The Lost Stars (28 page)

The ring on his left hand was concealed under the gauntlet of his battle armor, but he always knew it was there. Nothing else remained, but the ring
did.

His spirit felt the lift that imminent battle carried before it, and for a moment, Gaiene could forget the emptiness he fought every day and the memories he fought to avoid every minute of every
day.

The link to the battleship's external sensors showed the battle cruiser looming very close now. “Five minutes,” the voice of Kapitan-Leytenant Kontos warned over the battleship's announcing system. “Both
Gryphon
and
Basilisk
have broadcast acceptance of the offer from Haris and are altering vectors to join up with the battle cruiser!”

“THEY
betrayed us?” Lieutenant Colonel Safir asked Gaiene.

“I doubt it.” Gaiene hoped he was right about that and about his evaluation of Kapitan Stein. When it came to judging women, or men for that matter, he wasn't always successful.

Five minutes and four seconds later, the battle cruiser came to a stop relative to the battleship, only about fifty meters separating the sides of the two massive vessels. Openings suddenly gaped in the hull facing the battleship as the battle cruiser opened all four of its cargo hatches on this side, openings five meters high and ten meters wide, which were almost immediately obscured by a flurry of shapes coming out on trajectories aimed at where similar still-sealed hatches could be found on the outer hull of the battleship.

Gaiene and part of his brigade waited patiently behind one such hatch, other portions of his brigade behind other hatches, close to a thousand soldiers in full battle armor with weapons at ready. He would have liked to have more, but one freighter could only carry so many (life support had been almost overloaded on their way to the gas giant as it was), and a thousand should be enough.

“All scouts launch,” Gaiene ordered.

Clinging to the outside of the battleship's hull where they had taken position half an hour ago were scouts in stealth armor, invisible to the attackers. At Gaiene's command, those scouts pushed themselves toward the battleship, passing unseen through the oncoming ranks of the Ulindi boarding party and toward the big hatches on the battle cruiser from which the attackers had come.

Spotting and counting objects was one of the things automated sensors were very good at. Within seconds, the battleship's sensors reported the result. Seven hundred and twenty. “Almost half the crew of the battle cruiser,” Safir commented.

“Excellent,” Gaiene agreed.

The impacts of a bit more than seven hundred attackers coming to a halt on the battleship's hull couldn't be felt by humans in armor, but once again the battleship's sensors reported the arrival of the boarding party, pinpointing the positions of all of them and passing that information on to the combat systems in the soldiers' armor. Gaiene watched, feeling his excitement ramp up, enjoying what he knew would be brief sensations of being truly alive.

The attackers attached overrides to the hatch controls on the battleship. Other attackers waited nearby with breaching charges to use if necessary, but Gaiene knew those would not be needed. Kontos had set the hatch controls to yield easily to the hacking. He didn't want his new battleship scratched up any more than necessary.

“Stand by,” Gaiene said, feeling a deepening awareness of his heart beating and his breath flowing in and out. His hands gripped his pulse rifle, feeling metal and composites and death under their touch. “Follow the assault plan. All units, weapons green.”

He knelt to provide a steadier aim, leveling his weapon at the hatch before him as it swung open. On either side of him, hundreds of other weapons came to bear on the hatch. The battleship hatches, burdened by much more armor than those of a battle cruiser's hull, moved more slowly than those of the other warship but still opened with gratifying speed.

The attackers came swarming in at all four hatches in a coordinated assault that would have swamped the number of defenders expected aboard the battleship. Among the boarding party were only two squads of special forces in armor like that of Gaiene's soldiers, heavily armed and trained for face-to-face combat. As was usually the case, the rest of the boarding party were crew from the battle cruiser in survival suits and carrying a variety of hand weapons. All of the attackers were expecting to face a meager number of defenders similarly lightly armed and lightly protected. As they entered the battleship, the attackers were forced to bunch up at the hatches, coming in from the top, the bottom, and both sides, silhouetted against empty space behind them, forming perfect targets.

