Ishaq was gone.
Michael and the two marines, the only occupants of the lifepod who were not injured, had managed to restore a semblance of order.
The three worst casualties—two weapons techs and an ordnance petty officer—were beyond help. It had been the work of moments to strip them before bundling them into one of the emergency regen bags secured to the lifepod’s bulkheads. There was nothing more Michael or anyone could do for them. They would live long enough to be rescued or they wouldn’t. It was as simple as that.
The rest of the lifepod’s complement was a pretty sorry-looking bunch, but they would survive. The onboard bulkhead-mounted medibots were working like demented little demons, debriding, cutting, suturing, injecting, hydrating, and dosing. Michael’s only contribution to the process was to lift and shift spacers around so that the bots could get in to finish the job. Finally, it was his turn, and it surprised him when the medibots told him in no uncertain terms to strip his skinsuit off so that they could clean and stitch a cut on his back he had thought was just a bruise.
He patched his neuronics into the medibot’s holocam to see what was going on and winced when he saw the jagged, shallow gash across his back running down from his shoulder. “I didn’t even feel that,” he murmured. He should pay more attention to his suit integrity alarms, he thought. Canceling them without checking for damage was probably not a life-extending strategy.
Corporal Yazdi looked impressed. “Nice one, sir. You know what?”
Michael rolled his eyes. “What?”
“Should have been a marine.” Yazdi grinned. “Not a scratch on either one of us.”
“Hmmph!” Michael winced as a suture went in too deep. “That hurts. Tell you what, Corporal Yazdi. Stand behind Marine Murphy; that’s the moral of the story. He’d stop a tacnuke at forty paces.”
Yazdi smiled. “He bloody well would. You ready for an update, sir?”
Bugger, Michael thought. He had forgotten: Once an officer, always responsible, or so the saying went. The time had come to display the leadership qualities three expensive years at Space Fleet College had ground into him, even though all he really wanted to do was to curl up in a corner and go to sleep.
His hyperexcited, adrenaline-fueled high was beginning to drop away. The full impact of what had happened had sunk in, dragging his spirits down as it did. He could not see how more than a handful of Ishaq’s crew could have gotten away, and that meant a lot of people he knew might be gone. Stone, Fellsworth, Ichiro, Bettany. “Christ,” he muttered aloud. That was for starters. How many more would there be? The list would be meters long.
“Sir?” Yazdi prompted gently.
Michael started as he came to earth. “Shit. Sorry. Daydreaming again. Fire away, Corporal.”
“We’re in trouble, sir.”
“Trouble? Of course we’re in trouble.” Michael looked baffled. Talk about stating the blindingly obvious.
Yazdi shook her head. “I don’t mean it like that, sir,” she replied patiently. “Have a look at the holovid. I’ve slaved it to the external holocam.”
Michael did as he was told. He stared at the holovid, but it did not make any sense. “Who is that?” All he could see was a single merchant ship closing in on them. He looked closer. “Who is he?”
Yazdi shrugged. “Don’t know, sir. It looks like he doesn’t want us around. Here, sir.”
“Stand by one.” Overriding the lifepod’s automatic pilot, Michael frantically spun the pod to point its armored nose at the unknown attacker. It was not much, but every little bit helped. “Right, Corp. Sorry. Go on.”
“No worries. Here, sir. Have a look.” Michael looked on intently as Yazdi zoomed the holocam in as close as it would go. For a moment, what he was seeing did not make sense. The ship was using chromaflage to conceal something, but what? An icy hand clamped itself around his heart as it came to him.
“Oh, Jeez! Are those what I think they are?”
“They are, sir. Those are rail-gun ports. That’s what took the Ishaq out. That’s—”The holovid flared with the brilliant flash of a rail-gun broadside. An instant later, the lifepod was slapped backward, the hull screeching in protest, a massive crunch announcing a rail-gun slug strike. It was over in an instant, so quickly that Michael did not have time to feel any fear. Desperately, he checked for damage.
