Summary:
Many of the world's excess youth turn to bloodsport for fame, respect, and quick money. Many more are compelled into the life by law and criminal alike. In Occupied Earth's second decade, a New York street rat and an off-world soldier cross paths in the deadliest game of them all.
TOC
1 - IHOP
2 - Elevator to Hell
3 - The Rotten Apple
4 - Whore
1.
The dreary gray counter drew closer, and the cup of coffee at her fingertips felt cold and distant. Then came a sharp spasm as she reflexively flung her slack right arm away like a bat, flinging the still piping hot mug to the floor before dropping numbly to the side. Nadine didn't panic, not because she knew this feeling intimately but because her brain hadn't had time to process the newly torn bloody red hole in her back and the chips of right shoulder blade already working on her spinal column, lungs and maybe even her heart. Maybe not the heart—her heightened pulse kept pumping hot iron to every inch of extremely distressed tissue. The pain came in sharp waves, and what her mind incorrectly processed as the second such hurtled her off the stool and to the floor.
Who gets shot in Mineola? The odd thought rung in Nadine's mind as shock washed over her. She barely registered her forehead slamming into the counter or the ground racing up to meet her, and her wide open eyes caught a glimpse of the water tower beyond the half open shades of the breakfast stop. The next thought nearly frightened her back into painful reality.
Who the hell's gonna fix me?
Nadine could still see blurs slowly moving through her muffled, ever more silent, world. She could've sworn someone was screaming, and maybe she thought she heard Cyrus barking something.
"Fuck me," she managed, her mind hysterically firing orders to limbs that no longer did as they were told. She was flailing, and the pain only encouraged her to do so with greater energy. Something sticky pooled under her cheek, and fright replaced reason as darkness closed in from the edge of sight.
Someone lifted her off the ground, and she heard the same strong, piercing baritone she prayed belonged to Cyrus ordering others to take cover as the whole world exploded in a cacophony of flying glass and the report of gunfire. For a moment, it felt as if she was flying, but then came the hard impact as both she and her protector flew over the counter onto the floor behind. Those arms--God, why hadn't she noticed how warm and strong they were before--finally wrapped around her, and her heart would scream bloody murder if anyone tried to release her from such sweet safety. Another wave of pain struck, shelling out only a brief moment of clarity for her trouble.
"Get me out of here."
"Hold on, Boss," Cyrus--it had to be--whispered in her ear. "Just hang on."
Nadine nodded dumbly, tasting blood churning at her lips and wondering why Cyrus thought she had a choice. She let her neck go limp, eyes straining to see around the corner. Brick was a mess, half his face and brains spread across the floor in a grotesque mat made worse by panicking patrons fleeing for safety. She could see, but no longer hear, Keenan and Shana taking turns laying grazing fire out the shattered windows at God knew what. Bodies littered the exit, waking Nadine to the fact that she and the closest things she had to friends in this world were going to die.
A brass thump crashed into the woodwork behind her, showering her in a rush of hot air, splinters, and something wet. Her good hand reached up to clasp the arm still wrapped around her, and found little more than chunks of meat at the shoulder. Nadine wanted to cry out, but she couldn't. Not now, not after coming this far. Not even for Cyrus.
Drunk with shock and pain, she lifted the rifle that had fallen from her dead companion's fingers and crawled out from behind the counter, just in time to see Shana die as return fire cut through her like teeth through a rag doll. Nadine screamed for Keenan, but couldn't even hear her own voice. Her last companion dove under a booth table, and she could see his lips flapping wildly and his arm frantically waving her away. Nadine turned, saw the exit to the kitchen, and looked back.
"Go!" the words finally broke through the haze in her mind. "Get the fuck out of here!"
"How many--" she protested.
Keenan's eyes lit up with white hot fury, "I said go, goddamn you!"
Nadine wanted to shake like a scared toddler, but the bitch in the back of her head lifted her on her knees like a marionette. Cyrus was dead and so was Shana; Keenan would be soon enough. But not her. Anyone but her.
She rolled into the kitchen and scampered for the rear, desperately putting as much distance as she could manage between herself and the death that awaited her outside the swinging door. When she reached the freezer closet, she propped herself on the rifle to work the latch. It took too long, but soon she was in; sealing herself away with nothing but fear and a shaky aim to keep her wits.
The nightmarish rancor two rooms away died to a whimper as Keenan probably met his likely end. Whoever was out there would be coming for her next. The blood trail was thick enough, to be sure, and when they finally reached the freezer door she would have only seconds to bring whoever charged in first with her to hell. If she could stay awake.
A minute passed, then five, and Nadine's strength finally faded. An unusually warm wind wrapped around her, and her thoughts drifted from the horror awaiting her outside that door as her sight finally failed.
Gunfighter
Moderator: LadyTevar
Gunfighter
Last edited by Paolo on 2009-12-13 05:27pm, edited 2 times in total.
Elevator to Hell
2.
Zia shivered as she awoke; her skinsuit hugged like ice water to the skin. A trio of sensors picked up her elevated heart rate, each firing off a signal to the suit's heater. The low hum and whine of electronics awakening from suspension surrounded her, but the temperature took too long to climb. She managed nonetheless.
When the suit reached 15 degrees Celsius, she risked a bit of movement. The artificial muscle enveloping her limbs responded sluggishly at first, then effortlessly. Her faceplate flickered to life, revealing safely filtered but true to life view of the flickering haze about Earth's curvature. She turned her head right and left, stretching her neck muscles as best she could given the tight fit of kevlar about her collar and the heavily armored contraption engulfing her head. By the time she finished her calisthenics, the internal thermometer read room temperature. Her radioisotope reactor, on the other hand, was already approaching 440 K. She dug her metal fingers deep into the skin of the twenty-meter long rock that had been her friend and companion these many days. If everything had gone according to plan up to now, Zia could blow it all by moving precariously far from her heat shade.
"Wasp 1, Beagle, click one two, acknowledge" her helmet speakers crackled. She dared enough movement to twice tap the blinking channel 8 icon on her wrist touchscreen.
The delay was palpable, almost six seconds. "Wasp 1, Beagle, stand by for clear vector. Target is at bearing 262 India Uniform, angels three-two hundred thousand. Correct and acknowledge twice."
A window expanded in Major Zia Nitay's visor. She fixed the moon--it was clear on the other side of Earth--and found India Uniform, a randomly picked point trailing and behind Earth's satellite. Some quick math by the computer placed Zia's target at a position sunward and under 10 kilometers from her own. She watched as one of her slave cameras maneuvered clear of the rock. A moment later, it homed in on a bright spot against the debris field. Zia was pleasantly surprised by her good fortune. Beagle had maneuvered them so close Zia's team might lay fire on the bastard before he could even clear weapons. Her slave shot through a series of complicated maneuvers, laying markers on each member of her team for her HUD's benefit. Zia radioed a single, brief word in Hebrew and was rewarded with a symphony of clicks in her headphones. She allowed herself one last look at Earth, knowing this was as close as she'd ever come to the homeland.
"Now."
Like synchronized swimmers, Zia's teammates emerged from behind their cover and lined on their target. Zia raised her debris shield over her head as her Zadin armor extended the first-stage booster pylons. On a three count, Zia and her comrades ignited their engines.
There was nowhere to hide now; if anyone over on the target was keeping even the slightest watch they would've seen the seventeen unmistakable lights of Shayetet 190 bearing down on their heads. But surprise had been total, and another twin set of pylons emerged from Zia's suit. Five small missiles detached, boosted away, then lined on preselected points of the hull.
The target was an Earth-Moon hauler, most likely but unfortunately crewed by men and women whose parents had worked their way into space from the planet below. That bothered Zia somewhat, who'd spent her entire life learning to revere this world, trained since childhood to believe her one and only aspiration in life was to defend it. The Homeland to an Astran had come to mean so much more than the once prosperous Levantine strip her ancestors once called home. She was now an entire planet, and no Astran could help but feel bitter over their failure to protect her. Zia, who'd never set foot on Earth, was no exception. But the men and women she'd been sent to kill were collaborators of the worst kind. When the enemy swept into the Earth sphere, scattered so many to the stars and destroying much of what they left behind, there were those who'd readily sold their countrymen into unbreakable bondage. So Zia watched with no small satisfaction as her missiles trained on their mark.
