by R. M. Meluch
The Roman sentinels launched homing missiles after them.
“They’re shooting the lifeboats!” Marcander Vincent reported.
“So they are.” Farragut’s fingers crossed themselves.
As the homing missiles launched to mate with their tags, Wolfhound spun, shedding her coat of foil sacks like a snake its skin.
Because all the tags were stuck to life sacks, Wolfhound discarded all the tags along with the sacks.
Sending the homing missiles chasing them.
Toward Gladiator’s sternside engine ports.
A Roman missile will not detonate against a Roman ship, but it will detonate against a tag stuck to a U.S. life pod thrown up against a Roman battleship’s stern.
Things happen quickly at these speeds. General Pompeii saw the trap as it hurtled up his battleship’s engines. Emplaced in the grid, Gladiator could not evade. Numa shouted on the open channel: “Deactivate those homers!”
He had noticed the sacks were unmanned, but not empty. Empty, they would have been collapsed flat. These were filled with gas. Probably hydrogen because they sent fireballs exploding up his engines as the homing missiles ripped through the sacks and slammed against Gladiator ’s stern midway through Numa’s warning shout.
The great ship canted, juddered, and rocked. The grid wavered.
Into that fluctuating crack in the Citadel’s impenetrable shell, the U.S. ship Gettysburg drove three robot seeker-killers.
Trajan, moving to take up the breach, thinned out another point in the grid through which two attack ships penetrated the perimeter. While the crippled Wolfhound miraculously reacquired her force field, her speed, and her atmospheric integrity.
Gladiator’s guns were turning round. Calli had Numa’s attention now.
Farragut saw it coming. Ordered Merrimack to line up a saber, “On the big, fat bully.”
“Targeting Gladiator, aye.”
“Fire saber.”
Nothing happened.
“This is not a balk!” Fire Control warned sharply. “Someone is in here!” An outside signal had taken over his control systems.
Not ever to be caught staring into the headlights, Farragut did not waste an instant wondering how this was happening or spare a breath to swear. Instantly he ordered computer controls shut down and called for manual overrides. “Anything that can receive remote commands—pull the plug!”
Flight Sergeant Kerry Blue had been waiting in her Swift for orders to launch. Got this instead.
Popped her canopy to squawk: “Manual over—! We are doing this skat for real?”
Climbed out of her Swift, still squawking, because the lights had dipped, and something was for sure wrong. She pulled her Swift’s remote recovery module from its compartment and tossed it into the pilot’s seat to make sure her fighter wasn’t going anywhere without her.
Her boots made a running clang up the starboard ramp tunnel. She scampered up the ladders three decks to the battery and shimmied into her team’s gun blister, where Reg Monroe was bringing the mechanical junk to bear, jacking up the loader.
Got the shell ratcheted into the cannon.
“Okay, here’s the fancy part,” said little Reg, resting a moment, flopped over the black barrel nearly a yard in diameter, puffing. “How do we aim?”
“Look out the window,” said Carly.
The open clearport was full—full—of bronze-colored Roman hull.
“Who is that!”
“Com chatter’s saying it’s the Scipio,” said Hazard Sewell.
Point-blank was an absurd term out here. In the absence of gravity, projectiles don’t fall off their trajectories. Still it had become the accepted term for the range at which you cannot possibly miss.
Scipio rode—point-blank—alongside Merrimack. Something shimmered between them, hard, like glass. “What is that?”
“Our force fields are touching!” Hazard Sewell relayed from the command deck. “Hold your fire! We can’t shoot. The shell will blow back in. Nobody fire!”
“Then they can’t shoot us either, right?” said Reg. Hopeful. “Right?”
“I think,” said Hazard, not comforted by that. This could not be good.
Kerry Blue pushed Cowboy away from the clearport so she could see. “So what are they doing?” Saw nothing but bronze hull.
The sounds were horrific. Electric groans and scraping squeals, sounds like nothing they had heard before.
Of something that had never happened before.
Scipio had matched phase pulses with Merrimack and was prying open her force field, like a starfish with a clam in its clutches.
“We’re going to get our guts eaten,” said Marcander Vincent on the command deck.
