Citation Series 1: Naero's War: The Annexation War (24 page)

If they left that sector–
and rendezvoused at some enemy staging area–all of them were good as dead.

Naero pushed off the hull
again and muscled her way forward with raw strength. She kept spinning, kicking, and punching foes out of her way. She used elbows and knees to crush and shatter bones.

On
her port side, stood the compartment containing the small ship’s power core.

On her
starboard side, stood the compartment containing the jump drive.

Naero’s
hands flashed.

Every explosive device she had left hit th
at damn jump drive.

She deflected off the ceiling and sped back out of the way as her devices cooked off
.

She dragged two Marines back with her, one of them Hayden
.

The stolen courier lurched into jump, just as its jump drive exploded. The air all around them went
blinding, white-hot, filled with burning fragments and plasma.

Not to mention the shock waves of the blast
.

32

Th
e jump drive blast killed or wounded everyone in the hold. No one escaped damage or injury, including Naero.

Shrapnel sprayed everywhere
.

Naero winced in agony from several serious burn and shrapnel wounds
, distributed across her body.

Spacer smartblood and her nanosuit str
ained to stop the bleeding and close off the damage.

The hull of the courier struggled to seal itself against the many punctures and ruptures patterned out from the shattered jump drive
.

The power core next to it was damaged also, but
held together for the time being. Emergency shielding prevented the deadly radiation and energy core forces from cooking off completely.

At least for now
.

Dead and wounded floated and bounced around everywhere within the hold
.

Faces and eyes star
ed, milked over pale in death. Some bodies had faces and entire heads ripped or burned off, along with other body parts.

Blood, entrails, and other bodily fluids and contents boil
ed around freely from the corpses and the seriously wounded.

Like her, any of the others who survived–whether friend or foe–struggled just to twitch or even move
, after the intense explosion.

Naero caught her breath, despite painful damage to her right chest and one lung. Her left leg felt numb
.

Something else was wrong with the ship. She could tell. The superstructure groaned and screamed as if gigantic hands or claws were attempting to tear it apart like a loaf of bread
.

Then she knew
, as if things weren’t bad enough.

The explosion right at the point of jump
had caused a misjump—extremely dangerous.

The small courier
careened out of control, spinning and smashing its way through jump space.

They could be tossed out anywhere, in any direction, within several parsecs
.

The could come out o
n either side of the frontline of the war.

Or they could be torn apart and obliterated. Just
random, scorched debris, spitting out from jump into normal space.

They could emerge any second, anywhere at random in the nearby vici
nity, or they could tumble through jump space for days out of control, while the stress forces on their ship only increased.

She covered her mouth with both hands suddenly
.

Admiral Sandusky
floated right below her. Dead.

A severed Hevangian arm still clutched a bloody shokkog, the poison dagger
had stabbed into the shredded rescue bag several times. The bag and everything nearby had also been shredded and torn apart, by the explosion she had caused.

At least Sandusky had been stunned
before he died.

It was a wonder any of them
still lived.

Somehow
, in her dazed state, Naero stumbled upon Leftenant Hayden, by dumb luck.

He looked all right
, overall. Nothing missing, no major wounds. Perhaps his shield had held up to the blast.

But his armored helmet was cracked and seriously deformed
.

Through his splintered visor, Naero could see a head wound and possible concussion, blood had streamed down over his face. She hit him up with some advanced healing meds that worked well in conjunction with Spacer smartblood.

His flickering suit signs said that he was still alive and with strong vitals, just knocked out. Most likely from being slammed into the hull of the hold by the explosion.

Any Hevangian she came to got two in the chest and one in the head
.

Just to be sure
–Naero wasn’t taking any chances.

Especially
, not in her reduced condition.

She kept moving,
staggering, bouncing around, trying to anchor herself, ignoring her own wounds and agony as she did so. She checked one floating body after the next.

She located five other surviving
Marines, and did her best to stabilize and secure them beside their leader.

Who now groaned and tossed his head, blinking in pain
.

The last
Marine she worked on was in bad shape.

A very young
Marine, with short green hair and dark eyes. He smiled weakly at her, and tried to make some smartass comment. Naero did her best to help him, but she was close to passing out by that time herself.

He took hold of her left hand and would not let go
.

She finally had to pull her hand away
to help him.

His wounds were simply too many and too severe
.

Naero couldn’t close them all off fast enough
.

The poor guy
bled to death in her very hands, while she struggled both to save him, and stay conscious herself.

Haisha.
Damn it!

Naero sobbed and
drifted to one side, too dizzy to get back up.

She
passed out for a bit–hard to tell for how long.

S
he wasn’t sure.

When her eyes flickered open again,
they did so to pain.

L
eftenant Hayden yanked a big chunk of nasty-looking shrapnel out of her left thigh.

It hurt like
blazes.

Her leg
wound instantly bubbled and boiled with blood.

Hayden sealed it off and closed the wound quickly and expertly
.

Naero was impressed, despite the pain that made her want to punch him
.

