Death World (Undying Mercenaries Series Book 5) (33 page)

-42-

The opening stages of the boarding action went smoothly enough.
Minotaur
hung in space, a derelict. Emergency flashers along the hull blinked slowly, showing the ship was in distress.

Even more ominous was the constant pinging tone that hit our headsets every ten seconds. It was on every channel—a powerful signal that rhythmically informed us the ship was in dire trouble. No one aboard had bothered to turn it off, and as we weren’t aboard yet, we couldn’t either. It was the best evidence yet that the entire crew was dead. Who would have let that signal continue, unchecked, for a solid week?

As we got closer to the ship, the tone pinged louder. It set my teeth on edge, and I had my crew lower the volume of their headsets’ general channel and increase the volume on the squad channel. We could still hear the distress call, but it no longer interfered in our conversations.

Our lifter spun around and began braking, setting up to land on the massive dreadnaught’s hull. The lifter was the most vulnerable at this stage of the game. If the enemy had gained control of the anti-ship weaponry—well, we were all as good as dead.

Gritting our teeth and listening to that incessant pinging, we waited until the transport came to rest on
Minotaur’s
hull. We felt the transport shiver as clamps were applied.

“We’re down, and we’re good!” Graves announced to the unit.

His words were met with a ragged cheer. All around me, troops clutched their morph-rifles and double-checked their suit integrity.

“All right,” Graves said. “We’re pumping all the air out of the lifter now, storing it in tanks for later. Prepare for hard vacuum.”

I could already hear the steady hiss of escaping air. It grew in intensity, and it seemed to me that I could feel cold spots inside my armor. I don’t think a spacesuit has ever been made that didn’t have hot and cold spots in it under extreme conditions. Some of our suits were pretty banged up, and they didn’t always work perfectly. My armor, for example, liked to pool up water in the lower left corner of my visor while in zero G. It was really sweat and steam from my exhalations and not overly dangerous, but it did demonstrate that the dehumidifiers weren’t operating at a hundred percent.

“They tell me from the bridge that the outer clamshell controls have been accessed from an external port,” Graves said, relaying what he was hearing from the brass channel. “We’re working with the AI to convince it to open up. That could be difficult if the transparent dome over Green Deck is compromised. The AI is programed to prevent decompression.”

“No shit,” Carlos said to me. “Next, he’ll tell us the whole plan to break in through the glass is tits-up. Then we’ll have to go in using those acid-holes the plants bored through the hull. You see if I’m—”

“Shut up, Ortiz,” I said.

For once, he did as I asked. No one wanted to hear about all the crap that could go wrong. We weren’t on our first mission in space. We knew it was the most deadly environment any man could have the misfortune to fight in.

A rumble went through the ship. Everyone put their right hand on their buckles and gripped their rifles with the left. Carlos looked at me, and I could see he was scared.

“Remember the first time they pumped the air out of a lifter on us?” I asked him, smiling.

“Oh yeah—how could I forget our first shared death experience? Graves is still a cold-hearted bastard. How can he maintain such a grim life after all these years? I mean, wouldn’t you get tired of it?”

I waited for a second, but he didn’t answer his own question.

“I expect it gets into a man’s blood,” I told him. “After a few decades, it’s all he knows.”

Carlos looked down at the deck. Debris floated around us. Discarded ammo. Dangling straps and wires. What looked like perfectly secured environment on the ground was rarely clean in space, once everything started to drift in the air.

“You think we’ll end up like Graves?” he asked. “Not caring if we live or die?”

Frowning, I strained to come up with an answer for a few seconds, when luck would have it that I didn’t need to.

Yellow flashers began rotating. The ramp was going down.

“Legionnaires,” Graves said in our headsets. “We’re going to move out in an organized fashion. Double-check your magnetics. If I see a man floating off with one of my last full sets of equipment into deep space, I’ll shoot him in the ass.”

The ramp lowered into the silence of space. The atmosphere was gone, so while we could feel the motors with our butts, we couldn’t hear them with our ears.

The harsh starlight of L374 shone in like a beacon as the crack grew. When the ramp was fully deployed, we slapped the central button on our safety belts, and they fell away.

We got up en masse, but at first, we could hardly move. There were lots of troops ahead of my squad this time. As close as I could figure it, we were going to get off the lifter in the very last wave.