Captain Farragut, amazed, turned to his specialists on deck. “Someone want to tell me how the hell this is happening?”
Best they could offer him was to report that Merrimack ’s phases had not been recalibrated during the refit. “They weren’t broke, so no one fixed them.”
Rome still had Monitor’s black box. Apparently no one considered that Rome had had the entire time span of the kangaroo truce in which to study Monitor’s workings and pull her phases from that.
“They did tell us the Mack wasn’t ready,” said Hamster.
“Oh, but we are,” said Farragut. Called for suits and swords.
Glenn Hamilton’s voice came over the loud com ship wide just before it went inoperative: “Prepare to repel boarders.”
“I don’t believe it,” Twitch Fuentes mumbled at the sword in his hand. “I don’t fragging believe it.” This was for real.
Cowboy swaggered cheerfully, shirt off inside his exo suit, and sporting a red scarf on his head, a gold earring, and an eye patch. He kept repeating, “Arr arr, matey!” until someone told him to learn another letter of the alphabet.
The exo-suits were the same as the Romans wore. Except for the manufacturers’ logos on the generators, the suits were identical on either side.
Mainly the suits provided deflector shields against beam fire. All were equipped with breathers in case of gas; sonic filters for the ears in case of sonic grenades; and energy dampers to protect against stunners. You could still get stunned through an exo suit, but your opponent needed to push the rod through the exo’s energy layer and touch you with it, delivering the jolt right into you rather than through the exo-layer.
Because slow-moving objects could pass through an exo-suit, and because Merrimack carried redundancy to fanaticism, Merrimack’s crew wore helmets and kevlar clothing under the suit’s energy shields.
The searing screeching of the force field’s parting had stopped. The next sound was the clanging of the corvus, the Roman grappling hook, banging on Merrimack ’s hull.
Reg Monroe crouched in place with her squad, cornered. The lights had gone, and no one turned on their headlamps. They listened in advancing horror to sounds of Them.
“Why don’t they just kill us?” Reg breathed. “They could just as easy chuck a nuke in and close us up, and that would be that. Why don’t they just do it?”
“They want the ship,” Kerry murmured. Thank God they want the ship.
Hazard hushed them silent. “Listen!”
Thumps against the hull.
Hazard whispered, “Can anyone make out where they’re going to force their way in?”
“Me, I’d come in the fighter shafts,” Reg muttered.
And so they did—on the starboard wing—prying up the caps on the fighter lifts.
Came the hiss of atmospheric bleed out. Roman ships kept a thinner atmosphere. The breach sucked Merrimack ’s air in with Scipio’s.
“They’re in.”
21
THE ROMANS OF THE invasion ship Scipio entered dark Merrimack warily, breathers clenched between their teeth, heads low. They used scanners in the dark hangar rather than illuminating their lamps. Did not like that they hadn’t been met at the breach. Roman soldiers preferred fighting in solid ranks. They did not like this guerrilla skat.<
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Still, they could not expect the Americans to play to Roman strengths. When you reach into a cobra hole, you’d best expect to meet the fanged end.
A whole file boarded unopposed. Others waited for the area to be pronounced secure before committing any more troops to the enemy craft. This hangar, its crouching fighter craft, its silence, smelled more and more of a trap.
But the first troops found no one. Nothing sprang out at them. But they could not go deeper until they were sure flankers were not hiding here.
The cobra wanted them deeper in the hole. But, just as the Romans could not expect the enemy to play to Roman strengths, neither would Rome play into a U.S. trap.
Sensors could not detect the loc of warm bodies within exo-suits, and the sensors were detecting no motion other than their own. Yet the Roman captain knew the dirtlings could not be far.
They were here. They had to be here.
The Roman captain turned his disruptor on the nearest U.S. Marine fighter craft—a Swift with the Arabic numeral 6 emblazoned on its hull—and raked it bow to stern.
Worked. Flushed a dirtling out of the overhead. She dropped, screeching: “That’s my crate!”
Someone crying after her, “Chica linda, no!”
Kerry Blue, madder than a wet zil, landed both boots on the Roman captain’s shoulders, mashed him to the deck. Went down with him, disruptor fire flashing off her exo-suit. Pummeled him bloody.
