Rich Man's War (52 page)

Not everyone would agree on appropriate weapons for this. Some would take along grenades and heavier stuff. Others would think that too destructive. Harris saw only the necessity for speed.

“Change of plans,” Harris growled. “We’ve been boarded. Fuckers dropped a bunch of troops on our hull and now they’re moving inside. We gotta clear ‘
em out before the invasion can proceed. Let’s not complicate this. We’re a small team and we’re geared up better than most of the rest here, so we’re gonna haul ass up to deck one and gun down anything that isn’t wearing a NorthStar vac suit. The rest of these guys will spread out through the ship as soon as they’re sorted, but we’re ready to go now. That lift over there looks open, so let’s move!”

Thankfully, nobody hesitated to ask questions. All of his people turned and hustled for the lift.

He was pretty sure he saw Eickenberry grinning.

* * *

Gunfire in the passageway refused to let up, though now the ship’s defenders clearly had the upper hand. Half of Tanner’s comrades died in the first twenty seconds. Baldwin fired her pulse rifle in sustained bursts, cutting down yet more of the opposition, but the rest used the cover offered by their end of the passageway to the best advantage. She had little more to target than rifles and the occasional hand that appeared only long enough to toss a grenade. No one was dumb enough to expose anything more.

Tanner had about the same problem. He couldn’t lean over Baldwin without putting a large portion of his body in the firing line. His eyes darted around, looking for anything he could
do to turn the tide. Then he saw Rivera take a slug through his shoulder. The hit threw him face-first to the deck. A blast from a pulse laser struck him across the back where he lay, searing open his combat jacket in a flash of light.

It all occurred in the space of a breath.

Desperate to get to Rivera, Tanner yanked a frag grenade off of his combat jacket. “Fire in the hole,” he shouted and then hurled it around the corner, deliberately banking the grenade off the far bulkhead since he couldn’t risk stepping out for a straight throw. The grenade went off and Tanner leapt out from cover, rolling across the deck to get to Rivera. He brought his pulse rifle up as soon as he came to a halt, planning to at least make them keep their heads down, but he saw no further laser flashes through the smoke of his grenade.

He heard plenty of gunfire. None of it came through the smoke. Then he saw one of the NorthStar troops rush through the smoke with one hand over the bloody gash in his other arm. Both Tanner and Baldwin cut him down out of reflex, but held their fire as the smoke quickly cleared.

The security troopers on the other side of the hatch kept fighting, but now they fought for their lives against someone on their end of the passageway. A body slumped over the lower lip of the hatch. Blood marred the bulkhead beyond him. Two men remained, both of them now with their backs turned to Tanner and shooting wildly at someone behind them and seemingly close up.

One of them crumpled after taking a burst of automatic gunfire to the chest. The other flew back through the hatch, lifted off his feet by a snap kick right under his chin. Their attacker, a woman in the blue vac suit, helmet and combat jacket of an Archangel marine, stepped over the lip of the hatch and the dead body that decorated it to empty the final few rounds from her magazine into her last fallen opponent.

“Holy shit,” Baldwin breathed.

Tanner was already busy trying to treat Rivera. He jerked open the corpsman’s bag, looking for the anti-cauterizing gel and the auto-suture. “Hold on, buddy, just keep breathing,” Tanner urged as he set to clearing out the mess of burned flesh along Rivera’s upper back. His voice shook. Rivera might have spinal damage; he’d probably lost bone
, too. Tanner didn’t have time to do anything for Rivera’s pain. He couldn’t open up the helmet, either, not with Rivera needing direct oxygen so much that the helmet was probably his best bet already.

“You guys okay?” asked their rescuer. She reloaded as she came forward, looking left to right in the passageway to take in the damage. “I heard the gunfire and came running as fast as I could.”

“I think we’re all that’s left,” Baldwin answered, kneeling beside one of the fallen marines. “Check on the other guy there!”