She'd been right, they'd nailed the bastard cold. Amir Glass's weapons hit first, punching through the second spin ring before detonating. Hers came a close second, finding a nice hot spot just between the propellant tank and the reactor. The rest mostly concentrated near the bow and the sail itself, hopefully killing as much of the standing watches as possible. The warheads were too small by themselves to do catastrophic damage, but twenty-five well placed hits were enough to bring down an armed merchantman. Within moments, the freighter went dead in space, screaming at nine kilometers per second around the Earth through a particularly nasty patch of debris.
"Strike, disengage!" she barked, adrenaline pulsing through her whole body. "Boarders, take her!"
Amir's shooters pulled out of their headlong dive towards the target, igniting their second set of boosters to climb further up into the debris field. Zia pinpointed the hauler's primary and secondary antennas from memory, then let the range fall to under a klick. Selecting guns, her armor reflexively fixed a cannon to her right forearm. In one lightening-fast act, she maneuvered from behind her shield, took aim, and fired. Seconds later, her slave cameras showed two sets of dishes aft of the sail disintegrate into so much dust. From start to finish, the entire engagement lasted less than five minutes.
Not that it was any time to dawdle. The boarders finally ignited their boosters--this time on the reciprocal--bringing their respective closing speeds down to a "safe" dozen meters per second. Zia touched down on a cargo hold just before the hauler's sail on the port side, digging her armor's talons into the armored hull to keep contact. She smoothly clawed her away to the nearest freight airlock, arriving just in time to see First Sergeant Simon Mandel and Staff Sergeant Ben Edel land sternward of her position.
Zia secured her footing on the hull and "stood up." She worked the latch until she'd freed herself of the half ton tank, booster and RTG assembly. Edel arrived just in time to take possession of both hers and Mandel's propulsion packs. He stood clear of the airlock as she traced her finger--and a Semtex dispenser--around the airlock hatch's outline. Zia and Mandel then stepped away about ten paces and ducked behind their debris shields before the Major hit the trigger. The ten meter wide circular door exploded into the ship along with a storm of fragments. Physics demanded at least some shrapnel fly outwards on the fringe of the shockwave, and when Zia emerged from behind her shield she noted with some discomfort that it was all but useless. No matter, with any luck she'd no longer need it.
They'd manage to avoid unacceptable damage, and even better the explosion killed no one. The cargo hold was, as expected, in vacuo, so none of the crew had been inside when they blew the hatch. The hole was wide enough to guide in their armor, but once inside Zia and Sergeant Mandel give them up to work their way deeper into the ship. They stripped to their skinsuits, taking only a pair of bullpup rifles and a single work satchel from their Zadins.
"You know the plan, Edel." Zia spoke to her companion still outside. This was Edel's first operation with a Shayetet team. "Remember. You spot anything, it's 'Tango, Tango, Tango!' on channel 3. Got it?"
"Yes, Major. Good hunting."
Zia tossed the satchel to Mandel. "Let's get this over with"
#
If anything had been lost in the translation, Janchu Sun couldn't find it. Years ago, the Connie occupation scoured the world's languages and customs in order to properly accredit their own agents at all levels of society. Their own cultural prejudices, though, favored something akin to corporate organization. Apii, for example, held the Orwellian billet of Xuanyu's human resources manager. The freakishly Chinese-looking foreigner--Sun still had a hard time thinking of Connies as something other than human--certainly acted the part, though with a zealous, hands on and thoroughly incorruptible approach that institutions as old as Sun's had grown to view suspiciously. Comrade Colonel Sun understood commissars, having come up in the People's Liberation Army Space Forces and surviving the disaster of the last World War. But Connies had their own system to impose, and saw the old zhengzhi weiyuan as unnecessary duplication. So they kept the name--for the most part--and even a good part of the organization. But if they'd any notion of politics as the Chinese saw it, Apii had yet to reveal it. Notwithstanding his unimpressive title, Sun had little intention of probing the boundaries of his new minder's authority.
As he'd only assumed command of Xuanyu two months ago, Sun was still learning the ropes when it came to dealing with men like Savim Apii. When Radar reported that a UIR-registered merchantman had suddenly veered off her scheduled intercept with a transfer tether, he'd taken the cautious road and invited his new "personnel officer" to the bridge. For his part, Apii certainly looked thoughtful as Sun delivered his brief, and did the Comrade Colonel the courtesy of waiting until the end before speaking.
"Forgive me, Comrade Colonel, but why is it you asked for me?"
"As your government's representative--"
Apii held up his hand "I apologize for interrupting. I am not a representative of any sort. My job is to see to the care and orderly disposition of personnel matters within the confines of service regulations and guidance set by the commanding officer. That you would be you, Comrade Colonel. I'm afraid you'll find I'm woefully inadequate where it concerns ship-handling and combat. Forgive me, but perhaps some other time you and I should step aside and discuss my role in detail."
Sun cocked an eyebrow. "Very well, I'm not sure how to take that. But you may stay if you'd like."
"If you think it's necessary," Apii answered, the deference of his words belied by the hint of authority in his voice.
Xuanyu's first lieutenant begged his Captain's attention, "Comrade Colonel, Comrade Zhao would like a word with you."
Sun nodded, keying a code in his digital assistant before inserting the earpiece. "CIC, Bridge. Go ahead."
"Bridge, CIC. We have imagery of the contact. You should take a look for yourself."
"Please send it to my screen," Sun ordered as he navigated to his PDA's messenger. Zhao's video popped up moments later, showing an infrared close up of freighter's starboard side. A handful of white hot specks scurried about the hull.
"A hijack?"
"Probably, Comrade Colonel," Zhao replied. "Contact is no longer thrusting and her reactor temperature is down to three-one-three."
"Understood. Bridge out."
Sun cut the link and sat in silent thought. He glanced at Apii, doing his best to look oblivious, before turning to his first lieutenant. "Chu, we may have a problem."
"I understand, Comrade Colonel," Major Sujin Chu. "The executive officer is on his way to the CIC. I've gone over the tank numbers with Mei, and we have enough to reach Canberra if we divert to low orbit at anything up to maximum cruise. The main problem will be debris shielding, obviously--we don't have any."
Sun pushed out of his chair and floated over to the gunnery station. He ordered up imagery of the local space. Their contact lay deep in the Scylla Sea's western shoals, an hour away at max cruise and on an orbit fifteen or so degrees south of their present position. Chu joined Sun as he scribbled down some numbers on his notepad, but Apii remained near the captain's chair as if his job was to look as supernumerary as possible.
"Look at this, Chu," he had the NCO at Gunnery throw up the debris field chart at millimeter resolution. He pointed to a black line that snaked towards the contact's marker. "That looks wide enough, and we could arrive in time to bring us right to the edge of the Hunter's range."
Sun handed him his notepad. Chu considered his captain's math and the display carefully before responding. "The inlet recedes very quickly from the contact. How do we retrieve it once we send it out?"
"Like this," he traced out a rough course on the chart, looping out of the shoals to high orbit before descending again to a position five degrees north, five thousand kilometers ahead. "But that's if we're forced to sink the freighter. What I want to do is recapture that ship, or at least force her to commit to a rendezvous."
"If the pirates cooperate," Chu observed dryly. "They might try to wait out the Hunter, and her onboard air supply would force her to abandon after an hour."
Sun nodded in agreement. "I'd like to see what we can do about that margin, but I only intend to give them half an hour to comply. If they stall or try to run, I will blow them out of space. Please pass the word."
#
Zia and Mandel worked their way aft without incident, but only after linking up with Sergeant Fiorina and his second in the reactor room did she learn why. The entire compartment suffered a most macabre makeover. Merchantmen--so the theory went--needed no more armor than that required to protect against cosmic and reactor radiation and whipple cloth to protect against high speed impactors. So when one of the missiles launched by Amir's strike team found its target, it managed to penetrate three decks before exploding in a neighboring compartment. Nothing but pieces remained of the freighter's reactor watch, but more importantly, the reactor controls were thoroughly wrecked. The reactor must have SCRAMMED itself immediately after, leaving the ship running on batteries. An unfortunate turn of events, but not unexpected. Zia hadn't come hundreds of millions of miles to steal a stupid Haji spaceship. She'd come to send a message.
