Battlecruiser Alamo - 7 - Battlecruiser Alamo: Sacred Honor (24 page)

 “A close intercept?” Marshall said, frowning. “Lousy tactics, I’d have gone for a chase. Not that I mind.”

 Spinelli turned to Marshall, his eyes widening, his hand shaking. He gulped a couple of times, as if he had temporarily lost the ability to speak.

 “What’s wrong, Spaceman?” Marshall said.

 “Dimensional instability, sir. Right behind us, and it’s big.”

 “Behind us?” Caine said. 

 Turning back to his station, Spinelli said, “Emergence now, Captain. Two more battlecruisers, and eight smaller craft, scoutships, I think.”

 “Trapped,” Steele said, her eyes widening.

 “We aren’t dead yet,” Marshall said. “More speed, Tyler, and let’s knock out the ships in front of us. We’ve got the speed advantage and we need to use it.”

 “Energy spike aft, sir. Twenty-eight missiles, bearing directly.” 

 Marshall looked at the sensor station to his left, and with a grin, said, “At least we’ve got a target-rich environment.”

Chapter 24

 The force of the shuttle’s engines kicked Barbara back in her couch as the acceleration built, throwing her onto an intercept course with the incoming fighters. A part of her was back on Alamo, worrying about Cooper; after four days of drugged catatonia, he ought to be in the medical bay being checked out by Duquesne, not preparing to lead men into battle. If she did her job, though, that wouldn’t be necessary.

 Running a hand over the newly-installed controls to her left, she checked the status of the missiles nesting in her cargo bay. Furious work had gone into preparing them, and now it was about to pay off; she thought with a smile of the instructor who had failed her for advanced flight training, dooming her chances to become a fighter pilot. She was going to get a dogfight after all, even if it was in an old orbital shuttle.

 Glancing across at her co-pilot, she saw Spaceman Hooke crouched over his controls, flashing a nervous look up at the viewscreen, as if he was looking for waves of incoming fighters to swarm in and destroy them. She tapped him on the shoulder, and he jerked up with a start.

 “What?” he hissed.

 “Relax, Con. You’ll do what you need to do when the time comes.”

 “Tell me that when the missiles are flying. All we’ve got is this countermeasure package.”

 Frowning, she said, “The last time I got shot at, I had a man next to me who didn’t even know how the systems worked, and we got through. I thought you were supposed to be an expert.”

 With a snort, he replied, “I was just the last one to step back when the Chief asked for volunteers.”

 A chime alerted her to an incoming call, “Caine to Bradley. We’re vectoring you in on the assault shuttles now. I’m afraid you won’t get much help from Alamo, we’ve got troubles over here. Good hunting.”

 “Troubles?”

 “Oh God, oh God, oh God,” Hooke started to murmur.

 “You seeing the Second Coming on your sensors, Spaceman?”

 He looked across at her, his face pale, “Eleven more ships just jumped into the system. Eleven! What the hell are we going to do about it! What are we going to do?”

 “Calm down, damn it! We’ve got a job of our own to do. Let the Captain work out what t
o
do with his new playmates. He’s counting on us to knock down those shuttles.” She tapped another control, then said, “Shuttle One to all Shuttles. No backup from Alamo now, so we’re on our own. Mesh your tactical systems with ours, and we’ll punch in towards those fighters.”

 “Then what?” a voice asked.

 Glancing down at her navigation screen, she said, “Then for us the battle’s pretty much over. We’re going to be crowding on the acceleration enough to throw us on a course to take us out of the combat zone for a later link-up with Alamo.”

 “Assuming Alamo’s still in existence then,” Hooke muttered.

 “One pass, guys, then all of this is over. Let’s make it count.”

 Throwing a series of switches, she armed the missiles then settled back into her couch for the burn, trying to ignore the stream of quiet complaints from the man next to her. Of all the co-pilots she could have been stuck with, she had to end up with th
is
one. Warning lights began to flash from the engine, alerts that she was burning too long, using too much fuel, but she just ignored them. The shuttle had one destination, and it was to intercept the four arrowheads up ahead.