Gaiene's sight automatically zoomed in on his target, a single figure in a survival suit, clean and clear and bright in the rifle's sight. He forgot everything else for a moment, forgot the past, forgot the pain, felt only the unholy joy of having a clean shot and a powerful weapon and the sensation of his hand tightening as his finger squeezed the trigger, then the shock as the weapon fired and the target jerked from the impact of a hit that blew open the suit and tore a hole through the chest of the unfortunate man or woman who wore
it.

He instinctively sought a second target, but the rest of his soldiers had opened fire at the same moment as their colonel, and there were very few targets left.

Of the seven hundred twenty attackers in the boarding party who had tried to board through the four cargo hatches, over six hundred died in the first volley.

“Forward!” Gaiene shouted.

As the survivors of the attack force tried to gather their wits, Gaiene's thousand hurled themselves forward, overrunning and annihilating the remnants of the attackers, then launching themselves without hesitating into open space toward the battle cruiser.

Fifty meters is not a large distance, even when measured against the standards of a planet's surface. In space, it is nothing, unless it is the distance between you and safety, between you and your target, between life and death. Men and women who had literally jumped off one ship to hurl themselves toward the other crossed that fifty meters in only a few seconds that felt much, much longer. Sufficiently alert sentries in the battle cruiser's cargo holds could have seen them coming, could have slammed shut the outer hatches in that brief time available, possibly giving the battle cruiser time to accelerate away before the soldiers could breach those outer hatches.

But the few sentries posted at the battle cruiser's outer hatches were all dead and dying, slain by Gaiene's scouts, whose presence the guards had never suspected until too late.

Gaiene felt a dizzy sense of elation and disorientation as a brief stretch of star-littered space flew past, infinity on all sides, the hull of the battleship forming an armored wall behind him and that of the battle cruiser an expanse before him, the cargo-loading dock that was his objective growing very quickly before him as if he were falling into it. He barely had time to override the panicked reaction of his instincts, keeping his sense of orientation—
It is ahead of me, not beneath me
—then he had plummeted inside the loading dock he had aimed for on the battle cruiser, landing with a practiced ease that kept him on his feet, weapon ready for immediate use. His soldiers had varying amounts of experience with the maneuvers required to leap from one artificial gravity field through a gap of zero gravity and land in another artificial gravity field. Some kept their feet like Gaiene, some skidded to a running halt, and others tumbled, rolling along the deck before scrambling to their feet. The least experienced hit hard, flailing, disoriented and confused by the abrupt shifts in where up and down were.

Against strong defenses at the hatches, Gaiene's troops might have taken significant losses as they hit the deck with varied degrees of skill. But the battle cruiser's commander had seen no need to leave strong forces at the hatches, instead throwing his entire assault force into the attack. Before the battle cruiser crew realized what was happening, more than seven hundred of their comrades were dead and nearly a thousand armored soldiers were inside the hull of their ship. A battle cruiser constructed by the Syndicate Worlds, whose deck plans had been easily available to help Gaiene prepare this counterattack, whose operating systems, hardware, and software were as well-known to the soldiers of Midway as they were to the crew of the battle cruiser.

Gaiene moved past the bodies of two dead sentries as the outer hatches finally swung shut, this time under the command of his own soldiers.
“Try to keep from blowing out the atmosphere in the ship,”
Drakon had ordered.
“The mobile forces people say their ships can handle vacuum inside, but it can make a real mess, and we're supposed to take this ship as intact as possible.”

Some of Gaiene's troops had attached small Bedlam Boxes to the comm terminals and sensors in the loading docks, the devices generating a stream of misleading and deceptive messages, warnings, and reassurances into the sensors and internal comm systems of the battle cruiser. The officers and crew of the ship, trying to figure out what was happening and where, would waste precious moments trying to grasp the situation as confusing data poured
in.

The instant the outer hatches sealed and safety interlocks glowed green, his soldiers got the inner hatches open and began pouring into the passageways of the battle cruiser.

In places where emergency locks had been activated in time, breaching charges blew out those inner hatches, a delay of only a few more seconds before the rest of Gaiene's forces were heading for their objectives. “Remember the General's orders,” Gaiene broadcast. “Give the crew members a chance to surrender if you have time.”

