“The tank’s coming forward again,” Vip said. “There are at least ten people behind it.”
“Back up,” Marten said. “Wernher, get ready with the cannon.”
“Should I leave them any surprises?” asked Vip.
“Negative,” Marten said. “Just back up to Wernher.”
The seconds ticked by.
“Ambush!” said Lance. “Omi’s taking hits.”
“Coming,” Marten said. He mentally berated himself for getting sloppy. Somebody on the other side definitely thought on their feet and had already incorporated the wall-breaking tactic into their battle considerations. They had used it to ambush them!
Marten ran though the wall openings that Lance and Omi had made, with two other shock troopers following him. They were the reaction team. He read Lance’s HUD. Omi lay on the floor, a gaping hole in his battlesuit. Lance crouched behind a bulky unit of unknown nature. He fired at the enemy, his heavy laser burning holes in the walls and through personal body-armor. Then Lance dove aside as a plasma glob touched and vaporized the unit he’d been hiding behind. Marten hoped superheated plasma wasn’t what had hit Omi. He sprinted down a different hall with the long glide they had been taught to use in ship corridors. He checked the blueprint grid and slapped a breach-bomb to a wall. Seconds later, he and his two mates burst through the wall and behind the enemy. In two heartbeats of glaring red lasers, enemy jerked, screamed and curled like burning leaves. Then it was over. Marten’s battlecomp counted ten corpses, three of them suited with SU security gear.
“We keep going and flank the tank,” Marten said. “Lance, check Omi. Close his battlesuit with construction foam.”
BLAM, BLAM, BLAM the reaction team burst through three more walls and came upon the damage control vehicle with its jury-rigged grenade launcher and the fifteen people crab-walking behind it. Laser beams and several grenades took them down before the enemy even knew they had been circled. This wasn’t a battle, it was butchery.
As he stood over the dead SU remains—a hulking mechanical troll in the guts of the
Bangladesh
—Marten finally allowed himself to worry about his friend. “Report,” he said.
“Omi is out,” said Lance.
Marten hesitated, part of him terrified to ask more. He had to, though. “Is he dead?”
“I shot him with Suspend,” said Lance.
Marten couldn’t breathe. He didn’t dare close his eyes even to mourn his friend. This was just one more mark against the HBs. No. It was more than that. He tasted his sweaty battlesuit air before he asked, “Was he dead when you did it?”
“No,” said Lance. “But is chest is badly burned.”
Why Omi
?
Why not Kang
? Marten forced himself to hang onto the fact that Omi wasn’t dead. But a plasma burn and with no medical facilities for millions of kilometers—
“Bring him along,” he said.
“We don’t have the luxury to carry our dead. …To take anyone who’s out,” Lance finished lamely.
“You carry him,” Marten said.
“Maniple Leader—”
“Do it!” Marten said. “That’s an order. We’ll all carry each other. No shock trooper leaves another behind. We’re all we have in this lousy universe.”
“Roger,” said Lance.
Marten didn’t want to think about Omi, his one true friend, his only friend ever since Nadia had been torn from him. He switched to the command channel. “What do you think, Kang? Do we continue to lunge at the command capsule or do we go for the engines?”
“Highborn battle-tactics always say to lop off the brain first,” Kang said.
“True. But what’s in our best interest?” Marten asked.
“Meaning what?”
“Have you contacted any more shock troopers?”
“I would have told you if I had,” Kang said. “But they’re jamming pretty heavy down here. So how can we know or not?”
“We can’t know,” Marten said. “So we have to assume the worst. With nine of us the best we can do is bargain.”
“With these pansies?” Kang said. “You’re kidding, right? We’re slaughtering them.”
“Omi is out,” Marten said. “What does the
Bangladesh
hold, two thousand personnel? We can’t afford to keep trading losses at the present ratio and win.”
“Then we’re dead,” Kang said. “We might as well shoot ourselves and save them the trouble.”