Up ahead, troops exited in a steady stream, scrambling into the glare of the local star. The reflections from their helmets were dazzling.

“Is that clamshell open?” Sargon asked. “I never heard Graves say—does anyone know?”

“It’s clear,” Kivi said. “The embedded techs are talking. Lots of techs have buzzers out now. Should I deploy one, Veteran?”

I glanced at her. I knew she had twenty of them, but sending one out early was technically a waste. In open space, they couldn’t use their wings. The tiny drones had to expend puffs of fuel to fly, and they had a very limited supply of that.

Opening my mouth to deny her request, I had a second thought. For purposes of morale, it would be good to see what we were going up against.

“Fly one,” I said. “Just one, mind you, and pipe the feed to everyone in the squad.”

She hurried to obey.  A few seconds later my tapper displayed an over the shoulder view of the lines of troops. The image slewed and moved rapidly.

With sickening speed, it zoomed past the helmets of a hundred troops and out into the open. I watched my tapper in fascination.

Open space. There wasn’t anything around other than
Minotaur
and the colorful disk of Death World itself below us.

I could see the clamshell, drawn back and displaying the inner layer of hardened polymer that kept the cold void outside the ship. Along the rim of the dome, a growing throng of soldiers spread out. They were walking oddly, using their magnetic boots to keep them anchored to the metal hull.

As we watched, a weaponeer in the lead squad fired his gun at the polymer sheet the troops were encircling. The effect was immediate and alarming. The ruptured surface fired out like a massive sheet of glass in slow motion. I could see air and water vapor escaping into space like a geyser. The mix frosted into a trillion ice crystals and began to coat the onlookers who stood too close to the edge.

Up until that moment, everything had gone exactly according to plan. We’d flown up from Death World to
Minotaur
, docked, opened the clamshell and punctured the dome. Honestly, I’d begun to hope that despite everything we’d recapture the ship without a loss.
Minotaur
looked to be devoid of any life at all. What if the radiation had killed the Wur as surely as it had killed the legion and the crew? That would be a best-case scenario, and up until now, it had seemed possible.

But then, as the air vented and the troops fell back from the fury of the blasting gasses, I felt a rumble beneath my feet.

Through Kivi’s drone, I could now see what it was. The two halves of the clamshell dome—the blast shields that normally covered Green Deck—were beginning to close again.

For about a second, no one reacted. The two metal half-domes rolled up, looking slow from the point of view of the drone, but to people out there on the hull, it was moving pretty fast.

Two figures were lifted up and tossed into space. They tumbled, ejected by the force of the moving dome. A few other figures were even less lucky. They were entangled in debris, and as the metal crescents rose, they were crushed to pulp.

“Emergency!” shouted Graves. “Everyone out of the lifter! Get into the ship now—anyway you can. That’s an order!”

We surged forward. The organized, shuffling mass of troops turned into a wild flood. I glanced one last time at my tapper to glimpse the view Kivi was relaying from her drone. Troops were throwing themselves into the geyser of escaping gas, fighting against the pressure to get inside. The geyser was visibly weaker now, but with nothing for the invading troops to push against, they were having a hard time overcoming that gushing current.

Meanwhile, the clamshells were still moving, shutting themselves at a steady rate. I could tell from the look of the choked up group ahead of us that we weren’t even going to make it to the exit before
Minotaur
closed up again.

“Squad!” I shouted. “Everyone release your magnetics and jump up! Climb on the ceiling, hand-over-hand!”

They hesitated until they saw me do as I’d ordered. Then they followed my lead.

Moving as fast as I could, I dragged myself over the ceiling, which was webbed with storage nets and like. Employing this tactic, we at least made it to the ramp. Behind me, I could see others adopting my approach. The ceiling of the lifter was thronged with troops who were moving like spiders.

“What do we do when we get out into the open?” Carlos demanded from behind me. “Just throw ourselves out into space?”

“Yes. Launch yourselves like you can fly. When you’re over the dome, open the external venting valve on your secondary air tank. Make sure the nozzle is aimed toward open space opposite your angle of flight. Use it like propellant. Remember that trick from vac training?”

“Hell no,” Carlos answered.

“Well, it will work. Open up your spare tank, and let it push you downward. That’s an order.”

They grumbled, and I could hear a lot of rapid, almost panicky breathing over their microphones. No one liked the idea of expending their limited air supply as a propellant, but they didn’t openly refuse.

