by Rick Partlow
* * *
McKay shook his head violently, trying to stay sharp. It was all he could do to maintain his hold on Ari Shamir’s harness, letting the younger man tow him with his maneuver jets. His leg throbbed with every heartbeat, though at least the blood had stopped soaking the field bandage the medic had forced onto him. The pain was all that had kept him alert as they had navigated their way back through the ship. Luckily, they’d encountered little resistance---a few scattered groups of biomechs and the odd human crew had been dispatched summarily by the Marines riding point.
Their biggest enemy was time. The Bradley and the Patton were scheduled to attack in minutes, and there was no way to contact them---the Eysselink drive warped all electromagnetic signals just as it warped spacetime, and the only way to contact a ship with its drive field activated was through the use of another drive field. Which the Protectorate ships didn’t have. Their only option was to get to the courier and get out of the free-fire zone before it was too late.
Finally, just when Jason was beginning to think they’d somehow gotten lost, the narrow corridor opened up into the broad expanse of the pressurized half of the ship’s docking bay. Waiting for them there, framed against the clear-plastic wall that separated them from the hard vacuum without, was Gunny Lambert and the other half of the platoon.
“Glad you fellas made it,” Lambert drawled, a scowl visible through his faceplate. “But I’m afraid we’re all dressed up with no place to go.” He jerked a thumb at the vacuum behind them, and the conspicuous emptiness therein. “The ship is gone.”
* * *
“Well, this is fucking hopeless,” Lieutenant Kristopolis sighed. “Pardon me, sir,” he apologized to the President, who hung behind Shannon Stark’s shoulder, watching the RSC officer attempt to take control of the orbital weapons control system.
“Not a problem, Lieutenant,” Jameson assured him. He seemed a bit more presidential now, not as harried and haunted as he’d been less than an hour before, though in his torn, soiled clothes he still looked more like a refugee than anything else. “What’s wrong?”
“Is it the controls, Kristy?” Shannon asked, leaning heavily against the console, the beating she’d taken during the attack beginning to take its toll on her.
“Controls work fine,” he told her, absently rubbing his hand across his face, smearing a persistent streak of carbon on his forehead. “It’s the antennae---they got totally blasted in the fight.” He frowned. “I told them to try not to damage them unless things looked hopeless, but...” A pained look passed across his face as he thought again of how many of his people had died just an hour ago.
“Can we fix it?” Jameson asked.
“There are plenty of spares in storage,” Kristopolis explained, “but it would take at least four or five hours just to put the new dishes up, let alone calibrating them.” He shook his head. “I can start some of my people on it if you think it’ll do any good.”
“No point,” Shannon decided. “It’s out of our hands now.”
Almost unconsciously, she glanced upwards. Somewhere up there was either their salvation or their destruction...and Jason.
* * *
Jason stared at the empty space where the courier had been, shaking his head. How the hell could anyone have got past the security seal they’d installed on the ship’s airlock? Surely those frightened sheep they’d left in the bay wouldn’t have had time to physically cut through the hull.
“What about the boarding pod?” Shamir asked. “It’s only one level up.”
“Useless,” Lambert grunted. “It’s fused to the hull, same as ours.”
“So what now?” Jock asked, still grasping Vinnie’s limp form by the back of his harness. “Are there any other ships? Maybe maintenance pods?”
“Escape pods,” McKay declared suddenly, remembering the emergency escape vehicle he’d seen on the bridge less than an hour before. “Ari, they’ll be on your map.”
“Roger that,” the Lieutenant confirmed, calling up the Heads-Up-Display from his suit’s computer. “We got three escape pod bays, closest one two levels down from here, second on the bridge that we blew through and one more back in engineering.”
“I can check on the pods from here,” Crossman announced, moving to a computer terminal set in the hull next to the docking umbilical. He came up short, looking back at the others with an expression that was half embarrassment and half desperation. “Does anyone read Russian?”
Jason sighed, kicked across the room to the terminal.
