“Initiating ejection protocols,” the Damage Control operator acknowledged.
“Mikey,” Middleton raised the Pride’s Chief Engineer over the com-link, “shut down the drives but keep our fusion plants operational. There’s still a chance we can bring our guns back into the fight, but I want all non-essential personnel evacuated from Engineering as soon as you can manage it. Get everyone else into thermal gear; it’s going to get hot down there.”
“You got it, Captain,” replied Garibaldi. “We’ve got medical teams working on severe plasma burns down here, but after they’ve stabilized my wounded we’ll get everyone out of here that we can afford to.”
“Captain,” Fei Long interrupted, “War Leader Atticus is reporting multiple contacts out on the hull. The War Leader’s people are already deployed around sensitive areas, and report engaging at least ten enemy Marines.”
Captain Middleton nodded in genuine relief. “Excellent,” he said as he fought the urge to sink back into his chair. “Every Marine tied up over here is one less that Gnuko’s team will have to deal with.” Even though the Marines’ method of traveling so quickly, and stealthily, across space was a concerning one, Middleton knew that Rabauch’s decision to send them against the Pride may well have cost the entitled Imperial officer victory in the battle.
While it was essentially a lucky break for his own people, Tim Middleton wasn’t about to look this particular gift horse in the mouth.
“We’re coming alongside now,” Sergeant Gnuko’s voice crackled in Lu Bu’s ear via her replacement helmet. “You need to wait until I give the order before depressurizing the airlock, am I clear?”
“Tri-locsium,” Lu Bu replied as she performed a final check of her blaster rifle. To her left, Bernice gripped a boarding axe in each hand, while Kratos held his own axe easily in one hand.
Several seconds passed, during which time Lu Bu’s hand hovered over the emergency access button which would depressurize the airlock and, hopefully, send them onto the hull of the Corvette.
“If it’s a choice between capturing the target and destroying the ship, our priority is to prevent that ship from leaving the system, Lu,” her Sergeant explained.
“Understood,” she acknowledged.
“Good. We’re coming up on the transfer. Wait…wait,” Gnuko said, and Lu Bu fought the mounting tension by drawing short, measured breaths. “Wait…now!”
Lu Bu’s hand slapped the icon, and the three Lancers were shot out of the airlock toward the droid warship’s hull. Even Lu Bu’s reflexes were unable to seamlessly handle the transition from normal gravity to zero gravity, and she slammed into the warship’s hull hip-first with enough force to shatter ordinary bone. Thankfully, Lu Bu’s bones were far from ordinary, while the same could also be said of her two remaining teammates.
A brief scramble ensued, but Lu Bu managed to get one boot partially engaged against the hull long enough to right her body and redirect her momentum into a controlled roll which quickly saw her plant both feet firmly on the warship’s hull.
Bernice rolled to a kneeling position and her mag-boots automatically engaged against the droid ship’s metal hull almost as quickly as Lu Bu’s did, and the two women knelt there motionless for a moment to gather their wits.
But Kratos was unable to engage his boots to the hull, and his body tumbled in an increasingly violent log roll toward the stern of the warship which saw his boarding axe fly out of his grip when he tried to use it to gain some sort of purchase on the angular, metal skin of the enemy vessel.
Kratos’ rolling body quickly approached an antenna of some kind, and acting purely on instinct Lu Bu fired a round from her blaster rifle aimed squarely at Kratos’ chest.
The round struck him in the near shoulder, and the force of the impact was enough to slow his roll sufficiently that his flailing arm hooked on the slender antenna. A few seconds of flailing later, and the one-eyed Tracto-an had engaged his mag-boots to the hull of the warship.
No sooner had he done so than there was an explosion fewer than ten meters from his position. Lu Bu looked to see the streaking form of the smooth-skinned, teardrop-shaped vessel which had brought them to their target, and she heard Sergeant Gnuko’s voice crackle in her ear, “Door’s open, Lu. Good hunting.”
