Judgment of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 5)

by Glynn Stewart

  “Life signs through here,” Massey radioed back to him. “I’m not reading energy signatures of heavy weapons, but could be pirates.”

  “Could be crew, too,” Denis pointed out. “Soft-touch it, Corporal.”

  “Wilco.”

  Denis caught up just as one of Massey’s Marines locked his boots to a wall and ripped a sealed metal hatch out of the way, the other three behind her with their heavy rifles pointed at the hatch.

  “We surrender!” a voice exclaimed.

  “No need for that, miss,” Massey barked. “We’re Marines. Are you all okay?”

  Taking that as a sign they hadn’t found pirates, Denis advanced forward to check on the situation. The room was a mess hall of some kind, and easily two dozen men and women in work suits had barricaded themselves in it.

  They had no weapons but had wedged a table against the hatch to keep it shut. That hadn’t sufficed against exosuit armor.

  “I’m Mage-Captain Denis Romanov,” he told them quickly. “We’ve secured local space and are retaking the ship. I’m trying to get to the power complex to make sure the bastards don’t blow us all to hell!”

  “You’re a sight for sore eyes,” the woman who’d initially offered their surrender said. “I’m engineer Darlene Matthews, one of the senior wrench jockeys for that complex. In theory, the safety protocols should stop them blowing the plants—”

  “Ma’am, I know seven different ways to make a properly safetied fusion reactor detonate,” Denis said gently. “We need to get in there safely and quietly.”

  “In those suits?”

  “Safely is more important,” the Marine admitted.

  “If you’re following the schematics, you’re going to walk right into an open area they’ll have set up as a kill zone if they’re smart,” Matthews told him. “But…there are always other ways around a ship of this size.”

  “Can you show me?”

  “No time to walk through it on paper,” she snapped. “You lot okay with following a civvie?”

  “It’s your ship, Miss Matthews.”

  #

  The engineer might have surrendered immediately on seeing exosuits breaking down the door of her hiding spot, but there clearly wasn’t anything wrong with Darlene Matthews’ general sense of courage and self-confidence.

  She drifted through Denis’s team of exosuited men and women without a moment’s hesitation, then gestured for them to follow her as she grabbed a handhold.

  “Follow the engineer, people,” he ordered. “She knows the way and we don’t.”

  The fact that Matthews was also significantly more familiar with the power systems they might need to stop overloading could also come in handy. If she hadn’t volunteered, Denis might have had to convince her.

  She led them off of the main routes, into a snarl of corridors and tubing that Denis wasn’t even surprised didn’t match his schematics, then stopped in the middle of one of those corridors.

  “I don’t suppose one of you fine folks has some kind of cutter?” she asked. “If we cut a hole through here, it’ll open up an air exchange pipe used by the main heating system. It’s big enough for your suits and will take us right into the center of the complex. They’ll be guarding the entrances, not the middle.”

  “Massey,” Denis snapped.

  He’d been a Marine officer for too long not to assume that his noncoms had the solution to most relatively mundane problems. He wasn’t surprised in the slightest when a compartment on Corporal Massey’s armor produced a technically non-regulation vibro-blade easily fifty centimeters long.

  The weapon made short work of the relatively frail wall of the corridor and shell of the vent beyond. The piping was slightly larger than Matthews had implied, though still not quite wide enough for the Marines to go two abreast.

  “Zhao, you go first,” Denis ordered one of his Marines. “Matthews, you can give her directions from behind, but you are not going first.”

  The engineer was smart enough not to argue the point, and the detail moved into the piping.

  “Coral, report,” Denis requested as he followed his people in. The air in the vent was actually colder than in the corridors. Presumably this was the return pipe, bringing air back to the complex to be warmed by the coolant from the fusion reactors.

  “Schematics put us near life support,” his subordinate replied. “I’m hearing gunfire, but it’s sporadic. We’re moving in to relieve the defenders.”

  “Be careful,” he ordered. “I want your people and Callisto’s crew intact when this is over. Prisoners would be nice but aren’t essential.”

  “Understood. Point has eyes on bogies,” she said crisply. “Coral out.”

  Smart subordinates were worth their weight in gold.

  The schematics he had of the generic MacMurray were so far off from the realities of Callisto’s interior piping that he had no idea where they’d ended up. This…wasn’t really a surprise. Corridors and living spaces weren’t consistent from ship to ship of a civilian ship class, and piping wasn’t even visible.

  There would be true schematics of Callisto somewhere. Denis didn’t have them—but he was relatively sure Matthews had them memorized.

  “Here,” she announced, shortly after his sensors started to warn him that the vent was getting uncomfortably warm for an unarmored human. “We’re right in the middle of the four main plants. If they’re going to try and blow us all to hell, they’ll at least start with those.”

  Even one of the smaller plants sent into overload would gut Callisto, but the big ones would vaporize her. Shaking his head, he tagged his people on his wrist-comp, directing each of them in specific directions.

  “All right. Matthews, get behind us all,” he ordered. “It’s warm in here, but I don’t want you in the line of fire. Massey, open me a door.”

