Rich Man's War (55 page)

Where’s
Saratoga?
someone might ask.
Didn’t they come out here with us? I don’t see them on the boards anymore.

A screen made a quick damage assessment:
Target eliminated. Engine room critical likely. No signals in debris field.
Another screen replayed a high-resolution image of the ship as it exploded. The console also reported the cannon’s current charge—low, needing a moment to reset and change out burned components on an automated reset function—but with a standard countdown showing when the cannon would be ready again. Behind him, the round shaft running from floor to ceiling that contained the cannon’s main power supply went back into recharge mode.

Business as usual.

“Tanner?” asked Baldwin. She wrapped up the wrists of another unconscious tech off to one side of the console, looking up at him with concern. He heard it in her voice, at least. He couldn’t see her actual expression, what with the faceplate.

He glanced up at the walkways, where Alicia now disappeared behind the power supply shaft on her way to wire up
Deck Two’s starboard side hatch with a mine just like the others. That was her idea of “securing” a door. She didn’t even blink at this. It was her element.

“I’m fine,” he
replied. Something felt wrong about that—it was the truth, and
that
was what bothered him—but he’d have to deal with it later. “Alicia, how we doing?”

“One more to go on this level,” she said, hustling around the walkway. The few crewmen on her level all lay still, thoroughly incapacitated by
all the electric shocks, concussive grenade blasts and punches and kicks of the small team’s initial entry. “If you can—“

Explosions from up above cut off her words
. They erupted at both hatches on Deck One and the port hatch of Deck Two, causing Alicia to reflexively throw herself down on Deck Two’s walkway. At one side of the compartment, a pair of men in charred, battered suits of recon armor tumbled over the walkway rails. Another fell through the flame and smoke at the other hatch, collapsing in a heap.

The starboard side hatch on Deck Two flew open as well, but this one didn’t explode. Alicia hadn’t gotten there in time to rig one of her mines yet. Two more Ranger
s in recon armor came through with their weapons up, looking for targets.

The captured NorthStar gunnery crew, still mostly groggy at best, did what they could to huddle against any bulkhead or console they could across all three levels of the compartment. Virtually all of them were now bound and more or less helpless. A few screamed.

With his back to the control console, Tanner’s eyes shot to the hatch on his right. It didn’t open. The one on the other side of the compartment flew back, however, and two more Rangers appeared. Tanner and Baldwin both dove for cover, but neither of the attackers fired a shot right away.

Alicia was not so lucky. The two Rangers on her level spotted her and opened fire, stepping around the open hatch onto the walkway with little regard for cover.
With her rifle was over her shoulder, Alicia reacted with the weapon already in hand. She hit the mine’s activator and hurled it forward, then threw herself into a backward somersault on the deck to get clear.

The blast pushed her away painfully, but it was much worse for the aspiring NorthStar Ranger who stood closest to the mine. It landed face down at
Narendra’s feet, detonating as soon as it hit the deck. Her armor and her body absorbed most of the blast for Bishop, moving in behind her, but even he was knocked over.

Despite
the flame and debris falling from the starboard side of the compartment, Baldwin found more safety there than she did on the opposite side with the other two Rangers coming in. The two armored bodies from Deck One now lay nearby on Deck Three, smoldering and sparking but otherwise not moving. Baldwin rushed for the corpses, figuring their broken armor would still offer sturdier cover than the computer consoles.

Tanner found himself stuck behind little more than a tool cabinet. Rapid-fire lasers flashed through the metal casing at its top, forcing him to cringe, but he dared to lean around the side and shoot back with his pulse rifle. He saw only one attacker coming around the huge power supply shaft toward him and realized the other would likely move in the opposite direction. Tanner fired away and managed to clip the armored figure’s leg, but his pulse rifle seemed to have no effect. “Aw, fuck me,” Tanner
muttered, then scrambled away from his tool cabinet as the recon trooper’s stream of fire shifted downward and annihilated the whole fixture.

Baldwin grabbed one shoulder of the corpse i
n front of her and heaved it up to get the body laying on its side to offer a little more cover. She caught a nametag that said “Soldan” with a brief glance, but paid it little mind. Like Tanner, she realized the enemy would likely split to go around both sides of the power supply shaft. She snatched one more grenade off her belt—this one considerably more lethal than her now exhausted supply of stun grenades—and hurled it around the shaft. If nothing else, it would give the enemy pause while she figured out what she could do.

Though her legs and her back felt like they might be on fire, Alicia forced herself to her side and got her rifle off of her shoulder. She fired a couple of bursts at the fumbling form of the armored Ranger just a few meters away from her, now separated by a hole in the walkway and some mangled railing, but she couldn’t tell if she did much good. Between the smoke and the stress, she wasn’t sure if she’d hit him until her third burst, when she saw sparks against the armor.

Laser fire came down at her from above and behind, striking the walkway beside her and forcing her to roll closer to the bulkhead for protection. She looked back over her shoulder and found another of the troopers, this one a bit blackened by her mine but otherwise fine. His angle of fire wasn’t good, but he could keep her pinned just by staying where he was… and she knew he didn’t really have to do that.

“Baldwin!” she shouted. “Tanner! Get out of here! Just go!”

The shooting from above stopped. “
Tanner?
” blurted the recon trooper.

Hiding behind the main control console, Tanner looked up to the sound of his name
. The blackened Ranger leapt over the rails from Deck One to come down onto his level. “Tanner motherfucking Malone, is that you?” he shouted, sounding almost giddy.

“Do I know you?” Tanner called back.

“Hold up!” shouted the Ranger Tanner had clipped, whom he now took for the leader. “Damn it, Eickenberry, I said—!”

