Over the next forty-five minutes, Gaiene watched the battle cruiser swooping in, starting out as a flaring spot of light marked by the propulsion units straining to bring it to a halt relative to the battleship, then growing dramatically in size as it reduced speed, creating the illusion that the massive warship was expanding at an ever-slowing rate as it got closer.
“I never liked these boarding operations,” Lieutenant Colonel Safir commented from her location elsewhere in the battleship. The nearly one thousand soldiers they had brought with them were dispersed among four large loading docks spaced along the battleship’s hull. Fitting almost two hundred and fifty armored soldiers into each of those docks in such a way that almost all could engage attackers had taken some careful arranging despite the size of the compartments. “I’ve only done the one, and I don’t have fond memories.”
“We’ll enjoy this one more than they will,” Gaiene replied. The universe had long been a drab thing for him, illuminated only by the highs brought on by combat or alcohol or women. Memories could have provided more light and color, but along with the light and color came pain, so he did his best to block them out.
The ring on his left hand was concealed under the gauntlet of his battle armor, but he always knew it was there. Nothing else remained, but the ring did.
His spirit felt the lift that imminent battle carried before it, and for a moment, Gaiene could forget the emptiness he fought every day and the memories he fought to avoid every minute of every day.
The link to the battleship’s external sensors showed the battle cruiser looming very close now. “Five minutes,” the voice of Kapitan-Leytenant Kontos warned over the battleship’s announcing system. “Both Gryphon and Basilisk have broadcast acceptance of the offer from Haris and are altering vectors to join up with the battle cruiser!”
Chapter Eleven
“They betrayed us?” Lieutenant Colonel Safir asked Gaiene.
“I doubt it.” Gaiene hoped he was right about that and about his evaluation of Kapitan Stein. When it came to judging women, or men for that matter, he wasn’t always successful.
Five minutes and four seconds later, the battle cruiser came to a stop relative to the battleship, only about fifty meters separating the sides of the two massive vessels. Openings suddenly gaped in the hull facing the battleship as the battle cruiser opened all four of its cargo hatches on this side, openings five meters high and ten meters wide, which were almost immediately obscured by a flurry of shapes coming out on trajectories aimed at where similar still-sealed hatches could be found on the outer hull of the battleship.
Gaiene and part of his brigade waited patiently behind one such hatch, other portions of his brigade behind other hatches, close to a thousand soldiers in full battle armor with weapons at ready. He would have liked to have more, but one freighter could only carry so many (life support had been almost overloaded on their way to the gas giant as it was), and a thousand should be enough.
“All scouts launch,” Gaiene ordered.
Clinging to the outside of the battleship’s hull where they had taken position half an hour ago were scouts in stealth armor, invisible to the attackers. At Gaiene’s command, those scouts pushed themselves toward the battleship, passing unseen through the oncoming ranks of the Ulindi boarding party and toward the big hatches on the battle cruiser from which the attackers had come.
Spotting and counting objects was one of the things automated sensors were very good at. Within seconds, the battleship’s sensors reported the result. Seven hundred and twenty. “Almost half the crew of the battle cruiser,” Safir commented.
“Excellent,” Gaiene agreed.
The impacts of a bit more than seven hundred attackers coming to a halt on the battleship’s hull couldn’t be felt by humans in armor, but once again the battleship’s sensors reported the arrival of the boarding party, pinpointing the positions of all of them and passing that information on to the combat systems in the soldiers’ armor. Gaiene watched, feeling his excitement ramp up, enjoying what he knew would be brief sensations of being truly alive.
The attackers attached overrides to the hatch controls on the battleship. Other attackers waited nearby with breaching charges to use if necessary, but Gaiene knew those would not be needed. Kontos had set the hatch controls to yield easily to the hacking. He didn’t want his new battleship scratched up any more than necessary.
“Stand by,” Gaiene said, feeling a deepening awareness of his heart beating and his breath flowing in and out. His hands gripped his pulse rifle, feeling metal and composites and death under their touch. “Follow the assault plan. All units, weapons green.”
He knelt to provide a steadier aim, leveling his weapon at the hatch before him as it swung open. On either side of him, hundreds of other weapons came to bear on the hatch. The battleship hatches, burdened by much more armor than those of a battle cruiser’s hull, moved more slowly than those of the other warship but still opened with gratifying speed.
The attackers came swarming in at all four hatches in a coordinated assault that would have swamped the number of defenders expected aboard the battleship. Among the boarding party were only two squads of special forces in armor like that of Gaiene’s soldiers, heavily armed and trained for face-to-face combat. As was usually the case, the rest of the boarding party were crew from the battle cruiser in survival suits and carrying a variety of hand weapons. All of the attackers were expecting to face a meager number of defenders similarly lightly armed and lightly protected. As they entered the battleship, the attackers were forced to bunch up at the hatches, coming in from the top, the bottom, and both sides, silhouetted against empty space behind them, forming perfect targets.
Gaiene’s sight automatically zoomed in on his target, a single figure in a survival suit, clean and clear and bright in the rifle’s sight. He forgot everything else for a moment, forgot the past, forgot the pain, felt only the unholy joy of having a clean shot and a powerful weapon and the sensation of his hand tightening as his finger squeezed the trigger, then the shock as the weapon fired and the target jerked from the impact of a hit that blew open the suit and tore a hole through the chest of the unfortunate man or woman who wore it.
He instinctively sought a second target, but the rest of his soldiers had opened fire at the same moment as their colonel, and there were very few targets left.
Of the seven hundred twenty attackers in the boarding party who had tried to board through the four cargo hatches, over six hundred died in the first volley.
“Forward!” Gaiene shouted.
As the survivors of the attack force tried to gather their wits, Gaiene’s thousand hurled themselves forward, overrunning and annihilating the remnants of the attackers, then launching themselves without hesitating into open space toward the battle cruiser.
Fifty meters is not a large distance, even when measured against the standards of a planet’s surface. In space, it is nothing, unless it is the distance between you and safety, between you and your target, between life and death. Men and women who had literally jumped off one ship to hurl themselves toward the other crossed that fifty meters in only a few seconds that felt much, much longer. Sufficiently alert sentries in the battle cruiser’s cargo holds could have seen them coming, could have slammed shut the outer hatches in that brief time available, possibly giving the battle cruiser time to accelerate away before the soldiers could breach those outer hatches.
But the few sentries posted at the battle cruiser’s outer hatches were all dead and dying, slain by Gaiene’s scouts, whose presence the guards had never suspected until too late.