Battleship Destroyer (80 page)

Clim
bing up off his butt Jack went around the turret cylinder and headed down a passageway toward the middle of the ship.  Walking around a corner Jack found several marines trying to open a hatch frozen and cracked open a couple of inches. Something was wedged into the lower part of the crack with a mass of material bulging out into the compartment. Jack could not understand why the hatch seemed to be stuck. It along with the other hatches around the turret looked almost new. And then he noticed that it was warped.

"Stand back everyone." Came the voice in Jack's ears. "Blowing the hatch in 5 seconds."  A
marine stood up from the hatch's hinges and jogged back to join a group of marines that grabbed Jack to step back around the corner Jack had just come around some 30 feet from the hatch as they turned their backs and bent down on one knee.

The Marine Commander grabbed Jacks shoulder turning him away from the
bend leading to the hatch, pulling him down onto his knee and  bending forward to present his back with as small a target as possible to anything bouncing off the bulkhead around the corner from the blast.

The Compartment lit up with a bright flash followed by a wall of gasses washing over them a fraction of a second later and the marines turned around and rushed for the hatch.

Jack and the Commander followed behind them through the hatch. Bodies lay strewn down the passageway toward the center of the ship. The mass half through the hatch was obviously a body that had almost been sucked through the obviously warped hatch. One of the Marines took a pistol off one of the bodies and pointed it down the passageway and pulled what looked like a trigger made for a big hand with three fingers and a thumb. It sent a ball of energy streaking down the passageway that exploded on the distant bulkhead over a hatch, leaving a hole about 3 inches around in the armor.

It did not take long for
the body’s to lose their weapon if it had one. Though half the bodies seemed to look and dress different than the others. It took a few seconds but it finally dawned on Jack that the other weaponless bodies were several different species and had to be technicians with tool belts around their wastes. All of them showed clear signs of being exposed to sudden vacuum making it hard to tell anything for sure. The mass sucked half through the cracked hatch had to be one of the technicians. "Get these into body bags and take their tools back to the ship with the turret." He said examining some of the tools the techs had on them. Most of them looked like the tools he had in his toolbox but some looked completely alien.

Jack stepped past the bodies and at the hatch he examined the crater made by the alien weapon that did not resemble damage from any human weapon he had even heard about. Then continued
through the hatch making a quick running tour of the deck and the other turrets before going through a hull hatch in the large core filled with elevator shafts and ladders and headed up. The next several decks consisted of storage Compartments containing equipment and supplies that looked familiar but wasn't. He called in another shuttle to back into a new landing hole and pack out as many samples as they could in the time they had.

Moving up one deck at a time
Jack was starting to worry. It was taking much to long since everything they found seemed to be strange and unusual and even incomprehensible. Though even if the technology that looked like it was a thousand years old by human standards had to be taken since they were not sure about anything the way advanced tech was combined with ancient.  Agonizingly slow, they moved up the enemy ship's decks as transport boats shuttled back and forth between the two ships, expecting an enemy sledge hammer to hit them at any time even though he kept a constant close look at the decks ahead. The fact that the decks were a thousand feet across did not help either as they had to clear each and every deck for hostiles. Though the large compartments helped that at least. Then Jack saw several squads of marines jumping off of a long life boat chain as it docked to load cargo.

Not recognizing their ship patches amongst the 10 squads making the initial assault with him
, he stopped a lieutenant. "Aren’t you supposed to be back on the Red Pepper cutting out trapped crewmen?"

The Lieutenant smiled
through his faceplate.  "Got most of them already Captain. We were just getting in the way. Besides, sounded like you guys were having way too much fun over here."

The
decks seemed to start going much faster as he saw more and more ship patches on both the marines and the ships personnel.  Tapping his comm. "Mr. Wilson, why do I keep seeing more and more ship patches over here on the crewmen? You were supposed to start sending the crews back to their ships when they finished their emergency repair work."

"Sorry Captain, I sent them over after only the most critical of the repairs have been made so they could help strip the hulk.
We are going to need them back aboard ship when you finish there sir.  Besides it is too late now. The fleet has already left."

Jack looked at the time and realized in shock that it had been hours already and decided it was time to take some short cuts to get them up ship faster.
Climbing to the tall deck just below the Hulk's main gun deck Jack climbed into what could only have come out of a museum back on Earth. He entered a large compartment with what could only be a nuclear core pile with large steam pipes running to a huge hundred foot long steam driven generator attached by a 3 foot diameter shaft to a generator standing 50 feet tall. Thick power cable ran up through the overhead and into the tower running out to one of the main gun towers to the monster gun at the top pointing off at an odd angle compared to the other guns circling the hulk at that deck. Shaking his head in disbelief. "Godstar Commander. Who powers their main guns with a damn nuclear reactor driving a steam generator? Hell, who uses a nuclear reactor to power anything anymore." Since Ultra dense Hydrogen had been discovered on Earth's Moon. Along with the world's largest mass collider hundreds of miles in diameter producing enough plasma waste that was used to heat and compress pin point sized pellets of the Ultra dense Hydrogen to create  the first self-sustaining fusion reactor, nuclear reactors have been outlawed. The Ultra Hydrogen mining on the moon and elsewhere in many system’s gas giants, also managed to pay for the explosion of man into space and eventually the stars. Shaking his head Jack decided they did not need to grab the dirty ancient power supplies for the main guns after all even if they were in easily replaceable modules and needed to power each gun. 