 Her warbook began to flash up information as fast as the sensors could gather it; these had been significantly modified from anything she had seen before. Bigger engines, toughened nose – were these actually intended to ram a ship? - more passenger space, and worst of all, a small cluster of missiles. This wasn’t going to be a bombing run, it was going to be a duel.

 “Focus on giving our warheads some cover, Hooke,” she said. “They’ll try and scramble them on the way in.” She glanced up at a readout, “Thirty-one seconds to contact.”

 “They’ll be trying to shoot at us as well,” he said. “I’m going to try and cover our butts and call it a win.”

 “Hooke, you will do what I say or you can find another ride home!”

 Sullenly, the technician returned to his work, while Barbara tried to concentrate on her own flying while keeping an eye on the other two. The rest of her flight had fallen into a ragged formation that any instructor would have condemned as hopeless, but it had the virtue of being a surprise to the enemy. It certainly was to her.

 “Fourteen seconds to range,” she said. “I’ll fire in twenty.”

 “Not right away?” Hooke replied. “We could turn off, then, head out of the battle area…”

 “Our job is to get those missiles to their targets, not to save our own skin.”

 Pressing home, she looked up as she saw a red light flash on, the enemy forces ahead drifting into missile lock. Working the controls, she sent the shuttle dancing across the sky, trying to frustrate the enemy systems, and Hooke finally began to work, furiously entering commands.

 “In firing range,” she said, and then to the other shuttles, “Go for time-on-target, people.” 

 “They’re launching! Three missiles! At us!”

 “Where did you think they would fire them, Hooke?”

 Her hand reached down to the controls, and with a casual flick she threw the launch levers, not knowing quite what to expect. The force of the launching missiles spun the shuttle off its course, sending it into a brief corkscrew before she regained control. With a glance across at the sensors, she saw six trails racing towards their target.

 The other shuttles had tarried longer than she had hoped, but their missiles were running now, fanning out in a wave to match hers, racing towards the boarding shuttles. She could concentrate on evasive action now, tossing the shuttle into a series of spins, knowing that it was unlikely to do any good but unable to just sit back and wait.

 Hooke was typing furiously now, sweat running down his forehead as he worked to protect their missiles while deflecting those of the enemy, his eyes leaping from one readout to the next, while he kept up a constant string of muttered curses. He might be annoying, but he seemed to know his stuff; two of the incoming missiles crashed into each other, while all six of the
irs
ranged towards their target.

 Then the modifications made to the enemy shuttles became obvious; their acceleration abruptly increased enormously to a level that must have made their crews borderline unconscious, but which forced the missiles to hastily change track to compensate. Somehow, the Cabal had managed to install afterburners; this was no quickly-improvised trick, the burn was lasting too long for that. This was planned.

 Barbara allowed herself a quick, satisfied smile as she saw one of her missiles swing around in a long arc, racing towards its target while the rest fell short, and a brief blossoming flame in the sky as it exploded just about the engine, sending the remains of the shuttle into a spiraling trajectory away from the battle. 

 Most of the missiles had been scattered all over the field of battle; the area was swarming with interference from the electronic warfare officers, and the missile guidance systems were struggling to cope. As the boarding shuttles curved away, she saw three more flashes in brief succession, and thought for a moment that they had accomplished their goal, only to be met by a doleful expression from Hooke.

 “One of theirs, two of ours.”

 “Both the others?”

 “Gone,” he said with finality, then looked down at his console, continuing, “And we’re next, by the look of it. We’ve got two missiles on our tail, and they’re coming in hot. Can you do that afterburner trick?”

 “Not this time,” she said. “Get onto that panel of yours.”

 “I have been,” he replied, but he continued to work despite his protests, his fingers running over the keyboards as he tried to feed misleading data to the missiles. None of it seemed to be doing any good, and Barbara watched the warheads close into their terminal track. No time to bail-out, and even if they did, based on Alamo’s battle plan that would just be a fast ticket to captivity. She’d had a good look at Discovery when they rescued the Hercules crew, and had no plans for such a fate.

