Orion Among the Stars

Chapter 28

Six against one were impossible odds. Especially when the six were battle cruisers, twice the size and firepower of the Apollo.

I looked at the stricken faces of the bridge crew. They had been prisoners of the Skorpis once before.

“They’ll freeze us,” muttered Emon.

“And serve us for dinner,” said Jerron, trying to make a joke of it. No one laughed. They all looked grim, frightened.

“They’re not going to take us alive,” I told them.

“And that’s the good news,” Frede wisecracked. Everyone laughed, breaking the tension.

Our one chance was to make it down to the surface of Loris before the Skorpis ships could destroy us. I turned the Apollo in that direction, hoping that the orbiting battle stations could pick off some of the warships hounding us.

“Take power from the weapons batteries,” I told Jerron. “Put every bit of power we’ve got into the engines.”

Emon looked unhappy that his weapons were being drained. I started to say, “Keep the shields—”

The ship was rocked by several hits. Then a massive jolt slammed into us, knocking me against my seat harness painfully.

“Nuclear missile,” Dyer yelled out.

I looked at her screen. The engine section had been hit.

“Screens absorbed most of the energy,” Dyer reported, “but the hull’s buckled. Section eighteen, deck two is open to vacuum.”

“Seal it,” I snapped.

“Automatic,” she replied.

The ship shuddered again.

“They’re hitting that section,” Frede said, almost calmly. “They’re trying to knock out our engines.”

I jinked the ship back and forth, trying to keep their laser beams from overpowering the screen shielding the engine section. But the weapons of six battle cruisers all firing at us were impossible to evade entirely. Apollo bounced and shook like a rat in a terrier’s jaws.

One of the Skorpis cruisers blew up, victim of a Commonwealth station’s guns. But the others pressed their attack even harder. One of my display screens sputtered and went dark. The overhead lights flickered fitfully.

And the surface of Loris still seemed to be a million light-years away. We were diving toward that blue and white planet, hoping desperately that the Commonwealth defenders would allow us through their planetary screen and shoot the Skorpis warships off our back.

“Power drain exceeding safety limits,” Jerron said tensely. “The shield isn’t going to hold up more than another fifteen seconds.”

“More nuclear missiles on their way!”

I saw them in the main display screen and turned the ship to avoid them. But their guidance sensors had locked on to us.

“Hang on!”

Three explosions hit us almost simultaneously. Display screens burst in showers of sparks all across the bridge. The lights blew out. Acrid smoke filled the darkness.

The red emergency lights came on. In the dimness I saw that the bridge crew was still alive, though we would all have bad bruises from our safety harnesses.

“Power’s gone,” Jerron muttered.

“We’re dead meat.”

“Not yet, we aren’t,” I said, unbuckling my harness. “They said they wanted to take us alive.”

Frede smiled grimly. “Break out the rifles and sidearms,” she said. “We’ll make a fight of it.”

A wild thought spun into my mind. A memory of ancient days when sailing ships grappled and sent boarding parties to seize their opponents. The Skorpis were going to board us, I knew. What if we ambushed their boarding party and then seized their battle cruiser?

“Come on,” I said, getting to my feet. “We don’t have much time.”

As we were passing out the hand weapons to the entire crew we heard the thump and clang of a Skorpis ship mating its air lock to our main hatch. With our sensors down, I could not tell if it was a shuttle craft or one of the battle cruisers.

“If that’s a shuttle,” I said, “there can’t be more than twenty or thirty warriors on board.”

“More likely it’s a battle cruiser,” said Frede. “They wouldn’t risk a shuttle with all the shooting going on out there.”

“And they know they’ll need more than thirty warriors to take us down,” Emon added, trying to sound cocky.

“Good,” I said. “Then after we finish the boarding party we can take over their ship.”

Someone laughed in the darkness and muttered, “Yeah, the thirty-five of us against a couple hundred Skorpis.”

There was no time to worry about the odds. The Skorpis would quickly burn through our locked hatch. I deployed my crew at the end of the short passageway leading from the main hatch to the power ladder that went down to the main deck.

“Let them into the passageway, then cut them down while they’ve got no place to hide,” I said.

I placed Emon and two other crewmen on the rungs of the ladder, where they could pop up and fire along the passageway. I flattened myself on the deck on the other side of the ladder’s hatch, hugging a rifle in both arms, behind a metal table we dragged out of a crewman’s quarters. Frede and the others were farther down the passageway, at the next ladder-way down, ready to fire at the Skorpis boarders or duck down to the main deck and continue the fight there if the Skorpis got past our first line of defense.

We barely had time to get ourselves set. The Skorpis did not bother trying to melt the hatch’s locking mechanism with a laser. They attached an explosive charge to the hatch and set it off. The blast knocked the heavy metal hatch inward, banging halfway down the passageway. Anyone standing there would have been flattened.