I launched first as I was the man in front. I think, in retrospect, I kicked off
too
hard. It was like pushing off from the wall of a pool and gliding forward. Only in space, there was no water to slow me down.

Soaring like a bird, I flew over the heads of a hundred struggling troops. I could see ahead that the dome was more than half shut. The troops trying to get into the narrowing opening were having increasing difficulties. The jaws of the blast shield were coming together, and soon, whoever was caught in them would be crushed.

Up high, the two halves of the dome were farther apart. I glided into this space, and the light of L-374 was shut out immediately. Stark shadow enclosed me, and I could feel the cold of it right through my suit.

A steady hiss began as I employed my spare tank. I fired it behind me, in my direction of travel, and a little upward. The force began to push me down.

Still, I could see I wasn’t going to make it. I was moving too fast. Before I could slow down, I was going to fly right out the other side of the closing dome.

“Squad, deploy that tank early!” I shouted. “I might not make it! My tank isn’t providing enough counterthrust!”

“I’m in,” said Kivi. “I can see you, McGill. You’re too high.”

Cursing, I struggled and looked around for a solution. It’s hard to think while spinning. Worse, my helmet occluded much of my vision. I couldn’t look over my shoulder, and I could barely see down into the dome.

Finally, I came up with a plan at the last second. I opened my main tank.

That did the trick. I shot down into the clamshells, and they closed silently over me, shutting out the light of the star and most of our troops. I quickly closed both tanks and checked the oxygen levels.

Thudding gently into the dome and pushing off it to sail down into the dark unknown that was Green Deck, I took stock of my situation.

We were officially aboard
Minotaur
, but that’s where the good news ended.

Half my squad had been left outside, along with two thirds of the invading troops. Even better, I was down to three hours of air, tops.

-43-

Vac-suits provide good protection against radiation. They have to, because open space is full of exotic particles and dangerous flares of invisible light.

Accordingly, one of the first things I checked when I stopped spinning around was my suit’s radiation counter.
Minotaur
was ticking hot, but the dose was far from lethal.

“Looks like the evacuation of the atmosphere worked,” Graves said. “Radiation levels are down. Let’s have a headcount. Who made it in here?”

We sounded off by squads, and I gathered my people while maneuvering toward the broken spot in the dome. As the pressure had just equalized, it was no longer firing a geyser up into our faces. Looking down, I didn’t see a forested area like I’d hoped to. First off, it was dark down there. Secondly, the trees I could make out looked dead and stripped down to the bare wood. Had the plant life eaten them?

“Hmm,” Graves said. “We’ve lost about seventy percent of the unit. After checking with members of the other units, however, I’ve found they did even worse. As I’m the senior officer present, I’m taking over tactical command until this action is over or until someone higher-ranked manages to get inside the hull.”

No one objected to the idea of Graves taking command. In fact, we were happy. Graves was a good man to have behind you in an unknown and possibly grim situation. If Turov had made it into the dome instead, I’d have been worried. Her record wasn’t the best in tough tactical actions.

Graves marshaled us quickly. He sent a few scouts down to the floor of Green Deck, then folded squads and platoons together. It soon became apparent there was only about a unit’s worth of legionnaires inside
Minotaur
. Only a hundred or so of us had made it through the closing blast shield alive.

Harris was one of those who hadn’t made it. Della was one of the few members of his team who had made it in, and she was folded into my squad.

Of my original group, I had Carlos, Kivi, Lau and Gorman. The rest had been too slow getting inside the closing dome—or they’d died trying.

When we were organized, Graves contacted me directly.

“McGill? How’d you manage to get your people in here?” he demanded. “I put you at the back of the bus so you wouldn’t cause trouble.”

“I’ve never liked the bus, Centurion,” I said. Then I quickly told him how we’d done it.

He was amused. “Never heard of a man so eager to get himself killed,” he chuckled. “I like that. Take point, madman.”

For a moment, I debated telling him about my oxygen supply situation, but I passed on that. I had a few hours left, after all, and reporting my technical difficulties before they stopped me from following my orders seemed weak. Instead, I dove for the ragged opening, and my hodge-podge squad dove after me.

We sailed down into stygian darkness. Dead leaves, corpses and even globules of ice floated around us.

“Look at our stripped trees,” Carlos said. “The alien plants must have eaten them. Disgusting freaks. They’re like an army of giant slugs.”