After a frustrating series of wrong turns in the complicated Protectorate operating system---some ancient, pre-Collapse relic called “Portholes” or something, he couldn’t quite make out the translation from Russian---Jason finally found the readout that gave the status of the ship’s escape pods.
“Okay,” he reported, “the pod bays below us are empty---we gotta go to engineering.”
“We’d better haul ass, too,” Lambert urged. “In another half-hour, this ship will be nothing but a fond memory.”
“You know the way, Gunny,” Jason waved a hand by way of invitation.
Lambert grunted humorlessly and pushed off from the wall, giving himself a boost in the right direction before he activated his maneuvering jets. The others followed close behind, backtracking through the eerily quiet corridors.
It’s a goddamn ghost ship, Jason thought, a cold shudder running through him. A Mary Celeste, with the food still on the plates. And if we can’t get off of it in time, we’ll be the ghosts.
Gunny Lambert led them back through a central hub that was the connection for the Defender’s independent modules, this time taking a route that led directly away from the bridge. The corridor narrowed until they were forced to move two abreast as they approached closer to the engineering section. Here and there floated the corpses of biomechs and crewmen, killed by Gunny Lambert’s team on their way to the auxiliary weapons center. Their bodies moved hauntingly with the air currents. Jason found his eyes following the corpses as he passed them, half-expecting them to come alive from their horrible wounds and begin shooting at him.
He shook himself, realizing with a start that he was starting to zone out---whether from the concussion of the earlier explosion, the violent decompression, the wound in his leg or a combination of all three. He had to watch himself---being careless could still get them killed. But the eyes on the corpses...they were staring at him with that sharklike blackness...
“Have you seen my master?”
Jason yelled in surprise, letting go of Ari’s arm as he spun around. And his jaw fell open.
“What the fuck, over?” Tom Crossman asked, and Jason had to admit it was a damn good question.
Standing half-in and half-out of an open doorway in a cloud of blond hair was one of the most beautiful women Jason had ever seen. A look of pure innocence graced her perfect face, an innocence belied somewhat by the fact that she was completely naked. She didn’t seem to even be conscious of her nudity. She made no attempt to cover herself, just hovered there with her hands behind her back like a little girl.
So befuddled was Jason by her appearance that it took him a full five seconds to realize that she had spoken in Russian.
“Have you seen my master?” she repeated in a little-girl voice that sent chills up Jason’s back, a voice that seemed eerily incongruous with her blatant sensuality. “He told me to wait here for you,” she explained, eyes blinking back tears. “He said you’d come. But then he left on the little ship, and he didn’t take me with him.”
“Your master?” Jason asked hesitantly in her language. He felt silly talking to her, still convinced she was but a product of his fevered imagination. “Who’s your master?”
“He’s a great man,” she assured him, nodding firmly, her breasts jiggling with the motion. “He’s the General, and he said I should give this to you.”
Her hands came from behind her back, and cradled lovingly in them as if she held a bouquet of flowers
was a small, round object that could only have been some kind of grenade. Her grasp had held the spoon in place, but as she opened her hands the curved metal spoon flew free.
An image of an old training video flashed through Jason’s mind: the spoon’s release would free a plunger that would, in turn, ignite a three-to-five second fuse...
Jason had time to think: Great...other guys see their lives flash before their eyes and my last thoughts are a Marine weapons lecture... before a grey-armored shape zipped past him on a burst of maneuvering jets, slamming into the woman and taking her back through the doorway, grenade and all.
The blast was puny compared to the one that had blown through the hole back on the bridge, but Jason jerked at the bass-drum sound as if the grenade had gone off inside his gut.
“Aw, Jesus!” The Marine medic shot into the room even before the pinging sounds of ricocheting fragments had quieted, and Ari went in on her heels, his face pale.
Jason grabbed one of the Marines by the arm and nodded for the man to take him into the room. It was somebody’s cabin, he realized immediately. A bunk folded out of the hull beneath a wall-mounted locker, and a clothes closet was set into the opposite wall, partially open to reveal a selection of utility fatigues. But those walls were covered with blood, and gobbets of flesh floated hellishly in the periphery of the room. What was left of the girl hovered in the center of the room, a hideous Venus de Milo, lacking arms and a head. She looked less a corpse to Jason than a doll dismembered by some spoiled child.
