Rich Man's War (54 page)

Then he realized a frightened, unarmed NorthStar crewman lay on the deck right next to him with his hands covering his head. “Oh God, man, don’t kill me!” the crewman shouted. “I don’t even want to be here! I
only signed up for the college money!”

“Yeah?” Tanner huffed. “Me, too.” With that, he pushed himself around the console again
and quickly drew down on the pair of security troopers across the small workspace. He put a pulse straight through one man’s helmet, killing him instantly. The other trooper stood his ground and returned fire, clipping Tanner across the shoulder, but the combat jacket deflected most of the shot. Riding high on adrenaline and focused on his aim, Tanner didn’t realize he’d been hit until a breath or two later. By then he’d cut down his second enemy. Then he looked at his shoulder and realized that for all the heat and resultant pain, he couldn’t be all that wounded. The jacket did its job.

He also realized that the shooting seemed to have stopped. The unarmed crewman beside him looked on in
terror. Tanner pointed to a corner. “You go sit down right there and wait for someone to tie you up,” he growled. “And turn off your helmet comm unit!”

“Okay! Okay! No argument!”

Tanner turned his attention to the rest of the compartment. He saw holo screens, monitoring stations and control consoles. In all, it appeared that perhaps a dozen people manned this compartment. By and large, most were probably there to handle any sort of equipment failure or power problem. The actual direction and output of the whole compartment ran through one specific station.

With no one shooting at him, Tanner pulled the electric stunner from his belt
to deal with the few frightened crewmen in his path to the master fire control station. Most of them, still affected by the stun grenades, never saw him coming and collapsed after a single shot. One NorthStar lieutenant heaved himself up in a feat of willpower, but Tanner’s foot came up into the man’s gut before he could reach the controls. Tanner didn’t kick gently.

“Baldwin?” he asked.

“Right behind you,” came her voice. He glanced back to see her only a few meters behind. “How the hell do we figure this thing out?”

“Military tech,” he grunted as he looked over the controls. “Can’t make things complicated if you want people to use it in stressful
conditions.”

The console offered power output control, a status board showing numerous other systems, and the tactical situation laid out across several flat screens. A helmeted face on another screen shouted out a warning, but luckily the on/off switch was plainly labeled right underneath it.
Tanner killed the connection between the console and the bridge. All that mattered now was the tactical situation and fire control.

Hercules
fled the main line of Archangel’s fleet—or, at least, what was left of it. Tanner didn’t count up ships, but he knew there were all too few contacts to the battleship’s rear. As Sinclair warned, the battleship would soon be surrounded by one of the other enemy formations. The computer-generated display showed icons for each of the NorthStar ships, all of them flashing to indicate a full spread of defensive fire meant to protect the battleship.

He heard Baldwin’s stunner go off as she put down anyone who still seemed conscious. Up above, Alicia ran across the walkway to secure the hatch on the opposite side from their point of entry. Tanner forced himself to take a slow, deep breath, and then another, his eyes moving across the controls the whole time.

He found the power regulator. Safety override. Targeting. His gaze returned to the tactical screens.

Hercules
flew into the middle of a formation of other ships. A light cruiser would soon lay off to port. A destroyer loomed to the battleship’s starboard. Both of them were at least sixty thousand klicks out. The closer ships, those that the escorts came to protect in the first place, were much closer to center.

Directly above
Hercules
, close enough that she could likely be seen with the naked eye, lay the assault carrier
Saratoga.
She looked undamaged and offered a steady output of both offensive and defensive fire.

She held thousands of landing troops and knew nothing of the danger beneath her.

Closest target
, he thought.
Clearest shot.
He knew that such carriers were meant to drive in through planetary assaults, and therefore were likely well armored, but his goal wasn’t outright destruction. He just needed to scare the hell out of the enemy forces.

As he expected, the targeting system was surprisingly simple. The override buttons were all clearly marked and covered so no one would ever accidentally push them. Tanner canceled
Saratoga’s
“friendly” status, aimed the battleship’s cannons and fired.

* * *

The man on Brent’s back wasn’t particularly heavy, given the lack of gravity outside
Hercules’s
hull, but he sure made everything awkward. He clung to Brent with his arms around the marine’s shoulders and his legs wrapped around his sides. Though his arms and legs all worked fine, he couldn’t get around out here on his own—not with his broken helmet wrapped in electrostatic tape.

Brent wondered why
no one ever thought this particular task should be included in zero-g ops training.

“Second squad!” Brent shouted. “Regroup on my position! Topside aft laser turret! Topside! Williams, dammit, I see you! Form up on me!”

Up beyond him on the battleship’s hull, another marine looked around in slight bewilderment. “I can’t tell which one is you,” complained a voice on the comm.

Brent almost sighed. “I’m the only fucker with someone else strapped to his back! Yeah,
now
you’re looking at me. C’mon, let’s go.”

Lasers, shells and missiles from the battleship’s guns continued to provide unwelcome lighting and a sense of chaos. Brent recognized the problem as soon as he’d made the jump—many of the boarders got confused or frightened as soon as they landed. Much as he wanted to get into the fight, he saw the need
for guidance outside the hull and took up the task.

Then he found Sinclair against the turret, panicked and almost out of air. Brent sealed up the signalman’s helmet with the first thing to come to mind and calmed him down, but that
put a clock on how much more time he could spend on herding cats. Sinclair’s remaining air cartridge would run out soon.

Brent didn’t know how long ago he’d hit the deck. H
e already felt like he’d been there all day.