Rivera neither moved nor responded to Tanner’s labor. Tanner slid his faceplate back, breathing heavily and working as fast as he could, but it seemed there was more blood and burnt flesh than live tissue along the wound site. Tanner placed the auto-suture along Rivera’s backbone and let it go, but the indicator lights flashed out negative vitals
before the tool’s tiny arms started their work. “Tissue loss severe,” said the tool’s on-board computer. “Patient has suffered catastrophic trauma.”

“Tanner?” asked the newcomer. Alicia pushed back her faceplate and moved over to him. “Tanner, how we doing over there?”

“Patient has expired,” said the auto-suture. “Defibrillation not recommended. Logging time of death.”

“It’s Rivera,” he said, his voice cracking.

“Oh God,” Alicia gasped. She knelt beside him, looking for a way to help, but Tanner shook his head.

“I can’t do anything,” Tanner said. “I can’t
—there wasn’t—” His eyes shut tightly. “Wasn’t time.”

“You did all you could,” said Alicia. “He knew that.”

Swallowing hard, Tanner nodded and said, “Jun didn’t make it, either. He died in the jump.”

“Was this it for you guys?” Alicia asked.

“We’ve got a wounded guy back at the gun turret guarding the access point,” explained Baldwin. She had a holocom screen up. “Hey, I think they’ve got a relay going from outside. Check out the main channel.”

Tanner and Alicia followed her advice. The jamming signal outside the ship couldn’t defeat a simple line-of-sight relay going from outside the hull to a
friendly receiver within the ship, and from there the boarders could at least communicate those still making their way inside.

“…moving back out of the fight, I think,” said a familiar voice. An indicator on their holocom screens l
isted the speaker as Signalman Third Class Sinclair. They could see through his helmet’s optics, too, giving them a view of the chaos outside the ship as flashes of defensive fire continued and more Archangel troops climbed and crawled toward open access points. Sinclair seemed to be perched under an active laser turret. Another corvette swooped overhead, dropping another team. Some boarders made it. Some didn’t.

“
St. Nicholas
has dropped!” Sinclair said, more or less interrupting his own report. “
St. Nicholas
has dropped! Moving off now, taking fire—we’re moving away from the main battle, but the screening fire is picking up. I think they’re tightening up with the rest of the fleet. None of the other corvettes could get through before
St. Nicholas
just now.”

A sharp tremor ran through the deck beneath them, one that Sinclair plainly felt as well. “Something blew on the ship, can’t tell what.
St. Valentine
is making her run—taking fire—shit, there’s too much fire—gah!” Sinclair cried out along with the sound of cracking metal and then a sharp whistling sound. “My mask is open! Can’t breathe,” he cried out, and then the screen went black as Sinclair’s hands came up to try to plug the hole over his face.

The connection died.

Tanner’s mind raced. He got to his feet, eyes scanning the bodies in the passageway. “We’re never gonna take this ship with what we’ve got,” he muttered, stepping away from his dead friend. He had to set aside his worries about Sinclair, too—another boot camp friend, his former squad leader and a fellow refugee from nasty academic debt. Tanner couldn’t do anything for Sinclair, just as he couldn’t do anything for Rivera.

He’d almost been caught unable to do anything for himself, too.

“Where’d you come in, anyway?” Baldwin asked.

“Atmosphere intake port, up that way,” Alicia explained, jerking her thumb back down the passageway. “Fire team got scattered. I was all alone. Either of you see Brent?”

Tanner shook his head. “Haven’t, sorry.”

Alicia let out a tense breath. “Okay, we’ve gotta link up with some more of our people
, head for the command bridge and turn this ship around before—”

“We can’t ta
ke the bridge.”

The statement stopped Alicia in her tracks. Baldwin, too, stood up straight, blinking at him. “Wait, this… this is
you
saying we can’t make it?” Baldwin asked. “You took on a pirate ship all by yourself!”

