In Earth's Service (Mapped Space Book 2) (39 page)

Izin drifted into the airlock’s dark circular
cavity, while I prepared myself for a gentle collision with the hull close to
the airlock entrance. Just as I struck, Izin’s armored arm pinned my leg to the
hull, preventing me from bouncing off, then I floated in beside him and was
caught by the
Mavia’s
artificial gravity. He then moved to the airlock
controls while I glanced back to the
Silver Lining
. Her belly door was
already closed and she was backing slowly away.

“Jase, we’re in,” I said. “Get going.”

“Aye aye, Skipper. I’ll back with the cavalry in
no time.”

The
Silver Lining
turned on her length,
then her engines glowed to life, pushing her into the
Mavia’s
shield. An
aura of static electricity sparkled around her as her shield interacted with
the
Mavia’s
, then as soon she was clear, she streaked away toward Lena’s
last known position.

Izin sealed the outer hatch, then when the inner
door irised open, my battle suit was suddenly struck by multiple high velocity
impacts, knocking me against the outer door. My headscreen’s tactical overlay
lit up with hostile contact markers, all crammed together in the blacked out
corridor beyond the inner door. Points of blue light twinkled in the darkness,
marking the electromagnetic muzzle flashes of the assault guns raking my suit. I
rolled sideways, trying to regain my balance as a headscreen indicator began
ticking down, warning that my suit armor was being shredded. In the cramped
airlock, all I could do was turn my side armor to the incoming torrent of fire,
spreading the damage, then a malfunction indicator flashed, warning that the
suit’s thruster pack had been destroyed.

Izin stood to the side of the inner hatch out of the
line of fire. He raised his left arm, sent three fragmentation grenades on low
trajectories into the corridor and immediately resealed the hatch. Three
muffled explosions sounded a moment later, then he opened the inner door to
smoke and silence and a corridor littered with shattered bodies.

“We appear to have lost the advantage of
surprise,” Izin observed dryly as he raised his suppressor and stepped into the
corridor. His tamph instincts would have preferred to ambush our adversaries
rather than go head to head.

“I guess you’ll have to fight like a human this
time,” I said, following him into the corridor as my suit warned almost half
its frontal armor had been ablated.

“I may not like frontal assaults, Captain, but you
will not find me lacking,” he replied, raising both weapon arms as he moved to
the left.

I took the right side, stepping over bodies
shredded by Izin’s grenades, aiming my weapons down the corridor. Both suits
were equipped with rapid fire, magnetically accelerated suppressors, each
capable of delivering ten thousand rounds of hurt with computerized precision. Our
secondary weapons were different. Izin had a thirty round grenade launcher, I
had a laser cannon that drained my suit’s power cell at a frightening rate. Being
sensor linked, we each saw everything both suits detected, and while these
armor coated widow makers could drop from orbit and deliver death and destruction
wherever they landed, I was beginning to realize they were too large for
fighting in confined spaces.

At the end of the corridor was a locked pressure
door. My target finder quickly located its locking points, which my laser
cannon sliced through like tin foil. Izin kicked the door, sending it flying
into a large darkened compartment, then fired a salvo of grenades, evenly
spaced, left to right. He waited for them to detonate, then stepped through and
moved left, immediately coming under fire. I followed close on his metallic
heels, going right, drawing ranged fire that sparkled like blue fire flies in
the darkness.

The Orie mercs concentrated on our torsos, trying
to ablate our chest armor for a kill shot. Our suits’ thermal sensors detected
their body heat while our optics tracked the flash of their weapons. Twenty six
threat prioritized targets appeared in front of my eyes, half allocated to me,
half to Izin. They wore heavier body armor than the troops that had greeted us
at the airlock and had some cover, making Izin’s grenades less effective. Our
suits calculated who were more accurate and bumped the expert gunners to the
top of the priority list. Izin ignored his suit’s helpful advice, choosing
instead to sweep the left side of the room with his suppressor, laying waste to
everything in his path. I took the other route, firing short bursts at targets
prioritized by the suit’s combat system, conserving my ammo. I held back on the
laser cannon, saving the juice in case we ran into something the suppressors
couldn’t handle.

