Only three more of the enemy had been inside; one soldier and two armed spacemen. All three now laid dismembered in various ways all over the deck. Pearce had also blasted out the main overhead lighting and started a small fire in one of the bunks. The fire suppression system would detect that and deal with it imminently.
With the compartment captured, Pearce quickly took up a position back at the doorway. He fired a few quick blasts with the spreader at the second doorway across the passageway, but didn’t have an angle to see inside. Then, taking a knee just inside the oval shaped hole, he laid the spreader across his thigh and propped it against his abdomen, aiming towards the opposing doorway.
He test-fired once and while he took quick a kick to his gut the blast was on target and the weapon stayed propped in place. This would allow him to cover the doorway and the corridor simultaneously. He quickly grabbed his rifle from its slung position across his chest and peeked out of the hole towards the squad approaching from behind Pearce’s fireteam.
He saw three soldiers slinking along the inner bulkhead in an attempt to get an angle on the persistent enemy that had boarded their ship. Pearce and the lead soldier fired simultaneously. The soldier had been aiming at chest-height, and the bolt zapped past just centimeters above Pearce’s head. Pearce’s own shot blasted directly into the face of the tango. As the soldier fell backwards Pearce just barely managed to whip his body back inside the doorway as the other two soldiers began firing volleys of suppressive fire. He fired the spreader several more times at the opposing doorway and considered his tactical options.
Barely thirty seconds had passed since the ambush had been sprung. The battlenet was tracking at least 5 tangos approaching in the passageway, and Pearce figured there was at least three more in the other compartment pinned by his spreader fire. While not as accurate as his own VIA’s ocular sensors, the rest of his team’s VIAs had updated the battlenet with at least ten tangos inside the mess hall. Miraculously, no one else had been seriously injured yet, but if the flanking force was able to get into a line of sight with them all sheltering behind the meager cover of the inner bulkhead it would turn into a shooting gallery. Pearce could tell that Emma was still not fully operational. She was crawling and dragging herself towards the heavy autocannon, but it was still a half-dozen meters away and she wouldn’t make it there in time.
Pearce took a deep breath and steeled himself for what to come. He maxed out his already sky-high stim dosage with a thought and took a few steps back from the doorway. He raised his left arm and then rested the rifle perpendicularly on top of the spreader, creating the appearance of deadly crucifix cradled in his arms. And then he sprinted for the passageway.
He bolted out of the hole like a jackrabbit, firing both weapons continuously. He was hit instantly in the upper left shoulder, the blast partially but not completely neutralized by the Marine light armor spauldrons he wore. He was hit two more times before he had even taken a single step on the deck of the passageway, both in the left leg. He cleared the rest of the passageway without further injury due to his terrific speed, but the injuries to his leg made him stumble slightly just before he dove headfirst into the second compartment. As he passed through the hole in the door the rifle barrel caught on the edge and sent Pearce crashing to the deck in a barely controlled slide, losing hold of both weapons in the process. He VIA had tracked four hits on the enemy, but none had been lethal. Still five threats remaining.
He found himself in the middle of a similarly designed berthing, lying prone next to a smoking lifeless body. There were two other people in the compartment. A soldier in armor to his left, and a spaceman in Fleet blues to his right. Both were holding pistols, but were still in the process of recovering from Pearce’s dramatic entry, flinching away from the doorway and attempting to shield their bodies from harm.
The soldier, a woman with a slashing scar across her lips, locked fierce eyes on Pearce’s and quickly whipped her gun hand around to fire. His rifle was pinned beneath his body and he wouldn’t have time to grab his own sidearm from his right thigh holster before she drilled a hole in his head.
Pearce was already bending his knees and arching his legs behind his body, while quickly shifting the weight of his body to his hands aligned next to his sternum. Instead of merely performing a quick kip-up to a standing position however, Pearce used the momentum of his legs and his tremendously enhanced arm strength to push straight into a handstand front flip with such force that he landed nearly all of the way across the compartment.
