Whatever their origins, it didn’t change the fact that Solomon had to find a way to get them off his ship before they could do some real damage like cutting some vital cable or air supply.
“Hyurgh!” There was a grunt of exertion over his visor’s speakers, and the shooting from below stopped.
“Commander, I think we’ve got a problem,” Wen panted.
“You’re telling me!” Solomon growled as he jumped down through the trapdoor. He saw Jezzie holding one of her poly-steel blades, dripping red, onto the body of a raider on the cold metal of the hold’s floor.
“Came out of nowhere. They must have breached the airlock,” Wen said, nodding to the pressure hatch at one end of the hold.
“Which means they could blow a hole through that hatch and depressurize the whole ship at any moment,” Solomon realized. It was a standard raider move. As soon as they figured out that you weren’t scared of a fight, they would just plant enough explosives to blow a hole in your hull, starving you of oxygen or at least gravity, before they came in and cleared up the mess.
The dead raider wore a motley collection of suit parts, cobbled together to form an incoherent whole. Here was a breastplate from some sort of colonial security firm. An ex-industrial undermesh suit, still complete with the extra pouches and pockets, and with its original factory identifier stenciling. His gear was topped off with large metal storm boots some decade out of date and a slim-fit helmet with front-loading air canisters.
Only now, the undermesh suit had a dirty red tear in its side from Wen’s blade.
“Come on.” Solomon had already moved to the pressurized hatch, checking the seal and controls. “It’s still reading that the chamber outside is intact. We have to act fast.” He raised his voice to shout over the suit radio. “Kol! Evasive maneuvers, as fast and hard as you can. Let’s shake ‘em about a bit!”
There was a distant, muted ‘Aye’ and suddenly, Solomon and Jezzie were thrown to one side to thump into the wall, as the scout craft started to spin on its axis as Kol fired first one set of positioning rockets, then another.
“That should give ‘em something to think about.” Solomon grinned inside his suit, hanging onto the metal bulkhead as the scout vessel shook and rolled.
After another nausea-inducing turn and a thump, Kol had apparently cleared the hull of the interlopers, and instead fired the rear engines to throw themselves forward.
Not that it got them out of trouble.
“We need to call this in,” Jezzie was saying. “The rest of the fleet will need to know it’s an ambush.”
“Our ship-to-ship communicators won’t work in here. We’ll need to leave the asteroid field to get a clear connection,” Solomon countered, just as the scout ship’s alarm split the air, and the ship shook from several much larger impacts.
AWAOWAOWAOOW!
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Warning! Marine Scout Vessel 17 is Under Attack!
Assigned to: Gold Squad (Sp. Cmdr. CREADY)
Hull integrity: 52%
The alerts scrolled over Cready’s visor in a warning orange as Scout Vessel 17, which they were inside, connected with their Gold Squad channel.
“Someone’s firing at us!” he heard Kol shout in alarm.
“We’ve got two raider ships coming up behind at our starboard four and seven o’clock,” Karamov announced a moment later.
Looks like they weren’t content with trying to swarm us. Solomon growled, racing back with Wen to the top deck, leaping over the body of the dead raider. Of course, the raiding party had to have been launched from somewhere, and as soon as he got to his seat, he could see on the screens just where that had been.
There were two craft flying toward them as Kol tried to swerve and dodge out of the way of their rockets. They weren’t heat-seekers or auto-guided missiles, at least, Solomon saw. They were single-thruster propulsion rockets launched from any one of the four ‘arms’ of the raider craft.
The enemy ships looked a little like dragonflies—a large ‘X’ with a long bulbous body sticking from the center. At the end of each of the arms was a positioning thruster, as well as a weapon’s pod that apparently fired salvos of their small rockets at them. On the screens above him, Solomon saw the raider craft rolling and swerving around the body of asteroids to try and get into a better firing position.
