My Life: An Ex-Quarterback's Adventures in the Galactic Empire (24 page)

Ruoni spoke to his computer, setting up the attack parameters for each missile’s computer. Normally, the job would be spread out among the sector fire controllers. Our one and only missile volley was too precious, however, to leave to inexperienced crew. I could see Ruoni sweat as he raced to ready the barrage.

“Missiles loose.”

“Go for it! Go for it!” I could not keep myself from cheering them on.

For a moment, the screen looked terrific. The Flower was moving at the cruiser when the missiles fired, so they added that vector to the one their engines provided. The distance between them and the cruiser vanished swiftly and it was gratifying to see the Imperial forced to take evasive action. All at once, though, four starbursts erupted. Four missiles were gone, caught in a barrage of counter-missiles from the Imperial. Two continued on and I prayed for them. I prayed hard. We were, after all, throwing Kmart missiles against a Fleet cruiser. It was not to be. The last two flashed into nothing well short of the target. Too far to do any damage to the cruiser. They had, however, achieved a different kind of success.

“Strike Force is docking,” Andrave reported.

I turned to say something, but never got to it. There was a massive thunderclap and the world went black.

I moaned and rolled from side to side on my back, unaware of my surroundings. My hindbrain told me that I’d been blindsided on a play, a real cheap shot. Something was very wrong with me. The turf felt odd, even the crowd noise seemed to have vanished.

“Command, are you all right?” Slowly, the words penetrated the fog in my brain.

It took a few more seconds for my wits to return enough for me to assimilate any information. I wasn’t lying flat on my back on a football field. I was flat on my back on the deck of a starship that was being torn apart. Ruoni was standing over me, shaking my shoulder. His suit helmet had sealed over and I realized that mine had as well. They would do that automatically if pressure was lost as long as the helmet was at least partially attached at the collar, so it meant that the Flower was breached so badly that even the bridge had lost its air. The chair I had been sitting in was a good eight feet from where I was lying. I groaned, wishing we had put seatbelts into the ship.

“I’ll do, Ru-, eh, Fire Control. Help me up, will you?”

The scene was worse standing up. The deck and ceiling of the bridge had been rent like a piece of tinfoil. The helm position was gone, along with the Srihani who had crewed it. Blahar was dead at his position, his torso ending in ragged and bloody fragments at the waist. I clamped my teeth together, and fought the urge to vomit. With the helmet visor closed, it would have been a very bad idea. Andrave and Cardoni moved to join Ruoni. Cardoni’s left arm hung like dead weight. Andrave appeared intact.

“What happened?”

“We took multiple hits from shot, just after the Strike Force docked,” Ruoni answered. “Our last communications indicated that they were fighting on the cruiser. Although we took a few more hits right after that, the incoming fire seems to have stopped, so it’s probably a pretty good fight over there.”

“Our ship?”

“Wrecked,” Cardoni said. “Engines are out. Our course is whatever it was when we were hit, but I can’t figure it out because the computer and the instruments are smashed. We have enough power and control to keep a minimal shield up and keep the lights on in here. Most of the lifts are out because there has been too much structural twisting. I will leave weapons to Fire Control.”

“None worth mentioning,” Ruoni put in. “What do you want to do, Command?”

It reminded me of the line I would hear on third and thirty-four when the coach asked me what I wanted to call.

“Tell me, is there any way off this ship?”

“There is one unmodified landing boat that can be launched. If it hasn’t been damaged it should reach the inhabited planet in this system. We don’t have a real pilot left, but I can fly it passably. None of the lifeboats are operational.”

A very grim sort of smile came to my face. I was not thinking of running for the planet. “On my world, there was once a famous captain who found himself in a similar predicament. When he was asked to surrender, he said ‘I have not yet begun to fight’ and took his enemy’s ship while his own was being destroyed. We’re going to do just what he did. Communications, I want everybody who can still fight on that boat. As fast as possible, we won’t wait for stragglers.”

My helmet receiver echoed back, “All crew able to respond, to Landing Boat Bay Four. Repeat, all crew able to respond, to Landing Boat Bay Four.” Andrave managed to keep his voice steady, although his hands trembled as he made the announcement.

