Strong Arm Tactics (17 page)

Chapter 9

“Battle stations! Battle stations!”

The lurch that returned the
Eastwood
to normal space brought with it not only the normal blanket of stars, but also the red tracers of laser guided, warp-assisted missiles and the gray-white bloom of depressurizing explosions half seen by distant starlight. Daivid’s eyes stayed glued to the nearest screen tank as he ran past it toward the armory. The trade ships were under attack!

“Where the hell were you?” the captain of the lead trader howled, as the communication system linked into the ship’s intercom system. “They were waiting for us!”

“Stand by laser cannon,” Harawe’s voice barked over the speakers. “Battle stations. Repeat: battle stations.”

Wolfe detached himself from the wall and ran to the nearest ship’s ladder and all but slid down the spiral banisters six decks to his crew’s quarters. By the time he got there, the Cockroaches had heard the alert and had skinned out of their uniforms. Lin threw a CBS,P web at him and continued to put hers on. The beige, skin-tight suit felt warm for a moment, until the little brain sensed his body temperature, and lowered its own to match his. Wearing a web felt like going naked except for the faint pulsing that began as soon as he sealed the front panel. A gentle squeeze around the biceps told him the peristalsis was working. The compression action on some of the modified suits was more obvious. D-45 looked as though his arms were being swallowed by boa constrictors. Daivid did not want to look too closely at anyone’s front.

Daivid grabbed his communication bar out of his uniform sleeve and the infopad out of its holster at his side, pushed his way into the armory, looking for his battle gear hung with the others along the walls. Since he was tall, his suit was easy to spot, being one of the longest, and the only one with red first-lieutenant insignia on the chest, which would become invisible as soon as the suit was operational. He slapped the thin card into its slot in the neck of the suit. The tiny lights inside the helmet glowed into life. He shoved the infopad into a rigid envelope at the left side of his ribcage. Its computer functions, including data storage, hooked directly into the suit’s computer system. He hoisted ammunition cases and clicked them into their slots along the sides of his legs and the small of his back.

The others were bumping into one another as they pulled the semi-flexible armored suits on like snug trousers. Aaooorru calmly clicked his way up the wall and onto the ceiling to get his on, the only one of the Cockroaches able to avoid the scrimmage. The semicat Ewanowski kept half a protective eye on the corlist as he smacked his weapons into place. Wolfe wondered about the relationship between the two, who seemed to have so little in common. Software and her pal Somulska braced against one another’s backs to gear up, then checked one another’s weapons and ammunition. With a friendly smack, platoon armorer Jones sent Thielind sprawling, indicating he was ready to go. The burly Cymraeg finished by clapping the helmet on his own head and lining up in front of Lin. The three squad chiefs stood by the door, counting off their troopers.

“Hop to it, X-Ray!” Daivid called over the in-helmet channel, watching the seconds tick by on his heads-up display.

“Aye, aye, sir!” He heard none of the false ennui or backtalk. Screw around they might on every other available occasion, but when it came to the real thing, they were all business. Three tidy lines of heavily armed shadows stood ready to be deployed. Less than three minutes had elapsed since the platoon had hit the armory.

“Let’s move out!”

With smooth precision, the sharpshooter scouts slipped out the door and into the corridor. All around them red-in-blue figures jog-marched toward their battle stations. X-Ray fell in with several other units headed for Deck 6, forward. Each unit peeled off in turn, leaving the Cockroaches and Engineering’s own personnel moving to defensive stations in the forward compartments.

“Stand by,” Iry’s voice came. The stocky commander and her officers appeared in the midst of the squads. “You are designated companies one, two, and three!” Daivid saw the number 2 appear in his view. Immediately it was superimposed on the gold tags that identified each one of his troopers. “Company 1, emergency bay 6. Company 2, main pumping chamber. Company 3, lifting chamber and all ship’s ladders. Stations!”

“Aye, aye, ma’am!” Daivid joined in the chorus. He relayed the order to his chiefs, but everyone had heard the command, and were on their way to their assigned posts.

“Don’t any of you clowns mess up my plumbing,” Chief Winston growled over the in-helmet channel.

“Stow it, Winston,” Iry barked. “Get into position, now!”

