The New Space Opera 2 (44 page)

“Ram it?” Danny said. “Not precisely. I want you to prepare our way with a precision low-power integrator burp against that structure there.” He pointed out a specific area of the target ship's hull on their tactical display. “Oeerlians need a lot of water to survive these long trading voyages, and unless I miss my guess, that plate covers one of their massive water
tanks. Wink the covering plate out of existence, and the suddenly exposed water venting into vacuum should do a fine job of fast-breaking us. Assuming we survive such a ridiculous stunt, we'll end up already deep inside the ship's vitals, while Brodogue and his bullyboys are still setting up their phase door against its outer hull.”

“And if the water tank's empty?” she said. “This is the end of their voyage after all. They may have used it up.”

“Then I might just have enough time to say ‘oops' before we're crushed like bugs against the ship's innards. But our bounceback sensors seem to indicate there's some considerable mass behind that section of hull.”

“Compared to vacuum, even an empty tank's going to show mass, if it's pressurized.”

“Why would they waste expensive air to pressurize an empty space? Makes no sense. Oeerlian merchants are the very definition of thrifty. They'd never spend their treasure so liberally, and uselessly. No, I think there's water there and that's good enough for me. How about the rest of you?”

A quick glance at the rest of the boarding party indicated they were more than willing to take the risk. Winning the boarding race meant reaping the greater share of rewards. What sort of pirates would they be if they ever allowed caution to override naked avarice?

With a half-contained sigh of resignation, Kyal accelerated the
Egg
. “Strap in,” she said. “Structural and internal fields are at maximum—not that they'll do us any good, if we've miscalculated.”

She extruded the small bow chaser gun from the
Egg
's shell and fired.

Part of the fast-approaching hull disappeared before them and the tank wasn't empty.

Brilliant crystals of pure water exploded into the void like a behemoth vomiting diamonds. The spray engulfed the
Raptor's Egg
, pummeling it with a billion tiny impacts, as it plummeted toward the gaping hole in the merchant's side.

The launch slowed—some.

Friction caused by impact with the ice crystals began to heat the
Egg
's outer shell, which in turn affected the ice, flash-heating it into steam. And still they fell toward the gaping hole, surrounded now by a superheated geyser.

Impact!

They came to rest three bulkheads beyond the original tank structure.

After too long a time, Danny's eyes began to focus again. He shook his
head to clear the last of the cobwebs and realized that Kyal was standing over him. She was outfitted in her battle exoskeleton, which magnified her already impressive strength.

“Are you okay, boss?” she said.

“I think so. How're the others?”

“Boze is dead. Harness snapped and he smacked headfirst against the inner hull. Instantaneous. I doubt he had time to feel anything. Peeker's leg is broken, but he'll live. Everyone else is good to go. Your nose is bleeding pretty bad, by the way.”

Danny absently wiped at his face. His hand came away with a disturbing amount of blood on it. “I'm fine,” he said. He popped his crash harness open and grappled himself out of his chair. The deck was canted a bit under his feet, indicating that their internal field was off—including the boat's six artificial gravity projectors—and they were now subject to the merchant ship's internal field. He could hear a distant siren wailing from somewhere beyond his own ship.

“We've powered down,” Kyal said, anticipating his question. “Ready to go to dampers. The
Egg
poked a nice hole in the final bulkhead, forming a nearly airtight seal. There's a little leakage around the edges, but not enough to worry about. We won't need full pressure suits out there.”

“Good to know,” Danny said. “But let's carry emergency pressure bubbles anyway, in case the enemy panics and starts purging sections of the ship.”

“Of course,” she said, with an expression that scolded him for even thinking she'd forget to issue such an order herself. Danny noticed belatedly that his crew already had bubble packs clipped to their belts.

A few minutes later, the pirates crowded out of a hatching hole that opened in the
Egg
's blue shell, and then oozed closed once again, featureless, behind them. Danny took the lead, as always. Each of them wore damper packs, dialed up to full dispersion. No energy projection weapons would work inside their overlapping fields, nor any other advanced forms of powered technology. All fighting in this action would be hand-to-hand.