The Skorpis were so big that they had to squeeze through the hatch one at a time. In the dim lighting of the smoke-filled passage I saw the first one step through, a heavy rifle pointed straight ahead, helmet brushing the overhead, cat’s eyes peering into the darkness warily. We could have potted him easily, but I wanted that passageway filled with as many of their boarding party as possible before we started mowing them down.

They were wearing body armor. They trudged down the passageway carefully, their boots as noiseless as cat’s feet on the metal deck plates. Emon and his two crewmates kept their heads down, out of sight, waiting as they clung to the ladder’s rungs. I huddled behind the overturned table, scarcely breathing.

The Skorpis warriors stood for several moments, as if waiting for something. Then I heard a muffled explosion from somewhere. And another. They were blowing in our auxiliary hatches! They must have assault teams in space suits breaking into the ship from all three hatches at once!

My brilliant plan was mincemeat. We had to get down onto the main deck and fight at least three boarding parties at once.

“Fire!” I screamed as I raised myself to my knees and cut the first Skorpis in half with a bolt from my rifle.

My senses went into overdrive and the world around me slowed into a dreamlike torpor. I saw Emon and his little team raise their heads leisurely above the ladder hatch’s sill and squeeze the triggers of their rifles. More laser beams came sizzling over my head from Frede and her team. The Skorpis warriors, huge and clumsy in the confines of the passageway, died in their tracks, slumping to their knees as laser beams burned holes through their armor, falling sluggishly, weapons dropping from their lifeless fingers. Their death screams sounded like eerie keening wails, echoing off the passageway’s metal bulkheads. Their bodies even blocked the hatch, making it difficult for more of them to get in.

But they fired as they fell. They died fighting. More of them pushed through the bodies of their own dead to worm their way on their bellies toward us.

“Everybody down to the main deck,” I yelled.

Too late. One of the dying warriors pulled a grenade from his equipment belt and tossed it toward the hatch. I saw it wobbling on a lazy arc toward Emon and his crewmen. I fired at it, hit it, and it exploded in a shower of white-hot shrapnel. Howls of pain came from the ladderway. A body thudded down onto the main deck.

I crawled along the deck plates, firing into the crouching Skorpis who were using their own dead as shields for themselves. I rolled headfirst down into the ladder well, grabbed a rail and let myself slide down the rest of the way to the main deck.

Emon’s head and shoulders were covered with blood, his own and his crewmates’. One of the men sprawled dead on the deck, the other clutched a shredded arm with one hand.

“I’m okay,” Emon said. “I can still shoot.” But when he tried to stand he staggered into my arms.

I pulled him away from the ladderway and into the comparative safety of a compartment hatch. Then I went back and got the other wounded man. I saw laser beams zipping past the open ladder hatch, up above.

Sitting the wounded man against the bulkhead of the compartment, I told Emon, “The Skorpis will be pouring down that ladderway in a few moments.”

“I’ll hold ’em off,” he said, hefting his rifle in bloodied hands.

“Do the best you can,” I said. I left him there and sprinted down the passageway toward Frede and the rest of our crew.

“They blew the other hatches,” I told her.

“I heard it.”

“Get those people down here.” I pointed to the crew who were still firing from the top of the ladder. “We’ll make our stand in the cargo bay.”

“Right.”

They must know that we’re carrying Anya in this ship. For some reason they want her alive. They don’t want her to surrender to the Commonwealth, but they’d rather take her back to Hegemony territory, if they can.

I ran past the dead and smoking bridge, ducked down the ladderway to the lower deck and raced for the cargo hold where Anya’s cryosleep capsule lay. Her sarcophagus, I thought.

Four Skorpis warriors were already prying the cargo bay hatch open when I hit the lower deck. They were in space suits and did not hear me running up the passageway toward them. I gave them no chance. I fired my rifle from the hip as I ran toward them. The oxygen tanks on their life-support systems exploded, blowing them to sticky shreds.

Twelve more space-suited warriors came pounding up the passageway from the other end, where the air-lock hatch was. Too many for me to handle by myself, especially when they were firing laser rifles at me. I backpedaled, then turned and ran into the nearest protective hatch. I found myself in the transceiver station, a flat open bay with a small console standing to one side.

Using the passageway hatch to shelter me, I fired at the Skorpis who stood near the cargo bay hatch. I saw one sag and slide down the bulkhead, his helmet smoking where my rifle beam had caught him. The others turned toward me, in dreamlike slow motion, raising their rifles toward me. I fired twice, shattering a helmet visor and burning a hole through the arm of another Skorpis. They backed away, firing. I ducked back inside the transceiver bay hatch.