Zia did a quick head count. "Where's David?"
Tony Fiorina shook his head, "I had him link up with the boat drivers while we checked out the path, Ma'am. Looks like we're going to have to take the sail after all. Hope we didn't fuck it up as badly as we did this place."
"Amen," Zia grunted. "Let's go."
Their circuitous route back forward took almost twenty minutes, during which time it became painfully obvious why resistance had been so light thus far. Just aft of where the main axle met the spin ring, Zia spotted a half meter gash open to space in a darkened passageway. She chanced shining a little light, and to her surprise the dead floating here in the passageway affected her in a way the massacre in the reactor control room hadn't. The few lucky ones had been enough to be near the site of the breach to die a relatively quick death due to the shrapnel. Most were trapped--many completely unscathed--when the shutters sealed the compartment. Zia met the empty, bloodshot stare of one of her victims, as if he knew that it was her missile--her second, in fact--that had left him clawing at his throat for the last few minutes of his life. She turned away, neither offering nor asking for forgiveness.
Mandel brushed by her with flashlight in hand, casting it on the shutter ahead. "Frame 35. Five more to go. The torch, Major?"
Zia nodded, reaching into her satchel. She was just about to hand the arc lance over when Mandel suddenly raised his fist. He brushed his other gloved hand against the door a couple of times just to be sure. "Movement and voices on the other side, Major. Four, maybe five."
"That's just great," Zia huffed. The easy part was over. She sent a set of clicks over channel 3 ordering a position check, then watched as her wrist screen lit up with icons representing all the bodies she'd brought aboard. Not one lay behind the bulkhead in front of her.
"Blow it," Zia ordered as she reached back into the satchel, this time pulling out two sticks of green-gray plastique, a detonator and remote. Mandel took hold of the items and went to work while Zia pushed her way back through the drifting corpses to the previous frame. She quickly found some cover--a thick work desk in an adjacent compartment, flashing her light back at Mandel to let him know. Moments later, Mandel swung through the ajar hatch and closed it behind him. The entire ship shuddered as Mandel's explosives tore at deck and deckhead at almost a thousand meters per second. A few dozen would be deadly splinters managed to find their way to Zia and Mandel, but their cover admitted none. Zia counted a few more seconds before emerging behind the desk, then swam out into the passageway. This time, the entire bulkhead had given way to space, and what hadn't been blown into space was unceremoniously pasted on, painted on, or driven deep into the surviving superstructure. No more frightened, lifeless eyes met Zia's as she and Mandel passed unobstructed through the last five, now depressurized frames between her and the sail section.
Staff Sergeant Angel Pena was thankfully the first sign of life they'd run into since leaving the reactor control room. He'd managed to set up a makeshift airlock two compartments to the centerline at Frame 30. He scanned down the wrecked, darkened passageway with his own flashlight. "My God, Ma'am."
"Lieutenant David?" Zia got to the point.
"Uh, we're all at the hatch, Ma'am. There's definitely movement one deck up."
Zia unlatched and flip backed her faceplate as Pena's airlock regained pressure. "The ring hatches?"
Mandel and Pena did mimicked their boss as the staff sergeant unwound the airlock's inner hatch. "Blown straight to hell, Ma'am. Anybody still down there's dropped like rats. We're still sweeping forward, but I hear that looks almost as bad as the way you came. If you'll follow me?"
Zia checked her watch as Pena led them to the sealed ladder-well. She had little over an hour to do what they came to do and escape, and standing in her way were three decks and maybe the upwards twenty crew that still breathed. Zia could ask Sara David's forgiveness later for borrowing her men like this; for now, she tossed Pena the arc lance.
"Cut it open."
Pena nodded and picked two others to help. In the meantime, Zia, Mandel and the remaining five guns spread out into three neighboring compartments, one each peering from behind cover and trained on the hatch. Once the job was complete, Pena waved his people back while he single-handedly yanked the heavy round hunk of metal clear of its hinges.
For a good minute, nothing happened. Then came the shouts, in Farsi--which Zia could barely make out. Outstretched, unarmed hands preceded the helmeted face of a man whose name Zia would never know. She raised her rifle, pulled the trigger, and erased the confused, scared look on his face forever. The rest Zia would remember clearly despite the blinding, instinctive speed of it all; five Shayetet men strafed across the open hatch, firing upwards ten rounds each, before one of them finally shouted "go!" Adrenaline raced through her as she pushed off the wall and skimmed under the opening. Mandel went first, and his first face-to-face kill of the day was the last poor bastard for three decks. No one in the tube above survived long enough to shut any of the intervening hatches. One by one, Zia's killers shot themselves up into the ladderwell.
Gunfire ripped through the decks below as Mandel and Zia flew up the mast to what was likely the Astrogation room. Mandel arrived just in time to jam himself into the ladderwell deck head and his foot against a hatch someone was trying desperately to seal. Zia forced the barrel of her rifle into the crack Mandel left her and squeezed off a burst. One more swift kick by Mandel and the hatch gave way, revealing three terrified men--one whom had taken a piece of Zia's fire in the thigh--crying and howling at the invaders, at God, at the end Zia and Mandel offered them as they released six controlled shots into their last victims.
"Clear!" someone shouted over channel 5, repeated seconds later by Pena. Mandel paused a moment before doing the same. Zia gave a moment's consideration to the gaping, blood-stained group she'd left center-mass in the youngest of the three kills, no longer feeling the need to meet the gaze of dead men.
#
Comrade Major Gaoli Bo's Hengte--Hunter--separated from Xuanyu and accelerated into the thicket with reckless abandon. The rock he'd chosen as a debris and heat shield increased his mass three fold, but he tanked enough reaction mass to get him at least as far as the target area, and he had enough onboard life support for the retrieval that would follow twenty hours later. In the meantime, he kept a watchful eye on the track from the volley of twelve small satellites Xuanyu had fired before leaving the area. They spread out conically with an overtake of three klicks per second. Fifteen minutes later and just under three hundred kilometers short of the hauler, they decelerated at a tenth of a gravity for twenty seconds and maneuvered to engulf the target in a globe a hundred miles wide. Bo kept pace at a leisurely half a klick per second overtake as his space warfare officer poured over the incoming imagery.
"Insane," Comrade Junior Lieutenant Yi Kai hissed just loud enough to pull Ma's eyes away from his own screen. "Look at this, Comrade Major."
She set the video to loop and handed him her tablet. The image was grainy, but he could clearly see three mannish shadows against the sunward hull. "Any sign of their mothership?"
"None, Comrade Major," Yi shook her head, then pointed out a set of jagged, black marks towards the stern. "These men seem to be patching the damage to the reactor housing. But why not do so under tow?"
"I can't say," Bo rubbed his chin. A space hijack was tricky business under the best of circumstances, and since the Occupation an exceedingly dangerous one. The act itself was often too violent to avoid attracting attention, so your typical pirate chose to hang around low orbit or Lagrange Points in order to snatch his prey, rig a tow, and lose himself in the nearest party of debris or commercial traffic he could find--preferably both. Fewer than five percent of hijackers managed to pull off that much. Of the remainder that almost always tried running after scuttling their catch, less than a quarter made good on their escape. With no horizon for cover and engines that could take a million tons to Mars and back in under a month and a half, space piracy was truly the profession of the devil-may-care psychopath. Which meant the bastards behind this latest outrage were either dumber or crazier than any Bo or Kai had ever come across.
"Aspect change!" the enlisted man at the radio and telescope station shouted. Bo listened to the follow up report as he checked the range. He was still over a hundred kilometers out of gun range, but well within his missile envelope. He swore under his breath as he watched his target's temperature steadily climb, not sure what to make of the pirate's latest antics. Were they really that far along on the reactor repairs? Ready or not, he had no intention of letting them run.
"Ready missiles one and two." he redlined the throttle as he passed the order to Kai. "Target the hijack."
#
"Roll one eighty and stand her on her toes, Lieutenant," Major Zia Nitay ordered just moments before from the flight deck. Sara David ignored the floating body to her left and pulled back on the stick. The momentum wheels did the rest. The hauler slowly came right side up relative to Earth's horizon, pitching high until she stood like a tower with her keel to the sun. Fifteen minutes to go.
