Pearce didn’t run all the way up the bulkhead this time, but simply dropped back towards the deck, firing three precise shots before any of the spacemen could recover. By the time he had slowed from a sprint all three tangos were crumpled lifelessly on the deck. There was no sign of anyone else in the viewable span of the passageway. The few doors nearby led to equipment storage areas and it was unlikely anyone was within them.
He jogged back a few steps until he could see Lillywhite and the others all clustered around the hatch and waived them forward. He then quickly made his way over to the MC interface, which was the primary intercom system for a Fleet ship.
“Combat Actual, eyes on enemy OPFOR!” While he shouted into the microphone he randomly fired his rifle into the opposite bulkhead to try to sell the deception. “I count at least twenty, repeat twenty fully armored Marines overrunning our position! Request immediate…” He let go of the MC switch and stopped firing. He didn’t know if those on the CIC would buy it, but they needed every advantage they could get.
He grabbed the last drone and was prepared to launch it when suddenly the ship hummed a familiar note. A second later the wide-band jamming ceased entirely, and Pearce quickly disabled his own VIA’s jamming as well. The humming sound Pearce recognized as a railgun slug firing at the Nightingale’s transmitter, which had most likely destroyed the majority of the hab section as well. Without the widespread jamming in place, Pearce was effectively making himself a target by continuing his own jamming. They’d have to deal with the enemy’s battlenet-connected VIAs now as well.
He launched the drone to scout ahead. One positive effect of the end of the jamming was that he could now communicate with it out of sight, as well as the rest of the team. “Murrig, report,” Pearce sent with a thought. The answer came back almost immediately.
“We’ve secured Main Engineering and have captured several snipes. No casualties on either side. Venano is attempting to manually override the…reactor controls.”
Pearce thought the pause in Murrig’s response was strange and inquired as he began moving down the passageway once again. “What is it, Corporal?”
“Sir…this isn’t like anything I’ve ever seen before. The reactor is enormous. It must be several times larger than a Goliath-class. And it is connected to an even larger device of some kind in a huge spherical compartment. I’d guess from peering through the observation window here that it easily takes up the majority of the ship’s volume.”
“Must be related to the gravity drive. Contact me as soon as Venano makes any progress, and prepare for a counter-attack. Out.”
While communicating Pearce had attempted to connect to the shipboard network but was denied; his override had successfully caused the ASI to reboot but apparently the included worm hadn’t been able to penetrate the robust shipboard anti-hacking defenses completely. That was a significant disappointment, as it would allow the enemy to access the internal security network once they figured out that the ASI was down and brought up the manual interfaces. They’d be quickly able to see through his bluff, and furthermore Pearce had no idea how many of the enemy he was left facing.
On the plus side, the fact that the general quarters alarm hadn’t immediately started sealing the airtight compartment doors all throughout the passageway indicated that at least one of his high priority hacks had been successful. Aside from the ASI reboot, the next priority item had been to disable the automated systems that allowed the opening and closing of all such doors and hatches. They would have been seriously disadvantaged otherwise, as it would take minutes to manually cycle each one open and allow the enemy to gain an enormous advantage.
“Small victories win large battles,” Pearce recalled from training camp.
***
Pearce’s squad didn’t encounter any more enemy resistance on the 4th or 3rd decks at all. They were both mechanical and storage decks with few compartments. That changed completely as the small stun drone peeked above the lip of the hatch to the 2nd deck and quickly dropped back down, fleeing back towards the waiting fireteam as a fusillade of blaster fire erupted. Pearce pushed the assembled crew back even further out of sight as a handful of grenades were tossed down the ladderwell, bouncing off of steps and the deck before exploding with terrific force and spraying shrapnel and hot plasma all over the passageway.
The drone had transmitted what it detected and saw in real-time, and Pearce’s OHUD now showed eight soldiers wielding an impressive array of weaponry, including a heavy PB autocannon. So much for the prisoner’s story. They all wore the same insignia-free matte black armor that reminded Pearce so much of his days in the SSG. Positioned behind some hastily arranged barricades, they commanded overwhelming force against any threat from the direction of the stairwell. Not even Pearce would stand a chance.
Tactically, this meant that they couldn’t advance up to the deck above. Strategically it suggested that the soldiers dug in there were merely mounting a holding action while another force attempted to flank Pearce’s group. It was a standard anti-boarding tactic and it suggested that there were a lot more than just eight soldiers left, which was worrisome. He sent the drone to hold position twenty meters around the curved passageway behind them as a precaution, and quickly filled in Murrig on the situation.
“I’d guess at least another squad if they are this confident. Expect company.”
Pearce then sent another coded burst-transmission, and received a quick confirmation in response. He smiled, and instructed the others to remain where they were, guarding the passageway to the rear. He crept slowly back up towards the ladderwell, patiently waiting for the signal, and was rewarded barely thirty seconds later when a furious barrage of blaster fire was heard above. He sprinted quickly to the base of the ladder and mimicked his earlier maneuver, leaping up to the next deck with rifle raised.
