Lieutenant (17 page)

My naked eyes were no substitute for the dozens of magnified cameras I’d previously had at my disposal, but that didn’t mean I was totally blind. There were now three clouds of debris where the troop-transports had once hovered, nor could I make out any sign of the enemy cruisers. While it was conceivable that they might be hidden behind the bulk of the Station, which was where
Javelin
was, there were no bright-red heavy-caliber laser bolts zipping past either. I could only suppose that this was due to lack of living targets. The battlecruiser was queen of the system now. If she were decelerating heavily, that would mean that I’d guessed incorrectly about the Imperial Fleet being in hot pursuit and that she’d have all the time in the world to bring us off. If she
wasn’t
slowing down, then we were either going to capture a boat or be left to die in her wake.

How could I know for sure?

I couldn’t, of course, and that was the ugliest, hardest-to-swallow truth I’d ever faced. Even asking
Javelin
’s captain such a question might yet somehow endanger her, so that was out too. But in my gut I felt that I’d reasoned things out properly, and that staying here where it seemed safe would be the surest possible route to death. So, I decided, that meant that we had to steal a boat and that was that.

Fremont didn’t want to abandon such a perfect little hidey-hole, especially not once the sick-making core collapse began flaring up more frequently and urgently. There’s a lot to be said for sticking to cover when the birth of a new black hole is both imminent and close at hand, and I couldn’t blame any of my troops for the way they looked at each other in doubt as I led them the wrong way across the outside of the primary bulkhead and into the collapse zone. Yet they followed, and that was enough.

The Station’s turrets had been built close to the engineering center in order to simplify power-transmission issues—a blaster fires energy, not a physical slug, so in essence the cores served as Zombie’s magazines. The bulk of the Imperial invasion force had landed in that area, so therefore there should still be large numbers of troops to be taken back off before things went kablooie. But… Where could they be taken
to
? Where would the assembly points be? Who would land where, and how would collisions be avoided? The troop transports were gone, along with the last vestiges of Imperial command and control on the navigational and logistic end of things. Every assault boat commander—usually a petty officer with little training in anything but basic navigation—would be on their own. The result would be—had to be!—chaos in the extreme.

Sure enough, when I cleared the last rise a dozen assault boats were jockeying for position to land on a patch of hull that could at most accommodate three, while panicked marines darted about the allegedly-cleared area beneath them. Finally one bore in and landed regardless, smashing at least three Imperials beneath its skids while the others circled and dithered. It was like a scene from the Inferno—hundreds of screaming lost souls surging mindlessly about and getting in the way of their would-be rescuers while a few individuals used their jetpacks to put all the distance they could between the dying Station and themselves. These latter would likely survive, I knew. But only if an Imperial fleet really
was
on the way—otherwise without the air in the boats they’d be goners in hours.

The wheels in my mind spun yet again—I hadn’t been able to plan this part out ahead of time. Then I looked back at my little force to make sure everyone was keeping up…

…and was struck with the stark contrast between the orderly discipline they still radiated and the mad, raging mob scene unfolding not so far away. If I were an assault boat captain, I asked myself, where would
I
rather try to land? Next to an orderly, under-control group of friendly Rabbits, or amidst a mass of rioting, terrified troopers liable to swarm aboard and prevent
everyone
from getting away?

The question answered itself, especially since all of we bunnies, even me, were wearing non-combatant slave-suits that carried no military ID chips. I decided to sweeten the deal even further by promising prisoners—surely the Imperial staff officers had assigned captives a high transport-priority so they could be interrogated while what they knew was still useful? Even better, almost all my bunnies were carrying Imperial weapons, just like I was. That was because we’d given the suited corpses priority for the Royal stuff to make them more convincing. “Everyone,” I ordered. “Throw away every bit of king’s military gear you’re carrying—guns and everything. Fremont, you and Nestor are to enable your safeties and keep your weapons pointed at the human’s heads. You two are going to pretend to be POW’s. Got it?”

“Yes, sir!” the chief replied, sounding surprisingly unruffled.