X-Ray platoon spread out through the huge chamber, identifying entry points. Squads broke up into pairs who flanked the vulnerable areas under cover and trained their weapons, ready to take out intruders. Ewanowski and Ambering hit the floor behind heavy guns, one aimed at each main door. Daivid took up a sheltered position where he could see both entrances. Borden and Thielind had spread out from there, each overseeing one point. Telemetry was good: he had a reading on every one of the
Eastwood’s
defenders throughout the ship.

All during their deployment, voices had been giving orders over both the ship’s system and the helmet channels, “… Pilots to their ships. Squadrons one through eight?”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

“Launch!”

“Goddammit, there’s hundreds of fighters hammering the traders!”

“One hundred forty three,” Borden’s quiet voice murmured to herself.

“Emergency systems all green. Fire control all green.”

“Gunners at the ready. Fire at will!”

In his heads-up display Daivid brought up telemetry from the bridge. He saw the besieged ships pinpointed on a star map. The pirate cruisers which had deposited the one-or two-man fighters stood off at a considerable distance from their prey. Tiny blue dots shot from their torpedo ports: computer-directed missiles targeting drives, weaponry, and life-support systems that would have to be destroyed in flight. The fighters themselves were depicted as dark red dots, harrying the traders like gnats around a hiker. Clusters of tiny gold dots jetted out from the
Eastwood
. Blue-white missiles issued around them, seeking the enemy’s projectiles and ships. With their NLS drives, the missiles sped up visibly, then seemed to vanish. Some of the enemy’s blue fire appeared to hesitate, change direction and disappear. The only way Daivid or the others knew if they had cancelled one another out was if a blossom of white fire appeared suddenly in the midst of the arena.

Seeing the
Eastwood
emerge, the pirates began to take evasive action. Though it did little good to try and outwit missiles with computer brains, the marauders put the traders between themselves and the dreadnought. The action served to prevent the
Eastwood’s
plasma cannon from having line-of-sight in which to fire. The distances involved were so great that if Daivid had been able to watch the battle from the cockpit of a fighter alongside one of the traders, both of the other parties might be invisible. It was only in scale they appeared to be close enough to see one another.

“This is not crystal threedeeo!” Iry snapped. “Get your eyes back on your station!”

Guiltily, Daivid ordered the heads-up display to show him Deck 6 and his troopers. He was certain he wasn’t the only one who wanted to see what was happening, but he did know his duty was there and then. Hands clutching his machine gun, he waited.

And waited. And waited. His eyes remained fixed on the doorframe, though his vision began to swim. He blinked, then turned to the other doorway, holding it tightly in his sight until it, too, began to dance and turn white. To counter boredom, he counted how long it took for his eyes to recover, then covered his other target, back and forth.

“Got one!” crowed a voice Daivid identified as Thielind’s. “Uh, sorry, ma’am. Aye, ma’am.”

Under their feet the Cockroaches felt the ship’s drives kick in suddenly. Daivid could only guess that they were going in pursuit of one of the ships, perhaps the destroyer that stood off to starboard at an even greater remove than the cruisers.

“First blood!”

“Not
now
, Mose,” Daivid snapped.

A slight juddering vibrated the
Eastwood
from port.

“Were we hit?” he asked aloud.

“Shields holding,” Iry announced. “The bastards are swarming us. Are they stupid, or what?”

“Maybe their telemetry’s not very good,” one of the others laughed. “They’re looking at us through the wrong end of the telescope.” The others joined in. Their nerves were getting stretched, waiting for an attack that might never come.

Boom! The deck shook, jarring some of Wolfe’s troopers out of their perches. They picked themselves up, swearing. Adri’Leta retrieved her rifle, which had spun out of her hands.

“Come on,” Daivid chided them. “Hang on harder. Pretend it’s a beer mug.”

“Wish I
had
a beer,” Boland grumbled, but he clambered back into his vantage point, nestled in between a lifter and the neck of a tank.

“Me, too,” Lin said.

“Me, three,” said D-45.

“No, you 45,” Okumede said.

A chorus of groans erupted from the rest of the Cockroaches. “Oh, don’t start that again!”

“Sorry,” Okumede replied, meekly. “It was automatic.”

“Well, get back on manual,” Ambering chided him.