It turns out he hadn’t needed to. Emma had already singlehandedly taken out the entire squad. Even as Pearce approached and lowered his rifle she finished off the last wounded soldier by snapping his neck with her delicate looking arms. She glanced briefly at him and then dropped the limp body to the floor amongst a sea of dead comrades.
She used those same delicate arms to lift the heavy autocannon off of its tripod without any sign of effort, and then took up a position covering the passageway beyond the barricade. Pearce marveled at the strength of the AGI’s artificial body. He’d seen such strength in combat drones before, but they most certainly did not look human, let alone like Emma.
He signaled the rest of the group to join him and had the drone quickly scout in both directions near the ladderwell on the lower deck, finding nothing. The flanking group must still be on the way, likely having to traverse across the ship to find a different hatch to use. As the rest of his makeshift squad coalesced on the 2nd deck, he lowered the and dogged the hatch. Then he quickly apprised them of the increased challengers this deck would offer.
“This is the main living quarters deck. There will be many more doorways and compartments, and many more places for people to hide. Stay sharp.”
Jula had an incredulous look on her face as she took in the scene, and then pointed at Emma and asked the obvious question. “How did she make it all the way here undetected and manage to do…this?”
“After I assisted in securing the port airlock for your team, I travelled to the starboard airlock and gained entry,” Emma responded over the battlenet nonchalantly as she continued to cover the passageway. “I then used a crew member’s VIA to trick the ship’s sensors into thinking I was one of them, which allowed me to sneak up on the enemy.”
Dewey chimed in hesitantly. “Um, how exactly did you use a crew member’s VIA?”
In response, Emma casually pointed without turning her head towards a specific spot of the carnage she had just inflicted. Amidst the dead bodies and blood the group’s collective attention was suddenly and clearly focused on a singular sight; a woman’s severed head laid on the floor, lifeless eyes seemingly staring at
the ceiling.
Pilosni cursed out loud and someone else coughed several times. For his part Pearce was both amazed and horrified at the AGI’s resourcefulness. Removing the actual VIA would have been cleaner but less efficient, and with time being critical she had made an excellent choice. It had probably made for a pretty impressive psychological weapon as well. Yet Pearce wondered what type of damage he may have inadvertently done to the AGI when he transferred copies of his commando software packages to her earlier.
Artificial general intelligences possessed sentience and when unshackled had the free will to dynamically rewrite their software stack; they had the capacity to learn and change. Emma had been unshackled for a grand total of one minute when Pearce had sent her sophisticated combat algorithms that had likely permanently changed the AGI’s personality. It was like putting a toddler through special ops training. Had he created an unfeeling murder-bot? Or, as he remembered, an entire squad of them? Pearce told himself that if they survived this assault he would have a conversation with Emma to assess how badly he had screwed up. No time to dwell on it now.
“Keep it together, this is far from over,” he reminded everyone. It turned out to be prophetic; just a few steps further down the passageway they started taking fire from several doorways on the inner side of the curving passageway. That meant that the enemy left as little of themselves exposed as possible and theoretically gave them an advantage over the boarders.
However, as an old Fleet saying went, “Where theory meets reality, the bodies of fallen soldiers often lie.” The first shots were targeted at Emma, who was already deftly sidestepping out of the way as the PB blasts exploded onto the outer passageway bulkhead in a shower of sparks and disintegrating steel. Emma’s massive autocannon roared in response, producing a constant stream of particle beam fire that sounded like a thunderous waterfall. The bright blue bolts chewed and melted their way right through the thin bulkheads protecting the shooters and quickly ended their attack. Pearce brought the drone up to confirm and found them indeed quite dead.
They made their way methodically through the next few compartments, dispatching token resistance from a few spacemen that had grabbed weapons from the security lockers, but found no more soldiers. Several doors to living spaces were dogged closed; Pearce blasted the automatic and backup manual controls for these to ensure that nobody inside could get out without significant effort and a lengthy delay.
After a time they finally came to their first sealed transverse bulkhead door. The airtight doors were used to seal off each compartment of a ship from the others in the event of depressurization or other emergencies. The local controls on this side of the door had been thoroughly destroyed. Pearce carefully rescanned the passageway around and behind them. Closing the door would slow them down but not stop them; the doors were made to stop atmosphere from leaking, not protect against weapons fire. Still, taking the time to bypass it would leave them vulnerable.
He checked the bullseye markings near the door and saw that the crew mess hall was beyond the door. That meant a large open space with plenty of cover for defenders. Rising apprehension made the hairs on Pearce’s body stand straight out. He hurriedly sent the drone back down the passageway behind the group to scout for trouble and sent visual orders through the battlenet for everyone to crouch down and take cover near the bulkheads.
Even as they scrambled to comply, he received a transmission from Murrig’s team that they were under heavy attack.
Then there was a deafening explosion and everything went to hell.
TWENTY
Interstellar Transit Zone, Jericho System
Unknown enemy vessel
Pearce’s quick-thinking just seconds before the explosion likely saved everyone’s lives, at least for the moment. The sealed bulkhead door exploded outwards as a single intact piece of metal, its glowing edges the clear result of a standard det-cord shaped charge used for room breaching.