“You heard him,” she growled as her left arm flared in pain. She had not taken a serious look at it since breaching the Dämmerung’s Main Engineering section. She had, however, applied a fast-acting sealant to her suit’s multiple compromised areas, but even with the patch job her helmet’s HUD suggested that she had no more than nine minutes before her oxygen supply was depleted.
The three Lancers moved with purpose toward the newly-made hole in the droid ship’s hull, and as they approached their entry point Lu Bu could not help but look up at the planet high above her. To her untrained eye, it looked like it might have been a view of her own home world. It had with patchy, white clouds concealing a largely brown surface. But she had learned in the briefing that it was utterly inhospitable to human life, and knew that if she ever reached the surface that the atmospheric pressure would crush her like a bug.
But that did not prevent her mind from briefly wandering to thoughts of her birthplace. She could almost smell the greasy, humid confines of her ‘family’s’ underground compound but, as quickly as the wave of nostalgia came over her, it disappeared entirely. For a moment she was nothing but a sixteen year old girl holding a blaster rifle, standing on the hull of a warship which was hurtling around a planet at speeds her mind could barely comprehend.
Never in her life had she felt as small as she did in that moment, and somehow she knew it was a moment in time that would be perfectly preserved in her memory for as long as she lived.
“Corporal?” she heard Bernice say over their channel, and Lu Bu shook herself from her silent reverie.
“Move out,” she snapped, more irritated with herself for losing focus than with her teammate for doing her duty.
Kratos stood beside the hatch and gestured for Bernice to hand him one of her boarding axes. She did so quickly, and for a moment Lu Bu thought she read something in their mutual body language which she had not expected to see. But she knew that the clock was ticking so she shook her head sharply and led her team the only way she knew how: from the front.
Her footsteps took her inside the ruined airlock, and she noted with satisfaction that both the inner and outer doors had been reduced to molten scrap by Sergeant Gnuko’s fire.
She had learned during the briefing that all droid ships maintain a vacuum seal inside their vessels, even though oxygen was harmful to many of their internal components over long-term exposure. Apparently they used airlocks for precisely the opposite reason humans used them: to keep gases out, rather than in.
As such, the airlocks were nowhere near as durable as those found on the Pride of Prometheus. If humans were to lose access to breathable gases, they would die almost instantaneously. But if droids were exposed to those same gases, the damage would be much less severe and would occur over a much longer period of time.
The interior of the droid warship was alien in its geometry, but thankfully the ceilings were high enough that her teammates could proceed in a deep crouch. They moved into the warship’s corridors—or perhaps the droids referred to them as something like ‘access paths’ or some such, Lu Bu wondered briefly as she visually cleared the nearby area.
They came to a T-junction and Lu Bu, leading her three-Lancer team, decided to head toward the stern of the vessel rather than the bow. Intelligence gathered by the Sectors 23&24 militaries suggested that command centers were more likely to be found in the stern of droid warships near the engines, which were generally even more heavily-armored than their human counterparts.
The corridor was rectangular, for the most part, with the passage about half again as wide as it was tall, which put it at just over two meters from one side to the other.
Using hand signals, she called a halt to their
advance fewer than ten paces down the passage when she saw lights flickering ahead. But before she could motion for her people to find cover, a hail of fire erupted from the far end of the corridor.
The kinetic force of the impacts on her torso was enough to briefly shake loose her grip on her blaster rifle as she went staggering backward. She loosed a pair of wild shots, one of which struck a nearby pipe that began to spray a blue liquid into the zero-gravity environment of the passageway.
After the fifth, or perhaps sixth, impact on her chest Lu Bu fell over backwards while her boots stubbornly refused to release from the deck. The droplets of liquid which were spraying from the damaged pipe covered her helmet and even through her metal helmet she could feel the intense heat being given off by it. Her Storm Drake armor was superbly insulated, but her helmet was not so well-protected from thermal radiation and she knew she needed to get away from the superheated fluid before her visor became damaged and what little breathable gases she still had would escape.
