Authors: Kennedy Hudner
“Don’t we all,” Gur replied sourly.
“Captain!” the Com Officer called. “Someone is hailing us through a com laser. Says it is an escape pod off the
London.
He’s demanding to talk to you, sir.”
Captain Gur frowned. An escape pod? He glanced at the holo display. It showed the
London
perfectly intact, just four hundred miles away. He gestured irritably to the Com Officer. “Put it on.”
“This is Captain Gur of the H.M.S.
Yorkshire,”
he said. “State your identity.”
“This is Lieutenant Skiffington, personal aide to Admiral Skiffington of the
London,”
the voice came back. “I am in an escape pod abut thirty miles from you. I need you to bring me aboard as quickly as you can.”
Gur looked at the Sensors Officer, who shook his head. “No beacon, skipper. Give us a minute and we’ll have him on radar.”
Gur frowned again. “Skiffington, turn on your distress beacon so that we can find you.”
“Negative,
Yorkshire
, we disabled the beacon because the
London
is in enemy hands and we don’t want them to know where we are.”
Beside him, Benny Peled gasped in shock. Gur leaned forward. “Lieutenant, what-”
“
Yorkshire,
there’s no time for this! Get a tractor beam on us and bring us in!
Yorkshire,
it is imperative that you do not make any more radio communications at all. And arm as many of your crew as you can. You are about to be boarded by a large group of Tilleke commandos.” There was a pause. “And
Yorkshire,
I know who killed the
Sussex
. Skiffington out.”
Captain Gur blinked twice, then shook his head in wonderment. “Get him on board, Benny,” he told his XO. “This kid is either our bloody savior, or he is barking dog mad and I’ll have him shot.”
T
he escape pod hatch opened with a hiss of over-pressurized air escaping. Cookie and Grant stepped out, blinking in the harsh lights of the
Yorkshire’s
landing bay. A slender, refined looking man stood there, flanked by four Marines. The Marines were armed with fleshchette pistols, all in hand, though pointing down at the deck.
“I’m Commander Peled, the XO,” the tall man said. “Please come with me, the Captain is anxious to speak to you.”
One of the Marines, a sergeant, stepped forward and spoke to Cookie. “Safe that weapon, soldier, and give it to me. No arms allowed on the bridge.”
“Bugger me! I’m not going anywhere without my weapon,” she bristled. “We had to fight our way off the
London.
Don’t you guys get it; they’re boarding our ships with commandos!”
“All I know,” the sergeant snapped, “Is that we’ve got an AWOL Marine and some junior officer who ought to be at their posts on the
London,
but instead ran away in an escape pod. Now put your weapon down or-”
“Belay that, Sergeant!” Grant ordered coldly. He turned to Cookie. “Corporal Sanchez, give me your weapon and go fetch our guest.”
Cookie hesitated, then thrust the rifle into his hands, glared coldly at the sergeant, then turned on her heel and disappeared back into the escape pod. Commander Peled watched impassively, but the Marine sergeant glanced warily at the pod’s hatchway. “I don’t like this, sir. What if she’s getting a weapon in there?” But as he spoke, Cookie returned, walking backwards and dragging the body of the dead Savak commando, which left a long blood smear behind it. She dumped the body at the feet of Commander Peled.
“This is a member of the Tilleke Emperor’s Guard, a crèche-born Savak,” Grant said coolly. “We think there are a hundred more like him right now on the
London.
The
London
is in enemy hands, Commander. We don’t have time to waste playing silly buggers because there are at least two Tilleke ships out there right now about to put more of these bastards on the
Yorkshire.”
Peled studied him for a long moment, taking in the bloodied clothing and the too bright eyes, then glanced down and saw the head wound on the Savak’s body. He looked at Cookie, grimly holding her Bullpup.
“Sergeant Zamir,” he said calmly. “Open the arms locker and distribute arms to as many people as you can. Perhaps the Corporal here will be good enough to assist you in planning a defense against any commando attack. I daresay she has valuable expertise to share. And you,” he said, turning to Grant, “will please accompany me to the bridge.” He smiled. “You may keep your weapon.”