“Can it,” Iry stated. “They’re making another pass. Oh, hell’s bells!”

The words had barely hit the air when the ship shook again, more violently than before. Sirens and shouting erupted beyond the pumping station. Wolfe checked his telemetry to see dozens of red bodies rushing around. Had the pirates managed to board?

“They’ve holed us,” Iry shouted. “Lanyard mines! Man your stations! Get that under control!”

Lanyard mines took magnetic hull-piercing explosives and tied them into a long chain that went off in a rapid sequence like holiday firecrackers when it managed to cling to a ship’s side. A long chain, up to half a kilometer, could cut a section off a vessel. Every TWC ship carried patching materials that could be rapidly deployed, as now.

Another explosion rocked the
Eastwood
, this time so close to Daivid it jarred his heart. A black line thinner than his finger appeared in the bulkhead beside him, hissing furiously. They’d been breached! Loose tools and testing gear went flying toward the breach. Light-boned Software, in spite of the weight of her suit, went flying toward the gap. Parviz and Nuu Myi made a flying tackle and brought her down, Parviz activating the magnetic clamps in his boots. The hatches automatically slammed shut and locked.

Daivid turned down his audio pickups and bellowed into his microphone. “Commander, we’ve got another hole in here.”

“Handle it,” Iry snapped. “We’ve got our hands full out here.”

Inside the double-walled hull, cells of thick resin were punctured by the pressure of the explosion. Hydraulics pushed the goo toward the break. It was too slow. The chamber was depressurizing.

“Get the patch!” Daivid shouted, triggering his boot clamps. His troopers were already on the move toward the emergency repair station. He struggled to join them. The klaxons howled the warning. Implosion could follow at any moment. “Hurry!”

“We’re hurrying,” Lin growled back. Having to pick up one foot and place it carefully meant they moved like robots. The ship continued to judder as the tail of mines detonated. Their progress only seemed slow. They yanked the emergency release on the repair kit. A red plastic parcel the size of a large human rolled out into their arms. Even with the enhanced strength the armor gave them, the pull of the vacuum tilted them toward the breach. They fought to hold on to the kit.

“Six!” Borden announced, as the explosions finally stopped. “We’re sliced about ten meters.”

Daivid read the instructions, which were printed in white on the container. “That’s about all we’ve got. Let’s get this spread out!”

Lin drew her knife and slit the seals. The parcel unrolled into a sheet ten meters long by three wide by approximately ten centimeters thick. Getting it toward the break in the hull was no problem. Fighting the vacuum to get it placed where they wanted it took the combined strength of everyone in X-Ray. Daivid hung on to his corner, wrestling it up the wall with the help of Meyers, Somulska, and Aaooorru. Meyers wrapped her legs around a plumbing fixture and wrenched the far bottom corner into place. Ambering held it up so it didn’t drop too soon. High up the bulkhead, Boland, Vacarole and Gire draped the remainder over their heads, working it over the biggest part of the gap.

“Okay, sir!” Borden said, peering underneath the folds. “That’ll do it. Let ’er go.”

The ten of them let the fabric slide out of their fingers. It slapped against the bulkhead, sealing tightly. Daivid staggered backward, as the fierce pull of vacuum was cut off. They watched as the red sheet began to change color from red to white, indicating that the cold of space was causing the gel inside to set.

“All clear, Commander,” he called to Iry.

“Well done,” she replied. “Stand by … they’re making another pass, damn them. They must be insane; there’s only half a dozen fighters left. Hold tight!”

Wolfe and the others braced themselves, and counted. No booms resounded through the hull. Sixty, sixty-one, sixty-two … Daivid almost let himself relax, when a loud clank echoed from outside the wall he was standing on. He jumped back just in time. With a
BANG!
the hull imploded inward, spraying molten metal, then air whooshed out again. The alarms, just recently stilled, began to howl again. Another explosion came, perpendicular to the first one, widening the gap.

“Get another patch!” Wolfe yelled.

“We don’t have another one,” Lin replied. “That one was intended to cover a
number
of small breaches.”

Daivid looked around frantically. Improvise! They had to improvise. What could they use to cover the gap? Think, he gritted. Think like a Cockroach!

“The hot tub,” he said.

“What, sir?”