Before she had consciously decided to do so, Lu Bu hurled the helmet toward the catwalk and gripped the primary grenade in her left hand. She was naturally left-handed, but had learned to throw with her right during the past several months and was filled with savage glee upon seeing the makeshift bomb sail through the air toward the catwalk and the five Marines manning it.
A blaster bolt smashed into her helmet, followed by a trio of impacts on her thighs, and she scrambled blindly to the right for no more than two steps as her visor blacked out entirely. In the same instant that the first bolt struck, she pressed the activation button for the grenade and tried to hurl it toward the center of the room.
Not long after it left her hand, the world went black.
“Maintain course,” Middleton ordered after the Pride had been rocked by yet another extreme range turbo-laser strike courtesy of the Dämmerung’s guns.
He looked up at the chronometer which indicated that Sergeant Gnuko’s team had already exceeded the mission’s timeline by thirty seconds and felt his stomach tighten into a hard knot.
“Mr. Fei,” he spun his chair to face the young man at Comm., “status report.”
Fei Long’s fingers were flying so quickly over his console that Middleton could scarcely keep up with his deceptively rhythmic motions. “I am still attempting to—“ he cut off mid-sentence as the Pride was rocked once again by the Dämmerung’s weapons. The impact was powerful enough to knock several people from their stations, including the Shields operator.
“Critical spotting on the starboard shields,” Sarkozi reported after helping the Shields operator regain his feet and return to his duties. “We must roll the ship, Captain.”
“Helm,” Middleton growled, “make it so.” He then returned his attention to Fei Long, knowing that if Sergeant Gnuko’s team had failed to breach Main Engineering then it was his obligation to retreat to the system’s gas giant in the hope that the Pride could use it for cover on an almost certainly doomed-to-failure run for the hyper limit. “Mr. Fei…now would be a good time for that report.”
“The signal has returned,” Fei Long replied anxiously, and a moment later a section of the main viewer was filled with the image of the enemy ship’s Main Engineering compartment. A firefight was under way, and catastrophic damage appeared to have been done to the main catwalk which had previously hung over the left side of the compartment.
The hulking form of a Lancer wearing Storm Drake armor appeared in front of the video pickup. The Lancer was hefting a plasma cannon in his hands, and the weapon’s power cell flashed an instant before Fei Long blurted, “No!”
The video stream cut to black instantly, and Middleton became aware of just how tightly his hands had been gripping the arms of his chair. “What happened?” he demanded of the talented young computer specialist.
“High frequency bursts caused by the plasma cannon are interfering with the onboard serial buses,” Fei Long replied as though it was an afterthought. His hands moved over the console with blazing speed, and after a moment he growled in frustration—an uncharacteristic sound to come from the young man. “The processors should re-align in forty three seconds,” he bit out angrily. “The drones will be incapable of reestablishing contact until then.”
“In thirty six seconds,” Middleton said after checking the new countdown which had appeared in the video feed’s place on the main viewer, “this will be decided…one way or another.”
An intense blast of heat was the first thing Lu Bu registered, and she looked dumbly toward the source for a moment as her brain struggled to cope with reality.
She saw Kratos standing nearby, with her plasma cannon in his hands and the glowing barrel pointed toward a nearby structure which Lu Bu’s mind instantly recognized as a standard LM ‘Skunk’ style fusion core.
The situation clarified in her still-addled mind in that instant, and she tried to regain her feet so she could join her fellow Lancers in completing their mission. Her left arm stubbornly hung limply at her side, but thankfully her legs worked properly. It was only when she had rolled to a kneeling position that she realized her helmet’s visor had been completely destroyed, and there was a wave of pain across her face unlike anything she had ever felt.
A Marine’s body lay nearby, and his weapon was still beside him so she scooped it up and felt a pair of relatively weak impacts hammer into her left flank. The Marine’s weapon was thankfully a one-handed blaster pistol, and she quickly sighted an engineer wielding a sonic rifle. Her first shot took him in the left cheek, and the crewman fell to the ground in a boneless heap.