 With a wild smile, she turned the engines off, waited for a second, then turned them back on again, a pulse that curved the approaching missiles onto a new course, actually gave them a few seconds more. Her mind raced as she tried to think of ideas.

 “I’ve armed the airlock bolts,” Hooke said. “Let’s get out of here?”

 “Don’t be stupid,” she reflexively replied, then turned to him with a grin. “Wait a minute, that’s a great idea!”

 Locking down the internal doors with the flick of another
switch
, she held her hand over the airlock hatch control. This was going to have to be timed to the microsecond, and whatever happened, the shuttle was still going to be crippled, but it might give them a chance of survival. As the missiles curved in for the kill, just a few meters away, she slammed the button then ducked back in her seat.

 The shuttle spun around with the force of the explosion, warning sirens sounding from thousands of hull breaches in the aft compartment, the primary engines now nothing but ruined equipment that would be next to impossible to identify. Ahead, the stars tumbled, the few remaining attitude thrusters completely unequal to the task of stabilizing the ship, but as she looked up at her status board, she shook her head in disbelief; they still had hull integrity.

 Hooke turned to her, then said, “What the hell did you do?”

 “Threw the aft airlock door at them. The detonation was about a hundred meters short of us. Enough to wreck us, but not to destroy us.” She looked around at the sensors, at the battle now far behind them, “Hopefully they’ll think we’re dead. I’ll have to work out some way of contacting Alamo.”

 The lights began to fade, and Hooke glanced up at panels as the readouts flashed out, one after another, “Main and emergency power is out. We’d better get in our spacesuits.” Reaching up to the overhead locker, he said, “What the hell do we do now?”

 “Wait and see who wins the battle. Someone will pick us up, eventually. I hope.”

 “You hope?”

 “Beats being dead.”

 As she
nimbly
slid into her spacesuit, she took one final look at the sensor display before it finally went dark. Two of the boarding shuttles had managed to get past her, and by now would be on their final approach to Alamo. Twenty, thirty troops that would shortly be racing through the corridors with murder in their minds.

 All that was left on board to face them was Cooper and a couple of troops, and whatever technicians were unfortunate enough to find themselves in the battle area. Alamo was facing attacks from all quarters, missiles ranging from all angles towards her, and the odds of victory had collapsed from slim to impossible.

 She chuckled to herself as the spacesuit completed its final locking sequence, the status lights winking green one after another. Here she was in a drifting piece of wreckage tumbling through space in a random direction, her life now measured only by the life support capability of her spacesuit, and she probably had the greatest chance of survival of any Alamo crewman in the system. And she would have given anything to be back there with the rest of them, instead of sitting here, waiting and praying for a miracle.

Chapter 25

 The trio of troopers pushed through the corridors, swinging from hand-hold to hand-hold, cursing the lack of gravity that made them cumbersome, dancing past huddled technicians as they raced to the calculated impact site. Cooper’s datapad kept screaming updates from the bridge, tactical reports giving projections of the number of enemies he was likely to encounter, all of them based on nothing but guesswork.

 He shouldn’t be having to do this. There ought to be squads of troopers stationed around the ship at key points, waiting to ambush any arriving forces, not a half-squad racing to try and get to the incursion point in time, before the invaders could have a chance to establish a foothold.

 “We’re here, guys,” he said to his two remaining comrades. “This is where we make our stand.”

 Space-tight doors had already sealed the other end of the corridor, long enough to at least buy them a little time, and this was the only other way through. Behind them was engineering, the heart of the ship, and a place they could not afford to lose. If the Cabal forces took control of that, the battle was over, and they were captured.

 The ship rocked, and Duvalier braced herself, asking, “That was three decks up. Are we in the wrong place?”

 “Missile impact near the sensor decks,” Cooper said. “We’re next.”

 Lane drifted up behind him, leading a pack of technicians who looked at least minimally comfortable with the weapons they were brandishing in their hands. She clapped Cooper on the back, then gestured to her force to spread out.

 “Where do you want us?” she asked.

 “Don’t you want to take command?” he replied.

 Shaking her head, she said, “You’re the expert, Corporal, and I’ll defer to your judgment.”