Pena's team had uncovered the manifest a half hour earlier and were hard at work fixing reentry shields, 'chutes and floaters to some most interesting items. As much as she despised the Connies, their medicine was truly something else. Transshipping knowledge and supplies from Astra to her allies on Earth had been the next best thing to impossible, so somebody upstairs had come up with the ingenious idea of having the Connies do most of the work for them. So far, Zia's hit on the MVS Zakariya had validated the idea. Soon, twelve hundred tons of drugs and instruments would descend through the atmosphere to a point just off the coast of Bermuda.
"Tango! Tango! Tango!" Zia's perfect execution came apart as Edel's three words seared in her ears. "Unknown directly above, four eight zero klicks and closing fast!"
"Damn it," Zia allowed herself a moment to savor the bitter news before activating her mike. "ID that unknown, Edel!"
Zia already knew there was a Chinese interceptor in the area, and Sara watched it closely as soon as she'd joined Zia on the flight deck. Whoever she was had come within a thousand klicks at the closest, apparently decided the debris thicket ahead was too much, and apparently moved on to find another way into the interior sea.
"Unknown is a Juliet-Sierra Eight," Edel finally reported. "Designating Bandit One."
Lieutenant David turned towards Zia with a painfully apologetic look on her face. "I should have seen that coming, Major. The enemy must have released her before removing from the inlet."
Zia felt the angry temptation to rub her pilot's face in it, but bit her tongue when the bandit's range suddenly flashed in her mind. "We should be pretty deep inside a Hunter's missile range, right?"
Sara opened her mouth, but paused long enough to check her wrist computer for an answer. "Uh, yes. For some time now."
"We're pirates," Zia said half in thought. "Right? We're just..."
She didn't bother completing the thought, sliding into the bloodstained seat next to Sara. Mandel floated to the front and placed a hand on her shoulder. "Where are you going this, Major?"
"I've got an idea."
#
"MSV Zakariya," Comrade Major Bo repeated for the third time. "This is PLA Space Forces Seven Hotel. Cut your reactor immediately. Respond."
The radio finally sizzled. "Unknown, this is MSV Phutet inbound from Haoqi--"
Bo had no time to spare for bullshit. "MSV Zakariya, you are a UIR-flagged vessel suspected of being hijacked and you will comply with our instructions or we will open fire. MSV Zakariya, this is your--"
"Wait!" a woman's voice on the radio pleaded. "It's a mess here, and we're trying to shutdown the fucker right now! Tell me you can see that! Please! Don't fire!"
Kai read off the latest read from the reconnaissance satellites. "Target temperature is holding steady of 484 K. It is not dropping, but she's not rising."
"PLA Seven Hotel, do you see it!" the voice repeated. Bo chewed through the numbers. He had them cold regardless, but a part of him itched for any excuse to send that ship straight to hell. Training won that argument.
"Very well, MSV Zakariya. State the nature of your emergency."
"Like I said," the voice betray profound relief mixed with a convincing tenor of a criminal's trepidation. "Reactor control is a mess, and I have people still patching up the injectors. My reactor is undamaged, but the rods are jammed in a...what is it? They're jammed in a tenth of the way."
"Do you need to abandon?" Bo thought to ask, half wanting to watch them run out of air.
"Not yet, we don't. I think we're out of the woods, but I want--I'd appreciate it if you'd give us enough time to finish repairs. I swear we'll comply."
Kai gave Bo a look that steeled the suspicion in his own spine. "MSV Zakariya. You will come about to one eight zero relative and hold directly on my nose. Acknowledge."
A few seconds passed with no reply. "Respond, MSV Zakariya. You will come about one eight zero relative and hold to my nose. This is your last--"
"PLA Seven Hotel, I got it!" the voice returned. "I got it, for fuck's sake! Listen, give us a second to figure--I mean get the attitude thrusters online."
"MSV Zakariya, you completed your last attitude evolution at 1204 Zulu on momentum transfer. I will not order you again to--"
"Do you see how we're fucking aligned right now, you dumb chink?" Bo's cheeks flared in fury at the vulgar, panicky interruption. "PLA Seven Hotel, sorry about that last. Listen, the wheels are shot and locked. Give us a minute, we'll re-orient just like you say."
Bo cut his mike again and caressed the trigger, easing his grip only when he met Comrade Kai's own intense gaze.
#
"Ten minutes." And the cabin radio went silent.
"Laid it on a little thick, Lieutenant?" First Sergeant Mandel smirked at Sara.
"You might want to keep your asshole pinched until after we get out of this," Sara's eyes stayed on her screen. "Major, we're coming up on target in five minutes. If he's smart, he'll open fire the minute he sees the fireworks. If he's dumb, he'll wait until the burn. If he's pissed, well..."
"No sense worrying about it," Zia said as she snapped her faceplate down. "First Sergeant, would you do the honors?"
Mandel raised his rifle and fired a full magazine into the flight deck's windows. Depressurization and a little butt-work took care of the rest, ripping away glass and composite frame alike while leaving a man-sized hole in its place. Just outside and to the port, Edel waited with Mandel's and Zia's Zadin armored suits and some cable to tie them down to the hull. Zia patted Sara on the back and helped her through the opening first. Then she turned to her First Sergeant. "You're next, Simon."
"Not a chance, Major," he answered in that voice she'd long accepted meant the end of the argument.
"Fine," Zia sighed switching the broadcast channel. "Boarders, bug out."
Mandel flipped the detonator switch in his hand at the same time.
#
"Many explosions on target!" Kai shouted. "Forward sail, cargo hold. None on the reactor. Temperature holding at 484 K."
Comrade Major Bo fought the urge to pour on his own fire, instead jamming his anger down the microphone. "MSV Zakariya. Report!"
His finger tensed on the trigger as he awaited a reply that never came.
#
The blasts continued for two minutes, covering the escape burns of Shayetet 190's Zadins. With a bit of luck, most would reach their egress points in a matter of hours and proceed under low-thrust and in hibernation to the rendezvous point. Zia hoped desperately they'd all get home, knowing that she never would.
She sat in the flight seat, carefully going over the steps Sara had walked her through in the precious minutes they'd been given to concoct this crazy plan. Mandel had gone ahead outside and strapped into his Zadin, throwing up a couple of slave cameras to train on the Chinese Hunter while talking Zia through it all. The Major eased the flight stick back, her eye nervously on the artificial horizon as the hauler flipped onto its back and pointed its nose towards the western edge of China. Mandel reported nothing.
As her wristwatch clicked through the last minute and a half, that old, sometimes forgotten part of herself that second-guessed every step she took gripped her thoughts. She wasn't trained for this. If she were off by so much as a half a minute or more, or if her angle wasn't right, they'd send their shipment careening into oblivion. Her newest teammates--Pena included--had been assigned the task of prepping the supplies for delivery. What if they hadn't properly laid on the ablative film, or what if the parachutes failed? What if the Hunter outside was calling her on a radio no one could hear in this airless cabin. What if he fired before--
Instinct took over as soon as the alarm sounded, and Zia not quite flawlessly executed the instructions Sara had given her. She selected the hauler's emergency LOX-kerosene brake and threw the throttle forward. She sank into her seat as the acceleration climbed to nearly four gravities before Mandel's voice blasted in her earpiece.
"Vampire! Vampire!"
The SD-10, China's answer to the NATO SM-14, could reach twelve kilometers per second in under five minutes, which gave Zia just over two minutes, twenty seconds. Enough time to do what she needed to do, and only enough.
"Hold on!" Zia shouted as the hauler finally slowed to de-orbiting speed. She yanked the flight stick right as hard as she could. The ship rolled stubbornly, and she counted to 63 degrees before yanking it as hard she could the other way.
Pena's team had carefully placed their target palettes just for this maneuver. As the rotation died, the loose crates rose out of the open cargo holds, flung into space with only two monopropellent rockets each to help them clear the hatches.
"Brace--!"
The first SM-10 struck just aft of the sail, tear a hole the size of a man into the thin skin of the freighter. The second had homed in the reactor housing, but went wild when its seeker suddenly bounced a return off one of the increasingly distant medical crates. She expended her remaining reaction mass on the longshot turn only to line up just right for an impact just forward of Zakariya's LOX tanks. The hauler literally snapped in half as the first tank detonated. On the flight deck, Zia almost had the wind knocked out of her as she was flung bodily into the overhead controls. Despite the pain, only two things remained razor clear in her mind--the cable stringing her Zadin to the hull outside and the hole Mandel had carved for their escape route. Not even pausing to catch her breath properly, she clawed at the scraggy exit, pulling herself out as best she could.
