Battlecruiser Alamo: The Price of Admiralty (7 page)

Four of them quickly ran out into the corridor, taking advantage of whatever cover they could find, but no-one was in sight. The second team ran out, heading in the opposite direction. A few hand signals later, and Hunter made his way back into the shuttle, looking from side to side.

"All clear, ma'am. Ready to move out."

"Right, let's go. You got your scout picked out?"

"Voldinski."

"Get her moving, and we'll follow in thirty seconds."

"Aye."

Esposito turned to the pilot, waving a mock salute. "I guess this is where
we part company
."

"Something like that. I'll hang around for a few minutes in case you run into any trouble right off the mat." Orlova tossed the pad with the directions over to Esposito, who snatched it out of the air.

"Thanks. See you around."

The group made their way down the corridor, leaving Orlova alone in her shuttle. Nice kid, she thought, if a little out of her depth. Maggie sat back in her chair, looking out at the stars for a moment, then reached underneath her couch, carefully pushing it in two different places with an outstretched hand.

With a pop, one of the hidden compartments opened out, and a pair of old pistols, heirlooms as much as anything else, spilled out under her chair. She flicked a magazine into each of them, and lay them down on her control console, just in case something went wrong.

The troopers made their way down the corridor, following the instructions hastily scrawled by Orlova on the flight over. After the initial deployment, Hunter had them form into slightly less obvious clumps, in a bid to make them seem less like an armed raiding party.

One corridor blended into another with a series of twists and turns, the flicker of the bio-luminescent lighting on the walls testifying to a failing series of systems, odd chemical tangs filling the air as they steadily marched towards their objective.

Up ahead, Voldinski raised her arm in the traditional gesture of a forward scout to stand still; she made her way quietly back to the group, pulling a datapad out of her pocket, her fingers dancing across the keys.

"Warehouse ahead. Two guards, one either side of door. Bored."

Hunter nodded, turning to the officer for approval before pulling a long, smooth, bamboo pipe out of his pocket with one hand, a worn leather pouch with the other. Clarke likewise pulled another blowgun out of his pocket, and both of them slipped off their shoes and quietly made their way forward to the corridor junction.

A confused look crossed Esposito's face; Lance-Corporal Riley gave her a cheeky thumbs-up and a smile in response, which did nothing to dispel her puzzlement. The two veterans reached the junction, and the corporal dropped to his knees, both of them raising the tubes to their mouths, sliding a dart into the end, carefully drawing in a deep breath. With a chopping motion from the sergeant, the two of them blew at the same instant, the darts flying through the air to land on their targets.

One of the two guards went down instantly; the other took a few seconds to go down, grabbing at his collar as if he was unable to breath. Hunter sped back to the waiting troops, gesturing them on to the door, while Corporal Clarke quickly checked over the two fallen guards, reliving them of the clips for their sidearms.

Esposito whispered to her sergeant, "What the hell was that?"

Hunter pulled the blowgun out of his pocket again, "Primitive but extremely effective at close range. Don't show up on a scanner, and the drug on the tip of the dart knocks you cold for hours. They don't cover them in Basic anymore since the officers took over."

"Got any more of them?"

"Couple of spares."

"Get some more. And I want at least two men in each squad trained in their use as soon as possible."

He raised his eyebrows, slightly surprised. "I'll make it happen, ma'am. Very easy to
fabricate
. I guess we've got some crates to move."

The squad filed in through the doors, a pair of troopers taking position on either side while the guards were dragged inside. Their trousers were close enough to uniform-issue to pass a cursory inspection, and their jackets fit the troopers reasonably well.

As she walked into
the storeroom, Esposito pulled out the datapad with the required inventory and started scanning for the ident tags they were looking for. The room was huge, more than a hundred meters across, with racks scattered liberally around the room in what was probably someone's idea of order, crates scattered ten or twelve high around the room. The only sound was the whirring of air recirculators overhead not quite working properly.

"Hey, Sarge, look over here!" said Riley, pulling a box down from on top of a large stack. "This place is a god-damned treasure trove."

