by Ramy Vance
“All right, assholes,” she snarled, letting her mind slip into the offensive maneuvering sub-routines. “Let’s dance.”
The Osprey lingered near the outer edge of the asteroid belt. Nothing stood between the shelter of her massive shuttle-bay doors and the limping shuttles, except a thousand kilometers of space.
In other words, a killing field.
“Powering up shields.” A high note of panic crept into Occy’s voice as the shuttles, the Alpha-Seeker, and the two remaining Creeper fighters soared out of the belt. The boy had kept his head quite well in past battles and drills—but for the first time, he was staring down the whole complicated operation of war without Jaeger or Toner over his shoulder.
“We’re not equipped to pass through the Osprey’s energy shields,” Portia reported, cucumber-cool. “We’ll fry if we try.”
Jaeger gritted her teeth. Barely a few minutes had passed since she pressed the big red button, and already the synthetic adrenaline was draining from her system, leaving her feeling hollow and dizzy. The stuff was dangerous. “Occy, get ready to drop the shields long enough for the shuttles to get to the docking bay. Coordinate landing with the shuttles. I’ll hold the fighters off.”
“Are you crazy?” Toner cried. “You’re outnumbered and without any cover!”
Like he had any right to accuse. Jaeger eyed the red button, knowing full well that even if she could override the fighter’s auto-shutoff, another shot of epinephrine right now would, quite literally, make her heart explode.
“The shuttles are sitting ducks,” Jaeger growled, shoving the button out of her mind and banking the Alpha-Seeker into a wide arc. “Get back to the Osprey.” She sprayed a line of concentrated plasma bursts across the stars. They all went wild, of course, but did their job. The formation of the pursuing fighters locked onto her and split away from the shuttles.
Toner was right about one thing. She needed cover.
Heart thudding in her throat, Jaeger let her consciousness sink into the Alpha-Seeker’s navigational computer, and with enemy fire skating off her hull, plunged back into the asteroid belt.
“We’re coming in awfully fast,” Toner fretted, watching the Osprey grow larger and larger on the viewer screen. Lupin, strapped into the pilot’s seat and staring unblinkingly at the thruster controls, nodded tightly. “Forward thrusters not fully responsive. I think they took damage back in the belt.”
“Are you saying you can’t slow down?”
“Not fast enough.” Lupin shook his head and tapped a button sequence on the shuttle. “We’re gonna come in hard. Activating docking bay drag nets.”
Toner stared up at the shuttle bay doors quickly filling the viewer screen. They were sliding open.
Not fast enough.
Toner jammed the comms button. “Occy! Is Baby in the docking bay?”
“What?” Occy sounded frantic, distracted. “No, she’s with me here in the engine room. Why?”
“It’s cool.” Toner’s voice went eerily calm as the growing gap of the docking bay doors split the viewer screen. “I didn’t want her to get smashed like a bug on a windshield.”
Alpha shuttle whizzed through the growing gap of the docking bay doors at ten times a safe landing speed. It ripped a hole across the network of docking bay cradles and catwalks like a meteor cratering into a planet’s surface. It spun through the docking bay, its momentum dying until it finally slammed into the massive dragnets, which groaned and screamed beneath the strain.
Toner rather lost track of what happened inside the shuttle during those agonizingly long seconds of pure madness. He only knew as he repeatedly slammed face-first into the control console that he should have buckled his harness after all.
When everything finally went still, he unfolded himself from where he had splattered against the cockpit wall, taking painful inventory of all of his cracked ribs with every motion.
Lupin lay motionless in his harness, his hair matted red with blood. Guts churning, Toner forced himself away from the unconscious, or possibly dead, man. He fumbled out of the shuttle, knees buckling with pain—and desperately hungry. He would have to send somebody back to help the wounded. He couldn’t handle it himself.
The Osprey’s shuttle bay doors had closed again. Alpha shuttle had wrecked the place. It would take months of work to undo all the damage it had done in only a few seconds, but at least nobody was actively getting shot at.
