Lieutenant (10 page)

I was relieved anyway when we all made it safely, though by then the lead destroyer was nipping at our heels. “Keep moving!” I ordered into my radio as the Station’s hangar-bay doors swung shut behind us. Unless I missed my guess, it’d be a very long time, if ever, before they moved under their own power again. “We’ve got to get past the first bend in the tunnel!”

We managed, though just barely and me last of all. Battles fought in vacuum are silent, but quite suddenly the lights dimmed as the ever-present film of rock-dust was shaken free from the tunnel walls. It was the destroyer’s main armament, slamming into the Station and vibrating all the garbage loose. Then behind me there was a series of violent flashes as the heavy energy-bolts fired at point-blank range burst through the now-ruined hangar door and slammed harmlessly into the bedrock not twenty feet away. Or almost harmlessly, rather; a single sliver of stone penetrated my suit and bit into my calf. It was just a flesh wound; in null-gee it’d barely be an annoyance. The incoming fire wasn’t anything more than an annoyance either, I decided. No mere destroyer’s guns could harm something as big and solid as Zombie Station, at least not in any significant way. And the ships carried far too high a relative vector to board us on this pass. They’d have to circle around and brake. Which they’d surely do, of course. It was clearly their duty to mop us up. But I had at least forty or fifty minutes to get ready for them first. That, I reckoned, was plenty.

“Chief!” I exclaimed into the intercom once I was locked through and had good air around me again. “Where are you?”

“In the engine room,” he answered.

“Secure your boards and get down here to the hangar deck right away,” I ordered.  “I’ve got a rush job for you, and your whole crew’s here to help you with it.”

There was a long, long pause. “David,” the chief said. “Have you forgotten something? Like my rank badges, perhaps?”

“No, sir!” I replied. “Of course not. But sir… Have
you
perhaps forgotten that I’m a line officer and you’re an engineer? With all due respect sir, I’m in command here. The captain’s dead, and Lieutenant Jeffries has deserted his post.”

Suddenly Chief Lancrest seemed much less certain of himself. “I… I mean… We’ve always gotten along, right? So how about I come down and discuss this so-called plan of yours with you?”

I decided to be gentle. It probably was quite difficult for an officer of the chief’s age and experience to defer to what must to him seem a mere child. The chain of command, however, was the chain of command. And it would brook no argument. “Yes, sir. We
have
always gotten along, and I respect you enormously. But we won’t be discussing anything once you get here, sir. Because I’m in command, and you’re going to obey my legal orders.” Then I hit the kill switch and turned to face Devin, who’d suddenly appeared at my elbow. “Pick out five of your best,” I instructed him. “Load them up with demolition charges and grenades, and two or three spools of wire. Have them meet me here. Then take the rest of the Rabbits and carry everything all the way down to Bottom Alley. The gear on the mess deck, too—especially the rockets and that tactical nuke we salvaged. The further down our stuff is, the harder it’ll be for the Imperials to get at.”

“Bottom Alley, sir?” Devin asked.

Of course; he’d been working out in open space. “That’s the nickname for Tunnel Zero,” I explained. “The very deepest one that runs right down the rock’s core. And, come to think of it, hold out one missile for me. Send someone reliable to find me with it.”

“Yes, sir,” Devin replied with a nod. Then he was gone.

And so I had at least four minutes for myself, I reckoned. I used one of them to remove my left boot, and half of another to slap an emergency patch on the rip the splinter had created. I was just about to slide my foot back into place when Nestor spoke up. “Wait, sir! You’re bleeding!”

Of
course
I was bleeding; the wound stung like the very devil, too. But… “Nestor,” I explained. “There just isn’t time—“

“Yes there is, sir!” And just like that the little Rabbit was peering intently at my calf. “It’s not deep at all!” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a combination corkscrew and icepick, both of which devices he’d probably needed frequently in his role as cabin boy given the captain’s proclivities. Then he pulled a tiny flask out of another pocket. “Hold still!”

He was right; the chip was indeed lodged quite near the surface. The icepick dug it out almost as quickly and easily as a real surgical instrument would’ve. The whisky burned as it hit the open wound, but once the pain passed I felt a lot better. And the bleeding was down to a trickle, too. I started to pull my boot on again, but before I could Nestor ripped a large piece of his shorts off and fashioned the material into a crude bandage. “Hold still,” he ordered. “You’re wiggling all over the place.”

“Sorry,” I muttered.

“It’s okay.” Then he looked up and smiled. “I’m done, sir!”