The soldier had fired several times just behind his body as her arm swung to keep track of the acrobatic maneuver, and managed to get one more shot off that Pearce anticipated and blocked with a raised forearm as he drew his own sidearm. Despite the searing pain, Pearce’s hip-fire response was accurate enough to blow a part of the soldier’s neck apart, and she fell to the floor, clawing at the ruined mess in a vain attempt to staunch the bleeding.
The spaceman, a young man whom didn’t look a day over seventeen, actually dropped his weapon and raised his hands in surrender. Pearce kneecapped both of his legs and then blasted the dropped pistol before his body even finishing falling over. As the young spacer howled in pain and the soldier choked and gasped a death rattle Pearce quickly retrieved the spreader and the soldier’s pistol and returned to the door threshold. Sporadic blue particle beam bolts blasted into the opening in an attempt to pin him inside.
Pearce laid the spreader on the deck and wielded a pistol in each hand. He ducked his head just past the edge in a quick feint, and a fusillade of shots pounded into the bulkhead. The brief peek had been enough for his VIA to mark the positions of the soldiers in view, which now included all five remaining. He quickly slipped the two handguns just pass the edge of the doorway and pulled the triggers as fast as he could, lining the dual RTA guidelines up with each red outlined figure on his OHUD.
He managed to land a few hits from the audible cries in the passageway before both pistols were hit by enemy fire. He took some shrapnel in his left hand but was otherwise uninjured, although the rate of incoming fire had now tripled and Pearce was forced to take a step back as pieces of the door and bulkhead blew apart with each successive blast.
More troubling was that based on the curvature of the passageway and the location of the approaching soldiers, they’d be in sight of the civilians hunkered down by the transverse bulkhead in just a few seconds. Emma was still struggling towards the autocannon. He was out of time, but he couldn’t move without a distraction. He could only think of a single plan that didn’t involve the Nightingale crew or himself charging suicidally to death.
“Venano, shut off the main power!” Pearce frantically sent, daring to hope that the engineer had figured out how to take control of the ship’s reactor. “Venano!” he sent again while picking up the spreader from the deck and grabbing onto a jagged hole that had been punched into the interior bulkhead by the doorway. With a thought his VIA broadcast to the rest of the team to prepare for zero gravity and grab on to something.
“I’m not sure that I’ll be able to switch it back on,” Pearce finally received in reply. “These systems are unlike…”
“Shut it down now or we’re all dead!”
There was a second pause, and then the lights went out, leaving only the ghostly outline of the ship’s bulkheads, deck, and overhead drawn on Pearce’s OHUD by his VIA’s battle-mapping software. Pearce pulled with all of his might before he even felt the telltale flutter in his stomach that indicated that the AG had been turned off. Without artificial gravity, the effort launched him out into the passageway like a bullet, even as the lightshow of blue bolts stuttered back into action after a slight hesitation.
Slight, but deadly for the OPFOR. The lull lasted just long enough to give Pearce a path to safety, and when they commenced firing once again it highlighted all of the enemy positions clearly in the pitch black darkness. Pearce’s OHUD updated the precise locations of the shooters and he began firing the spreader with a
bandon. It was by nature a short-range weapon, but the nearest of the enemy had gotten close enough to face a lethal rain of particle blasts.
As Pearce soared across the passageway he reached out with a hand and redirected his momentum towards the remaining four tangos, who were all pivoting to try and get Pearce in their sights. But tracking the flying madman hurtling towards them was difficult even for elite soldiers, and Pearce was firing so quickly that the heat warning was going off on the weapon. The blast’s damage dropped off precipitously past ten meters but was still enough to cause pain, disorientation, and psychological impact. Pearce’s null-g glide path took him right past each of the staggered soldiers and he put them down one-by-one.
By the time he impacted the outer bulkhead beyond the final soldier the weapon was venting and had shutdown. He bounced once before securing a handhold that brought his body to a wrenching stop and signaled back to Venano.
“It worked, you brilliant bastard! Now get it back on!”
