Refusing Excalibur (19 page)

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Authors: Zachary Jones

BOOK: Refusing Excalibur
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He felt something glance against his chestplate, but ignored it as he emptied the assault rifle, forcing the four pirates to duck for cover.
He took cover and checked his chestplate, feeling a small dent in a flank where a bullet had hit but did not penetrate.
Good
.
He reloaded as the pirates returned fire. They appeared to only be armed with small hand weapons. But more would come. He regretted leaving Gaz and his grenade launcher behind to guard Cormac.
Victor fired another burst, this one more controlled. He thought he saw a pirate drop, but two more appeared to take his place.
When he returned to cover, he saw Lena leading the rest of the prisoners to the armory. He shouted to the armed ones, “Covering fire!” and then took aim down the corridor and fired a series of bursts to hold down the pirates.
The footsteps of dozens of prisoners drummed behind Victor as he kept up the fire. He stopped to reload, his place taken by an armed prisoner with a machine pistol, who emptied the weapon with abandon down the corridor.
Slamming home a fresh magazine, Victor turned around to fire another burst, just as more pirates piled into the corridor.
He took a hit right to the chest, knocking the wind from him and forcing him back around the corner. His armor stopped the round, but his sternum hurt from the impact.
The last of the unarmed prisoners made their way to the armory. Victor hoped that Cormac had hacked the door by now.
He checked around the corner and saw pirates advancing up the corridor under the covering fire of their comrades.
Victor pulled out a hand grenade and primed it, then threw it around the corner toward the pirates. He didn’t hear it bounce over the roar of the gunfire, but he did hear it detonate, causing a sudden drop in the incoming fire.
Victor took the opportunity to fire another long burst from his assault rifle, holding down the pirates until his magazine emptied.
He reloaded his weapon, noticing he was down to his last magazine. Soon he’d be reduced to his revolver.
Then, in a running march from the armory, came dozens of armed and angry merchant crewmembers, carrying all manner of guns.
Lena and Gaz led the mob. They stopped beside Victor, Gaz saying, “We gots ourselves an army now.”
“That’s good, but the pirates have this corridor saturated with fire. We’ll need to flank them,” Victor said.
“I know a way around,” Lena said.
Gaz nodded, holding up the light machine gun he had liberated from the armory. “I’ll hold their attention here. You and the redhead do the flankin’.”
“Uh, right,” Victor said. “I could use some ammo.”
Lena tapped one of the men on the shoulder, a big man covered with guns and ammo belts.
“Give this man a gun and fresh ammo,” she told the big man.
“Got it, Cap.” He hooked his thumb through a strap and pulled a big black beast of a gun off his back.
Victor set down his assault rifle and accepted the drum-fed autoshotgun, along with a bandolier holding four spare magazines. He flung the ammo belt over his neck and hefted the weapon, pulling back the slide to make sure it was loaded, then looked to Lena. “Show me the way but stay behind me. I’m the one with body armor, after all.”
“You got it,” she said.
Victor, Lena, and a half-dozen former prisoners who were Lena’s crew moved up the corridor, leading back to the prison.
“Go that way.” Lena pointed to the left corridor of a four-way intersection. They ran down the corridor, going straight through another intersection.
Victor didn’t like the headlong rush; it would be too easy for them to blunder into an ambush.
Just as he finished that thought, a dozen pirates ran around the corner in front of him.
Both groups stopped.
Without thinking, Victor brought his autoshotgun to his hip and held down the trigger.
The big gun roared, firing more rapidly than Victor expected, launching a swarm of barely aimed buckshot into the pirates, spraying blood all over the corridor. Lena and her crew fired their own weapons and, in seconds, killed all the pirates.
Victor looked down at his now empty shotgun, smoke rising from the vents in its muzzle brake. “Holy hell!”
“Looks like the pirates had the same idea we did,” Lena said.
“Yeah.” Victor released the empty drum, letting it bounce against the deck in the low gravity. “Let’s move before they figure out we’re coming.”
“Lead the way. They should be just up ahead,” Lena said.
“Right,” he said. He could already hear the gunfire. Loading a new drum into the shotgun, he moved forward, more cautious than before.
When the gunfire got loud enough to be almost deafening, he leaned around the corner and saw the pirates behind cover. He was almost directly on their left flank.
He hefted his autoshotgun, and looked to Lena and her people. He mouthed,
three…two…one…
and then shouldered his shotgun and turned the corner.
With a light squeeze of the trigger, he announced his presence with a two-round burst into the side of the first pirate he saw, splattering the man against the bulkhead.
The other pirates turned to him just as he fired another burst, reducing the head of another pirate into a red mist.
Then Lena’s crew opened fire and rained bullets down on the exposed pirates. Those who weren’t hit didn’t even bother to return fire; they turned and ran.
A cheer went up from the left corridor, and the other armed merchant crewmembers charged after them.
“Hold fire! Hold fire!” Victor yelled to keep Lena’s crew from shooting their allies.
“We need to get to the control center,” Lena said.
“Do you know where that is too?” Victor asked.
“Uh, not really, no,” she said.
“Great,” Victor said.
Gaz came around the corner, his weapon at the ready. “Where to now?” he asked.
“We need to find this base’s control center,” Victor said.
“What about the hangar? I thought the plan was to escape,” Gaz said.
“That was before we had an army,” Victor said.
“Right, gotcha. So where do you think we should look?” Gaz asked.
“Let’s find Cormac. If he’s hacked their network, he can find the control center,” Victor said.
Victor, Gaz, Lena, and her crew made their way back to the armory where they had left Cormac. There they found a line made up of the few remaining unarmed prisoners. At the end of the line, Cormac and Fara handed out the guns to would-be slaves looking for a little payback.