I waited until all the weapons had been discarded. “All right,” I ordered. “I want us all to move out into the open in a nice tight group, just as sure and confident as if we owned the place. Then, if a boat comes near, smile and wave like hell!”

38

It worked like magic. Given a choice between the maelstrom and an easily-justified and safe-looking alternative, well…. Our ride arrived within two minutes, and the airlock slid silently open. The loadmaster’s eyes widened at the sight of Rabbits under arms, but it’d been a strange and stressful day all around, and perhaps he wasn’t processing data so well anymore. I pointed him out to Fremont and, still smiling, made a furtive throat-slitting gesture. Then I worried about that particular Imperial no more as I led the rest of my Rabbits forward towards the cockpit. The pilot thrusted us off the surface without warning, and I picked up a nasty bruise on my right thigh. But otherwise it went off like a charm.

“Hello, Master!” I declared with vacant eyes as I stepped without slowing through the bright-red “No Admittance” doorway that separated the cockpit from the cargo bay. “Thank you
so
much for picking us up.” I tried to look proud of myself. “The major told us to get the prisoners aboard a boat, and we did it, we did it, we did it!”

“Good Rabbit!” the copilot replied reflexively, eyeing my Sword. I’d forgotten all about the thing, and clearly game-time was over. So, still much nearer to the Station than I’d have liked, I drew my blaster and held it to the copilots head. Beside me, the quick-thinking Nestor did the same for the pilot.

“Don’t move a muscle without being told,” I ordered them. “Keep thrusting us away from the Station. And bring up a tactical readout.”

“Why, you…” the copilot protested. Then he began to rise out of his seat—

—and without the slightest hesitation I splattered his brains all over the controls.

“Holy shit!” the pilot screamed. “Jesus Christ! I mean…”

Then I leveled my weapon at
his
head. “Wipe off the screen,” I ordered him, my voice still calm and gentle. “Then bring me up a tactical display.”

“I’ll see you in…
Jesus
!” he screamed, the last in agony. For I’d just blown off the toes of his right foot.

“We don’t have time for this,” I explained. “It’s also quite tiresome. Besides, I think I just might be able to fly this thing myself.”

“Ooooow!” he moaned, rocking back and forth.

“Wipe off the screen,” I prompted him. “Now. Or I’ll do the other foot too.”

“Shit!” he muttered, skin ghost-white. “I have a handkerchief in my pocket.”

“Dig it out,” I allowed. “Nice and slow.”

He did so, then used it to wipe the glass clear. Or mostly clear—it was still streaked up something awful. The tactical display wasn’t much like its Royal equivalent, but with just the one large ship left in the system it wasn’t too difficult to interpret. “The Royal vessel,” I asked. “Is it slowing?”

“No,” he answered. “But not accelerating either. No one understands what’s going on anymore—everything’s gone totally to hell. Christ! This was supposed to be a milk run!”

I allowed myself a faint smile. “It still can be, relatively speaking. Because my side
does
take prisoners. At least sometimes, that is. When they’re nice and cooperative. We’ve even been known to grant them refugee status.” I let that sink in a moment. “Do we understand each other?”

“We do,” he answered after a long, thoughtful moment. “May I please put a dressing on my foot?”

“Soon,” I promised him. “I’ll get Nestor to do it for you—he’s good at that sort of thing. For now, I want you to put us on a course to intercept
Javelin
—that’s the Royal battle-cruiser. I don’t care if you run the tanks dry or burn the motors out either one; get us as close as you can.”

“Aye aye, sir,” he replied, pressing what certainly looked like the proper buttons to me.

I nodded, satisfied. “Nestor, go ahead and get out your first-aid kit.”

39

Javelin
might often have been referred to as the fastest thing in the sky, but that wasn’t quite the literal truth. What people meant was that she was the fastest large interstellar warship in the sky, which was another thing entirely. Smaller vessels could be and often were much quicker, in the fashion of speedboats compared to ocean liners, and by virtue of their intended purpose assault boats were sprinters, designed to duck into and out of ‘hot’ landing zones as quickly as possible. No, we'd never catch the battlecruiser unless she chose to shed some of the massive delta-vee she’d built over a period of who knew how long. But we could come fairly close, if we were willing to totally trash the boat’s engines. For the rest, all we could do was hope.