“It’s going to take at least a minute,” the engineer responded.
Pearce tossed the useless spreader to the side, sending it floating slowly through the passageway in a flat spin, and brought his rifle up from where it was slung across his chest. He kicked off the bulkhead with his right foot; his left leg throbbed even with the pain suppressors maxed out from the hits he’d taken during his charge across the passageway. His left arm was likewise a wreck, with wounds to his shoulder, forearm, and hand doing enough damage that he was barely able to open and close his fingers. He used it merely as a prop underneath the forestock of the rifle.
As he slowly floated back towards the rest of the group he noticed how quiet the ship had become with the power off. The nonstop humming of a starship was something that was immediately noticeable when it became absent. Pearce knew that it was mostly the air circulators contributing to the drone, but dozens of other pieces of machinery all combined to create a familiar shipmate to any seasoned starfarer.
Also conspicuously missing was the frenetic zapping of particle beam weapons from seconds ago. Pearce pinged the battlenet for an update and his OHUD updated to show the positions of his fireteam in blue. The four figures taking cover by the bulkhead were still safe, but two of them were floating nearly upside down, unable to gain precise control over their motions in null-g even with the advanced warning. He assumed those defenders inside the mess hall were also experiencing similar distress, but all he could see were dull yellow outlines representing the last known positions of those inside the next compartment.
But it was the blue outlined figured of Emma hurtling towards the blown doorway to the mess that captured his attention. She was once again cradling the autocannon in her arms and had launched herself with incredible speed through the air. Pearce came around the curve of the passageway and into sight of her just as she sailed through the opening and opened fire. The AGI’s artificial body spun rapidly in a ballet of death and destruction. The nearly continuous stream of blue bolts erupting from the auto-cannon swept across the room like a small child playing with a flashlight.
Even as she scythed particle beams through body after body, a few of the defenders in the room managed to maintain enough composure to return fire. Seeming pathetic in contrast to the death ray Emma wielded, they nevertheless were able to hit her several times in the torso before she crashed into the far bulkhead of the room. The battlenet marked eight tangos neutralized and three remaining, all focused squarely on Emma as she weakly pushed off from the bulkhead towards the cover of a long table. It would do little to stop incoming fire, but served to visually obscure the AGI from the enemy. Emma had lost the autocannon on impact with the bulkhead, and with the damage her body had sustained Pearce doubted she could get it back anytime soon.
He was helpless to assist in an expeditious manner, as he was on the float with nothing to lever off of until he reached the destination he was gliding towards, an area of bulkhead near the edge of the doorway into the mess hall. He was surprised to see that two others were rapidly scur-hopping towards the opening, a spacer technique for quickly moving about in zero gravity conditions using short “hops” along sections of a ship.
He was even more surprised to see that the leader was Jula, followed closely by Lillywhite. Rather than try to dissuade them from entering on their own, he sent specific commands over the battlenet assigning a single target to Jula and the other two to the Captain.
After briefly pausing to stack up, they both flung themselves through the portal and into the fray. Jula fired her pistol several times and manage to strike her target, who was trying to maneuver into a position on Emma and was caught exposed. Lillywhite faced stiffer opposition as both of his targets were still behind cover and aiming at the entrance. He managed to headshot one of the tangos before taking a hit to his body armor, sending him into a spin that left him dangerously vulnerable. With the Captain unable to put any suppressive fire on the last of the enemy, Jula facing away from the opponent, and Emma combat ineffective, Pearce feared the worst.
“Power coming back online now,” came Venano’s life-saving transmission. The lights snapped instantly back on, as effective as a flash grenade. The ship’s telltale hum took a few seconds to return to normal, the sudden breaking of relative silence seemingly a roar in contrast. The artificial gravity generators built into the decking likewise took a moment to fully power up, and so everyone not anchored to something fell gently to the floor as the ship returned to normal gravity conditions. This sent Lillywhite and Jula tumbling to the deck and out of immediate danger.