A standoff. They could not get into the cargo bay; neither could I.

I wondered if the ship was still hurtling toward Loris, and if the planet’s defensive systems would blast the Skorpis battle cruiser and us with it. Or had the cruiser’s captain maneuvered us away from our collision course with the planet?

Footsteps running up the passageway. I glanced out and saw Frede leading the rest of the crew. I counted only thirty.

“Look out!” I yelled. “They’re at the other end of the passageway, by the cargo bay hatch.”

Frede and her people flattened out against the bulkheads, firing and being fired upon as they, one by one, ducked into the transceiver bay with me.

“We caught the other boarding party coming through the after hatch,” she said. “Took some casualties.”

“So I see.” None of them were unwounded. Frede’s face was smeared with blood and sweat.

But she grinned. “We wiped them out. Killed every last one of those damned cats.”

That leaves only a couple of hundred, I thought. It was obvious that the Skorpis battle cruiser had attached itself to our air lock. We were not dealing with a shuttle load of warriors, not the way they were pouring reinforcements into our ship.

“They’re regrouping down the passageway,” I said. “Probably getting reinforcements before they charge us.”

“The first landing party, up by the main air lock—”

“They’ll be coming down here the same way you came. We’ll have our hands full.”

“Still thinking of taking their ship?”

I laughed bitterly.

Looking over the ragged remains of my crew, I saw that little Jerron was badly burned in the abdomen and left leg. He lay panting, wide-eyed with shock, with our medical officer bending over him.

“Magro,” I called to the comm officer. “Can you power up the transceiver?”

He was grimy and breathing hard, like all the others. But he gave me a nod and said, “I can try, sir.”

“What are you thinking?” Frede asked.

Peering down the dimly lit, smoky passageway, I could see no Skorpis. They were beyond the air-lock hatch, preparing their next attack on us.

“They want the cryo capsule in the cargo hold,” I told Frede. “Maybe we can beam it down to the planet.”

“We’d have to drag it in here,” Frede objected.

“We could cut through the bulkhead. Are there any flight packs stashed in that cargo bay? That would make it easier to move the capsule.”

Clearly, she did not think much of my idea. But she said, “I’ll get a couple of people to cut through the bulkhead.”

Nodding, I turned my attention back to the empty passageway. The Skorpis could cut through the ship’s outer hull and get into the cargo bay that way, I knew. Would they try that, or would they first try to wipe us out and walk into the cargo bay after we were done with?

Why not blow a hole in the hull right here, in the transceiver bay, and kill us all at one stroke? Blow out the hull, expose us to vacuum; none of us had space suits. Explosive decompression, we’d be dead in an instant. The thought startled me. But then I reasoned that if they had wanted to do that they would have done it by now. A blast big enough to puncture the hull would probably damage Anya’s cryosleep capsule, as well, and it seemed that they wanted Anya alive. If possible.

Waiting, wondering what would happen next, was harder than actually fighting. Behind me I heard the crackling sizzle of lasers cutting through the metal of the bulkhead separating us from the cargo bay. The passageway remained empty. Whatever the Skorpis were planning, they were taking their time about it.

I heard a crewman sing out, “Watch it, the section’s falling.”

Glancing over my shoulder I saw a whole section of the bulkhead, its edges glowing red, fall inward, scattering the crewmen who had burned it through. It thumped loudly, making me wonder if the Skorpis could hear it.

“Damn,” I heard Frede call, her voice echoing in the nearly empty cargo bay, “not a flight pack in the place. We’ll have to muscle it.”

I called Dyer and told her to watch the passageway. Then I stepped through the jagged hole in the bulkhead to join the team of sweating, grunting, cursing men and women who were tugging at the massive cryosleep capsule.

“Heavier than a sergeant’s ass,” one of the men muttered.

“Heavier than your ass, anyway.”

It was like dragging one of the stones for Khufu’s pyramid without the aid of rollers. The capsule screeched along the metal deck plates, moving grudgingly, a millimeter at a time. I called almost all the remaining members of the crew to help us, as I watched through sweat-stung eyes while Magro bent over the transceiver console, a puzzled frown on his face as he pecked tentatively at the keyboard.

At last we hauled the capsule onto the transceiver stage. I felt as if I had dragged the planet Jupiter through a light-year of mud.

Trudging slowly to Magro at the console, I asked, “You do have power, don’t you?”

“Yessir,” he said, still frowning at the readouts. “But I don’t know where we are in relation to the planet. I need a navigational fix.”

I turned to Frede, who was leaning against the side of the capsule, mopping her sweaty face. “How can we—”

“Here they come!” yelped Dyer. And a grenade went off at her feet, blowing her legs off.