“Secure the door!” she heard Sergeant Gnuko bark, and she turned to see that he, too, wore a ruined helmet. Bernice and Cassius made their way inside the compartment, followed by the pair of drones. The spider-like drone climbed up the bulkhead to interface with the door’s control panel, and a second after it had begun to do so the doors slid shut.
Lu Bu staggered toward the center of the room and quickly realized that only Gnuko, Kratos, Bernice, Cassius, and Lu Bu remained of the original team. The loss of her fellow Lancers should have caused her some measure of anger, or sorrow, or disappointment, but she felt absolutely nothing in that moment. All that filled her thoughts was the mission, and the fact that the Pride—and everyone on board—was depending on them to succeed.
“Lu, are you with me?” Gnuko snapped as he came into her field of view, and she realized she had been standing motionless for several seconds prior to his query.
She shook herself in an attempt to clear the cobwebs and nodded. “Shut down reactors,” she said, her words slurring oddly as they passed her lips. Her forehead and cheeks felt like they had been freshly boiled while she had been unconscious, but she was thankfully able to breathe without difficulty.
“You take port, I’ll take starboard,” Gnuko said, and for the first time in her life Lu Bu was grateful for someone treating her like an idiot and pointing while telling her where to go.
“Port,” she repeated before turning and proceeding to the indicated area. Scramming a fusion reactor was not as difficult as she had once thought it would be. All that she needed to do was cut off the supply of fuel—helium three in this case—just like she had done on Zhu’s Hope. Improperly deactivating a fusion plant would cause significant damage to the core itself, but since that was actually their mission she knew that the only thing that really mattered was shutting the reactors down as fast as possible.
She was dimly aware of Kratos following her, and for a moment she was struck by just how utterly absurd it was that she, of all people, should be tasked with shutting down a fusion reactor—with little better than a stone-age savage providing support, no less!
Lu Bu felt her cheeks begin to sting differently than before, and she very nearly reached up to massage the area before realizing that if her face had been burned then the last thing she wanted to do was worsen the damage by rubbing it.
“Corporal,” she heard Kratos say as he gripped her right arm tightly in his massive hand, “we must move.”
“Yes,” she agreed after a brief pause to recollect her thoughts, and they quickly found themselves at the primary helium three feeds. She knew that turning them off was only the first step, but between her and Kratos they quickly closed the manual valve and then made their way to the second step of the process.
There was enough helium three staged inside of a warship’s reactor to feed it for several days even in the event of a catastrophic failure to the fuel system. The quantities in question were ridiculously small, being measured in microliters, so the reactors required only a few drops of fuel to maintain their reaction.
This differed from the fusion reactors she had encountered on Zhu’s Hope in that those larger, land-based reactors were purposefully constructed with manual shutoff procedures in mind. The volumes were still incredibly small, but the delivery systems were calibrated accordingly. During combat maneuvers a warship could not risk a fuel leak depriving the ship o
f much-needed power, so shutting down this particular type of reactor would be different than the ones at Zhu’s Hope.
So after they had shut off the external fuel supply feeding the Dämmerung’s number two fusion reactor, Lu Bu and Kratos worked to access the emergency shutdown systems. They had gone over the schematics in the shuttle, and every member of the team had been taught how to manually shut down the reactor, but Lu Bu’s mind was foggy and she was finding it difficult to focus on the task at hand.
“This one,” Kratos said with only the barest hint of a query in his voice.
Lu Bu looked at it for several seconds before nodding. “Yes,” she agreed, and he wrenched the valve open before proceeding with the rest of the checklist.
An explosion near the entrance snapped the world back into focus, and Lu Bu instinctively raised the blaster pistol in the direction of the door.
“This one?” Kratos demanded loudly, and Lu Bu tore her eyes from the still-intact blast doors to verify that he was proceeding correctly.
