Battlegroup (StarFight Series Book 2) (11 page)

CHAPTER SIX

Daisy felt shock at Richard’s yell to take wasp captives. Using the captives as shields on their way back to their Dart made tactical sense. It just bothered her sense of rightness. Then she realized her Marines were outnumbered dozens to one and that this boarding of the wasp ship was exceedingly dangerous. The guy Tim was wounded. What about the other Dart groups? She looked away from Richard’s image to the wallscreen images that held the views from the vidcams of the other Dart leaders. Her memory supplied the names Auggie Naranjo and Wayne Park. She’d learned their names from chatting with Richard, his pilots and the other Marines during their Alcubierre transit. Auggie and Wayne were Hispanic and Korean-American troops. Both were first sergeants, while their Dart pilots were master sergeants. The pilots and the team leaders were all combat experienced. She told herself not to worry about them. Surely they would soon head back to their Darts, now that they’d all taken tech stuff from the rooms and tubeways they’d passed through.

“Tactical,” called Jacob. “How long have the teams been inside that ship?”

“Twenty-three minutes, captain,” answered Rosemary from her post.

“Aaron,” said Jacob, his tone thoughtful. “What’s the average time for an in-and-out ship boarding?”

“Half an hour,” the khaki-wearing Marine said.

Daisy noticed the man’s big hands were gripping tightly the armrests of his seat.

“Are they running overtime?”

Aaron looked up at Jacob, clearly worried. “They are. They had no intel on the interior of this ship. Earth ships are the ones we practiced on.”

“Then let us each say prayers for their safe return,” Jacob murmured.

Daisy thought a prayer to the Goddess for the safe return of the Marines now inside the wasp ship. While a few of them had thought her mixed race heritage was . . . different, all of them had shown her thoughtfulness after a few evenings hanging with their pilots. And she liked Richard O’Connor. Though clearly wounded by his marriage and divorce, the older man had never said anything negative about the partnerships and love hookups of the people on board the
Lepanto
. Clearly he respected those personal choices. Her time with him had been mostly filled with chuckles over videos of his granddaughter as she swam in pool races held in the girl’s hometown of St. Louis. She had no doubt the chief warrant officer was a doting grandfather. She just hoped he would survive this deadly encounter with the wasps.

♦   ♦   ♦

“Auggie!” yelled a voice over Richard’s comlink. “The wasps are attacking!”

Memory told him the voice belonged to Chao Lee, the pilot of Dart Three. Which had entered near the rear of the wasp ship.

“They’re firing on our tubeway entry hole! There’s a dozen of them! All armed! I’m heading back to the Dart!”

“Lee! Get in there and lock the hatch!” called Auggie.

A quick check of his helmet vidscreens showed the Dart Three team of Marines was still proceeding down a tube that brought them close to the entry point of his own Dart. That put Auggie and his people far away from their own Dart. While they each carried sacks filled with tech, they had no wasp captives yet. Richard kept listening as he followed after Jane and the rest of his team. Their tubeway was coming up on a four way intersection, judging from what her drone’s videye showed.

“Chief, we’ve got four wasps flying toward us from a side tubeway,” Jane said quickly. “Unarmed.”

“Troops, ambush ‘em!” he said firmly. “Use your tasers. Knock ‘em out. If we grab these four, we can head back to our Dart.”

“Setting ambush,” called Jane.

Briefly he wondered why Chao had not used his two claymore drones to fly out and attack the approaching wasps. The man wore a hard shell identical to what everyone wore on this job. Then again, maybe he had used one of the drones to spot the approaching wasps. And a dozen wasps armed with lightning bolt rods could likely take out two drones before they got close enough to hurt the wasps. Whatever. He would learn what had happened once they were all in space and headed back to the
Sea
.

“Got one!” yelled Tim.

“Me too!” called Didier

Jack and Jane said the same as their taser handguns shot out thin silvery threads that wedged into the hard exoskeleton of the arriving wasps. The batteries in the tasers delivered powerful knockout charges. Richard watched as the four wasps fell to the floor, their wings fluttering weakly. He came to a stop just a few meters from the pile of flying critters. Turning around, he lifted both arms and pointed his shotgun and flamethrower down the tubeway they’d just run up. Didier’s drone came flying toward him as the trooper called it in.

