"Computer, switch: Fain!"
* * *
Gronningen ducked as a burst of plasma filled the passage with steam. A previous burst had penetrated the inboard bulkhead and cracked a gray-water pipe. Now the blast turned the gray-water to vapor and fecal plasma.
"Julian!" he called, lifting his own plasma cannon over the security station and blasting away in return. "They're trying to break out!"
"All units," Pahner announced over the general frequency. "General counterattack underway. Hold what you've got; the Diasprans are nearly there!"
"Pocking hell," the squad leader snarled, sliding on his belly towards the plasma gunner's position. "Why couldn't they just wait for our reinforcements?"
"Because they don't want to die?" the Asgardian suggested. "You know—"
The second blast of plasma had been more carefully coordinated, with two plasma cannons and a bead cannon all aimed at the base of the security point. Although the security point was a "hard patch," a ChromSten plate which was not only secured to the bulkhead but anchored into the next deck, the concentrated blast from multiple sources first weakened the armored patch, then ripped it out of its frame.
The ChromSten plate, its backing of hardened steel melted in the intense heat, flew down the passage, catching Moseyev unawares and slamming him into the outboard bulkhead.
And all the coordinated fire the plate was no longer intercepting tore into Gronningen.
* * *
Julian ducked under the last blast of plasma fire, reached the stricken Asgardian, and rolled him over. The final blast had caught him just below the waist, and shredded the heavy body armor with effortless viciousness. Gronningen's eyes were screwed shut, but he opened them for just a moment, raising a hand to his squad leader. His mouth worked soundlessly, and the hand clamped on the sergeant's armored shoulder.
Then it dropped, and Adib Julian let out a scream of pure primal rage.
"Stay down!" Macek bellowed as he grabbed Julian from behind and fought to wrestle him to the deck, but Julian wasn't interested in staying down.
"Dead! They're all dead!" he yelled, and swatted Macek away like a toy.
"Sergeant Julian," Pahner called. "What is your situation?"
"I'm sending them all to hell, Sir!" the sergeant yelled back, and picked up the plasma gunner's weapon.
Julian's toot, courtesy of Temu Jin, had been reloaded with all the hacking protocols available to military and civilian intelligence, alike. He used them now, diving deep into the central circuits of his own armor, ripping out security protocols until the system was down to bare bones. Although personal armor was designed to be partially mobile in zero-gravity, the jump system had never been designed for full-gravity combat. But by taking all the control systems off of what was, effectively, a small plasma cannon, the sergeant could create a jump capability that was actually worth the name.
Of course, there were drawbacks.
"Don't try this at home, boys and girls," he hissed, and hit the power circuit.
His leap carried him over the barricade and into the deckhead, and the howling plasma stream melted the bulkheads behind him.
Macek let out a yowl as the stream passed across his lower legs, heating the nearly invulnerable armor of his suit and jumping the internal temperature nearly a hundred degrees. The automatic systems dumped the heat nearly as fast as it went up, but for just a moment, the armor made Marduk seem cool.
Julian's armor smashed into the overhead, taking him partially into the upper deck, throwing him from side to side in an erratic pattern that was impossible for the Saint battle armor to track. Somehow, he managed to turn a bounce into a spin, bringing himself around as the last of the power was expended, and as the jump gear's last, spiteful bit of plasma bit into the overhead, he caromed from one side of the passage to the other until he landed on his feet behind the Saint defenders.
The four Saints were still trying to track in on him as his first blast hit them. He swept the weapon from side to side, low, ripping their legs out from under them. As the commandos fell, he continued to sweep the weapon back and forth, ignoring the screaming emergency overload indicator as he melted not only their fallen battle armor, but the deck underneath and the bulkheads to either side. He expended the cannon's power like a drunkard, but before the capacitor completely discharged, the overloaded control circuits let go.
The ball of undirected plasma picked the sergeant up and slammed him backwards into the armored command deck hatch. Since the door was made of ChromSten, like the armor, but much thicker, he hit and bounced.
Hard.
* * *
Krindi Fain shook his head as the human suits fell backward into the intersecting side passage and then rolled around the corner for shelter. The air in the other passage was silver and red with plasma bolts, and the bulkhead on the opposite edge of the corridor disappeared as the fire from the Saints punched through it into one of the innumerable holds before dissipating itself on the cargo.
His unit—twenty Diasprans, the captain himself, Erkum Pol, and the drummer—was approaching from the ship's west. The Armory ought to be about twenty meters up the passageway the humans had just tumbled out of. And, obviously, it was heavily defended.
"Ah, me," he muttered as he fumbled with the human radio controls. "SNAPU: Situation Normal, All Pocked Up. First Platoon will prepare to engage," he said, continuing to trot towards the intersection as he finally got the radio to work properly. The fire had slackened off to what the defenders obviously believed was enough to keep the Marines from reentering the passage. "Platoon will face right into the corridor, in column of threes, proceeding to the Armory by volley fire at a march. Platoon, quick time ... march."
* * *
"Sergeant, what's that?"
Private Kapila Ammann would have been just as happy to crawl back into his bunk. He'd long ago quit trying to figure out why he'd ever joined the commandos. It was days like this that made him count the number of hours until his ETS date, but the way things were going, he wasn't going to make it for another one hundred and twenty-six days, fourteen hours, and—he glanced at his chrono—twenty-three minutes.
"What's what?" Sergeant Gao snapped, then looked up in surprise from the casualty he was treating. "A unit ... marching?"
"Holy Pollution," Ammann whispered as the Diasprans rounded the corner. "They gave scummies plasma guns!"
* * *
In the last few months, the Diasprans had gone through revolutions in weaponry that humans had taken millennia to achieve. They'd started off as untrained conscripts who had been turned into pikemen. Then they'd progressed to musketeers, then to rifle skirmishers, and now they were plasma and bead gunners. But much of their drill from the early days remained. And they used it now.
The first rank turned the corner, pivoting on the interior Mardukan, leveled their plasma cannon, and opened fire, stepping forward at a walk.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
"Aaaaahh!"
Kapila hugged the deck as the air literally disappeared around him. The Mardukan fire mostly went over his head, but its intensity first superheated the atmosphere in the corridor, then expanded it to the very fringe of vacuum. He supposed he could return the fire, but there didn't seem to be much point. If he killed one or two of the scummies with a shot, the rest would turn him into drifting atoms for his efforts. Even if they didn't, a near miss would be sufficient to kill him. Flying fragments could easily punch holes in his standard ship suit, which would permit the intense heat to fry him to a crisp ... which would at least save him from asphyxiation when his suit depressurized.
But so far, they seemed to be missing. He liked that, and he had no intention of doing anything to change it.
He rolled his head to look back up the passage behind him and saw that the entire unit was gone. One or two of them might have gotten back into the Armory, but he saw at least four carbon statues that indicated casualties. Graubart was still alive, though. He might even stay that way, if he got some prompt medical attention. Sergeant Gao, on the other hand, was just a pair of legs, attached to some cooked meat.