She straightened up, hauling her sword edge across the advancing chest. The gushing stopped quickly with the heart’s stopping. Just like in the simulators.
The hangar was in chaos. Kerry’s sonic filters maxed with the din of screaming all around her, the screech of searing metal hit by deflected fire, the scattered crashes of severed equipment falling from the overhead, and triumphant shouts of “Arrrr!”
Captain Farragut, imitating a caged panther on the command deck, demanded again, “Status.”
Lieutenant Glenn Hamilton hesitated to report that the battle was going well. It was going too well.
Roman boarders had breached Red and Blue docks, and the cargo hold. But Red dock was already secured, and very red.
Glenn expressed a concern that the Romans might decide to cut their losses, withdraw their bloody stump, and lob a bomb into the Mack.
“Then let’s lob a bomb into Scipio first,” said Farragut.
His techs pointed out that Scipio was shielded against Merrimack’s gunports. The Romans were not so careless as to leave an opening in front of any of Mack’s barrels, even though they had deactivated Merrimack’s computer controls.
“The mountain came to Mohammed,” said Farragut. “Haul a cannon down to Red dock and shoot through the breach.”
“Haul?” A thousand-kilogram cannon from the battery, three decks down, then all the way out to the starboard wing? “Uh, how, sir? We’re on manual. The robot skids are not functional.”
And, a sign from God, the antigrav failed.
As Hamster’s hair lifted from her shoulders and her feet left the deck, she said, “I know Who loves you, John Farragut.” And Colonel Steele bellowed for a Marine detail to bring a cannon to the starboard wing.
“Do what?” Cowboy protested, scrambling to action, fleet, agile, and upside down as a cockroach, propelling himself up the ramp tunnel, hand over hand along the overhead pipes. Kerry Blue had long suspected Cowboy had vermin in his ancestry.
Spurning the ladder, Cowboy sprang like Superman up through the hatch to the gun blister. Too hard. Weightless, he bounced himself off the overhead, banged his helmet, caromed back down, only to bowl Twitch Fuentes off the ladder.
Already in the gunroom, Kerry asked Reg, “Shell?” As Reg unhooked and unlatched the cannon moorings.
“Still one in there,” said Reg. “We never got one off.”
The grunting gorilla, Dak, wrenched the deck bolts loose.
Bolts off, the cannon lifted from its moorings. Kerry pushed the big gun toward the hatch, as Cowboy’s head popped out of the hole like a prairie dog. “Ho—!” His head disappeared under the swinging cannon.
Kerry heard a metallic thud. She’d hit something. “Cowboy?” Kerry called down.
A lot of words she didn’t know, then, “She’s trying to kill me again!”
Kerry tsked, maneuvering the cannon into position to guide it down the hatchway. “Oh, shut it, Cowboy. I did not try to kill you! I did kill you, but I was not tryin’. And if you hadn’t been brain dead, you’da had the sense to stay that way! This isn’t gonna fit. Cowboy, Twitch, you’re gonna have to take the ladder off!”
“Just push. It’ll fit!”
“It will not!”
Cowboy pulled and Dak shoved. Between the two of them, they wedged the cannon tight in the hatch. The cannon hung up on the ladder.
“It doesn’t fit,” said Dak.
Cowboy said, “Kerry, don’t push! Now look. You got it stuck. You got a wrench up there? I’m gonna have to take this whole ladder off.”
There was a quick exchange of tools through the available gaps in the cannon-clogged hatchway to unbolt the ladder above and below. Kerry yelling, “Come on! Come on! We gotta go now!”
Ladder rungs clattered as Cowboy yanked it clear of the hatch. Shouted, “Move it! Move it!”
Kerry gave the cannon the gentlest of pushes. One thousand kilograms smashed into the deck below, bent the grates.
“God bless it!” Cowboy cried.
Kerry jumped up, pushed off the overhead and went air-swimming down the hatch headfirst to help dislodge the cannon from the deck.
Cannon mobile again, Cowboy, Dak, Twitch, Kerry, Carly, and Reg shepherded it down decks, like floating an elephant. They could not afford to get a mass that size moving too boisterously in any direction. Slight taps from it hurt, and turns were hard lessons in inertia.
