Poor Man's Fight (54 page)

Lauren
blinked, then realized what he meant. She inhaled deeply just before the blast seals opened. Air rushed out into the empty passageway as Tanner walked through. More air pumped into the bridge from its independent emergency supply, replenishing the atmosphere until the hatch closed behind him.

Then he was gone.
Lauren had only the pain of her injured arms and the endless loop of Tanner’s mayday call to keep her company.

***

“Oh, Christ, Jesus
fuck
, Casey,” Carl ranted, frantically looking from one sensor readout to the next on the bridge of
Polaris
, “there’s gotta be five hundred guys out there just floating in space!
Our
guys! I can’t get goddamn anyone on a comms channel over on
Vengeance
. I think they’re all dead!”

“Calm down, Carl,” he heard
Casey say in an even tone. “You’re still alive and you’ve still got the bridge. We’re still in control of this ship. They might not all be gone on
Vengeance
. We had guys fighting a fire, right? They’d be suited up for that. Right, Wilson?”

Carl turned to his comms screens then, looking to the one dedicated to
Wilson and the engineering boarding team for some reassurance. It wasn’t forthcoming. “If he emergency vented the whole ship from the bridge, it might not matter,” answered Wilson. “The system’s designed to expel everything from engineering that isn’t welded or bolted to the ship, so—“

“Okay, nevermind,”
Casey interrupted. “Don’t worry about them. Either they made it or they didn’t. Nothing we can do about it from here. Carl, do another security monitor sweep of this ship. Make sure none of our hostages have slipped away and gotten squirrely without us noticing. And keep the bridge crew up there in check. Wilson, I need an estimate on how long it’ll take to get this ship’s propulsion going again. FTL and sublight. How do we look?”

“We’ve
almost got the thrusters online. Just give us a few more minutes to button things up the rest of the way and we should be ready to run tests on the sublight drives. FTL should be ready in another ten or fifteen.”

“Can’t you work any faster?” pressed Carl. “Maybe we oughta grab some snipes from the
Pride’s
crew and force ‘em to help?”

“And give them a chance to sabotage us?”
Wilson shot back. “It would be one thing if someone volunteered, but pressed for time like this? Too tempting for some snipe to be a hero. I know what I’m doing, Carl!”

“But—!”

“Excellent,” Casey broke in. “Keep at it, Wilson. See, Carl? We’re gonna be fine.”

There was a moment of silence. Then, “Boss, I don’t like the way the bridge crew up here is looking at us. Should I just smoke ‘em?”

“Christ,” Casey muttered under his breath. Then he turned his voice back to the comms channel. “No, Carl, don’t smoke ‘em. Don’t kill anybody you don’t have to. Every one of these fuckers we kill might be money down the drain. We’re gonna need ransoms to buy our way back out of this hole.” He cut the audio on his holocom and looked over to Chang. “I’ve gotta go up there and settle his ass down before he does something stupid. Probably should be on the bridge, anyway.”

Chang merely nodded. “Keep the channels open.”

The pirate captain walked out.

As soon as he was gone, Chang turned to Turtle. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”

***

Despite the destroyer’s uncontrolled drift,
Vengeance
and the
Pride
hadn’t yet come far apart. Tanner stood on the destroyer’s outer hull, held in place by the magnetic pads in his boots as he assessed the distance by eye. His fear had not abated so much as grown familiar. This was no less insane than everything else he’d done today. Suicidal or not, though, his work was not done. Every minute the two ships remained stranded was another minute for help to arrive. With that in mind, he pointed himself toward the aft quarter of the
Pride of Polaris
, inhaled deeply and jumped.

Too hard
, he realized as soon as his feet left
Vengeance
.
Way too hard.
Shit. Shit.
Tanner scolded himself bitterly as the
Pride
rushed up much faster than he expected. He had strapped a portable (as if!) plasma cutter to his back along with two or three more weapons. That much extra mass would make for a rough landing if he wasn’t careful. He realized as he crossed the empty space that he hadn’t been careful at all.

Nothing for it
. Tanner unstrapped the plasma cutter from his back, holding it well away from his body as he closed on the liner’s hull. He couldn’t risk bouncing off, either; he’d just have to suck this up and hope he didn’t break any bones. Tanner put the magnetic pads in his vac suit on full strength and hoped for the best.

“Ooof!” He fell against the hull about as roughly as he’d feared. Tanner landed on his feet, knees bent loosely and ready to fall backward as inertia, momentum, magnetics and his body mass came together in a mess of physics he didn’t want to think about. He bounced despite the magnets in his vac suit, but
he didn’t float far before being pulled back to the hull once more. He didn’t hear the plasma cutter hit the deck, and then he remembered why he couldn’t hear anything out in space. It took only a moment to regain his jarred senses.

He risked several long jumps along the hull, feeling sore all over as he moved and wishing he’d allowed himself more in the way of painkillers. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Chief
Everett scolded him for his bitching. He kept moving.

At the edge of the
Pride’s
starboard main thruster, Tanner inhaled deeply to brace himself for what really made zero-g ops unpleasant. He took a step over the side, magnetic treads meeting with the hull to reorient his personal sense of up and down, and then with two more steps he did it yet again. In those few meters of movement, he turned himself completely upside down from where he’d stood a moment ago. Tanner walked into the gaping maw of the
Pride’s
thruster, keying up the power sequence on his plasma cutter along the way.

She
suffered damage here. Nasty gouges had been cut into the metal by
Vengeance
’s lasers. The
Pride
had been built with automatic sealing chemical jets all across her vital areas; as soon as breaches occurred, the affected area filled up with foam. He saw the remnants, and he could see where new plating had been hurriedly welded in place from the inside.

