"I’ve been doing some thinking, and the way I see it we have a few options."
Aesop counted off on the fingers of his vacuum suit glove as their stolen Gavisari ship passed over the storms of Juna. The small laser on his shoulder blinked out his words to Maggie Chambers, who leaned against the bulkhead trying not to look like she was in crippling pain. "One, we wait for the old lady and hope she gets back to Pedres in time to stop Mags from bleeding out."
"You ever rely on hope in the Mossad?" asked Singh. "Marine Commandos didn’t. We can’t wait, we need to take action."
"Two," said Aesop, "we radio Jones for an emergency pickup. Whatever else, he’s still a Privateer. Chances are he’d come get us."
"Fuck no," said Vega, slapping a hand against the bulkhead. "He’d probably blast us instead of pulling us out. He’s too far up the ass of the tripods. In any case, I’d rather eat a box of broken glass than call on that guy for anything. We may got bullshit orders out here, but I ain’t bailing on Marin’s orders and shacking up with that asshole."
Aesop looked at Maggie. "You’re the one hurt. If you say we call, then we call."
Mags shook her head. She’d never ask for help from anyone, let alone Captain Jones of the Howard Phillips. That left one other choice.
"I guess that leaves option three. We take a ship with a functioning medbay and perform the surgery there."
Vega bit back an excited laugh, but Singh was more skeptical. "Take a ship with a functioning medical bay? How exactly do you propose we accomplish that?" she asked.
Vega held out two fingers like a pistol. "We pull up alongside one and knock on the door. Then when they answer it? Boom boom, our ship now. Easy."
"I’ve already checked the Blessing’s doc office. It’s fully stocked with surgical tools and equipment. The Gavisari may not look much like us, but physiologically speaking I don’t think they’re all that dissimilar. Brain, heart, lungs, liver. They’re oxygen breathing and they have an arterial circulatory system. Vega, I think they’ll have whatever you need, including a pressurized suite. There’s a thousand ships floating around this planet, take your pick."
Maggie’s light pulsed. "You Israelis are nuts. I’m in."
Aesop turned to Singh, who was already shaking her head. "I can spoof their comms, send a phony distress call on a narrowband, but this is crazy. You want to board a hostile vessel with three marines? Sorry Mags, but you’re in no condition to fight."
Aesop shrugged. "I’ve taken more with less. This plan involves direct action against xenos though, including against civilians. All their fighting ships have left. We have to hit them hard and fast, before they can get their own distress call out. If anyone here has an issue killing a noncombatant, this is the time to speak up."
"Hell Sarge, there ain’t no noncombatants anymore. A xeno is a xeno, and I just want to blow some shit up." Vega checked his X-87 and cycled a round into the chamber. "Just say the word."
Aesop didn’t bother asking again for Singh. She would kill a thousand xenos to save the life of a marine. A thousand xenos with families, spouses, children, who knew? Her quiet demeanor belied the fact that she’d been in the Indian Marine Commandos during the Indian Exchange, the only nuclear event between major powers since World War II. The aftermath had been some of the grisliest fighting of the last century across burning and irradiated territory between India and Pakistan. Whatever she’d seen, a few dead aliens were a drop in the bucket.
"Alright Singh, get on the horn. Vega, prep whatever we have. I need to talk to Mags."
"Aye bossman. I’ll be ready," said Vega. He tossed an unnecessary salute as he drifted through the broken airlock. Singh launched herself in the opposite direction, headed to the communications deck where she could patch into the fleet comms through the portable transceiver. Once they were gone, Aesop turned to Maggie Chambers.
"How you holding up? Honest truth, Mags."
The light on her shoulder began to tap out a message. "I can still fight, Sarge."
"The hell you can. You can barely move, and don’t think I haven’t spotted you holding the puncture site when you think I’m not looking. You’re going to sit this one out. You can’t be first in this time, Chambers. It’d kill you."
"I won’t have anyone else dying for me instead."
"Then say you want me to call Jones. I can’t order you to flip hulls, but damn it Maggie, that’s the only way I see you realistically walking away from this."
Maggie Chambers’ composite helmet swung back and forth. "No."