Zia offered a silent prayer of thanks as she climbed into her armor, cut herself loose, and pushed off from the fragmenting wreck. The terminator was barely twenty degrees off her normal with the surface, and she could even make out the outline of Peru creeping over the horizon. Not that she could afford to admire the view.
"Simon! Where are you!" she scanned the horizon as her suit's last set of solid rocket boosters deployed.
"Zero-six-eight! Move your ass, Major!"
She didn't even wait for him to finish, punching the ignition as soon as she keyed in the bearing. Another ten seconds or so, the seventeen gravity burn wouldn't have mattered as the MVS Zakariya's other two LOX tanks went. Her debris shield absorbed the incoming shrapnel like an armored car absorbs a brick wall, and Zia felt the crunch of bone as her left shoulder blade and right femur snapped like so much balsa wood.
#
Gaoli Bo gaped as he watched a ship die for the first time. "Just what the hell was that?"
"Comrade Major!" Kai's face went ashen with terror. "I...I don't know."
Bo ignored her, quickly maneuvering his Hunter behind his rock. Tens of thousands of shards, hundreds reaching a meter in length--expanded from the center of the flash at a klick per second--dozens sweeping by PLA 7H in an unfathomable display of improbability. Two of PLA Seven Hotel's remotes were not so lucky.
He took a break from barking orders to watch another of Kai's satellites record the last minutes of Zakariya's life. Her shattered forward hull dove towards the atmosphere, the Hunter crew watching helplessly as her crew, cargo and hijackers--if any survived--raced headlong toward fiery death.
#
Zia screamed in pain as someone she had every right to expect to be First Sergeant Mandel yanked her to him by her injured right arm. Luckily for her, Pena and Lieutenant David had disobeyed orders, and only Pena had been close enough to catch her when she emerged from her wild ride through the hell.
"Hold on, Ma'am!" he said as he worked his way behind her, cutting away her debris shield and working her damaged Zadin's pylons manually. It took too long, but he eventually unfurled the reentry shuttlecock and ablative film. By the time he pushed clear and deployed his own reentry system, they'd already enter the atmosphere.
Zia numbly watched as the starry blackness around her went a dull red, then flaming yellow-orange, then black again.
Zia shivered as she awoke; her skinsuit hugged like ice water to the skin. A trio of sensors picked up her elevated heart rate, each firing off a signal to the suit's heater. The low hum and whine of electronics awakening from suspension surrounded her, but the temperature took too long to climb. She managed nonetheless.
When the suit reached 15 degrees Celsius, she risked a bit of movement. The artificial muscle enveloping her limbs responded sluggishly at first, then effortlessly. Her faceplate flickered to life, revealing safely filtered but true to life view of the flickering haze about Earth's curvature. She turned her head right and left, stretching her neck muscles as best she could given the tight fit of kevlar about her collar and the heavily armored contraption engulfing her head. By the time she finished her calisthenics, the internal thermometer read room temperature. Her radioisotope reactor, on the other hand, was already approaching 440 K. She dug her metal fingers deep into the skin of the twenty-meter long rock that had been her friend and companion these many days. If everything had gone according to plan up to now, Zia could blow it all by moving precariously far from her heat shade.
"Wasp 1, Beagle, click one two, acknowledge" her helmet speakers crackled. She dared enough movement to twice tap the blinking channel 8 icon on her wrist touchscreen.
The delay was palpable, almost six seconds. "Wasp 1, Beagle, stand by for clear vector. Target is at bearing 262 India Uniform, angels three-two hundred thousand. Correct and acknowledge twice."
A window expanded in Major Zia Nitay's visor. She fixed the moon--it was clear on the other side of Earth--and found India Uniform, a randomly picked point trailing and behind Earth's satellite. Some quick math by the computer placed Zia's target at a position sunward and under 10 kilometers from her own. She watched as one of her slave cameras maneuvered clear of the rock. A moment later, it homed in on a bright spot against the debris field. Zia was pleasantly surprised by her good fortune. Beagle had maneuvered them so close Zia's team might lay fire on the bastard before he could even clear weapons. Her slave shot through a series of complicated maneuvers, laying markers on each member of her team for her HUD's benefit. Zia radioed a single, brief word in Hebrew and was rewarded with a symphony of clicks in her headphones. She allowed herself one last look at Earth, knowing this was as close as she'd ever come to the homeland.
"Now."
Like synchronized swimmers, Zia's teammates emerged from behind their cover and lined on their target. Zia raised her debris shield over her head as her Zadin armor extended the first-stage booster pylons. On a three count, Zia and her comrades ignited their engines.
There was nowhere to hide now; if anyone over on the target was keeping even the slightest watch they would've seen the seventeen unmistakable lights of Shayetet 190 bearing down on their heads. But surprise had been total, and another twin set of pylons emerged from Zia's suit. Five small missiles detached, boosted away, then lined on preselected points of the hull.
The target was an Earth-Moon hauler, most likely but unfortunately crewed by men and women whose parents had worked their way into space from the planet below. That bothered Zia somewhat, who'd spent her entire life learning to revere this world, trained since childhood to believe her one and only aspiration in life was to defend it. The Homeland to an Astran had come to mean so much more than the once prosperous Levantine strip her ancestors once called home. She was now an entire planet, and no Astran could help but feel bitter over their failure to protect her. Zia, who'd never set foot on Earth, was no exception. But the men and women she'd been sent to kill were collaborators of the worst kind. When the enemy swept into the Earth sphere, scattered so many to the stars and destroying much of what they left behind, there were those who'd readily sold their countrymen into unbreakable bondage. So Zia watched with no small satisfaction as her missiles trained on their mark.
She'd been right, they'd nailed the bastard cold. Amir Glass's weapons hit first, punching through the second spin ring before detonating. Hers came a close second, finding a nice hot spot just between the propellant tank and the reactor. The rest mostly concentrated near the bow and the sail itself, hopefully killing as much of the standing watches as possible. The warheads were too small by themselves to do catastrophic damage, but twenty-five well placed hits were enough to bring down an armed merchantman. Within moments, the freighter went dead in space, screaming at nine kilometers per second around the Earth through a particularly nasty patch of debris.
"Strike, disengage!" she barked, adrenaline pulsing through her whole body. "Boarders, take her!"
Amir's shooters pulled out of their headlong dive towards the target, igniting their second set of boosters to climb further up into the debris field. Zia pinpointed the hauler's primary and secondary antennas from memory, then let the range fall to under a klick. Selecting guns, her armor reflexively fixed a cannon to her right forearm. In one lightening-fast act, she maneuvered from behind her shield, took aim, and fired. Seconds later, her slave cameras showed two sets of dishes aft of the sail disintegrate into so much dust. From start to finish, the entire engagement lasted less than five minutes.
Not that it was any time to dawdle. The boarders finally ignited their boosters--this time on the reciprocal--bringing their respective closing speeds down to a "safe" dozen meters per second. Zia touched down on a cargo hold just before the hauler's sail on the port side, digging her armor's talons into the armored hull to keep contact. She smoothly clawed her away to the nearest freight airlock, arriving just in time to see First Sergeant Simon Mandel and Staff Sergeant Ben Edel land sternward of her position.
Zia secured her footing on the hull and "stood up." She worked the latch until she'd freed herself of the half ton tank, booster and RTG assembly. Edel arrived just in time to take possession of both hers and Mandel's propulsion packs. He stood clear of the airlock as she traced her finger--and a Semtex dispenser--around the airlock hatch's outline. Zia and Mandel then stepped away about ten paces and ducked behind their debris shields before the Major hit the trigger. The ten meter wide circular door exploded into the ship along with a storm of fragments. Physics demanded at least some shrapnel fly outwards on the fringe of the shockwave, and when Zia emerged from behind her shield she noted with some discomfort that it was all but useless. No matter, with any luck she'd no longer need it.