“The balls of ice are beautiful in a way,” Della said. “They must be from the lake in the center of the artificial forest. It’s so strange to see it frozen into balls and left floating in the dark.”

“The ship’s plumbing system automatically sucks most of the water down into holding tanks before battle,” I told her. “But this time, they clearly didn’t get it all. Della, can you dive into that empty pond and see if there’s anything alive down there?”

She was the fastest troop I had, even in zero G. There was something about growing up on a barbaric alien planet that made a person tougher than usual. I couldn’t help but admire her form as she grabbed a tree branch and swung around it like gibbon.

Before she could push off however, the branch she was on snapped. It was brittle with cold, but she managed to get her legs around the trunk. The rest of us watched as she shimmied all the way to the ground and then darted over a cliff wall, vanishing.

We waited for about ten seconds. Then another twenty. I’d just begun to frown and open my mouth to ask if she was okay, when she radioed back to me.

“There’s nothing from Earth down here,” she said. “Even the water plants are dead.”

When she first said that, I naturally assumed that she was talking about algae and the like, but when I launched down and joined her, I was in for a surprise.

The whole lake bed, some hundred meters across, was full of alien pods. Every inch of the sandy bottom was replanted with hulking, bulbous growths. Fortunately, they all seemed to be as dead as the Earthly plants were.

Around the lake bed, there were still trees here and there from Earth, but all of them were stripped to bare wood like looming skeletons. The plants that were in better shape resembled those I’d seen back on Death World.

For some reason, the sight appalled me. I’d always liked Green Deck. It pissed me off that these damned aliens had taken it upon themselves to uproot our greenery and replace it with their own. It just didn’t seem right.

“Centurion Graves?” I transmitted. “McGill reporting. The enemy is here, at least in pod form. The pods appear to have been frozen to death by depressurization, however.”

“Say again, McGill?” Graves asked. “Do you see enemy troops?”

“No sir, not exactly. We’re surrounded by alien pods and vines, and I’m certain we didn’t plant them here. Fortunately, they’re frozen stiff.”

“Interesting. It sounds like the radiation released from the core didn’t kill them, but the hard vacuum did. I’m bringing the rest of the unit down to your position.”

We poked around for a time as the unit formed around us. We had to use our hands to pull ourselves around on the dead vines until we found a big iron pipe. We figured it must have been the one that drained the water while
Minotaur
was in flight. Walking on it with our magnetic boots activated, we managed to reach the main exit.

There, we were in for another surprise. The exit had been sealed.

“Weapons at the ready, soldiers,” Graves said, hand-over-handing it along our line to the front. He grabbed each man’s helmet or air hose and pulled himself over our heads.

It was a strange way to move, but it worked well. He used his gauntlets to grab onto our suits and pull himself along. In zero-G training, we’d learned a number of techniques, and we were using them all now. Another trick was to use our magnetic boots to walk on another man’s armor. There was a lot of titanium in our suits, but there were steel components, too.

Graves inspected the exit, which looked like it had been welded shut.

“Is Natasha here?”

“No sir,” I said. “Turov left her back on Death World.”

“Great. What have we got in the way of techs?”

A few came forward. Graves recognized Kivi and selected her. He directed her to inspect the edges of the metal and give an expert opinion.

I could tell right off Kivi was nervous. She’d only been a tech for a short time, and her background knowledge didn’t extend much past whatever it took to get through tech school. Natasha, on the other hand, had been a hardcore science-geek her whole life.

“I’m not sure…” Kivi said after letting her light play over the strange, weld-like fusing of metal that ringed the exit. “If I had to guess, I’d say they used their secreted acid. Maybe they’re able to apply it lightly over two surfaces, melting them together. Then they might chemically neutralize the reaction. That would cause the metal to fuse like this—but it’s only a guess.”

“Good enough,” Graves said. “Weaponeers, destroy this door. Everyone else, take hold of something solid. There’s likely to be a blast of gas if the corridor beyond is pressurized.”

Those of us who were near the door hastened to get out of the way. Three belchers emitted lances of fire the moment my leg was clear. The door turned white-hot in an instant then melted into a burning, incandescent radiance. The metal burned like a giant sparkler, and a hole opened up in the center.

A gush of released gas flowed out of the hole, but it wasn’t as powerful as when we’d opened Green Deck to space.

“McGill, give me a quick recon.”