Aesop sighed. He didn’t want to call Jones any more than she did, but he wanted to lose a marine even less. Still, regs were clear. Marines calling for rescue effectively abandoned their previous billet to whichever ship picked them up. Their days on the Condor would be numbered, and until the next port they’d be taking orders from the captain working to directly undermine Victoria Marin’s efforts to solidify a formal defense agreement. The Maeyar were a culture within the boundary of advancement. Their technology was close enough to directly reverse engineer for practical applications, not just theoretical ones. Victoria Marin had gone to Gavisar in attempt to secure that technology for Earth, at great risk to herself. Jones had just latched on like a stomach worm to suck on the anticipated success of the invasion fleet, but had no real stake. The old lady knew the easy road and the right road were rarely the same, and her crew always willingly followed her.
Looking around at the battle-worn remnants of the Blessing, Aesop shrugged. "Guess it’s time to trade up to the newer model. I’ve had about enough of this dusty old hulk anyway."
Maggie hesitated before blinking out a reply.
"Thanks."
"Yeah, well, it will all be for nothing if you bleed to death before we hook a drifter. Try and get some rest if you can. I know it’s tough in L-grav."
Maggie nodded, and Aesop left her to check on Singh. The comms room was as cramped as any of the others, ceiling and floor only about four feet apart. Two Gavisari had been viciously stuffed into a tight crevice to make room and Aesop had to drift past them to reach Singh. The callous brutality was not a trait Aesop admired in his fellow humans, but without it humanity didn’t have much of a future in the stars.
"Give me some good news, Singh."
His marine held up a finger, and Aesop arrested his approach. Singh’s other hand was wiggling in the air, typing on her suit computer’s virtual keyboard. Aesop called up his own computer, using his command circuit to listen in on the text-based communication between the Blessing and an ECW scout frigate in too poor a shape to fight, but not quite bad enough to need a tether.
"This was easier than expected," said Singh. "Even in the midst of invasion, it doesn’t occur to them to be suspicious."
"No concept of opsec for a lot of the xenos."
"No concept of ‘repel boarders’ either. They’ll be in range to dock in a little under an hour."
And the frigate would have clean air and a medical suite. Vega was no surgeon, but he could maybe keep Maggie alive until Doc Whipple could fix her up. Only a dozen dead xenos stood between him and taking his helmet off. His curly stubble itched like hell. A thousand tiny annoyances could drive a vacuum jockey nuts after a day in the deep, and they were pushing hour seventy-two. Aesop had been awake for almost the entirety of them. He’d be relying on stimulants to keep him alert through the boarding acting.
Better stimulants than opiates. He thought of Mags. She wouldn’t be first in this time.
"Positive bearing migration, Wing Officer. Ahead at three-nine thousand meters."
Sothcide checked his own gunner’s ranging solution before transmitting the information back to the Vitacuus. He hesitated as his interceptor vibrated under the turbulence of the storm. It must have been furious for him to be feeling it. His fighter wing spread across an embedded thunderstorm, both to hide their individual signatures and to form a picket that could use shared sensor data to provide a rough estimate as to enemy ranges when the signatures weren’t being masked by Juna’s magnetic interference. They were close enough to the Gavisari formation to distinguish individual ships, or at least tightly packed clusters to within a few kilometers based on passive sensors alone. Not good enough for a kill shot from one of the Slingray’s planetary missiles, and lasers wouldn’t penetrate more than a few kilometers of storm cloud before refraction robbed their strength.
The light for Sothcide’s intercom winked on for the first time since they left the mountain passes through which the Vitacuus maneuvered. His gunner Riz, nominally silent as she performed her targeting and weapons calculations, piped up from the rear cockpit of the interceptor. "Wing officer, engine signature for the invasion fleet is decreasing, the formation appears to be slowing."
Slowing. Perhaps. Such a maneuver would allow Arda’s ships to rake across the underbellies of the formation, an inviting prospect that could tip force parity in favor of the Maeyar remnant fleet if Sothcide was quick to signal the battlegroup. But the overextended Gavisar line had been an inviting temptation too. "Ranging solution?"
