Admiral Invincible (A Spineward Sectors Novel: Book 7)

by Luke Sky Wachter

  The force of the blast sent the man’s lone, surviving partner staggering until he fell, his armor blackened below the knees from proximity to the blast.

  “That’ll buy us a few minutes,” Laurent said, thinking of the two grenades that went back through the broken blast doors thanks to that Lancer’s heroic sacrifice.

  “Maybe, sir. But with only one Lancer left, and his suit damaged, we won’t survive another attack,” said Lieutenant Steiner, coming up on his elbow. “It won’t matter how much we fire in support; these hand weapons just aren’t meant to deal with battle droids.”

  The noise of metallic feet clanging outside the bridge gave the lie to the ‘few minutes’ Laurent had proposed. It looked like they were going to be right back in it shortly.

  “Half the bridge crew is down, dead, or wounded, Captain,” the Comm. Lieutenant said, looking a little ragged around the edges but clearly firm in her resolve to do her duty to her shipmates. “What should we do, Captain?”

  “Aim your weapon, Lieutenant,” Laurent said shortly, “and pray that someone gets here in time to reinforce us, otherwise…” he trailed off, knowing there really wasn’t very much else to say.

  The fallen Lancer tried to get back up, but something in his feet and ankles wouldn’t work right and so instead he sat back against the wall and aimed his weapon at the entrance.

  Crouching down behind his command chair, the Captain prepared to sell himself dearly. Then the sound of multiple footsteps caused him to turn his head.

  Looking back, he saw the grim expressions of a dozen men and women as they took up new positions behind him, using consoles and chairs for cover.

  “We’re with you, Captain,” the Navigator said firmly, “till the end, sir.”

  “They won’t take the bridge while we’re alive,” DuPont agreed firmly, gripping a sonic pistol in one hand and a ruined piece of a console in the other as a makeshift shield.

  The captain closed his eyes and then nodded, turning back to the door with a sense of renewed purpose. He couldn’t help but do his best with a crew like this at his back.

  “Steady on, Mr. Shepherd and Mr. DuPont. Steady on,” he said in a loud, carrying voice.

  Then the entrance to the bridge opened up into a hailstorm of blaster fire.

  **************************************************

  “The droids are moving reinforcements to block you, Mistress,” informed Captain Darius, “we’re catching what we can, but they’re moving from the center of the ship and making a concerted push for the bridge. Expect an attack from the rear before I can gather my company and relieve you.”

  Akantha gritted her teeth in frustration. “We are finding heavy resistance to our front and intermittent attacks to our flanks. We are almost there! May MEN curse these droids with weak wrists and sterility.”

  “What are your orders, Lady Akantha?” asked the Caprian Sergeant beside her.

  For a long moment, she stared at the fire fight taking place to the front of her warriors’ position. They were so close—a mere two corridors away from the bridge!

  “In the name of MEN,” she swore, glaring back the way they had just come and wishing she could destroy the enemy just by willing it. She gave a growl, “Pull in our flanking parties; we need to reinforce the rear guard and prepare for a concerted counterattack on all sides. It seems the Droid Overlords are objecting to our presence.”

  **************************************************

  “I thought you said you could get us close to the bridge, not drown us in muck,” I said with an unhappy look at the man beside me.

  “You said you wanted to get to the bridge as fast as possible while avoiding the droid battle-bots,” said the Environmental Senior Petty Officer. “Well, this is it!”

  “This is a sewage tank!” I protested irritably.

  “It’s an empty algae tank for reprocessing waste into food bars—and exactly,” the Environmental man corrected. “Oh, and, uh, here we are,” replied the Petty Officer, proudly pointing to the wall of the tank.

  I walked over and rapped my fist against the solid metal wall and shook my head. I looked back at the PO, questioning why exactly again I was standing knee deep in an algae tank waiting to be refilled with raw sewage that would be eventually turned into emergency ration bars.

