This particular ship was the second of the U.A. battleships to stumble into Warshaw’s shooting gallery. It had taken the least damage. With the third battleship fighting its way out of our trap, Warshaw’s techs had shifted their fire over to that ship the moment this one went dark. What had looked like a quiet death from the outside, however, didn’t seem so gentle now that I had entered the ship.
We threaded through the broken, second lock and found the third lock fully open. By the time we reached that final lock, we were walking along the deck. I had already noticed this when Thomer hailed me to say, “General, the gravity generator is still online.”
Wondering what other equipment might still be up and running, I answered, “Tell your men to stay alert.” If the gravity generator had survived the fight, the environmental systems might have also survived; and if there was heat and air, there might well be survivors.
Listening in on the commandLink, I heard one Marine say, “We had a battle simulation just like this back at the orphanage.”
“Damn, I remember that sim,” a second man said. “That’s the one where you have to defend the ship or blow the sucker up.”
“Keep it quiet,” Thomer ordered.
I knew that simulation as well. The holographic simulation took place on a disabled freighter. One team played as sailors and the other as pirates. The pirates were the aggressors, sent to capture the ship; and they had every possible advantage. They had better guns. They did not have to worry about laws or regulations. They even had more men on their team. The simulation was set up so that they outnumbered the sailors three to one.
But the sailors always won.
Since blowing up the freighter kept it out of enemy hands, all the sailors had to do was set the reactor to overload. It wasn’t fair, but it was realistic. I thought this and realized that from the U.A. point of view, this operation had the same zero-sum solution. If the U.A. Navy found itself unable to salvage this ship, they would demolish it before allowing us to capture it.
“Thomer, tell the men to look for anything that looks like it could explode.”
“Like on the Corvair?” Thomer asked.
Corvair? I thought. The name sounded so damn familiar. It only took a moment for me to place it. Corvair was the name of the ship in the simulation. “That is precisely what I am talking about.”
Thomer issued the order, then spoke to me again. “I hated that simulation. I always ended up a pirate. We never won.”
Because of the darkness, our combat visors defaulted to night-for-day lenses, but we would also need to use heat vision in order to search for survivors. It would not be hard to locate heat on this busted scow, the ambient temperature had dropped to absolute zero.
I switched to heat vision and saw that the men in front of me radiated red with an orange halo against the cobalt world around them. Normally men in combat armor did not give off a heat signature. They did in space.
The fire teams spread out quickly. Eight teams headed toward the lower decks, where we would have found Engineering and the Marines on other ships. Who knew what they would find with this new design.
I commandeered a team, telling them to follow me as I headed toward the bow of the ship. I entered a hall and quickly located a stairwell that would take us to any deck. The stairs were wide enough for five men to climb abreast.
Two flights up, I paused to check the lay of the land, switching to heat vision as I looked down a hallway lined with sealed hatches. Four of the hatches showed dark orange. There was heat behind those doors. A fifth hatch had not been sealed. Blades of yellow and red danced outside that doorway. I switched to my tactical lens and watched the flames. Whether it was oxygen or some other gas, something leaking from that room was fueling the fire.
I marked the rooms with a virtual beacon, which I sent to Thomer. “I have some interesting prospects up here,” I said.
“I’ll send a team by,” Thomer said.
The correct response would have been, “I’ll send a team by, sir,” but I overlooked it. Worrying about being addressed as “sir” may sound petty, but it isn’t. The Marine Corps was built on discipline. Without that discipline, we were just another gang of soldiers.
I wished there was some surefire way to dry Thomer out without killing him.
I led my fire team up two more flights and surveyed the next deck. It looked exactly like the same scene one deck down, sans the flames. Almost all of the doors radiated heat, but the hall itself was as cold as space.
A man had died in this hall. He lay on the floor. Seen through night-for-day lenses, the dead sailor’s hands were the color of snow. Coin-sized speckles of blood had formed on the ground around his head. Frozen blood showed in the gash along the back of his head. If I’d stomped a boot down hard enough on the man, he would have shattered like a porcelain figurine. His bones were the least rigid part of his body, now that the veins and capillaries had frozen solid.
None of the hatches on the sixth deck radiated heat, and we found no bodies. What we did locate was the wound that had killed the ship—where the first lasers hit once the shields had given way. I remembered seeing a narrow beam hit the ship on the bow, just below the bridge. Once the lasers pierced the hull, the cabin pressure must have flushed all of the bodies into space.
The seventh deck looked like a battlefield. We passed the frozen bodies of dozens of dead sailors right off the stairwell. I had to kick one out of the way just to enter the hall. The man must have fallen to his knees as he died—at least his body had frozen in that position. The palm of his hand had frozen to the floor. It snapped off just above the wrist when I kicked his body out of the way.
I listened in on my fire team.
Man, this place is a specking morgue.
I hate specking space battles.
At least these guys died fast. I saw a guy take five days to die after he got hit in the gut.
I knew a guy that got burned. The poor bastard hung on for six months.
The way to the bridge was an obstacle course, and we found at least a hundred frozen dead in the various stations around the bridge. Fifteen crewmen lay in a huddle around the weapons section. I found the captain of the ship sprawled out on the floor near the front of the bridge. His skin was a glacier blue, and his eyes were open and frozen.
“Did you see that, sir?” my fire team leader asked me.
I had. It was just a fleeting glimpse, but I had seen a man in soft-shell armor slip through a doorway.
“Thomer, I’ve got a contact. Seventh deck, just off the bridge, I repeat, we have a live one!” I switched to an open frequency. “There’s been a change of plans, boys. There is life aboard this ship, and that means there may be traps. I want everyone to stay where you are until you receive further instructions. Do not engage. I will personally snap every finger off the first sorry speck who fires his gun on this ship.”
I had not gotten a good look at the man. He had flittered across the hall outside the bridge. With my peripheral vision hampered by my helmet, I might not have seen him at all, had he not stumbled over a frozen body and flailed before ducking out of sight.
“What did you see?” Thomer asked on a direct frequency.
“One contact,” I said. “He’s dressed in soft-shell.” All of my men were dressed in combat armor.
In the simulation, the defending team only needed one member to prevent the pirates from capturing the Corvair. If the ship was rigged, it would not matter if the Unified Authority had one man on this ship or a million, we would not be able to take it.