She felt a hand under her armpit, and looked up to see Bernice was helping her to her feet. Meanwhile, Kratos had taken off down the low-ceilinged corridor with a boarding axe in hand. The hail of enemy fire began to hammer into him, and Lu Bu quickly concluded that even the mighty, one-eyed Tracto-an would be unable to push through the onslaught of enemy fire.
“We must charge,” she shouted after reaching her feet and, no sooner had she and Bernice begun their own push down the corridor, Kratos’ run had been stymied by the incredible weight of enemy fire.
Bernice somehow managed to get in front of Lu Bu, which was infuriating to the teenaged woman—she was supposed to be the leader! But just as the Tracto-an woman had charged past Kratos’ position, the enemy fire consolidated on Bernice and Lu Bu realized something crucial: there was only one weapon firing against them, and it was a crew-served, relatively low-powered, ion cannon!
Bernice’s steps were slowed even more quickly than Kratos’ had been. Taking a page out of her old smashball playbook, Lu Bu slammed her shoulder into the other woman’s side and, using their combined strength, managed to drive their way several more steps down the corridor. The thought occurred that if the ion cannon struck any of their helmets directly, it could possibly deactivate their functions—which included the recirculation of breathable gases.
She pushed the thought form her mind, and at the precise moment when even their combined strength failed to drive them forward, and Lu Bu became worried for Bernice’s armor integrity.
Then she experienced what a lesser physical specimen might describe as being hit by a hover-bus. Memories of smashball scrums came to her in that moment, realizing that Kratos had added his own strength to Lu Bu’s and Bernice’s. Together the three of them drove down the corridor until finally Bernice tripped and staggered to her knees when the ion cannon’s fire lowered to her shins.
“Push!” she screamed, and Kratos did precisely that as she felt his massive, powerful arm reach around her waist. She was only a handful of steps from the weapon’s position, which appeared to be a makeshift fortification comprised of quickly welded plates from nearby sections of the corridor’s floor, ceiling, and walls.
The fire ceased unexpectedly, and Lu Bu was driven to the deck when Kratos’ bulk drove through her as though she was not there. Her head struck the deck violently, and when she shook out the cobwebs she looked up to see Kratos engaged in melee with an enemy Marine.
“We’ve lost heavy laser number eight,” the Damage Control stander reported tightly after recovering from the latest turbo-laser strike to land on the Pride’s unprotected port hull. “Engineering is reporting a coolant leak,” she added, a note of horror clear in her voice.
“Divert all available personnel to Engineering,” Middleton ordered immediately, knowing that a coolant leak in Main Engineering was one of the absolute worst possible things that could happen. Even if it was a relatively minor leak, it would significantly diminish the Pride’s ability to perform tactically until the damage was patched up.
If it was a severe leak, then Main Engineering would soon be turned into a tomb for anyone unfortunate enough to have been inside when the emergency doors contained the leak of superheated chemicals.
“War Leader Atticus reports all hostiles have been neutralized,” Fei Long reported, “I am instructing his unit to assist in Main Engineering.”
Middleton very nearly belayed the young man’s initiative, since recalling the Pride’s Lancers to the ship’s interior would expose them to further intrusions on the hull. But he realized that the young man had made a solid appraisal of their available assets:; the power-armored Lancers were among the only crewmembers capable of surviving for any significant period of time inside of Main Engineering during a severe coolant leak.
“Make it so,” he said with a firm nod before returning his attention to the main viewer. “Status of enemy Corvette?”
“They’re still on escape trajectory, Captain,” Sarkozi reported grimly. “And they’re well outside of our firing arc.”
“It was a good try,” Middleton muttered under his breath as he saw Sergeant Gnuko’s top-of-the-line yacht zig and zag in front of the Corvette while strafing with its relatively light weaponry. But the enemy pilot clearly had no wish to destroy the nimble craft, which spoke to the value of whatever cargo the yacht might be carrying.
“Gunship low on fuel,” Toto reported, “but enough remains for attack run on Corvette, Captain.”