“Yes, that one,” she replied irritably. She had resolved during the shuttle ride that if she was going to die, it would be with the enemy in her sights. So she kept her weapon trained on the door until there was a marked shift in the sounds the reactor behind her was making. When she spared it a brief glance, she saw that the indicators had all gone red.
Kratos had successfully shut the reactor down, and he had managed to do so without getting any of them killed. It was a minor miracle worthy of formal appreciation at some point in the future, but Lu Bu knew their mission was not completed just yet.
“This is too easy,” she heard Sergeant Gnuko growl as he came away from the other reactor.
“Dämmerung still have third and fourth reactor,” Lu Bu said, barely managing to resist an urge to strike the side of her head to banish a sudden headache.
“Yes, and they’re out of our reach,” Gnuko said sourly just before another explosion went off outside the very doors through which they had entered. “But the crew should have put up more of a fight,” he continued, and even in her addled state it was clear to Lu Bu that her commander was torn as to how they should proceed.
“We have secondary mission,” she said with a measure of confidence she did not actually feel. “Cut the head off the dragon and it can no longer see.”
Gnuko met her eyes for several seconds, and for a moment she considered recanting her suggestion that they proceed with the mission as directed. The odds had been against them surviving long enough to shut down the two fusion reactors in Main Engineering, but now that they had it seemed cowardly to find the nearest escape pod and flee.
The crew of the Pride was still depending on them to do their mission, and Lu Bu realized in that moment that she was willing to do whatever it took to protect her shipmates.
“You heard the woman,” Sergeant Gnuko barked, and another explosion rocked the blast doors. This time the doors deformed along the seam formed where they met, and Lu Bu knew that the next blast would finish the job which the previous blasts had begun. “We fight through to the bridge and cut the head off this ship.”
The short burst of acknowledging shouts issued by her teammates filled Lu Bu with honor, and she felt privileged to stand at their sides in that moment. The small, track-based drone scurried toward an access tube and, working together with the spider-legged drone, managed to remove the covering panel.
The tread-based drone quickly disappeared into the tiny passageway, and Lu Bu knew that Fei Long had regained control of the drones once again and was carrying out his own part in the mission. The spider-legged drone returned to Lu Bu’s side, and she gave it a brief nod before returning her attention to her squad-mates.
Only Kratos remained silent while the others shouted their assent to Sergeant Gnuko’s plan. The massive, one-eyed Tracto-an hefted the plasma cannon and nodded stoically as he turned the weapon’s muzzle toward the entry. “Then we should waste no more time,” he growled in his deep, stony voice. He then, quite unexpectedly, fired a blast of superheated plasma at the heavily damaged door and the rest of the team quickly followed suit with their weapons.
Chapter XXX: The Shot
“Confirmed, Captain,” Sarkozi reported gleefully as the Pride was rocked by another salvo from the Dämmerung. “The Dämmerung has slowed to sixty percent its previous speed.”
“Good work, Gnuko,” Middleton said under his breath. “Helm: alter course to intercept the Dämmerung. Tactical: I want every one of our guns clearing on target as soon as we’re within range. Comm.,” he spun to face Fei Long, “I need those shields down as soon as our guns are in range. Coordinate with Tactical.”
“Yes, Captain,” Fei Long replied, his previous anxiety markedly diminished. “The drone was executing its programming when we lost contact with it,” he reported, clearly disappointed in his drones’ sketchy long-range communication capabilities, “it will not bring down the Dämmerung’s shields until I have issued the final command.”
Captain Middleton could understand Fei Long’s disappointment—in truth, he partially shared it—but as far as Middleton was concerned, the drones had already proven more capable than he had ever dreamed possible. No one had managed to produce combat drones with capabilities even remotely resembling those of Fei Long’s units since the dawn of the AI wars—which begged a whole host of questions which Middleton needed to ignore for the time being.