They'd manage to avoid unacceptable damage, and even better the explosion killed no one. The cargo hold was, as expected, in vacuo, so none of the crew had been inside when they blew the hatch. The hole was wide enough to guide in their armor, but once inside Zia and Sergeant Mandel give them up to work their way deeper into the ship. They stripped to their skinsuits, taking only a pair of bullpup rifles and a single work satchel from their Zadins.
"You know the plan, Edel." Zia spoke to her companion still outside. This was Edel's first operation with a Shayetet team. "Remember. You spot anything, it's 'Tango, Tango, Tango!' on channel 3. Got it?"
"Yes, Major. Good hunting."
Zia tossed the satchel to Mandel. "Let's get this over with"
#
If anything had been lost in the translation, Janchu Sun couldn't find it. Years ago, the Connie occupation scoured the world's languages and customs in order to properly accredit their own agents at all levels of society. Their own cultural prejudices, though, favored something akin to corporate organization. Apii, for example, held the Orwellian billet of Xuanyu's human resources manager. The freakishly Chinese-looking foreigner--Sun still had a hard time thinking of Connies as something other than human--certainly acted the part, though with a zealous, hands on and thoroughly incorruptible approach that institutions as old as Sun's had grown to view suspiciously. Comrade Colonel Sun understood commissars, having come up in the People's Liberation Army Space Forces and surviving the disaster of the last World War. But Connies had their own system to impose, and saw the old zhengzhi weiyuan as unnecessary duplication. So they kept the name--for the most part--and even a good part of the organization. But if they'd any notion of politics as the Chinese saw it, Apii had yet to reveal it. Notwithstanding his unimpressive title, Sun had little intention of probing the boundaries of his new minder's authority.
As he'd only assumed command of Xuanyu two months ago, Sun was still learning the ropes when it came to dealing with men like Savim Apii. When Radar reported that a UIR-registered merchantman had suddenly veered off her scheduled intercept with a transfer tether, he'd taken the cautious road and invited his new "personnel officer" to the bridge. For his part, Apii certainly looked thoughtful as Sun delivered his brief, and did the Comrade Colonel the courtesy of waiting until the end before speaking.
"Forgive me, Comrade Colonel, but why is it you asked for me?"
"As your government's representative--"
Apii held up his hand "I apologize for interrupting. I am not a representative of any sort. My job is to see to the care and orderly disposition of personnel matters within the confines of service regulations and guidance set by the commanding officer. That you would be you, Comrade Colonel. I'm afraid you'll find I'm woefully inadequate where it concerns ship-handling and combat. Forgive me, but perhaps some other time you and I should step aside and discuss my role in detail."
Sun cocked an eyebrow. "Very well, I'm not sure how to take that. But you may stay if you'd like."
"If you think it's necessary," Apii answered, the deference of his words belied by the hint of authority in his voice.
Xuanyu's first lieutenant begged his Captain's attention, "Comrade Colonel, Comrade Zhao would like a word with you."
Sun nodded, keying a code in his digital assistant before inserting the earpiece. "CIC, Bridge. Go ahead."
"Bridge, CIC. We have imagery of the contact. You should take a look for yourself."
"Please send it to my screen," Sun ordered as he navigated to his PDA's messenger. Zhao's video popped up moments later, showing an infrared close up of freighter's starboard side. A handful of white hot specks scurried about the hull.
"A hijack?"
"Probably, Comrade Colonel," Zhao replied. "Contact is no longer thrusting and her reactor temperature is down to three-one-three."
"Understood. Bridge out."
Sun cut the link and sat in silent thought. He glanced at Apii, doing his best to look oblivious, before turning to his first lieutenant. "Chu, we may have a problem."
"I understand, Comrade Colonel," Major Sujin Chu. "The executive officer is on his way to the CIC. I've gone over the tank numbers with Mei, and we have enough to reach Canberra if we divert to low orbit at anything up to maximum cruise. The main problem will be debris shielding, obviously--we don't have any."
Sun pushed out of his chair and floated over to the gunnery station. He ordered up imagery of the local space. Their contact lay deep in the Scylla Sea's western shoals, an hour away at max cruise and on an orbit fifteen or so degrees south of their present position. Chu joined Sun as he scribbled down some numbers on his notepad, but Apii remained near the captain's chair as if his job was to look as supernumerary as possible.
"Look at this, Chu," he had the NCO at Gunnery throw up the debris field chart at millimeter resolution. He pointed to a black line that snaked towards the contact's marker. "That looks wide enough, and we could arrive in time to bring us right to the edge of the Hunter's range."
Sun handed him his notepad. Chu considered his captain's math and the display carefully before responding. "The inlet recedes very quickly from the contact. How do we retrieve it once we send it out?"
"Like this," he traced out a rough course on the chart, looping out of the shoals to high orbit before descending again to a position five degrees north, five thousand kilometers ahead. "But that's if we're forced to sink the freighter. What I want to do is recapture that ship, or at least force her to commit to a rendezvous."
"If the pirates cooperate," Chu observed dryly. "They might try to wait out the Hunter, and her onboard air supply would force her to abandon after an hour."
Sun nodded in agreement. "I'd like to see what we can do about that margin, but I only intend to give them half an hour to comply. If they stall or try to run, I will blow them out of space. Please pass the word."
#
Zia and Mandel worked their way aft without incident, but only after linking up with Sergeant Fiorina and his second in the reactor room did she learn why. The entire compartment suffered a most macabre makeover. Merchantmen--so the theory went--needed no more armor than that required to protect against cosmic and reactor radiation and whipple cloth to protect against high speed impactors. So when one of the missiles launched by Amir's strike team found its target, it managed to penetrate three decks before exploding in a neighboring compartment. Nothing but pieces remained of the freighter's reactor watch, but more importantly, the reactor controls were thoroughly wrecked. The reactor must have SCRAMMED itself immediately after, leaving the ship running on batteries. An unfortunate turn of events, but not unexpected. Zia hadn't come hundreds of millions of miles to steal a stupid Haji spaceship. She'd come to send a message.
Zia did a quick head count. "Where's David?"
Tony Fiorina shook his head, "I had him link up with the boat drivers while we checked out the path, Ma'am. Looks like we're going to have to take the sail after all. Hope we didn't fuck it up as badly as we did this place."
"Amen," Zia grunted. "Let's go."
Their circuitous route back forward took almost twenty minutes, during which time it became painfully obvious why resistance had been so light thus far. Just aft of where the main axle met the spin ring, Zia spotted a half meter gash open to space in a darkened passageway. She chanced shining a little light, and to her surprise the dead floating here in the passageway affected her in a way the massacre in the reactor control room hadn't. The few lucky ones had been enough to be near the site of the breach to die a relatively quick death due to the shrapnel. Most were trapped--many completely unscathed--when the shutters sealed the compartment. Zia met the empty, bloodshot stare of one of her victims, as if he knew that it was her missile--her second, in fact--that had left him clawing at his throat for the last few minutes of his life. She turned away, neither offering nor asking for forgiveness.
Mandel brushed by her with flashlight in hand, casting it on the shutter ahead. "Frame 35. Five more to go. The torch, Major?"
Zia nodded, reaching into her satchel. She was just about to hand the arc lance over when Mandel suddenly raised his fist. He brushed his other gloved hand against the door a couple of times just to be sure. "Movement and voices on the other side, Major. Four, maybe five."
"That's just great," Zia huffed. The easy part was over. She sent a set of clicks over channel 3 ordering a position check, then watched as her wrist screen lit up with icons representing all the bodies she'd brought aboard. Not one lay behind the bulkhead in front of her.
"Blow it," Zia ordered as she reached back into the satchel, this time pulling out two sticks of green-gray plastique, a detonator and remote. Mandel took hold of the items and went to work while Zia pushed her way back through the drifting corpses to the previous frame. She quickly found some cover--a thick work desk in an adjacent compartment, flashing her light back at Mandel to let him know. Moments later, Mandel swung through the ajar hatch and closed it behind him. The entire ship shuddered as Mandel's explosives tore at deck and deckhead at almost a thousand meters per second. A few dozen would be deadly splinters managed to find their way to Zia and Mandel, but their cover admitted none. Zia counted a few more seconds before emerging behind the desk, then swam out into the passageway. This time, the entire bulkhead had given way to space, and what hadn't been blown into space was unceremoniously pasted on, painted on, or driven deep into the surviving superstructure. No more frightened, lifeless eyes met Zia's as she and Mandel passed unobstructed through the last five, now depressurized frames between her and the sail section.