Gunfire echoed through every corridor. The fighting spread like wildfire through the base, punctuated by the blasts of grenades and other explosives going off.
Victor clenched each time he heard an explosion. An atmospheric breach would not be much of a threat to him, since he was still in his suit, but none of the prisoners wore pressure suits. If one of them or the pirates blew a hole in the side of the rather sturdy-looking dome,…it could get messy.
“Cormac, we need your services,” Victor said as he shouldered his way past the prisoners waiting for their guns. None of them appeared to mind seeing one of their liberators cutting through the line.
Fara put a hand on Cormac’s shoulder. “I can handle handing out the toys, Cormac.”
The starchild nodded his long head and moved away from the end of the line to Victor. “What is it that you require, Victor?”
“Can you find where the control center is?” asked Victor.
Cormac rubbed his chin. “Yes, I can do that.” He walked over to the armory’s security terminal, already broken open with optical wires attached to one of his datapads.
He picked up the datapad and tapped the screen, swiping the display until it showed a map of the base with a web of lines radiating from a central point near the hangar midway in the base. “Yes.” He tapped the screen. “That’s where all the base’s controls and alarms are routed to. I’ll upload the map to your suit computer.”
A query appeared in the display screen inside his helmet. Victor accepted it and downloaded the map from Cormac’s datapad. Soon he had the most direct route to Lucille’s Bay’s control center overlaid in his helmet display. “All right. Cormac, come with us. We’ll need your expertise.”
“I am right behind you,” Cormac said.
Lena tapped him on the shoulder plate. “Me and my people will stick with you in case you need backup.”
Victor nodded. “Okay. Me and Gaz will take point while you and yours watch our flanks.”
The freighter captain nodded. “You got it.”
Victor followed the path laid out on his display, Gaz at his side. Cormac and Lena followed behind them, with the merchant captain’s crew taking up the rear.
Along the way, they encountered pirates and former prisoners locked in gun battles that Victor and Gaz decidedly ended with vicious bursts of fire from their weapons.
As they got closer to the control center, however, the pirate resistance became more entrenched, and dead prisoners began outnumbering dead pirates.
Victor and Gaz had used up all but one of their grenades, clearing one pirate checkpoint after another, until they reached the door to the command center.
“Lena, cover us while we try to open this,” Victor said.
“On it,” she said, directing her crew to cover the corridors leading toward the control center.
Cormac went up to the door’s control console and pulled on it, ripping it apart.
“Can you open it?” asked Victor.
“Just a moment,” the starchild engineer said tersely. He pulled out optical wires and examined them. They were all dark. Cormac shook his head. “They shut down the door. There’s no way I can hack it.”
“Then we do this my way,” Gaz said, opening the satchel where he kept his breaching charges.
“How many you need to open this door?” asked Victor.
Gaz shrugged. “I was just goin’ to put all of ’em on and see what happens.”
“Right.” Victor wasn’t in love with the idea but didn't see a better alternative. He turned to Lena. “You and your people may want to take cover.”
“Yeah, I got that impression.” She turned to face her crew. “Come on! Let’s get out of here before those fireworks go off!”
By the time Lena’s crew had cleared out, Gaz had attached six of the conical bombs to the door.
“You fuckers may want to find some cover too,” Gaz said, smiling wide enough to show every one of his spiked teeth.
Victor found Gaz’s anticipation to be more than a little disturbing. “Yeah, good idea,” he said, turning a corner and pressing his back against the bulkhead. Cormac came up beside him, the helmet visor shut.
Another good idea
, Victor thought, closing his own visor in anticipation of the overpressure from the blast.
Gaz rounded the corner soon afterward, his visor wide open to show off the unmistakable glee on his tattooed face, not concerned in the slightest at the loud bang about to happen.
“Fire in the ’ole!” he yelled and then pressed the detonator.
A flash bloomed around the corner, and a helmet-muffled
bang
echoed through the corridor. Victor hefted his shotgun and turned the corner to see the heavy door blown off its hinges, embedded into the opposite wall of the control center.
Victor ran inside the control center and activated his suit speakers. “Hands up!”
The pirates not too injured to do so raised their hands. Except one, a woman, with short black hair and the overlarge eyes of a nightperson. In her hands was a familiar-looking handle.
Victor eyes went wide as he recognized the handle.
A variblade!
He swung his autoshotgun around, but the nightwoman launched herself toward him, her jump made long by the low gravity. Just as Victor brought his weapon to bear, she swung the variblade, forming the morphmetal into a heavy curved blade. The blow was aimed right for Victor’s head.
Reflexively Victor blocked the variblade with his autoshotgun. The morphmetal blade cut cleanly through the plastic construction of the gun and buried itself in the weapon’s barrel, almost cutting it in half.
Victor shoved away the shotgun, off-balancing the swordswoman. He then reached for his revolver, but, as he drew it, the other pirates jumped him, grabbing his arm and prying the pistol from his grip.
Victor slammed his helmet into the face of the pirate holding his right arm, knocking him to the ground.
Another pirate, the one who took his pistol, raised the weapon to fire. In one smooth motion, Victor drew the cutlass from his back and severed the pirate’s arm at the shoulder with a downward cut.
His pistol, and the arm of the pirate who stole it, fell slowly to the deck in the low gravity as Victor stabbed and sliced with his cutlass until he was free of the pirates who jumped him, just in time to see the swordswoman’s variblade flying toward his face.

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