Jac
k was finally about to open the hatch into the ship's  main gun deck after climbing up what looked like an emergency trunk running up through the nuclear generator room when Commander Murphy stopped him at the hatch and slapped a scanner on the face of the hatch and looked through it. "Captain. Let my men get into position in several of the other trunks. Storage compartments are one thing but this looks like one of their main weapons decks from the scan. We need a coordinated attack this time sir. Just to make sure we don't have casualties."

Jack smiled at the Commander. He could see what was o
n the other side of the hatch a lot better than the scanner, especially if it was radiating any energy and all he was getting was a few power lines and low powered lights and a few rather warm spots around the other side of the core going up the center of the ship that had to be some kind of control consoles and could not possibly be live bodies as cold as they were. But Jack backed off from the hatch and waited. Finally a half dozen marine fire teams were ready and the Commander gave the signal and 4 marines rushed through the hatch into the compartment ahead of the Captain and Marine Commander.

Stepping
through the hatch Jack watched the teams spread out around the huge compartment that seemed to run from one side of the ship a thousand feet to the other side without an obstruction except for the large main vertical central tube and roughly a dozen smaller tubes that included the small 8 foot diameter emergency access, pipe and power chase tubes they had come up in. Jack turned to look around the outer hull that seemed to be lined with large stubby cylinders sticking into the compartment that had to be the basses of the Main ships guns on towers around the ship with a 20 foot wide hole in the hull from a direct hit by one of the fleets torpedoes that must have opened the deck to vacuum taking out several racks along with a long 30 foot slice of deck protruding into the compartment. What Jack was not ready for was the row upon row of racks with weapons on them and the hundreds upon hundreds of bodies scattered around them. Mostly of huge heavily armored three fingered Apes. The only clear space was a hundred foot area in front of the hole blasted in the hull itself.

Looking around Jack suddenly saw a flash and then an expanding wave of gas from one of the tubes across the compartment as a rusty broken handled hatch flew across and into a rack of weapons. A few seconds later another flash and
another gas wave repeated the first followed by more marines rushing into the compartment.

Jack looke
d down at several of the helmetless suited bodies. "Where are all of their helmets? This is too large a compartment for them not to have had time to get them on if they were close." He also notice that they carried some kind of power packs in pouches across their chests. Even the ones that had not gotten their weapons yet. "Ok. Where are the power packs stored?"

Something streaked across the compartment as a brief scream erupted in Jacks ears
before vacuum made screaming impossible for the marine that died. A scream he had never heard the likes of in The Game ever over the 10+ years he had been playing it. A scream that would hunt him for the rest of his life even though he would hear many more of them.

The Compartment was suddenly lit up by lasers
in a cone across the compartment focused toward the warm area Jack had seen earlier and thought were control consoles. With streaks of balls going back out from the small area.

"Damn it!" Someone screamed. "Our lasers are not penetrating their armor.
"

A few seconds later
, fireballs started streaking back toward the enemy from weapons and power packs taken off the hundreds of bodies that looked like large apes. Another marine screamed and died but a few seconds later the compartment quieted down as the marines cleared the last of the enemy.

As the marines spread out across the rest of the compartment
checking for anymore enemy Apes, the torpedo hole suddenly expanded to some 50 feet wide between turret towers behind them with a blinding flash lighting up the entire compartment for a brief second as a half dozen low powered 16 inch beams opened up a wider docking port.  The blast leaving the edges of the hull and deck red hot. A shuttle backed into the hole, having to cross the missing deck before letting its stern touch down on solid decking. The stern hatch was already open and crewmen started jumping over the gap before the shuttle touched down, running to start disconnecting the nearest turret on one side while another crew started work on the other side.

Jack walked up to the officer standing on the ramp as the shuttle touched down.
He wanted to yell at him for almost killing several marines that would have been near the blasted hull if not for the fire fight that had ended only seconds before drawing them away from that part of the hull, but it was not the officers fault and he did not have time to call the Commander who had ordered the guns to fire and widen the landing zone before Jack had ordered it. "I need the rest of your men to join the cargo crew to start gathering weapons off these racks. I want to strip this compartment of all the weapons as well as the power pack magazine when we find it."

"Do you want me to stop work on the turrets sir?"

"No. The turrets should not take long. Just get any crewman not on the turrets humping weapons off of racks." Looking up through the deck Jack headed for the nearest trunk and then stopped. Turning he walked across the compartment until he came to the enemy squad that had managed to get their helmets on. "Why could I not see you guys?" He looked closely at the bodies as several marines shined bright lights into their helmets to study them better.

Trying to shield his eyes from the glare
of the faceplates holding up his hands. "Damn it. Turn out those stupid lights. I can't see a thing with them blinding me."

They
shut off their head lamps. Jack suddenly was able to see the faint glow one of the bodies was giving off. Looking closer Jack realized that the enemy gorilla was still alive with only arm wounds and a suit that clamped a tourniquet above the wound to keep it from losing its air and bleeding to death.  "We have a live one here. Get a medical case and strip it of everything on its suit. Where is that doctor we brought along just for this reason? He needs to find out what they breathe and anything else we need to know to keep it alive." Looking around at a half dozen frozen marines. "Move it people, we don't have much time here." Standing back away from the lizard scaled creature that looked like a gorilla with scales, Jack stared down at it. "No wonder I could not see you, you bastered. You’re a fucking cold blooded lizard." He said out loud as he looked up. "Now that I know what to look for, your cousins are not going to kill any more of my marines."

As the Doctor rushed up
, a Sgt. held out his arm to stop him. "Let us finish securing the prisoner Doc and then you can work on him."  The prisoner's legs were bound together so they could not move and both his arms where pulled away from his body and over his head and tied to a bar to keep his good hand from reaching any controls. They finished stripping it of anything that would come off except what looked like a life support pack before letting the Doctor near it.