  #

  Exosuits weren’t designed for stealth or sneakiness. Matthews’ route had got them into the middle of the power complex, but Denis had no illusions about his people’s ability to try and quietly secure the facility.

  His sensors were doing their best to estimate positions of hostiles, and he haloed each one on his screen, marking the potentials for each of his people as Massey went to work with the blade.

  Opening up the side of the flimsy vent was easy. Arranging it so a door wide enough for more than a single exosuit opened in one shot without giving too much warning of what was coming…that took a master, and Corporal Massey was just such a master.

  When the noncom finally kicked out the panel he’d created, a path wide enough for three exosuited troopers appeared in an instant. His fire team was out of the vent in the same moment, three Marines moving in at high speed with their rifles tracking and their scanners sweeping for threats.

  Exosuits weren’t designed for stealth. They were designed for assault.

  “Drop your weapons!” Massey bellowed over his suit’s speakers. “Drop your weapons or die!”

  Denis followed the first fire team out, his own suit’s computers collating the sensor take from each exosuit around him and layering it over the existing possibles it had identified before. A bogie flashed red, raising an assault rifle that probably wasn’t a threat to Denis’s men.

  It didn’t matter. Anyone who didn’t drop their weapons was a threat to somebody. Denis fired, his rifle spitting frangible antipersonnel rounds across the massive open space containing Callisto’s power generators.

  The rifleman went down. Others went down with him as Denis’s people charged in. None of the weapons his scans were detecting were a threat to exosuits on their own, though enough fire from even cheap assault rifles would eventually bring down even an exosuited Marine.

  The initial break-in over, Denis focused his attention on the sensor data, searching for the threat he was actually worried about.

  There.

  A cluster of three men, none registering as armed, working away at the control console for one of the primary power plants. They might not be
trying to rig it to explode, but it was a risk he couldn’t take.

  He turned off his exosuit’s magnetic boots and kicked off, triggering the suit’s jets at the same time. His ensuing flight drew fire from all across the power complex, but none of the pirates had penetrator rounds. Their bullets bounced off his armor, and he slammed into the metal floor next to the console, his rifle pointing directly at the center man.

  “Step away from the console,” he ordered. “It’s over.”

  Then, of course, his sensors went crazy with a threat warning. There was only so much his scans could do to find a concealed weapon, especially one without an active power source. The weapon one of the helpers pulled out didn’t even have moving parts. It was a one-shot, close-range weapon that fired a discarding sabot tungsten penetrator triggered by a tiny battery.

  Instinct and training took over, the rifle barking as he shot the man on the console and swung an armored fist around to smash aside the man with the penetrator pistol. Both men went down…and his suit warnings informed him that the third man had also drawn an identical weapon.

  He was out of position. Even with the suit’s enhanced speed, he couldn’t even get himself around to cast a spell to take the man down.

  Then a crowbar, in the hands of a pissed-off engineer, smashed into the thug’s arm with a horrible snapping sound as Matthews interjected herself into the fight. She had to have launched into the dive the moment Denis had fired, but she’d arrived in time to save his life.

  The pirate went spinning off into the reactor, which he hit with a very final-sounding crunch.

  “Thank you, Miss Matthews,” Denis said softly. “Can you check the console for me?”

  He locked his boots to the metal and surveyed the complex. Despite being abandoned by their peers, it looked like the thirty or so men—and they were all men, he noted absently—had refused to surrender. None of them were still standing and, sadly, it didn’t look like they’d taken any prisoners.

  “Oh, this is not good,” the engineer exclaimed. “They mirrored the controls of all four primary plants to this console and shut down the temperature sensors.”

  Which, if Denis remembered his own training on how to blow a plant like this up, short-circuited about half of the safety lockouts.

  “They opened up all of the fuel lines and set the tokamak to maximum pressure,” she continued. “They were busy overriding the rest of the safety protocols when you interrupted them.”

  “That puts us well over halfway to critical overload,” Denis concluded. “Can you stop it?”

  “Working on it,” she snapped.

  There was no way he could even evacuate his team. Callisto had at least a thousand people on board, and he’d brought twenty more with him. All of them were going to die very quickly if Matthews couldn’t stop the process.

  “Corporal, start pulling fuel lines,” he ordered crisply. “It won’t stop the process, but it’ll buy Miss Matthews time.”

  “Wilco.”

  His people started to jet around the massive open space with its spherical power plants. Denis watched on the schematics projected on his helmet as they detached fuel line after fuel line. There was no way they could remove them all, not in time, but each line removed reduced the amount of fuel being fed into the plants.

  His armor’s scanners happily informed him that both the temperature and radiation levels in the complex were rising as the containment vessels began to be overwhelmed.

  “There!” Matthews exclaimed. “Temperature sensors back online. Oh, shit.”

  “Matthews?”

  “Safety venting initiating, but temperatures are way over the line. I’m going to have to do a full emergency vent or we’re still going to have an overload.”

  That would dump a massive amount of superheated coolant into the very room they were standing in—a process that Denis’s exosuited men could survive but Matthews would not.

