CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

"Aaaaahh!"

Kapila hugged the deck as the air literally disappeared around him. The Mardukan fire mostly went over his head, but its intensity first superheated the atmosphere in the corridor, then expanded it to the very fringe of vacuum. He supposed he could return the fire, but there didn't seem to be much point. If he killed one or two of the scummies with a shot, the rest would turn him into drifting atoms for his efforts. Even if they didn't, a near miss would be sufficient to kill him. Flying fragments could easily punch holes in his standard ship suit, which would permit the intense heat to fry him to a crisp . . . which would at least save him from asphyxiation when his suit depressurized.

But so far, they seemed to be missing. He liked that, and he had no intention of doing anything to change it.

He rolled his head to look back up the passage behind him and saw that the entire unit was gone. One or two of them might have gotten back into the Armory, but he saw at least four carbon statues that indicated casualties. Graubart was still alive, though. He might even stay that way, if he got some prompt medical attention. Sergeant Gao, on the other hand, was just a pair of legs, attached to some cooked meat.

Kapila slid his bead rifle carefully to the side and spreadeagled himself on the deck, hoping that the scummies would settle for just capturing him.

Of course, he'd heard that scummies tortured their prisoners to death. But if it was a question of the possibility of torture, or absolutely buying it from a plasma blast, he'd go for the possibility any day.

"Cease fire," Fain ordered as he stepped around a gaping hole in the deck. His troopers' fire had opened the bulkheads on either side of the passage to the surrounding compartments, and the wrecked corridor sparked with electricity and finely divided steam. The ChromSten reinforced Armory had shrugged off most of the damage, and now most of one of its walls and its support structure—which had taken a beating—could be seen through the gaps in the bulkheads. All in all, they'd done quite a bit of damage, he reflected. But as long as they were in their suits, the environmental conditions were survivable. Actually, things were looking good; the Armory hatch was shut, and the passage was secure.

"Sergeant Sern, take four men and secure the far end of the hall." He fumbled with his radio some more until he managed to shift frequencies. "Captain Pahner, we have the corridor outside the Armory. The doors are shut, though."

There was a human—presumably one of the "Saint Commandos"—lying face-down on the deck. He didn't appear to be injured, but he had his fingers interlaced on the back of his helmet, and he wasn't moving. Fain gestured to Pol, who picked the wretch up by the back of his uniform and dangled him in the air.

"And it seems that we have a prisoner, too."

Roger rounded the corner to the bridge entrance and stopped, shaking his head in awe. The ship was trashed. Indeed, never in his worst nightmares had he ever imagined that a ship could be so trashed and still hang together.

More or less.

The deck looked as if it had been carved by a giant kindergartner who had somehow gotten his hands on an absentmindedly mislaid blowtorch. The heavy-duty plastic of the decksole had melted and splashed, leaving jagged splatters, like impressionistic stalagmites, on the bulkheads and huge dripping holes in the deck itself. The bulkheads had sustained major damage of their own, as well. Many of the holes blasted through them were large enough for battle armor to crawl through into the surrounding compartments. One of the larger ones led to what had once been the captain's day cabin, which was as thoroughly trashed as the passageway itself.

And the Bridge hatch was, once again, firmly shut.

Roger sighed as the drifting smoke and steam suddenly moved sideways and disappeared. He didn't have to look at the red vacuum morning light on his helmet HUD to figure out what had just happened.

"Memo to self," he muttered. "Giving Mardukans—or Marines, for that matter—plasma cannon on a ship assault is contraindicated."

Honal followed the first entry team into the shuttle bay, then dove sideways as a blast of bead-fire tore the three Vashin apart. Fire seemed to be coming from everywhere in the open bay, but the majority of the human defenders were on the far side, near the bay's huge outer hatches. It was easy enough to tell where they were, but doing anything about it was another matter, because they'd taken shelter behind a massive raised plate which undoubtedly did something significant when shuttles were parked in the vast, cavernous space.

Honal favored bead rifles over cannons, since the full-sized rifles—after suitable reshaping by Poertena—made a short, handy carbine for someone the size of a Mardukan. Now he used his to return fire, walking the beads along the top of the plate. Each hit tore a chunk out of the top of the device—whatever it was—but didn't seem to faze any of the humans crouched behind it.

