Throne of Stars (50 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

“Aaaaahh!”

Kapila hugged the deck as the air literally disappeared around him. The Mardukan fire mostly went over his head, but its intensity first superheated the atmosphere in the corridor, then expanded it to the very fringe of vacuum. He supposed he could return the fire, but there didn’t seem to be much point. If he killed one or two of the scummies with a shot, the rest would turn him into drifting atoms for his efforts. Even if they didn’t, a near miss would be sufficient to kill him. Flying fragments could easily punch holes in his standard ship suit, which would permit the intense heat to fry him to a crisp . . . which would at least save him from asphyxiation when his suit depressurized.

But so far, they seemed to be missing. He liked that, and he had no intention of doing anything to change it.

He rolled his head to look back up the passage behind him and saw that the entire unit was gone. One or two of them might have gotten back into the Armory, but he saw at least four carbon statues that indicated casualties. Graubart was still alive, though. He might even stay that way, if he got some prompt medical attention. Sergeant Gao, on the other hand, was just a pair of legs, attached to some cooked meat.

Kapila slid his bead rifle carefully to the side and spreadeagled himself on the deck, hoping that the scummies would settle for just capturing him.

Of course, he’d heard that scummies tortured their prisoners to death. But if it was a question of the possibility of torture, or absolutely buying it from a plasma blast, he’d go for the possibility any day.

“Cease fire,” Fain ordered as he stepped around a gaping hole in the deck. His troopers’ fire had opened the bulkheads on either side of the passage to the surrounding compartments, and the wrecked corridor sparked with electricity and finely divided steam. The ChromSten reinforced Armory had shrugged off most of the damage, and now most of one of its walls and its support structure—which had taken a beating—could be seen through the gaps in the bulkheads. All in all, they’d done quite a bit of damage, he reflected. But as long as they were in their suits, the environmental conditions were survivable. Actually, things were looking good; the Armory hatch was shut, and the passage was secure.

“Sergeant Sern, take four men and secure the far end of the hall.” He fumbled with his radio some more until he managed to shift frequencies. “Captain Pahner, we have the corridor outside the Armory. The doors are shut, though.”

There was a human—presumably one of the “Saint Commandos”—lying face-down on the deck. He didn’t appear to be injured, but he had his fingers interlaced on the back of his helmet, and he wasn’t moving. Fain gestured to Pol, who picked the wretch up by the back of his uniform and dangled him in the air.

“And it seems that we have a prisoner, too.”

Roger rounded the corner to the bridge entrance and stopped, shaking his head in awe. The ship was trashed. Indeed, never in his worst nightmares had he ever imagined that a ship
could
be so trashed and still hang together.

More or less.

The deck looked as if it had been carved by a giant kindergartner who had somehow gotten his hands on an absentmindedly mislaid blowtorch. The heavy-duty plastic of the decksole had melted and splashed, leaving jagged splatters, like impressionistic stalagmites, on the bulkheads and huge dripping holes in the deck itself. The bulkheads had sustained major damage of their own, as well. Many of the holes blasted through them were large enough for battle armor to crawl through into the surrounding compartments. One of the larger ones led to what had once been the captain’s day cabin, which was as thoroughly trashed as the passageway itself.

And the Bridge hatch was, once again, firmly shut.

Roger sighed as the drifting smoke and steam suddenly moved sideways and disappeared. He didn’t have to look at the red vacuum morning light on his helmet HUD to figure out what had just happened.

“Memo to self,” he muttered. “Giving Mardukans—or Marines, for that matter—plasma cannon on a ship assault is contraindicated.”

Honal followed the first entry team into the shuttle bay, then dove sideways as a blast of bead-fire tore the three Vashin apart. Fire seemed to be coming from everywhere in the open bay, but the majority of the human defenders were on the far side, near the bay’s huge outer hatches. It was easy enough to tell where they were, but doing anything about it was another matter, because they’d taken shelter behind a massive raised plate which undoubtedly did something significant when shuttles were parked in the vast, cavernous space.

