Rich Man's War (57 page)

Then
Subong saw the extra legs behind Gould’s body, and the hand that grabbed his comrade’s assault rifle before it fell to the floor, and the flash of the rifle’s muzzle. Bullets came flying down the corridor, many of them ricocheting wildly, while the woman demanded yet again, “
Get the fuck off my ship!
”

He ran. His friends ran with him. They ran for the nearest avenue of escape, not questioning the merits of taking one corner or another. The bullets and the shouts chased them until they came to the first path out of the corridor they could find, and it didn’t matter at all to them that it led to one of the ship’s lifeboats. The remaining men of Second Squad piled inside. Someone slammed the hatch closed behind them. Someone else—no one would ever rightly remember whom—hit the button to launch the lifeboat without a second thought. The lifeboat blasted away from
Hercules
, leaving a sealed hatch in its wake.

Janeka let the body fall away. She doubled back into the workshop, where one of the NorthStar marines still lay on the deck half screaming and half whimpering. The noise was terrible, but her own people took priority. She knelt at their side
s, checking for life signs. Only one still clung to life, despite the hole in his gut.

“
Thibert,” she said. “Thibert, you with me?”

“Gunny? I’m hit
.”

She already had her first aid kit out. “I know. You’re gonna make it.” She cut open his combat jacket with her heated knife
and placed a self-compressing bandage over his wound. Several hypo shots fell from her kit onto the deck. She picked one up and injected it in Thibert’s leg, ensuring that he’d stay out of shock and easing his pain.

“I’m sorry, Gunny.”

“Don’t be sorry. You did good. You survived and you held ‘em until I could get here. I’m proud of you both.”

“Where’s Zacapa?” he asked.

Janeka shook her head. “Don’t worry about Zacapa. You stay awake, you hear me? Stay awake. I have one other thing to do.” She picked up another shot and strode over to the moaning enemy marine.

Janeka grabbed the man by the chin of his helmet and leaned in, her eyes staring at his through her faceplate and his visor. “You will not die,” she told him firmly. “Your wound is cauterized. I’ve got a hypo shot right here.” She jabbed him with the hypo gun as she spoke and then dragged him over to one side of the bulkhead, lingering only long enough to pull the pistol and knife from his belt and toss them to the other side of the compartment. Then she drew the electric stunner from her belt and gave the fallen man a solid jolt, knocking him unconscious.

“Donner!” called out a voice from an interior entrance.

“
Blitzen.” Janeka stood and turned toward the trio of Archangel boarders before her. “Two wounded, one of ‘em ours,” she said, quickly crossing the workshop to leave via the same route her reinforcements took to join her. “I can’t stay. Finish setting up the charges and get both our guys out of here before you seal up the compartment. Pull him out, too,” she added, gesturing to the wounded NorthStar trooper against the far bulkhead. “You hear me?”

“Will do, Gunny,” nodded one of the others.

She didn’t wait to say more. Janeka needed to be in a dozen different places, all of them vital and all of them under fire. Deciding on the closest and most critical spot on the list, Janeka doubled back further into Main Engineering, wishing she could have moved faster.

She’d trained both
Thibert and Zacapa in Whiskey Company. Thibert had broken Fort Stalwart’s record on the four-mile run. Zacapa had a gift for drawing. Both had done fine on their previous assignments, and both survived the jump and the fight to get this far. They’d fought to hold the workshop. They’d done everything right. Janeka would tell Thibert that, and Zacapa’s family, if she survived this.

A person could do everything right in a battle and still wind up dead. Anyone. Even the ones the rest all looked up to.

Coming to the last junction before Main Engineering, Janeka slowed and spotted the sentry just past the open hatch. Little of the Navy crewman showed—just the edge of her helmet and her rifle—but that was what Janeka wanted to see. “Donner,” she called out, and waited for the countersign before she emerged from the corridor and hustled into the compartment.