"Unchanged, wing officer."
Sothcide’s eye spun to an inverted position, examining the different perspective offered on his tactical display as he puzzled over the Gavisari actions. Thus far the commander of the cruiser leading the formation had been both proactive and reactionary, and the question was whether the decrease in engine signature was an effort to pen in the Maeyar fleet or a reaction to new information. And if it was a response to new intelligence, where had that come from? Sothcide switched to his squad-wide circuit.
"Transmit a cautionary to Wing Commander Arda. Hold on the attack, Gavisari fleet is realigning, battlegroup position may be compromised. Attack risks approaching a defensive formation."
As he was speaking, the bearing rate of the Homeworld Defense Fleet abruptly dropped, and the engine signatures all but disappeared even as active sensor alarms blared across his consoles. The Gavisari were initiating a rapid course change, and it was only thanks to their sturdy design that half of them didn’t fall out of the sky at the stress on their hulls from the maneuver.
"All ships, brace! Position is compromised, incoming HDF attack!"
Sothcide didn’t wait for the response before he signaled his own squad into action. "All wings, climb, climb, clear the interim zone and prepare to engage!"
The powerful engines on the interceptor, kept barely at a level to maintain flight, roared to life, unrestricted by the vanishing need for stealth. Active sensor radiation from the direction of Arda's battlegroup washed over his squadron, and IFF weapon warnings followed behind as the Vitacuus and her sister ships began launching weapons. Even without a complete targeting solution, exotic matter warheads had killing power of more than a dozen kilometers, and Sothcide wanted to be well clear before they arrived. At the same time, active heat emissions from the vectors bearing the Gavisari contacts increased tenfold, as their own initial salvo streaked into the space Sothcide's wing of fighters had just occupied. Even in the thick murk of Juna's clouds he could see the streaks of light pass below him on his climbing ship's rear-facing cameras, shockwaves trailing behind the bursts of the missile propellant.
Only instants passed before the answering salvo returned in the opposite direction, and then the thunderclouds of Juna were shown what a real storm looked like.
Light washed over the Blessing, columns of white brilliance that slid over her hull as the Gavisari scout frigate examined what was left of the temple ship. Not much, to be told. The frigate was an ECW boat called the Oracle, armed with sophisticated electronic counter-warfare equipment, and Aesop hoped that whatever scan they were performing didn't extend to the realization that no life-support systems were receiving power, and no compartments on board were pressurized. He pulled his head back from the hull breach as the lights swept over the opening, casting harsh rays on the interior of the ship, where Vega and Singh were pressed to the bulkheads, short rifles tightened in slings across their chests. They were silent, EM emissions, even internal suit-to-suit comms, ran the risk of detection here, and any giveaway would rob their tactical advantage.
Or at least increase their already severe handicap.
The light passed, and the beams coalesced on the open airlock of the Blessing, leaving the hull breach in shadow. With an archaic hand signal, Vega swung through the hull breach, followed by Singh with the comms package. Aesop followed behind, Maggie's unconscious form under one arm. The last of her carefully rationed painkillers were spent, and she had succumbed to the agony of her untreated injury. Small vents of super-cooled vapor allowed the marines to control their flight, aiming for the open gasket of the airlock on the approaching scout frigate. A halo of light winked in and out on the other side of the frigate, careful adjustments in thrust as they closed the distance. This version of a boarding was never drilled, but then no fleet intel office had ever expected marines to be jumping from one crippled enemy ship to another.
Singh still offered text communications even as they floated across the exterior hull of the scout frigate. They could enter through one of the Gavisari ship's own hull breaches, but they would have to go compartment by compartment, vacating the atmosphere as they went with no way to reseal it. It would clear the ship, but ruin the medical facilities. No, the humans had to knock on the front door and be let in.
As the gap began to tighten between the two airlocks, the privateer marines slipped inside and clamped down with magnetic boots on the sides of the squat tunnel. The light from Pedres' distant star began to wane, and as the gasket closed around the battered airlock of the Blessing, Aesop uttered his own prayer, far from any god that might have heard it. Total darkness engulfed him as he laid Maggie Chambers against the curve of the bulkhead. Artificial blue light flooded the interior of the evacuated airlock. Vega and Singh had already knelt against the surface of the scout frigate hull, rifles unslung and pointed down at the metal doors between them. Aesop joined them, his heart beginning to beat the steady cadence of combat.