The rest of the Vashin entered behind him, but the fire which greeted them was murderous. Beside the Saints by the main airlocks, there were more scattered on catwalks around the bay, and some sheltering by a second set of hatches. The combined crossfire had the Vashin pinned down in the open, without any cover of their own, and the defenders were methodically massacring them.

"The hell with this!" Honal snarled. He and the human Mansul were partially sheltered by a control panel. It had taken a few hits, but it was still functional, judging by the red and green flashing symbols above the buttons at its center. He contemplated the device for a moment, and then smiled.

"Mansul, can you work this thing?"

Harvard Mansul had been in a few tight situations in his life. He'd dealt with bandits on more than one occasion, and even done a small piece on them at one point. Then there'd been the pirates. He'd been on a ship once when it was boarded by pirates, but the head of the group had been an IAS reader and let him go. In fact, he'd been sent on his way with an autographed photo of the suitably masked pirate leader. He'd been shot at by inner city gangs, stabbed doing a shoot in Imperial City, and nearly died that time his team got lost in the desert. Then there'd been being picked up by the Krath and imprisoned by a batch of ritualistic cannibals. That had been unpleasant.

But being pinned down by a Saint Special Operations team raised "unpleasant" to a new high. Nothing else on the list of his previous life experiences even came close. So sticking his head up to look at the control panel was not high on his list of priorities.

But he took a quick peek, anyway.

"Hatches, grav, cargo handling, environmental!" he shouted, pointing to the appropriate sections of the panel in turn. "What are you going to do?"

"Play a practical joke."

"Here goes nothing," Honal muttered to himself, and hit a green button.

Nothing happened. He waited a heartbeat or two to be certain of that, then grimaced. Time for Phase Two, he thought, and lifted the clear, protective plastic box over the red button beside the green.

He depressed it.

The blast of wind from the half-melted hatch behind him shoved him into the control panel hard, but that was about all. The Saints on the far side of the bay, with their backs to the opening shuttle bay doors, were less fortunate. More than half of them were picked up and sucked out the opening portal before they could react. The rest, unfortunately, managed to find handholds and hung on until the extremely brief blast of pressure change stopped. Then they opened fire again.

"Well, that didn't work," Honal grumbled irritably. The brief delight he'd felt when the first humans vanished out the opening only made his irritation when the others didn't even more intense, and he contemplated the controls again. Mansul's description of their functions was considerably less than bare bones, he reflected. And he, after all, was only an ignorant Vashin civan-rider. It was unreasonable to expect him to actually understand what any of them did, so perhaps he should simply do what came naturally.

He started hitting buttons at random.

Lights went on and off. Panels appeared out of the deck and rose, and other panels disappeared, while cranes and pulleys and less readily identifiable pieces of equipment dashed back and forth on overhead rails. Honal had no idea what any of the fascinating, confusing movements and energy were supposed to achieve under normal conditions. But he didn't much care, either, when one of the buttons lowered the platform the Saints had been sheltering behind into the deck. And then, finally, the gravity itself disappeared.

Honal watched an astonished Saint commando spin over in mid-air—well, mid-vacuum, the Vashin noble corrected himself—when he fired his bead rifle just as someone snatched the shuttle bay's gravity away from him. The Saint sailed helplessly out into the open, propelled by the unexpected reaction engine his rifle had just become, and then exploded in a grisly profusion of crimson blood beads as a burst of someone's fire tore him almost in half.

"Now this is more like it!" Honal said with a huge, human-style grin as he drew his sword and gripped the top of the control center with his false-hands as if it were a vaulting horse. "Vashin! Up and at 'em! Cold steel!"

"Roger, what's your position?" Pahner asked.

For a wonder, it looked as if things might be stabilizing. Georgiadas had managed to kill enough of the Saints counterattacking his position to hold on until the Diasprans arrived. Now he had Engineering intact, and while there might (or might not) still be a few of the enemy inside the Armory, Krindi Fain's troops had it isolated and fully contained. The counterattack by Emerald Dawn's bridge personnel had also been stopped, and the Vashin were running rampant. Pahner's own area was still pressurized, but two-thirds of the ship had lost pressure, and large portions of the internal gravity net had been shut down. The Northern cavalry had developed a positive liking for zero-g combat. Which was just . . . sick.