Ten seconds after we entered, the only ones left
standing were us. The room was now lit by burning equipment and strewn with
bodies. The compartment had once been a machine shop for fabricating
replacement parts for Earth Navy ships. Now it was a support facility for the
Mavia
in its new guise as a wormhole generator ship. A single vehicle door dominated
the opposite bulkhead, showing signs it had been augmented with slab armor.
Capital ships were built with armored citadels at their heart to protect critical
sections, but I’d never heard of a repair ship being fitted with one. A small
hand torch lay on the deck in front of the door, beneath thin black scars where
someone had tried cutting through.

Izin fired a grenade at the armored door, which exploded
on contact, doing no damage.

“I’ve got this,” I said, clanking toward the armored
door and switching my laser cannon from pulse to beam. I fired a pencil thin
stream of white energy at the top of the door and began carving a horizontal
line across it. Black smoke billowed into the air as molten metal flowed onto
the deck and my suit’s power level began dropping steadily.

Leaving me to my work, Izin marched to various
open hatches and scanned for threats. When he’d finished his sweep, he said, “There’s
no one close, Captain, but I can hear movement.”

“Maybe the crew’s abandoning ship before we blow
it up,” I suggested.

Izin took up position beside me, aiming his
weapons at the pressure door as I began cutting back up to my starting point. When
I finished, with half my suit’s power supply gone, he pushed the rectangular
slab through to the other side. It crashed onto the deck with a horrendous
clang, telling everyone where we were, but rather than inviting another hail of
gunfire, we were met by an empty corridor, pitch black except for a distant
flickering light.

Izin stepped through, weapons raised, then declared,
“It’s deserted, Captain.”

I followed him through into a vehicle passageway
immersed in darkness. It led to a blacked out intersection, then onto a large compartment
at the center of the ship, the source of the flickering light. Izin moved
quickly, almost recklessly, along the wide passageway, forcing me to hurry to
keep up. The little tamph might not like frontal assaults, but when he had to,
he preferred speed over caution. He paused at the intersection only long enough
to scan both directions, then started across with me a few paces behind.

My headscreen suddenly flashed, then the visual feed
broke into static and the tactical overlay began blinking erratically with
meaningless symbols. No diagnostics popped up advising me whether it was a
malfunction or jamming, but the suit’s combat system was clearly scrambled. The
only indicator that made any sense was the suit’s power level and it was
falling fast, threatening to trap me inside a metal coffin.

I slammed my chin onto the emergency release as my
suit power flat lined, just in time for it to half open before freezing. The headscreen
blacked out as unpowered pressure fields collapsed around my body, turning my
suit into tonnes of scrap metal which toppled face first onto the deck with a
thunderous crash. The unpowered suit was too heavy for me to open by hand, so I
twisted my shoulders until I could squeeze my left arm across my chest to a small
lever at my right shoulder. I started rocking the lever furiously, slowly cranking
the clamshell torso open. When it was wide enough for me to squeeze through, I flopped
out onto the deck, relieved to have escaped.

A glowing silver disk floated a meter above me, humming
and spinning as it bathed the suit in a narrow cone of light. I rolled away
into the darkness, keeping the suit between me and the end of the corridor, determined
to get my gun away from the disk before it too was drained of power.

DEVICE UNKNOWN, my threading informed me as I drew
my P-50.

Izin’s battle suit was still standing, a metallic statue
beneath another disk the twin of the one that had knocked out my suit without
firing a shot. Beyond the junction, my threading picked up a small thermal
signature retreating toward the distant compartment. The red ghost was far too
small for a Mataron or even a man. For a moment, I thought it was a child, then
I caught a glimpse of its silhouette against the light coming from the
compartment.

It was a
tamph
!

I shouldn’t have been surprised the Consortium were
recruiting tamphs. They were smarter than us and with the right training would make
the best possible engineers for the Consortium’s stolen alien-tech, once their
Mataron instructor was gone. I could have tried for a shot, but I remembered
how deadly Izin’s aim was and ducked behind my fighting suit’s torso as a
streak of light flashed through the space my head had occupied a moment before.
My threading then flashed another alert into my mind’s eye:

WARNING! HIGH ENERGY PLASMA DISCHARGE, TECHNOLOGY
UNKNOWN.