Our first order of business was to turn off our Imperial squawker and mount the Royal beacon we’d brought along on the boat's outside hull. I sent Fremont and Snow to attend to that, though the former was perfectly capable of doing it by himself. I didn’t at all like the looks of the big white bunny, and felt he needed something to do. Then I had Nestor yank the dead Imperial out of the copilot’s seat and let the chief ease himself into place there instead. He and I were both engineers, but I didn’t have a tenth of his experience. Our pilot might or might not attempt something funny; if he did there was at least a good chance that one of or the other of us engine-room types would catch him in the act. Not that I thought he would—he seemed like an intelligent, reasonable sort of man for an Imperial, and after what I’d already shown him it’d take a raving lunatic to offer even the slightest resistance. He moaned once or twice while Nestor cut off his boot and bandaged his truncated foot, which was understandable enough. Other than that, however, all we got out of him was an instant “Aye-aye, sir!” to every request, as if the little cockpit were the bridge of his fleet’s flagship and I the most gold-adorned officer in Imperial history.

Like I said, he wasn’t stupid.

Communicating with
Javelin
was problematical at first—our suit-to-suit communicators didn’t have half enough range. But I finally established a link by broadcasting on the interstellar distress frequency. Using that for military traffic was a violation of the laws of war, but attempting to tote up the number of such violations that occurred during almost any large-scale military encounter tended to evoke rapid dizziness anyway. For my own part I’d already run up such an impressive sin-count that one more wouldn’t matter. “Captured Imperial launch to
Javelin
,” I said in the clear. “Do you read?”

“Loud and clear, launch. We note your beacon. Who and what are you?”

“Zombie’s survivors,” I replied, knowing that my words would incense every Imperial listening in. Which they certainly were, of course. Security no longer mattered so much, now that I knew for fact that the sky was at least momentarily clear. “This is Midshipman Birkenhead again. We’re doing our best to match your vector. However, we won’t make it on our own.”

A long, long silence followed. “Who was your tutor, Midshipman?”

By then I was tiring of the game. “Mr. Banes,” I replied. “And James has a heart-shaped mole on his left butt-cheek as well. He doesn’t know that I’ve seen it.”

“Well…” the voice replied with a chuckle. “We won’t be verifying
that
one, I don’t think. At least not up here on the bridge.”

I still wasn’t in any mood to laugh. “Sir, there are nineteen Royal servicemen aboard, many of whom have recently survived combat of the utmost savagery. Two are wounded. All have served their sovereign well, if I’m any judge. Plus I have a prisoner here who’s wounded too.”

There was another long pause. “That’s an Imperial boat,” he pointed out. “I’m not sure what it’s capabilities are.”

I turned to the pilot. “Life or death,” I warned him.

“Life,” he replied. “I’ve long since decided. Please, let me speak to them directly?” With commendable efficiency he reported on the capabilities and fuel status of his craft. “We can’t close you,” he finished up. “But we ought to manage something fairly near to it. It depends on exactly when the engines fail.”

“Right,” the captain replied. “I see.” There was an endless delay before he answered back, while every man and Rabbit aboard awaited word of their fate. “Damnit,” he muttered. “I could never face His Majesty again if I didn’t at least try. Stand by for docking instructions.”

40

After that, it was all an endless, excruciating ride. The engines grew hotter and hotter, and our eyes remained so firmly fixed to the gauges that we hardly looked up when Zombie finally imploded and over half the Station vanished from our universe. Heaven only knew how many Imperials died in the collapse—it was a shame at a certain level, because no one really had to have been killed at all. There’d been plenty of time for their marines to either move forward of the primary bulkhead or else climb into an assault boat in an organized manner. But it hadn’t happened that way, for a thousand reasons. I looked guiltily down at my feet for a moment, realizing that Lancrest’s booby-traps and my own barriers across the main corridors probably had a lot to do with the inflated body count, though not nearly so much as
Javelin
’s main battery.