"Very good," Miles applauded. "We'd better save the rest until they're in critical positions, not tip our hand with too much too soon."
"Right."
The ship was moving closer, closer to the docking station. The enemy troops were preparing to board through the normal flex tubes.
Suddenly, Thorne's assault groups exploded from the dockside airlocks. Magnetic mines were hastily fired onto the station hull, where they flared like sparks burning holes in a rug. Thorne's mercenaries jumped the gap and poured through. The enemy's radio silence burst into shocked chaos.
Miles hummed over his readouts. An enemy officer turned her head to look over her shoulder, calling orders to her platoon; Miles promptly locked the helmet in its position of maximum torsion, and the Oseran's head perforce with it. He picked out another soldier, in a corridor his own people had not yet reached, and locked his suit's built-in heavy-duty plasma arc into full-on. Fire flared wildly from the man's hand at his surprised reflexive recoil, spraying floor, ceiling, and comrades.
Miles paused to glance over to Elena's readouts. A corridor was flowing past at high speed on the visual. It spun wildly as she used her suit's jets to brake. The artificial gravity was evidently now shut down in the docking station. An automatic air seal had clanged shut, blocking the corridor. She stopped her spin, aimed, and blasted a hole in it with her plasma arc. She flung herself through it as, at the same moment, an enemy soldier on the other side did likewise. They met in a confused scrambling grapple, servos screaming at the overload demands.
Miles searched frantically for the enemy among the ten readouts, but he was a Pelian. Miles had no access to his suit. His heart pounded in his ears. There was another view of the fight between Elena and the Pelian on the screens; Miles had a dizzy sense of being in two places at once, as if his atman had left his body, then realized he was looking at them through another Oseran's suit. The Oseran was raising his weapon to fire—he couldn't miss—
Miles called up the man's medkit and fired every drug in it into the man's veins at once. The audio transmitted a shuddering gasp; the heartbeat readout jumped crazily and then registered fibrillation. Another figure—Baz?—in the Ariel's armor rolled through the gash in the air seal, firing as he flew. The plasma washed over the Oseran, interrupting transmission.
"Son-of-a-bitch!" Auson screamed suddenly at Miles's elbow. "Where in hell did he come from?"
Miles thought at first he was referring to the armored soldier, then followed the direction of Auson's gaze to another screen, showing space opposite the docking station.
Looming up behind them was a large Oseran warship.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Miles swore in frustration. Of course! Oseran full-feedback space armor logically implied an Oseran monitor nearby. He should have realized it instantly. Fool he was, to have simply assumed the enemy was being directed from inside the docking station. He ground his teeth in chagrin. He had totally forgotten, in the overwhelming excitement of the attack, in his particular terror for Elena, the first principle of larger commands: don't get balled up in the little details. It was no consolation that Auson appeared to have forgotten it too.
The communications officer hastily abandoned the game of suit sabotage and returned to his proper post. "They're calling for surrender, sir," he reported.
Miles licked dry lips, and cleared his throat. "Ah—suggestions, Trainee Auson?"
Auson gave him a dirty look. "It's that snob Tung. He's from Earth, and never lets you forget it. He has four times our shielding and firepower, three times our acceleration, three times our crew, and thirty years experience. I don't suppose you'd care to consider surrender?"
"You're right," Miles said after a moment. "I don't care for it."
The assault on the docking station was nearly over. Thorne and company were already moving into adjoining structures for the mopping-up. Victory swallowed so swiftly by defeat? Unbearable. Miles groped vainly in the pit of his inspiration for a better idea.
"It's not very elegant," he said at last, "but we're at such incredibly short range, it's at least possible—we could try to ram them."
Auson mouthed the words: my ship … He found his voice. "My ship! The finest technology Illyrica will sell, and you want to use it for a frigging medieval battering ram? Shall we boil some oil and fling it at 'em, while we're at it? Throw a few rocks?" His voice went up an octave, and cracked.
"I bet they wouldn't expect it," offered Miles, a little quelled.
"I'll strangle you with my bare hands—" Auson, trying to raise them, rediscovered the limits of his motion.
"Uh, Sergeant," Miles called, retreating before the rapidly breathing mercenary captain.
Bothari uncoiled from his chair. His narrow eyes mapped Auson coldly, like a coroner planning his first cut.
"It's got to be at least tried," Miles reasoned.
"Not with my ship you don't, you little—" Auson's language sputtered into body language. His balance shifted to free one foot for a karate kick.
"My God! Look!" cried the communications officer.
The RG 132, torpid, massive, was rolling away from the docking station. Its normal space drives blared at full power, giving it the usual acceleration of an elephant swimming in molasses.
Auson dropped, unheeded, from Miles's attention. "The RG 132, loaded, has four times the mass of that pocket dreadnought," he breathed.
"Which is why it flies like a pig and costs a fortune in fuel to move!" yelled Auson. "That pilot officer of yours is crazy if he thinks he can outrun Tung—"
"Go, Arde! " cried Miles, jumping up and down. "Perfect! You'll pin him right up against that smelting unit—"
"He's not—" began Auson. "Son-of-a-bitch! He is!"
Tung, like Auson, was apparently late in divining the bulk freighter's true intentions. Verniers began to flare, to rotate the warship into position to thrust toward open space. The dreadnought got one shot off, which was absorbed with little visible effect in the freighter's cargo area.
Then, almost in slow motion, with a kind of crazy majesty, the RG 132 lumbered into the warship—and kept going. The dreadnought was nudged into the huge smeltery. Projecting equipment and surface housings snapped and spun off in all directions.
Action calling for reaction, after an aching moment the smeltery heaved back. A wave of motion passed down its adjoining structures, like a giant's game of crack-the-whip. Smashed edges of the dreadnought were caught up on the smeltery, thoroughly entangled. Gaudy chemical fires gouted here and there into the vacuum.
The RG 132 drifted off. Miles stood before the tactics room screen and stared in stunned fascination as half the freighter's outer hull delaminated and peeled into space.
The RG 132 was the final detail to be mopped up in the capture of the metals refinery. Thorne's commandos smoked the last of the Oserans out of their crippled ship, and cleared the outlying structures of resisters and refugees. The wounded were sorted from the dead, prisoners taken under guard, booby traps detected and deactivated, atmosphere restored in key areas. Then, at last, the manpower and shuttles could be spared to warp the old freighter into the docking station.
A smudged figure in a pressure suit stumbled out of the flex tube into the loading bay.
"They're bent! They're bent!" cried Mayhew to Miles, pulling off his helmet. His hair stuck out in all directions, plastered by dried sweat.
Baz and Elena strode up to him, looking, with their helmets off, like a pair of dark knights after the tournament. Elena's hug pulled the pilot off his feet; from Mayhew's suffused look, Miles guessed she was still having a little trouble with her servos. "It was great, Arde!' she laughed.