Pillars of smoke and venting atmosphere filled the docking bay as Gamma shuttle came to rest in the only intact cradle. Its cargo hold doors slid open, and Pandion slid out, shepherding a mutilated, twitching Locauri ahead of him.
“Medic,” Toner croaked. “I need a medic.”
With a medical kit slung over her shoulder, Aquila sprang out of the hold and in Toner’s direction. He hopped out of the way, head turned to the side. Blood. The whole damned docking bay smelled like blood. Nobody had made it through unhurt.
He waved Aquila toward Alpha shuttle, and skating on the reverse-polarity setting of his mag soles, pushed himself toward an emergency medical cabinet in the back corner of the docking bay. There were six pouches of universal blood substitute packed into the cabinet.
All of them were empty.
Wow, Toner, he berated himself as he stared at the punctured bags. You’re a real asshole.
The universal comms channel activated, and Occy’s frantic voice echoed around the bay. “One of the Creeper ships broke off from following the captain and came back toward the Osprey. I’m sorry, she was moving so fast, I couldn’t shoot her down in time.”
Toner’s head shot up, his senses sharpening once more. Adrenaline was no substitute for blood substitute, but it was better than nothing. “What’s going on, kid?”
Occy’s voice cracked like he was holding back a sob. “I’m sorry. It got under our shields, and now it’s too close to shoot. They’re lancing into the hull.”
“Where at?”
There was a second of breathless silence as Occy consulted his sensors. “General crew quarters. Hull breach. They’re making a door into the Osprey.”
Toner slammed his fist into the med cabinet door with a wail. “I just got that sector patched up! Okay. Occy. Seal off every route to and from the crew quarters. Lock it down tight as you can.”
He pushed himself away from the med cabinet and flew toward the port wing corridor. It might buy him some time—but not much. If the K’tax could breach the exterior hull, it wouldn’t take them long to get through the interior bulkhead. At any rate, he suspected the battle crab foreclaws were built as glorified can openers.
He flew past his disembarking crew, counting all the cradled limbs, the bloody faces. Too many injuries. “Occy. I need backup. Crack open the next batch of crew.”
“I’m on it,” Occy said weakly. “Twelve minutes to decanting.”
Toner gritted his teeth. Twelve minutes was too much time to let a boarding party run rampant on his ship.
He’d need to call up an unconventional ally. “If you’re injured,” he called to his crew as he shot toward the port corridor, “head to med bay. Help the other injured there too. If you’re in fighting shape, grab a gun and follow me. We have a boarding party to greet.”
“The enemy has breached the hull,” the computer murmured. A hint of disgust crept into its normally bland voice. “Fools.”
Seeker stood in his cell, arms folded across his chest. Waiting. Deep in his bones, he felt the heavy hum of the ship’s energy lances powering up for offensive maneuvers, the steady back-beat to the music of war.
“Incompetent fools.”
Seeker wondered what it said about the ship’s AI, that it had been muttering to itself more and more lately.
Except that it’s not muttering to itself, he realized. It’s muttering to me. Does it still think I’m its ally?
“They’re going to get themselves killed. They’re going to get us all killed.” The computer paused and said, wonderingly, as if it had received
divine revelation, “They’re going to get me killed. This will not do. No. No, something must be done.”
The red seal around the door turned blue. It slid open.
Seeker prided himself on a poker face fit to win tournaments. With nothing better to do in this little rabbit cage, he had practiced his stoic stare in the mirror for hours on end.
Still, when he saw the man silhouetted in the open hatch, his mask slipped. He stared.
Toner stood in the entryway, his back curved into an animalistic hunch, his long arms hanging nearly to his knees. His exo-suit hung off him in shreds, making him a chaotic mess of tattered black fabric and exposed, colorless flesh streaked with long, bloody gashes. His hair hung limp and greasy down to his shoulders, hanging over the brilliant blue pinpricks of rabid eyes.
Seeker knew that Jaeger offhandedly referred to her first mate as a vampire, but that was horribly wrong. The man wasn’t a vampire. He was a fucking werewolf—and the moon was full.
