Land of the Dead (43 page)

“She’s an old
Spear
-class cruiser,” he barked on both channels, hands light on his suit propellant controls. “Cargo locks are dorsal mount, to our right and high. All hands, maneuver on my mark. Mark!”

Mitsuharu angled to the right, jets hissing, and the black wall came rushing on. Even without a suit-comp to feed him intercept times and distances, his eye was keen enough to gauge the right moment.

“Team one, braking!” He blew the last of his propellant, but even this was not enough to avoid slamming hard into the shipskin of the old
Spear
. The junior comm officer hit next, then the marine. Off to their left, Cajeme and his team had done a better job, touching down at almost zero delta. “Team One is down, repeat Team One is down.”

Hadeishi staggered up, letting his boots adhere to the shipskin. The marine was cursing, his right arm injured, and the comm officer was just clinging in panic to the hull with both hands and feet.

“Up you get,
Sho-i
,” Mitsuharu growled, seizing her by the shoulder. The ensign yelped but got her feet beneath her. “
Joto-hei
, are you mobile? We’ve thirty seconds to get inside.”

The marine nodded, his face parchment-pale behind his helmet visor. “Good to go,
kyo!
”

The hull shivered under Hadeishi’s feet and he moved left, a lanyard snapped to the
Sho-i
’s belt, another cast to the marine. Cajeme had already scuttled towards them, sparing only seconds for himself before the demo plastic he’d slapped down around the periphery of a maintenance hatch offset from the set of massive cargo doors blew—a hard white flash stabbing at their eyes, sending everyone’s visor polarized—and the shipskin peeled away from the edges of the portal. A pair of remote-controlled antipersonnel guns had also taken the brunt of the explosion, and their short, stubby barrels were now pointed off at the distant stars.

“Team One, go!” Mitsuharu was at the side of the two crewmen with the magnetic rams as they slammed them into place at the edge of the hatchway, where the locking bolts were now exposed. Each ram consisted of a half-circle of molybdenum-steel wrapped around the magnet array and a fusion-pumped capacitor. The crewmen snapped the adhesion arm into place, stamped down on the locking mechanism to fix the rams to the shipskin and then—bracing themselves—triggered the two devices on a count of “And one!”

Hadeishi’s radio squealed, flooded with radiation, and the bolts tore free. Chunks of metal spalled away, spiraling off into the void. The crewmen cranked back the rams, peeling away the hatch.

“Team Two, go!” The engineers’ mates with the blasting plastic swarmed into the hole, their tethers taut in the hands of the men behind them. Mitsuharu spared a glance for the comm officer, seeing she still had hold of her comp and the data-crystals. The marine was right at her side, shipgun at the ready, his face a blur of sweat. The two engineers popped back out of the hatch, shouting “Clear!”

A jet of plasma erupted from the hatchway, boiling the shattered edges and licking out thirty or forty meters into the jewel-hot sky.

You’ve got company coming,
De Molay suddenly announced in his earbug.
We’re getting a storm of chatter on that circuit you pirated.

“Team Three, go!” Mitsuharu rotated in a quick circle, picking out the rest of his men, spread out across the hull. “Cargo doors first, then punch through to the shipcore.” He clapped a hand on the
Sho-i
’s shoulder. “We need to get Ensign Lovelace as far into the hull as we can!”

Then he toggled the throatmike channel. “Get out of here,
Sencho
; they can’t miss seeing you now.”

We’ll hold on just a little longer. I have an idea, but you’ve got to get clear of the outer hull.

Hadeishi’s heart skipped, catching a wild tone in the freighter captain’s voice. “You have to leave
my
ship in one piece, too,
Sencho
.”

De Molay laughed and at this short distance, he could see the black outline of the
Wilful
rotate on her maneuvering jets, swinging the main drives ’round to face him. Marines were dropping through the hatch as fast as they could, but Mitsuharu was suddenly certain they wouldn’t all get through before De Molay lit off her drives.