White gas flooded the airlock and Aesop suppressed his nerves, reminding himself that it was just air, not VX, as the Gavisar ECW frigate refilled the space with oxygenated atmosphere. Slowly, a hiss began to build, and behind it the sounds of the thrusters on the frigate continuing to make small corrections in course and speed. Sound, heard through his ears instead of translated through his boots for the first time in days. It grew louder as the pressure mounted, and he could feel the space in his vacuum suit pressing against him as his retinal implants registered Earth normal atmospheric pressure, and then continued to mount.
The exterior airlock on the small frigate was the same iris-type hatch the Gavisari favored for separating their interior compartments, and it had no window or porthole. Nothing to warn the xenos within of the death that lay on the other side of the thin metal veneer. Spaced around it at equal intervals, Aesop and his marines raised their rifles. Each would maintain nearly full cover as he or she fired down at threats from all angles. It was a textbook microgravity breach maneuver Aesop had hoped to never have to employ.
A thin thread of light appeared at the center of the iris, expanding as the metal slid back to reveal the harshly lit interior. As soon as the door swept aside, Aesop saw the clinging legs of a Gavisari maneuvering itself through the airlock. He took aim, and began to fire as Singh and Vega did the same.
The harsh, rapid bark of the stubby assault rifles preceded high screams from inhuman mouths, and was unexpectedly answered by a spike in Aesop’s radiation sensors. The air crackled, and a shower of sparks erupted from the bulkhead behind him. He ducked as the free-floating slag of the docking ring spar spun through the airlock, and leaned over to finish off the xeno he’d wounded in his first volley. It had some sort of armature around its flat head that shattered as Aesop’s rounds tore through it. Even without his xenotechnology degree he would have recognized a weapon-type emitter for an excited particle gun.
"The bastards are armed," announced Vega as he swung in through the airlock. "Jones must have warned them, has them expecting us. Where are the others?"
"Retreated, I know I hit one," said Singh.
"As did I," said Aesop. "They don’t die easy, tough xenos."
Aesop followed after Vega, taking the communication array that was now being used to jam outbound transmissions. Vega covered the hatch, and they watched as Singh pushed Maggie through the iris last and closed the airlock door in case the Gavisari tried to evacuate the air. Aesop jammed the interior hatch open for good measure, if they tried it they’d be spacing the forward half of their ship. They had to have heard those shots, and even if they didn’t know exactly what they were, the tripods had to know they shouldn’t have been aboard the Gavisar ship. Once the iris was closed he pushed off the wall past Vega. "I’ll take comms. Singh, you get to the pilot. Vega, make sure they can’t sneak up on us."
Vega cleared his magazine, swapping it with a fresh one as he nodded. He took position as Singh followed after Aesop, bracing his leg against the narrow door to maintain control over the rifle. Aesop reached the corner of the passageway and barely dodged another blast of the Gavisar small arms, warned only by his radiation alarms. His retinal implants were trying to classify the device as a directed nuclear projector, something that probably wouldn’t penetrate the pressure hull or kill their own kind but would certainly cook any marine caught in the blast.
If communications was in a similar location to the Blessing, Aesop would need to get past the two xenos covering the passageway, and they had it locked down. He took several shots at them, succeeding only in slowing his approach enough to hook a handhold on the bulkhead and maneuver out of sight behind a junction. Singh took that path, rifle at the ready as she floated down the passageway leading to the nose of the small vessel. He pushed his rifle out of cover to look through its camera and didn’t like the long, narrow passageway between him and the communication center, which offered little in the way of cover or concealment. The staff on this frigate were trained in electronic warfare, even if their knowledge didn’t extend to advanced computing. Spacefaring xenos typically had minds as impressive as any computer. Soon they would overcome Singh’s jamming, and then they’d call down reinforcements. Maybe even the fleet left behind to mop up Arda’s battlegroup.
