War Against the White Knights (15 page)

It took just over a minute between the
850
coming to a halt and Tremayne following the Marines along the corridor to the side-mounted hatch through which she’d entered the modified ammo carrier. Not long, but a lifetime in comparison to her Marine days when a squad could deploy out of a specialized troop carrier and into space in under three seconds. This secret stealth tech Xin mentioned was keeping them alive.

“About time,” said Xin when Tremayne arrived. “For the benefit of Deputy Ambassador Tremayne, here are my orders for this expedition. If you see General McEwan bring him back to the
850
. If you see anyone else, kill them. My additional orders to you, Tremayne, are: one, don’t get yourself killed because General McEwan would be upset – and two, stay close in case your freaky mutant powers suddenly become vital, which they have an annoying habit of doing.”

“What about Romulus?” asked Tremayne in a panic. “If he’s here, do we shoot him?” She had rarely met the boy she had rescued from the clutches of the Hardits in the abortive liberation of Tranquility, but she had followed the careers of every one of the few survivors of that expedition.

“You have your orders,” growled Xin. “Do not question them again.”

Tremayne bit down on the anger roiling in her breast.
You aren’t my commander, bitch. I do what I think best.

Tremayne tested the heft of this pistol. It was weightless in the zero-gee but still possessed inertia, and she needed to familiarize herself with its feel. The sidearm was a miniature railgun, which meant it would be useless against armor, but for its compact size, very effective against soft targets.

Then, with a brief howl of wind, the outer door slid away, and Tremayne shot into space, seeking targets.

But according to the evidence before her eyes, there was nothing there. Even the Marines had disappeared.

When it came to void combat, Tremayne was still a Marine. Stick her inside an ACE/2 combat suit with her AI embedded in the armored chest band, and admit her into the team’s combat net, and her instinct and training would cut back in – she was sure of it.

But none of those things happened.

She hung in space, unable to see Xin’s squad, the kidnappers, the Legion fleet or even the
TS 850
that had brought her here. She felt at rest because she had no frame of reference, but for all she knew she could be hurtling at high speed away from any or all of those points of interest. Even if she had a tactical map, she was still helpless, because the maneuver capability of her pressure suit was minimal.

Only one thing was abundantly clear to her: she was fully visible and on a constant vector, like a training target for a freshman novice. In void combat you had three choices: move fast, hide, or die. The fact that she was doing none of them meant the enemy must be blind or were being jammed. Or that no one was there.

Had Xin abandoned her? Tidying up an irritating detail from her past before carrying on to rescue her beloved, the father of her unborn child? Surely Bolinny and the others wouldn’t follow such orders?

She looked around for any sign that she was not alone.

The situation was so unsettling that when something impacted her arm, she screamed like a crècheling. It took a moment to realize it was the hand of a Marine, one who was now towing Tremayne.

“Stealth on stealth… it’s hilarious,” said Kraken, who she assumed was the one grabbing her arm. “We had to find the enemy ship and map its exterior by feel. Can you believe that? And with all the cloaking and cyber-bollocks we’re pulling, we’ve also lost the
850
.”

“You mean it’s destroyed?”

“No, I mean we can’t find it. Could be a long walk home. Still, all these cyber-shenanigans have kept you alive, at least until now.”

“You mean we’re going to board?”

“Yep. Right about… wait for it… now!”

The invisible Kraken grabbed Tremayne and swiveled her around until she was pointing at a circle of glowing blue about a hundred meters away: a breaching charge burning hot, not least warming Tremayne’s heart to finally see something. The blue suddenly flared into an intense ring of yellow and white before exploding into a hail of shattered fragments from the ship hatch. Behind the white vapor streaming out of the depressurizing ship, she could see its interior. It looked so ordinary. Nothing there to intimidate her.

Then the ship reestablished pressure seals, shutting off the spray of vapor. A moment later, the open hatchway folded itself away out of sight as the enemy ship’s stealth capability reasserted itself, but not before Tremayne caught flickering glimpses of Kuzak’s mysterious box inside the kidnapper’s ship before it too was lost to sight.

