A Greater Interest: Samair in Argos: Book 4 (81 page)

              Gants looked up.  “What are you saying, Ensign?”

              “Well, sir,” knowing he was in too deep to stop now, the man went on, “they needed to get on board somehow and now that we’re looking for them I think we can say that there falling back to five of the starboard side airlocks.  That means they have to have shuttles or small ships or something docked there.”

              “They could have jumped in from a stealthed ship, sir,” one of the chiefs sitting at sensors put in.  “That armor they’re all wearing looks to have their own life support.”

              “Sensors!” he barked, louder than was necessary, but he didn’t care.  “Go active on all sensors.  Scan everything in nearby space.  Find me their ship!”

              The port side of the
Leystonstone
was pure pandemonium.  Colonel Gants’ order to evacuate the ship had apparently been taken to heart and the mob of crewmen that Tamara and her guards had recently escaped just moments before washed over them, all of them desperate to get off the battlecruiser.  There was no order and discipline, there was no brave faces showing their stalwart resolve in the face of the enemy.  This was a sea of desperate people determined that they would get off this ship.

              From snippets of conversation Tamara picked up from the people around them the people on the ship had no real idea what was actually happening.  Theories were abound: there were bombs aboard ship, there were chemical weapons aboard ship.  This attack was just the beginning: there was a massive strike force just waiting to approach and attack the system.  Colonel Gants was a coward who couldn’t handle the pressure of command and had invited these pirates on board as cover before he surrendered the ship.

              That last one would have made her laugh if the situation wasn’t so serious.  The colonel might be many things, and while the two of them were not the coziest of friends, one thing Tamara did know about him was the love he held for this ship.  If nothing else, the man would
never
surrender this vessel, not while he was still alive.

              Unfortunately, knowing this information didn’t change anything in the corridor of the ship she and her guards were fighting through.  And they were fighting now.  The crew had turned from a disciplined group of sailors and officers into a rabid pack of terrified animals that were clawing and trampling anything that stood between them and the escape they sought.  On more than one occasion, her guards were forced to roughly push someone out of the way.  All of them were screaming at people to make way, even Tamara.  Brandishing their weapons had ceased to be effective; no one was paying any attention to that.  The wolves were snarling and barking at anyone who tried to cut them off. 

              [Less than fifty meters, people,] Viktoriya reported to them. 

              There was a chorus of acknowledgments from all of them.  A trio of absolutely blubbering crewmen, two female humans and a hissing male zheen, rushed at them from the rear of the group, desperately trying to get past.  There was a quartet of escape pods up ahead that some crewmen were already getting into and these three wanted to be sure that they had seats.  They figured that the quickest way to get to the pods was to shove through the group of civilians, which were directly in the way.  The zheen tried to bull his way through, but Beau clocked him with a closed fist, knocking him aside.  The two females screeched like banshees and leaped at him.  The big lupusan swatted one aside, but the other leapt on him grappling for his weapon.  She managed to pull his sidearm from his thigh holster and somehow fend off his arms trying to push her away.

              And then things all fell apart.  Calvin, trying to protect his teammate, overcompensated and opened fire with his carbine, sending a trio of shots into the woman, who collapsed in a spray of blood.  The other woman shrieked when the blood splattered on her.  Others nearby all heard the shots, saw one of their own gunned down and went absolutely ballistic.  With a roar of fury, which seemed to overcome their collective terror and empower them with some sort of berserker frenzy, the crowd charged forward. 

              [Run!] Viktoriya ordered. 

              Calvin popped the spoon on a slimer grenade and tossed it at the crowd before he, like the others, turned tail and bolted in the opposite direction.  The foam burst outward, coating the corridor in two seconds and the bodies and legs of the screaming crewmen.  The sisters barreled into the fray of the crewmen that were in front of them, heedless of the people and any injuries they suffered.  Viktoriya clamped a long-fingered hand around Tamara’s upper arm and dragged her forward with her.  Tamara tried to protest, sending comms to her lead guard, but the lupusan completely ignored them.  Short of shooting the serzhant, Tamara discovered that she was physically incapable of changing the mind of Viktoriya Eristov.  The crowd’s screams of rage changed to fear and panic as the foam solidified, locking them in place.  Their terror washed over the guards and their principle like a big stinking wave, but the lupusan, the Severite and their human charge did not take any serious note of it.