Staff Sergeant Angel Pena was thankfully the first sign of life they'd run into since leaving the reactor control room. He'd managed to set up a makeshift airlock two compartments to the centerline at Frame 30. He scanned down the wrecked, darkened passageway with his own flashlight. "My God, Ma'am."
"Lieutenant David?" Zia got to the point.
"Uh, we're all at the hatch, Ma'am. There's definitely movement one deck up."
Zia unlatched and flip backed her faceplate as Pena's airlock regained pressure. "The ring hatches?"
Mandel and Pena did mimicked their boss as the staff sergeant unwound the airlock's inner hatch. "Blown straight to hell, Ma'am. Anybody still down there's dropped like rats. We're still sweeping forward, but I hear that looks almost as bad as the way you came. If you'll follow me?"
Zia checked her watch as Pena led them to the sealed ladder-well. She had little over an hour to do what they came to do and escape, and standing in her way were three decks and maybe the upwards twenty crew that still breathed. Zia could ask Sara David's forgiveness later for borrowing her men like this; for now, she tossed Pena the arc lance.
"Cut it open."
Pena nodded and picked two others to help. In the meantime, Zia, Mandel and the remaining five guns spread out into three neighboring compartments, one each peering from behind cover and trained on the hatch. Once the job was complete, Pena waved his people back while he single-handedly yanked the heavy round hunk of metal clear of its hinges.
For a good minute, nothing happened. Then came the shouts, in Farsi--which Zia could barely make out. Outstretched, unarmed hands preceded the helmeted face of a man whose name Zia would never know. She raised her rifle, pulled the trigger, and erased the confused, scared look on his face forever. The rest Zia would remember clearly despite the blinding, instinctive speed of it all; five Shayetet men strafed across the open hatch, firing upwards ten rounds each, before one of them finally shouted "go!" Adrenaline raced through her as she pushed off the wall and skimmed under the opening. Mandel went first, and his first face-to-face kill of the day was the last poor bastard for three decks. No one in the tube above survived long enough to shut any of the intervening hatches. One by one, Zia's killers shot themselves up into the ladderwell.
Gunfire ripped through the decks below as Mandel and Zia flew up the mast to what was likely the Astrogation room. Mandel arrived just in time to jam himself into the ladderwell deck head and his foot against a hatch someone was trying desperately to seal. Zia forced the barrel of her rifle into the crack Mandel left her and squeezed off a burst. One more swift kick by Mandel and the hatch gave way, revealing three terrified men--one whom had taken a piece of Zia's fire in the thigh--crying and howling at the invaders, at God, at the end Zia and Mandel offered them as they released six controlled shots into their last victims.
"Clear!" someone shouted over channel 5, repeated seconds later by Pena. Mandel paused a moment before doing the same. Zia gave a moment's consideration to the gaping, blood-stained group she'd left center-mass in the youngest of the three kills, no longer feeling the need to meet the gaze of dead men.
#
Comrade Major Gaoli Bo's Hengte--Hunter--separated from Xuanyu and accelerated into the thicket with reckless abandon. The rock he'd chosen as a debris and heat shield increased his mass three fold, but he tanked enough reaction mass to get him at least as far as the target area, and he had enough onboard life support for the retrieval that would follow twenty hours later. In the meantime, he kept a watchful eye on the track from the volley of twelve small satellites Xuanyu had fired before leaving the area. They spread out conically with an overtake of three klicks per second. Fifteen minutes later and just under three hundred kilometers short of the hauler, they decelerated at a tenth of a gravity for twenty seconds and maneuvered to engulf the target in a globe a hundred miles wide. Bo kept pace at a leisurely half a klick per second overtake as his space warfare officer poured over the incoming imagery.
"Insane," Comrade Junior Lieutenant Yi Kai hissed just loud enough to pull Ma's eyes away from his own screen. "Look at this, Comrade Major."
She set the video to loop and handed him her tablet. The image was grainy, but he could clearly see three mannish shadows against the sunward hull. "Any sign of their mothership?"
"None, Comrade Major," Yi shook her head, then pointed out a set of jagged, black marks towards the stern. "These men seem to be patching the damage to the reactor housing. But why not do so under tow?"
"I can't say," Bo rubbed his chin. A space hijack was tricky business under the best of circumstances, and since the Occupation an exceedingly dangerous one. The act itself was often too violent to avoid attracting attention, so your typical pirate chose to hang around low orbit or Lagrange Points in order to snatch his prey, rig a tow, and lose himself in the nearest party of debris or commercial traffic he could find--preferably both. Fewer than five percent of hijackers managed to pull off that much. Of the remainder that almost always tried running after scuttling their catch, less than a quarter made good on their escape. With no horizon for cover and engines that could take a million tons to Mars and back in under a month and a half, space piracy was truly the profession of the devil-may-care psychopath. Which meant the bastards behind this latest outrage were either dumber or crazier than any Bo or Kai had ever come across.
"Aspect change!" the enlisted man at the radio and telescope station shouted. Bo listened to the follow up report as he checked the range. He was still over a hundred kilometers out of gun range, but well within his missile envelope. He swore under his breath as he watched his target's temperature steadily climb, not sure what to make of the pirate's latest antics. Were they really that far along on the reactor repairs? Ready or not, he had no intention of letting them run.
"Ready missiles one and two." he redlined the throttle as he passed the order to Kai. "Target the hijack."
#
"Roll one eighty and stand her on her toes, Lieutenant," Major Zia Nitay ordered just moments before from the flight deck. Sara David ignored the floating body to her left and pulled back on the stick. The momentum wheels did the rest. The hauler slowly came right side up relative to Earth's horizon, pitching high until she stood like a tower with her keel to the sun. Fifteen minutes to go.
Pena's team had uncovered the manifest a half hour earlier and were hard at work fixing reentry shields, 'chutes and floaters to some most interesting items. As much as she despised the Connies, their medicine was truly something else. Transshipping knowledge and supplies from Astra to her allies on Earth had been the next best thing to impossible, so somebody upstairs had come up with the ingenious idea of having the Connies do most of the work for them. So far, Zia's hit on the MVS Zakariya had validated the idea. Soon, twelve hundred tons of drugs and instruments would descend through the atmosphere to a point just off the coast of Bermuda.
"Tango! Tango! Tango!" Zia's perfect execution came apart as Edel's three words seared in her ears. "Unknown directly above, four eight zero klicks and closing fast!"
"Damn it," Zia allowed herself a moment to savor the bitter news before activating her mike. "ID that unknown, Edel!"
Zia already knew there was a Chinese interceptor in the area, and Sara watched it closely as soon as she'd joined Zia on the flight deck. Whoever she was had come within a thousand klicks at the closest, apparently decided the debris thicket ahead was too much, and apparently moved on to find another way into the interior sea.
"Unknown is a Juliet-Sierra Eight," Edel finally reported. "Designating Bandit One."
Lieutenant David turned towards Zia with a painfully apologetic look on her face. "I should have seen that coming, Major. The enemy must have released her before removing from the inlet."
Zia felt the angry temptation to rub her pilot's face in it, but bit her tongue when the bandit's range suddenly flashed in her mind. "We should be pretty deep inside a Hunter's missile range, right?"
Sara opened her mouth, but paused long enough to check her wrist computer for an answer. "Uh, yes. For some time now."
"We're pirates," Zia said half in thought. "Right? We're just..."
She didn't bother completing the thought, sliding into the bloodstained seat next to Sara. Mandel floated to the front and placed a hand on her shoulder. "Where are you going this, Major?"
"I've got an idea."
#
"MSV Zakariya," Comrade Major Bo repeated for the third time. "This is PLA Space Forces Seven Hotel. Cut your reactor immediately. Respond."
The radio finally sizzled. "Unknown, this is MSV Phutet inbound from Haoqi--"
Bo had no time to spare for bullshit. "MSV Zakariya, you are a UIR-flagged vessel suspected of being hijacked and you will comply with our instructions or we will open fire. MSV Zakariya, this is your--"
"Wait!" a woman's voice on the radio pleaded. "It's a mess here, and we're trying to shutdown the fucker right now! Tell me you can see that! Please! Don't fire!"