“Lucky, lucky, lucky,” he muttered as he ran the pod’s diagnostics. The slug had punched into the lifepod’s bow and ripped its way along the outer skin without penetrating the inner hull, leaving only a blazing white-hot furrow spewing ionized gas to record its passing. They had survived by pure, blind chance; a hit dead center would have gutted the pod. He took a deep breath. A lifepod was a small target, but even small targets got hit. His stomach knotted at the thought.
“Christ! Now it all makes sense. Those are the bad guys, Corporal.”
“They sure as hell are, sir.”
“Hang on a moment. Let me have a look at something.” Michael patched his neuronics into the Ishaq’s event log he had downloaded in the awful near-panicked rush to get to the lifepods before the ship blew. The data were raw and there were terabytes to look at, so it took a while, but he found it in the end: data from Ishaq’s infrared sensors acquired in the moments before the rail-gun attack had hit home. There it was. Michael could not be sure, but it looked to him like the characteristic heat signature of a ship that had lost fusion containment and exploded. He looked again. Not one ship, either—lots of ships. Ishaq had not died alone. Other ships had died that day. Why? None of it made any sense.
“Shit. This changes things bigtime.” Michael sat back to think. “Right, this is what we need to do, Corporal. First, I’m going to comm you and Murphy here a data file—a big data file. It’s the Ishaq’s event log, and if we live long enough, we’ll need it to convict these people of piracy. I’m going to put a neuronics block on it, so whoever these people are, you can’t tell them it exists. Okay?”
The two marines nodded. “Good.” There was a short pause as the transfer went through. “Right! Now we need to get our escape kits tucked away and then our skinsuits back on in case they get lucky and punch a hole in us. Anything else?”
Yazdi shook her head. “No, sir. Got to say, I don’t fancy our chances. They’re either going to blow us to hell or it’s some damn prison camp somewhere.”
Michael nodded. Yazdi was right. If they were going to be blown to hell, there was nothing he could do to stop it. And if they were about to be captured, they would need the little escape kits tucked away safely under synthskin patches: two under the upper arms, one low on each buttock, and one behind each thigh above the knee. Neuronics blocks made it impossible for any Fleet spacer to reveal the kits’ existence to anyone not positively authenticated as serving Fleet personnel, so their captors would never find out. Whoever they were.
“Right,” he said forcefully as a quick check of the holovid showed their attacker closing in. “Let’s get the escape kits out and make a start. We may not have much time.” He stood up to reach a small panel high on one bulkhead, pressing his finger down on the access control. A small prick signaled that his DNA had been sampled, and then the panel clicked open, revealing a tightly packed mass of small white packets.
They were in business.
Commodore Monroe looked at his chief of staff in frustration. “What do you mean we can’t eliminate them? They’re only damn lifepods, for Kraa’s sake. Rail guns, lasers, machetes, baseball bats, sticks. I don’t give a damn what you use. Get rid of them. No survivors, remember?”
“I do, sir, but these are military lifepods with hardened, self-sealing hulls. They are damn tough. We’re only fitted with standard mership lasers. They are taking far too long to break into them, and even then we’re only depressurizing them for a second or two. They’ll go to skinsuits and wait until the hull reseals. We could be all day.”
“Rail guns, then.”
“Sir,” Monroe’s chief of staff replied, a
touch impatiently. “They’re too small. We can’t get them all. We’ve had two hits, neither fatal. It’ll take too long. Sir, I strongly advise that we move in and scoop them up. We can work out what to do with them later.”
Monroe thought about it for a moment. His chief of staff was right. He knew now that he had made a mistake. He had sent the rest of his ships on their way without thinking the problem through. According to the traffic schedule, the next merchant ship was due to arrive in less than half an hour. The window of opportunity he had taken to destroy twenty-seven FedWorld merchant ships and one heavy cruiser was closing fast. He was confident that his false identity would hold up to scrutiny, but not if he was sitting in the middle of an expanding cloud of ionized gas, firing lasers and rail guns at defenseless lifepods. Then there was the FedWorld heavy cruiser Al-Masu’di due in fifty minutes to worry about. He was damn sure they would not let him go without asking the hard questions.
“Right, I agree. Let’s do it.” He watched as his chief of staff gave the orders to move Quebec-One in close. Its two shuttles would launch as it approached to round up the strays.