Gaiene was one of the first out of the loading dock where he had landed, finding himself facing a half-dozen crew members of the battle cruiser who had been racing toward the dock. A single shot ricocheted off of Gaiene's battle armor before he and the soldiers closest to him opened fire and riddled the sailors through their relatively flimsy survival suits. “Didn't have time,” the sergeant nearest Gaiene noted apologetically.

“No. But that was their own fault,” Gaiene said, as his column moved along the passageways. The interior of a warship could be a maze to someone unfamiliar with it, but the heads-up displays on the soldiers' armor provided clear maps of the routes they needed to take to their objectives, with occasional helpful reminders such as “turn right here and take the next ladder down.”

Gaiene's column shrank as squads peeled off but remained strong since his ultimate objective was the battle cruiser's bridge, securely nestled deep inside the hull. Alarms had begun blaring through the ship, interspersed with frantic orders shouted into the general announcing circuit.

“Most of the remaining crew are at their duty stations,” Lieutenant Colonel Safir reported. “We're rolling them
up.”

“There are a few wandering around loose,” Gaiene warned, as his own column encountered another group of sailors still trying to scramble into survival suits. For an instant the two groups stared at each other, then the sailors' hands bolted upward, coming to rest palm first on their heads as they slammed their backs against the bulkheads. “Good lads,” Gaiene told them. “Leave a fire team here to guard this batch,” he ordered the sergeant.

The next group of crew members they ran into was either more highly motivated or simply had a lot less common sense. Weapons carried by the crew members swung to bear, but before they could fire, Gaiene's soldiers opened up and wiped out the pocket of resistance, the soldiers scarcely pausing in their movement, rushing onward as the last of the dead crew members were still falling limply to the deck.

Gaiene kept one eye on the directions to the bridge his heads-up display was providing, used his other eye to monitor the progress of the whole assault on another portion of his heads-up display, and used his other eye to watch for immediate danger.
“That's three eyes,”
a young Conner Gaiene had protested to the veteran who had told him what commanding an assault required. The veteran had smiled sadly.
“By the time you reach command, if you're any good, you'll know how to make two eyes do the work of three. Or you'll
die.”

Gaiene hadn't died though that particular veteran had, not long after imparting some painfully acquired wisdom to him. It sometimes bothered Gaiene that he had trouble remembering what the woman had looked like before an Alliance bombardment projectile had blown her into tiny pieces.

“Looking good,” Safir's voice reported to Gaiene.

The brigade was seizing more and more of the ship, resistance in most places crumbling as what was happening became clear to the survivors in the crew. “Don't relax,” Gaiene warned everyone. “Mobile forces can fight well when their backs are to the wall, and there are supposed to be a lot of snakes aboard this
can.”

“We found some of them!” a unit leader warned on the heels of Gaiene's words. “Snakes!” Brighter symbols popped up in an area far from Gaiene, showing a bastion of resistance where Internal Security Service agents were putting up a fierce fight near the central weapons-control citadel.

“Handle that, Safir,” Gaiene directed. Weapons control was Safir's objective, so she was already in that area.

Battle cruisers were almost as large as battleships but longer and leaner, presenting an apparently endless series of passageways leading to an apparently endless series of more passageways. The command staff in the battle cruiser's bridge citadel had awoken to their peril and were trying to lock isolation and blast barriers in place to seal off routes through the ship, but Gaiene's soldiers had brought the means to either blow holes through those barriers or locally override the lock commands.

Shouts of triumph erupted across the command circuit. Annoyed by the noise, Gaiene checked his display and saw that the nest of snakes had been eliminated. All dead, of course. General Drakon might issue orders that opponents be allowed to surrender, but snakes rarely tried to surrender and, if they did, were killed by vengeful soldiers anyway. The General surely wouldn't mind, as he knew as well as the rest of them did that snakes occupied a different category than regular forces
did.

Gaiene and the soldiers with him ran past a group of crew members waving enthusiastic greetings and bloodied implements. At their feet lay two others, both newly dead, both wearing the standard suits for Internal Security Service snakes. Another fire team broke off to guard the new volunteers who had formerly worked for Supreme CEO Haris before tendering their resignations in blood.