They’re just going to try and blow us up and pick through the carcass for anything useful, Solomon thought as the ship swerved and rolled once more.
“What kind of weapons do we have on this thing?” he growled, checking through the controls. Surely a Marine vessel—even a scouting one—had to have some kind of armaments, didn’t it?
MARINE SCOUT VESSEL 17:
Operational:
Guide-Laser (small-object orbital particle generator)
Weapons Pods x 2 (3 seek-and-destroy missiles per pod)
“Now that’s more like it!” Solomon found the interface between his suit and the ship, and used a series of eye movements to pull up the details on his visor screen, matching the graphics to the ones on the desk in front of him.
Guide lasers would be no use in a firefight, he thought, although they could pack a pretty powerful punch, as they were designed to send a super-heated radioactive particle beam to destroy rocks and obstacles in the way.
No, it was the seek-and-destroy missiles he knew that he wanted, as he clicked open the targeting window and swiveled the firing stick until it held one of the racing raider craft in its sights.
“Firing! Weapon Pod 1, full salvo!” he called out as his fingers pulled the trigger and there was a slight judder of recoil through the ship.
Outside the cockpit, on the underside of the scout craft, a bulbous dome of metal broke open to reveal the nasty, snub maw of a missile holder with three darkened ports set back at an angle. There was a glint of light and then suddenly—
WHOOOOSH!
Steam and fire burst from each of the three tubes as three small missiles—barely bigger than Solomon’s arm—erupted from their sanctuaries and performed an almost immediate turn in space in front of them, swinging back to dart underneath the scout and straight toward the first raider craft that was right on their tail!
“It’s a hit!” Karamov called out from his chair behind Solomon, watching as the small vectors of the heat-seeking, seek-and-destroy missiles smashed into two of the out-flung arms of the craft, while the third scored a direct hit on its central body.
Sensor screens don’t do justice to ship-to-ship combat, as all Karamov, Kol, and Solomon could see were the vectors and the sudden disappearance of the attacking raider craft. Their scout vessel was suddenly rocked by the first bow-wave of the explosion as outside, the four-armed raider craft broke apart in a plume of disappearing flames and escaping gases.
That left one raider ship.
“Spin us around, Kol!” Solomon called with a savage grin. “I want them running from us this time!” And I also want them to lead us back to wherever they’ve stashed the Kepler, Solomon thought. He felt the G-force pull on his body as Kol hit the forward propulsion rockets—which would normally make them go backwards—at the same time angling the rear engines and firing at the same time. The result was that they flipped end-over-head and were now facing the oncoming raider craft.
Guide Laser: Activate.
Solomon didn’t want to destroy this raider craft, not yet, so instead of firing the second weapons pod of missiles—which would surely destroy it at such close proximity—he hit the front nosecone’s guide laser button instead. The lights along the interior of the craft flickered as the engines experienced a momentary drain of energy, and then a scintillating beam of white, yellow, and red light burst out, missing the raider craft by ten meters or so, and burying itself in the asteroid wall behind it.
“You missed!” Karamov said in dismay.
“I wasn’t trying to hit it,” Solomon said.
His ruse worked. The sudden burst of a high-powered particle weapon
, accompanied by the sudden loss of its fellow craft, were enough to make the raider vessel think twice about attacking this smaller, but clearly very well piloted, Marine vessel. It spiraled on its propulsion arms, performing a spaceship equivalent of a handstand before spinning off between two asteroid boulders.
“After her!” Solomon shouted, and Kol was only too eager to comply.
The scout burst into motion, spinning to avoid a narrowing gap between asteroids as it followed its spiraling target. The raider was fast, and clearly suited to maneuvering in tight spaces such as this, but the Marine ship had the advantage of far more sophisticated engines. The scout narrowed the gap between them, only for the raider to suddenly turn and duck down the flat rock face of an asteroid, screaming underneath it.
Kol matched his positional thrusters perfectly, but still, they came close to slamming into the asteroid wall, before they too were racing underneath the giant asteroid and then coming up the other side.
