One of the men at the top of the ramp panicked. He screamed for help over an open frequency and tried to fight his way to the back of the kettle. Warshaw addressed the kid over an open frequency. “Westerfield, get out there.”
“I, I can’t. I can’t.”
“That is an order,” Warshaw said, but the softness in his voice made it more of a request than an order.
“I can’t do it.”
Warshaw ordered the other sailors to let the kid through, and then asked, “Is anyone else too specking scared?”
I reminded myself that these were sailors, not Marines. They had grown accustomed to having an atmosphere and walls around them.
“No other takers?” Warshaw asked. “Okay, A Team, move out.”
That was my call. There were about twenty of us on the team. We walked down the ramp, the gravity becoming weaker the farther we got. Halfway down, I could have kicked off hard and flown into space. When the first man reached the bottom of the ramp, he held his motivator over his head and lifted off.
Engineers used handheld motivators instead of attaching jetpacks to their armor. The device looked like a pair of bin-oculars with handlebars instead of a strap. Their thrust technology used noncombustible gas emissions instead of flames. When I switched on its power, my motivator lifted me from the ramp and into open space.
Following the sailor before me, I banked around the stern of the transport. As we flew along the transport, the pilot switched on the runner lights along the hull, lighting the rust-colored skids and smooth steel underbelly of the sturdy bird. Each motivator had a row of knuckle-sized safety lights blinking a ruby red signal along their top.
Our team leader hit some button, and a headlight appeared at the front of his motivator. He only flew about fifty feet ahead of me; but I could not see him, just the cone of his headlight. The men ahead of me lit lights on their motivators as well.
We circled the wreck of a massive battleship like a swarm of flies approaching a beached whale. The holes along the belly of the ship were large enough for us to fly through, but the bottom deck of the ship had imploded.
“General Harris, sir?” My visor identified the man on the line as our team leader contacting me on an open line.
“What is it, Ensign?”
“Sir, do you know what kinds of weapons they used on this ship? I’ve never seen such extensive damage.”
Having spent the last six years of their lives trapped in the Scutum-Crux Arm, none of these boys had ever seen combat up close. “This is what happens when you get hit with your shields down,” I said. What I did not add was that this ship had gotten off lightly.
“Their shields were down?” the team leader asked. “Why would they lower their shields in battle?”
“We lowered the shields for them,” I said. “The Mogats used a centralized shielding technology that they broadcast to their fleet. Once our SEALs shut down the central shield generator, the ships were unprotected.”
“You were in on the Mogat invasion, sir?” The team leader did not ask that question; it came from another member of our little team. I heard a tone of awe in the boy’s voice.
“Yeah, I was there,” I said, trying to keep the darkness of my thoughts out of my voice. “A lot of good men died. We lost a lot more men than we should have.”
We flew across the battered underbelly of the battleship and up the port side. My interLink connection remained fairly quiet as men fanned out and inspected holes and burns along the face of the ship. Three decks up, one of the men found our doorway.
“The outer lock of the docking bay is open,” the man reported.
Knowing that the end had come, some Mogats had piled into a transport to abandon ship. They almost made it to safety. The broken nose of the transport poked out of the docking-bay hatch like a missile launching from a silo. The outer hatch of the docking bay had come down on the transport like a giant cleaver, slicing halfway through the kettle and crushing the rest into a bow-shaped heap.
The transport had made it through all three atmospheric locks when the first torpedo or laser pierced the hull of the battleship. Once the hull integrity failed, all of the outer hatches would have automatically sealed to protect the ship against the vacuum of space. In theory, sealing hatches creates pockets of oxygen in which sailors can survive for days. I’d been on enough wrecks to know that air pockets preserve fires, not lives. Rescuers never arrive in time. Scavengers may come looking for treasure, but the hope of rescue is the last resort of fools.
We flew in around the crushed transport. The eight-inch-thick hatch had slid down like a blade on a guillotine with enough force to flatten the nearly impregnable walls of a kettle.
Small diodes embedded in my visor sent out a fifteen-foot shaft of light. Beyond that beam of light, blackness shrouded everything not illuminated by the beams from another man’s helmet.
As I worked my way in along the side of the transport, three men floated in place, staring into a spot where the hatch had sliced through the kettle wall. Seeing the wreckage of the transport gave these boys a good introduction to what they would find inside the ship.
“Move along,” the team leader said. “We have a job to do. Perryman, Miller, Ferris, see if you can open the locks. Gold-berg, Lewis, figure out a way to sweep this place out. I need the runway clear.” By “sweep” he meant for them to purge the transport.
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Until we found a way to open the inner doors of the atmospheric locks, we would not be able to enter the ship. A trio of beams played along the wall until they all centered on the same panel. Using small torches, three engineers cut away the panel and discarded it. Behind the panel, they found a small lever, which one of them pumped up and down as if using a socket wrench. After four or five twists, the door pinning down the transport lifted toward the ceiling, rocking the injured transport as the hatch rose from the kettle.
“How can it still have power?” I asked the team leader.
“Emergency hydraulics.”
Three engineers placed charges along the rear of the transport. There was a flash, a small explosion, and the wreck rolled into space.
“That was easy,” the team leader said over an open channel.
Getting rid of that transport was the only thing that came easily. The other emergency controls were all on the inner sides of each hatch, meaning our engineers needed to cut through each of the locks, then open the way for the rest of us.
It took Warshaw’s engineers most of an hour to untangle the first lock, but they learned as they went. The next lock only took ten minutes. After they opened it, we entered the enormous, blackened cavern of the landing bay. Up to that point, the sailors only knew there would be bodies aboard the ship. Now they saw some.
Men in overalls hung suspended just off the ground, their limbs so stiff and brittle they might have been made of glass. I spotted a man whose face hung from his head like a flap of skin on a badly stubbed toe. The exposed parts of his skin had the blue-white color of an evening cloud. The skinned remains of his head sparkled like coal. His blood hung above him in a tangle of beaded icicles.
The team leader started to say something and vomited. I felt bad for the man, I did. Once the transport came, he could clean his equipment; but without steam cleaning, the air in that armor would never be sweet again.
“Good God,” the team leader bawled.
“Get used to it, Ensign. Everybody on this ship is going to look like that,” I said.
Nobody said anything after that, at least they did not say anything to me. For all I knew, the rest of the team was playing twenty questions. I doubted it, though. Most of the men stood in a huddle staring at the body, the lights from their visors shining on a loose flap of skin that had once been a face.
Trying to get the mission back on track, I asked the team leader, “Ensign, are you planning on bringing our transport inside to dock?”