“But we like intel,” said Fi. No, not again. Let it be right this time. “Sergeant Kal never read us bedtime stories, so intel satisfies our innate boyish need for heroic fantasy.”
“Is he always like this?” Sicko asked.
“No, he's pretty quiet today.” Darman clutched a magnetic frame charge to his chest plate—his hatch persuader, as he liked to call it. “So are we going to jump the first crate or what?”
“Play it by ear,” said Niner, who always seemed to resort to Skirata's voice under pressure. He hit the release on his restraints. “Let's see how it reacts when we approach. Pressure up helmets, gentlemen, and we're in business.”
“Coming about,” said Sicko. “And if I can't disable its drive, blow the navigation power conduit. The access ought to be outside the engineering compartment, but it's sometimes inside the port-side bulkhead, three meters from the hatch. So knock the rotten thing out, will you? Or they'll bolt and drag us across ten star systems.”
Then the pilot punched the TIV into a ninety-degree roll and the apparently fixed constellations Fi had been watching tilted before his eyes. He understood instantly why they called the man Sicko.
Fi grabbed a restraint instictively and his backpack hit the bulkhead.
“Oh fierfek—”
“Whoaaa!”
“Uhhh.”
Fi could see through the cockpit screen as he steadied himself alongside the hatch. A box-like freighter—yes, a Gizer L-6—loomed out of black nothing.
“Interdict that,”Niner said.
Fi reached for his jet-pack controls, hanging right beside Darman in free fall.
Sicko powered the TIV into a slow head-on approach and corkscrewed slowly to line it up and bring the deckhead hatch against the port side of the freighter, landing lights on.
The freighter slowed, too. Darman stood ready, fingers flexing over the jet-pack controls on his belt. He'd be first out, blowing the hatch controls when the blastproof coaming sealed against the target's hull, pulling aside to let the others storm in. As the TIV moved sedately along the freighter's flank, the landing lights picked out the bright orange livery of VOSHAN CONTAINERS.
“Oops,” said Sicko. “Looks like the legit one.”
“Back off, then,” Niner said. “If the other ship sees this, we've lost—”
A flash caught Fi's eye at the same time it did everyone else's. The second vessel was heading their way.
“Another L-six,” Sicko said. “Please don't let there be three of them.”
The first L-6 suddenly altered course with a rapid burn. It had probably picked up the wrong idea about a scruffy little ship in an area of space that was frequently populated by pirates. One of its spars wheeled ninety degrees almost instantly, looming in the TIV's viewscreen on collision course.
“Abort abort abort!” Sicko yelled. “Brace brace brace—”
He was cut short by a screech of tearing alloy that shuddered through the TIV, and suddenly it wasn't the tight gut-exhilaration of a boarding but the desperate scramble to survive. The impact spun the TIV off and the last thing Fi saw as he somersaulted involuntarily was Sicko pulling on the yoke and punching a stabilizing burn to stop the spin.
There was nothing Fi or the squad could do. It was all down to the pilot. Fi hated that moment of helpless realization every time. The display in his HUD shuddered like a cheap bootleg holovid as he hit the bulkhead harder than he thought possible in zero-g.
“Incoming! Returning fire.”
And then there was light: brilliant blue-white light. The instant hot rain of fragments peppered and pecked on the hull. Sicko had neutralized the incoming missile. The second L-6 powered up and punched back into hyperspace in a flare of light.
“Chew on that,” Sicko said, and slapped his fist hard on the console. “Foam deployed … hull breach secure.”
“What's that?” Fi said, suddenly ice-cold and focused, and not nauseous at all.
“BRB.”
“What?”
“Big Red Button. Emergency hull seal.”
The remains of the freighter's missile cartwheeled slowly into the distance, trailing vapor. It was the kind of self-defense many freighters felt the need to carry these days: wars created useful opportunity for the criminal community.
Niner sighed. “Oh, fierfek, everyone knows we're here now …”
“Anyone get his license number?” Fi said. “Maniac.”
“Yeah, and more maniacs along shortly, too.” Sicko turned his head toward the scanner readout. “Next one's due in sixty seconds … and the next one two minutes later, I reckon. I hope he doesn't call for assistance, or we're going to have to bang out of here really fast.”
“Tell me they're not going to notice that little fracas.”
“They're not going to notice that little fracas.”
“Vor'e, brother.”
“You're welcome.” The pilot didn't take his eyes off the scanner. “Happy to lie to a comrade anytime, if it makes him feel better—there you go …”
The next freighter fell out of hyperspace fifteen hundred meters from their port bow, and its pilot definitely noticed. Fi knew that because the immediate bright arc of laser cannon shaved the elint mast mounted on the TIV's nose just as Sicko let loose a sustained volley into the freighter's under-slung drive. It was still showering debris as Sicko brought the TIV about and swung back under the freighter to loop over its casing from its starboard quarter and bring the TIV, totally inverted, to rest hatch-to-hatch with the target.
And there was nothing the crippled freighter could do about it. Sicko was too close in, too far inside the minimum range of its cannon, and now riding a very angry Ralltiiri tiger.
“This is where you get off.” Sicko's voice was just a little shaky. “End of the line.”
“Stand to!” Niner said. The skirt of coaming shot out of the TIV's hatch housing and sealed tight against the freighter's hull while the grapple arms held it secure. The pressure equalization light flashed red and the TIV's blastproof inner hatch opened, then the outer one. “Dar, take it!”
Dar slapped the frame charges on the freighter's hatch, the inner hatch snapped shut again, and a muffled whump vibrated through the TIV.
How Sicko had managed to bring the TIV alongside the port hatch without ramming the vessel—or ripping the deck-head out of the TIV—Fi would never understand, but that was what trooper pilots did, and he was in awe of them. The inner hatch opened again. Darman bowled in two flash-bangs blinding, deafening stun grenades—and Niner was first through the hatch.
“Go go go—”
Fi, buoyed up on a wave of adrenaline, plunged through after him, DC-17 set to blaster mode. The TIV and Sicko were swept from his mind from that moment as time disobeyed all the rules and he was caught in an infinite, slow-motion split second while the squad burst through the hatch and the L-6's artificial gravity smacked him down hard on the deck. The impact ran up through the soles of his boots. He was running for seconds before his proprioception caught up with the gravity and his body said I remember this.
But there weren't many places to run on an L-6 freighter. It was a cockpit and a couple of cabins bolted to a durasteel box of nothing. Atin moved ahead and simply opened up with the Deece's new PEP laser, knocking two men flat in a massive shock wave of sound and light as they came out of the starboard cabin firing blasters.
Fi's anti-flash visor darkened instantly. Even with armor, he felt the shock of the PEP'S unleashed energy. They all did.
Fi ran on over Atin as he dropped to one knee to cuff and search the men, wrists to ankles, as they lay struggling for breath, whimpering. A PEP round was like being flashbanged and hit in the chest by several plastoid rounds at once.