And then there, in front of them, was the deep-field station-ship known as the Kepler.
11
Ghost Hulk
“Whoa…” Kol sounded a little awed, and Solomon didn’t blame him.
“Is that it?” Wen was peering over their chairs at the cockpit screens in front of them.
“Not just it, apparently,” Solomon said, as it seemed that they weren’t just looking at a ship, but at a graveyard of ships.
The raider craft had spiraled high above the twisted and mutant metal in front of them and was even now disappearing up into the asteroid field above.
“Shall we go after them, Commander?” Kol asked distractedly.
“No need. We got what we came for. I think,” Solomon said, looking at the mess in front of them.
That was the thing about space, Solomon reflected. It held infinite wonders like folding space-time, or time itself slowing to almost nothing around a blackhole. There were the wonders of particle fission in the hearts of super-massive star.
And yet, for the most part, it obeyed natural laws.
The Erisian Asteroid Field was out beyond the reaches of one of the furthest planetoids of humanity’s Sol System. Out here, the gravity of the sun was weak, and objects easily lost their drift towards the solar center. Instead, they congregated like flotsam around the nearest densest objects or formed their own instead.
What had been holding this field together was a graveyard of dead spacecraft, their dense metals and slowly decaying reactors creating a slow gravitational pulse that drew the Erisian asteroids to congregate around it.
Solomon wondered how many people knew this was here. He saw the partial remains of a large, blocky tanker-style ship, as well as several smaller tubes of the fast messenger-style rocket ships primarily used for super-fast planet-to-planet travel. He wondered if this had once been a decommissioning site, or a work yard for some corporation, before the asteroids came. Maybe the raiders themselves hauled all of their seized victories here, to better hide their presence?
By far the largest and most derelict of all of the craft here, however, was the large rhomboid shape scattered with pods and domes and blocky bulkhead doors. Rows and rows of porthole windows lined its hull, speaking of a complicated interior world of rooms, habitations. Enough for several families, at least.
And on the side of the craft, there was printed in giant machine-plate, industrialist lettering:
KEPLER DEEP-FIELD
“It’s got no engines,” Wen said, pointing out the great gouged and ragged holes near the back where several large engine blocks—each one larger than the scout vessel itself—used to reside.
“Those weren’t just propulsion engines, either,” Karamov confirmed. “That size? They’re Barr-Hawking generators.”
Jump engines. Solomon knew that each of the deep-field ships had them, although he had never seen them on any craft other than the hauler jump-ships like the one that had brought them out here.
And well, I guess I’m not looking at them now, either, he admitted. “They’ve been scavenged by the raiders, clearly,” he said, which was probably bad news for someone down the line, he figured. If the raiders had Barr-Hawking generators that size, then they could pretty much run their own deep-field ships, competing directly with the Confederacy for trade to the Outer Colonies.
But whatever, we’re not here for politics. Solomon shook his head.
“What happened to her? Raiders?” Kol asked.
“Looks like it,” Solomon started to say, before he stopped himself. The Kepler did indeed have blackened scorch marks pocked all over its nose and belly, betraying the fact that it must have had many of the raiders’ rockets fired at it. The ship was so large, though, that he knew that would be like gnats biting an elephant.
“Unless they boarded at the same time…” Solomon considered, sweeping his eyes over the vessel.
Wait a minute. “What’s that?” His gaze stopped on a broken section of the hull, which looked to be where the raiders had started to tear apart the metal walls for their own salvage mission.
Only, from the outward jags of blackened and twisted metal, it looked as though it had been burst apart from within, not from without. Almost like the Kepler had given birth to some monstrous, murdering child all its own out here in the depths of space. Solomon shuddered superstitiously.
“That’s an internal explosion.” He tapped his finger on the screen.
“Sabotage?” Wen considered.