Then, it was time for us to go. There was no concern about leaving the bridge solely in the hands of the dead. Nothing of importance could be controlled from there anymore.

The passage aft was an obstacle course of buckled doors and blown-out sections. At one point, a large chunk of the ship had been torn out and the stars were visible, slowly rotating past the jagged edges of the hull. There were few bodies visible. Those were all at their last action stations.

For a while, I thought we would never reach the boat bay. The lift leading to the side passage running to the bay was out of commission. There was a hatch leading to a service corridor that could be used to take a parallel route, but the frame of the ship had buckled, leaving only a narrow opening. Cardoni’s arm was useless and he got stuck, unable to pull himself up with only one hand. Because of the way the wall was twisted, he was unable to find purchase for his feet. It was only after much cursing that we were able to shove him past the bottleneck.

The scene in the boat bay was deceptively normal. The dead, dying and seriously injured weren’t there, could not be there. The injuries sustained by the walking wounded were, for the most part, hidden by their suits and half-armor. The relatively small number present, however, spoke of the toll the battle had taken. Even so, with only one small boat it was going to be standing room only.

When we had settled in, I asked Andrave if he could pick up anything from the Strike Force.

“Nothing beamed back to us, Command,” he replied. “The instruments on this boat aren’t nearly good enough to pick up our on-ship communications. What I’m getting from the cruiser would indicate that they are still fighting.”

“Could be worse.” I turned to Ruoni, now strapped into the pilot’s seat. “I don’t know whether to call you Pilot or Fire Control, but what I want is for you to get us over to that cruiser.”

“Swapping ships sounds like an excellent idea,” he said. In fact, he seemed quite taken with it. “As for my position, the engines on this boat weren’t replaced with the high thrust ones and the computer wasn’t modified to respond with an automatic vector change when a beam hits the shield. If I can get us there at all, you can most certainly call me Pilot.”

Ruoni took us away from the Flower cautiously. Unlike the parent starship, the boat had a real viewport. Once we were away from the Flower, the Imperial cruiser was visible to the naked eye as a dark blot that tracked across the starfield. A thin rim of brightness showed its sunward side. It was much less impressive than the image the screens constructed. There was no sign of missiles, beams and shot.

If they concentrated their fire on us, we were dead. Our boat had not been modified to resemble an attack boat. It was just an old, slow landing boat, with no hope of surviving the kind of defensive barrage the Imperials could mount. My hope was that they would not. Behind us, the Flower had been sitting helplessly, waiting to be blown out of space, ever since that big Imperial strike had hit. Yet the cruiser had done nothing. Andrave continued to pick up signs that fighting was raging aboard the cruiser; with luck, they would be too tied up to think about shooting at other spacecraft.

My hope of coming in unopposed vanished when we were about halfway there. Light suddenly flared on our shield, leaping away from us in fountains that ran from purple to red.

“What have we got?” I asked.

“Space defense beams,” Ruoni answered. “Antimissile and auxiliary. All light stuff.”

“Light or not,” Cardoni said from his position, “they have a good chance of burning through the shield this tub has.”

“Acknowledged. Can we evade?”

“In this?” Ruoni asked. “Some of the crew aren’t even properly anchored.”

More light flared around us.

“Do it anyway.”

“At your order, Command. Communications …”

Andrave didn’t need to hear him finish. “Brace for uncompensated acceleration,” he shouted.

Ruoni changed the thrust vector, pitching the tail up and diving us almost ninety degrees from the previous course. The beamers on the cruiser had to track us before they could fire again, which of course they did, but again, as soon as the light flared on the shields, Ruoni slammed the boat around sharply. Normally the computer would do that, sensing the instant a beam hit the shield and randomly changing course to reduce the chance of a burn-through. This boat wasn’t set up that way, so Ruoni had to do it by hand. Obviously, he was much slower than the computer would have been, giving the beams more time to work on our shields.

“Burn-through, Command. Rear starboard quarter, one casualty.”

I acknowledged the report silently. The boat was still running on full thrust, so there had been no major damage. As for the casualty, we probably had more injuries from the maneuvering. The screen showed one of the cruiser’s railguns going into operation.

