Rich Man's War (56 page)

“You okay?” Tanner asked, moving over to lift some of the weight off of her.

She let out an exasperated grunt. “Not really. You look pretty beat up, too.”

Shots rang out from up above, just beyond the blasted entry hatches. Alicia and Tanner could hear lasers, assault rifle fire and shouts. Tanner grabbed Alicia’s wrist and heaved her the rest of the way out from under the armored corpse, wincing in pain all the while. “
Ow ribs ow ow,” he winced, though he persevered until she was free.

Shouts and gunshots grew closer. Baldwin rolled over to lie on the other side of
Soldan’s corpse so she could point the plasma repeater up toward the open hatch where the noise continued. Tanner and Alicia hadn’t yet made it to cover when a pair of men in NorthStar vac suits, holding laser rifles, dove through the charred hatch, turned to fire back—and were promptly cut down from outside the compartment.

“Donner,” called a voice from one charred hatch.

“Blitzen!” answered Alicia and Baldwin in unison, though Tanner reflexively croaked out, “party.”

A tall Archangel marine stepped around the corner on Deck Two, his pulse rifle up but ready. He quickly looked over the scene and then slid back the faceplate of his helmet. “Hey, you guys
okay down there?” asked Ravenell.

“Oh, Jesus, am I glad to see you!” Alicia sighed. Baldwin slumped against the armored corpse. Tanner, too, let out a relieved breath, leaning against a maintenance console. “What’s going on?”

“We’ve got about half a squad together on Deck Two here. They’ve already got people guarding the command bridge, though, and they’ve got it sealed up tight. We think there’s an ES generator protecting the whole compartment, plus a lot of guys guarding the passageway. I dunno how we’re gonna get it open. Lieutenant Thompson sent me out to find more help. Shit, are you sure you’re all okay?”

Alicia looked to the others. Tanner
didn’t answer; he turned away from the conversation and started looking around for something, though she didn’t know what. Baldwin gave a shrug. “We’re banged up, but we’re fine,” replied Alicia. “It’s just the three of us.” She glanced around the compartment and at her companions. “I don’t think we can hold this space.”

“Maybe we
oughta power down the whole cannon?” suggested Baldwin. “That way if they re-take the compartment, they’ll have to rev the system up again. Might at least stall ‘em.”

“Or blow out the controls,” Alicia frowned. “
Rav, I’m out of explosives. You got any?”

Ravenell shook his head. “No, I lost most of mine in the jump. Used the rest. That’s what I’m
sayin’, I don’t know how we’re gonna get inside the bridge even if we can get past… Tanner?” he asked. “You okay?”

Tanner
slumped down next to a cabinet, jerking it open and rummaging through its contents. Then he opened up the next.

Baldwin rose. “I think Tanner needs a first aid kit.”

“Tool kit,” he grunted.

Baldwin blinked. “What?”

Tanner reached into the next cabinet drawer, reached in and pulled out a black binder full of ordinary paper pages. He looked back to the corpse at Baldwin’s feet. “Is that… That plasma repeater is attached to him, right?” Tanner huffed. “We’re gonna need a tool kit.”

Blood, Sweat and Tears

“Sometimes I think about all those normal goals like going to college, getting my dream job and finding someone special
, and I realize I’m starting to look at them like they’re tactical objectives. Like I have to fight my way through some bad guys to get to them. Then I wonder how long I’ll feel like this, or if I’ll start thinking that way about getting the groceries or doing my laundry. And then I think maybe just living in some small house with a bunch of cats and not giving a shit about the rest of the world actually sounds like a good plan.”

--Unsent Letter, MA3 Tanner Malone, December 2276

Captain Paulson saw it all unravel with the destruction of
Saratoga
. She’d been fully engrossed in the pair of struggles fought by her own battleship,
Andromeda
—the one between spaceships across thousands of kilometers and the chaos raging within her own hull—when
Saratoga
blew apart. The moment shocked her. It stunned a fair number of her officers and, from what she saw on the tactical screens, it apparently had the same effect on several other ships.

Like many officers of her rank and age, Harriet Paulson was a student of military history. It was the kind of thing discussed at war colleges and officers’ retreats. Seeing the brief flare of destruction on her screens and the
slight pause in the shooting, a small corner of her mind recalled the Battle of the Nile, hundreds of years ago. She thought of the destruction of the French flagship,
Orient
, and how the spectacular explosion so shocked both the British and French that the fighting ended for a good ten minutes. Nelson, the books said, dropped several boats into the water to help recover survivors.

For that pause,
lasting no longer than a couple of breaths, Paulson wondered how this might play out. Then Lai Wa’s destroyer squadron tightened up around their expeditionary group—three full assault carriers at its center—and they all visibly altered course to back further away from the battle.