“Why do you figure that?” Marten said. “We take over the engines and make a deal.”
“What kind of deal?” Kang asked.
“They take us to the Jupiter System where we all get off.”
Kang laughed harshly.
“Isn’t that better than dying?”
Kang was silent. “What if more shock troopers show up?”
“They haven’t so far. But if they do… why not talk them into the same deal? What’s the use of working for the HBs when nine out of five hundred make it to target?”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Listen to me, Kang. The enemy will expect us to go for the command capsule. With nine men, we have to do the unexpected. It’s our only chance for victory.”
Kang was silent for several seconds. “You have a point. But HB battle-tactics say—”
“Screw the HBs! We’re on our own, Kang. Nine of us! You gotta think like a gang leader again, like a Red Blade in the heart of Sydney’s slums.”
More silence, then Kang said, “Yeah. Let’s do it your way.”
Marten switched to open channels. “We have a little change in plans.”
Admiral Rica Sioux made a fist and kept tapping the arm of her command chair with it. The
Bangladesh
accelerated at one-G for rendezvous with the flotilla of spacecraft that would all join near Venus’ orbital path—the planet wouldn’t be there. It was over sixty days from reaching that point in its orbit. The HB missiles had all passed the beamship or were destroyed. One Doom Star accelerated toward them, although it no longer fired its long-range lasers. It would take several weeks for the enemy to reach them. The other Doom Star had turned back for Venus. General Hawthorne’s ploy of sending battleships at Venus had worked to pull that Doom Star off them.
Despite all these pluses, Admiral Sioux scowled. Her officers huddled by the Tracking Officer’s module. They whispered among themselves and kept glancing at her. She hadn’t given them the gun-locker key yet. It rested in the middle of her fist, the one that tap, tap, tapped her armrest. Enemy soldiers were on her beamship. They were few in numbers: less than one hundred versus her two thousand ship’s personnel. That was twenty to one odds. It shouldn’t be a problem defeating these handfuls. But to use all two thousand personnel meant she would have to give up the code to the weapons bins. Her officers would also demand to be armed. Some might even want to leave the armored command capsule in order to help fight the invaders. But once they were armed—could the
Bangladesh
’s
two thousand stop the enemy space marines? Because if they couldn’t… once her people were armed, she didn’t think the officers would let her blow the beamship. Yet if she didn’t arm ship’s personnel would her Security teams be able to defeat the enemy?
Her chair’s speaker unit blinked. She opened the comlink channel.
“Security Chief here, Admiral. I’m ready to attack the smaller concentration.”
A sinking feeling filled her. “I thought by now you would have slain those few.”
“They’re a tough bunch, Admiral, and very clever. They slaughtered those I sent to keep them busy. Now I’ve left a covering force to slow down the bigger concentration. I want to wipe out these few first so they can’t do anything cute while I turn and overwhelm the bigger concentration with everything we have.”
Her chest constricted and she found breathing difficult. She was the Admiral, the one in charge. She had to make the decisions. Yet space combat was so different from infantry action. She wasn’t sure what to do. “Should I arm everyone, Security Chief?”
He didn’t answer immediately. “Some of the lower personnel might have long memories, Admiral.”
“You mean when we liquidated the mutinous ringleaders while we were in near-Sun orbit?”
“Right,” he said.
“Maybe they will have long memories, Chief. But I’m sure they won’t remember until after the enemy is slain.”
“You’re probably right.”
“So what’s your recommendation?”
“I’d arm everyone and use them. These space marines are tough and obviously highly trained and armored for exactly this type of fight.”
Admiral Rica Sioux massaged her ancient chest. Nothing was guaranteed. “No one is taking my beamship,” she whispered.
“Admiral?”
She punched a sequence of buttons on her armrest panel. “I’m initiating the locker codes now.” She pressed the last button, blowing the locks on the weapons bins in the outer beamship.