“You still good to fight, Sinclair?” he asked. Given the extra burden, Brent had to bend over and keep his hands on the deck as well as his feet. Crawling along on all fours made for slow going, but it beat getting flung out into the void.

“Yeah, I’m good, Corporal,” Sinclair said. His tone conveyed everything Brent needed to hear: the panic had passed. Sinclair was now more embarrassed than afraid. He’d be fine. “Get me inside so I can ditch my faceplate and I’ll be okay.”

“Good to hear. There’s a maintenance hatch right ahead of us. Be there in a second.”

Other marines from Brent’s squad made it to the hatch before he did. They had it open by the time he reached them. “Okay, Sinclair, I’m gonna put you down and we’ll guide you to the ladder, okay? Just—woah!”

The brilliant burst of orange light far above them stood out among the rest. No one heard anything, of course, but the light alone
got everyone’s attention.

“What?” Sinclair asked. “What’s going on?”

Brent swallowed hard. He’d been afraid that assault carrier directly above them would start dropping shuttles full of armored troops on them any minute. Now it was so much burning gas and metal. He turned from the display and found his guys similarly distracted.

“Hey! Focus, guys. No time to gawk, we gotta get into this. Move.”

* * *

Status boards and holo
screens across the flag bridge flashed
Saratoga’s
icon brightly with an unwelcome notification tone. The icon then went grey, remaining in place to mark the wreckage. On other screens, where computer-enhanced sensor graphics presented real-time images, the destruction of the assault carrier was much more dramatic.

Many personnel on the flag bridge had their attention focused on other matters. Everyone else seemed to stop in their tracks
as if unable to process the development. The cannon blast must have gone straight through main engineering, or perhaps caught some part of a central magazine compartment. No one could know, or would ever know until and unless a salvage crew could piece together the disaster. But they all knew the blast came from
Hercules
.

Commodore
Eldridge looked on in shock. The next development, however, snapped his attention back to the battle at hand: the other ships of Expeditionary Group Alpha all changed course and kicked in their engines to get away from
Hercules
.

“Report,”
Eldridge croaked, and then cleared his throat. “Report! No, wait. Saraff! Tell those ships to get back into formation right now! Wagner,” he said, hitting the connection to the command bridge, “Wagner, spin this ship over to keep that gun pointed away from the other carriers! And get it back under control, damn it! Kill the power if you have to!”

“We’re working on it, sir,” Wagner replied. “Diverting troops now. But we’ve got hostiles in Thruster One and heading to main engineering, and it looks like Thruster Two is—“

“Deal with it, captain!” shouted Eldridge. He killed the connection and looked to Saraff. “I don’t see those ships coming back!”

Saraff
looked back to him with an obvious feeling of dread. “Sir,
Tuttle
and
Thermopylae
both want confirmation that we’re not already under enemy control.”

Eldridge
growled, stomping over to Saraff’s station. “They can’t take this whole ship with the handful of boarders they’ve dropped off.”

“Incoming corvettes!” yelled out another officer.

Eldridge’s gaze snapped back to the tactical screens. Four more corvettes quickly approached. This time,
Hercules
had less acceleration and fewer friends.

* * *

“Cannon Two! Haul ass, go! Go!” Harris barked at his team. He spun around as he gave the order, all but bowling a couple of his people over as he rushed through.

“What about main engineering?” asked
Finch.

“Forget
it! Let the regular grunts handle that. Hostiles took over Cannon Two and we’re closest, so let’s move.”

“Any word how many?”
Narendra wondered, following as instructed.

“No, shut up, I’m listening to updates!” Harris fumed.

With their armor on, the squad could only fit two abreast in the passageway. It made for more of a racket than he cared for, but he had to accept that a stealthy approach was out the window, anyway. The de facto dispatcher on the command bridge kept babbling on about
Saratoga
being blown out of the sky and not wanting anything else to take such a hit. After a few seconds, Harris gave up and tuned the woman out. She didn’t seem to know how many hostiles were in the compartment, anyway.

He stopped at one of the emergency ladder wells. “Okay, Cannon Two goes down from here to Deck Three, so we’re gonna hit it on
all three levels. Soldan, Clark, you’re on top here. Just keep on going down the passageway. Finch, Eickenberry, you stay up here on Deck One as well, but sweep around and go in from the port side. Secure the top deck and then shoot your way down, like an air assault. Bishop, you and Narendra go down the ladder well over there and enter on Deck Two, starboard side. Hold the level, don’t try to advance unless Soldan or I tell you, got me? Patrick, you’re with me. We go in on Deck Three.”

The team split up quickly per his instructions. Half of them remained on the top deck, while the rest took the ladder well down
. Given the benefit of their recon armor, they more or less dropped from level to level rather than using the steps.

“I want aimed fire in this one,” Harris said as he and Patrick rushed to their destination.
Soldan and the others topside gave the silent green signal to indicate readiness. Bishop and Narendra followed. “We’ve got friendlies in there and we want to get that cannon up and running again, so don’t hose the place down. Rely on your armor. No stray shots—if you don’t have a clear shot, do not pull the trigger. Slug it out if you have to. Eickenberry, I’m talkin’ to you, got me?”

“Sir, yes, sir!” came the response.

Harris scowled, but let it go. It’s not like he didn’t want to hear exactly that. He looked to Patrick, nodded, and then hit the go signal.

* * *

Tanner pushed back his faceplate, suddenly feeling constricted by the helmet’s seals around his neck and its snug fit on his skull. He looked with wide eyes at the displays.
Saratoga
remained on the screen, but its icon turned to a faded grey. The system did that to make sure people could keep track of ships lost in combat.