              Rushing like a phalanx down the corridor, knocking people clear, the wolves arrived at the airlock.  [Pilot!] Viktoriya commed. 

              [Go ahead, Serzhant,] came Mike the pilot’s message back.  [I’m pulling up to airlock eight, portside now.]

              [We’re waiting.  As soon as you’re on, pop the hatch.  We need to get aboard and get out of here.]

              [Thirty seconds, Serzhant.]

              [Faster is better, pilot.]  Viktoriya’s text even carried her implicit snarl and threat with it.  [Watch our six, team.]  The others simply turned and pointed their guns in the direction of the incoming crewmen.  Hopefully the sight of three angry and heavily armed lupusan and a gun-toting Severite would keep the mob at bay.  Several of them were already leaping into the hatches for the nearby escape pods, more had managed to tear themselves loose from the solidified secure foam and were moving in the direction of the airlock, pure terror giving them strength.  [They close to ten meters, you’re clear to fire.]

              [Oh no you are not!] Tamara frantically commed to them.  None of them answered her and before she could send another message, the black-furred female wolf yanked her back, roughly, her grip bruising on Tamara’s arm.  The woman slammed against the airlock hatch, hard, knocking the breath from her.  She doubled over, starting to drop to the deck, but the iron grip of the serzhant hoisted her back up on her feet, refusing to allow her to go down.

              There was a clunk and a hiss from behind them.  [Serzhant, I have good seal.  Get on board.]

              Viktoriya, never letting go of Tamara, jammed her weapon under one arm, pressed a control and twisted a knob to equalize pressure in the airlock.  More hissing.  After an eternity, all of five seconds, the hatches cycled open and she yanked Tamara through.  “Fall back!” she bellowed.  The others all moved back, their weapons still trained on the corridor.  Beau held the airlock clear while the other three rushed into the smaller ship.  Beau, moving backwards, hopped over the knee-knockers and climbed aboard.

              “Seal that hatch!” the serzhant ordered, her hand never leaving Tamara’s arm.

              “NO!” Tamara gasped, her free hand clutching her stomach, trying to bring air into her lungs.  “Get some of those people aboard.”  Beau hesitated and Viktoriya’s ears flattened.  “Do it, Beau,” Tamara coughed, leaning over, endeavoring to catch her breath.

              The big lupusan paused a moment longer, then pointed his carbine at the deck.  He went back to the airlock.  He called to crewmen rushing past, who after a brief hesitation, accepted the offer.  Forty-six people took the wolf up on his offer before the head guard’s sense of honor was overridden by her sense of duty and ordered Beau to seal the hatch or she would kill him herself.  He believed her. 

              “Go!” she bellowed to the pilot.  The ship detached from the battlecruiser’s airlock and accelerated away, out into space.

              “All wolves secure, Colonel,” Yanakov’s voice came over the shuttle’s comms. 

              “All strike shuttles, this is Arn, detach from the enemy ship and move off, maintain stealth until we are behind the ship.  Use your thrusters only, we don’t want any accidents or trigger happy gunners to shoot us down now that our victory is so close at hand.”  The colonel closed the circuit and sent an acknowledgement to the pilot, who carried out the orders.  The five stealth shuttles decoupled and gave a strong blast on their forward thrusters, arresting their momentum.  The battlecruiser raced past them as the shuttles slowed down.  Less than a minute later, the five small vessels were clear of all but the battlecruiser’s aft weapons, far less formidable than the rest of the ship’s armament but to the troop shuttles they were still deadly.