“Chief!” called Jane. “Look! There’s a vertical tubeway here! It heads up!”

Richard turned back to where his troops were separating the wasps. Each was grabbing the narrow spot where abdomen met thorax. The neck juncture looked too fragile to grab with their hard shell’s metal gauntlets. He stepped into the intersection and looked up. Jane was right. An illuminated tubeway hole filled the ceiling above the intersection. Not an elevator but clearly a way out that did not involve time-consuming use of explosives.

“Up! Everyone, use your jets to head up! Maybe this tubeway connects with the tubeway that leads back to our Dart!”

Jane led the way, her leg jets shooting red flames down toward the floor of the intersection. She held a wasp in her left arm while her right arm pointed upward. Her drone was rising above her, he noticed form one of his helmet vidscreens.

“Following!” called Tim as he moved into position and ignited his leg jets. He too held a wasp.

He knew Jack and Didier would soon follow, once Tim rose high enough that his leg jets did not hit the helmet of a following trooper.

“Auggie! They’re firing on my midbody airlock with lightning bolts!” yelled Chao over the comlink. “It’s melting. I’ve got my laser and arm weapons aimed at the hatch. I’ll take out some of them before they get me!”

“Resist them!” yelled Auggie.

“I am! They’re inside!”

Over his helmet comlink came the sound of heavy breathing and a loud whoosh as Chao fired his flamethrower at the invading wasps.

In his mind there grew a picture of a lone Marine, wearing a white hard shell, firing with every weapon at hand. His fingers would be firing the shotgun and flamethrower, while he would be tonguing a helmet tab to make his belly laser fire a green beam. Chao’s eyes would do the target sighting using a reticule in his helmet’s HUD. The young man was a deadly fighter. But it would only take one hit from a lightning rod to zap the electricals in his hard shell. His helmet battery would keep his comlink working and air circulating. Richard’s mind built an image of Chao in his hard shell, standing at the front of the Dart’s cargohold, as the brave man fought with his back to the wall-mounted nav controls.

“I’m down,” the young pilot whispered. “Bolts have killed my shell. They’re coming for me. Auggie, send me off.”

“Dart Three!” yelled Auggie over his own comlink. “Emergency override command Beta Four Blue! Destroy yourself!”

For a moment, a long moment, Richard hoped the Dart AI would not be able to activate the Dart’s self-destruct mechanism. Which were several loads of plastique placed at the front, middle and engine sections of the Dart. It was a last ditch option unique to Darts. And to Marines.

“Activating!” spoke the soft voice of the Dart AI.

“
Kaboom
.”

Silence followed over the frequency that connected Richard, his people and the other two Dart teams to each other, and to the pilot and AIs in each Dart. What effect would the explosion of a Dart inside the hull of the wasp ship have on that ship?

“Watch out!” called Jane.

He leaned left as his hard shell rose up the long vertical tubeway. A tubeway that now shifted its orientation by a few degrees.

Newton’s laws still governed. An equal and opposite reaction had moved the bulk of the wasp ship away from the site of the Dart blast. That blast had acted like a maneuvering jet.

Richard realized something else as his new flight angle matched the tilt of the tubeway. The wasp ship did not have any inertial damper field. Otherwise, he and his four Marines would not have had to adjust their upward flight path. The field would have moved them all in synchrony with the tubeway as it responded to an external impact.

“Ceiling up ahead!” Jane called over his comlink.

“Auggie,” he called to the man whom he knew like a brother. “Sorry you had to do that.”

“Part of the job,” his friend said, his voice sounding parched. “Our ride’s toast. Can you give us a lift out in your Dart?”

“For sure,” Richard said quickly, his mind filling with an image of the relative positions of his team and Auggie’s team. “You’re still close to the outer hull. Keep coming along that tubeway. It should bring you up on the entry hole we blew in the tubeway wall. And keep your drones flying ahead of you! These bastards just pulled an ambush on us.”

“Heading your way. Our drones are flying.”

Richard leaned hard left and tongued off his leg jets. He landed with a thud next to Jane, who stood with his troops in a pipe-lined tubeway. It stretched in two directions. One way led toward the ship’s nose. The other led back toward the middle of the ship, and hopefully their Dart.

