“I can always swing by to pick you up later,” the pilot suggested, “after you kill the crew and knock out their weapons.”
“You’ll stay until the job is done and they’re all dead,” I said as smoothly as velvet, hoping I wouldn't have to resort to the iron fist just yet again.
“I’m just saying if it looks like the Bugs are going to make it into the cutter, I’m taking off. There’s no way I’m going hand to hand with a bunch of bug fighters,” the pilot declared with a hint of finality.
“I’ll post the Prometheans to defend the ship,” I said, happy to have found a solution that got those heavily armed, blood thirsty settlers out of the way.
“Thanks, Admiral,” said the pilot, not looking very thankful. Maybe he thought if the Prometheans were there they might not take kindly to him trying to run away at the first sign of trouble. Who knows? Maybe he was just unhappy with the entire situation. I can't say that I would hold it against him.
Of course, this new plan didn’t sit well with the Prometheans. They were out for blood. Preferably pirate blood as it turned out, but Bug blood would do in a pinch.
There was no way I was leaving Gants or his men behind, the eight fools were decked out in power armor. It didn’t matter that it whined and clanked worse than my suit ever had, there was no way I was leaving that kind of firepower behind.
Instead, I left the medics and the only pair of genuine volunteers out of the whole ship's crew. I felt disgusted. I had eight idiots who were here mainly to test-drive their cool new armor and/or blow things up, and six misdirected, untrained foreigners out for revenge. On top of that, we only filled half the ship and I was leaving the only genuine pair of volunteers behind!
My hope was that our experience inside the Bug ship, assuming we actually got there and the pilot didn’t try to run away or get us blown up trying to get in close, went better than my recruitment drive. It couldn't really go any worse, could it?
As we entered extreme range, the Bugs cut loose with a barrage of laser fire, most of it aimed in the general direction of our small cutter, but some of it targeted at nothing in particular as far as my untrained eye could tell. The Pilot juked and dived for all he was worth, trying to get in close. There were a few tense moments when their missiles locked on target.
The pilot (whose name I did not know at the time) proved his value to the team quickly, firing the forward heavy laser cannon for all it was worth. He even took out one of the missiles with what I assume was a lucky shot. The explosion of the missile was somewhat anticlimactic. I couldn't hear any massive 'whump,' or see a gigantic fireball like in the vids. The laser cannon, firing as fast as I believe it could cycle, simply intercepted the incoming weapon with a small flash of light as it vaporized part of the device's fuselage, and a barely audible clatter of its constituent bits and pieces splashed against our hull as we raced through the newly-formed debris cloud filled my mind with images of disaster.
Racing forward as recklessly as possible, we bypassed the rest of the Bug Ship’s fire-and-forget missiles and matched speeds with the Marauder. Angling in toward their hull faster than I thought was advisable while under manual control, the pilot slewed us in beside the Bug Ship. At least this part was unfolding like in the bad vids, I thought.
The hull was rocked in rapid succession as several powerful impacts knocked our little ship off course. "Laser impacts on the hull, maintaining course," cried the pilot, obviously unhappy about this development, but maintaining focus under pressure. A few moments later, we were locked onto the hull of the alien ship. So far, so good, I thought to myself.
After a few moments, an alarm sounded and I jerked my gaze up to the readout panel. The glyph indicating low cabin pressure was flashing in sequence with the alarm's pulsating rhythm. The pilot flipped off the audio portion of the alarm and said, "Looks like we're losing air. I can try to isolate the leak by sealing off non-essential sections and hoping the main cabin isn't compromised. But, if I don't have any luck, the breathable air won't last more than an hour at this rate," said the pilot, sounding more serene than I would have thought appropriate. He was probably just happy for a halfway decent excuse to leave us stranded here.
He checked his instruments and became crestfallen. "We've also lost our main laser cannon, so it's a good bet our ride out of here will be a little more interesting than the trip in." With that, he jumped out of the pilot's chair and made his way to the back of the ship, probably to begin sealing off potentially compromised sections of the ship in the hopes of saving as much of our breathable air as possible.
Now, the rest of us just had to find an airlock or cut a hole to get inside. Fortunately, the pirates had left some of their boarding equipment behind because my overeager young men from Armory forgot to bring ours. We extended a retractable boarding tube, slid open the connecting hatch on the bottom of the cutter (one designed expressly for this purpose) and cut an opening on the bug hull. This process was quite a bit faster than I expected it to be, and after only a few minutes we had our opening. A quick check of the various gases present inside the enemy vessel revealed nothing immediately dangerous to humans, so we opened the hatch and dropped in one by one.
Dropping into the bug ship was like dropping into a vision of Hades. The ship was more bio-organic than metallic construction. What looked like a cross between ropy veins and some kind of angry tree roots pulsed and twisted on the walls. The walls themselves appeared to be moist, but it could have just been a trick of the light or my imagination.
If I'm to be honest, the holo-vids didn’t do the place justice. In the dim lighting, surrounded by the moving constantly squirming environment, it was much worse than anything the entertainment industry had shown.
