Refusing Excalibur (25 page)

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Authors: Zachary Jones

BOOK: Refusing Excalibur
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“Yes, but I think they’re about one-third of the way cutting through the hatch. Best guess is they’ll be through in less than ten minutes,” she said.
“Roger that, Captain. Hold tight,” Victor said. The ambient noise in the airlock grew fainter and fainter as the air evacuated out.
“I have a cask of fifty-year-old brandy in my cabin. It’s yours if you get us out of here alive,” Captain Gale said.
“You got it, Captain,” Victor said. The green light on the outer hatch lit, signaling the depressurization cycle was complete. Gaz hit the controls and opened the hatch. “We’re on our way.”
Through the open hatch, the
General Ian
and the
Fortune
were visible only as black blobs blocking out the background stars. Victor killed the airlock’s interior lights and activated his light amplification, revealing the linked starships in green scale.
Gaz got to work aiming the harpoon launcher attached to the deck of the airlock. He aimed down on the
Fortune
and fired the serrated harpoon with attached cable into it.
Gaz then reeled in the line until it went taut. “Spiked ’em good,” he said, turning to his boarding specialists. “You fuckers follow me.” He attached himself to the line and pulled himself toward the
Fortune
.
Victor waited for Gaz and his boarding specialists to clear the airlock before he walked around the harpoon launcher and stood right on the black and yellow line that marked where the
Alex
’s internal AG field stopped. He took a deep breath and then jumped into the darkness. The pull of gravity vanished, and he had the sudden sensation of falling, but it quickly passed.
He activated his thruster pack and canceled out the slight spin caused by his jump. He then fired it again and set course for the
Ian
.
As he drifted toward the cruiser, he studied its hull. The vessel had also been heavily damaged. One of the engine nacelles was gone, and kinetic impacts had peppered the main hull with dents and craters. The warship had been battered into submission.
In many ways, the
General Ian
reminded Victor of his old cruiser, the
Osprey
. It was long, thin, and streamlined for flight in atmosphere. Its engines were laid out differently, mounted on a pair of nacelles rather than the X pattern on Savannan cruisers.
Remembering the
Osprey
brought back the memory of both the joy of commanding her and the pain from the terrible day he lost her and everything else.
Then he realized he was about to slam into the hull of the
Ian
at ten meters per second.
“Shit!” he said, cursing himself for losing focus. He fired his braking thrusters at full power, throwing himself forward as he came to a sudden stop just short of the cruiser's hull.
“You all right, Captain?” Fara asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Just hit the brakes a bit hard,” Victor said. “Do you still have a connection with the
Ian
’s captain?”
“Yes, Captain,” Fara said.
“Patch me through,” Victor said.
“This is Captain Gale. What do you need?” she asked.
“I’m just outside the hull of your ship, but I need a way in,” Victor said. “What’s the closest airlock to the bridge you still control?”
“Wait,
you
are just outside my ship?” she asked.
“Yes, and I need a way in,” Victor said. “To distract the pirates cutting their way into your bridge while my boarding party does their thing.”
“Uh, okay, hold on,” Captain Gale said. “I can open the main cargo airlock for you. It’s on the ventral hull of the ship. I’ll upload a map of my ship’s interior so you can find your way to the bridge. I hope this crazy plan of yours works.”
“It will. They won’t be expecting this,” Victor said. He maneuvered himself under the ship, just in time to see the doors of the cargo bay open. Gas and debris blew out the open hatch, Captain Gale clearly not wanting to waste time depressurizing it.
Shutting down his light amplification, Victor pushed himself into the cargo bay with a puff from his thruster pack. He was then pulled to the deck as he crossed into the cruiser’s AG field. He landed on his feet and slid to a stop.
“I’m in.” Victor hit the release on his thruster pack, dropping it to the deck. He then pulled out his assault rifle and made his way to the cargo bay’s airlock.
As promised, the airlock was unlocked and depressurized, its outer hatch opened in invitation. Victor walked inside and hit the controls to close the outer hatch and begin pressurizing. Nothing happened.
“Captain Gale, the airlock isn’t closing,” Victor said.
“My apologies. We still have control from the bridge. Cycling it now,” she said. The outer hatch closed, and the airlock filled with the gradually increasing noise of air flowing into the compartment.
“Captain Gale, how are things up there?”
“Ah, the hole is close to a complete circle,” she said.
“All right, I’m on my way. Hold on!” Victor said. The light on the inner door went green and opened.
Victor raised his assault rifle and peeked through the corridor. It was empty.
He called up the interior map of the
Ian
. The bridge was located four decks directly above him, at the top of the pressure hull.
He stepped into the corridor where the bodies of the
Ian
’s crew littered the deck. Putting himself up against a corner, he opened his comm to the bridge.
“Captain Gale, could you show me where the pirates are located inside the hull?” Victor asked.
“Our control of the security system is patchy, but I can give you something. Here’s our real-time feed.”
Red dots appeared on the minimap in Victor’s HUD. A cluster of them waited just outside the bridge, with a few scattered dots guarding points leading to the bridge.
“I estimate we have no more than four minutes until they breach the blast door.”
“Moving,” Victor said. He climbed the stairs to the bridge deck and waited at the landing. On the other side of the next hatch above him was a guard post set up by the pirates.
“Fara, has Gaz breached the
Fortune
yet?”
“He’s about to,” Fara said. “Did you need him to hurry up?”
“No, just tell him that I’m ready for him,” Victor said.
“Roger that, Captain,” Fara said.
Victor turned up his suit’s exterior microphones to listen to the pirates waiting to gun down anyone who came from the stairwell.
“Shit, someone’s boarded the
Fortune
!” one of the pirates said.