Hunter frowned for a moment, but Esposito shook her head, "Only take any crates that have 'Alamo' written on them or that match the tags I'm scanning for. We're going to have enough problems getting our own stuff home without dragging anything else with us."

The Sergeant looked a little disappointed, but nodded, "OK, you bastards. You heard the officer. Clarke, Flanagan, see if you can find something we can get this stuff out on. The rest of you start stacking crates, and I'd better not see you slipping anything else in our load!"

Sergeants were still renowned for their creative use of language, Esposito briefly mused. She was quite confident that anything of value that could easily be pocketed would be removed from the room upon their departure, and equally confident that none of it would ever be found.

While the troopers started to load crates, grumbling about the weight, she looked around the back of the room. A thin layer of dust covered some of the older containers, and she rubbed it from the label to get a proper look at it, squinting at the unfamiliar characters.

"Anyone speak Mandarin?" she yelled.

Voldinski put down the crate she was moving, slapping her hands against her side as she bounded over to the far side of the room, "My grandma was born in the Lunar Republic. What you got, ma'am?" Esposito gestured, and the private bent over to read it out, giving a long whistle, "Mark III Plasma Pistols, off Republic Spaceship
Ma Kong
. Date about two years ago."

"That's a lot better than the sidearms we've got back on the Alamo, ma'am," Hunter offered.

Esposito looked back and forth between the crate and the door. "Will our clips fit these sidearms?"

"Might have to do a little work with the energy interface, but I reckon our armorer can manage it," the sergeant replied.

"Grab 'em."

That opened the door for full-scale scavenging, of course, but it was probably worth it. The Lunar Republic had always had the edge on plasma weaponry, and they never exported their best kit. Getting those issued to the platoon could make all the difference at some point. The young officer looked around, and noted that the troopers were not even bothering to conceal their scavenging now, their pockets bulging at the seams.

"Got some grenades back here!", Clarke shouted. "Half-kiloton yield."

Esposito and Hunter looked at each other in shock, the sergeant reacting first. "You make god-damned sure that they aren't booby-trapped, Corporal. What the hell would someone be doing with weapons like that on a space station?"

"You sure, Clarke? Voldinski, take a look," the Ensign said. The private made her way over to the small box, reading the label and nodding. The crate made its way to the growing pile, with Esposito making a note to make sure that they were disarmed and stored very carefully in the armory when they got back.

"We're getting distracted now, Sergeant. How much left?"

Hunter peered at the pile and down at his datapad. "Two crates missing, but no sign of them. I make seventeen crates of Alamo stores and three more that we're interested enough in to take back with us."

"Three?"

"Riley found a crate of spices we probably ought to donate to the mess. Smart kid; obviously she's been exposed to ship rations before."

Esposito walked over to the door, where Clarke and McBride were starting to load the crates onto a pair of motorized trolleys. She looked over the dilapidated equipment and the worn tracks, then up at the corporal, who shrugged his shoulders with a 'best we could do' look on his face. Before she could speak, one of the two guard on the door ran into the room.

"Take cover!" he yelled, and the troopers threw themselves behind crates, pulling their tasers out of their pockets. A couple of them looked longingly at the plasma pistols on the trolley, but without clips they were nothing but small, expensive clubs. A pair of green blasts shot through the room, blowing out a pair of crates, sending shards of white-hot plastic raining down on the troopers.

"Plasma weapons? In a station? What the hell?" Riley yelled at no-one in particular.

The sergeant peered over the crate he was hiding behind, then yelled at the scout, "What did you see, trooper?"

"Six of them, in shock armor, with plasma rifles. Two of them took station in the corridor, the others heading for the doors."

Esposito looked at her sergeant, "What do you think?"

"I think we're screwed, and they knew we were coming."

"The pilot?" Esposito said.

"What do you think, ma'am?"

Corporal Clarke spat at the deck, "Might as well throw our damn tasers away!"

The ensign looked out over her first field command, and shook her head, "That's enough of that shit, Corporal! Maintain a suppressing fire. Might find an exposed spot."