“Good,” I replied. Then, despite the insanity and chaos I’d been dealing with all day, I forced a smile. “Thank you, Nestor.”

He sort of glowed for a moment, then looked down at the hull plates. “No sir. Thank
you
.”

18

The chief, his mates and the Rabbits with the demolition charges all arrived at the same time. Fortunately the Rabbits were accustomed to going last, because Lancrest didn’t waste a nanosecond before opening up. “David!” he cried from halfway down the corridor, floating along at breakneck speed. “Son! I don’t think you—“

There wasn’t time for that. “Go to Turret Ten,” I snapped. “The one that took so many hits. At one point the traverse and elevation motors were knocked out, so the Station’s people jury-rigged an auxiliary system. The Imperials slagged it when they boarded, but it’s an idiot-simple hoist-and-pulley set up. Get it working again, pronto! And see if you can’t connect a few outside cameras to the internal net so we can see what’s going on. Do that first, in fact. There’s not a second to spare!”

“But… David! The Imperials are bound to board us! And… And…”

“
Do it
!” I snapped, my face an angry snarl. It probably didn’t hurt any that my hand found my Sword hilt as well, though I had no intention of using it. Besides, at heart he was a good officer even if he’d never seen anything resembling combat and had therefore grown slow, lazy and sloppy. The clincher, of course, was that under the circumstances I really did outrank him and he knew it.

“Aye-aye, sir!” he snapped as his old training began to reassert itself. “Right away, sir!” Then he flipped himself around and, followed by his crew, vanished.

“All right,” I said turning to my Rabbits and shifting mental gears. These weren't sailors, I reminded myself, and had never been exposed to military discipline. They were also expert non-cooperators whenever they chose to be. Therefore an entirely different approach was required. Carefully, I smiled. “Thank you for your help, guys.”

“No problem, sir!” Snow replied, smiling back. Then his expression faded. “Nestor said you’re hurt, sir.”

I showed him the little patch on my calf. The clock was racing along, but with this group there was no sense in even trying to hurry. It’d just cost even more time in the end. “It’s not much. He bandaged it up real nice for me.”

Snow nodded. “He’s good at first aid, Nestor is.” Then he looked down at the demolition charge in his arms, and it was time to get down to business.

“We have a nasty little job to do,” I explained. “The Imperials are going to board us, probably somewhere near the bridge…”

“Why the bridge, sir?” Cutter asked, his brow wrinkled in confusion. He asked lots questions in training classes too, and I had to remind myself that under normal circumstances I actively encouraged him to do so.

So I forced another smile. “For two reasons. One is that the big guns are normally controlled from there, and even though they don’t work anymore that’s sort of automatically where they’ll go without thinking about it. Like how most of us always brush ourselves from the head down when there’s a million different ways we could do it. The other is that the hull in that area is like swiss cheese; there’s no pressure because it’s so shot up, and there’s plenty of holes for them to come in through.”

He nodded. “All right. I understand now.”

“Good! I’m going to take us to the place nearest the bridge where I can access to the ship’s computer. Once I'm sure of where the Imperials are going to land, we’re going to rush in and wire that whole section of the Station to blow. They won’t be expecting that, because people generally don’t blow up large parts of their own ships. In our case, however, it doesn’t matter. We don’t need it all anyway.”

“What if they land in more than one place, sir?” Felix asked.

“Then I’ll have to figure something out,” I explained. “But I doubt that’ll happen; destroyers don’t carry very many marines because their real job is to rush around and see what’s happening, and maybe shoot up a merchant ship or another destroyer now and again. They’ll want to stay close together because if they break up the groups will be so small that we might wipe them out one by one. That’s called ‘concentration of force’. It’s a basic principle of strategy.”

“Concentration of force,” Felix muttered. “I see.”

I smiled again. “Anyway, I’ll tell you guys where to set the charges. Then we’ll wire them up to a central board, and you guys will be done. In fact… once everything’s all set up why don’t you go down to Bottom Alley and take a little rest?”

Snow’s whiskers bristled. “Sir?”

“Yes?”

“These people are… They're same ones who made all the navy people here kill themselves?”

I nodded. “Yes. I’m afraid that’s basically the situation.”

“And… You’re a navy person too, even though you’re a Rabbit?”

I didn’t like where this was going. “Yes. But—“

“So,” he interrupted, speaking right over me in a manner no enlisted man would ever dare attempt, “that means that they’re going to make you kill yourself too, if they can. Right?”