“These aren’t pirates. These are trained troops and they’re regrouping fast.”

“Tanner, most of the crew isn’t even armed! You saw it yourself with that gunnery team.”

“Yeah, but more than enough of them
are.
You see what they did to us here. This was just the closest batch of ship’s security grunts. There’s gotta be at least two thousand marines on board, and they’ll all be armed. They’re probably getting organized and they’ll damn sure send plenty of defenders straight for both of the bridges first.”

“So, what, you’re gonna chicken out?” Baldwin asked.

Tanner bent over MacAllan’s corpse to snatch up the dead captain’s remaining grenades. “Chickening out doesn’t get anyone home alive.”

Alicia watched him load up on extra weapons. She’d seen this look on his face once—right before he knocked her flat on her ass. It never happened again, but she never forgot it, or what came afterward. “So what are you thinking?”

“It’s Operation Beowulf,” said Tanner. “We tear the monster’s arm off and beat him with it.”

* * *

“Main Thruster Two has hostiles inside! I repeat, boarders in Main Thruster Two! Send help, they’re everywhere in here!” yelled Ensign Samantha Young. She ducked under a pipe distribution trunk, trying to dodge the blasts of electric stunners that seemed to be flying everywhere. The sight of the enemy using non-lethal weapons on her fellow engineering crewmen gave her no sense of relief. For all she knew, they wanted people alive for whatever crazy Inquisition their clergy had in mind. To make matters worse, someone took out the overhead power conduit as soon as the shooting started, killing more than half the lights.

Samantha heard mostly her own breath now as she darted from one bit of machinery to the other. The whole compartment vented out as soon as the boarders breached the repair hatch. Someone should have considered this when they designed the battleship, she thought. Didn’t anyone think that maybe, just
maybe
they’d want to make sure those hatches all had locks on them in case someone tried a crazy move like boarding a battleship in the middle of combat? How stupid were these designers?

Were they stupid enough to sign up for the NorthStar fleet right out of university? Stupid enough to take the loan payoff incentives? Great career-builder, they said, excellent way to
build experience… and now this.

Nobody else responded on the Thruster Two channel. Someone from ship’s security yammered away at her, telling her to hold the compartment.
With what?
Samantha thought.
A crowbar?
She hadn’t touched a gun since Officer Indoctrination School, and that was only a short safety course.

Samantha ducked behind the fuel consumption monitor station. Another electric pop lit up the otherwise darkened compartment. Chief
Grishin made some sort of whining, gurgling noise over the comm channel, letting her know who’d been hit. She looked left and right, spotting the exit hatch a few meters away. She didn’t think about matters like air pressure or where she’d go from there; she just wanted to get out and away.

She made it two steps before she found a helmeted Archangel marine in front of her. Though the other woman moved like lightning, Samantha read the “Janeka” tag on her combat jacket before that fist came driving up into her solar plexus, reducing her to a gasping wreck on the floor.

“Someone give me an update at that hatch!” Janeka demanded over her team’s comm channel. “Is anyone else coming? We’ve gotta move!”

“We’ve got two more coming in,” announced one of her marines. “Got a
survivalman carrying in one of our guys, must have gotten hurt.”

“Then get over there and help him in, Private. We need to close that hatch if we’re gonna advance. The rest of you, help Fuller shut this thruster down. You’ve been through the program, you know how to do what an engineer tells you! Move, people! We’ve still got to take main engineering!”

* * *

Admiral Yeoh rolled onto her side and then got to her hands and knees, shaking her helmeted head in order to clear it. The last missile burst hit
Los Angeles
close enough to put everyone on her flag bridge on the deck if they weren’t already strapped into a chair. Looking around as she rose, she realized that even a few of the people in secure seats had been thrown for a loop.

“Thruster One is down, power to Thruster Two cutting out!” someone announced. “We’ve lost one of the starboard laser batteries! Atmosphere venting out of deck six.”