A wave of relief and utter fatigue washed over Grant as he followed Peled out the door. Behind him he could hear Cookie: “…nasty motherfuckers…you’ll need grenades, as many as you have. And they’ve got these fucking swords…”
In contrast to Commander Peled’s urbane dignity, Captain Gur was a short, barrel chested man who looked like he’d been in his share of barroom brawls. His nose had been broken more than once and there was a white scar above his eyebrow that stood in sharp relief to his swarthy complexion. He had hard, shrewd eyes that only a day before would have made Grant nervous.
“Well, Lieutenant,” Gur said coldly. “We are in the middle of a battle in which we are getting our asses kicked. The flag ship of the Victorian task force, led by your father, is sitting in space with its thumb up its ass, and you just dropped by in an escape pod. Now would you be so kind,
Lieutenant
, as to tell me just what the fuck is going on?”
Grant had to fight the fatigue that wrapped his head in wool and dulled his mind. Part of him wanted to laugh; part of him feared he was going to cry. Without asking the Captain’s permission, he collapsed into a chair and scrubbed his face with his hands. Gur’s face flushed at what he took to be a sign of disrespect.
“I asked you a question, Lieutenant!” he snapped.
Grant nodded wearily. “I am trying to think of a way to explain it that you will understand, sir.”
“Well think fast, mister, because I am just a heartbeat away from having you tossed out the airlock for cowardness and desertion in the face of the enemy,” Gur replied angrily, his chin thrust out and his eyes flashing.
Grant’s face flushed with anger. “Then here it is, Captain. Our fleet was ambushed by a combined force of Dominion and Tilleke ships. Those Duck ships we rescued were a set up. It was a ploy to get them into our formation where they could hurt us once the shooting started. The
London
was boarded by a hundred or more commandos and is now in enemy hands. And right now, Captain, there are two enemy ships just a few miles away from you. If I’m right, and I
know
I am right,” Grant said flatly, “a bunch of very bad-ass Tilleke commandos are going to board the
Yorkshire
in the next few minutes and slaughter every one of you.”
“We don’t have any ships that close on our sensors, Lieutenant. How do you explain that?” Gur demanded.
“I don’t know, sir. But I
do
know the Tilleke put at a least a company’s worth of troops on the
London
and we never had a clue. I was sitting right on the bridge; we never saw it coming.”
Commander Peled cleared his throat. “Ah, Captain, the Lieutenant here had a very convincing corpse on the escape pod with him. Commando style battle gear, but most definitely not a Victorian Royal Marine.”
Gur raised an eyebrow in question. Peled nodded. “I am having arms distributed now, sir.”
Grant never felt so frustrated in his life. He knew what was coming, just not what to do about it. He rubbed his eyes. He could hear Emily Tuttle’s voice:
I tried to figure out what Grant would want to do, and how Hiram would do it.
So, first things first.
“Sir, they hit us first in the Engineering Room.”
“How did they get to Engineering without passing through other ship spaces?” Gur snarled.
Grant shook his head. “I have no idea, sir, but our Mildred did not give us any warning of hull breaches.”
Commander Peled’s normal look of casual indifference was replaced by a sudden look of alarm. “Sir, we’ve heard reports for years that the Tilleke were researching teleportation.”
“Teleportation is a fairy tale!” Gur shot back. “Our best scientists have spent years poking at it and have gotten nowhere.”
“I don’t know how they got on board, but they did,” Grant said softly. “We had fifty Marines on the
London,
and they overwhelmed us. The Savak are good, and there are a lot of them. You’ve got what, twenty, thirty Marines for the entire ship?” Gur nodded. “We need something better than shooting at them, Captain. If they are transporting aboard, I’ve got another idea.”
The Tilleke krait hovered like a shadow ten miles from the
Yorkshire.
It was in full stealth mode, with fewer emissions than the ambient space around it. With a nano-technology matte finish that absorbed light, baffles that dispersed its heat signature and running without either radio noise or active sensors, it could only be detected if someone happened to look right at it. The First Sister Pilot studied her sensors. The enemy vessel loomed before them. If all was well, there was another Krait just to its stern. She checked the computer display. Ten seconds more, then eighty of the Emperor’s Imperial Guard would beam aboard and another enemy ship would be theirs.
The timer chimed. She turned to her brothers. “Remember your duty! Glory to the Emperor!” She activated the transporter. Snow began to fall.
