The weapon had detonated on top of Mira’s hull, but close enough to the aft to take out the port corner of the pinecone wall. The skiff vibrated as Copenhaver fired shot after shot directly into the pinecone horde. A flechette impacted with one of the new creatures and detonated. The insectile thing instantly transformed into a debris cloud of shattered arms, mandibles, and carapace.
Taulbee grinned in spite of himself. At least the Trio’s ammo worked on those things too. “Gunny?” he said over the comms. “What’s your ETA?”
Nothing.
Taulbee tried again, but the sergeant didn’t answer. He flinched when the captain’s voice broke over the comms a heartbeat later.
“Taulbee,” Dunn said, “what’s your ammo count?”
He checked the counters on the right side of his HUD. “62 tritium and—”
“Cease fire and switch to regular rounds.”
“Aye, sir. Copenhaver?” Taulbee said.
“Doing it now, sir,” she said.
The ammo counter had already dropped to 60 rounds before she switched. Cursing to himself, Taulbee refocused on the cannon feed. The explosive rounds, as expected, didn’t appear to be damaging the pinecones. However, the barrage of lethal tritium rounds had apparently made them wary of the flying projectiles. The wall had begun to thin in patches as some of the pinecones decided to get out of range, or at least be less of a target.
Taulbee glanced at the other cam feeds. S&R Black’s starboard flechette cannons had started firing explosive rounds as well. The top of Mira’s hull was alight with micro explosions driving Atmo-steel flechettes into the groups still descending to the aft. A proximity alert warning flashed on the HUD. With a mental groan, he flipped to the starboard cam. What he saw made him blink. Just a few kilometers away, a trio of objects headed to the area. At least a dozen kilometers separated the three, and their trajectories weren’t uniform, but they were coming. And if they were anything like the insect things, they’d arrive sooner than later.
“Taulbee to Dunn. Do you—?”
“We see them, Lieutenant,” Dunn said. “Stay as long as you can.”
“Aye, sir.” Taulbee flipped back to the cannon feed. The pinecones had thinned their wall, but it was still at least a few creatures thick at its least crowded points. Through a few gaps, he could even see the blacker than black darkness inside the cut-off aft section, looking like the gaps between black teeth in a black mouth.
Copenhaver was running out of explosive flechettes. During a typical marine engagement, you didn’t send 100 rounds into a crowd of suited humans without knowing they’d all be fragmented to hell. By the time you got five shots off, that particular battle was over and portable anti-ship munitions were streaking toward you, or you managed to hurt them bad enough to force a retreat and move in for a search and destroy mission. But here? These damned things just soaked up the flechettes like Atmo-steel sponges.
“Gunny!” Taulbee tried again. “Gunny, are you there?”
No response.
Taulbee initiated a block connection to Gunny, but that didn’t work either. Something inside the ship had completely scrambled their comms. Either that, or Gunny and his squad were already dead, floating inside the great derelict, meters from the beacon, trapped behind a wall of alien creatures. “And we’d never know it,” he said to himself.
“Dunn to Taulbee,” the captain’s voice broke through his thoughts.
“Aye, sir?”
“Another thirty seconds of this and Black will be down to less than 50% of her munitions.”
He knew what the captain was saying. He’d been thinking the same thoughts Taulbee had. Now it was time to cut bait. They’d failed for now. They’d have to find another way to—
“Sir!” Copenhaver yelled.
Taulbee switched to the cannon feed. A pinpoint of white light penetrated the moving wall. Dozens of pinecones shattered in its wake. He held his breath and waited to see what was coming out.
******
His speed bordered on suicidal, but there were gaps of light up ahead. He had a pretty good idea as to why, too. Right now, Private Copenhaver was no doubt spraying down the fucking things with flechette after flechette. And the pinecones? Well, they didn’t like it one bit.
Wendt and Murdock fired their own weapons, tritium flechettes streaking through the darkness before plowing into the wall of creatures. The floodlights, seeming to get brighter the further they retreated toward the rear of the aft section, shined through clouds of shattered shells, decapitated silver hooks, and spinning gore.
