by Rick Partlow
Robillard was all business, military through and through, a recent transfer from the Spartan Navy, sent to replace Lance Bergh, their old Helm officer, who’d betrayed them to Rhianna Hale after her secret police had taken his family hostage. Kammy felt horrible for Bergh and was glad Logan had decided to limit his punishment to involuntary separation from the service, but it was still strange seeing someone else driving his ship.
“Tara,” Kammy ordered, “I want this over as quickly as possible, before they can warn anyone on the ground, but I want the ship intact for boarding. Take out her drives, her communications antenna and her hangar bay, in that order.”
The image on the main bridge screen had shifted as he spoke, the planet and the Jeuta ship orbiting it drawing closer at a precipitous rate as the stardrive boosted them at the equivalent of twenty gravities of acceleration without any of the nasty parts about dying and being squished into a fine paste against the deck. Thanks to the artificial gravity field Terrin had engineered using an effect of the stardrive, they were able to sit in a comfortable one standard gravity and talk as if they weren’t hurtling breakneck through space. Kammy wasn’t sure if it was something he’d ever get used to.
“We’ll need the main gun to take out the drives,” Tara mused, tapping a finger against her cheek in contemplation. “Have to make it a glancing blow to avoid igniting her fuel stores. With the reactor down, we won’t have to worry about her deflectors or ECM, so we can use conventional missiles to hit the communications array and the docking bay.”
“Your call, Tara,” Kammy said. “Just make it happen before they detect us.”
“They might not see us at all till we’re right on top of them,” Robillard reminded him. “They won’t have any experience with the stardrive, so we won’t look anything like a ship to their sensors.”
“They’ll know we’re something weird,” Kammy insisted, “even if they don’t know we’re a ship, and that might be enough to put their ground forces on alert, so let’s not waste any time.”
“Capacitors are charged,” Tara announced. “Main gun is ready and I estimate two minutes until we’re in range.”
“Transfer Helm control to Tactical,” Kammy ordered. They both knew their jobs and the command was probably unnecessary on a practical level, but traditions and habits were there for a reason. If nothing else, concentrating on the routine made it easier for him to avoid thinking about Katy and the civilians.
“Helm is yours, Tactical,” Robillard acknowledged, fingers tracing a pattern to allow the override.
“I have the helm,” Tara murmured, eyes fixed on the targeting display.
Unlike any conventional beam weapon, the particle accelerator that was the Shakak’s main gun couldn’t divert the beam using mirrors or magnets. The only way to aim it was to move the whole damn ship, which would have been much more inconvenient if she’d been a conventional vessel dependent on reaction thrusters to maneuver.
Kammy felt himself smiling at a fond memory of the original Shakak, the ship that had been mostly destroyed in a battle with a Starkad cruiser over Terminus. She’d been a conventional ship and her primary weaponry had been a spinal-mount railgun, with the same limitations in regard to aiming. It had been a stone bitch to use in combat, and he’d never thought he’d ever feel nostalgia for it, but the old Shakak had come to represent a far simpler time in his life.
Nothing was simple anymore.
“She’s painting us,” Tara said. “She knows we’re here.” She bared her teeth. “Firing main gun.”
The enemy ship gleamed in the light of the system primary, its surface polished a sterling silver to reflect back as much heat as possible, so bright it nearly hurt to look at it even in the bridge display. This close, it could have passed as a second moon for the planet, the details of the surface of its hull lost in the reflection.
So bright was the glow, the blue glimmer of the particle accelerator firing was almost invisible, and Kammy nearly missed it even with the computer enhancement of the beam on the screen. He didn’t miss the impact. The cruiser’s drives weren’t lit, the interior of the huge, gaping drive bells dark and inactive, but the halo of electrostatic energy bursting out from the drive coils when the beam hit was unmistakable, engulfing the rear of the ship in a cloud of burning metal vapor. Flashes of electrostatic energy crackled inside the cloud like volcanic lightning and he would have thought sure the whole ship was doomed, but the explosions didn’t spread, confined to the drive coils through the expert marksmanship of Tara Gerard.