  “Oh,” the environmental PO said with sudden understanding, “you’ll need to get through this wall, and then two sets of floors and you’ll be right outside the end of the hallway leading to the bridge.” He then turned put two fingers into his mouth and whistled.

  A pair of environmental techs came running up with a heavy metal container swaying between them.

  “Here, Chief,” the Techs told the young petty officer.

  “Here we go,” the Senior Petty Officer said, pulling out a wet, not-quite-liquid substance and spreading it over the wall in the general outline of a door, before sticking a series of metal cylinders into the wet substance. “A follower of the Lady Briga is never without a little fire in their back pocket, if you know what I mean.”

  “Are those explosives?” I asked with concern.

  “Got it in one, Admiral,” the Senior PO said with satisfaction. “You’d be surprised what you can make from basic cleaning chemicals they send us for keeping this ship running. Our Lady of Glorious Oxidation isn’t only just about fire and oxidation, you know, sir; she’s got any number of recipes in her cookbook of mysteries,” he added with a wink. “Now, if you wouldn’t mind stepping back.”

  Belatedly, I stepped back and while moving quickly through the sludge-like fluid was difficult I did it as fast as my protesting joint could manage.

  “Fire in the hole!” the other man shouted, and with a stutter the explosive material ignited. “It’ll burn through in a minute or so, and I made sure to bring enough to get you where you’re going, Admiral!”

  After multiple popping sounds, the impromptu door fell back with a clang exposing an empty corridor.

  “Wonderful,” I said, glumly trying to imagine how I was supposed to climb up two levels without a ladder, and in my current condition the only answer I was coming up with was ‘very painfully.’

  “I’ve seen the way those battle-suits can jump, so you lot should be up there in nothing flat,” the Environmental Petty Officer assured me.

  For emphasis, I looked down at my unsuited form and then back up. “We’ll manage,” I said shortly and then turned and motioned for Gants.

  “The bridge is out there, sir?” he asked skeptically.

  I shook my head and pointed. “Two floors up,” I said.

  Gants barked a laugh. “How are we supposed to manage that,” the Armory Chief wondered aloud.

  “The PO here assures me that the Lancers jump these kinds of things easily,” I replied, raising my brows in mock surprise.

  Gants shook his head. “I guess we’ll find a way…” he stopped and looked around, “hey, does anybody have a ladder?”

  I face palmed.

  Fortunately—and despite the initial three-ring circus—the Armory team came up with a plan and, within minutes, we were applying the explosive paste Environmental had come up with to the ceiling.

  “Are you sure it’s safe to use something the enviro-techs cooked up with cleaning chemicals?” Gants asked nervously.

  “I think the better question is” just what exactly are the techs doing with recipes that can blow down walls inside my ship?” I said, giving the techs in question a piercing look.

  Eyes were averted, and faces turned elsewhere.

  “Just something we found on the ship’s Briga-net, Admiral,” the Petty Officer said uncomfortably. “You know, for in case of emergencies. Engineers aren’t the only ones with their secrets onboard this ship,” he finished with semi-defiant pride.

  “That didn’t help alleviate my worries,” I said tersely, but not having the time to chase down the particulars and investigate quasi-religious, explosive practices, of the life support crew or just
what exactly was going on in the bowls of this ship when no one else was looking, I decided to let it pass…for now. “Let’s get going.”

  Putting words to action, the Armory team soon had two holes in the flooring of my increasingly beleaguered ship. Of course, making holes was a lot easier than climbing up through them and, after one brief attempt that left me in agony, I decided it was better to suffer the indignity of a ride on the back of an Armory member. Each team member, in turn, climbed up the back of another man in power-armor, who was bracing himself against the wall and forming a kind of human ladder.

  Climbing up one another wasn’t as fast or as dramatic as the Lancers who would toss one another this way and that in full power armor, but it got the job done. Before we knew it, I was climbing up into the hallway just around the corner from the entrance to the bridge.

  “Just around the corner here, Admiral Montagne,” Gants whispered loudly, although I didn’t know why he bothered.