“Aw, Christ,” Tanner grunted before his old antagonist charged straight for the console, crashing
straight through it. Though Tanner managed to avoid being pinned by anything, the impact of so much metal and weight all across his body sent him tumbling across the deck.

“Wow, I fucking dreamed about running into you again!”

“Eickenberry,” demanded the other man behind him, “finish it or get out of the fucking way!”

“Relax, Harris, I’ve got this!”

Tanner pulled the pistol from his side holster. “Einstein,” he croaked, “this is a really bad time—“

“Don’t call me that!” Einstein roared, grabbing Tanner by the back of his coat and heaving him up over his head. “You think you’re fucking funny with that name? Hah?” He slammed Tanner into a nearby console, knocking the gun from his hand. “I bet fuckin’ Janeka’s on this
ship, too, huh? Is she? I’m gonna find her and kill her ass when I’m done with you. This is what they were trainin’ us all for all along, isn’t it? This is what I wasn’t good enough for?”

Tanner coughed. “Well, you
did
kinda suck at everything.”

“
Aaargh!” Einstein roared, slamming Tanner against the console again.

On the walkway above, Alicia knew little of her friend’s plight. Her armored opponent recovered and moved in, firing in a deadly arc with his pulse rifle before leaping over the hole in the walkway
. Alicia withdrew as best she could, knowing her guns were almost useless against that armor. Other boarders carried heavier weapons for such a problem, none were here now. She’d have to handle this the hard way.

The Ranger kept advancing. Alicia grabbed her last stun grenade, dropped it at her feet and then launched herself toward the Ranger’s feet. Though she knew anything as formidable as powered recon armor would have audio and visual protection, the stun grenade would hopefully, at least, provide a moment’s distraction—and it did. Rather than shoot her or catch her, the Ranger flinched and stepped back from the blast.

The concussion shook Alicia up, too, but she pushed past it. In a flash, she was on her feet again and behind her opponent. Spinning in a full circle, Alicia delivered a forceful kick to the Ranger’s lower back. It knocked him up against the walkway railing, throwing him off balance.

Corporal Bishop got his bearings in time for his opponent to tackle him, which seemed crazy against someone in powered armor. She had nothing but a combat jacket and a helmet. Bishop reached
back, grabbing at her combat jacket to pull her off.

Then the heated knife in her hand pierced the flexible material at the back of his neck, along with his flesh and his spine.

Tanner couldn’t get to his knife. He couldn’t do much of anything other than try to brace himself as Einstein slammed him into things—which, at this point, he couldn’t identify. Maybe a bulkhead. Maybe a computer console. Maybe a car for all he could tell. Then Einstein held him up in the air again and threw him into another computer console, which Tanner crashed straight through and onto the deck beyond.

He couldn’t tell where he was in the compartment, or who else might still be fighting, but he heard Einstein cheering for himself. That much was easy enough to make out.

“You see, asshole? Who’s getting the last laugh now, huh?” Einstein prodded.

Tanner didn’t answer. Hurting from head to toe, he patted himself down for weapons. His guns were gone. He was out of grenades. About the only things he had now were his knife, a useless electric stunner, amm
o for weapons he couldn’t reach, and his breaching kit.

He threw the charging switch on the breaching kit and began unspooling the cable from the box, letting it hit the deck in a pile at his side.

“They pay me three times what you make in that fuckin’ militia,” Einstein continued, “and I’m just getting started! You see the gear they give me?” he asked, stalking around the computer console to get at Tanner again. “You get anything like this in the fucking Archangel Navy?”

Black contact cable whipped out from around the console.
Tanner caught Einstein across the hip with the cable, lashing out with enough force that the cable wrapped itself part-way around his waist. As soon as he saw contact, Tanner hit the power button on the breaching kit, sending a powerful burst of electric pulses and override signals through the armor.

Seals popped all across Einstein’s armor. Others locked up. A second later, the armor’s anti-theft system recognized the false signals sent by the kit and reacted as designed. From ankle to shoulder, every joint within the armor fused
violently. Circuitry all along the chest piece and the legs overheated and melted.

Einstein howled in agony before he fell to the deck in a smoking ruin.

“No,” Tanner huffed, “but I read the user manual once.”

“Aw, Christ, it
is
you,” said a voice. Tanner looked up to find the one Einstein called Harris standing not far away, his rifle trained on Tanner. “I thought I recognized your face. Tough show, kid, but Eickenberry had it right. You just joined up with the wrong tea—“

Dazzling bolts of green light struck Harris from the side, plunging right into and through his body in a rapid burst. He didn’t scream so much as gurgle as he collapsed under the barrage of p
lasma blasts, which stopped as suddenly as he began.

“Not everything i
s about Tanner!” shouted Baldwin from across the compartment. Tanner looked over to find her slumped against the two charred and battered Rangers that had fallen from Deck One, holding a large weapon in her hand with a power cable that ran to one of the corpses beside her.

“Plasma repeaters!” she
huffed, holding up the heavy weapon. “Do you believe this shit? They give these guys fucking plasma repeaters!”

Tanner staggered out from behind the computer console. “Alicia?” he called out. He heard nothing, nor did he see hostiles or any threatening movement from the still bound and terrified members of the gun crew. He gingerly bent over Harris’s corpse to pick up the man’s
rifle before continuing on past Baldwin, who remained at her spot where she could keep hold of her newfound fire superiority.

“Alicia, you there?” he asked, looking up toward the smoking ruin of the catwalk. He saw two sets of recon armor laying in the wreckage, but not his friend. “Alicia!?”

“I’m down here,” came her voice. Tanner turned his attention lower and rushed around the power supply shaft to find Alicia laying underneath the body of one last Ranger. This one, too, remained motionless, with a knife embedded to its hilt up underneath his jaw. Alicia tried to push herself free of the heavy body. “Had to jump down on this one,” she grumbled.