“Launching short-range missiles,” she announced, fingers dancing over the controls.
It all could have been a Virtual Reality simulation as far anyone on the bridge could tell. The pair of small, short-range missiles darted away from their launch tubes set in the side of the Shakak, the microfluctuation of the drive field to allow their passage barely noticeable. Their rocket engines were matchheads against a bonfire and the only way Kammy could follow their progress was by watching the twin blue lines projected on the tactical display. The warheads were conventional explosives and even the detonations were undetectable except as white thermal blooms in the sensor readout against the yellows and reds of the ship’s superstructure.
“Targets have been serviced,” Tara reported, the term antiseptic in ways inadequate to describe the twisted metal and burning atmosphere where the warhead had taken out a docked shuttle. “Negative transmission ability. Negative drive capability. All docked shuttles destroyed.” She paused, tracing lines across the screen. “Helm control returned.”
“Val, you read me?” Kammy said, touching the intercom control on the arm of his command chair.
“You’re loud and clear, Kammy,” Kurtz returned from back in the hangar bay, strapped into the cockpit of his mech, secured in the hold of the drop-ship waiting there for clearance.
“I’m releasing launch control for the shuttles to you.” Kammy paused. “If she’s down there…”
“I’ll bring her back,” Kurtz finished for him. “Assault shuttles and drop-ships launching immediately.”
Kammy pulled up the feed from the cameras in the hangar bay, casting it to a corner of the front viewers, the blackness of interplanetary space replacing the glow of the planet out the opening of the bay. It didn’t seem natural, the entire compartment being open to space, the air only held in by an electromagnetic field of Imperial design. He didn’t venture to the hangar very often, always struck by an absurd conviction that he’d walk too close to the field and somehow get sucked into space.
In combat, the hangar crews all wore vacuum suits, just in case of a power failure, and he could see them running clear of the ramp just seconds ahead of the assault shuttle. The silver delta glided down an electromagnetic catapult and ejected clear of the ship before the drive ignited and carried the aerospacecraft out of view.
Lieutenant Oliveira. He’d come aboard at Sparta along with Robillard and Kammy knew even less about the man.
Commander Haskell launched behind him, Katy’s appointed successor as Wholesale Slaughter’s assault shuttle squadron leader. He was a good man, steady and unflappable, though not as instinctive a pilot as Katy. But then, Kammy had never met anyone who was.
The assault shuttles had been graceful, deadly, hurling themselves into space with the willful abandon of a bird of prey. The drop-ships were clumsy, awkward, ungainly by comparison, gigantic waterfowl desperately lunging towards the sky against all odds and all the laws of aerodynamics. Kammy shuddered at the thought of flying one of the huge, bulbous lifting bodies in an atmosphere.
Then again, this ship actually flew in an atmosphere. Once. With enough antimatter to power a whole planet for a couple hours.
Once the second of the drop-ships was away, Kammy shifted the view with a stroke of his finger on the screen, showing the odd, cylindrical craft they’d brought along just for this mission.
“Colonel Lee,” Kammy said to the Ranger commander, “you are clear to launch. The Sha
kak will provide cover for your approach.”
“Roger that, Captain,” Lee responded. “Boarding craft launching now.”
Rangers, Kammy thought, were the military equivalent of religious fanatics. Something as ridiculously dangerous and potentially suicidal as boarding an enemy cruiser to secure operational intelligence was seen as perfectly reasonable to them.
“Track the enemy point defenses and take them out, Tara.”
And all the Beneficent Spirits go with you, Colonel. Because you’re going to need them.
John Lee wasn’t used to being scared shitless.
He’d been a Ranger for fifteen years, an officer for eight, and in that time, he’d seen more combat than any three Ranger officers did in an entire career. To dart between the tree-trunk legs of enemy mecha during a battle was nothing to him. Running gunfights in the streets of some Periphery world cow town were business as usual.