“Okay, sir. That’s done.”
“Good. How long?”
“Twenty minutes, sir. Unlike ours, their pods are programmed to close in on each other to make recovery easier.”
Monroe grimaced. It would be close. “How kind of them. Such caring people, the Feds.” He sniffed. “How many pods?”
“Twenty-five, sir.”
Monroe’s eyebrows shot up. “Twenty-five? That all?”
“Twenty-five, sir. That’s it.”
Monroe blinked, still struggling to understand the full magnitude of the loss. “Kraa! So few.”
“We didn’t give them much time, sir. We caught them napping. When the fusion plant powering the aft rail-gun batteries lost containment . . . Well, that was pretty much it for most of them. The rest would have gone when the main engines went up.”
“So how many spacers are we talking about?”
“FedWorld heavy cruisers carry twelve-man lifepods, sir. So at most, let’s see . . . Three hundred? Probably less allowing for casualties.”
Monroe turned away. For a brief instant he felt sick, his adrenaline-fueled compulsion to eliminate the pods gone.
He might be a Hammer. He might hate the Feds—and he did—but he was a spacer, too, a human speck alone in the appalling vastness of space. Three hundred survivors from a crew of—what?—well over a thousand spacers. That was hard.
Monroe turned back to his chief of staff. “One more thing.”
“Sir?”
“They will have seen Quebec-One. Nothing we can do about that, but they must not know who we are. I want standard mership skinsuits worn, visors down. Nothing obviously Hammer, nothing military-issue, and stun-gun anyone who’s not already unconscious. Once we’ve got them locked down on board, we’ll work out what to do next.”
“Understood, sir!”
Monroe watched as the man fired off the necessary orders. He did not have to ask his chief of staff what he wanted to do with their three hundred or so unwanted guests. It was bloody obvious. He could see it in the man’s eyes. But somehow he could not see himself ejecting defenseless spacers into the void. Killing at a distance was one thing. Killing people you had just rescued, well, that was quite another—he smiled grimly—even for a Hammer who had commanded an operation that had killed twenty-eight ships and close to two thousand spacers.
Monroe sat back; he was well satisfied with the day’s work. The Feds would be shitting themselves when the news broke, he thought. The loss of twenty-seven merships would be bad enough; the impact on their interstellar trade would be nothing short of a disaster. But the loss of the Ishaq would be ten times worse. For the Feds, it would be an absolute catastrophe. Monroe had been to staff college. He knew how the Feds saw themselves. The power of their Space Fleet was the foundation on which the safety and security of the entire Federated Worlds was built.
He smiled again. For once, things were going the Hammer’s way. It was a good feeling.
Friday, September 3, 2399, UD
HWS Quebec-One, pinchspace
Michael could not work it out.
Why would that damn dog not leave him alone? All he wanted to do was sleep; the warm, fuzzy, welcoming darkness kept pulling him down to a safe place away from all the pain and disappointment of the world. The dog was persistent; it kept licking his face, its cold wet tongue dragging him back from the warm, safe depths toward a cold light burning fiercely far above him. And the dog was winning; bit by bit, the light got stronger and stronger.
He opened his eyes and screamed in agony. Blinding white light drove red-hot slivers of pain into his skull. He dropped back into the darkness, but not for long. Slowly, the darkness seeped away, the cold and light returning until he was fully conscious again.
This time he opened his eyes slowly. The overhead lights were searingly bright, and a blue-white glare hammered into a head suddenly splitting with pain. He closed his eyes and lay still for a moment, his entire body jangling and fizzing with little shocks of pain. Shit. He remembered now. Stun guns; the bastards had stun-gunned him, but who were they, for God’s sake? He could not even remember what they looked like.
Cautiously, he opened his eyes again. Standing above him was a shipsuited figure, black against the blinding brightness overhead, his face covered by some sort of mask. Michael’s eyes hurt. He could not make the man out. Where was he? He started to turn his head.
“Ah, ha, you little Fed wart. Awake, are we? Get up. Now!”