“Very good, Admiral,” said the Security Chief. “I’ll swamp this smaller concentration and wheel and hit the bigger one. Out.”
She sagged in her chair, forcing air into her lungs. Slowly the constriction in her chest eased, although now her bad knee started throbbing. She noticed the First Gunner approaching her.
“Yes, First Gunner?” she said.
“Shouldn’t we open our own gun-locker?” he asked.
“Do you want to join the Security Chief?”
The First Gunner stiffened. He wore his tan uniform and hat, a lean Pakistani with deep brown eyes. “I’m not ground-troop trained, Admiral.”
“Ah.”
“But if something should happen,” he said. “It seems the height of reason that we be armed.”
The others now edged toward her. A determined look had settled upon them. Always command, the Admiral knew.
“Tracking Officer,” she said.
“Admiral,” the officer said, saluting.
“Open the gun-locker and pass out ordnance.” She threw the key to the Tracking Officer, who snatched it out of the air and turned smartly toward the locker beside the outer door. Then Admiral Sioux slumped in her chair. It was two thousand or so against seventy-odd enemy. They should easily win. She wondered then why she felt so gloomy about the future.
“Let’s take a breather,” Marten said. “Vip, Wernher, stand guard at either end of the corridor. Everyone else, re-supply yourselves.”
“They’re hot on us,” said Lance.
“We’ve got thirty seconds, the way I time it,” Marten said. They were in a wide corridor, a service ramp. Whenever the beamship entered space-dock, vehicles would use this ramp to bring in heavy equipment and supplies.
Marten knelt an armored knee, reached back and unclipped a laser pack. He powered his heavy laser-tubes with the old pack, pumped the rest of the juice into recycling and then detached the drained pack, slapping the fresh one into place. He rolled ten grenades at his feet and inserted a fresh tube into his launchers. Lastly, he relieved himself, letting his battlesuit take care of wastes, gulped some concentrates and drank a lot of water. While he did that he made two bomb-clutches with the grenades, looked around and rigged one to the pipes overhead, flicking on a motion sensor with a forty-second delay so they could get away. The other clutch he stuck to the corridor wall, timing it to blast in sixty seconds. As Lance had said, the enemy was hot on them.
“See anything, Vip?”
“I killed three scouts while you all lounged around. There are a lot of others working up their nerve in the room just behind those three. Most are armed with las-rifles, useless against our armor.”
“Don’t get cocky, Vip,” warned Lance.
“I hear you,” Vip said. “And I ain’t.”
“Is everyone ready?” asked Marten.
They said they were.
Marten scanned their surroundings, checked the ship’s blueprint and said, “Through the six o’clock wall. Go, go, go!”
BLAM, the hole was made and they charged off the service ramp.
“They coming!” Vip said, who stood guard in the corridor.
“Go!” Marten said. “Run!”
“Relax, Maniple Leader,” Vip said. “I’m slaughtering them. None of them have any armor and like I said, all this bunch has is las-rifles.”
“They’re throwing fodder,” Kang said, “to make you overconfident.”
“I rigged the corridor to blow,” Marten said. “Retreat, Vip! Do it now!”
“Roger,” Vip said. “I’m on my way.”
Marten kept blowing through corridor walls and then using a corridor for a two-hundred-meter stretch. He kept switching methods to keep the enemy off guard and guessing. They entered a large engineering section, with plenty of floor space and big domed generators with panels attached. According to specs, the generators charged the proton beam, or at least they started the process here.
“This is perfect ambush territory,” said Lance.
“So perfect that even they would realize it,” Marten said. “Keep going.”
Nine shock troopers in battlesuits charged past the many domed generators. Their radar pinged and the motion-detectors scanned.
“Should we booby-trap anything?” asked Lance.
“Negative,” Marten said. “Let them get mad at themselves for being too cautious. Then they’ll start getting cocky again and that’s then we’ll hit them. That will turn them even extra cautious later on.”