Forcing a docking on an enemy ship and boarding under fire was something he’d practiced but never thought he’d do in real life. Still, it wasn’t totally unprecedented. Performing that task against a ship full of Jeuta seemed like a uniquely painful and stupid method of suicide. Lee feared no human, but the Jeuta weren’t human.
But he was a Ranger officer, and showing weakness or fear in front of the troops wasn’t an option. He kept his thoughts to himself and let the platoon think he was being silently stoic.
“ETA three minutes,” First Sergeant Tremonti droned, her voice deliberately emotionless.
He caught a glimpse of her face through the visor of her helmet as she turned back from the control console, a stray beam of light from the cockpit display catching the high-impact polymer at just the right angle. Her brow was pinched, her eyes narrowed and any of the enlisted or junior officers who saw her right now might think she was annoyed, particularly since she seemed perpetually annoyed. But he’d served with her for over a year and he knew it was worry. The fact Top was worried scared him even more.
Sgt. Tremonti was in the foremost seat in the boarding craft, but she wasn’t piloting it. No one was, which might very well have been what was worrying Tremonti.
“Colonel Lee,” a tremulous voice came over his helmet earphones. He didn’t have to check the Heads-Up Display to see it was Lt. Davidson. She was the nominal platoon leader, though he’d be personally leading the unit and the mission.
“Yes, Lieutenant?” he replied, trying to keep the impatience and annoyance out of his tone. He knew she was going to need some hand-holding. She was on her first combat mission and it was a hell of an operation for it. But he needed some hand-holding and damned if there was anyone around to coddle him.
“This thing is basically just an orbital transfer pod someone rigged up, isn’t it?” she asked him.
“That’s correct, Davidson,” he allowed. “Though it was ‘rigged up,’ as you put it, by Navy technicians and based on consultation with Ranger units who’d served in the field.”
“I was just wondering, sir, why it doesn’t have a pilot.”
“It doesn’t need one. The flight computer is programmed with a schematic of the ship taken from the long-range scans and it’ll takes us right to the aft service airlock. No intuitive maneuvering necessary. If everything goes as planned, the whole thing’ll be single-use. We’ll take the ship and get picked up by a shuttle once they can dock unopposed.”
Theoretically.
“But what happens if our primary docking point is blocked or unusable and we have to change our objective, sir? Or what if it’s too heavily defended and we can’t make it through?”
Lee touched the control on his wrist pad to mute his audio so he could sigh heavily without making his disdain too obvious.
“The Shakak is clearing a path for us through their point defenses. And if there is an emergency, there are manual controls and Top is qualified to operate the pod.” He shrugged, then realized she wouldn’t see it through his armor. “It all comes down to this, Lieutenant. There’s barely room inside this thing for a full platoon of Rangers in extravehicular armor. Trying to squeeze in a pilot would just mean one less armed Ranger to help take the ship. I think it’s a good trade-off. Now let’s cut the chatter. We’re either going to be docking or dead in about thirty seconds and I’d like to enjoy either possibility in silence.”
Something flashed in the display screen half-hidden by Top’s shoulder and Lee tried not to flinch. If it had been an enemy weapon, they’d already feel the hit, so he had to trust it was the Shakak’s lasers taking out Jeuta point-defense turrets.
“Everyone, hold on,” Top warned them. “Final braking burn.”
The maneuvering thrusters fired almost before the last word was out of the sergeant’s mouth, their deceleration a loud, sustained banging at the bow of the pod. Lee grunted as the thrust pushed him against his seat restraints, squeezing the breath out of him, the roaring in his ears loud enough he nearly missed Top’s next word.
“Contact!”
If the deceleration had been a mild pressure against his chest, the impact with the hull of the Jeuta ship was a sledgehammer blow, sending stars dancing across his vision. Lee couldn’t see the accordion folds of the docking ring collapsing into the hull of the cruiser, but he could certainly hear it, the concussion of warping metal conducted right through the fuselage of the pod. The active docking ring was the chief innovation responsible for turning a conventional orbital transfer shuttle into a boarding pod. Its broad, funnel shape extended five meters out from the main airlock, an oversized magnetic grapple connecting them to the surface of the hull around the ship’s service lock.
