An Officer’s Duty (46 page)

It was also the most dangerous thing Ia and her crew could do, since launching the pods meant risking being shot at by the supposedly disabled Salik vessel ahead of them. Only when a commanding officer was certain the ship was disabled did they risk launching the pods. Sometimes they were right and landed safely. Sometimes they were wrong. The casualty rate was 80 percent for a reason, though this time Ia and the others were fully suited and sealed, just in case something cracked open the small boarding vessel.

This time, they were crammed four to a pod, with Ia, Tamaganej, Higatsu, and Nguyen in one pod, and Chief Petty Officer Kendric with Privates Doolittle, Quangyan, and de la Soleza in the other pod, all members of the
Murphy
half of the
crew. This time, Ia was the only one who was relaxed inside her suit. She knew—she had
made sure
—that all of the alien ship’s weapons systems had been disabled, plus she had directed the gunners to hit the ship hard enough in the right spots to disable their self-destruct capacity.

Instead of fretting, she reviewed known ship schematics for this general configuration, and for known Salik databank units, using her heads-up display to pretend like she was studying for the coming encounter. Swaying against her restraint sockets, Ia listened to the
thump
and buzzing
hiss
of the pod sealing onto the ship’s hull, and then cutting into it. Like so many other things, modern ceristeel technology had been denied to the Salik, but their own version of hull armor was still quite tough.

Giving the others the thumbs-up with one servo-glove, Ia moved to the airlock door and slipped through, with Nguyen right behind her. A twist of the controls activated the cutters, the heavy, mining-quality laser drills that sliced into the ship’s hull. With their bodies wrapped in p-suits inside their jointed armor, the eight members of the boarding team would be fine if the Salik ship depressurized. The Salik might or might not be alright, depending on whether or not they had donned their own suits in the aftermath of the battle.

Nguyen passed her the buzzbomb cannon. Fitting it to the port in the center of the door, Ia hooked her helmet’s HUD to the pod’s external cameras. The lasers were still drilling, circling around and around on their oval track. Finally, a faint
clannng
rippled into the pod from the other ship as the pistons pushing on the hull shoved the layers of armor plating and bulkhead into the depths of the Salik vessel.

Ia pulled the trigger on the cannon, pulsing it four times. Four orbs spat down into the alien vessel. The first one exploded in a
pzzzt
of sound and light, a stunner grenade that flashed its electrosonic pulse through the cabin beyond the opening she had made. The second through fourth flew down, bounced, and rolled off under self-control, automatically seeking out live bodies to pulse a second wave of sonic shocks.

Unhooking the cannon let in a hiss of steam. The heated vapor didn’t do anything to her mechsuit, so Ia ignored it. She passed the launcher back to Nguyen with a murmur through her external speakers. “We could’ve seriously used these on
board the
Liu Ji
, back in my old Marines Company. They would’ve made boarding pirate ships a lot easier.”

“Let’s trade places, sir,” he offered, lifting his chin behind the half-silvered curve of his inner faceplate.

“Why?” she asked. She turned her attention to the controls for the airlock door.

“Sir, you shouldn’t go in first. Leave that job to a Marine,” he stated.

“I
am
a Marine. Even if I wear Blues these days,” she amended. “Either way, I am the boarding officer for this little party.”

The door hissed open, swinging and pivoting almost like a rolltop door in order to give them the clearance to enter. More steamy air billowed their way, though not as saturated as before. Nguyen touched Ia, the rubberized tips of his servo-fingers gripping her arm plates.

“Then let an enlisted meioa go first, sir. It isn’t right our leader should risk herself as the first one into the enemy’s ship,” he argued.

“Duly noted, Private, but denied. I lead from the front,” Ia told him. Ducking into the opening, she climbed over the still-hot edges of the oval. The sensors on her mechsuit boot soles flared their temperature warnings at the edges of the heads-up display shining off the inner curve of her faceplate. A blink-code slid her thick-silvered blast plate into place, and a shift of her servo-arms pulled her HK-114 mechsuit-sized laser rifle to the front of her armored body.