The cannon crushed all the fingers of Twitch’s right hand as the corridor turned and the cannon did not. Twitch kept up with the rest of his squad, crying.
Reg pointed up at a different sound. Knew that one. Usually liked it, but not this time. A Roman retreat clarion.
Kerry cried, “Oh, hell, they’re going to close the doors! Move it! Move it! Move it!”
The cannon clanged, blundered, clunked, and smashed through the corridors. Made it to the ramp tunnel where it was clear sailing. Had the cannon hurtling toward the Red dock, Cowboy yelling, “Git along, little doggie!”
Came time to stop it, but Cowboy, Dak, Twitch, Kerry, Carly and Reg together did not come near to a thousand kilograms, and with a dearth of anything to grab onto as a brace, they skidded along with the careening mass.
Cowboy jumped in front of the cannon, hands out as if commanding it to stop.
It mowed him down—“Cowboy!”—and kept going. Bumped at the bottom of the ramp tunnel, bounced, like a slow motion missile, straight at a Swift.
“Not my crate! Not my crate!”
And plowed into the scorched side of Alpha Six.
Hazard Sewell with another squad of Marines—Echo Flight—was already in the hangar fixing braces in the Roman boarding hatch to force it to stay open against the sounding retreat.
Echo Flight helped disengage the cannon from Kerry’s Swift, and then set it down, carriage-side to the deck. The Marines maneuvered the cannon to point at the breach; bolted it to the deck grates.
The two flights looked at each other. “We waiting on a command?”
“Com’s down,” said Reg.
“At will, I think,” said Hazard.
Cowboy—bruised but still game—said: “Well, hell. Fire!”
The manual load fired dirty, the boom resounded to the limit of the sonic filters. The recoil ripped up the deck grates and shot the cannon backward into the bulk.
The shell found its mark, blew through Scipio and detonated deep within. The Marines could hear, then smell, the fire inside.
Their celebration was cut short with the flash of Roman lights signaling a decompression warning.
> “They’re gonna pull out without closing up!” Echo Leader motioned everyone up the ramp tunnel. “Get out of here! They’re gonna space us! Go! Go! Go!”
“Captain, Scipio is preparing to disengage,” Kit Kittering reported.
“Oh, no, you don’t.” Farragut spoke to his enemy, as if Romans were there on deck with him. Farragut was ready for this. During the melee, he had teams of erks weld the Roman grappling hooks in place, and jam at least one of them at the root, so Scipio could not just cast off the line. “You finish this dance.”
Scipio had its hooks into Merrimack and could not get them out.
The communications tech, in some surprise, reported, “Getting a signal from Scipio.”
“How? Our com’s down.”
“It’s on the radio. Captain Edward Sejanus is demanding Merrimack’s surrender.”
Farragut laughed aloud in shock. “He said that?”
The com tech put Sejanus through to the captain’s console so Farragut could tell him for himself, “Are you nuts?”
Sejanus sent a crackling reply, “I could destroy you.”
“You’re going to have to.”
Destroying Merrimack would require destroying Scipio with it.
“I don’t believe you, Captain Farragut. Your profile shows you the furthest thing from suicidal.”
“And I’m not threatening suicide. You’re the one fixin’ to pull the trigger, Capita. You go do what you think you have to do. I’m working here.” Motioned across his throat for the com tech to disconnect.
Captain Farragut left the command platform. “Your boat, Hamster.” He had his sword.
Farragut met TR Steele in the corridor on his way to the starboard ramp tunnel. “TR—your big guys and your crazy guys. With me.”
Colonel Steele counted himself with the big guys, Serge, Dak, Ski. Gordo. And Delgado—crazy, not big, but then wolverines were only about twenty-three kilos.
Captain Farragut led the charge into smoky Scipio. Hacked his way forward, stormed onto the Roman command platform, and demanded Sejanus’ surrender.
Sejanus came out of his scarlet-draped command chair, eyes flaring. The word No! came out of his mouth. Might have been an expression of horror, but it was the wrong answer to the demand. Farragut’s sword stroke sent his head tumbling to the deck. And Captain Farragut accepted the surrender from Scipio’s second-in-command.