“One hundred eighty-six seconds to get them all inside,” squeaked a tiny voice at close range. Hadeishi looked down, seeing Lovelace crouched on the hull, her satchel clutched to her chest and one hand gripping a twisted piece of metal. Her eyes were huge and he suddenly realized she was susceptible to vertigo. “Three seconds for a marine, five seconds for a crewman.”

“You’re next,” he barked, seizing her by the lanyard loop on her belt and handing her off to the last of the Team Three marines ducking into the hole. “Get her core-ward,
Gunso
! There’s an engineering console at the junction of the fourth spaceframe and compartment ninety-six on this class—she needs to be there, and working, in eleven minutes!”

Get inside, Chu-sa; I’ve got gun emplacements in motion up here.

“My men are still outside,
Sencho
, keep your rotation and head back down the drive-wake. They’ll punch you full of holes other—”

The
Wilful
suddenly rippled from one end to the other as a wave of burning pinpoints and wild color swept across her. Mitsuharu gaped, watching in stunned surprise as the freighter pulled the raiment of heaven over her head and disappeared from visual sight. “Goddess of the dawn,” he breathed, “I’ve been sold a lame horse!”

*   *   *

Team Four was inside the hatch in less than one hundred and sixty seconds, though the time lag dragged into an eternity for the
Chu-sa
as he crouched at the edge of the hatchway, urging them on. As far as he could tell, the
Wilful
had entirely vanished. He couldn’t see maneuvering jet flare, star-occlusion, anything to tell where she was. Despite this, he guessed De Molay was waiting it out, hiding in plain sight, so when the last of his men had dropped inside the hull, Mitsuharu climbed down himself, squirting “twenty-four seconds” on his earbug before the shipskin cut off the transmission.

The maintenance hatch airlock was a wreck, all plasma-burns and torn metal. The inner airlock was no better, and as soon as Hadeishi was inside the hull proper, his radio burst alive with the combat-chatter of men running, fighting, being killed, the roar of gunfire and the distant unmistakable whine of a monofilament saw cutting into hexacarbon. The interior of the ship seemed mostly unchanged, at least on this deck, though the old Imperial signage had been torn down and replaced, or pasted over, with Khadesh equivalents.

The marine
Gunso
commanding Team Three was waiting as Hadeishi kicked through a secondary interior door, just past the corridors servicing the cargo bay. “Shut this hatch,” the
Chu-sa
snapped. “We’ve artillery incoming.”

A pair of Team Four
kashikan-hei
slammed the portal closed, rotating the manual locking mechanism. “Report, sergeant.”

The marine grinned, his faceplate scored with black streaks. “
Kyo
, this compartment’s secure and we’ve punched through to the shipcore along the immediate axis. Cargo elevators are knocked out, as is the tube car system. There’s atmosphere in most compartments, but not all. We blew out a set of blast doors at frame three and I’ve got the combat team pushing downdeck towards frame four—”

At that moment, the ship groaned and everything shuddered. The overheads flickered, shading from a Khaid-friendly bright white to a more normal yellow tone, then popped back. The alarms, which had been blaring since Mitsuharu had entered the primary hull, shifted tone—now they squealed like a pierced bladderfish.

“We’re hit!” The
Gunso
stared at the ceiling. “Sounded like a bomb-pod going off at short range.”

Hadeishi shook his head, starting to grin ferally. “The freighter’s lit off her maneuver drives. I doubt she’ll punch through the shipskin, but we need to abandon this corridor. Move everyone downdeck towards the engineering ring. That’s where we’ll settle this.”

Then he—and the others—were thrown violently to one side as the light cruiser went into some violent evolution and the g-decking on their whole ring fluctuated. Hadeishi hit the wall hard, feeling chitin splinter, and then bounced back as the decking failed entirely. He tucked in tight, getting his feet under before hitting the far wall. The marine had done the same. One of the
kashikan-hei
was floating limp, his faceplate filled with crimson bubbles.