Once again, she was alone in the void, according to what her eyes reported, but this time she knew that was misleading, and within seconds the invisible Marine had pushed her through a hidden perimeter and suddenly the kidnapper’s ship was fully visible.

It was an ugly, blocky craft, about the size of a Stork, the largest shuttle craft in the Legion fleet. Given the insistence of the White Knights for reusable and modular designs, the fact that she didn’t recognize any aspect of this ship meant it was highly unlikely to be part of a White Knight fleet, of either faction. It didn’t look like a Muryani ship type either.

Hardits! It had to be.

At last she was inside the ship, and glad to find modest pseudo-gravity pulling down through the deck. A ladderwell aft led down into the ship, but she allowed Kraken to point her in the other direction, where a passageway led away from the hatch before curving around to the right. A few paces along was a shimmering, translucent wall, which she recognized as the pressure wall preventing the atmosphere from rushing into the vacuum where she stood.

“That direction’s forward,” he explained, not realizing that she had glimpsed the ship from the outside. “The passageway feeds starboard until it meets the bridge. We are on the upper of three decks. Romulus is on Deck Two and General McEwan on Three. Neither are moving.”

“Talking of not moving, why are you standing there telling me all this? Shouldn’t we be, you know, doing something?”

“I
am
doing something. Horden’s Hairy Fanny, you’re out of practice, Springer.”

“I’m not called… Oh, you’re covering the blown hatch.”

“Got it. And Giant’s covering the ladderwell, though she’s got it easy because she’s behind a force wall. Reckon if I were the Hardit commander, my best chance would be to take a team out into the void and come at us through our own breach.”

The idea sparked painful memories. “General McEwan used that tactic against the Hardits on Antilles when he was still a cadet.”

“Which is where you lost your leg and half your face. Yes, I know. Problem is, so do the Hardits.”

“Isn’t there anyone else at our position?”

“Negative. Now, shut up and listen. We read twelve Hardits aboard but can assume there are many more, hidden from our sensors by their stealth systems. Update…. Stand by… Eight of those Hardits are now dead.”

“How?”

“Killed when we seized the bridge… Bridge control systems are now destroyed, main force returning to our position. Get ready to move out, Tremayne.”

The Marines might have been stealthed beyond her ability to see them, and there was no sound in the vacuum of the depressurized part of the ship for sound to travel through, but the deck carried the unmistakable pounding of armored Marines running in low gravity. Strange that it was this sound that brought the memories flooding back. She had been proud to be a Marine, and she’d been a good one too.

Don’t suppose you ever stop being a Marine, no matter what they do to you.

She frowned. Why weren’t the Marines flying? Outside of a gravity field, their combat suits were designed to do just that. In fact…

“Kraken?”

“Yes?”

“Can’t you just pick me up and fly me around?”

“Negative. Suit systems are failing fast. Hardits might be cowardly monkeys in the physical world, but they fight hard and dirty in cyberspace. We still move fast, though.”

The Hardit ship lurched and Tremayne fought to keep her feet as violent flashes of light flared up the ladderwell from the deck below.

“Move it!” yelled Kraken.

Tremayne bounded toward the ladderwell, pushing through the pressure wall and into air and sound. She descended using the handrail to push herself down hand-over-hand in the low-gee. It was faster this way, and with less chance of breaking an ankle because she was soon enveloped in impenetrably thick clouds. The Marines must have fired off smoke grenades.

She had just planted her feet on the deck when a shadowy humanoid form suddenly loomed out of the clouds.

Tremayne didn’t hesitate, didn’t even need to think. She drove headfirst into the passageway, firing two accurate shots at the figure before rolling in midair and coming to her feet. With only one of those feet still flesh and blood in nature, her landing wasn’t as balanced as it needed to be, and she fretted that she was wasting valuable moments before regaining her poise sufficiently to dodge and fire at the target again.

Turned out, that was just as well.

“Cease fire, Tremayne!” The voice was Kraken’s. “Stop shooting at me and shift your ass up the passageway. Come on, move!”

“Did I damage you?” asked Tremayne, as she advanced up the passageway.

“How should I know? My suit’s on the fritz. Jeez, you got a strange way of telling a Marine his stealth function has failed.