He didn't want to think about the hideous price his people and their Mardukan allies had paid, but the Saints were clearly on the defensive and well on the way to completely losing their ship. Now if they could only talk Emerald Dawn's surviving officers out of the Bridge before they did irreparable harm.

"I'm at the Bridge security point. Gronningen's dead, and Julian is injured. About the only ones standing are Moseyev, Aburia, and Macek, and even they aren't in very good shape; I'd put their armor at no more than thirty percent of base capability. Max. I'm getting ready to negotiate with the Saint commander."

"Understood." Pahner waved for Temu Jin to stay where he was, monitoring the hacked infonet, then headed up the passageway at a trot. "Wait until I get there. I've seen the results of your negotiations too many times."

"Saint commander, this is Prince Roger."

Giovannuci looked over at the sweating tactical officer. Sergeant Major Iovan, who'd been with the colonel since Giovannuci was a shavetail, stood with a bead pistol screwed into Cellini's ear. Having a gun in one's ear could make just about anyone sweat, but the tactical officer was looking particularly wan. It had taken a while to get him to give up his release codes, and even longer for the computer to accept them. Probably because of his stammering. But now he seemed more or less resigned to his fate.

"Well, Prince Roger, or whoever you are. This is Colonel Fiorello Giovannuci, Imperial Cavazan Special Operations Branch. What can I do for you?"

"You can surrender your ship. I gave you one chance, and now most of your crew, and commandos, are dead. Last chance. Surrender, and we'll spare the rest. Resist, and I'll give you all to the Krath. They're ritualistic cannibals, but they don't get squeamish about humans."

"Well, I'll give you a couple of choices, buddy," the Saint snarled furiously. "Get off my ship, or I'll blow it up!"

"Talk to me, Armand," Roger said, looking at the sealed hatch.

"I'm on my way to the Bridge. Engineering and the Armory are secured. Captain Fain just took the Armory. But we've got to figure out what to do about this scuttling threat."

"Do think he's serious?" Roger asked. "He sounds that way."

"Most Saints aren't true-believers," Pahner said. "Unfortunately, I've heard of Giovannuci, and he is. Hold one, Your Highness. Computer: patch Kosutic."

"Kosutic," the sergeant major acknowledged, peering over her bead rifle's sights at the Saints she'd captured. "I think we've got most of the actual ship's crew, Armand. They seem a lot less interested in dying gloriously than the commandos."

"Good, but we have a situation," Pahner told her. "Tell me what you know about Saint scuttling charges."

"I take it this isn't an academic exercise," she said with a grimace. "They're always timer-delayed. They require a code and a key to activate—two of them, actually; they can't be set by just one person. They require at least one key and code to deactivate, but any key and code will work. They work on the basis of positive action locks; if you don't have the code and key, you're not going to turn them off. Authorized code/key holders are usually the CO, the exec, the tactical officer, and the chief engineer."

"Okay," Pahner replied. "That's what I recalled, too. Computer: all hands. All Imperial personnel, begin evacuation of the ship. Computer: command group. Captain Fain? Rastar?"

"Here," Fain called.

"This is Honal," Rastar's cousin said a moment later. "Rastar is . . . occupied, but we've secured the shuttle bays. They're damaged, but secure."

"You need to start evacuating the ship," Pahner said. "Pull off as many of the Saint prisoners as seems practical."

"Armand," Roger said on a discrete frequency. "We can't let them go. If we do, my life isn't worth spit."

"No, but if we get our forces off, we might have a shot at the next ship," Pahner replied.

"Imperial commander," Giovannuci called. "You have thirty seconds to begin evacuation. After that, I'll start the detonation sequence, and there's no way to stop it."

Roger had automatically shifted back to the command group frequency, which meant that the Saint colonel's voice had gone out to everyone else patched into it with him. He grimaced, but then he shrugged. Maybe it was for the best.

"That's the situation, guys," he said.

"Not good," Honal said. "We're loading on the shuttles, but our assault did a certain amount of damage."

"Honal," Kosutic said. "Send a team of Vashin down to the southwest quadrant. I've got a group of crew that needs evacuating."