Paulson snapped out of her reverie. “Son of a bitch,” she fumed and jabbed a button at the personal comm panel on her chair. “Captain Leung, I have you withdrawing from the fight. Please
advise!”

Leung’s face appeared on her screen. “Captain Paulson,” she said, “we cannot risk closing with you or the other battleships while you are compromised. We are establishing a safe distance until you regain full control.”

“No, you can’t do that,” Paulson argued, “you’ll leave us open for more of those corvettes! If we tighten up now, we can ward them off and get a handle on the boarding situations and resolve this.”

“Captain, we both see what happened to
Saratoga
,” Leung replied firmly. “I cannot risk a similar fate for one of my assault carriers.”

“You’ve got a
full destroyer squadron on top of your carrier group! At least send them in. We’re too thinned out already out here!”

“My f
irst duty is to protect my own people, captain.”

“Dammit, Leung, you’re a part of this task force! You can’t leave us hanging like this!”

“Your company insisted on taking the lead, captain,” said Leung, her tone infuriatingly emotionless. “If you cannot control your ships, I must exercise my own command judgment. Confirm that you have full control and I will move in once more.”

Paulson balled her hands up into fists. She never wanted to punch another woman so much in her life. “They don’t have control of
Andromeda
,” she said through gritted teeth, “they’re just running around causing—“

“Hostiles in main engineering!” shouted out one of Paulson’s bridge officers.

“Two more corvettes coming in!” warned another. “We can’t catch them!”

Though Leung’s expression barely changed, Paulson could see that the other captain overheard both announcements all too well. Lai
Wa’s field commander turned to one side and barked out a command in Chinese. With that, the connection went dead.

* * *

“Attention Group Two, Charlie Wing. Priority extraction required at
Los Angeles
. Say again, priority extraction at
Los Angeles
. Any combat-capable unit, please respond.”

Though the cruiser remained on the tactical screens,
Los Angeles
fell back from the fighting. The wreckage of NorthStar’s cruiser
Lovejoy
lay between
Los Angeles
and what remained of the battleship
Ursa’s
remaining escorts.
Los Angeles
couldn’t keep up with
Hercules
when the battleship fled for the protection of her own lines, and
Halley
remained out of action. With that fight decided, Archangel’s flagship had turned to get into the fight with the next closest battleship group.

That courage bought
Los Angeles
another nasty beating. Burning gases continued to spew from one of her main thrusters, now reduced to so much jagged metal. One of her primary cannons was gone. Computer images at this distance couldn’t make out more detail than that, so God only knew how much of her atmosphere she’d lost—or how much of her crew.

A blood-stained vac suit glove reached out to tap the comms panel. Frost continued to spread over the blood on all four fingers. With no air to keep things warm, most of the rest of the blood in the compartment had already frozen up.
Emergency sealing foam sat in a hardened bulge on the wrist below the glove, a rash but necessary act of first aid given a raging battle and an airless compartment.

Thankfully, whoever dreamt up all the code words for this flight kept things simple from the start. Charlie Wing contained all of the corvettes assigned to drop troops onto the enemy battleships. Anyone still carrying troops was in Group One. Once a corvette made its drop, it fell into Group Two, which kept busy after those runs by engaging in anything smaller than a cruiser… though a few such corvettes had their hands full with just holding together.

Joan of Arc
fit both descriptions.

No one else responded to the call from
Los Angeles
. That couldn’t surprise anyone. Though both sides had taken serious losses, the fight continued on. Any corvette still capable of combat was still engaged.
Joan of Arc
could only answer by virtue of having just dispatched one of the enemy’s corvettes mere seconds ago. That match could easily have gone the other way.

Lieutenant Kelly responded by voice, though she had to stop and swallow after her first syllable. “
Los… Los Angeles
,
Joan of Arc
. We can take the job.”

“
Joan of Arc
, please advise of your combat status, over.”

“Minor hull damage, some life support loss. We’re down to beam weapons only. No more missiles in our tubes.” She
coughed once, which made her wince in pain. Her wrist wasn’t the only part of her body covered in sealing foam. Shrapnel had gotten into her right hip and her thigh. “Three crew casualties. Two dead, one wounded. We’re still flying.”

She waited through the expected pause. “Copy,
Joan of Arc
. Proceed to
Los Angeles
.”

With the helm still under her manual control, Kelly turned
Joan of Arc
down and hard to port. She lit up the corvette’s thrusters, heading quickly for
Los Angeles
. “XO,” she said on the ship’s comm, “we’re breaking off to pick up some passengers. Let’s make sure we do this quick.”

“Aye, aye, skipper,” replied Booker’s voice. “We’re on it.” He paused. “You okay up there?”