Static swept across her faceplate display, pulsed from the stunner grenade on the floor inside the cabin. By the time it cleared, she was inside. From the trio of lidded tanks lining three of the walls—or rather, two and the remains of the middle third, which had been crushed by the falling chunks of hull and overhead storage lockers—this was some sort of crew quarters.

Ignoring the debris, Ia stepped over it and slapped the sucker hand over the controls for the cabin door, lifting on the buttons to open the panel. Rolling through as soon as it hissed wide, she pointed her rifle both ways down the corridor outside. Nothing and no one. The stunner bombs bounced out the door and rolled down the hall, occasionally flashing electrosonic
shockwaves, which, like stunner rifles, would disrupt the neural networks of just about any form of life that used electrical signals. Ceristeel absorbed most of the shockwave, but the sensors built into her mechsuit fuzzed a second time with another brief moment of static before they cleared.

Still, her suit’s scanners, upgraded for Blockade work, showed no other life-forms nearby. No stray sounds, no Salik-shaped heat signatures, with their distinctive, ostrich-backwards knees and rear-facing flipper-feet, nor their pseudo-tentacle arms with the four, supple, sucker-covered ends. She flicked on her comm with another blink, triggered by the sensors picking up the focal point of her gaze flicking over the command options hovering around the edges of her faceplate display.

“This is too quiet. They’d know where we latched on. We should be facing resistance. Heads up, people.
Petty Kendric, report.
”

“It’s too quiet here, sir,”
the noncom replied over her headset.
“We emerged in a storage locker just off the hangar deck, but there’s no sign any of them tried to get to the courier to flee.
”

“Did you say courier?”
That question came from Salish, back on board the
Audie-Murphy
.

Ia knew what was coming. She let First Petty Kendric reply, since he was the one who “knew” for sure.

“I’m staring at what looks like a hyperspace nosecone on the
pointy end of a Salik—”

“Shakk!”
Ia swore into her headset mike.
“All units, get to the bridge! I repeat,
get to the bridge!”

She took off at a sprint, startling Nguyen and the other two. They lumbered after her, rattling the deckplates with the weight of their halfmech. Snatching up the nearest stunner ball without crushing it as she ran—no mean feat in the bulk of a mechsuit—she confirmed her course from a light skimming of the time-streams.

“Lieutenant, report!”
Salish snapped.

“It’s a suicide ship, sir,”
she stated, skidding around a corner and slapping the sucker hand over the controls for one of the ship’s emergency stairwells.
“They
must
have been carrying navigation data on either the location of a secret base or the coordinates for a rendezvous. That’s why there’s no resistance;
they’re holed up somewhere, either dead or killing themselves off to ensure they can’t be interrogated. Our best chance is to hope they haven’t completely slagged the relevant data consoles.”

As soon as she got the door open, she pulled off the device and clanged down the steps. The Salik version of feet—backwards-pointing flippers on ostrich-like legs—weren’t exactly adapted for using ladder rungs, which meant there was plenty of room for her halfmech suit to charge down two levels. By the time she reached the right door, Private de la Soleza’s voice rang over the comm channels.

“I think I found the bridge, sir! Something just shot at me!”

“All units, converge on de la Soleza,”
Ia ordered, more of her attention on getting the stairwell door open than on either her scanners or the timestreams of who or what was attacking the private. The ball in her grip
pzzzzted
with another wave of stunner energy, but the brief fuzzing of her sensors didn’t matter. The who or what wasn’t far away; within moments, they reached the right cross-corridor, one with a pair of gun turrets mounted on the ceiling outside two sets of mirror-image doors.

Swinging her gun up into position, Ia fired, slicing through the power conduits feeding both lasers. One of them managed to swivel around in time to take a potshot at her, but the blood orange bolt merely scuffed her armor. Without missing a beat, she turned to her left and started lasering through the seam sealing the double doors together. Nguyen joined her, while de la Soleza and her partner Doolittle used their own HK-114s on the double doors opposite.

One set of the mirror-image doors would lead to a shallow storage locker; the other would lead onto the real bridge. Ia knew which set were the real doors. Tamaganej from her left and Higatsu from her right pulled out pocket crowbars from storage compartments on their thighs. Jamming them into the glowing-hot crack she and Nguyen had made, they flexed their synthetic muscles, prying the doors apart. On the other side, Quangyan and Kendric started to do the same.