  “Right,” he said cheerfully, dropping an armored hand on the engineer’s shoulder. “Fortunately, I’m familiar with this system. Shout when you’re clear.”

  “Wait, what?”

  Denis’s suit computers finished assessing her mass and the necessary vector before she’d finished objecting, and his hand on her shoulder tightened as he picked her up and threw her toward an open security hatch.

  “Everyone, full seals,” he ordered, watching with one eye as the engineer flew across the complex while checking the temperature readings on the console with the other.

  They had…about thirty seconds. He spent ten of them making sure Matthews was clear and the security hatch had slammed shut behind her.

  It took five more seconds for him to locate the correct commands.

  Fortunately, the emergency venting was designed for exactly this situation and only took six seconds to go live, venting superheated coolant into the main engineering space. Alarms blazed across his helmet display again as the temperature skyrocketed toward two hundred degrees Celsius.

  Three hundred.

  Four.

  The exosuit was only rated for five hundred and fifty, and Denis was starting to get very worried when the temperature crossed five hundred degrees, but it finally, finally peaked.

  “Core temperatures are dropping,” he said softly, studying the panel. “The venting system for this room is engaging. Congratulations, folks. We get to live today.”

  Unfortunately, if any of the pirates had survived the clash with his people, they definitely had not survived his filling the room with superheated toxic coolant.

  #

  Matthews was waiting outside the security hatch when Denis clomped out of the slowly cooling engineering space. Once he was in clean, if still uncomfortably warm, air, he removed his helmet, studying the fair-haired woman with a small smile.

  “You were all ready to sacrifice yourself, miss,” he told her. “There wasn’t time to argue or to explain that I was qualified on the system. Needed you out of the danger zone.”

  “Appreciate that, Captain,” she said stiffly. “And thank you. I have a lot of friends on this ship.”

  “And there was no need for you to die for them today,” Denis said. “Tomorrow, well, you remain a power systems engineer.”

  She chuckled.

  “Fair enough.”

  With a nod to her, he pinged his other team.

  “Coral, what’s your status?”

  “I’ve had better days, boss,” the Corporal replied. “Someone is playing clever buggers. There’s almost nobody here, but they’ve got heavy-enough guns to keep us and the folks in life support pinned down.”

  “You can take them?”

  “Give me time and I can take anything, but I’m guessing they had more and I don’t know where they went. But I can guess.”

  “The bridge.”

  “Bingo.”

  “Thanks, Corporal,” Denis growled. “Box those bastards in, see if you can force a surrender. We’re going to go see if we can find the Captain.”

  He turned back to Matthews.

  “Miss Matthews, you’ve already helped a great deal, but it seems I may need one more favor,” he told her. “What’s the fastest way to the bridge?”

  “That depends, Captain. Are you feeling up to flying?”

  #

  Chapter 14

  While Callisto’s overall dimensions were immense, it looked much like a collection of towers and factories linked together by piping and struts and surrounded by two massive spinning rings. The power complex was a squat tower near the edge for easy access, and the bridge was on the “top” of the tallest tower, at the centerline of the ship.

  To get from the power-generator complex to the bridge inside would require going “down” to the disk that was the base of the ship and then “up” to the top of the tower. The ship had a decent internal transit system, but it would have been a thirty- or forty-minute trip for Denis and his team.

  Their exosuits, however, had begun as combat suits for use in vacuum. T
hey had everything needed to make a three-kilometer EVA jaunt built in, though their fuel tanks were normally kept empty.

  The airlock that Matthews led them to was intended for the engineers and repair teams to carry out exterior work on Callisto. There were lockers full of civilian EVA suits, one of which Matthews strapped on, and available tanks to fill the exosuit fuel cells.

  “Dropping a marker on your maps, but you’re still best off following me,” the engineer told them. “I’ve made this exact jump before for maintenance work. It’s not just a vector; you need to know the path.”

  Denis didn’t like dragging the civilian into yet another firefight, but she was damned useful while they were retaking her ship.

  “All right, Miss Matthews. Lead the way.”

  The airlock cycled, venting the air into space—followed a moment later by the eleven of them. They drifted out for a moment, then Matthews activated her suit jets and took off toward the bridge.

  “Follow the engineer, people,” Denis ordered, locking his own suit’s systems onto her. Her course wasn’t a direct path to the marker for the bridge airlock, but he trusted her enough to believe there was a reason for that.

  Their course arced them away from the power-generator complex, which was still venting gases as the fusion plants slowly cooled back down to normal operating temperature and pressure, and around several massive storage containers likely holding unprocessed ore. Each of the containers would have easily swallowed a Navy destroyer or two, and the pipes that fed into and out of them were at least thirty meters across.

  A MacMurray refinery ship represented more spaceborne industry than some entire star systems commanded. There were, at last count, sixteen of them in Sol.

  “Adjusting course to bear on the airlock; bringing us around Storage Six’s feeder pipes,” Matthews told them, her suit’s computers feeding the vector change back to the Secret Service team following her.

  The course twisted them away from the storage containers, dodging them around a set of immense, hundred-and-fifty-meter-wide exhaust flues for the main refinery, toward the central administration tower.