I was first through the tube, so I stepped forward and noticed the usual clanking of my power-armored feet hitting metal was no longer present. Instead, my feet sank a good inch into the floor of the ship and as I looked behind at my footprints and watched, the floor slowly filled back in the impressions my boots had made.
It felt like the ship was prepared to swallow me up and erase any sign of my presence, any record that I had ever been here, or any indication I had ever existed in the first place. Suppressing a shudder, I turned and growled at my fellow power armored crewmates. I had intended to bark some of that tactical nonsense they always used in dramatic depictions of these events, but one look at my band of power armored, erstwhile marines shook me off my game.
I suppose unsurprisingly, they were lined up in the most unmilitary formation you could ever expect to see. They were all fidgeting with their power armor, and having more than a small measure of difficulty dealing with the soft footing and ghastly surroundings. This was clearly a case of the blind leading the blind, at least as far as the Clover’s Caprian compliment was concerned.
By comparison, the Prometheans almost looked like they knew what they were doing. They quickly poked their heads around the nearest door before rapidly pulling them back, positioning men to either side of the door with rifles pointed at the opening. Maybe they only thought they knew what they were up to but they certainly appeared confident about it.
Not knowing what else to do (but knowing I couldn’t just stand around waiting until trouble came to find us), I pointed at the doorway nearest me and shoved my hands through the crusty, membranous substance that apparently passed for a closed door around here. My power assisted gauntlets tore apart the vile portal and I found myself in a corridor of sorts. I was determined to delve deeper into the ship.
It went on like this for several doorways before we reached what must pass for some kind of main junction. At least a hundred feet across, it was a six way intersection with paths leading up, down and to every side. What it lacked in the rigid uniformity we Caprians were used to with our solid state ships, it made up for in sheer horrifying nastiness. The dark holes looming in every direction you looked swarmed with Bugs of every shape and size.
There was gravity, but despite this, the
Bugs crawled up the ceiling and down into the floor opening. They could even be found hanging upside down in the circular crossroad we’d come across, and I’m not just talking the little six-legged, three foot tall ones with the delicate arm-like appendages. Even the six foot tall, semi-humanoid monstrosities with razor sharp claws that looked capable of rending my power armor into pieces like tissue paper could be seen hanging upside-down. Once again, it appeared that the entertainment industry failed to do the true horror of these creatures any measure of justice whatsoever.
We knew the moment they spotted us.
The little ones started dancing up and down, chittering ferociously and waving their delicate little bug hands in our directions, while the larger ones converged on our position like a wave of water suddenly changing direction.
I wasted a moment gulping down my fear. Then, spurred on by that same fear I shouted, “Get them!” I jumped forward, landing on a large bug with a crunching sound, pinning it to the deck, or whatever this stuff was called.
The Prometheans tried to provide cover fire but they weren’t in big battle suits, and so weren’t able to wade into the fray. They stayed in the corridor and shot Bugs as they came.
On the other hand, the armory crew was a disorganized array of smashing power-assisted fists and wild weapons fire. Each member of the armory crew had his own unique battle plan, and it mostly involved raging around smashing Bugs like a three year old in a cockroach farm, and had little to do with following any kind of coherent battle strategy.
Trying to push my way into the middle of the bug avalanche was a losing proposition and I was soon swarmed over. There were Bugs all around and on top of me, each trying to poke and prod me out of the suit. Thankfully (and to my pleasant surprise), their claws skittered off my armor.
Flailing around wildly, I was rewarded with sick crunching and cracking noises as I ripped and tore at the oversized insects until I was able to see again. Throwing another six foot soldier off me, I activated the full strength of my servos and jumped clear of the mess which had descended on my position.
“Sweet Murphy,” exclaimed one of the armory crew. “The little ones have power tools!”
I looked over, certain the man had misspoken. To my surprise, several of the battle-suited figures were pinned down on the ground by weight of numbers. Individually, the large six foot defenders were unable to do more than scratch our armor, but when taken as a chittering, overbearing mass of chitin and claws, they managed to pin some of the men down.
As I watched, several of the smaller ones, the ones with the delicate hand-like appendages, showed us what those hands could be used for. Each one approached a downed man holding at least one crystalline tipped whirling cutting wheel. The vaguely cylindrical mass of the wheel was attached to something that looked like it was made out of same material as the inside of the ship. However, the crystal tipped cutting wheel (aside from being of alien design) looked like something you would expect to see in any regular machine shop.
The large defender Bugs weren’t doing a lot of damage, but I had an all-new respect for the little Bugs hanging out on the side lines up until now.
I brought my blaster rifle around and clumsily inserted my gauntleted fingers into the trigger, then cut loose with a hail of fire in the direction of the little tool-wielding critters hanging around the ceiling, and in a few cases managed to wing one or two before they were able to descend on the downed men.