The moment the opening was barely big enough, Ia tossed the stunner grenade through. Just in time, too; it went off on the other side of the glowing door edges. A smattering of static sparkled across her heads-up display. It didn’t stop her from
bringing her rifle back up into position…nor did it stop the deadman switch from triggering on the grenade in the limp grip of one of the stunned Salik inside.

Ignoring the bloody, smoldering pieces smacking into the doors, the bits that spattered down her armor, Ia crouched a little, aimed carefully below the Salik-style overhead screens dotting each workstation, and fired. The acid poured over the data cubes beneath the navigation console ignited in a rush of light and heat. The flames burned swiftly, extinguishing themselves as they used up the available oxygen in their vicinity.

“Whoa,” Nguyen muttered over the open comms. “What’d you do
that
for, sir?”

“They use a corrosive acid to destroy their memory banks, but the acid is highly flammable,” Ia stated. She waited while another stunner-pulse from the grenade rolling around on the floor fuzzed her heads-up view, then stepped onto the bridge. “I tend to play the
Audie-Murphy
’s logs for past encounters before falling asleep. With luck, I’ve saved enough of the units that the higher-ups can extract something useful.
Commander Salish, I don’t know how many of the Salik are still alive elsewhere, but I think we have four prisoners here.
Um…
maybe three. I think one of them is bleeding to death.
”

“I’ve already received a pingback on the hyperrelays,”
Salish promised her.
“The TUPSF
Kaiwinoka
is on her way to give the enemy a tow back to base. They’ve also promised to bring a spare set of starboard insystem thrusters for the
Murphy.
Thank our lucky stars, that’s the worst of the damage we sustained. Stay on board the enemy ship, Lieutenant, and do your best to finish securing it. Don’t hesitate to make a run for the pods if it looks like things are going southward. I’ll be keeping the
Audie
and the
Murphy
separate until the
Kaiwinoka
arrives, just in case they have a few crewmembers stashed away, waiting for a chance of sabotage.”

“Understood, sir,”
Ia agreed. “You heard our fearless leader, meioas. Strip and zip the prisoners, and haul them out of here. I want them duct-taped to a bulkhead outside and unable to do anything but hang there and breathe in ten minutes flat—and yes, I do mean that literally. Strip ’n zip, and strap ’em flat!”

A ragged chorus of “
Aye, sir
” answered her command, both locally and over her headset.

“Be careful and scan each one before you move them,” First Petty Officer Kendric ordered. “Some of these sons of squids have a bad habit of lying down on a deadman’s switch, particularly if they think they’ll be stunned. The moment you turn them over—boom!”

“Don’t count on your armor protecting you, either, if you’re close enough to turn ’em over,” Ia added in warning, backing up the noncom. “No one buys a star out of carelessness, today.”

JANUARY 9, 2494 T.S.
BATTLE PLATFORM
MAD JACK
SIC TRANSIT

“So, how was your first week?” Bennie asked as she came back from the caf’ dispenser. Once more, she was stuck in a small office attached to her quarters, though at least they were larger than the ones back on the
Liu Ji
.

Accepting the mug of hot liquid, Ia shrugged. “Not bad. I’m getting some respect from the crews of the authorized ships we’ve boarded, and we’ve caught three that weren’t authorized. Well, exploded, disabled, and boarded.”

The redheaded chaplain curled one leg under the other as she settled in her cushioned chair. A wry smirk curved the corner of her mouth. “The way I hear it, you earned your nickname again.”

Ia shook her head, sipping at the slightly bitter beverage. “Not really. It was just a small amount of spatter, this time. Mostly down the midline. The bridge doors weren’t open very wide when the grenade went off.”

Blowing on her own mug, Bennie shrugged. “Any nightmares from it?”

“Not as far as I know. Besides, everyone on my side lived,” Ia pointed out. “That’s the best nightmare deterrent I can have. The techs might be able to get useful navigation data out of the banks we salvaged. I won’t hold my breath, but even if they just have a series of slightly more detailed starcharts for several systems, that’d give them a place to start looking. The really disturbing thing, though, is that someone gave them OTL technology.”