“Permission to initiate breaching charge?” Top asked him, her finger hovering over the detonator.
Lee marveled at how quickly the First Sergeant had recovered from the impact. It still took him another three seconds for his head to clear enough to simply confirm the order.
“Initiate.”
“Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole!”
Lee gritted his teeth as Sergeant Tremonti twisted the detonator, but the blast wasn’t as violent as the impact with the hull had been, just a shudder passing through the deck. Most of the shaped charge had been directed downward into the outer door of the ship’s airlock, and if it had worked…
“Positive seal!” Top barked, yanking at the quick-release for his safety harness. “First squad stack for entry!”
The phrase had a slightly different meaning in microgravity. The Rangers squeezed past Top’s command station and clustered around the pod’s interior lock like a constellation, waiting for the woman to pull the lever and release the hatch. They were attack dogs on a leash, Lee thought, spastic, quivering, ready to go.
Was I ever that young?
“Go!” Top yelled. She’d attached her magnetic boots to the deck for purchase and now she used the anchorage to jerk the lever downward.
The airlock iris dilated and a haze of pale smoke was expelled into the boarding pod along with a gust of air, the pressure differential between the two spacecraft equalizing in an instant. The inrush of atmosphere ceased abruptly and the Rangers erupted through the docking tunnel on jets of compressed gas from the zero-g maneuvering packs attached to their vacuum armor.
The chatter of gunfire reached up from the interior of the ship before Second squad squeezed through behind them, just two quick bursts, some unlucky technician in the wrong place at the wrong time. Top had followed First, moving like a wraith through the smoke, and Lee moved out behind Second, one hand gripping the remote for his maneuvering pack while the other wrapped around the pistol grip of his carbine. The weapon was secured to his vacuum armor with a gimbal mount to make it easier to aim and fire one-handed, and connected to the circuitry of his maneuvering pack to allow the jets to compensate for the rifle’s recoil with their compressed-gas thrusters.
It all seemed ungainly, awkward, and incredibly bulky to Lee, who had always shared the late Lyta Randell’s fondness for a minimalist approach t
o infantry tactics. But special environments required special equipment and he resigned himself to the idea of becoming a miniature assault shuttle for the duration of the operation.
At the moment, he felt less like an assault shuttle and more a passenger car at a busy intersection. The service airlock opened up into a small utility bay, crammed with square, metal equipment lockers and racks of vacuum suits, everything covered in a dark, greasy soot from the explosion, though no smoke remained from the blast since it had all been blown into the pod. First squad had moved on through the bay and into the passageway beyond, but Second was still spread out across the open space, blocking his way. Third was strung out behind him, with Lt. Davidson bringing up the rear, somehow managing to look more tentative and awkward than the others, even in the bulky armor.
Spinning lazily in the midst of the squad of Rangers were the remains of a pair of Jeuta, probably a maintenance crew from the stained work coveralls they both wore. Globules of blood orbited their torn bodies like the rings of a gas giant, a few splattering against Ranger armor when they strayed too far from the proximity of the Jeuta. The blood gave him comfort in some odd, demented way, reassuring him of their vulnerability.
“We’re clear,” Top reported. “Move up.”
Second squad funneled through the hatchway out into the passage, the Rangers staggering their positions between opposite bulkheads and the last pair through positioning themselves to watch their rear approach until Third could follow.
Colonel Lee sailed through the center of the formation towards Sgt. Tremonti’s position, finally noticing the lighting. It hadn’t been apparent to him before, with the infrared night vision built into his helmet’s visor, but finally he saw the flashing of warning beacons left over from the human designers of the ship and paused to touch a control and deactivate the night-vision filters. The light was tinged red, the signature of the low-power emergency lighting, activated when the ship’s main power was down and they were running on battery backup alone.