Honal favored bead rifles over cannons, since the full-sized rifles—after suitable reshaping by Poertena—made a short, handy carbine for someone the size of a Mardukan. Now he used his to return fire, walking the beads along the top of the plate. Each hit tore a chunk out of the top of the device—whatever it was—but didn’t seem to faze any of the humans crouched behind it.

The rest of the Vashin entered behind him, but the fire which greeted them was murderous. Besides the Saints by the main airlocks, there were more scattered on catwalks around the bay, and some sheltering by a second set of hatches. The combined crossfire had the Vashin pinned down in the open, without any cover of their own, and the defenders were methodically massacring them.

“The hell with this!” Honal snarled. He and the human Mansul were partially sheltered by a control panel. It had taken a few hits, but it was still functional, judging by the red and green flashing symbols above the buttons at its center. He contemplated the device for a moment, and then smiled.

“Mansul, can you work this thing?”

Harvard Mansul had been in a few tight situations in his life. He’d dealt with bandits on more than one occasion, and even done a small piece on them at one point. Then there’d been the pirates. He’d been on a ship once when it was boarded by pirates, but the head of the group had been an IAS reader and let him go. In fact, he’d been sent on his way with an autographed photo of the suitably masked pirate leader. He’d been shot at by inner city gangs, stabbed doing a shoot in Imperial City, and nearly died that time his team got lost in the desert. Then there’d been being picked up by the Krath and imprisoned by a batch of ritualistic cannibals. That had been unpleasant.

But being pinned down by a Saint Special Operations team raised “unpleasant” to a new high. Nothing else on the list of his previous life experiences even came close. So sticking his head up to look at the control panel was not high on his list of priorities.

But he took a quick peek, anyway.

“Hatches, grav, cargo handling, environmental!” he shouted, pointing to the appropriate sections of the panel in turn. “What are you going to do?”

“Play a practical joke.”

“Here goes nothing,” Honal muttered to himself, and hit a green button.

Nothing happened. He waited a heartbeat or two to be certain of that, then grimaced. Time for Phase Two, he thought, and lifted the clear, protective plastic box over the red button beside the green.

He depressed it.

The blast of wind from the half-melted hatch behind him shoved him into the control panel hard, but that was about all. The Saints on the far side of the bay, with their backs to the opening shuttle bay doors, were less fortunate. More than half of them were picked up and sucked out the opening portal before they could react. The rest, unfortunately, managed to find handholds and hung on until the extremely brief blast of pressure change stopped. Then they opened fire again.

“Well,
that
didn’t work,” Honal grumbled irritably. The brief delight he’d felt when the first humans vanished out the opening only made his irritation when the others didn’t even more intense, and he contemplated the controls again. Mansul’s description of their functions was considerably less than bare bones, he reflected. And he, after all, was only an ignorant Vashin
civan
-rider. It was unreasonable to expect him to actually understand what any of them did, so perhaps he should simply do what came naturally.

He started hitting buttons at random.

Lights went on and off. Panels appeared out of the deck and rose, and other panels disappeared, while cranes and pulleys and less readily identifiable pieces of equipment dashed back and forth on overhead rails. Honal had no idea what any of the fascinating, confusing movements and energy were supposed to achieve under normal conditions. But he didn’t much care, either, when one of the buttons lowered the platform the Saints had been sheltering behind into the deck. And then, finally, the gravity itself disappeared.

Honal watched an astonished Saint commando spin over in mid-air—well, mid-vacuum, the Vashin noble corrected himself—when he fired his bead rifle just as someone snatched the shuttle bay’s gravity away from him. The Saint sailed helplessly out into the open, propelled by the unexpected reaction engine his rifle had just become, and then exploded in a grisly profusion of crimson blood beads as a burst of someone’s fire tore him almost in half.