What the hell was she? Was she human, or something like the biomechs?
Jason shook the thought away as his gaze drifted to the armored body that was cradled in the medic’s arms. Shamir stood by her side helplessly, fists clenching and unclenching, eyes closed. It took McKay a long moment to realize who it was---the blast had shattered the faceplate of the helmet together with the face beneath. But the Sergeant’s stripes marked in subdued black on the sleeve of his combat armor left no doubt: it was Gunnery Sergeant Lambert.
“Christ,” Jason breathed. Looking at Ari, he saw the same hurt and disbelief in the man’s face that had manifested itself in his own visage back on Inferno. But there was no time.
“Ari,” Jason said quietly.
For a moment, he thought the man hadn’t heard him, but then he looked up. His eyes linked with Jason’s and there was so much in that gaze that would never be expressed. So much hurt and betrayal and disillusionment...so much that Jason had already felt.
“Corporal Kurita,” Ari finally said, his eyes never leaving Jason’s, “you’re the platoon sergeant. Everyone out of here! We’ve got to get to the escape pod.”
“What about Gunny’s body?” the medic asked.
“We won’t be able to take him on the pod.” Shamir shook his head.
“But...” she began to argue. His chilling stare stopped her in mid-sentence.
“Let’s worry about the living,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” she mumbled, reluctantly letting loose of Lambert’s body and exiting the room.
Jason took one last look at Ari, then headed out, leaving behind the lifeless form of yet another good soldier.
The engineering section was scarred with the pockmarks of bullet impacts and strewn with metal fragments, globules of blood and the chewed-up bodies of dead crewmen and biomechs. Electricity arced from ruined terminals and consoles, sending a haze of light smoke drifted lazily through the compartment. The acrid smell of burnt insulation was thick in the air.
“Where are we going?” Ari asked the Corporal who had been with Lambert’s team.
“This way.” The rangy young Australian waved, leading them down a side corridor through a darkened maze of power conduits and coolant pipes.
The circuitous route finally ended in a small chamber set at the very edge of the hull and a pair of rounded, drum-shaped escape pods.
“Thank God,” someone sighed. Jason couldn’t tell who it was, but he personally wasn’t inclined to be thankful for anything yet.
“Get Vinnie into a pod first,” Jason ordered. He was finding it harder and harder to talk and he wondered if the ship’s atmosphere was going.
The medic tugged Vinnie toward the left-hand pod while Jock worked the hand-crank to open the access hatch. The wheel-shaped crank had seen little use, apparently, since the ship had left the Protectorate, and it refused to budge at Jock’s effort. The big Aussie tried to wedge himself against the wall to gain leverage, but the wheel stuck fast.
“Somebody give me a hand,” Jock grunted, glaring at the rest of them.
Clarke, the autogunner, shifted his weapon around to his back and moved to help Jock, but suddenly the ship was jolted violently, the impact throwing everyone against the hull. Jason found himself floating upside down over Jock, his vision filled with explosions of light from the impact of his head against the wall.
“What the hell was that?” Crossman demanded.
“That was a mass driver,” Corporal Kurita announced. “I was on a Patrol boat in the belt that got hit by pirates, and that’s exactly what it felt like.” She looked Ari and Jason in the eye. “Sirs, I think the Fleet has arrived.”
* * *
“Direct hit, Captain,” the weapons officer announced quietly. “That took out her engines.”
“Hit the weapons pods,” Patel directed. “I want to make sure she’s defanged before we do anything else.”
On the bridge’s tactical display, another of the Protectorate ships disappeared in a globular fusion blast from one of the Bradley’s Shipbuster missiles, leaving nothing behind but a ball of glowing gas.