I scuttled forward, and once I’d stepped through the white hot breach, I felt weight return to my limbs. That was a relief. The passage didn’t provide anything like a full G of gravity, but it was enough to keep me on the ground.

Behind me, my squad hurried to keep up. We had our rifles up to our faceplates, ready to tear up anything we saw.

“It’s a mess inside, sir,” I said. “Empty spacesuits, dead plants, debris—I’d say there was a fight in here, all right.”

“No sign of active resistance?”

“None, sir.”

“Unit, forward!”

We pressed on. The one thing that surprised me was the lack of bodies. There were a few, but not as many as I’d expected there to be. What’s more, when we investigated those we found, we discovered they were empty suits and not dead men at all.

“Where are all the bodies?” Carlos demanded. “What did these green bastards do with them?”

“Why don’t you find one and ask him?” Kivi suggested.

Carlos turned to frown at her, and there might have been an argument if Graves hadn’t called to us over the unit-wide channel.

“Unit, halt. The central passageway appears to be clear. I’m going to switch over to our original invasion plan. Each unit with specialized orders will now carry them out. Graves out.”

“What the frig?” Carlos said loudly. “Is he crazy? There’s only about a hundred of us left, and he wants us to break up and get lost in the ship?”

“Our mission is to recapture this vessel,” I told him. “Our original operational orders were designed to do just that. Gather up, people. Our target is Gold Deck. We’ll take this duct leading upward as a shortcut.”

In addition to powered lifts, there were tubes with ladders in them to allow access between decks. We found one that went up. We slung our rifles on our backs and shimmied into the tube one at a time. Leading the way, I emerged on another level of the ship.

Gold Deck was eerie. I’d been up here on a number of occasions, and there’d always been a pack of staffers bustling around in perfectly creased uniforms. Now, the place was deserted.

“Spread out,” I directed my squad as they popped out of the tube behind me, “search and confirm we’re secure.”

“Vet?” Kivi asked in a hushed voice. “Shouldn’t there be some dead people? There were a few in the passages, but…”

“Actually,” I said, “there were none. The corpses we saw were really empty suits of armor. The bodies themselves are all missing.”

She gave me a worried glance. I headed for the central consoles, and she stuck close behind me. We tried to engage the power couplings, but failed.

“No juice,” Kivi said. “The power cables have been cut off somewhere between here and the generators.”

“Where are the generators?”

“Engineering.”

No one had much to say to that. Engineering, or Red Deck, was where the breach had originally occurred. Most of Graves’ troops were headed there now. We all had visions of high radiation, holes in the core shielding and hard vacuum that couldn’t be easily sealed off.

Reluctantly, I contacted Graves. “Centurion? McGill reporting. We’ve reached and secured Gold Deck. It’s a ghost town. The bad news is we’ve got no power up here for the control systems. Any chance of getting a feed from Engineering?”

“Negative, McGill,” Graves said. “We’re nowhere near reaching our target yet. We’ve encountered a lot of damaged areas of the ship: Debris, exposed radioactives, collapsed passages, you name it. We might have to space-walk to get there at all.”

“Okay then, sir,” I said. “Should we hold our position here until you can get through?”

“No, I’ve got a better idea. Take your squad down to support Adjunct Toro. She’s trying to get into Blue Deck, and she’s having some kind of problem.”

“Will do, sir.”

We almost left before I remembered my special orders from Tribune Drusus and Turov. They’d ordered me directly to take this part of the ship. In fact, they’d asked me to locate a specific locker on Gold Deck.

Clanking to the spot, I opened the locker with the code she’d given me. Sure enough, there was a spanking-new walking vehicle we called a dragon inside.

“Looks like it’s in good condition,” Carlos commented.

“It is,” I said thoughtfully.

I mounted the dragon’s back-plate and got a surprise—the dragon wasn’t empty. There was a body inside.

Tapping the same code I’d used on the locker to open the dragon, I found the first intact dead body I’d seen since I’d boarded
Minotaur
. The shocker was that the body was none other than Imperator Turov herself.

“Carlos, get up here,” I ordered.

Carlos scrambled to my position and looked her over.

“She died in the pilot’s harness,” he said. “Looks like she was overcome before she could seal up the dragon.”

“Yeah…” I said thoughtfully. “What I don’t get is why she didn’t mention during the briefing that this was where she died.”