“Energy spike!” the Sensors Officer on the
Yorkshire
yelled. “No, two spikes. One ten miles to port and one three miles behind us. There was nothing there a minute ago, now something big just flared up!”
“Mark those locations,” Gur ordered. He switched to ship broadcast mode. “This is the Captain. Intruder alert! Stay in your assigned posts! Stay alert! Captain, out.” They had been able to arm only one in every five crewmen, and they hadn’t had time to properly group together their new “militia,” as Benny Peled had sardonically labeled them. Too thin on the ground, he fretted.
Beside him, Grant hunched over the video display, which showed a perfectly empty Engineering Deck. Other video feeds showed the docking bay, the first, second and third cargo bays and the ship’s auditorium - anyplace with enough room to transport a couple of dozen armed soldiers who didn’t want to materialize in the middle of a bulkhead. He hunched his shoulders. Cookie was down there, waiting in a corridor just outside the Engineering Deck with fifteen of the
Yorkshire’s
precious Marines, all of them swathed in ballistic armor and helmets, Bullpups and blasters fully charged.
Come on,
he thought irritably,
where the hell are you?
Then the video feed from Engineering suddenly sparkled as a swirl of something white – snow? - popped into existence. The snow blew and gusted in a circle, dropping visibility to just a few feet, and then there were ten armed men standing in what had been an empty room. Grant stole a look at the computer. From nothing to full materialization in nine seconds. “Bugger me,” he whispered, awe-struck. “They really can do it. They really
can
do it.”
We need to get one of those little ships of theirs,
he thought.
He had been so focused on Engineering that he only now realized the Savak had transported to the auditorium and the second cargo bay as well.
“Chief, vent the Engineering Deck, auditorium and Cargo Hold Two.”
He turned to Captain Gur. “Captain, I would advise that you now turn on your navigation lights and set them to blink mode.” He smiled grimly. “Welcome to the Tilleke navy, Captain.”
Gur gave a shark’s grin, all white teeth and menace. The video screens showed the Savak beating frantically at hatchways, and then slowly collapsing as their air was vented to space. One fell to his knees, shooting his rifle impotently again and again into the bulkhead until he pitched over and lay still. Gur nodded in satisfaction. “How many, Skiffington?”
“A total of thirty in these rooms, sir,” Grant replied. “Computer shows a total of fifty more scattered in smaller groups through fifteen other spaces. But they’re all locked down tight.” His face darkened. “Some of your crew were caught in there, Captain. I’m sorry.”
“We knew there was going to be a butcher’s bill, Lieutenant.” Gur looked at Sergeant Zamir. “Sergeant, take care of the rest. If they are in a space with a live member of our crew, I want you to do whatever you can to save the crew member. If not, you are authorized to vent the space before you enter.” He held up two fingers. “I only want two prisoners, Sergeant Zamir.”
Three hours later, it was done. Gur, Peled, Grant and Sergeant Zamir slouched in chairs in the Captain’s day room. Zamir was blood spattered and grey faced.
“We lost eight Marines and thirty six crew, but we got all of the bastards, sir,” he said wearily. “Two prisoners, like you asked for, but you’ll have to keep them shackled or sedated. They don’t surrender, sir. They keep trying to kill you until you kill them. We only got these two because they were knocked out by grenade concussion.”
Commander Peled said: “We’ve heard from the
Kent.
They mouse-trapped their Savak like we did, but caught more of them in the first few minutes, so it went pretty well.
Rutland
didn’t have it so easy. The Savak materialized on the bridge and Captain Sheffer lost most of her bridge crew before they got it under control. Her XO is dead.”
Gur nodded. “So we’ve got three ships we can trust. Sensors report that the Tilleke force has withdrawn towards Arcadia. The
London
and half a dozen others are still sitting out there, but for how long is anybody’s guess. This deep in Tilleke space, figure we are three full days from home.”
“All we have between us and home is half the Dominion fleet, sir, Commander Peled noted dryly. “Plus, they’ve got the
London.”
Gur smiled indifferently. “How many crew to properly run a battleship, Benny? Two thousand? Get rid of the cooks and other non-essentials, you still got nine hundred, a thousand? How many men do you think the Tilleke could put on the
London?
Skiffington and his sidekick think they put on a hundred or more soldiers, but how many who actually know how to run the ship?”