The ensign at the weapons board adjusted the aim of the electromagnetic cannon that ran the length of the ship and hit the control to fire it. The ship jolted noticeably, swayed by the expulsion at hypersonic velocity of a lump of metal the size of a groundcar. The projectile was invisible as it covered the hundred kilometers between the two ships in a heartbeat, slicing through the strut that connected the Defender’s primary weapons pod to the hull. The massive collection of chemical power cells, missiles, lasers and submunitions twisted away from the main body of the ship, propelled by the torque imparted to it by the impact, and tore free with a puff of escaping atmosphere. The pod described a lazy arc downward, destined to burn up in the atmosphere, leaving the Protectorate vessel shuddering from the twin impacts.
“Teeth are pulled, sir,” the ensign reported, turning back to face Captain Patel. “Orders?”
Patel’s face was grim, his eyes half-closed in a silent prayer.
“Give it a Shipbuster,” he ordered, his voice almost a whisper. “Blow it out of orbit.”
* * *
“Get those Goddamned things open!” Jason bellowed, shoving off the hull, where he’d just been hurtled for a second time. “That’s got to have been the weapons section going, and the only thing that’s left is to put a fusion bomb up our ass!”
“Get over here and help me!” Jock urged, grabbing hold of the left-side pod’s crank one more time.
Clarke growled deep in his throat, unhooked his autogun and maneuvering jets and shrugged them free, then set his back into the wheel, shoulder to shoulder with Jock. On the opposite side, three marines worked the other pod’s hatch, sliding a carbine stock through the spokes of the wheel and using it for leverage. A bone-rattling shriek echoed through the chamber as the Marines on the right-hand pod broke the wheel loose and the hatch popped open, nearly swatting them away. A second later, Jock and Clarke got their side moving, their pained grunts drowning out the squeal of the rust, but the medic was already shoving Vinnie into the right-side hatch.
“Into the left one,” Ari urged his Marines, sending half the platoon scurrying into the little pod.
Weapons and maneuvering packs flew free as they were abandoned to save space, and the Marines packed into the spacecraft, ignoring the safety straps and counting on their sheer numbers to restrain them. In the right-hand vehicle, the medic swiftly but thoroughly
secured Vinnie in one of the six acceleration couches while the remaining two Marines, Ari, Jason and Tom Crossman waited impatiently, eyes darting toward the hull, wishing they could see through it.
Jason checked the chronometer on his wrist computer. It had been nearly a minute since the last mass-driver hit.
“Two minutes,” he estimated in a soft whisper. Two minutes till the multimegaton fusion warhead turned them into a cloud of radioactive particles.
Two minutes to live.
* * *
“Ma’am,” Lieutenant Kristopolis announced, excitement in his voice, “I’ve got a feed from one of the satellites!”
Shannon and President Jameson hopped up from the consoles they’d been using as impromptu seats and rushed to hang behind the man’s shoulder as he adjusted the view on the screen he’d been fiddling with for the last hour.
“What is it?” Jameson asked, looking from the static-filled screen to Kristy and back.
“It’s not a defense bird,” Kristy told them, chewing on his lip as he tried to bring in a clear view. “But I managed to hook into a weather satellite in geosynchronous orbit.”
The snow on the viewscreen slowly cleared and revealed a dimly-glimmering metallic star just at the edge of vision. Kristopolis worked the magnification and the glint of light grew into a huge cigar shape, its aft end twisted into a shapeless wreckage and a free length of metal strut hanging limply along its belly. Scrawled alongside a Protectorate flag was a red stream of Cyrillic letters that Shannon recognized as spelling “Defender.”
“That’s the flagship,” Shannon guessed. “That has to be the one Jason is on.”
“It looks like they’ve taken damage,” President Jameson observed.
“Yeah, and we’re still alive,” Kristy cracked. “Does that mean we’ve won?”
“Maybe,” Shannon said, eyes glued to the screen. “I just hope he’s...they’re okay.”
“What’s that?” Jameson pointed to a small flare of light closing on the Protectorate ship from a higher orbital path.
“I don’t know,” Kristy admitted, shaking his head. “Maybe another ship?”