The skiff bumped a beam on the port-side and the craft slid sideways as it approached the wall. Cursing, he adjusted the attitude and tried to keep the skiff pointed straight into their midst. The skiff was moving at 20m/s now. No more than thirty meters from the wall, they were going to hit it head-on. If one of the creatures got in his way, it might take his damned head off. Or Murdock’s. Or even destroy the cannon. He ground his teeth and hit the thrusters. The skiff slid sideways again and he put it into a controlled roll at the same time.
A bone-jarring vibration shuddered through the skiff’s Atmo-steel hull as the skiff’s bottom slammed into the wall of creatures. It cut their momentum significantly, but the skiff continued floating out into space. Gunny checked the starboard cam feed and could see a hole through the wall he’d just come through. The pinecone wall had formed a ripple and had begun parting like curtains.
Both Murdock and Wendt were yelling on the comms, but Gunny didn’t even notice. He was too busy flipping the skiff out of the aft section and pointing the bow back into space. The rear cam showed him more of the pinecones detaching from the ship and from one another. They seemed to be following him.
Gunny pounded the rear thrusters and the skiff quickly accelerated. He kept them firing until a fuel reserve warning kicked on, as well as a proximity alert. He looked up in time to see the SV-52 flying in a positive vector directly above the skiff. Taulbee was providing more cover. Good.
Another vibration shuddered through the hull, but his HUD showed no impacts. “Shit! Gunny!”
“What, Murdock?”
The marine sounded both shocked and terrified at the same time. “I think this thing is getting ready to go off!”
His teeth rattled in his skull. Whatever the beacon had started doing, it was getting worse. A HUD alert flashed. The skiff’s Atmo-steel integrity was beginning to give way. If they didn’t stop the beacon, the goddamned thing was going to shake them into pieces, and his squad would die long before that happened.
“Private!” Gunny yelled. “Wendt! Eject! Now!”
“No!” Wendt yelled back. “I’m—”
“That’s a fucking order, marine!” Gunny screamed through the mic.
A heartbeat later, he watched as their suit-beacons went into emergency mode. His HUD showed them as two pulsing red dots behind him. At the speed the skiff was traveling, the marines would have to use their suit thrusters to slow down unless they wanted to follow him. He hoped like hell neither of them was dumb enough for that.
Gunny punched the thrusters again. “Fuck the fuel,” he said to no one and kept the pressure on. The thrusters, not designed for a full burn, glowed like miniature stars. The pulsing continued getting stronger, his stomach and lungs wanting to jump through his chest with each successive energy wave.
His HUD flickered twice and lines of static flitted across the cam image, leaving his vision distorted and incomplete. Before him was the vast emptiness of the Kuiper Belt. He checked the rear cam and just had time to make out a few of the dangerous lifeforms following him before it went dead.
“Well,” he said, “at least it’s not the whole fucking horde.”
“Gunny!” Taulbee yelled. “Eject! Now!”
His brain felt as though it was turning jelly, as if it were hopping up and down in his skull like a two year old throwing a tantrum. Taulbee was still screaming over the comms, but the words came out in unintelligible, gap-filled s
treams of syllables. The gist, however, was pretty clear—Gunny needed to eject.
The next vibration made something snap in his chest and he suddenly lost vision in his left eye. The image through the cam feed became a wall of static in his right eye while his left looked at nothing but darkness. His hand hovered over the eject button.
Fuck Pluto. As long as he was in the chair, he could fly the skiff out. He could set the beacon on a course to go back the way it came. He could—
His body shook with a convulsion. That last pulse had broken something inside him. A rib. Or maybe his spleen. Bright pain rose in a fiery column from his feet to his fingers. A tooth exploded in the lower left of his jaw. Gunny slumped forward and his hand hit the eject button.
Suddenly, he was out of the skiff, his right eye watching as the craft continued into the black, heading not toward Pluto, but further out into the Kuiper Belt. “Fuck,” he said. “I could have—”
Just as the cylinder detonated a sun’s worth of light into the darkness, he passed out.