“Now this is more like it!” Honal said with a huge, human-style grin as he drew his sword and gripped the top of the control center with his false-hands as if it were a vaulting horse. “Vashin! Up and at ’em!
Cold steel!
”

“Roger, what’s your position?” Pahner asked.

For a wonder, it looked as if things might be stabilizing. Georgiadas had managed to kill enough of the Saints counter-attacking his position to hold on until the Diasprans arrived. Now he had Engineering intact, and while there might (or might not) still be a few of the enemy inside the Armory, Krindi Fain’s troops had it isolated and fully contained. The counterattack by
Emerald Dawn
’s bridge personnel had also been stopped, and the Vashin were running rampant. Pahner’s own area was still pressurized, but two-thirds of the ship had lost pressure, and large portions of the internal gravity net had been shut down. The Northern cavalry had developed a positive liking for zero-g combat. Which was just . . . sick.

He didn’t want to think about the hideous price his people and their Mardukan allies had paid, but the Saints were clearly on the defensive and well on the way to completely losing their ship. Now if they could only talk
Emerald Dawn
’s surviving officers out of the Bridge before they did irreparable harm.

“I’m at the Bridge security point. Gronningen’s dead, and Julian is injured. About the only ones standing are Moseyev, Aburia, and Macek, and even they aren’t in very good shape; I’d put their armor at no more than thirty percent of base capability. Max. I’m getting ready to negotiate with the Saint commander.”

“Understood.” Pahner waved for Temu Jin to stay where he was, monitoring the hacked infonet, then headed up the passageway at a trot. “Wait until I get there. I’ve seen the results of your negotiations too many times.”

“Saint commander, this is Prince Roger.”

Giovannuci looked over at the sweating tactical officer. Sergeant Major Iovan, who’d been with the colonel since Giovannuci was a shavetail, stood with a bead pistol screwed into Cellini’s ear. Having a gun in one’s ear could make just about anyone sweat, but the tactical officer was looking particularly wan. It had taken a while to get him to give up his release codes, and even longer for the computer to accept them. Probably because of his stammering. But now he seemed more or less resigned to his fate.

“Well, Prince Roger, or whoever you are. This is Colonel Fiorello Giovannuci, Imperial Cavazan Special Operations Branch. What can I do for you?”

“You can surrender your ship. I gave you one chance, and now most of your crew, and commandos, are dead. Last chance. Surrender, and we’ll spare the rest. Resist, and I’ll give you all to the Krath. They’re ritualistic cannibals, but they don’t get squeamish about humans.”

“Well, I’ll give
you
a couple of choices, buddy,” the Saint snarled furiously. “Get off my ship, or I’ll blow it up!”

“Talk to me, Armand,” Roger said, looking at the sealed hatch.

“I’m on my way to the Bridge. Engineering and the Armory are secured. Captain Fain just took the Armory. But we’ve got to figure out what to do about this scuttling threat.”

“Do think he’s serious?” Roger asked. “He sounds that way.”

“
Most
Saints aren’t true-believers,” Pahner said. “Unfortunately, I’ve heard of Giovannuci, and he
is
. Hold one, Your Highness. Computer: patch Kosutic.”

“Kosutic,” the sergeant major acknowledged, peering over her bead rifle’s sights at the Saints she’d captured. “I think we’ve got most of the actual ship’s crew, Armand. They seem a lot less interested in dying gloriously than the commandos.”

“Good, but we have a situation,” Pahner told her. “Tell me what you know about Saint scuttling charges.”

“I take it this isn’t an academic exercise,” she said with a grimace. “They’re always timer-delayed. They require a code and a key to activate—two of them, actually; they can’t be set by just one person. They require at least one key and code to deactivate, but any key and code will work. They work on the basis of positive action locks; if you don’t have the code and key, you’re not going to turn them off. Authorized code/key holders are usually the CO, the exec, the tactical officer, and the chief engineer.”