Tanner only knew the very basics of ship propulsion, but
now he felt desperately grateful for all the sadistic repair chores Everett dreamt up in basic training. A common crewman like him had no idea how to fix a starship engine, but he knew a damage control patch when he saw one… and he knew how to use the tools he had to get through it.

“Hope they don’t have any of the ship’s engineers in here working for ‘em,” Tanner said to himself as he got to cutting.

***

Casey
sank into the captain’s chair at the center of the bridge, looking over the shoulders of three of his people at the control consoles arranged in front of him. Not every station on the bridge was manned, but not every one of them needed to be.

Off to one side sat Carl, doing his best to keep his hands steady as he drank from a mug. Opposite Carl
were the hostages from the bridge crew. Someone had seen to the junior astrogator’s wounded leg. Wisely, they kept quiet. Casey could see plenty of fear in their eyes, which was good, but it wasn’t the sort of fear he normally saw from hostages. These weren’t people facing a dreadful but unavoidable unknown. These bastards still had hope.

He tried not to think about that. He
focused instead on settling the issue. Casey called up main engineering on his primary viewscreen. “Wilson,” he said, “talk to me. How we doing?”

Wilson
looked up from his control bank at the two-way viewscreen above him. “Running through our checklists now. Systems are all buttoned up, breaches are all sealed. Main power is online and stable.” His eyes darted from one area to the next as he spoke, reviewing data screens and gesturing to his crew of techs and machinists. “Power flow checklist from drives to thrusters complete. Main thruster ignition safety check is good. Stabilizers look…” Wilson frowned. “Shit.”

“What is it?”
Casey asked, but he could already hear someone beyond Wilson shouting in alarm.

“Shit!”
Wilson spat.

“Talk to me!” demanded
Casey.

“We’ve got a hull breach on the starboard thruster. Radwell, you and Ron told me you had that buttoned up!”

“We did!” someone shouted. “Air pressure recovering—wait, there’s another breach! What the fuck!?”

“Main thrusters going into auto safety shutdown!” someone else yelled.

“Breach sealing system firing again!” another voice called out. Alarms flared, both in engineering and on the bridge, to announce much the same warning.

Casey
’s eyes went wide as a sensation of dread threatened to drown him. “Wilson, get someone in there now! Somebody armed!”

“On it,”
Wilson said, already turned away from the viewscreen and waving his arms as Casey spoke. Then he turned back to him. “Wait, what did you say?” he asked. “Somebody what?”

“Armed!”
Casey shouted. “Somebody—!”

Shots rang out in engineering.
Casey could hear them almost as clearly as Wilson. Endless bullets streamed and ricocheted across the bulkheads and the machinery. Men screamed. Others leapt for cover, pulled weapons and returned fire. Someone shouted, “Grenade!”

There was a burst of light and a high-pitched sound so loud that the audio baffles cut in.
Casey watched in horror as Wilson reflexively put his hands over his ears, staggered out into the open, and was then torn apart by a burst of bullets.

***

Shift to cover. Stay low. Advance. Advance.

The grenade did it
s job beautifully. Tanner’s ears rang as loud as ever; he crouched several meters out of the effective radius and wore a sealed helmet, but even so the blast was shockingly loud. Had that grenade been used to retake
Vengeance’s
bridge as its owner had undoubtedly planned, it surely would’ve done the trick. Instead, it provided Tanner with a vital edge.

Given the labyrinthine environment, Tanner decided not to be stingy. He had three more such grenades and no reason not to use them.

He moved forward, ducking and slipping behind every bit of cover he could. Each corner that might hide trouble got one of his grenades. He took only a split second to assess each moving target. None wore anything remotely like a passenger liner’s uniform. All carried weapons. He had no time to secure prisoners, nor even to ask for surrender, and no back-up.

Tanner shot men in the back, men who
struggled just to get to their knees, even men who looked up at him in a dazed, confused manner. The kick of his assault rifle and the roar of its fire didn’t blot out their faces or their screams. He had no time to invent a less lethal solution. He fired, moved, reloaded and fired. The helmet interfered with his aim. It was bulky and fit poorly. He ditched it and kept shooting.

Little more than a minute later, Tanner ran out of targets. The last of his opponents disappeared through a hatch at the other end of the compartment.

Stop and think, Tanner,
he told himself.
Think.

Luxury liner. No idea how many pirates remained. They were long on guts but short on tactical firearms training. Few of them used cover
to full effect. They kept taking chances to get clear shots, and Tanner kept cutting them down for it. Yet Tanner had the drop on them in most of his clashes. Even here, he was lucky not to be flanked. He couldn’t count on that to continue.

He moved to a console with a map of the ship on one screen. It was as bad as Tanner expected.
Choke points, blind corners, vaulted ceilings and wide-open passageways lay all over the place. There would be distracting decorations everywhere, too.

And passengers. Panicked, unarmed passengers. Tanner was up against career criminals without a shred of conscience. He looked around at the dead bodies on the deck, looking for options. Precision weapons would be vital.

“Tanner!” demanded a gravelly voice. He froze in his tracks, then swung his rifle around this way and that before he realized the voice came over the PA. “That’s your name, right? Tanner? Figure we ought to be on a first name basis by now. Don’t try shooting out the speakers this time. Won’t do you any good. You did realize that there’d be cameras all over engineering, right?”

He hadn’t thought of that, actually. He should have. Tanner scowled, turning back to his search for weapons. None of
the dangers of conversation with the pirate captain had changed in the last ten minutes.