Chapter Fifty-Five
Cut me a goddamned break, Dickerson thought. Of the five escape pods, only three had come back online. The other two? Nothing. He leaned down to the power connectors checking for damage. Sure enough, there was. Of a kind.
One of the power cables connecting to the pods was covered in a translucent, silver line of acid. The stuff had eaten through the insulation surrounding the cable, no doubt causing a short in the system. Dickerson marked the cable on his HUD with a hazard indicator and checked the others.
The fifth escape pod’s power coupling seemed fine, but it still didn’t show any power readings. “Elliott? Stand out here and let me know if this thing flickers.”
“Got it,” Elliott said.
Dickerson climbed into the escape pod and checked the controls. A barely visible indicator light pulsed red. He reached out and pressed it. The manual controls HUD appeared, flickered, and then died. He cursed and tried again. The holographic HUD blinked into existence, but ghostly lines of static flickered across the readouts. He found the diagnostic button and touched it.
The HUD disappeared, leaving a single line of text floating in the air: “Running Diagnostic.” Dickerson activated his comms. “Corporal. One of the dead pods is actually responding, but the block interface is fried. It’s manual only and the controls are, well, a little damaged. I think.”
Kali sighed. “Okay. How damaged?”
“Running a diagnostic. Assuming it finishes, I’ll know.”
“Hey, Dickerson,” Elliott said, “the pod’s running lights are dim, but they’re glowing.”
“Figures.” Running lights weren’t high on the list of priorities. If the emergency beacon wasn’t too damaged, S&R Black, the skiffs, and the SV-52 would be able to track it. He glared at the text still glowing in mid-air, willing it to finish its cycle. Tapping your foot in z-g while connected via magnetics was practically impossible, but you could still curl your toes. Dickerson found himself doing just that.
A few seconds later, the text froze and slowly faded out as a barely legible status report appeared in its place. Several yellow and red highlights glared at him from the display. Dickerson pounded his fist on the flight chair armrest. “Corporal? This pod’s mostly fried.”
“No life support?”
“Worse,” he said. “The automatic controls are more or less dead. The manual ones check out, but there’s also a fault in one of the thrusters.”
Kalimura paused before responding. “How about comms?”
“Diagnostic says they’re in good shape, but I don’t even know if we can trust this.”
“Elliott,” Kalimura said, “go to one of the good pods and run a diagnostic there too. I want to compare them.”
“Aye, Corporal,” Elliott said.
Dickerson continued scanning through the damage report and sighed. At least the damned thing had fuel. Not as though that was much of a surprise. The escape pods required very little in the way of actual propulsion. If Mira had power, the launchers would catapult the escape pods out into space with a charge of compressed gas. In doing so, the pods could accelerate away from the ship and slowly change their trajectory via thrusters. Since Mira wasn’t powered, he was dubious they’d have much of a push into space. Each pod would quickly exhaust its fuel, leaving the occupants stuck on whatever trajectory they managed before going dry.
He examined the fuel reports with a grim chuckle. Well, Mira’s pods may be of some use after all. Since the ship had been designed for deep space, and any chance of immediate rescue by SF Gov forces was nil, the pods had been designed to at least give their occupants a chance. Not much of one, but better than he’d expected.
Assuming the pods hadn’t been too damaged, they might actually be able to pilot these things as far as Pluto. Maybe. Out here in the Kuiper Belt, it wasn’t as though there was much gravity to contend with. Provided they could point themselves in that direction, the pods would eventually take up orbit around the dwarf planet.
But this pod? No automatic controls, a damaged flight console, and plenty of concerns about its integrity, regardless of what the diagnostic said. “Fucked as usual,” he said to no one.
“Hey!” Elliott called out. “No block comms, but it looks like we should be able to communicate with Black.”
“Outstanding,” Kalimura said. “How about the diagnostics?”
“I’ll check the other two, but looks like we’re in good shape,” Elliott said.
“Dickerson?” Kalimura asked. “What do you think?”
