You are mad.
“Do it!” Hadeishi reached down and unsnapped his tether from the cargo tray. “All teams! Release your tethers. The Khaid ship is rolling aspect and we need to match v on her. No step-through, repeat no step-through. We’re going to make contact in free flight.”
There was a flurry of activity, but the Nisei officer had already turned to watch the bay doors thud back into the hull. A vast expanse of boiling dust and hidden, gleaming stars opened before him, swallowing all sight and vision. The beauty of the kuub -the intricate traceries of debris plumes and the shining coronas of distant stars-poured in, filling the cargo bay with a hot jeweled light.
The appearance of the black shape of the Khaid ship was an abrupt jolt as the Wilful went into a hard burn herself. It loomed up suddenly, still in the middle of its own maneuver, the drive-plume blazing like a rising sun off to starboard as the massive ship turned inside their own course.
“Velocities match!” Tocoztic and De Molay’s voices overlapped. “Gantries away!”
Rail one slammed forward, safety interlocks disengaged, and Mitsuharu and his two crewmen were suddenly blown out of the side of the freighter as the tray slammed into the end of the rail and flipped down and out of the way. The successive trays on the gantry banged away, one every three seconds. Clouds of men hurtled across the void between the two ships, suddenly enveloped in a coruscating radiance.
The Khaid light cruiser continued her burn, the hull swelling before them like a basalt cliff, a jagged landscape of thermocouple fins, airlocks, gun emplacements… Hadeishi’s eye grasped her outline in a flash and exulted. His intuition had been right, the drive signature confirmed.
“She’s an old Spear -class cruiser,” he barked on both channels, hands light on his suit propellant controls. “Cargo locks are dorsal mount, to our right and high. All hands, maneuver on my mark. Mark!”
Mitsuharu angled to the right, jets hissing, and the black wall came rushing on. Even without a suit-comp to feed him intercept times and distances, his eye was keen enough to gauge the right moment.
“Team one, braking!” He blew the last of his propellant, but even this was not enough to avoid slamming hard into the shipskin of the old Spear. The junior comm officer hit next, then the marine. Off to their left, Cajeme and his team had done a better job, touching down at almost zero delta. “Team One is down, repeat Team One is down.”
Hadeishi staggered up, letting his boots adhere to the shipskin. The marine was cursing, his right arm injured, and the comm officer was just clinging in panic to the hull with both hands and feet.
“Up you get, Sho-i,” Mitsuharu growled, seizing her by the shoulder. The ensign yelped but got her feet beneath her. “ Joto-hei, are you mobile? We’ve thirty seconds to get inside.”
The marine nodded, his face parchment-pale behind his helmet visor. “Good to go, kyo! ”
The hull shivered under Hadeishi’s feet and he moved left, a lanyard snapped to the Sho-i ’s belt, another cast to the marine. Cajeme had already scuttled towards them, sparing only seconds for himself before the demo plastic he’d slapped down around the periphery of a maintenance hatch offset from the set of massive cargo doors blew-a hard white flash stabbing at their eyes, sending everyone’s visor polarized-and the shipskin peeled away from the edges of the portal. A pair of remote-controlled antipersonnel guns had also taken the brunt of the explosion, and their short, stubby barrels were now pointed off at the distant stars.
“Team One, go!” Mitsuharu was at the side of the two crewmen with the magnetic rams as they slammed them into place at the edge of the hatchway, where the locking bolts were now exposed. Each ram consisted of a half-circle of molybdenum-steel wrapped around the magnet array and a fusion-pumped capacitor. The crewmen snapped the adhesion arm into place, stamped down on the locking mechanism to fix the rams to the shipskin and then-bracing themselves-triggered the two devices on a count of “And one!”
Hadeishi’s radio squealed, flooded with radiation, and the bolts tore free. Chunks of metal spalled away, spiraling off into the void. The crewmen cranked back the rams, peeling away the hatch.
“Team Two, go!” The engineers’ mates with the blasting plastic swarmed into the hole, their tethers taut in the hands of the men behind them. Mitsuharu spared a glance for the comm officer, seeing she still had hold of her comp and the data-crystals. The marine was right at her side, shipgun at the ready, his face a blur of sweat. The two engineers popped back out of the hatch, shouting “Clear!”
A jet of plasma erupted from the hatchway, boiling the shattered edges and licking out thirty or forty meters into the jewel-hot sky.
You’ve got company coming, De Molay suddenly announced in his earbug. We’re getting a storm of chatter on that circuit you pirated.
“Team Three, go!” Mitsuharu rotated in a quick circle, picking out the rest of his men, spread out across the hull. “Cargo doors first, then punch through to the shipcore.” He clapped a hand on the Sho-i ’s shoulder. “We need to get Ensign Lovelace as far into the hull as we can!”
Then he toggled the throatmike channel. “Get out of here, Sencho; they can’t miss seeing you now.”
We’ll hold on just a little longer. I have an idea, but you’ve got to get clear of the outer hull.
Hadeishi’s heart skipped, catching a wild tone in the freighter captain’s voice. “You have to leave my ship in one piece, too, Sencho .”
De Molay laughed and at this short distance, he could see the black outline of the Wilful rotate on her maneuvering jets, swinging the main drives ’round to face him. Marines were dropping through the hatch as fast as they could, but Mitsuharu was suddenly certain they wouldn’t all get through before De Molay lit off her drives.
“One hundred eighty-six seconds to get them all inside,” squeaked a tiny voice at close range. Hadeishi looked down, seeing Lovelace crouched on the hull, her satchel clutched to her chest and one hand gripping a twisted piece of metal. Her eyes were huge and he suddenly realized she was susceptible to vertigo. “Three seconds for a marine, five seconds for a crewman.”
“You’re next,” he barked, seizing her by the lanyard loop on her belt and handing her off to the last of the Team Three marines ducking into the hole. “Get her core-ward, Gunso! There’s an engineering console at the junction of the fourth spaceframe and compartment ninety-six on this class-she needs to be there, and working, in eleven minutes!”
Get inside, Chu-sa; I’ve got gun emplacements in motion up here.
“My men are still outside, Sencho, keep your rotation and head back down the drive-wake. They’ll punch you full of holes other-”
The Wilful suddenly rippled from one end to the other as a wave of burning pinpoints and wild color swept across her. Mitsuharu gaped, watching in stunned surprise as the freighter pulled the raiment of heaven over her head and disappeared from visual sight. “Goddess of the dawn,” he breathed, “I’ve been sold a lame horse!”
Team Four was inside the hatch in less than one hundred and sixty seconds, though the time lag dragged into an eternity for the Chu-sa as he crouched at the edge of the hatchway, urging them on. As far as he could tell, the Wilful had entirely vanished. He couldn’t see maneuvering jet flare, star-occlusion, anything to tell where she was. Despite this, he guessed De Molay was waiting it out, hiding in plain sight, so when the last of his men had dropped inside the hull, Mitsuharu climbed down himself, squirting “twenty-four seconds” on his earbug before the shipskin cut off the transmission.
The maintenance hatch airlock was a wreck, all plasma-burns and torn metal. The inner airlock was no better, and as soon as Hadeishi was inside the hull proper, his radio burst alive with the combat-chatter of men running, fighting, being killed, the roar of gunfire and the distant unmistakable whine of a monofilament saw cutting into hexacarbon. The interior of the ship seemed mostly unchanged, at least on this deck, though the old Imperial signage had been torn down and replaced, or pasted over, with Khadesh equivalents.