“Move!” Mitsuharu pulled himself along the guiderail set into the wall, heading downdeck as fast as he could. The
Gunso
followed with the other
kashikan-hei
, the two men dragging a spool of comm-wire and a repeater with them. The hammering roar of shipguns swelled in on the radio feed, and from the sound of his team commanders shouting, the
Chu-sa
guessed the Khaid on board were counterattacking along the shipcore.

*   *   *

Fifteen minutes later, Hadeishi swung himself through a jagged hole hacked from a sidewall and into the engineering station at frame four. The room, controlling the cruiser’s dorsal power mains and shipskin sensor nodes, was tucked in behind a thermocouple relay and the motors for a pair of the big cargo elevators. Dead Khaid were webbed to one of the walls, and everything was scorched by plasma-cutter backwash.

Lovelace had found the main console, but she was engaged in a furious shouting match with one of the engineers when Mitsuharu reached her.

“
Kyo
,” the
Kikan-shi
pleaded, turning towards him, “she’s going to get us all killed—she wants to—”

Hadeishi stopped the engineer with a cold glance. His face was rigid when he turned to the comm officer. “We’re four minutes behind schedule and you’ve already been here at least that long. What’s wrong?”

“This idiot,” Lovelace spat, wrenching her field comp from the
Kikan-shi
’s hands. “Is trying to convince me we can crack the authorization codes for the shipnet interface by
guessing them
with something he’s hacked together on his hand-comp.”

“We don’t have time. Give me that cutter.” Hadeishi hooked one boot under the console, took the proffered plasma cutter—a small one, not the big industrial version they’d used on the wall—and sliced open the paneling directly under the display panel. “There are thirty-six billion combinations allowed in the authorization interface of a
Spear
-class cruiser, Engineer. There’s a lockout after fifteen tries in the base software—and we don’t have time to work around that.” He shoved aside a handful of hardwired data threads, and found—by feel—a comm node nestled behind them in the kind of socket that Defense Consortium salesmen liked to say was “easy to service, but hard to dislodge accidentally.”

“
Sho-i
, you ready up there?” Mitsuharu plucked a multitool from his belt and wiggled half his shoulder into the panel.

“Ready,
Chu-sa
.” Lovelace’s voice was tight and trembling on the edge of open panic. “Are you really sure—”

“It worked before,” Mitsuharu said, trying to sound as cheerful as possible.
At the academy, on a different class of training cruiser—but from the same manufacturing yard and design shop—if memory serves.
“Shorting the shipnet relay for this compartment—now.” He jammed the tool’s screwdriver into the node’s service socket and twisted to the right, grinding his wrist against the bundle of data threads. There was a sharp, bright flash and he felt his glove spark. “Done!”

The lights went out. There were a series of explosions very close by, followed by the high-pitched whine of shipguns on full automatic opening up.
I didn’t mean to do that.

“They’re in the corridor,” barked the
Gunso
on the team radio. “Power’s down in the whole compartment!”

“Hachiman’s spear, they’ve cut the mains!” Hadeishi popped up from under the console, finding the room had cleared save for
Sho-i
Lovelace, who was staring at him with wide eyes. The engineering panel was dead, along with the overheads and everything else in the room save one emergency light which had flickered on to shed a feeble reddish glow.

“No power,” she bleated, pointing at the lightless displays.

Mitsuharu glared around the room, and then caught sight of her field comp, which was still humming away. “Powercell—pull the powercells from everything you’ve got. Move!”

Lovelace’s face cleared and she tore open the satchel, dragging out two Fleet-standard cells, just like the ones that ran her comp. “Here—and I’ve an adapter!”

Hadeishi was back under the panel, one ear listening to the scrum in the hallway, with both cells in his hands and the adapter wrapped around one wrist. The
choonk
of a grenade launcher punched through all the other noise and he hooked an arm out, grabbing the
Sho-i
by the foot. “Down!” She yelped, pitching over backward, just as the doorway billowed with smoke, shrapnel, and the whine of flechettes. Two sharp
booms
followed, and then the marine
Gunso
ducked back in.