It took me a moment to figure how best to answer, during which times the Rabbits’ noses wriggled furiously. “Either that or kill me outright,” I finally said. “But don’t worry! They’re not after you guys. All you’re going to have to do is surrender—in fact, I promise on my honor that I’ll work it out as soon as I can. Though it won’t be to these destroyers, I fear—things are happening much too…”

My voice trailed off as I realized that all five of the Rabbits were staring at me in abject horror. Snow was the first to recover, however, as usual. “Well,” he said, exchanging glances one by one with his peers. “We’ll deal with that when we come to it, just like you always say, sir. In the meantime I guess we ought to get to work.”

19

There must’ve been a thousand books in print on the proper and efficient employment of military explosives. Unfortunately I’d never read any of them. So for the moment I was limited to the bare essentials—just wire up what looked like enough charges, and make them go ‘boom’. Simple, efficient, purposeful, sudden; these were the hallmarks of a successful military operation. Perhaps just this once we could let the ‘efficient’ part slide?

Once it became obvious that the destroyers were indeed making a close approach to the Station’s bridge, we began wiring the place up like a bunch of long-eared demons. It was glorious in a way, destroying what was quite possibly the most expensive part of the costliest installation in Royal space. I personally emplaced a satchel charge right next to the Station’s billion-credit main targeting computer—it looked like it’d make fine shrapnel indeed. And later I found out that Snow set up another right under the Station Commander’s seat. We stuck the things practically everywhere, so many that we barely had time to finish before the destroyers braked to a halt just a couple hundred yards outside the Station’s skin.

Then we waited. But not so very long, because the Imperials were nothing if not well-drilled. They formed up beautifully outside their ships, coalesced into a single mass of perhaps fifty men, and began thrusting our way. They might as well have been on parade. Best of all, they headed directly towards the center of my little minefield. “Well,” I said to Snow once I saw how things were proceeding. “I guess you guys had better fall back now. Thank you so much for the hard work! You all did very, very well!”

Snow blushed and lowered his ears; he always did that when praised. “Thank you, sir. But… Couldn’t we stay and help?”

I shook my head. “I’m sure you mean well, all of you. But you can’t have any idea of what combat’s like. It’s something you have to train years for, to ready yourselves physically and psychologically. Besides… We can’t let the enemy see that you’ve done too much. If they do they’ll treat you as soldiers instead of property and won’t accept your surrender. Then you’ll all die, and… and….” Somehow, I couldn’t finish.

Snow nodded. “Sir,” he observed, “if anyone knows how awful a battlefield is, it’s us. And… You weren’t trained for combat before your first time either.”

My jaw worked. Wherever I went in the universe, it seemed, the Rabbits all knew my story in the minutest detail. I’d never once discussed the matter with a single bunny, but somehow they always knew. “That’s true enough,” I admitted. “But… Take your Rabbits and go down below anyway, Snow. I’ll handle matters up here by myself. This isn’t your war, and you have no stake in it. So let there be some survivors this time, eh?” I smiled faintly. “Though I’m quite certain you’d all do as well as any humans would. I’m prouder of you all than you can possibly imagine—every last one of you.”

Snow nodded. “I see,” he said, his voice very soft. “Thank you for caring so much about us, sir. We’ve never had it so good.” Then, obeying orders as he always had, he vanished.

That left me with a little time to think things through and make final preparations. My armor-piercing missile had arrived, and on his own initiative Devin had sent a hand-blaster along with it. My ears burned with embarrassment when I saw the thing; how could I have forgotten to ask for one? But the embarrassment was also mixed with pride—not so long ago neither Devin nor any of the others would’ve lifted a finger without being told precisely what to do in painstaking detail, and even then would’ve taken as long as they possibly could about doing it. Now they were easily the finest labor squad in the navy. In all fairness I probably deserved part of the credit. But the pride I took in them far exceeded anything that might’ve related to ‘excellent’ ratings on an efficiency report. No matter where I went or what happened to me, Devin and Snow and Nestor and all the rest would always be my brothers in a way that even James couldn’t match. It was a brotherhood that reached down deep into the bedrock of who and what I was. It was
right
that they should survive the battle, I decided, right in a way that transcended even my duty to the navy. There was a spark in them now that was good for Rabbitkind and therefore good for everyone in the long run. If their fire had to spread in the Imperium rather than the Kingdom, then that was the way it had to be. But it was something altogether too rare and precious to allow a mere war to destroy.