Even before the g-force had been dialed all the way up Pearce had twisted his body to land feet-first on the deck and began sprinting to the mess hall doorway, just ten meters away. He darted past the other two Nightingale crew still getting their bearings and straight into the room without pause, rifle raised and ready. The second his weapon passed the threshold he was firing at the last tango, who had stood up fully and was just about to squeeze his trigger. A triple tap of bolts sent the enemy to the deck, most certainly dead.
His OHUD showed all targets neutralized, with all but two KIA. Pearce quickly checked the wounded and saw that they would likely survive but were not a threat at the moment. That gave him a second to breathe and analyze their tactical situation. The SSG saying in this type of mid-battle pause would be SARA--“Secure, Assess, Recover, Attack”-- and it was ingrained deeply into Pearce’s soul. First up, secure the immediate area.
As Pilosni and Dewey entered the mess, he quickly gave out orders. He instructed Pilosni to cover the blown-open doorway for any more threats. At some point she had switched from her pistol to the rifle she had acquired, and as she took a knee and aimed down the passageway they had just vacated Pearce marveled at how quickly humans could adapt to their situation.
Jula and Dewey were assigned to keep an eye on the wounded prisoners while Lillywhite covered the other entrance to the mess on the far bulkhead. The door there was dogged closed but there was no telling if it was similarly wired to explode on demand.
Next; assess the situation. Pearce ignored his own wounds for the moment and hopped over a dining table to land next to Emma’s prone body. The AGI was in bad shape, but still functional. Two of the hits to her torso had left holes clean through the chest. The construct’s entire right side was crushed and bent, with the artificial skin broken open in places and showing glints of synthetic metals and materials underneath. The face, only hours ago an exquisitely sculpted paragon of beauty, was likewise damaged, with the right side now featuring a large concave depression that bulged the eye completely out of its socket and left the rest of the face a hideous mockery of its former self. Taking the exploding door directly had certainly saved the others from potentially fatal injuries, but had pretty much destroyed her top-of-the-line artificial body.
As Pearce crouched over the AGI, her head swiveled and the single functional eye focused unnervingly on him. “I’ve decided I don’t particularly like combat all that m
uch,” she said with a slight warble in her voice.
Pearce forced a grim smile before responding. “I’m sorry that you had to go through any of this. But we couldn’t have done this without you. So thank you for saving us all. It’s more than we humans deserve after putting you through hell for so long.”
Emma tried to respond in kind with a smile, but her damaged face couldn’t quite manage it and the result was more like a snarl. Pearce picked the body up and propped her in a seat, handing her a pistol to defend herself with.
Pearce then took the time to finally do a quick self-examination. His Marine combat armor had taken a few hits but it was his left side that was the issue. His arm was nearly useless, and his leg was severely compromised. The wounds in both his upper arm and thigh had burned completely through his sub-dermal armor and left deep wounds in the tissue beneath. The only saving grace was that particle beam wounds were generally self-cauterizing, so he was not in any danger of bleeding out. A quick battlenet query showed that everyone else was bearing some minor injuries, mostly shrapnel related, but were all generally ok.
Examining the war-torn mess hall, Peace quickly discovered that all of the enemy force had been mere spacers and not soldiers. That strongly indicated that those back in the passageway that Pearce had felled were the last of the special ops forces aboard the ship. Bog down the OPFOR with a bunch of gunfire from within the mess, while the real troops conduct a flanking assault. A sound tactic against an inferior foe. Based on the total number of enemy that they had already defeated, Pearce figured that there couldn’t be many more left between here and the CIC.
He checked with the other fireteam who relayed that they had also defeated their counter-attackers in engineering. Allison had sustained some serious but not life threatening injuries, and the engineering room was still fully under their control. That was critical as it meant that the remaining enemy would be seriously hindered in any attempts to scuttle the ship. Especially with the shipboard ASI still rebooting. Thinking of the ASI gave Peace an interesting idea, which he quickly relayed to Emma.
Impact Event (Dargo Pearce Chronicles #1) Page 26