“Gunny, lead the way!” Richard yelled. “I’ll cover our rear with my drone.”

“Move out!” she yelled.

His troops moved to a running trot, despite each of them carrying the weight of an unconscious wasp.

Richard watched the vidscreen image from Jane’s drone that preceded them, then switched to the view of his drone as it followed them. Tim’s drone flew above the running troopers. Briefly he glanced at the vidscreen image of Wayne and his team. They had finished gathering tech from the park-like room they’d entered and were headed for an exit door. That was when he noticed the yellow shapes of twenty or so wasps coming up on the backside of the Dart One team.

“Wayne! Wasps behind you!” he yelled.

He watched as yellow lightning bolts rained down on Wayne’s team of five. One of his men dropped to the floor thanks to a full body bolt strike. But Wayne and three of his troopers now launched napalm rockets at the oncoming wasps.

“Burn the bastards!” he yelled.

♦   ♦   ♦

Seven felt shock then great anger as his watcher eyes showed the craft of the invading Soft Skins explode in a violent blast of yellow flame, black smoke and fragments of metal and flesh that had once been a team of Fighters led by a Fighter Leader. Signal pheromones exploded from signalers all around the Flight Chamber as the explosion opened the nearby tubeway to cold dark space. Air rushed out in a whirl of white gases, according to the view of a watcher unit at the rear weapons rings. He felt the shifting of his flying nest as the explosive impact echoed through the metal and air of all the chambers in his nest.

“Alert! Rear tubeway entries now closing!” scent cried the Servant for within nest communications. “Air loss has stopped.”

A flood of fear and anxiety pheromones came from his Flight Servant. “Our flight path has changed! The explosion pushed us off our pursuit of the attacking Soft Skin nest!”

“Calmness!” he yelled in a rush of aggregation, trail and dominance pheromones. “Our nest is still whole! Forget the distant Soft Skin nest. Fighters and Workers and Servants, pursue the Soft Skins still moving inside our tubeways! Bite them! Kill them!”

“Three six-groups of Fighters are attacking the Soft Skins in the Practice Chamber,” called the Fighter Leader on his left. “They fly to englobe the invaders!”

Seven saw that in one of the front perception imagers. He also saw things that infuriated him. “But the Soft Skins can fly! See that tubeway that rises up to our outer hard skin! See the Soft Skins in the Practice Chamber! They fly to meet your Fighters in the sky!”

“So they do,” the Fighter Leader said a low rush of signal and alarm pheromones.

His Flight Chamber was filled with alarm and anxiety pheromones. Those scents were being transmitted to every chamber in his nest, to be perceived by every living Swarmer.
No!

“I am the Hunter!” he cried in a mix of shell raspings and a flood of trail, territorial and dominance pheromones. “Fighter Leader! Follow me as I pursue the Soft Skins in our Practice Chamber! Surely they will die under my stinger!”

Seven whirred his wings, lifted up and flew through the entry hole that gave access to his level’s tubeway. Behind him came the sound of the Fighter Leader and several Servants whose duties did not require their presence in the Flight Chamber. Joy now flew alongside his fury. He and his fellow Swarmers could surely defeat so few Soft Skins!

♦   ♦   ♦

Richard kept one eye on the wasp ship cutaway that filled one part of his HUD display, while his other eye watched the deadly fighting between Wayne’s team and the attacking wasps. Napalm rockets flew out of the backpacks of Auggie and his three Marines. Black slugs and steel birdshot flew from their arms toward the flying forms of the wasps. Yellow lightning bolts passed by the troopers, missing them as the wasps moved apart to avoid his rush and his team jockeyed sideways in spiraling lines to avoid being an easy target. Exact shooting while flying through the air of the park room was clearly something the wasps had not practiced for. His Marines had. The curtains of steel birdshot ripped through the wings of half the wasps, while exploding napalm warheads incinerated a third of them. In seconds it came down to eight dispersed wasps trying to hit four Marines with their lightning bolt rods. But the leg jets of the Marines allowed them to move as fast as the wasps could fly. Maybe faster. And every Marine had practiced jet flying in open space as part of boarding an enemy spaceship. None of Wayne’s team was down, except for the first trooper hit while they were on the ground, near the room exit door. The wasps suddenly joined together and flew at a single Marine.