“Could be. Or a malfunction?” Solomon shrugged. “It either means that the raiders got on board first and crippled her, or that the Kepler was in a bad shape anyway and had suffered an almost catastrophic accident by the time the raiders hauled her in here.”
There were no lights along the entire length of the Kepler, and short-range scans either returned with asteroid static or inconclusive results.
“Looks like we’re going to have take a closer look,” Solomon said, nodding to Kol to begin the approach. “Karamov, I want you staying here with Kol. Keep this boat in a tight scouting circuit around the Kepler. Flush out any more raiders if you can. Wen and Malady, you two are with me on the away mission.”
“At last!” Even though Wen had recently had the excitement and terror of hand-to-hand combat to the death in the hold of this very ship, it appeared that she was only too ready for some more.
Three vaguely humanoid shapes threw themselves from the airlock of the Marine vessel, arms and legs wide in star positions as their momentum carried them across the emptiness of space toward the jagged hole in the Kepler.
The three shapes looked almost like satellites themselves, the metal of their suits shining under the vessel’s floodlights, their collars glimmering with their own subdued suit lights.
“Ready?!” Solomon called from in front as he flew past the first twisted and half-slagged girder and into the belly of the metal beast. Behind him and slightly above was spread-eagled Specialist Jezzie Wen, and last of all, looking like a cannonball compared to the rest of them, powered Full Tactical Malady.
The bright, reflective glare of the Kepler’s outer hull vanished in an instant, to be replaced by a confusing darkness of shadows and shapes threatening to criss-cross their flight path.
Solomon’s suit lights showed buckled girders thicker than he was wide, as well as plates of bulkhead metal that had been seemingly torn and pushed out with the force of some kind of explosion.
And then his suit lights revealed that they were floating through a large, empty space.
“Looks like some kind of holding bay,” he called out over the suit’s Gold Squad communicators.
“TZZZZRK! What’s that, Commander? I can’t…TZZZRK!” The fuzzy voice of Karamov in his ears, dressed in static, revealed that the Kepler was disrupting any attempt at long-range communication. They were on their own in here.
“I read you loud and clear, Commander,” Malady informed him.
“Aye, same here,” Wen confirmed. “We should be able to use short-wave suit-to-suit
in here.”
The ‘in here,’ as it turned out, was much larger than Solomon had initially thought.
“No graviton generators working, clearly,” Solomon heard Malady say. “Depressurized. No oxygen.”
“I think we can see that, Mal.” Solomon even managed a joke as he floated through the center of the vast metallic cavern.
This was one of several holds in the ship, Solomon surmised, whereas the upper floors of the station-ship would be given over to workshops, domestic units, and even galleries of shops. Down there, in the massive vault space that could have easily fit several of the scout ships that Gold Squad had come in on, was where the hundreds if not thousands of tons of cargo would be stored. These deep-field ships were the caravans of the colonial Confederacy, hauling everything from raw minerals to prefabricated buildings, entire drone assembly units, or even spacecraft.
It was all gone.
“Where is everything?” Solomon asked. “Did the raiders really strip it that fast?” He couldn’t believe his eyes.
“Stealing stuff is what they are famous for, Commander,” Wen said dryly as she floated up behind him, making small, languid movements with her hands to direct her flight.
Solomon flinched a little at that. He wondered if he should feel some sort of strange criminal loyalty to the raiders that he had just fired upon, and doubtlessly had killed in the process. I was a thief once, too, he thought. Being a thief also gave him a little inside into the nature of this crime, though.
The hold was a large oblong room, whose walls were criss-crossed with metal gantries that led to bulkhead doors. Some of those doors would doubtless lead up into the more personal and human areas of the Kepler. He could tell easily which four, six, or eight-man doors were also the loading and unloading ports. When he craned his head up, he saw a whole forest of metal winches and grabbing arms stationed securely above, which would have been used to move containers around.
Outcast Marines series Boxed Set Page 24