  With the amount of blaster fire and plasma grenade explosions taking place a short distance away, I doubted even a droid could hear us.

  “Sounds like the bridge is in trouble. What do you want we should do?” asked Gants.

  I looked around meeting the gazes of the half dozen men here with me. “Let’s take them in the rear and pound those droids into scrap metal, boys,” I said, raising a hand, clenching my fist, and pointing in the direction of the bridge. “With all this commotion, they’ll never see us coming….” I paused dramatically, “Once again, it’s just you, me, and the Armory team, Gants. Just like in the bug ship: victory or death!”

  Heads bobbed up and down vigorously, “Victory or death!”

  “Let’s go!” I shouted, pulling out my hand blaster.

  “Charge!” shouted Gants.

  Rushing around the corner, we found at least two dozen droids. But they were so focused on rushing onto the bridge that they didn’t even notice us—until we smashed into them like a grav-bus into a street filled with pedestrians, that is.

  “Run them over and get into the bridge!” I screamed, unloading my pistol into the faceplate—or whatever it was called—of a droid that had fallen to the floor from a shot to the torso by a blaster rifle.

  A sonic grenade went off in the middle of the largest concentration of droids, throwing them to the ground and not incidentally picking me up and tossing me back the way I’d come.

  For long moments, all I could do was curl up in agony. When I finally looked back up, I could see battle-suits in amongst the droids, kicking, stomping and firing their rifles at point blank range.

  More sonic grenades went off, sending the smaller, but more nimble and maneuverable, battle droids crashing to the ground. But those same blasts did no more than stagger the larger, power-armored Armory team.

  Having no wish to be knocked to the ground again, I stayed lying down until the grenades stopped going off.

  “Who’s got the Admiral?” shouted Gants. “We’ve got a hole; we’ve got to go in now!”

  Two deck-shaking strides later, a man in a battle-suit landed beside me with a crash. “Come on, sir!” shouted the Armory man, temporarily deafening me as he must have had his external speaker set to maximum volume. Reaching down, he grabbed me by the arm and—ignoring or unaware of the pain-filled screech I made as he manhandled me to my feet—he placed an arm around my middle and then jumped back the way he had just come.

  Many droids were down, but not all of them were out—as was soon made evident by the blaster bolt that took me in the arm.

  “Go, go, go,” Gants shouted, tapping each of the three other Armory battlesuits crouched outside the door to the bridge on the shoulder. After each tap, a man threw himself shouting and screaming into the bridge, his blaster firing even before he was inside.

  “You’re next, sir,” Gants shouted shoving the armory man who was holding me through the doorway.

  “Stay by the wall,” shouted the man who’d been carrying me before suddenly letting me go.

  I fell to the ground with a thump, but with the cross-fire I suddenly found myself in, I forced myself to crawl out of the immediate line of fire before looking up for targets.

  What I saw when I looked at my previously pristine bridge was an image right out of a battlefield.

  Near the blast doors were the metallic bodies of droids and duralloy-encased Lancers, which I had halfway expected. But further in, the images of unarmored bridge standers lying dead in the aisles, or slumped face-first over their consoles with holes shot through their bodies shook me to my core.

  For half a second, I wondered if everyone was dead. Then I saw Captain Laurent pop up and fire a blaster pistol at a droid before ducking back down behind a far console.

  “Get them, boys!” cried Gants, charging at the nearest droid and taking several blaster shots as the Droid stood its ground briefly before rolling away when Gants got too close. With a mighty kick, Gants’ leg shot out, punting the smaller droid into the wall like it was a smashball.

  Shoving the barrel of his rifle into the face of the droid, he blew its head off before turning and using the butt of the rifle to knock away a battle-droid coming at him with a vibro-blade.

  “The Admiral’s here, and he’s brought reinforcements,” shouted DuPont. “Hurray for the Little Admiral!”

  “Huzzah!” cried a dozen voices.