More sparks slagged the corner of the bulkhead junction, the blast hot enough for Aesop to feel even through his vacuum suit as the projected particles slammed into the paneling. He could hear the panicked calls from the other end of the passage.
"Space walker!"
Good, let them fear. Let the Gavisari think that the humans slipped in from the dead of space to haunt their ship. For all the good that did him. He risked another look down the passageway. The recess the two tripods were firing from was shallow enough that he’d never nail it with a grenade.
The communications compartment was critical. The longer he took to secure it, the higher the chance of failure for this mission became. And a compromise of their position in orbit compromised the fleet below as well, blinding their eyes in the sky above Juna.
Aesop looked out again, almost losing his head in the Gavisari’s weapon discharge. It was a clear line of sight, no twists or winds to storm with the clever tactics he’d learned in Pakistani tunnels.
The vacuum suit’s radio crackled, and Vega’s voice came over, competing with the sound of sporadic gunfire. "Sarge, They’re trying to push around this junction, I can hold them here but you’re going to be cut off if you don’t hurry up."
All of their lives depended on him getting down the hallway. He took two deep breaths, steeling himself against the odds of being charbroiled by Gavisari radiation if he failed.
As he made to swing around the corner, he felt a pressure on his waist holding him back, and looked down to see the armored legs of Maggie Chambers wrapped around him. Her arm wrapped around a pipe to arrest his momentum, and her other hand held something small up to his faceplate. It was a loose rail-mag grenade. She must have pulled it out of the underslung launcher on her X-87.
Humans had never fully adapted to L-grav combat. It was too foreign to the lizard parts of the brain that still controlled fear and response. Firing the grenade wouldn’t work, but it didn’t need to be fired. It just needed to be encouraged, and Newtons laws would take care of the rest.
Two more blasts from the Gavisari emitters made molten scrap of the bulkhead behind him as he moved aside and Maggie Chambers pushed the grenade around the corner with just enough momentum to send it tumbling in the direction of the opposite end of the tunnel. He held his rifle scope out next, viewing the feed through his retinal implants. The newer models had color transmission, but he had to settle for black and white as the 30 millimeter shell drifted abreast of the guarding Gavisari. Almost . . . almost . . . there.
The suit computer automatically muted his sound feed as he squeezed the trigger with the grenade just outside the sensor shack. The scope feed on his retinal implants whited out completely, causing him to curse and shut his eyes tight. The impact of the shockwave hit him in the gut from almost 10 meters away, even around the bend in the passageway. A churning cloud of dust followed the blast. No hiss of air or vicious wind betrayed a hull breach, but an explosion alarm now blared in a prerecorded Kosso Standard. Coughing despite the composite face mask, Aesop pushed into the cloud at the opening.
"Nice one, Chambers," he said. She offered a sardonic salute in response. Aesop supposed it was foolish to assume she’d follow orders if it meant staying out of the fight.
Once in the passageway, he engaged his magnetic boots against the bulkheads and began to pace down. He could feel the vibration of Maggie doing the same behind him. She must have saved the last of her painkillers to prove she could still fight, true to her word she wasn’t letting anyone else do the dying for her. The bulkheads had been peppered with shrapnel, and twisted metal reached for him in jagged shards as he traversed the length in a low crouch. A fire suppression system was adding to the dust as it sprayed from a nozzle, so Aesop raised his rifle and used the infrared companion sight. Hotspots abounded wherever his grenade had damaged, and as he watched, a hot mass emerged from the sensor shack. Aesop squeezed off two rounds and the thing went limp, drifting near the rear of the chamber. He couldn’t tell if that was one of the xenos that had been trying to fry his face. The delicate nuclear projectors were no match for the carefully crafted and honed X-87 assault rifles, built for L-grav combat with downward shell ejection and vectored exhaust to counteract the rifle’s recoil.
"Cohen, vibration sensors are going nuts, did something blow up?" Vega asked.
"Yeah I ran into a slight roadblock up here, but it’s nothing a half-stick couldn’t clear. I’m coming up on the sensor shack now. Singh?"
"Control is secure, Sarge. The frigate is under our control. I’m moving to assist Vega."