The background hum of fans, ubiquitous in space vehicles, became a foreground, screaming whine as the air-scrubbing system went into overdrive. The smoke from the grenades cleared within seconds, and finally Tremayne could see the situation with her own eyes.

Xin and her bodyguard of eight Marines were trapped in a twenty-meter section of passageway. Limpet-like devices were positioned around the passageway and over the two hatches that led deeper into the ship. Invisible – for the moment – force shields were generated by those limpets. There were no signs of Hardits but they would soon congregate on the outside of the force shields, and given that they had the equipment and skill to penetrate
Lance of Freedom
and steal away the commanding officer of the Human Legion, she didn’t expect the shields would hold up for long.

As for the Legion side, the situation looked tactically dire. Giant had secured the tripod-mounted weapon to the deck just inside the forward force shield, and looked ready to fire. Alongside her was a Marine she didn’t recognize with a stubby weapon attached by a thick cable to a bulky backpack heavy enough that he had struggled to move into position. What was that, a flamethrower?

The Marines could spit fire if they were given the chance but they were bunched in a tight space. And having given up options for movement they had yielded the initiative to the Hardits, offering themselves as static targets.

Tremayne prayed Xin and Majanita knew what they were doing, because it sure looked like a frakk-up to her.

The lone Marine who’d taken up a position on the overhead flailed one arm for balance, and then fell to the floor with a dull thud, combat suit motors finally succumbing to the Hardit cyber-attack.

“And I thought you could see the future,” said Kraken, mockingly, though she could hear his smile even though she couldn’t see it. “The monkeys are as good as dead.” Then he added somberly, “I just pray the same can’t be said of the General McEwan.”

“Switch to radio comms,” said Xin. “I’m bored with stealth now. Go ahead, Kuzak, let her rip.”

Kuzak had been hunched over the box he’d hauled from the
850
. The colored lights on its top panel all turned green.

“Bolinny, Jintu, Morgan, watch our rear,” ordered Majanita. “Kraken, the port-side hatches. Everyone else, keep smoke ready up your tubes, but leave the firing to Giant and O’Hanlan. That’s the pulse beam gunner and the automatic rifleman for Tremayne’s benefit. Hold your fire, Deputy Ambassador, in case you hit something with a thinner hide than your new buddy, Kraken.”

Like a nightmare, heavily armed and armored Hardits on the far side of the forward force shield seemed to slide through a tear from another dimension and into visibility, as Kuzak’s box of tricks defeated the enemy stealth capability.

But it was the Hardits whose worst nightmare had just come real, because Giant opened up with her heavy weapon on the Hardits, who just stood there, confused.

Tremayne’s heart sank. Kraken had been so confident that she had believed the Marines had some kind of secret weapon. But whatever they had intended Giant’s weapon to do, it wasn’t working. Its barrel was glowing hot already, but there was nothing visible coming out of its business end, and no effect on the Hardits. All it did was hit the inside of the force shield sufficiently hard to cause slight multicolored ripples from the impact point that quickly died away.

Xin came up to stand by Tremayne’s shoulder. She didn’t look to be in any hurry.

“Ever heard of pulse weapons, Tremayne?” she asked.

“Of course. Pulsing a laser reduces its power consumption and any tendency to overheat, and also allows some of the debris bloom on the target to clear. Also, the rapid temperature changes on the target can cause–”

“Yeah, yeah.” Xin waved a dismissive hand. “Now Giant has her lucky hands on a really cool pulse weapon. Keep watching…”

Tremayne watched as the enemy, untouched by Giant’s weapon, pointed their tails at the humans in what she took to be a disparaging gesture of contempt. She counted sixteen of them, and now they knew the humans could see them, they took advantage of their still-functioning combat suit motors to take to the air and swarm through the passageway like insects, a constant and confusing motion. Two clumps pushed through the swarm, and resolved themselves as tripod-mounted devices of their own. She guessed this was what would cut through the Marine force shields.

“The clever thing about Giant’s pulse gun,” said Xin sounding amused by the Hardits’ activity, “is that its microwave beam fires continuously but pulses out of this reality, and into neighboring ones.”