"Colonel Giovannuci," Roger called, this time making certain that he wasn't putting it out over the command frequency, as well. "We're evacuating as we speak, but both sides have casualties, and there are depressurized zones all over the ship. It's going to take a little time."

"I'll give you two minutes," Giovannuci replied. "But that's it."

"Armand, I am not giving up this ship," Roger snarled over the discrete frequency. "If they're stupid enough to go ahead and blow themselves up after we evacuate, well and good. But if they just fly away, we're pocked."

"I know, Your Highness," the captain sighed.

"Captain Pahner," Poertena's voice interrupted. "Are we suppose' to evacuate t'e Saints?"

"Yes," Pahner replied calmly. So far, only the command group knew they were looking at a self-destruct situation, and he intended to keep it that way as long as possible. "The ship is in bad shape. We need to get the Saints off for their own safety, and as prisoners of war."

"Okay. I t'ink I gots t'e ship's exec tied up in a closet. I'll go get her."

"Wait one, Poertena," Roger interrupted. "Where are you?"

"In t'e southeas' quadrant," the armorer replied. "Deck Four."

"Sergeant Major," Roger instructed. "Head to the southeast quadrant and link up with Poertena. Do it now."

"Don't go off half-cocked, Roger," Pahner warned. He was nearly to the Bridge tunnel.

"Not a problem," Roger replied. "I'm cool as cold."

Kosutic took the proffered crowbar and inserted it into a crack between the door and its frame. Then she threw her weight on it, and the metal seal popped loose with an explosive "Crack!" The closet door sprang open, and she looked in at the female officer in a combat crouch and shook her head.

"I could probably take you out of the armor," the sergeant major warned her. "And we don't have time for games."

"I know we don't. We need to get out of here," Beach replied. "That Pollution-crazed idiot is getting ready to blow up the whole ship."

"What happens if we take the Bridge?" Kosutic asked. "For general information, we already have Engineering and the Armory."

"Well, if you take the Bridge, it's possible that I could shut down the scuttling charges," Beach admitted. "It all depends."

"We don't have a lot of time to debate here," Kosutic said.

"Look, we're technically illegal combatants," Beach said. "You know it, I know it. What's your law in that regard?"

"Generally, you're repatriated," Kosutic told her. "Especially if we can trade you for one of our groups."

"And then, most of the time, we replace your group on a recovery planet," Beach said. "So I can die fast, here, when the charges go off. Or I can die slow, being worked and starved to death."

"Or?"

"Or, I can get asylum."

"We can't grant asylum," Kosutic said. "We can try, but we can't guarantee it. We don't have the authority."

"Is the guy leading you really Prince Roger? Because, according to our intelligence, he's dead, and has been for months."

"Yeah, it's really him," Kosutic replied. "You want his word on it or something?"

"Yes. If a member of your Imperial Family promises, at least it's going to be a big political stink if the Empies don't comply."

"You have no idea how complicated you're making this," the sergeant major muttered.

"Imperial commander, you have fifteen seconds to exit the ship," Giovannuci called. "I don't think you're gone yet."

"We're working on it," Roger said, just as his helmet flashed a priority signal from the sergeant major. "Hold one, Colonel Giovannuci. This may be from my people in the shuttle bay. Computer: switch Kosutic."

"It's the Saint second, all right," the sergeant major confirmed over the secure channel. "She's willing to give us the codes in exchange for asylum. She wants Roger's personal word."

"If she thinks that's going to help, she obviously doesn't know there's a price on my head, does she?" Roger said with a grim chuckle.

"I think we're dealing with intelligence lag," Kosutic replied. "She knows you're dead; she hasn't heard Jackson's latest version yet. Either way, what do I do? We're on our way, by the way."

"Tell her she has my personal word as a MacClintock that I will do all in my power to ensure that she gets asylum from the Empire," Roger replied. "But I want to be there when she finds out I'm an outlaw."

"Will do," the sergeant major said with a grin that could be heard over the radio. "About a minute until we're there."

"And I'm here already," Pahner said as he strode up behind Roger. "You need to get the hell off the ship, Your Highness. Sergeant Despreaux is already on the shuttle, and so are most of the wounded."