Kai read off the latest read from the reconnaissance satellites. "Target temperature is holding steady of 484 K. It is not dropping, but she's not rising."
"PLA Seven Hotel, do you see it!" the voice repeated. Bo chewed through the numbers. He had them cold regardless, but a part of him itched for any excuse to send that ship straight to hell. Training won that argument.
"Very well, MSV Zakariya. State the nature of your emergency."
"Like I said," the voice betray profound relief mixed with a convincing tenor of a criminal's trepidation. "Reactor control is a mess, and I have people still patching up the injectors. My reactor is undamaged, but the rods are jammed in a...what is it? They're jammed in a tenth of the way."
"Do you need to abandon?" Bo thought to ask, half wanting to watch them run out of air.
"Not yet, we don't. I think we're out of the woods, but I want--I'd appreciate it if you'd give us enough time to finish repairs. I swear we'll comply."
Kai gave Bo a look that steeled the suspicion in his own spine. "MSV Zakariya. You will come about to one eight zero relative and hold directly on my nose. Acknowledge."
A few seconds passed with no reply. "Respond, MSV Zakariya. You will come about one eight zero relative and hold to my nose. This is your last--"
"PLA Seven Hotel, I got it!" the voice returned. "I got it, for fuck's sake! Listen, give us a second to figure--I mean get the attitude thrusters online."
"MSV Zakariya, you completed your last attitude evolution at 1204 Zulu on momentum transfer. I will not order you again to--"
"Do you see how we're fucking aligned right now, you dumb chink?" Bo's cheeks flared in fury at the vulgar, panicky interruption. "PLA Seven Hotel, sorry about that last. Listen, the wheels are shot and locked. Give us a minute, we'll re-orient just like you say."
Bo cut his mike again and caressed the trigger, easing his grip only when he met Comrade Kai's own intense gaze.
#
"Ten minutes." And the cabin radio went silent.
"Laid it on a little thick, Lieutenant?" First Sergeant Mandel smirked at Sara.
"You might want to keep your asshole pinched until after we get out of this," Sara's eyes stayed on her screen. "Major, we're coming up on target in five minutes. If he's smart, he'll open fire the minute he sees the fireworks. If he's dumb, he'll wait until the burn. If he's pissed, well..."
"No sense worrying about it," Zia said as she snapped her faceplate down. "First Sergeant, would you do the honors?"
Mandel raised his rifle and fired a full magazine into the flight deck's windows. Depressurization and a little butt-work took care of the rest, ripping away glass and composite frame alike while leaving a man-sized hole in its place. Just outside and to the port, Edel waited with Mandel's and Zia's Zadin armored suits and some cable to tie them down to the hull. Zia patted Sara on the back and helped her through the opening first. Then she turned to her First Sergeant. "You're next, Simon."
"Not a chance, Major," he answered in that voice she'd long accepted meant the end of the argument.
"Fine," Zia sighed switching the broadcast channel. "Boarders, bug out."
Mandel flipped the detonator switch in his hand at the same time.
#
"Many explosions on target!" Kai shouted. "Forward sail, cargo hold. None on the reactor. Temperature holding at 484 K."
Comrade Major Bo fought the urge to pour on his own fire, instead jamming his anger down the microphone. "MSV Zakariya. Report!"
His finger tensed on the trigger as he awaited a reply that never came.
#
The blasts continued for two minutes, covering the escape burns of Shayetet 190's Zadins. With a bit of luck, most would reach their egress points in a matter of hours and proceed under low-thrust and in hibernation to the rendezvous point. Zia hoped desperately they'd all get home, knowing that she never would.
She sat in the flight seat, carefully going over the steps Sara had walked her through in the precious minutes they'd been given to concoct this crazy plan. Mandel had gone ahead outside and strapped into his Zadin, throwing up a couple of slave cameras to train on the Chinese Hunter while talking Zia through it all. The Major eased the flight stick back, her eye nervously on the artificial horizon as the hauler flipped onto its back and pointed its nose towards the western edge of China. Mandel reported nothing.
As her wristwatch clicked through the last minute and a half, that old, sometimes forgotten part of herself that second-guessed every step she took gripped her thoughts. She wasn't trained for this. If she were off by so much as a half a minute or more, or if her angle wasn't right, they'd send their shipment careening into oblivion. Her newest teammates--Pena included--had been assigned the task of prepping the supplies for delivery. What if they hadn't properly laid on the ablative film, or what if the parachutes failed? What if the Hunter outside was calling her on a radio no one could hear in this airless cabin. What if he fired before--
Instinct took over as soon as the alarm sounded, and Zia not quite flawlessly executed the instructions Sara had given her. She selected the hauler's emergency LOX-kerosene brake and threw the throttle forward. She sank into her seat as the acceleration climbed to nearly four gravities before Mandel's voice blasted in her earpiece.
"Vampire! Vampire!"
The SD-10, China's answer to the NATO SM-14, could reach twelve kilometers per second in under five minutes, which gave Zia just over two minutes, twenty seconds. Enough time to do what she needed to do, and only enough.
"Hold on!" Zia shouted as the hauler finally slowed to de-orbiting speed. She yanked the flight stick right as hard as she could. The ship rolled stubbornly, and she counted to 63 degrees before yanking it as hard she could the other way.
Pena's team had carefully placed their target palettes just for this maneuver. As the rotation died, the loose crates rose out of the open cargo holds, flung into space with only two monopropellent rockets each to help them clear the hatches.
"Brace--!"
The first SM-10 struck just aft of the sail, tear a hole the size of a man into the thin skin of the freighter. The second had homed in the reactor housing, but went wild when its seeker suddenly bounced a return off one of the increasingly distant medical crates. She expended her remaining reaction mass on the longshot turn only to line up just right for an impact just forward of Zakariya's LOX tanks. The hauler literally snapped in half as the first tank detonated. On the flight deck, Zia almost had the wind knocked out of her as she was flung bodily into the overhead controls. Despite the pain, only two things remained razor clear in her mind--the cable stringing her Zadin to the hull outside and the hole Mandel had carved for their escape route. Not even pausing to catch her breath properly, she clawed at the scraggy exit, pulling herself out as best she could.
Zia offered a silent prayer of thanks as she climbed into her armor, cut herself loose, and pushed off from the fragmenting wreck. The terminator was barely twenty degrees off her normal with the surface, and she could even make out the outline of Peru creeping over the horizon. Not that she could afford to admire the view.
"Simon! Where are you!" she scanned the horizon as her suit's last set of solid rocket boosters deployed.
"Zero-six-eight! Move your ass, Major!"
She didn't even wait for him to finish, punching the ignition as soon as she keyed in the bearing. Another ten seconds or so, the seventeen gravity burn wouldn't have mattered as the MVS Zakariya's other two LOX tanks went. Her debris shield absorbed the incoming shrapnel like an armored car absorbs a brick wall, and Zia felt the crunch of bone as her left shoulder blade and right femur snapped like so much balsa wood.
#
Gaoli Bo gaped as he watched a ship die for the first time. "Just what the hell was that?"
"Comrade Major!" Kai's face went ashen with terror. "I...I don't know."
Bo ignored her, quickly maneuvering his Hunter behind his rock. Tens of thousands of shards, hundreds reaching a meter in length--expanded from the center of the flash at a klick per second--dozens sweeping by PLA 7H in an unfathomable display of improbability. Two of PLA Seven Hotel's remotes were not so lucky.
He took a break from barking orders to watch another of Kai's satellites record the last minutes of Zakariya's life. Her shattered forward hull dove towards the atmosphere, the Hunter crew watching helplessly as her crew, cargo and hijackers--if any survived--raced headlong toward fiery death.
#
Zia screamed in pain as someone she had every right to expect to be First Sergeant Mandel yanked her to him by her injured right arm. Luckily for her, Pena and Lieutenant David had disobeyed orders, and only Pena had been close enough to catch her when she emerged from her wild ride through the hell.
"Hold on, Ma'am!" he said as he worked his way behind her, cutting away her debris shield and working her damaged Zadin's pylons manually. It took too long, but he eventually unfurled the reentry shuttlecock and ablative film. By the time he pushed clear and deployed his own reentry system, they'd already enter the atmosphere.
Zia numbly watched as the starry blackness around her went a dull red, then flaming yellow-orange, then black again.