“What happened to you?” Seeker asked.
Toner slammed his hand against the computer panel on the wall, and the faint blue force field flickered—and vanished.
“Crabs,” Toner growled. He lifted an arm, and easy as tossing an apple, flung a minigun at Seeker. Seeker caught the weapon and held it close to his chest. Hello darlin’, he thought. I’ve missed you.
“They’ve breached the crew quarters,” Toner announced. “You wanna shoot something?”
Seeker shouldered the rifle, biting back a hard grin. “Always.”
He followed Toner out of the prison at a dead run.
Smoke and screams filled the corridor. Screams of tearing metal as the heavily-armored K’tax warriors ripped through the bulkhead, their claws snipping through reinforced steel like it was aluminum foil. It had taken a few minutes, but the enemy had ripped a path through the general crew quarters and was breaching the central column main shaft.
Screams of plasma fire as Aquila, Pandion, and Ursa, crouched behind a makeshift barricade a little way up the shaft, fired into the widening breach. A wave of smaller, faster-moving K’tax morphs spilled into the hallway, filling it with the hum of buzzing pseudo-wings.
Screams of pain as the nightmare creatures, too numerous and fast to shoot, overran the barricade. Pandion and Aquila scrambled backward. Ursa wasn’t so fast.
They converged over Ursa’s broad form, burying her in a flickering pile of legs and carapace, stabbing her with long stingers slung beneath their bellies.
The little squad of defenders had made a valiant effort, holding the breach, but it was over.
Pandion and Aquila broke and ran as Ursa stopped screaming. A few of the light-footed creatures sprang away from the swarm, pursuing the fleeing eagle-folk. The rest wouldn’t be far behind.
Pandion and Aquila turned up a side corridor and found themselves staring down the barrel of a rifle.
“We’ve lost the breach,” Pandion gasped, catching Toner’s eye. “There’s too many of them. They’re too fast.”
“Fancy that,” Toner grunted, moving to the side. Seeker stepped forward, lifting the heavy body of a minigun to his hips. “We got just the thing for exterminating a swarm.”
Firing solid projectiles inside a spaceship was never a good idea. Even if the bullets were too weak to pierce the hull or bulkhead, there was always the very real possibility that they would hit a pipe or a conduit or some other important component. Still, when you had no other choice, you had no other choice.
The first spray of minigun fire had a dozen of the small, swarming K’tax dropping dead to the floor, their shells torn into unrecognizable pieces.
It also tore into the electrical grid. The lighting flickered, then strobed between deep shadows, and utter blackness sprayed with showers of sparks.
“Virgil!” Toner screamed. “Play The Matrix soundtrack!”
The smaller K’tax bodies became dancers at a rave, twirling around listlessly as the heavy battle-crabs crawled up the corridor toward Toner and Seeker. What was good for the goose was not good for the gander. The little morphs might have crumbled beneath the spray of minigun fire, but the bullets bounced uselessly off the heavily armored monsters.
Toner knew from experience that normal stunners wouldn’t slow them, either. They required some hands-on TLC. He cracked his knuckles. “I gotta rip this sumbitch open,” he bellowed to Seeker between bursts of minigun fire. “Switch to manual firing. Don’t shoot me!”
Toner kind of doubted Seeker heard him. With all the gunfire in closed quarters, he doubted any of them would be hearing much for quite a while.
Still, the man had an intuition for combat and seemed to take Toner’s meaning. He nodded. Toner waited for the burst of gunfire to subside and lunged.
Though they were slow, the battle crab morphs were amazingly tough bastards. Couldn’t stab ‘em. Couldn’t shoot ‘em. Couldn’t stun ‘em through that armor. A grenade blast might rattle them a bit. Toner didn’t have a grenade—not that he’d detonate one in the Osprey if he did—but he did have some pretty strong hands.
The trick, he’d discovered in the tunnels of the asteroid base, was to get up close and pull them apart.