"Somebody needs to take this bridge, Armand," Roger said tightly. "And we need it more or less intact. Who's the best close-quarters person we have?"

"You're not assaulting the bridge," Pahner said. "Lose you, and it's all for nothing."

"Lose the ship, and it's all for nothing," Roger replied.

"There'll be other ships," Pahner said, putting his hand on the prince's shoulder.

"Yeah, but if this one leaves, they'll be Saint carriers!"

"Yes, but—"

"What's the mission, Captain?" Roger interrupted harshly, and Pahner hesitated for just a moment. But then he shook his head.

"To safeguard you, Your Highness," he said.

"No," Roger replied. "The mission is to safeguard the Empire, Captain. Safeguarding me is only part of that. If just Temu Jin makes it back and saves my mother, fine. If you make it back and do the same, fine. If Julian makes it back and performs the mission, fine. She can make a new heir. If she wants to, she can use DNA from John and Alexandra's dad. The mission, Captain, is 'Save the Empire.' And to do that, we have to take this ship. And to take this ship, we have to use the personnel who can do that most effectively and who can physically get here in time to do it. And that makes taking this bridge Colonel Roger MacClintock's best possible role. Am I wrong?"

Armand Pahner looked at the man he'd spent eight endless months keeping alive on a nightmare planet for a long, silent moment. Then he shook his head again.

"No, you're not. Sir," he said.

"Thought not," Roger said, and pointed his plasma cannon at the hatch.

Giovannuci looked at the tactical officer and nodded as the first blast shook the bridge.

"On three," he said, inserting his key into the console.

Lieutenant Cellini reached out slowly to insert his own key, but then he stopped. His hand dropped away from the board, and he shook his head.

"No. It's not worth it, Sir." He turned to face Iovan, pivoting in place until the noncom's pistol was pointed squarely between his eyes. "Two hundred crew left, Sergeant Major. Two hundred. You're going to kill them all for what? A corrupt leadership that preaches environmentalism and builds itself castles in the most beautiful parts of the wilderness? Kill me, and you kill yourself, and you kill the colonel. Think about what we're doing here!"

Giovannuci looked over at the sergeant major and tipped his chin up in a questioning gesture.

"Iovan?"

"Everybody dies someplace, Lieutenant," the sergeant major said, and pulled the trigger. Cellini's head splashed away from the impact, and the sergeant major sighed. "What a senseless waste of human life," he said, as he wiped the key clear of brains and looked at the colonel. "On three, you said, Sir?"

ChromSten was almost impervious to plasma fire, but "almost" was a relative term. Even ChromSten transmitted energy to its underlying matrix, which meant, in the case of the command deck, to a high stress cero-plastic. And as the heat buildup from the repeated plasma discharges bled into it, that underlying matrix began to melt, and then burn. . . .

"Breach!" Roger shouted, as the center of the hatch buckled, and then cracked open. For just a moment, white light from the bridge illuminated the smoke and steam from the blazing matrix before it was sucked greedily away by the vacuum.

The approach corridor was just gone. The intense heat from the plasma discharges had melted the material of the surrounding bulkheads and decks, creating a large opening that revealed the bridge as a ChromSten cylinder, thirty meters across, and fifty high, attached to the armored engineering core.

Getting across the yawning, five-meter gulf between his present position and the breach was going to be Roger's first problem.

"No time like the present," he muttered, and triggered his armor's jump gear with a considerably gentler touch than Julian had used.

He sailed across the chasm, one hand supporting the plasma cannon while the other stretched out for the hole, and slammed into the outer face of the cylinder. The outstretched arm slipped through the breach, but his reaching fingers found nothing to grip. His arm slithered backwards, and for just a moment he felt a stab of panic. But then his fingers hooked into the ragged edge of the hole and locked.

"Piece of cake," he panted, and exoskeletal "muscles" whined as he lifted himself up onto the slight lip which was all that remained of the outer door frame. He braced himself and ripped at the hole, widening it. The matrix of the ChromSten itself had begun to fail under the plasma fire, and the material sparked against his armored hand, returning to its original chrome and selenium atomic structure.

Giovannuci and Iovan stood with their hands behind their heads, with the rest of the command deck crew lined up at their stations behind them, as Roger entered the compartment behind his plasma cannon. All of them were in skin-suits against the soft vacuum that now filled most of the ship.