“What does Captain Hyde want us to do?” asked another.
Captain Hyde
, Victor thought.
“Me and Rexy will go back to the
Fortune
to help fight them off. You and Chandlers stay here and shoot anyone who comes from that stairwell.”
Heavy boots thumped against the deck as two of the four pirates guarding the stairwell exit jogged away. Now Victor just had two to deal with. Though two would be more than enough to kill him if he screwed up.
He waited for the sound of footsteps to recede, then waited for a few more seconds. He couldn’t wait too long though. Knowing Warwick Hyde, he was probably pushing his people even harder to break into the bridge so they could take hostages.
Holding his assault rifle in his left hand, Victor took a grenade from his belt with his right hand. The grenade was a high-end model that Gaz swore by, because, unlike many grenades, it had an exact five-second fuse. Victor flipped the plastic safety cover off the grenade’s Activation button with his thumb. The small piece of plastic hit the deck and bounced toward the exit, right into view of the pirates guarding it.
“Did you see that?” one of them said.
Shit
. Victor pressed the Activation button and then let go, starting the countdown. Just as he was about to throw his grenade, another came bouncing into the stairwell, right in front of him.
“That oughta take care of things,” the other pirate said.
Oh
was all Victor had time to think before he threw his grenade along the corridor and then dived into the stairs toward the landing below.
He landed halfway down the flight and tumbled the rest of the way. The armor plating and thick padding of his combat suit softened the impacts as he tumbled onto the lower landing with all the grace of a rockslide.
He rolled onto his back and thought,
I wonder how long
…
Tandem blasts echoed inside his helmet, causing his ears to ring despite the protection provided by the suit.
He got up and noticed he had lost track of his assault rifle. Looking around, he found it lying at his feet. Its barrel was bent, probably because he fell on it during his tumble down the stairs.
“Oops,” he said, drawing his pistol in his left hand and his variblade in his right. He ran up the stairs, taking two steps in each bound.
He took cover at the exit and sneaked a quick look around. One pirate was down; the other stood over his friend, rendering aid. Victor walked around the corner, raised his pistol and shot the standing one in the face.
The man fell. The one already on the ground, presumably wounded by Victor’s grenade, raised his hand.
Victor shot him twice and moved to the next intersection, where he blundered right into a trio of pirates moving from the direction of the bridge.
The pirates raised their guns. Victor swung his variblade, forming it into a longsword with just a thought.
His first swing cut the nearest pirate’s assault rifle in half, taking the man’s left hand with it. Victor then kicked the man, driving him into another pirate.
The third pirate rounded the corner, and Victor raised his pistol, firing four close-range shots into the man’s chest before he could level his shotgun at Victor.
As that man dropped, Victor slashed down on the head of the second pirate. The sharp, thin blade cut through the man’s helmet and split his skull.
The pirate whose hand had been severed tried to reach for his sidearm with his other. Victor stopped him by planting a boot on his forearm and then drove the tip of his variblade through the gap between the man’s chestplate and helmet.
The man gurgled and died. Victor pulled out his variblade and retracted it. He continued toward the bridge. No other pirates came his way—hopefully because Gaz was giving them too much trouble to notice the lone man moving to flank them.
Victor reached the last turn before the bridge hatch. He could hear the sizzling of a cutting torch working on the bridge’s blast door. The pirates at the door had been clever enough to destroy all the security cameras outside the bridge, so Victor had no way to tell how many pirates were there without exposing himself.
He considered his next course of action, taking time to reload his pistol as he did. He had another frag grenade and a stun grenade, and he was coming from almost the opposite direction Gaz would be. He could wait for Gaz to arrive, then toss a grenade while the pit fighter and his team distracted the pirates. But Victor doubted he had enough time to wait on Gaz before the pirates broke into the bridge and took hostages, including the chancellor. Then things would get complicated.
He heard the torch stop cutting.
“Get that door open!” a man with a familiar voice said. “We need hostages if we want to get out of this mess alive!”
It was Warwick himself, which surprised Victor. His former captain had never struck Victor as the type to lead from the front line.
A screech of a broken door echoed around the corner, followed by gunfire. The bridge had been breached. Victor was out of time.
He holstered his pistol and sheathed his variblade, then took both his frag and stun grenades off his belt. Priming them, he tossed his frag grenade around the corner first, followed by the stun grenade a couple seconds later.
“Grenade!” shouted Warwick a moment before the frag went off. The stun grenade went off two seconds later with a flash of light illuminating the corridor like a camera flash.
Victor drew his weapons, formed the variblade into a longsword, took a deep breath, and then charged down the smoke-filled corridor.
A dazed pirate stumbled in front of him. Victor cut him down without stopping, finding himself in the middle of the room.
Dead and stunned pirates littered the floor, but three remained standing. Stunned from the two grenades going off, they reacted slowly to Victor’s presence. He didn’t give them time to recover.
Raising his pistol, he put four rounds into one pirate, then trained his pistol on the next and similarly gunned him down. But before he could aim at the third one, the remaining pirate fired his shotgun, catching Victor in the left shoulder.
Victor spun, dropping his pistol as a sharp pain stabbed his upper arm. He kept his balance and ran for cover. Another shotgun blast took him full in the backplate, driving him to his hands and knees. He crawled from the line of fire as a third shot ricocheted off the wall.

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