Unlike their larger claw equipped cousins, who had no regard for anything you did to them and just kept coming and attacking until they were crushed and disabled, the little ones seemed to possess a rudimentary survival instinct and scattered away from the blaster bolts, only to come right back to where they had been standing before the bolt landed. It didn’t matter to them if the bolt had hit an empty patch of wall or one of their comrades, they scattered and then returned time and again with machine-like precision.
I was mostly ignoring the large ones around me in favor of destroying the little ones who might be able to cut my armory crew out of their armor. This plan was nearly my undoing.
Since the big ones were unable to affect me, I had taken to blasting a circle around my position, then unloading the rifle on the little ones. I stayed blasting the little scuttling crab-like centaurs on the walls a little too long and one of the big soldier Bugs grabbed my blaster rifle and yanked it out of my hands.
I was still trying to pull the trigger when the rifle was thrown out of my reach by flailing claws.
Now desperate, I punched and clawed and gouged for all I was worth, slowly going under from the weight of an ever increasing number of Bugs. How many of these things were there on this ship, I wondered desperately. They just kept coming and coming, mindless of the carnage we had wrought.
Then a voice came in through the com patch in my suit helmet and another suit loomed over me. It tossed a long metal stick at one of my free hands.
“The Chief was meaning to save this until later, for a surprise. But when he heard you were going on this mission, he said give it you if things ever turned hairy,” said Gants before swinging around to deal with several more of the large ones. Gants seemed almost oblivious to the dangers surrounding us. He seemed to be having the time of his life.
I missed grabbing the metal stick and dropped it. Grunting and straining under the weight of large Bugs, I felt around until my gauntlets clanked against something hard and cylindrical. I closed my fingers around it and gave a yank.
I managed to pull it close enough to realize it wasn’t a metal staff of some kind; instead it was an old style vibro-blade, the type that went out of fashion over fifty years ago when the new force blades came into fashion. Until then, they’d had a long run as the finest hand to hand weapons mankind had ever created.
Thankful for this latest gift, I ran my fingers along it until I felt the hilt. Twisting the pommel to activate it was a chore, but I finally got it and was rewarded by a nearly inaudible hum.
Lips unconsciously pulled back in what must have been a fairly bestial grin, I pulled and pushed the sword around until I had cut through enough Bug flesh to start really swinging the sword.
The vibro-blade, combined with the power servos in my suit, cut through bug flesh like it was butter. It was almost fun, slicing and slashing through the mindless beasts like some sort of superhero. Soon, I had slaughtered my way clear of the overbearing pile of Bugs that had been trying to hold me down.
A sound I had been ignoring until now finally penetrated the haze. There was a whining screech coming from several of the bug piles covering the young Armory fools who thought a battle suit made them invincible.
With a throaty bellow, I leapt and pushed and slashed my way to the nearest pile, wielding my sword with reckless abandon. I hewed and cleaved, cutting my way down to the man underneath the pile. My swordplay instructor would never have approved, but I couldn’t care less what he thought about my technique right at the moment.
He had only shown up to instruct us because the government thought it was fashionable for the Royal Family to be training an ancient art of fighting that was nearly useless in modern times.
Nearly useless, but not quite. I fought savagely and, despite the man’s condescending attitude and lack of genuine care for his students, I was actually thankful to this particular former instructor.
I freed the first crewman quickly and leapt to the next, ignoring the first one's babbled thanks. The second mound was harder and the man underneath had started screaming in pain before I managed to clear the Bugs off him. By now, we were on a roll and every still-active suit was blasting and pummeling or, in my case, slashing our companions free.
My haste to help another man, screaming in sick harmony with the whining of a crystalline power tool nearly did me in. I leapt towards the writhing man and lost my footing when I landed, which caused me to stumble near the hole in the bottom of the tunnel intersection. Apparently sensing my vulnerable state, a large soldier bug jumped on me a
nd I fell in.
Chapter 24: The Great Fall
Tumbling and twisting, my metallic bulk crushed the bug when we landed, but also nearly broke my neck. The helmet on these old battle suits stuck too far up on the shoulders and allowed enough movement that when the weight of the rest of the suits came down almost full force upon it, the metal reinforced neck board almost broke, which would have been bad for my somewhat less-reinforced spine.
As it was, my neck was seriously torqued and the helmet was permanently twisted to the side as far, at least as I could tell without trying to reef it back straight using my power assisted hands. Something I was reluctant to do after a gentle attempt to turn the thing confirmed that it was stuck sideways. I didn't want to risk breaking the mechanism, neck board, or perhaps most importantly the neck inside it. My neck.
The pain was almost crippling but it helped convince me I would eventually be okay. Assuming I survived this bug ship. An outcome which was less and less certain, the further into this thing I went and the more Bugs I encountered.
A scraping clanking sound on the belly of my armor convinced me I had to move despite the terrible pain. I used the vibro-blade still in my hand to clear an area around me with a wild swing. Feeling resistance, I blindly stabbed and hacked in that direction. When I could no longer feel anything trying to kill me, I staggered to my feet.
Admiral Who? (A Spineward Sectors Novel:) Page 21