As the lights strobed around him, he flung himself into the spiky embrace of one of the oncoming crabs. Toner glimpsed a collection of hulking shapes rushing up the corridor from the opposite direction. Beefy, naked human shapes, charging into battle behind the lumbering shape of a two-ton ambulatory woodchipper.
Baby hit the second battle crab with all the force of an eighteen-wheeler.
The reinforcements had arrived.
The other Creeper fighters had fallen away, either destroyed or damaged or simply not crazy enough to continue with this insane game of high-speed chicken.
Now it was just Jaeger versus a single, dogged pursuer.
Jaeger’s reflexes, made sluggish in the wake of the epinephrine that had burned through her, weren’t quite up to snuff.
She banked a hard curve around a smaller asteroid and came within meters of ripping off her wing on the jagged rock.
“The bastard won’t sit still and let me shoot him!” Jaeger despaired as an enemy lance sweep hit her wing and sent her tumbling through space. On her display screen, the hull integrity schematic flashed from green to red. The hit had short-circuited her primary shields generator.
Re-route shields, she thought as the stars spun madly around her. No time to call Seeker and ask him to walk her through the exercise. She could only look inward and focus on the neural link that synchronized her mind with the ship. Re-route shields, she thought, letting her imagination sink into a half-understood image of the millions of couplings and pathways that made up the machine.
It didn’t feel real—it felt like making something happen by simply wishing it so, by visualizing it. Unsure if it was her imagination, made desperate and run ragged by drugs, or bloody reality, she pictured a patch of fried circuits in the shield grid, the spark of panicking electricity trying to arc across fried lines, and falling short.
On the visual display, the pursuing fighter was growing larger, its course straight and true, now that it thought she was dead in the water.
The mandible-shaped lances slung beneath its cockpit began to glow with energy buildup.
Re. Route. Shields!
She imagined the network branching itself in different directions, detouring around the burnt-out patch.
On screen, the hull integrity schematic flickered and turned green. The next spray of enemy fire skittered across her wings and deflected into space.
“Unreal!” Jaeger locked her targeting system on the approaching enemy and fired.
Repair droids were spraying sealant foam over the hull of the general crew quarters by the time Jaeger limped her way back to the Osprey. An automatic signal from the Osprey warned her that there wasn’t a single open docking cradle in the shuttle bay. Other than the one Gamma shuttle was in, they had all been wrecked.
Jaeger was too exhau
sted to open up the comms channel and yell at Toner for wrecking her ship. She let the Alpha-Seeker pilot itself into the little-used secondary fighter bay.
Her eyes fluttered closed as the Alpha-Seeker began its post-flight cooldown sequence in the empty hangar. She understood why they kept the epinephrine shots locked up tight. The bolt of go-juice might have saved her ass, but it had also ruined her. The pain of her snapped wrist, and cracked ribs had returned. The headache was murder.
She was half-asleep in her harness when the cockpit door swung open.
Occy peered down at her. “Captain?” his voice was small and weak as if he was scared she wouldn’t answer. “Captain?”
Jaeger forced herself to twitch to let the boy know she wasn’t dead. “I’ll be fine,” she mumbled. “Just tired.”
There was a long moment of silence, with Occy standing on the hull of the fighter.
Then, slowly, Jaeger felt the air grow warm and close as a body slipped into the cockpit beside her.
“I’m sorry,” Occy whispered as coils of warm tentacles curled around Jaeger in a desperate hug. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t do it. People died. I wasn’t good enough.”
Jaeger lifted her good hand and placed it gently on Occy’s hair as the boy rested his head on her shoulder.
You and me both, kid, she thought, as sleep rushed to claim her.
Chapter Twenty-One
“What’s the holdup?”
A young man Petra had never seen before leaned in close to peer at the queue over her shoulder.
Petra shrugged and lifted her travel thermos to her lips. It was bad coffee, bitter and weak, but she could only get coffee when she was on bridge duty and hadn’t seen the harm in taking a top-off once her shift was up. “Same as always.”
She sighed. “Shuttle services running behind schedule. Is that my fault? No, but you can bet my supervisors down in the Ed department won’t care when I show up late for my shift again.”
