“Thrarm-Captain, the atmosphere on the other side of the door is under tremendous pressure.” The high-pitched keening of the in-pouring gases almost made his report inaudible.
At that moment, a toxicity alarm started yowling and the specialist with the wrist comp looked up sharply. “Thrarm-Captain, the gas from the Raker: it’s pure hydrogen. Coming in at a rate of-”
But Thrarm-Captain wasn’t listening: he no longer needed to. He was too busy damning his own gullibility and rapping out orders: “Torch team, immediate return to our hull. Seal our hatches behind you. Bridge, jettison the emergency docking ring-”
The world seemed to tear itself apart around him. Before the torch team could exit the Raker’s shattered airlock, its inner door was blasted off its hinges with terrible force, killing two of the team outright, disabling a third.
Following that blast so quickly that it seemed to be part of the same event, flame came gushing into the companionways of Guardant Ancestor. The first roaring rush of white fire was the hydrogen combusting, knocking the kzinti down or spilling them sideways against walls and bulkheads. But hard on its heels came a thicker yellow-orange conflagration: clearly, a pressurized fuel-air explosive gas was being pumped in at immense pressure, right behind the hydrogen. The unit patches on the kzinti’s spacesuits began to burn. The battery of the beam-torch cooked off, detonating with a blue-white flash and a double-toned thunder-clap.
zh-Sensor’s voice was screaming reports as Thrarm-Captain picked himself up off the deck. “Launches from the Raker. More lifepods-no, not lifepods. Can’t be: they are maneuvering, moving straight toward our hull-”
Of course. The leaf-eaters are going to cut their way into my ship: why use an existing door when you can make your own? “zh-Sensor, engage the pods with all weapons; they are breaching craft.”
“Trying, Thrarm-Captain. They are too close; our weapons will not bear.”
That’s when the shooting started. The screaming buzz of a human heavy-coil gun was audible through Thrarm-Captain’s supposedly sound-proof faceplate, along with images of hellish carnage. The squad leader, who had been racing around the corner toward the airlock, caught a full flight of the electromagnetically propelled four-millimeter, tungsten-cored, steel needles. One moment he was there; the next, a vaguely bipedal mist of plasma and body parts was falling backward, a diffusing red smear. Following close behind him, a newly arrived junior squad leader was blown aside by just two of the projectiles, each one opening up a red crater on the left side of his torso.
Thrarm-Captain had his own handgun up as a reflective object rolled swiftly past the tee-intersection where the two kzinti had been riddled. Thrarm-Captain sent three fast rounds after it, may have hit the device, which, he now discerned, resembled a large metal ball propelled by four roller-rings on interpenetrated axes.
The full implications of what Thrarm-Captain was witnessing sunk in. The leaf-eaters were on his ship, with specialized combat ’bots. Somehow they knew what he was carrying, why his ship was built for defense not offense. It was impossible to conceive of how they had learned it, but they had, and their intent was now clear: they did not want to destroy his ship; they wanted to take it.
Unthinkable.
Thrarm-Captain had his mouth open to order his bridge crew to override all local controls and autoseal all bulkhead doors when there was a muffled blast from aft; the lights flickered and the faintly crackling carrier-tone of the command-channel died away. It came back after a moment, along with approximately half of the lights.
zh-Sensor’s words were tinny in the helmet’s compromised speakers: “Thrarm-Captain, power in Engineering is out. Apparently the humans have already sent some automated EMP bombs on ahead to-”
There was a dull explosion from the direction the robot-ball had gone-and zh-Sensor’s words died along with the rest of the lights. Leaf-eating spoor-spawn humans: they didn’t even have the courage to board themselves and-
Thrarm-Captain, changing his handgun’s now-malfunctioning power-pack, heard and then saw the approach of a new human robot: a floating oblong that bristled with weapons, one of which was clearly the hopper-fed coil-gun that had already killed two of his Heroes.
Screaming rage, seeing the spittle spray in a fine mist against the inner surface of his helmet’s face-plate, Thrarm-Captain seated the power pack, and brought up his weapon.
Which operated slightly longer than he did: the grav-chassised robot fired a stream of needles into the big kzin’s center of mass. Dead instantaneously, Thrarm-Captain’s finger remained frozen around the trigger: the gun fired a few rounds of futile defiance before falling to the deck in imitation of its wielder.
The autocutter-an expensive, purpose-built, one-use device derived from reverse-engineered kzin weapon technology-finished slicing into the hull of the kzin auxiliary cruiser that Lieutenant Commander Dieter Armbrust had determined was his op team’s target.
“Holding at two meters standoff,” announced the boarding pod’s steersman.
“Deploy charge; detonate at will,” responded Dieter.
The gravitically tamped charge-which cost a small fortune-spat out of the boarding-pod’s nose. It sunk snugly into a small depression that had been burned into the hull. It was ringed by a three-centimeter-deep groove that the autocutter had sliced fifteen seconds earlier.
“Three seconds.” Dieter checked his gear: mostly non-lethals. However, for entry, he was carrying a retrofitted kzin beamer: a carbine and, therefore, right-sized for him.
“Fire in the hole,” warned the gunnery sergeant in charge of the heavy weapons.
One sharp jar, and then the steersman was moving the pod in quickly, making his confirmations as he went: “Charge was successfuclass="underline" One-point-five-meter breaching hole established.” A soft bump as the pod kissed the holed hulclass="underline" “Pressure gasket is deployed and holding; we have hard dock.”
The gunnery sergeant pressed a few virtual buttons on the heavy weapons control console. “Deploying proximity security packages.” Almost inaudible through the layers that were still between the boarding team and the interior of the kzin ship, there was a long ripping sound like an oversized popcorn popper in overdrive. “Cluster munitions have cleared ingress point. Releasing hunter-killer ROVs.”
Dieter nodded, turned to the six men in Alpha Team. “It’s easy to forget your training because of the excitement.” Or fear. But I can’t use that word, not here, not now. “So, one more time by the numbers. We enter in twos, we fan out, using the maps that are being uploaded by the ROVs to our helmet processors right now. Once we have located the target, we move toward it directly, leapfrog advance. A pair of ROVs will cover our six. Watch for friendlies; all teams are converging on the same point. Lethal systems are ‘weapons free’ until we reach and confirm the target. Then, only designated sharpshooters remain ‘weapons free’ with lethals: all the rest of us shift over to non-lethal systems. As soon as I signal ‘objective achieved,’ we reverse our path and fall back upon our pods. Watch for ambushes on the way out.” Dieter checked his watch. “Any questions?” Heads rotated tightly from side to side. “Gunny, are the ROVs done?”
“Almost, skipper. Ran into a few big bucks in terminal defensive positions. They took out one of my ’bots. Damn, but the ratcats have good night vision, even unaided. But that’s the last of them. I think I’m seeing the objective ahead. I’m labeling its location as Zone Cougar on your maps.”
Dieter glanced at the forehead HUD in his helmet. “Got it. And they’ve lost power in there?”
“Sure looks like it. Seems like this ship doesn’t have any more defense against internal EMP weapons than the other kzin battlewagons.”