“Evade!” I shouted. “Whatever it takes.”

In response, Ruoni made the boat move like a wounded horse. Up, down, sideways and roll. Anything to keep the beams from lingering on the shield and to dodge the shot that was now coming in. It wasn’t good enough.

“Three critical areas on shield at front starboard quarter!”

“It’s going to burn through!”

There was a flash, this time inside the cabin. Rosy afterimages danced across my eyes as I fought to see what had happened. The air was gone. That was immediately obvious.

“Ship-to-ship comm is shot,” Andrave told me. “I still have intraship, but that’s all.”

The burn-through into the hull had partially wrecked his station. Most of it was melted and charred. It was a wonder that Andrave was still alive.

“Incoming fire is slackening,” Cardoni said.

“What? Why?”

“Don’t know, Command. Maybe they’re having a lot of trouble over there.”

“If so,” Ruoni said, “we should make it in. The fire is down to where we can handle it.”

He was right, and we did make it in. By the end of our flight, there was nothing coming from the cruiser, not even a flicker. Ruoni brought us in close, hunting for a place to dock. That would be tricky in the landing boat. An attack boat is equipped to seal itself against its target and cut into the hull. But that machinery, like the modified computer and the engines, hadn’t been installed on this boat. We had to find an easy way in.

“That’s the hatch covering one of the cruiser’s boat bays,” Ruoni pointed out. He had brought us to a halt relative to the other ship and lit up part of the cruiser’s side with a broad-beam searchlight. “Somewhere on that hull is an emergency access hatch. They are usually placed near the boat bays on Imperial ships, but it can vary depending on how old the ship is. If we can get into it we can open the boat bay from the inside.”

“Do it,” I ordered Ruoni.

“Right, Command.”

“Communications, any idea what we’ll find on the other side?”

“Sorry, Command. The comm is totally blown.”

“Well then,” I said, “I guess we find out the hard way. Have you spotted that hatch?”

“I think this is it,” Ruoni said. He highlighted a small area of the displayed image on the screen.

“Are you sure?”

“No.”

“It’ll have to do. Let’s go see what we find.”

Easier said than done. It meant popping out of the boat, navigating the space between the boat and the cruiser and getting through the cruiser’s hatch. Most of the Srihani in the boat were veteran space travelers, but they were
Imperials
. They were accustomed to traveling between the stars in ships that maintained an internal gravity field and were entered only from an orbital dock. Not one of them had ever been outside a spaceship in a suit.

We put together a small expedition hastily. Ruoni was going; he had the best idea of how the hatch might operate and what might be on the other side. That left the boat without a pilot, but Cardoni thought that if the bay doors could be opened he could nudge the boat into it. With his damaged arm, there wasn’t much else for him to do. We took Andrave because he was intact and good with the comm systems. I went because I had to. We selected three more to round out our team. Six seemed a reasonable size. It was enough to fight, but few enough to be quick.

The main troop area, when we passed through it, was a shambles. Anything that hadn’t been bolted down, and that included our standing-room-only crowd, had been unmercifully flung around by Ruoni’s maneuvering. There were several dead and many more moaning from the pain of broken bones. The boat didn’t have a medical section, only first aid supplies. The artificial endorphin in the kits was soon exhausted, leaving most of the injured to cope with their pain as best they could. There was certainly nothing we could do for them, except break into that cruiser.

Half-armor in place over our suits and magnetic slippers on our feet, we cycled through the airlock and went outside. Barely fifteen yards away, the wall of the cruiser’s hull blotted out the stars. Most of it was black, an irregular hole in the star-dusted night, as it was between us and the local sun. The boat’s searchlight picked out a sharply defined circle in front of us. The outline of the bay door was visible, as was the structure Ruoni believed to be the emergency hatch. All we had to do was reach it.

Unfortunately, moving in space is unlike any other experience. As long as you stood on the hull with the magnetic slippers there was an “up” and a “down” and you could walk. You just had to make sure one foot always stayed in contact with the surface. If both feet broke free, you were out of luck. You hung there helplessly, slowly drifting away from the ship.