             
Well, the gunners and the remainder of the crew are going to have far more to worry themselves with than what happened to their saboteurs,
Arn thought, a grin spreading across his face.  He turned to Sigma. 

             
[Sigma, start the show.]

              She gave a howl of triumph and thought-clicked an icon on her HUD, sending a pulse through the comm system on the shuttle to the battlecruiser.  The fun was about to begin.  Or rather, the
next
phase of the fun was about to begin.

              Gants slumped in his command seat, alone on the bridge.  As soon as the pirates had murdered his XO and another hundred of his crewmen who were caught between them and their own escape, Gants had sounded the general alarm and ordered all hands to abandon ship.  The bridge crew had been reluctant for all of two seconds before Gants shouted himself hoarse for them to leave him alone.  They gave no further argument and offered no other hesitation.  They bolted, leaving him with only his thoughts on the empty bridge.

              He had failed.  He had this great beast of a warship, the pride of the Argos Cluster, the terror of pirates everywhere, and he’d been overrun and killed byt a handful of pirate soldiers.  Oh, he was still breathing, but it wouldn’t be for long, of that he was certain.  He didn’t know exactly what treachery had been inflicted on his ship but now that the pirates had all retreated, disappeared from his ship.

              Malachai Gants reached up and put a hand to his forehead and groaned.  A stabbing headache was forming behind his eyes and shook his head slowly.  “Well, it’ll be over soon.”

              He didn’t have long to wait.

              The destruction of the
Leytonstone
had been well planned, and the execution of the plan was as close to flawless as was possible.  The first phase of the plan was simple: Colonel Arn and his teams had planted charges all along the keel of the ship, along all the stress points there.  With the comms pulse by the combat engineer Sigma, those charges detonated all at once.  The ship rocked as the keel snapped, at all the stress points all the way down the ship.  Internal braces broke loose, causing serious structural weakness all along the length of the
Leytonstone
.

              Five seconds after that, the second phase was initiated.  An override device attached to the crossfeeds in Inertial Dampener control switched on, its software slicing through the system firewalls like tissue paper.  The combat engineer, Septima, had laughed in derision at the local’s crappy attempts at preventing software intrusion.  “Why did they even bother?” were her exact words.  The device attacked the controls for the inertial dampeners for all but the aft quarter of the ship.  The dampeners in the forward sections all deactivated, but the aft section stayed on full.  Two seconds after that, explosives tore apart the compartment, permanently locking the sequences in place.

              Then the third phase began.  Another computer control intrusion device was attached to the systems in Auxiliary damage control and it went active, seven seconds after the inertial dampeners went off line.  The main propulsion units came to life, engaging at full power which rammed the ship forward, while the maneuvering thrusters began firing in a proscribed sequence.  The ship was tossed into a wild and increasingly crazy corkscrew maneuver, as the ship’s acceleration continued to mount.  Everyone still aboard ship in the forward sections, and they still numbered over nine hundred souls, were flung backward to smack into the bulkheads.  A number of them died on impact, but many only suffered blunt force trauma from the impact against metal.

              The metal of the hull began to groan and then scream in protest, almost as though the great warship was moaning in pain.  The damage to the keel was significant enough that great rents tore in the hull plating, as the wild maneuver rapidly began to show its violence.  With the aft quarter and more importantly the drive section still under anti-grav fields and “solid” under the power of the inertial dampeners, it was still trying to accelerate freely while the rest of the hull was tethered to the solid drive section by the spine while thrashing around because of the damage to the keel.  That damage, coupled with the lack of inertial compensators and the wild maneuvers was rapidly tearing the ship apart.

              Then phase four began.  The majority of the thrusters maintained their pre-programmed firing sequence, but three groups all kicked on full all at once: one group on the keel at the bow, one on the keel at the stern and the last on the ventral spine right in the middle of the vessel.  It had the effect of bowing the keel upward at both ends, while the ship was still accelerating into its crazy tumble.  Even without the keel damage, this maneuver plus the added strain of the thrusters would have caused serious damage.