"What's the point, Sarge?"

Hunter looked venom at his subordinate, who looked doubtful for a few seconds, then shook his head, pulled out the fist-sized taser and unleashed a couple of bolts, the rest of his squad following suit. Esposito looked futilely down at her communicator, but she knew that it was jammed before she even tried to contact Alamo. The sergeant gave a hollow laugh, then looked around at the squad, pointing to a few of the younger troopers to get into better cover.

Periodic
ly,
green bolts shot through the air, none of them hitting the espatiers, but sending them all ducking down even further for cover. One touch by a plasma bolt would be enough to kill a man. A full hit, and it would be impossible to tell that a man was ever there.

"They've got us nicely pinned down, ma'am. Orders?"

"What are they waiting for?"

"Reinforcements, maybe? They'd have a bad time taking us all in hand-to-hand, and if they wanted us dead we'd be floating outside by now. Orders, ma'am?"

She looked around, desperately trying to find inspiration in the stuff lying on the deck. Briefly, the thought of using one of the grenades entered her mind, but it left just as quickly. Those were strictly for battlefield use only; blowing a hundred-meter gash in the station wouldn't improve their situation much.

An
other bolt slam
med
dangerously close to the wall. If one of them hit the wrong place, then none of this would matter in any case – they were close enough to the outer hull that a misplaced blast would do more than enough damage. Her eye glanced on the trolleys, one of them half-loaded, the other still loading its cargo.

"Sergeant, can we run those trolleys remotely?"

The grizzled veteran grimaced, "That we can, ma'am." He peered over, then ducked down again as another pair of bolts blasted overhead. "But we'd have to get over there to set them to remote operation."

"So we've got a plan, all we need now is some sort of distraction."

Back in the shuttle, Orlova looked up at her two pistols again, and then back at the clock. It had been almost half an hour since the troopers left for the storeroom, and logically she should have left twenty minutes ago if she wasn't going to be distracted. Yet she kept thinking about that maze of corridors, kept thinking over her instructions again and again, thinking that they might have been insufficient to get them out again.

She looked back out at the stars again, reached up to an overhead compartment to pull a battered old cap out, and tucked her hair inside. The pistols went in a worn holster attached to a belt at least four sizes too big for her, holes ripped into the synth-leather. Almost imperceptible on the belt was the logo of the Martian Space Service, the faded lettering reading 'S. R. Orlov, 1st Lieutenant.'

Securing the hatch behind her, she ran through the corridors, taking short-cuts that would have been too confusing to explain, focused completely on what she might find ahead. A little voice in her head was telling her to run back to the shuttle and escape, to get out of there before the wrong sort of person saw her, but then she smelled a harsh tang in the air. Ozone. Electrical discharges up ahead, and big ones.

She raced further down the corridor, bringing herself to a
skidding
halt when she saw six men in the corridor outside the storeroom, all armed with dangerous-looking weapons and well protected from taser fire. While she watched, two of them rose and unleashed a pair of bolts into the room.

"Do what's right, Maggie," she muttered to herself under her breath, then pulled one of the pistols out of its holster, lined up on the shoulder of one of the guards, and pulled the trigger twice, the antique weapon jerking to the side after each shot.

Her target dropped to the ground, screaming, his gun rattling to the deck; without waiting for a reaction she ducked back behind the corridor, taking a quick look to see if anyone was following her. Three green bolts flew past her head, slamming into what was mercifully an interior wall, ripping gaping holes into the next compartment – suddenly alarms began to ring down the corridors, screaming of a security alert.

Hunter and Esposito looked at each other across the cover as they saw the gunman go down, and without even looking back the sergeant jumped over the crate and sprinted towards the trolley, weaving from side to side as another bolt tried to find its mark.

Purely on instinct, he ran his hand over the controls, flicking a pair of switches and tapping a button, before veering off and diving behind another crate, a second bolt right on his tail. There was a loud crash on the far side, a brief burst of whispered swearing, then a thumbs-up from the sergeant.