and another ten were just now arriving opposite Dozer-One.
You just keep waiting there, boys.
Sergeant Trotter’s Dozer-Three reached the hull of the Calypso Queen and within five seconds was cutting through. A few moments later, Dozer-Four reached the ship.
Esther keyed in the S3 and brought Captain Kingery, the assault element commander, up on the P2P. “Fred, break off Eickbush and RP. I’m going to stop Dozer-One and Two the moment Three and Four have breached. Hopefully, the pirates will react to the breach and abandon One and Two. If they do, send those two in.”
Esther knew she should just give her intent to Kingery and not tell him who to send in, but she was not as confident about Lieutenant Torten and Staff Sergeant Francisco, the Second Platoon commander and platoon sergeant. Kingery was rightly so putting them into positions where they had to work together and develop, but this wasn’t the time for that.
“We’ve got more movement inside the ship. They’re reacting to the new breach,” the petty officer on the schematic shouted out.
Sure enough, two more groups had split off from the mass of what had to be the passengers. The two groups opposite One and Two were remaining in place.
“Breach clear!” Trotter passed on the net as he led his four Marines through the tube and into the ship.
“Dozer-Three, you’ve got eight pirates inbound, looks like about ten seconds,” Captain Cynthia Strong, Esther’s S-3A, passed to Trotter.
“Move it,” Esther passed to Lieutenant Weisskopf, who was leading his Marines to Dozer-Three’s breach. “I want you in that ship now. Trotter’s about to be in contact.”
She pulled up Sergeant Trotter’s feed just as the first two pirates entered the passage at a dead run, only to be immediately dropped. Another pirate appeared momentarily before diving back out of sight before the Marine’s could target him.
Esther barely registered Major Kutzman telling Dozers One and Two to stop cutting and remain quiet. Whether that ruse would work or not was overshadowed by the fight currently going on.
“Grenade!” one of the Marines shouted, his voice picked up by Sergeant Trotter’s feed, which despite the motion compensators, became a mishmash of motion as the sergeant took cover.
He hit the deck, and immediately, his feed stabilized the view of the barrel of his weapon pointed upwards and down the passage. The blast barely shook the feed, and a moment later, two more pirates, clad in their signature multi-colored uniforms, burst around the corner, firing kinetics at waist level. Trotter barely had to shift his point of aim as he cut down the lead man, dropping him face-first on the deck. The second pirate fell a split second later.
“Coming in center!” a voice cried out.
Trotter didn’t look back, and in a few moments, the first of Eickbush’s Marines rushed past, ready to consolidate the breach.
“Dozer-One, Dozer-Two, commence breach,” Major Kutzman passed on the command net.
Esther shifted her attention to see that the pirates who had been facing the two original breach teams had, in fact, abandoned their positions, probably sure that the two had been feints. She let a tiny feeling of satisfaction surface before pushing it back down to monitor the action. With Marines onboard, she was confident about taking the ship back. What still concerned her was the chance that the pirates had booby trapped the ship in case they realized the battle was lost.
Thirty seconds later, Captain McLamb’s Marines were pouring through the Dozer-One and Two-s breaches. Lieutenant Eickbush’s Third Platoon was in heavy contact with the pirates, but the young lieutenant was pushing the pirates back. Two Marines were WIA, but the platoon’s discipline was simply too much for the pirates to withstand.
Esther intersected herself in the battle once more, ordering “Stone-One, do not pursue the enemy. I want you to move to this position and form a blocking force. No one is to get to the passengers.”
“Roger that, “Lieutenant Radiant Purpose said, his confidence evident even over the comms.
Esther didn’t know how many, if any, of the pirates were still with the passengers, but she didn’t want any of the others rejoining them. The passengers and crew rep
resented a huge bargaining chip, one Esther wanted to deny them. As more and more of the assault element entered the ship, she had an overwhelming force to root out any remaining enemy, so she felt confident that she could afford to use RP’s platoon as a blocking force.
And the enemy numbers were dropping. As the running firefights continued, at least eight were KIA with three wounded and in custody. Captain Montoya, who was technically part of the support element but who was already onboard the ship, had just arrived on the scene to question one of the pirates.
Pirates were not protected by the Accords, so with Doc Stevenson injecting the pirate with Mylanozene, Captain Montoya would be ferreting out if the ship was in fact boobytrapped, Esther’s primary remaining concern. Mylanozene had some serious side-effects, but it was fast-acting, and within 60 seconds, the S-2 would be able to start questioning. Esther just hoped the two-day interrogation course the Two had taken back on Tarawa before reporting in had sunk in.
And suddenly, it was over. The remaining pirates were surrendering. These were not the terrorists Esther had fought in the past. These were men and woman fighting for material wealth despite their claims to the contrary, and while their bosses might want them to make the retaking of the Calypso Queen as expensive as possible, the fighters evidently had other ideas.
“I’m transiting,” she announced to the CIC.
“Are you sure that’s wise?” Commander Anderson asked.
“I can’t get a feel for what’s going on from here.”
“What about—”
“Captain Montoya is questioning the prisoners, and we’re starting to sweep the ship. I won’t go aboard until the sweep is completed.”
The commander was right. Esther could perform her duties aboard the Mount Fuji. She didn’t have to go to the Calypso Queen, and she certainly didn’t have to go now. But she was too hyped to simply sit in the CIC. She had to get out there to her Marines.
“Mark, you’ve got it,” she told her XO.
She wasn’t passing over her command to him, but he’d be the one to monitor the situation while she was making the crossing. And if anything did happen to her . . .
Blood United (The United Federation Marine Corps' Lysander Twins Book 5) Page 13