Zhen couldn’t have done a better job
.

He only fixed one other wound on her upper right arm. He told her the rest had stopped bleeding
, and should be all right, given time. He gave her a dose of the same meds she’d hit him up with.

The he put two enemy machine pistols in her hands and propped her up, adjacent to the far hatch
.

The hatch that led
to the courier’s small bridge. Most likely one or two chairs, for either a single pilot, or a pilot and co-pilot.

Naero flopped her aching head to one side and stared at Hayden, lifting the pistols weakly
.

She could hardly hold them up, let alone hit anything
.

“What are these for?” she asked
.

Hayden reached back over and activated her
backup personal shield.

“Think about it.
” He jerked a thumb back. “Someone might be piloting this ship, still. Keep an eye on that hatch. Blast the living shit out of anyone who comes through it. I have to check on the others, but it looks like you’ve stabilized them all just fine.”

Naero swallowed hard
.

“I…I lost the kid
…with the green hair.”

“Private
First Class Donovan? Yeah. I saw that, N. Not your fault.”

She wiped her face.
“Doesn’t feel like not my fault. I caused the jump drive to go off.”

“
And a good thing you did. All of us would be captured and looking forward to Hevangian torture teams, or simply shot in the head by now. You did the right thing.”

Naero smiled, sensing a little of her strength returning
.

Hayden
double-checked his people and their wounds.

A booted foot out of nowhere kicked him right in the face, stunning him
.

The Hevangian leader phazed in right between them
.

Naero tried to raise
her pistols.

Too slow
.

The leader booted her in the chest and smashed her against the hull
.

She gasped for air and dropped both guns
.

The Hevangian Leader grinned, his face oozing with phaze disease over his skull bones. Terrible scars
crisscrossing his face beneath that.

He snarled and gloated at the both of them
.

“You stinking, bloody spacks! You think yourselves so cunning and resourceful. Always messing things up. Always causing mayhem!
”

He drew his shokkog, the poison just streaming off the blade in rivulets
.

“Now we have time to play. Poison for the good
leftenant–my shokkog shoved through his eyes and into his brain. Death to your helpless wounded, that goes without saying. But you…I have not had a pretty spack whore like you to toy with, my dear. Not for a very long while.”

He glared down at her with eager, unbridled lust
.

“I’m going to use your own blades on you, my dear. I’m going to enjoy slowly
, slowly, slowly cutting…and slicing…and sawing you in half…length-wise. From your gash all the way up to your pretty white throat. Now, how does that sound?”

“Screw that…and you
,” Naero told him.

Hayden tried to lunge forward
.

The leader booted him to one side, leaned over him, and
raised the poison dagger to stab forward.

With her last remaining strength, Naero plucked up her machine pistols where they fell and jammed them
up into the leader’s buttocks from behind and below.

She pulled both triggers
, aiming the muzzles of both blasting guns up into the leader’s jerking body cavity.

The exploding rounds caused the
Hevangians torso to jiggle obscenely and then disintegrate. His head, neck, and part of one shoulder flopped gory to one side.

She
completely gutted him, with gunfire.

Naero fell back, c
ompletely spent.

Hayden staggered to his feet, grabbed a stray weapon, and went to secure the rest of the ship before they did anything else
.

He returned shortly
. “Good, the leader was the last of them.”

Except for the cargo hold
, and an extremely small crew cabin, the courier did not have many amenities. It could carry passengers in the hold, but basically it was a one or two person ship at best.

They
still had no way of knowing how long they would be stuck in jump space.

They rested, floating around with the wounded and the dead
.

“Mist shower,”
Naero finally insisted, pulling herself up and forward. “We can’t do much else until we come out of jump and see where we’re at. We don’t have gravitics, but all the other systems are holding steady. So I’m going to bathe. And I will kill anyone who tries to stop me.”

Hayden raised both hands, and then brought them to his aching
skull.

“Go right ahead. I’m going to float right here and pass out with
my guys.”

He proceeded to do so
.

The ship kept shaking and j
erking around without warning, battered within jump space.

Naero float
ed against and patted the hull.

“Just hold together, baby. Just keep it together until we make it out
.”

Naero stripped down and slipped into th
e tiniest mist showers she had ever seen on any ship.

She was small, and even she had to slip in sideways
and squeeze in.

Did they really recruit pygmies
to be courier pilots and crew? It boggled the mind.

She collapsed on the floor and let the mist wash and wave over her in
gentle, cleansing pulses.

So good.
So relaxing.

She curled up
in a tight ball and drifted off again on the mist shower floor.

She woke when the ship hit a patch of terrible jump space turbulence
.

It knocked the ship around
violently.

Naero smashed into first the ceiling of the mist shower, and then
back down into the floor.

She floated, gasped, and bled anew
, from fresh wounds and old wounds that re-opened, including the serious gash on her thigh.

She started to black out
.

Naero feared she might bleed to death, naked on the mist shower floor, her lifeblood slowly seeping and running down the drain
.