In one hand, Danny carried an old-fashioned novaplast shield, one of the kind he called a “pie plate” because of its small diameter. He preferred to move the smaller shield to intercept oncoming weapons strikes rather than have to lug a larger one that might offer a greater scope of protection, but at the price of added weight and bulk. In his other hand, he carried his anyweapon. It was the pride of his personal arsenal, grown specifically
for him, at considerable cost, by the mysterious Inomo Crafters of Core Polon.

Danny had his anyweapon formed into the shape of a short-bladed cutlass. Once they'd cleared the
Egg
's small hatch, emerging into one of the merchantman's considerably more roomy corridors, he thought it into a longer-bladed version and it instantly responded to his desires.

Like a pack of prowling wolves, long practiced at working together, they hunted the ship's compartments. Stripped to the bare minimum of equipment, they were able to move silently. Their damper packs ensured that none of the ship's internal sensors could detect them.

At a bend in a corridor, they encountered their first group of defenders. As Danny had predicted, they were Vuurick mercenaries, each one of which was outfitted in state-of-the-art powered battle armor. Because of the damper fields, the armor was frozen to immobility, as were their unfortunate occupants trapped inside.

Kempee the Vraal peered through one of the defenders' faceplates. He said, “The Vuurick thug sure looks surprised in there, Danny. And a bit scared too, if I read his barbaric alien expression correctly. Should we kill them, while we have them at our mercy? Their armor will reactivate, once we've passed them by, and I'd hate to leave live enemies at our rear, cutting off our avenue of retreat.” Kempee placed the tip of his fighting dagger at one of the more vulnerable joints in the defender's armor.

“No need,” Danny said. “Having foes at our mercy occasionally merits showing some—mercy I mean. We'll just strip the guts out of their power packs. Then they'll continue to be frozen in place long after we've moved on. It'll take an engineering team hours to cut them out of those shells. We'll be long dead or long gone by then.”

Neither Danny nor his crew wore powered armor, for obvious reasons. Even Kyal's exoskeleton worked primarily off of more basic pneumatic-hydraulic systems, needing one with her size and natural strength to operate it.

They sabotaged the power suits and moved on.

The next squad of Vuurick defenders were armed as they were with novaplast shields and blades. Danny caught the first of them half through a hatchway between connecting compartments and rushed to keep him—and the fighters behind him—bottled up there. Danny engaged him shield-to-shield, blade-to-blade. The Vuurick was bigger and stronger than the frail human, but his six appendages worked against him in the confined space. And Danny was faster.

They thrust and parried at each other for a while, neither opponent giving ground. The Vuurick carried a full-sized shield and used it to full advantage, blocking most of the hatchway with it, each time he needed to step back at arm's length and rest, or mentally regroup, for another sally. Danny quickly grew tired of the tactic and thought his anyweapon to extend its blade, and keep extending it, until it was thin enough to fit through the small sliver of space between the top of the open hatchway and the top of the lead Vuurick's hand shield. Once it was beyond the shield, quick as an attacking viper, Danny had the blade curve and grow downward, shooting forward too fast for the eye to follow, until it pierced the mercenary's skull.

The Vuurick fell like a sack of wet cement, while Danny thought his anyweapon back into a more traditional cutlass shape. Beyond the hatchway were nine more defenders, getting ready to surge forward, and Danny was out of breath. He didn't think twice about simply stepping aside, on his side of the hatchway, knowing with absolute certainty that Kyal would be right behind him.

Once the way was opened for her, she surged ahead, through the hatch and into the next compartment, picking up the dead Vuurick's body as she did so. Then she proceeded to swing the body this way and that, using it as a massive bludgeon. Fully surprised by this bizarre tactic, all they could immediately do in response was duck and dodge. That gave the rest of Danny's crew time to flood into the room, where they carefully picked their opponents and made short work of them.