Michael did his best, but nothing would work properly. His legs collapsed under him as he tried to struggle to his feet.
“You idle piece of crap. Get the fuck up,” the shipsuit ordered, reinforcing his words with a full-blooded kick to the ribs.
Michael screamed as the boot hit home, the pain almost overwhelming him as something inside his chest tore with a crackling rip. The agony was almost unbearable. He could barely breathe, but at least it had cleared his head. He could think now. He commed his neuronics to dump painkillers into his system. Instantly, the pain receded; after a huge effort, he managed to get to his feet, hand clamped to a pipe to keep himself upright. He stood swaying in front of the anonymous shipsuited figure. He stared at a pair of pale blue-green eyes, the only thing visible through two slits in the hood, a crudely made piece of cloth like a small bag draped loosely over the man’s head. I’m going to call you Shithead, Michael decided.
“Good,” Shithead said. “Walk!” He waved Michael toward a hole in a wire cage crudely erected across one corner of what looked like the empty cargo bay of a merchant ship. “I’ll tell you where to go.”
Michael began an unsteady shuffle out of the cage. Apart from the two of them, the huge bay was completely empty, an echoing shell. Where in God’s name were the rest of his lifepod? Where were Yazdi, Murphy, and the rest? While he walked, Michael carefully checked himself out. He had been searched roughly; his shipsuit had been left a tattered wreck, pockets torn off and badges gone. His boots had gone, too, but a furtive check confirmed that his escape kits were still in place, thank God. Something told him he was going to need them.
Once he was out of the cage, Shithead waved him on; they came to an airtight door. “Go through, turn left. Keep going and don’t stop until I tell you,” Shithead called from somewhere close behind his right shoulder.
Michael turned to him. “But who—”
He had barely opened his mouth when Shithead whipped a short club from behind his back. Stepping to one side, he smashed the club backhanded into Michael’s stomach. It was so quick, so unexpected, Michael could do nothing to avoid the blow. The club drove the wind out of him, doubling him over with an oooofff as the air in his lungs exploded out of his mouth.
Shithead stood back, watching in silence. Michael slowly recovered, his mouth working desperately as he fought to refill lungs screaming for air. It took a while, but eventually he was
able to stand upright with great difficulty, the pain in his lungs, stomach, and ribs coming and going in great searing waves.
Shithead put the tip of the bat into Michael’s face. “You don’t talk unless I ask you a question. Got it?”
Michael stood there, not saying a word. Shithead could go screw himself.
“Well? You understand?” Shithead swung the bat back, but this time Michael was ready for him. He ignored the pain from his ribs and stomach as the simple routines drilled into him by Corporal Yazdi kicked in. Michael’s arm went up. Half turning under the oncoming blow, he deflected the club away from him. Shithead lost his balance as he followed through. As he twisted, Michael stepped behind him and with delicate precision kicked the man hard in the crotch, the arch of his foot hitting home with a deeply satisfying crunching thump. Dropping the club, Shithead collapsed to the deck, screaming in pain. Michael grabbed the club off the deck. He was going to beat the son of a bitch to a pulp.
He never got the chance. A stun shot on full power hit him square in the back, dropping his body to the deck alongside the moaning Shithead. He writhed in a futile attempt to escape from the exquisite agony of tortured nerve endings, the club slipping from his fingers to clatter away across the plasteel deck panels.
Michael lay in a twisted heap, lungs heaving as he struggled to breathe, the aftereffects of the stun-gun shot driving bolts of molten pain up and down every nerve in his body. A second shipsuited figure appeared over him, this one a fat, dumpy man with pitiless eyes. He looked down at Michael through the slits in his hood. “I don’t suggest you try that again, sonny. If you do, I’ll ask the boss if I can space you. And you know what? I’m sure he’ll agree. Understand?”
Michael’s mouth tried to shape the words, but nothing in his body seemed to be working properly. His brain was, though; he was going to call this one Porky.
Porky leaned down. “I think you understand,” he whispered. He stood upright, stepped back, and kicked Michael casually in the kidneys for emphasis. He waved over the men who had followed him into the cargo bay.
The Battle of the Hammer Worlds Page 9