“I’ll be fine,” said Kelly. “No time to deal with it right now. By the time anyone got to me, I’d need them back at their post, anyway. Let’s all stay focused.”

“Aye, aye,” Booker repeated. She heard him call out instructions to the rest of the crew.

Kelly’s eyes shut tightly as she took in a deep, shaking breath. She didn’t have time to think about anything but the enemy corvette trying to kill hers while it was still there. Now it was gone, and she had at least a minute or so before she’d link up with
Los Angeles
. When her eyes opened again, she tried to keep them fixed on control console and the tactical screens in front of her, despite the holes and the cracks in
Joan’s
armored bridge canopy
.

Better to stare at the screens than to look at the frozen bodies of Stan and Chief Romita lying on the deck.

* * *

Second Squad, First Platoon—
Hercules’s
own—hardly knew what hit them.

They arrived at Main Engineering in good order, holding together and moving quickly
while the other two squads from First Platoon were held up by engineers fleeing their posts and by the confused instructions from the battalion HQ section trying to run things from the battleship’s hangar bay. Under orders from their platoon leader, Second Squad hurried up two levels to come into Main Engineering from Deck Seven, entering through the narrow maze of cooling conduits that led into the broader workshop space at the maze’s end.

They found a pair of Archangel
marines hurriedly wiring the compartment with explosives and shot them both down in a brief exchange of gunfire. Slowing down to confirm that none of the bombs were actually set to blow, the squad pushed in.

From out of nowhere, pulse rifle fire cut down both Corporal Swanson and Private Meeks.

“Cover!” ordered Staff Sergeant Newitz. “There! Shooter’s over there! Get fire on—!” He didn’t get out the rest of his order. The pulse laser blast that cut straight through his helmet saw to that.

Their opponent slipped behind a support beam, fired again with a blast that all but took off Jensen’s leg before he could make it to cover, and then ducked back into the shadows. Jensen lay on the deck howling in pain and shock.

“Someone check on the sarge!” yelled Gulati.

“He’s dead! Shit, there’s a hole right through his helmet!”

Private Masters fired off a few rounds of suppressing fire so he could look out from behind his tool cabinet and check on Swanson and Meeks. Gulati tried to cover him, but then Masters suddenly tumbled to the ground, clutching at something in his throat while blood poured out all over him from the wound.

Gulati pulled Masters back around the corner by his legs. Blood spurt
ed everywhere. “Oh, God, it’s a
knife
!” Gulati yelled. “Who the fuck uses throwing knives?”

Their squad leader
lay dead. A whole fire team was down. Jensen lay on the deck screaming where no one could get to him. Masters kept on bleeding to death right in front of everyone.

“
Get off my ship,” she demanded from the shadows. At least, the voice sounded like a woman’s. The gender wasn’t nearly as easy to determine as the mood.

Hiding behind a cable distribution panel, Lance Corporal
Subong tried to catch his breath and think. He was already of a mind to fill the workshop compartment with grenades, but every third order on the comm system was to limit damage and protect ships’ equipment. That concern ran so deeply that the heavy weapons platoons were all still down in the hangar bay waiting for orders while the rest of the ship’s battalion spread out to secure every vital space they could.

“I said,” repeated the woman’s low, angry voice, “get off my ship.”

Subong looked over to his other comrades, wanting to give an order, but he saw Donati’s eyes flare. “Kiss my ass, you fucking—!” Donati began, whirling around the side of another gear locker to light up the compartment with his assault rifle, but he never finished his retort. He fired wildly toward his enemy, who took an extra second to aim and put him down with three holes in his chest.

Subong
decided he’d had enough. “Okay, fuck it,” he hissed, yanking a grenade off his belt—only to see one much like it clatter to the floor at his feet. “Grenade!” Subong yelled, diving away before the thing detonated and sent shrapnel, flame and debris flying everywhere.

“Get off my ship!” the woman demanded again, her voice now impossibly loud in the wake of the exploding grenade.
Subong felt himself lifted up off his feet by hands at his shoulders.

“C’mon,” shouted the wailing voice of one of his comrades, “we gotta get out of here!”

“What?” Subong exclaimed. He’d lost his laser rifle, and so he pulled his pistol. “No, get a grip, damn it! Turn around!”

He followed his own advice.
Subong wrenched free of the two marines carrying him, got his feet on the deck and turned. Private Gould was there in his line of vision, just a couple meters back from Subong and the others. For some reason, though, Gould didn’t follow. He stood there in a weird posture, his hips thrust forward while his shoulders leaned too far back and his head tilted forward with a big, wet, red spot in his chest and a little gleaming bit of metal sticking through at the center.