“Are you okay, Kyal?” Now it was Danny's turn to ask, as he stepped into the room, after the last defender had fallen. The Sendarian warrior woman had a number of sword and knife cuts on her body. Her blood ran a lighter red than his—more the color of pale rust. Her exoskeleton had a few novaplast plates included in its structure. But they only covered the most vital areas. Full protection would have made the mechanism too heavy to operate, even for her remarkable strength. She looked down at herself in her usual, disinterested way.

“Superficial,” was all she said.

They continued on, advancing toward the ship's bridge, fighting when they had to and avoiding confrontation whenever they could. When the way was blocked, Danny would use his anyweapon to cut a new route through a bulkhead. Its unbreakable blade could be thought into such exquisite sharpness that it could slice through anything less than the outer-hull material. Once an opening cut was made, Kyal would peel back the metal
(or sheetplast, in some cases, where recent repairs and updates had been made to the ancient vessel) and they'd be free to proceed once again.

Less than twenty minutes after they'd first set foot out of the
Egg
's shell, they arrived on the bridge.

Brodogue and his prize crew were already there.

Three Oeerlians were dead on the deck, pools of azure blood seeping out from their bodies. A half-dozen more had been herded into one corner, under guard by two of Brodogue's bullyboys. They whistled their distress in music so sweet no human composer would ever be able to approach, much less duplicate it.

“I saw your trick, Danny!” Brodogue laughed, clicking his sincere admiration between his words. “But it didn't work! Inspired us to take our own risk and construct our phase door right into the bridge! Dangerous gambit, eh? All of the electronic crap between the hulls interfering with our phase picture—likely to short the door out mid-passage and cut us into bloody gobbets!”

Brodogue was lying on the deck, along with the dead Oeerlians. His personal aide, a trained medic, was tending to a vicious burn wound in his upper torso. The injury smelled of crisped flesh and salty decay. Yellow blood-pus hissed and sputtered out of the edges of the plasma burn.

“We made it though!” Brodogue continued. “And won!”

“How do you figure?” Danny said. He wanted to ask about his captain's injury, but wouldn't shame him by discussing such things in front of their captives. “We boarded the ship before you did.”

“But we captured the bridge first and took their surrender!” He winced as his medic squirted a thick paste out of a tube, directly into the wound's main fissure.

“It was a boarding race. We boarded first! Case closed!”

“Fairly argued,” Brodogue said. “We'll split the bonus equally among the two crews.” This elicited a short cheer from pirates in each crew. “You made me proud, once again, Danny. Well done!”

Brodogue died an hour later, never having left the bloodstained deck of the captured trader.

 

Danny watched from the
Merry Prankster
's bridge as the giant Oeerlian ship powered up its engines in preparation for the two- or three-week run it would have to make to build up sufficient momentum for even the most shallow dive into underspace. A prize crew from the
Prankster
was onboard and would take it to where it could be sold, either in whole or
stripped for parts. Looking in-system, toward the distant primary, Danny could still make out the reaction drive glow from one of the merchant ship's launches. It was packed to the scuppers with all of the surviving Oeerlians and their Vuurick mercenaries. With no diving capability in the launch, limited to travel through normal upperspace, by the time they'd arrived anywhere they might plead for help, the pirates would be safely away, back to where no one could ever find them.

The
Prankster
's crew (his crew now, he had to remind himself) had argued vociferously against letting them live. Those filthy, greedy merchants had caused their beloved captain's death, and such a profound debt could only be paid in the coin of wholesale massacre. Besides, in order to let them live, Danny had to give them one of the trader's largest launches, which was cash out of every crewmember's share.

At first, Danny tried to argue logically. Brodogue had always let the survivors go when he could. It was part of their ancient code. When it was clear that his imprecations were falling on deaf ears—or aural plates, as the case may be—Danny drew his anyweapon, formed it into a standard Kell blaster (the same kind that had so recently felled their captain), and burned the primary leg stalks off of one of the loudest protestors. He knew from long experience that any hint of mutiny had to be dealt with instantly and brutally. It seemed to do the trick. The crew returned to their duties, sullen and reluctant—but they obeyed.