"Good," Aesop replied. He turned to Maggie so that her suit could pick up the laser communication. "Cover me."
Aesop tossed a second grenade, a stunner this time, through the hatch before he risked entering himself. After the thick whump of detonation, he swung through the opening with his rifle at the ready, drifting through the shattered glass of the desolated communications hub. A half-dozen Gavisari were within, two floating freely either dead or stunned, and another four huddled in the corner, muttering Kossovoldt prayers. The four lacked the curious weapons of the defenders so he dismissed them as an immediate threat. Civilians, survivors of the Gavisar Armageddon. Even as he watched, one of the stunned tripods recovered, shaking itself awake and latching on to both walls. Radiation warnings blared in his suit as the emitter swung in his direction, and he pushed off the bulkhead before it exploded where he’d clung. He sighted the Gavisari as it scrabbled after him, squeezing a half-dozen rounds into it. It took all six to stop the thing, and its momentum carried its body forward to crash into Aesop. They tumbled until the bulkhead knocked his shortened breath out of his lungs. Blood pounding in his ears, Aesop untangled himself from the mess of thick limbs and emptied half his remaining rounds into the other floating Gavisari before it could pull a similar act, also blasting apart the radiation gun. That first one had moved faster than he’d have thought possible, and he wasn’t about to give the other one the opportunity.
Clearing his magazine and inserting a fresh one gave him time to look around without concentrating on immediate threats. Aesop’s time aboard the Blessing gave him ample opportunity to learn his way around the xenotechnology used to design the alien ships’ systems. Scanning the room, he spotted a main power bus, and put three rounds from his rifle into the panel on the wall. The displays and tape reels dotting the compartment dimmed and faltered, leaving the Gavisari with no way to alert their comrades for help without significant repair. Repairs that, in all likelihood, Aesop himself would be performing.
"Stay here, don’t resist, and you won’t be harmed." Aesop offered in Kosso Standard before retreating. The doors were controlled with simple panels, and Aesop closed and locked the communications deck from the outside for good measure. If the four had rushed him, they could have swarmed him and overwhelmed him. The Gavisari were tough as hell, as strong and probably as heavy as a Grayling.
"Where was that cover?" asked Aesop, landing next to Maggie. There was no response from her suit’s beacon. The pit of Aesop’s stomach dropped as he gently shook her. She was completely limp in the microgravity, magnetic boots still latched to the decking gave the impression that she was standing on her own.
Aesop could hear the sound of his squad’s rifles clattering down the passage, closer than he had left it. One thing to be said for microgravity, it made transporting wounded marines less risky. That might just be saving the girl’s life. He disengaged her boots and pulled the unconscious marine along with him.
Vega was shouting obscenities in Portuguese through his helmet speaker back at the engine room, punctuating each taunt with a burst of rifle fire. Clumps of blood clotted into spheres decorated the air around him, and Aesop could see the vacuum suit had self-sealed over a nasty gash rent over Vega’s right thigh. A section of bulkhead in front of him exploded, and Vega was pushed back into a set of pipes by the impact, helmet ringing like a bell. Aesop grabbed him and pulled him out of the line of fire as another shot twisted and ruptured the piping, spraying a gout of what looked like water down the passage. Deep, gravely Kosso shouts came from down the corridor, and an iris hatch slammed shut as the remaining Gavisari sealed themselves in the aft half of the ship. If they had pushed up any further, they would have cut off Aesop’s return route. The xenos had control of the engine room, but for the moment Aesop wasn’t interested in the engine room. Singh still had her weapon trained down the corridor.
"Vega, Vega! You still with me?"
The marine must have had a carbon fiber skull, because he shook off what Aesop knew would have been an impact hard enough to concuss, or a fracture for the unlucky skull. "Yeah, yeah Cohen. Let me finish them up, only a few left back there."
"Belay that. Did you find the medical suite?"
"What? Oh, yea. Shit, is that Mags?" asked Vega, looking at the prostrate marine. Alright, maybe he’d been rattled a little. The armored vacuum suits could only take so much punishment.
"Let’s move, I don’t think she’s doing too well."