“I think someone’s getting the short end of the straw,” he said. “Whoever takes this one is going to need to be damned careful.”
She went silent for a moment. He knew what she was going to say before she said it. It was the exact same thing he’d have said if he were still a corporal. “The damaged one is mine,” Kalimura said.
“Bullshit,” Carb said.
“No arguments.”
Dickerson glared at the diagnostics, willing them to give him some idea of her chances. It was going to be a crapshoot. If Kalimura took this pod, he reckoned her chances were 50/50 for finding a decent trajectory. Since they didn’t even know where S&R Black was, that could mean flying in a direction that would require the ship to actually come and get her, or flying straight into the ship’s hull. The other pods, with their working automatic controls, would thrust or brake depending on obstacles and other factors. Kalimura would have to take care of that on her own.
Fighting a sigh, Dickerson stood from the pod couch just as the ship quaked. The vibration made him sway on his magnetically locked feet. Whatever was happening to Mira was certainly tearing her apart. The quake stopped as suddenly as it had begun.
“Goddamnit,” Elliott wheezed through the mic. “What the hell are they doing out there?”
“Guessing the tow isn’t going well,” Kalimura said. “All the more reason for us to get the hell out of here.”
“Um, Boss?” Carb said.
The tone of her voice chilled Dickerson’s blood.
“What, Carb?” Kalimura asked.
“That hatch is open.”
Dickerson quickly exited the escape pod and looked at the far bulkhead. The hatch leading to the cargo bay had completely buckled, one side of it crumbling into flakes of metal swirling toward the ceiling. He felt a vibration beneath his feet followed by a series of impacts below the deck.
“Oh, shit,” Kalimura said. Dickerson fixed his eyes on the widening hole where the hatch had been. Something long and black was making its way through the hole.
Chapter Fifty-Six
A brilliant cone of yellow and white light punctured the shadowy Kuiper Belt. Even as his screens dimmed, he saw the skiff silhouetted behind the blast looking like a tiny slit of darkness. Alarms filled his HUD, including a radiation warning. A moment later, a vibration rattled the SV-52 like an earthquake.
“Motherfucker!” Taulbee yelled. He set the rear cam feed as t
he primary window on his HUD and slammed down the throttle, the SV-52 jerking backward as the thrusters engaged. “Copenhaver? Turn the cannon. Track our marines.”
“Aye, sir,” she said.
“Taulbee to Dunn.”
“Copy, Taulbee. We see it. Oakes is breaking off our attack. We’ll be turning away from Mira and curving back to meet you.”
“Aye, sir. Did Gunny eject?”
Dunn paused. “Yes, he did. You might want to make him your first pickup.”
A cold chill ran down his spine. “Sir?”
“He’s lost consciousness and his life signs are weak.”
Taulbee cursed. “Aye, sir. Taulbee out.”
He killed the forward thrusters, rotated the ‘52, and flew toward Gunny. Since he’d gone the farthest with the skiff, the sergeant had traveled at a positive vector with a negative lateral. In other words, from Taulbee’s vantage point, Gunny was traveling up and away. The up was fast. The away was even faster.
The skiff had been flying at 40m/s and picking up speed. Taulbee accelerated the SV-52 to 60m/s, all the while checking the positions of the other two marines so he didn’t collide with them. He passed both Wendt and Murdock. The pair had used their suit thrusters to slow down and link up. They would remain safe for a few minutes. He hoped.
Taulbee’s screens flickered, stabilized, and flickered again. A few lines of static broke over his view before disappearing. Interference wave? Some kind of shockwave? He didn’t know. Shit, how the hell could he?
Finally nearing the sergeant, he slowed the SV-52 as quickly as he could. “Copenhaver?”
“Aye, sir. I’ve got the tether ready.”
He grinned. The deep steel in her voice told him she was ready to save her sergeant and damned confident she was going to do it. Yup. Field promotion was definitely in her future.
“I’m going to pull up in front of him. Fire the net and we’ll slowly reel him in. I want him stable so we can get back to Black in a flash.” Taulbee checked his speed and position. “Here we go.”
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