Roger looked around the bridge, then at the gore splattered over the self-destruct console, and shook his head.

"Was that strictly necessary?" he asked, as he walked over to the tactical officer's body and turned it over. "Who?"

"Me," Iovan said.

"Short range," Roger said contemptuously. "I guess you couldn't hit him from any farther away."

"Take off that fucking armor and we'll see how far away I can shoot," Iovan said, and spat on the floor.

Pahner clambered through the hole, widening it further in the process, and crossed to the prince.

"You should've waited for us to secure it, Your Highness," he said over the command frequency.

"And give them a chance to destroy the controls?" Roger replied over the same circuit. "No way. Besides," he chuckled tightly, "I figured they were probably down to bead guns after Julian's crazy stunt. If they hadn't been, they'd still be shooting at us in the passageway."

He switched back to the external amplifier, cranked up to maximum in the near-vacuum that passed for "air" on Emerald Dawn's bridge at that particular moment, and looked at Giovannuci and Iovan.

"I can't read 'merchant marine' rank tabs. Which of you is Giovannuci?"

"I am," the colonel told him.

"Turn off the self-destruct," Roger said.

"No."

"Okay," Roger said, with an unseen shrug inside his armor, and turned to Iovan. "Who are you?"

"I don't have to tell you that," Iovan said.

"Senior NCO," Pahner said.

"Yeah, he's got that look," Roger said. "Not a bridge officer, so you can't turn it off, can you?"

"Nobody in here can," Giovannuci said. "Except me."

Roger started to replied, then half-turned as Kosutic crawled into the bridge.

"I've got that second officer out here," the sergeant major said over the command frequency. "She's ready to turn off the self-destruct, just as soon as we clear all these guys off the Bridge. She said to watch the CO. He's a real true-believer."

"So which one of you is Prince Roger?" Giovannuci asked.

"I am," the prince replied. "And I'm going to see to it that you hang, if it's the last thing I do."

"I don't think so," the Saint colonel said, calmly, and pulled the one-shot from behind his neck.

Time seemed to crawl as Roger started to lift his plasma cannon, then dropped it. If he fired it, the blast would take out half the ship controls . . . including the self-destruct console. So instead, he sprang forward, his hand continuing upward to the hilt of his sword even as the plasma cannon fell.

The prince was almost supernally fast, but whether he could have killed the colonel before he fired would remain forever unknown, since Pahner slammed into his suit, arms spread.

The impact threw the prince's armor to the side, sending it smashing into the tactical display and out of the Saint's' line of fire just as Giovannuci swung the weapon forward, catching Pahner dead center, and squeezed the button.

Roger lunged back upright with a shriek of pure rage and spun in place as Iovan produced another of the weapons and came at him. But this time there was no mistake, and the flashing Voitan-forged blade took off the sergeant major's head and hand in a steaming fan of blood.

The shot from the anti-armor device had spun Giovannuci backwards and on to the deck. Now he climbed back to his feet and raised his hands.

"I'm sorry I missed," he said tightly. "But we're all going to die anyway. Pollution take you."

"I don't think so," Roger grated. "We have your second-in-command, and she's more than willing to turn it off. You are going to, though, I promise you," he continued in a voice of frozen helium, and looked at Kosutic. "Sergeant Major, take the colonel to the shuttle bays. Make sure he doesn't do any more damage, but don't let anything happen to him on the way, either. We'll deal with him later, and I want him in perfect shape when he faces the hangman."

The sergeant major said something in reply, but Roger didn't hear her as he dropped to his knees beside Pahner. He turned the captain over as gently as possible, but there wasn't really much point. This time, the placement had been accurate. The one-shot had struck the Marine squarely on the his armor's carapace, and the ricocheting scab of armor had done precisely what it was supposed to do.

Roger bent close, trying to see through the flickering distortion of the captain's helmet. The readouts indicated that there was still brain function, but as the blood drained from the head into the shattered body, it was fading fast.

"I promise," Roger said, lifting the captain and holding him. "I promise I won't die. I promise I'll save my mother. You can depend on me, Armand. You can, I promise. Rest now. Rest, my champion."

He sat there, rocking the body, until the last display flickered out.