Another blast hit the suit as I made myself into
as small a target as possible. I resisted the urge to return fire, certain the
tamph was baiting me just as Izin would have done. More blasts hit the suit’s
legs, then the firing stopped. I brought my P-50 up, preparing to shoot in case
the tamph was closing in for the kill, then I noticed its power level was down
a third. Even in the dark, the disk was draining it. Before my eyes, its charge
dropped another tick, then I blasted the disk, shattering it with a single shot.

Now only the light from the disk above Izin’s suit
illuminated the junction, enough for an eagle eyed tamph to drill me the moment
I left cover. Tamphs were infinitely patient, and this one had more time to
spare than me. I raised my P-50 as if to fire blind, knowing if the tamph was
waiting to ambush me, I’d lose my gun and probably my hand, but no shot came. Relieved
to discover my hand was still attached to my arm, I stole a look up the
corridor. There was no flash of a weapon, no silhouette, no ghostly infra red
blur from my threading’s optics. The tamph had retreated, perhaps summoned by
his Mataron master.

I blasted the second disk, then darted across to
Izin’s suit, using it for cover. A hairline crack ran down its side, showing it
had no more than unlocked before dying.

“Izin, can you hear me?”

“Yes, Captain. I can’t open the suit.”

“There’s a lever beside your right shoulder. Twist
and grab it with your left arm.”

Soon I heard a rapid creaking sound, then the
torso slowly opened. I could do nothing to help as the suit was too heavy and
without power, the clamshell machinery was locked tight. When it was two thirds
open, Izin climbed out and dropped to the deck beside me.

“Left the eject a little late, did we?” I asked.

“I was trying to block the power drain,” Izin
replied defensively.

“You were over thinking the problem.”

“You, of course, ejected at the first sign of
trouble.”

“Let’s just chalk that one up to superior human
survival instincts over excessive tamph tinkering.”

“I do not tinker, Captain, and I’ll let you know,
my survival instincts are in no way inferior to yours.”

“Then how come you were trapped like a sardine and
I wasn’t?” I asked with a grin. Before he could answer, I added, “Speaking of
tamphs, there’s one on this ship. He knocked out our suits.”

Izin glanced at the two wrecked disks on the deck.
“That’s not Earth-tech.”

“Neither’s the gun he’s using.” I nodded to the
shallow craters pockmarking my suit where the tamph’s plasma weapon had
vaporized the Union Army’s finest ablation armor. “The Consortium are turning
stealing alien-tech into an art form.”

“It appears the Tau Cetins had more cause to
interrogate me than we believed,” Izin said soberly, ever able to focus on the
truth, no matter how painful.

“Let’s give them cause to trust you,” I said,
determined that the tamph traitor was not getting off the
Mavia
alive.

We started forward, creeping through the shadows toward
the electrostatic hum coming from the enormous compartment at the end of the
passage. It had once been the industrial center of the depot ship, a veritable
mobile space dock that could be carried to the furthest reaches of Mapped
Space. Now stripped of its human equipment, the circular base of the Hrane tower
occupied the center of the cavernous chamber. Its trunk reached up through the
Mavia’s
hull all the way to the wormhole mouth nine kilometers above.

Surrounding the quantum tunneler were four
structures. Three were dark energy siphons surrounded by glowing white fields,
each emitting a brilliant white energy beam into a receptor in the deck below,
twins of the machine on Gern Vrate’s ship. The hemispherical siphons floated
off the deck, held in place by pressure fields, while a few meters from each
siphon were rectangular cryochambers similar to the one I’d seen aboard the
Merak
Star
on Novo Pantanal. Each held a Kesarn in hydrothermic suspension, alive
enough to allow the Tau Cetin siphons to drain limitless energies from the
universe. They stood at three corners of a square, with the fourth corner
empty. The empty corner was where Gern Vrate’s siphon had been meant to go, but
clearly three were enough to operate the tunneler.