  “Shoot them!” cried Shepherd, popping up to shoot a droid, but an instant later he spun from a droid counter-shot and crashed to the deck.

  “Rick!” screamed DuPont looking down at his friend. The ship’s Helmsman started to come around from behind his console, firing with wild abandon before Steiner came running from the side, and tackled him to the ground. The timing of the little com-tech’s move was perfect, as a pair of bolts intersected where his head and his heart had been located.

  “I’ve got more of them coming out here,” shouted the single rearguard who Gants had posted to guard the permanently opened blast door.

  “Use the grenades!” Gants shouted.

  Sonic and plasma explosions started rocking the deck outside the bridge. Thanks to the sudden counterattack from the rear, and some inspired defensive shots from the handful of bridge survivors, the tide took a decisive turn.

  Within moments, the last of the battle-droids were unmoving on the floor and only three of the Armory team—including Gants—were still moving. A fourth was sitting on the floor holding his side while another had been shot through the helmet and lay unmoving on the floor.

  Only counting five battle-suits within the bridge, I concluded we must have lost one out in the hall before even reaching the door.

  “There’s more of them coming, but these ones seem damaged,” called out the Armory guy at the doorway. “I need help!” he screamed, just before reeling back as his visor shattered from a blaster bolt.

  Gants and the other still-mobile man in power-armor ran back to the door.

  The firing was fast and furious, with the droids going hand to hand in a last-ditch attempt to overwhelm us.

  Then the firing outside redoubled, but not all of it was coming through the doorway.

  “Messene!” roared a Tracto-an voice, quickly echoed by a dozen others.

  Half a minute later, the last of the droids outside our doors had been annihilated, and fresh Lancer reinforcements were pouring onto the bridge.

  A tall figure in distinctive battle armor strode into the room, took a moment to survey the dead and wounded at the bridge consoles, and then spotted me.

  The Lancer strode over to where I was sitting on the floor. “You live, Jason?” asked the voice of my wife, sounding faintly concerned.

  “I think I’ll make it,” I said with a half-smile. “Nice entrance; you came just in time—but I still got here first. Had to go through a wall and two floors, though…”

  “You weren’t on the bridge, my Protector?” Akantha asked more formally, that brief moment of semi-concern gone.

  I shook my head.

&
nbsp; “Then what are you doing lazing about on the floor?” she demanded, and just like that all softer emotions were gone.

  I tried to get back up under my own power, but my abused body just didn’t want to do it. It took a pair of hands under my armpits to lift me back up and when I regained my feet I swayed.

  “How did you get here?” I asked.

  “We took a battleship and counter-boarded when we saw the Phoenix under duress,” Akantha informed me matter-of-factly, as though she was recounting a recent trip to the local shopping mall—not that Akantha had ever set foot in one.

  Instinctively, I looked toward the bridge but the screen was down. The projector must have been damaged or destroyed.

  “What’s the situation outside the ship?” I called out, my voice a clear question that invited anyone with the knowledge to answer.

  Slowly regaining their feet the stunned survivors of the massacre on the bridge looked at me and then at their shot up and damaged consoles and dead comrades sprawled about.

  Despite a heroic defense, it was clear I wasn’t going to find out anything of major importance anytime soon.

  “We’ve got wounded in the ready room,” Laurent said, standing up and starting toward me only to collapse. He had a burn mark scorching the side of his uniform, and he was bleeding from the same spot.

  “Let’s get some medics in here,” I said, turning to Akantha.

  “We crippled the engines of one Heavy Cruiser, but the other ran off and we could not catch it. We also destroyed the engines of one Battleship, and the warriors of the Parliamentary Power were boarding another. However, there was still a fourth Battleship, moving and firing her weapons. There is no way of knowing if the Droid force that boarded her will be able to successfully storm her or not,” Akantha said. “Droid force? Did the droids turn on each other, or…” at her head shake I understood. “The Sentients Assembly,” I said feeling a weight of relief roll over me.