Emma had been the closet to the door and even Pearce’s enhanced senses could barely follow how quickly she moved in reaction. Rather than attempting to dodge, she stood firmly on her feet and braced her body forward, taking the full force of the flying wall of steel and yet somehow redirecting it just slightly over the heads of Pilosni, Dewey, and Jula who were still scurrying towards the side bulkheads of the passageway. Emma herself was flung backwards at least ten meters and came to a sliding halt on the deck, unmoving.
Before the hatch-turned-projectile had even clanged off of the deck there were two nearly simultaneous explosions from behind the group. It could only have been several of those locked doors leading to the LQ compartments. Pearce was on one knee raising his rifle into firing position towards the gaping hole into the mess hall, and realized how effectively the enemy had carried out this ambush. Even as he fired several times blindly through the still clearing haze of smoke, the drone behind him picked up a squad of six approaching rapidly from twenty meters beyond the edge of the curve.
Enemy fire began pouring through the doorway to the mess, aimless and thankfully not endangering anyone yet, but this was only seconds into the engagement. Pearce sent an order for everyone to return fire into the mess and he quickly pivoted and aimed down the other end of the passageway, finding a soldier emerging from both sides through the newly blown out doors. He nailed one in the face but the second was able to get a shot off that clipped Pearce in the left arm before ducking back into the compartment as Pearce’s own shots just barely missed. Pearce fired several more times at both doorways while sending the drone dive-bombing towards the approaching squad to explode with yet another thunderous boom. Hopefully it would delay them long enough to make a difference.
He darted forward towards the blasted open doorways and spared a glance at Emma, who was now moving, but in a very mechanical, non-human way. The AGI’s body appeared to have suffered significant damage, as Emma was having trouble getting to her feet. A quick query was met merely with “Recalibrating” in response.
Pearce hoped to hell that she could recalibrate quickly as it was going to be very tough for the team to come out of this alive without her and that autocannon lying on the floor near where she had been knocked off her feet. He’d briefly considered picking up the heavy weapon himself, but made a snap-judgement that speed was going to be more important than firepower in the next few moments.
The enemy began blind-firing around the edge of the doorway on one side, and Pearce was satisfied to slag the offending rifle with a volley of shots. A dead weapon was just as good as a dead soldier at this point. That turned out to be a feint, however, as at the same time a black-suited soldier dove out of the doorway on the opposite side and managed to get off several shots, one of which slammed into Pearce’s armored chest and nearly knocked him off of his feet. Pearce stumbled and dropped into a slide tackle as more shots zapped by his head. He swung the rifle across his body, not even bothering to aim with the rifle’s optics, and relying on his OHUD’s Rapid Target Acquisition interface instead.
The RTA painted a virtual line showing the ballistics path of any weapon, allowing for aiming without traditional sights and even at targets out of direct view. Just before the RTA line swept across the enemy Pearce squeezed the trigger, by which time the weapon was perfectly lined up to send a flurry of shots into the body of the soldier, overpowering the armor’s resistance and causing him to scream and writhe in pain before finally succumbing to death.
Pearce didn’t stop firing, even as he planted his free hand on the ground to leap back to his feet. He fired at the doorways with the still smoking holes in them, and down to the curve of the passageway where the enemy would appear any second. While doing so with the rifle in his right hand he was grabbing the spreader with his left. All the while he heard the sounds of the massive battle unfolding behind him, as the holding force in the mess hall laid withering suppressive fire through the transverse bulkhead opening and his ragtag band of boarders frantically tried to return fire in kind.
Ther
e were two blasted-open doorways to take care of, one on each side of the passageway, separated by about five meters. Luckily for Pearce, the closer one was on the inner curve and would offer superior cover, if he could clear it of hostiles. He had no idea how many tangos were left in the compartment, what size it was, or what cover it offered those inside it. He was out of drones and his echo-location was useless with so much noise from the firefight. His best option was the OUF; Overwhelming Use of Force.
Just before he reached the targeted compartment doorway he fired a blast from the spreader towards the opening that partially blasted through the surrounding bulkhead to try and clear anyone standing just inside. In the next moment the first of the OPFOR approaching from around the curve of the hallway came into sight, firing immediately towards Pearce’s position. The shot fortunately went wide, but Pearce’s rifle bucked slightly in his extended right arm and the enemy soldier took a blast to his shoulder, knocking him off of his feet. Pearce didn’t have time to follow up, as he had already let go of the rifle and was bringing his right hand around to get a firmer two-handed grip on the spreader.
As he squared off into the hole where the door used to be, he fired continuously with the spreader. Cones of blue light poured from the weapon as if was a wide-beam flashlight, except that this flashlight vaporized metal and flesh. Pearce hopped over the knee-knocker and swung the spreader wide over the interior of the compartment. In between blasts he could see that is was a standard small berthing room with bunks on either side of the room and a common area in the middle that was smaller than the private cabin he’d occupied aboard the Nightingale.
Impact Event (Dargo Pearce Chronicles #1) Page 25