“Very good, Mr. Fei,” he said as he turned and saw the icons of the Pride and Dämmerung on the main viewer begin to converge with increasing speed. The enemy vessel, with her superior shields—shields which had yet to be so much as caressed by the Pride’s weapons—was doing precisely what any good commander would have her do after losing the speed advantage: she was barreling toward the Pride at the maximum speed her engines could manage.
The Pride’s greatest offensive strength—her fix-mounted forward heavy laser array—was also its greatest limiting factor. In order to keep his guns on target, Middleton needed to drive his ship toward the enemy at all times. The Dämmerung, on the other hand, possessed weapons with broad fields of fire, which meant that she could keep her guns trained on an enemy vessel during maneuvers—maneuvers like rolling to present a fresh shield facing, for example.
This meant that one of two things could reasonably be expected to happen in the ensuing exchange. First, and most likely, the Dämmerung would strafe the Pride with particular emphasis on further damaging the aged cruiser’s engines. Second, and significantly less likely, was that the Pride would somehow escape the exchange with more or less the same motive power it possessed prior to the head-on exchange and would use its momentum to escape the Dämmerung’s zone of control.
Of course, none of that allowed for the possibility of the Dämmerung’s shields failing at precisely the wrong moment. Nor did it take into consideration the last-minute modifications Garibaldi had made to the Pride’s shield grid. And, of course, there was probably still Sergeant Gnuko’s suicide team in play.
“We’ve got him right where we want him,” Middleton growled, knowing that statement would never be truer than it was in that moment.
“Enemy corvette is closing, Captain,” Sarkozi reported stiffly. “She’s moving to interdict our escape trajectory.”
“Good for her,” Middleton said darkly, silently grateful for his opponent’s strict adherence to conventional strategy. “That just means we’ll get the one-on-one dance we wanted after all.”
“Heavy laser range in two minutes,” Toto rumbled.
Middleton raised Garibaldi via the command chair’s com-link. “Chief, Sitting Duck is ‘go.’ Execute the package in sixty seconds.”
“Sitting Duck,” Garibaldi acknowledged with a wry note to his voice, “aye, Cap. T-minus fifty five seconds and counting.”
“Convey my appreciation to your crews, Chief,” Middleton said evenly.
“We’ll do our part, Captain,” Garibaldi replied with mock indignation similar to Sergeant Gnuko’s
during the emergency briefing. “Everybody wants their chance with the ball.”
Middleton wanted to roll his eyes at the latest in a seemingly endless stream of smashball metaphors, but the stakes were too high and he knew that before long his engineers were going to find themselves squarely in the line of fire. “Middleton out,” he said after failing to think of anything more constructive to say, and he cut the com-link.
It had finally come down to those final thirty seconds, and the Pride’s commanding officer knew that when the dust had settled the cost to his crew would be extreme.
But it was his job to make sure that their enemy paid an even higher price, and he would be blasted and damned to the Pit for eternity if he failed.
Lu Bu fired a short burst from her pistol and saw a crewman’s torso explode in a red mist when her round struck home.
Kratos’ opening shot—which had taken even his own team by surprise—had succeeded in killing a half dozen enemy crewmen on the other side of the door when their explosives had cooked off and turned them into little more than carbon residue on the bulkheads.
To the Lancers’ collective surprise, the next resistance they met was made of nothing but regular crewmembers armed with an assortment of weapons ranging from plasma torches to blaster rifles. They had not seen a single Marine since their exodus from Main Engineering, and their absence grew more conspicuous with each junction the Lancers passed through.
“We surrender!” one of the enemy crewmen shouted before throwing his hands into the air and coming out of hiding. “Please don’t kill us; we didn’t sign up for this!”
Lu Bu trained her pistol on the crewman as five others came out of concealment, and Sergeant Gnuko approached with his own blaster rifle sweeping through the small group until settling on the spokesman.
Up The Middle (Spineward Sectors: Middleton's Pride Book 2) Page 30