Inside Main Engineering, Janeka found smoke, blaring alarms and the dull but ever-present vibration of the battleship’s huge fuel cell-driven engines. Navy engineers crawled halfway under machinery and up onto exposed catwalks to hurriedly cut power to the rest of the ship, with officers and enlisted ratings taking on dirty or dangerous jobs with no regard for risk or rank. At many points, they skipped straight to disconnecting conduits manually rather than try to deal with unfamiliar computer controls.

Hercules
had to be forced out of the fight, but not shut down cold. At this stage of the battle, the boarding team didn’t want the battleship’s ES reinforcement to fall, let alone main life support or other vital systems. But above all else,
Hercules
had to be taken out of the fight and not allowed to return.

Though the engineering work took full priority, Janeka, the other marines and a good number of other
Navy personnel were focused on holding Main Engineering and its adjacent compartments. Firefights raged in a number of directions and at several levels. Archangel’s forces took full advantage of the choke points and natural cover offered by their surroundings. The battlefield offered one benefit: given the danger of a misfire hitting a fuel cell container or penetrating one of the main engines, the enemy couldn’t use heavy weapons or serious explosives.

Unfortunately,
Archangel’s people had similar restrictions. The chance of one stray shot causing a total catastrophe remained even with the limited selection of weapons on both sides.

Wounded men and women lay on the deck near one of the larger fuel cell lockers, a spot chosen by Corpsman Matuskey—the only one of his rating to make it this far—because it was out of the way
and unlikely to receive heavy fire. Janeka strode past the impromptu triage station to a set of desks and computer consoles up beyond the pair of main engines, which rose up two full decks and reached at least another deck below her current spot. At the desks, she found a small handful of fellow boarders surrounded by holo screens and captured and bound NorthStar crewmen. They worked with their faceplates up, allowing her to see their stress and grim concentration.

One man in a blue marine vac suit did most of the talking. Janeka didn’t interrupt as she arrived. “If Wilkins doesn’t think she can hold that passageway, tell her to blow it as best she can and pull back. We can’t spare enough people to back her up. Not now. Get on it, sergeant.” He turned from that matter to the next without taking a breath. “La Rocca, I’ve got a job for you. Backtrack from here to our access point. Take some of that paint from that locker there. I want you to mark out the path for our guys, okay? Put some big red ar
rows on the deck if you have to. I don’t care what you do. But let’s mark out a clear route for the next boarding team that gets dropped off on the hull so they get straight here. We need reinforcements. Go.”

The men took off. Their leader glanced over to Janeka with dark eyes and a darker frown. “Gunny, got any good news for me?”

“Workshop in Deck Five is secure. Much as we can get it,” she said with a shake of her head. “Two casualties, one wounded prisoner. Came back fast as I could, Captain.” She glanced around their surroundings. “How many have we got?” she asked, gesturing to the prisoners.

“Seventeen,” Captain Alvarado shrugged. “Yeah, I know, I’d rather put them somewhere else, too, but right now there is nowhere else. Unless I want to put them with the wounded. Doesn’t seem like a good idea.”

Janeka shook her head in agreement. “No, sir, it doesn’t. No word from Captain MacAllan?”

“None. Looks like I’m running the show in here on my own unless we get another drop of reinforcements.”

She glanced up to ensure that the captain’s last remaining aide had his attention elsewhere. “You’re doing fine, sir,” she said. “No second guessing. Make decisions and stick with them until you’re sure they aren’t working and then fix it.” She paused long enough to see him nod. “Orders, sir?”