Middleton shook his head as he sliced a look over at Fei Long, who was apparently in direct control of his remaining war drone as he manipulated his glove-like remote control while watching one of the screens built into his workstation. “Maintain safe distance, Tactical,” he replied, knowing that one gunship’s relatively minimal amount of fire could not deter the Corvette in a short period of time. Had Toto’s assault craft been fully fueled, it would have been a different consideration altogether. But the gunship was ‘operating on fumes,’ as the saying supposedly went.
If there was even a small chance that Fei Long’s drone could disrupt the Corvette’s operation, the better play was to support the drone and not endanger Fei Long’s tenuous uplink with his so-called ‘attack dog.’
The ship shuddered and lurched violently to port. “Decompressions on decks three through six port-side,” the Damage Control stander reported.
“How can they hit us from this far away?” Sarkozi growled as she moved to the Sensors station. “We’re already twenty percent beyond the maximum rated turbo-laser range, Captain!”
“Steady on, XO,” Middleton said with a warning look. The last thing the ship needed was a morale crisis on the bridge, and his XO’s nerve appeared to have frayed to near the breaking point. But she was right; there was an extremely low probability that the enemy vessel should have been able to land strikes at their current range.
“Yes, sir,” she replied stiffly, and Middleton knew that his ship, and its crew, were very nearly done for.
Their engines were off-line, the port shields had finally collapsed, and they had even lost one of their heavy lasers to a lucky shot from the Dämmerung’s unfathomably long-ranged weaponry. The impact profiles suggested that they were being hit by standard, current-generation, Imperial turbo-lasers. But he had never heard of more than a lucky shot landing at such an extreme range, and it seemed that the Heavy Destroyer’s accuracy was more like fifty percent.
Another handful of turbo-laser strikes to his unshielded hull would likely cause catastrophic damage and render the Pride a drifting hulk. Thankfully, they had already achieved escape velocity and were in no danger of crashing into the system’s inner planet.
“Get me an update on Engineering,” Middleton barked, knowing that his ship was very nearly done for. They had caught a few breaks in the battle already, but it seemed that they would need at least one more in order to emerge victorious. “Come on, Gnuko,” he hissed under his breath.
Lu Bu staggered to her feet with nothing but s
tars in her field of view. She fell against the nearby bulkhead before she could reach out and steady herself in an effort to counteract an intense wave of vertigo.
She pushed herself to a standing position, completely unaware of where she was or how she had gotten there. But the first sight she laid eyes on snapped everything back into focus immediately.
Kratos and Bernice were engaged in a pitched battle with a strangely-armored warrior. The speed and ferocity of his movements, along with the unfamiliar design of his sleek power armor, were like nothing she had ever seen. She raised her blaster rifle to her shoulder and found that her left arm refused to obey her commands. She looked down and saw it hanging limply at her side, and decided the best she could manage was a one-handed shot with the cumbersome rifle.
Propping the weapon against a nearby support strut, she sighted in on the enemy warrior and squeezed off a shot. The blaster bolt ricocheted off his breastplate, and she cursed loudly at having missed the lesser-armored gorget.
The warrior, whose melee weapons were forearm-mounted vibro-blades, deftly turned Kratos’ and Bernice’s attacks to the side and kicked out at their legs as he moved with almost hypnotic grace and efficiency. Even with the low ceilings, the warrior did not appear to be in any way hindered while Lu Bu’s teammates were struggling to do battle in a perpetual crouch, which too often became a brief three point stance.
She lined up another shot on the warrior, but just as she was about to squeeze the trigger he raised his arm and fired a blaster bolt from another built-in weapon mount positioned near his left forearm-mounted vibro-blade. Lu Bu reacted just in time to prevent the bolt from striking her weapon’s power cell, but the force of the impact knocked the rifle from her hand and elicited a scream of frustration as she reached for the vibro-blade at her hip. If she was going to fail in her mission, it would be with that warrior’s blood on her blade!
Up The Middle (Spineward Sectors: Middleton's Pride Book 2) Page 33