His eyes turned down toward an open binder full of deck layouts found on
a shelf in another compartment. It proved far more accurate than anything provided by Naval Intelligence. He indicated different spots on the layouts as he spoke. “We’ve got hostiles attempting to breach here, here and here. Can’t seal the blast doors at any of these spots. This central passageway is the widest, and it also offers a straight shot into this whole section of the ship without a line of fire on either of the main engines or any of the fuel cell lockers. I expect they’ll bring up heavy lasers or plasma repeaters as soon as they figure that out, and then we’ll have a real problem holding.” He looked back up at her. “I’ve got six people up there now and a buck sergeant holding them together. They could probably use your help. Lieutenant Quincy says his guys should only need another ten or fifteen minutes with the engines,” he added, making a face as if to add that he understood full well what an eternity that could mean in combat. “He can’t cut anyone loose until then, so for now this is what we’ve got. I’ll send you whoever else I can if you give a shout. Might wind up just being me.”

“Yes, sir,” Janeka grunted, then took off running. Behind her, she heard a pop and an electric sizzle along with an agonized shriek from one of the engineers, but she couldn’t stop to help. The calls for a corpsman weren’t meant for her.

Janeka’s path took her aft of the ship’s main engine space and past another set of consoles, most of them shot full of holes. This end of the large compartment offered somewhat more open space than the rest, which along with the broader entryway suggested it was where large equipment and supplies came through. She found the defenders evenly split on either side of the entrance with gunfire coming in from further down the corridor beyond them. The tall doors remained wide open in a silent confirmation that they were too damaged to close once more. Spotting sergeant’s stripes on one man’s sleeve, Janeka rolled to his side of the entrance while bullets and laser fire shot past.

“Sergeant!” she said. “Came to help you out. Anything to tell me beyond the obvious?”

The sergeant ducked back around the corner while his other two comrades kept firing. “Not really,” he replied, “other than the fact that we’re all out of grenades. We’ve taken down a few of them, but the longer this goes on, the more of ‘em show up. They’re putting out light fire now compared to a few seconds ago.”

Janeka scowled. “That can’t be a good sign. Al
l right, we can’t hold them here all day and we can’t fall back, so we’re gonna have to advance and push them back from around their corner instead. There’s a load lifter back that way. I’ll take over here. You take one of your guys to get the lifter unfastened and running, and we’ll roll it down the passageway loaded up with—“

A stuttering, high-pitched whistle and the screams of men outside of her
arm’s reach cut off the rest of her words. Red laser blasts half a foot in diameter cut through two men on the other side of the entrance, leaving metal sagging from the corner of the bulkhead in their wake. The other three marines all jerked back around their corner rather than risk exposure.

“Damn,” Janeka spat. She rolled to the deck, coming around the corner in a prone position and firing before she saw the fat, squat infantry laser cannon mounted on its rolling tripod at the other end of the passageway. “Captain!” she called on her helmet comm. “We’ve got heavy weapons down here!”

She fired carefully, heedless of the wide flashes of lethal red light that came back in return from the cannon and the gunfire offered by the men moving up around it in support. Janeka took the foot off the man behind the cannon, sending him screaming to the deck, but her following shots couldn’t disable the tripod. The metal was too strong.

A new
cannoneer took the first one’s place. The weapon fired again. Her fellow marines fought on, but yet another of them died in a sudden flash of light.

“Perimeter breach aft of the engines!” she shouted into the comm. “Aft section! Get people up here right now!”

* * *

No one needed to follow any signs or consult a map to find the command bridge. The loud, intense and sustained exchange of gunfire provided a perfect beacon.

Alicia and Ravenell took the lead, pausing at a disabled blast door to look down the passageway. Stray laser blasts and ricocheting bullets provided ample warning against going further, but they got a partial look at the situation up ahead. Archangel marines and navy crewmen pressed themselves up against the corners of two sides of a four-way intersection, while a good number of NorthStar troops kept up a steady field of fire from behind a waist-high portable riot barrier further down the passageway. Behind them lay a sealed hatch marred with burns and chipped paint—but not a single hole or dent.

The two young marines ducked back around the corner to relay the situation to their companions. “That about the same way it looked when you left?” asked Alicia.

“More or less,” said Ravenell. “More of our guys, about the same number of theirs. They only just beat us here, but it was enough time to set up that riot barrier. We didn’t have anything heavy enough to break it down.”